Decolonizing the Body: Gender, Nation, and Narration in Tahar Ben Jelloun's L'enfant de sable

• REsEaRch in afRican litERatuREs, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Winter 2006). © 2006 •

Decolonizing the Body: Gender, Nation, and Narration in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s L’enfant de sable

ReBecca SauNDeRSIllinois State university

aBSTRacT

Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novel L’enfant de sable proposes that gender is a coloniza-tion of the body. This essay considers that proposition by placing it in a theo-retical dialogue with postcolonial and gender studies and analyzing it in the context of Morocco. I critique the language of natural development com-mon to both gender and colonization, examining its processes of abjection, reliance on distinct genres, and dependence on “style.” arguing that Ben Jelloun’s proposition is an invitation to scrutinize the historical specificities of colonization, I turn to an investigation of the Moroccan protectorate, to the ideological work done by its terminological distinction from coloniza-tion and the material and discursive forms of its implementation. These specificities, I argue, disclose significant nuances in the way gender oper-ates: as a protective envelope from its own disciplinary effects, a safeguard from uncertainty, and an inculcation of desire subtended by violence.

Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novel L’enfant de sable proposes that gender is a colonization of the body. This essay attempts to think through that proposition by explor-ing the novel’s narrative construction of it; by placing it in a theoretical dia-

logue with postcolonial and gender studies; and by considering it in the specific context of Morocco. I am less concerned with campaigning for this proposition as a critical shibboleth than with attending to the productive problems to which it leads us; indeed I want to begin with the assumption that nearly every term in this proposition merits being taken to task.

L’enfant de sable formulates the proposition that gender is a colonization of the body by melding together the troubled gender identity of its main character with the (de)colonization of Morocco and a reticulate narrative architecture of mul-tiple and feuding storytellers, enigmatic journals, and mysterious letters. Having

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fathered seven daughters and wishing to salvage both his inheritance and dignity, Hadj ahmed Suleiman decides to raise his next child—whatever its sex—as a son. Thus commences the saga of ahmed, biologically female but gendered male, whom the novel follows (albeit circuitously and obliquely) through a series of life experi-ences: circumcision; gender lessons in the home, hammam, mosque, and street; the onset of menstruation and the libidinal agonies of adolescence; marriage to a dis-abled cousin; experiments with a feminine identity, the circus, drag performance, and global travel; and an uncertain rebirth as a woman named Zahra.

This tale of gender unrest unfolds, not insignificantly, in the context of Moroc-can decolonization. Tension between nationalists and officials of the French protec-torate flicker regularly in the novel’s background: in “le bruit strident de l’appel à la prière . . . [qui] n’était plus un appel à la prière mais une incitation à l’émeute ” ‘the strident sound of the call to prayer . . . [that] was no longer a call to prayer, but inci-tation to a riot” (8) or in the description of “ceux qui ont été chassés des campagnes par la sécheresse et les détournements d’eau” ‘those chased from the countryside by the drought and diversions of water supplies’ (168). 1 While the novel does not fix these allusions to specified dates, they might very well depict the year 1937, when a drought devastated Morocco (exacerbated by certain colons’ impudent diversion of public water to their own farms), famine and typhus ravaged the population, and the French colonial administration, in an astonishingly brutal response to protests, killed and injured numerous civilians.2 Similarly, later in this passage, Fatouma narrates events that might well be those of 1944; she describes, for example, “tous ces gamins des bidonvilles, renvoyés des écoles, sans travail, sans toit, sans avenir, sans espoir. Ils était sortis dans les rues, d’abord les mains nues, ensuite les mains pleines de pierres, réclamant du pain. Ils hurlaient n’importe quel slogan . . . des femmes et des hommes sans travail les rejoingirent . . . [et] l’armée a tiré dans la foule” ‘all these kids from the shantytowns, turned away from school, without work, without shelter, without future, without hope. They took to the streets, at first with empty hands, then with their hands filled with stones, demanding bread. They yel-led any and every slogan . . . women and men without work joined them . . . and the army fired into the crowd’ (168). Such a scene bears unmistakable resemblance to

“les semaines sanglantes” that followed French arrests of Istiqlal leaders in January 1944. Apparently part of a deliberate strategy of provocation and repression, the arrests succeeded in sparking a massive popular uprising that included the closing of shops and schools, factories and worksites, and a general strike.3 In Rabat, when protesters in front of the palais royal were ordered to leave, they were bludgeoned by French police, who, subsequently, began shooting blindly into the crowd. In Fes, a similar scene of civilian slaughter and mass arrest transpired a few days later.

If the novel hints coyly at events of Moroccan decolonization, it also reflects on decolonization allegorically. as Lisa Lowe has suggested, Salem, amar, and Fatouma (who narrate chapters fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen, respectively), in their alternative conclusions to ahmed’s tale, allegorize possible scenarios for decolonization: a violent, suicidal struggle against a rapacious aggressor; a slowly decaying, nostalgic isolation; or the piecing together of an eclectic collage from the fragments of past and present, self and other, here and elsewhere.4 Moreover, the uncertain brink of identity on which ahmed seeks to balance him/herself regularly allegorizes the bewilderingly complex process of establishing national independence:

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Aujourd’hui je cherche à me délivrer. De quoi au juste? . . . de cette relation avec l’autre en moi, celui qui m’écrit et me donne l’étrange impression d’être encore de ce monde ? . . . Alors je vais sortir. Il est temps de naître de nouveau. En fait je ne vais pas changer mais simplement revenir à moi, juste avant que le destin qu’on m’avait fabriqué ne commence à se dérouler et ne m’emporte dans un courant. . . . Quel soulagement, quel plaisir de penser que ce seront mes propres mains qui traceront le chemin . . .

Today I seek to free myself. From what, exactly? . . . From this relation with the other in me, who writes (to) me and gives me the strange impression of still being of this world? . . . So, I shall go out. It is time to be born again. In fact, I am not going to change, but simply to return to myself, before the destiny that was fabricated for me begins to unroll and carry me off on its current. . . . What relief, what pleasure to think that it will be my own hands that trace the path . . . (111–12)

The question that Ahmed poses vis-à-vis his/her own body is, arguably, the ur-question of decolonization: from what (political, economic, cultural, or military forces) must I free myself to be truly liberated? And the figures in this passage—of an other that has permeated the self and on whose discourse I have come to depend for my very being, of a rebirth that is also a “return to myself,” of a narrow escape from an engulfing destiny and a heady chance to make my own way—trace a pattern very similar to that of colonial disassembly and nation building. This entanglement of corporal and political decolonization is also deepened by the thwarted and inconclusive nature of ahmed’s various attempts to “return to the self,” which allegorizes the simultaneous impossibility of returning to a “natu-ral” pre-discursive body and of recuperating an “authentic” native or national identity.5

Ahmed’s story is infinitely complicated by the fact that it is differently nar-rated by a professional storyteller, by ahmed him/herself (ostensibly), by the brother of ahmed’s wife, by a man recently arrived from the South, by three mem-bers of the audience who convene after the storyteller’s death (the aforementioned Salem, amar, and Fatouma), and by a blind troubadour with an uncanny resem-blance to Ben Jelloun’s literary mentor, Jorge Luis Borges.6 as we have already begun to see, this complex alloy of gender trouble, national unrest, and narrative revolt form a kind of fluid triangulation in which the body is the nation, the nation is the narrative, and the narrative is the body. Indeed, from birth, ahmed’s body is linked to the body politic. When s/he is born, his/her father runs the following announcement in the national newspaper:

Dieu est clémentIl vient d’illuminer la vie et le foyer de votre serviteur et dévoué potier Hadj ahmed Souleïamane. un garçon—que Dieu le protège et lui donne longue vie—est né jeudi à 10h. Nous l’avons nommé Mohamed Ahmed. Cette naissance annonce fertilité pour la terre, paix et prospérité pour le pays. Vive ahmed! Vive le Maroc!

