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Department of English and Comparative Literature, American University in Cairo

Interrogating Identity: Abdelkebir Khatibi and the Postcolonial Prerogative Author(s): Mustapha Hamil Source: Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, No. 22, The Language of the Self: Autobiographies and Testimonies/: ,)2002( pp. 72-86 Published by: Department of English and Comparative Literature, American University in Cairo and American University in Cairo Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1350050 . Accessed: 15/06/2011 17:38
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Interrogating Identity: Rbdelkebir Khatibi and the Postcolonial Prerogative Mustapha Hamil

Postcolonial theory in its English and Anglophone replications is dominatedby such figures as EdwardSaid, Homi Bhabha,Gayatri Spivak, StuartHall, to cite but these. Writersas ideologically and artistically diverse as Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Albert Memmi, and EdouardGlissant dominate its French and Francophoneramification. In fact, one can easily trace the genealogy of both English and French branchesof postcolonial theoryto Fanon, and fartherdown to Hegel's master-slave dialectic. The allegories that permeate the postcolonial imaginary,such as those of Calibanand Prospero;Crusoe and Friday; Kurtz and "the heart of darkness"(or Tayeb Salih's inversion of the imperialadventureby taking it back to the "North"),are all variations on the same pattern.This is to say, in simple terms, that the same Manicheangrammarand the same history of imperialisminformmost of these theoriesof postcoloniality,no matterwhere or when they originate. In the presentarticle,I propose to examine the issue of self-definition in the Maghrebiannovel in French. Here I want to examine Abdelkebir Khatibi's La Memoire tatouee (1971)1 one of the first Maghrebianautobiographies publishedin the wake of independence. In Black Skin WhiteMasks, FrantzFanon argues that the colonized subject cannot make a meaning for himself; it is the meaning that is already there, pre-existing him that makes him.2 Despite his noteworthypsycho-sociological study of the colonial context, Fanon overlooks the socio-cultural reality of the Maghreb. For during the colonial period, two distinct meanings-French (or Western) and Arabo-Berbero-Islamic-seemed to shape the colonized subject's vision of himself and of the Other,and out of which he had to extract a meaning that he would recognize as his. Khatibiopens his autobiography with a referenceto the dechirure nominale:"Bornthe day of Eid el-Kebir [the feast known as "Greater Bairam"] name suggests a millenaryrite, andit occursto me, for the my occasion, to imagineAbraham'sact of sacrificinghis son"(9). Born the
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feels his whole being already day of a religious festivity, the narrator out-or sacrificed,so to speak-on the altarof the sacredWord. played In otherwords,to be bor duringthe festive day of Eid El-Kebirand to be namedafterit-Abdelkebir means 'servantof the Almighty'-establishes a definite affiliation,in his stead, to a genealogy of Names that To glorifies God's oneness and preeminence. be bor, then, in the middle of the Abrahamicdreamrepresents,as it were, a re-enactmentof unfinishedact of sacrificeanda perpetuation a stablereliAbraham's of orderof being. In the Quran,Abraham holds a prominent statusas gious the Fatherof all prophetsandreligions,andthus symbolizesthe embodiment,par excellence,of the notionof a foundational origin,immutable and divine, from which all historicaltemporalitiesoriginate.It is not, therefore,fortuitousthatKhatibichooses to begin his autobiography by a referenceto his birthdayin the one-pagePreface.The Preface,which dwells on the notion of origin (asl) becomes the veritablebeginningof the autobiography. turningthe idea of origin into a simple textual By Khatibireleases his autobiography from the sovereigntyof beginning, the divine, since, as EdwardSaid argues,origins are "divine,mythical and privileged,"while beginningsare "secular,humanlyproduced,and ceaselessly re-examined."3By way of such a textual negotiation, Khatibidisruptsthe theologicalorderof the Name andof its logos, long before his autobiographical narrative begun. has Contraryto such classic autobiographiesin Arabic as Taha Hussein's Al-Ayyam,in three volumes (1929-1967), or Abdelmejid Ben Jelloun's Fi at-Tufulah(1957), where Hussein and Ben Jelloun hardly make any reference to world events, Khatibi alludes in the Preface to the political and psychological effects of WWII on foreign lands like Morocco. In fact, the narrator'schildhood coincides with WWII:"I was born with WWII, I also grew up underits shadow .... Internationalhistory entered my childhood through the voice of the sinister dictator"(9). One may read in this coincidence (of historical events) how theological and man-made histories-origin and beginning-can occur within the same space and mingle within the same consciousness. In addition, these two histories are informed by two differentconceptionsof time: Eid el-Kebir is ritualistic,recurrent, and thereforecyclical, whereas WWII belongs to a linear historical succession. Being concurrentlyaffected by the metaphysicalabsolutism of the past and the historical relativism of the present, the will narrator/author seek to disruptboth the notion of origin as totaliand the historicistidea of time as an orderedwhole. ty Alif 22 (2002) 73

