Representing Minorities

Representing Minorities

Representing Minorities Studies in Literature and Criticism

Edited by

Larbi Touaf and Soumia Boutkhil

CAMBRIDGE SCHOLARS PRESS

Representing Minorities: Studies in Literature and Criticism, edited by Larbi Touaf and Soumia Boutkhil This book first published 2006 by Cambridge Scholars Press 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2006 by Larbi Touaf and Soumia Boutkhil 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 1-84718-046-9

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction.................................................................................................... viii Part I: Textual (De)constructions of Nation, Race, Culture, and Identity ....1 Chapter One Double Slavery: (De)Constructions of Race and Gender in the United States Lucy Melbourne...................................................................................................2 Chapter Two Will the Real Indian Please Stand Up?: The Life and Work of Sylvester Long Lance Sarita Cannon.......................................................................................................8 Chapter Three Identity, Incompletion, and the Advent of the Political: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Dialectic of Race and Nation Ainsworth A. Clarke ..........................................................................................15 Chapter Four Tangier: a Place Reinvented, Made and Unmade by Anouar Majid in Si Yussef Chourouq Nasri..................................................................................................27 Chapter Five Mapping the Postcolonial Metropolis: Three Recent Novels from Nigeria Ian Munro...........................................................................................................38 Part II: Women, Identity, and Gender constructions ...................................55 Chapter Six “The evil eye”: Re/presenting Woman in Moroccan Literature in French Soumia Boutkhil ................................................................................................56

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Chapter Seven Narrating Domestic Frontiers: Unbecoming Daughters of Patriarchy Moroccan Women Writers of French Expression Hassan Zrizi, .....................................................................................................64 Chapter Eight Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) The Yellow Wallpaper: The Feminist Identity Meryem Ayan ....................................................................................................74 Chapter Nine Mourning, Subjectivity and Gender Construction In Contemporary American Feminist Writing Bouchra Belgaid.................................................................................................91 Chapter Ten The Empowerment of Women’s Silences in Unless by Carol Shields Alejandro Moreno-Álvarez ................................................................................98 Part III: Visions of the Past: History, Memory and Identity in Literature ...................................................................................................107 Chapter Eleven Native Stages: The Revision of History in Witi Ihimaera’s Woman Far Walking Paloma Fresno Calleja .....................................................................................108 Chapter Twelve Reverberations of Identity in Contemporary Native American Poetry Feryal Cubukcu................................................................................................114 Chapter Thirteen Traumatic Traces: Slave Narratives, Post-Traumatic Stress, and the Limits of Resistance Penny Tucker ...................................................................................................139 Chapter Fourteen Memory, History, and Narrative Ethics in the Writing of Edmond Amran El Maleh Larbi Touaf ......................................................................................................150

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Chapter Fifteen Cartography and the Contingent Subject in Morgan Yasbincek’s Liv Jennifer Wawrzinek .........................................................................................160 Part IV: Exile, Migration, and Cultural Encounters...................................169 Chapter Sixteen Writing in/on the Front Lines of Exile: Political Dissidence, Memory and Cultural (Dis)location in Francophone Literature of the Maghreb Valérie K. Orlando...........................................................................................170 Chapter Seventeen Exilic Writer Saad Elkhadem and Two Transnational Novellas F. Elizabeth Dahab...........................................................................................183 Chapter Eighteen The Power of Place and Space: (Re)Constructing Identity and Selfhood in Ahdaf Soueif’s Eye of the Sun Nadine A. Sinno...............................................................................................194 Chapter Nineteen From Amine Rihani to Edward W. Said: The Quest for the Prophecy of the 'Out-Placed' Fatima Radhouani Saidani ...............................................................................207 Chapter Twenty Picaros of Our Times: Narrating Migration Sabrina Brancato ..............................................................................................217 Index................................................................................................................230 Contributors ...................................................................................................233

INTRODUCTION

At no other time has the question of minority been so crucial than it is today. As the world is made to shrink to a yet smaller village, it is also made to look more and more the same. In the process, the cultural diversity of the world is at risk of been wiped out by the bulldozers of global economy and consumer culture. When we called for the first international conference on minorities and minor literatures almost three years ago, our plan was to bring together scholars to discuss the issues and conditions of small minorities (ethnic, religious, linguistic…etc.) and “unknown” literary and artistic productions that do not usually make it to the global market. We soon realized that with the actual drive towards the uniformisation of culture and taste across the globe, a redefining of minority and a change of focus was needed. Indeed, ‘minority’ is no longer to be viewed and even theorized in opposition to ‘majority’ but most likely against the vacuum of late capital consumerism and the anxiety of rootless identities and the postmodern indeterminacies. Thus, the second international conference on minorities and minor literatures the proceedings of which make up the present book intended to widen the scope and include not only the traditional view of what constitutes minority by also any individual, or group recalcitrant and reluctant, not to say resistant, to the generalized lobotomy operated by the above mentioned uniformisation. For in the ruins of “the end of history” and its context of violence and Manichean politics, any opposition to the “general consensus” could be dismissed as anti-historical and atavistic. The objective of the conference was precisely to counter such rhetoric and underscore the necessity of cultural diversity and the right to difference. Obviously, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri’s study Kafka: towards a Minor Literature (trans. 1986) remains the theoretical armature of most discussions of minor literature, for according to the authors, a minor literature is not a literature written in a ‘minor’ language, rather it is that written in a major language, or as in the case of formerly colonized countries of Africa and Asia, the literature written in the coloniser’s language. In this perspective, most postcolonial literatures can be said to be minoritarian, at least for the fact that they are written in major European languages. The use of these media gives rise to the dilemma that postcolonial writers face and which Deleuze describes as the impasse that bars access to writing [for the minority] and turns their literature into something impossible -- the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in [a major language], the impossibility of writing otherwise”(16).


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Besides the controversial idea that whether they like it or not these writers represent and speak for their groups, communities or nations which seems to be inseparable from Deleuze’s argument, it seems important to consider the ways in which such representation is actually both possible and impossible. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari’s theoretical model needs to be refocused in the light of the postmodern crisis of representation, including the political one, and the redrawing of the boundaries not only between centres and peripheries but also between all the major “structural” categories or binary oppositions. Creative writing, like any artistic activity, being basically subjective, it is quite legitimate to contend that writers create their own language just as they create their own worlds. In this sense the meaning of minority shifts completely to denote idiosyncrasy. This book contains what can amount to a critical response to the current context of confusion surrounding the postmodern condition that arguably dominates most societies. It stresses the issue of ethics not only in world politics but also in literature and criticism which is our main focus here. In fact, the interest in minority issues is in itself an ethical concern that contributes to give substance to the idea that postmodernity opens the gates for the long-suppressed identities and sensibilities to emerge and demand recognition. So, in bringing together people from different parts of the world our goal is to stimulate reflection and debate on the issue of minority at a time where cultural specificities are more than ever threatened. Indeed, the tightening of borders to isolate and seal off the wealthy North from the impoverished South, doesn’t impede the free north-to-south circulation of commodities, not only food and technology but above all cultural products. In the process, cultural diversity is at risk of being a thing of the past, obliterated by the hegemony of consumerist culture generated by the global economy. Therefore, the fate of the social, ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities as well as their different forms of expression is the real indication by which we not only gauge the health of a society but that of humanity as a whole. This volume intends, therefore, to contribute to the recent ethical turn that seems to take place in scholarship worldwide. Concomitant with this ethical turn operated mainly by what is referred to as postcolonial studies is an important shift that turned literary criticism and cultural studies into the site where a sense of literature can be envisioned that is not at all universalist, or reflecting the hegemonic temptations of the new world order. Instead it seeks to present a patchwork of minor literatures, in the sense that besides the “major” literatures/languages, there are myriads of minor voices that express dissimilarity oftentimes under the umbrella of those major languages and literatures themselves. Writing from a minoritarian position already signals certain scepticism towards the grand narratives of modernity and its promise of

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an enlightened and progressive humanity. In fact, the colonial experience and its aftermath left no doubt as to the bankrupt state of such discourses so that the Eurocentrism that dominated the literary tradition has been shaken in the wake of decolonisation. This is not merely because European critics have finally begun to notice the existence of literatures outside Europe, but more importantly, they have started to learn the hard lesson that not only the European notion of humanity was ethno-centric, but the very notion of a general idea of humanity was itself only a part of the universalising and totalising tradition of modern western thought. Therefore it is of crucial necessity that literary criticism and theory take stock of the many différends (J-F.Lyotard) that constitute the condition of postmodernity and postcoloniality. If there is anything that serves today to unite thinkers on either side of the great north/south gap, it is the rejection of foundationalist and essentialist myths that unfortunately continue to structure the discourse of power that is wrecking the world. The contributors to this book agree that the very survival of human civilization is contingent upon people interacting within and between nations in a genuinely ethical manner. Their inquiries into the minoritarian thing attest to the impossibility of harmonizing its heterogeneity with either the meta-narrative of the nation-state or that of the realization of the Eurocentric idea of humanity. The scholarship presented here is a testimony that the emergence of minor literatures (and identities) is not a recent matter; rather, every great literature (and nation) is a patchwork of minor elements. This is a view that challenges the need for legitimation from a greater unity, and that performs a reading that seeks to do away with the violence and exclusion of literary nationalisms. It is a reading of the frontiers and borders that exist within and against the claims to "greatness", to majority, of any national literature or identity. That is to say, to locate and evocate the minor and its differend where it is least expected. The book is divided into four thematic parts: I) Textual (De)constructions of nation, race, culture, and identity; II) Women, Identity, and Gender constructions; III) (Re)visions of the Past: History, Memory and Identity in Literature; IV) Exile, migration, and cultural encounters. These parts focus on some of the key issues and debates that have taken place in many areas of literary studies and critical theory and articulate an overlapping set of concerns with identity, nation, race, gender, memory, history, exile, and migration. Although these divisions may seem clear-cut, many of the chapters could have featured in more than one part, for the overall theme that brought them together is “the ethics and politics of [de]constructing identity in literature, art, and the humanities”. The issues presented and debated are emblematic of the concerns of scholars around the world. While the geographical and historical scope of this book is not exhaustive, we have tried to be as inclusive as possible in presenting the notion of minority under different angles of visions, and under many guises.


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In addition to widening the notion to comprise subjectivities that wouldn’t normally be thought of as minorities (such as women in constraining social orders and in circumstances where their consciousness is made hypersensitive) we have redefined it as a position from which the enunciation of singular and or communal subjectivity articulates a critical engagement with the reality of society and its history.

I) Textual (De)constructions of nation, race, culture, and identity The question of identity is a key issue in this book; in this section it is looked at from different perspectives and studied in relation with a number of concepts such as race, nation, African metropolis, colonial realities and postcolonial consciousness. Thus, in “Double Slavery: (De)Constructions of Race and Gender in the United States” Lucy Melbourne traces the notion of slavery as a racial and gendered construction, and of black women as therefore doubly enslaved. The author first explores the discourse surrounding definitions of slavery during the 18th and 19th centuries, especially the notions of Montesquieu, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Jefferson, and Mary Wollstonecraft. She then specifically discusses the classic slave narrative, “Narrative of Frederick Douglass”, and Douglass’ betrayal of the early women’s rights movement in solidarity with white males, thereby gendering slavery as female, freedom as male. The author concludes by examining contemporary black women writers in light of the black feminist Bell Hooks ’ notion that black women have been constrained by the black male patriarchy to deconstruct their gender in order to reconstruct their race; in short, that black women as both black AND women--have been effectively silenced. Ms Melbourne’s paper posits a gradual shift in the notion of slavery from race to gender and suggests that only recently have some black women found a voice that affirms both their racial and gender narratives. Taking on the issue of race and identity Sarita Cannon argues in her paper “Will the real Indian please stand up: the work and life of Sylvester Long Lance” that the archetype of the person who pulls himself up out of poverty and becomes an upstanding, financially secure citizen is quite popular in U.S. literature, bolstering the myth of a meritocratic American society in which all members have equal opportunity for success. But when a person crosses racial lines rather than class lines, this is frequently seen as a betrayal, not a triumph. Ms cannon discusses the ethics of creating a new ethnic or racial identity by examining the life of Sylvester Long, a man who was born into a coloured community in North Carolina in 1896 and transformed himself into an American Indian athlete, journalist, and film actor named Chief Buffalo Child

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Long Lance. The author discusses how his fabrication of a Native identity may have perpetuated stereotypes of American Indians and capitulated to the racist, pseudo-scientific thinking of the time. She further examines the effects of Long Lance's ethnic performance, reinforced by his 1928 autobiography, and explores the ramifications of his “ethnic fraud” not only for Long Lance himself but also for the Native American communities he claimed to represent. There is, perhaps, nothing more estranging than to feel oneself or one’s identity being addressed in political discourse as a “problem” simply because one belongs to a minority. In “Identity, Incompletion, and the Advent of the Political: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Dialectic of Race and Nation” Ainsworth A. Clarke argues that the question “How does it feel to be a problem?” defines better than any other formulation available the scope of what recent criticism has come to understand as Du Bois’s critical project. Refracted through the prism of this question is the notion of race that underpins nineteenth century American racialist discourse and the conception of the ‘Negro’ that it produces. But this question also lays bare the instability of this notion of race and of the idea of the ‘Negro’ at its core. It is from the site of this instability that Du Bois’s earliest theoretical texts reformulate the notion of race from which late nineteenth century racialist discourse presents the ‘Negro.’ It is through his investigation of the contours of African American identity that his reformulation of the inherited notion of race occurs. Increasingly, the postcolonial city --Tangier in Chourouq Nasri’s “Reinventing Tangier in Anouar Majid’s Si Youssef”, and Lagos in Ian Munro’s “Mapping the postcolonial metropolis: three recent novels from Nigeria”-- has become the site for representation of new identities. Ms Nasri argues that Anouar Majid’s novel describes the psychological journey of Lamin (Majid as a young man) into the idealized past of Tangier. Tangier, the writer’s native city becomes the locale of identity. It is transformed into a symbolic space onto which multiple tales and diverse identities transmitting the rediscovered memory of the past are projected. The novel invites readers to question fixed definitions of identity and to take a journey towards diversity and plurality. However, Ian Munroe presents Lagos as an alienated city. The author examines the exploration of imaginary sites that point toward the mapping and situational representation of the postcolonial metropolis by the individual subject, in relation to what Jameson calls “that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society’s structure as a whole.”1

1 “Postmodernism of the Logic of Late Capitalism”, Thomas Docherty (ed), Postmodernism A Reader. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) 89.


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II) Women, Identity, and Gender constructions In this section women’s identity construction posits at least two positions for women in relation with discourse: either as objects of male discourse or as subjects/agents of their own. Historically, identity question and feminism have always been the most discussed issues in the literary world because their very polemical nature makes them open to endless arguments. Thus, approaching the question of identity from a feminist perspective, feminists and women writers construct a sense of unified selfhood, a rational, coherent, and an effective identity. They all seek a “subjective identity”, a sense of effective agency, and a history for women that they had been denied because of male domination. In "The evil eye: Re-presenting woman in Moroccan literature in French” Soumia Boutkhil (co-editor of this book) examines how the male gaze in Moroccan Francophone fiction constructs an identity for woman and present her as an object of spectacular fantasies. She argues that some supposedly pro-feminist works of literature not only consolidate woman’ status as the eternal victim of the social order but actually contribute to the perpetuation of the stereotypical image of woman as a subject deprived of agency. Arguing that this constitutes a form of “symbolic violence”, the author discusses the problems that arise from the ambiguity of what she calls the “romantic” representation of women that prevails in most works of Moroccan literature in French and how these stereotypes subvert the “liberatory, pro-female” discourse that seems to animate such works. Similarly, Hassan Zrizi argues in "Narrating Domestic Frontiers: Unbecoming Daughters of Patriarchy" that the historical, social, political and psychological "domestication" of the female in Moroccan society has taken multiple forms and various proportions. For Moroccan women writing in French, the appropriation of language and narrative is a means to dismantle the patriarchal order and to forge a female voice that breaks the "domestic frontiers". The author examines some examples of Moroccan women writers narrating domestic frontiers in the light of the new Moroccan family law, the rise of the feminine NGOs, the democratisation of the political scene, and international migration of feminist values. In her contribution “Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) The Yellow Wallpaper: the feminist identity paper”, Meryem Ayan performs a feminist reading of identity in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper and presents a portrait of a woman gaining identity and freedom through actions rather than words especially after her madness. The author discusses how women struggle to gain their own identity regardless of their relation to man, concluding that even if this struggle ends with madness, it is still worthwhile. On her part, Bouchra Belgaid in “Subjectivity, Mourning and Gender Construction in Contemporary American Feminist Writings” dwells on how

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feminist texts represent female identity within a consumer postmodern American culture and the ways they represent issues of gender, community, and home. In her reading of two contemporary American feminist novels, Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country (1985) and Anne Tyler's A Slipping Down Life (1983), the author argues that sexual differences have become the focal point in contemporary American culture and literature, and that the construction of female identity is enacted through the structure of mourning: mourning the American soldiers lost in Vietnam. Concluding that mourning presents a dark picture of female identity within a consumer culture that reflects an image without a body, Ms Belgaid asserts that both novels do not offer a sustained vision of new possibilities of sexual identity and so remain reactionary in their model of the female self. While the majority of the contributions in this section analyse or seek to give voice to the voiceless, Alejandra Moreno Ãlvarez studies women’s silence. In her contribution “The Empowerment of Women’s Silence in Unless by Carold Shields” Ms Moreno Alvarez argues that Carol Shields’ novel Unless is a multi-layered examination of a woman’s life (Norah) that highlights women’s lack of a language of their own. Using the poststructuralist feminist theories of Luce Irigaray and Rosi Braidotti, the author analyses the speechlessness/voicelessness of women in Carol Shield’s novel concluding that this work of fiction reminds us of how little has really changed and what is still to be done for and by women both at the individual and the social level.

III) (Re)visions of the Past: History, Memory and Identity in Literature The task of minority writers has often been to find a means of representation and expression, to open the historical record, to revisit the past and assert an identity, within a system that systematically excludes difference. This section focuses on how a sense of minority writing allows for the expression of hybrid and contingent subjectivities, opening spaces that allow the marginalized to exist without being subjected to the forces of oppression and control normally exerted over the space of the other. Thus in “Native Stages: The Revision of history in Witi Ihimaera ’s Woman Far Walking” Paloma Fresno-Calleja examines Witi Ihimaera’s first play, Woman Far Walking (2000), looking at the ways in which its specific dramatic features dismantle western conceptions of Maori identity and offer an alternative version of postcontact history from an unofficial and indigenous perspective. The author argues that while the play engages in the military and political resistance of the Maori community, presenting and favouring a Maori version of events, it becomes a hybrid text which combines western theatrical elements, with Maori song and


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ritual, and native conceptions of theatrical time and space in order to validate Maori heritage as an essential constituent of New Zealand’s/Aotearoa’s national identity. Similarly Feryal Cubukcu’s contribution , “Reverbrations of Identity in Contemporary Native American Poetry”, proceeds to show how the contemporary native American poets, Joy Harjo And Leslie Marmon Silko use what is left from the old times to reflect the feelings and thoughts of today’s Indians and what their poems reveal about the identity of Indians living in the Southwest and Northern Plains. Approaching the traumas of the past, Penny Tucker argues in “Traumatic Traces: Slave Narratives, Post-Traumatic Stress, and the Limits of Resistance” that collecting and analysing the evidence of traumatic experience in slave writings can add important scholarly depth to our understanding of how minority subject formation occurs in situations of political oppression, occupation, an discrimination. While slave records have been traditionally used to reassemble the histories of enslaved and oppressed persons, focusing on strategies of resistance, almost none has searched for the residual effects of trauma or analysed the resulting implications for the politics of empowerment. The author argues that trauma and traumatic stress played a significant, though underanalysed, role in the cultural construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of the identities of enslaved persons. While history remains the official and authoritative way through which the past is preserved, the debate on its propensity to exclusiveness is still open. In this perspective, Larbi Touaf (co-editor of this book) argues in “Memory, history, and Narrative Ethics in the writings of Edmond Amran El Maleh”, that the monumental work of Moroccan Jewish writer, El Maleh, initiates a narrative ethics wherein memory revisits the history of his country to trace the presence/absence of the Jewish community. The author argues that such writing renews our vision of the past and widens our perspective on the present/future so that the historical reality may open possibilities for the yet-to-come. In this sense, even though presence cannot be separated from absence, the attempt to salvage memory from oblivion contains the hope that what had been an example of “living together” and coexistence could serve as a lesson for us in these troubled times. Speaking from the margins of history or society, minority authors’ fragmented narratives deconstruct fossilized distinctions as Jennifer Wawrzinek explains in “Nomads in the Desert: Mapping Subjectivity in Morgan Yasbincek’s liv.” Morgan Yasbincek who is a Croatian/Australian poet speaks from a marginalized position within an Australian Anglosaxon context, inhabiting and using a borrowed language, but refusing to be fixed within it. Ms Wawrzinek argues that the cross-circuiting of the various narratives, languages and geographical positions in liv dismantles categorical distinctions to allow

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hybrid and contingent forms of identity to emerge such that transcendence, and agency, are engendered within a process of chaotic and unpredictable mappings within three-dimensional space.

IV) Exile, migration, and cultural encounters Ever since Homi Bhabha 's celebrated idea of “third space” appeared, scholars and readers of migration and postcolonial literatures have looked at exile as an emancipatory experience, one that allows writers to challenge and ultimately subvert conventional boundaries—whether those pertaining to language, religion, politics, gender, or literary genres. Thus in “Writing in/on the Front Lines of Exile: Political Dissidence, Memory and Cultural (Dis)location in Francophone Literature of the Maghreb”, Valérie Orlando studies the extent to which authors of the Maghreb (Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia), living in exile, influence the political climates and socio-cultural discourses of their homelands. Analyzing the novels of some of the most prominent contemporary exiled writers of the Maghreb, professor Orlando argues that these men and women write politically engaged narratives which challenge the socio-political and cultural climates of their homelands. Authors, playwrights, and journalists such as Salim Bachi (Algeria), Alec Toumi Baylee (Algeria), Tahar Ben Jelloun (Morocco), Ali Bourequat (Morocco), Gisèle Halimi (Tunisia), Leïla Marouane (Algeria), Albert Memmi (Tunisia), Abdelwahab Meddeb (Tunisia), and Malika Mokeddem (Algeria), among others contribute to a new literary consciousness that has been formed outside of the Maghreb, opening up new political discourses that encourage the historical revision of colonial and postcolonial eras and forcing postcolonial regimes to acknowledge egregious infractions of human rights. The vision of the native land from the vantage point of exile, the recurring themes in patterns of binary oppositions, the linguistic experimentations in the form of fragments, mute dialogues, and abrupt time-shifts, the use of situational irony and sudden changes in point of views are some of the features common to the literature of exile. This is what F. Elizabeth Dahab-Haydn studies in “Exilic Writer Saad Elkhadem and two transnational novellas.” Couched in two languages, Arabic and English, two countries, two awarenesses, and an array of shifting perspectives partaking in the larger postmodern vision shared by many, Elkhadem's works are neither short stories, novellas, novels, diaries, nor biographies per se, but hybrid reconstructions and deconstructions of elements of each. In fact, as is often the case with literatures of exile, it is the very notion of genres that seems to have undertaken a major reshuffling. Similarly, Nadine A. Sinno’s “The Power of Place and Space: (Re)Constructing Identity and Selfhood in Ahdaf Soueif ’s Eye of the Sun” addresses some of the topics that


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are pertinent to the literature of exile namely, “minority subject formations,” “ethnic narratives,” and “hybridity and ethics of cultural encounters.” Ms Sinno asserts that Asya, Eye of the Sun’s main protagonist, is highly affected by the place and space in which she exists. Arguing that Asya owes her complexity to the various places and spaces which she encounters at different stages in her life, the author examines the significance of place and space in Asya’s life and the way place and space-- both at home and overseas-- shape Asya’s sense of identity and allow her to (re)construct a new self and a mode of life that are not bound by place of origin, but that rather draw on the various resources that she benefits from as a result of her authentic encounters with other places and cultures. Considering the literature of/on Minorities as reflecting and refracting experiences of various ethnic groups namely Arab Americans in the United States of America, Fatima Radhouani Saidani in "From Amin Rihani to Edward Said: the Quest for the Prophecy of the Out-Placed" highlights the productions of two Arab American exiled writers from both end of the 20th century: Amin Rihani and Edward W. Said. Focusing on Amin Rihani's novel The Book of Khalid (the first novel written in English by an Arab writer) published in 1911 and Edward Said's Memoir, Out of Place, Ms Radhouani Saidani argues that these samples of Arab-American literature attempt to prophesize a land that could embrace distinct cultures. The author asserts that Rihani's The Book of Khalid reveals the writer's desire to reconcile the East and the West through an endorsement of a cross-cultural dialogue, while Said's Out of Place emanates from a distinct identity that is juxtaposed amid an experience in the land of exile where he was in the: " richest position of speaking for two opposed constituencies one Western the other Arab." On the European side and as Sabrina Brancato affirms in “Picaros of our Times: narrating Migration”, the presence of increasing numbers of migrants from developing countries in Europe has stirred a growing native interest for allogenous communities. Together with various forms of documentary literature produced both by locals and new citizens, new genres are proliferating which give voice to the individual experience of the expatrié. Immigrant autobiographies in literary form (self-authored in some cases or co-authored with the assistance of a local intellectual) are being published all over Europe. These texts constitute a re-elaboration of the old picaresque genre adapted to the reality of contemporary multicultural Europe. Ms Brancato addresses migration narratives by Sub-Saharan Africans in Southern and Western Europe. She argues that the sense of alienation and the development of survival strategies typical of picaresque characters acquire the specificities of intercultural and interracial (dis)encounters. The subjective experience becomes emblematic for a whole community and foregrounds a cultural confrontation between a minority

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and a dominant group, raising questions about the implications of being black in a white country, of being African in Europe. In this sense, these texts are the pioneers of a nascent Afro-European literature, characterized by linguistic and cultural plurality (for the different languages, origins and locations of the authors) and yet finding a common ground both in the narrative strategies and in the thematic focus on identity and cultural interaction. Larbi Touaf

Part I Textual (De)constructions of Nation, Race, Culture, and Identity

CHAPTER ONE DOUBLE SLAVERY: (DE)CONSTRUCTIONS OF RACE AND GENDER IN THE UNITED STATES LUCY MELBOURNE

Introduction In an address to the World Congress of Representative Women in 1893, Anna Julia Cooper, an erudite champion of black women's rights, said: All through the darkest period of the colored women's oppression in this country her yet unwritten history is full of heroic struggle . . . . The white woman could at least plead for her own emancipation; the black women doubly enslaved, could but suffer and struggle and be silent (Cooper in hooks, Woman, 2).

Anna Julia Cooper here locates the black woman's experience in the double enslavement of a racism and sexism. From both a theoretical and literary perspective, this presentation traces the construction of woman as slave--and that of the black woman as doubly enslaved. As I researched this discourse, however, I began to experience it as a vivid and ongoing conversation crossing centuries, gender, and race. I tried to capture the powerful thematic echoes and resonances of this conversation in the handout that should help you follow the presentation and give you a sense of the living dialogue that has arisen around the theme of black women as doubly enslaved.

Part I: Theory Enlightenment theorists such as Montesquieu as well as later 18th and 19th century advocates for women's rights such as Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill, frequently compare women's situation to that of slavery. Enlightenment thought was founded on the principle of natural rights and Montesquieu, for example, in his Esprit des Lois (Spirit of the Laws) saw

Representing Minorites: Studies in Literature and Criticism

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slavery as unnatural. He gives this resonant definition: "Slavery, properly so called, is the establishment of a right which gives to one man such a power over another as renders him absolute master of his life and fortune. ("Of Civil Slavery," The Spirit of the Laws, in Humanities, 254). By this definition, then, women of the time would be classified as slaves in their total want of rights and in their subjugation to patriarchal masters. Montesquieu also points out that this unnatural master-slave relationship as morally debilitating: the slave seeks only to please while the master is inevitably corrupted by the use of unchecked power. Montesquieu uses this wonderful phrase about the masters, saying they inevitably become "fierce, hasty, severe, choleric, voluptuous, and cruel." In his initial draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson, another Enlightenment thinker, includes as his final charge against King George aggression against "human nature itself" in permitting the slave trade. This allegation is today fraught with painful irony given Jefferson's own unsavory practices as a slave holder, including the fathering of children on his slave mistress, Sally Hemings, an egregious (yet, as we have come to learn, all-toocommon) example of racist patriarchal coercion. (One is reminded of Montesquieu's admonition against the master's use of power rendering him, among others, "voluptuous.") Double slavery, then, lies at the compromised heart of our nation's founding fathers and--to include Sally Hemings--founding mothers. In the 19th century, the analogy between women and slavery becomes overt. Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill describe a subtle form of white women's enslavement by a benevolent but nevertheless authoritarian patriarchy. Wollstonecraft, for example, in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), questions whether "one half of the human species, like the poor African slaves, [is] to be subject to prejudices that brutalize them," astutely noting that women have been indirectly denied that sine qua non of any patriarchal definition of the human--reason. In 1861, Mill argues in The Subjection of Women that despite the abolition of slavery in England, it nevertheless continues in the slavish dependence of women in a society that denies her all natural, social and civil rights: "Slavery, from being a mere affair of force between the master and the slave, became regularised and a matter of compact among the masters . . . The slavery of the male sex has . . . been at length abolished, and that of the female sex has been gradually changed into a milder form of dependence. But this dependence . . . is the primitive state of slavery lasting on" (Subjection in Humanities page). Mill clearly recognized the raw power underlying even a benevolent patriarchy. Interestingly, Mill critiques oppositional definitions of gender and anticipates contemporary theories that see oppression as originating in the creation of an Other, a process whereby stereotypical masculinity is affirmed against so-called "feminine" qualities and masculinity can emerge as

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the definition of autonomous subjectivity, of humanness: "[Men] have therefore put everything in practice to enslave [women's] minds. . . . All women are brought up . . . in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men: not self-will, and government by self-control, but submission, and yielding to the control of others. All the moralities tell them that it is the duty of women, and all the current sentimentalities that it is their nature, to live for others; to make complete abnegation of themselves (Subjection in Humanities 342). In short, Mill sees that patriarchal dominance consists in a form of brainwashing; women are to internalize their Otherness and thereby permit psychic enslavement, surrendering autonomy to their masters—men.

Part II: Reality While Enlightenment thinkers such as Montesquieu, and later theorists such as Wollstonecraft and Mill explore the theory of slavery as an analogy for women's situation, the harsh realities of slavery by color continued in the United States. In his classic Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist and orator riveted 19th century Americans with his vivid description of the indignities and brutalities of slavery and of his psychological liberation. Douglass's eloquent masterpiece testifies to the notion that the path from slavery to freedom in both a literal and figural sense is not only an escape from actual bondage but, even more importantly, a liberation from feelings of inferiority and Otherness. As an escaped slave, Douglass is to address an abolitionist rally but has yet to overcome his internalized sense of degradation. He describes his breakthrough into full human autonomy this way: "The truth was, I felt myself a slave, and the idea of speaking to white people weighed me down. I spoke but a few moments, when I felt a degree of freedom, and said what I desired with considerable ease" (Narrative 69). Liberation for Douglass as a black man is thus gendered, in imitation of white patriarchy, as male self-assertion in public life. Douglass's description of his liberation becomes the prototype for subsequent male-dominated black liberation movements: freedom, in other words, meant being a MAN. Initially, however, abolitionists were closely allied with the early advocates for women's rights. The former slave Sojourner Truth, one of the earliest voices for black women, famously asserted that women were just as capable as men of enduring pain and physical hardship, histrionically baring her breast and exclaiming, "and ain't I a woman?" Indeed, the first women's rights convention in history, the Seneca Falls convention of 1848, was based on anti-slavery tactics and organization. Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, rhetorically modeled on the Declaration of Independence,


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proclaimed that "all men and women are created equal" (Declaration, in Humanities 339). Cady Stanton shocked even her most loyal supporters, however, by a final amendment calling for women's right to "exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise" (Declaration, in Humanities 340). Hotly debated, this radical amendment was only passed because of Frederick Douglass's impassioned defense. Thus, from the outset of discourse surrounding the woman's movement, the metaphor of slavery bridged the fragile alliance between abolitionists and those fighting for women's rights. In 1869, however, this tenuous alliance was shattered along lines of race and gender in Cady Stanton and Douglass's vituperative debate over the 15th amendment to the U.S. Constitution, an amendment designed to ensure all males--especially recently freed black men--the right to vote. It pointedly excluded women from the franchise.

Video Clip Cady Stanton felt betrayed by men--both white and black men--who had achieved patriarchal solidarity in denying women the right to vote. At that moment, then, sexism proved stronger than racism: maleness of whatever color trumped femaleness in this patriarchal symbiosis. White women such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were outraged, but Sojourner Truth also felt betrayed by black men: "there is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored woman; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before" (Truth in Hooks 4). The metaphor and reality of slavery had sharpened focus: henceforth the terms of this discourse on slavery were to apply only to constructions of women. Sojourner Truth obviously clearly understood that sexism was as oppressive as racism. Although she sided with Anthony and Cady Stanton, her position as a black woman in the debate over universal male suffrage becomes emblematic of black women's stance caught on the one hand between what had clearly been revealed as a white racist women's movement--Cady Stanton's racial invective is painful to witness--and, on the other hand, the sexism of the black male. While Sojourner Truth nevertheless chose to ally herself with Cady Stanton in her fight against sexism, most black women in the 20th century have viewed black and women's liberation as inimical, mutually exclusive. Bell Hooks asserts that, "black women disassociated themselves from feminist struggle when they were convinced that to appear feminist, i.e. radical, would hurt the cause of black liberation" (Woman 176). Twenty years ago, Hooks' contention that black women's choice to ignore what they perceived as white female constructions of

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liberation inevitably enmeshed them once again in double slavery: now, in addition to racial prejudice and discrimination by whites, black women were coerced by arguments of racial solidarity into adopting a subservient role toward a patriarchal civil rights movement largely dominated by black men, and hooks explains: "Racist, sexist socialization had conditioned us to devalue our femaleness and to regard race as the only relevant label of identification. In other words, we were asked to deny a part of ourselves--and we did" (1). She concludes that black women, caught between white women liberationists and black male patriarchs, express only "the silence of the oppressed" (1).

Conclusion: Contemporary Responses Hooks' conclusion that black women have been silenced echoes Anna Julia Cooper's phrase: "the black women doubly enslaved, could but suffer and struggle and be silent." Does this still hold true? Have contemporary black women's voices been silenced? Writers like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison have specifically addressed this issue of double slavery both as black artists and black feminist advocates. In her essays, short stories, and novels, Walker has consistently articulated what she calls "womanism," a distinctive form of black feminism, and--in the essay "One Child of One's Own" 1979-- attacked those white feminists and black people who would deny the black woman her womanhood by defining the issues of liberation solely in terms of blacks or women, missing the obvious fact that black people come in both sexes. Walker decries black women's rejection of feminism as a betrayal of the tradition of Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, and as a global betrayal of all women of color. Her best-known work, The Color Purple, was vilified by the black community who accused her of sabotaging the race and unfairly portraying the black male. The Nobel-prize winner Toni Morrison is perhaps the pre-eminent writer today on the black woman's experience. To interpolate James Joyce in another context, her project is to "forge the consciousness of [her] race." In novels like Beloved and, in Paradise, she specifically addresses the theme of double slavery. In Beloved, the freed slave Sethe’s haunting by the accumulated horrors of her life of slavery as a woman threaten to overwhelm her and paralyze her daughter's future. Used as a breeder of slaves, brutally beaten, Sethe nevertheless eventually escapes with her children but is forced to murder them rather than accept their recapture. In Paradise, Morrison further explores the race and gender divisions between a multi-racial women's commune-cumwomen's shelter and an all-black town dominated by racial and patriarchal myth. The novel begins with black men murdering the women and, in retrospective narrative, explores the underlying causes for this event. Clearly, Morrison has moved beyond portraying black women exclusively and toward a racially


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encompassing feminist perspective, thereby redefining her previous discourse of division between men and black women. Like most contemporary black feminist theorists, Toni Morrison views race, gender, and class as interlocking cultural constructions, and in her wonderful essay "Friday on the Potomac" (in Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power, 1992), she examines the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings as a ritual of black social constructs in which the black male triumphs by allying himself with white patriarchy. But Morrison is especially intrigued by the new rhetoric of the black woman: "It would have been more comfortable to remain silent. . . . I took no initiative to inform anyone. . . . I could not keep silent" (Hill in Morrison). Anita Hill's accusations of harassment reflect a new voice: Anita Hill refuses to be silenced. Morrison concludes--and her reply resonates in response to Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, and bell hooks--"In matters of race and gender, it is now possible and necessary, as it seemed never to have been before, to speak about these matters without the barriers, the silences" (Morrison R J, E P).

Works Cited Christian, Barbara. Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers. New York: Pergamon, 1985. Griffith, Elisabeth. In Her Own Right: The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Hooks, bell. Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End Press, 1981. Morrison, Toni, ed. Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality. New York: Pantheon, 1992. Smith, Valerie. not just race, not just gender: Black Feminist Readings. New York: Routledge, 1998. Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose. New York: Harcourt, 1984. Witt, Mary Ann Frese et al, eds. The Humanities: Cultural Roots and Continuities, Fifth Ed. Vol II. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.

CHAPTER TWO WILL THE REAL INDIAN PLEASE STAND UP?: THE LIFE AND WORK OF SYLVESTER LONG LANCE SARITA CANNON

I. Introduction The archetype of the person who pulls himself up out of poverty and becomes an upstanding, financially secure citizen is quite popular in the American literary imagination. But when a person crosses racial lines rather than socioeconomic class lines, this is frequently seen as a betrayal, not a triumph. Indeed, what are the ethics of creating a new ethnic or racial identity? I will discuss this question by examining the life of Sylvester Long, a man who was born into a colored community in North Carolina in 1896 and transformed himself into an American Indian athlete, journalist, and film actor named Chief Buffalo Long Lance. Some argue that Long Lance’s racial impersonation was justified; during a time of political upheaval and racial violence, Long Lance escaped life as a Black man in the best way he knew how. On the other hand, perhaps Long Lance was merely one of thousands of people who “play Indian” for their own personal gain. Moreover, perhaps his fabrication of a Native identity perpetuated stereotypes of American Indians and capitulated to the pseudo-scientific racist thinking of the time. Both of these perspectives are valid; but more important than determining whether Long Lance was a hero or a coward is critically unpacking what Long Lance’s life tells us about the past and present construction of race in the United States.

II. Legacy of Self-Made Man The archetype of the man who goes from rags to riches because of hard work and perseverance is central to the construction of a national American identity. What makes the United States great, many have claimed, is that anyone,


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regardless of background, can be a success. Benjamin Franklin, particularly as he represents himself in his autobiography, first published in 1791, embodies one of the earliest examples of this self-made man. As Laura Browder writes: “More than anyone else Franklin introduced Americans to the notion that the self was not a historically determined structure, and this was what would be distinctive about American life. The self in this model is mutable” (Browder, 3). The stories of Ragged Dick by Horatio Alger (which were first serialized in 1867) bolstered this collective belief that anyone in America can make it if he tries hard enough. Perhaps the most salient modern-day example is Oprah Winfrey, who survived a childhood of poverty and abuse in the American South, went on to create a career for herself as a news anchor/talk show host, and is now one the most wealthy and influential people in the United States, if not the world. Of course the danger in believing in a meritocracy is that one may be more likely to fail to recognize the institutionalized practices of racism, sexism, and homophobia that make it much harder for members of certain historically marginalized groups to succeed. Nevertheless, the person who pulls himself up by his bootstraps is an essential element of the American spirit. While socioeconomic mobility is valued, even venerated, racial mobility is not. Passing, particularly racial passing, is often seen as a betrayal rather than an act of nobility or bravery or wit. What accounts for this difference?

III. Racial Passing Part of the answer to this question of why Americans as a whole find racial passing so threatening lies in the history of race relations in the United States. As a nation established by Europeans who used the labor of Africans and the land of indigenous peoples, the United States has a long legacy of racial hierarchy. Louis Owens explains the connections between racial classification and capitalism in the following excerpt from his book Mixedblood Messages: If it takes only the most minute drop of “black” blood to make a person black, why must it take a preponderance of “Indian” blood – or a government number – to make a person a real Indian? Could we be dealing with a question of commodification? Could it be that white America bears a powerful residue of the old slave-owning sense that it is always most economically profitable to label a man or woman black if possible? A black person was once worth money to white America. And could it be that the same white America wants, deep, deep down in its colonial soul, to be Indian so desperately that such a quality becomes a bitterly contested value, a highly eroticized value, as the recent abominable movies Dances With Wolves and Pocahontas make painfully clear? America wants to strip itself bare, like Dunbar in Dances With Wolves, bathe in purifying baptismal waters, and confront – and in confronting possess – Indianness. (Owens, 199)

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The idea that somebody who was considered Black because of the one-drop rule or hypodescent could “pass” as a white person was (and still is, in many cases) frightening to members of the dominant group. Visual cues such as skin color and hair texture are not always accurate markers of racial or ethnic identity. Race itself is an unstable, fluid category, and thus the power of those in the ruling class is also unstable and contingent.

IV. Long Lance Biography The topic of this essay is a man who crossed the color line in order to better his own life. His life is a testament to the mutability of racial identity. Sylvester Long was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in 1896 to two parents who claimed that they were white and Indian (Croatan, to be exact). But because of the racial binary in the South at the time and the “logic” of the one-drop rule, anyone who was not fully white was considered Colored (Smith, 23). Thus Sylvester’s parents taught him that in order to survive in the South, he had to abide by the written and unwritten laws of Jim Crow culture. Early on, Sylvester looked for away to escape life as a Black man in the South, and his first opportunity came when he applied to and matriculated at Carlisle Boarding School, claiming that he was part-Cherokee and part-Croatan (Smith, 41). Although rumors swirled at Carlisle that Long had some black blood, he was generally accepted by his peers and teachers. After writing a letter to President Woodrow Wilson in 1915 in which he claimed to be a full-flooded Cherokee, Sylvester was accepted as a presidential appointee to West Point, an institution that was not open to Black people at that time (Smith, 51). But just as he was about to take his entrance exams, he fled North to Canada, the first of many flights to escape possible inquiries into his past. He earned a reputation as an excellent journalist in Calgary, Alberta, doing field research and writing articles abut various Native American tribes. It was during this time that Long Lance changed his official Indian story and claimed to be a full-blooded Blackfoot chief (Smith, 109). Yet even as he documented the lives of Native peoples, some Indians were suspicious of Long Lance’s version of his own life story. As a result, he consistently made attempts to legitimate his status as an Indian. For instance, in 1928, he published an autobiography entitled Long Lance, which was a fabricated tale of growing up as a Plains Indian (Smith, 206-7). Even as he gained fame as a prominent figure in New York society, as a well-known writer, and as an actor, many people, mostly Indians, openly contested his claim to being a full-blooded Indian (Smith, 242-3). Over time these scandals took an emotional toll on him, and as a result Long Lance became depressed, started drinking, and killed himself with a single gunshot to the head in 1932 (Smith, 312-3).


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V. Heroic Trickster? It is possible to view Long Lance’s lifelong racial masquerade as an act of subversion against a racist system. From a young age refused to follow the rules by which young colored men in early twentieth-century South were expected to live. Long Lance used his creativity and his intelligence to gain entry to various communities that were barred to African Americans at the time. Like many people who cross the color line, Long Lance seemed to enjoy the thrill of tricking white America.1 Long Lance also embodies characteristics of the trickster figure that is central to both African American and Native American oral traditions. In the introduction to her study of trickster figures in modern literature by women of color, Jeanne Rosier Smith describes tricksters as “shape-shifters who fell on borders, at crossroads, and between worlds” (1). Indeed, one of the most common traits of the trickster in multiple cultural contexts is his liminality, a characteristic that is also shared by the mixed-race figure. In addition to being situated at “crossroads and thresholds,” tricksters are “uninhibited by social constraints,” can “escape virtually any situation,” and have a “boundless ability to survive” (Smith 8-9). While the trickster figure exhibits behavior that places him on the margins of society, he is also central to cultural survival and actually reinforces core community values. Like the African American trickster seen in folklore such as the Uncle Remus tales, Long Lance often cleverly manipulated language in order to fight oppression. His 1928 autobiography exemplifies his ability to use the printed word to bolster his identity as a Blackfoot chief. Long Lance literally wrote himself out of blackness and into an Indian identity. And like the Native American trickster, especially its iteration in Creek and Cherokee folk tales, Long Lance faced a seemingly insurmountable challenge. In order to fulfill his goal, he must “transform himself racially or change social norms. He tries several times but fails, and though he may be punished or killed he endeavors to try again and again” (Wiget, 91-94). Far from being an unequivocally triumphant hero, trickster is often vulnerable and foolish – like humans themselves. Probably because these figures embody our own foibles, these tricksters often evoke laughter. An example of Long Lance’s role as a 1

Werner Sollors writes about this phenomenon: “Passing may even lead an individual who succeeds in it to a feeling of elation and exultation, an experience of living as a spy who crosses a significant boundary and sees the world anew from a changed vantage point, heightened by the double consciousness of his subterfuge. Thus persons who pass may enjoy their role as tricksters who play, as does the ‘ex-colored man,’ a ‘capital joke’ on society, or who, as Langston Hughes puts it, ‘get a kick out of putting something over on the boss, who never dreams he’s got a colored secretary’” (Sollors, Neither Black Nor White, 253).

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trickster is the famous photograph of him posing in full tribal regalia. Even though Long Lance’s identity was called into question (or perhaps because it was perpetually called into question), he continued to prove his Indian-ness by any means necessary. Long Lance’s biographer, Donald B. Smith, describes the photo: “The pants probably came from the Crow in Montana, the tobacco pouch from the Bloods, the vest from the Blackfoot. On his head Long Lance wore a wig and the headdress used in the Chicken Dance” (Smith, 148). While Long Lance’s dress may have appeared “authentic” to the average Anglo-American viewer, anyone who was familiar with differences among Native American tribes would have recognized the inconsistencies in his clothing.

VI. Pitiful Wannabe? On the other hand, we can see Long Lance as yet another example of a nonNative person taking on Native identity for fame and profit. Philip Deloria has written extensively about the numerous ways in which non-Indians and Indians alike have deployed various versions of Indian-ness for multiple purposes. “Playing Indian” manifests itself in the Indian hobby craze that swept the nation in the 1960s as well as in the numerous “Indian” mascots that exist in college and professional sports today. In her book entitled Going Native, Shari Huhndorf explores how European Americans have appropriated aspects of Indian culture and identity in order to create and solidify a white national identity (Huhndorf, 15). One of the most notorious examples of this behavior is the life of Asa Carter, also known as Forrest Carter, a card-carrying member of the KKK and speechwriter of George Wallace’s infamous speech “Segregation Now, Segregation Forever!” who published the Education of Little Tree in 1976 (Browder, 132). This “autobiography” was supposedly the story of Carter himself, a young Cherokee boy who grew up with his traditional grandparents. The book was quite popular, most likely because it fed into the “fantasy about Native American primal spirituality” (Browder, 134), until Carter’s true identity as a violent racist was revealed in 1991. While Long Lance’s deception, I would argue, is not as sinister as Carter’s impersonation, one could argue that both men did buy into stereotypes of Indian people and ultimately strengthened false or misinformed images of Native people that have been circulating for many years.

VII. Ramifications The personal consequences of Long Lance’s ethnic impersonation are double-edged. He did gain money and fame, but Long Lance could never relax and enjoy the fruits of his labor. He was constantly on edge, preparing to deal


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with the next person who would attack his claim to Indian ancestry. In the end, this constant stress may have cost him his life, for he became depressed and most likely committed suicide as a result of the constant scrutiny he faced. Not only did Long Lance hurt himself, but he also may have hurt the members of the Blackfoot Indian communities of which he claimed to be a part. While it is true that Long Lance aimed to give a voice to Native people, especially those on the Blackfoot reservations, and he did advertise their plight through his numerous magazine and newspaper articles, ultimately, Long Lance bolstered the idea of the “noble savage” and “inevitable” extinction of the red man. He participates in this spirit-killing behavior most notably in the 1930 film he made with Douglas Burden, The Silent Enemy. This movie, starring several Native American actors and filmed in the dead of the Canadian winter, told the story of the Ojibway people fighting against hunger and the loss of their traditional way of life. Although Burden intended the film to be a true-to-life depiction of a people struggling to hold onto their disappearing way of life, Nancy Cook asserts that the film “manufactures. . . . its own authenticity” (Cook, 110-1). In particular, although the story depicts Ojibway people, all of the principal actors from tribes other than Ojibway (Cook, 112). And because so few Native Americans of any tribe practiced the traditional ways, Burden brought props to set the from the Museum of Natural History and then set out to “teach the Indians their use. Old games, old customs, old methods of making fire and cooking, and many other customs forgotten by disuse were revived. To accomplish this, [they] consulted authorities on Indian lore and sought the advice of specialists on the subject” (Cook, 112). Like the photographs of Edward Curtis, the supposedly authentic customs and dress of the Ojibway in The Silent Enemy are actually staged. These Indians are packaged according mainstream stereotypes in an attempt to appeal to a largely white viewing audience that enjoys the image of the “exotic,” “tragic,” and “inevitably disappearing” Indian on the big screen. One could argue that by starring in this film, Long Lance promoted these romanticized myths of Native Americans.

VIII. Conclusion Ultimately it is difficult to know how to interpret the ethics of Long Lance’s decision to take on an American Indian identity. Long Lance did what he thought was in his own best interests at the time. Any fabrication exacts a price, whether it is emotional or financial, personal or collective. But instead of critiquing Long Lance’s choice, let us critique the racist system into which he was born and which spurred his decision to claim Native ancestry. Seventy years later, the society we live in still operates according to a racial hierarchy in which blackness sits at the absolute bottom. Seventy years later, American

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culture continued to operate according to the notion of racial or ethnic authenticity, an idea that attempts to impose strict, narrow definitions of blackness, whiteness, and Indian-ness onto people. Seventy years later, we have an obligation to question the rules by which Long Lance played in order to understand our own complicity in maintaining the racial status quo.

Works Cited Browder, Laura. Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Cook, Nancy. “The Scandal of Race: Authenticity, The Silent Enemy, and the Problem of Long Lance.” Headline Hollywood: A Century of Film Scandal. Eds. Adrienne L. McLean and David A. Cook. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2001. 107-128. Deloria, Philip. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. Huhndorf, Shari. Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Owens, Louis. Mixedblood Mesasages: Literature, Film, Family, Place. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Smith, Donald B. Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance: The Glorious Impostor. Red Deer. Alberta, Canada: Red Deer Press, 1999. Smith, Jeanne Rosier. Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. Sollors, Werner. Neither Black Nor White: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Wiget, Andrew. “His Life in His Tail: The Native American Trickster Figure and the Literature of Possibility.” Redefining American Literary History. Eds. LaVonne Brown Ruoff and Henry W. Ward Jr. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1990. 83-96.

CHAPTER THREE IDENTITY, INCOMPLETION, AND THE ADVENT OF THE POLITICAL: W.E.B. DU BOIS AND THE DIALECTIC OF RACE AND NATION AINSWORTH A. CLARKE

“The question, then, which we must seriously consider is this: what is the real meaning of Race; what has, in the past, been the law of race development, and what lessons has the past history of race development to teach the rising Negro people?”2 This is the question that begins W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Conservation of Races,” his 1897 address to the American Negro Academy. Delivered less than a year after Plessy vs. Ferguson, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that constitutionally sanctioned legal segregation, and written within the ever receding shadow of what was the promise of the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments, Du Bois’s essay appears at an undeniably burdened historical moment for African Americans.3 The 1890s were also to become the decade of the highest number of reported lynchings in American history.4 The over 2000 lynchings during the decade, most of which visited upon black people, punctuated the reversal of what had seemingly begun so well with the Emancipation Proclamation and the hopes of the newly freed slaves. Alongside these developments, the 1890 U.S. census unleashed a new debate, couched in Darwinian terms, regarding the Negro’s fitness for survival. The census reported declining Negro birthrates and populations and this was construed as betokening

2 W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Conservation of Races," in Du Bois: Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library of America, 1986), 815. 3 The decision in Plessy was given on May 18th, 1896 and Du Bois delivered “Conservation,” on March 5th, 1897. 4 Shipp Trial Project, Lynching in America: Statistics, Information, Images [Internet] (Archive at Tuskegee Institute, [cited); available from: www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchingyear.html.

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the death knell of the Negro race.5 By the 1890s discussions of the inevitable disappearance of the American Negro, spurred primarily by interpretations of the 1890 census, acquired increasing currency. The prevailing question was no longer, as it had been, whether the Negro constituted a different species, but whether the Negro was fit for survival.6 Written alongside the tumult of late nineteenth century American racial politics “The Conservation of Races” presents itself in part as Du Bois’s attempt to situate the Negro within the period’s “race talk” –– to borrow a phrase from Arendt –– in a somewhat different way.7 What is worked through in Du Bois’s address, at a subterranean level as it were, is the attempt to broker the beginnings of a rapprochement between an understanding of the Negro and a conception of race. That the conception of race on offer in Du Bois’s “Conservation” finds itself at odds with either the biological or cultural variant of the notion might at first seem to be a slightly specious argument. After all Du Bois’s entire terminology seems borrowed from the governing discursive schemes of the day. Race appears to be a question of “language,” “blood,” even of specific “genius; Du Bois marshals the entire rhetoric of late nineteenth century racial discourse in service of a conception of race that seemingly leaves us no further than when we began. But in following this either/or choice we quickly find that Du Bois’s text can in fact offer us either option ––a biological or a cultural determination of race –– and sometimes in remarkably close proximity to each other.8 That tensions and slippages arise in Du Bois’s text between a conception of race anchored in the biological and one firmly situated on the semantic field of the socio-historical is altogether clear. Yet the question remains: is this all there is to the position Du Bois elaborates, namely, an overly confused notion of racial difference that fails to rigorously propose a consistent definition. Does the conception of race Du Bois outlines falter on the unresolved tensions that his texts appear unable to surmount? Whatever answer one chooses to pursue, proceeding without due attentiveness to the complexity of the claims registered 5

The rate of population increase among Negroes (as African Americans were designated in the 1890 census) had dropped by almost half in the 1890 census. Whereas the Negro population increased by approximately 1.7 million between 1870 and 1880, the 1890 census indicated that their numbers increased by less than one million between 1880 and 1890. United States Census Bureau, Census Data for the Year 1890 [Internet] (United States Historical Census Data, [cited); available from www.fisher.lib.virginia.edu/cgilocal/censusbin/census/cen.pl?year=890. 6 George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1971), 246-47. 7 Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1973), 174. 8 Du Bois, "Conservation," 818.


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in a text such as “The Conservation of Races,” ignores what may be construed as Du Bois’s initial cautionary note regarding race: Although the wonderful developments of human history teach that the grosser physical differences of color, hair and bone go but a short way toward explaining the different roles which groups of men have played in Human Progress, yet there are differences –– subtle, delicate and elusive, though they may be –– which have silently but definitely separated men into groups. While these subtle forces have generally followed the natural cleavages of common blood, descent and physical peculiarities, they have at other times swept across and ignored these. At all times, however, they have divided human beings into races, which, while they perhaps transcend scientific definition, nevertheless, are clearly defined to the eye of the Historian and Sociologist.9

Students of Du Bois are undoubtedly familiar with this passage. Outside of the well-known opening section of The Souls of Black Folk, there might not be a more recognizably Du Boisian paragraph than this one. It appears to articulate the two competing conceptions of race seemingly at the center of Du Bois’s essay. The first, a definition that ensconces race in the framework of scientific discourse thereby relegating race to a species of biological determinism and making of the Negro an epiphenomenon of biological destiny. The second conception seemingly operative in Du Bois’s text locates race within the parameter of a socio-historical determination of racial difference. Both of these ideas of race present themselves in this paragraph and provide the terms through which a critical reading of Du Bois’s notion of race must navigate. Most critics, whether sympathetic or otherwise, have generally construed the distinction between these two conceptions of race as an opposition.10 Either one of the

9

Ibid., 816-17. See amongst others, Peter Coviello, "Intimacy and Affliction: Du Bois, Race, and Psychoanalysis," Modern Language Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2003): 1-32, Robert GoodingWilliams, "Outlaw, Appiah, and Du Bois's 'the Conservation of Races'," in W.E.B. Du Bois on Race and Culture: Philosophy, Politics, and Poetics, ed. Bernard W. Bell, Emily Grosholz, and James B. Stewart (New York: Routledge, 1996), 39-56, Tommy Lott, "Du Bois and Locke on the Scientific Study of the Negro," Boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture 27, no. 3 (2000): 135-52, Tommy Lott, "Du Bois's Anthropological Notion of Race," in Race, ed. Robert Bernasconi (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2001), 59-83, Kevin Thomas Miles, ""One Far Off Divine Event": "Race" and a Future History in Du Bois," in Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy, ed. Robert Bernasconi and Sybol Cook, Studies in Continental Thought (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 19-31, Lucius Outlaw, "'Conserve' Races? In Defense of W.E.B. Du Bois," in W.E.B. Du Bois on Race and Culture, ed. Bernard W. Bell, Emily Grosholz, and James B. Stewart (New York: Routledge, 1996), 15-37, Cynthia D. 10

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definitions must be dismissed as unrepresentative of the true scope of Du Bois idea of race, or the apparent contradiction implied by their dual presence minimized by emphasizing the presence of one at the expense of the other. That within these pages the number of races varies, depending on whether Du Bois is relying on the scientific (2) or socio-historical (8) account, would seem to reinforce the interpretive strategy that attempts to resolve this problem by adjudicating between these two seemingly ‘rival’ accounts of race.11 But Du Bois’s text appears to offer a third formulation, one that may provide another way of negotiating the specifically Du Boisian paradox of race: “If this be true, then the history of the world is the history, not of individuals, but of groups, not of nations, but of races…” 12 Found at the beginning of the paragraph that succeeds the previous citation, Du Bois here introduces an equivalence in which a peculiar notion of race seems operative: individuals are to nations as groups are to races. The peculiarity of the citation stems less from the seeming identification of nations and races. This commonplace already fueled much of the political rhetoric of European and American imperial expansionism during the 1890s through the turn of the century.13 Du Bois’ formulation would appear then, on this reading, to rehearse the accepted truisms of contemporary political rhetoric and race thinking albeit in service of a slightly different objective, namely, the rehabilitation of the American Negro. But reading Du Bois’claim in such a narrowly circumscribed a manner denies the actual idea of race at the heart of his formulation. The specificity of Du Bois’ proposition is clarified if compared to another late nineteenth century theorist of the dialectic of race and nation Ernest Renan. Renan’s classic statement on the matter “What is a Nation?” delivered some fifteen years before Du Bois’ own effort to reinscribe the

Schrager, "Both Sides of the Veil: Race, Science, and Mysticism in W.E.B. Du Bois," American Quarterly 48, no. 4 (1996): 551-86. 11 Referencing the scientific definition Du Bois maintains that “[t]he final word of science, so far, is that we have at least two, perhaps three, great families of human beings –– the whites and Negroes, possibly the yellow race.” A page later, once he turns to history, the number is augmented by five: “We find upon the world’s stage today eight distinctly different races, in the sense in which History tells us the word must be used. They are, the Slavs of eastern Europe, the Teutons of middle Europe, the English of Great Britain and America, the Romance nations of Southern and Western Europe, the Negroes of Africa and America, the Semitic people of Western Asia and Northern Africa, the Hindoos of Central Asia and the Mongolian of Eastern Asia.” Du Bois, "Conservation," 816, 17-18. 12 Ibid., 817. 13 Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 185-221.


19

relationship between race and nation, 14 argues for the distinctiveness of the nation and of its centrality as the site for the actualization of the ‘properly’ modern political relation: At the time of the French Revolution, it was commonly believed that the institutions proper to small, independent cities, such as Sparta and Rome, might be applied to our large nations, which number some thirty or forty million souls. Nowadays, a far graver mistake is made: race is confused with nation and a sovereignty analogous to that of really existing peoples is attributed to ethnographic or, rather linguistic groups.15

The nation that Renan defines above as the locus of an authentic, “really existing peoples,” is also the site from which one recognizes the operation of true sovereignty; in other words sovereignty derived from the facticity of this people. Following a clear and well worn path, Renan offers a recognizable trajectory by which sovereignty derives from a source –– in this case the “people” –– from which authority, the authority of the political, is itself authorized. Why then, if the heart of the argument seems in such proper order, is it that the misapplication of institutional-political models (i.e., Sparta, Rome) constitutes a far less serious matter than the apparently egregious confusion of race with nation? What sort of dissimulation does race initiate and on whose behalf? And what is the exact nature of its threat to sovereignty? The question is not simply one of definition. As conceived by Renan, the emergence of the nation requires that its constituent peoples engage in an active forgetting through which the national bond is thereby formed.16 For Renan nations constitute themselves by transmuting pre-existing identifications into ‘historic’ attachments thereby forging a unified national identity through the fusion of their various populations.17 The relation that defines the political and from which the sovereignty ascribed to the “people” issues is this fusion, this

14

Renan delivered his famous speech at the Sorbonne on March 11th, 1882 and Du Bois delivered his on May 1897, a little over fifteen years later. 15 Ernest Renan, "What Is a Nation?," in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990), 8. 16 Ibid., 11. 17 Renan relates the specific failures of the Hapsburg monarchy to its inability to enact this dialectic of fusion and forgetting: “Far from managing to fuse the diverse [ethnic] elements to be found in its domains, the House of Hapsburg has kept them distinct and often opposed the one to the other. …If you take a city such as Salonika, or Smyrna, you will find their five or six communities each of which has its own memories and which have almost nothing in common. Yet the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things.” Ibid.