GOD IS MeRcIFuL. He has illuminated the life and home of your servant and devoted potter Hajji ahmed Suleyman. a boy—may God protect him and bring him long life—was born on Thursday at 10:00 a.m. We have named him Mohammed


ahmed. This birth will bring fertility to the land, peace and prosperity to the country. Long live ahmed! Long live Morocco! (30)

Not only does this announcement inaugurate the figural association of Ahmed with Morocco, but it suggests that fertility, peace, and the prosperity of the coun-try are contingent upon the birth of sons, that the destiny of the country rests in men’s hands. It thus founds both the novel’s analogy between sexual and politi-cal liberation—ahmed’s attempts to decolonize the body and Moroccans’ efforts to decolonize the body politic—and its implicit interrogation of masculinist nationalisms.7

If Ahmed’s body is a figure for the space of the nation, so too is the narrative, which is consistently depicted in terms of the geographical space of a Moroccan city. The seven gates through which the primary raconteur organizes his narra-tive, those openings through which one may enter or exit the story, are also the gates that separate the medina from the ville nouvelle, the arab from the european.8 The intricate circuitousness of the narrative, moreover—its “ruelles tres étroites . . . [et] circulaires [qui] n’ont pas de bout ” ‘narrow little streets . . . endless and circular’ (20–21)—seem to identify it expressly with the medina. Yet, like the body of ahmed, this na(ra)tion is inscribed by both genders, associated both with the public, masculine space of the street and market, and with the interior, feminine space of the home9:

Le livre est ainsi: une maison ou chaque fenetre est un quartier, chaque porte une ville, chaque page est une rue . . . Nous allons habiter cette grande maison . . . La maison garde la façade sereine, à l’écart de cette agitation interne. Nous, nous serons à l’intérieur des murs dans la cour, dans la place ronde, et de ce cercle partiront autant de rues que de nuits . . .

Thus is the book: a house in which each window is a quartier, each door a town, each page a street . . . We are going to inhabit this big house . . . The house keeps a serene façade, detached from this internal agitation. as for us, we will be inside the walls, in the courtyard, in the circular court, from which will branch off as many streets as nights . . . (108–09)

The transgendered narrative space of L’enfant de sable not only thickens the novel’s admixture of body and narrative, but emphasizes that a nation, like the body, never exists as pure res extensa, that it is always an already narrativized and practiced surface perpetually becoming the significance inscribed on it.

To complete that triangular figure, the narrative is also figured as the body—of the storyteller, or of ahmed. “Vous ne pouvez y accéder,” says the storyteller of ahmed’s narrative, “sans traverser mes nuits et mon corps. Je suis ce livre . . . j’ai senti le livre s’incarner en moi.” ‘You can’t get to it without traversing my nights and my body. I am this book . . . I felt the book embody itself in me’ (13). Stories, he says,

“m’habitent et me transforment. J’ai besoin de les sortir de mon corps” ‘inhabit and transform me. I need to get them out of my body’ (16). ahmed, similarly, describes the material, embodied, and intimate reach of the anonymous correspondent’s

“phrases [qui] me caressent la peau, me touchent aux endroits les plus sensible de


mon corps” ‘sentences that caress my skin, touch me in the most sensitive parts of my body’ (96). And in a similar vein, the correspondent writes, “je vous entends parler à vous-même ou vous coucher nue dans les pages blanches de ce cahier” ‘I hear you speak to yourself and lay down naked in the blank pages of this notebook’ (60). This nakedness and blankness, this embodied narrative clad in notions that se débarassent, might also be read as the nakedness of a story (like that of the nation or the transgendered body) that is yet to be written, that calls for an undressing or an erasure, a “decolonization” that entails confronting oneself exposed.

It is through these figural, thematic and allegorical imbrications, that the novel formulates the proposition that gender is a colonization of the body. and the premise draws on a certain historicized logic. For not unlike the political vari-ant of colonization, gender is a practice of taking possession of, and discursively occupying, putatively “undeveloped” bodies through an attachment to a “parent state,” a practice that is cast simultaneously as natural development and logical submission and that is carried out by disciplining desire, by regulating spaces and time, by persuasion, by negotiation, or by force. But let us be more specific and, subsequently, more skeptical of this proposition.

Both gender and colonization are imbedded in a language of natural devel-opment that assigns the pregendered, like the pre-colonial, the status of a child. Gender nonconformists, natives, and children are not subjects in their own right, but, to borrow Judith Butler’s language, abjected beings not yet properly gendered or civilized. They inhabit the uncontrollable and chaotic boundaries of civiliza-tion and “their very humanness comes into question; these excluded sites come to bound the human as its constitutive outside, and to haunt those boundaries as the persistent possibility of their disruption and rearticulation”(Butler 8).10 conceived via negativa (as the uncivilized, abnormal, undeveloped, inhuman), they are discur-sively associated with (figurally related to and often conceptually undifferentiated from) the insane, the poor, the ill, the physically disabled, the homeless, and the criminal; that is, with other pathologized groups, with whom they are perceived to share properties such as unreason, impurity, and social impropriety.11

For example, in one version of the story, Ahmed, reflecting on his/her mar-riage to a disabled female cousin, makes the following journal entry: “Je finis par penser . . . qu’elle avait accepté ce mariage en pensant que, si je l’avais demandée, ce nétait pas par amour, mais pour un arrangement social, pour masquer une infirmité ou une perversité” ‘I ended up thinking . . . that she had accepted this marriage thinking that, if I had asked for it, it wasn’t out of love, but for a social arrangement, to mask some infirmity or perversity’ (76). Gender nonconformity, as ahmed recognizes, is perceived as sickness (as indeed “gender identity disorder” is, in US medicine, classified as mental illness12) or, like criminality, as a more will-ful deviation from normality; it thus bears a striking resemblance to the patholo-gies attributed to natives by colonial discourse, to the “Oriental” of european invention described by edward Said, to those inhabiting the negative side of the Manichean allegory as elaborated by abdul JanMohamed.13 Such pathologizing discourses operate, as Foucault has taught us, by submitting specific acts, practices, or characteristics to a structural extrapolation that makes of them signs of a condi-tion. The colonial economy described by JanMohamed, “based on a transformation of racial into moral and even metaphysical difference,” the allegorical extensions of which “come to dominate every facet of imperialist mentality” is one example of


this diffusion from specific characteristic to essential character (80). At least three facets of this pathologizing language of development merit attention.

First, it disciplines the idiosyncrasies of phenomena into a taxonomy of dis-tinct and identifiable genres. “The European” writes JanMohamed, “commodifies the native by negating his individuality, his subjectivity, so that he is now per-ceived as a generic being that can be exchanged for any other native” (83). It is no coincidence that genre and gender both derive from the same root, from Greek γενος (race, kind, sort, class, genus) and connote a particular style or manner. Indeed, we might rephrase JanMohamed’s contention to say that the native is perceived as a gender: for, negating individuality and subjectivity, gender also makes beings into interchangeable parts.14 as a verb, moreover, this stem means to beget, to breed, to engender; it is thus imbedded in a familial figure that subtends both the notion of ethnicity on which colonialism depends and the heterosexual matrix that produces gender. As if to evoke reflection on this very matter, the seminal word of Ben Jelloun’s novel—that is, the title of the first chapter—is “Homme [Man]”: a term that may refer to mankind, to men only, or to a particular man, a designation that is thus inspecifically generic and that specifies by gender, that inscribes not only the manner in which one gender eclipses the other, but the imperious power of gender to say who one is without saying anything about one.

Second, the generic descriptors through which the native, the little boy, or the little girl are “known” are also the pedagogy through which they are taught to know themselves; and they are thus a formidable mechanism for overriding local experience. In other words, the colonized subject is counted upon to take over the process of engendering: of making men, women, or natives, much as the child is counted upon to assume the law of the father, or, as in our narrative, ahmed, at his/her father’s death, assumes the role of master of the household. addressing his/her sisters s/he declares:

a partir de ce jour, je ne suis plus votre frère; je ne suis pas votre père non plus, mais votre tuteur. J’ai le devoir et le droit de veiller sur vous. Vous me devez obéissance et respect. Enfin, inutile de vous rappeler que je suis un homme d’ordre et que, si la femme chez nous est inférieure à l’homme, ce n’est pas parce que Dieu l’a voulu ou que le Prophète l’a décideé, mais parce qu’elle accepte ce sort. alors subissez et vivez dans le silence!

From this day on, I’m no longer your brother; I’m not your father, either, but your guardian. I have the duty and the right to watch over you. You owe me obedience and respect. anyway, I don’t have to remind you that I’m a man of order and that, if women are inferior to men here it’s not because God wished it or the prophet decided it, but because women accept it. So submit, and live in silence! (65–66)

a model of both logical and vicious circularity, ahmed’s speech simultaneously asserts his/her authority by fiat and insists that power operates by consensus; s/he at once imposes an order and snatches away the consolation of that order being god-willed or natural. ahmed’s address to his/her sisters not only, like the novel itself, juxtaposes a pervasive and rigid system of gender relationships with a recognition that potentially undoes them, but demonstrates the manner in which subjects take over the process of their own and others’ colonization.