Reading thus the Preface against the sub-title of the book, of d'un decolonise," [Autobiography a Decolonized "Autobiographie Person] informsus on Khatibi's intellectualand culturalprojectin the autobiography.As far as the process of decolonization is concerned, his interventionin Maghrebianculturalpolitics implies more thanjust a frantic Fanoniancall for 'counter-violence,' or a desperatecall for some sort of cultural essentialism or romanticismin the manner of Senghor's Negritude. Indeed, Khatibi invites Arab intellectuals and writersto a double critiqueof both the Orientand the West: Et si parfois l'Occident triomphantchantait sa deperdition nietzscheenne,qu'en etait-il de moi et de ma culture?
[. . .] Aimer l'autre c'est parler le lieu perdu de la

memoire,et mon insurrection dans un premiertemps, qui, n'etait qu'une histoire imposee, se perpetue en ressemblance acceptee, parce que l'Occident est une partie de moi, que je ne peux nier que dans la mesure ou je lutte contre tous les occidents et orients qui m'opprimentou me desenchantent.(105-06) [And if the triumphantOccident (West) was singing its Nietzschean loss, what about myself and my culture?
[. . .] To love the Other is to speak of the lost space of

memory, and my insurrectionwhich in an earlier time was nothing but a history imposed on me, now perpetuates itself in an acknowledged resemblance, for the Occidentis partof me, a partthat I can only deny insofar as I resist all the 'Occidents' and all the 'Orients' that oppress and disenchantme.] 'Double critique,' as Khatibi defines it more extensively in Maghrebpluriel,4 may be describedas a double negative hermeneutic. First, it calls for a demystification of Western and Arabo-Islamic metaphysicallogo-centrism.Second, it seeks to deconstructthe structuralcohesion of the Western episteme in its differentimperialistand ethnocentricpractices. In other words, not only do Arab intellectuals need to disrupt what Abdullah Laroui qualifies as the magical and mythical view of origin, they also need to resist and, ultimately dismantle the discursive violence inherentin all forms of Western politics of representation.For Khatibi,postcolonialrealityrequiresa dou74
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ble resistanceto all the Occidents and Orientsthat alienate and subjugate the postcolonial subject. Viewed against the theoretical backgroundof postcolonial studies, 'double critique'points to the possibility of redeeming postcolonial history from its interminableoppositional thinking by shifting the postcolonial subject's fixation on the of Other/Westto an inwardinterrogation his political and ideological self-colonizationand self-victimization.Throughout work, Khatibi his interrogatesthe notion of alterity, and refuses to be ensnaredby any form of cultural or religious essentialism. Hence his insistence on opposing all forms of dual thinking in favor of a "pensee-autre"5 [thinkingotherwise] that targets the stability of the Cartesianself, as well as the authorityof the metaphysicalfoundationsupon which the Arabo-Islamicself is conventionallyconstructed.All modes of essentialist and/oroppositionalthinkingneed to be interrogated, and evendiscarded. Inspired by Derrida's deconstructionism,"penseetually autre"invites suspicion, ratherthan blind acceptance of such hegemonic notions as the Western unitary self and the Arabo-Islamic vision of a pure origin. Khatibi's invocation of origin in La Memoire tatouee does not thereforeintend to fix that origin in an eternaltime, but ratherto turn it into one beginning among other beginnings. Being a writerwithout boundaries,the disruptionof origin liberateshis discourse and imagination from any culturaland ideological affiliation to any established constructof identity.Such strategicinterferencewith the notion of oriof gin constitutes a preliminaryphase in the (re)construction identity dichotomizedpatternsof self-definition.In Maghrebian literabeyond ture in French,the dislocation of origins, or the revolt against the figure of the Father as in Driss Chraibi's Le Passe simple (1954) or Rachid Boudjedra's La Repudiation (1969), becomes possible only afterthe displacementof the sacredsign; thatis, afterGod's death:"Is our childhood's God dead, a hundredtimes dead, thrownaway on the rocks?" asks Khatibi's narratorin La Memoire tatouee (46). Such a philosophical inquiry does not involve a denial of God per se, but rather the inscription in the autobiographyof a post-Nietzschean vision of the Self. In fact, in all his fictional and theoreticalworks, Khatibientertainsa tactical relationshipwith the Arabo-Islamictradition, namely the Quranand the Hadiths. In La Memoire tatouee, for the example, he incorporates Quranictext in two differentways. First, he recognizes the primacy of the sacred scripturesin his early socialization: "Tree of my childhood, the Quran dominated my speech,
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while the school was a library without a Book" (55). Second, the Quranic word undergoes a radical transformationas it enters into direct contention with the French word over theological and philosophicaldefinitionsof Being. As a Muslim subjectin immediateinterbecomes action with Western modes of thought, the author/narrator aware of the possibility to be the subject of his own discourse: "The Quranicparable... figures identity's memory that knowledge can rerhetoric:Our autobiography" double in a sort of contemporary (183). The projectof writing an autobiography suggests, as it were, the existence of other alternativesto construct a new identity that does not necessarily subscribeto the idea of the unified subject(ivity)or to the notion of a foundational origin. Such an autobiographicalproject appearsat once subversive and innovative. It is subversivebecause it challenges the idea of the metaphysicalunity of the subject, and the transcendental Logos, be it Westernor non-Western.It is also innovative in that it proposes a constructionof identitythat complementsthe dogmaticdiscourseof religion withouthowever rejectingits universal principlesaltogether. Throughoutthe autobiography,Khatibi appropriateshis own voice throughvarious ironic and parodic flirtationswith the religious sign. Irony and parody are variously deployed in the text as strategic tropes that allow him to addressboth French and Arabo-Islamiccultures from within, while still maintaining some challenge to their homogenizingdiscourses.Duringhis Frenchschooling in Casablanca, the narrator deliberatelyimitates, parodies and subvertsgreat French writers:"J'avaisvire vers la parodie que je croyais decolonisante"[I turnedto parodywhich I believed to be decolonizing] (85). Subversion does not concern Frenchcultureonly. In fact, the narrator also targets the absolutes of language and religion that constitute his AraboIslamic identity. The Quran,for example, maintainsthat a man may wish to marryone, two, three,or four women. In La Memoiretatouee, the narratorrejects this precept by reversing it: "Do not alter your women, we shall be grateful to your undulation, thus changes the world" (71). While God promises virgin houris to His believers, the narrator looks at his Frenchfemale teachersas vicious houris deliberately arousing the young pupils' sexual curiosity (54). Alongside God's Words, Khatibievokes popularlore and superstition:"Besides the Quran,there was the spell and magic of women" (55). The narrator valorizes the feminine sign of tattooing as a culturalpractice that helps him safeguard(his) memory against disintegration.The title, La 76 Alif 22 (2002)

