Publications of the University of Eastern Finland

Dissertations in Education, Humanities, and Theology

isbn 978-952-61-0678-6

issn 1798-5625

Publications of the University of Eastern FinlandDissertations in Education, Humanities, and Theology No 24

Kamal Sbiri

Voices from the Margin Rethinking History, Identity, and Belonging in the Contemporary North African Anglophone Novel

Voices from the Margin is a study

that seeks to engage in the post-

colonial debate on the notions of

history, identity, and belonging. By

analyzing three contemporary North

African novels in English, the study

attempts to negotiate alternative

modernities in order to accommodate

those histories in the margin in a

transcultural context. The thesis

shows that transcultural belonging

can help capture the voices in the

margin and help them engage in

a process of reconstructing their

identities in a global milieu.

disser

tation

s | No

24 | Ka

ma

l Sb

iri | V

oices from

the M

argin

Kamal SbiriVoices from the Margin

Rethinking History, Identity, and Belonging in the Con-temporary North African

Anglophone Novel

KAMAL SBIRI

Voices from the Margin

Rethinking History, Identity, and Belonging in the

Contemporary North African Anglophone Novel

Publications of the University of Eastern Finland

Dissertations in Education, Humanities, and Theology

No 24

University of Eastern Finland

Joensuu

2012

Kopijyvä

Joensuu, 2012

Sarjan vastaava toimittaja: Jopi Nyman

Myynti: Itä-Suomen yliopiston kirjasto

ISBN: 978-952-61-0678-6 (nid.)

ISSNL: 1798-5625

ISSN: 1798-5625

ISBN: 978-952-61-0679-3 (PDF)

ISSN: 1798-5633 (PDF)

Sbiri, Kamal

Voices from the Margin. Rethinking History, Identity, and Belonging in the

Contemporary North African Anglophone Novel

Joensuu: University of Eastern Finland, 2012, 160 pages

Publications of the University of Eastern Finland, Dissertations in Education, Humanities,

and Theology; 24

ISBN: 978-952-61-0678-6 (nid.)

ISSNL: 1798-5625

ISSN: 1798-5625

ISBN: 978-952-61-0679-3 (PDF)

ISSN: 1798-5633 (PDF)

Diss.

ABSTRACT: VOICES FROM THE MARGIN. RETHINKING HISTORY,

IDENTITY, AND BELONGING IN THE CONTEMPORARY NORTH AFRICAN

ANGLOPHONE NOVEL

This study attempts to contest the notion of the writing back by emphasizing the act of

post-colonial re-writing. In doing so, this dissertation attempts to engage in the cultural

and theoretical critiques of hegemonies that have long marginalized the new minorities –

inside or outside of their imagined communities – from the post-colonial debates. In

considering new voices that emerge from the margin of the post-colonial canon, this

dissertation argues for new approaches that inform post-colonialism with the new

changes that permeate literary and cultural studies today. This study is concerned with

the emergence of new modes of literary expression from North Africa that consider

English as the language of their voice. In order to clarify such a purpose, this study

engages in the critique of post-colonialism by showing its limitations, as a literary and

cultural theory, in including the emerging voices from the margin, such as those from

North Africa.

While there are several works dealing with the emergence of Arab Anglophone

narrative, no comprehensive study exists that examines North African Anglophone

narratives in particular. In order to overcome such seclusion, the case studies in this

dissertation discuss two novels from Morocco and one from Tunisia, and each novel is

discussed in a separate chapter. The dissertation employs the notion of bricolage as a tool

to analyze the novels by means of deducing theory from the narrative. Deleuze and

Guattari’s approach on minority literature is relevant to my analysis since it emphasizes

the idea of language, identity, and deterritorialization of minorities. The texts address

such issues and further problematize the notion of the post-colonial writing back. The

thesis shows that the notion of transculturality challenges the aspects of the act of writing

back where the emphasis is laid on the act of re-writing. This dissertation concludes that

voices from the margin need to be heard: whereas language needs to be used to monitor

the process of writing back, it is suggested that the process can involve parallel processes

in which the post-colonial subject negotiates her/his past in spatial and temporal ways.

As a result, the North African Anglophone narrative seems to engage not only in the

critique of post-colonialism, but also in the processes of re-defining the post-colonial

identity and re-writing a counter-history of the North African subject. The thesis also

shows that in order to engage in the process of writing back, the post-colonial need to

negotiate their belonging, which can only be imagined transculturally.

Keywords: Anouar Majid – Sabiha Al Khemir – Laila Lalami – Gilles Deleuze – Félix

Guattari – language – North Africa – post-colonialism – minority literature –

deterritorialization – bricolage – writing back – alternative modernity – countermemory –

identity – transculturality.

Sbiri, Kamal

Voices from the Margin. Rethinking History, Identity, and Belonging in the

Contemporary North African Anglophone Novel

Joensuu: University of Eastern Finland, 2012, 160 sivua.

Publications of the University of Eastern Finland, Dissertations in Education, Humanities,

and Theology; 24

ISBN: 978-952-61-0678-6 (nid.)

ISSNL: 1798-5625

ISSN: 1798-5625

ISBN: 978-952-61-0679-3 (PDF)

ISSN: 1798-5633 (PDF)

Diss.

ABSTRAKTI: ÄÄNIÄ MARGINAALISTA. HISTORIAN, IDENTITEETIN JA

KUULUMISEN UUDELLEENAJATTELUA NYKYHETKEN POHJOIS-

AFRIKKALAISESSA ROMAANISSA

Tämä tutkimus pyrkii haastamaan jälkikoloniaalisen takaisinkirjoittamisen käsitteen

korostamalla jälkikoloniaalisen uudelleenkirjoittamisen aktia. Väitöskirja pyrkii

osallistumaan niiden kulttuuristen ja teoreettisten hegemonioiden kritiikkiin, jotka ovat

kauan marginalisoineet kuviteltujen yhteisöjensä sisä- tai ulkopuolella olevat uudet

vähemmistöt jälkikoloniaalisista keskusteluista. Tarkastelemalla jälkikoloniaalisen

kirjallisen kaanonin ulkopuolelta tulevia uusia kirjallisia ääniä, väitöskirja argumentoi

sellaisten uusien lähestymistapojen puolesta, joissa jälkikolonialismi ottaa huomioon

nykypäivän kirjallisuuden ja kulttuurin tutkimusta läpäisevät uudet muutokset.