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transformation of many into one.18 But what in this operation is being forgotten? What must memory leave behind? In his comparison of the relative success of the nationality principle in France as compared to the Hapsburg Empire Renan suggests an answer: “No French citizen knows whether he is a Burgundian, an Alan, a Taifale, or a Visigoth, yet every French citizen has to have forgotten the massacre of Saint Bartholomew, or the massacres that took place in the Midi in the thirteenth century”.19 Lost to the beyond of memory are those identifications that defined individuals and peoples before their attachment to the nation and erased from its place in lived memory is the violence that inaugurates the space of the political itself: Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for [the principle of] nationality. Indeed, historical enquiry brings to light deeds of violence which took place at the origin of all political formations, even those whose consequences have been altogether beneficial.20

The violence at issue here is not simply the violence of inauguration but is the violence of race, racial violence. Race constitutes itself in Renan’s contention as the site of inauguration but one that doesn’t itself accede to a place within the configuration of the political. In other words, race is precisely what must be superseded if a nation is to be formed as such. If the political is the space of fusion, of a supervening unity, in essence, of the union of the subject, then race in its proposition of violent difference, of racial violence, remains inassimilable to the project that defines the national principle. If we follow the logic of Renan’s argument we come to recognize why race constitutes such a disturbing formative component of the national project. In the dialectic of forgetting and remembering that facilitates the transformation of preexisting relations into national attachments, the fiction is the idea of nation itself. The actualization of what Renan terms the “nation” requires the eclipse of the violent inscription of group life he calls “race.” To distinguish racial identification as the moment which founds the possibility of nation, and therefore the emergence of a site that one can identify with the political, is to derive the legitimacy of that site from a moment that exceeds it, that of racial 18

Renan couldn’t be clearer when he writes that the “defining feature” of those states that can be genuinely termed nations is that they have achieved “the fusion of their component populations.” Ibid., 10. 19 Ibid., 11. 20 Ibid.


21

violence itself. It’s this founding paradox that threatens the phantasm of national becoming. The very sovereignty that grounds the political space of the nation derives from an articulation at once external and internal to it, in fact, simultaneously in both places and in neither. If Renan’s conception of the relation between nation and race favors the privileging of nation at the expense of race and construes nation as the site of legitimate political relation, Du Bois’s confers on race a somewhat different status. Let’s return to the Du Boisian passage with which we began: “If this be true, then the history of the world is the history, not of individuals, but of groups, not of nations, but of races…” With Du Bois, as with Renan, there is also a question of the “really” existent, especially as it applies to the agent that constitutes the motor of history. In other words there is an indication that the discourse proffered by Du Bois, inasmuch as it evinces, even in an understated fashion, a concern with “true” and “false” peoples, i.e., with the locus of true agency, displays a subtle affiliation with the discursive framework Renan produces. But if we follow the logic of Du Bois’s formulation to its conclusion we find ourselves at a somewhat different point of arrival than Renan. For Du Bois, the nation does not constitute the locus of the relation one can call political. If the analogies at work in the above passage liken individual to nation and group to race then nation cannot constitute the form of the political configuration. Du Bois’s words seem an echo of an earlier analogy itself a consideration of the similarity between individual and nation: What is the use of working for a law-governed civil constitution among individual men, i.e., of planning a commonwealth? The same unsociability which forced men to do so gives rise in turn to a situation whereby each commonwealth, in its external relations (i.e., as a state in relation to other states), is in a position of unrestricted freedom. Each must accordingly expect from any other precisely the same evils which formerly oppressed individual men and forced them into a law-governed civil state.21 (Italics added)

Drawn from the seventh proposition of Kant’s “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,” the analogy relies on a comparison in which individual states are likened to human beings. Nations according to Kant, occupy the same status as individuals prior to their entrance into civil union, they live in a “lawless state of savagery.”22 The analogy extends beyond being a 21

Immanuel Kant, "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose," in Kant: Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 47. 22 Ibid.

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simple illustration, for Kant the “state of savagery” in which states find themselves before the advent of a federation of nations prevents the full development of human capacities. As with the individual human being for whom to live outside the civil order, outside the political relation, is to “hold up the development of all [one’s] natural capacities,” likewise the state that remains within the realm of “barbarous freedom” also hinders the full and complete development of human capacities.23 For inasmuch as the fulfillment of human freedom –– and thus one’s proper identity as a human being –– requires the establishment of the civil bond, of the political relation, to live outside of such relation is to withdraw from that which defines oneself as a human being.24 Following the logic of Kant’s own analogy, Du Bois situates the individual and the nation along an axis that places both terms outside the (self-)defining conditions of the political relation. Yet with this difference: under Du Bois race has now become part of this conceptual mix. For if individuals and nations are outside the constitutive relation of the political bond, then the other pairing in Du Bois’s equivalence, i.e., groups and races, may well have a claim to more than simple membership within it. By placing race amid this discursive context and having it assume other than its prescribed role, Du Bois places pressure on the conception of race itself and, as I will suggest, on the parameters of our understanding of the political as well. Understood along these lines race no longer conforms to its previous incarnation as a referent for distinctions drawn from differences of pigment or acculturation. Having revalorized the dialectic of race and nation by placing race –– granted, in a tentative and altogether insecure fashion –– at the site of what nation had previously claimed for itself (viz., the political), Du Bois locates race on quite different terrain. This conception of race might initially appear utterly alien not only to our conception of Du Bois but to the actual concerns of Du Bois’s text. After all doesn’t the Du Bois with which we are familiar oscillate between two very different yet clearly, if inconsistently, defined notions of race? And aren’t there 23

Ibid., 49. Summarizing the importance Kant ascribes to our common relation through the law Charles Taylor remarks that: “If to be free is to follow the moral law, and to act morally is to see that the maxim of my action could be willed universally, then freedom requires that I understand myself as a human among humans. I have to understand myself as standing under a law that applies to myself as well to others, one that is not addressed to me alone, but to a rational subject as such.” Charles Taylor, "Kant's Theory of Freedom," in Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 326, see also 28-30. Refracted through the formalism of the law, the common bond Kant imputes to the human being in its capacity as moral subject and as a constituent feature of the subject’s very humanity finds its corollary in the possibility –– because the result of the purposiveness of nature –– of the ideal political constitution. 24


23

numerous instances, especially in a text such as “Conservation,” in which the conflict that arises occurs between a scientific and a sociohistorical conception of racial difference? A passage such as the following may well be a citation on which the skeptical might rely: Certainly we must acknowledge that physical differences play a great part, and that, with wide exceptions and qualifications, these eight great races of to-day follow the cleavage of physical race distinctions… But while race differences have followed mainly physical race lines, yet no mere physical distinctions would really define or explain the deeper differences –– the cohesiveness and continuity of these groups. The deeper differences are spiritual, psychical, differences –– undoubtedly based on the physical, but infinitely transcending them.25

Here we have all the elements generally assumed to define Du Bois’s conception of race; his recognition of the “great part” played by phenotypic difference, accompanied by his evident unwillingness to reduce the issue to simple physio-biological determinations. And, in the final analysis, Du Bois is either conceived as having failed to surmount the biological underpinnings inscribed in his notion of race, or, it is concluded, that the true issue at hand is Du Bois’s introduction of a cultural definition of race. Yet, as is often the case with Du Bois’s text, it seemingly provides an alternative formulation. In this instance that alternative means a reading that doesn’t reduce the semantic economy of “Conservation” to an entrenched binary opposition: “The whole process which has brought about these race differentiations has been a growth, and the great characteristic of this growth has been the differentiation of spiritual and mental differences between great races of mankind and the integration of physical differences.”26 In this passage, which occurs at the conclusion of the previous citation, we find that Du Bois’s terms are not static. Predicated on the growing differentiation of “spiritual and mental differences” and the convergence of “physical differences,” Du Bois’s conception of race requires the eclipsing of physical differences for the emergence of racial difference itself. Whether one finds Du Bois claim regarding the dual criterion by which the emergence of race is defined consistent with the entire rhetoric of “Conservation,” there remains nonetheless a level at which the full reduction of race to the biological is resisted. But “Conservation” takes us further afield:

25 26

Du Bois, "Conservation," 818. Ibid., 818-19.

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The age of nomadic tribes of closely related individuals represents the maximum of physical differences. They were practically vast families, and there were as many groups as families. As the families came together to form cities the physical differences lessened, purity of blood was replaced by the requirement of domicile, and all who lived within the city bounds became gradually to be regarded as members of the group, i.e., there was a slight and slow breaking down of physical barriers. This, however, was accompanied by an increase of the spiritual and social differences between cities. This city became husbandmen, this, merchants, another warriors, and so on. The ideals of life for which the different cities struggled were different. When at last cities began to coalesce into nations there was another breaking down of barriers which separated groups of men. The larger and broader differences of color, hair and physical proportions were not by any means ignored, but myriads of minor differences disappeared, and the sociological and historical races of men began to approximate the present division of races as indicated by physical researches.27

Conceiving of race within the terms specified above, Du Bois removes it from the reductive categorization that would claim it for either biology or history. In his narrative, individuals initially find themselves in loose aggregations defined either through familial or group affiliation. These aggregations, distinguished principally by their tribal or familial combinations, constitute “the maximum of physical differences,” and yet we are not here speaking of race. Rather than race these ‘pre-racial’ individuals inhabit what is best defined as a state of nature. Aligning less with the radical atomism of Hobbes than with Kant and Rousseau, Du Bois structures his illustration as a representation of the transition from a state of nature to a realm of political relation. “Conservation” maps the journey undertaken by individuals circumscribed by profound cleavages whose movement away from the “age of nomadic tribes” –– and the emphatic physical differences that define it –– concludes with a markedly different type of relation. It’s not simply that physical differences cease to assume importance, but rather that the transition from a state of nature to a form of association requires the eclipse of these differences. In other words “purity of blood” must be “replaced by the requirement of domicile.” What characterizes Du Bois’ narrative is this shift from blood to domicile, from family to city, from nature to something he calls ‘race.’ In formulating this alternative narrative of de-differentiation Du Bois conceives of race in substantially different terms by identifying the contours of race with the space of the political.

27

Ibid., 819.


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Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1973. Coviello, Peter. "Intimacy and Affliction: Du Bois, Race, and Psychoanalysis." Modern Language Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2003): 1-32. Du Bois, W.E.B. "The Conservation of Races." In Du Bois: Writings, edited by Nathan Huggins, 815-26. New York: Library of America, 1986. Fredrickson, George M. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1971. Gooding-Williams, Robert. "Outlaw, Appiah, and Du Bois's 'the Conservation of Races'." In W.E.B. Du Bois on Race and Culture: Philosophy, Politics, and Poetics, edited by Bernard W. Bell, Emily Grosholz and James B. Stewart, 39-56. New York: Routledge, 1996. Kant, Immanuel. "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose." In Kant: Political Writings, edited by Hans Reiss, 41-53. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Lott, Tommy. "Du Bois and Locke on the Scientific Study of the Negro." Boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture 27, no. 3 (2000): 135-52. ———. "Du Bois's Anthropological Notion of Race." In Race, edited by Robert Bernasconi, 59-83. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 2001. Miles, Kevin Thomas. ""One Far Off Divine Event": "Race" and a Future History in Du Bois." In Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy, edited by Robert Bernasconi and Sybol Cook, 19-31. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Outlaw, Lucius. "'Conserve' Races? In Defense of W.E.B. Du Bois." In W.E.B. Du Bois on Race and Culture, edited by Bernard W. Bell, Emily Grosholz and James B. Stewart. New York: Routledge, 1996. Renan, Ernest. "What Is a Nation?" In Nation and Narration, edited by Homi Bhabha, 8-22. New York: Routledge, 1990. Schrager, Cynthia D. "Both Sides of the Veil: Race, Science, and Mysticism in W.E.B. Du Bois." American Quarterly 48, no. 4 (1996): 551-86. Shipp Trial Project. Lynching in America: Statistics, Information, Images [Internet]. Archive at Tuskegee Institute, [cited. Available from www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchingyear.html. Taylor, Charles. "Kant's Theory of Freedom." In Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2, 318-37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

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United States Census Bureau. Census Data for the Year 1890 [Internet]. United States Historical Census Data, [cited. Available from: www.fisher.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/censusbin/census/cen.pl?year=890.

CHAPTER FOUR TANGIER: A PLACE REINVENTED, MADE AND UNMADE BY ANOUAR MAJID IN SI YUSSEF CHOUROUQ NASRI

Introduction Anouar Majid is a Moroccan American writer of a double-voiced literature bearing relationship to the Anglophone tradition and to the Moroccan culture. He has created a new narrative space for the representation of the Moroccan experience through and within the realm of the English language. Majid has stepped outside his culture in order to 'defamiliarize' it by translating it into a new mode of discourse. English is a space of freedom within an alienating medium which helped him come to terms with a new identity that transgresses national boundaries. It is a coded language he uses to escape restrictions characteristic of our national literature in Arabic. In Si Yussef, first published in 1992, and republished in 2005, Majid describes the psychological journey of Lamin (Majid as a young man) into the idealized past of Tangier. Tangier, the writer’s native city becomes the locale of identity. It is transformed into a symbolic space into which multiple tales and diverse identities transmitting the rediscovered memory of the past are projected. My interest in this paper is to study how the dialogue between one’s culture and the language of the Other that allows one to 'think otherwise' operates in the fiction of Majid. My desire is to demonstrate that the novel invites readers to question fixed definitions of identity and take a journey towards diversity and plurality.

The Journey Back Home Si Yussef, the first and only novel written by Anouar Majid is a largely autobiographical work. A slim volume of little more than 150 pages, it is a dense and problematic work which addresses questions of language, narrative and identity. The writer explores the idea of literature and narration as the space of a

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quest for home and identity. He examines the relationship between self and place. Si Yussef is the story of a modern being in search for the boundaries of selfhood. It is a diverse palette of identification. It describes a process of identity making that never reaches its terminus. Identity, as explored by Majid is a notion which is always fluid and able innovatively to respond to change. It echoes that of Edward Said who says in Culture and Imperialism that “all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure …” (xxix). In this novel, the writer is seeking another sense of home. He attempts a new conquest of the inner self and the outer world. He undertakes a return home through fiction writing. Narration unveils a new space for the retrieval of the writer’s scattered fragments of his conflicting identities. It offers a territory where he attempts to recuperate his dispersed self. Lamin, the narrator of his novel significantly describes himself as “the seeker of truth, decomposing myself to recapture the past” (34). Narration is a place where Majid puts himself in touch with the Other. Narrative is the chosen space for the appropriation of the identity of difference, a place where the struggle between the 'I' and the Other is ignited. Imagination embarks on a quest for new values, a psychical journey which can only be final in the beginning of something new; a process of becoming, susceptible to dialogue with otherness. The very title of the novel invites the reader to explore the themes of difference and alterity. Yussef is an etymologically historical name. When one remembers that Yussef was a Jewish prophet who immigrated to Egypt and founded a community there, one realises the universal, timeless dimension of Majid’s quest. According to the narrator, “a name like this never smells of the diluted blood that he carries in his veins . . . a mixing more powerful than the therapeutic métissage, a dance of souls, separated by the sea and the history of our glory and defeat” (35-6). Si Yussef is about the complicity of Lamin, a university student in Fez and Si Yussef, a seventy-seven year old Tanjawi. One rainy day, Lamin encounters the protagonist of his story in Achab’s café in Tangier. They continue to meet for the next twelve days, exactly four weeks and two days before Si Yussef’s death. Si Yussef guided tourists around the town when he was young. Later, he became a bookkeeper at La Gazelle’s. He was married to Lucia, a very beautiful Spanish and Christian woman. In Si Yussef’s remembrance of the past, many gaps are left which the narrator fills by using his imagination. The text alternates told and untold tales, episodes thoroughly explained or merely hinted at. Si Yussef acts as the recorder of the history of Tangier. He represents the voice of the idealized past whereas Lamin is the writer himself before experiencing exile. Lamin and Si Yussef represent the self approaching otherness. They are aspects of the writer. This


29

dialogic space of the encounter with alterity, simultaneously articulates a re-turn, a journey back to oneself, and towards home. This story is not for telling; rather it is a tale already told; whispered around the edges of an old soul; buried there for ever … Si Yussef’s life is a version of it: decadent, brutally realistic, a dream. Maybe all our lives are versions of it. . . . (Majid 84)

The book is a meditation on the self, on the homeland as though through estranged eyes. It is as if the situation of displacement (living in between two worlds) urged the transcultural writer Majid to revisit his culture of origin by the essential questioning of his relationship with history, social rites, faith and language. The writer who has made a literal journey from the third world to the first has learned to journey against certain fixed notions of origin. He is immersed in another culture and through this vantage point, he gained a critical understanding of cultural constructions. The experience of voluntary exile allowed him to understand cultural differences in a more essential manner and to view national boundaries as imaginary constructs. Majid’s purpose is to deconstruct these boundaries; to explore identity without loosing sight of the complexity of his task. He belongs to a tradition of writers who “had to step outside” their “culture, to defamiliarize the concept by translating it into a new mode of discourse, before” they “could see its potential in critical theory” (Gates 987-88). The novel creates a self-interrogating space where the narrator turns inward in an attempt to gather the dispersed fragments of the past. The story of Si Yussef was told in a thousand tongues. A diminutive man, a vanishing shadow leaning on a cane was, as you [the reader] see, to become my [Lamin’s] obsession, inhabiting my mind as if he had all the right in the world to be there, a silent ambiguous presence that seems to have sprung spontaneously from the terra incognita of my soul. . . . (Majid 71)

Identity becomes a process of narrative, a process which can be equated with profound creativity. Prayer, a leitmotiv running through the whole novel, gives the writer’s quest a spiritual dimension. It transforms it into a psychological and spiritual reconstruction of the self. The space of writing unveils a new territory for the exploration of a new identity. This is a split and demanding identity which chooses to assert itself at the crossroads of cultures, on the border of languages, in the transgression of taboos (the main taboo being the non-use of one’s mother tongue). Majid narrates a Moroccan story/the Moroccan history using English words, setting up a dialogue that extends from language to broader issues of culture. His narrative offers an example of how creative writing by the migrant writer can break away from Western cultural paradigms.

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A Symbolic Space In this returning back home, there is a threshold, a suspended space; the writer is in an ambivalent situation. How can he undertake a journey back home using English, the language of the Other? Is it paradoxical for a Moroccan living in the USA to write about Morocco in English? Majid faces a particular literary challenge as a Moroccan writer in English. He admits that “the language itself is becoming an unresolved nightmare, precipitating all kinds of dilemmas and generating a guilt whose redemption, speaks in a shy stuttering voice” (83). The writer is burdened by a double belonging. He suffers from both a geographical and a linguistic displacement. The language question is at the heart of his book. He says, “I never knew that the story of the new generation would be told in English; sound exotic. Yet the mission is too serious to afford a cautious withdrawal” (83). This sense of guilt has been expressed by African writer Chiuana Achebe in a speech entitled “The African Writer and the English Language”: Is it right that a man should abandon his mother tongue for someone else’s? It looks like a dreadful betrayal and produces a guilty feeling. But for me there is no other choice. I have the language and I intend to use it. (62)

English translates the experience of displacement and generates a creative tension within the language. It is the language of Majid’s intellectual make-up. The writer is probably more at ease with it because it is the language of his professional training. But is it the language of his emotional make-up as well? Is there any risk of maltreating one’s identity in an alien language? These are issues which obviously torment the writer although he attempts to account for his choice. As Chicana American writer Gloria Anzaldua explains in her book, Borderlands/La Frontera, “Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity – I am my language. Until I take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself” (1027). However, Majid does not use English to supplant his mother tongue. English offers him an alternative medium which guarantees a wider readership. When Omar, Si Yussef’s son, asked Lamin why he chose to write his book in English the narrator answered thus, “I want the whole world to know what your father said” (115). English then is used as a language, not as a cultural institution. Majid adopts it as a neutral tool for assessing the nature of cultural reality/identity. Unloaded from its traditional, cultural and emotional connotations, English offers Majid a freedom, a distance and a power. “To name the world”, Ashcroft and Griffiths say, is to ‘understand it and to have control over it” (283). To name it in English creates the suspended space of the return to selfhood through the encounter of the subject with the external


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Other. English is a symbolic space that challenges fixed assumptions of identity. It is both a space of alienation and reconnection. Si Yussef is thus a symbiosis with contrasting spaces: English and Tangier. Language, geography and identity are intimately intertwined in it. The same way as Majid uses the figure of the Other as a mediator against all forms of enclosure, so does he use the Other's language to free himself of monologic discourse, and gain access to a plural world. Although it seems paradoxical, he succeeds in conveying the reality of the Moroccan culture in English. He uses it in such a way as to make it unfold his native history. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience. (Achebe 61)

The writer has modified English, generating alternative literary possibilities. Language is transformed, appropriated, remoulded to suit the Moroccan experience. Majid has transfused Moroccan blood into English to capture the vivid images of the Moroccan dialect. His novel is replete with Arabic words whose translation into English would alter their meaning. Affarit, baraka, belgha, farran, fquih, gelassa, mihrab, muqaddam, nassrani, shuwwaffa, wali, etc. are Moroccan terms which Majid transplanted into his novel, creating thus a distinctive and colourful English. But Arabic is not the only idiom which has been incorporated into English. Majid’s language absorbs expressions from French and Spanish as well. Mixing English with words from other tongues which have their own resonances and connotations helped a foreign medium carry the weight of his native experience. It has paved the way for a new English in full communion with his ancestral home. Through the heterogeneity of languages, a new life is given to a true interweaving of plural histories. Due to a combination between a non English vocabulary with English principles of structure, language in Si Yussef conveys the Moroccan cultural sensibility. The novel is powerfully enriched and interrogated by this mixture. The tempo of Moroccan life is infused into English expressions in multiple ways. The use of very long sentences for example reflects the Moroccan tendency to gossip interminably. The main characters of the novel are bilingual. Lamin speaks Arabic and writes in English. Si Yussef and his children speak Spanish more than they do Arabic. This multilingual dialogism is part and parcel of Majid’s writing technique, it expresses the experience of crossing cultures which is a major theme in his book. Oral transmission of the past is yet another code of expression invented by Majid in his process of altering English. The tales told by Si Yussef and

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other characters are oral traces and testimonies of the past which the writer uses as a strategy of identity. Oral tradition is used to remould English and create a fundamental connection between Si Yussef’s remembrances and the collective memory. Si Yussef illustrates how a multilingual, inter-textual, multi-accented text works against the propensity of the dominant culture to homogenize. English gives way to a creative route towards oneself. It is a symbolic space which represents the territory of loss and memory, the site of an imaginary and unfulfilled journey home. Language describes a city which no longer exists, an ideal which cannot be attained. This sense of lack has propelled Majid to construct a new language: place. Place is language; it expresses the writer’s sense of lack and absence. English negotiates the space between the Other’s language and the writer’s lost city.

Memory and Space Tangier is a text that the writer invites us to read, a series of tales unfolded by Si Yussef, Lamin, Lucia and many other characters. These tales fill an empty space; they reshape the old cosmopolitan city. Memory and space, two elements crucial to the make-up of the book intersect in the text. The tone is proper to fantasy; the mood is melancholic and nostalgic. The novel carries the reader on a journey of remembering, expressing, feeling, and experiencing. The subject matter is tangible and abstract, material and metaphorical. The narrator is the writer himself, seeking traces of the past, attempting to recover lost origins. Lamin carries within him remnants of deep-seated antecedents. The Affarit, mythical creatures which belong to the Moroccan folklore stand for his ancestors. I [Lamin] hear you, O tribe of the Affarit, trapped like Hajjouj and Majjouj, I hear your whispers in the dark, unable to swallow your temporary but long and humiliating defeat. And your pain … and your pain … reaching out even to those, like myself, whose only wish is Allah’s mercy and forgiveness. And to make of remembrance an education … and to record the lives of men for a redemption foreseen, even by dark magicians who summon unholy spirits. (Majid 81)

Lamin clings to the old world and his life is split in two separate halves: the present, real and unsatisfactory and the past, remote and unattainable. By entering into a dialogue with Si Yussef, he attempts to revive a memory buried within him and which is part of his ancestors. The dialogic encounter between him and the old man is a dialogue between the present and the past. Lamin stresses the beauty of the past; his narration is an attempt to incorporate into the


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present the fragments of his dispersed cultural and historical identities, and assimilate the features of his ancestors. I [Si Yussef] have endless stories like these to tell, and sometimes I feel like digging in my memory to resuscitate them and bring them before me like complicitious ghosts against the present. . . . (Majid 59)

Trespassing the barrier between themselves and the ancestors enables both Lamin and Si Yussef to abridge the distances and break ground for a new space of belonging. Stylistically, then, flashbacks and monologues allow the narrative form to reflect the dialogic relationship of old and new, of the achievements of ancient times and a presently experienced corruption and decay. Si Yussef tells Lamin, your grandfather … promised the downfall of our culture in one hundred and twenty years, saying that unless we invoked the mercy of our land, we would be reduced to a transparence without soul, our status becoming that of servants, not of the legitimate masters of a civilisation that had created beauty and showered mercy on so many people in so many lands. . . . (33)

Lamin/Majid is conscious of being helpless in his wrestling with something authentic, rich and challenging. He performs an act of atonement with the past, the homage of a prodigal son. His is a divine destiny; a mystical mission. I [Lamin] felt like a vessel for his [Si Yussef] recollections … and I, for some mysterious reason, the same reason that justified the writing of old documents and scriptures, struggling with them as if it was a matter of life and death, I did better than listen. And I hope I remembered. (Majid 121, emphasis added)

This novel explores the politics of memory. The writer stresses the fact that individual and collective memories are forms of knowledge. Therefore, what is significant may not be what is written by the accepted historians, but truth can be known in other ways, including the memory of individuals. Si Yussef, by remembering his past in Tangier, is both part of a collective memory and a contributor to it. He tells Lamin, “I hoped that remembrance would be taught at schools, but there they only teach them big events like wars and state affairs and plagues and dates” (59). There is a history of imaginary geographies which cast minorities, 'imperfect' people, and a list of others who are seen to pose a threat to the dominant group in society as polluting bodies or folk devils who are then located 'elsewhere'. This 'elsewhere' might be nowhere. . . . (Sibley 49)

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Si Yussef produces an investigation of the past which goes beyond official documentation. His tales offer a counter-history of the imagination. He transposes the marvellous into his vision of the past, sounding original while repeating the same old truths, speaking on behalf of a whole nation. His stories are crowded with phantoms and mythic figures. What emerges from his tales is not history but reminiscences about places visited in the past, each recording a stage in his idealized past. We have thus two story-tellers relating the same narrative: Lamin and Si Yussef. They are different in their use of words and images, and the inflexion of voices to effect different tones. But both are loading their tales with their own anxieties, expectations and disappointments. These tales feed on elements from myth and popular imagination. They reflect the unfulfilled dreams of the writer himself. Majid proposes a reading of history in terms of an unfulfilled past subsequently endowed with a fullness through imagination. I [Lamin] was suddenly introduced … to a world not of Hercules and gladiators and other mythical or semi-mythical heroes that history creates everywhere, at any time, but to the world of anonymous men on the verge of extinction, and these men talking of the fabulous wonders of their collective unrecorded past, suddenly making of the legitimate knowledge I had been acquiring for years in public and private institutions, an intolerable lie. (Majid 7, emphasis added)

The book is centred on a mixture of legendary tales, real memories, and imaginary events. There is no such thing as an authentic traditional culture to fall back on. Si Yussef’s story is unhistorical, timeless, and untimely. The writer is deconstructing the official national memory and reconstituting identity. Stories of myth are transformed into narratives of dissent. Fantasy and magical narratives display an alternative version of history and narrative construction. It is not important to verify how and where fiction draws from reality. The writer avoids seeing the literary process as the symbolic representation of the real; he avoids seeing his characters as somehow corresponding to real people in a real world. Myths express a reality of multiple identities, where there is no longer a single underlying truth, but a multiplicity of truths. Magical realism is a strategy of narration. It allows the writer to erase an entire world and a mode of representation dictated by others. The overlapping of fantastic and realistic narratives allows Majid to offer a history which has been turned into self-parody. The novel form is emblematic of the change in identity and the loss and disorientation this involves. The production of a new discourse defies the constraints and taboos of the official history by putting it in dialogue with a legendary one. The purpose is to propose creative new identities for the individual and the collective subject.


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Lamin and Yussef’s encounters take place in the café. The café is the setting of Tangiers’s daily reality. It is the only visual site of the city. The iconic has no place in this text. Photographs of Tangier are described as a “satanic deception” (94). The city looks “barren” and “empty” in them. (94) The writer delineates the city less by descriptions of place than by the stories which his characters tell. The novel presents a range of characters of different professional, religious and national categories. The reader encounters waiters, teachers, foreign scholars and businessmen. Legendary characters like Hercules and Aïcha Kandicha have also a place in Si Yussef. Majid’s novel is traversed by an eclectic range of multiple voices. The city has many dimensions, and stereotypes quickly fade as one travels through the narrative and gets to know characters. Tangier is a city at the crossroads of cultures. It is a symbolic site; a meeting place and a battleground of two opposed worlds. Binary words such as North/South, traditional/modern, and colonial/postcolonial enable us to understand its history. Majid describes it as “a City-on-two-Seas whose refuge even the most treacherous nassara seek, a city filled with wonders, shrouded and protected by the shield of sin . . .” (39). Tangier is an international place where African, Berber, Arab, Islamic, Christian, Jewish, and Western cultural elements co-exist. It is a transit point between the North and the South, a refugee haven, and a site of belonging for many of its multinational inhabitants. Sheikh El-Mdina had sworn on all the spirits that it was our people who had welcomed the blessed ship of God’s chosen; it was he who pointed to the ship and yelled Tin ja! Tin ja! And the Romans and probably another nation calling it Tingis, and now, you know, Tanja, Tangier. . . . (Majid 116)

Tangier has a problematic in-between status which recalls the writer’s own shifting identity. It presents the cosmopolitan ideal due to its limitless diversity of character and its variety and open texture. But this quality is a dangerous potency. The Tangier viewed by the others is a one-dimensional city. It is oversimplified and trivialised. According to the foreign writers for which Tangier provided a cultural context, the city is a world which is culturally colonised, loosing its own identity and acquiring a different and alien one. Majid’s interest is to dismantle this stereotype. Indeed, perhaps the defining characteristic of Tangier according to him is its sense of diversity and plurality within individual cultural identity. Whereas foreign writers emphasize black-versus-white divisions and separations, Majid emphasizes the inevitability of mixing and the construction of new identities. There were, of course, the nightclubs, whorehouses, hotels, and casinos that offered more than liberalism and more than a refuge from the unendurable miseries that the European and American people who frequented them suffered in

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their own countries, but these were zona francas, places outside the logic of our lives, where men drifted in and out with the same mystery that condemned them to the life of peripheries and edges, for reasons that were too complex for any of us to understand, except for the foreign habitués who knew these places and wrote about them with the same authority and scholarship that allowed them to gain the respect that they were now forfeiting in the forbidden territories of our lives. (Majid 20) Tangier is partly an idea, a myth, as well as a dominant physical presence. But does the tale of Si Yussef evoke the lost homeland or does it articulate its absence? What we have is an imaginary Tangier. Si Yussef’s remembrances participate not in an act of nostalgia but of forgetting. His is a subterfuge in which Tangier is not so much recovered but invented, made and unmade. Instead of writing up his native space, Majid is striving to show the impossibility of his task. His [Si Yussef’s] confessions were at best a statement, a commentary, a tirade against something. He never got himself to visualize that thing, God knows why. Something serious was going on; yet it defied articulation (Majid 121).

The writer is discovering something essential to the city he has tried to bring into existence. The authentic space, Tangier, no longer exists; the medium used to evoke it is alien. Instead of naming an experience taking place in his native city, Majid is un-naming his city. The winds that Hercules had brought with him seemed to have settled in Tangier for life. I [Lamin] saw Spain, the seductress, whispering a future I hadn’t imagined yet … tall hotels were rising furiously … stretching their arms to embrace new visitors and organized tours … Smoke rose from long, metallically built factories and curled on the blue horizon to confirm our irretrievable destiny: that we were determined to join the holy ranks of the blessed France, Spain, England, and who knows maybe even America. After this, there was only land, cultivated by reluctant hands sensing wrenching uprootedness. Tangier was left behind; it was no more. (Majid 144, emphasis added)

At the end of the book, the writer has achieved a state wherein he might give birth to his true identity: an identity which is not only something rooted in a single place, but which is in motion. Prayer may be designated as a symbolic token for home, community, or sense of belonging. Yet, the process of writing is the only home Majid belongs to. It is the chosen space for the conquest of the identity of difference. Although Majid considers the act of retrieving the past as a moral duty, he mostly stresses the impossibility of returning home. Therefore, even though he has


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returned home through fiction, he is, in a sense, out of place. He is an awkward presence in a foreign territory. The only real home is what he carries within him.

Works Cited Achebe, Chiuana. “The African Writer and the English Language.” Morning Yet on Creative Day. Essays. London: Biddles, 1975. Asccroft, Bill, and Gareth Griffiths, eds. The Post-colonial Studies Reader. 1995. New York: Routledge, 2004. Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. 1988. Rivkin and Ryan. Gloria, Anzaldua. Borderlands/La Frontera. 1987. Rivkin and Ryan. Majid, Anouar. Si Yussef. 1992. Massachusetts: Interlink Books, 2005. Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan, eds. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993. Sibley, David. Geographies of Exclusion: Society and Difference in the West. New York: Routledge, 1995.

CHAPTER FIVE MAPPING THE POSTCOLONIAL METROPOLIS: THREE RECENT NOVELS FROM NIGERIA IAN MUNRO

In her essay “Squatters, Space, and Belonging in the Underdeveloped City,” Ashley Dawson cites the opinion of Eric Hobsbawn that “the most convulsive social change” of the twentieth century was not its wars, genocides, the revolutions in Russia and China or the development of the atomic bomb, but “the death of the peasantry.” 28 In 1900, Hobsbawn points out, the vast majority of humanity lived in rural areas. By the close of century, the majority lived in cities, a change particularly drastic in the developing world, where every year tens of millions of subsistence farmers leave the countryside for the cities. By 2030, UN estimates project that of 8 billion humans, 5 billion will live in cities, of which 2-3 billion will be what the UN calls “informal workers,” living in slums and shantytowns, outside formal relations of production, “ravaged,” in Mike Davis’s words, “by emergent diseases and subject to a menu of megadisasters following in the wake of global warming and the exhaustion of urban water supplies.”29 By 2010, Lagos, Nigeria, is projected to become the planet’s third largest city,30 and a leading example of the burgeoning megacities of the global South, which, writes Ashley Dawson, “embody the most extreme instances of economic injustice, ecological unsustainability, and spatial apartheid ever confronted by humanity.” 31 Mike Davis points out that despite Nigeria’s great

28 Ashley Dawson, “Squatters, Space, and Belonging in the Underdeveloped City.” Social Text 81 (Winter 2004), 15. 29 Mike Davis, “The Urbanization of Empire: Megacities and the Laws of Chaos.” Social Text 81 (Winter 2004), 13 30 Ashley Dawson and Brent Hayes Edwards, “Introduction” to “Global Cities of the South.” Special Issue of Social Text 81 (Winter 2004), 1. 31 Dawson and Edwards, 6.


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oil wealth, the country has seen an increase in poverty from 28 percent in 1980 to 66 percent in 1996. 32 But, writes Davis, “The new urban poor … will not go gently into this dark night. Their resistance, indeed, becomes the principal condition for the survival of the unity of the human race against the implicit triage of the new global order.”33 That is, the fate of cities like Lagos cannot be separated from that of the rest of humanity: “The key nodes of the global economy,” point out Davis and Edwards, “are tied intimately to the historically unparalleled poverty and suffering generated in cities such as Cairo, Lagos and Buenos Aires.” 34 It is the work of the intellectual, as Gramsci points out, to articulate connections between north and south, as Gramsci does in his essay “Some Aspects of the Southern Question,” in which, quoting Edward Said, “social history and actuality are grasped in geographical terms – such words as ‘terrain,’ ‘territoriality,’ ‘blocks’ and ‘region’ predominate.” 35 Just as Gramsci analyzes the relation between northern and southern regions of Italy in terms of the peculiar topography of the south, it is the intellectual who can map into imaginative existence the postcolonial city in its own right, rather than as an adjunct or imitative offshoot of the metropolitan center. In the literature of the colonial and immediate postcolonial period, it was the metropolitan center to which the colonized intellectual migrated and where his identity was sought, if not found, in works like Camara Laye’s Dream of Africa, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, V.S. Naipaul ’s The Mimic Men, Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, George Lamming’s The Emigrants, and Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s L’Aventure Ambigue. Increasingly, young Nigerian writers are “mapping” their identities within postcolonial metropolises like Lagos, giving them space, shape, and design. It is precisely such individuals, themselves creations of the city as a locus of traffic among cultures, who can give voice to creative visions of their city’s “physical duality” and “cultural cleavage,”36 as Jane Abu-Lughod says of Cairo, as well as to its potential for human freedom and what Davis calls “the unity of the human race.” In his study The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch refers to the “need to recognize and pattern our surroundings,” arguing that it is “so crucial, and has such long roots in the past, that this image has wide practical and emotional importance to the individual… A clear image of the surroundings is … a useful

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Davis, 9. Davis,13. My italics. 34 Davis and Edwards, 6. 35 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books 1994, 49. 36 Cited in Said, 128. 33

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basis for individual growth.” 37 Using Lynch’s five identifying components or “elements of form” (paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks), this paper examines four novels by young Nigerian writers, in each of which Lagos serves as the site for the protagonist’s journey, or what Lynch calls “way-finding,” a useful expression for the protagonist’s quest for identity. In all the novels, The Famished Road, by Ben Okri (1991), Waiting for an Angel by Helon Habila (2002), Graceland by Chris Abani (2004), and Everything Good Will Come by Sefi Atta (2005), the mapping of Lagos is inseparable from the protagonist’s quest for freedom and identity. Lagos, for each an alienating and chaotic city, is made legible by a process of way finding, ultimately becoming a site for representation of Nigerian society as whole and the individual’s place within it and within the larger world. The novels will be examined in the order of their publication, which happens to coincide with an increasingly precise and detailed mapping of urban Lagos onto the consciousness of the protagonists. Ben Okri’s The Famished Road covers the longest period of time of the four, from colonial Nigeria in the 1950’s through 1991. In fact, the novel opens with origins: “In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out into the whole world. And because the road was once a river it was always hungry.”38 This image of transformations, movement across boundaries, and “hunger” is unified in Okri’s complex work around the abiku child Azaro -- whose name, derived from Lazarus, alludes to his movement between the world of the living and the world of spirits -- and around the growth of the spectral city, Lagos, from the bush. Of the novels to be examined here, the Lagos of The Famished Road is the least concretely “mapped” through the consciousness of its narrator, Azaro. Indeed, city and country remain unnamed, perhaps because, as Azaro says, the poor “belong to one country” (33). Okri’s city is envisioned in historical rather than topographical terms; like the country and the narrator, it is undergoing a process of change in which “a new world was being erected amidst the old” (113). All of the formal elements of Lynch’s typology are present in the novel: there are paths and roads throughout the novel, but they change, fracture and lead to unpredictable places. A familiar path becomes a labyrinth where borderlines between dream and reality disappear. Edges exist, such as those marking the distinction between forest and ghetto, but are constantly being eroded as the ghetto expands and the forest is cut down. There are landmarks, of which the most evident are a clearing in the forest in which Azaro often finds himself, the burned party van in the ghetto, and the photographer’s broken display case. The van is burned by the ghetto dwellers, infuriated at having been 37 38

Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press 1960, 4. Ben Okri, The Famished Road. New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1991, 3.


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given poison milk and false promises by the Party of the Rich; it remains in place as a reference point for the increasingly ferocious internecine conflict between party thugs, just as the destruction of the photographer’s display case by party thugs is a comment on the growing intolerance toward anyone who questions their dominance of the country’s politics as the country approaches Independence. There are nodes, including Azaro’s home and Madame Koto’s bar, but they too are changeable. Madame Koto appears at times a motherly healer, at others a secretive practitioner of the occult and adherent of the “Party of the Rich” which brings her material benefits others in the ghetto do not have. The transition of Madame Koto’s bar from a down-at-heels gathering place for ghetto dwellers -along with an assortment of Tutuolan grotesques, mutants, spirits and ghosts -to a brightly lit brothel and hangout for thugs of the Party of the Rich accompanies and represents the country’s transition from colony to independence. There are also the city center and market, where Azaro learns the truth about his parents’ existence. His visits there mark a turning point in the novel, coincident with the transformation of Madame Koto’s bar from a “strange fairyland in the real world” (208) to a place of celebration for the Party of the Rich. There are districts, unnamed and generic, of which the two most significant are forest and ghetto. The forest is shrinking as the ghetto expands: “sooner than you think there won’t be one tree standing,” predicts Azaro’s father, whom he calls Dad. “There will be no forest left at all. And there will be wretched houses all over the place. This is where the poor people will live” (34). In the early phases of the novel, the boundary between forest and ghetto is permeable: spirits freely enter the ghetto to join in the life of the living, appearing with parts of human beings they have borrowed for the occasion: “they get tired of being just spirits,” says Azaro, who as an abiku child can see spirits when others do not. “They want to taste human things, pain, drunkenness, laughter, and sex,” he says. “Sometimes they do it to spread mischief and sometimes to seduce grownups or abduct children into their realm” (136). And Azaro frequently enters the forest in his wanderings or in the course of being abducted. His ventures into the forest invariably lead him into encounters with spirits and strange creatures, or into visions such as that he has of a future city when he is abducted by a pair of albinos and escapes along an “endless … road [that] led to a thousand others, which in turn fed into paths, which fed into dirt tracks, which became streets, which ended in avenues and cul-de-sacs […] Skyscrapers stood high and inscrutable beside huts and zinc abodes. Bridges were being built; flyovers, halffinished, were like passageways into the air[…]. Roads, half-constructed, were crowded with heavy machinery” (113.).

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The ghetto dwellers continue many aspects of village life and beliefs they brought with them to the city, those hurtful as well as healing. When the residents of the ghetto riot against the attacks of the colonial police, they chant ancient war-songs; when party thugs attack the ghetto they are, says Azaro, “answering the call of old bloodknots and secret tribal curfews” (178). Azaro’s father, Dad, and the equally powerful Madame Koto, draw on ancestral knowledge as a source of power. Azaro’s grandfather is head priest of their village shrine, Priest of the God of Roads. “Anyone who wants a special sacrifice for their journeys, undertakings, births, funerals, whatever, goes to him,” says Dad. “All human beings travel the same road’ (70). The grandfather represents a time when people were powerful in spirit and had, says Dad, “all kinds of powers” which “We are forgetting…. Now, all the power that people have is selfishness, money, and politics” (70). Madame Koto uses her knowledge of these powers for personal gain. Ultimately, Azaro’s Dad becomes her antithesis, using his powers to seek positive transformation in a society going in the other direction. Each of the five components is not a topographical location but a trope for the nature of the historical change with which Okri’s magical realist novel is chiefly concerned. In the beginning of the novel it is the colonial police who attack the militant ghetto dwellers; in the latter part it is party thugs. Electricity comes to the ghetto, though only to Madame Koto’s; party vans seek votes for candidates by promising good roads, electricity and free education. Koto’s bar comes to resemble an allegory of African history where, as Azaro’s vision shapes it, celebrants include the “ghost forms of white men in helmets” who supervise the excavation of gems from the earth in the presence of “ghost figures of young men and women, heads bowed, necks and ankles chained together,” images of slavery’s continuation among the poor while “the celebrants danced to the music of a new era that promised Independence” (455). Azaro envisions superficial change without transformation; the latter, Okri suggests, requires a new vision of Africa rather than Koto’s gospel of “selfishness, money, and politics” (70), as Dad calls it. But it is not the narrator, Azaro, whose consciousness is shaped, whose alienation is transcended, by a new vision of Africa; instead, it is his father who becomes the transforming voice. Azaro remains throughout the novel what he was at the beginning: an abiku child and unwilling adventurer, caught in the same historical noose as others. At the novel’s outset, he suspects that whatever his motives for deciding to remain with his parents rather than return to his spirit companions, his time may have run out: “in between my coming and going,” he says, “the great cycles of time had finally tightened around my neck” (6). Even abiku children may no longer have the option of dying and being reborn.


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The alienation of Azaro, the unwilling adventurer, begins before he is born, when he swears a pact with other spirit children to return to the land of origins rather than remain permanently in the land of the living. “We disliked the rigors of existence,” he explains, “the unfulfilled longings, the enshrined injustices of the world, the labyrinths of love, the ignorance of the parents… We feared the heartlessness of human beings, all of whom are born blind, few of whom ever learn to see” (3). Arriving in the world with what he describes as an “inextinguishable sense of exile,” he nevertheless chooses to break his pact and remain among the living. Perhaps, he thinks, he has grown tired of the repeated journeys between living and unborn, perhaps he wanted to “taste of this world, to feel it, suffer it, know it, to love it, to make a valuable contribution to it,” or perhaps he wanted only “to make happy the bruised face of the woman who would become my mother” (5). While the spirit half of Azaro, sometimes aided by palm wine, is always wandering off and having adventures in regions where the borderline between dream and reality is dissolved, his human half always returns to his parents’ home in the ghetto: the one place where spirits, grotesques and hungry ghosts do not appear. Its reality is the poverty of his parents, whom he calls Mum and Dad, yet for much of the novel, Azaro has no awareness of their struggle to exist. He sees his father as a giant, a “fabled being” (50) with occult powers and arcane knowledge, intimate with the secrets of the forest, and he deeply loves his suffering mother. At a crucial juncture of the novel, after his vision of skyscrapers springing up beside ghetto huts, of sorcerers making sacrifices at dawn and prophets emerging from the forest while workers head to the garages and bus-stops to begin their day’s work, Azaro travels to the commercial centre of the city where his father works, and sees the degradation his father suffers to earn a living as a load-carrier: [As] the salt poured on his shoulder, tears streamed from his eyes, and there was shame on his face as he staggered right past me, almost crushing me with his mighty buckling feet. He appeared not to have seen me and he struggled on, trying to bear the load with dignity […]. My wanderings had at last betrayed me, because for the first time in my life I had seen one of the secret sources of my father’s misery (149).

Not long after, he goes to the market and makes a similar discovery about his mother’s true condition, as her flimsy provision stall is wrecked by a gang of thugs demanding she join the Party of the Rich or leave the market. Despite his compassion for his parents and his new understanding of the struggle of the formerly despised neighbors, “privations before them, hunger behind them” (343), Azaro remains detached, a seer and wanderer, “wanting to live the earth’s life and contradictions […] to master one’s self […]” (488). It is his father who

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insists, “we can change the world. That is why our road is hungry. We have no desire to change things” (451), and his father who has a vision of a world in which “black people always suffered […] preyed upon by other powers, manipulated by the Western world […]” (492). Dad foresees the country’s economic boom and the squandering of its national wealth, and “traveled the spheres, seeking the restoration of our race” (494). Is Azaro being reborn in his father, he wonders, or is Dad instead a reincarnation of the king of the land of origins, whose essence throughout his multiple appearances in life had been “the love of transformation, and the transformation of love into higher realities” (4). Azaro does not take the burden of social transformation or justice on himself; it is his father who asserts, “we can redream this world and make the dream real. Human beings are gods hidden from themselves. My son, our hunger can change the world, make it better, sweeter […]. It is not death that human beings are most afraid of, it is love” (498). Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel consists of seven narratives arranged in an inverted chronology. The first story, “Lomba,” is set in 1997 and deals with the confinement of the central figure, Lomba, in a Lagos prison during the latter days of the notorious rule of the dictator Sani Abacha. Subsequent stories revolve around two periods of resistance to military rule in Nigeria which preceded Lomba’s detention: the 1993 student demonstrations against the Babangida regime’s annulment of the presidential election, which were brutally suppressed, and the even more violent repressive measures of the Abacha regime in 1995, including arrest of opponents and closure of opposition newspapers and magazines. The final story, “James,” ends with Lomba’s departure to cover a neighborhood demonstration. Lomba is the protagonist in four of the stories in Waiting for an Angel; in the other three he is an observer. Throughout, however, he represents the condition of the writer and intellectual in what Habila describes in the “Afterword” as “a terrible time to be alive” in Nigeria for anyone who was “young, talented and ambitious” 39Lomba wants only to be a writer; he has little interest in the politics of the country: “He thinks politics is for barbarians” (194), a friend says of him. In apparent sympathy with his protagonist’s critical distance, Habila represents the leaders of the opposition to the military junta as sloganeering extremists from whom Lomba stands aloof. Listening to the university student leader Sankara denounce the military regime in the story “Bola,” Lomba “felt cold […] like an imposter” (55). He agrees with Sankara’s sentiments but doubts the effectiveness of a student boycott in removing the Babangida regime; he has a presentiment of a “dark, 39

Helon Habila, Waiting for an Angel. New York: Norton 2002, 223.


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lurking figure inching towards the centre” (57), suggestive of the coming reign of terror of Sani Abacha. Similarly, the neighborhood leader “Mao” in the story “Kela” is given to posing and leftist phrase mongering. Even the dissident writers Lomba meets in the final story, “James” – Habila slyly includes himself among the carousing writers and artists – offer only another version of political opportunism, one of the artists telling Lomba, “You really must try and get arrested – that’s the quickest way to make it as a poet. You’ll have no problem with visas after that, you might even get an international award” (218). Like the dreams of others in Habila’s collection, Lomba’s goal of being a writer is repeatedly frustrated by the circumstances of Nigerian life in the 1990s. He leaves the University of Lagos after a police attack in response to the student boycott. The campus, where his writing had been acknowledged and he felt “a sense of place” (86), now appears to him a prison, “arms widespread to restrain and contain and limit” (81), one of many references to the prison-like condition of the country. He then spends two years trying to write a novel, and living in the Lagos ghetto, Morgan Street, which plays a key role in the subsequent three stories in the volume. After two years, his novel hasn’t progressed; writing itself has begun to look “ominously like chains, binding me forever to this table” (110), so he abandons it to take up journalism with the well-known Lagos opposition weekly The Dial. His first assignment is an article on Morgan Street, Habila’s description of the article suggesting Lomba’s continued abstraction from ghetto life. He treats the district as a “paradigmatic locale,” within which, he says, “I place the ubiquitous gun- and whip-toting soldiers […] I position winos to pass the day in vinous slumber. For local colour, I bring in the aged and the dying […]” (117). In the remaining two stories in the volume, “Kela” and “James,” Lomba is shown returning to Morgan Street to cover a demonstration by the residents of the district against government neglect, an assignment he has had to be persuaded to take by his editor, who tells Lomba that his ambitions as a writer can never succeed while Nigeria is in its present condition: no publisher will publish a novel which people are too poor and too harried by the police and army to read: “You can’t write with chains on your hands,” says the editor. The Armageddon Lomba was anticipating arrives with a wave of assassinations, arrests of political opponents, and closure of opposition newspapers and magazines, including The Dial, whose building is burned. The last story in the volume sees Lomba escaping from an army raid on a writers’ gathering and -though The Dial no longer exists and the editor is presumably in custody – going off to cover the demonstration. Though he has remained a witness rather than participant, he is arrested for “organizing violence” and detained without trial, where we had encountered him in the volume’s first story. Even in a Lagos

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prison, his writing is frustrated when his pencil and paper are taken away and his poetic skills exploited by the prison superintendent to woo his intended. Around the central, rather aloof figure of Lomba revolve a number of other characters whose dreams are similarly stifled, though for different reasons: the unnamed narrator of “The Angel,” a student friend of Lomba’s, who wants his death to be momentous but who is gunned down by a soldier; Bola, another student friend, who in the story “Bola” goes insane when his family is killed in a road accident and is tortured by security police who mistake his ravings for a political statements; Alice, Lomba’s university girlfriend who is forced to marry a man she doesn’t love to pay her mother’s medical bills, in the story “Alice;” and Joshua, a central character in “Kela,” the book’s longest story. Joshua is another of the book’s intellectuals, but unlike Lomba he is involved in the life of the ghetto, writing essays on social issues and carrying on a doomed love affair with Hagar, a former student who has turned to prostitution after being cast out by her family. He is looked up to as “the only person that knew anything about anything on Poverty Street” (124), and when the street’s denizens organize a demonstration against the neglect of the local government administration, Joshua becomes their spokesman. The peaceful demonstration provokes a police attack, as Joshua knew it would, in which Hagar dies accidentally. While Joshua is represented as being no less realistic than Lomba about the possibilities for change in Nigerian politics, he is more insistent on the necessity of action: “One day you too will have to stand up for something” (181), he tells Kela, the adolescent narrator of the story. Joshua uses the topography of Lagos to make his point that the imagination can reveal that “things are not as fixed or as impossible as we believe” (186). Lagos, he points out to Kela, is on the ocean, an “edge” in Lynch’s sense: “this is Africa, this is Nigeria, and here is Lagos […] Across is America”(185). But an edge can become a pathway, the ocean reduced to “a little river, then all we’d need to get to the American shore is a tiny bridge.” America, he explains, is “where people go when they can’t live in their own country” (185). In the last three stories in the collection, Morgan Street acts as the central node, in Lynch’s terminology, for a number of characters, including Joshua and Lomba. A ghetto rather than a single street, Morgan Street is mapped in detail through the eyes of Kela, from the single tarred road, Egunje Road, running through its center to the roads running off it, including Olokun Road, “the shabbiest and poorest of all the quarters,” which connects with University Road, “the flux point for all the vices on the street” (123). Morgan Street, though only one of the “many decrepit, disease-ridden quarters that dotted the city of Lagos like ringworm on a beggar’s body” (122), is a node connecting the University to Ikeja, the gathering place of poets and artists, and the location of the government Secretariat to which the residents take their protest. It is a node too


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in the sense that it is where Lomba and Joshua’s private dreams are tested in the crucible of public protest and military repression. The climactic point of “Kela” is Joshua’s dramatic renaming of Morgan Street as “Poverty Street,” since, as Joshua says, “We don’t know who Morgan was – some colonial administrator, perhaps, a reminder of our hopeless, subjected state […] but we do know what poverty is. We live with it daily” (174). By comparison, the middle class residents of Ikeja, where Bola’s wealthy parents live, and of Yaba, where the editor of The Dial lives, enjoy an apparently ordered existence, but even they are not immune from the repression and tragedy that hangs over daily life. The second key node in the imaging of Lagos in Waiting for an Angel is the slave port museum at Badagry, which several of the key figures in the stories visit. In “The Angel,” Lomba, Bola and the unnamed narrator of the story as university students have little interest in the museum and wander off to consult a local marabout. In “James,” however, set several years later, Lomba revisits Badagry with his editor, James Fiki, who uses the museum and the mouth-locks used by slavers to silence their captives as exempla for “why nothing must be taken for granted” (196): “every oppressor knows that wherever one word is joined to another word to form a sentence, there’ll be revolt. That is our work, the media: to refuse to be silenced […]” (198). He explains the next day in “Kela” that it was the visit to Badagry that convinced him “it is important to agitate against injustice, no matter the consequence” (168). Mapping the districts, edges, paths and nodes of Lagos is a central part of the transformation of Lomba – a Hausa-speaking northerner and outsider -- from witness to actor. Chris Abani’s Graceland is a coming of age story about a young Igbo, Elvis Oke, who comes to Lagos with his father Sunday from their home village of Afikpo. For the first twenty chapters the novel alternates between events in the village between 1972 and 1980, when Elvis and Sunday leave Ofikpo; the last eight chapters are all set in 1983 in Lagos except for two set in nearby towns. Between each chapter appears, in most cases, recipes for traditional Igbo dishes like bitter-leaf soup and pounded yam, or descriptions of plants and herbs with their scientific and Igbo names. One chapter is preceded by an extract from the well-known Onitsha chapbook “Mabel the sweet honey that poured away,” and others by the Islamic call to prayer and Psalm 23. In addition, each chapter is headed by brief epigraphs commenting from different perspectives on the ritual significance of the kola nut in Igbo culture. One voice represents an elder; the other takes a more detached, anthropological stance. The mix of locations, texts and periods seems intended to deepen the moral complexity of Elvis’s quest for identity. The recipes and herbal descriptions express the female side of Igbo culture and the intimate interconnections of traditional Igbo village life with its surroundings. Each herb has healing properties, but can also be used for witchcraft. The kola nut ritual is central to

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traditional Igbo concepts of manhood within the clan, concepts that are often rigid and repressive of the individual. Elvis, whose sexual identity is ambiguous and who dreams of being a professional dancer in a society that spurns homosexuals, degrades women, and regards his artistic ambitions as foolish, must find his way between these competing cultural absolutes. His imaging and mapping of Lagos is central to his maturation. At the outset, Elvis – idealistic, literate, but alienated and rebellious – sees Maroko, the ghetto where he and his father live, from a distance: “What do I have to do with all this?”40 he asks. They had migrated to Lagos after his father went bankrupt trying to win a parliamentary seat; Elvis’s mother is dead, and Sunday Oke has sunk into an alcoholic haze. Elvis has conflicting emotions toward his father, who represents the traditional male values of Igbo society. He is preoccupied with making a man of his son. At age five in Afikpo, Elvis had been subjected to a ritual involving the killing of an eagle: “he has to learn early how to be a man” (18), says Sunday. Even though the eagle is represented by a chick which has already been impaled on the arrow before Elvis receives it (“it is chicken, eagle is too expensive, (19)” says his uncle), the village elders solemnly carry through the formalities. Later, he shaves Elvis’s head as punishment after the nine-year old Elvis – already experimenting with sexual identity – puts on a dress and has his hair plaited by female relatives. The simplicity of Sunday’s obsession with ideals of Igbo manhood and family honor is related to the brutality it licenses in Afikpo, where Uncle Joseph can rape his own daughter, Efua, and Elvis as well, without being called to account, and where a disreputable relative, Godfrey, is murdered in order to preserve family honor. “De only inheritance I had to give you,” he tells Elvis, “was a name of honor. His actions were muddying de only thing of value we had to give you… Dat’s why I don’t want you to be a dancer. It will spoil your name” (187-8). His career as an Elvis Presley impersonator and dancer a failure, Elvis is forced to take a job as a laborer in Lagos, where his education in manhood begins as his horizons expand beyond the “half slum, half paradise” (7) of Maroko. Under the bridges connecting Lagos to the mainland he discovers the Bridge Cities that exist under Lagos flyovers, populated by “petty traders, roadside mechanics, barbers, street urchins, madmen and other mendicants” (29), including the King of Beggars, Caesar Augustus Anyanwu, who becomes one of the two guides in Elvis’s journey. The other guide is Redemption, an apparently Mephistophelean figure who introduces Elvis to cocaine wrapping and involves him in the smuggling of human body parts. The King, in contrast, introduces Elvis to foreign films, in contrast to Elvis’s preference for the simple 40

Chris Abani, Graceland. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004, 6.


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plots and hero/villain dichotomies of American westerns. The King makes speeches denouncing the government and brings Elvis into his troupe of traveling players. But the apparent good and evil contrast between the King and Redemption is misleading, as is Elvis’s simplistic view of life. The two characters offer Elvis different routes to manhood, both insisting that he make a choice if he is to be a man, but the King proves to be motivated by a desire for vengeance against a soldier who had murdered his family in the massacres that preceded the Biafran war, while Redemption sacrifices his personal dream of going to America to be an actor to provide Elvis with a way out of Nigeria. Through his relationship with his two guides, Elvis discovers the brutal amorality of the military elite --though Nigeria at the time was in the brief Second Republic period -- and the reality of life for the urban poor. “[W]here is your pride?” he asks of the King’s occupation as a beggar. “I cannot afford it” (31), the King replies. Elvis’s travels around Lagos are his education; his imaging of the city is also his imaging the lives of those who live within it and his relation to them. Visiting a part of Lagos he hasn’t been to with Redemption, he sees a man accused of being a thief set upon and burnt by a mob; it is the same elemental brutality he had witnessed as a child in Afikpo: “comically biblical, yet purely animal” (225), he thinks. Why doesn’t anyone help the accused man, he asks Redemption; “dese are poor people,” Redemption replies. “Poor people are hungry people, and […] a hungry man is an angry man” (226). From the ghetto of Maroko, which seems as if suspended above a swamp, Elvis can look across the lagoon to see Ikoyi. Says Redemption, “though dey hate us, de rich still have to look at us” (137). Ikoyi is that third of the city “transplanted from the rich suburbs of the west” (7) and populated, he imagines, by crooked politicians and oil-company executives. Yet when later he visits his Aunt Felicia’s condo on Ikoyi and looks across at Maroko, he sees reality differently: “It is nice, the way the rich live” (164), he tells Felicia. Increasingly, Elvis is able to map the topography of Lagos within the complex network of choices he faces: streets which seemed straight and simple before he had confronted the military’s casual brutality now seem crooked, connecting to alleys which are “like tendrils of a spider’s web… connecting each other in a network that probably traversed the entire city” (120). The simple dualities which American films or his father’s code of manliness put before him become as complex as the complexities of life in chaotic, disordered, incomprehensible Lagos. The efforts of the government of the Second Republic to make the poor vanish during Operation Clean the Nation, when Maroko and other ghettos around Lagos were bulldozed, only increase his confusion, as his father rises to the occasion and becomes a leader of the community’s resistance to the slum clearance. Charged by his leopard totem to

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“die like a man,” Sunday charges the bulldozer and is crushed. The presence of the leopard, into which Sunday changes at the moment of his death, affirms Sunday’s continued belief in the “ancient laws.” For Elvis, now fatherless and homeless after Maroko’s destruction, there are no such laws: “There is a message in it all somewhere,” he thinks, “a point to the chaos, But no matter how hard he tried, the meaning always seemed be out there somewhere beyond reach, mocking him” (307). With other refugees from bulldozed slums he becomes a resident of Bridge City, a slum under a flyover, where he learns what survival means: “Different laws apply here,” says Okon, another Bridge City resident, who has just had sex with a child. “We are who we are because we are who we were made” (312). It is the same amoral sentiment a soldier had expressed when explaining why soldiers had assaulted Elvis in a night club: “dere is no right or wrong with soldier. Just what we want” (121). These comments intersect with the novel’s underlying concern with freedom of choice and destiny, another knotty problem Elvis fails to solve. Elvis’s friends Redemption and the King of Beggars insist on his need to choose his way; yet in traditional Igbo thought, individual personalities, abilities and vocations are pre-ordained, as described in the epigraph to chapter ten: “The Igbo believe that if one does not follow the life pattern determined by their energy grouping, they are living outside the dictates of their chi, or personal god” (98). Elvis’s dilemma of freedom and destiny are unresolved as he leaves Lagos for America carrying Redemption’s passport, to join his aunt Felicia: “there was no way he could survive in Lagos,” he knows, even if there is also no guarantee he can survive in America: “What was the point? Nothing is ever resolved […]. It just changes” (320). Einitan Taiwo, the heroine of Sefi Atta’s novel Everything Good Will Come takes the opposite decision from Elvis, deciding to remain in Lagos despite the many reasons there are for her to leave. It is her mapping of the city and developing image of its wholeness rather than separateness and chaos that shape her development as protagonist. Atta’s novel covers Enitan’s life from childhood in 1971, as Nigeria was beginning its boom years, to her maturity in 2001. As a child, Enitan lives a privileged, protected Westernized life with her family in the old colonial enclave of Ikoyi, in a house built by two Englishmen. Lagos Lagoon forms an “edge” or boundary in Lynch’s terms. The jetty protruding from their property into the Lagoon is a place of refuge for Enitan from the quarrels of her parents and a point of entry into the world of the “island people,” the fisherman, beyond, until Enitan’s mother becomes convinced the island people will invade the house to steal the family’s valuables. She has a wire fence erected, further drawing a line between the family and the world outside.