Memoiretatouee, reinforcesthe primacyof this corporealwriting as a permanentsignifier in the constructionof Maghrebianidentity.6Such discursive rearrangements, among many others in the autobiography, aim at disruptingthe hegemonic system of signification that informs Arabo-Islamicpatriarchal discourseon identity.One must recall, howthatKhatibi'sintellectualprojectinscribesa double interrogation ever, of the political and culturalreificationof the past, either in official or religious discourses. Not only does he object to the vision of the past, especially in the context of Maghrebian cultural identity, as an immutable foundational structure,he also suspects any ideological attemptto repudiatethis past in the name of some sort of de-historicized and decontextualizedculturalidentity. Khatibi summarizes the linguistic plurality in the Maghreb througha referenceto his own schooling:"At school, a secularteaching (was) imposedon my religion;I becametriglote,readingFrenchwithout it, understanding playingwith a few wordsof writtenArabic,and speakthe dialect as an everydaylanguage"(52). In this state of linguistic ing heterogeneity,two adverseprocesses enter into competition:the colonizationof the child's mind,on the one hand,and,on the other,the assertion of popularand oral culture:"Whilethe child's mind was being colonized, his heartwas playing insteadwith the talismans" (57). While at home he feels protected a plethoraof greatArabo-Islamic heroesand by to saints,preservedand transmitted him by his mother,at school he discovers how his entirepast andculturearereducedto a shamefulpanorama of "chaos"-dethronedmonarchs,tribalanarchy,politicaldisorder, and religiousobscurantism. Moreover,his Frenchteacherstry to make him understand the occupation his countryhas no politicalor ecoof why nomic objectives,butrather humanist a missionintendedto save his peofrom darknessand ignorance:"Surprised this disorder,the colople by nial Occidentdecidedto intervenefor the sake of everybody.Alleluiathe colonization!" (59). Even the Frenchtextbooksthat he readsdepict his culturein termsof a "cheerful piece of folklore,"wortha specialexhibition in a Frenchmuseum(57). Khatibishows how the colonialisteducation-with its attendant class andethnicdiscrimination-affectsthe consciousnessof the natives,especiallywriterslike himself: We well know the colonial imagination: sandover the cultureof the colonizedpeople. In discoveringtheiralienation suchpeoplewill err,distraught, the crushedspaceof their in history.(44) Alif 22 (2002)
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Strongly convinced of the legitimacy of their colonialist misthe French imposed their language and culture as the only lansion, guage of civilization. Their objective was, as Laroui argues, "to deprive the Moroccan of his religion, language and historic heritage, so producinga man free from culture,who would then be civilized."7 reduces its references to the French Though Khatibi's autobiography colonials to a bare minimum-a strategyto turntheir spatial domination into a textual subjugation-one can still have some sense of how they view the natives' culture: Well! The Arabslike to look at roses made of paper,or of plastic; nature has slipped through their fingers, they stagnate, intoxicated by tea and absinthe. And to hide theirdestitution,they fornicateall day long. Rationalgardens must be created,geometricalcities, a booming economy, earthlyParadisesmust be created.God is dead;long live the colonizer! (42-43) Reading this passage, one cannot fail to discern Khatibi's awareness of the Orientalisttraditionto which he is ironically alluding.8 The natives' lack of romanticsensibility, theirexorbitantsexuality and historical stagnationjust before reaching civility belong to a large Orientalistconstellation of stereotypicaltropes and representations, and which one can still encountereven today in Westernmedia coverage, tourist brochures, and 'area studies' introductionsto the Arab world. In orderto preserve their moral and culturalsuperiorityamong the natives, the French divided the Moroccan city into the nouvelle cite, reserved for the settlers, and the medina, where the natives are locked up behind walls. This topographicalorganizationof the colonial space reflects one of the colonizer's strategies to obliterate the native, as a person and as a presence, from colonial conscience. The ideology behind the Cartesianrationalizationof the Moroccan space and imaginationserves-besides bettercontroland containmentof the natives-to legitimate spatialand theoreticaldomination.The opposition between the Europeancity and the medinais based on differences in race, language, cultural values, and modes of production. Occupying a spatial exterioritythat corroboratestheir culturaldifference, the natives become a mirroron which the Frenchproject, allegrement,their fantasies, anxieties, and fear. Khatibi's ironic summary 78