Tutkimuksessa tarkastellaan Pohjois-Afrikasta tulevaa uutta kirjallisuutta, jossa

käytetään englantia ilmaisun kielenä. Tutkimus osallistuu jälkikolonialistisen

kirjallisuus- ja kulttuuriteorian kritiikkiin osoittamalla sen rajallisuuden Pohjois-Afrikan

kaltaisesta marginaalista tulevia uusia kirjallisia ääniä tarkasteltaessa.

Vaikka englanninkielisen arabikirjallisuuden nousua on tarkasteltu useissa

esityksissä, Pohjois-Afrikan englanninkielisestä kirjallisuudesta ei ole toistaiseksi tehty

mittavia tutkimuksissa. Tämä väitöskirja pyrkii korjaamaan tilannetta tarkastelemalla

kolmea esimerkkiromaania, joista kaksi tulee Marokosta (Anouar Majidin Si Youssef ja

Laila Lalamin Secret Son) ja yksi Tunisiasta (Sabiha Al Khemirin Waiting in the Future for

the Past to Come). Tutkimus hyödyntää analyyttisesti yhdistämisen ja uudelleen

tuottamisen käsitettä (eng. bricolage), jonka avulla teoksista luetaan ulos teoreettista

ajattelua. Myös Gilles Deleuzen ja Félix Guattarin esittämä tapa lähestyä

vähemmistökirjallisuutta on analyyttisesti relevantti, sillä se korostaa kielen, identiteetin

ja vähemmistöjen deterritoriaalisuutta. Tarkasteltavat tekstit käsittelevät näitä teemoja

pyrkien problematisoimaan ajatuksen takaisinkirjoittavasta jälkikoloniaalista.

Tutkimuksen mukaan transkulttuurisuuden käsite haastaa sellaiset takaisinkirjoittamisen

teot, jotka painottavat uudelleenkirjoittamista. Tutkimus esittää, että marginaalin äänien

tulee tulla kuulluiksi. Vaikka kieltä tulee käyttää takaisinkirjoittamisen prosessin

valvonnassa, tutkimuksen mukaan prosessiin voi kuulua erilaisia rinnakkaisia prosesseja,

joissa jälkikoloniaalinen subjekti neuvottelee menneisyyttään erilaisin tilallisin ja ajallisin

tavoin. Tästä johtuen Pohjois-Afrikan englanninkielinen kirjallisuus ei ole pelkkää

jälkikolonialismin kritiikkiä vaan se osallistuu myös jälkikoloniaalisen identiteetin

uudelleenmäärittelyyn sekä pohjois-afrikkalaisen subjektin vastahistorian

uudelleenkirjoittamiseen. Tutkimus osoittaa, että pystyäkseen osallistumaan

takaisinkirjoittamiseen jälkikoloniaalisten subjektien tarvitsee neuvotella kuulumisestaan,

ja sen kuvitteleminen on mahdollista vain transkulttuurisesti.

Avainsanat: Anouar Majid – Sabiha Al Khemir – Laila Lalami – Gilles Deleuze – Félix

Guattari – kieli – Pohjois-Afrikka – jälkikolonialismi – vähemmistökirjallisuus –

deterritorialisaatio – bricolage – takaisinkirjoittaminen – vaihtoehtoinen moderniteetti –

vastamuisti – identiteetti – transkulttuurisuus.

vii

Acknowledgments

This thesis would not have been possible without the guidance of my advisor and the

support of my family and friends.

I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my advisor, Professor Jopi Nyman,

for his guidance, caring, and patience. Professor Nyman has provided me with an

excellent atmosphere for doing research. His criticism and positive attitude have been

significant to the development of the dissertation’s main argument. I would like also to

thank Dr. John A. Stotesbury, for proofreading the language of the final draft of the

manuscript. I also wish to express my gratitude to Professor John McLeod and Professor

Gerald Porter for reading the manuscript. Their comments were encouraging and their

suggestions prompted new critical thinking to complete the final version of the thesis.

A dissertation in Finland is a challenge for a foreigner, especially if the area of

research does not fall within the interests of the locals. I am thankful to the Philosophical

Faculty for providing the research facilities needed to complete this dissertation. I am

also thankful to Amanuensis Kaisu Kortelainen for her help and assistance in matters that

concern the publication and the public defense. I am also indebted to Ms. Rosalia

Stamatakos for her support, help, and encouragement. I have been in constant

communication with her as she has had the opportunity to read chapters from my

dissertation.

I received remarkable support from friends and family in Morocco. In particular I

wish to thank my parents, and brothers and sisters for their support. I owe a special debt

of gratitude to my wife for her patience while I have been away in Finland and her

encouragement with best wishes. Special thanks goes also to Mourad and Abdessamad

Benrahmoune, Mustapha Kharoua, Abderrahim Anbi, and Driss Baba, who as good

friends, were always willing to help and give their best suggestions.

Joensuu, 1 February 2012

Kamal Sbiri

viii

ix

In memory of my sister,

Aicha

x

xi

Table of Contents

ABSTRACT .............................................................................................................. iii

ABSTRAKTI ............................................................................................................... v

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................ vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS .................................................................................................... xi

1 INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................ 1

1.1 Aims and Research Problem .......................................................................................... 1

1.2 Texts and Contexts .......................................................................................................... 5

1.3 Previous Studies .............................................................................................................. 9

2 BRICOLAGE AND THE DISCOURSE OF TRANSCULTURAL MINORITY:

RE-WRITING POST-COLONIALISM .......................................................................... 11

2.1 Contesting Post-colonialism ........................................................................................ 13

2.2 Bricolage and Minority Literature ............................................................................... 21

2.3 Global Spaces, Transcultural Locations ...................................................................... 31

3 THE MOOR SPEAKS: MEMORY, IDENTITY, AND SPACE IN ANOUAR

MAJID’S SI YOUSSEF .......................................................................................................... 41

3.1 Whose Story? The Moor Fills the Void Between Memory and History ................. 42

3.2 The Moor Writes Back: An Alterative History ........................................................... 55

3.3 Tangier: A Contact Zone .............................................................................................. 67