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Enitan’s father Sunday is a wealthy lawyer with a superficial patina of approval for modern ideas like women’s rights and abolition of capital punishment; in practice he is a habitual philanderer who has had a child by another woman, keeps his wife in the kitchen and defends native law and custom related to marriage, law which gives the male a considerable advantage. Enitan’s sympathies as a child are entirely with her worldly father rather than the fanatically religious mother. It is only when she matures that she understands how her mother needed religion to defend herself against the father’s abandonment: “her fixation with religion was nothing but a liferebellion” (180), she concludes. Enitan’s own rebellion against male domination and the limitations of family and class are initiated by her relationship with a neighbor, Sherifat Bakare, who introduces her to a more complex, liminal environment: she is sexually open in a repressed society, a half-caste and Muslim in a Lagos society that denigrates both. Sheri’s rape by a group of schoolboys forces Enitan to step outside of her comfortable, familiar environment, her “protectorate”: “I wondered if the ground was firm enough to support us, or if our journey would last and never end” (63). The image of ground giving way connects to Enitan’s abrupt sense following Sheri’s rape of the insubstantiality of all that was familiar. Nine years later, in 1985, she returns to Lagos from schooling in England, as was the fashion for her social class. In her absence, the apparently solid fabric of middle class Lagos life during the 1970s oil boom has further unraveled: a military coup has occurred, her parents’ marriage has broken up, the houses and condominiums of Ikoyi Park are sinking into marshy land, armed robbery is commonplace. Every part of Lagos is marked by poverty and crime. Enitan’s decision to remain in Lagos and accept the difficulties of life there is shaped by her re-imaging of the city as a whole while she is doing her turn of National Service and driving about the city. From Ikoyi while growing up she had seen the city from only one angle. Now she sees its interconnections, with the Lagoon, previously envisioned as an edge or barrier, now mapped into her vision of the connected whole as a pathway: Sometimes dull and muddy, other times strident and salty, bearing different names: Kuramo waters, Five Cowry Creek, Lagos Marina, Lagos Lagoon. It was the same water. Asphalt bridges connected the islands to the mainland […]. Millions lived in Lagos. Some were natives, but most had roots in the provinces […]. Most days it felt like a billion people walking down the labyrinth of petty and main streets: beggar men, secretaries, government contractors (thieves, some would say), Area Boys, street children (97-98).

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Enitan must struggle for a place within the noisy, confusing city, “a hard city to love; a bedlam of trade” (98), as a highly educated “been-to” who is intolerant of the contradictions she encounters, many of which have to do with male privilege. One of her father’s clients is a energetic social crusader and a bigamist; the wife of the imprisoned political leader Moshood Abiola fights for the release of her polygamist husband. She is, says Enitan, “the symbol of the Africa I’d been at odds with since my return, a senior wife, fighting for her husband’s freedom” (250). Yet when her own father is arrested for his political activities, Enitan takes over in his office, paying his staff their meager salaries and becoming aware of the realities of life in Lagos as it is for most people: Lagos, she says, was “always reminding me where exactly in the world I was living,” where “the masses were poor. They begged for work and money, served, envied and despised the elite, which actually made the elite feel more special and important” (226). The growing class and ethnic divisions in the country, the gap between rich and poor, as well as her role as wife and mother-to-be, force Enitan to decide whether to act or “let it go,” as her husband Niyi advises her. But Enitan has come to image Lagos as a whole, “My father, backdoor house boys and house girls, child hawkers, beggars,” with whose condition she feels a connection. “The truth was, we in places like Sunrise, if we never spoke out, were free as we could possibly be, complaining about our rubbish rotten country, and crazy armed robbers, and inflation” (231). Even the condition of her marriage to Niyi depends, she decides, on her remaining silent and complying with his moods. Yet she remains in the marriage for several years, until she is arrested for attending a literature reading which included criticism of the military government; it is 1995, the same period of oppression by the Abacha regime described in Abani’s Graceland. Enitan is briefly confined in a Lagos prison, where she encounters the Mother of Prisons and other women who have faced levels of oppression she had not imagined. Lagos becomes for her the “city of broken survivors” (292) and she feels a new sympathy for its inhabitants: “I was born here, raised here. Privilege never did blind my eyes, but there were parts of the city I’d never visited, parts I never needed to” (299). Her family gardener, Baba, formerly lived in Maroko, the same ghetto bulldozed in Abani’s Graceland; like Elvis, he was displaced, yet Enitan had known nothing of the event at the time. Enitan decides to join an overtly political campaign to release political detainees, realizing that her privilege has not protected her: “The state our country is in affects everyone” (326). She becomes an advocate for women’s prisoners in the country, and leaves her husband. Her imaging of Lagos has played a critical role in Enitan’s progress from privileged, isolated child to


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mature, committed woman. As she maps its paths, edges, nodes and districts into her consciousness, she sees the city as prison-like for all its inhabitants: the elite are trapped within their elite confines, living behind iron gates; they are further confined by their foreign tastes and prejudices toward the poor. Lagos Lagoon serves as both a node connecting Ikoyi to the rest of Lagos and a pathway to other parts of the city, including the Royal College in Yaba, the girls’ school that Enitan attends and comes to see as yet another prison. The novel, through its protagonist’s experience, weaves together these different parts of Lagos to create a sense of the city’s wholeness and the interconnection of its inhabitants. Atta’s Lagos is more precisely imaged by its protagonist than it had been in the preceding novels examined in this discussion; the relation of Enitan’s imaging of the city as a whole to her development as a character is apparent. In Okri’s Famished Road, Lagos is a fantastic and unpredictable setting from which freaks and spirits are likely to emerge at any time. Okri’s goal is not to create a sense of Lagos as a whole; rather, the city is a metaphor for the transitions and transformations of African culture and the continued presence of the old within the new. The Lagos of Habila’s collection Waiting for an Angel is focused mainly around the single locale of Morgan Street, represented as paradigmatic of the city’s numerous ghettos and of the country’s colonial and postcolonial history. In Abani’s Graceland, in contrast, Lagos becomes an actor in the protagonist’s development; Elvis travels the city by a multitude of paths and perceives the city as connected by its network of paths like a spider’s web; his perspective, however, is always that of an outsider in the dominant and oppressive culture, a position like that of the African American writers he admires, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. In contrast, Enitan in Atta’s Everything Good Will Come is determined to remain in Lagos from the moment of her return from England: “I would embrace the nuisances of Lagos from then on: all of them, to be acknowledged at last” (79-80). She does not change her position despite the setbacks her city and country face. “Hell and Lagos?” says one of her mother’s pallbearers. “Which is worse?” (317) Enitan does not deny that Lagos can be a hellish place, but remains convinced as the novel ends that “Everything good will come to me” (335).

Works Cited Abani, Chris. Graceland. New York: Picador, 2004. Atta, Sefi. Everything Good Will Come. Northampton, Massachusetts: Interlink Publishing Group, 2005. Davis, Mike. “The Urbanization of Empire: Megacities and the Laws of Chaos.” Social Text 81 (Winter 2004).

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Dawson, Ashley. “Squatters, Space, and Belonging in the Underdeveloped City.” Social Text 81 (Winter 2004), 3-8. —. and Brent Hayes Edwards. “Introduction” to “Global Cities of the South.” Special Issue of Social Text 81 (Winter 2004), 1-3. Habila, Helon. Waiting for an Angel. New York: W.W. Norton, 2002. Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1960. Okri, Ben. The Famished Road. New York: Doubleday, 1991. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.

Part II Women, Identity, and Gender constructions

CHAPTER SIX “THE EVIL EYE”: RE/PRESENTING WOMAN IN MOROCCAN LITERATURE IN FRENCH SOUMIA BOUTKHIL

Woman is that which cannot be represented, that which is not spoken, that which remains outside naming and ideologies (“a femme", 20). Kristeva, 1974

It may sound surprising but it seems that feminists and islamists agree on one issue, i.e., that of the ‘male gaze’. Both, though at different levels, consider it problematic. Islam as a religion ordered believers to ‘lower their gaze’.41 Men are ordered by the sacred text not to stare at ‘the other sex’ in public. A sustained stare by a male believer may have disastrous consequences for him in the other world. The Koran departs from the basic belief that men and women are weak and that they are not able to resist temptation. The uncontrollable desire will lead to sin khatea that will undoubtedly result in unauthorized sex zina. For feminists, however, the alchemy of sight/desire is not the only concern; their first interest is with the phallocentric bearer of the look and the object of that look (the looker Vs the looked at). The problematic dimension of 'the gaze' lies beyond trifle moral considerations, it is rather “a fundamental structure in the ways in which the subject relates to the cultural order ... the way in which subjectivity itself is formed through [its] mechanisms ... [It is] something that impacts on, shapes, and contorts the body/subject” (Fuery & Mansfield, 1997:70). Therefore, the metaphor of literary paternity at the centre of this symbolic order of the dominant, comfortable subject, in opposition to the weak and fragile object, is a cultural practice imbued with struggle, “a dynamic 41 "Tell believing men that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty, that will make for greater purity for them and say to the believing women to lower their gaze and guard their modesty and they should not display their beauty and ornaments...." [24:30,31]


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of control and lack of control … [where] Power is exercised within discourses in the ways in which they constitute and govern individual subjects” (Weedon, 113). In the dialectic of the gaze and sexual pleasure, Freud singled out scopophilia (pleasure in looking) as the main source of satisfaction outside the erotogenic zones. Thus, Laura Mulvey states that Freud "associates scopophilia with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze" (441). Feminists specifically target male voyeurism that fails to recognize women as subjects and violates the private and the forbidden. Mulvey argues, "In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female". The female body is offered to the gaze of the wayward viewer in a gratifying ‘spectacle’ while the male body is secured from the viewer’s gaze. What discomforts the female spectator of films in which the female body is gratuitously displayed, is the comforting representation of woman as a mere body, a lure, an object instrumental in the accomplishment of male desire. While Mulvey bases her analysis on the image of women in cinematographic production, her conclusions about the question of the depiction of the ‘other sex’ are also relevant to literary texts even though the latter may prove a lot more intricate. The female body becomes implicitly the battlefield where feminist resistance strategically engage male dominance. Feminist literary criticism and theory aim to raise the reader’s awareness precisely to the dangers related to “gender imbalances” inherent to any act of representation no matter what the intentions of the author male or female are. To use Toril Moi’s expression, it is not the empirical sex of the author, that matters, but the kind of writing at stake (Moi, 108). In other words, not only are texts gender-constructed and genderoriented, they are above all expressions of gender. In this perspective, Hélène Cixous has warned against the confusion of the sex of the author with that of the text. Such confusion is a result of unawareness, the effects of which is that “ women […] do someone else’s --man’s-- writing, and in their innocence sustain it and give it voice, and end up producing writing that’s in effect masculine.” (qtd. in Moi, 108). The question here is if female writers can unconsciously reproduce masculine texts, can male writers and pro-feminists for that matter, produce feminine or at least gender objective texts? Can they even in their enthusiastic defence of women’s rights escape the mental structures of our society that make it quite impossible to view woman outside the demeaning scheme set and strengthened by hundreds of years of daily practice? In taking this perspective, my concern is to re-examine the oftenunsuspected gender bias that lurks in male-produced supposedly pro-feminist writings. The primary question in which I am interested is how are women

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Chapter Six

viewed/represented in these texts? Do authors substitute a “false” image to a “correct” one? My contention is that the relationship between the male gaze and the stereotypical depiction of women in so-called “pro-feminist” Moroccan narratives of the 70s and the 80s in fact mirror, reproduce and strengthen the symbolic order and the power-structured relation at work in the society at large. Two prominent texts from the Moroccan francophone literature will be interrogated here; Harrouda (1973) by Tahar Ben Jelloun and Messaouda (1983) by Abdelhak Serhane. The two novels could be read from two different perspectives: the first reading and the most popular is the one that considers them oppositional because they rebel against the traditional order and they denounce women’s condition in the traditional Moroccan society. However, such a reading ignores that both of these works posit the centrality of the male figure as an agent of change. The second reading, the one adopted here, considers that this type of writing capitalizes on outdated and deeply rooted gender stereotypes, closeting the female figure in male phantasmagoric visions. The two texts do in fact depict a sick, obscure, and highly “eroticized” femininity, a “dark continent”, to use Freud’s expression, waiting to be explored and demystified. In this logic, women are not agents; they are excluded from the process of meaning-making being merely an object of representation and study, they are helpless and worthless agents. Since Both narratives show a significant influence of Freudian psychoanalysis, it may be useful to cite Luce Irigaray’s opening of Speculum (1974) which consist in a striking quotation from one of Freud’s texts on femininity: “Le problème de la féminité vous préoccupe puisque vous êtes des hommes. Pour les femmes qui se trouvent parmi vous, la question ne se pose pas puisqu’elles sont elles-mêmes l’énigme dont nous parlons.”(9)42 The mystery or enigma of woman is men’s concern. It is the business of a masculine discourse to which women are absent except as object of study. In the same line of thought, women in Serhane and Ben Jelloune’s novels remain an unsolved mystery. Accordingly, the male authors articulate a female identity from a privileged position; a set of ready-made conditions or stereotypes work to structure the dynamics of presence/absence in the two texts. Thus, the female characters are presented as vulgar, enigmatic, and self-effacing creatures (prostitutes, mad women, mother figures). They are moved by an effusion of affect, and their intrinsic sense of imbalance and ambiguity disseminates disorder and insecurity in society. In such representation, the stereotype of the mentally ill female serves the romantic appeal of the story in shedding light on the difficulties of adjustment encountered by women who are 42

“Nor will you have escaped worrying over this problem -- those of you who are men; those of you who are women this will not apply -- you are yourselves the problem” (Freud, 1933, p. 113)


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at odds with the values of traditional societies. Yet, its most dangerous effect is that it works to closet the female figure in archetypal schemes of subjective vulnerability that lead to disempowerment and loss of agency. In both narratives the female characters show signs of submissiveness, they are passive, languid and thus available: Pour nous, elle était la femme transparente, la vierge éternelle et aussi, la chair tuméfiée, saccagée. Elle était la nébuleuse aux jambes arquées, toujours ouvertes aux doigts poilus et aux regards avides. (Messaouda, 13) [To us, she was the transparent woman, the eternal virgin and also, the tumefied wrecked flesh,. She was the nebula of the arched legs, always open to the shaggy fingers and to the greedy looks]

One cannot help but notice that both Serhane and Ben Jelloun intentionally or accidentally played on the symbolic cultural value of the “purity/impurity” motif. An examination of the status of the degraded and fallen bodies of the insane women reveals that they are treated as male sperm depositories for a whole town and for different generations of males. They are impure najissat women, and therefore not allowed in the spheres of the purified. In Islam, as Abdelwahab Bouhdiba argues, the life of a believer is a succession of states of acquired and lost purity and of effaced and regained impurity (59). Thus, in keeping with the religious and cultural traditions, the male characters in both novels are portrayed as pure and clean while women are either dirty or soiled by semen or menstrual bleeding. Ben Jelloun and Serhane also use a too common motif of mental illness in their portrayal of the female protagonists as psychologically “unfit”. In fact, this is clearly in keeping with the mentalities and general mores in conservative societies where labels such as insanity or hysteria are convenient tools of social ostracism. At about the same the period the two novels appeared, feminist critics and sociologists were examining what was referred to as “the privileged relationship and correlation between women and madness”. Thus in a 1975 article “Women and Madness: the Critical Fallacy” Shoshana Felman wonders whether it is by chance that the word hysteria, derived from the Greek word for “Uterus”, was conceived as a female complaint (7). She cites a book, Women and Madness (1973) by Phyllis Chesler in which the latter observes that “Women more than men, and in greater numbers than their existence in the general population would predict, are involved in ‘careers’ as psychiatric patients.” Chesler comes to the conclusion that “the ethic of mental health is masculine in our culture” (qtd in Felman, 7). According to Felman, Chesler “derives and disputes a “female psychology” conditioned by an oppressive and patriarchal male culture”(7). What is noteworthy here is that the relationship between female and hysteria or madness is an old universal stereotype. In fact

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the weak psychological state of women that results in madness seems to be set in a binary system where it is opposed to the solidity and superiority of the male personality. As objects of discourse, women are logically unable to negotiate a place in this system. The existing pattern of oppositions in the novels (male/female, reason/madness, sense/nonsense, head/emotions, sexual activity / Sexual abstinence, purity/impurity) translates “a subtle mechanism of hierarchization which assures the unique valorization of the ‘positive’ pole and, consequently, the repressive subordination of all ‘negativity’”. (Felman, 8) Similarly, Caminero-Santangelo convincingly argues in her brilliant study of women and insanity in post world war II, The madwoman Can’t Speak or Why Insanity is not Subversive that the women writers she examines "share the premise that insanity is the final surrender to [dominant discourses] precisely because it is characterized by the (dis)ability to produce meaning." Following Teresa de Lauretis's notion of the ideological "space off," 43 (where she argues that the "space-off" maintains a defying proximity to ideology, it remains close to it yet it resists to it) De Lauretis suggests, "a movement from the space represented by/in a representation, by/in a discourse, by/in a sex-gender system, to the space not represented yet implied (unseen) in them" (Lauretis, 26). As subjects of his story, the female characters in both Harrouda and Messaouda are caught up in a male-dominated web of power relations that reduce their status to that of an “eternal minor”. Any attempt to break free is deterred by the threat of yet a worse status, i.e. that of the insane or the prostitute. Thus, a “free” woman in the story is devalued and debased; she is everyman’s woman. In contexts close to those depicted by Serhane’s and Ben Jelloun’s novels, the value of freedom is made to obey the restrictions imposed by the social order so that the desire to have a dignified social position is an option reserved almost exclusively to males. The public and private spheres are heavily guarded as Mernissi argues in her article “The meaning of spatial boundaries.” In fact, for a woman the act of trespassing into the public space is “bound by specific rituals, such as the wearing of the veil.”(Mernissi, 493) Venturing outside the home is considered a provocative act, an appeal for rape that will end in the fall from the community’s “grace”/law. Mernissi contends that the seclusion of women (both physical, behind walls or metaphorical, under a veil) was meant to prevent sexual interactions. Ironically, gender segregation results in the heightening of the sexual dimension of any interaction between men and women (491). As Michel Foucault shows in The History of sexuality, power has been and is exercised, within institutions, by prohibitions, censorship, and denial. The truth is that despite all kinds of justifications female seclusion in 43

Book review Berry, Ellen E. "The Madwoman Can't Speak, or, Why Insanity is Not Subversive " MFS Modern Fiction Studies - Volume 45, Number 4, Winter 1999, pp. 1079-1081 The Johns Hopkins University Press


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Islamic societies boils down to a will to control that which is incomprehensible, mysterious and enigmatic, i.e. female sexuality. The irony in Serhane & Ben Jelloun’s depiction of the “free” women as sexually uncontrolled is that female freedom equals hysteria and insanity. In making Harrouda and Messaouda expose their intimate parts to the “gaze” of the reader and other male characters in the story, the authors closet the female in the object position whereby she is given/offered as “spectacle”. Elle finissait toujours par laisser échapper de sa bouche édentée son rire acre en montrant son derrière à la foule pendant que quelques adultes farfouillaient sous ses haillons. son liquide sale dégoulinait toujours entre ses jambes et les doigts continuaient à s’égarer dans ses dédales (Messaouda,11-12) [She always ended up letting out of her toothless mouth her sour laughter showing her behind to the crowd while some adults rummaged under her rags. Her dirty liquid always trickled between her legs and the fingers continued to get lost in her mazes.]

The portrayal of the female sexual organ as “dédales”, or a maze where one may be lost is quite revealing of a long tradition of misrepresentation. In ancient times, the Greeks associated female with curved, dark, and evil. Similarly Malek Chebel argues that the seclusion of women in the Maghreb resulted in the development of fear of women, this fear itself resulted in the development of phantasmagoric representations of women as Lghoula (the ogress), la pastèque fendue (the cracked watermelon), le hérisson (the hedgehog) et le “sexe-océan” (the sex-ocean). (87) The archetype of a giant, dark, hidden vagina is recurrent in Ben Jelloun & Serhane’s novels. These women are available to gratify male’s desire; their nakedness is “ a potent visual sign that [their] body is available for sexual encounter with an other body.” (Macdonald, 7) Concomitant with this representation is the disempowerment of the female characters depicted as passive, fragile, unstable, emotional and uncanny. “…Moi, je n’étais bonne qu’à laver, frotter, pleurer, veiller, faire un enfant chaque année, tuer les poux, vider ses pots de chambre, attendre puis attendre ” (Messaouda, 59) [Me, I was only good to wash, to rub, to cry, to watch, to make a child every year, to kill lice, to empty his chamber pots, to wait and wait …] In Messaouda the mother is naturally living on the margin; she accepts her fate and hardly complains about her situation. When “allowed” to tell her story, she is constantly interrupted by the speech of Hammada, the village madman. Significantly, the narrator’s attention oscillates between the mother’s story and the fool’s speech; he seems more interested in the “wisdom” of Hammada than in the tragic account of his own mother. “C'était extraordinaire ce que cet homme pouvait parler. Il était notre parole intarissable. Savait-il au moins ce

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qu'il disait ? Mi lui ressemblait un peu; elle disait n'importe quoi.” (54) [It was extraordinary how much this man could speak. He was our inexhaustible speech. Did he know at least what he was saying? Mi (mother) resembled him a little; she said whatever] The ‘n’importe quoi’ refers to the psychological torture that the father has subjected her to: “Un soir, il se déshabilla, me demanda d’en faire autant et quand je fus nue à mon tour, il pissa sur mon corps, le cochon.” (Messaouda, 61) [One evening, he undressed, asked me to do the same and when I was naked, he peed on my body, the pig] While the son-narrator was not really listening, his mother described how she suffered from neglect, ill treatment, physical and psychological abuse. Yet her story seems less interesting than Hammada’s ramblings. Reflecting the general attitude of male self-centeredness, the ‘narration machine’ seems to have little interest in the tragic experience of the mother. A ‘double standards’ approach seem to characterize the way the narrator deals with the two sexes, as is obvious from the fact that the insane orations of Hammada, who is a replica of the protagonist in Ben Jelloun’s Moha le fou Moha le Sage, are considered words of wisdom while the demented Messaouda’s words are not even reported. In the same way, the mother’s grievances do not seem to move the narrator. Therefore there is reason enough to argue here that since the power of the word remains with the male, there is little space left for female agency to emerge. This power relation relates to the kind of conventional dualism described by Hélène Cixous wherein the female is synonymous with the negative, the Pathos, whereas the male is associated with the Logos. The masculine is considered as nobility as Bourdieu states in La Domination Masculine ‘la masculinité comme noblesse’ 63). It is no coincidence that Messaouda is silenced in the novel while Hammada is given the time/space to speak. Madness in the novel is a female prerogative; it is the lot and fate of women as they are incapable of letting out their frustration. While Messaouda suffers silently in her loneliness, Hammada fills the streets with his rage and vociferations. While she surrenders, he resists and nobody holds him accountable for his verbal abuse. While she is played with as a doll, he is feared in the whole town. The stereotypes and the recurrent themes and motifs throughout the malewritten texts indicate several things about the relationships and attitudes centring on women. The author faithfully depicted the female characters from a male perspective and with a male consciousness. Although women are at the heart of the two novels, and although the intensions of the two authors may be good, the reality of the texts, nonetheless, plunges the reader in, yet another man’s story.


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Works Cited Ben Jelloun, Tahar. Harrouda. Paris: Denoël,1973. Bourdieu, Pierre. La domination masculine. Paris: Seuil,1998. Chebel, Malek. L’esprit du Sérail. Paris: Payot & Rivages, 1995. De Lauretis, teresa. Technologies of Gender : Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Felman, Shoshana. “Women and Madness: The Critical Phallacy.” in Robyn R. Warhol, & Diane P. Herndl. Feminisms : An Anthology of Literary Criticism. New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, 1997. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction. New York: Pantheon, 1978. Fuery, Patrick & Mansfield, Nick. Cultural Studies and the New Humanities: Concepts and Controversies. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1997. Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979. Irigaray, Luce. Speculum, de l’autre femme. Paris: Minuit, 1974. Macdonald, Helen. Erotic Ambiguities: The Female Nude in Art .Routledge, an imprint of Taylor & Francis Books Ltd, 2000. Mernissi, Fatima.“The meaning of Special Boundaries” in Lewis, Reina & Sara Mills (eds). Feminist Postcolonial Theory A Reader. New York: Routledge, 2003. Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics : Feminist Literary Theory. London: Routledge, 1985. Mulvey, Laura."Visual pleasure and narrative cinema", in Robyn R. Warhol, & Diane P. Herndl. Feminisms : An Anthology of Literary Criticism. New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, 1997. Serhane, Abdelhak. Messaouda. Paris : Seuil, 1983. Weedon, Chris. Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory. London: Basil Blackwell, 1987.

CHAPTER SEVEN NARRATING DOMESTIC FRONTIERS: UNBECOMING DAUGHTERS OF PATRIARCHY MOROCCAN WOMEN WRITERS OF FRENCH EXPRESSION HASSAN ZRIZI

Woman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies- for the same reasons, by the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history- by her own movement. (Hélène Cixous)

In this paper, I examine two examples of Moroccan women writings as manifested and produced in an Arabo-Islamic, north-African, Mediterranean, middle-class, multi-lingual, multi-cultural and urban patriarchal Morocco in the beginning of the twenty first century. I would like to consider Siham Benchekroun’s Oser Vivre and Touria Oulehri’s La Répudiée as two women narrative pieces which appropriate both language and narration and involve themselves into a moment of denunciation of the female predicament in a phallocentric society seemingly involved in modernity and institutional modernization but still caught in the web of tradition. In this context, the narrative symbolically empowers women as it provides them with a subversive and “volcanic” voice that allows them to break away with the conventional practices, beliefs and roles. The remarkable shift in the qualitative and quantative artistic contribution of the Moroccan women writers of French expression witnesses the historical, social, political, and ideological changes that the Moroccan society and the Moroccan frame of mind have undergone in the postcolonial Moroccan political and cultural scene. Undoubtedly, the postcolonial Moroccan male writers’ tradition, pioneered by a group of young intellectuals of French expression,


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namely the “Souffles” group, paved the way for a liberatory discourse in their historical “prise de position” and in their reconsideration and historical questioning of the Moroccan cultural heritage in their attempt to respond to an overwhelming theocracy supported by the patriarchal doxa. Their liberatory drive could be summed up in their attempt to subvert, “renverser”, “la parole du pouvoir au pouvoir de parole”44 as Khatibi put it. Their revolutionary agenda was clearly distinguished as a vehicle of new aspirations to get involved in the era of modernity resulting from the impact of the French/ colonial culture. The postcolonial male Moroccan writers’ tendency to narrativize the margins was part of their urgent need to include the excluded, to historicize the dehistoricized and to narrate the nation as a “lack” as long as it does not include the margins: the mother languages, the oral culture, and the female populate these male writers’ fiction. In these male writings, the mother-figure is often associated with the repressed mothertongue.45 However, these writers’ narrativization of the marginalized female-figure is handled from a male writer’s perspective. i.e. from the outside, from the position of the patriarchal order and such a presentation would inevitably be distorted and incomplete as long as it lacks the feminine sensibility and the feminine perspective as a subaltern. The appearance of women writers on the literary scene is a turning point in the literary periodization of Moroccan literature in general and a historical marker of the repressed other trespassing the frontiers long set by patriarchy. Their appropriation of language and narration is part of a symbolical process of decolonization. Access to writing means adopting new forms: multiplicity, variety and open-endedness as a response to the monotonous, repetitive and linear forms. Feminine writing not only writes patriarchy back thematically, as it can be obviously detected, but adopts new strategies which juxtapose both worlds: in/out, and thus shows the double movement or the schizophrenic state46 that women writers are caught in. 44

Abdelkebir Khatibi , Maghreb Pluriel, (Paris: Donoel, 1983), p. 61. In her essay, “Mother-Word and French Language Moroccan Writing”, Zohra Mezgueldi deals with the liberation of the oral culture in the Moroccan male writers. She associates the oral culture with the presence of the mother, through the use of the mother language, as an indication of a counter-discursive narrative which opposes both the French- Western textual authority and Arabo-Islamic paternalism. (Research in African Literatures, Vol 27, n13, Fall, 1996, pp.5-14 46 Nayanta Sahgal defines the « schizophrenic imagination » as « a state of mind and feeling that is firmly rooted in particular subsoil, but above ground has a more fluid identity that doesn’t fit comfortably into any single mould. A schizophrenic of this description is a migrant who may never have left his people or his soil; we are somewhat divided selves, but I’m referring to the divisions that history and circumstance impose on the complex creatures we already are.” “The Schizophrenic Imagination”, Unbecoming 45

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Olheri’s La répudiée re-writes the conventional leitmotif of the male in quest for the female as a reproductive agent, as a “productive uterus” and the writer reproduces the traditional leitmotif as a means to disentangle herself from the silence imposed by patriarchy and to have access to self-expression long negated to the female. Writing becomes a symbolical and a physical entry into the forbidden space formerly colonized by the male generations. Narration is a moment of purging the personal/emotional load exercised on the female body and ultimately becomes a means to map up the physical, economic, social and psychological violence exercised on a category of being labelled as the “other”, object of “desire” and “fear”, to be possessed and controlled by a maledominating society. The narrative tragically delineates Niran’s story, the heroine’s tragic fate, caught in a schizophrenic state, moving between the “je”(I) and the “elle” (she). The “je” as the site of “la blessure” (the wound), upon whom the exercise of power is set and associated with a particular space: Fes. It is history, culture, and tradition. Such a space becomes in the woman writer’s fiction the site of the exercise of power, the manifestation of the patriarchal doxa. Narrating the male cultural barrenness is a means to subvert the one-eyed view of patriarchy endorsed by blind tradition. Repudiation is a central leitmotif which first of all urges writing as, at the same time, an expression, a passage into another stage, and a moment of consciousness. It makes the subject “je” moves into “elle” and the space Fes into Casablanca. A spatial, temporal, and existential passage exercised in the novel as an earthquake, Agadir’s earthquake, which accompanies the heroine throughout the novel. It projects the internal earthquake she has undergone: “Etre répudiée, lorsqu’on ne s’y attend pas, vous met face à votre destin, vous obligeant à assumer une existence que des siècles de dépendance ont rendue vaine, voire inutile”. 47 Niran, modern Scherazade, has found a voice of her own and narrative becomes a process of liberation and self-fulfilment in a hybrid space located in an in-between-ness. The narrator states: “J’ai l’impression d’être à la frontière entre deux mondes parallèles et de n’en connaître véritablement aucun. Mes sens et ma raison ne sont pas des instruments de connaissance fiables” (Olheri, 80) The movement takes place between the je/elle ; self/other ; female/male ; Fes/Casablanca ; internal/external…The narrative keeps shifting between this everlasting doubleness the female voice is caught in. Ironically, textuality limits the narrator’s scope as it is set in a totally opposite context marked by illiteracy

Daughters of Empire (ed by Shirley Chew and Anna Rutherford, London: Dangroo Press, 1993), p.115. 47 Touria Olheri, La Répudiée, p.90.


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and orality, factors which undermine the impact of the textual strategy in being a vehicle of change. The feminine “prise de position/parole” stands as an opposition to sexual politics and towards an endorsement of the female identity confirmation: Est-ce à dire que les femmes courent toujours après la reconnaissance masculine qui les légitimerait dans leur essence, leur intelligence, revendiquant respect indépendant de la féminité (Olheri, 80)

And it is repeatedly reiterated in the woman/narrator’s direct refusal to be reduced to a “reproductive sex”: « Je refuse d’être assimilée à un sexe reproducteur » (7) In Benchekroun’s Oser Vivre, both language and narration are appropriated and handled in such a way as to become both tools of immediate protest and interruption. The pronouns “je” (I), “tu”(you), “elle”(she) delineate the multi-roles –woman, mother, daughter-- the female has in society. They are multi-facets of the triangular female identity mapped up throughout the narrative which is, in its turn, interrupted to indicate the double movements/ spaces the female narrator is caught in (in/out; je/elle…) The textual violence interrupts both the mono-vocal narrator and the linear mode of narrative and thus inscribes a multi- linear and multi-vocal perspective. Olheri’s La Répudiée narrates the middle-class-educated Moroccan woman predicament in a patriarchal context outside the institution of motherhood. Barrenness is presented as a woman’s fault in a phallocentric society and the “barren” woman is excluded as a “lack” as “unfinished” or “incomplete”; she is quite a woman but not a “complete” one. The narrator’s struggle takes place outside motherhood and as a response to a conventional social order which tends to make of the female body a means of production and reproduction and to make “nature” (the female body) in service of “culture” (patriarchy) and thus negate the identity of woman as a complete entity: body/ mind. The narrative is a violent denunciation against the historical patriarchal ideology that has limited women’s action, voice and visibility: Non! J’existe moi aussi d’abord et avant tout en tant que femme, j’apprécie mon identité profonde, mes rapports au monde passent par cette enveloppe charnelle mais je refuse de n’être vue qu’à travers elle…Je refuse d’être assimilée à un sexe reproducteur, susceptible d’apporter du plaisir à un mâle (Olheri, 80)

Many narrative interruptions remove the narrator from retrospection and involve the woman narrator into a moment of reflexion on women’s predicament in a conservative system. Such a strategy shows the woman in a decisive historical moment of inquiry while she tries to break away with domestic frontiers –economic, social, cultural and sexual- and makes of the personal

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subjective experience a means to outvoice and liberate the silenced agents of her sex. In a different way, Benchekroun’s Oser Vivre narrates the predicament of the Moroccan educated woman in a patriarchal context from inside the institution of motherhood. The “productive” woman is possessed and enslaved as she fulfils the social wishes and expectations. Actually, the narrative symbolically recuperates this facet of woman society negates: Des fois, on a comme ça l’impression que ce bonheur civilisé, codifié, en barbelé, ce bonheur dicté par d’autres, sur lequel on vous a forcé à fantasmer sans vous laisser le choix – une évidence- des fois, on se demande si on ne pourrait pas servir à autre chose qu’à se prolonger, comme ça, stupidement, dans de petites cellules familiales reproduites à l’infini… 48

The narrative questions the historical, social and ideological frontiers patriarchy long set to limit women’s movement and action and symbolically threatens the patriarchal order which fixes the female’s role inside the circuit of reproduction and which the woman-narrator-protagonist refuses to abide by. Jane Flax maintains that: Female sexuality outside the circuits of reproduction or relatedness is threatening to many women and men. Many men and women have trouble with the idea that they might simply be an object of women’s desire or that sometimes might experience sex as an end in itself 49

Writing means exploring other spaces and threading other areas of experience and ultimately transgressing domestic frontiers. The function assigned to woman by patriarchy is conceived as a trap, a point supported by Mary O’Brien when she states: When we ask questions about the suppression of women and its causes, the answers which are given usually relate the social condition of women to female reproductive function. The trap in this correlation is, of course, that it suggests that male dominance is in some sense “natural”, as natural as motherhood…50

48

Siham Benchekroun, Oser Vivre, p.127. Jane Flax, Disputed Sujects: Essay on Psychoanalysis, Politics and Philosophy, (NY/ London: Routledge, 1993), p.65. 50 Mary O’Brien, The Politics of Reproduction (Boston, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), p.20. 49


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She also asks: “What does it mean to be trapped in a natural function?”(O’Brien, 20). Maternity, as a lack (la Répudiée) or as a characteristic (Oser Viver), traps women into the patriarchal order which makes of the female natural function a cultural imprisonment, a prejudice, a means to reduce woman’s identity. Both novels, different as they are, show that maternity is used as a means to possess/control the female body and to fix it as a means of reproduction. Serving patriarchy, i.e. putting the body in service of reproduction, means being alienated and “oser vivre” is a “prise de position” and a historical moment of consciousness of the trap set. The patriarchal gaze reduces woman and limits her function while mother/daughter relationship is meant to be a continuity of the reinforcement of the patriarchal doxa. In both novels, patriarchy is questioned and patriarchal ideology is symbolically subverted. Writing implies mastering one of the fundamental tools patriarchy used to employ to subdue and control woman (the constitution, mudawana or Personal Status Code). It also means writing back. Divorce/repudiation, which is one of the tools patriarchy used to threaten woman’s existence, described as an earthquake in La Répudiée, is delineated as a difficult passage but paradoxically as a moment of awareness, self-questioning and struggling in reshaping the woman identity in a male-dominant society. Motherhood, as in Oser Vivre, takes place but is questioned as a fabricated male ideology. It is presented as unnatural since it deprives woman of her real self/ identity. The act of writing is a symbolical moment of recuperating the lost woman and it is a daring act in the face of an ideology that silences the real woman. It also tends to interrupt the conventional mother- daughter relationship. In the novel, the mother not only reproduces herself in her daughter but also writes a new/different text/body that incites the new generation (daughter) to rebel and foretells a different new woman who is not trapped in the hypocritical patriarchal order: Ma fille, ma fille, n’oublie pas ce que je te dis: il faut oser vivre…Saisis le monde qui t’entoure avec ton cœur. Ne te ferme pas à la connaissance, à la culture, à la découverte. Et ne crois jamais que l’amour des autres signifie le mépris de soi…. (Benchekroun, 275- 276)

Both writers, different as they are, write from the margins and both break away with the frontiers that have historically domesticated women. In both novels, the woman writer recuperates the narrative and language and independently sets a borderline between the woman/slave and the newlyindependent/”free” woman writer. This involves the woman writer’s attempt to dismantle the patriarchal doxa and to head for the establishment of a woman’s writing tradition, i.e. the woman writer is in a historical moment of construction of femininity. The two writers appropriate the autobiographical-confessional

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form but interrupt the fist-person-narrative “Je”/”I” with the third-person “elle”/“she” and thus move between the in/out; Je/elle. The narrative keeps shifting between the in-world and the out-world and ultimately dwells in an “inbetween-ness”. Writing becomes a historical marker of the female engagement in shaping her own (hi)story and destiny. Both women writers struggle to translate Assia Djebar’s, “les cris” (screams) into “l’écrit” (writing) and they choose to do so in the language of the ex-colonizer, associated with secularism and modernity. Doing that, they move away from the mother language (darija) and separate themselves from the maternal tradition and break away with the traditional institution of motherhood or standard Arabic associated with the Arabo-Islamic doxa. In writing in the language of the other, or in the other language, as Miriam Cooke wrote: There is a break with the mother, which the writer needs to heal or overcome. This break is a sign of separateness of the mother from the writer, whether that distance is wanted or not. By extension, it marks the independence of this language from primordial identity. 51

Breaking away with the conventional institution of motherhood and conjugal life, delineated in the two novels as physical, spiritual and intellectual confinement, is a step towards liberation, which the narrative reinforces and endorses. To use Terry Eagleton’s terminology, both “textual” and “authorial” ideologies question and interrupt the dominant “general” patriarchal ideology. The liberatory discourse which the narrative underpins tends to disempower the structure of the postcolonial sexual politics and empower the female to constitute a room of her own, rather a nation of her own. The feminization of the narrative and the language is in fact a feminization of the nation women writers fictively re-create. The Arabo-Islamic ideology, which served as a vehicle for liberation from the French-colonial rule, is the selfsame ideology that continued to rule over in the postcolonial era, serving the patriarchal ideology and relegating women, besides the Amazigh languages and cultures to the margins. Women are thus in a continuous quest for a nation of their own. Not writing in the mother language implies separating the female writer from the mother, not writing in classical Arabic means refusing to abide by the AraboIslamic doxa. Writing in French means situating oneself in a “third space” (Bhabha) in the language of “the other”, the language of modernity/secularization. Domestic frontiers set by Darija (illiteracy) or classical 51

- Miriam Cooke,“The Other Language and Construction of the Self”, La Construction de l’Autre, Peuples Mediterranéens, (n.78, Janvier-Mars, 1997), p.152.


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Arabic (Fusha) (theocracy) have made women dwell in an “in-between-ness” and thus break away with masculinity and the patriarchal frame of mind. Both writers are involved, in different ways, in an act of borrowing a medium and in reconstructing the female body through the narrative. The patriarchal exercise of power is dismantled as a deprivation, and the women’s “prise de position” is presented as a historical as well as an existential moment wherein the female is conscious of the urgent necessity for change. The female body/psyche is dislocated and trapped; it is caught between two systems, two cultures, (masculine/feminine); it is located between what is and what should be. Both narratives display their tendency to disrupt and occasionally interrupt the narrative linearity and thus metaphorically question the patriarchal order and insert the voice of the other as a necessary component in the construction of a sexually democratic nation. Already in her books and writings, Fatema Mernissi, the spiritual mother of Moroccan feminism, has involved herself in recreating and re-tracing new boundaries for the female voice/ consciousness. In her books, The Harem Within or Scheherazade Goes West, she questions and dismantles the “hudud” (boundaries) patriarchy has set to confine the female body, consciousness and voice. Mernissi’s “sisters” endorse their protest against the patriarchal constitution of the harem and the inegalitarian system which restricts women’s autonomy – this autonomy becomes a historical necessity in the face of the quick socio-economic and social changes. Carla Makhloof Obermyer states that: The situation is rapidly changing as a result of momentous demographic and socio-economic transformations that have radically altered the frequency and quality of interactions between men and women and the realities of the marriage market, and contributed to the emergence of a youth culture attuned to global domain of sexuality is contested as a result of discrepancies between Islamic doctrine and its application, changing relations between the sexes, socio-economic transformations, and competing claims for legitimacy and authenticity.52

Both Siham Benchekroun’s Oser Vivre and Touria Oulehri’s La répudiée are situated in a crucial historical moment of changing relations, though society continues to be too demanding towards women. They both delineate the middleclass educated woman in a moment of historical/psychological dislocation moving to and fro between the demands of a totalitarian masculine society and the strong desire of the educated woman for freedom and her constant quest for 52

Carla Makhlouf Obermeyer, “Sexuality in Morocco: Changing Context and and Contested Domain”, Culture, Health and Sexuality (Vol2, n.3, 2000),p. 239.

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an identity lost in a patriarchal universe. The Moroccan feminine aesthetic production is a counter-narrative that refuses tutelage and proposes a vision. Fredric Jameson considers the literary text as the site of “production of ideology” wherein the aesthetic proposes an “imaginary” solution to “unresolvable contradictions in reality.”53 Both Olherri’s and Benchekroun’s texts suggest a textual anti-patriarchal stand in a context that still considers “le silence, l’immobilité et l’obeissance”54 as criteria of feminine beauty. Both texts recuperate patriarchal tools such as language and narrative. both break the “silences” and the “frontiers” and celebrate women’s strong yearning for freedom which is achieved only textually and imaginatively but not yet in reality.

Works Cited Ait Sabah, Fatna. La Femme dans l’Inconscient Musulman. Paris : le Sycomore, 1982. Benchekroun, Siham. Oser Vivre. Casalanca : Editions Empreintes, 2004. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London : Routledge, 1994. Ben Jelloun, Tahar. Harrouda. Paris: Denoel, 1973. ———. Moha le fou Moha le sage. Paris : Seuil, 1978. Chew, s & Rutherford, a (eds). Unbecoming Daughters of Empire. London: Dargoo Press, 1993. Chrabi, Driss. Le Passé Simple. Paris: Denoel, 1954. Cooke, Miriam. “The Other Language and Construction of the Self”, La Construction de l’autre. Peuples Méditerranéens. n.78, Janvier-Février, 19997. Déjeux, Jean. La Littérature Maghrébine d’expression Française. Paris : P.U.F, 1992. Eagleton, Terry. Crticism and Ideology. London: Verso, 1984. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Methuen, 1981. Khatibi, Adelkebir. Maghreb Pluriel. Paris: Editions Denoel, 1983. Mernissi, Fatema. Le Harem Europpéen. Casablanca : Editions le Fennec, 2003. 53

Fredric Jameson considers the literary text as both aesthetic and ideological discourse. He states that: “The aesthetic act is itself ideological, and the production of aesthetic or narrative form is to e seen as an ideological act in its own right, with the function of inventing imaginary or formal “solutions” to unresolvable social contradictions”. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. (London: Methuen, 1981), p.79. 54 Fatna Ait Sabah, La Femme dans l’Inconscient Musulman, (Paris: Le Sycomore, 1982), p.11.


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Mezgueldi, Zohra. « Mother-Word and French Language Moroccan Writing ». Research in African Literatures. Vol.27,n.3, Fall 1996. O’Brien, Mary. The Politics of Reproduction. Boston, London : Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981. Oulehri, Touria. La Répudiée. Casablanca: Afrique Orient, 2001.

CHAPTER EIGHT CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN (1860-1935) THE YELLOW WALLPAPER: THE FEMINIST IDENTITY PAPER MERYEM AYAN

"I've got out at last," said I, "in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!" (from The Yellow Wallpaper)

Identity questions and feminism have always been the most discussed issues in the literary world because they are very polemical and open to endless arguments. A feminist reading of identity in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s highly symbolic short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1890) presents the reader with a portrait of a woman gaining identity, freedom from oppressive restrictions, a woman being able to express herself more freely through actions rather than words after her madness. Thus, this study in addition to the discussion of identity and feminism will focus on madness and question how women struggle to gain identity without being defined as relative to man, even if this struggle for identity may end up with madness. Feminist reading of identity has continued and will continue to open new platforms for discussion because women and women writers for the first time in history began to construct a sense of unified selfhood, a rational, coherent, and effective identity with the development of feminism. Actually, Feminist scholars pointed out early on that “the study of women would not add only new subject matter but would also force a critical re-examination of the premises and standards of existing female works”. (Scott, 159) Thus, some of the feminists became interested in rediscovering the works of women writers overlooked by a male-dominated culture, and others revisited books by male authors and reviewed them from a women’s point of view to understand how they both reflect and shape the attitudes that have held women back. The rediscovering, revisiting and reviewing of feminists formed the bases of feminism.


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Feminism describes a broad movement embracing numerous phases of destiny; freedom from sex-determined roles, freedom from society’s oppressive restrictions, freedom to express feminine thoughts fully and convert feminine thought or words freely into actions. Feminism demands the acceptance of woman’s right to individual conscience and judgment. It postulates that a woman’s essential worth stems from her common humanity and does not depend on the other relationship of her life. Feminism directs itself “inward, first seeking to free the woman herself from social pressures, to conform to externally establish social standards, as such it transcends any changing set of demands.” (Berg, 320) Moreover, Feminism examines the cultural consequences of the decline of consensual aesthetics, of effective literary voice as the absence of a strong sense of stable subjectivity. “Subjectivity” is used to refer to the conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions of the individual, her sense of herself and her ways of understanding her relation to the world. “Humanist discourses presupposed an essence at the heart of the individual which is unique, fixed and coherent and which makes her what she is” (Weedon, 32). Thus, at the level of the individual, feminism offers a way of understanding the importance of subjective movement and the illusion of full subjectivity necessary for individuals to act in the world with their own subjectivity (identity). The site of subjectivity in literary texts is normally centered on the device of character, the figure in literature which equates with our sense of individuality and that tries to gain an identity. Feminism seeks a “subjective identity”, a sense of effective agency and a history for women whose position in literature and in the male-dominated world is marginalized and are always defined as the “other”. The reason for such a placement comes right from the very beginning of humanity; the humanist views, place “man” at the center of ideas, action and meaning. Therefore, the world is explained primarily through their voice and power because the women are the ones pushed to the margins rather than being placed at the center of ideas, action and meaning. They are defined in relation to men because they are not regarded as autonomous beings. As Simon De Beauvoir expressed in The Second Sex; Thus humanity is male and defined woman in itself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being . . . She is defined and differentiated with reference to men and not he with reference to her, she is the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the subject, he is the absolute. She is the other. She is the object. (Webster, 71)

Obviously, women occupy rather a different position in relation to men because they are not defined as an individual but relative to men. Therefore, they are the “other” not able to explain their ideas or raise their voice because

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they are not the subject and the absolute ones but the “other” and the “object”. The woman character, in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is defined relative to her husband, John, who is a doctor. She is the “other,” the “object” and the one unable to express herself. From the very beginning of feminism, Feminists tried to subvert the position of women because they did not want to be defined relative to “men” or as the “other,” just as the woman character of “The Yellow Wallpaper” and as most of the women in reality. They wanted to be the “subject” not the “object” any more. Therefore, Feminists socially constructed differences between sexes as chief source of woman’s oppression, and examined sex roles as modes of social control. Moreover, the feminists argued that gender and sex should be differentiated because sex indicated the biological differences (male / female) whereas gender signified the socially constructed differences which operate in most societies and which lead to forms of inequality, oppression and exploitation between the sexes (masculine / feminine). “Both femininity and masculinity are socially constructed and invested with various qualities, values, images and narratives which constantly circulate in society, and shape and determine people’s attitudes and lives” (Eagleton, 185). Thus, feminist theory’s emergent aesthetic drew not on sex differentiation but on gender difference because generally feminist writers make reference to gender issues. In other words, feminist and gender studies are intermingled. Recently, “gender” has started to be used as a synonym for “women”. This usage denotes that women are valid historical subjects because “gender” has a more neutral and objective sound than does “women”. However, gender used as a substitute for women suggests that information about women is necessarily information about men, that is to say, the world of women is part of the world of men. This means, the experience of one gender has something to do with the other. For example, in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” the wife’s madness has something to do with her husband’s attitudes, because it is he, who gradually drives her into madness with his limitations and orders. Gender relations emphasize an entire system of relationships that may include sex, but is not directly determined by sex or directly determining of sexuality. (Scott, 156) Gender can be used to describe the liberal theories of inalienable rights, sociological roles and individual psychology which emphasized the need to actualize the “self” and “identity” in the world. In particular gender emphasized the ideological production of femininity as different. Therefore, when feminists focus on gender they point out that the most essential thing for women is to become real subjects to discover their true selves and gain their own identities beside men not relative to them. Thus, for Feminists “a search for a coherent and unified feminine subject began the deconstruction of the myth of woman as absolute” (Waugh, 97).


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Feminists have employed a variety of approaches to the analysis and usage of gender, but approaches came down to three theoretical positions. The first approach is an attempt to explain the origins of patriarchy. The second one locates itself with a Marxian tradition and seeks an accommodation with feminist critics. The third, approach tries to explain the production and reproduction of subject’s gendered identity (Scott, 157). All of these approaches have taken their place in women’s writings. Women’s writing can, in fact, be seen not as an attempt to define an isolated individual ego but to discover a collective concept of subjectivity which foregrounds the construction of gender and identity in relationship (Webster, 77) In fact, there are numerous issues regarding the representation of women in literature and there are a considerable number of questions aroused such as; why were women portrayed relative to men in literary works? To what extent are the experiences of women represented in literature? Why were women seen in less significant roles than men? Can a male writer adequately represent women characters and female experiences? All these questions form the major concerns of feminist criticism and women in literature. Feminist criticism tries to find answers to such questions. One thing is for sure: a male writer cannot exactly represent the experience and voice of women in literature because what he would do is only guess, he cannot live or experience in the way women do. Therefore, the main concern of feminism can be stated as to disrupt traditional boundaries between art and life, gender and sex, masculine and feminine, high and popular culture, and the dominant and marginal. An important precursor in feminist criticism, whose works dealt with some of the problems specific to women writers, was Virginia Woolf. Her work A Room of One’s Own (1929), though not a theatrical work in the conventional sense of feminism, still serves as a point of departure for the study of women’s literature and the beginning of feminism and feminist criticism. Virginia Woolf in her work insisted that the “lack of a room of one’s own” and the kind of financial and social independence it represented put a brake on women’s ambitions in literature. It was not that the women were not able to write, but their lack of financial independence and their generally being expected to serve the needs of men created certain boundaries. However, the example of “Aphra Ben” and the increasing number of women writers in the 18th century and the 19th century demonstrates that women can write as well. Though for most of these women writing was not a profession but more often a diversion. Everything was under male control and every example a woman writer looks at would involve male tradition. This means that whatever women intend to do, one way or the other, they would start from male dominated areas Thus, women’s ambitions were broken and they were not able to raise their voice.

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The woman character in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is forced to lead a life in a room she did not choose but that was chosen by her husband. It may seem as though the woman character has “a room of her own” but this is not really the case, it is “a room of the owner”. It is a room arranged for her by her husband and she is forbidden to write. She indicates in the story, “he hates to have me write a word”. However, she secretly continues to write. It is significant that she is just writing without speaking or thinking. Therefore, at the end of the story she expresses herself through her actions rather than words. Moreover, she is not supported, either financially or morally. All these limitations indicate that there is a very heavy male control in her life that limits her in every way. Genuinely, because of male control and social roles, women have no time left for themselves. The roles they play in life; as mother, wife, housewife, worker, and many others, and the pressure of the society, its customs and traditions all limit women. Thus, in comparison to men, women have to struggle double time to be able to raise their voice and prove that they can be as good as men if they have the same conditions as they. The basic reason for women not being able to raise their voice and be successful is the unequal conditions they live in, and the boundaries in their lives. In the literary world, most of the women writers had no examples of their own or had no female novelist to follow or learn from. Therefore, they formed their own examples and deconstructed male dominated traditions. Trditionally, female characters were represented in relation to men. Feminist critics opposed such representation of female characters. Josephine Donovan is one of these opposing feminist critics. She opposed most of the literary works written by men that represented women only in relation to male protagonists, rather than as themselves; a true “self”, who is not an “other” but, will be a moral agent capable of self determined action (Newton, 159). For Josephine Donovan the crucial question is not whether woman can be identified with the male self, but whether she ought to? Obviously, woman should not identify herself with a “male self” but with her “own self” because each individual woman should struggle to find her own “true identity.” Another important feminist critic Elaine Showalter, in her book, A Literature of Their Own, expresses that women have generally been regarded as sociological chameleons, taking on the class, lifestyle and culture of their male relatives (Eagleton, 190). Each generation of women writers have found itself, in a sense, without history and were forced to rediscover the past, in order to achieve equality and create indistinguishably in literature. Elaine Showalter asks honestly, do women achieve equality by producing a literature clearly distinguished in its own right, or do they achieve it by merging their work indistinguishably in the literary mainstream? In the former case women accept a sexist differentiation and in the later case they yield to assimilation. Showalter


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argues that the experience of woman can easily disappear under the diagrams of the structuralists. She fears the development of a system of higher and lower criticism scientific and humanistic, which will subtly assure gender identities masculine and feminine and reassert a sexual polarity (Newton, 158). Showalter emphasizes that feminine criticism is a fundamentally suspicious approach to literature. Showalter explains this suspiciousness in two forms: the first one is concerned with women as readers, in which they are labeled feminist critics. The second deals with women as writers, and Showalter calls this “gynocriticism” (Abrams, 236). Feminist critics deal with works by male authors and Showalter indicates that this form of criticism is a historically grounded inquiry which probes the ideological assumptions of literary phenomena. This sort of suspicious approach to literary texts seems absent from Showalter’s second category since among the primary concerns of gynocriticism is to find the history, themes and structures of literature by women. The text is not or not only what it pretends to be and, therefore, the search for underlying contradictions and conflicts as well as absence and silence in the text, seems to be reserved for texts written by men (Newton, 159). The feminist critics, in other words, must realize that women produced text will occupy a totally different status from that of the male text. Showalter says: “One of the problems of feminist criticism is that it is male oriented. If we study stereotypes of women, the sexism of male critics and limited roles women play in literary history, we are not, but only what men have thought women should be.” (Eagleton, 193) What Showalter means is that women should write their own experiences; form their own literature; otherwise what feminist critics are trying to do would be useless. She asserts that experience is directly available in texts written by women, and gynocriticism should be used by feminist critics to study women’s writing, because gynocriticism frees itself from pandering to male values, and seeks to focus on newly visible worlds of female culture. Gynocriticism is related to feminist research in history, anthropology, psychology and sociology, which all have developed hypotheses of a female subculture (Abrams, 236). Showalter sees no place for the adaptation of male models and theories or, indeed, for the angry or loving fixation on male literature. She proposes gynocriticism, which will construct a female framework for the analysis of women’s literature, and offer new models based on the study of female experience. Although Showalter rejects male theories, feminists make use of male-dominated theories, so that, just as there are many traditions and themes in literary study, there are many feminisms. No single voice can speak for them all. Feminist criticism usually combines attention to women with various approaches based on contemporary literary theory resulting in methodologies as diverse as historical materialist or Marxist feminism, psychoanalytic or

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Lacanian feminism and post-structualist feminism drawing on the insight of Baktinian dialogues, Derridean deconstruction, narrative poetics and readerresponse theory (Perkins, 327). Besides, the various feminist approaches, one of the most significant contributions to feminist criticism is the discussion on “language”. Virginia Woolf talks of male and female sentences without analyzing their respective characters beyond the impressionistic level but she identifies the ideological role of language in constructing gender. Masculine language is bold, forceful, clear, and vigorous whereas feminine language is vague, weak tremulous and pastel. Masculine group of adjectives often have connotations such as strong, gusty, hard, mean, and so on. A hard-hitting piece of writing by a man is liable to be thought as merely realistic; an equivalent piece by a woman is more likely to be cruel or tough. The assumption is that a woman writer happens to be a good one only if she is deprived of her identity as a female. Thus, in the mind of the reviewers a woman writer has two choices. She can be bad but a female a carrier of the feminine sensibility virus; or she can be good in male adjectives and terms but sexless. Badness seems to be then a surplus of female hormones whereas badness in male writer is usually ascribed to nothing but badness. For example, when a man writes about things like doing the dishes it is realism but when a woman does, it is an unfortunate feminine genetic labour. This shows that woman’s desires and expression would not speak the same as a man’s, and there is a powerful determination in the language usage between male and female writers which comes from sexual differentiation. Helen Cixous sees women as locked in struggle against conventional man but “she rejects the concept of typical woman because of the inexhaustible richness of individual variations, but it cannot be said by adopting the system of discourse which governs phallocentric thinking, built as it is on a philosophical theoretical basis“(Webster, 78). In general, feminist critics have never all shared the same assumptions and goals as male writers. Historically speaking, feminist criticism drives from firm political and ideological commitments and insists that literature both reflects and influences human behavior in the larger world. Feminist criticism often, too, has practical aims. Strongly conscious that most of recorded history has given great attention to the interests, thoughts, and actions of men, feminist thought endeavors both to extend contemporary attention to distinctively female concerns, ideas, and accomplishments and to recover the largely unrecorded and unknown history of women in earlier times. Not all directions of feminist criticism are historical; feminism has, in fact, taken many different directions and forms in recent years, and it has many different concerns. French feminist criticism, for example, has been deeply influenced by psychoanalysis, especially Lacanian psychoanalysis, and by French poststructuralist emphasis is on language (Leitch, 323).


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Beyond their common aim of explicating and furthering specifically female interests, feminist critics may differ substantially in their assumptions and emphases. Like Marxism, feminism draws creatively on various other approaches and theories for its several methodologies. The most common historical directions of American feminism, in particular involves the recovery of neglected or forgotten texts written by women in earlier times, the redrawing of literary values to include forms of writing that women were able to create when more public and accepted forms were denied to them, the discovery of the roles that reading played in lives and consciousness of women when they were unable to pursue more “active” and “public” courses, and the sorting out of cultural values implicit in the way women are. (Beaty, 640). Since the early 1970s the feminist criticism, has been categorized either as French, American, or British. These categories should not be allowed to obscure either the global implications of the women’s movement or the fact that interests and ideas have been shared by feminists from France, Great Britain, and the United States. British and American feminists have examined similar problems while writing about many of the same writers and works. American feminists have recently become more receptive to French theories about femininity and writing. French, American, and British feminists have examined similar problems from somewhat different perspectives. French feminists have tended to focus their attention on language, analyzing the ways in which meaning is produced. They have concluded that language as we commonly think of it is a decidedly male realm. Drawing on the ideas of psychoanalytic philosopher Jacques Lacan, French feminists remind us that language is a realm of public discourse. French feminists have said that the structure of language is phallocentric: it privileges the phallus and, more generally, masculinity by associating them with things and values more appreciated by the masculine dominated culture. Moreover, French feminists believe, that “masculine desire dominates speech and posits woman as an idealized fantasy fulfillment for the incurable emotional lack caused by separation from the mother.” In the view of French feminists, language is associated with the separation from the mother. The language learned reflects a binary logic that opposes such terms as active/ passive, masculine/ feminine, sun/ moon, father/mother, head/ heart, son/ daughter, intelligent/sensitive, brother/sister, form/matter, phallus/vagina, and reason/emotion because this logic tends to group with masculinity such qualities as light, thought and activity. Julia Kristeva has said that feminine language is “semiotic” not “symbolic” and it is also said to be rhythmic and unifying. (Walker, 159) British feminism, on the other hand, declares itself to be more political than American and French feminism. British feminism, advocating social change often vied as Marxist, is more ideological and therefore seemingly more concerned with social and cultural change than its American counterpart.