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of the colonial imaginationpoints to the illusion behind the French anthropological patterns of self-identification, since these patterns remain inherentlypredicatedon the presence-though invisible-of the natives. The splitting of the colonial subject on the screen that the native holds for him bears witness not only to the limits of his essentializing categorizations-as fostered in/by language and the idea of the autonomous(Western)subject-but also attests to the impossibility of effacing the presenceof the Otherthathauntshis conscience and text. In his study of the colonial context in The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon writes that "the two zones [of the colonial city] are opposed, but not in the service of a higher unity. Obedientto the rules of pure Aristotelian logic, both follow the principle of reciprocal exclusivity."9 However deep Fanon's insight into the Maghrebian colonial realityis, his Hegelian vision for a humanreality in-itself-forof itself is undermined his view of the Manicheanstructure colonial by consciousness and its non-dialecticaldivision.10The two halves of the Maghrebiancity seem to follow, in Fanon's sociodiagnosticpsychiatry of the colonial space, two self-determiningtemporaltrajectories. Fanon fails to notice how the natives, despite their spatial confinement, have always managedto transgress,in ways both manifest and latent, the forbiddenzones of the nouvelle cite and, thus, to influence the historical and moral authorityof the French themselves. In fact, France's partition of space into two distinct spheres has ironically jeopardizedthe whole colonial project in the Maghreb.In his article, "The Colonial Labyrinth," Khatibisuccinctly sums up this paradox: MarechalLyautey [the architectof the Frenchdomestication of Morocco] militarily surroundedthe medina to breakup its anarchicproliferationand its apparentillogicality [...] (he) thoughthe could frame it inside its walls and gates. But the whole space became "mural," riddled with holes of intense life, silence, humiliation, anger, boots, and grenade.11 In Practices of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau illustrates how, in the face of the grid of "discipline,""an entire society resists being reducedto it... popularprocedures(also "minuscule"and quotidian) manipulatethe mechanism of discipline and conform to them only in order to evade them."12In La Memoire tatouee, the idea of Alif 22 (2002)
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popularresistance to the French policy of zoning is first introduced, though on symbolic plane, in the legendaryfigure of Aisha Kendisha, who is at once a seductive woman and a destructive ogress.13 This a mythicalfigure embodies in the autobiography textualrepresentation of that otherness which is at once an object of desire and fear. Occupying a shifting limit between reality and imagination, Aisha Kendisha symbolizes the ambivalent line of demarcationbetween identificationand difference. As a legendary woman, she epitomizes indigenousimaginationand mysteriesover which the colonizer has no control. Interestinglyenough, the narrator'smother is herself called of Aisha. The interchangeability the two figures associates the mother with popularresistance:"The counter-violencereorganizedour anger. Invincible,the militantwould dynamite,bombard,kill and then disappear inside a well. The women maintainedthe enigmaticpower of the talisman .... The labyrinthof the streets surrendered once more to a feminine protection"(95). Protected by the invisible powers of its women, the medina-with its multifariousAishas-has always defied the French systems of codification and pacification. The inability to navigate throughits labyrinthinespace has as a consequence createda new form of spatial imprisonment.In their attemptto preserve their moral authorityand culturaldifference among the natives, the French colons end up being incarcerated within the boundaries of their Cartesianrationalization the colonial space. In theirmutualdistancof ing, both the natives and the colonizers are subjected in varying degrees to the same effect of zoning: self-definition in opposition to the Other. Thus the partition of Maghrebianspace and imagination, the disruptionof local culture, and the imposition of an alien culture and languagehave all combined to create new forms of looking at the self and the Other. No doubt, the French school representsa significant transformationof the cultural encounter between France and the natives. Despite its divide-and-ruleideology, the French school has always functionedas the location where the frontiersthatlink and separatethe medina and the Europeancity, and differences between colonized and colonizer are no longer tenable. Like in most Maghrebian novels in French,the narrator's experience of the Frenchschool in La Memoiretatoueereflects a tension between a fear of losing one's identity and a desire to know the Other.Fascinatedby the Occident, he is first tempted to dissociate himself from his cultural "difference," since, as he puts it, "throughCoreille I will be admittedinto the eter80 Alif 22 (2002)