4 GENDER AND SPACE IN NORTH AFRICA: HOUSE, REMEMORY, AND

HOSPITALITY IN SABIHA AL KHEMIR’S WAITING IN THE FUTURE FOR

THE PAST TO COME ........................................................................................................... 81

4.1 Negotiating Space in the Post-colonial House ........................................................... 82

4.2 Rememory: Liberating the North African Woman ................................................... 94

4.3 Re-defining the Post-colonial Female Space ............................................................ 103

5 ESCAPING POSTCOLONIALITY, RECONSTRUCTING IDENTITIES:

TOWARDS A TRANSCULTURAL BELONGING IN LAILA LALAMI’S

SECRET SON ......................................................................................................................... 111

5.1 A Multilingual Text: Between Language and Translation ..................................... 113

5.2 Gender and Transculturality ..................................................................................... 121

5.3 Aggressive Modernity: Compradors and Post-colonial Minorities ...................... 126

5.4 Towards a Transcultural Un/Belonging ................................................................... 133

xii

6 CONCLUSION ................................................................................................................. 143

WORKS CITED ................................................................................................................. 149

1

1 Introduction

This study aims to engage in the cultural and theoretical critiques of hegemonies that

have long marginalized the new minorities – inside or outside of their imagined

communities – from both the post-colonial debates and the process of writing back. A

reader of this dissertation may perhaps be involved in the critique that develops what

Edward Chamberlin calls “the new world” of the major minorities (1993, 187). This is a

world from which the voices from the margin of post-colonialism can emerge and engage

in forming new versions of memories and countermemories in North Africa. To put it

simply, this study aims to contribute to the debate that the writers of The Empire Writes

Back initiated by considering texts written in English from geographical spaces that have

not necessarily been colonized by Britain, i.e., North Africa. A shift in focus is already

underway, and to critically reflect on this shift, the study aims at locating the emerging

North African Anglophone novel within post-colonialism. This emergence is due to the

fact that there has been more focus, on the one hand, on works that have emerged in

post-colonial countries that were once part of the British Empire, such as India, the

Caribbean, East and West Africa, and Middle East and, on the other hand, on the

Francophone writings. As little attention has been given to this form of literary

production in English from this geographical space, it seems that there is a need to assign

new importance to this category. Its importance stems from the possibility of revisiting

the North African literature so that new voices can articulate their concerns as

deterritorialized minorities. It is also noteworthy that North African Anglophone writers

have not yet been studied collectively, and studies that have examined literary

production from North Africa have either aimed at focusing on the Arab or Francophone

narratives, or have merely analyzed single Anglophone novels in individual essays. In

contrast, this study considers this emergence using an inclusive approach.

1.1 AIMS AND RESEARCH PROBLEM

While the North African region consists of Mauritania, Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Libya,

and Egypt, my focus will be restricted to Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria for two main

reasons: historical and technical. With regard to the historical, North Africa has been

under the dominion of three main colonial powers: France (in Tunisia, Morocco,

Mauritania, and Algeria), Italy (in Libya), and Britain (in Egypt). The French colonial

legacy in these four countries has created interesting sites where one can reflect on new

modes of writings. These new modes seem to shift the focus from adopting French as the

language of writing to the English language as a means of post-colonial bricolage. Such a

shift is also vibrant and provides a medium for reconsidering North Africa as a space for

identity construction that goes beyond what is cultural, religious, or national. At the

technical level, the lack of a diversified corpus restricts my choice of data and demands a

reformulation at the theoretical onset of this study. Consequently, three novels from two

2

nations form the case studies to be analyzed: two from Morocco and one from Tunisia.

Even though similarities do exist concerning Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, it is not my

intention to construct any generalized conclusion, as each of the imagined communities

may have its own cultural, social, and even historical specificities. Whereas Mauritania is

excluded because of its difference from these three countries – as a sub-Saharan country –

culturally, socially, and historically, Egypt and Libya are excluded due to their colonial

histories (not directly bound to French colonialism). In trying to frame my argument

within the geographical space of North Africa, I am emphasizing the following aspects:

language and history, identity, and transcultural belonging.

It is certainly true that in creating the “locations we study” one tends to “remap the

geographies of literary and cultural forms” (Jay, 2010: 4). The space of North Africa has

been structured and restructured on the colonial maps. Names have been erased, and

places have been established, and the history of a new generation has been left to the

hand of the progeny of the colonial powers. It can be said that only France might have

access to the historical archive of North Africa, and yet the intention of the post-colonial

to free the self from the power structure of the colonial language may result in new forms

of writing history without necessarily writing back to the canon. English, in North Africa

(as would be the case of French in India for instance), provides this kind of opportunity

to remap the geographies of not only literary and cultural forms but also memory, which

in turn implies new forms of countermemory.

North Africa has been, and still is, exclusively a French province in which the

margin for alternative representations to negotiate the political, economical, and social

changes is small. To write in English can provoke certain challenges to literary and

cultural theorists and critics whose focus on North African literature combines both

French and Arabic literature. Ahmed Boukous notes that, whereas French is deemed the

“colonial stratum”, the emergence of the English language in Morocco is considered a

part of the “imperial stratum” that makes Moroccan English a product of “localization

and globalization” (2008, 134-8). Nevertheless, with regard to this, to write in English

might inspire consideration of new methodologies and theoretical frameworks that

appropriate and transform the field of post-colonial studies into a larger arena that is

now characterized by the word “trans”- transcultural, transnational, and translational.

The increasing engagements in post-colonial studies have engendered a legacy that every

post-colonial writer has to start with/write against the colonial, and, accordingly, this

dissertation will also take the colonial as its point of departure, but with a rather different

focus.

The North African writes in English because s/he aims not at restoring or

romanticizing the past but at reading the past in order to make sense of the present. The

act of writing pioneers an engagement with a silent past that has been erased from the

memory of the collective in North Africa: a minor past. To invoke the memory of the

minoritarian is to foreground another form of countermemory that compels us to extend

the post-colonial horizon in order to include the minoritarian, though fragile but

significant, account of history as a collective version of memory. The minority seeks a

“line of flight”, as Deleuze and Guattari remind us (1986, 14), in order to deconstruct the

fixity of the notion of history that the mainstream represents. In addition, to reflect on the

3

term minority is to bring into discussion all that is political, social, cultural, historical, and

economic in the debate on the notion of voices from the margin. The term minority or

minoritarian does not imply minority in its normative aspect, such as that defined in

contrast to the majority, but it is a new approach, an epistemology, and a construct that

emerges from the inner structure of power of the majority and whose flavor is the

revolutionary. Subsequently, the North African writes in English for a political purpose in

order to take advantage of the diminutive space available as one such possibility to

deconstruct the binary of Mashreq/Maghreb. It can also be a way to reorient the narrative

map in the Arab Anglophone literary space, where English flourishes today.