Finally, in both colonial regimes and the gender system, the body and its coverings function as primary signs, as the style that identifies one’s genre.15 What Fanon writes of a society in “algeria unveiled” applies equally to gender: “The way people clothe themselves, together with the traditions of dress and finery that custom implies, constitutes the most distinctive form of a society’s uniqueness, that is to say the one that is the most immediately perceptible” (35).16 Often, as Fanon notes of the veil, a single accessory suffices to signify an entire gender or society, and, in its overdetermination, becomes a site where much larger political and social issues are contested:

The officials of the French administration . . . committed to destroying the people’s originality and under instructions to bring about the disintegration, at whatever cost, of forms of existence likely to evoke a national reality directly or indirectly, were to concentrate their efforts on the wearing of the veil, which was looked upon at this juncture as a symbol of the status of the [Maghrebian] woman. (37)

This logic, then, of natural development, of pathology and cure, and of fixed γενοι expressed in, through, and on the body governs the way in which both gender and colonization have historically been conceived. I wish to further interrogate this analogy, however, by invoking two theorists who critique this description of gender and colonization, respectively: Judith Butler and Homi Bhahba.17 While similarities between Butler’s and Bhabha’s projects are symptomatic of shared Nietszchean, Foucauldian, and post-structural influences, I would like to sug-gest that we entertain the possibility that they may also expose significant and necessary intersections between the tasks of thinking gender and theorizing colonialism. Let me mark three such junctures.

First, Butler and Bhabha mount critiques of the assumption of already con-stituted groups on which both gender and colonialism depend; they argue, that is, that a predetermined sex or culture available as an epistemological object simply does not exist. Gender and culture are not simply there to be analyzed. Rather, they judge such identity categories, and indeed identity itself, to be effects of regulatory practices that produce the bodies they then “represent” and govern. Such identities, they argue, are normative ideals rather than phenomenological descriptions and they are problematic both because subjects regularly exceed their boundaries and because they dictate that certain kinds of identities either will not be tolerated or cannot exist. Both Butler and Bhabha, then, call for a shift in the object of analysis, which neither presumes pre-existent categories nor subjects representations to “correction,” but, rather, traces critically the genealogy of their production.

Second, Butler and Bhabha both appropriate and extend the linguistic con-cept of performativity to describe the sedimented effects of reiterative practices that acquire the aura of the natural. They contend that the very fact that this reit-eration is necessary is a sign that its referent—a sexed body or a native culture—is never quite complete, that bodies and cultures never quite comply with the norms by which their materialization is impelled. and if I have, in this instance, bor-rowed Butler’s language of materialization, I might as well have borrowed from Bhabha’s discussion of the stereotype—a structure that, he argues, anxiously repeats what is ostensibly “known,” and that, like the fetish, is predicated on both


mastery and defense, pleasure and anxiety.18 We might also arrive at this point of desedimentation by following ahmed’s journal. Shifting from conceiving of gender dysphoria as losing the language of the body (which assumes a former pos-session) to positing that gender as such is, like colonization, a force of discursive demands with the capacity to drown out the materiality of the body, s/he writes:

“J’ai perdu la langue de mon corps; d’ailleurs je ne l’ai jamais possédée. Je devrais l’apprendre et commencer d’abord par parler comme une femme. comme une femme? Pourquoi? Suis-je un homme? ” ‘I have lost the language of my body. But perhaps I never possessed it. I must learn it and begin speaking as a woman. as a woman? Why? Am I a man?’ (96).

Third, Butler and Bhabha locate a space of agency, a transformative moment, in this process of reiteration; that is, it is precisely because identity comes into being through repetition that it can be altered. On this site where gender and cul-ture may be uttered differently, both stage strategies of resistance that are enacted as parody: drag, on the one hand, “sly civility” on the other, strategies which are simultaneously performative (in both the theatrical and linguistic senses) and deformative. concomitantly, they insist on indeterminacy as a theoretically nec-essary and politically viable presence rather than as a mere threat to feminism and nations respectively. This revaluation of indeterminacy is also narratively elaborated in L’enfant de Sable, which constructs a significant intersection between its own narrative uncertainty, ahmed’s gender uncertainty, and Morocco’s political uncertainty. Indeed the novel, in my view, ultimately suggests that decolonization is largely synonymous with a tolerance of uncertainty—of, for example, narrative irresolution, ambiguous genders, and national ambivalence.19

While I have, to this point, attempted to render Ben Jelloun’s proposition that gender is a colonization of the body more theoretically specific, I also wish to look at that proposition more critically. For there are, surely, significant differences between gender and colonization. colonization, for example, arguably only refers to the imposition of a culturally external force; phenomena, however pervasive their effects, don’t count as colonization if they are culturally internal. While this objection merits being responded to in greater detail, I wish merely to mark the difficulty of drawing boundaries between the internal and external; it would be quite possible, for example, to theorize gender as other, as external to the self, if not to culture. and even in the domain of culture, sorting out what is internal and what is external, what is indigenous and what is imported, particularly in a post- or neocolonial setting, has proven to be a formidable, if not impossible, task. another ostensibly egregious flaw with this proposition would be that gender isn’t imposed militarily, by force, the way colonization has been or that it doesn’t construct economic dependence. again, this question deserves a detailed response, but I would insist that the answer is by no means self-evident when one considers, for example, violence against the differently gendered or the degree to which gender is expressed through commodity choices (the degree to which one purchases masculinity or femininity and must have the requisite capital to do so).20

While it remains possible that Ben Jelloun’s proposition is merely a false comparison, many of the apparently self-evident differences between gender and colonization are also constructed on exceedingly shaky foundations. Indeed the problem may be less with the contents of the comparison than with the struc-ture of comparison itself; for to conceive this proposition as a comparison assumes,


problematically, that gender and colonization are pre-existent objects of knowledge that we can observe and compare and, further, that it would be possible, even in theory, to divvy up traits between the two: this trait belongs to culture, that to gender etc.

If we should hesitate before dismissing Ben Jelloun’s proposition as a faulty comparison, we should also be careful to distinguish it from certain feminist argu-ments with which it is, I believe, easily confused: specifically, those that contend that patriarchy oppresses women as a colonizer oppresses the colonized; those that demonstrate the ways in which colonialism has actively engaged local patriarchies and subjected women to a “double colonization;” and those that have highlighted lacunae both in post-colonial studies and in Western feminism.21 I think what dis-tinguishes Ben Jelloun’s proposition from these arguments is first, that even when they question particular gender inflections, they accept sex as a given, natural, bodily fact that assumes the necessity of two genders and endorses a heterosexual imperative, whereas Ben Jelloun’s proposition poses gender and colonization as mechanisms of production whereby subjects are fabricated. Second, postcolonial feminisms have dealt with cultural differences among women by narrowing and refining categories of women—Western women, Third World women, Moroccan women, Moroccan women of a particular class and ethnic group etc.—rather than by interrogating the category of woman as such as, I would argue, Ben Jelloun’s proposition invites us to do.22

But if we take seriously the statement “gender is a colonization of the body,” does it not so inflate the meaning of colonization as to obliterate the histori-cal and political specificities of colonization? Does it not, as Anthony Appiah, Simon During, and Linda Hutcheon have all (in very different ways) charged of postmodernist interventions in postcolonial studies, suffice to erase the “fact of colonization”?23 Denying the existence or material effects of colonization would, I agree, be irresponsible if not absurd, but I think it is also crucial to recognize that determining anything like the “fact of colonialism”—what constitutes this event, where it begins and ends, what its content, nature, and boundaries are—would necessitate an act of the most arbitrary theoretical despotism. The multiple prac-tices, discourses, and effects that comprise colonialism, as well as the arenas (political, economic, cultural etc.) through which it has been instituted do not add up to anything like a singular “fact.” The kind of genealogical practice and indeter-minacy to which I have been pointing via Butler and Bhabha—precisely the type of “postmodern” practice charged with de-historicizing colonialism—can, I would argue, function in two ways. It can, on the one hand, settle down in a metaphysical concept of indeterminacy in such a way that indeterminacy itself is used to dismiss the significance of gender and colonization: they are indeterminate concepts and therefore logically unfeasible, without significance, even unreal. On the other hand, such a recognition of instability can—and should, I would contend—initi-ate the much more complex task of sorting through the idiosyncrasies that are left when categories such as “gender” and “colonization” have been deconstructed. In this sense, Ben Jelloun’s proposition, like the “postmodern” projects with which I have suggested it is allied, are, rather than an erasure of specificity, precisely its condition of possibility.