nity of the Other. The Occident is offering us its paradises" (84). Placing himself thus underthe gaze of his colonizer, he unconsciously allows the circle of projection and reflection to close on him. As FrantzFanon puts it in Black Skin, WhiteMasks: Every colonized people-in other words, every people in whose soul an inferioritycomplex has been createdby the death and burial of its local cultural originality-finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation;thatis, with the cultureof the mothercountry.The colonized is elevated above his jungle statusin proportion to his adoptionof the mothercountry'sculturalstandards. He becomes whiter as he renounces his blackness, his jungle.14 The irony of this situation,at least in the Maghrebian context, is that the msid (Quranic school) usually precedes the French school, where the whole business of "whitening" takes place. This means that before learning the French language the Maghrebianchild has long alreadydeveloped a clear sense of his/her identity and of the differentiation between Muslims and non-Muslims. No doubt, France's educationalpolicies in North Africa were informedby a colonialist ideology whose ultimateobjective is the preservationand consolidationof pre-existing social and economic inequalities. Georges Hardy, who took over the general direction of public education and fine arts in Morocco in 1920, maintainsin his reportsthat the integrationof the natives into French culture through education is a "bad utopia." He overtly expressed his fear that any alteration in traditional social organizationof the natives would eventuallyjeopardize France's primary goal to maintainpeople and objects in their customaryplaces. with the folHardyconcludes one of his reportsto France'sParliament lowing recommendations: "We must not think of liberating the Moroccancitizen, or the slave, or the woman. Once you become familiar with the Moroccancontext you will be convinced that these ideas (of liberation), once applied here, will turn into uncontrollable threats."15 Implicit in Hardy's recommendationis an ethnocentrism thatcannot sustainits claims: Hardy,like all othercolonial officials,16 wants to preserve France's culturaland moral supremacyamong the natives. Yet the way he intendsto do so betrayshis fear of the natives' ability to turnWesternideals againstFranceitself. In his first novel in Alif 22 (2002) 81