It is pertinent to argue that North African literary production has also been

marginalized in the Arab literary and cultural map. In saying this, it is acknowledged

that a number of elements have contributed to this divide between North Africa (Al

Maghreb) and the Middle East (Al Mashreq) as regards the question of language. This

division has maintained currency since the era of colonialism. As a result, North Africa

has been identified more with Europe than the Eastern Arab cultures. In their Dialogue of

the Mashreq and Maghreb, Mohammed Abed al Jabri and Hassan Hanafi argue that the

terms Mashreq and Maghreb are a creation of colonialism that aimed at a drastic divide

of the Arab World, so that people from Morocco, for instance, could be more Westernized

than the Islamized, orthodox people of Saudi Arabia (1990, 7). This book executes a

dialogue between two intellects, al Jabri from Morocco and Hanafi from Egypt, and

addresses the core issue of this division. It also calls for an end to the use of these labels

(Mashreq-Maghreb) and focuses instead on the Arab Islamic world in its general sphere.

Nevertheless, the division is obvious in the construction of Arab Anglophone writing.

The rubrics Arab or Muslim are too wide for naming the emerging literature by North

African writers. Such a geographical distinction (Mashreq and Maghreb) does not,

however, evoke a post-colonial categorization similar to that of New Literatures in

English or literature of the Commonwealth. The aim is to position the North African

Anglophone novel in post-colonial literature. Middle Eastern writers seem to have a long

history of writing in English. The same would apply, to a certain degree, to North African

writing in French. Thus, writing in French flourishes today, whereas writing in English is

relatively new with regard to the North African novel.

The corpus of Arab writing in French in North Africa rests mainly on issues of

identity, hybridity, and the post-colonial condition. Many Francophone writers express a

certain sense of alienation and exile that emanates from the post-colonial condition. Their

writings are haunted by memories of the past and the condition of the future that

characterize a return home. In contrast with these Francophone writers, those who write

in Arabic can be said to address sociopolitical issues, intimacies, colonialism, post-

colonialism, and the issue of Arabization itself (the process of “Arabizing” the social

system in North Africa). Even though similarities may exist, the North African novel in

English may differ significantly from the Arab and Francophone novel. Interestingly

enough, North African Anglophone fiction may help to reach a larger audience than its

Arabic counterpart, for instance. It may also help in promoting a more in-depth

discussion of the transcultural identity as articulated in English by those writing outside

the nation.

4

The North African novel in English can be seen to be a new mode of writing back

and a way to remap the structure of North African literature. At the same time, it can also

be viewed as a way to re-route post-colonial studies. To use memory in order to establish

a platform for a countermemory suggests a typological convention that determines the

minimal level of authenticity that this literature might achieve. To account for the history

of reception by reference to such a newly emergent mode of narrative would be

inappropriate, because the fact that such a narrative is written in English makes it

enmeshed in what is called the transnational novel. The question more directly rests on

the notion of hospitality as an indication of a freeing of the voice. The term hospitality is

important to the North African novel in English, in essence because it generates a larger

space where writers can negotiate their positions in post-colonial society at home or away.

Such literature is emblematic of the transnational epoch in which borderlines are

deconstructed, nations become trans-nations, and the belief in the transcultural belonging,

let alone the feeling of no-belonging, permeates the writer’s narrative.

To reorient ourselves around this issue, transculturality becomes the aspect that

makes the minoritarian live without the cultural boundaries imposed by the nation. In

order to give a voice and to rewrite the past and the present, it is imperative for the North

African to belong to transculturality and collaborate with the transcultural

responsibilities. The transcultural dissimilitude requires each to recognize the subjectivity

of the other that is indexed in the question of incommensurability. The minoritarian,

revolutionary North African novel in English implies that new directions must be

considered in literary and cultural studies, and that to link a certain region to the former

colonial power becomes a legacy of the past that needs to be reviewed and reoriented.

Theories of post-colonialism prove their inadequacy in inhabiting rapid changes in

literary and cultural studies. In accounting for postcoloniality, which is no longer tied up

with post-colonialism, we need wider approaches that will inaugurate the beginning of

new forms of modernity.

Furthermore, it is important to note that to delve into the issue of transculturality of

subjectivities requires a different identity politics that discards differences and adopts a

more general economy of incommensurability as a key element in literary studies. It is in

no way possible to dwell on difference as an aspect of cultural syncretism. Rather,

transcultural forms of identities demand that one should think of other forms of

modernity that exclude the post-colonial division of subjectivities into the colonial and

the post-colonial, and engages instead in cosmopolitanism as a device of the new form of

modernity. In this sense, it is my intention to argue that the North African novel delves

into questions of language, identity, and history mainly to further the discussion on other

forms of modernity and to contribute to the post-colonial debate on the notion of

transculturality. To do this, one needs to think of new approaches to analyzing such

narratives without necessarily neglecting the importance of the post-colonial and the new

currents in the region.

Up to this point, I have already foregrounded the points that I seek to address in

this dissertation. To elaborate them clearly I would like to cite the main questions and

points that I aim to answer and clarify. First, in order to locate the North African novel in

English, I argue that new epistemologies need to be taken into consideration. Because

5

terms such as post-colonialism or new literatures in English designate a rather different

framework that may or may not exclude this emergent literature in English from the

post-colonial debate, I aim to emphasize the importance of bricolage as a methodological

aproach of re-writing modernity. Second, the question arises of how the North African

Anglophone writer re-writes the past, and what mechanisms are used in the process of

re-writing? Third, how does the North African writer in diaspora re-imagine space in

relation to gender? And fourth, in what ways does transculturality enable the

minoritarian to belong and to sketch the patterns for alternative forms of modernity?