Let us turn, then, to some of the specificities of Moroccan colonization and to the ways those specificities nuance and interrogate this refractory semantic terrain shared by gender and colonization.24 These details, it is perhaps worth


emphasizing, are the residue of colonization deployed as a generic term; and this is true as much when the term is used “metaphorically” (gender is a colonization of the body) as when it is used “literally” (Morocco was colonized by France). In either case, such pecularities are implicitly chased off to the unpacified territory of irrelevant exceptions where, like those “dissident tribes” forever troubling the edges of empire, they do not cease to beleaguer the identity of colonization as such. The most conspicuous of these specificities, in the Moroccan case, is that, technically speaking—that is, from the perspective of French political terminol-ogy—Morocco was never a colony, but a protectorate. What, then, is obscured by subsuming Morocco into a generalized theory—or history—of colonization? How does the protectorate, as a form of political or economic intervention, differ from colonization proper?25 What is the ideological work done by this conceptual dis-tinction? And, finally, how does the protectorate, in its theoretical or materialized forms, nuance, refute, or clarify the proposition that gender is a colonization of the body?

Casting France in the role of the beneficent guardian—as more adult, robust, and masculine—the notion of the “protectorate” concomitantly constitutes Morocco as immature, weak, and unsound; it represents French intervention in Morocco as a kind of brace that compensates for infirmity or developmental defi-ciency.26 Yet while regularly describing Morocco as “still in her infancy,” Maréchal Lyautey, the theoretical and administrative architect of the Moroccan protectorate, spiked this otherwise rather bland paternalism with a representation of it as a kind of freedom—a letting go or a release, rather than an occupation: “Like all children,” he advised in his 1922 lecture to the Institut Colonial, “we must let her grow up; and we must let her achieve full growth in every sense . . .” (Qtd. Scham 40–41).27 an even more stupefying concoction was his mixture of this image of France as benign guardian and emancipator—as Liberty unflinchingly leading the people—with a clear recognition of the direction of colonial profit flows. Ostensibly counting on rhetorical juxtaposition to pass for logical agreement, he calls on France to play “le rôle d’un tutuer, d’un grand frère bienfaisant, auquel [l’élite marocaine] aurait intérêt à rester liée [the role of a tutor, a beneficent big brother, to whom it will be in the Moroccan elite’s interest to remain tied]” and from which France will benefit

“de l’avantage d’avoir à faire ici . . . à une nation dont l’émancipation se fera sous notre tutelle, sous notre direction, à notre profit . . . [from the advantage of having constructed . . . a nation whose emancipation will be made under our tutelage, under our direction, to our profit]” (qtd. in Delanoë 33). Here emancipation is not from but through France, a formulation that handily disguises the threat posed by France itself, which becomes the protector rather than the agressor from which one needs protection, the liberator rather than the subjugator.28

This depiction of colonization as a protective envelope is, I also want to signal, intriguingly similar to Ben Jelloun’s portrayal of gender, to the “voile de chair [veil of flesh]” that, for Ahmed, “le séparait et le protégeait des autres [separated and protected him from others],” that provides an asylum from the “curiosité, méfiance et meme une haine tenace [curiosity, disdain and even a tenacious hatred],” elic-ited by his strangeness (7). Performing a distinct gender, this passage suggests, not only protects the good citizenry from the threat of uncertainty—from confu-sion, anomaly, infirmity, defilement, hybridity, fitna—but safeguards the gender conformist from the violence of others.29 But in both these instances, the protector


is really the aggressor: it is France that is occupying Morocco; it is a rigid gender system that is oppressing ahmed; the protective envelope is a disguise of its own menace, the consequences against which it “protects” are both of its own produc-tion and among its most potent disciplinary mechanisms. The antidote produces the sickness and the sickness makes necessary the antidote.30

If this ruse of protection performed smoothly enough in the metropole, Moroc-cans were not so easily duped by it. A central and explicit demand of the 1944 Mani-feste de l’Indépendance was “la liberation de notre souveraineté de toute forme de tutelle [the liberation of our sovereignty from every form of tutelage]”( Qtd. Delanoë 203). Having handed the text to the Résident General Gabriel Puaux, the Vizir de la Justice added, “Nous sommes venus . . . de mettre fin aux rapports de tutelle qui nous ont été imposés par le traité de Fès de 1912 . . . Nous avons vécu, nous gens du Magh-zen, depuis 1912, comme des pantins, des singes, manipulés par l’administration du protectorat. [We have come to put an end to the relation of tutelage that was imposed on us by the Treaty of Fes in 1912 . . . We, the people of the Maghzen, have lived since 1912 as puppets and monkeys, manipulated by the protectorate administration]” (Qtd. Delanoë 203). The Vizir’s words, I want to suggest—the commitment he makes to eradicating manipulation, external imposition, and paternalistic relations—propels Morocco directly onto the terrain of that irreducible question posed by ahmed:

“Aujourd’hui je cherche à me délivrer. De quoi au juste? [Today I seek to liberate myself. From what, exactly ?]” In other words, the Manifeste de l’Independence is implicitly as interrogative as it is declarative: from what must we free ourselves to be truly liberated? To what degree is it possible to liberate oneself from all forms of tutelage, from externally scripted desires and foreign manipulation? How does one sort out one’s own desire and identity from this self-alienation? And by what mechanisms will this project of liberation and disalienation be carried out in these specific historical and material circumstances? The questions posed by (Ahmed’s interrogation of) gender turn out to be highly correlative with the questions confronted at the moment of independence from colonial rule.31

If the rhetoric of the protectorate was one of benign guidance, the administrative structure, according to Lyautey, was to be one of indirect rule along British lines, of association rather than assimilation: 32

La conception du Protectorat est celle d’un pays gardant ses institutions, se gouvernant et s’administrant lui-même avec ses organes propres sous le simple contrôle d’une puissance européenne, laquelle, substituée à lui pour la repré-sentation extérieure, prend généralement l’administration de son armée, de ses finances, la dirige dans son développement économique. Ce qui domine et caractérise cette conception, c’est la notion contrôle, oppossée à la formule administration directe. (Qtd. Delanoë 29)33

[The concept of the Protecorate is one of a country maintaining its institutions, governing and administering itself with its own organs under the simple control of a european power which, replacing external representation, generally takes charge of the administration of the army, finances, and the management of eco-nomic development. What dominates and chracterizes this conception, is the notion of control, as opposed to the formula of direct administration.]


More discreet, less obviously coercive, this mechanism of “simple control” is a way of letting the natives play grown-up. It is more or less a game of pretend where, like dressing up in Mommy’s or Daddy’s clothes, one is guided into genre-appropriate behaviors. Indeed another way of describing this indirect rule would be by way of amar’s narration in L’enfant de sable which begins with an excursus on hollowing out, ———, corruption:

Je n’ai pas besoin de préciser davantage: vous savez bien que la corruption a fait son travail et continue de dévaster lentement et irrémédiablement nos corps et nos âmes. J’aime bien le mot arabe qui désigne la corruption ——. Ça s’applique aux matières qui perdent leur substance et qui n’ont plus de consistence, comme le bois par exemple qui garde l’enveloppe extérieure, il garde l’apparence, mais il est creux, il n’y a plus rien dedans, il a été miné de l’intérieur; des petites bêtes vraiment minuscules ont grignoté tout ce qu’il y avait sous l’écorce. (146)

[I needn’t be more specific: you know that corruption has done its work and continues, slowly and irremediably, to devastate our bodies and souls. I love the arabic word for corruption, ——. It’s used for materials that lose their sub-stance, consistency, or stability, like wood, for example, that retains its external shell, it keeps its outward appearance, but it’s hollow, there’s no longer anything inside, it’s been worn away from the inside; minute insects have gnawed away the core.]

amar is sketching the outlines of Moroccan society, but much the same might be said of the edifice of indirect rule which, as instituted by the Treaty of Fes, set out to “sauvegarde[r] la situation religieuse, le respect et le prestige traditionnel du Sultan [the religious conditions, the respect and traditional prestige of the Sultan]”( Qtd. Delanoë 17). The wording could not be more “corrupt” in the sense elaborated by amar; it enacts the hollowing out of the sultan’s authority, reserv-ing his “respect and prestige,” but not his power; it keeps up the appearance of his authority at the same time that it hands over formal “administrative, judicial, educational, economic, financial and military” control to the interests that have already gnawed away the substance of his rule.34 cloaked in the impeccable attire of “mutual respect,”—the “essential characteristic” of the protectorate is, in Lyautey’s words, “close association and cooperation between the autochtonous race and the protecting race, joined in mutual respect, and the scrupulous safeguarding of traditional institutions” (Qtd. Scham 29)35—indirect rule in essence gave the sul-tan “authority” over ceremonies, tradition, and “Muslim affairs”, over the symbolic, but not the material; the spiritual, but not the wordly; the past, not the present or future; the cultural, but not the political or economic. He, along with his chorus of vizirs, pashas, and caïds, would function as a sort of poet laureate decorating—and legitimating—French rule with aesthetic beauty. This specifically Franco-Moroccan rendition of colonialism, inserted into ben Jelloun’s analogy, also throws into relief the degree to which gender may be conceived as a mechanism for keeping up the appearance of authority—of agency, self-definition and individual expression—while substituting for such agency a well-guided identity and desire, exchanging decorative accessories for power.