French, Le Passe simple, for example, Driss Chraibi vehemently denounces the incompatibilityof the grand narrativeof the French Revolution within a colonial context: "I have committed myself to
your way of life, gentlemen .... Consequently if I say: 'Liberty,

Equality, Fraternity:a slogan as rusty as ours is,' you will no doubt understandme. Nevertheless, as I go along, I still dare to hope that those words will be cleansed and refurbished,regaining their impact and the seductive power that my books communicatedto me."17 The adoption of the French language as a medium of selfexpression by native writers allows them, therefore, to denounce in one fell swoop France's colonialist projectsin the Maghrebas well as those ambientelements of theirown culturethatare either 'taboos,' or so disturbing to the political or theological orders that they must remain in the dark.18French functions in the Maghrebiannovel as a neutrallanguage throughwhich writers seek to constructnew identities out of the debris of colonialist and nationalist discourses. This does not imply that Francophonewriters disparagetheir mother languages and the culturesthey embody. On the contrary,as Khatibiputs it, the mother-language-because it is not codified-"maintains the On memory of the story, and its genealogical primacy."19 a different the French language represents, as in the case of other level, writerslike Assia Djebarand MohamedKhair-Eddine, a Francophone mediumthatenables the Francophone writerto come to termswith the of writing his or her mother-language. The Maghrebian impossibility text becomes, then, a bilingual space whereinthe writerexerts the faculty to see, to hear, and to write double.20Khatibidefines this faculty in terms of a "scenographyof the double and the palimpsest;"21 that is, a word is always/alreadycomposite. For him, the bilingual writer's prime objective is to give voice to the intention of the mother-language, not as a mechanical reproduction,but as a supplementto the language in which it expresses itself. To write in Frenchfor an Arab or a Berber is, therefore, to write in more than one language at the same time. Such being the case, both Arabic and Frenchare betrayed duringthe act of writing;both of them verge on linguistic "madness." Linguistic madness, however, is not fundamentallyprejudicial,and it does not even have to stimulateincoherentmodes of narrativeand disjointed subjectivities,for only in the ironic freedom of linguistic madness can the true bilingual actually write.22 In Khatibi's Amour bilingue (1983), the fusion of Arabic and French becomes possible only when the French language is itself estranged from its cultural 82 Alif 22 (2002)

background througha rathermystic union with the writer'snative lanThe subsequent exchange that takes place on the inter/intra guage. plane of the text guaranteestotal liberationfrom all forms of cultural and ideological egocentrism.In fact, Maghrebianliteraturein French, whetherthat of the colonial or postcolonial period, presentsa reaction againstwhat AbdullahLarouicalls the "loss of the self in the absolutes of language, culture, and the saga of the past."23Writing in the language of the former colonizer representsfor many writers a strategic depassementof oppositionalthoughtthatenforces the tyrannyof fixed origins and identities. The narrator's departure to Paris in La Memoire tatouee announces thus a new phase in his search for a synthesis to the I/Other-Orient/Occident--dialectic: "And the Occident remained a disguise to overcome"(113). Once in Europe,he chooses 'seduction' as a strategyto subdue the Other:"On your breast Occident, I delay the end of all ends. [.. .] I chose, it is evident, but not clear, your seduction [.. .] . What do I have to fear of your abduction, Occident?"(172).