1.2 TEXTS AND CONTEXTS

The attempt to answer these questions will emerge from analysis of three texts written in

English by North African writers. Chapter 2 aims to chart critical approaches through the

main concepts to be applied in the analytical chapters, with the aim of considering new

approaches for examining this emerging narrative in North Africa. This will lead us to

inscribe the notion of bricolage as an approach to the analysis of the novels. Furthermore,

I will argue that these novels follow the pattern of what Deleuze and Guattari call a

deterritorialized mode of narrative, whereby language represents an important aspect in

its construction. Following this line, I will argue that to start from the colonial in order to

write back seems to locate the post-colonial within the scope of the colonial itself.

However, the North African Anglophone novel seems to provide new modes of writing

back in which transculturality can be employed as an opportunity for the minoritarian to

engage in the post-colonial debates. In this vein, to be a transcultural can invoke the

possibility of becoming a diasporan, without necessarily functioning overseas. The

chance to integrate the critical discourses of post-colonialism and globalization with that

of minority narrative suggests an approach that transcends the epistemological and

ontological understanding of certain contemporaneities. As an effect of the discourses of

globalization, cultural syncretism, and displacement that shape the era of the 21st century,

minoritarian narratives insistently call for a voice that copes with such transformation

that affects literary and cultural studies at large.

Notwithstanding, this transcultural turn in literary and cultural studies challenges

our understanding of narratives in the English language that are emerging from countries

that have no direct or indirect contact with, for instance, the British Empire. Globalization

and transculturality remain two trajectories that bring the question of minorities and

hospitality to the fore of this analysis. In other words, the subsequent emergence of

voices from the margins of post-colonialism aims at a total engagement with such

narratives politically, socially, historically, and culturally and thereby obliterates any

instances of what Spivak calls “epistemic violence”, a process where knowledge

functions as a means of producing negative representations about the other (cf. Spivak

1988, 280-1). To invoke a minoritarian voice in the emerging Anglophone narratives from

North Africa suggests that the aspect of reading history provided by the majority in this

geographical space need not be totalized. The reason for this rejection is to help to clarify

the ambiguity maintained in the “major” history and to sustain the act of re-writing

history from the margin, which can be achieved through unveiling certain hidden corners

6

in the historical archive. By starting from the post-colonial discourse and ending with

transculturality, I aim at opening up new horizons in approaching the North African

Anglophone narrative differently.

To link the theoretical with the methodological, I will use Deleuze and Guattari’s

approach on minority literature, with an emphasis laid on the notion of bricolage as a

tool for my analysis. According to Deleuze and Guattari, a minor literature designates a

new understanding to literature in the sense that it attacks the major language from

within its structure of meaning (cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1986). By the use of a

deterritorialized English (e.g., English mixed for instance with Arabic as one’s first

language), the minor subject will be able to negotiate her/his identity and space within

the major culture. To quote Deleuze and Guattari, “only the possibility of setting up a

minor practice of major language from within allows one to define popular literature,

marginal literature, and so on” (1986, 18). In addition, the relative emphasis on language

as a site of struggle has been enabling for the minoritarian. The use of the major language

(English) reinforces the optimism of inclusion in the majority, especially in the hope of

deconstructing the potential danger of exclusion from cultural memory. Language in this

sense connects two distinct facades harmoniously. English connects the minor to the host

land, whereas connection to the homeland is a matter of cultural memory as reflected in

the use of Arabic words and cultural concepts.

I will link this question of language and cultural memory with the imagining of

transcultural communities. By writing in English the North African writer creates an

imagined community through different kinds of alignments at home or overseas, be they

memorial, historical, familial, ethnic or gendered, and so on. These identifications require

that the North African subject live in two places at one time. In other words, the post-

colonial subject inserts her/his cultural concepts into the major language through the

medium of cultural memory. Also, s/he gives new meanings to each space s/he comes to

inhabit through that memory itself.

In order to understand the transition from language to history, identity, and

belonging I will shift the focus from the theoretical to the analytical by analyzing the

three novels. Chapter 3 will therefore be devoted to the study of the first novel. Anouar

Majid’s Si Yussef (2005 [1992]) is a story of an old man, Si Yussef, told by Lamin, a young

university student, and narrated by different characters. Chourouq Nasri describes the

novella as Majid’s “psychological journey […] into the idealized past of Tangier” (2006,

27). The narrative describes the complexity of Lamin’s identity and Si Yussef’s desire to

re-write his past. Lamin encounters Si Yussef in Ashab Café in the city of Tangier and

they continue to meet for twelve days: four weeks before the death of Si Yussef. Lamin

learns of Si Yussef’s death three months later when he arrives back from Fés.

Si Yussef has worked as a tourist guide in the old city of Tangier, and later as a

bookkeeper at La Gazelle’s when he managed to marry the Spanish Christian woman,

Lucia. In the twelve-days encounter with Si Yussef in the Ashab Café, Lamin also seeks a

“psychological” journey into the past in order to re-constitute his identity in the new

Tangier. To do this, Lamin manages to tell the world about Si Yussef’s story. During the

course of narration, there seem to be certain gaps that Lamin fills in from his imagination.

He manages to meet both Si Yussef’s wife, before she dies, and his children to tell them

7

about his plan to write a book about Si Yussef’s memory. The English language remains

the main tool to make Si Yussef’s voice heard by the world. However, English becomes

also a site of identity construction where Lamin explains this as being “a nightmare” for

one to write in a third language (Majid 2005, 83).

In addition, to implicate identity with language, Lamin’s aim lies in making the

Tanjawi’s voice articulated in the world. Because Si Youssef wants his narrative to be

listened to/read by a wider audience than his home culture, Lamin puts himself in the

position of the reader who can give hope for North African literature in English to be

recognized. The questions of language, history, and memory are central to the structure

of the novel, in which the notion of place is also emphasized.

Sabiha Al Khemir’s first novel Waiting in the Future for the Past to Come (1993) will be

in the focus of Chapter 4. The narrative follows the feelings of Amina as a child in Kurba

(a small town in Tunisia), as a university student, and as an adult after she graduates. The

narrative opens when Amina returns from Britain to celebrate her graduation with her

mother, yet such a return reveals Amina’s identity as a split one. Using flashbacks, the

narrative moves between the real and the imagined to picture the changing of both

Amina’s emotions and the cultural values in Tunisia. Amina’s memories of her childhood

in Kurba and her life in the capital problematize her identity construction. Among the

stories she recalls is her childhood confinement in the family house where her uncles

sought to guard the family honor after the death of Amina’s father.