Trumpetted by Lyautey as a less expensive, more streamlined and efficient, form of imperialism, as well as a more “humane” one,36 indirect rule meant, in


practice, expanding the meaning of “supervision” to the point where it was exceed-ingly difficult to distinguish from direct rule or colonization proper.37 When he needed to please the hard line colonial lobby in Paris, Lyautey admitted as much:

“The functions of supervision are in fact much more extensive than the word seems to indicate,” he writes. “In effect, the contrôleurs civils not only have the mission of supervising the systems of native justice and government per se; they are in truth the real administrators of the country, charged with centralizing and coordinating in all matters” (Memo to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, October 1917, Qtd. Hoisington 51). “Indirect” or “native” rule also entailed simply removing native leaders who were uncooperative, including the sultan himself: one of Lyautey’s first exploits in Morocco was removing the disobliging sultan Moulay Abdelhafid and replacing him with the more acquiescent Moulay Youssef. Similarly, while the “politique des grands caïds” ostensibly remained central to Lyautey’s method in the atlas mountains and the South, it too meant simple elimination of leaders (like el-Hiba, Moha ou Hamou, or abd al’Krim) who were not willing to cooperate with the French (See Hoisington 46–7). The role of the native intermediary was, moreover, far from that of an equal partner; Lyautey expected the native leader to function essentially as a conduit for French ideology and interests:

It is through this officer in permanent contact with the native leader that little by little the latter’s horizons will expand and through him those of his people. and it is through him as an intermediary that bit by bit we will introduce our ideas of justice, humanity, and progress, that is to say, we will involve ourselves in all that is beneficial and legitimate and stay away from all that is annoying and unacceptable to people for whom our intervention disturbs all customs and all traditions. This set-up has two characteristics which should make it incontest-able: it is the only one that conforms to the reality of the situation and it is the most economical. (Qtd. Hoisington, 20)38

The slither in Lyautey’s language from “justice, humanity, and progress” to the “economical” is both characteristic and telling; so too is the “little by little” and

“bit by bit” by way of which he describes colonial advance. This perseverant stealth was, indeed, central to Lyatuey’s conception of the protectorate—a “method” that he depicted in terms of a “tache de huile” [spot of oil]. Developed on the basis of his experience in Vietnam and Madagascar, and his association with Gallieni, the idea entailed spreading French influence—unctuously, inevitably, imperceptibly—by gathering knowledge of native politics and culture, colluding with tribal leaders, establishing civil institutions, and constructing desire: “je veux nous faire aimer de ce peuple [I want to make us loved by this people],” he wrote (Qtd. Delanoë 25). as c.R. Pennell describes it, the basic strategy was that “the army would build posts on the edge of as-yet-uncolonised regions. These would show off French military power, and provide security, safe markets, and medical facilities that would win hearts and minds. Then French control would spread forward and the process would begin again”(Pennell 130; see also Miller, Nationalists and Nomads 68; and Hoisington 7). If, in theory, this spot of oil was a peaceful and inevitable expansion of civilization, it was, as Pennell is quick to add, “backed by superior weapons and excellent intelligence”( Pennell 130). and while the metaphor of the “tache de huile” didn’t entirely correspond to, and did much to obscure, the forms of coercion and violence that took place on the ground, it did do an impressive


amount of ideological work: it represented the advance of French civilization as unstoppable and unavoidable, and, even more interestingly, figured cultural borders as permeable, shifting, and undefined. The image, perhaps inadvertently, suggests that what is French or what is Moroccan (be it territory, desire, culture, economic interest, or political structure) can never be clearly distinguished; they will necessarily become blurred, indeed indecipherable, at the edges. This concep-tion posits a kind of proto-hybridity (where, as Bhabha would have it, cultures are not static entities but dynamic processes), but it also demonstrates the degree to which such “hybridity,” in circumstances of fundamental structural and material inequality, can function as the right hand of imperialism. When placed in the con-text of ben Jelloun’s corporal, narrative, and national uncertainties, as well as in the company of Butler and Bhabha, it becomes clear again that such indeterminacy is double-edged—always fraught with risk: it can function as a fashionable disguise for hegemony as much as a tool for dismantling the prisonhouse of identity.

Lyautey’s other viscous term for this method was “penetration pacifique.” He never intended to be a “hammer” pounding away at Morocco, he wrote to a series of his colleagues, but a “drill which penetrates slowly but irresistibly”(Qtd. Hoisington, 27).39 Despite his regular recourse to military force, he preferred to represent the colo-nial mission as progressing by “la pénetration économique et moral d’un peuple, non par l’asservissement à notre force ou même à nos libertés, mais par une association étroite [the economic and moral penetration of a people, not by subjugation to our force or even our liberties, but by a close association]” (Qtd. Scham 224): a gentler, friendlier rape.40 advocating a combined strategy of military force and political influence, he conceived this penetration as an insemination of organization and order, as a mastery of “resistant and warlike populations” which, without the firm hand of the French, would inevitably stray back to “the freedom of chaos, pillage, and oppression which had benefitted them for centuries” (Qtd. Hoisington 73).41

This imposition of order was also, for Lyatuey, coincident with the reign of reason and understanding—“What is pacification in most cases anyway,” he wrote,

“if not the end of a misunderstanding?”42—as well as the institution of private property. Here, ostensibly, is the kind of “understanding” Lyautey had in mind:

We are trying to convince them [the Moroccans], and we have already been able to make them understand that the only real form of property is individual pri-vate property. and thus, as we transform collective tribal property into private property, as we increase the value of the estate of each member of the tribe, we ask in return to have a part of the collective tribal property transferred to State ownership. It is on this same collective property that we are creating sectors to be made ready for French colonization. (Qtd. Scham 118)

This tacit series of equivalencies between colonial penetration, order, reason, and French economic interests is the ideological bedrock of the protectorate.

a protectorate, then, bears relation to gender insofar as it functions as con-trol portrayed as benign guidance, as thoughtful parenting that is at once a kind of protective envelope and the enabling condition of freedom and individuality; insofar as it substitutes surface adornment for agency and authority, abjecting, or simply eliminating, those alien to the decorative scheme of the “centralizing and coordinating” power;43 and insofar as its development, while undergirded by violence, is so insidious as to seem inevitable—as synonymous with civilization,


order, the reasonable, proper, and human. The Moroccan protectorate, as sculpted by Lyautey, might also—like the gender system—be described as a structure of difference intolerant to differences. It is a classifactory scheme, that is, that “safe-guards” differences by rendering them static, fixed, essentialized, immutable, distinct. Lyautey’s valorization of association over assimilation, often touted as an admirable respect for native customs and as a particularly magnanimous form of colonization, was also a kind of apartheid that, in the name of “natural differen-ces,” insisted that ethnicities be kept distinct and separate, and that they guard and perform their purity.44 This fixed and “naturalized” system of categories is, of course, precisely the sort of scheme that Bhabha and Butler critique. In the domain of cul-ture, as in that of gender, such a system assumes the existence of already consti-tuted groups, rather than recognizing them as the effects of materially interested, and socially consequential, regulatory practices—as artifacts with a traceable and critiquable genealogy. It also erects normative ideals that abject, pathologize, and punish those characteristics—and those characters—that do not conform to the norms of the category. The entities underpinning Lyautey’s system of segregation, moreover, are, in both structural and ideological terms, separate but not equal. We have seen, for example, the way in which the theory of indirect rule, purveyed as “mutual respect,” in effect instituted a radically assymetrical access to power and resources, assigning the sultan, and Moroccans in general, to the realm of the symbolic, spiritual, and traditional (gendered “feminine”) and thereby largely restricting them from participation in the material world of modernity (gendered

“masculine”).In Morocco, this hierarchized structure of difference functioned along three

axes: european/Moroccan, arab/Berber, elite/common. These divisions bore cer-tain similarities to other instances of colonization: the assumption of an irreducible difference between europeans and natives was characteristic of many colonial environments; the “divide and rule” impulse behind the arab/Berber distinction resembled strategies deployed elsewhere, as did the filtration of a cooperative native elite from the masses. But the differential structure of the Moroccan pro-tectorate, and Lyautey’s theorization of it, also bore some intriguing pecularities. For example, Lyautey’s radical reconstruction of Moroccan cities, carried out by Henri Prost (“Lyautey’s Haussman,” as Hoisington calls him), was a strikingly literal incarnation of the ideological separteness posited between europeans and Moroccans (Hoisington, 110)45 conceived as saving the medinas from destruc-tion—as preserving a jewel of the tradition—the dual city design (where the French ville nouvelle was built next to, but a safe distance from, the medina) had the effect not only of fossilizing the medinas into impracticable museum pieces (there was no provision in Prost’s plans, for example, for a growing arab population), but of reinforcing what abderrahim Bouabid, one signatory of the Manifeste de l”Indépendance, identified as “une présence coloniale tendant à instituer, au Maroc et dans l’ensemble Nord-africain, un régime comparable à celui de l’Afrique du Sud [a colonial presence tending to institute, in Morocco and the whole of North africa, a regime comparable to that of South Africa]” (qtd. Delanoë 182).