The feminizationof the colonizer implies at once desire and fear: the desire to dominatethe Other,and the fear to lose one's identityin that domination. Unlike Sa'ed's sexual adventuresin Salih's Season of Migration to the North (1969), Khatibi admits that both the desiring subject and the desired object engage in the playfulness and ambivalence of seductionand deceit. Hence his decision to entertainwith the Occident a relationshipthat involves disloyalty ratherthan total submission: "I tattoo on your sex, Occident, the graphof my disloyalty" (137). Two different things are implied in this confession. First, to the appropriate Other'sbody throughthe (ethno)graphic writingof tatthe subject's sovereignty. Second, the idea of disloytooing preserves alty establishes Khatibi as a 'lover' on whom the West exerts but a provisional fascination. Far from being a Mecca where Maghrebian writerscamp in orderto cast off their native garbs and rehearsetheir endless grievances,Paris emerges here as a transitory phase and space in the long flight from what Khatibi calls "identite aveugle"[blind identity] and "differencesauvage"24[savage difference]. Contraryto Salih's hero, MustafaSa'ed, who leaves London and goes to die mysteriously in his Sudanese village, Khatibi's narratorleaves Paris in searchof new insights into the problematicof identity and origin: Farewell, the Left Bank and Paris of my adulthood! Difference is a woman and savage difference is a latent Alif 22 (2002) 83

seduction. Good illusion is the returnhome! One never returns home, one simply falls in the circle of one's shadow. (143) The narrator'sdecision to returnback to his tribe and culture does not emphasize the primacy of some sort of immaculatecultural identity. In fact, Khatibimaintainsthat the history of the Maghrebis one of cultural hybridization.Celebration of linguistic and cultural pluralityimplicitlyrecognizes Frenchcultureas an integrallayer grafted onto an already plural identity. Hence Khatibi's appeal for the "GrandeViolence" that targets the foundationalmyth of the unitary self and the unsullied origin. Inspiredby Derrida's deconstructionist critiqueof identity,Khatibiresists and ultimatelyrejects all forms and ideologies of culturalauthenticity.In Lutteurde classe a la maniere Taoiste, he sums up his ideas as follows: Everybodycherishes identity Everybodysearchesfor origin And I am teaching orphanknowledge.25 In a world intenton refurbishing essentialistdiscourseson idenand origins, Khatibiis in favor of exilic knowledge. 'Orphanhood' tity implies more than just the loss of a biological father or mother (Memoire 14), but a systematic rejection of all forms of monolithic discourses on identity and difference. The figure of the orphanintellectual-one thatepitomizes free thoughtand nomadism-inscribes in the text a discourse that subverts such rigid notions as the centered self, homeland, nationhood, and exile. For the orphanintellectual is par excellence an eternalnomad passengerin the lands of mortals. Orphanthoughtallows Maghrebianwritersin Frenchto negotiate their way out of the establishedArabo-Islamictheological and literary tradition. It also establishes a sufficient detachment from the dogmatism of Eurocentricthought and culture. Hence Maghrebian writers in French may be said to occupy an intellectual and cultural space whose 'Fathers' and 'Gods' have long been buried, or simply put to rest. Once one knows where s/he has buriedhis/her 'fathers'and 'gods,' the veneration,or else the defamationof their languages and heritage becomes a personal business. Given the crucial significance of the idea of origin to any understanding Maghrebianliteraturein of French, it is no surprisethat Khatibi enunciates the polyphonic con84 Alif 22 (2002)

struct of Maghrebian identity in the title of his autobiography: La Memoire tatouee. Similar to other titles, Le Livre du sang (1979), Maghreb pluriel (1983), Amour bilingue (1983), Un Etc a Stockholm (1990), to cite but these, Khatbi's autobiography challenges the assumption of homogeneity embedded in conventional Arabo-Islamic discourses on identity. Spatial and linguistic displacement of frontiers targets the ideologies that are based on historical closure. By liberating the Self from Western and non-Western notions of origin (existential, foundational), Khatibi casts Maghrebian writers in the role of transnational nomads whose postcolonial predicament is a permanent crossing and re-crossing of conventional boundaries and limits, whether those of language, religion, gender, or nationhood. In fact, most Maghrebian texts in French harbor a vision of the Maghrebian self as being decentered; a vision that banishes from its narrative address of postcolonial identity the fixation on a unified Self whose origin is inscribed in a foundational moment in the past. Notes
1 Abdelkebir Khatibi, La Memoire tatouee: autobiographie d'un colonise