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It attempts to analyze the relationship between gender and class to show how the dominant power structures controlled by men influence all of society and oppress women. For the far most part, American feminism emphasizes the actual text with all its textual qualities, such as theme, voice, and tone, while at the same time being suspicious of any one theory that would attempt to explain the difference between male and female writings. (Bressler, 104) No matter what they emphasize in theory all feminist critics assert that they are on a journey of self-discovery that will lead them to a better understanding of themselves, and once they understand and then define themselves as women, they believe they will be able to change their world. In fact, all feminist critics struggle to discover who they are, and change the world in which they live under male domination and try to find an identity of their own by becoming a subject instead of an object defined relative to man. While analyzing “The Yellow Wallpaper” some general questions can be asked: Is the author male or female? Is the text narrated by a male or by a female? What type of roles do women have in the story? What are the attitudes toward women held by the male characters? Is a feminine image used? Do the female characters speak differently from the male ones? Such questions will present this journey of feminist reading of identity in “The Yellow Wallpaper”. Actually, feminist criticism is applied rather than approached because feminist critics aim to deconstruct the male values. As cultures continue to be economically, politically, and socially dominated by males, criticizing the male-dominated values is essential. Despite heightened awareness against stereotypes, societies give authority to the reasoning and rational male, not to the female who supposedly acts according to mysterious intuition of dubious value. Also, in many cultures women most often experience life as inferiors whose very identities depend on the men around them. Actually, even though Gilman has managed to become a successful writer, has experienced a nervous breakdown with a slight hysterical tendency in the 1880s, after she had given birth to her first child. This nervous break down made her dependent on her husband who ordered her to become more involved with her family and to give up writing. This made her much more distressed, but in a moment of clear vision, she realized that she did not want to be a wife; she wanted to be a writer and an activist rather than a passive housewife. Actually, in her most famous short story; “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a feminist classic, Gilman wrote down her own story, bringing out the details of her problems and her experience during her nervous breakdown. Presentation of “experience” is one of the most important issues in feminist criticism because it is claimed that male writers cannot reflect woman experience in its realistic way. Feminists say that women writers should write their own experience to be able to develop a real presentation of female characters in a literary work. Therefore, in her


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fictionalized account of her experiences in “The Yellow Wallpaper”, Gilman writes of a woman ordered to rest, forbidden to write, seeing herself and the others trapped behind the wallpaper and desperately trying to escape from the limitations of the society and the female roles. (Russell, 128) In fact, Charlotte Perkins Gilman explained, in The Forerunner magazine, the reason why she wrote "The Yellow Wallpaper," with the words: "It was not intended to drive people crazy, but to save people from being driven crazy, and it worked (Gilman 1). Generally, the common theme in Gilman’s writing is the attempt to break out of the limitations of the female role and focus on the women question. Gilman believed that men and women should share the responsibility of housework that is a radical notion at the turn of the century. She believed that women should be encouraged, from a very early age, to be independent and to work for themselves. Gilman by presenting a yellow wallpapered small room of a haunted house as her setting explores the larger issues of the experience of woman in marriage and society. In “The Yellow Wallpaper”, the protagonist is slowly driven into madness by her physician husband while undergoing the rest-cure treatment for nervous prostration. Her husband concluded that her breakdown was the product of too much work especially writing not housework. Her husband and Dr. S. Weir Mitchell decided upon "rest cure" treatment. The "rest cure" calls for a woman to be isolated in a bed in a private room, where she is denied access to "pen, brush, or pencil (Gilman 1)." Time away from thinking and rest was suggested to be the most immediate way of curing depression in women. However, Gilman proves the opposite of this treatment in "The Yellow Wallpaper” because being placed in a room alone added to her nervousness. Thus, rather than being cured from depression she was driven into madness. Gilman uses the symbol of madness as a powerful metaphor in the story. “Madness manifested as progressive incipient insanity and madness manifested as extreme and repressed anger at female bondage become dichotomous components of the protagonist’s condition.” (Knight, xvi) Madness is to be understood in terms of sex roles-- attitudes towards being female or male that exists in modern Western cultures. According to Phyllis Chesler, madness does not emerge of unhappiness in one’s roles but from alienation or rejection of one’s role. (Russell, 113) If a woman is pushed to extremes, this will cause unhappiness and unsatisfaction. This unhappiness may take the form of depression, anxiety, paranoia (fearfulness), suicide attempts, or frigidity. These are all regarded as forms of madness but not genuinely madness. However, if a woman totally or partially rejects her female roles she runs the risk of being labeled “schizophrenic” and this would constitute genuine madness. (Russell, 113) For Chesler schizophrenia, which is genuine madness in women, can be understood in terms of “oppression” and “conditioning.”

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Females from an early age are channeled into the female role and punished when they step out of its bounds. The oppressive features of this role are covered over by romantic illusions because contemporary women are “free slaves” they choose their servitude of love. indisputably, “mad women step outside the female role, becoming dominating, perhaps even hostile and violent, but usually retaining feelings of inferiority, helplessness and self-mistrust.” (Russell, 114) Such women may experience certain “transformations of self.” The key to understanding women’s madness lies in oppression. Chesler believes that neither private psychiatrists nor institutions will end female oppression. Thus, for her, the best prescription for madness is to work towards an end to female oppression by understanding the cause of women’s oppression, and then by accomplishing successfully organizations around such issues as childcare, abortion and birth control, and women working cooperatively in groups. Actually, there are no short-term solutions to the problems of madness. What is needed is a breakdown of the rigidly defined female roles and an end to the oppression of women. Luce Irigaray believes that identity is tied up with sexuality, that under patriarchy, women’s sexuality has been conceptualized in male terms, and that women have not been allowed to speak for themselves about their desire and pleasure. (Russell, 117) Women’s desire does not speak the same language as men’s desire because feminine language is characterized by a multiplicity of meanings, by lack of unity. In fact, women’s silence is connected to the repression of sexuality and this leads to women’s madness. Women’s suffering may find direct expression in their body or in their words but men express their suffering verbally rather than bodily. To overcome women’s madness, repression needs to be lifted by freeing up sexuality, allowing a female language to develop, re-evaluating mother-daughter relationship and promoting respect for sexual difference. Irigaray argues that women should find a new way of writing which gives expression to their sexuality. Writing could be a way of breaking the traditional roles of women. Plurality would be the key feature, no determinate, unique meaning would emerge, because for women at each moment there is “at least two meanings” without one being able to decide which meaning prevails (Russell, 123). Creativity and madness are often linked in popular imagination, and in reality, many creative women have experienced mental distress. Madness is also a common theme in women’s writing because many women writers have started off their writing journey under oppression that drew them to madness. Writing (creativity of women) is in fact madness because they try to get rid of male oppression or repression through their rejecing male standards. The opening of “The Yellow Wallpaper” quickly establishes the narrator’s circumstances. She is spending the summer in an isolated house with her


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husband, John, a well-respected physician whose character is defined by pragmatism and reason. The narrator is suffering from an illness, which John downplays as a “temporary nervous depression.” As part of her treatment, she is “forbidden to work,” a remedy with which she strongly disagrees. Writing of any kind is prohibited, since John has cautioned her “not to give way to fancy in the least.” He says “that with my imaginative power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency”. However, the narrator is convinced that writing might prove therapeutic, and despite John’s disapproval, she keeps a secret diary. The woman, from whose point of view the story is told, is set in an inferior position and under the control of her physician husband. The name of the husband, John, has been given but the woman’s name has not been given. The man has a name, a profession, and power over everything in the house and society. However, the woman is nameless, has no profession, she cannot even write or choose the room she wants to stay in. Everything has been arranged for her by her husband. Although he is a doctor, a person in charge of other people’s health, he does not believe in his wife’s illness. This forms a conflict. In fact, throughout the story male and female worlds have been opposed. In the context of marriage discourse, we have a husband and wife relation. Their positions, attitudes, and language all are opposed to each other as follows: Male: powerful, physician, active, practical, believes in concrete evidence, has knowledge, gives orders, he is the master or the guardian, nothing is forbidden for him because he is in the position of a father, he tells the truth. He is serious and he is the one who laughs all the time. Female: powerless, jobless, passive, not practical, believes in superstition, has no knowledge, gives no orders, she is the servant or the prisoner; things she wants to do are forbidden for her because she is in the position of a child. She tells lies. She is unwarranted and the one laughed at all time. The woman character, the narrator of the story always uses “I”, but in fact, she is the “other” compared to her husband. In other words, it can be said that in the textual world she has an identity as “I”, she is the subject but in a male dominated world she cannot be the “I”, (subject) but only the “other” (object) without an identity of her own (name). In fact, the use of this pronoun conveys an emerging sense of self and conviction. It demonstrates “a positive change in self-presentation precisely at the point when her actions dramatically compromise her sanity and condemn her to madness” and the word “becomes not an act of assertion but rather of acquiescence determined by John’s authority” (Golden 193,195). The pronoun, actually, expresses the narrator’s desire of gaining an identity.

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At the very beginning the wife (narrator) says; “John laughs at me, of course one expects that in marriage.” With these words she is making a generalization and this represents for the readers common sense. She is accepting everything he does and says because he is the strong one and she is the weak one in the male-dominate world. The husband is "armed with knowledge” (King, Morris 27). He uses his knowledge to impose his version of reality on his wife. The weak wife’s weapon against her husband’s knowledge is her “madness”, which frees her of responsibility (Johnson 526). In fact, madness is a weapon that the wife (narrator) uses against all the people who try to silence and change her. Thus, she remains silent while the husband decides for everything on behalf of her. He does not give her the chance to choose the room she wants; “I don't like our room a bit. I wanted one downstairs that opened on the piazza and had roses all over the window, and such pretty old-fashioned chintz hangings! but John would not hear of it.” She is hopeless, unaware of what to do. Therefore, at the beginning of the story she asks; and what can I do? What is one to do? But what is one to do? She says she is ill but her husband does not believe her and neither does her brother. “You see he does not believe I am sick! And what can one do?” Thus, she does not know how to express her self because she is under a heavy opposition. She says; “I did write for a while in spite of them; but it does exhaust me a good deal- having to be so sly about it, or else meet with heavy opposition.” In a way she is forced to be sly because of the heavy opposition and attitudes of those around her. However, as a result of the woman's forbidden activity, the story is written in a journal or diary-like form. The narrator’s report of the wallpaper observations can be accepted as a case study of Gilman’s own nervousness and psychological instability because Gilman had experienced a similar pattern in her life. Therefore, the patterns on the yellow wallpaper are significant because they are self-projections that indicate how a woman driven into madness feels. Through the patterns that are symbolic images, the narrator is gaining insight in how women are suppressed in general. The narrator also talks about the house that seems empty for years and about which she feels something strange. She describes the house as the most beautiful place, but in fact it is a prison for her. All the contradictory ideas lay out the contradictories between male and female ideas and understanding. She does not like the room and the yellow wallpaper. However, she cannot clearly express herself, even if she tries to express her thoughts her husband laughs at her or does not listen to her seriously. Therefore, she says that “I get unreasonably angry with John sometimes . ..”, and adds “I think it is due to this nervous condition”. Though this represents a woman’s obedience to her husband, a woman getting angry is the beginning of some sort of rebellion or awakening.


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There is also a female authority figure in the story. She is John’s sister. This woman character has a name, Jennie, she is not nameless and she is different from the narrator. Jennie is a typical woman figure who is the product of the patriarchal system. She is a housekeeper, a servant, obeying the orders and acting according to the social roles given to her. “She is a perfect and enthusiastic housekeeper, and hopes for no better profession.” The female authority figure, Jennie cannot understand why the narrator wants to write. The narrator does not want her to see her writing saying: “I must not let her find me writing. I verily believe she thinks it is the writing which made me sick! But I can write when she is out, and see her long way off from these windows.” However, the narrator says; “. . . if I were only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me”. Thus, the difference between the two female characters is obvious. Although she wants to write due to her illness and depression she is able to do very little things as walk, get dressed, and sleep. She is not even able to take care of her own baby. She is away from her child, and cannot be a mother of a child at the moment because she is treated as a baby herself. Afterwards, she begins to like the room and says; “I’m getting really fond of the room in spite of the wallpaper. Perhaps because of the wallpaper...” She explains that she lies down and follows the pointless pattern to some sort of a conclusion. “I lie here on this great immovable bed -- it is nailed down, I believe -- and follow that pattern about by the hour. It is as good as gymnastics, I assure you. I start, we'll say, at the bottom, down in the corner over there where it has not been touched, and I determine for the thousandth time that I will follow that pointless pattern to some sort of a conclusion”. In other words, she tries to find a way to escape from the traditions that surround her. Day after day she followed the patterns on the wallpaper. The patterns were first blured, later they became shadowy women figures, and finally after all her observations she began to see a woman prisoner trapped behind the bars of the wallpaper. The narrator starts to visualize her as a crawling and a creeping woman. She feels as she should help her escape the way she would like to. In fact, by helping the trapped woman escape, the unnamed narrator helps herself escape because the trapped woman is a projection of herself. In general she tries to help women from being held captive at home and in a narrower sense she tries to free herself from the life she is leading as a captive because of the doctor’s rest-cure treatment. In order to help herself and the shadowy women figures and the creeping woman escape she decides to tear down the dreadful and the smelling yellow wallpaper. “Then I peeled off all the paper I could reach standing on the floor. It sticks horribly and the pattern just enjoys it! All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths just shriek with derision”. She peels down the wallpaper and locks herself into the room. The peeling of the yellow wallpaper

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is symbolic because she for the first time throughout the story shows action. Afterwards, she locks the door, throws the key out of the window and starts creeping. The actions, actually, indicate that she is not passive any more. In a way, she has got rid of the personality and passivity that has kept her under pressure and quietness. She peels down the “yellow wallpaper” and creeps into another world that is different from the one she was forced to live in. She finds away to escape the male domination and creep into a new world far from all sorts of opposition. When John manages to open the door, he sees his wife creeping and faints. Of course, she cannot understand why her husband faints: “Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!” She continues to creep and she even creeps over her husband and goes out of the room. The creeping is a kind of freedom and victory for her. This way she became a baby unaware of the social roles. Whatever she may do she will not be held responsible. She has to obey no rules and be a prisoner no more. “I've got out at last," said I, "in spite of you and Jane. And I've pulled off most of the paper, so you can't put me back!" She is free in her own way and is expressing herself freely through actions rather than words after her madness. Actually, Gilman is doing something very interesting throughout her story. She is presenting a clinical study of a woman descending into insanity. First, starting with unreasonable anger and crying symptoms, then lying without moving, talking to herself, staring, and seeing hallucinations. Afterwards, acting very odd, for example locking the door, throwing the key, damaging things around. Finally, creeping and madness came. Step by step the reader can follow a woman who has been given a rest-cure driven into madness. In fact, Gilman is representing a woman escaping from all the social pressures and finding an order of her own through madness. The ending of the story can be interpreted as a victorious one because the narrator is a feminist heroine. The narrator driven into madness has actually defeated her husband and has set out for a new life just like a baby crawling before it walks. In other words, she is like a baby unaware of the pressures and the oppressions around her, and her husband who has caused unhappiness in her life. Thus, the narrator, by rejecting all the social roles (wife, mother, sister in law, daughter, so on.) that the male dominated society has burdened her with, has gradually fallen into depression and then madness. In fact, madness in real life will limit ones life and either the person will lead a passive life or commit suicide but in the literary world since approaches and interpretations vary, madness form a feminist point of view can be interpreted as freedom or escape from the burden of the feminine roles because the narrator stops suffering and obeying the orders of the others once she manages to creep over and finally get out from the place (room) the other (husband) had placed her into. Thus, the


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“creeping over” the well-respected husband is the indicator of victory because the husband is now unconsciously lying on the floor and the woman (the subject) is crossing over him and crawling into a new life. The narrator, whether good or bad, acceptable or not, has an identity; “mad woman.” Madness gave her the opportunity to escape from the pressures of the social and cultural values of the male dominated world. In conclusion, women through a very long journey have succeeded to find an identity of their own, in their own way and a literature of their own. Actually, it was feminist criticism and feminism that allowed women to gain freedom and identity in the literary world. Feminism brought a different way of looking at literary works because all the approaches are male dominated, but feminism and feminist criticism are female dominated. Feminist criticism by opening a new door has affected the world of literary criticism and brought a very feminine point of view to gender relations, women positions and women writers in the male dominated world, and madness has found a new form through feminist reading of identity. Madness has brought victory, freedom and has given an opportunity to peel the yellow wallpaper that has been covering the walls in the male dominated world. Finally, The Yellow Wallpaper has been peeled off and the feminist identity-paper has been covered on the walls of the rooms of women with identity.

Works Cited Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. U.K.: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1993. Beaty, Jerome. The Norton Introduction to Fiction. New York / London: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 1981. Berg, Barbara S. The Remembered Gate, Origins of American Feminism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978. Bressler, Charles E. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. New Jersey: Prentice- Hall, Inc., 1994. Eagleton, Mary. Feminist Literary Theory. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1986. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper”, http//www. The Yellow Wallpaper, html, (2006) —. "Why I Wrote 'The Yellow Wallpaper?" The Forerunner October 1913. Golden, Catherine. The Captive Imagination: A Casebook on “The Yellow WallPaper” New York: The Feminist Press, 1992. Johnson, Greg. “Gilman's Gothic Allegory: Rage and Redemption in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.” Studies in Short Fiction 26:4 (1989): 521-530.

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King, Jeanette and Pam Morris. "On Not Reading Between The Lines: Models of Reading in 'The Yellow Wallpaper." Studies in Short Fiction 26:1 (1989): 23-32. Knight, Denise D. ed., Herland The Yellow Wall-Paper, And Selected Writings. New York: Penguin Books, 1999. Perkins, George & Barbara. Benet’s Readers Encyclopedia of American Literature. London: Harper Collins Publishers, 1991. Russell, Denise. Woman, Madness and Medicine. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1995. Walker, Nancy A. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Bedford: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. Waugh, Patricia. Feminine Fictions Revisiting the Post-modern. New York: Routlege Inc., 1989. Webster, Roger. Studying Literary Theory: An Introduction. London: Chapman and Hall, Inc., 1993. Weedon, Chris. Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory. Massachusetts: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1981.

CHAPTER NINE MOURNING, SUBJECTIVITY AND GENDER CONSTRUCTION IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FEMINIST WRITING BOUCHRA BELGAID

Identity is one of the central issues in American literature and culture. Such cultural circumstance reflects the disparity that a great number of critics have noted between one governing model of selfhood and its consequences: that of a privileged, personally empowered and singularly expressive identity whose realization, in Fredric Jameson’s words, ironically ‘‘maims our existence as individual subjects and paralyzes our thinking about time and change just as surely it alienates us from our speech itself.’’55 Such irony is hardly new in American literature. As a matter of fact, Sacvan Bercovitch takes it to originate the American literary history56 that labours prodigiously to imagine a social divine selfhood that is a representative of America itself. In a significant way, this American literary legacy continues nostalgically to provide contemporary American writers with an archetypical vision of the American hero as the one who carries America’s values and desires or in the words of Evan Carton as the ‘‘figure who personally incorporates the national politics.’’57 Yet with all the fervour of later postmodernism during the past twenty years the notion of identity or the human subject seems to have disappeared from postmodern writing and many critics begin to proclaim, lament or celebrate the ‘‘Death of the Self’’. Jameson, indeed, regards this as postmodernism’s most radical insight: 55

Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (New York: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 20. 56 Sacvan Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), p. 134. 57 Evan Carton, ‘‘The Politics of Selfhood,’’ A Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Vol: 20, Fall 1984, pp. 41-61.

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Not only is the bourgeois individual subject a thing of the past, it is also a myth: it never really existed in the first place; there have never been autonomous subjects of that type. Rather this construct is merely a philosophical and cultural mystification, which sought to persuade people that they ‘had’ individual subjects and possessed this unique personal identity.58

Although postmodernism’s major ontological disruption that textuality is the primary reality of a world and a book fabricated through discourse, it still contemplates the demise of the belief in the full humanist subject, such a loss is often a cause of lament. It seems that the imagination longs nostalgically for, and thus in a sense continues to reproduce the illusion of a full subjective presence. Or does it always? For what is this subject that, threatened by loss, is so bemoaned? Bourgeois perhaps, patriarchal certainly—it is the phallocentric order of subjectivity. For some, for many, this is indeed a great loss—and may lead to narcissistic laments about the end of art, of culture, of the west. But for others, precisely for Others, this is no great loss at all.59

Those, as a matter of fact, who are excluded from or marginalized by the dominant culture—for reasons of class, gender, belief or whatever—those Others mentioned above by Foster may have never experienced a sense of full subjective presence in the first instance. They may never have identified with that stable sense of identity mediated through the naturalizing conventions of fictional tradition. Such Others may, indeed, already have felt the extent to which their sense of identity is constructed through the dominant culture. Many postmodern writers express a nostalgia for the disintegration of that unitary self as it is the case with Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five whose lament represents not only an existential identity crisis, but also the collapse of a particular set of historical and moral conditions which allowed for the reading and understanding of character in nineteenth-century realist fiction: Rosewater said an interesting thing to Billy one time about a book that wasn’t science fiction. He said that everything there was to know about life was in The Brothers Karamazov, by Feodor Dostoevsky. ‘But that isn’t enough any more,’ said Rosewater.60

58

Fredric Jameson, ‘‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’’ in Postmodern Culture (ed) Hal Foster (London: Pluto Press, 1999), pp. 111-125. 59 Hal Foster, ‘‘(Post)modern polemics’’ in New-German Critique, N: 33, pp. 67-79. 60 Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five (London : Traid Granadian, 1969), p. 71.


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It is quite lucid that postmodern writers share this nostalgia for Dostoevsky’s representation of life and identity. However, do feminist writings share this anxiety for this unitary sense of identity that is situated within a patriarchal discourse? Indeed, at the moment when postmodernism started to forge its identity through articulating the exhaustion of the existential belief in self-presence and self-fulfillment, feminism begins to assemble its sense of cultural identity in what appears to be the opposite direction. When male writers as Vonnegut and Barth wave a fond goodbye to the whole or unitary self, women writers (as Patricia Waugh asserts) ‘‘were beginning for the first time in history, to construct an identity out of the recognition that women need to discover, and must fight for, a sense of unified selfhood, a rational, a coherent, effective identity.’’61 While many male writers mourn/lament its demise, many women writers have not yet experienced or forged an individual or collective sense of identity. Yet the feminist search for a subjective identity, a sense of coherent and essential self that can speak and know itself is still positioned in a patriarchal discourse. In this respect, for many women writers a more appropriate question would be ‘‘what represents me?’’ Such question brings forward a necessary recognition of alienation for the woman writer: that the ‘‘I’’ is spoken and positioned in a discourse where subjectivity, the norm of humanness is still male, then the ‘‘I’’ is already constituted by others according to whom, and yet outside of what, women take themselves to be. These concerns are central to contemporary feminist writings. Anne Tyler, for example, in A Slipping Down Life (1969) illustrates this feminine search for a rational and coherent self that is positioned in a patriarchal discourse and offers an identity defined necessarily through alienation. Evie, the central character, is an overweight and physically unprepossessing seventeen year-old who longs to chisel out a form for herself, to become different, to feel that she is no longer a grey inchoate mass which merges with the drab environment outside. Her quest for selfhood leads her to an imaginary identification with the ideal sexually seductive feminine image as represented through the popular romances of mass media she avidly consumes. Evie becomes obsessed first with a disembodied voice and then with the physical presence of Casey, a small town teenage popsinger who himself is a prisoner of a fantasy world of stardom and fame that seems more real to him than his reality as a garage mechanic in his father’s shoestring business. When they marry Evie seeks identification with the image of wife as suggested by the popular women’s magazines, striving to satisfy Casey’s desires by ‘‘mixing orange juices: saying no to a vacuum cleaner

61 Patricia Waugh, Feminine Fictions Revisiting the Postmodern (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 6.

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salesman.’’62 However, Casey’s response was that of a mockery and ignorance of her desires. Evie begins then to look for substitutes and to construct another identity for herself through the use of her body. She becomes pregnant, and asserts her own needs and independence. But at the end of the novel we are left with confusion for her behaviours stress the overwhelming force of cultural determination in the construction of gender and identity: Hundreds of times, in movies and on television, she had watched this scene being rehearsed for her. Wives had laid blouses neatly in overnight bags and had given them a brisk little pat, then crossed on clicking heels to collect an armload of dresses still on their hangers. There was no way she could make a mistake. Her motions were prescribed for her, right down to the tucking of rolled stockings into empty corners and the thoughtful look she gave the empty closet. (p. 155)

The prescribed patriarchal cultural role for women revolves around an endless series of displacement and around an impossible absent sense of subjectivity. What kind of self-definition is granted to women? Or one might ask after Julia Kristeva: ‘‘What can ‘identity,’ even ‘sexual identity,’ mean in a new...space where the very notion of identity is challenged?’’63 Or should we argue instead the feminine search for self-fulfillment is doomed in a patriarchal world? The remainder of this essay aims to answer these issues. Many contemporary feminist writers in United States have adopted the traditional mode, or what has become known as the new realist64 school of writing, to show how the formation of female identity is structured through the condition of mourning. Through invoking and reconstructuring the memory of fathers or brothers lost in Vietnam, feminist writings cast light upon the meanings attached to sexual identity in contemporary American culture. As in Bobbie Ann Mason’s novel In Country the female identity is formed through mourning. The novel narrates the memories and desires through which Samantha Hughes acquires her female identity in contemporary American culture. Mason’s In Country relates how her female heroine’s search for her own identity is shaped by learning about her father who was lost in Vietnam, and by trying to heal her Uncle Emmett, a veteran traumatized by his experience of the same War. Her search leads her through a panorama of postmodern 62 Anne Tyler, A Slipping Down A Life (London: Hamlyn, 1983), p. 97. All page references refer to the same edition. 63 Julia Kristeva, ‘‘Women’s Time’’ in Toril Moi, ed., The Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 209. 64 They are labelled as realist because they have eschewed the postmodern formal experimentation and adopted rather a more conventional way of writing following the nineteenth century tradition.


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American culture, bringing her finally to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. Mason explores how the acquisition of femininity is enacted only through the bodily identification with the dead father. Looking at the picture of her father, Sam seeks resemblance: In the picture, Dwayne Hughes had on a dark uniform with a cap like the one Sam had worn when she worked at the Burger Boy. His face was long and thin, and a blemish on the bridge of his nose stood out like a connecting point between his eyebrows, like a town on a map. The boy in the picture was nineteen...Sam looked at her face in the mirror—fat, sassy, stubborn. Her father’s face was so scrawny. She couldn’t see any resemblance.65

This fragmented feminine identity is accompanied, for Mason’s characters, by a mourning, a memory of loss and desire which is blown out through the body. Femininity as transmitted from mother to daughter is dissolved and sexual differences become blurred. Emmett, for example, simply cannot adjust himself to the outside reality and depends on Sam to nurture him. His inability to achieve his male identity is a result of the absence of father figures, or in a word, the lack of the body of the father. For Samantha the realization of adult femininity necessitates an identification of a bodily identity within a consumer culture that both denies and exploits the female body. Samantha rather seeks substitutes for her self-image within the masculine narratives which represent the trauma lived by the boys in Vietnam: She thought of all the lives wasted by the war. She wanted to cry, but then she wanted to yell and scream and kick. She could imagine fighting, but only against war. All the boys getting killed, on both sides. And boys getting mutilated. And then not being allowed to grow up. That was it—they didn’t get to grow up and become regular people. (p. 140)

As an adolescent about to enter the realm of womanhood, Sam is the target of a consumer culture which heavily wreaks the female body while at the same time acknowledges her adolescent desires and fantasies. Sam’s model of femininity is Lolita, for the masculine is ‘‘the teenage warriors’’ who fought in Vietnam. The most powerful image that postmodern culture suggests to her is that of a femininity freed of any maternal projection where the body becomes a mere commodity. Yet, Sam rather attempts to cast out and to reject her body. She tries to achieve a mechanization of her feminine body through jogging and driving—two activities which Jean Baudrillard has identified as symptomatic of 65 Bobbie Ann Mason, In Country (New York: Harper &Row Publishers, 1985), p. 58. All page references are quoted in the text.

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the American culture66 and its obsession with the cult of the body. The object of expulsion, as Julia Kristeva argues, is the maternal body which is visceral and fecund. Kristeva, indeed, has devised the term ‘‘abjection’’67 to describe the process whereby the consumer culture attempts to define the maternal otherness through its expulsion/rejection. However, such culture attempts to place a taboo on the maternal body. Such fear is known to Sam especially in her dreams of abortion and rejection of the maternal destiny. It is in some ways a desire to liberate herself from the female destiny that of returning to the maternal body through her attempt to relive the experiences of the American soldiers in Vietnam. Such possibility is offered to Sam by her veteran uncle’s vision of the egret, a bird indigenous to both Vietnam and United States. She ponders: She felt the way Emmett must feel when he watched birds. It was as though the most ordinary thing had opened up into a thousand meanings... It was a way of grabbing it and bringing it back every time it started to wander... If he concentrated on something fascinating and thrilling, like birds soaring, the pain of his memories wouldn’t come through. His mind would be full of birds. Just birds and no memories. Flight. (p. 139)

Indeed, Sam strives for a unity which leads her to seek solace in the diary of her father. Her exploration of the images of the war through reading the memories of her father is a longing to know and to identify with the dead Father. Lacking the body, she seeks resemblance in his words. Instead she finds rather herself in the disintegrating landscape of the American dream: a display of the mortal body of her father in the putrifying and moribund Vietnam that is contrasted with her father’s childhood in Kentucky. Sam becomes disillusioned: ‘‘And the diary disgusted her, with the rotting corpse, her father’s shrivelled feet, his dead buddy, those sickly-sweet banana leaves.’’ (p. 206) After reading her father’s diary, Sam flees to the wilderness of Cawood’s Pond, in order to fulfil her masculine identification by imagining herself ‘‘in country,’’ ‘‘humping in the boonies.’’ (p. 210) But, soon she finds herself confronted with the harsh reality that she is a woman and the real threat is rape. What remains to her, to be accomplished through mourning her dead father is to face up to what her patriarchal culture defines as other. The concluding scene of the novel, where Mason depicts Sam’s visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial with her uncle Emmett and her grand mother, is very revealing. Samantha’s discovery of her ‘‘own name’’ on the Memorial signifies the erasement of her feminine identity because Sam arrives at the 66

Jean Baudrillard, America (London: Verso, 1988) Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982)

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Memorial trying hard to reject her femininity, longing rather for an acceptance within the masculine realm. As she mourns the death of her father in a sublime moment she ends up with the effacement of her female identity. She is confused: ‘‘Sam doesn’t understand what she is feeling, but it is something so strong, it is like a tornado moving to her, something massive and overpowering.’’ (p. 240) This is a symbol of the female body which Sam disavows: ‘‘it feels like giving birth to the wall.’’ (p. 240) Mason appears here to celebrate Samantha’s acceptance of her feminine otherness and the possibility of adjusting into the community. To sum up, both Tyler and Mason do not offer a sustained vision of new possibilities of sexual identity. They remain reactionary in their model of the female identity in the sense that in both novels the female fragmented subjectivity identifies with the wounded psyche of post-Vietnam. But is such identification a positive or negative thing? I would argue that this identification is positive in the sense that it opens up new horizons for female subjectivity. In such feminist writings the reconstitution of female identity is enacted through various gestures of figuration. In Tyler’s novel, Evie’s recovery of her female self is done through the acceptance of the patriarchal culture which offers self-esteem to women only by the physical gratification and service of others especially when she decides to adopt her role of the wife. In Mason’s novel, Sam recovers her female identity only when she identifies her father’s name in the granite. In such moment, Sam finds her own name, which she experiences as a moment of recognition, of selfidentity, of reconciliation of female self and others. Feminine difference is recuperated into the community.

CHAPTER TEN THE EMPOWERMENT OF WOMEN’S SILENCES IN UNLESS BY CAROL SHIELDS ALEJANDRA MORENO-ÁLVAREZ

Carol Shields, best known for The Stone Diaries (1993) which won the Pulitzer Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, published Unless in 2002; a novel which was short listed for the Man Booker Prize and for the Orange Prize for fiction. This Canadian author of ten novels and three collections of short stories was born and brought up in Chicago although she soon moved to Canada where she lived until the end of her days. In 1998 she gave a conference within the programme “Rethinking Canada for the 21st Century” where she addressed how in 1957 the Canada Council was founded since Canada became a country that decided it could afford its own culture. Reflecting upon those years Shields manifests that the problem-solution set-up of early 20th century novels were too formulaic because they did not relate to the lives of women/minorities. Shields underlined how “novels trafficked too freely in artificial moments of revelation and too neatly in terms of closure” (Shields 1998) and stressed the importance of resistant readers in the new millennium to discern manipulation. Shields concluded her lecture stating that a novel is the most sublime form of human communication. It is through literature that Carol Shields gives voice to minorities since she writes about women’s identities with the intention of giving them a space within a dominant discourse. She does not traffic freely in artificial moments but neatly shows the artificiality constructed and embedded within women. In Unless the author is “a woman writing about a woman writing about woman writing about a woman” (295); there is Shields, the author; Reta Winters, the main character of Unless; Alicia, the main character in Reta’s novel, who is at the same time an author in a Women’s fashion magazine. Shields gives voice to multiple women identities having at the same time in mind the diverse women resistant readers her novel will encounter. The author addresses women’s multiplicity by using female diversity, denounces the intentional omission of women authors from the dominant canon, uses silences as a female language of resistance and criticizes


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the dominant discourse for impeding women’s own language and spaces. It is due to these factors that we consider Unless an empowering work of women’s resistance since it does not only denounce but also gives hope. My poststructural analysis of Unless will demonstrate how Shields deconstructs in the novel the current symbolic order. Unless is here analysed following three important thematic blocks: symbolic order, language, and body. The thirty seven chapters which give shape to Unless address these important issues in order to denounce the present symbolic order, to urge for a women’s own language and to visualize women’s bodies as a frontier which encloses a dominant discourse that needs to be deconstructed to free the body; body, language and symbolic order are all interrelated although they will be analysed separately. The plot of the novel deals with a woman trying to understand other women. There is Reta, the mother, and Norah, the daughter; a mother-daughter relationship within an artificial constructed society where women are, at the beginning of the 21st century, still a minority. A middle class Canadian family formed by Reta the mother, Tom the father, Lois –Reta’s mother in law-, Norah, Christine and Natalie –their three daughters- experience a loss. Norah, a twentyyear-old university student, witnesses the self-immolation of a Muslim woman. This event ends with the artificiality Norah has embedded by looking immersed in the patriarchal system and gives way to the neatly visualization of injustice towards her real I. We defend the existence of a real I in a first stage, which following Lacan’s theory is the real order; the dominant symbolic order turns this I into a constructed/false I in the empiric and imaginary state. When Norah watches the body and the big black veil of the Saudi woman being eaten up by the flames, her real I arises. She leaves her artificial daily routine aside to sit on a street corner with a sign on her lap bearing a single word: Goodness. This event makes Norah see the false I she was trapped in and the dominant discourse which hid her real I. She could have spoken out loud to denounce the system’s manipulation which until then had silenced her real I but the language she knew was no other than the same language the dominant discourse uses to erase her, this being the reason for her abrupt muteness. Reta has to put words to her daughter’s silence in order to comprehend Norah and also herself. All the female characters in Unless will search within their own frontiers -her own female bodies- to come closer to the understanding of Norah’s muteness and their own. Power is constructed by the logos, and the dominant discourse we are addressing is made by dichotomies where an element defines the other: passivity versus activity, voice versus muteness, men versus women, summer versus winter. One part of the dichotomy becomes a minor to give existence to the other. Following Freud and Lacan women are the others and otherness does not

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have access to the symbolic order where language is created. Rosi Braidotti pictures the symbolic order as a satellite antenna which distributes through language codified information which men and women embed; Shields tries to uncode this language in Unless. Feminist poststructuralist theory deconstructs the dominant discourse and urges women to find new ways of expression since patriarchal language has been imposed upon them and it is not apt to express their experiences. Three French feminist theorists, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, underline the need for women to have a language of their own. Cixous establishes that binary structures need to be abolished; otherwise women will always be associated with negativity. Shields plays with these dichotomies giving her main character the name of Reta Summers changed for Reta Winters after her marriage to Tom. “Winter” demands shelter and so she becomes the angel of the house needing a room of her own to write her so called light fiction. The author also plays with the dichotomy words versus silences; Reta uses words all along to create Alicia, the main character of her novel, while Norah, is unable to utter a word once she has seen her constructed I. Reta is writing a sequel of My thyme is up where she constructs Alice as a woman “who has gone on a no-carb diet so she can fit into the size-eight wedding dress” (172). Alicia is a vapid woman until Norah’s silence made Alicia’s creator, Reta, understand the fatal vanity and lack of suffering Alicia was experiencing. The women in Unless seem to be passive: Norah just sits on a street corner, Danielle Western, another writer for whom Reta works, just waits with the table set for Reta’s visit once a week and Alicia waits to marry Roman. Norah’s silence turns things up: Danielle Westerman deconstructs the dominant discourse made by western/occidental patriarchy and Reta makes Alicia cancel her wedding with Roman. Shields distances herself from dominant discourse by using but at the same time, neatly avoiding binary structures. The dichotomies we have just mentioned are intended to overblow the already constructed ones since, as Braidotti underlines, by overdoing already established structures you deconstruct them (1999). The chapters of Unless have for a title non content/periphery words. The fact of using these periphery words is another way that Shield uses to address minorities since they are not within but outside the symbolic order. “Here”, “nearly”, “once”, “where in”, “nevertheless”, “so”, “otherwise”, …etc. seem meaningless but have instead the same powering effect as Norah’s silence since they break with the already established dichotomies. Shields uses conjunctions, adverbs and connectors which intend to connect women’s identities, language and spaces. Shields also plays with the first letters of the chapters, most of them starting with an “I” and a “W”. She is trying to connect the real I of women and women themselves.


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Luce Irigaray asserts, contradicting Lacan, that women represent a malleable multiplicity which addresses difference. This difference gives the possibility of placing women in the upper part of the pyramidal structure where codified language -which perpetuates women as the others- is created (1977: 210). Braidotti insists on the need of this multiplicity and underlines how “[f]eminist theory is about multiple and potentially contradictory locations and differences among, but also within, different women” (in Eagleton 2003: 198). Shields describes the conflict that Norah undergoes when she witnesses the selfimmolation of a Muslim woman. This flame consumption of the flesh is also interpreted as the urge to immolate women’s false I with the aim to free their real ones since following Irigaray women are “enveloped in proper skins, but not our own” (1977: 205). Multiplicity is present in the novel by diverse identities portrayed by the same character. Reta writes six letters to denounce how women have been “shut from the universe” (135), how they are “forced into the position of complaining and the needing comfort” (165), how they have been “alienated” seeing “an endless series of obstacles, an alignment of locked doors” (220) and how they have “awakened […] to the solitary state of non-belonging, understanding at last how little she would be allowed to say” (310). She sings these letters using different names/identities: Reta Winters, Renata, Rita Orange d’Ville, Xeta d’Orange and Rita Hayworth. All these identities are a multiplicity enclosed within a single body which she needs to link in order to deconstruct the dominant discourse that annihilates her real I. Irigaray urges women to find a body language to awake from forced paralysis: If we don’t invent a language, of we don’t find our body’s language, it will have too few gestures to accompany our story. We shall tire of the same ones, and leave our desires unexpressed, unrealized. Asleep again, unsatisfied, we shall fall back upon the words of men-who, for their part, have known “for a long time”. But not our body. Seduced, attracted, fascinated, ecstatic with our becoming, we shall remain paralyzed. Deprived of our movements. Rigid, whereas we are made for endless change. Without leaps or falls, and without repetitions. (1977: 214)

Kristeva also underlines the need of unity among women and how women should stop transmitting patriarchal messages since language produces a thought and communicates it (Kristeva 1981: 7). This theorist highlights how men have always “mastered the use of language- indeed language is so intimately linked to man and society that they are inseparable” (1981: 3). This patriarchal codified information is created, as we have already mentioned, within the symbolic order and from there it is transmitted acting the symbolic set-up as a satellite antenna. The subjects, active or passive, intercept the information broadcasted and then

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proceed to the proliferation of these patriarchal messages which annihilate passive subjects. According to Kristeva, the union among women is essential for the deconstruction of the language received and for claiming a women’s language. Shields is pursuing the unity among women to give Norah and the other female characters their real Is voices back. She is urging the resistant reader to demand a language and space of their own, unless they do it the minorities of the 21st century will never leave the passive status they have been attributed. Both Shields and Reta Winters write novels “about characters moving against a there” (11). We interpret there as an opposition to here, meaning here what we are allowed to see by the dominant discourse. We understand the body as a frontier within a here; such body placed inside a symbolic order has internalised the dominant discourse which enclosures “half the world’s population” (220) in a passive status. The body needs to function as a frontier which lives in a here but also has its own there; a dichotomy which having the two elements joined will enrich women’s lives annihilating the passivity they have been assigned. The I performed outside the frontier is a set of masks needed in order to live within a constructed society and the real I inside the frontier is what women need to utter in order to conquer the desired space they have been prohibited. The novel begins quoting George Eliot “[i]f we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silences”. Shields makes her character want an ordinary life, one which adapts to the values already established by patriarchy. Reta at the beginning of the novel has not yet looked inside her frontier but she feels the urge to do so when Norah stops talking abruptly leaving aside what her mother called an ordinary life. Norah is looking for goodness and Reta needs to find out what is the greatness her daughter is looking for. This search will make Reta dismantle her false I and what she encounters is a disrupted real I which had been hidden by dominant discourse. Reta realizes how Norah, “by doing nothing is claiming everything” (104); “she is claiming her existence by ceasing to exist” (105). Shields uses Eliot’s words to alter the meaning of Reta’s ordinary life; ordinary stops meaning being the angel of the house and it turns into the understanding of her daughter and herself. The symbolic order has to be twisted in order to bring such ordinariness to the other half of the population. The keen/justice vision would be hearing nature and we need to keep in mind that nature has been always associated to women. For a dominant discourse to exist women need to become invisible and Shields uses Eliot’s words to make an accusation and to claim a change. On the one hand an element of the dichotomy needs to give meaning to the other, being nature the opposition of science which primes in the


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dominant discourse. On the other a justice life will need the positive meaning of nature/women, the grass/women needs to grow and the squirrel’s heart beat/women’s needs to be heard inside and outside the body frontier. The roar that lies on the other side of silence represents women’s silences such as Norah’s, Lois, Reta, etc. which needs to be listened to. Alicia, the character created by Reta, when not living in Wonderland, is “not as happy as she deserves to be” (15). She lives in a society where the dominant discourse she has not created -although she does transmit to the others- imposes its own rules. As Reta underlines, the fact of calling her “Mrs. gave him power over me: that vexing r rucking things up in the middle and making one think of such distractions as clotheslines and baking tins” (32); and power is what has made real Is disappear. Reta sees along the novel how her life as a writer and translator is her back story and her front story is that she lives in Ontario, in a house on a hill with Tom and the girls and a seven-year-old golden retriever called Pet. She does not mention her inside story, the one hidden within her body frontier since power does not allow her to look beneath the surface she projects. Reta wonders if trust could be what has deprived her from looking beyond since “we have had [trust] drilled into us at birth. Or rather we emerge from the womb already trusting. Trusting the hand that is about to hold us. So it goes” (77). Women trust the system they are living as it is enclosed within them, and Shields is urging women to stop trusting in order to initiate their own conquest of a space. Once the trust has been dismantled Shields goes further with her accusations and gives Reta the following words: We are too kind, too willing –too unwilling too- reaching out blindly with a grasping hand but not knowing how to ask for what we don’t even know what we want.[…] I need to speak further about this problem of women, how they are dismissed and excluded form the most primary of entitlements. But we have come so far; that is the thinking. So far compared to fifty or a hundred years ago. Well, no, we have arrived to the new millennium and we haven’t arrived at all. (99)

Irigaray urges women to invent their own phrases, in other words, to stop trusting the dominant discourse: “[l]et’s hurry and invent our own phrases” (1977: 215). To voice the real I takes us to discuss language within a dominant discourse. Reta makes it clear that she sees the world as split in two: [B]etween those who are handed power at birth, at gestation, encoded with a seemingly random chromosome determinate that says yes for ever and ever, and those like Norah, like Danielle Westerman, like my mother, like my mother-in-law, like me, like all of us who fall into the uncoded otherness in which the power to assert ourselves and claim our lives has been displaced by a

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Chapter Ten compulsion to shut down our bodies and seal our mouths and be as nothing against the fireworks and streaking stars and blinding light of the Big Bang.(270)

The Symbolic/Big Bang has displaced women through language to the status of muteness. Reta is an author and constantly deals with words but as she recognises she does not know what the world really means, though “words are my business” (11). Reta is using a language that does not belong to her and which creates meanings that she does not comprehend once she has uncoded her real I. When she sees the light she understands how she has been performing again and again a false I which also contributed to create the false system she is living in. She has also used a language which differs from the patriarchal one: cleaning. Cleaning gave her pleasure; it was a sort of meditation which allowed her to keep herself going. With a damped dust cloth she was able to utter her real I; the reality is that if they do not have a space of their own, these angels of the house take care of their own permitted space. When talking about cleaning with Danielle Westerman she states that “we don’t make metaphors in order to distract ourselves. Metaphors hold their own power over us” (61). Reta in her on going process of dismantling her false I understands the metaphors the system has conjured up such as houses being an existence between reality and desire, as Vicente Verdú underlines (57). The constructed reality is Reta being the angel of the house and the house being the desirable space. The real truth is that she has not a space of her own and she needs to deconstruct language in order to claim it. It is not what women know but what they do not know that does women in and as Reta says “such gaps of comprehension, such incompletions had to be lived with silently- that seemed the natural law” (144). Reta has abandoned her discourse for the unworthiness of writing light fiction, Lois adopts silence which seems an “uncanny reflection of Norah’s silence” (230) and Norah just sits silently with a card board on her lap with the word Goodness. Through literature, as Shields points out, women demand a space and language. Reta gives up writing light fiction for literature which pictures a new Alicia “intelligent and inventive and capable of moral resolution, the same qualities we presume, without demonstration, in a male hero” (320). She gives Alicia and IDEN-TI-TY (279), where I is a pronoun full of meaning which is not supposed to pretend anything and who is not injured if it opens its mouth. Alicia is not goodness but greatness since she subverts and inverts in society. Danielle Westerman underlined when talking about Norah how “[s]ubversion of society is possible for a mere few” since just a few will risk being outcasts when dismantling the symbolic order. Women need to alienate to stop inverting in a system that encloses them.


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Body frontiers have to move into a different sort of life since following Reta happiness is a pane of glass you carry in your head and once smashed there is no possibility of hanging to it. The pane of glass controls metaphorically representing the symbolic order refrains from looking inside ourselves. Norah becomes invisible once she has smashed the dominant discourse. She sits with her head bent down as if she had got rid of the shell of “goodness” society has imposed upon her. Reta has that shell which she tries to break until she has got enough of being Reta Winters, the doctor’s wife, the mother of three daughters and a writer. She is more than that and by helping Norah and creating Alicia she achieves greatness. Norah does claim goodness instead of greatness but we do interpret goodness as condemning; she stops existing to claim existence and she claims real goodness by denouncing false goodness. What Shields, Reta, Norah, Danielle Westerman, Lois and Alicia are claiming with their silences is women’s own spaces, language and greatness.

Works Cited Braidotti, Rosi. Research Programme 1995-2000. Netherlands Research School of Women’s Studies: Utrecht, Nov 1999. Irigaray, Luce. This Sex which is Not One. New York: Cornell University Press, 1985 [1977]. Kristeva, Julia. Language the Unknown: An Initiation into Linguistics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989. Shields, Carol Unless. Great Britain: Fourth State, (2003) [2002] ———. (1998): http://www.couch.ca/history/1998/shields.html (1/02/2006)

Part III Visions of the Past: History, Memory and Identity in Literature

CHAPTER ELEVEN NATIVE STAGES: THE REVISION OF HISTORY IN WITI IHIMAERA’S WOMAN FAR WALKING PALOMA FRESNO CALLEJA

Witi Ihimaera’s prolific career as a novelist, short story writer, poet, editor, librettist, and playwright has undoubtedly placed him at the forefront of contemporary New Zealand literature. His works are essential to understand the development of indigenous writing, a process he pioneered in the 1970s, when he became the first Maori author to publish a work of fiction. Ihimaera’s writing has evolved tremendously since his first works, moving from the pastoral to the political (Ihimaera 1982: 50), from realism to postmodernism, displaying a range of political and aesthetic concerns which are grounded in postcolonialism and Maori nationalism and remain intent on a firm purpose: the faithful portrayal of Maori identity and the need to rescue the indigenous profile of New Zealand culture. Rather than analysing the different phases of his literary production, I am going to concentrate on his play Woman Far Walking (2000), which he defines as his “strongest work to date in terms of a political platform” (Fresno 2004: 200). My interest is to look at the ways in which the dramatic genre has allowed the author to refresh his ideological and artistic preoccupations, especially those connected to the revision of colonial history. Ihimaera’s project of historical reconstruction has been studied mainly in connection with his novels The Matriarch (1986) and The Dream Swimmer (1997), which narrate the story of a Maori saga involved in the long history of anti-colonial struggle from the nineteenth century to the 1990s. In their “theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs” (Hutcheon 1988: 5), these novels fit into Hutcheon’s model of “historiographic metafiction” since they undermine the authority of colonial discourse and its capacity to inscribe a unique and definite version of the past, immersing the readers in a postmodern game of deferred interpretations. In Woman Far Walking Ihimaera follows a similar agenda of historical revision through a series of strategies of (re)presentation intended to put forward


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an alter/native version of events, to reject biased interpretation of his people as the passive recipients of colonialism and to stress their active role in the long history of resilience and struggle traditionally obscured in colonial accounts (Belich 1996: 270). This is done by resorting to a series of dramatic devices through which Ihimaera conveys his political aims more effectively, in agreement with the efforts of most contemporary Maori playwrights who are struggling to develop specific ways of presenting their material “using selfdetermined processes which suit us and achieve our political, cultural, and artistic aims” (Potiki 1992: 153). In order to illustrate the revisionist nature of the play I am going to concentrate on two specific aspects: the re/presentation of its characters and its temporal structure. The protagonist of the play is Tiri, the oldest person in the world, a Maori woman who has just turned 160 years old. When the play opens, some journalists wait impatiently by her door hoping to interview her as she is about to receive a telegram from Queen Elizabeth II congratulating her on this special occasion. Far from showing any excitement about the arrival of the royal message, Tiri sits quietly at home and addresses the audience to explain the particularities of her age and condition: I am 160 years old. I was born on 6 February, 1840. I am an aberration. A Freak. People make the sign of the cross when they see me because I am against Nature, an affront to God; they think Dracula must have bit me on the neck and made me into one of the living dead. Well if he did, he was the one who died. [...] You want to know what a dinosaur looks like? Look at me. I’m a T-Rex. No comet, no Noah’s flood, no volcanic eruption, has finished me off. I’m still here. […] I was not always like this. People tell me I don’t look my age –what do you think? They say I only look 130! […] I have lived longer than my mother, my sisters and my brothers. I have outlived their children and their children’s children and their children’s children’s children. (2000: 9-11)

Tiri’s opening lines take us back to her birth in 1840, the year which is officially taken as the beginning of the British colonisation, coinciding with the signing of Treaty of Waitangi. The Treaty was a binding agreement which granted the British population with the rights to settle down and administer native land but, in the Maori understanding of the term, not with its unconditional possession. Delving on the controversies associated with the founding document would exceed my purposes here, but it is interesting to notice how Ihimaera chooses to deal with its contradictory legal and moral interpretations not through a detached historical explanation, but presenting the political debate through the ironic voice of a woman called after the document: I was named Tiri for short, and as I was growing up I thought my longer name came from one of my aunties. I always looked forward to meeting my auntie

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Chapter Eleven [...] It was a shock to know that Auntie Tiri was a piece of paper. And what a name sake. A fraud. Full of lies and Pakeha promises. How would you like to take the name of a document which took Maori land? (2000: 18)

Her insistence on labelling the document a “fraud” refers to the breaking of colonial promises after the agreement and attests to the need of restoring the sovereignty of the land to the Maori people. Tiri is the link between a series of past events she has actually witnessed and the contemporary conflicts deriving from them, her name and role being therefore highly symbolic. Likewise, her age works as an effective dramatic device to put into practice Ihimaera’s process of historical revision, which is not only based on first-hand evidence, but relies heavily on her personal experiences, conveyed through Tiri’s shamelessly subjective remarks, at times angry and bitter, at times ironic and witty. In this way Ihimaera equates visual evidence, oral narration, selected memories and personal issues with the apparent objectivity of official history. We witness, for example, Tiri’s childhood which coincides with the beginning of the British colonisation; her involvement in the rebellion which took Te Kooti and his followers to fight the British government during the colonial wars of the 1880s; the suffering she undergoes when the flu epidemic kills some members of her family together with thousands of Maori in 1918; her active participation in the demonstrations of the Springbok tour in 1981; and finally her reaction to the recent projects of land development which have put her ancestral land at risk. A quick look at this list is enough to realize that Ihimaera is interested in stressing historical events which have been pivotal to understand the interracial relationships in his country. Tiri not only serves him to pull that uninterrupted thread which connects past and present, but to personalise it through a female voice. By presenting the history of the country through her eyes, mixing real facts and fiction, and favouring an individual and female perception of events, Ihimaera manages to rescue a doubly subordinated perspective, breaking the common assumption of women as passive victims of the process. Tiri is an extremely original and powerful creation who manages to display the strength and determination of historical leaders while becoming a figure of mythological resonances, whose almost superhuman qualities merge with her most vulnerable human side; a character who narrates the most intimate aspects of her life as a little girl, an adolescent, a middle-aged and a mature woman, but who gives shape to the epic tale of her tribe like a true warrior. In fact, Ihimaera places Tiri at the forefront of the confrontation both in colonial and postcolonial times by showing that women like her have always given life to the community in more than merely physical ways. With Tiri the pervasive image of the male warrior is expanded:


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The man is a warrior, so too is the woman a warrior. And when we go into battle, all of us go. Not just the men by themselves. The women and children too. If you are ever against us don’t spare the women or the brats that we have because in war, gender and age make no difference. We are soldiers all. Famed for our ferocity. Where you see one woman you see –a thousand. The fight is not over until we are dead. (2000: 35)

Tiri’s inclusive approach in these lines is extensive to the other character of the play, Tilly, the young woman who turns up at her house every year on her birthday, and who accompanies her on stage. The similarity of their names and their physical appearance suggests that throughout the play Tilly is going to act as Tiri’s alter ego, as her “eternal shadow” (2000: 36), a character of unexplained origin coming from the past and capable of impersonating different roles as the play advances. Sometimes Tilly acts as the moderator of Tiri’s exchanges with the audience, asking questions and leading her to specific moments of remembrance. Some other times, and due to the age difference that separates both women and to the fact that the Tiri is sitting in a wheelchair, Tilly performs short scenes of her childhood and youth, thus acting as her younger self. This interchangeability of roles which allows for the splitting of the voice and body of a single character into multiple forms attests to Tiri’s symbolic role as the representative of the indigenous collective. She is actually the Maori female version of the allegorical figure of Everyman or Mankind we find in medieval morality plays, with the difference that every time Death comes to haunt her she sends him away claiming that she is too busy to go anywhere. The flexibility with which both women interchange their roles constitutes a very effective device to transmit the communal ethics of Maori culture. Both bodies seem to merge on stage as if they were one, in a way that reveals the connections between the ancestors and the young generations, linking them in what seems to be a neverending fight against injustice. But Tiri and Tilly also show disagreements on stage, arguing at some points about how and when things need to be told. This struggle allows Ihimaera to reflect on the personal conflicts undergone by many Maori individuals as a result of having been brought up in the contradictions of a colonised society. At the same time, it draws our attention to the conflicts which have affected different generations of indigenous people. Having lived over a period of 160 years, Tiri’s body can almost be read as a palimpsest where multiple traces are still visible: from the the remnants of colonial stereotyping she still embodies— one journalist addresses her as “the queen of the cannibals” (2000: 34)— to the images of a global culture in which Maori are irremediably immersed —Tilly calls her “Super Nan” (2000: 82), contemporising her mythical image. Ihimaera constructs these characters so that their dissonant voices can merge into harmony at specific points and then occupy discrepant discursive positions.

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In fact, the same combination of centrifugal and centripetal forces which determines the interaction between the characters is relevant to analyse the temporal structure of the play. Even though Tiri’s life is narrated in a linear fashion, when she is on stage she seems to be immersed in a spiralling force which keeps pushing her forwards and backwards. The author suggests in the introduction that “[t]he events of Tiri’s life are […] more appropriately seen as happening in a continuum in which past and present exist as one and at the same time in a single continuous dramatic reality” (2000:4). This is partly an effect deriving from the specific dramatic frame, as Gilbert and Tompkins suggest: Whereas words on a page must be interpreted sequentially, theatre offers the possibility of a simultaneous reading of all the visual and aural signifiers embedded in the text as performance. It lends itself particularly well to the interrogation of spatial and temporal (teleological) aspects of imperialism and facilitates the telling/showing of oppositional versions of the past that propose not only different constitutive events but different ways of constructing that past in the present. (1996: 109)

Tiri complains that she is forced to recall bitter memories but realises that reviving the past is her main source of life for herself and her community. She is responsible for “keep[ing] the fire alive” (2000: 68), as an alternative historian aware of the need to tell her version. In this way Tiri assures that divergent historical narratives are played simultaneously and contrapuntally, rejecting the uniqueness of the official accounts and underlying the contradictory impulses which have determined the construction of history. But Ihimaera also conveys this idea by resorting to specific conceptions of time and particularly to the notion of the double spiral: a recurrent motif in Maori art and culture which suggests a structure of “repetition with a difference” (Deloughrey 1999: 68). Because of its double nature, the spiral allows for a centrifugal movement, but ensures a return to a centre, after a certain transformation has been effected. This spiralling structure determines the dynamics of the historical narration in the play: Tiri reconstructs the past by sharing her memories with the audience, but transforming static and closed interpretations into events she still experiences as part of her life, hence submitting them to the change implicit in every new retelling. By making the audience perceive apparently well-known events through her voice, Ihimaera sets the scene for what he hopes will be a reaction of reassessment of their history and identity as Maori and New Zealanders. And yet, in agreement both with indigenous perception of history and with postmodern approaches to the narration of the past, the play concludes with an open ending by means of which, while Tiri’s death is suggested, the action remains suspended. Even though we have seen her long life performed on stage,


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the most important conclusion which can be extracted from her narrative is that there is still a long stretch of road ahead and that it is the responsibility of the younger generations to keep walking far and looking back, sometimes in anger, in order to reconstruct a past which will help them build a future; as Ihimaera himself suggests: For us, there can never be only one story or one ending. All tribal cultures know that the one great truth to our narratives is that they do not end. They go on and on, and unending spiral going forward and returning in a balance of constant tension. (1997: 313).

Works Cited Belich, James. Making Peoples. A History of the New Zealanders. From Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century. Auckland: Penguin,1996. Deloughrey, Elizabeth. “The Spiral of Temporality in Patricia Grace’s Potiki”. Ariel, 13. 1, (1999): 59-83. Fresno Calleja, Paloma.“Riding Across Cultural Boundaries: An Interview with Witi Ihimaera”. ODISEA. Revista de Estudios Ingleses. vol. 5. JanuaryDecember (2004): 199-208. Gilbert, Helen and Joane Tompkins. Post-colonial Drama. Theory, Practice, Politics. London and New York: Routledge,1996. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge,1988. Ihimaera, Witi. Woman Far Walking. Wellington: Huia Publishers, 2000. ———. The Matriarch. Auckland: Reed,1986. ———.The Dream Swimmer. Auckland: Penguin, 1997. ———.“Maori Life and Literature: A Sensory Perception”. The Turnbull Library Record, 15.1, May (1982): 45-55. Potiki, Roma. “Confirming Identity and Telling the Stories: A Woman’s Perspective of Maori Theatre”. In Du Plessis, Rosemary ed. Feminist Voices. Women’s Studies Texts for Aotearoa/New Zealand. Auckland: Oxford UP, 1992.153-162.

CHAPTER TWELVE REVERBERATIONS OF IDENTITY IN CONTEMPORARY NATIVE AMERICAN POETRY FERYAL CUBUKCU

The current interest in what has come to be called "multicultural" literature has focused critical attention on defining its most salient characteristic: authoring a text which appeals to at least two different cultural codes. The discourse created by the ethnic artists shows both sides of the coin: how they negotiate between these two different cultures, how they shift to and from these different cultural codes. Wiget (1992) believes that it should be clear that, far from being determinate realities, the cultural codes of which an author avails himself or herself are themselves mental constructs, and that multicultural discourse, like any discourse, is at the least a form of secondary representation and he claims that an author instantiates in that secondary discourse his or her primary act of representation, which establishes the author's self-conceived relationship to those cultural traditions, thus creating the codes which become aesthetic resources. In art authority has customarily been reflected in two ways. Frequently authority is located in certain features of the discourse itself, whether matters of content or form, which counted as signs of continuity with previous instances of the same kind of discourse. Texts rich in such elements were considered "authoritative." Moreover, Wiget (1992) says authority could also be located in the social role of the speaker as a sanctioned performer of the tradition. Speakers so sanctioned were considered "authoritative." He thinks this view of things is unsatisfactory, precisely because it locates authority either in the text or in the speaker, when it seems to me that authority is more properly understood as naming the effect of narrative voice upon an audience. The problem of authority is problematic in Native American literature. The prevailing popular assumption is that a Native American writer must in some isomorphic way "reflect" or "represent" the culture of her origin. But when asked how her Indian heritage entered into her art, Wendy Rose, a prominent contemporary Native American poet, responded tartly: "Indian is what I am.