The smell of bread in the beginning of the novel suggests that the novel is about the

past and memories. It starts by painting a subtle picture of the cultural values of Tunisia

for an English reader by installing Arabic words, of which a glossary is provided in the

beginning. Amina’s account of her past begins to unfold: as her mother begins “knitting”

her own memories, she creates stories within stories. The concept of rememory is crucial

to the analysis of the Al Khemir’s novel.

In addition, Amina’s story seems to be Al Khemir’s own story. Amina’s account of

her past in the present seems to be an escape from her childhood confinement between

Kurba and the city of Tunis before and after her voyage to Britain. Kurba is also Al

Khemir’s town, and the École Normale Supérieure of Tunis, where Amina studies, is the

college where Al Khemir graduated in 1986 with a “degree in English Literature” (Shear

2009). It can be said that Amina’s story is an account of the childhood of Al Khemir’s,

who has later decided to live in Britain.

Even though Al Khemir’s narrative seems to subtly “design” two different cultures

of Tunisia before and after colonialism, the narrative seems to problematize the post-

colonial identity of Tunisia. This aspect is clearly indicated in Amina’s inability to take a

stand over living in Tunisia. Amina is incapable of deciding whether to stay at home or

leave for England. The narrative, also, employs the language of the body to delve into the

protagonist’s sense of alienation, given the heart-rending process she has undertaken to

refine her past. The post-colonial space becomes contested in this novel: Amina’s identity

is negotiated in the present through the medium of ethnic memory in order to reveal the

urgency of the call of minority literature to give a voice to the category of North African

writers in English.

8

Chapter 5 engages in the questions of belonging and transculturality in post-

colonial North Africa. It also questions new epistemologies that the North African

Anglophone writer employs in order to re-write modernity, by taking Laila Lalami’s

novel Secret Son (2009) as an example. The narrative maps out the life of the protagonist

Youssef, a student of English at the university, and his mother, Rachida, in Morocco. It

follows Youssef El Mekki who was born out of marriage to Rachida. At the age of 19,

Youssef discovers that he is not the son of El Mekki as his mother told him, but he is the

illegitimate son of a wealthy man called Nabil Amrani.

Youssef’s dream of re-establishing connection with his father becomes yet another

journey that forces him to re-constitute his identity. At college, Youssef realizes the

existence of another life in Casablanca beyond the slum of Hay An Najat, where he lives.

This aspect forces Youssef to search for his father and start a process of re-writing his

identity. The journey from the slum to the metropolitan Casablanca enables Youssef to

partly live the life he seeks. However, such a life remains a secret because his father

installs him in a penthouse apartment beyond the reach of Amrani’s “legitimate” family.

Youssef learns from his father that he has a sister, but since his father refuses to present

him to the other family, Youssef is unable to meet his sister. Dissatisfaction penetrates

Youssef, and his dream to be with his father becomes a nightmare when he is dismissed

from both his job and the apartment.

Youssef, after leaving his mother for the sake of the father and his short journey

from slum of Hay An Najat to the metropolitan Casablanca, decides to go back to his

imagined community in the slum. In Hay An Najat, the Islamic Party, Hizb, is gaining

ground through helping the underprivileged in the slum. Simultaneously, the feeling of

agony and the suffering from his father’s negligence, Youssef agrees to join the Party and

support his friend to “slaughter” one of his father’s friends, the journalist Benaboud. The

novel ends when Youssef is caught by the police as a suspect for the murder.

Nevertheless, Secret Son seems to go beyond such themes in the ways the narrative

expresses the feeling of alienation from class-based culture. In effect, to write in English

can be seen as a way of attacking the privilege enjoyed by the old revolutionist, the new

Francophone, neo-liberalist elites representing the majority within Moroccan culture.

Youssef and his sister, Amal, engage in a process of negotiating globalization: where

Youssef fails, Amal succeeds. The novel aims at conveying the message of the minorities,

that in order to negotiate globalization one needs to belong to transculturation.

What is significant in the three novels I have chosen to study is the fact that the

main character in each novel is a student of English. To project this aspect on the authors

themselves, we can presume that Sabiha Al Khemir, Anouar Majid, and Laila Lalami

have been exposed to English as students in one of the English departments in their home

countries. Travel to the United States or Britain has been part of the process of continuing

their studies. Sabhia Al Khemir moved to Britain to earn her MA in 1986 and PhD in 1990,

majoring in the History of Islamic Studies and Archeology. Laila Lalami went to England

to earn a Master’s in Linguistics and has moved to the United States to complete a PhD in

English linguistics. Anouar Majid is currently the director of the Center for Global

Humanities and Associate Provost for Global Initiatives at the University of New

England.

9

While there are other narratives by North African writers, in this thesis the focus

will be laid on narratives available in print. Mohamed Laamiri has created a bibliography

of all those writers whose novels, short stories, and poems appeared initially in English.

What is unique in his bibliography is that almost all those that he cites are by professors

or teachers of English (Laamiri 2008, np.). Consequently, my study will focus mainly on

the overseas writing, with a reading that centers on re-writing the imagined community.

1.3 PREVIOUS STUDIES

Even though North African writing in English can be seen as a new phenomenon in post-

colonial English literary studies and in North Africa itself, very few studies have been

undertaken to include their works for analysis. In her “Overview” in the Arab Voices in

Diaspora, for instance, Layla Al Maleh outlines the changes that come with the emergence

of the Arab Anglophone literatures from the 1950s to the contemporary Arab

Anglophone writers. She points out that the difference between those who wrote in the

1950s and those in early 1990s originates in the diverse topics they have undertaken to

emphasize their ethnicity. She notes that “whereas Arab immigrants to the USA […] were

busy settling down and assimilating, Anglophone Arab writing was beginning to shift its

locus elsewhere” (2009, 6). This “elsewhere” emanates from the fascination with the

Englishness that could be seen in the universities and that was inspired by the

Anglophone lifestyle, which ultimately expresses the difference from their lifestyle at

home. In this period, such literature was the outcome of the writing emerging from

within the mainstream of England and its discourse of Englishness: the production was

“not from a locally emergent language, an appropriation or subversion of it or from the

desire to challenge its dominance” (Al Maleh 2009, 7). For a long time after 1970, works

written in English by Arabs were mainly the offspring of exile and diaspora. The main

themes were the Arab-Israel war, escaping Arab despotism, and the desire to provide a

voice and to be heard. As Al Maleh suggests, much of the Arab Anglophone literatures

resonates between home and diaspora, nurturing a complex identity located in the

hybrid and liminal space of “inbetwixity” (2009, 38).