The second dyad of distinctions deployed in colonial Morocco was that between arabs and Berbers. Drawn partly from experience in Kabylia and partly from Édouard Michaux-Bellaire’s publications on his “Mission Scientifique du


Maroc,” the received wisdom on Morocco was that there was a sharp divide between bled-el Makhzen (territory controlled by the sultan) and bled-el siba (terri-tory outside the sultan’s control), which roughly corresponded to the distinction between arab and Berber.46 This theory, as Pennell puts it, “divided arabs from Berbers and assigned to each a series of characteristics that were apparently based on scientific principles but which were really little more than prejudices that justi-fied colonial methods and created a hierarchy of local populations”( Pennell 159). Berbers, on this view, were seen as more assimilable to French policy and direct rule because they were only superficially Muslim, without loyalty to the sultan, and, as Rivet describes it, “foncièrement démocrate et prêt à entrer dans la francité républicaine pour peu qu’on l’aide à se detacher du vernis de civilisation orientale et musulmane [fundamentally democratic and ready to adopt French republicanism as soon as someone helped them detach themselves from the veneer of oriental and Islamic civilization]”(Rivet, Le Maroc de Lyautey 42).47 In this bifurcated scheme of things, the tribes of the so-called “unpacified” regions—those who had not fallen into the foreseen pattern of effortless absorption into French political dominance—were designated “dissident”: a telltale term, from Latin dissidere (to sit apart, disagree), that inscribes disagreement or difference, but not that much difference. It means to be at variance with an established order (particularly a religious one), not integrated into the whole, but not fundamentally different in kind: unorthodox and wayward, but recuperable.

Lyautey’s oft-proclaimed esteem for Moroccan culture was, it should be stressed, respect for a specific elite sliver of Moroccan society and was instrumental in inten-sifying perhaps the most singular and consequential mode of differentiation in colonial Morocco, that between an aristocracy and the “common people.” “We must remind ourselves,” he wrote to his sister, “that in all human society there is a rul-ing class, born to rule, without which nothing can be done, and a class to be ruled.” In this instance, he cast this distinction as a straightforward political and military expedient: “[We must] enlist the ruling class in our service. Once the mandarins are our friends, certain of us and needing us, they have only to say the word and the country will be pacified, and at far less cost and with greater certainty than by all the military expeditions we could send there”(Qtd. Hoisington 6). But just as often this view was integrated into a romanticized view of a Moroccan elite capable of recuperating the magesty of the Ancien Régime. aptly characterizing Lyautey as “le grand seigneur épris de tradition et de hiérarchie, passionnément réfractaire à la société individualiste et égalitaire issue de 1789 [the great lord taken with tradition and hiearchy, passionately resistant to the individualistic and egalitarian society ushered in by 1789],” Rivet contends:

cet aristocratisme le fait vibrer pour la monarchie et s’enthousiasmer pour tou-tes les élites qui constellent le Makhzen. D’une certain manière, Lyautey va se dilater dans ce veiel “empire fortuné” parce que justement, il est archaïque . . . il donne à son séjour de treize années au Maroc la tonalité du temps retrouvé: celui de l’ancien Régime . . . “cette race marocaine [he wrote] . . . est restée le refuge de la politesse, de la mesure, des façons élégantes, des gestes nobles, du respect des hièrarchies sociales, de tout ce qui nous ornait au XVIIIe siècle.” (Le Maroc de Lyautey 36)


This aristocractic mindset made him tremble with enthusiasm for the monarchy and the elites that comprised the Makhzen. In a certain way, Lyautey was to flourish in this old “fortuned empire” precisely because it was archaic . . . he gives to his stay of 13 years in Morocco the tone of time regained : that of the ancien Régime . . . “This Moroccan race (he wrote) . . . has remained the refuge of courtesy, measure, elegant manners, noble gestures, respect of social hierarchies, and all that which embellished our 18th century.”

This distinction between an elite, authentic Morocco and a counterfeit, common one was produced and institutionalized both by French empowerment of the Makhzen and by its construction of the “Écoles des Fils de Notables,” whose purpose, as Pennell puts it, was “to bind the fathers more closely to the French system, and to produce in the sons a loyal class of young men to help run the bureaucracy” (Pennell 177). It also resulted, among Lyautey’s successors, in French support of some of the most reactionary and oppressive characters in the country, such as el Glaoui or abdelhay el Kittani.48

The hierarchized distinctions of the Moroccan protectorate, then, exhibit significant resemblances to a binary system of gender differentiation: a structure of difference intoleratant to differences; discrimination (re)produced by spatial segregation; a hierarchy, justified by a “science” of differences, that constitutes its lower rung as “dissident”—more or less of the same species, but distinct in genus, at variance with, and prone to stray from, the established order; a politically institutionalized and educationally reinforced distinctivness, expressed through manners and guarded by an ethic of “loyalty”; a reproduction of privilege based on a conception of inherited, natural rights of domination in which the governing genre is also more genuine (and neither the etymological connections between genre, gender, genus, and genuine, nor the latter’s roots in conceptions of the native, free-born, begotten, and natural, should be overlooked here).

Recognition of this shared, if highly contested, semantic terrain is, I think, what is valuable about ben Jelloun’s decidedly risky proposition that gender is a colonization of the body. and it is worth reiterating, in conclusion, that my intent in pursuing this proposition—so evocatively articulated by the novel’s palimpsest of nation, body, and narrative—is not to institute an easily reproducible critical axiom, but to respond seriously to the dense thicket of questions with which that proposition confronts us. The two broad branches of this thicket I have attempted to follow here are a theoretical interrogation of this proposition through postcolo-nial and gender studies and a historicized analysis of it from the site of the Moroc-can protectorate. The former branch of inquiry led us to a critique of the language of natural development common to both gender and colonization, as well as to an examination of its processes of abjection, reliance on a taxonomy of distinct genres, self-engendering capacities, and dependence on manner, style, ornamen-tation. This theoretical line of investigation also led us to consider the merits of a genealogical (over a metaphysical) methodology, and to attend to a performativity that never quite completes itself and thereby opens up a site of indeterminacy that is also a transformative moment and a space of agency. Following this path, we have been led to see that while gender and colonization are by no means identi-cal, that some of their ostensibly self-evident differences are less egregious than might be expected; that it is as much the structure of comparison—that takes


gender and colonization as pre-existent objects of inquiry—as the content of the comparison that is problematic; and that while postcolonial critics have cogently analyzed the ways in which colonization has operated through gender and have de-essentialized, through cultural and temporal particularity, the categories of men and women, that they have been much less vigorous in critiquing these categories as such.

I have also argued that ben Jelloun’s proposition can—and should—be taken as an invitation to scrutinize, rather than an excuse to dismiss, the historical and political specificities of colonization; this led me to a second branch of this theoreti-cal thicket, that is, to an analysis of the Moroccan protectorate, the ideological work done by its conceptual distinction from colonization, and the material and discur-sive forms of its impelementation. We noted Lyautey’s representation of occupation as liberation, his theories of indirect rule, the “tache de huile” and “penetration pacifique”, his series of equivalencies between order, reason, and French eco-nomic interest, and his institution of systems of difference (european/Moroccan, arab/Berber, elite/common). Bearing ben Jelloun’s provocative proposition in mind, these specificities, I’ve argued, disclose some significant nuances in the way the gender system operates: as a protective envelope from its own disciplinary effects, as a safeguard from uncertainty, as an inculcation of desire subtended by violence, and, ultimately, as the fiendishly intricate and irreducible question of all revolutions: from what, exactly, do I seek to free myself?