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Writing is what I do." Indian writers today are often very ambivalent toward the cultures of their origin and wary, even defensive, about discussing the relationship between ethnicity and authorial function. When the meaning of “author” is probed, it means “to oiriginate”. Work was valued as creative because it was original: that is, it shaped personal vision into an irreplicable texture of words and images that supposedly transcended historical and cultural constraints. A work had authority because it was characterized by a distinctive "voice," as if the spirit or "genius" of the author were transubstantiated and made present in his work. Native American writers, to oversimplify the matter greatly for the sake of brevity, necessarily participate in two worlds. One of these is Indian, often but not always characterized by specific ties to particular reservations, societies, and histories. By virtue of their advanced education, mixed blood, and inability to speak a native language, however, their Indian world is increasingly detribalized, marginalized, and pan-Indian. The other world is Anglo-American, the world of their education, their literature, their publishers, and, if the truth be told, their principal audience. Indian people who read Silko (Pueblo Laguna) and Harjo (Creek) are marginalized from their own communities to read complex literary forms and comprehend an elaborate structure of allusion to those structures of knowledge (economics, psychology, physical science, literary criticism) that undergird contemporary Euro-American life. Native American writers may wish to locate themselves in relationship to some sense of a Native tradition, insofar as they are writers, they can only do so with the consent of their Anglo audience and to some degree in Anglo terms. That means participating in the Anglo-authored discourse of "Indianness," though certainly without any presumption of affirming it. This discourse has evolved in several important stages. Initially, in the first half of the nineteenth century Indians were imagined as the nameable Others, whose otherness was constituted precisely as the projection of those characteristics which EuroAmericans repressed in themselves. Indians and the frontier were a horror from which to flee, the desire to "go Indian" something to be violently suppressed. In this century Anglo writers admiring the Indian but persuaded of his absolute Otherness, no longer presumed to speak for Indians but found themselves reduced to silence. A Native American writer who approaches the creation of literature in bicultural terms finds herself caught up in the literary dimension of a historical dilemma in which each of the voices rising within her cancels the authority of the other. Thus, tradition can only be misrepresented. Wiget (1992) says neither can she create something utterly Other from her historical and cultural entanglements, because that space is occupied by Euro-American voices. In short, whatever she creates will emerge or be inserted into the larger Anglo-

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American discourse. Realization of this reality is often rendered as silence and impotence, an important theme in Native American fiction beginning with the earliest Indian writers in this century. If such a question as ‘what an Indian voice would be like’ were to be posed, one might expect an Indian voice to be full of ethnographic detail, committed to a description of the customs, language, and beliefs particular to a historically specifiable tribal community. However, such a voice, which one might call the "ethnographic" voice, would certainly signal a false attempt to authorize the speaker by locating her in relationship to a tradition she has never experienced. Indian communities today do not have the kind of static cultural integrity represented in the ethnographic record developed in the first decades of this century; indeed, they never did. Ts'its'tsi'nako, Thought Woman, is sitting in her room and whatever she thinks about appears. She is sitting in her room thinking of a story now I'm telling you the story she is thinking.

The reader assumes the task of creating a dialogic relationship between the two voices in Silko’s poem. They are thus required to recognize certain violations of narrative conventions. These violations have the effect of displacing artistic authority and decentering the text, because we have been trained to assume that we are being told the story by the voice of the writer. The decentering of an Anglo authorial voice has double consequences, each deeply implicated in the other. On the one hand, it liberates a genuine Indian voice. On the other hand, this decentering is accomplished only by assuming a precarious, almost Olympian position from which to manage both voices. This ultimate assumption of power satisfies all the expectations for control and demands for originality that constitutes authority in Euro-American literary tradition. Silko, in other words, can both eat her cake and have it too, because she uses her biculturality not only as two distinct literary resources, supplying images, types, and so on, but as two distinct fields of action, of meaningmaking. Like a figure between two mirrors, Silko's authorial stance presents us with two simultaneous images of herself, realized in the narrative through the two voices, each of which, like reflections of reflections, continually evokes the other. In much of American Indian literature it is possible to see variations on


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the underlying theme of traditional oral storytelling -- particularly in the intersubjective involvement of the listener-reader. Hirsch notes that Silko fosters the kind of intimacy with the reader that the oral storyteller does with the listener. Many scholars ranging from Krumholz to Jones explain how the stories in Storyteller change us as subjects, as readers, how the oral storytelling tradition forms the basic structure of Silko's text and involves the reader in such a dynamic process. The reader, in effect, becomes participant in the text, connecting stories, finishing them, rewriting them, and constructing his or her own stories whenever they find the suitable lapses. These critics note that Storyteller is a work that is more of a telling than a text. As Krupat (Littératures anglophones 1989) explicitly notes about Silko, having called herself a storyteller, she thus places herself in a tradition of telling. What is crucial in conversive writing is not the relationship between readers but that between the teller and the listener. Silko even explicitly refers to her reader as a listenerreader -- a term that underscores the categorically different role for readers of American Indian literatures and all other literatures varyingly informed by their oral roots. Silko’s works provide clear examples that demonstrate the reality of the storyteller and concomitantly the role of the story listeners. Through a Laguna Pueblo representation and understanding of the world, readers have a chance to read the text to transform consciousness and social structures. The original place down below and there was no more rain then everything dried up all the plants the corn the beans they all dried up and started blowing away in the wind the people and animals were thirsty they were starving (Ceremony 13-14)

De Ramirez (1988) claims that throughout telling stories Silko interweaves times, places, and persons, thereby leveling different stories into one story that is as much about the process of storytelling as it is about the ostensible story lines of marriage, seduction, and human frailty. Here the pueblo myth of Corn Woman and how she got angry with her sister at Reed Woman is infused into the current problems of Indians. Silent pauses are provided throughout by means of additional spacing, which the listener-reader is expected or at least enabled to fill with her or his own responses to the text.

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Velie (1992) holds that in the earlier novels the authors were chiefly concerned with depicting the Indian ethnic experience, the texture of tribal life. Although there certainly are many middle-class Indians, statistically most Indians on and off the reservation are working-class. The U.S. Census Bureau reported that in 1980--the most pertinent date for the novels under discussion-31 percent of Indians had finished high school, 17 percent had attended college (8 percent graduated), and 28 percent were living below the poverty line. So, an author concerned with depicting the Indian experience is not likely to make his protagonist a yuppie. Furthermore, ethnic characteristics are more obvious at the lower end of the social scale. Poor Indians, especially rural ones who live with their tribes, are more likely to retain traditional patterns of ethnic behavior, whereas generally speaking, an Indian banker living in the suburbs is likely to live pretty much as his white neighbour does. It is possible to see the postcolonial effects on these Indian artists according to Bendiktsson (1992) who holds that the plot pattern identified here is a literary representation of a deep cultural conflict among formerly colonized people. A member of an oppressed and marginalized people is suffering from a grave illness, a malady that seems simultaneously to be psychological, physical, and spiritual. Eventually this character is healed through traditional ritual and through a literal encounter with the supernatural, whose reawakening accompanies the main character's rebirth. At the end of the novel this powerless person has appropriated a source of transcendent power, and there is hope for a new society based on the values of the reborn traditional culture: as Silko puts it at the end of Ceremony, the witchery "is dead for now” implying that many traditions Native Americans have been keeping alive are dead as well. It is not easy to escape from the ideological pitfalls inherent in the postcolonial situation. In Manichean Aesthetics, his study of the literature of African colonialism, Abdul Jan Mohammed (1983) has written of the double binds of assimilation: for the native to choose the traditional culture is to doom himself to remain in a calcified society whose momentum has been checked by colonization; on the other hand, to choose assimilation is to be trapped in a form of historical catalepsy in which his own culture has been replaced by the colonizer’s. The literature of postcolonialism is a literature of marginality and liminality, portraying characters caught between one culture and another. According to Silko, the autoreferential text has "an ethereal clarity and shimmering beauty because no history or politics intrudes to muddy the well of pure necessity contained within the language itself." This sort of writing is, in Silko's perspective, radically different from the Native American oral tradition, which is by definition a shared, communal experience. The postmodern literary aesthetic would thus reflect the fragmentation of contemporary society as portrayed by the alienated Western writer, whose only link to other human


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beings is through language (Silko, "Artifact," 178-79). Rather than depicting the Indian communal experience, Silko prefers to have a perspective combining her biculturalistic attitudes and affirms that the auto-referential text is singularly well suited to depict the labyrinthine world of the subconscious mind, or to evoke complicated relationships between tormented characters. Castillo (1991) believes that it is worth noting that the adjectives "labyrinthine" and "complicated" are used in a pejorative sense. It is interesting to note that we can observe this sort of ontological flicker in Ceremony. The reader is thrust into contact with two widely divergent worlds, namely that of the Laguna oral tradition and that of the sordid reality of the Laguna reservation in the years after World War II. This ontological disparity functions in two ways: by highlighting the coalescence between the mythical and the profane worlds, it gives vividness and universality to the narrative, but at the same time it points out the gap between the extraordinary richness of Laguna mythology and the cultural impoverishment and alienation which characterize so much of contemporary reservation life. Joy Harjo in her interview with Kalett (1993) says that though she met Silko and was affected by her at the university, the way she has come to things is very different from say, Beth Cuthand, who is a Cree writer from Saskatchewan, or Leslie Silko from Laguna. Harjo adds that there is a tendency in this country to find one writer of a particular ethnicity and expect her to speak for everyone and expect her experience to be representative of all Native women and all Native people. Her experience is very different from Silko's and Cuthand's, although it is similar in the sense of a generational thing, of certain influences on us and influences they have on each other. But her experience has been predominantly urban. She did not grow up on a reservation (they did not have any). There are more rural areas where the people are. She is not a full blood, and yet she is a full member of her (Muscogee) tribe, and she has been a full member of her tribe since her birth into the tribe. She finds some people have preconceived ideas –she was talking to this guy on the plane and he says, "Well, you don't fit my idea of an Indian." What does that mean? I think for most people in this country, it means to be a Hollywood version of a Plains tribe, as falsely imagined 100 or 150 years ago. Most people in this country have learned all they know about Indian people from movies and television. She clearly acknowledges that she is not a true Indian but more an urbanized Indian without even any reservation to go back to. She maintains that there is always a definite link between poetry and prayer and her poems are prayers for the continuance of humans as in Eagle poem. She even means even the act of writing, to be creative, has everything to do with our continuance as peoples. To pray you open your whole self To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon

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Chapter Twelve To one whole voice that is you And know there is more That you can't see, can't hear Can't know except in moments Steadly growing, and in languages That aren't always sound but other Circles of motion. Like eagle that Sunday morning.

Despite her urban upbringing, the eagle poem displays the Native American themes of nature and interdependence between nature and human beings, sort of mystery in nature that is also found along with past and present concepts in Silko (Story teller): I climb the blcak rock mountain stepping from dat to day silently. Returning up the grey stone cliff where I descended a thousand years ago. How I danced in snow frost moonlight distant stars to the end of the Earth, How I swam away in the freezing mountain water marrow mossy canyon tumbling down out of the mountain out of deep canyon stone. Down the memory spilling out into the world.

It is not surprising to see that Harjo's work contains the elements of oral tradition and ancient matter, comment that brings together two of the most important elements in her poetry, elements that have been present in her work from the beginning. One of the keys to Harjo's thinking is her firm belief -confirmed in so many of her poems--that, in her words, in the real world all is in motion, in a state of change. This helps explain why it is often so difficult, if not impossible, to point to the actual moment in a Harjo poem when one world moves into the next, when one voice changes to another, or when one landscape is utterly transformed in either an evolutionary or a revolutionary way. Scarry (1992) believes that this apparent surreality of many of Harjo's settings and


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situations is not really a distortion; it is simply a presentation of reality observed through the poet's prism. Her instrument is myth, which the poet uses extensively because that's where meaning is exploded, and one is taken into the realm where anything is possible: there are sixty-five miles of telephone wire between acoma and albuquerque i dial the number and listen for the sound of his low voice on the other side "hello" is a gentle motion of a western wind cradling tiny purple flowers that grow near the road towards laguna i smell them as i near the rio puerco bridge my voice stumbles returning over sandstone as it passes the canoncito exit "i have missed you" he says the rhythm circles the curve of mesita cliffs to meet me but my voice is caught shredded on a barbed wire fence at the side of the road and flutters soundless in the wind

The use of the telephone as a central device and the final images may resonate with the originality of the poem; but the security of the tone, along with the impressive integration of image and meaning, is remarkable in a poet writing in her early twenties. The opening lines immediately establish the exterior and interior landscapes; in fact, by the time we are shown the "tiny purple flowers / that grow near the road" we cannot be absolutely sure which landscape we are in Woırdsworthian landscape or Harjo’s mind and the city she was raised in or areservation where many Indians live. Those same flowers, seen as they are in an ambiguous "cradling" by a "western wind," are filled with implications for a relationship we know is already doomed. However, the final image of the wind shows no such nurturing: barbed wire has taken over telephone wire, and

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conversation has become the "soundless" voice of the speaker. Readers need to ask many questions such as does the word "still" mean a lack of movement, or does it mean "yet"? Is the "you" the speaker being addressed by the other person, or is it the speaker who addresses the other? This poem and several others show Harjo moving easily between the worlds of imagination and reality. The following poem from The Last Song, "3 AM," is a work filled with ghosts from the Native American past, figures seen operating in an alien culture that is itself a victim of fragmentation. 3 AM in the albuquerque airport trying to find a flight to old oraibi, third mesa TWA is the only desk open bright lights outline new york chicago and the attendant doesn't know that third mesa is a part of the center of the world and who are we just two indians at three in the morning trying to find a way back and then i remembered that time simon took a yellow cab out to acoma from albuquerque a twenty-five dollar ride to the center of himself 3 AM is not too late to find the way back

There are always romantic images of departures at the airports for writers, and airports are redolent with meaning in more than one Harjo poem. Here the Albuquerque airport is both modern America's technology and moral nature-and both clearly have failed. Together they cannot get these Indians to their destination, a failure that stretches from the earliest history to the sleek desks of the most up-to-date airline offices. Even the airline attendant, surrounded by the triumphs of technology and framed by the glowing images of our urban


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culture—New York and Chicago--stands as an ineffectual person. The shift is from Indian mesas to the mind of the poetic speaker, to the landscape of memory, to the perception of self. It is significant too that the final journey in the poem--the only one truly accomplished—is the speaker's voyage back into memory. As in so many of Harjo's poems, movement and progress are only indicated or promised in the world where we expect them to happen (Scarry 1992); they really happen in the landscape of the mind, journeys made all the more vibrant and meaningful by the external paralysis we are shown only too clearly. "I Am a Dangerous Woman," the sharp ridges of clear blue windows motion to me from the airports second floor edges dance in the foothills of the sandias behind security guards who wave me into their guncatcher machine i am a dangerous woman when the machine buzzes they say to take off my belt and i remove it so easy that it catches the glance of a man standing nearby (maybe that is the deadly weapon that has the machine singing) i am a dangerous woman but the weapon is not visible security will never find it they can't hear the clicking of the gun inside my head

Again, the setting is clearly the American Southwest, but the reader is immediately aware of other, overlapping settings that urge themselves upon the attention. There is the natural world and the human construction of an airport, there are men and machines, there are men and at least one woman, and, more subtly, there are cultures that encounter each other in very limited ways and only for a very limited time. In "3 AM" the speaker does not come forward until we are halfway through the poem; in "I Am a Dangerous Woman" the speaker identifies herself in the first word of the title. The tension in the latter poem is also announced early and decisively and is sustained throughout: the "sharp

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ridges" of the windows, the "guncatcher machine" and its buzzing, along with the most dramatic sound of all, the inaudible "clicking / of the gun" inside the speaker's mind--all combine to create a tension-filled atmosphere, one that is intensified by the strange similarity between the control imposed by the security forces and the self-control exercised by the always silent poetic speaker. Without question, "I Am a Dangerous Woman" is a more political, more feminist poem than "3 AM," but beyond this primary distinction both works are expressions of the almost wistful determination one senses in so many of Harjo's poems. Joy Harjo is clearly a highly political and feminist Native American, but she is even more the poet of myth and the subconscious; her images and landscapes owe as much to the vast stretches of our hidden mind as they do to her native southwest. This is one reason why her Secrets from the Center of the World is such a continually intriguing book. Complex reverberations of the relationships between human and other life, between past and present, and the cosmic connections between an unimaginably distant past and an equally mysterious future all come together in this deceptively simple prose poem, one that captures the essentially meditative quality of this extraordinary book. It is easy to see that the landscape which has a clearly Native American identity initially, soon becomes an everywhere and anytime, with humanity thrown together in the midst of a coldness that only intensifies the need for human connection. The opening of "Summer Night" is filled with romantic delicacy: The moon is nearly full, the humid air sweet like melon. Flowers that have cupped the sun all day dream of iridescent wings under the long dark sleep.

These lines might seem to have been written by any poet from any culture, but by Harjo's use of her poetic voice to take one of the humblest images from her culture to discuss the steady revolution Native American art is causing in the larger culture in the other lines: I am fragile, a piece of pottery smoked from fire made of dung, the design drawn from nightmares. I am an arrow, painted with lightning to seek the way to the name of the enemy, but the arrow has now created its own language (We Must Call a Meeting).


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Harjo (1992) believes that she was one more link in the concatenation of ancestors and she tells in her Family Album ” Close behind me are my son and daughter, behind them my granddaughter. Next to me, interlocking the pattern, are my cousins, my aunts and uncles. We dance together in this place of knowing beyond the physical dimensions of space, much denser than the chemicals and paper of photographs. It is larger than mere human memory, than any destruction we have walked through to come to this ground of memory. Time can never be stopped; rather, it is poised to make a leap into knowing or a field of questions. I understood this as we stompdanced in the middle of the night, as the stars whirred in the same pattern overhead, as they had been when Katie, Marsie, and the children lived beneath them. I heard time resume as the insects took up their singing once more to guide us through memory. The old Hudson heads to the east of the border of the photograph. For the Muscogee, East is the place of origins, the place the People emerged from so many hundreds of years ago. It is also a place of return”. Joy Harjo’s poems seem written in a moment of urgency, fed by deeply rooted memory or longing, sometimes by defiance, and always by a warriorlike compassion that sees through the split between people and their histories, people and their hearts, people and the natural world. These poems reflect her heritage as a Creek Indian, both in their evocation of emblems such as deer, laughing birds, and "the language of lizards and storms," and also in their identification with people whose dreams have been thwarted by dull circumstance or outright violence. Ullman (1991) holds that Harjo stands squarely in these poems as "one born of a blood who wrestled the whites for freedom" , but her stance is not so much that of a representative of a culture as it is the more generative one of a storyteller whose stories resurrect memory, myth, and private struggles that have been overlooked, and who thus restores vitality to the culture at large. As a storyteller, Harjo steps into herself as a passionate individual living on the edge, at once goaded and strengthened by a heightened sensitivity to the natural order of things and to the ways history has violated that order. This sensitivity, a gift of her heritage, becomes her gift to the readers of h er poems. The rest of the long title to her poem on Aquash reads: ". . . we remember the story and tell it again so that we may all live" . Humor and irony play important but often-undervalued roles in Native American cultures and literatures by overturning stereotypical assumptions about Natives and their tribal histories. As Paula Gunn Allen (1993) argues, humor is widely used by Indians to deal with life, and indian gatherings are marked by laughter and jokes, many directed at the horrors of history, at the continuing impact of colonization, and at the biting knowledge that living as an exile in one's own land necessitates. These two discursive strategies (Andrews 2000) are particularly effective methods of expressing the contradictions and

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dichotomies that shape the lives of Native Americans today, as individuals and communities blend "tribal tradition" and "contemporary experience". Using a combination of humor and irony, Leslie Marmon Silko and Joy Harjo--have attempted to convey both the humanity of Native peoples and the pain that they have suffered over hundreds of years due to colonization, forced assimilation, and acculturation. Humor can channel anger, celebrate survival, and even unite Native and non-Native readers by allowing otherwise disparate groups of people to laugh together. Irony, in turn, often tempers the playful elements of humor by reminding readers of the legacy of oppression that has shaped the lives of Native North Americans for centuries. Harjo frequently uses both in her poetry to explore the contradictions that are part of being a mixed-blood contemporary Native American woman writer who has strong ties to her tribal heritage but was raised in urban centers (off the reservation) and is continually negotiating the roles of poet, musician, teacher, and academic. By incorporating humor and irony into her own texts Harjo is able to address a range of readers simultaneously. She also examines what constitutes historical "truth," raises questions about western conceptions of time and space, and depicts her own complex status as a Native American poet who is a part of many different communities and is continually crossing various kinds of borders and boundaries--both literal and figurative--in her writing. Arthur Koestler's theory of "bisociation" (1964: 35) humor happens when mutually incompatible codes or perspectives are put together and "the incongruous parts edge each other". Coined by Koestler, the term bisociation calls attention to "the creative act, which ... always operates on more than one plane”. For Koestler humor is a prime example of this movement beyond "the routine skills of thinking on a single 'plane. In The Act of Creation Koestler offers a useful and succinct formula to describe the conceptual aspects of bisociation. He claims bisociation involves "the perceiving of a situation or idea, L, in two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference, M1 and M2" (Koestler 1964: 35). To make sense of these "incompatible matrices" which have been placed side-by-side, readers usually create palimpsests to help them grasp and respond to these otherwise baffling juxtapositions. Similarly, Hutcheon contends that irony involves a rubbing together of the said and the unsaid, a process that leads to the creation of a third meaning and gives irony its edge. When paired, humor and irony layer texts with linguistic and situational incongruities that encourage readers to negotiate multiple, often conflicting perspectives to contribute their own interpretations of the work and to take pleasure in this challenge. Harjo couples humor and irony to contest native stereotypes, to bring to the foreground the significance of mythic time and to reveal the vitality of memory


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as an ongoing process of recollection and contemplation that encompasses the past, present, and future in Anchorage: someone's Athabascan grandmother is folded up on a park bench and buried in an ache in which nothing makes sense.

The speaker's feelings of inadequacy and distress, especially when faced with the image of this grandmother, are countered by Henry's narrative, which, despite its violent nature, is surprisingly funny. Henry recalls, as the poem's speaker puts it, being shot at eight times outside a liquor store in L.A., but when the car sped away he was surprised he was alive.

When Henry tries to find out where he has been wounded, he discovers that there are "no bullet holes" lodged in his body. Instead, "eight cartridges" are strewn on the sidewalk all around him. Her poem counters the potentially tragic outcome of this violent scene with the miracle of Henry's survival. In the stanza that follows, Harjo employs line-breaks and wordplay to juxtapose moments of suspense with a sense of relief, as those who are listening to Henry's fantastic narrative struggle to make sense of this unlikely and wondrous outcome. At the end of "Anchorage" Harjo presents her own playfully subversive version: Everyone laughed at the impossibility of it, but also the truth. Because who would believe the fantastic and terrible story of all of our survival those who were never meant to survive?

Instead of assuming that "we were never meant to survive", Harjo interrogates it adding a question mark, which suggests that the stability of such viewpoints needs to be contested even more explicitly. Andrews (2000) holds that Harjo updates the legacies of racism and violence in America by depicting a scene of urban warfare, in which visible minorities may become victims of a crime simply because of their skin color. Henry's shooting specifically invokes the police brutality and gang violence associated with Los Angeles, a city where the high cost of living widens the gulf between wealth and poverty. In choosing this setting and writing the poem for Lorde, Harjo cuts across the borders that

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separate African-Americans, Native Americans, and other groups that are vulnerable to racial, ethnic, and gender-based oppression; she shows how Henry's story epitomizes the history of many different segments of the American population. At the same time Harjo conveys the specificity of Henry's own Native American heritage and history, a legacy of assimilation, removal, and genocide that is particular to the individual and to the tribal community. In "Anchorage," a poem dedicated to Audre Lorde, Harjo's speaker, now seemingly free from fear, strides purposefully through this Alaska city "of stone, of blood, and fish" . Speaking in a powerfully articulate voice, and sustained by memories of a once-strong, now lost and buried Native American heritage echoing along the streets and lying under the earth, Harjo's central figure also knows that the spirit world still lives. While on the surface the Anchorage of Harjo poem appears to be a city of mountains, ancestral Athabascan voices, and creatures of the air and ocean, the speaker also knows that lying "underneath the concrete / is the cooking earth”, or the earth of suppressed volcanic forces barely held in check by the thin concrete skin of the modern city. Like the unarticulated stories of "someone's Athabascan / grandmother”, the smothered earth and native peoples of Alaska are muted for now. Yet even so, sometimes a story breaks through, and someone pays homage to life. Within the 6th Avenue jail a man named Henry tells his story of surviving eight shots aimed at him outside an L. A. liquor store, and the other inmates laugh at the impossible truths in his tale. Like the earth itself, Anchorage's poor and oppressed native people somehow continue to survive by creating bridges of ongoing dialogue with each other and the land. Yesterday I turned north on Greasewood the long way home and was shocked to see a double rainbow two-stepping across the valley. Suddenly there were twin gods bending over to plant something like themselves in the wet earth, a song larger than all our cheap hopes, our small-town radios, whipping everything back into the geometry of dreams...

In "Your Phone Call,"she describes the ex-lover as someone who wants "a few words," "a few books / some pages, anything" other than intimacy. As the poem's speaker appears to be vulnerable and in need of protection: she is quietly undermining the ex-lover's power through her own choice of language, poetic diction, and control over the text itself. Instead of treating the pain and suffering that the ex-lover's rejection may inflict on the poetic "I" as an accomplished fact, Harjo reworks the presumed purpose of the poem by having the speaker declare in the final lines of the text:


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But that's alright because this poem isn't for you but for me after all.

In another poem, Harjo playfully parallels the control television wields over people with the legacy of colonization by describing its seductiveness: Once we abandoned ourselves for television, the box that separates the dreamer from the dreaming. It was as if we were stolen, put into a bag carried on the back of a whiteman who pretends to own the earth and the sky.

In Harjo's poetry, Andrews (2000) maintains, humor and irony together acknowledge the pain and pleasure of her tribe's history by directly addressing the topics of Indian removal, poverty, and alcoholism in a manner that is poignant, funny, and provocative. Harjo focuses on the particularities of her individual experience and considers how these situations may also express the concerns of a larger community. Humor and irony offer points of access to Harjo's texts for a multitude of readers (both Native and non-Native) who can take pleasure in the miracle of Henry's survival, the narrator's playfully subversive response to her ex-lover, and the trickery of tale-telling, especially when reclaimed by those who have been colonized. But the same poems refuse to let readers forget a terrible history of racism and sexism that has radically influenced Harjo's own life. Harjo couples humor and irony to create a sustained dialogue with her readers and continue a Native tradition of using these discursive strategies to protect and validate tribal communities, as well as challenge reductive representations of Native Americans. In the other poem, she says: I can still close my eyes and open them four floors up looking south and west from the hospital, the approximate direction of Acoma, and farther on to the roofs of the houses of the gods who have learned there are no endings, only beginnings.

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and talks about the continuity of time and nature and life processes. Her finding the continuous meaning of life both in hospital and home shows that locations are important for people to relate themselves to life. Hernandez (1995) says that Native American women writers also are interested in home, identity, and community; more specifically, in the power and appeal of 'home' as a concept and a desire. While "home" occurs as a metaphor in feminist writings, it is, after all, a metaphor in the work of many, if not most, Native American women writers as well. At the same time, I do not find many Native American women writers particularly interested in locating, in their writings, an "all encompassing" or even "discrete" home within feminism, or at least feminist scholarship per se. Caren Kaplan (1994) critiques the universalizing, naturalizing, and totalizing tendencies of Western feminism, acknowledging that the "concern with location and space, with rooms of one's own, with expanding 'home' from the domestic to the public sphere, has been one of the hallmarks of Western feminist practice." Herein lies a major difference between "Western feminist practice" and what might be called a Native American "feminism." Even when Native women activists no longer reside on their ancestral land bases (though many still do) they continue to defend the tribal sovereignty of their own communities as well as communities of other indigenous peoples. Sovereignty encompasses the cultural, spiritual, economic, and political aspects of the life of the communities and of the individuals who compose them. For Native people, any notion of "home" within the domestic sphere was largely and intentionally disrupted by the colonialist process. They were seen literally as the enemy by colonial and then (in the United States) federal forces, and have been forced historically to address the issue of "home”. Hernandez (1995) claims that Native voices and Native languages were silenced and denied and that it is the English language and, for some of us, Spanish as well, that they make use of in si(gh)ting ours and our people's sovereignty, not only in academia but also in local and international political arenas. It is also a historical fact, however, that Native communities were (and are) the object of colonialist, imperialist moves. For most Native people, leaving home at the level of the collective has meant relocation, through war or peacetime governmental policies and deterritorilization Kaplan (1994) repeats a crucial question asked by them, "How many people live today in a language that is not their own?" For Native Americans, "leaving language" is too benign a term for the attempted and sometimes successful eradication of their languages. This campaign of eradication had and has the purpose of destroying their sovereignty by destroying their connections to their land bases. However, Native people have managed to sustain, through memory


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and the constant presence of the land, their connections to their home(land)s in this hemisphere. This realized connection has made it possible for many Native people to reclaim and recall their languages (Native and otherwise) as their own. In this sense, location as a contextualizing factor must be claimed as a necessary element in the struggle for self-reflexivity. So, yes, the situation of Native people, and Native women, is complicated, and not all reflections are the same. We are truly blessed because we Were born, and die soon within a True circle of motion, Like eagle rounding out the morning Inside us

The story of the eagles is a place of origin, an explanation of how people arrived on the land. Indian Tribes have stories, sacred stories that were considered factual, and the idea of history, of past and present and future for indigenous peoples before contact, was quite different from the linear, chronological way events are organized in the Western world. There were always the stories. And they weren't just stories, they were the truth. They were views on the truth of life. The truth of this life was that it was a way of life, the way we--the community of Acoma Pueblo, the larger Native American world, the world in general--lived. And it was the stories that opened my eyes, my mind, my soul upon that way of life that world in which I lived. And because the world continued and I continued with it, the stories went on, constantly in the making, changing, reaffirming the belief that there would always be the stories (Ortiz, 1984). In a collection of interviews titled Winged Words Harjo spoke of time as nonlinear: "I also see memory as not just associated with past history, past events, past stories, but nonlinear, as in future and ongoing history, events, and stories" (Coltelli 1990:57). The juxtaposition and incorporation of past and present, history and future, survive in contemporary stories within Harjo's poetry. The theme of survival, of continuation, is a foundation for the act of storytelling in oral cultures. Erdoes and Ortiz (1934:389) discuss the crossing of boundaries in Native myths: "In the Indian imagination there is no division between the animal and human spheres; each takes the other's clothing, shifting appearance at will." Here, boundaries can be not only shifting and vague, but in traditional Native myths, "there is no division." Thus, storytelling functions in traditional myths as a performance that renders the effect of making boundaries disappear. Harjo continues the tradition of erasing boundaries when she discusses the lines between contemporary and traditional stories. Eventually there is no division between the old and new stories. They become part of each other. They are dancing the same dance and sustaining active life in that dance.

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Harjo skillfully combines the perspective, which assumes that poetry has an essential nature that is timeless and universal with the view which assumes that poetic discourse (like the other discourses of a given culture and moment) is defined largely by what the dominant classes take it to be, that indeed there is no such thing as "inherent" poetic value, the production of poetry always being culture specific and ideologically determined (Goodman 1984). As such, our role as critics is, in the first place, to characterize the dominant discourse and then to read against it that writing it has excluded or marginalized, thus redefining the canon so as to give pride of place to the hitherto repressed. Harjo thinks that she writes poetry because it is one way she can speak. Writing poetry enables me to speak of things that are more difficult to speak of in "normal" conversations (Bruchac 1987). Harjo expresses and reflects patterns of ongoing, multilayered, and multivocal memories within the narratives of her poems. Lang (1993) maintains that these memories flow and interweave on a continuum within a metaphysical world that begins deep within her personal psyche and simultaneously moves back into past memories of her Creek (Muskogee) heritage, as well as forward into current pan-tribal experiences and the assimilationist, Anglo-dominated world of much contemporary Native American life. Harjo's poetic memories may be personal stories, family and tribal histories, myths, recent pan-tribal experiences, or spiritual icons of an ancient culture and history. The importance of memory to Harjo's poetry best reveals itself through a survey and examination of one of her most important ongoing tropes, the contemporary American city. Within her varied urban landscapes, Harjo's poetry most clearly illustrates the multi-voiced nature of any marginalized poetry, and of Native American women's poetry in particular. On the one hand, after a first reading Harjo may seem to be writing out of the city-as-subject tradition of American poets like Walt Whitman, Carl Sandburg, Hart Crane, and William Carlos Williams. On the other hand, her city landscapes do not reflect promise and optimistic excitement, as do many urban settings of earlier white male American poets. Rather, Harjo's cities resonate with Native American memories of an endless and ongoing history of Eurocentric and genocidal social and political policies: war, forced removal, imposed education, racism, and assimilationism. In Harjo's poems the multi-voiced city experiences of Native Americans living within indifferent and often hostile urban landscapes offer a strikingly different reading from contemporary Anglo experience of the American city, and thus they make an important statement about current American societies. Moreover, we can also trace a distinct growth in the richness, complexity, and tone of Harjo's city trope from her earliest to her most recent poetic texts. It is with the poems of She Had Some Horses (1983), and especially with one of her most powerful poems, "The Woman Hanging From the Thirteenth


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Floor," that Harjo fully articulates the interlocked problems of unnamed fears and the resulting speechlessness of an oppressed and dispossessed woman. Told in the flat, seemingly unemotional voice of a dispassionate observer, this highly rhythmic prose poem tells the story of a young Native American mother caught in the trap of her life and trying to find some way, any way, out of her nightmare. Memories of her own traditionally-oriented childhood, her family, her children, and her lovers no longer sustain her, as "her mind chatters like neon and northside bars”. Hanging in space, thirteen floors up from the city streets of an East Chicago ghetto, she hears some people screaming that she should jump, while others try to help her with their prayers. At the end of the poem "she would speak", but will she take charge of her own life? Or, is she doomed to death and oblivion? Whereas Harjo's early city poems are usually set physically in bars, apartments, or automobiles and often describe aimless and alienated drifting, her later poems tend to be set in the mind and its memories of an urban experience, and to describe both a clear-eyed acceptance of life as it is and a quiet but fiercely unwavering commitment to the Native American belief in the inherent spirituality within all life forms. Memory underlies Harjo’s poetry. While all Native American cultures value the powers of memory, the contemporary urban pulse-beats and incidents recorded in Joy Harjo's poems bring memory most fully and dramatically into the non-Native American reader's awareness and understanding. When she juxtaposes her Native American memories of the earth against present-day urban life experiences, Harjo creates a uniquely surreal, yet frighteningly accurate and familiar picture of modern American cities and their alienated citizenry (Lang 1993). As Harjo explains memory, one has no authentic voice without memory; and without an authentic voice, one is speechless, hardly human, and unable to survive for very long. Thus, Harjo's braided strands of multilayered memory and poetic voice intertwine into the very warp and woof of her poetic creation. She remembers the massacre in the poem "Resurrection," about the massacre at Esteh, near the Honduran-Nicaraguan border: We all watch for fire for all the fallen dead to return and teach us a language so terrible it could resurrect us all.

Silko’s approach to memory is more affectionate and more encompassing. Don’t be afraid we love you

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134 we’ve been calling you all this time Go ahead Turn around see the shape of your footprints in the sand.(Storyteller)

Harjo’s memory shows that in her earliest poems she has grappled with the alienation, anger, and (at times) hopelessness of living within modern civilization. Her response has consistently been to delve into her tribal heritage and attempt to "go back" to a world where humans and non-humans lived not as separate entities but as interdependent parts of a symbiotic whole. This process of going back entails neither regression nor a naive longing to escape modernity, but rather a recovering of a perspective that is mindful of both place and space (Bryson 2002). To give the nuance between place and space Tuan (1977: 54) says place is enclosed and humanized space. Therefore, when viewed through Tuan's framework, Harjo can be viewed as a place-maker, attempting to move her audience out of an existence in an abstract space where we are simply visitors in an unknown neighborhood, and into a recognition of our present surroundings as place and thus as home. On the other hand, there is an ignorance of nature's wildness and humans’ relationship to that wildness. This ignorance results from an under-developed appreciation of space and leads to an arrogance that makes humans feel and act as if they can control forces obviously beyond their control. Harjo’s poems are perpetrated by language and western rationality, humans are increasingly separated from the rest of nature, and thus modern people in the towns and in the cities learn not to hear the ground as it spins around beneath them When we view ourselves as separated from nature, we cannot view the world as home or place; instead, our surroundings will be simply an "environment" and natural non-human entities nothing more than natural resources. Likewise, it is difficult to maintain an awareness of the world's wildness from such an isolated vantage point. Harjo envisions a contemporary world that is violent, oppressive, and dehumanizing. Two primary sources for these social and philosophical ills are a loss of a sense of place—in other words a loss of connection to the world around us—and a loss of space-consciousness—an ignorance of the wildness within the world and ourselves. And all of these theoretical predicaments, along with their resultant socio-cultural problems, result largely from western society and language. The solution is that people need to recall the mythic world when self and nature were not distinct entities, but rather one interdependent and symbiotic organism. Thus the word "back" appears throughout Harjo's poetry, as when in


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"3 AM" she speaks of "trying to find a way back" to "the center of the world," which she equates with the center of her self. Songs, words, stories, memories: all become vehicles to transport poet and readers back to a place of non-duality, where people have not experienced what she calls "the shame of forgetful ness" Possibly the best example of Harjo's message is her well known poem "Remember," which concludes with these lines: Remember you are all people and all people are you. Remember you are this universe and this universe is you. Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you. Remember language comes from this. Remember the dance language is. that life is. Remember.

In its prayerful, chant-like rhythm and its cumulative parallel catalogue, this poem exemplifies the frequency and intensity with which Harjo expresses her desire to find a way back to a world where people understand the reciprocity between themselves and the rest of the universe (Bryson 2002). In this unifying process of going back—in remembering, in telling the old stories—people are more capable of learning once again how to connect with place and appreciate space. Harjo has stated place-making is the purpose of her poetry: "I've been especially involved in the struggles of Indian peoples to maintain a place and culture in this precarious age. My poetry has everything to do with this" (Smith and Allen: 1987). Harjo's place-making occurs as a result of going back, of creating a poetry based on the landscape. Therefore, the processes of going back and place-making are intertwined; in order to recover a sense of place we must remember and return to what we have known in the past: Give me back my language and build a house Inside it. A house of madness. A house for the dead who are not dead. And the spiral of the sky above it. And the sun and the moon And the stars to guide us called promise.

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Works Cited Andrews, Jennifer. “In the Belly of a Laughing God: Reading Humor and Irony in the Poetry of Joy Harjo.” American Indian Quarterly Vol. 24 Issue 2, (Spring 2000): 200-219 Benediktsson, Thomas E. “The Reawakening Of The Gods: Realism and The Supernatural in Silko and Hulme.” Critique Vol. 33 Issue 2 (Winter92): 121-132 Bruchac, Joseph. "The Story of All Our Survival: An Interview with Joy Harjo." Survival This Way: Interviews with American Indian Poets. Ed. Bruchac. Tucson: Sun Tracks and U of Arizona Press, 1987. 87-103. Bryson, Scott. “Finding the Way Back: Place and Space in the Ecological Poetry of Joy Harjo”. MEIJ-S. Volume 27. Number 3 (Fall 2002). Castillo, Susan Pérez. “Postmodernism, Native American literature and the real: The Silko-Erdrich controversy.” Massachusetts Review Vol. 32 Issue 2, (Summer91): 285-295. Coltelli Laura, ed. Winged Words. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,1990. De Ramirez, Susan Berry Brill. “Storytellers And Their Listener-Readers In Silko's 'Storytelling' and 'Storyteller'“. American Indian Quarterly Vol. 21. Issue 3, (Summer 98): 333-358. Erdoes, Richard and Simon Ortiz. "Introduction." American Indian Myths and Legends. New York: Pantheon,1984. Goodman, Jenny. “Politics and the personal lyric in the poetry of Joy Harjo and C.D. Wright.” MELUS Vol. 19 Issue 2, (Summer 94): 35-57. Gunn Allen, Paula. Studies in American Indian Literature. New York: The Modern Language Association, 1993. Harjo, Joy. The Last Song. Las Cruces, N.M: Puerto del Sol, 1975. ———. What Moon Drove Me to This? New York: I. Reed Books, 1980. ———. She Had Some Horses. New York: Thunder's Mouth, 1983. ———, Stephen Strom. Secrets from the Center of the World. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989. ———. In Mad Love and War. Middletown, Ct.: Wesleyan University Press, 1990. ———. “Family Album”. Progressive Vol. 56 Issue 3 (March 1992): 22-26. Hernandez-Avila, Ines. “Relocations Upon Relocations: Home, Language, And Native.” American Indian Quarterly Vol. 19 Issue 4 (Fall95): 491-498. Hirsch, Bernard “The Telling Which Continues: Oral Tradition and the Written Word in Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller”. American Indian Quarterly 12 (1988): 2. Jan-Mohammed, Abdul. Manichean Aesthetics. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983.


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Johnson, Robert. “Inspired Lines.” American Indian Quarterly Vol. 23 Issue 3/4 (Summer/Fall 99): 13-24. Jones, Patricia. The Web of Meaning: Naming the Absent Mother in Storyteller," "Yellow Woman ". Leslie Marmon Silko. ed. Melody Graulich. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993. Kaplan, Caren "The Politics of Location as Transnational Feminist Critical Practice”. Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, Eds. Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. ———."Deterritorializations: The Rewriting of Home and Exile in Western Feminist Discourse”. The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, Eds. Abdul R. Jan-Mohammed and David Lloyd .New York: Oxford UP, 1990. Kallett, Marilyn In love and war and music: An interview with Joy Harjo. Critique Vol. 33 Issue 2 (Winter 1992): 121-132. Koestler, Arthur. The Act of Creation. London: Hutchinson, 1964. Krupat, Arnold. “The Dialogic of Silko's Storyteller”. Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures. Ed. Gerald Vizenor Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989. Krumholz, Linda "'To understand this world differently': Reading and Subversion in Leslie Marmon Silko's 'Storyteller' ". Ariel 25.1 (1994): 90. Lang, Nancy. “Twin gods bending over: Joy Harjo and poetic memory.” MELUS Vol. 18 Issue 3, (Fall 1993): 41-50. Leen, Mary. “An art of saying: Joy Harjo's poetry and the survival of storytelling”. American Indian Quarterly Vol. 19 Issue 1 (Winter1995): 116. Ortiz, Simon J. Always the Stories: A Brief History and Thoughts on My Writing. Coyote Was Here. Ed. Bo Scholer. Aarhus, Denmark: SEKLOS,1984. Root, William Pitt. “About Joy Harjo”. Ploughshares Vol 30 Issue 4 (Winter 2004/2005):180-185. Scarry, John. “Representing Real Worlds: The Evolving Poetry of Joy Harjo. World Literature Today. Vol. 66 Issue 2 (Spring1992): 286-292. Silko, Leslie Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak, ed. Laura Coltelli. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. ——— . Storyteller New York : Little Brown, 1981. Smith, Patricia Clark, with Paula Gunn Allen. "'Earthy Relations. Carnal Knowledge: Southwestern American Indian Women Writers and Landscape." The Desert is \!o Lady: Southwestern Landscapes in Women 's Writing and Art. VA. Vera Norwood and Janice Monk. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987. 174-96.

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Tuan, Yi-tu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. St. Paul: University of Minnesota Press, 1977. Ullman, Leslie. “Solitaries and Storytellers, Magicians and pagans: Five Poets in the World”. Kenyon Review Vol. 13 Issue 2 (Spring 1991): 179-193 U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Census of Population and Housing, 1980: General Social and Economic Characteristics, United States Summary, PC80-1-C1, table 123. Velie, Alan R. “American Indian Literature In The Nineties: The Emergence Of The Middle-Class Protagonist”. World Literature Today Vol. 66 Issue 2 (Spring 1992): 264-271. Wiget, Andrew. “Identity, Voice, And Authority: Artist-Audience Relations In Native American Literature”. World Literature Today Vol. 66 Issue 2 (Spring 1992): 258-264.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN TRAUMATIC TRACES: SLAVE NARRATIVES, POSTTRAUMATIC STRESS, AND THE LIMITS OF RESISTANCE PENNY TUCKER

In 1893, the former fugitive slave and U.S. abolitionist Frederick Douglass published the third version of his autobiography entitled The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.68 Already famous for his previous autobiographies and speeches, Douglass once again returned to his life story preparing it for a third public presentation, but some important things changed in this attempt at autobiography. In the latter version, Douglass wrote much more openly and perhaps even freely about the kinds of negative psychological states that before he only briefly mentioned or sketched. Late in life, he seemed to take extra care to describe or to re-imagine his mental experience of enslavement. In fact, he described himself as “suffering bodily as well as mentally,” as a “living embodiment of mental and physical wretchedness,” as “terrified, stunned, and bewildered” and, even after his escape from slavery, as feeling “a sense of loneliness and insecurity” that “oppressed [him] most sadly.”69 He added: “I shall never be able to narrate half the mental experience through which it was my lot to pass. […] I was completely wrecked, changed, and bewildered; goaded almost to madness at one time, and at another reconciling myself to my wretched condition.”70 This virtual catalog of extreme and fluctuating psychological complaints distinguishes Douglass’ narrative of 1893 from his first narrative published in 1845. The first was certainly passionate as an argument against slavery, but it was limited and even incomplete in its 68

Frederick Douglass, Autobiographies: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, My Bondage and My Freedom, and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (New York: Library of America, 1994). 69 Ibid., 574, 497, 648. 70 Ibid., 574.

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description and chronicle of the psychological details of the trauma of enslavement. The 1893 account differs markedly from the first abbreviated and relatively dispassionate account of his mental state. It seems that Douglass went out of his way in 1893 to express the psychological impact of slavery. Rather than simply representing defiant resistance to slavery, here he was a man willing to depict himself as traumatized and even at times diminished by slavery. This was a significant revision for the person who served as the de facto representative black man in nineteenth-century abolitionism, the person whose “representativeness” was expected to stand for all former slaves—indeed, for all black people. Douglass in 1893 emphasized the psychic harm in addition to the physical injuries of slavery; it was as if he wanted to say that the legal and physical end of slavery alone did not mean the end of slavery’s injurious effects, and that psychological residues—the traces of past trauma—persisted. I begin with this example of Frederick Douglass because he, more than any other slave narrator, or, for that matter, any other primary text about slavery, represented and embodies the injustices of slavery, and symbolized the achievement of respectability by a slave through literacy, literary eloquence, and reason. For mid-nineteenth-century U.S. culture, that kind of respectability in itself was indeed an achievement in the face of the general degradation and dehumanization of African Americans, but, I want to consider in this paper at what cost that respectability was achieved. In other words, at what cost did this respect come in regard to the less literate, less eloquent, and less represented slaves? Also, at what cost did the respectability won through defiance come when resistance precluded descriptions of trauma? That brand of respectability, I want to suggest, was predicated on a particular notion of personal identity and psychological constancy that implicitly effaced the fractured identities of the many victims of severe trauma whose persistent, recurrent trauma was produced by the conditions of U.S. slavery and its aftermath. When thinking of what is involved in the “ethics and politics of deconstructing identity,” many people may begin their thinking from a default position that presupposes individuals of untraumatized mental health, but this, I think, is problematic especially when considering the history of U.S. slavery. In many critical studies of slavery, traumatic experience is labeled “unspeakable.” This theory of unspeakability has its value because it retains an intellectual and political space for traumatized victims who do not tell their stories, but it can inadvertently overshadow the actual spoken and written accounts of traumatic experience and its psychic repercussions. For victims of trauma, in general, their identities are challenged and deconstructed by the traumatic experience, and by the recurrence of traumatic memories months even years following the initial events. Achieving recovery is considered to be a reconstruction of something like, but not identical to, mental health prior to trauma. This requires


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restructuring the sense of self by integrating the traumatized memories into a coherent narrative that meshes the fragmented parts of self. As late-twentiethcentury psychologists, psychiatrists, and theorists have shown, this can be accomplished through several means including communal assistance, therapeutic conversation, and even the act of writing itself. But, it seems worthwhile to consider the ways in which trauma, and, in particular, the lives lived in the aftermath of trauma, challenge the usefulness of this neutral starting point when considering American slave narratives, and the way trauma asks us to re-imagine how we read autobiographies and other narratives of identity, that take account of, bear witness to, and stand as testament to the ways identity is constructed, deconstructed, and, reconstructed by traumatic experience. By focusing my analysis on the effects of posttraumatic stress, I am interested in the implications and imperatives that follow from thinking specifically about the already endangered and dispossessed person who endures persistent post-traumatic episodes, and considering how and where such stories fit into the larger stories of struggle against oppression and political movements that seek to end or to mitigate oppression. Since I am using the historical test case of slavery in the United States, this means considering the role of slave narratives that depict prolonged and significant psychic suffering due to what we might call in retrospect post-traumatic stress disorder. For purposes of analysis, I am using the DSM-IV-TR diagnostic criteria to identify which narratives contain descriptions that might qualify as examples of recorded post-traumatic stress.71 Admittedly this type of project is immediately fraught with some difficulties. So I offer some caveats: First, this is necessarily an imaginative act of historical recovery and retrospective psychological diagnosis. Rarely can a retrospective diagnosis ever be considered definitive for physical illness, and, it is probably safe to assume that one-hundred-and-fiftyyear-old evidence cannot produce a definitive psychological diagnosis. Second and perhaps quite obvious, detailed medical records do not exist for slaves because they received little medical care for somatic injury and none for psychic injury. As a result, my literary diagnosis is just that—literary and circumstantial. And, third, many of these testimonies that I consider were written before standardized research on trauma began in the late-nineteenth century—that is, before a vocabulary, however crude, existed that legitimated the symptoms. With these caveats in mind, I now will turn to an analysis of the representation of trauma in the narratives. 71

For specific details on the diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder, see Michael B. First, M.D., Allen Frances, M.D., and Harold Alan Pincus, M.D., DSM-IV-TR Guidebook (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2004) 250-255.

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Published narratives written by runaway slaves frequently describe initial moments of traumatic experience and some describe this trauma in great detail. In fact, the language of torture and terror is common in slave narratives. It is also common for slave narratives to describe both experiencing and witnessing other slaves being beaten or otherwise traumatized. Fewer narratives, unfortunately, chronicle the psychological experiences of the aftermath of these traumas. One instance appears in the Life of William Grimes.72 Published in New York in 1825, Grimes describes the dreams that he experienced after enduring violent beatings at the hands of his brutal master. In several sections, Grimes recounts dreams he had while he fears capture and punishment as a runaway slave. Grimes writes: “While in the log I fell asleep and dreamed they had caught [me] and [were] tying me to be whipped; and such was my agony, that I awoke, from a dream, indeed, but to reality not less painful.”73 He also describes what he calls “[o]ne instance of cruelty… [he] can never forget.”74 He emphasizes the persistence and the vividness of this memory: “It seems as though I should not forget this flogging when I die, it grieved my soul beyond the power of time to cure.”75 In the narrative, the languages of both immediate trauma and traumatic aftermath overlap. Also psychic memory is reiterated in somatic form when the beating is embodied in scars on Grimes’s back, but Grimes’s emphasis, it seems, points more toward the psychic scar than the physical one. It is as if he mentions the physical scar to underscore, or, perhaps even, to prove the existence of the psychic one. In addition, Grimes translates some of his traumatic experience into the gothic imagery of ghosts. “Sometimes when I was wide awake…,” he writes, “the spirits would unlock the doors, and come upstairs, and trample on me, press me to the floor, and squeeze me almost to death: I should have screamed, but fear of my master, who would not believe me, but would have whipped me, prevented.”76 While Grimes himself borrows a gothic vocabulary, we might look clinically on this episode and identify symptoms of sleep paralysis and traumatic nightmares—both of which occur in post-traumatic stress. In this example, Grimes might also be said to suffer from the PTSD symptom of constriction where, as psychiatrist Judith Herman describes it, “[a] person is completely powerless, and any form of resistance is futile” and responds by

72 See William Grimes, Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave in Yuval Taylor, ed., I Was Born a Slave: An Anthology of Classic Slave Narratives, Volume I: 1772-1849 (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999) 184-233. 73 Ibid., 192. 74 Ibid., 194. 75 Ibid., 194. Emphasis added. 76 Ibid., 194.


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“go[ing] into a state of surrender.”77 In such a case, Herman says that the individual’s “system of self-defense shuts down entirely. The helpless person escapes from [the] situation not by action in the real world but rather by [his or] her state of consciousness.”78 In addition to the terrifying dreams, gothic vocabulary, and constriction, Grimes recounts an extended episode of fear that he himself labels as a “nightmare” and could also be described as an instance of either sleep paralysis or numbing. He describes this episode this way: I have at different times of the night felt a singular sensation, such as people generally call the night-mare: I would feel [a witch] coming towards me, and endeavouring to make a noise, which I could quite plainly at first; but the nearer she approached me the more faintly I would cry out. I called to her…as plain as I could, until she got upon me and began to exercise her enchantments on me. I was then entirely speechless; making a noise like one apparently choking, or strangling. My master had often heard me make this noise in the night, and had called to me, to know what was the matter; but as long as she remained there I could not answer. […] I could then, after she had left me, speak myself, and also have use of my limbs. […] I have often, at the time, she started from her own bed, in some shape or other, felt a shock, and the nigher she advanced towards me, the more severe the shock would be.79

Grimes’s symptoms—sleep paralysis, nightmares, constriction, and what might even be called intrusive memories—appear in the narrative as well as an example of hypervigilance, characterized by the constant fear of capture, even after he has reached an anti-slavery state. Still there are other accounts in other slave narratives that further expand this psychological history of post-traumatic stress in slavery. One account appears in Henry Box Brown’s 1851 narrative where he describes the persistent traumatic memory of the separation of his family. This, he says, was “the most severe trial to my feelings which I had ever endured. I was then only fifteen years of age, but it is as present in my mind as if but yesterday’s sun had shone upon the dreadful exhibition.”80 He adds what I think is an interesting clarification, because it is another example where psychic injury is emphasized above physical injury and where Brown makes a point of highlighting the persistence of traumatic memory as if it were a stubborn stain on the mind: 77

Judith Herman, M.D., Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, (New York: Basic Books, 1997) 42. 78 Ibid., 42. 79 Grimes in Yuval Taylor, 201. 80 Henry Box Brown, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) 28. Emphasis added.

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Chapter Thirteen This kind of torture is a thousand fold more cruel and barbarous than the use of the lash which lacerates the back; the gashes which the whip, or the cow skin makes may heal, and the place which was marked may cease to exhibit the signs of what it had endured, but the pangs which lacerate the soul in consequence of the forcible disruption of parent and the dearest family ties, only grow deeper and more piercing, as memory fetches from a greater distance the horrid acts by which they have been produced. And there is no doubt but they under the weighty infirmities of declining life, and the increasing force and vividness with which the mind retains the memoranda of the agonies of former years—which form so great a part of memory’s possessions in the minds of most slaves—hurry thousands annually from off the stage of life.81

Here the “force” and “vividness” of traumatic memory are emphasized and reiterated. Brown’s comment also prefigures a link that scientists would not identify for almost another one hundred and fifty years—namely, that psychic injury diminishes physical health over the long term and that, in turn, shortens overall life span. Similarly, Thomas H. Jones’s slave narrative, published in 1857, describes his early life in slavery as “years of suffering” and describes the persistence of trauma as “the shuddering memory of which is deeply fixed on my heart.”82 Like other narratives, part of Jones’s trauma involved witnessing other people’s suffering. The narrative describes Jones witnessing the beating of his sister: …[O]ne of the earliest scenes of painful memory associated with my opening years of suffering is connected with a severe whipping which my master inflicted on my sister Sarah. He tied her up, having compelled her to strip herself entirely naked, in the smoke-house, and gave her a terrible whipping— at least so it seemed to my young heart, as I heard her scream, and stood by my mother, who was wringing her hands in an agony of grief, at the cruelties which her tender child was enduring. I do not know what my sister had done for which she was then whipped: but I remember that her body was marked and scarred for weeks after that terrible scourging, and that our parents always after seemed to hold their breath when they spoke of it.83

Such instances of trauma—both personally experienced and passively witnessed—occurred numerous times for Jones who also describes later in life the feelings he had after being sold away from his family, Jones says: “…how 81

Ibid., 28. Emphasis added. The Experience of Thomas H. Jones, Who Was a Slave for Forty-Three Years. Written by a Friend, as Given to Him by Brother Jones. (Worcester, Mass.: Henry J. Howland, 1857), 8. Emphasis added. 83 Ibid., 9. 82


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the memory of that year of constant toil and weariness is imprinted on my heart, an impression of appalling sorrow. My dreams are still haunted with the agony of that year.”84 This “shuddering memory” combined with humiliation and beating of his sister and of baring her naked body before others represents the kind of accumulation of traumatic experience that would make Jones vulnerable to post-traumatic episodes. So when he says that his “dreams are still haunted with the agony” we should not assume that his trauma is unspeakable because he has, to the best of his ability we can assume, spoken at least some of it. Likewise, James L. Smith’s slave narrative, Recollections of a Former Slave, describes multiple events of trauma, one of which left him lame as a child. He also describes witnessing numerous traumatic events in childhood. For instance, he describes witnessing his master beat a woman: “…he commenced beating her over the head and shoulders till he had worn the can out. After he had stopped beating her in this brutal manner her head was swollen or puffed to such a size that it was impossible to recognize who she was” and he adds, as if necessary, that “she did not look like the same woman.”85 Such instances of trauma culminate in his own escape from slavery and his subsequent fear of being caught as a fugitive. In narrating this he mentions that he “…was very much frightened, and was continually haunted by dreams which were so vivid as to appear really true.”86 This fear was followed by intrusive dreams: “One night I dreamt my master had come for me, and, as he proved property, I was delivered up to him by the United States Marshal.”87 The effect of the dream was to intensify his preexisting fear. “You may rest assured,” he tells the reader, “I was pretty well frightened out of my wits.”88 Along with this fear and these recurring intrusive dreams, Smith has his own experience with hypervigilance when he thinks he sees his master in the northern town where he is a fugitive and enlists the aid of other members of the community to protect him. He receives assurances from other community members and the Marshal that he will not be turned over to any slave catcher, but it later turns out that it was not his master who appeared in the town. Along with violence and the fears of fugitive slaves, forcible family separation within slavery also created contexts for trauma. In Charles Ball’s narrative, for instance, he describes the day his mother was sold away from the family and violently beaten when she would not release her child. Ball writes that he was “[f]rightened at the sight of cruelties inflicted on my poor mother” 84

Ibid., 11. James L. Smith, Recollections of a Former Slave (New York: Humanity Books, 2004) 39. 86 Ibid., 119. Emphasis added. 87 Ibid., 119. 88 Ibid., 120. 85

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who was given “two or three heavy blows on the shoulders with…raw hide, snatched me from her arms, handed me to my master, and seizing her by one arm, dragged her back toward the place of sale.”89 Ball remarks on that episode this way: “Young as I was, the horrors of that day sank deeply into my heart, and even at this time, though half a century has elapsed, the terrors of the scene return with painful vividness upon my memory.”90 Still more important is what Ball says about his father’s subsequent mood change: “My father never recovered from the effect of the shock, which this sudden and overwhelming ruin of his family gave him. […] After this time I never heard him laugh heartily, or sing a song. He became gloomy and morose in his temper, to all but me.”91 He describes in particularly vivid detail one instance of his own traumatizing injury where he was whipped and the wounds doused with pepper tea that “produced a tormenting smart, beyond the description of language.”92 Like many other narrators who experienced trauma, Ball says this injury is beyond the description of language though he in fact proceeds to describe it: After a delay of ten minutes…I received another dozen lashes, on the part of my back which was immediately above the bleeding and burning gashes of the former whipping; and again the biting, stinging, pepper tea was applied to my lacerated and trembling muscles. This operation was continued at regular intervals, until I had received ninety-six lashes, and my back was cut and scalded from end to end. Every stroke of the whip had drawn blood; many of the gashes were three inches long; my back burned as if it had been covered by a coat of hot embers, mixed with living coals; and I felt my flesh quiver like that of animals that have been slaughtered by the butcher and are flayed whilst still yet half alive. My face was bruised, and my nose bled profusely, for in the madness of my agony, I had not been able to refrain from beating my head violently against the post.93

This is a surprisingly, even shockingly vivid, description of the experience of traumatic injury, and it is evidence that even when someone reports trauma as unspeakable she or he may go on to contradict that claim by effectively, though certainly not exhaustively, describing the trauma. For Ball, physical trauma was accompanied by familial trauma and subsequent nightmares. After his own 89

Charles Ball, Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man, Who Lived Forty Years in Maryland, South Carolina and Georgia as a Slave in Yuval Taylor, ed., I Was Born a Slave: An Anthology of Classic Slave Narratives: Volume I: 1772-1849 (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999) 267. 90 Ibid., 267. Emphasis added. 91 Ibid., 267. Emphasis added. 92 Ibid., 310. 93 Ibid., 310.