It is noteworthy that, although Al Maleh has included Lalami’s first work in her

account, the contributors to the Arab Voices in Diapora seem to focus mostly on the

Mashreq Anglophone writers. Furthermore, books such as Arab Voices in Diaspora (cf. Al

Maleh 2009), Steven Salaita’s Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics (2007),

and Amin Malak’s Muslim Narrative and the Discourse of English (2004) mostly concern the

Arabs writing in English from the Mashreq (mostly Lebanese, Jordanian and Egyptian).

The rubrics “Arab” or “Muslim” are too wide to be used to name the emerging literature

produced by Arab writers. Sometimes even those from Pakistan or India are considered

Arabs: “It did not seem to matter who was who, so long as the names and titles fed the

euphoria of luring the reader to a better comprehension of the ‘terrorist other’” (Al Maleh

2009, 2).

In addition, Geoffrey Nash’s interest in Arabs writing in English has resulted in a

book entitled The Arab Writer in English: Arab Themes in a Metropolitan Language, 1908-1958.

In this book, Nash aims mainly at exploring the aspects that influence an Arab to write in

10

English and whether postcoloniality can be seen as a condition for their writings. As

indicated in the title, the book traces Arab writing in English over five decades by taking

four major Arab Anglophone writers between 1908 and 1958. Even though the scope of

the title seems to include the Mashreq and the Maghreb, Nash’s thesis focuses on writers

from the Middle East such as Ameen Rihani, Khalil Jibran, George Antonius, and Edward

Atiyah.

This does not, however, explain the current absence of adequate academic interest

in North African Anglophone novel. Very few studies have tended to include the

emerging North African Anglophone writers in their scope. Jacqueline Jondot, for

instance, has pointed to Anouar Majid and Sabiha Al Khemir in her dissertation Les

Ecrivains d'Expression Anglaise au Proche Orient Arabe, but her focus has mainly been

comparative, which makes the Mashreq a more focalized aspect for study.

As a North African, Nouri Gana’s interest in Arab Anglophone narrative has

resulted in significant articles such as “In Search of Andalusia: Reconfiguring Arabness in

Diana Abu-Jaber’s Crescent,” (2008) and “Everyday Arabness: The Poetics of Arab

Canadian Literature and Film” (2009). Gana’s forthcoming edited collection initially

entitled The Rise of the Arab Novel in English: The Politics of Anglo Arab and Arab American

Literature and Culture may be a significant contribution that focusses on the rise of North

African Anglophone literature. In considering his position as a North African critic, his

works on the Arab writers in English may help to expand the horizon of the Arab

Anglophone novel for future research.

Yet, the reason for this neglect may be linguistic and related to language power, and

especially to the weight that Amazigh, Arabic, and French have in North Africa. The

corpus of North African Arabs writing in French centers mainly on issues of identity,

hybridity, and the post-colonial condition in North Africa. Many works express a certain

sense of alienation and exile that emanates from the heritage of colonialism. The writings

by Francophone Arabs are haunted by memories of the past and visions of the future that

characterize their return home. Most of those who write in French have lived for a

lengthy time in France or their studies have been conducted mainly using French: these

writers include Driss Chraibi, Abdelkebir Khatibi, and Abdelatif Laabi in Morocco; Assia

Djebar, Leïla Sebbar, and Mohammed Dib in Algeria, and Gisèle Halimi; and Hédi

Bouraoui in Tunisia. Their writings have also been preoccupied with the tension arising

between modernity and tradition at home. Nevertheless, I will argue that North African

Anglophone writing is a new area of research. Among the critics whom I cited above only

Jacqueline Jondot from France and Nouri Gana from Tunisia seem to display an interest

in the North African novel in English. This dissertation, therefore, is a contribution to

such efforts, with the aim of refining post-colonial literary studies by placing an emphasis

on the act of re-writing.

In sum, my reading of North African Anglophone narratives aims at presenting a

deconstructive approach to the “idea” of post-colonial literature. In Chapter 2, I will

attempt to locate the emerging literature of North Africa in the global space. The notions

of bricolage and transculturality will serve to locate this literature geographically resting

as it does at the meeting of several boundaries as a literature of the minoritarian.

11

2 Bricolage and the

Discourse of Transcultural

Minority: Re-writing Post-

colonialism

By the ‘right to narrate’, I mean to suggest all those forms of creative behavior that

allow us to represent the lives we lead, question the conventions and customs that

we inherit, dispute and propagate the ideas and ideals that come to us most

naturally […] When you fail to protect the right to narrate, you are in danger of

filling the silence with sirens, megaphones, hectoring voices carried by

loudspeakers from the podiums of great height over people who shrink into

indistinguishable masses. (Bhabha 2003, 180-1)

If a language seems to represent ‘us’ because it is ‘ours’, what of a colonial language?

It is not exactly ‘ours’ but it is not exclusively ‘theirs’ either: it is ‘ours’ because we

make it ours, and when we do so we choose to identify ourselves in a particular

contested, a particular ambivalent space. It is then no longer fully ‘theirs’ because

making it ‘ours’ we change its form. Quite simply, the post-colonial use of English

problematizes all those questions of identity that linger around our possession of a

mother tongue. (Ashcroft 2009, 96)

In the past few decades, our perception of the “idea” of literature has begun to hover

around multilinguality as a marker for the literature of deterritorialization. The works of

Kafka, the German-speaking Jew of Prague, have become a main referent of such literary

forms. More recently, the literature produced by writers in a language that is not affected

by colonialism but whose production is influenced by processes of globalization,

diaspora, and transculturation, remains a indicator of contemporary deterritorialized

narrative. The production of such a literature assumes that another process is already at

work, i.e. translation. This process challenges all the assumptions of the notion of the

“imagined community” positioned by Benedict Anderson (cf. 1991).