NOTeS 1. Translations from the French throughout this essay are my own. I have consulted Sheridan’s translation for guidance in translating passages from L’enfant de sable. 2. On these events see Lugan 256–260; and Delanoë 195. The larger economic and social scene is sketched in Pennell 239–253. Similar scenes transpired in Rabat, Casablanca and Salé. Water rights were one of the first issues around which Moroccan nationalism coalesced; see Pennell 211–216 and Hoisington 121–123. 3. In a clear attempt to crush the power of the newly formed independence party, Istiqlal, the Résidence Général accused its leaders (absurdly) of collusion with the axis (“intelligence avec l’ennemi”), and arrested a. Balfrej, Mohamed Lyazidi, ahmed Mekkour, Hachemi Filali, and abdelaziz ben Driss. The action was clearly a reprisal for the Manifeste de l’Indépandance which Istiqlal leaders had, on January 11, presented to the sultan, the consulates of Great Britian and the u.S., and the Résidence Général. The manifeste drawn up by Istiqlal openly rejected a reform plan or revision of the Pro-tectorate “treaty,” and, referencing the right to self determination as articulated in the atlantic charter (and implicitly relying on american assurances at the anfa confer-ence), demanded independence. See Delanoë 209–217; Pennell 264–268; and Rivet 357ff. a copy of the manifesto can be found in Lugan 265–6. 4. Lowe analyzes these various endings in terms of (anti)colonialism, nativism, and nomadism, in which the latter, epitomized by Fatouma’s narration, “is finally more than a simple wandering from site to site; [but rather] names a practice of active and collective resistance to structures, logics, and narratives of domination” (59). These narrations are rich in details significant to an allegorical interpretation. In Salem’s narrative, for example, ahmed/Zahra’s transformation into a circus freak exhibited in a cage is highly reminiscent of the exhibition of africans at european colonial expo-sitions; his/her loss of language, meanwhile, associates him/her with the barbarian and the infantile—standard images of the colonized. His/her method of simultaneous


homocide and suicide is, in a perverse reworking of the “demonstration effect” (and, perhaps, the career of Maréchal Lyautey), appropriated from the Indochinese war. amar’s version of the tale concentrates on an internal “loss of substance” rather than external aggression and would seem to blame colonization as much on the hypocricy, corruption, and hollowness of Morrocan society as on French (or Spanish or american) imperialism. His narrative is also replete with images of self-negation—of, for exam-ple, mirrors that don’t return an image—which might well be figures of the erasure of indigienous identities under colonization, or of the méconnaissance that inheres in Fanon’s “split self.” Fatouma’s first-person narrative of travel, gender crossing, and ima-gined voyages, while shaped by historical events and material conditions, is in many ways a fantasy of freedom, boundary transgression, and self-determination. See John Erickson’s perceptive interpretation of Fatouma’s narration, 55–59. 5. Lowe has noted both the impossibility of realizing an “authentic female identity as analogous to the inability to return to a precolonial nativism” (56) and the similarity of the novel’s repeated images of a bifurcated self to Fanon’s discussions of the split subjectivity of colonialism. 6. On the narrative structure of L’Enfant de Sable, its non-definitive, self-revising, and participatory nature, its complex intertextuality, and its imbrication with North african oral traditions, see Marrouchi, Orlando, chap. 2, and elbaz 44–66. On the connection with Borges, see Fayad and Harvey 229–231. 7. On the centrality of producing male children to Maghrebian masculinity, see Ouzgane. On the patriarchal significance of the name Mohammed Ahmed, see Masmoudi. On the relations of compulsory heterosexuality, patriarchy, and national identity in the Maghreb, see Hayes. 8. The number seven also presumably alludes to ahmed’s seven sisters, as well as the days of the week. For a discussion of the significance of the number seven and of the conceit of the gates, see elbaz 45–48 and erickson 63. On the divided cities of the protectorate, see below. 9. On the gendered division of space in North africa, see Mernissi, chap. 8. 10. On the degree to which the colonies functioned as a site for transgressive sexual fantasies and experimentation, see Said, Hayes, and Sharpley-Whiting. 11. This is a theme I have developed at length in The Concept of the Foreign, chap 3. 12. See DSM-IV, 532–538. 13. On the pathologization of natives, see also Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. Sander Gilman, anne Mcclintock, christopher Miller (in Blank Darkness), and ann Laura Stoler are all theorists who have contributed significantly to our understand-ing of this dynamic. Such pathologization has, unfortunately, also made its way into readings of the novel. cazenave, for example, judges ahmed’s transgendered identity as a resistance to “the natural order,” as a species of “infirmity,” and as a falsification of his/her “true subjectivity”. 14. arabic is equally etymologically suggestive, the word for nationality (jinsiyya) coming from the same root as sex (jins). See Badran 99. 15. Thus a central component of L’Exposition Colonial (1931–32) was exhibits of typically dressed bodies of colonized subjects, “performing a simulacrum of their everyday life for the enjoyment and enlightenment of the French public.” See Miller, Nationalists and Nomads, 67. Miller also marks the way in which these human exhibits were confined in physical enclosures at night in “a perfect literalization of the colonial politics of identity” (Nationalists and Nomads 71). 16. See also Woodhull’s extended discussion of this essay and her critique of woman as national symbol in Transfigurations of the Maghreb, chap. 1. 17. In this discussion, I am drawing primarily on Butler and Bhabha. 18. On the latter, see Bhabha, ch. 3.


19. Orlando reads this uncertainty in Deleuzian terms as “an-Other space that is constructed from exile, difference, and subversion . . . [that allows Ben Jelloun] to travel beyond the limits of stereotyped identity in order to reach a place of imperceptibility— the open, smooth plane of all possibilities” (76). 20. See also Hayes’s argument that “ben Jelloun’s allegory of gender demonstrates that at the origin of gender, as at the origin of Renan’s Nation, there is a violence that must be forgotten for gender to be naturalized” (165). 21. Such arguments (with which I largely agree) have been variously elaborated by, for example, Mohanty, Minh-ha, and Suleri. Numerous readings of L’enfant de sable have also focused on the treatment of the Maghrebian, arab, or Islamic woman. See, for example, Maazaoui who argues that these two novels of Ben Jelloun are “l’expression, à tous les niveaux, des méfaits de la misogynie et de la violence dans la societé marocaine de culture arabo-musulmane [the expression, on all levels, of the mysognistic mis-deeds and the violence of Moroccan society and arab/Muslim culture]” (75); see also Marrouchi and erickson. 22. I am thus arguing for a more radical reading of the novel than the majority of critics who have interpreted ahmed’s distress as resulting from “her” being trapped in the “wrong” gender, rather than from the gender system as such. The critic that perhaps comes closest to this position is Harvey who, (while egregiously misusing the term “intersexed”) writes, “The true ontological deformity, then, would be existence as either gender to the exclusion of the other: a deformity that ahmed/Zahra can elude by remaining at a threshold between man ‘becoming-woman’ and woman ‘becoming-man’ ” (238). Laurel Taylor, despite the potentially interesting contention that all women are female impersonators, retreats into an endorsement of a calcified gender system in which any kind of gender play is interpreted as either a mocking appropriation, or repudiation, of the female body. 23. The phrase is from the “General Introduction” to The Post-Colonial Studies Reader 2. See also appiah, chap. 7, During, Hutcheon, Parry, and Mcclintock and Nixon. 24. acknowledging both the error and the precision allowed by such a focus, I am concentrating here on the French protectorate (1912–1956), established by the Treaty of Fez in 1912. However, it should be recognized that both Spain (officially) and Britain (unofficially) also had their hand in imperial control of commerce and administration, and that such control began long before 1912. Earlier manifestations of this influence include the Entente Cordiale signed by France and Britain in 1904 (which formally recog-nized French dominance in Morocco) and the Conference of Algeciras in 1906, by which time Morocco was already a de facto protectorate instituting a program of economic, administrative, and military reforms dictated by the Quai d’Orsay. The history of the Spanish protectorate (1913–1956), as well as its relation to, and influence on, the French regime, is well elaborated by Pennell. 25. The nature of the protectorate, while theorized and heavily inflected by Maréchal Lyautey, its first Resident General, was redefined on the ground by his successors, generals in the field, and French colons. By the time of the events of 1937 alluded to above, for example, the protectorate as governed by charles Noguès, was a very different creature than that envisioned by Lyautey. 26. We should also bear in mind the instability in the entities we are calling “France” and “Morocco,” and that who or what constitutes “the French” or “Moroccans” in this scenario is far from self-evident. In numerous instances, for example, French officers in the field acted independently of the dictates of the Résidence General; in equally numerous instances, the Résidence General acted independently of instructions from Paris. See Hoisington for details. There was also significant contention over colonial policy in Morocco throughout the period of the protectorate between the Quai d’Orsay, the président de la republique, the ministre de l’étranger, the colonial lobby, and French