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experience of family separation as an adult, Ball—like Grimes, Smith, and Jones—is haunted by nightmares: “At length I fell asleep, but was distressed by dreams. My wife and children appeared to be weeping and lamenting my calamity; and beseeching and imploring my master on their knees, not to carry me away from them. My little boy came and begged me not to go and leave him, and endeavoured, as I thought, with his little hands to break the fetters that bound me. I awoke in agony….”94 The dreams are described as “dreadful apprehensions of future evil…[that] harassed and harrowed [his] mind that night” and he, like some other slave narrators, mentions thoughts of suicide.95 In his 1893 narrative, Frederick Douglass also describes his suicidal thoughts this way: “In this unhappy state of mind described in the foregoing chapter, regretting my very existence because I was doomed to a life of bondage, and so goaded and wretched as to be even tempted at the time to take my own life.” Suicidal thoughts represent another symptom consistent with posttraumatic stress disorder. Having taken this initial look at a selection of representations of posttraumatic stress in slave narratives, what I would like to suggest by bringing together these narratives is that those who experienced persistent post-traumatic episodes were made inadvertently into a dispossessed minority within a minority by the rhetoric and discourse of representativeness that was ironically meant to assist in their liberation, and, as a result, they were doubly effaced within the cultural field of political action. Representativeness and the respectability it entailed were claimed as a form of resistance against slavery, racism, discrimination, violence, and other forms of degradation. A similar sense of representativeness appears in the work of the critic Leigh Gilmore, who while not working specifically on slave narratives also identifies a similar limit to being representative in her work on the limits of autobiography. She argues that the “limits of representativeness” compel an autobiographer toward an “inflation of self to stand for others,” and she also notes the way [autobiography] operates both to expand and to constrict testimonial speech…” because it is “partially structured through proscriptions (or limits) it places on self-representation.”96 In this sense, representativeness places limits on what can or should be represented, and, as a result, it places limits on what is appropriate for public presentation and display. Resistance, then, ultimately relies on a constrained form of representativeness. What I want to argue is that within the anti-slavery movement in the nineteenth-century U.S., limitations were explicitly and implicitly placed on what constituted acceptable testimony 94

Ibid., 276. Ibid., 289. 96 Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998) 5-6. 95

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and desirable witnesses to present and, perhaps more critical, even to create the “representative” person instead of the inconsolable one, to offer up the literate and eloquent speakers without also giving audience to the stuttering and haunted ones. Despite the fact that the haunted voices of the traumatized tell an important part of the psychological story of slavery, the interior story of enslavement, they can never in the sense of Douglass’ 1845 narrative count as “representative” nor can they do the work that such “representativeness” performs in political and social discourses of reform. But, they can, I think, offer an important parallel, synchronic story that refocuses attention on the experience of the victims and the variety of ways they psychologically experienced slavery rather than reinforce or recreate standards similar to the propriety and self-control circulated by majority society. These kinds of accounts of post-traumatic stress also show the limits of resistance at the individual level where, despite one’s best efforts, trauma persists, and, at the cultural level, it shows how narrowly the subject of liberation is defined for political purposes. With the stories and evidence of post-traumatic stress, we also see the limits of representativeness and how psychologically heterogeneous voices from within the ranks of oppressed populations can offer an enlargement of the sensibilities and the sense of concern within resistance movements. What I am suggesting finally might seem paradoxical, but in the struggle for respectability, inclusion, and equality, representativeness, like that assigned to the esteemed Frederick Douglass, coincidentally assisted in the effacement of a significant part of the experience of slavery for those already marginal, already traumatized slaves whose psychological experience diverged from the majority sense of controlled, contained, even restrained personhood.

Works Cited Anonymous, The Experience of Thomas H. Jones, Who Was a Slave for FortyThree Years. Written by a Friend, as Given to Him by Brother Jones, Worcester, Mass.: Henry J. Howland, 1857. Henry Box Brown, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Frederick Douglass, Autobiographies: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, My Bondage and My Freedom, and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, New York: Library of America, 1994. Michael B. First, M.D., Allen Frances, M.D., and Harold Alan Pincus, M.D., DSM-IV-TR Guidebook, Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2004. Leigh Gilmore, The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.


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Judith Herman, M.D., Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, New York: Basic Books, 1997. James L. Smith, Recollections of a Former Slave, New York: Humanity Books, 2004. Yuval Taylor, ed., I Was Born a Slave: An Anthology of Classic Slave Narratives: Volume I: 1772-1849, Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN MEMORY, HISTORY, AND NARRATIVE ETHICS IN THE WRITING OF EDMOND AMRAN EL MALEH LARBI TOUAF

History and memory seem to be two antinomic paths that we follow in our ongoing involvement with the past and in our search to make sense of it. Though something about the past is undoubtedly no longer accessible to us, we try to represent it in the present relying on the traces that remain. We do so through memory, and the writing and reading of history. But memory can be extremely porous and is often unreliable, while historical accounts, since they cannot represent the past “as it really was”, are at best, partial, and are therefore subject to the charge that they misrepresent, rather than represent, the past. This, in a nutshell, is the issue that historians and philosophers of history but also literary critics continue to grapple with at least since the big bang of postmodernity. The debate, which centres principally on the relationship between memory and history, seems to have taken a dramatic turn in the last decades when history’ s claim to truthful representation of the past has become the target of fierce criticism. Indeed, the postmodern crisis of representation and the focus on the issue of textuality and interpretation has brought together history and literature, the historian and the literary critic. The dividing line between the two categories-- which corresponded roughly to Emile Benveniste’s opposed concepts of “discours” and “histoire” – seems to have vanished with the collapse of these categories, which have come to be seen as two instances of discourse. In fact, “histoire” and “discours” contain an undeniable degree of subjectivity and interpretation. Consequently, the historian’s claims to unquestioned objectivity, neutrality, and totality of “facts” have become matter for debate. Although history is an imperfect narrative always open to contention, it remains possible for the historian to revise it with as much disinterested objectivity as can be humanly mustered. The concern with solid facts and reasoned truth bring history closer to human knowledge in comparison to the chaotic and poetic character of human memory. Nevertheless the


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writing/narrating of history has not been the exclusive work of historians; it has also been that of artists and writers. It is significant that in French for example the word histoire is used for both "history" and "story." This signifies that history as a scriptural activity follows the same technical procedures that are found in fiction. Thus historians, like storytellers, are also concerned with “the creation” of characters and shaping their stories with a rhetorical sense needed to confront their audience's expectations and to bring the past to life. Furthermore, when testimonies or histories comprise eyewitness accounts of events, worldviews, interpretations, analyses, and historical judgments, memory and history are brought together. French historians Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora and philosopher Paul Ricoeur, have examined the complex interaction between history and memory extensively. Their work triggered a more expansive and yet critical attitude toward both history and memory. Thus Memory and its diverse forms, written or oral; collective or individual; affective, analytic, or artistic, have become an object of concentrated inquiry by historians. Their main questions revolve around the point when memory becomes a part of history; the selection of what memory is to be passed on to future generations and who does that, the actual relation of art and history, and of history and memory. These issues and others contributed to a redefining of history as totally opposed to memory. Where the first is an intellectual, analytical and critical reconstruction of the past, the second is more intimate, affective, magical, almost sacred, and concretely rooted in spaces, gestures, images, and objects. Thus for Pierre Nora history is a static and always problematic and incomplete reconstruction of that which no longer exists. Memory, on the other hand is dynamic; it is an actual phenomenon open to the dialectic of remembrance and forgetting (xix). Whereas History is mainly about how our hopelessly forgetful modern societies, driven by change, organize the past, memory is life itself, vulnerable to the vicissitudes of our time, nourishing recollection, yet responsive to trends, including censorship. (xix). In fact the idea of a total history backed by a global memory has given way to decentered microhistories and to a multiplicity of memories. The will to remember or the conscious effort to limit forgetfulness is at the origin of the creation of what Nora calls --lieux de mémoire which are the products of the interaction between history and memory, of the interplay between the personal and the collective. According to Pierre Nora the lieux de mémoire “are born and are nourished by the feeling that no spontaneous memory exists, that we must create archives, maintain anniversaries, organize celebrations, pronounce eulogies, …etc. Without commemorative vigilance, history will wipe them out." (xxiv). Whether deliberately or not, individual or collective memory selects certain landmarks of the past--places, artworks, dates; persons, public or private,

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well known or obscure, real or imagined--and invests them with symbolic and political significance. Thus a lieu de mémoire may be historical or legendary event or figure, a book or an era, a place or an idea. From a historian’s perspective these are nostalgic testimonies that something did exist and that it is its absence and not its presence that is commemorated. However, for an artist memory and its traces can be the sign of an eternal presence. Memory can in effect fill the “gaps” left behind by the historian’s search for a more “objective” and thus universal presentation of the past. Memory, because it is more intimate and close, has more significance for the individual as well as for the group. In this perspective, the monumental work of Edmond Amran Elmaleh adopts a narrative ethics where what paul Ricoeur calls “le vœu de fidélité de la mémoire” (memory’s wish or aspiration to faithfulness) and “l’intention de vérité de l’histoire”97 (history’s intention of truth) converge to conjure up the presence/absence of the Jewish community in the Moroccan socio-cultural space. El Maleh brings together fiction autobiography, and historical memory in an ethically charged narrative whose complexity attests to the weight of the personal and collective heritage. The task of representing a historical component of the culture and history of Morocco faces a conglomerate of unfavourable factors (the shrinking community in the country, the political context and forgetfulness). The author’s ”writing-memory “l’écriture-mémoire attempts to re-inscribes cultural pluralism and heterogeneity in the historical record. Employing a highly poetic style the narrative operates beyond the narrow patterns of both nostalgic and historiographic compositions to strengthen the weight of what can be called, after Edouard Glissant, a poetics of relation based on the idea that a shared narrative is central to individual and collective identity. Edmond Amran El Maleh who is a Moroccan Jewish writer did not start his writing career until late in his life when he published four volumes the first of which is Parcours Immobile,(1980) followed by Eilen ou La Nuit du Récit (1983). The other two Mille Ans Un Jour and Le Retour D’Abou El Haki, followed a few years later. El Maleh’s itinerary started with politics as member and later as the leader of the Moroccan communist party, and continued with his involvement in the struggle for independence in the fifties of the last century. His political commitment caused him to be persecuted and imprisoned first by the colonial authorities and later by the Moroccan police. Of that period he says he was not a politician but an idealist who believed that there was an ideal that he and others could change the world:

97 Paul Ricoeur, “Entre la Mémoire et l’Histoire” Tr@nsit online, Nr. 22/2002. (February 1st, 2006) http:// www.transitonline.nr


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…quand j’ai adhéré au PC en 1945, à Casablanca, où vivait ma famille, il y avait un idéal. S’est greffé pour moi le désir d’indépendance, de liberté. Sur le terrain, notre action transcendait le réel. On rêvait d’une humanité nouvelle, de la chaleur, de la fraternité.“98 [When I joined the Communist Party in 1945, in Casablanca where my familly lived, there was an ideal. The desire for independence, for freedom grafted itself on me. In the real world, our action transcended reality. We were dreaming of a new humanity, of warmth and of fraternity] However, what makes this itinerary an outstanding one is that the facts of ethnicity and culture played a determining role; like Aissa the protagonist of his narrative, El Maleh was a young man from the Moroccan Jewish Bourgeoisie who grew up in the medina: Et tout mon parcours a été déterminé par mon statut de jeune juif, provenant d’une famille bourgeoise, plongé au cœur du peuple. Je me suis retrouvé, du jour au lendemain, partageant la vie de fellahs, de dockers. Grâce à ces gens, j’ai découvert en moi le Marocain vivant, partageant la harira avec les gens, habitant dans des douars, etc. Tout cela m’a métamorphosé. Ce capital inestimable, j’en tire une grande fierté et il m’en est resté une admiration, un attachement, au peuple marocain. [and my entire itinerary was determined by my status as a young Jew, coming from a bourgeois family, and plunged into the heart of the people. Overnight I found myself sharing the life of peasants, and of Dockers. Thanks to these people, I discovered in myself the Moroccan citizen, living and sharing Harira (Soup) with people, living in villages …etc. All of this has transformed me. This invaluable richness is a source of great pride for me, and I keep from it an admiration for, and an attachment to the Moroccan people.]

The author’s attachment to the reality of his country is all the more significant considering the process of assimilation that the Jewish community of morocco was subjected to by the colonial authorities. El Maleh does not deny that assimilation was complacently accepted by his community especially in the cities, yet he blames it for the gap that it created between the Moslems and the Jews in the country. In a sense it was a prelude to their subsequent massive emigration. In Parcours Immobile we find instances of his satirical description of the assimilation process that started since the early years of the French colonization: a character, Ruben is described as being dressed in European clothing but as he was used only to traditional Moroccan dress (djellaba) he could not adjust to the French suit so he kept moving his shoulders backward and forward, a gesture meant to straighten the djellaba over his back: 98 Driss Ksikes, “Interview, Edmond Amran El Maleh : Je ne suis pas juif marocain, mais Marocain juif” http://www.telquel-online.com/101/sujet6.shtml (01/02/2006)

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Chapter Fourteen Habillé à l’européenne, hier encore en djellaba noire, calotte noire, souliers ou babouches, la conquête a commencé par le bas, […] un mouvement d’arrière en avant : bien asseoir la djellaba sur les épaules “allah ihdik ruben. C’est un veston. (26) [Dressed in European fashion, yesterday still in a black djellaba and black calotte, shoes or babouches, conquest started from below, […] a movement from back to front: correctly seating the djellaba on the shoulders “come on ruben. It’s a jacket”]

Elmaleh traces the alienating process and the ultimate assimilation of the middle class Moroccan Jewish community to the exploitation of their desire for good education by the colonial authorities as can be seen from this report written by an officer of the French army who headed the “Bureau des affaires indigenes” when an ancestor, Haroun, went to ask for permission to open a Jewish School in Safi “nous avons intérêt, me semble -t-il, à nous appuyer sur la communauté juive qui paraît bien disposée à notre égard, étant donné surtout le prix qu’elle accorde à l’enseignement. “ (P.I. 43)99. Clearly, Parcours Immobile initiates a meditation on how the process of assimilation aided by the international context (the Zionist movement and the creation of Israel) initiated the progressive alienation of the Moroccan Jews who gradually started to feel less at home in their country and to become psychologically prepared to migrate. Seen from this perspective, El Maleh’s first book is a reflection on how the Hagada i.e., the tale of the exodus, constitutes a pattern in Jewish history, an eternal return of the same. No Egypt, no Moses here, yet this new Jewish exodus seems a re-enactment of an ancestral urge to depart. Significantly enough, Parcours Immobile opens on a cemetery, a “lieu de mémoire”, yet not just a sign of absence, but a palpable presence and a will to fight oblivion. The scene describes a man overcome by an inexpressible feeling as he stood among the abandoned, overgrown, and ocean-sprayed graves in the Jewish cemetery of Asilah. The last to date grave is that of the last Jew of Asilah, a certain Nahon who died in 1966. They are all gone, dead or exiled. Of this inaugural moment he says: “C’est en tant que Marocain profondément enraciné dans la réalité du pays que la blessure, la cassure produite par cet exode est thématisée, explorée, développée, reprise en différents récits tout au long d’une expérience vécue. (Entretiens, 74). [It is as a Moroccan who is deeply rooted in the the country’s reality that the wound, the break, produced by this exodus is thematized, explored, developed, reused in different narratives all along a lived experience.] 99 [it is in our interest, it seems to me , to rely on the Jewish community that appears well disposed towards us, considering especially the value that it grants to education]


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From the outset then, the book sets the tone, the Moroccan Jewish community, by far the largest in North Africa, is no more. Its “destiny” had been accomplished by the disappearance of the last Jew of Asilah. the signs of absence are overwhelming: the local cemetery, the closed synagogues, recent memories and tales of trade and business relations, neighbourly and family ties, friendships… We may in fact easily concede that writing memory is always already a confession of loss and absence, yet presence is more powerful. Haroun, the protagonist’s ancestor who was also a great traveller, is both present and absent as the narrator examines some of his pictures: “Haroun était là et nulle part Haroun était là lui d’autres personne”100 (32). Haroun is the infinitely recurrent story of departure, that foretells the fortune of a whole community doomed to disappear: une voix parlait dans ce silence , une résonance familière et pourtant d’ailleurs, une histoire se disait se perdait et pourtant revenait inlassablement, le mouvement infiniment recommence des vagues, une histoire anonyme sans visage ou Presque: Haroun! Haroun ! quelque chose a commencé avec toi, quelque chose s’est achevé avec toi. (32) [a voice spoke in this silence, a familiar and yet foreign resonance, a story was being told was lost and yet was coming back tirelessly, the infinitely repeated movement of the waves, an anonymous story without a face or almost: Haroun! Haroun! something began with you, something ended with you.]

The narrative therefore works to turn absence into presence. For El Maleh, the loss of an entire community is transposed into a utopia that while it is dead, it actually never dies. In fact, the value of the lost world is affirmed the moment one feels its loss: “Un monde qui meurt et qui en même temps revit sous la forme d’une expérience existentielle, […] fait surgir les valeurs silencieuses découvertes seulement après. ”101 (Entretiens, 74). The narrative represents an attempt to salvage memory from the generalized amnesia in hope that what had been an example of living together could be a lesson in peaceful coexistence in a world of intolerance. This is what one Moroccan critic, Salim Jay, perceived when he described El Maleh in Dictionnaire des Ecrivains du Maroc as “Mémorialiste qui semble voué à lire dans le passé les raisons et les causes de l’avenir[…]“ (177)102. Evidently, El Maleh does not revisit the past with nostalgia but with a concern for the actual and future state of human relations. His narrative presents the historical 100

[Haroun was here and nowhere Haroun was here himself others no one] [A world that dies and that relives at the same time under the shape of an existential experience, […] brings out silent values discovered only afterwards.] 102 [A memorialist who seems devoted to read in the past the reasons and causes of the future] 101

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experience of coexistence between different religions in Morocco as still holding possibilities for the present as well as for the future. Narrating the past from that perspective is, as Elizabeth Wesseling remarked about postmodernist writers, “writing history as a prophet” and that “means recording the past with an eye to the future, in the hope that prematurely crushed possibilities may yet be realized.”(1992, 178) It must be made clear then that El Maleh’s narrative is not “une oeuvre de circonstances” i.e. a book written for the sole purpose of glorifying the past and deprecating the present. It is a great work of literature that traces not only the political and literary itinerary of the author, but also the rise of a nation, its cultural diversity and the historical presence of jewish culture in it, its struggle for independence, and its postcolonial disappointments and strife. Parcours Immobile is thus traversed by a narrative ethics that aim to give every component its due share. This “writing-memory” (écriture-mémoire) does not approach the Moroccan past from an exclusively jewish point of view, but from that of a Moroccan citizen who rejects the reduction of identity to race and creed: Je suis hostile au judéo-centrisme, dont on commence à voir les méfaits. Donc, je ne parle pas à partir d’une conviction ou d’un point de vue juif. En parlant d’une position marocaine, cela n’a rien de nationaliste. Je n’ai pas de visée politique, mais juste une appartenance à la réalité de mon pays.” (Telquel) [I am hostile to judeo-centrism, of which we begin to see the wrongdoings. Therefore, I don't speak from a conviction or from Jewish point of view. Speaking from a Moroccan position doesn't mean I am a nationalist. I don't have any political goals, but just an adherence to the reality of my country.]

More than just reviving a forgotten side of Moroccan social history, the author seeks to uncover the deep rootedness of Jewish presence in the Moroccan reality, history and culture,103 a fact that reminds everyone that in this country religious coexistence is not just a temporary political slogan but a historical reality. As a semi-autobiographical novel, Parcours immobile is the narrative of Josua/Aissa’ s life over a period of Moroccan history extending from the dawn of the colonial period to the first decades of independence. Josua/Aissa, whose life experiences share a lot with those of the author himself, is a young Moroccan who got involved in the political struggle for national independence as a result of a series of encounters with workers, peasants, and Dockers in 103

for a historical study of this subject see Haim Zafrani’s Deux Mille Ans de Vie Juive au Maroc (Paris: maison neuve et La rose, 1983 & 1998, Casablanca: Eddif, 2000) among others.


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Casablanca harbour. In its portrait of the artist as a young militant, the novel also describes the rise and fall of the Moroccan Jewish community, and attempts to re-inscribe plurality into national history with a view of correcting the record and raising the consciousness of the modern Moroccan (but also the foreign) reader to the reality of his country’s history. The gesture could be seen not just as an act of resistance against any ideologically and politically motivated desire for purification, but also as testimony to the whole world that the contemporary grim realities of intolerance and violence have little historical ground, if not none at all. This outlines an ethico-poetical position that consists in reconciling the aesthetic requirements of narrative with the imperatives of memory and history. In this sense, the highly poetic language in which the narrator’s reminiscences are related expresses not only the emotional impact such remembrances have on him and the feelings they trigger, but also the profound and the existential truth and presence of a historical reality. The author’s insists on his rootedness to his country’s reality because it was one in which communality and living together between Arabs, Berbers, and Jews transcended ethnic and religious differences: J’en viens à l’idée que juifs et musulmans ont partagé le même destin, pour le bien comme pour le pire, partagé une langue, l’arabe ou le berbère, un imaginaire, tout ce qui fait la vie d’un homme. (Telquel) [I come to the idea that Jews and Moslems shared the same destiny, for better or worse, shared a language, Arabic or Berber, an imaginaire, everything that makes a man's life.]

From the standpoint of ethics there is a kind of primacy of the other-thanself over the self, so that the narrative unity of a life is made up of the moments of its responsiveness to others. Therefore the author’s ethical concerns make Josua/Aissa’s personal identity, which after all is a narrative identity,104 meaningful only in and through its involvement with others. The complexity of his narrative reminds us that the writer does not reduce reality to one unique interpretation, just as he does not despair of a “happy pluralism” in the future. El Maleh revisits the sites (lieux) of memory and identity, explores the relations between individual and collective memory, history and experience, following the itinerary of the great dream of secular pluralism, tolerance and multiculturalism. In fact, narrative ethics in Parcours Immobile work on many levels to avoid critical reductions of the book to a simple act of testimony, an eyewitness account that posits its performer as the holder of the ultimate truth. For we all 104

Narrative identity is a concept developed by Paul Ricoeur in Temps et RécitIII (1985) and Taken up again in Soi-même comme un Autre (1990)

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know that memory does not function as a tape on which sequences of events are recorded, memory as the protagonist of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children says, “selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events.” (211) In other words, the boundary between memory and creative imagination is extremely thin. Memory is creative, and its creativeness is not to be understood as a license to forge history, but to bring out the forceful moments and events that hold meaning for the community and the destiny of the nation at large. Thus, El Maleh positions his narrative on the overlapping territories of history and creative fiction, a positioning that forestalls possible historians’ oppositions. In fact, the narrative is not only based on personal memory but also on collective memory of shared family and community histories. In this respect, two types of memory-triggering devices are used: the first category consists of personal and intimate devices such as a set of postcards and a family album of photographs that, like Proust’s Madeleine, bring back images, voices, stories, names, and events from the past: Maintenant devant moi ce jeu de cartes postales: tenter de recomposer une vie pas à pas à partir de ces images muettes des feuilles mortes dérisoires souvenirs de cartons” (33). [Now before me this set of post cards: try step by step to recompose a life from these mute pictures dead leaves derisory memories of cardboards]

The second one consists of what we may call, after Pierre Nora, “lieux de Mémoire”: cities like Essaouira, Safi, Asilah, Casablanca, but also streets, culinary art, abandoned houses and closed synagogues. While the first category of devices foreground the personal and intimate version of memory, the second extends it to include the public and collective recollection. Both are effectively intertwined so as to underscore the necessity of an anamnesis to counter the unceasing attacks of oblivion. Seen from the perspective of the “duty to memory” (le devoir de mémoire) Parcours Immobile is more than just attesting the truth of a certain historical reality. (Je ne me reconnais pas dans ces juifs qui ont écrit, de l’extérieur, pour prendre acte qu’ils ont vécu au Maroc comme "un corps étranger" et qu’à un moment donné, ils ont été rejetés.) It is to remind the present of the diversity, the plurality of its past; to stand up against the homogenizing and purifying temptations of the present; to stress the plurality of the culture when society is tempted to rid itself of its foundational differences, to renew our visions of the past and to widen our perspective on the present/future so that the historical reality may open possibilities for the yet-to-come.


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Works Cited Edmond Amran El maleh. Parcours Immobile. 1980. Paris : André Dimanche, 2000. Jacques le Goff, Histoire et mémoire. Paris: Gallimard, 1988. Jacques le Goff & Pierre Nora, eds. Faire de l'histoire, 3 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1974. Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit: le temps raconté. Paris: Seuil, 1985. ———. Soi-même Comme un autre. Paris : Seuil, 1990. ———. La M’moire, L’histoire, L’oubli. Paris : Seuil, 2000. Pierre Nora, Les Lieux de mémoire Salman Rushdie.Midnight’s Children.1981. London: Picador, 1982. Wesseling, Elizabeth. Writing History as a Prophet: Postmodernist Innovations of the Historical Novel. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1992. Marie Redonnet. Entretiens avec Edmond Amran El Maleh. Paris : La Pensée Sauvage, 2005.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN CARTOGRAPHY AND THE CONTINGENT SUBJECT IN MORGAN YASBINCEK’S LIV JENNIFER WAWRZINEK

Morgan Yasbincek is a Croatian/Australian writer whose novel in fragments, liv, is situated within the cultural and linguistic landscape of an Australian society which has been informed by successive waves of immigration. Whilst the British colonists brought the English language to Australian shores in 1788, suppressing the indigenous Australian voice and instituting English as the formal language of colonised society, Australian government statistics in 2005 point to a cultural and linguistic diversity that includes the number of immigration source countries as a staggering 185. Most of the formal migration programs were conducted by the Australian government during the twentieth century. The largest of these was the one that followed the end of the Second World War, when Australia was experiencing labour shortages and millions of people had been displaced from their homelands. The Australian Department of Immigration lists the number of immigrant arrivals in Australia since 1945 as almost six million.105 In the post-war years, this was mostly the result of government assisted passage agreements with several European countries and formal agreements with the International Refugee Organisation to resettle displaced persons from camps across Europe. During the fifties and sixties, large numbers of migrants left the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Greece and the former Yugoslavia for a new life on the Australian continent. But despite the cultural and linguistic melange created by such diverse patterns of immigration, government statistics list the cultural make-up of contemporary Australian society as 74% Anglo-Celtic. For the other 24% the question remains one of how to effect the transition between cultures, languages and states of being; how, in effect, to live in a language that is not one’s own? Yasbincek’s novel liv examines the effects of war trauma and geographic dislocation from the differing viewpoints within one family of Croatian 105

Australian Department of Immigration website: www. immi.gov.au/facts/


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immigrants living in the Western Australian suburbs, situating its protagonist, Olivia, within a narrative fabric where memories of war and trauma in the former Yugoslavia continually impact upon the everyday occurrences of contemporary Australian life. Yasbincek uses the trope of the Rainbow Serpent as a way of moving through these fragments, where the various moments jostle and collide up against each other to create multiple connections, entryways and exits. This process allows a subject to emerge that is contingent and always open to (re)negotiation. It allows the cohabitation of differences and tolerates tensions between oppositional states as a generative moment that allows further renegotiations of territory. Here, traditional notions of the transcendent and autonomous subject, the subject who says ‘I’, become irrelevant. Identity is always necessarily contingent upon systems that allow heterogenous structures and forms to coexist, even what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the “despotic signifier” that destroys sequences and free movement, linearizes narratives and “uses the bricks as so many immobile units for the construction of an imperial Great Wall of China.”106 Traditional means of affirming identity are predicated on a system of overcoming and domination that typically reinscribes a division between self and other as well as the position of the marginalised and the abject. Here, the structure of the sublime provides a useful paradigm with which to understand the power dynamics inherent within this struggle. In the Kantian and Hegelian sublime, the notion of transcendence involves a disassociation between form and content, and a movement beyond the threshold of consciousness and narrative form, thus reinstating the imperatives of the dialectic as one that is predicated on exclusion. In the Kantian sublime, the alienation between imagination and reason, between self and other, must be continually reinscribed for the (re)assertions of hegemonic forms of power through the transposition of loss into gain, instantiated through the necessities of a sublime informed by the negative principle. The totalising work of these forms of the sublime, with their deference to an absolute value, even if this value cannot be known, ensures the exclusion of the abject body from the canons of good taste. The moment of transport that effects the closure of the sublime as the incorporation of an overwhelming power reinscribes dialectical hierarchies and ensures the abjection of the unsayable from the perimeters of acceptable discourse. The structures in liv, however, refuse final and complete transcendence and configure the subject instead as a process of becoming and transformation that remains open to multiple determinations, and where the textual landscape figures reading as a cartographic process that follows movements and 106

Gilles Deleuze, and Guattari, Félix, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Hurley, Seem and Lane, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983) 40.

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disjunctions between the various moments of the narrative. This dynamic of production and metamorphosis without possession or incorporation is what Patricia Yaeger identifies as the primary feature of a horizontal sublime, which she essentializes as specifically feminine, using the trope of menstrual blood as the “female fluid pas excellence” to suggest a mode of representation that can “rearticulate and praise our bodily beginnings”.107 This reading of the sublime is indeed useful in deconstructing the oppositions between corporeal abjection and transcendence but its articulation as a feminine mode of being rescripts the binary divisions between self and other underwriting the very form of the sublime that it seeks to criticise. Yasbincek’s novel uses fragmentation and the serpentine movements and pulsations of the snake to move beyond such categorical distinctions to gesture towards heterogenous forms of difference that are contingent and ambiguous, so that forms of naming, and identity, are continually open to (re)negotiation. Deleuze and Guattari describe the process of leaving one territory to move towards another as ‘deterritorialisation’, where the resultant flows liberate other flows that extend beyond the notion of the individual in order to move through un unorganised social field. Rather than ascending towards a singular transcendent signifier, the process of deterritorialisation short-cuts the appeal to dominant forms of reality that function as principles of subjectivisation and defines instead what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as “an unlimited number of stationary, metastable states through which a subject passes”.108 Within this system there can be no mother tongue, only an unyielding reterritorialisation with a “power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity.”109 In liv, the grandmother, Lydia, accepts the primacy of hierarchical structures by struggling to assimilate and integrate into a system where subject positions and channels of communication are pre-determined. In other words, these systems pre-exist the individual who must enact a form of mimicry against a preordained Ideal in order to adopt an authorised speaking position. For Lydia, this means that her body is always already coded racially and sexually as other, and her social position always already marginalised and abjected. As I have shown earlier, there is always an alchemical remainder to this process, with the deference to an absolute value resulting in the abjection of the grotesque, or what simply cannot be incorporated. When Lydia misappropriates the English language with phrases such as “I voz gone to Fremantle, She voz laughed to me”, inadvertently configuring the phrase in its 107 Patricia Yaegar , “The ‘Language of Blood’: Toward a Maternal Sublime” Genre, Vol. XXV (Spring 1992): 18. 108 Gilles Deleuze and Guattari, Félix. Anti-Oedipus,19. 109 Gilles Deleuze, and Guattari, Félix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: The Athlone Press, 1988) 7.


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passive sense, her response is to attack the detritus of her misplaced inhabitation with her vacuum cleaner. In an attempt to erase the signs of not only her own abjection, but that of her daughter and granddaughters, Lydia “sucks up Sancha’s ash, dried-up Milo granules from the drink that Adrienne let soak into her carpet and the knotted, excessive words. She carries the bag into the rubbish bin out the front by the letterbox. Her lips grip together so nothing can jump back in.”110 This inability to move through the fragmentation that is the result of her culturally and linguistically hybrid position, together with her resistance to the dynamic forces that elsewhere in the novel open up lines of flight towards other modes of being, ensures Lydia’s silence in the face of an organisation that stratifies and fixes structural configurations in place and restores power to the absolute. We see this most clearly in the confrontation with another overwhelming force, that of Cyclone Alby. The cyclone causes a blackout and Lydia rushes her pots and pans outside to the barbeque in order to finish her cooking. Yasbincek writes that “the wind was so wild with dust that you couldn’t see her from the back door. She just vanished right into another dimension, like something from the Twilight Zone or Star Trek. There were moments of shadow as she reformed, then shape and colour. She stood on the back step, hair blown out of its combs, with a pot of beans in her hands”.111 The tension here between Cyclone Alby’s force of absolute deterritorialisation and Lydia’s adherence to the despotic signifier means that Lydia emerges from her momentary dissimulation and disappearance as a frozen caricature, immobile on the rear steps just outside the boundary of the family home. The polydimensional structure of liv means that there is never an absolute totality or a single and unified point of view, despite the presence of the ‘despotic signifier’. It is possible to approach the narrative of liv from any direction and at any point within the book, so that any progression from moment to moment enacts a cartographic process, or what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the ‘rhizome’. In fact, the rhizome is a botanical term which defines the subterraneous growth of a stem that puts out lateral shoots and adventitious roots at various intervals.112 In liv, however, the rhizomorphous nature of the fragmented narrative brings into play different regimes of signs and nonsign states, allowing the name to produce stems and filaments which then become open to new connections. In this way, the name can be reperformed differently. It is Lydia’s granddaughters, Adrienne and Olivia, who perform deterritorialisations upon the English language with their seemingly innocuous word game, the purpose of which is to have a conversation using only one word, 110

Morgan Yasbincek,. liv. ( Freemantle: Freemantle Arts Centre Press, 2000) 41. Ibid., 136-7. 112 Lesley Brown, ed. New Shorter Oxford Dictionary, Vol. 2. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) 2588. 111

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in this case, tomato. The sentence, “Tomato tomato tomatotomatotomato tomato tomatotomato”, and the reply, “Tomato? Tomato tomato tom ato”113, highlight the ways in which language can be decomposed and recomposed, loosening the term ‘tomato’ from its chain of signification in order to reposition it within a system that is transcursive, where it can be attached to different dimensions of various multiplicities. In this sense, even the transposition of the proper name, Olivia, into its truncated and lower case form, liv, attests to the position of the subject within a narrative structure where subjectivity is always on the point of becoming, or becoming other. In other words, formalised structures and proper names, fixed identities and subject positions that compel self-enforced repetition without change, as we saw in the case of Lydia, are destabilised through breakdowns in the molar aggregates that stabilise identity. What is important here are the disjunctions and moments of instability caused by such breakdowns, placing emphasis not on the convergence of random elements within one specific location (where the contingent subject emerges), but rather on the flows and synaptic pulsations that traverse these convergences. These movements are random and unpredictable, but suggest what Tamsin Lorraine argues are the contours of a self with a “rich sense of connectedness, an inevitable and mutually informing contact with a surrounding terrain, and the arbitrariness of staking out one’s boundaries.”114 In liv, Yasbincek continually returns to the trope of the snake in order to emphasise the cross-circuiting of series and the connection of heterogenous singularities, such that novel configurations are produced not only on a linguistic level, but also on a corporeal level. The snake here is not an actual or metaphorical snake, but what we might call a ‘becoming-snake’. Tamsin Lorraine notes that becomings are “encounters that engage the subject at the limits of the corporeal and conceptual logics already formed and so bring on the destabilisation of conscious awareness.”115 It is this interaction that forces the textual body to shift ground, producing and dissipating subjective alignments, so that, in the words of Antonin Artaud, “one’s entire soul flows into this emotion that makes the mind aware of the terribly disturbing sound of matter, and passes through its white-hot flame.”116 Scientific studies of the snake have identified four types of motion: lateral undulation, rectilinear locomotion, concertina progression, and sidewinding.”117 113

Yasbincek,. Liv., 123. Tamsin, Lorraine, Irigaray and Deleuze: Experiments in Visceral Philosophy, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999) 125. 115 Ibid., 182. 116 Artaud in Gilles Deleuze and Guattari, Félix, Anti-Oedipus, 19. 117 Carl Gans, “How Snakes Move” in Vertebrate Structures and Functions (San Francisco: WH Freeman and Co., 1974) 40. 114


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Carl Gans notes, however, that snakes often move in several of these directions at once, and that “as the snake travels its parts move and accelerate at different speeds.”118 Yasbincek’s becoming-snake not only moves in multiple directions but prioritises touch and connection as forms of participation where the subject is no longer the sole agent of what transpires. In liv, this process finds its apotheosis at the moment when Olivia goes on a picnic with her family and climbs to the top of a hill overlooking the river estuary. In her description of the movements of a group of people working on the sandbanks, the articulation of the subject within the context of a systemic network is foregrounded through a specificity that emerges only to dissolve into the overall hum of the organism: A line of people are making their way out along the bank. Each has a pole with a scrap of colour struggling to free itself at the top. More people are gathering on the shore and lifting poles out of the sand. Each is loyal to their colour, wants to see their colour set free. . . . Even from here, Olivia knows that within them a singing has begun, a hum that happens in moments of harmony, a collective inaudible purr that is particularly shy and vulnerable to shame and mockery. A woman with reddish-blonde frizzy hair is running up and down the limping rainbow, shouting. The rainbow staggers at these points. In one place it even bows out into the river. These points are where there are breaks in the thread of the hum. They reform as she moves on and the hum continues its flow. Eventually there is an enormous rainbow ribboning out into the brown river. It sways and gyrates, like a charmed snake trying to make sense of its charmer. The hum travels up and down its spine in a hot current of shuddering coloured silk.119

The forming, breaking and reforming of the becoming-snake, and the staggering at moments of collision or confrontation with the shouting voice, challenges conventional boundaries and unsettles any coherent notion of self and identity. The subject in liv is not contained by the mnemonic traces of past experiences but deterritorializes from habitual patterns through coming into contact with fresh stimuli. The scene of becoming-snake pulses and reverberates with life in an action that releases lines of flight from the organism to allow connections on other levels and at other points throughout the narrative. Indeed, the sonorous hum that issues from the movement suggests that the vibration of sequences as they open out onto unexpected intensities, or what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as an “asignifying intensive utilisation of language”,120 liberates an expressive material with no need of being contained within form. The sound 118

Ibid., 38. Yasbincek, liv., 118-119. 120 Gilles Deleuze and Guattari, F. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986: p.22. 119

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here issues forth but escapes signification. It acts upon other terms within the sequence – the colours of the rainbow, or the woman with red, frizzy hair – but its expression is unformalized and intrinsically connected to its own abolition within the hot current of shuddering colours. The figuration of becoming-snake raises questions about the silences that result from an unyielding territorialisation, or what I discussed earlier as the workings of the despotic signifier. The various elements that make up this scene on the riverbank – the serpentine movement, rainbow colours, and the riverside location in the countryside near the city of Perth – suggest rhizomorphous connections with voices outside of this text which have been effaced and rescripted by the processes of colonisation. The indigenous Australian myth of the Rainbow Serpent, which is known also in the Swan Valley as Waugul121, is clearly significant here. Within indigenous societies, the Rainbow Serpent myth is used to delineate the combination of various binary oppositions as a form of intertwining. Anthropological studies suggest that the Rainbow Serpent’s combination of oppositional qualities represents a grotesque parade of beings that destabilise any preconceived notion of representation. Kenneth Maddock notes, for instance, that the myth suggests forms who are “male but have a womb or female breasts, who are down in the water but up in the sky, who are one but father and son and brothers, who . . . look like a snake but also like a woman”.122 The vibration of Yasbincek’s becoming-snake scene on the riverbank with the unspoken aboriginal presence in the form of the Waugul myth makes allusions towards the dissimulation and erasure of the indigenous Australian voice within the cultural and linguistic Australian landscape, attesting to a past where British colonisation resulted not only in the deaths of a significant percentage of the indigenous population and the disappearance of entire communities, but also the reinscription and retracing of physical landscapes with the narratives of European settlement. The indirect presence of the mythical Rainbow Serpent within the polydimensional structures of liv, compels us to pay attention to the dangers of stasis, and to systems that require assimilation according to fixed categories based on preexisting Ideals. The nomadic movements that traverse the multiplicitous narratives and moments within liv, ensure the contingency of the subject and the nominal as that which is always open to rejuxtaposition and renegotiation with other terms that may inform the subject differently. In the final paragraph of liv, Yasbincek emphasises the importance of the hybrid subject that is always on the point of becoming: “My body is the country where fragmented subjectivities jostle for relativity, proximity. They don’t all originate with me. I am their drive. I am the 121

Nyungah testimonial, www.west.com.au/pyrton/rainbow.html Kenneth Maddock, “Introduction” in The Rainbow Serpent: A Chromatic Piece, ed. Ira B. Buchler and Kenneth Maddock. (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1978)10. 122


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mother tongue and the second language and the idiolect.”123 It is this formulation of the contingent subject who emerges from a textual cartography of flows and conjunctions that allows the inhabitation of a dominant language to become a catalyst for the production of new possibilities.

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Yasbincek, liv., 300.

Part IV Exile, Migration, and Cultural Encounters

CHAPTER SIXTEEN WRITING IN/ON THE FRONT LINES OF EXILE: POLITICAL DISSIDENCE, MEMORY AND CULTURAL (DIS)LOCATION IN FRANCOPHONE LITERATURE OF THE MAGHREB VALERIE K. ORLANDO

This article analyses politically engaged works by francophone authors from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia who primarily live in exile either in the US or France. These writers contribute to a new literary consciousness that extends beyond the limits of national boundaries to found new political discourses that encourage the historical revision of colonial and postcolonial eras. Much of the corpus of writing d’expression française has been achieved in exile. Francophone novels, plays, and testimonials written by authors such as Salim Bachi (Le Chien d’Ulysse [Ulysses’ Dog], Algeria, 2001), Ali Bourequat (Dixhuit ans de solitude [Eighteen Years of Solitude], Morocco, 1993), Abdelwahab Meddeb (La Maladie d’Islam [The Sickness of Islam], Tunisia, 2002), Malika Mokeddem (La Transe des insoumis [The Trance of the Rebellious], Algeria, 2003) and Mohamed Mokeddem (Nuit Afghane [Afghan Night], Algeria, 2002) engage topics such as the growing pressures of globalization, conflicts between modernity and traditionalism, and the role of Islam in contemporary Maghrebian society. Dissidence and délocalisation --the dislocation, disassociation or departure from the home space-- have come to characterize the contemporary milieu and literature of some of the Maghreb’s most recent francophone authors. These authors I call the engagés,124 a French term I feel appropriate for describing the author as an activist, who promotes socio-political and cultural dialogues 124

. Laurent Seksik, book review in L’Expresse, March 8, 2001. np. David L. Schalk in his book, The Spectrum of Political Engagement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1979) explains that the word “‘Engagement’ was first used in scholarly studies after its importation from France” in the 19th century, 3-4.


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pertinent to his/her homeland. French humanist Jean Bessière stresses the term describes a means of existence in and by which the author is implicated actively in the development of the world, as he/she “opens a future of action.” 125 The French term “engagé” is pertinent because of its historical significance and its connotation which entreats a certain metaphysical quality that implicates the social as well as the political. David Schalk points out in The Spectrum of Political Engagement (1979) that the metaphysical content the word implies dates to Sartre’s existentialism, invoking the notion that intellectuals, thinkers, writers, and artists “take a position” that maintains the “conscience of humanity.”126 Today’s engaged Francophone authors of the Maghreb, as scholar Réda Bensmaia suggests, promote a “new literary consciousness [that] has…. rapidly moved beyond the limits of national boundaries to become open toBas well as to openBa field that is now planetwide.”127 The Francophone authors discussed here have chosen to risk alienation and/or State repercussions to “pensée-autre” –entreat a Thinking Other, or another way of thinking-- as Moroccan philosopher and author Abdelkebir Khatibi would say.128 The conscience of humanity is questioned and explored in the testimonial literature of Moroccan Ali and Midhat Bourequat, the socio-historical commentary of Tunisian Abdelwahab Meddeb, the theatrical works of Algerian playwright Alec Toumi Baylee and the socially engaging prose of novels by Algerians Salim Bachi, Malika Mokeddem and Mohamed Mokeddem. These works provide a context to the historical memory and trauma of the Maghreb while also offering analyses that foster better understanding of the contemporary socio-cultural and political contours of the region.129 In Maghrebian writing of French expression, pain and suffering are rendered on a universal level, transgressing the limits of national boundaries, ethnicities, cultures and religious convictions. The contemporary Maghrebian author writing in French always bears witness to, for, and about the Humanity that he/she seeks to claim through the written word. Whether they evoke the 125

. Jean Bessière, Les Écrivains engagés, (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1977), 13. . Schalk, 27. 127 . Réda Bensmaïa, Experimental Nations: Or the Invention of the Maghreb, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2003), 6. 128 . Here I’m referring to the term as defined in his work, Maghreb Pluriel, (Paris: Denoël, 1983). 129 . For a comprehensive study of how historical memory and trauma are documented in testimonial literature, see Shoshona Felman and Dori Laub,Testimony: Crisis of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (NY: Routledge, 1992). I am referencing here Dori Laub’s chapter, “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening” page 57. 126

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alienation and marginalization suffered due to imprisonment (as do Moroccans Ali and Midhat Bourequat, Ahmed Marzouki, and Mohamed Raiss), or threats made by religious extremists (as is the case of Algerians Malika Mokeddem, Mohamed Mokeddem and Alec Toumi Baylee), or promote political views that challenge the established order of history (evoked by Tunisians Abdelwahab Meddeb and Gisèle Halimi), the novel, political treatise, poem or play by authors of French expression, seeks to reveal the reality of the present day Maghreb. For exiled Maghrebian authors, the French language is a linguafranca appealing to the pan-African diaspora, and furnishes a means to look back and assess the home country through many lenses: the historical (before and after colonialism), the political (issues such as the rise of Islamic extremism, failed elections, and civil war) and the socio-cultural (encompassing subjects such as poverty, economics, and human rights).

Exile and its Many Faces “The place of writers, at home and in exile, acutely reflects social and political conditions,” writes Jane Guyer.130 Exile for most of the authors analysed here has provided a means to write politically engaged novels and testimonials that critique the socio-cultural climates of the contemporary Maghreb. Living in exile has shaped how Maghrebian authors formulate Bessière’s “future of action.” Algerian author Malika Mokeddem’s work cumulates into “the reinvention of identity—both personal and national.”131 Literary critic, Kofi Anyidoyo, proclaims that literature written in exile “functions as an implicit critique of the nation-state, or how claims of authority and tradition are negotiated in the anguished ambiguity of an embryonic diaspora community.”132 Although exile for Algerian authors such as Salim Bachi and Malika Mokeddem facilitates stepping outside of their Algerian experience to critique and relativize it, these exilés also confront specific hurdles. Edward Said describes the pain of exile as a double-edged sword. In Representations of the Intellectual, he states that exile “frees you from having always to proceed with caution.” However, he notes, it also means that “you are always going to be marginal…the exilic intellectual does not respond to the logic of the 130

. Jane Guyer. Forward to The Word Behind Bars and the Paradox of Exile, edited by Kofi Anyidoho, (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1997), i. 131 . Kofi Anyidoho, “Prison as Exile/Exile as Prison: Circumstance, Metaphor, and a Paradox of Modern African Literatures,” in The Word Behind Bars and the Paradox of Exile, edited by Kofi Anyidoho, Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1997, 3. 132 . Ibid.


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conventional but to the audacity of daring, and to representing change, to moving on, not standing still.”133 Said’s thoughts on the liberty that exile provides as far as effacing barriers so that the author can examine those places/experiences that have “never been traveled” is clearly evidenced in many novels by contemporary Maghrebian authors. Each novelist places his/her work in the in between space of the past/present and here/now realms of his/her experiences in and outside the Maghreb. Exile is the only means for them to hold onto a sense of self ---one’s country of birth and its history--- while allowing the conceptualization of a new space of perspective and insight. Yet, although often gratifying, the space of exile is not always a tranquil one. In her novel, La transe des insoumis, Malika Mokeddem comments on the death threats made against her by the Islamic extremists followers of the Front Islamique du Salut, which she endured in the 1990s even while living in France. Their coercion forced her to reject her country and her nationality, to live clandestinely, giving up any hope of returning to Algeria. She writes: “Je...observais alors de l’extérieur, de loin, ce corps et le persiflais: Crève sur place et que ton pays crève en toi. Moi, je suis devenue apatride!” [I...observe thus from the exterior, from afar, this body and the mocking. Die right here, and hope that your country dies in you. I have become a stateless person]. 134 The validity of states and nations, as scholar Christopher Miller reminds us, has been increasingly questioned by exiled authors such as Mokeddem who often, because of state authority, are persecuted, threatened, maimed and slain. On many occasions, in our postcolonial era, nationalist writing has been coopted by State ideology and, since the 1980s, revolutionary authors who write in the venue of Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi for example, promoting pure ideals of nationalism, have been threatened by authoritarian state apparati. Early Algerian authors, Kateb Yacine, Mohammed Dib, and Nabile Farès believed in, and extolled, the idea of nationhood in terms of what Frantz Fanon originally proposed in The Wretched of the Earth. Nationhood should be the key to developing a national identity and culture for peoples who, for so long, hadn’t had the freedom to enjoy them. However, in many instances, as our contemporary era has shown us, authors have been manipulated or muted by the very States they helped ideologically emerge from the shadows of colonialism. More recent authors, such as Algerian Salim Bachi and Malika Mokeddem, recontextualize the idea of the post-independent Algerian “state” as repressive. Their themes accuse the modern nation as being the product of a militant 133

. Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual, (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1996), 62-64. 134 . Malika Mokeddem, La transe des insoumis, (Paris : Grasset, 2003), 171. All English translations of Mokeddem’s work are my own.

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independence movement that, at one time, represented national freedom for all, but that has since done little to protect the Algerian people. Mokeddem and others are living in exile without nations. They therefore must be considered in a new category. Algerian scholar Reda Bensmaïa in his work, Experimental Nations: Or the Invention of the Maghreb, designates these new, wandering writers without states as the inhabitants of “experimental nations,” free spaces where authors live as nomads, not hindered by borders or state ideologies. Bensmaïa maintains that in borderless space, nomadic authors are able to “reappropriate their national heritage, to regain their idioms, and reconfigure their history, territory and community.” 135 Exile provides the only means for authors to critique objectively the sociopolitical structures that continue to disenfranchise common people living in the homeland. Their lives in exile “[become] an important instrument of combat, wielded in defence of those they have left behind at home.”136 Malika Mokeddem and Moroccan/French Ali Bourequat (former Tazmamart prisoner who was later threatened by the French state for publicly condemning the Moroccan-French drug trade), would admit that life as exiled nomads has allowed them the liberty in which to write.

Malika Mokeddem Malika Mokeddem’s recent novel, La transe des insoumis, is an autobiographical description of the split identity the author faces and has faced as she is caught between the “ici”/here of her exile in France and the “làbas”/over there, the identity she left in Algeria. The title of the novel also alludes to the reality of the author’s fragmented identity as a girl growing up in Algeria who had to stand up to the power of patriarchy, fighting a lonely battle to free herself from it. Her title is a play on words to be read as both a “trance” due to the “insomnie” –insomnia-- she has suffered since childhood, and the “insoumis” --the rebelliousness-- of a young Malika who had to fight family, tradition and religion in order to go to school, study, and eventually leave Algeria to attend medical school in France. In Mokeddem’s novel, insomnia and rebelliousness are inextricably linked. She attests that “It’s in a state of insomnia that lucidity is founded” and it is these lucid, wakeful moments that empower her to speak out about the reality of present day atrocities committed in Algeria:137

135

. Bensmaïa, 23 [page number needs to be checked]. . Anyidoho, 11-12. 137 . Mokeddem, 25. 136


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Je noircis des pages de cahiers, d’une écriture rageuse. J’en aurais crevé si je n’avais pas écrit. Sans ces salves de mots, la violence du pays, le désespoir de la séparation m’auraient explosée, pulvérisée. Les intégristes menacent de faire périr par le sabre ceux qui pèchent par la plume. Je fais partie de ceux qui cloués à une page ou un écran, répondent par des diatribes au délabrement de la vie, aux folies des couteaux, aux transes des kalachnikoves. [I have blackened the pages of notebooks with enraged writing. I would have died if I hadn’t written. Without the balm of words, the violence of the country, the hopelessness of separation would have exploded, pulverized, me. The fundamentalists threaten to kill by the saber those who sin with the pen. I’m one of those who, glued to the page or the screen, responds with diatribes about the sorry state of life, the whims of knives, the trances of machine guns.] 138

Mohamed Mokeddem In his novel, Nuit Afghane, Mohamed Mokeddem (no relation to Malika), documentary filmmaker and author, critiques the egregious violence of religious extremism and civil war that turned postcolonial Algeria upside down in the 1990s. Mokeddem is one of the many Algerian journalists, authors, and political figures, forced to flee to France and other parts of Europe during the 90s because of threats made against them by the Front Islamique du Salut, or FIS. Mokeddem’s work is exemplary of the figurative and physical marginalization of the exiled author. His narrative, like his own life, is never Asettled@ but, rather, vacillates between memory, reality, past, present, and two countries, cultures and languages. His is the life of a Abinational, a doublenational, intellectual who loves and hates himself for his split identity: AAllez comprendre! Le binational, cet Algérien-français, par définition et par expérience, refuse son semblable et le méprise parce qu’il lui reflète cette identité d’origine qu’il rejette sciemment, qu’il renie, qu’il refoule....Entre Français-algérien et Algérien-algérien, c’est toujours un combat entre chien et loup.... » [Come on try to understand ! The bi-national, this Français-Algerian, by definition and experience, refuses and despises his mirror-image because he reflects this identity that from the beginning he has wittingly rejected, that he denies, that he represses…Between French-Algerian and Algerian-Algerian, it’s always a battle between dog and wolf.] 139 The humiliation of this exile is most acutely felt by the Algerian who must turn to the Frenchman as his last resort as does Med, Mokeddem’s hero, when

138

. Ibid, 39. . Mohamed Mokeddem, Nuit Afghane, (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 76. All English translations of Mohamed Mokeddem’s work are my own. 139

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he realizes that the only way to save himself from being beheaded by the FIS is to seek a visa to France: Quelle douloureuse douleur que celle de supplier par le regard un homme qui vous fixe tout sourire, tout silence, de vous protéger en vous facilitant la fuite de votre propre pays, l’exil, alors qu’au fond, vous le soupçonnez lui peut-être, ou quelqu’un d’autre de sa famille, de son entourage, d’avoir froidement assassiné votre propre père, brûlé votre maison, chassé votre famille de ses terres pour la plonger dans l’ignorance, et vous n’osez pas le dire, l’Histoire, d’affirmer être un nouvel homme sans haine et sans rancœur! [What painful pain to have to endure the gaze of a man who fixes you with a smile, silence, who protects you in facilitating your departure from your own country, exile, while all along, you suspect him, or someone from his family, his entourage, to have coldly assassinated your own father, burnt your house down, chased your family off their land to plunge them into ignorance, and you don’t dare say anything, History, affirming that you are a new man without hate or resentment.]140

Nuit Afghane, compels us to reflect upon the state of present day Algeria, what Benjamin Stora describes as Aa tragedy behind closed doors,@ fuelled by the many failures, the Asymptomatic signs,@ as he suggests, of the postcolonial era. These signs of decay have manifested in the country in the forms of a disenfranchised population, economic ruin, extremists insurgency and civil war.141 In the closing pages, Mokeddem’s character mulls over the randomness of identity and nationality. What would he have been if born somewhere else? His cry is a universal one about the human condition that is circumscribed by nations, states, armies, religious zealots and terror: Qui n’aimerait naître ou renaître dans un pays de liberté et de paix, de pain et de lait, sans fascistes, sans Arabes, sans Juifs, sans Slaves, sans Asiatiques, sans Africains, sans Européens, sans Américains, seulement des êtres humains et des bêtes, seulement. [Who wouldn’t want to be born or reborn in a country of freedom and peace, with bread and milk, without fascists, without Arabs, without Jews, without Slavs, without Asians, without Africans, without Europeans, without Americans, only human beings and animals, only.]142

140

. Ibid, 99. 18. Stora’s work cited in Bernard Aresu’s article, “Translations of Memory from Kateb to Sansal,” L’Esprit créateur, 43: 1 (Spring 2003): 32B45, 32. 142 . Mokeddem, 123-4.


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Exile for Mokeddem is a double-edged sword. On one side it offers only Ale vide, celui de la solitude....le froid de l’exil@ [the emptiness, that of solitude…the cold of exile.]143 Yet, on the other, as he contemplates his memories of Algeria in his Parisian apartment, the author, like so many others enduring his same fate, also realizes that life in the margins, in exile, is the only means he has as an engaged activist author to Aunderstand what is happening to [himself] and to [his] own country.”144 For Mokeddem, APartir ailleurs,@ to leave, was the only solution to foster a process of making sense, free of violence and despair.145

Salim Bachi Salim Bachi’s first novel Le Chien d’Ulysse (2001)146 mirrors the fantastic, the grotesque, the carnivalesque, as well as the tragedy of Homer’s epic poemThe Odyssey while dwelling on the historic and recent events from 1988 to the present that make up Algeria’s bloody historiography. Bachi’s tale, a Kafkaesque journal told through the voice of principal protagonist, Hocine, reviews the memories and history of Algeria in an attempt to explain the violence that overtook the country in the 1990s. The young man, unlike his epic counterpart, only travels in his dreams and his nightmares. He is unable to escape the real-life violence taking place in the Algerian streets of his hometown during the rise of the FIS from 1988 to 1996. The desire to escape, to flee into exile, is experienced on several levels by most of the characters in Le Chien d’Ulysse. Indeed, Bachi’s title calls to mind the first epic voyage which was also a voyage of exile, since Homer’s hero was forced to leave his homeland to fight distant battles. The author succeeds in emotionally impregnating his readers with the chaos and suffering that has characterized particularly the history of Algeria in the post-independence era of the last thirty years. The violence of the recent past has displaced an entire generation and left the country in chaos. The intertwined stories of the novel lead us down endless streets like those of Bachi’s mythical city of Cyrtha; these all lead nowhere. Characters are lost, memories are contorted, and the truth is never discovered because in Salim Bachi’s Algeria there is no defining moment in the past to mark the beginning of a future: “Plus de jugement qui tienne, car en cet état les lois humaines sont caduques, et personne ne lèvera son regard sur le visage de l’homme enseveli.” [No more judgment that holds up, because in 143

. Ibid, 138. . Bensmaïa, 163. 145 . Mokeddem, 138-39. 146 . Salim Bachi. Le Chien d’Ulysse, (Paris: Gallimard, 2001). 144

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this state, human laws are nullified and no one will cast his gaze on the face of a buried man.]147

Ali & Midhat Bourequat Ali Bourequat, former Tazmamart prison survivor, told me in an interview I conducted with him in March 2005 that “La souffrance n’a pas de nom…il n’y a pas d’adjectif…à Tazmamart on était enfermé vivant” [Suffering has no name….it has no adjective…at Tazmamart we were locked away alive]148 For those who survived Tazmamart, reconstructing an identity after having lived through the nightmares of indescribable human abuse, is virtually impossible. Les années de plomb, which have come to characterize the reign of Hassan II, have been the subject of works by many francophone Moroccan authors since 1991, the year so many were released from the underground dungeons of Moroccan prisons. The testimonies written by Tazmamart prison survivors (the Bourequat brothers, Ali and Midhat, Mohammed Raïs, Ahmed Marzouki for example) were published in France, and after made their way back to Morocco. Their testimonies reveal the atrocities of Hassan II’s reign and reflect Mohamed VI’s commitment to founding transparent processes to heal the wounds of years of human rights abuses in the country.149 In his testimonial, Dix-huit ans de solitude (1993), Ali Bourequat delineates the horror faced by 58 men who, for eighteen years, were imprisoned in tiny, cramped cells with hardly any light, air or palatable food. Of these 58, only 28 survived. As one journalist describes Tazmamart, the prison was so horrible it was like “Danté crossed with Kafka: the difference being that the inmates of Tazmamart didn’t know why they were there”.150 Ali, Midhat and Bayazid Bourequat, businessmen close to the royal family, never knew why on that fated night in 1973 they were kidnapped from their homes, beaten, tortured and then thrown into prison for the next 18 years. To this day, Ali Bourequat does not understand “why,” emphasizing that no matter what a man has done, he should never have to face the dehumanization the inmates of Tazmamart had to live

147

. Ibid., 188. My translation. . Interview with Ali Bourequat in Houston, Texas, March 2005. All translations from French are my own. 149 . In 2004, Mohammed VI founded the Instance d’Equité et Reconciliation, a committee responsible for gathering testimonies and data from victims and their families across Morocco. It remains to be seen if the committee’s findings will lead to remuneration for victims and legal action against perpetrators. 150 . Fouad Laroui, “Entre Dante et Kafka.” Jeune Afrique/L’Intelligent. No. 2110. 19-21 June 2001 : 74-76, 74. My translation from the French. 148


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through. Midhat Bourequat describes this dehumanization in his testimonial, Mort vivant: Je tomb[ais] dans un autre monde, inhumain, fait de souffrances et de tortures à la mesure de ses effluves empoisonnées. J’allais basculer et entrer dans la mort, enfourné dans la géhenne….je venais d’être enfermé dans ma tombe en béton d’où je ne sortirai, sur un brancard, que dix-huit ans et demi plus tard ou trois mille neuf cent vingt jours sans avoir à peine revu la lumière du jour. [I fell into another world, inhuman, made of sufferance and torture like its poisoned odors. I was going to slide into, and enter death, shoved into Hell….I had just been shut up in my concrete tomb where I would leave, on a stretcher, eighteen and a half years later, or three thousand, nine hundred and twenty days, almost without ever seeing the light of day again.]151

In my interview with Ali Bourequat, he affirmed that to combat the animality that was ever present in Tazmamart, ready to overtake him, he had to “lutter”, struggle, physically and psychologically: “je décide donc de lutter, de survivre, de m’en sortir pour renaitre, revenir à la vie. Je me mets, comme dit Sartre dans Les Mots, ‘tout entier à l’oeuvre pour me sauver tout entier’. Refuser la solitude, l’isolement» [I decided to fight, to survive, to emerge in order to be reborn, to come back to life. I dedicated myself, as Sartre says in Les Mots, ‘entirely to the task of saving myself entirely.’ Refuse solitude and isolation.]152 Bourequat notes that the title of his book alludes to «la solitude qui m’a pesé le plus….avec tout ce qu’on a pu faire dans ce pays….je n’arrivais pas comprendre comment avec tout le monde qu’on connaissait, personne est venu nous aider…..c’était ce sens de la solitude” [It’s solitude that weights the most….with all that we were able to do in this country….I could not understand, with all the people we knew, why no one came to help us…that is the meaning of solitude.]153 The testimonies of the Bourequat brothers are so horrifying that they surpass our capacity to understand how certain humans are able to reduce themselves to their own “dehumanization,” as Frantz Fanon would say, in order to strip others of their humanity. Yet, their stories make us think of other egregious scenarios which take place every day in our global society. Atrocities committed in Iraq, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Serbia or Abu Ghraib are not the purview of one people, ethnic group or nationality. Exiled in the USA, Ali Bourequat told me that his years lost in Tazmamart prison could never be restored, but his goal, 151

. Midhat Bourequat, Mort Vivant, (Paris: Pygmalion, 2001), 181. My translation. Italics in the original. 152 . Ali Bourequat, Dix-huit ans de solitude, (Paris : Michel Lafon, 1993), 199. My translation. 153 . Interview with Ali Bourequat, March 2005.