(Paris:Denoel, 1971). All translationsare mine; all page numbersin my articlerefer to this edition. 2 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, Charles Lam Markmann,trans. (New York: Grove 1967) 134. 3 EdwardSaid, Beginnings:Intentionand Method(New York:ColumbiaU P, 1985) xiii. 4 AbdelkebirKhatibi,Maghrebpluriel (Paris : Denoel, 1983). All subsequent translationsfrom this edition are mine. 5 Khatibi,Maghrebpluriel, 11-39. 6 For a detailed discussion of the symbolic attributesof tattooing in popular cultureof the Maghreb,see Malek Chebel, Le Corps dans la traditionau Maghreb (Paris:Presses Universitairesde France, 1984). 7 Abdullah Laroui, The History of the Maghreb: An InterpretativeEssay, Ralph Manheim,trans.(New Jersey:PrincetonU P, 1977) 343-44. 8 Despite its reduced reference to the representationof North Africa in Orientalist texts, Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) remains the most valuable work in the field. For a detailed discussion of the image of Morocco in French literature,see the distinguished work by Abdeljelil Lahjomri, L'Image du Maroc dans la litteraturefrancaise (de Loti a Alif 22 (2002) 85

Montherlant),(Alger: SNED, 1973). 9 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Constance Farrington,trans. (New York: Grove Press, 1963) 38-39. 10 Homi Bhabha,The Location of Culture(London:Routledge, 1994) 61. 11 AbdelkebirKhatibi, "The Colonial Labyrinth," Yale French Studies 82.2 5-6. (1993): 12 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Steven F. Rendall, trans.(Berkeley:U of CaliforniaP, 1984) xiv. 13 Aicha Kendisha would be a young and beautiful woman who, under the Portugueseoccupationof Dukkalain Morocco (1450-57), would go out at night and seduce and then kill Portuguesesoldiers to avenge the killing of one of her relatives. Popularimaginationhas retainedof this story Aisha Kendisha'sdestructivepowers. See Vincent Crapanzano, Hamadsha: The Study in Moroccan Ethnopsychiatry(Berkeley: U of CaliforniaP, 1981) for a discussion of the spiritual significance of the figure of Aisha Kendishafor the Sufi sect of Hamadsha. 14 Fanon,Black Skins WhiteMasks, 18. 15 Georges Hardy, "L'Ame marocaine d'apres la litteraturefranqaise," Bulletin de l'enseignementpublic au Maroc 25 (novembre 1920): 54. 16 See, for example, Paul Marty, Le Maroc de demain (Paris: Comite de l'Afrique francaise, 1925). 17 Driss Chraibi,Le Passe simple (Paris:Denoel 1954) 119. My translation. 18 French and criticism has deliberatelyinsisted on the formal Maghrebian and stylistic featuresat the expense of the ideological and culturalimplications of North African literaturein French. 19 Khatibi,Maghrebpluriel (Paris:Denoel 1983) 193-94. 20 Reda Bensmaia, "Traduireou 'blanchir':Amour bilingue d'Abdelkebir Khatibi,"Imaginairesde l'autre: Khatibiou la memoirelitteraire (Paris: L'Harmattan,1987) 140. 21 Khatibi, Maghrebpluriel, 207. 22 James McGuire, "Forked Tongues, Marginal Bodies: Writing as Translationin Khatibi,"Research in African Literatures 23: 1 (Spring 1992): 108. 23 Abdullah Laroui, The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual: Traditionalismor Historicism,DiarmidCammell,trans.(Berkeley:U of CaliforniaP, 1976) 156. 24 "Pourune veritablepensee de difference,"Interviewwith Khatibi,Lamalif 85 (janvier 1977): 27-33. 25 A. Khatibi,Lutteurde classe a la maniere taoiste (Paris:Sindbad, 1976) 14. My translation. 86

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