public opinion. Similarly, nationalism in Morocco, was less a unified political program than a contestatory struggle between actors with very different ideas about the identity of the nation. Many Moroccans and other africans were, it should also be remembered, fighting on the side of the “French.” For an interesting study of this collaboration, see Gershovich. 27. France’s first Resident General in Morocco, a disciple of Gallieni, and among the most renowned of French colonial administrators, Maréchal Lyautey was also known as a military theorist who argued that the military officer should play an active social role in France—inculcating discipline, respect, and self-sacrifice—a view that he sub-sequently transferred to the colonies, which he conceived as an antidote to fin-de-siècle French decadence. See Lyautey. He was general commissioner of the 1931–32 Exposition colonial, which, as Miller contends, was largely an artifact of Lyautey’s ideology and career. See Miller, Nationalists and Nomads, 68–69. He was also a royalist, an aristocrat contemptuous of the bourgeoisie, and an aspiring member of the literati whose vision of North Africa was heavily influenced by the Arabian Nights and Romantic Orienta-lism. On the life, thought, and career of Lyautey, see Hoisington, Scham, Rivet, Benoist-Méchin, and Maurois. 28. If he regularly questioned colonial method and policy, Lyautey questioned nei-ther empire per se nor its benefit to France. While the coarse materialism of this benefit was occasionally smoothed over by “concern” for africans, it was accompanied by the assumption that France bequeathed to its colonies what he called “a higher moral life, a more complete life” (Qtd. Hoisington 16). 29. On defilement and hybridity, see my “Shaking Down the Pillars”; on fitna (dis-order or chaos) and its gender entanglements, see Mernissi, ch. 1 and 2; and Orlando 80–81. 30. These forms of “protection” thus function much like the pharmakon. See Derrida,

“Plato’s Pharmacy.” It should be emphasized, however, that in neither of these cases is the represented threat not “real”. In pre-colonial Morocco, the Makhzen operated through an intricate system of caïds, patronage, and reciprocity, in which refusals of alliance with, and rivalries against, the sultan were not uncommon. Similarly, a parent guiding a child into the gender system is protecting him/her from the very real contempt and violence aimed at the differently gendered. On the former, see Pennell 98–100, 114–115, and 126–29.On the latter, see, for example, Onken and Gagné and Tewksbury. 31. The nationalist movement in Morocco was a dynamic and sometimes pre-carious alliance between a conservative monarchy, militant nationalists, religious zealots, radical revolutionaries, and moderate proponents of democracy. Moroccan nationalism also brought into intriguing alliances and disputes an educated elite, an urban middle class, an expanding and increasingly unionized working class, and an illiterate rural peasantry. The issues faced by the architects of post-colonial Morocco, moreover, included how to integrate the sultanate with democratic representation, how to adapt the traditional system of caïds to a modern state, what to do with both French colons and business interests (which dominated the economy), and where exactly the geographical boundaries of the nation were to be drawn. Pennell is especially helpful at untangling this dense web of nationalist contention; see chap. 6. 32. Lyautey was particularly influenced by British examples in India and Nigeria. On the political structure of the Protectorate, see the detailed and historicized account of abdellah Ben Mlih. Pennell notes that even in the “Islamic ministries, Moroccans had little control, for a parallel administration, the Secrétariat-Général du Gouvern-ment Chérifien, shadowed them and ran the technical services. Every department of modern government—finance, public works, health, communications, education, justice, agriculture, land use (eaux-et-Forêts), commerce, industry and mines, labour, social affairs, public security and ancient monuments—was run by French adminis-trators. The two systems ran in parallel and the boundaries between them were the


boundaries of modernity” (Pennell 162). On administrative reconstruction under the Protectorate, see also Hoisington 48–53 and Scham, ch. 2 33. a good review of the transformations effected by Lyautey’s successors in the Résidence General can be found in Rivet, Le double visage, ch. 4. 34. This is the precise wording of the treaty: “les réformes administratives, judi-caires, scolaires, économiques, financiers et militaries que le Gouvernement Français jugera utile d’introduire sur le territoire marocain” (Qtd. Delanoë 17). The full text of the treaty is contained in Delanoë. 35. From Lyautey’s 1915 speech to the Lyon Chamber of Commerce. In his “Rap-port General sur la situation du protectorat du Maroc au 31 juillet 1914,” Lyautey wrote,

“On s’est attaché d’abord à rehausser le prestige personnel du Sultan, en faisant revivre autour de lui les anciennes traditions et le vieux cérémonial de la cour, à garantir scrupu-leusement l’autonomie de son pouvoir religieux, à raffermir sa confiance et son autorité en l’associant à nos projets, en sollicitant ses réflexions et ses avis. [We have first set out to highten the personal prestige of the Sultan, by reviving around him the ancient courtly traditions and ceremonies, scrupulously guaranteeing the autonomy of his religious power, reaffirming his confidence and authority by associating him with our projects, and sollicting his reflections and opionions]” (qtd. Scham 224). On this hollowing out of the sultanate’s power, see also Hoisington 48–9. 36. Hoisington, ch. 1 provides a good introduction to the “new imperialism” espoused by Lyautey. 37. Indeed, this was increasingly a rhetorical, rather than a material, distinctive-ness. As early as 1934, at which time Moroccans were merely pressing for French com-pliance with the Treaty of Fes, the “Plan des Reformes” charged of French policy that

“elle est raciale [it is racial]”; “elle pratique le favoritisme fiscal et budgétaire [it practices fiscal and budgetary favoritism]”; “elle est obscurantiste [it is obscurantist]”; “elle est antilibérale [it is antiliberal]”; “elle est colonisatrice [it is colonizing]”; and “elle est assimilatrice [it is assimilating]”. See the text of the document in Delanoë, 38–39. By the time of the Manifeste de l’indépendance (1944), the concerted Moroccan position was that France had substituted direct rule for protection. an important early articulation of this point was that of Lahbabi in Le Gouvernement marocain à l’aube du vigntième siècle, originally published in 1957. 38. This letter dates from 1902, when Lyautey was serving under Gallieni in Madagascar. 39. as Hoisington points out, Lyautey essentially developed “a new language of conquest to describe the army’s colonial mission. In Lyautey’s words an ‘invasion route’ or a ‘line of operations’ now became an ‘avenue of commercial penetration.’ A strategic or tactical position became a ‘center of economic relations’ ” (16). On the diversity of fronts through which this “penetration” was enacted, see Ben Mlih 192–204. 40. As early as 1912, with the very establishment of the protectorate, French pen-etration of Moroccan cities was carried out through house by house combat. While French military strategy changed over time and between regions, the conquest of the Rif and the Middle Atlas was effected almost entirely by brute force. By 1954, following the deposition and exile of the sultan, urban warfare became the primary tool of maintaining the protectorate. 41. This remark was made in reference to the “pacification” of the Middle Atlas. On the pacification of the Middle Atlas and South, see Hoisington, ch. 4 and 5, respectively. For Lyautey’s assessment of the process of pacification up to 1916, see the Preface to his

“Rapport Général” reprinted in Scham 214–233. 42. The misunderstanding is presumably on the part of the “unpacified” Moroccans, rather than the French. From Lyautey’s Introduction to Paul chatinières, Dans le Grand Atlas marocain: Extraits du carnet du route d’un médecin d’assistance médicale indigène, 1912–1916 (qtd. Hoisington 92).


43. These are Lyautey’s terms for the supervisory functions of the protectorate; see “Memo to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, October 1917.” Qtd. Hoisington 51. 44. “The solidarity that Lyautey spoke of,” as Miller quite rightly contends, “was predicated on segregation and specificity” (Miller, Nationalists and Nomads 71). See also Miller’s astute analysis of the colonial exhibition (over which Lyautey presided) as an involuted and controlled reduction of the globe “to the sameness of an exoticized series of differences” (Miller, Nationalists and Nomads 92). 45. On the remaking of Rabat, see Hoisington’s excellent analysis in chap 6. Hois-ington notes that “almost everywhere in the Rabat that Lyautey remade and Fren-chmen ruled, Moroccans lost prestige, influence, and authority as well as land and money” (134). 46. See Pennell 158–60 and chap. 6 As he puts it, the “defining cliché of Morroco for european observers [was t]he division between bilad al-siba and bilad al-makhzan, between the zones of rebellion and government, and the idea of institutionalized disorder in the mountains and deserts” (97). 47. This (mis)conception led to the rather disastrous “Berber policy” that, assum-ing Berbers could be de-Islamicized (if not christianized) resulted in a war that lasted thirty years and, as institutionalized in the Berber dahirs of 1914 and 1930, created an issue around which Moroccan nationalism could solidify. 48. Pashas and caïds in positions such as el Glaoui’s or abdelhay el Kittani’s thus strongly opposed independence because it represented for them a significant loss of power.

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Decolonizing the Body: Gender, Nation, and Narration in Tahar Ben Jelloun's L'enfant de sable

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