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to tell the world what really happened and not to let those who were lost “tomber dans l’oubli” had been achieved.

Abdelwahab Meddeb: La Maladie d’Islam Tunisian Abdelwahab Meddeb has been characterized by scholar Dina AlKassim as an author and poet who “transgraphs” the Maghreb. He “effectively shifts the emphasis from a concern with semantic meanings toward a search for new terms and new forms of writing that…[show].. the social transformations of kinship that are evident in the modern postcolonial state.”154 Meddeb’s most famous work, Talismano (1979) mirrors Fanon’s prescriptions in The Wretched of the Earth that nationalist literature should promote social consciousness: “If you really wish your country to avoid regression, or at best halts and uncertainties, a rapid step must be taken from national consciousness to political and social consciousness.”155 Al-Kassim notes that in Talismano, “Meddeb reflects on the regulative foreclosures of the postcolonial nation-state [using] a particular kind of writing….[he]…calls allographie” [Talismano proposes] a utopian cure for the scripted stalemate of normativity and abjection” of the nation-state at the dawn of the postcolonial era.156 Published twenty-five years later, La maladie de l’islam (2002) seeks to cultivate socio-political awareness abroad about the Maghreb in particular and the Arab world in general. Drawing on critical moments in Islamic history, Meddeb traces the failure of Arab nation-states as a primary cause for the cancerous ills that continue to impede their development. The author’s work published in 2002 in the wake of 9/11, reveals the commonalities between Christian and Islamic extremists ideologies as the author attempts to explain the carnage of contemporary terrorist events. He blames both sides for the erosion of West-East relations. In an interview shortly after 9/11 and just before he wrote La Maladie de l’Islam, he explaines that the rise of Islamic fundamentalism is due, in part, to the failure of the nation-state and of nationalism. A terrible failure, first in that independence and nationalism did not manage to solve the societal questions, nor did they manage to eradicate poverty: they did not bring a good school system, they did not bring hospitals, nor improve the health of the people. 154

. Dina Al-Kassim. “The Faded Bond: Calligraphesis and Kinship in Abdelwahab Meddeb’s Talismano. Public Culture. 13(1), 2001: 113-138, 115. 155 . Frantz Fanon. The Wretched of the Earth, translation by Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1991), 203. As cited in Al-Kassim, 113. 156 . Al-Kassim, 121.


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Furthermore, they wallowed in violence, in authoritarianism, they did not propose a new model of authority…and they did not turn out to be pedagogues of democracy.157

Meddeb indicates that loss of scientific and technological know-how and the increasing disassociation from the tolerance inherent in the original teachings of Islam have led to failure and “ressentiment” in the Islamic world. This resentment means that le sujet islamique n’est plus l’homme du ‘oui’, qui rayonne par le monde et crée un être naturellement hégémonique. …il est peu à peu devenu l’homme du ‘non’, celui qui refuse, qui n’est plus actif mais réactif, celui qui accumule la haine et attend l’heure de la vengeance. [The Islamic subject is no longer a ‘yes’ man, who shines throughout the world and creates a naturally hegemonic being....little by little he has become a ‘no’ man, he who refuses, who is no longer active but reactive, who has accumulated hate and waits for his hour of vengeance.]158

Meddeb’s work not only faults the Islamic world, he also lays blame on Western hegemony, Americanization run rampant, and unequal distributions of wealth divided along north-south boundaries that have tipped economic, social and cultural power away from the developing world at alarming rates. In his conclusion, the author explains that people of both Western and Eastern cultures are “amnesiacs” about their histories, victims of ‘official’ propaganda and the over-simplification of religious dogma and teachings. J’évoquerai enfin quelques-unes des raisons internes, sans avoir ni le temps ni la place de les développer. Cela exigerait un autre livre. Le premier remède à la maladie d’Islam concerne la nécessité de revenir à une profonde connaissance des polémiques, des controverses et des débats dont s’est nourrie la tradition. Lutter contre l’oubli exige un travail d’anamnèse. Il importe d’articuler la reconstitution du sens (à partir des traces et des vestiges médiévaux) avec la conscience critique moderne pour que s’instaure la liberté d’une parole plurielle, conflictuelle, entretenant le désaccord dans la civilité. [In closing, I will evoke some of the internal reasons, without really having the time or place to develop them. These would require another book. The first cure for the sickness of Islam concerns the necessity to return to a profound knowledge of its polemics, controversies and the debates that have nourished the tradition. Struggle against forgetting means working on amnesia. It is 157

. “Islam and its Discontents: An Interview with Frank Berberich,” October 99 (Winter 2002): 3-20. Translated by Pierre Joris from the original published in Esprit (Paris, 2002), 14. 158 . Abdelwahab Meddeb. La Maladie de l’Islam, (Paris: Seuil, 2002), 19. My translation.

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important to articulate the reconstruction of the sense [of Islam] (from the traces and vestiges of the Middle Ages) with the critical conscience of modernity so that the liberty of a plural, conflicted, and civil debate is instituted.]159

Meddeb expresses strong views that in today’s Tunisia have become problematic. In just the last year the Ben Ali government’s suppression of the press, a variety of internet sites and internet blogging as well as the monitoring of internet users and, in some instances their incarceration, as is the recent case of Tunisian journalist Muhammad Abou, have become frequent in Tunisia. Writing from exile in France, Meddeb offers a critique of the complexities of and in the Islamic world that can only éclaircir the darkness of global ignorance and bigotry. These commentaries are vital to understanding not only the Maghreb but also the divided globe on which we live. Today, most Francophone authors from the Maghreb and, indeed, other parts of the francophone African diaspora, live in flux on the margins of nations to which they no longer feel they belong. They are cautiously waiting to see where the “postcolonial” condition will take them. These authors ask: What part of the nation or homeland should I, or Can I keep? and what part must I reject? Must I live in exile for ever, experiencing only “le vide de la solitude et le froid de l’exil” [the emptiness of solitude and the coldness of exile] as Mohamed Mokeddem demands to know in his novel Nuit Afghane?160 Will I ever truly be able to return to my nation? These are the seminal questions that haunt the pages of works by Maghrebian francophone authors living in exile.

159

. Ibid, 215-216. . Mokeddem, 138.

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN EXILIC WRITER SAAD ELKHADEM AND TWO TRANSNATIONAL NOVELLAS F. ELIZABETH DAHAB

“Don't say anything about your doctorate or mention it at all, lest they should cancel the visa at the last moment.” Saad Elkhadem (The Plague 29)

Saad Elkhadem161 (1932-2003), a prolific Egyptian-Canadian writer and scholar, produced over 23 books, of which 14 are fiction—some of them are banned in Egypt—and the rest reference books. He also translated works from German and Arabic into English, including, in some instances, some of his own, such as Ajnihah min Rasâs, Wings of Lead (1971/1994) and Rijâl wa Khanâzîr , Men and Pigs (1967/1977),162 much in the tradition of Brecht and Beckett who were themselves writers/translators of their own writing. Moreover, Elkhadem was an editor and an eminent publisher, and as such, he was amongst those Egyptian-Canadian mediators (such as Alonzo and Naaman163) who played a significant role in the transmission and diffusion of their own and other writers’ products through the literary reviews and the publishing houses they founded. In 1975, he created the eminent International Fiction Review and the year before a 161

He was born in Cairo, where he grew up and received his Bachelor of Arts degree. He went to graduate school in Graz, Austria where he received his doctorate. He worked for the government in Egypt and shortly in Switzerland, then he taught at the university of North Dakota. In 1968, he was hired as Associate Professor in the Department of German at the University of New Brunswick (Canada) where he taught German and Comparative Literature. He spent the rest of his career there, becoming Professor Emeritus in 1995. 162 Appeared in Arabic in the collection of short stories entitled Rijâl wa Khanâzîr (Men and Pigs), Cairo: Matba‘it al-Dâr al-Misriyyah, 1967. Translated into English in 1977. Likewise, Ajnihah min Rasâs first appeared in Arabic in 1971 and then in English in 1994. 163 See Dahab 1999 and 2001

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publishing company, York Press, where he published internationally recognized intellectuals such as Roger Moore, Alain Robbe-Grillet, M. P. Gillepsie, and others. Elkhadem’s literary production, a major contribution in the area of Canadian writing of Middle Eastern origins, spans three decades, from1971 to shortly before his death in 2003; it is also credited for having provided one of the first landmarks of Arabic-Canadian literature. Thus, in1971, his Ajnihah min Rasâs (Wings of Lead), written in Arabic in Canada, appeared in Cairo (an English translation by the author followed in 1994). In 1978, Elkhadem produced (in Cairo, in Arabic) Min Rihlat Odysseus al-Misri (From Travels of the Egyptian Odysseus) which was to be published a year later in an English translation in New Brunswick. A few years later, Thulathiyat Ûlis (The Ulysses Trilogy, 1988) and Al-Tâ‘ûn, (The Plague, 1989) appeared, followed in 1990-1992, by the experimental Thulathiyat al-Misri al-Tâir (Trilogy of the Flying Egyptian). As for the reception of Elkhadem’s work in Canada, it is worth noting that the majority of the reviews of his work (over five dozens) are written by fellow Arabic scholars, and published in International Fiction Review. Only a fifth, approximatively164 of the total references on him are book-reviews written by English Canadians or Americans, published in World Literature Today and Canadian Book Review Annual: Most of these tributes tend to stress the intercultural aspect of his work rather than the wealth of technical devices and artistic craft inherent in it. Ironically, a very perceptive appraisal of The Plague (1989) was written by Paradela, a Spanish scholar from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid who rightly pointed out the marginality of Elkhadem’s status in Egypt as a result of Western influences in his narrative techniques. Nevertheless, by far, the best, the most thorough and truly analytical appraisal of the artist’s work, comes from his translator and critic Saad El-Gabalawy who contributed a lengthy critical introduction to each of the works he translated and who rightly considers Elkhadem “an artist of great power, versatility and craftsmanship” (Canadian Adventures 8). The translations themselves are excellent renditions, at once close to the original and dynamic, preserving some of the characteristic patterns of Arabic narrative discourse without detracting from the quality of the English prose. The recurring themes in patterns of binary oppositions, the linguistic experimentations in the form of fragments, mute dialogues and abrupt time-shifts, the use of situational irony and sudden changes in points of view, The vision of the native land from the vantage point of exile, these are all features in Elkhadem's writings shared by a number of contemporary exilic writers. In fact, as with many of the writings of his counterparts, Elkhadem’s works are neither 164

See Dahab 1999


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short stories, novellas, novels, diaries, nor biographies per se. They lie between novels and novellas in length, and they are hybrid reconstructions and deconstructions of elements of each, for, as is often the case with literatures of exile, here it is the very notion of genres that seems to have undertaken a major reshuffling: literatures of exile fuse and mix literary genres, and they are marked by the same reflexivity characteristic of post-modern literatures. The language used in them is often dislocated and disjointed, essentially a language which will mirror internal distance, the melancholy of the initial departure, a sense of estrangement, and finally, deterritorialization. The notions of extra-territoriality, in-betweenness, estrangement in fact, mark exilic literatures in Canada, especially those of Arabic origins whose authors, in many cases, already belonged to ethnic minorities in their country of origins (such as Copts, Jews, Christians, Greeks, Armenians, Syrians, Lebanese, etc...) and who had multiple components in the make-up of their cultural background. In the case of Elkhadem and as his translator eloquently put it in the introduction to The Ulysses Trilogy: “It seems that emotional and geographical distance from his homeland has liberated Elkhadem as a writer-in-exile, giving him a special vantage point from which to observe his past and reshape it into fiction” (2). I propose a brief study of two of Saad Elkhadem’s works, namely Wings of Lead, (1971/1994) and The Plague (1989), commenting on the major themes they harbor and highlighting the main underlying narrative techniques used in their making.165

Wings of Lead (1971-1994) Egyptians come to Europe carrying two sacks on their shoulders. One bulges with psychological complexes and emotional sores, and the other is inflated with naive hopes and crazy dreams.[…].Thrilled with their new freedom, they run in every direction. A train that has jumped off its rails […].” (Wings of Lead 14) 165

. This project, a critical article, is part of an ongoing and broader project of a booklength monograph tentatively on Canadian Literature of Arabic origins that will account for, survey, analyze and process a growing trilingual body of literary texts written and published throughout Canada and produced by first generation Canadians of Arabic origins. 6. The major wave of Egyptian immigration happened after the 1967 war The largest wave of Egyptian emigration began in 1973 and continued throughout the seventies and eighties. Its impetus lies in the disillusionement with Anwar El Sadat’s regime: his political and economic policies and the sharp social decline accompanying his policy of al infitah or “opening up” to foreign influences.

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This is how the antihero of Wings of Lead sums up the collective experience of expatriation, one which sheds light on the title of this experimental work that beautifully portrays the flight to Europe of a young man, his struggles, downfall, disintegration, and final crash, when he is deported to Egypt at the very end of the novella. The last sentence, “my new life begins tomorrow”, is a poignant reminder of the tenacity of human vice—in Europe he got acquainted with, then became addicted to, alcohol—the fragility of willpower, and the clinging force of the illusion of possible redemption. It occurs several times throughout the novella whenever the protagonist encounters a major setback, hence confirming the sense of failure and despair conveyed by it. The nameless protagonist-narrator narrates his woes in diary form, a dramatic monologue consisting of fragments of unequal length. He succeeds, after a number of difficulties, to travel to Vienna to study medicine, with next to no financial resources—his low-middle-class father will send him the paltry monthly sum of twenty Egyptian pounds, roughly the equivalent of forty dollars in the sixties— and without any prior knowledge of German, “a barbarous language in which the exception is the rule, and the exemption is the norm” (16), he likes to repeat. He believes he can learn it “in a month or two” (3). He studies it arduously for three months then fails the language examination upon which his admittance to the university rests. This first failure (“I came to Europe to satisfy my hunger for knowledge, for freedom, and for love. I tripped on the first obstacle on the road to knowledge” (9)) marks the beginning of his descending curve, his subsequent failures in his studies three years later, his alcohol addiction, his disastrous amorous ventures, and his final demise: A decision of some kind must be taken regarding my studies. There is no hope for me now in the faculty of medicine. I failed the physics exam twice. Should I fail again, my dismissal will be final. Three years have passed and I haven’t advanced one single step (13).

I disagree with the claim that the protagonist’s immaturity, his “cultural shock” and “abuse of freedom” (El-Gabalawy 1977, 10) are the sole factors that led to his ruin, for I think the novel can also be interpreted from a stance whereby the socio-economic background would provide a reliable prognosis for success: tightness of financial means and insufficient resources are undoubtedly contributing factors to the demoralization and the dismal failures of the likes of the protagonist of Wings of Lead. It is thus from that standpoint that I would tend to read the portrayal of the wasted life of Egyptian students in Europe— “they talk about nothing but dance halls and girls and discuss nothing but trivial matters and obscene affairs”(4)—in glimpses scattered throughout: much like the Egyptians in Canada we encounter in the Trilogy of the Flying Egyptian


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(1990-1992), they are portrayed as “the travelers who never arrive, the eternal outsiders who never belong, the aliens who are constantly isolated from the center” (Crash Landing.. 6), a theme that recurs in The Ulysses Trilogy (1988) as well. The “emotional sores” in the opening quotation of the present section are related to the protagonist’s flashbacks into his past, one full of “all kinds of hunger. Hunger for freedom. Hunger for knowledge. Hunger for love” (3); his parents’ “tyranny and rigidity”, his mother’s utter submissiveness, and his father's preference for his older brother, “the first-born. The breast of the chicken. The heart of the watermelon” (Wings of Lead 1). The protagonist of Wings of Lead, much like his counterpart in Crash Landing of the Flying Egyptian, the third volume of a Trilogy of the Flying Egyptian (1990-1992) is prisoner of his obscure, unhappy past that seems to have marked his life once and for all, much to his detriment: A man’s family is a macrocosm of himself and a microcosm of his country. Wherever you went, you found yourself chained to what you had experienced in the early days of your life; and however far you moved, you were always tied to what you had endured during your boyhood and youth” (Crash Landing...12)

In a relatively small number of pages, the past, the present, and the future of the problematic antihero of Wings of Lead will become interwoven into a full picture of a life marked with doom: I spent six weeks turning the pages of my life. I didn't find one thing that I would like to keep. I didn’t come across a single ray of light that might illuminate my way. I made more than one decision. I designed more than one plan. I don’t know what to do with myself. Or what myself would do to me. (Wings of Lead 19) Such statements, minimalistic in their expression, exuding contradiction and a feeling of being trapped, abound in this book. They convey a complete, albeit condensed picture, of the mental state of the protagonist. As Saad El Gabalawy remarked (1977, 10), there is a great economy of style (marked with a careful selection of narrative details) in those alternatingly long and short highly poetic fragments that give the reader flashes of the protagonist’s erratic life and aimless energies. The end of the novella finds the narrator sitting on the balcony of his father’s apartment in Cairo, and ruminating on his failures. He is sexually impotent, depressed and fears what the Student Exchange Office will tell his father. In one additional instance of failure, he is turned down by his ex-love Sanniyah upon his return to Cairo, and he exclaims, “I must leave this damned balcony before I lose my mind” (23). The last lines of this pathetic tale of

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national claustrophia end in the following ethos of desperation, unbalance and hatred of one’s native land: [...]I will never go back to Europe. Australia pays the immigrants all moving costs. I will apply to immigrate to Australia [...]. I will look tomorrow for a way out of this damned situation. I ’ll stay in Australia forever. I’ll save a lot of money. I may become a rich man one of these days. I’ll never return to Egypt no matter what. I won’t miss them for a moment. How much I suffered because of their tyranny and rigidity! My new life begins tomorrow (23)

The Plague (1989) Saad Elkhadem's micro-novel, The Plague, reminiscent in its structure of Boccaccio’s The Decameron in which ten characters are fleeing plague-ridden Florence, is a satirical novel (banned in Egypt) where ten nameless middle-class characters, seven men and three women (instead of the seven women and three men of Boccaccio’s work)—they are, chronologically, an engineer, a teacher of French, a young girl, a businessman, a journalist, a television actress, a student, a translator, and older housewife and a commander of a military prison—happen to meet in a visa office in Cairo as they are waiting for their exit visa in order to escape from the oppression and brutality of Nasser's tyrannical regime. In an attempt to while away the time and to alleviate the boredom of waiting, each one in turn introduces him/herself to all the others, telling something of their near future plans. The title, The Plague, evokes the confinement the characters find themselves in: “I don't know why these bastards prevent people from leaving and hold them as if they had the plague and must be kept in quarantine. The whole country is in quarantine...the whole nation is under house arrest" (The Plague 31-32) thinks character number 9 to himself. In fact, the characters are identified by a numerical number from one to ten, a number which is also the title of each of the corresponding ten chapters that constitute the novella. There are no fewer than four sets of point of views in this complex experimental work: 1. an omniscient voice (an eleventh invisible character), in parentheses marked with an asterisk, that speaks of the past and future of each character; 2. each of the nine characters who pursue their internal monologue while one of them is speaking aloud; 3. the voice of the person introducing him or herself to the others, and 4. the inner discourse of the speaker, again in parentheses, but with no number attached this time. Since there are ten characters, the outward dramatic monologue they proffer in turn is constantly interrupted by a sequence of numerical parenthetical inserts belonging to the inward utterances of their fellow visa-seekers. Those consist partly of ruminations about the conditions of life in Egypt, and reactions to the


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speakers’ monologues. There are over twelve abrupt shifts in point of views at any given section of the narrative which constitutes a tight flow with no paragraph breaks. The following extract taken from chapter two, the one devoted to the teacher, will illustrate this scheme: Is it my turn? (*the speaker was a thirty-two-year-old man, elegant and bald, with a bushy moustache that endowed him with an air of gravity and dignity which belied his diminutive size and soft voice) I am Magdi Na’im, a teacher of French (5-which means he’s a blue boned son of a bitch; …the rest of his name might be John or George or Christian;…they are all sons of bitches posturing as modish Westerners) (9-He seems to be a Christian; resembles the handsome young man who married princess Fathiya and the King kicked them out of the country […]). (11)

The narrative harbors not only multiple points of view but also multiple registers of language, a multiplicity that brings together form and content, one that further enriches The Plague with several dimensions (social, political, and psychological), endowing it with the collective value of utterances and the mark of the political, characteristics pointed out by Deleuze and Guattari with regard to minor literatures. The novel becomes, through the wealth of its linguistic constituent, “an important social document, which reveals manners, morals, customs, habits, and ways of life in contemporary Egypt” (El Gabalawy 1989, 5). The omniscient voice that functions as an all-knowing chorus, revealing to the reader the future that awaits each character in turn uses classical Arabic, in a matter-of-fact, objective tone, devoid of any judgments. There are also the spoken words and the internal monologue of the characters, in stark contrast to one another. The language the characters speak in public is standard Arabic, polite and correct, well-edited, restrained, polished, free of insults and popular idioms, and full of patriotic and civic commitment to the reigning regime. Unlike The Decameron where the spoken word is a vehicle for escapism and entertainment, here, it is an instrument of restraint and self-control. The language used in the internal soliloquies, on the other hand, is full of profanities, proverbs, idioms, humor, irony, and popular jokes. It betrays the suspicion they all have of their countrymen as well as their intense, seemingly paranoid fear lest an intelligence agent be hidden amongst them, ready to retract their visa at the last moment, or even after they have boarded the plane: “I think, and I do not say what I think, therefore I am”, seems to be their mode of discourse and communication (Paradela 50), if one can qualify as communication an assemblage of juxtaposed monologues, whether internal or external, and a total absence of dialogues. Given that predicament, the biggest fear of the ten characters is, understandably, to utter something that would prevent the characters from

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leaving Egypt. Thus, the University Professor cautions himself before speaking: “Don't say anything about your doctorate or mention it at all, lest they should cancel the visa at the last moment...they have blocked the departure of those with Ph.D.'s because the state needs them to erect its new renaissance” (29) and the businessman will reflect in the same vein: It's only one hour at the most and the window will be opened, then each will get his visa and go his way; even after giving you the visa, they may retract their word for whatever reason.... a presidential decree for general mobilization.... they can cancel the visa even when you are about to board the plane...or force you to leave it...or order it back from the sky. They’ll never lack means to do it. (18)

This very fear constitutes the leitmotiv of the novel, with the visa office taking the role of an “objective correlative”—this theme was slightly dealt with in the earlier novella, Wings of Lead—that triggers associations of suppression and suspicion, as the translator rightly pointed out (1989, 3). Moreover, it leads the characters to claim loudly that they will go back to Egypt as soon as they have achieved the purpose of their trip, even though they all know this to be untrue and that none of them has the intention of ever returning. Thus speaks the scholar, his inward thoughts (parenthetical insert) belying his hypocritical public stance: “[…] I will publish the results of my research immediately after my return to Cairo (I’d be a real son of a bitch if I ever come back again of my own volition[…]”) (29). While he says that, character number ten speaks to him inwardly: "Where will you publish, brother?...publishing houses are up to their ears these days printing and distributing the President's speeches, his so-called 'Covenant', and the manifesto of his Socialist Union (30) The young woman, similarly speaks and thinks simultaneously: […] and I shall return to Egypt before the opening of the great Alexandria festival in order to take part in organizing it (there is my face, spit on it, one by one, if I ever set foot in Egypt as long as you are in power, you dirty pimps!...enough is enough! …God never tasks a soul beyond its limits![…]). (25)

The truth of the matter is that all those characters have been wounded, directly or indirectly, by a sociopolitical system marked with brutality and autocracy, but not a word pertaining to their woes is ever revealed to their companions. We have a glimpse of those woes only through their internal monologues and the mysterious omniscient voice that informs the reader of their past and future: the gifted scholar whose fellowship obtained from an American university was diverted by his deputy minister in favor of the latter’s nephew; the Coptic teacher of French who faced religious persecution; the government employee, victim of the fanatic religious clerk, his boss, who used religion as a


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pretext for controlling and intimidating others; the young woman forced to marry an “old, impotent, crippled rhinoceros, with dirty fingernails and a paunch sagging in front of him[…]” (25), the student pushed into exile by his older brother to protect the latter’s newly acquired, heightened social status. The list is long, and Nasser seems to be the ultimate culprit. The older housewife thinks to herself, while pitying character number three, the young girl: "[…] oh, poor child, she’s no older than nineteen or twenty;…why are you too, my girl, compelled to leave your homeland?!…may God deprive you, Nasser, of all His blessings and make you wander aimlessly all your life, just as you did to us and all our children.” (15)

Wealthy as it may be from the standpoint of modernist experimentation, The Plague is first and foremost an indictment of Egypt under Nasser, from the death of the last king (Farouk) to the 1952 revolution that overruled the monarchy and established the republic, to the rise of Sadat in the seventies. As a critic has rightly put it, The Plague is “One of the most ironic and scathing critiques of Nasser’s regime to be found in the pages of a literary creation” (Paradela 50). The last character (number ten), the commander of the military prison, now out of favor with his superiors, evokes people he tortured, crippled and killed, and how one of them sat trembling with a pool of urine, blood and excrements underneath him. Ironically, bitter to have been demoted, this excommander thinks himself a victim, and in a most perverse way, he probably is, once he fell out of favor: “for whom did I torture the traitors and crush the enemies of the Revolution?!...for my mother?...wasn’t it for you, sons of whores” (34), he exclaims in an internal invective addressed to his enemies. Similarly, referring to the Québec 101 law (issued in 1975) that mandates the use of French by all immigrants, character number two, the teacher about to leave to Montréal, thinks to himself: “They [the Quebecois] should just ask Nasser and he'll send them some intelligence officers who would keep beating, terrifying, and torturing the people until they are forced to stop uttering a single word except in French" (The Plague 3). It is not just an Egyptian ethos that transpires through The Plague. The wealth of fragmentary perceptions contained in it, and the intensity of these perceptions shot from a multitude of angles and expressed in a compelling language, contribute to making this novel “[a work] of both regional and universal significance.” (Werner-King 155), for the idea of cultural dislocation inherent in the notion of Diaspora, is linked with the properties of exile (as an exterior and interior phenomenon) and can be used for the interrogation of both ethnic identity and cultural nationalism. In the words of Saad El-Gabalawy:

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Chapter Seventeen An accomplished artist, Elkhadem attempts to comprehend the reality of the moment by means of shifting particles which accentuate the lack of stability and permanence. With his strong emphasis on flux and process in this work, he can aptly be described as a ‘shape shifter’ who designs a wonderfully complex pattern: a tale within a tale within a tale” (Canadian Adventures1990, 3).

Works Cited Dahab, F. Elizabeth. “Arabic-Canadian Literature: Overview and Preliminary Bibliography”, Canadian Ethnic Studies 2, (1999): 101-111. ———. “Voices Of Exile: The Literary Odyssey of Canadian Writers of Arabic Origins.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue canadienne de littérature comparée, 28.1 (2001): 48–69. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Kafka. Pour une Littérature Mineure. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1975. Elkhadem, Saad. Min Rihlat Odysseus al-Misri (From Travels of the Egyptian Odysseus), in Three Contemporary Egyptian Novels. Translated by Saad El Gabalawy. Fredericton: York Press, 1979. Bilingual edition (EnglishArabic). ———. Thulathiyat Ûlis (The Ulysses Trilogy). Translated by Saad El Gabalawy. Fredericton: York Press, 1988. Bilingual edition (EnglishArabic) ———. Al Tâ‘ûn (The Plague). Translated by Saad El-Gabalawy. Fredericton: York Press, 1989. Bilingual edition (Enlish-Arabic). ———. Ajnihah min Rasâs. Cairo: Dâr al-Ma‘ârif, 1971;Wings of Lead. A Modern Egyptian Novella, translated by the author. Bilingual edition (English-Arabic). Fredericton: York Press, 1994. ———. Thulathiyat al-Misri al-Tâir (Trilogy of the Flying Egyptian), Saad El Gabalawy, trans., Bilingual edition (English-Arabic). Fredericton: York Press, 1990–1992: Canadian Adventures of the Flying Egyptian 1990; Chronicle of the Flying Egyptian in Canada 1991; Crash Landing of the Flying Egyptian 1992. ———. Five Innovative Egyptian Short Stories. Translated by the author. Fredericton: York Press, 1994. Bilingual edition (Arabic-English) ———. Rijâl wa Khanâzîr (Pigs and Men), in Five Innovative Egyptian stories. Translated by the author. Fredericton: York Press, 1994. Bilingual edition (Arabic-English). El-Gabalawy, Saad. “Introduction”. The Ulysses Trilogy. Fredericton: York Press, 1988: 1-9. ———. “Introduction.” Modern Egyptian Short Stories. Fredericton: York Press, 1977: 5-11. ———. “Introduction.”The Plague. Fredericton: York Press, 1989: 3-6.


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———. “Introduction.” Canadian Adventures of the Flying Egyptian. Fredericton: York Press, 1990: 3-8. Paradela, Nieves. “Arabic Literature in Exile: The Plague by Saad Elkhadem”, International Fiction Review 22 (1995): 47-53. Werner-King, Janeen. “The Plague/Al Ta’un”. Book Review, International Fiction Review, 16.2 (1989):154-156.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN THE POWER OF PLACE AND SPACE: (RE)CONSTRUCTING IDENTITY AND SELFHOOD IN AHDAF SOUEIF’S EYE OF THE SUN NADINE A. SINNO

Asya, Eye of the Sun’s major protagonist, is a complex, multi-layered character who often confuses and disturbs many readers because she defies most categorizations and stereotypes. Part of what makes Asya a complex and multilayered character is the way her perceptions and sensations are constantly informed by the space and place in which she is present at a given time in the novel. The significance of place and space in Ahdaf Soueif’s Eye of the Sun goes far beyond the creation of a vivid setting. In other words, Asya does not simply exist in a given environment. On the contrary, she genuinely reflects on and interacts with her physical and cultural environment—allowing it to shape, nurture, and disturb her beliefs as well as actions. Indeed, Asya’s attention to space and place in the novel is remarkable. Even home, despite its familiarity, provides Asya with myriad novel experiences as she stands outside her window watching her neighbors and fantasizing about their sex lives. Furthermore, each of the countries that Asya visits (and temporarily inhabits) provide her with a new experience, or at the very least, a fresh perspective on life and living. At times, Asya’s interactions with another culture mock her established beliefs and put her familiar environment to the test; other times, Asya concludes that her place of origin is not too bad after all. As she travels across place and space, as she encounters different cultures and sub-cultures, Asya learns to open her mind to different experiences, to question her innermost beliefs, and to ultimately pick and choose what befits her own character and needs. Her trips are not always smooth. Nor are they free of missteps and transgressions. But they are certainly necessary. As Minh-ha, author of “Other than Myself/My Other Self,” notes, “If traveling perpetuates a discontinuous state of being, it also satisfies, despite the existential difficulties,


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it often entails one’s insatiable need for detours and displacements in postmodern culture (21). Asya, through her traveling, takes all sorts of “detours” before she can begin to construct the self of her own choice. Soueif’s Eye of the Sun, written in the Anglophone tradition, is the perfect form for communicating Asya’s multicultural experiences. Like Asya (and Soueif herself), the novel is a cultural hybrid that defies strict categorization. This paper examines the significance of place and space in Asya’s life and the way place and space-- both at home and overseas-- shape Asya’s sense of identity (especially as manifested through her sexual experiences) and allow her to reconstruct a new self and a mode of life that are not bound by place of origin, but that rather draw on the various resources that she benefits from as a result of her authentic encounters with other places and cultures. Furthermore, the paper emphasizes that there is a crucial connection between Asya’s romantic and sexual experiences-- in various places-- and her overall sense of selfhood and identity. Asya’s family house in Zamalek, in Cairo, is the fist space that she inhabits in Egypt. At the time (and up until today), Cairo had been experiencing tremendous development and expansion, which gave rise to traffic and housing crises that naturally created physical proximity among people of different backgrounds. In his article, “Cairo,” Andre Raymond discusses the phenomenon of expansion and the way it created a fascinating medley of old and new architecture, as well as modes of life: The suddenness of the change undergone by Cairo during the last century explains for the most part the incompleteness of the contemporary city; the irresistible expansion of the city produces, like so many boulders deposited by a glacier, fragments, glorious and miserable, of its past, distant and recent…there are astonishingly contrasting ways of life juxtaposed in a rich confusion of colour and sound: pockets of medieval city and contemporary urban slum border, and sometimes surround, the modern quarters. (Hourani 336) Thus, crowded among other apartment buildings-- as a result of overpopulation and housing crises in Cairo-- the Ulama residence houses many of Asya’s private memories, experiences, and daydreams. “Our house,” Bachelard asserts, “is our corner of the world… it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the world” (4). Asya’s first “universe,” therefore, thanks to the close quarters imposed by the conditions of the space-deprived urban city, is by no means isolated or innocent. Furthermore, this first universe is not restricted to the lives of the people inside the house. On the contrary, Asya’s first house provides her with a window (literally and metaphorically) onto the neighboring apartments and into the private lives of their various residents. In fact, the most prominent of those memories and daydreams-- some of which she will continue to recall later when she is thousands of miles away

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from home-- are those related to the intimacy she was exposed to as she toiled in preparation for the government exams. Asya’s teenage years, when the budding of her sexuality occurs, are informed by the uncensored ‘voyeurism’ that her window allows during the late hours of the night. Among Asya’s treats then are the breaks that she takes as she surveys the surrounding buildings, often communicating through gestures and facial expressions with a few members of the late-night, sub-culture youth studying for their exams. For instance, from her window, Asya watches a Lebanese family, paying close attention to father and son. The tall son, noting Asya’s recurring gaze, begins to “incline his head just slightly when Asya appears at the window.” In turn, Asya “permits herself a curt nod back and then turns away” (47). In another apartment, Asya feasts her eyes on a fair-skinned, young man as he “flexes his muscles and swings his arm around” without giving Asya any attention, which make her suspect that he is with the “Frere Jesuits.” And, in the apartment above him, Asya watches a famous painter flirt with a lady, whom Asya concludes must be “foreign” (47). Ironically, it is Asya who-- consciously or unconsciously-- objectifies these men rather than the other way around. More significant than Asya’s innocent flirtations with and contemplation of her young male neighbors is her peeking into rooms that are loaded with overtones of sexuality and that keep her imagination busy at work. Among those apartments is one on the fourth floor—inhabited by a ‘ruined’ courtesan and her angelic twin sisters. The redheaded courtesan, with her huge collection of gaudy lingerie, fascinates Asya, as she shamelessly embraces her lover in full view of the neighbors. One night, the courtesan and her lover catch Asya looking at them, and they smile and wave at her, causing her to close the blinds and retreat from the window. However, moments later, Asya regrets not waving back. That brief encounter provides Asya’s imagination with plenty of fodder for her sexual fantasies. “She dreamed up scenes in which she was with them; sometimes being introduced to strange and wonderful things; other times being subjected to painful yet exhilarating ones” (48). Through her daydreams and imagination, the teenage Asya starts to anticipate the pains and pleasures of sex, and her ‘threesome’ fantasy foreshadows the orgy scene that she later experiences in Italy. In a way, Asya’s experience in Italy becomes the fulfillment of a fantasy born out of the proximity of houses in her Cairo neighborhood. Bachelard emphasizes the connection between daydreaming and the house. “… If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace… The values that belong to daydreaming mark humanity in its depth” (6). Furthermore, Asya delights in witnessing the co-existence of ‘sin’ and ‘innocence’ on the fourth floor. “She conceals herself behind the right-hand blind and peeps out and is sometimes… rewarded by seeing, in one window, the


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two neat twins reading in their books, and, in the next window, their elder sister sharing a watermelon with her lover” (48). This fascinating image of sin and innocence intertwined appeals to Asya’s aesthetic taste as well as her sensibilities. In other words, she appreciates a scene which most of her neighbors would find appalling. Another memory that continues to accompany Asya throughout the years is that of a childhood friend who got married at a young age and who got sick of her mother’s fussing over her dirty laundry. “You know what these stains are, Mama? They’re my husband’s semen. Semen. Semen. MY HUSBAND’S SEMEN,” the girl yells, and the noise travels from her mother’s kitchen window to Asya’s (77). Years later, Asya will conjure up this scene as she imagines Saif asking her about the stains in her bed; her hypothetical reply is modeled after her friend’s crude reply: “Semen, semen. Gerald’s SEMEN,” is what she’d love to say (618). According to Bachelard, “… thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed… All of our lives we come back to them in daydreams” (8). In one way or another, because of the dynamics of space that it provides, Asya’s first residence nurtures her sexuality and, to a certain extent, shapes some of her expectations of and reactions towards sex. Having watched other people embrace their sexuality, Asya’s failed sexual life with her fiancé, Saif, later is bound to arouse in her feelings of dissatisfaction and rebellion. These scenes become the equivalent of Hollywood movies that make our actual experiences, in their imperfections, all the more painful. Asya’s home country offers another major space that shapes her romantic and erotic self as well as her identity in general—the University of Cairo. There, Asya plunges into the world of poetry and fiction, a world that intensifies her romantic self and drives her into judging everything else by the same standards. Unsurprisingly, among Asya’s early crushes is the one she has on her sixty-year old poetry professor, whom everyone else finds ugly. In fact, Asya feels a sense of awe every time her old professor lectures them on the power of poetry, and she is bewitched by his intimidating teaching style, as well as his reputation. Asya devours her professor’s views on poetry, and she learns to appreciate art for art’s sake, rather than stress out about exams the way her peers do. Her world is broadened by poetry, and so is her vision of art and beauty: “The world, for Asya, takes on a new pattern. Into the dustbin go the subjective scanned verses of her middle teens. A poem is of the self but beyond the self. The supreme achievement of life is to create an object of beauty…” (94). Indeed, art becomes yet another space in which Asya gladly loses herself; it affects her introspections as well as her interactions with others. In many ways, Asya’s later longing for a passionate and romantic relationship, may be seen as her ‘mimetic’ response to the poetry she reads. She strives to shape her life-romantic and otherwise-- in a way that would make it as aesthetically pleasing

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as a piece of art. Perhaps that also explains her tolerance towards Saif’s ‘revisionist’ narratives, in which he recreates and embellishes real life events. At one point, she tells Saif and her mother -- who keep telling her that real life is not a novel-- “I just think that if we could manage to look at real people and real actions with the same interest, the same generous detachment, that we give to a novel or play-- we should understand things better” (579). This statement sums up Asya’s resistance to the separation between the two worlds of art and life; she puts art into practice. Furthermore, the university of Cairo provides Asya with another major space beside the classroom: The domed festival hall. In its hosting of Egypt’s two most phenomenal figures, singer Umm Kulthuum and President Jamal Abd al-Naser, the hall offers Asya more than just a cultural experience. It becomes the perfect space for the intertwining of eros and politics—leaving Asya feeling ecstatic as she feels bewitched by Naser’s charisma and his power over the audience and thrilled by Umm Kulthuum’s huge presence on stage. She can’t help staring at Naser’s “magnificent head and shoulders,” and his “wide” and “shining” smile, and she is quick to notice the audacity of Umm Kulthuum’s songs on love and freedom, as she contemplates their socio-political references (63). Umm Kulthuum and Naser continue to be part of Asya’s life in Egypt as well as overseas. By the end of the novel, when Asya writes a list of her dream man’s qualifications, she says that he should be able to appreciate good music; among the artists that he would listen to is Umm Kulthuum. It is in this sense that Asya’s identity is not simply shaped by the “voyage” that she undertakes, as is the case with most buildungsroman protagonists; rather, at the core of her self, are experiences that she inevitably carries with her from her native culture. While Asya’s colorful Cairo introduces her to romance, eros, and sex, it does not really allow her to fully enjoy and experiment with her sexuality. To be able to engage is stress-free amorous behavior, and to spend some private times away from everybody’s eyes, Asya and Saif have to sneak to Beirut-- having internalized the stigma associated with premarital sex. In Beirut, the Contessa’s house provides the couple with a private space. This private space marks a progress in Asya’s sexual maturity and self-assertion. After all, Asya’s intimate experiences in Cairo may be seen as more or less passive. Even when she did get intimate with Saif at Omar Khayyam, it was always he who took initiative and made advances. In “Sinful” Beirut, however, Asya is automatically drawn into the sensual world of the flamboyant Contessa. The Contessa’s wide variety of “perfumes, powders, creams, varnishes, sprays and paints” fascinate Asya and put her plain “Ma Griffe” to shame (Soueif 132). The Contessa’s temptation-laden apartment intensifies Asya’s desires, and she asks Saif that they “make love properly,” something that he refuses and argues against (139). In many ways, Asya subverts the traditional scenario where the woman feels


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compelled to protect her virginity because it is more detectable than a man’s and because the punishment for women is often much more severe. This scene also exhibits one of the early signs of Asya’s potential for sexual transgression and her disregard for cultural rules that repress her own needs and go against her common sense. In Beirut, Asya also becomes more in touch with her body and her sexuality. Slowly but surely, she learns to flaunt her body as she wears in bed the “white lace slip” that she has stolen from her mother (Soueif 138). On the sunny beach, Asya wears a sexy, orange bikini that her parents don’t even know about (Soueif 141). “On the beach,” Rob Shield writes, “the body shows itself as a malleable form and flexible performance that aspires to hybridity, underwriting the suspension of social norms and categories of identity” (45). While Asya allows herself to take advantage of the space and anonymity offered by Beirut, Saif’s refusal to make love, his enforcement of the ‘law’, stands in the way of her full actualization of her sexuality and, ultimately, of her selfempowerment. After all, a woman’s control of her body and her sex life is crucial for her overall liberation and self-assertion. While Lebanon provides Asya and Saif with some privacy, Italy provides Asya alone with the chance of being a nonchalant tourist. In fact, the trip to Italy takes the Beirut trip a step further; perhaps the larger geographical distance in Italy allows Asya to establish a deeper mental distance from her own culture. It also gives her the space to fully engage with her new environment, without Saif watching over her shoulders and playing the role of the superego. Because Asya’s stay in Italy is brief, she is not under any pressure to either adapt to or resist the new culture. Rather, she has the luxury to completely indulge and lose herself in it-- to be the “foreigner” she’d always associated with Saif’s nonEgyptian girlfriend. In Italy, Asya learns that paying the rent is the only thing expected of her and that her sex life is completely irrelevant as far as the Signora is concerned. In fact, most Italians assume that all the international students are in for a decadent experience. According to Curtis and Pajaczkowska, “Abroad is often perceived as a place where simple selfgratification is not possible but also constituted as a way of life” (204). On the Yahcht trip, Asya’s learns the difference between romance and casual sex. She is both fascinated and sickened by the idea of Bobba and the old man sleeping together . “She had-- although it made her sick to admit it-- been excited by the thought that behind the closed door of the cabin Bobba was doing it with the old man-- and doing it without love or talk of love” (167). Furthermore, back in her room, when Asya admits to herself how she good she had felt when Umberto had rubbed oil all over her body, she experiences the uneasiness that comes with realizing that one’s beliefs have failed the test of time-- and place. She recalls the time when she had passionately argued with her

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mother, “If somebody is in love with you, they don’t want to sleep with anyone else. And if they want to sleep with someone else, they’re not in love with you” (168). Love and sex, the trip confirms, are not inseparable. The Yacht trip marks one of the major scenes in which Asya’s categorical beliefs start to crumble right before her eyes. In many ways, Asya owes her early contemplation of ‘theory’ versus ‘practice’, ‘love’ versus ‘sex’, and ‘foreigner’ versus ‘native’ to her brief trip to Italy. From now on, she will learn to judge less and to think beyond binary oppositions. Moreover, she is shocked when Umberto asks her to pretend that they are actually sleeping together-- rather than just fooling around- so he could protect his macho reputation. Asya and Umberto’s ‘deal’ manifests the anti-thesis of the sexual dynamics that occur in Asya’s Egypt. “So much the opposite of everything she’s known: people sleeping with each other but pretending not to. People suspecting people of sleeping with each other… Here it’s all the other way around” (173). In her article, “Home and Identity,” Madan Syrup comments on the inevitability of comparison and assessment as the traveler takes the role of a foreigner and allows herself to genuinely reflect on her experiences abroad: On the one hand, it is interesting to leave one’s homeland in order to enter the culture of others, but, on the other hand, this move is undertaken only to return to oneself and one’s home, to judge or laugh at one’s peculiarities and limitations. In other words, the foreigner becomes the figure on to which the penetrating, ironical mind of the philosopher is delegated—his double, his mask. (100) Asya’s experience in Italy reaches its climactic moment when Asya engages in a pseudo-orgy scene at a wild party. Crowded in a small, dark room with a group of drunk and stoned people, Asya allows a total stranger to touch her in the most intimate places. Upon his touch, she discovers the greatness of her anatomy and capacity for pleasure. “… there was so much scope for searching down there: a miniature maze where you could wander for a lifetime, a maze of soft, shaded paths and a hundred hiding places all longing to be discovered” (176). At that point, Asya almost gives in to the stranger, and Umberto rushes to the rescue. Asya’s experience at the party is reminiscent of the carnival in which all order is inverted: “ The ‘trip’ constitutes a lapse in the regular rhythms of mundane existence, it leads to a place where time stands still or is reversed into a utopian space of freedom, abundance, and transparency. Like Carnival, this movement implies an inversion of everyday order” (Curtis and Pajaczkowska 199). The fact that Asya can’t really speak the language makes the encounter even more intense. “Without recourse to speech and listening, the tourist is isolated in the intensification of the significance of nonverbal communication… The significance of gesture, expression, and the body is intensified” (Curtis and Pajaczkowska 212).


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Therefore, Italy gives Asya the chance to experience pleasure that she had not experienced (and never would) with Saif. Her pleasurable experience also gives her even more insight into the joys of the body. Italy becomes the practical equivalence of the late-night peeking and sexual fantasies of Cairo. It is important to note that Asya’s experience in Italy remains a secret since she realizes that no one (not even Chrissie) would understand without judging her; but it remains engraved in her memory. Later, she will recall that experience when assessing her relationship with Gerald Stone. In a way, like Egypt and Beirut, Italy becomes another of Asya’s resources, as she continuously reflects on her sexuality and identity throughout the novel. Asya’s non-superficial encounter with different places and modes of life give her identity more texture and malleability and enrich her repertoire of values and expectations. In other words, even though Asya is a tourist in Italy, she still manages to turn her visit into much more than a wild, fun vacation. According to Daniel Williams, “…leisure may present a dizzying array of possibilities and options such that the modern life may seem irreparably fragmented. The diversity of available lifestyles, however, may also be an opportunity to create a distinctive selfidentity which positively incorporates elements from different settings into an integrated narrative” (Williams 360). In her introspections, Asya continues to integrate her past experiences in different parts of the world, often using them as ‘references’ in her assessment of current experiences. The Italy experience also contributes to Asya’s becoming a separate entity as she learns not to share everything with her family and friends and to form her own boundaries. Not unlike Beirut, Italy foreshadows her impending sexual transgression—a transgression that ultimately occurs when she gets involved with Gerald Stone. After her visit to Italy, Asya reunites with Saif in London. There, Asya is once again put in a culture where she’s not only sheltered from the judging eyes of friends and family—as was the case with Beirut—but also where she’s expected to have premarital sex. Unsurprisingly, she becomes keener on having sex with Saif, because she concludes that their imposed abstinence must have put a strain on their relationship. In London, in the privacy of their rented apartment, Asya once again tries to talk Saif into making love, but he puts it off. That night, after Asya has taken the initiative to take off her underwear and “unzip his pants,” Saif urges her to go to sleep, and he never touches her again, as if he is threatened by her unabashed erotic desires and her increased need to fulfill them (Soueif 190-91). Naturally, the Italy trip had instilled in Asya the need to be touched by Saif, the love of her life, in her newly discovered pleasurable zones. Asya’s behavior in London also signifies Asya’s unconscious attempt to merge the erotic (sex) with the romantic (Saif). Back home, Asya and Saif’s marriage crumbles, primarily due to the failure of their sex life and lack of communication; it also fails as a result of Saif’s

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inability to deal with the fast-growing Asya who increasingly questions the validity of his opinions and judgments—and who still feels the need for a healthy sex life between them. In fact, Asya’s dysfunctional sex life with Saif and her unsuccessful pregnancy may be seen as her body and mind’s refusal to share her body-- her own space -- with an ‘other’ before she has actualized herself as an entity. In her discussion of the discourse of “embodiment,” Sidonie Smith discusses the longtime association of a woman’s selfhood with both her hymen and her womb—two areas that are never totally private and that house the ‘other,’ either through penetration or child bearing. “There is no isolable core of selfhood there for a woman,” she explains, “for in the act of heterosexual intercourse, the female body is penetrated…and in the experience of pregnancy, that other that is part of the subject takes up greater and greater space inside until it is suddenly expelled” (12). It is this cultural narrative of what a woman’s selfhood and sphere should be that Asya symbolically challenges. “Discourses of embodiment,” Smith argues, “also mark woman as an encumbered self, identified almost entirely by the social roles concomitant with her biological destiny… The unified self disperses, radiating outward until its fragments dissipate altogether into social and communal masks” (13). Asya’s miserable existence in Egypt during that period demonstrates her feelings of confinement and necessitates yet another trip— another movement into a new place where she is freer to construct her self and where she continues to modify her perceptions of love and sex. In her review of the novel, Marilyn Booth argues that Asya, despite her privileged status, still suffers from huge restrictions. “…Asya is among the most economically and socially privileged of her society, the least hampered by received social expectations or economic constraints. Yet, as the buildungsroman unfolds we see how privilege shackles those who enjoy it, and how restrictive are the expectations placed on women of this stratum” (204). Among the most significant landmarks in North England is the cottage which Asya moves into after Saif relocates to the Middle East. At first, the cottage provides Asya with tranquility and ritual. In contrast to the student housing, the cottage gives her the peace that comes with having privacy and isolation—away from the noise and action of campus. It also makes her less nostalgic to home because it is an aesthetically pleasing space that appeals to her taste and gives her a sense of belonging: “While at the university, she had always hankered after Cairo, had missed the hot weather, the sounds of the street, the views from the windows… now that she is out here she delights in the very differences between this set-up and every set-up she’s ever known” (Soueif 435). Her cottage’s rituals which including chopping wood for the fire, reading or daydreaming, and drinking tea, however, make Asya long for someone to share that idyllic existence with. In the cottage, Asya will dream about Mario,


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Saif’s friend who is obviously fond of her but would never act on his feelings. The cottage may be contrasted with that of Asya’s apartment building in Cairo. While her family’s apartment in the midst of crowded Cairo awakens her sensations and teases her imagination regarding sex and eros, the cottage initially sparks her longing for romance and companionship—thus making her, after Mario’s departure, more susceptible to yielding to Gerald’s advances. Ironically, Asya’s first comment that the cottage is “too big” for her foreshadows her affair. Asya’s affair with Gerald Stone is doomed to failure, however. At first, Gerald is fascinated by Asya’s place of origin. In fact, Asya and Gerald meet at “Anglo-Arab” party to which Asya had been dragged by her sister. As the novel unfolds, we realize that this first space in which they meet is not incidental. This party, organized mainly by Arab students, manifests Gerald’s obsession with the ‘Other’ and the satisfaction that he gets through his encounter with the exotic cultures of the “Third world.” At the party, Gerald is enamored by Asya’s foreignness, and he can’t get enough of her Egyptian food. According to Curtis and Pajaczkowska, “Eating the ‘Other’ is partly regressive,” and it serves as “an alternative method of assimilating the otherness of a culture which cannot easily be apprehended and negotiated by language” (208). The “Anglo-Arab” space reflects another reality regarding Asya. She doesn’t really belong in that confined space which upholds the most traditional values of home. For instance, Asya mocks the self-imposed segregation of men and women at the party, and she insists to mingle with men (including non-Arab men), while still being friendly and genuine towards people from her own culture. It is in this sense that Asya’s identity reflects a “psychological-political oscillation between worlds, the ability to possess more than one world…” (Booth 204). As the novel progresses, we notice that not only is Gerald taken by Asya’s native culture, but he also tries to impose his stereotypes of that culture on Asya herself. Therefore, whenever she debunks his stereotypes, he becomes angry and frustrated. For instance, he is angered by her knowledge, sophistication, and access to knowledge. For him, Asya is too “civilized” for someone who comes from that part of the world. Her table manners, her jewelry, and her intellect— all these privileges make his role as the savior harder to achieve. Upon realizing that he has very little to offer the ‘noble savage,’ Gerald Stone feels inadequate and inferior. Geoffrey P. Nash argues that Gerald is a “predator who, without being conscious of his Orientalist tastes and sadistic urges, nevertheless subdues his ‘eastern butterfly’ as the West Imperialists had conquered the East” (319). I believe that Gerald stone strives to subdue and appropriate Asya, but he fails miserably. In other words, Asya denies Gerald the luxury of playing the role of the colonizer. Furthermore, instead of being the wild fiery woman Gerald expects, Asya displays coldness and rationality when dealing with his anger,

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thus defying the whole notion about the East’s excessive emotion and lack of reason. During one of his emotional outbursts, Gerald is startled by her selfconstraint and calls her a “monster” for not showing enough emotion. Asya and Gerlad’s final breakup occurs in New York, a city that Asya falls in love with because it strikes her as brutal and authentic; it also reminds her of Cairo—which she now views in a different, more complex way than when she was there. In her letter to Chrissie she recounts stories of heated conversations between customers and waiters at restaurants, of blunt signs that say “Don’t ever think of Parking here,” and of untidy streets with pot-holes (Soueif 717-19). The sound and the fury of New York City seem to revive Asya, and she is mesmerized by the city’s lack of pretentiousness. She feels a certain affinity with it, an affinity that she never really felt with the aloof London. More importantly, Asya’s visit to New York brings out the even more outrageous “monster,” in her, to use Gerlad’s expression. It is in New York, after watching a daring topless dancer at a bar, that Asya confronts Gerald and tells him to get out of her life for good. In New York, Asya manages to squeeze the word “Fuck” with “hospitality” in the same breath (724) when she decides to move out of Gerald’s friends’ apartment after breaking up with him. Therefore, While New York reminds Asya of Egypt, it also drives her to do things she would have never dreamed of doing in Egypt, or even London. After all, hospitality is a trait which most Arabs pride themselves in—a trait which may often stand in the way of honest exchanges, as in the case of Asya who never dared to kick Gerald out of her cottage in England for fear of being “rude.” In many ways, Asya internalizes the scenes and conversations she sees earlier in the day in the merciless city, and when the moment comes, she finally makes use of them as she acquires the driving force to send Gerald away. She even amazes herself. “…If she can say [Fuck their hospitality] she can say anything,” she thinks to herself, “anything at all—nothing can stop her now--” (Soueif 724). Asya’s affair with Gerald, however, is not a complete waste. It rather serves three crucial objectives. First, Gerald’s great lovemaking satisfies Asya’s erotic desires, heals her deserted body, and confirms the healthiness of her needs— something that Asya acknowledges. Second, as she sees herself (and her culture) through Gerald’s eyes, Asya learns to appreciate home better and get closer to it. She becomes defensive of home and yells at Gerald for being a hypocrite and a phony in his judgments of her upbringing. For instance, towards the end of the novel, at her grandfather’s grave site, Asya contemplates Gerlad’s hypothetical reaction to her aunt’s charity, and she rejects his mentality because though it might theoretically sound good, does not fit the particular context of her society (746). In other words, she realizes that home has its own system and its own merits. Finally, Asya’s affair with Gerald leads to her ultimate separation from Saif-- a separation that, despite its painfulness, marks her final act of


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independence and self-sufficiency. Unlike her first few months in North England, Asya does not need someone to hold her hand. If Asya has learned anything from her journey and transgression, it is that she has developed the skills to take care of herself anywhere, anytime. Granted, Asya’s dissociation from Saif takes a while to happen, but it happens nonetheless—when Asya is finally ready to let go. Asya’s return to Egypt, her homeland, marks her coming full circle. Launched into the world from her Egyptian society, Asya had carried with her perceptions and values regarding the ways of life-- some of which she keeps by the end, and some of which she disposes of or modifies. According to Amin Malak, author of “Muslim Feminism and the Narrative of Hybridity: The Fiction of Ahdaf Soueif,” Asya, at the end of the novel, typifies the hybrid woman par excellence: “Asya—polyglot, well-travelled, and academically accomplished is simultaneously Egyptian, Arab and Muslim, as well as other things…” (148). Undeniably, Asya’s journey has added more layers to her identity-- layers that allow her to deal with her new circumstances as a divorced woman who, according to her friends and family, had a lot to do with her own “downfall.” Anybody in her situation may have been devastated as a result of the constant judgment and berating. Not Asya. By the end of the novel, Asya is much more sure of herself. She also has a pretty good idea of what the man of her dreams should be like —a man who combines the tastes, values and sensibilities of a hybrid culture, a man who satisfies her romantic, intellectual, and erotic needs. Until he shows up, she will gladly be her own companion. Like the enduring statue of the refined dancer from the age of Ramses, Asya is “in complete possession of herself” (785). As Malak put it, “…Asya reconnects symbolically with her two civilizational inspirations: Islamic and Ancient Pharaonic, without necessarily disowning her acquired western values and experiences” (147). She is glad to be home-- but she will live life under her own terms this time. She recognizes her roots without being bound by them.

Works Cited Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Mraia Jolas. New York: Orion Press, 1964. Booth, Marilyn. “Egypt—In the Eye of the Sun by Ahdaf Soueif.” World Literature Today. Review. 68 (1994): 204. Curtis, Barry and Pajaczkowska Claire. “‘Getting There’: Travel, Time, and Narrative.” Travellers’ Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement. Eds. Robertson, George and Mash, Melinda. London: Routledge, 1994. Malak, Amin. “Muslim Feminism and the Narrative of Hybridity: The Fiction of Ahdaf Soueif.” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics. 20(2000). 140-63.

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Minh-ha, Trinh. “Other than Myself/My Other Self.” Travellers’ Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement. Eds. Robertson, George and Mash, Melinda. London: Routledge, 1994. Nash, Geoffrey P. “Ahdaf Soueif.” Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 267: Twenty-first-Century British and Irish Novelists. Ed. Michael R. Molino. Illinois: The Gale Group, 2002. 314-321. Raymond, Andre. “Cairo.” 1997. The Modern Middle East. 1993. Eds. Albert Hourani and Philip Khoury. NY: I.B.Tauris, 2004. 311-37. Shields, Rob. “Surfing: Global Space or Dwelling in the Waves.” Tourism Mobilities: Places to Play, Places in Play. Eds. Mimi Sheller and John Urry. London: Routledge, 2004. Smith, Sidonie. Subjectivity, Identity and the Body: Women’s Autobiographical Practices in Twentieth Century. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. Soueif, Ahdaf. In the Eye of the Sun. NY: Random House, 1992. Syrup, Madan. “Home and Identity.” Travellers’ Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement. Eds. Robertson, George and Mash, Melinda. London: Routledge, 1994. Williams, Daniel. “Leisure Identities, Globalization, and the Politics of Place.” Journal of Leisure Research. 34(2002): 351-67

CHAPTER NINETEEN FROM AMINE RIHANI TO EDWARD W. SAID: THE QUEST FOR THE PROPHECY OF THE 'OUT-PLACED' FATIMA RADHOUANI SAIDANI

The Arab American tradition goes back to the early years of the twentieth century and is continuing to thrive today. In fact, issues of race and identity are significant factors in American social history as a whole and in each one's ethnic, exiled group or minority. The dual legacies of these two issues--and therefore the intersection between them overtime—has deeply impacted the ways in which the world of the exiled relate to the place that they occupy or to the land of which they are dispossessed. This world is viewed mainly in terms of people cut-off and migrating; of people whose native place or the place of origin seems to be unrecoverable. Insomuch as their writings, thoughts and controversies are constituted by the experience of exile the Arab American thinkers have made identity the core of everything. An identity of an exiled who has made "his new homeland" a diverse and intertwined place in the sense suggested by Ghada Talhami that Arab American thinkers and literature cannot be seen through any prism than the prism of exile. Indeed, Arab-American literature presents a particular interest in this cross-cultural writing insomuch as it exercises an influence on the Arab-Americans -be poets, novelists, literary critics or feminist writers who have sought a link between nation and narration, literature and culture with a view to contributing to the American culture since the 1870s in fields as diverse as literature, science, history, anthropology, art and politics. The purpose of this paper is to explore the controversies and thoughts revealed in the Arab American thinkers’ literary expressions as they have impacted the Arab-American experience and taken role on the different identity issues. I will focus on Ameen Rihani, an Arab American thinker and founder of Arab American literature, and Edward Said. Sifting the ashes of Rihani' s novel

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The Book of Khalid and Said's Memoir Out of Place, my approach will account for their insights and explores their prophecies. Actually the academic, political and social interest in Arab American culture has been revived though encountering hurdles, for the last three decades166. There have been documents and archaeological discoveries asserting that the Arabs arrived to America many centuries ago. 0'Connr and Gregory Orfalea 167 believe that the writings and the ruins discovered in Mister Hill located in the city of Salem in New Hampshire and those found in Mount Hop in Bristol city in Rhode Island, as well as in some other sites in the State of Iowa indicate the existence of advanced trade relations between Native Americans and the peoples of the Mediterranean civilizations going back to 400 years before Christ. ln 1492, Luis De Tauro, fluent in Arabic, accompanied C. Columbus in his historical trip as a translator. Columbus decided on that trip after having read the book of Charif El Idrissi who related a detailed story about the sailing of eight Arabs from Lisbon, Portugal to discover the world beyond the Atlantic. Charif El Idrissi's book had actually been found among C. Columbus's personal belongings 168. Actually the earliest Arab immigrants to the new world came as slaves from the coast of Africa as early as 1501. Very few seemed to retain their religion and a Muslim identity. The first arrival of free Arab immigrants dates back to the later sixteenth century when captured Muslim soldiers were deposited on the coast of North Carolina in the south of the US. Daniel Pipes and Khalid Dur argue that the Melungeons, whites who live on the Cumberland Plateau in different parts of the southern eastern United States stretching from Virginia to Kentucky are probably their ancestors whose religion disappeared by the 1860s or two generations after the import of slaves ceased. Three centuries later in 1717, however, a group of Arabic-speaking Africans got to America. Worthy of note, the Moroccan King Mohammed III was the first to recognize officially the independence of America in 1787. Ten years later, he signed a Friendship Treaty with George Washington who himself signed a peace treaty with Algeria on 5th July 1795.169 In 1790, the Council of 166

Michael W. Suleiman, Arabs in America: The Conflict of Alienation and Integration (Beirut: Centre for Arab Unity Studies, 2003), 506. 167 0' Connor C., "History of the Arab Community " ln Joseph Haiek Arab American Almanac (Giedale: The News Circle Company, 1986), 34. 168 Gregory Orfalea, Before the Flames : A Quest for the History of Arab Americans (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1988 ) it is also available in Washington D.C. Arab American Institute, 1990, 49. 169 George Washington signed the first peace treaty ever with Bakler Hassen Algiers Regent. The treaty asserts that the USA should pay Algeria $642,000 in gold and 1200 Ottoman Liras in repatriation of American captives and ships. It is the only treaty written in Turkish (22 articles) that the USA signed in its history. The first American ship to be


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representatives in South Carolina, US. decided to sue the Moroccans Sundry Mores by the codes of the free whites and not by the slaves' codes. 170 G. Orfalea refers to an issue decreed by Jefferson Davis to import camels from Morocco to be used by the American army in the Westward expansion whereby 77 camels were imported in 1857 and cared for by three Arabs one of whom was El Hadj Ali, nicknamed Hi July and whose tomb is in Quartz city, Arizona. The modern wave of Arab Immigration to the US actually began a decade after the civil war, consisting mostly of Levantines. The 1893 Columbian Exposition with Cairo Street and the creation of the make-believe character Jameleddine El Yahbi by the sponsors of the Exposition enhanced the arrival of more Arabs. To note, the first Arab immigrant to the US. was Antonious Bechalani, a Syrian, who followed his studies in New York and whose tomb is in Greenwood cemetery in Brooklyn. In fact, the Syrian immigration reached its peak between 1905 and 1914 and the turn of the century period witnessed the first sustained influx of immigrants from the Arab world. It is the contention of Helen Hatab Samhan that the first wave of Arab immigration to the US started a century ago and lasted until the twenties, by which time the community numbered some 200,000. As sojourners, and up to WWI, Arabs in the US. thought of themselves as in and not a part of American society. Their politics, M. Suleiman argues: " reflected and emulated the politics of their origin homeland in both substance and style. In other words, they behaved not so much as US citizens or potential permanent residents but rather as subjects of the Ottoman authorities.”171 The newspaper, Kawkab America, the first Arabic newspaper established in the US in 1892, declared in its first issue its unequivocal support for the Ottoman sultan.172 Indeed, this notion of temporary residence or AI-Nizala173 was quite

caught by Algeria was in the Gadesh waters in Ramadhan 1199, (July 1785) then 11 other American ships were caught. In AL- Arab newspaper, Tuesday June 7th, 2005, p.7. 170 Ibtihaj Said Arafat, The Arab Settlement in America: Factors and Conditions. I. Said is a professor of Demography and Statistics at New York University. 171 M. Suleiman, “Arab Immigrants to America, 1880-1940”, in Awraq Magazine . XVI, 1995. Published by Instituto De Cooperacion Con El Mundo Arabo, Ministerio De Asunto Exteriores De Espana. 172 Kawkab America, 15 April 1892, p. l. English section. It should be noted that the English titles of Arabic newspapers cited here are provided as originally used. 173 Al -Nizala is a term used by the early Arabic-speaking community to identify itself as a group of people residing temporarily in the USA. The term seems to counter the term “Americans” emphasizing the alien status of these temporary settlers. In M. Suleiman, “ Arab Immigrants to America 1880-1940,” in Awraq Magazine, Volume XVI 1995, p.77.

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witnessed in the representation of the Arab culture in The Syrian World 174 which devoted a great deal of space to selections of Arab folk tales, stories from the Arabian Nights; famous Arab lovers, stories from Kalila wa Dimna, essays about Islam, Arab proverbs, and short notes about Ibn Sina. While early Arabs settlers strived to earn their living without being assimilated at the expense of the original culture and heritage, their children were thoroughly immersed in American society. This was perhaps due to the women and the change in societal relations because women were involved in the pack peddling activity 175 and the children’s education was ignored. Louise Houghton argued that early Arab immigrants : “ were roaming over North Dakota in 1888…Fort Wayne Grand rapids, Illinois, Arizona and Mexico.”176 Naoum Mokharzel contends that Syrian women peddlers: “ were given the freedom to peddle goods all over the place, which sometimes included staying out of town overnight, but were thought ‘immodest’ or ‘ indecent’ if they gave public speeches or became writers.”177 Under these circumstances, Englishspeaking newspapers and journals were established to: "cater to young Americans of Arab heritage"178 while identifying and contributing to the American nation. One can cite Al Ayyam, Al Musheer, Al Hoda, and Meraatul-Gharb. By 1919, for instance, 70.000 immigrants supported 9 Arabiclanguage newspapers, many of them dailies including the two women journalists' newspapers Victoria Antonious and Afifa Karam.179 174

Among these journals the most important one was The Syrian World published and edited by Saloum Mokharzel. (St. Paul, MN, Immigration History Research Centre, University of Minnesota, 1994). 175 What is unique with / about the Syrians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was their identification with pack peddling which they used as a stepping stone on the upward path to success, settlement and integration. It was in 1892 that a brimming Syrian colony of peddlers was established. The peddling experience of the early Arab settlers and particularly Syrians impacted their potential to assimilate and establish a network of peddling settlements. 176 Alixa Naff, “Pack Peddling” in Becoming America: The Early Arab Immigrant Experience. Carabondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illois University Press, 1965. pp.130-1. 177 Michael Suleiman, “The Mokarzels’ Contributions to the Arabic Speaking Community in the United States” in Arab Studies Quarterly, Volume 21, Number 2, Spring 1999.p.76. 178 Naoum Mokarzel sought in AL- Huda newspaper better conditions for Arab American women. He championed women’s rights to be educated and advocated the preservation of the Arab family. 179 Afifa Karam was born in the village of Amshit in the coastal town of Jbail, Lebanon. She emigrated to Louisiana then moved to New York where she worked as an editor at Al- Huda newspaper.. The first Arab journalist to own a newspaper in the US.) She edited


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But WWI exercised a great influence on Arab Americans who happened to be cut-off from their own people and confronted race-based challenges to their identity. Though the Arab settlers did not constitute an “ ethnic nation” in America like the Irish, or the Poles, their experience of isolation and separation enhanced their sense of solidarity. By 1910, discriminatory attitudes of nativists began reflecting in laws controlling immigration and naturalization. The ArabAmericans were not immune to this brand of discrimination for the Americanization programmes implemented in 1915180, for instance, excluded them when the federal authorities began to deprive this community of the right to naturalization and American citizenship on the grounds that they allegedly did not belong to the white race or were actually: "not quite white."181 Not until 1906 did Syrian Sojourners make of it a racial issue when a bureau of Immigration and Naturalisation was established to administer a whole set of laws entangling immigrants from Western Asia for voting purposes. Therefore, the issue of race discrimination even worsened when a naturalisation law of 1870 was carried out as a background for determining the suitability for citizenship: a ‘right’ for which the Syrians were disqualified. However, by 1920, an impressive number of Syrians got naturalised Americans. Of the recorded 55,102 foreign born Syrians and Palestinians, about 41%, or 22, 583, were naturalised or had received their first papers. In 1930, the figure rose to 61.8%. A. Rihani, who emigrated to the U.S. in 1888 at the age of twelve, is the founding father of Arab American literature. The author of 29 books in English and 26 in Arabic, Rihani's first translation of the Quatrains of Abu- Al- Alaa El Maarri was published in 1903. During that period, he joined several literary and Artistic societies in New York such as The Poetry Society of America and The a woman's newspaper called Al- Alim al- Nissai- al Jadid ( The New Women’s World) in 1912. She was appointed by Naoum Mokarzel to write for Arab Women in AL- Huda . N. Mokarzel offered a free AL- Huda subscription to any Arab women that could read. In “ It Is Our Duty”, AL- Huda,14 August 1907, p.4 in Arab Studies Quarterly, p. 88. A. Karam died in 1924. 180 July 4th 1915 was the first “ National Americanization Day” with the motto” Many Peoples but One nation” This has unfortunately never been carried out culminating in the law of 1924 which restricted the number of Syrian immigrants from 9000 immigrants per year to a few hundreds. 181 Helen Hatab Samhan, “Race Classification and the Arab Experience” in M. Suleiman, Arabs in America: Building a New future. This paper was first presented on April 4th,1997 at a Symposium on Arab Americans by the Centre of Contemporary Arab Studies ( CCAS) , Georgetown University. Samhan argues that classification by race has dominated the official attitudes towards immigrants. She is currently the deputy of the Arab American Institute.

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Pleiade Club. His remarkable involvement in and contributions to the American culture is witnessed in his pursuit of a literary career through the publication of essays in English (The Path of Vision and The Fate of Palestine); of novels (The Lily of Al Ghawr: Zanbakat el Ghour, Jihan, and The book of Khalid published in 1911 with illustrations provided by the poet painter Gibran Khalil Gibran; historical and political literary analyses (The Lore of the Arabian Nights, Arabian Contribution to Civilization, The Poetry of Arabia); short stories, and poetry ( A Chant of Mystics, The Hymn of the Valleys) and plays. E. Said emigrated to the US more than half a century after Ameen Rihani. With an English education, E. Said is well-trained to believe and think like a westerner. Whereas Rihani went back and forth between Lebanon and New York, three times with two long stays ( from 1899 to 1903, then from 1905 -1911), E. Said remained outside the net of the west though he made New York his home and his concerns for teaching and research are purely canonical. While at Columbia University the war of 1967 coincided with the heightened political activism at the university over civil rights and the Vietnam War. The emergence of Palestinian nationalism and armed struggle urged him to articulate a history of loss and dispossession. His works are then constituted by the experience of his exile and highlight a resistance spirit. Rejecting any kind of filiations, E. Said embraced a resistance culture in his confrontational essays and his trilogy Orientalism (1978), The Question of Palestine (1979), and Covering Islam (1981). Accounting for the thinkers’ insights into Arab-American culture and their prophecies, Ameen Rihani sought the preservation of Arab heritage since the majority of the settlers thought of themselves as sojourners or temporary residents and their relation to the homeland remained inextricably bound. Of all the challenges, the issue of identity was the most difficult to address. Rihani's legacy of conciliation between the East and the West and his attempt to bridge the gap between the Arab and the American civilizations is expressed in his novel in which he endorsed a cross-cultural dialogue between the US and his homeland which remained behind. Rihani's challenge as an exile relates to prophesying a world where the East and the West could unite. His appeal to bring to terms these two worlds is revealed in his novel The Book of Khalid, the first novel written in English by an Arab American. The narrator states: “ The twelfth day of January 1910, this Book of Khalid was finished.” Steven Blackburn asserts that the story: “ of our hero, a young Syrian visionary, covers his adolescence through his emigration, this time to the desert of Egypt.” The novel actually centres on the journey made by the character Khalid from the city of Baalbek, Lebanon, to New York City seeking a promised land that could embrace the romanticism of the East with the prosperity of the West. Rihani’s prophecy endorses his awareness


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of his inborn role as a bridge between cultures revealed in Khalid's statement: "...for our country is just beginning to speak, and I am her chosen voice. I feel that if I do not respond, if I do not come to her, she will be dump forever." Khalid's desire is to fulfil his prophecy by going beyond the visible. He further claims that: "never was he satisfied with the seen horizon, we are told, no matter how vast and beautiful, his soul always yearned for what was beyond, above and below, the visible line." In his journey from the East to the West his motto was: "… One book at a time." Since he would not overload himself with books, Khalid would burn the book in hand after having read it, and warms his hands upon its flames.182 Edwin Markham argues that in The Book of Khalid: “Ameen Rihani writes a critique of our Western civilization as it appears to the wisdom of the East...his hero, Khalid, explores many creeds seeking to find a way through the labyrinth of human thought." In this light, Khalid pursues his dream of the promised land prophesying that the East and the West are: "the Male and the Female of the Spirit…[and] should give birth to a unifying faith, a unifying art, and unifying truth…."183 A message addressed to East and West. To his disenchantment, his dream proved elusive. Though the story seems to be that of a young man’s life whose aspect is actually present: “ the raison d’etre behind it is not so much a narration as it is the recounting of the development of an idea, or rather of a system of thought, on the part of this young man.” Accounting for the events surrounding this process--one could cite the travels, the lynching phenomenon of African Americans-- they seem to have given direction to Khalid’s thought and his quest for the truth within himself through his personal experience and one of his mates Shakib. Rihani’s two fictional characters, upon getting to Washington Street rented a cellar, stocked it with a variety of goods and pack peddled for three years. In the terms of Khalid: “ A peddler is superior to a merchant, we travel and earn money; our compatriots the merchants rust in their cellars and lose it.”184 Khalid’s reflections on America continue endorsing a twofold aspect: that of an enemy and a benefactor, a land where material prosperity and spiritual plight coexist. Certainly if America’s potential were intertwined with the glories of the East the outcome would overscore both. For Khalid is acutely aware of his Arab heritage as he owes to Tyre, Sidon and 182

In his Memoir Out of Place Edward Said refers to a summer camp at Maranacook in Maine, US where he experienced a canoe trip with a Czech counsellor named Andy who was reading a book . What surprised Said was that the counsellor would tear the page from the book after having read it and / “ roll it up into a ball, and toss it casually into the lake. Out of Place, section VI p.137. If Rihani uses fire imagery to convey the burning , Said relates water imagery. Fire and water are two elements used by the Elizabethans. 183 A. Rihani, The Book of Khalid. P.364. 184 Alixa Naff, “Pack Peddling”.p. 134.

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Byblos the reasons behind his character. In 1917, in his Letters to Uncle Sam ( a collection of essays), Ameen Rihani wrote a letter to the president of the USA in which he revealed that: " I have always felt that I was after all but an adopted child, an outsider, an alien American at best and never was my voice heard in your study or in your parlour ...we are not of the East or the West, no boundaries exist in our breast." If The Book of Khalid maintains the attempt to be in a world rather than of this world, E. Said lays out his conceptual framework in exploring the nature of the encounter between the East and the West and puts forward a 'Culture of Resistance' which consists in dismantling the views pertaining to Arab culture in Western discourse. Said states that the urgent role of culture is: " the vital, enabling counterpoint to the institutional practices, demonstrating how the extension of territory through military force and the exercise of power in the colonies was sustained by the ideological invasion of cultural space."185 In this sense, E. Said had been fighting to reactivate the lost culture or rather to discover an identity worth risking. Though out placed, E. Said had never fought for the occupation of a place but to ensure a room for cohabitation hence, clearing a space for the marginalized resistance so that he could make his voice heard. His long-standing support for a resistance view and his commitment to disseminating his writings beyond the restricted audience of academic specialists and intellectuals proved that exile as a punishment is considered as: "... [The] most horrible fate, a permanent fall from Paradise that an individual could endure."186 Although he writes in After the Last Sky that this living aspect of the memory meant: "That stability of geography and the continuity of land - these have completely disappeared from my life and the life of all the Palestinians," this view of exile in Said's mind is inextricably bound with the urgency for connections with Palestine. Said's major concern is to portray an image of a new Arab. But this could not suffice. He further stresses: " Whether I am with Americans or with Arabs, I always feel incomplete. Part of myself can't be expressed.,”187 E. Said's personal awareness that the western institution left him incomplete by neglecting that part of him which belongs to an alien cultural group urged him to undermine in his confrontational essays the discursive productions of the west which, in a sense, deformed his Arab roots. That was why he was determined to: "think and write contrapuntally." Situated in the centre of New York but with roots in the periphery, E. Said 185

Benita Parry, "Overlapping Territories, intertwined Histories" in Michael Sprinker Ed. Edward Said. A Critical Reader, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1992 p.24. 186 Nubar Hovsepian, "Connections with Palestine" ln Edward Said, . A critical Reader. p.5. 187 Ferial Zaghlul, “The Resonance of the Arab- Islamic Heritage in Said's Works” . p. l 57.


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‘contain[s] multitudes’, to borrow Walt Whitman's words. With in his hands the map of Palestine, in his mind the issue of its people, and in his heart the displacement, the homelessness, and exile; E. Said took the Arab Nation's burden to the North in a similar fashion to the westerner who took the ‘white man' s burden’ to the South but a burden of controversies and thoughts revealed in a resistance culture or 'contrapuntal. If Mustapha Said, the protagonist in Season of the Migration to the North claims that " [I] came to [you] as an invader, " Said, could say, " [I]came to [ you ]as a judge". Through his journey, E.Said broke into the boundaries of aesthetics unveiling the aspects which western literature consciously or wittingly made invisible. In this light, he tried to settle the core of his unease and his people's restlessness. By stating in Out of Place that he: "felt that [he] had been fashioning a self who revealed for a western audience things that had so far either been hidden or not discussed at all," Palestine has therefore become in Said's hands a significant novel, not fictitious but a production of reality. He turned exile from a place outside the world to a place in the core of the world. It is " better to be out of place" he asserts " than to be in a place." That Rihani and E. Said had always been between cultures or they had always stood outside of cultures, being in and out of things and out of places rendered them perhaps closer than they otherwise seem. Their prophecies are undertaken through different lenses. While Rihani chose to be 'out of place', Said's exile was involuntary due to the dispossession of his land. Neither E.Said nor his father could be allowed an inch where they could be buried. Had not Rihani and Said had the seeds of the imaginary, the fictional sojourner Khalid and Said would not have had the ability to survive. Ensuring that he does not belong to: “ the hypocrites, philistines, pretenders, and conceited,” Khalid’s dream or rather Rihani's remains within the romantic desire, while Said accords a special status to the resistance culture. Whereas Khalid wends his way to Beirut getting involved in the political controversies, E. Said remained in the US with a view to being the Orient’s voice and undertaking the task of speaking truth to power. In no way is the disparity drawn between A. Rihani and E. Said just a discrepancy between two individuals or two visions but it may serve as a guide to a change in relation of Arab Americans with the US. and to their homeland. As The Book of Khalid and Out of Place stand witnesses to the two thinkers’ prophecies and products as well as expressions of their identity at a time identity strives, the events, the thoughts, and the messages are emerging again the USA, a world where there are almost three million registered Arab-Americans, 82 percent of whom have at least a high school diploma. The Arab Americans are still struggling to 'cater' their Arab heritage and strengthen their identity. In 1999, The Anthology of New Arab American Writing was published

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focusing on themes of culture and identity with the help of the magazine Mizna.188 Dina Abu Jaber, for instance, and other Arab American writers extended the scope and focus by responding to the styles and concerns too much further from the roots of A. Rihani. In a desert of Arab-American strife, the new generation is a resting place, an oasis where the sun will then rise after the rain tires of falling. Until then I would tell E. Said what the poet painter Khalil Gibran wrote in his letter to Amin Rihani in 1911: " I will not bid you a happy new year, but I will bid the new year happiness in having you, and I will not wish what people wish each other, but I will wish for people some of what you possess- for you are rich in yourself, and I am rich in you. "

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Mizna an Arab term which means an oasis or a shadow in the desert.

CHAPTER TWENTY PİCAROS OF OUR TİMES: NARRATİNG MİGRATİON189 SABRINA BRANCATO

In the last decades, the presence of increasing numbers of migrants from developing countries in European conurbations has stirred a growing interest for allogeneous communities. Together with various forms of documentary literature produced both by locals and new citizens, new genres are proliferating which give voice to the individual experience of expatriés and members of minorities. Fictions centred on displacement as well as immigrant autobiographies in literary form (usually self-authored, but occasionally coauthored with the assistance of a local intellectual) are being published all over Europe. These texts, which constitute the corpus of what could be termed ‘migration literature’ or ‘immigrant literature’, draw the attention of European readerships to the problematics of migration and look deep into the reality of contemporary multicultural Europe. In countries such as Britain or France, which, in part as a consequence of their colonial past, have a long experience of hosting immigrants, expatriés and refugees and are involved in a longstanding debate on multicultural politics, migration literature has been developing over several decades, and minor literatures of this kind already have a tradition and a canon of their own.190 By contrast, in countries such as Italy or Spain, where immigration in great numbers is a more recent phenomenon (and let us not forget that these are countries from where a lot of people left during the twentieth century out of

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This research was supported by a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship within the 6th European Community Framework programme. 190 Even if still marginal, literatures such as the Black British and the Beur have gained enough recognition as to be included in national curricula and enough visibility as to occupy special bookshelves in libraries and bookshops.

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hunger and poverty), migration literature is still a novelty, although it is developing very quickly.191 The literature of the African diaspora in Europe has a tradition which can be traced back to the slave narratives of the 18th and 19th century. One could argue that from the very beginning that this writing has presented strong picaresque traits, because of its autobiographic character, a recurrent episodic structure, the peculiarity of the situation (a black person in a white-dominated environment), a critical – often ironic or satiric – view of the dominant society, and the focus on marginalisation and, in most cases, on poverty, which lead to the development of a series of survival strategies. The migratory texts of the last decades of the twentieth century (from the period of the decolonisations to mass migrations in the global era) mark the beginning of a European dimension in the literature of migrant minorities, which, although characterized by linguistic and cultural plurality (with regard to the different languages, origins and locations of the authors), find common ground both in the narrative strategies and in the thematic focus on ethnic identity and cultural interaction. In the texts of displaced African authors the picaresque experience acquires the specificity of intercultural and interracial (dis)encounters. The subjective experience becomes emblematic for a whole community and foregrounds a cultural confrontation between a minority and a dominant group, raising questions about the implications of being black in a white country, of being African in Europe. Although several Afro-European narratives could be taken as examples of how the old picaresque genre is re-elaborated and adapted to the reality of contemporary multicultural Europe, for reasons of space I will focus on two texts which I find particularly illustrative: I, Vendor of Elephants: A Life by Force between Dakar, Paris and Milan, written in Italian by Pap Khouma, a Senegalese writer resident in Italy who has made the courageous choice of writing in the language of his host country, and Another Lonely Londoner, by Nigerian-British writer Gbenga Agbenugba (pen name for Ola Opesan). The 191

In Italy the first texts from immigrant authors were published during the late eighties and early nineties and, since then, the field has been growing at surprising speed. Although it is still very difficult for authors to find a publisher and to have access to the mainstream, a great effort is being made to endorse and give recognition to emergent italophone voices, both by authors themselves and by local scholars such as, for example, Professor Armando Gnisci, of the University La Sapienza in Rome, who has written a considerable number of articles and books on the subject and who has established a migration literature on-line database of primary and secondary sources. Spain, on the other hand, has recently started to devote more attention to the cultural production of authors from its former colony Equatorial Guinea and immigrant authors from other linguistic areas, and major publishers are now taking the challenge of promoting migration literature, sometimes even by privileging content over literary quality.


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two novels were published respectively in 1990 and 1991. Both texts, whose titles evoke images of movement, exile, alienation, loneliness and hardship, are centred around the picaresque journey of a young black African man in search of better opportunities in the Western world, a journey which is physical as well as psychological and intellectual, as the protagonists gradually acquire an articulate understanding of their position in the host society and come to terms with their transcultural identities, constantly renegotiating between contending cultures. Both works foreground blackness as a mark of exclusion and powerlessness, and offer a bitter reflection on the dynamics of ghettoisation in multicultural environments. Following the tradition of the picaresque genre, both novels present an episodic structure and follow the adventures of the protagonists in urban and suburban spaces where they are positioned as outcasts. Also in line with picaresque classics, the environment portrayed is often a violent one where a sense of dignity is hard to mantain: immigrant picaros are often witty and talented, but forced by circumstances to live from hand to mouth and endure hardships; they can seldom avoid trouble with the police, and they can easily fall into the clutches of drug dealers or roguish peers. But the most outstanding feature to be pointed out is movement, which informs both narratives at different levels. In the first place, a transnational drive to defy borders is foregrounded. No matter how difficult it is to get a visa or how much the trip costs in terms of money, danger and broken illusions, the migrant is always on the move: the protagonists leave Africa for Europe, eventually go back home, then to Europe again, and finally one stays and one goes back to Africa. In the second place, a predominance of open and public spaces reflects the picaresque street life of immigrants: they walk or drive through cities and suburbs, get on and off trains and buses, meet their ethnic peers in overcrowded stations and squares which constitute the emblem of those countries within a country formed by immigrant communities, and cover kilometers or stand in long queues to get an immigration paper, to get a job or whatever may make their life better. Finally, in both works the subjective experience has a collective value, in the sense that it stands for and gives voice to the quests and plights of a whole community of dispossessed and subalterns, and speaks up against racial and social discrimination bringing to the fore the flaws of a multicultural Europe which is not struggling hard enough to guarantee its minorities the dignity and social justice all citizens should enjoy.

I, Vendor of Elephants: A Life by Force between Dakar, Paris and Milan: The year 1990 marks the emergence of Afro-Italian literature with the publication of three autobiographical works: Senegalese Pap Khouma’s Io,

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venditore di elefanti, Tunisian Salah Methnani’s Immigrato and Moroccan Mohamed Bouchane’s Chiamatemi Alì. The first fictional narratives appear in the following years (we can mention two of the most successful: Senegalese Saidou Moussa Ba’s La promessa di Hamadi, published in 1991 and Tunisian Mohsen Melliti’s Pantanella: Canto lungo la strada, published in 1992), together with the first literary accomplishments of immigrant women: Eritrean Ribka Sibhatu’s Aulò (1993), Somalian Shirin Ramzanali Fazel’s Lontano da Mogadiscio (1994) and Capoverdian’s Maria de Lourdes Jesus’ Racordai: Vengo da un’Isola di Capoverde (1996). These pioneering works, which address an Italian readership, arise from the double need to give voice to the experience of immigrants and to make Italians familiar with the cultures of origin of their new neighbours.192 Pap Khouma was born in Senegal in 1966 and arrived in Italy in 1984. I, Vendor of Elephants193 is his first work, the autobiographical account of the hardships of an undocumented immigrant. The book is divided into 31 short episodic sections whose titles indicate the frames of reference concerned: ‘Selling’, ‘Clandestine’, ‘Italian money’, ‘The girls from Senegal’, ‘The carhome’, ‘Senegalese meal’, ‘Tourist in Rome’ and ‘Metropolitan riots’ are only a few significant examples. About ten years of perpetual roaming through Africa and Europe are summarized in a chronologically linear narrative where the use of the present tense together with very short sentences and the prevalence of informative elements over rhetorical images produce a sense of immediacy and evoke the style of journalistic chronicles. In the first two chapters, the narrator introduces himself as a former streetvendor, explains how hard his life was as a clandestine in Italy, and then gives vent to memory and starts relating his migratory story. Life was hard for him as a young ceramist in Senegal; therefore, he left in 1979 and became a streetvendor in the Ivory Coast. Struck by homesickness, he then went back, but was eventually forced by circumstances to leave again, this time for Europe. He spent a summer in Italy, 192

The majority of books belonging to this first phase are co-authored (edited by or written with the assistance of a native speaker), since Italian is for these authors a second language often acquired in adult age. Nonetheless, this should not diminish the authenticity or the literary value of these works, but should rather be seen as a necessary transitional phenomenon. Most of these writers, on the other hand, have continued their career and have later published other works in Italian without assistance of any kind. Pap Khouma’s Io, venditore di elefanti was written with the help of a journalist, Oreste Pivetta, since the author had not yet mastered the Italian language at that time, whereas his second novel, recently published, is completely self-authored. 193 Only a short excerpt from the book has been translated into English and appeared in the first anthology of italophone migration literature in English, Mediterranean Crossroads, edited by Graziella Parati. All translations from Italian in this article are mine.


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selling masks, elephants, necklaces, and other exotic objects on the beaches in Riccione, on the Adriatic coast, with the intention of heading then to Germany through France. But he and his friends were stopped on the German border and sent back to Paris. France was not a good option for him, since as a newcomer he felt rejected by established Senegalese and since his awareness of past colonial relations made the country particularly hostile and unpleasant for him. After spending one month in Paris and trying without success to get into the Foreign Legion, he crossed the border again and went to Italy for his second stay, which was longer this time. However, the following bitter deception with life conditions took him back to Senegal for another try, a short experience in Gambia, a new failure, and the final return to Italy. There, life continued to be hard, he often had to move from one town to another because of troubles with the police, and eventually settled in Milan, where, although his circumstances were slow to improve (health problems adding to economic difficulties and the hardship of illegal selling), he finally found a role in the community and a way of making his voice heard by founding an association defending the rights of immigrants. Khouma shows how immigrants in Italy live by their wits and how important it is to gain an understanding of the host society and of the psychology of its inhabitants in order to survive and make a living. He was a good vendor, he says, because he was “a good observer” and he knew how to “approach a good customer” (11). Illegal immigrants have to put aside both personal dignity and pride for the sake of selling: “For me, for example, it was just fine if one called me ‘marocchino’ and told me ‘marocchino, come here’, because this was a way to get into a conversation. And after chatting for a while, it was likely that the guy decided to buy something. If one began, the others would not back out, in order not to look stingy” (11).194 Nevertheless, however subaltern their position is in Italian society, immigrants are often able to find a space of their own, so that they can make a decent living. The impact they make on the host society can be observed, for example, in the changes of the cityscape. The occupation of space is a sign of empowerment. In Milan, Khouma was ‘an inventor’, because he set up the first market places in underground stations, smoothing the way for others to come: “Now, as you can see, the Senegalese are on all mezzanines of the underground and there is no way of throwing them out. They know how to make themselves heard” (11). Another important means of empowerment is language: immigrants who master the Italian language deal more easily both with customers and with the authorities and can more easily get themselves out of trouble. Khouma relates 194

The term marocchino, which means Moroccan, is improperly used in Italy to refer to immigrants from Africa.

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how, whenever he and his friends got stopped by the police or the carabinieri, he was always the one who spoke for the group. Every night, after the selling, he would stay awake and swallow a number of grammatical rules: I am the best. During these months I have learned an important thing: in front of the police it is not convenient to play the part of the one who does not know, who does not understand, who does not let out a word in Italian, never ever. Better, much better to answer appropriately, not to make life more difficult for the police and the carabinieri, who are already angry for whatever reason. Eyes downcast, then, yes capo, you’re right capo, but in Italian. (59-60)

Language also enables Khouma to act as a mediator between his Senegalese peers in need and Italian authorities, occasionally translating for them in official situations and then becoming, as director of the association of Senegalese immigrants, the spokesperson for his community. In a manner typical of many African migration narratives, expectations and experience are continuously set against each other in Khouma’s text, producing a dialectic between images of Africa and Europe which keep changing as by refraction. Dakar, a big and difficult city in the eyes of the young narrator, appears small, “almost an island” (16), when he goes back, and its beauty grows through distance and memory. The West, the home of the tubab,195 the “country of happiness” (23), an ideal unspecified space before departure, imagined as a place full of lights, shops, beautiful women and friends, concretises itself in different deceptive localities where the immigrant is seen as an exotic curiosity (in the best of cases), an intruder or an outcast. Self-perception changes accordingly: an outfit which had appeared the non plus ultra of elegance in Senegal, for example, becomes for the narrator a mark of weirdness and a reason of embarassment in fashion-obsessed Italy (25). The disillusionment with the dreams of departure together with the feeling of being out of place and, often, the sense of being rejected by the host society result in an oppositional perspective whereby the ‘I’ of the narration becomes a collective ‘we’ (we the Senegalese, we the clandestines, we the immigrants) set against the ‘you’ (the autoctonous people, the tubab) to whom the narrative is addressed. The tone of the narration, which is usually conciliatory, in the struggle to compare and mediate between conflicting cultures, occasionally becomes hostile and resentful, giving vent to the sense of loneliness and helplessness of uprooting: You have seen them innumerable times, those black guys with thin legs and long feet sinking in the sand, loaded with necklaces and elephants. I was one of them, among the first, when we were still a curiosity for you. Out of place,

195

Expression used in several countries of subsaharan Africa to identify whites.


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because a black in Rimini or in Riccione is not in his place, although I know many beaches and above all I know the sea of Dakar, which is then the ocean losing itself in the infinity, quite the opposite of your Adriatic which is small, closed and dirty. (31-32)

The portrayal Khouma offers of Italian society is all but uniform and, as well as relating experiences of rejection and racism, he also reports displays of genuine concern and solidarity. Nevertheless, the two worlds of clandestines and Italians can never truly come together because undocumented immigrants cannot allow themeselves to trust anybody: “Never say who we are, where we go, what we do” (114). The dividing line is then constituted by illegality: the smallest mistake can cost the immigrant an expulsion order. But then things change. With the decree of 1986, leading three years later to the legge Martelli, which issues residence permits to legalise the situation of immigrants, Khouma and his friends can finally stop hiding. However, their commerce is still forbidden and finding a regular job is very difficult, let alone the exploitation by local employers to which foreign workers are subjected. Some of them resort to more dangerous but more lucrative activities, like drug selling; others, like Khouma himself, keep struggling to achieve a decorous life. With the regularisation of undocumented immigrants, some sections of Italian society become more suspicious and more hostile towards the new guests: “As soon as our life has got a bit better, many have got angry, others scared” (137). Nevertheless, legality contributes to give immigrants a sense of self-confidence and a more articulate awareness of their rights: “We have learned to make ourselves heard, to explain why we are in Italy, to defend our demands, our protests” (127). As a result, their relationship with local citizens also improves, since they no longer have to fear being denounced to the police, and they understand that a favourable public opinion can help in their struggle: “For us it is very important to have the people on our side” (127). Towards the conclusion of his tale Khouma declares himself lucky because he could tell his story, since, as it is said in Senegal, “if you can tell the tale, it means it brought you luck” (140). Writing, then, is associated with survival, and this is certainly a tale of survival, but also one of improvement and of cultural interchange. The last chapter of the autobiography, significantly entitled ‘Children’, envisages a transcultural future for Italy. The very last sentences portray the gradual transformation of Italian ethnoscapes and express a sense of optimism about the possibility of peaceful cohabitation: “Many stay and meet Italian girls. They fall in love. There are marriages, and then also separations and divorces. And then again other marriages. Children are born” (141). Khouma himself stayed, married and had children. Today, he is a respected intellectual. He has founded and directs an online review which promotes migration literature, and

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his second novel has just been published by a major mainstream publisher. His is, after all, a story of successful integration.

Another Lonely Londoner As the title itself indicates, Another Lonely Londoner inserts itself in the tradition of Black migration writing in Britain established by earlier generations of immigrants. This tradition is now taken up by younger authors whose work illustrates both the persistance of old racist structures in British society (which points to the need to continue giving voice to the migratory experience) and the changes in the self-perception of the black subject in a country where the impact of black presence on society and culture becomes more visible every day. Apart from the text the novel explicitly refers to (Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, published in 1956 and now a classic of Black British literature), we can recall a few more titles in the same picaresque line: Dillibe Onyeama’s Nigger at Eton (1972), Buchi Emecheta’s In the Ditch (1972) and Second Class Citizen (1974), Joan Riley’s The Unbelonging (1985), and, more recently, Simi Bedford’s Yoruba Girl Dancing (1991) and Biyi Bandele’s The Street (1999), to name just a few. Another Lonely Londoner is a debut novel partly inspired by the author’s personal experience. Born in London to Nigerian parents in 1966, Gbenga Agbenugba returned with his family to Nigeria when he was ten years old, and attended school and university there. Back in London, he then completed a TV & Video course and wrote several screenplays. His novel centres on those years in London, the feeling of being an outsider in his hometown, the negotiation between Nigerian and British culture, and the dilemmas of transnational identity. The novel is divided into three parts (‘Arriving in London’, ‘Existing in London’ and ‘Lonely in London’), which clearly refer to the main phases of immigrant experience and anticipate both the difficulties of the process of adjustment to the host country (the expression existing evokes deprivation and subsistance) and the failed integration. The narration is retrospective and in third person, but it closely follows the point of view of the protagonist, Akin, and employs a colloquial register. Set in London during the eighties, the story covers five years in the life of a London-born Nigerian who had gone back to Nigeria with his family as a child and heads back to London on his own as a young man, in search of better opportunities and with the dream of becoming a scriptwriter. The first part of the book describes the traumas of arrival: the cold, the distress of neither having money nor a place to stay for the night, the loneliness. Akin then finds an old school friend who helps him out and offers him a roof; he finds work as a packer and begins to feel comfortable in London. Eventually, however, he realises that his friend makes a living out of selling drugs, and when they


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receive a visit by the police, he decides it is time to settle down on his own. The second and main part centres on Akin’s independent life in London and his gradual adjustment to the new environment. He settles down in a small flat, finds a better job as a postman, makes new friends, and frequently entertains relationships with women of Nigerian or Caribbean origin. Then he starts regularly attending a writing course and sending his scripts and poetry out for publication, although without success. He resigns from his job and after a lot of effort he finds another one as a sales clerk, which he will soon leave to become a taxi driver. Flexible working hours allow him to attend a course of video production at university and devote a lot of time to writing. The friendship with a classmate, a race-conscious angry black man, awakes his interest in social and political issues and he slowly acquires a more articulate awareness of the historical oppression of black people. After four years in Britain, he then goes back to Nigeria for three weeks and, surprising everybody including himself, gets formally engaged to his former girlfriend, Tolu, and promises to take her to Britain as soon as she finishes her studies. In the third and last part of the novel, we witness Akin’s disillusion with his dreams. On the one hand, he tries to make a film for a black audience but the project fails. On the other hand, he is forced to find himself a steady job, this time in a security company, in order to demonstrate to immigration authorities that he is able to support his future wife. Nevertheless, within a year, Tolu is twice denied the visa to join him in Britain. Frustrated and disenchanted with the lack of opportunities for black people, Akin suddenly decides to go back to Nigeria for good. Through Akin’s journey, Agbenugba illustrates several typical features of the immigrant experience, such as the anxieties before arrival, the attitude of established immigrants towards newcomers, the determination to make the best out of sometimes very unfavourable conditions, the way the pressure of the society of origin can influence the life of an immigrant in the host country and the difficult cultural negotiations immigrants go through. But, more than anything else, the novel confronts the difficulty black people have in making England their home. The feeling of being out of place and the sense of rejection Akin experiences even in such a multicultural metropolis as London is all the more striking considering that he was born and spent the first ten years of his life there. It is then not so much a question of conflicting cultures as it is one of skin colour, of persisting racist structures of power which make Britain unable to accept black citizens as part of society and which ghettoise the black community, dividing the country into first- and second-class citizens. The picture Agbenugba gives of British society is one of completely separate communities. Whites and blacks can work together, even go out together and intermarry in exceptional cases, but the colour line is always visible and constitutes a barrier for interaction and integration. Whereas the tales

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of some of Akin’s friends, such as the episode of Bimbo not being served his drink in a pub in Norwich (172-173), leave no doubt about the blatant racism of provincial England, white Londoners’ discriminative attitude towards their black counterparts is more subtle but no less recognisable. Akin, for example, is not asked out by his work mates until he shows up with a nice car; then, they offer him drinks and introduce him to white girls, but flirting with one of them is out of the question and Akin finds himself “like a good boy running an errand for mummy” (43), and escorting the ladies home is all he is left with. When the post office where he is employed receives several complaints about missing giros and cheques, he is the one to be looked upon with suspicion and everybody stops talking to him: “Gossip spreading like wildfire and as soon as Akin return from his delivery him feel the sudden hush that came over the place, it seem to him like in a nightmare, walking through a graveyard in the middle of the night and the dead arise to look at this foreign soul walking within their midst” (76). Akin’s new encounter with England is more of a disencounter. His everyday experiences delude his expectations, his self-confidence is shaken and his progression from colour-blindness to race-consciousness entails a loss of innocence and a sense of personal disintegration. Recently arrived from Nigeria, he is portrayed as being quite naive about race relations. Willing to integrate as quickly as possible, he does his best to please everybody around him. When staying at his friend’s place, for example, where his white girlfriend does not hide her dislike of him, he acts obligingly and takes upon himself the household chores: “He proving very helpful around the house, sweeping the whole house when he return from overtime on Saturdays, he washing the plates and tidying up with amazing regularity. Akin know which side him bread was buttered, so he doing all the chores with happiness” (32). At work, he doesn’t seem to mind being seen as a stranger and feels flattered by his mates’ compliments about his good command of local English slang (a language he had already mastered as a child living in East London): “Him white collegues telling him how he quickly pick up the way them day speak; that some people would arrive in London and still have an accent after two, three years. Them saying him doing very well, and Akin feeling very proud of this. Him trying harder to polish him Cockney” (33). He is more than indulgent about old racist stereotypes and he even laughs along when one of his mates makes fun of blacks “walking back and forth ... in a baboon-style walk” (33-34). Obviously, by acting easy-going and cool, he hopes to be taken in and to stop feeling like an outsider in his home-town: “When them telling a joke concerning black people, Akin make sure he add a few extra chuckles so that they could see he was a liberal, understanding fellow who didn’t have a chip on his shoulder” (34).


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At the beginning Akin truly believes that being sensitive and obstinate about race issues does not bring black people any good, as a line from one of his poems illustrates: “Ignore your colour on interview day, For a negative mind can let you stray” (61). But then, a number of events make him change his mind completely, so that he becomes increasingly race-conscious and assertive. In the first place, his day-to-day endurance of subtle forms of racism and the difficulties he and his friends encounter finding a good job, even being qualified, slowly wear him down, corrode his best hopes and good will to make England his home, and make him aware of the relationship between skin colour and the position one occupies in society. He starts observing the life conditions of his fellow Nigerians more closely and wonders “where his kinsmen find the resourcefulness to wake up for early in the morning and leave their houses in all sorts of weather to clean offices. Offices that many yearned to work in, and many would not get the chance to” (106). He slowly begins to identify with them, and Britain, which he had previously regarded as a country of opportunities, becomes a land of alienation in his eyes: “What was their hope, how could one regard as home a country that reduced qualified Lawyers, Doctors, Accountants to mere cleaners. It was enough to break the strongest of spirits, and at times Akin thought that was exactly how the system was set up to work” (106). But what finally marks a turning point in Akin’s view of racial issues is the friendship with Tyrone, an angry young Jamaican who really sees the world in black and white and is always protesting loudly about the social and institutional discrimination of black people. Tyrone indoctrinates Akin about the black diaspora’s historical oppression and introduces him to the milestones of the Black Power movement, such as the autobiography of Malcom X. From then on, Akin starts reading all sorts of texts concerning blacks and militates among his friends to awaken their consciousness to the cause. Agbenugba’s view of what Britain offers both to African immigrants and British-born blacks is quite gloomy and the conclusions we can draw from his novel quite disheartening: Britain can be no home for blacks as long as they are regarded as strangers and as long as they are doomed to “being neither here, nor there, just sitting in Limbo waiting for the inevitable” (233). Through Akin’s picaresque adventures in modern London (which are not devoid of irony and humour, although it was not the purpose of this paper to stress this point), the book sets up an overt denunciation of Britain’s failure, protracted over the years, in the process of inclusion of black citizens: “Life in Britain ‘1990’ had not changed much for Black folk since Sam Selvon’s picture of immigrant community life during the late fifties and early sixties” (218). Akin’s final decision to go back to Nigeria leaves no doubt about Agbenugba’s pessimism in the possibility of improvement: “He had spent the greater part of his life in London, and he had come to realise that though the colour of him passport blue,

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the colour of him skin tell him, he had no choice about where was home” (233). The concluding lines reiterate the regrettable alienation which sadly joins present-day immigrants with those of Salvon’s generation: “Akin turned again to the window, him admire the City aglow and the starry overhead sky, and him promise himself that should he have to return here, it would not be as Another Lonely Londoner”(233). Not as an immigrant, that is. Not as an outsider. Two authors from different places and with different backgrounds; two novels from different geographic and linguistic areas. Still, the commonalities are immediately evident in spite of the fact that they suggest differing conclusions (paradoxically, but also significantly, Agbenugba’s novel, set in a country with a long history of cultural and racial interaction, gives a more pessimistic view than Khouma’s autobiography, based in what is still one of the least multiethnic countries in Europe). In addition to the similarities already mentioned in the first part of this paper, in these and in several migratory narratives of the African diaspora, two recurring elements are to be pointed out. On the one hand, because of their subaltern position, immigrants are seen occupying spaces often unknown to a large part of the indigenous population, spaces of marginality such as prison cells, underground and train stations at night, remote suburbs. Their point of view is that of the outsider/insider, that is, as outcasts, they penetrate the country’s underbelly and offer a more complete view of society than any average citizen could give. On the other hand, these narratives dramatise a poetic of cultural negotiation and multiple belonging, enacting a dialectic between affiliation and alienation where migratory subjects position themselves transnationally. It seems then legitimate to ponder the possibility of talking about an Afro-European literature as a new discursive category, since Afrosporic texts produced in Europe present striking common traits in spite of the cultural and linguistic plurality in which they are inserted. Migrants, the picaros of our times, are the mirrors of contemporary Europe; they reflect its qualities and flaws while suggesting the way towards a transcultural future.

Works Cited Agbenugba, Gbenga. Another Lonely Londoner. London: Ronu Books, 1991. Bandele, Biyi. The Street. London: Picador, 1999. Beford, Simi. Yoruba Girl Dancing. London: Penguin, 1991. Bouchane, Mohamed. Chiamatemi Alì. Milano: Leonardo, 1990. Emecheta, Buchi. In the Ditch. London: Allison & Busby, 1972. ———. Second Class Citizen. London: Allison & Busby, 1974. Jesus, Maria de Lourdes. Racordai: Vengo da un’isola di Capo Verde. Roma: Sinnos, 1996.


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Khouma, Pap. Io, venditore di elefanti: Una vita per forza tra Dakar, Parigi e Milano. Milano: Garzanti, 1990. Methnani, Salah. Immigrato. Roma: Theoria, 1990. Melliti, Mohsen. Pantanella: Canto lungo la strada. Roma: Lavoro, 1992. Moussa Ba, Saidou. La promessa di Hamadi. Novara: De Agostini, 1991. Onyeama, Dillibe. Nigger at Eton. London: Leslie Frewin, 1972. Parati, Graziella (ed.). Mediterranean Crossoroads: Migration Literature in Italy. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999. Ramzanali Fazel, Shirin. Lontano da Mogadiscio. Roma: Datanews, 1994. Riley, Joan. The Unbelonging. London: Women’s Press, 1985. Selvon, Sam. The Lonely Londoners. Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1956. Sibhatu, Ribka. Auló. Canto-poesia dall’Eritrea. Roma: Sinnos, 1993.

INDEX

Abdelwahab Meddeb, 170, 171, 172, 180, 181 Achebe, Chinua 30, 31, 37 Afro-European literature, 228 Afro-Italian literature, 219 Agency, 21, 59, 62, 75 Ahdaf Soueif, 194, 205, 206 Albert Memmi, 173 Alice Walker, 6 Alienation, 31, 42, 43, 83, 93, 119, 134, 154, 161, 171, 172, 219, 227, 228 Amin Rihani, 216 Anne Tyler, 93, 94 Aphra Ben, 77 Arab Immigration, 209 Arab-American literature, 207 Assia Djebar, 70 Baudrillard, Jean, 95, 96 Bell Hooks, 5 Beloved, 6 Ben Jelloun,Tahar 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 72 Ben Okri, 40 Black women, 2, 4, 5, 6 Blackfoot, 10, 11, 13 Bobbie Ann Mason, 94, 95 Bourdieu,Pierre, 62, 63 Camara Laye, 39 Cheikh Hamidou Kane, 39 Chris Abani, 40, 47, 48 Cixous, Hélène, 57, 62, 64, 80, 100 Consumer culture, 95 Critical theory, 29 Cultural plurality, 218 Culture, 1, 10, 12, 14, 27, 29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 47, 53, 59, 65, 66, 67, 69, 71, 74, 77, 78, 79, 81, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 108, 111, 112, 114, 118, 122, 123, 124, 125, 132, 135,

140, 152, 153, 156, 158, 173, 194, 195, 196, 198, 199, 200, 201, 203, 204, 205, 207, 208, 210, 212, 214, 215, 224 Culture and Imperialism, 28, 37, 39, 54 Deleuze, Gilles, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 189, 192 Diaspora, 172, 182, 218, 227, 228 Dissidence, 170 Edward Said, 28, 39, 172, 173, 207, 213, 214 El Maleh, Edmond Amran, 150, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159 Ethics, 8, 13, 111, 140, 152, 156, 157 Exile, 137, 169, 170, 172, 173, 174, 177, 192, 193 Eye of the Sun, 194, 195, 205, 206 Fanon, Franz, 173, 179, 180 Femininity, 58, 69, 76, 81, 95, 97 Feminism, 6, 71, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 89, 93, 130 Francophone Literature, 170 Frederick Douglass, 4, 5, 7, 139, 140, 147, 148 Fredric Jameson, 72, 91, 92 Gender, 2, 55, 63, 76, 91 George Lamming, 39 Global economy, 39 Gramsci, Antonio, 39 Helon Habila, 40, 44 History, 13, 14, 17, 18, 21, 25, 60, 107, 108, 113, 137, 150, 151, 159, 171, 176, 208, 210 Hobbes, Thomas, 24 Homi Bhabha, 19, 25 Hybridity, 199 Identity, 1, 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, 19, 22, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35, 36, 39, 40, 47, 48, 58, 65, 67, 69, 70, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 82, 84, 85,

Representing Minorites: Studies in Literature and Criticism 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 108, 112, 124, 130, 140, 141, 152, 156, 157, 161, 162, 164, 165, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178, 191, 195, 197, 198, 199, 201, 203, 205, 207, 208, 211, 212, 214, 215, 218, 224 Irony, 3, 61, 91, 125, 126, 129, 184, 189, 227 Joy Harjo, 119, 124, 125, 126, 133, 136, 137 Kant, Immanuel, 21, 22, 24, 25 Kateb Yacine, 173 Khatibi, Abdelkébir, 65, 73, 171 Koran, 56 Kristeva, Julia, 56, 81, 94, 96, 100, 101, 105 L’Aventure Ambigue, 39 Lacan, Jacques, 81, 99, 101 lieux de mémoire, 151 liv, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167 Luce Irigaray, 58, 84, 100, 101 Madness, 59, 62, 63, 83, 84, 89, 90 Maghreb, 61, 65, 73, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 180, 182 Magical realism, 34 Male domination, 51, 82, 88 Male gaze’, 56 Malika Mokeddem, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174 Maori, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113 Mary Wollstonecraft, 2 Memory, 32, 107, 133, 150, 151, 152, 158, 170, 176 Mernissi, Fatema, 60, 63, 71, 73 Migration, 160, 169, 217, 218, 220, 222, 223, 224 Minor literatures, 189, 217 Minorities, 33, 98, 100, 102, 127, 185, 217, 218, 219 Minority, 99, 147, 207, 218 Modernity, 64, 65, 70, 134, 170, 182 Mohammed Dib, 173 Montesquieu, 2, 3, 4 Moroccan Jewish community, 154, 155, 157

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Moroccan literature, 56, 65 Nabile Farès, 173 Nation, 1, 3, 9, 12, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 34, 35, 65, 70, 71, 156, 158, 172, 173, 180, 182, 188, 207, 210, 211 Nation-state, 172, 180 Native American, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 114, 115, 118, 122, 124, 125, 126, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133, 136, 137, 138 Negro, 15, 16, 17, 18, 25 Out of Place, 208, 213, 215 Paradise, 6, 214 Parcours Immobile, 152, 153, 154, 156, 157, 158, 159 Patriarchy, 3, 4, 7, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 71, 77, 84, 100, 102, 174 Pierre Nora, 151, 158, 159 Politics, 16, 33, 41, 42, 44, 46, 67, 70, 91, 118, 140, 152, 198, 207, 209, 217 Postmodern, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 108, 112, 118, 150, 195 Postmodernism, 91, 92, 93, 108 Postmodernity, 150 Race, 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 39, 44, 156, 207, 211, 225, 226, 227 Racial passing, 9 Racism, 2, 5, 9, 127, 129, 132, 147, 223, 226, 227 Religion, 51, 56, 174, 190, 208 Renan, Ernest,18, 19, 20, 21, 25 Ricoeur, Paul, 151, 152, 157, 159 Rosi Braidotti, 100 Rousseau, J-Jacques 24 Rushdie, Salman, 158, 159 Saad Elkhadem, 183, 185, 188, 193 Salim Bachi, 170, 171, 172, 173, 177 Serhane, Abdelhak, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63 Sexism, 2, 5, 9, 79, 129 Silko, Marmon, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 126, 133, 136, 137 Slavery, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 42, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145, 147, 148 Souffles, (journal) 65

232 Stereotypes, 8, 12, 13, 35, 58, 62, 79, 82, 126, 194, 203, 226 Subjectivity, 4, 56, 75, 77, 92, 93, 94, 97, 150, 164 Tayeb Salih, 39 The Book of Khalid, 208, 212, 213, 214, 215 The Color Purple, 6 The Famished Road, 40, 54 The Lonely Londoners, 39, 224, 229 The Souls of Black Folk, 17 The Stone Diaries, 98

Index The Wretched of the Earth, 173, 180 Toni Morrison, 6, 7 Trauma, 95, 140, 141, 142, 144, 145, 146, 148, 160, 171 V.S. Naipaul, 39 Virginia Woolf, 77, 80 Vonnegut, Kurt, 92, 93 W.E.B. Du Bois, 15, 17, 25 Witi Ihimaera, 108, 113 Woman Far Walking, 108, 113 Yasbincek, 160, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167

CONTRIBUTORS

Meryem Ayan received her PhD from the Department of American Culture and Literature, Dokuz Eylül University, in İzmir, Turkey. She is currently Assistant Professor at Pamukkale University, Denizli. Bouchra Belgaid holds a PhD from the University of Wales, Swansea. She teaches at Mohamed I University Oujda. Her Research interests include postmodernism and American Feminist fiction. Soumia Boutkhil is Assistant-Professor of English at Faculté des Lettres, Mohamed I University Oujda, she holds a Ph.D in English Studies from Université Nanterre-Paris X, and has lectured at the State University of New York at Buffalo from 1999 to 2001 while attending the PhD programme of the Modern languages and Literatures Department. She Co-edited two books, La Violence à L’oeuvre (Celat-Uqam, Montréal 2002) and Minority Matters, Society, Theory, Literature. (Faculté des Lettres, Oujda, 2005) Sabrina Brancato received a PhD in English from the Universitat de Barcelona in Spain (2001), in literature and cultural pluralism. She has given courses on women’s literary history, postcolonial and migration literatures, contemporary poetry, Caribbean and Black British fiction and poetry. She is currently a research fellow in the Dept. of New English Literatures and Cultures at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität in Frankfurt am Main. Her main research interests and publications are focused on Black Studies, migration, and gender perspectives. Her current project on African Migration in Europe is supported by a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship within the 6th European Community Framework Programme and involves a comparative study of AfroItalian, Afro-Spanish and Afro-British narratives. Sarita Cannon earned her A.B. in Literature magna cum laude from Harvard University and recently completed her Ph.D. in English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

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Contributors

Ainsworth A. Clarke is currently completing a dissertation in comparative literature at Cornell University (New York, USA) entitled “Aporetic Thinking and the Production of ‘Race’: W.E.B. Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, and the Unmaking of the ‘Negro.’” Presently he is a visiting faculty member at Suffolk University, Dakar, Senegal. Feryal Cubukcu has a Ph. D. in literature and literary theories. Her interests range from English as a second language, learning strategies, literary theories, teaching literature to film studies. She’s currently working as an AssistantProfessor at Dokuz Eylul University, Izmir, Turkey. F. Elizabeth Dahab is Associate professor of Comparative world Literature in California State University, Long Beach. She obtained her Doctorate from The Univesité Paris IV Sorbonne, France in comparative literature. She published numerous articles on literatures of exile in Canada. Her latest Book Voices in the Desert, an Anthology of Arabic-Canadian Women-Writers was published in Toronto, Canada by Guernica in 2002. Paloma Fresno-Calleja has a PhD in English from the University of Oviedo. She is currently lecturing in the English Department at the University of the Balearic Islands in Spain. She has worked and published mainly in the field of postcolonial literatures. Lucy Melbourne is a senior Fulbright Scholar in Morocco for the academic year 2005-2006, currently teaches at the Mohammed V University in Rabat while conducting research on Moroccan women writers. She is Professor of English at Saint Augustine’s College in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she also directs an interdisciplinary program in the humanities. Dr. Melbourne’s publications, several in international journals, are in the area of narrative studies, drama, African-American, and women’s literature; her book, Double Heart, on Saul Bellow, Kafka, and Camus, explores the concept of the lie. She is a world traveler who has lived and studied in the Middle East, Europe, Scandinavia, and China. Dr. Melbourne is currently working on a book of essays about her Moroccan experiences. Alejandra Moreno-Alvarez is a lecturer at the Universitat de les Illes Balears, Spain. She holds a degree in English Studies and a PhD in Women’s Studies by the Universidad de Oviedo, Spain. She participated in the Intensive International PhD Program of the Netherlands Research School of Women’s Studies, directed by Rosi Braidotti. Her work is related to women’s body and language; she applies a poststructuralist feminist theory as a theoretical framework, basing her


235

research on the theories of Braidotti, Irigaray, Kristeva, Cixous, Haraway and Butler. She uses the work of Margaret Atwood and Fay Weldon to prove the thesis that eating disorders and cosmetic surgery are the consequence of the search for a proper women’s language. Ian Munro is Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri. He has published articles, reviews and interviews on African, Caribbean and Postcolonial literatures. His article and interview with Leila Abouzeid appears in the current issue of The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literature. He is currently Fulbright lecturer in English at Université Ibn Zohr in Agadir. Chourouq Nasri is Assistant-Professor of English at Mohamed I University, Oujda. She received her Ph.D from Université Paris III Sorbonne-Nouvelle. Her research interests are gothic literature, 18th century studies and Moroccan literature written in English. Valérie Orlando is Associate Professor of French & Francophone Studies in the Department of French & Italian at the University of Maryland, College Park. She has taught at Eastern Mediterranean University in the Turkish Northern Republic of Cyprus (1996-1997), Purdue University (1997-1999) and Illinois Wesleyan University (1999-2006). She is the author of two books: Nomadic Voices of Exile: Feminine Identity in Francophone Literature of the Maghreb, (Ohio University Press, 1999) and Of Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls: Seeking Subjecthood Through Madness in Francophone Women’s Writing of Africa and the Caribbean (Lexington Books, 2003). She has written numerous articles on Francophone writing from the African Diaspora, African Cinema, and French literature and culture. She is currently working on a book entitled: Writing in/on the Front Lines of Exile: Political Dissidence, Memory and Cultural (Dis)location in Francophone Literature of the Maghreb. Fatima Radhouani Saidani is a Professor of English Literature and Language at the High Institute of Human Sciences in Tunis. Her research interests include Gender studies with a focus on Arab American women poets, artists, and novelists. Nadine Sinno is a PhD candidate in the program for Comparative Literature at the University of Arkansas. Her research interests include Arabic and English Literature, Literary Translation, and Gender Studies.

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Contributors

Larbi Touaf is Assistant-Professor of English at The Faculty of Letters (Mohamed I University, Oujda). He holds a PhD from Université Paris IV Sorbonne and has lectured at the State University of New York at Buffalo from 1999 to 2001 while attending the PhD Programme of the Modern Languages and Literatures Department. His doctoral dissertation on Postmodern English Fiction was published in France in 1998. He also co-edited La Violence à L’oeuvre (2002, Celat-Uqam, Montréal) and Minority Matters: Society, Theory, Literature (2005, Faculté Des Lettres, Oujda). Penny Tucker is currently visiting Assistant-Professor of English and American Studies at Pomona College, Calremont, California.. She received her A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in the History of American Civilization. As a fellow at the University Center for Ethics and the Professions in 2001-2002 she received the Judge A. Leon Higginbotham Fellowship for research on issues of social justice. She is currently completing a book-length manuscript on ethics and disenfranchisement in nineteenth-century U.S. literature, culture, and politics entitled Sentimental Ethics. Jennifer Wawrzinek is a doctoral candidate at the University of Melbourne. Her thesis examines the intersection of the grotesque and the sublime within contemporary postmodern texts as a way of allowing the emergence of contingent and ambiguous subjectivites. Her critical essays have been published in literary journals and anthohologies in Australia and France. Her short fiction has been published in Australia and the United States, and has been adapted for broadcast on Australian national radio. Hassan Zrizi is a Professor of English at Hassan II University, Mohamedia, Morocco. He’s the current Chair of the English department.

Representing Minorities

Representing Minorities

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