To write in a foreign language is to contribute to the act of re-writing the history of

the nation to which the writer belongs. However, belonging itself becomes an aspect of

contestation in such narratives, thereby offering alternative modes of modernity. Deleuze

12

and Guattari note that literature which comes from the complexities of migration can be

called “minority literature” (1986, 19) in terms of the ways in which, on the one hand, it

contests the mechanism of the mainstream or the canonized literature. On the other hand,

it provides a rather holistic revision of the “hidden” construction of identities in order to

delineate a reading of the imagined nation and its history from a much broader contact

zone.

Multilingual, diasporic, transcultural, and/or minoritarian writings are aspects of

North African literature written in English. In order to address these issues, this chapter

is devoted to a discussion of the theoretical and methodological framework permitting a

reading of the emerging North African literature in English in a “flexible” way. Flexibility

can be understood in the way the notion of bricolage is introduced in the discussion that

follows. In this chapter, I aim mainly to locate the theoretical starting-point that enables

the study of North African Anglophone literature in post-colonialism. The importance of

this location/locality is twofold: first, it presents a discussion of the notion of post-

colonialism in relation to the changes that alter the world today. These changes seem to

render the term post-colonial a problematic concept and incapable of accommodating the

emergence of this literature. Consequently, contesting the notion of post-colonialism

becomes, in the following discussion, an argument against the act of writing back to the

canon. I will argue that the act of writing back discussed at length by Ashcroft, Griffiths,

and Tiffin in their The Empire Writes Back does not allow for the inclusion of literature that

is not necessarily post-colonial. On the contrary, it only characterizes the period that

emerges as post-colonial, thereby giving credence to “Third World” canonized texts

without accounting for the new global contemporaneity that permeates in cultural

globalization.

Second, I will explain that the changes require us to reflect on this shift and to

attempt to contribute to the debate on alternative modernity, with an emphasis on the

notion of re-writing. At the theoretical level this discussion will cause me to think of the

notion of bricolage, introduced by Lévi-Strauss, as a way to challenge the post-colonial

and its idea of writing back. At the methodological level, minority literature, a concept

coined by Deleuze and Guattari, will be the basis on which the notion of transculturality

is constructed. In other words, in this chapter I argue that the concept of minority

literature helps in the deconstruction of the notion of “national literature”’ by offering a

more inclusive literature that takes the form of transculturality as its paradigm for the act

of re-writing. It also helps re-construct post-colonial identity, and thereby provides an

alternative modernity. With all this in mind, I suggest that to read the emerging North

African Anglophone narrative is to re-read the history of North Africa and to contribute

to the construction of an imagined community. Whereas Section 1 will be devoted to the

critique of post-colonialism, section 2 will be an introduction to the notion of minority

literature and its bricolage. Section 3 delves into the question of transculturality and the

ways of using it as a tool to re-imagine the space of literature in North Africa as one of

becoming.

13

2.1 CONTESTING POST-COLONIALISM

It is argued that colonialism has sown the seeds of post-colonial writing. The history of

the natives as mapped out by the discourse of colonialism has yielded post-colonial

literature, criticism, and writing. The overlap of language and colonialism on the one

hand, and post-colonialism and the writing back on the other hand, assumes a certain

sense of identity (re-)construction and self (re-)presentation. Post-colonialism has

engaged with the question of language to the extent that the act of writing back receives

its stimulus from the perception of difference that accrues to theories of colonial language

usage. As the epigraph from Caliban’s Voice illustrates, this engagement problematizes the

notion of identity “that lingers around our possession of a mother tongue” (Ashcroft 2009,

96). The flux of identities, hybridized borders, and hyphenation stimulates a discourse

that shares the epistemology of self-representation in a major language. The post-colonial

era in this sense is not marked solely by the subject’s engagement in a process of writing

back to the canon. Being in constant motion, the post-colonial subject struggles to live up

to the lives inside the borders and writing outside the nation.

In the mid-twentieth century, when most colonies struggled for their independence,

the act of writing back estranged the colonized from the colonizer, rendering the colonial

discourse obsolete. At a certain point, to write back meant to go beyond the “fixity” of

stereotypes in which the colonized subject had been entrapped (Bhabha 1983, 200). These

approaches endeavor to modify the project of writing against colonialism by pushing the

dominant ideals and layers of the discourse of colonialism toward a middle passage. To

go beyond fixity, or to become a hybrid: these are examples of the notion of identity

offered by post-colonial theories in order to create ruptures in colonial discourse and to

write the history of the natives anew. The process is complex because it touches on the

(re-) construction of both the history and the past of the natives.

Accordingly, it is argued that disconnecting past events from the current world

would imply the conception of the knowledge that the present has to receive. Rather,

such a conception may entail that knowledge of such thought has already been

determined by master historians (in the case of colonialism, they are the orientalists1).

Such arguments subscribe to the idea that any historical account of certain events is

ideologically determined (White 1973, 21-4). White has pointed out that any “historical

work” is reflected

in the mode of ideological implication by which an aesthetic perception

(emplotement) and a cognitive operation (the argument) can be combined so as to

derive prescriptive statements from what may appear to be purely descriptive or

analytical ones. (1973, 27; emphasis original)

1 ‘Orientalist’ evokes Edward Said’s notion of colonialism. The term is critical in its reference to the

scientific scholarship of the Orient among which writers, anthropologist, politicians, and all those

who had a certain effect in the Orient. By way of analogy – the Orient here is not perceived as the

geographical space that lies to the east of Europe, a concept of the 18th and 19th century. The Orient

refers to all those parts of the world that fell under British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and other

European empires.

14

This quotation, apart from the critique it provokes, remains the background that enables

one to understand the importance of history in a narrative that writes back to the center.

The colonial subject has been represented as barbaric and ignorant of history and

culture. S/he was out of history or historyless. S/he was later described as an idea born

and bred as such for the Western reader. Developed for Europe2, knowledge of the

history of the subject race was represented as a story. In this way, the narrative that has

created a culture with an invented history is portrayed as a fact, where “the lines

between ’fact’ and ’fiction’ were becoming blurred […] subject to intense scrutiny”

(Loomba 2005, 39). In other words, historical works are meant to be narrative discourses

used as icons of past processes in an attempt to explain the nature of the indigenous by

means of representations (White 1973, 2). White’s argument apparently pinpoints the

historical eruption where events drawing the plot within a single story can be employed

to discern the elements of history (1973, 12). Nevertheless, this premise problematizes the

act of writing back because the prefix “post” does not designate a homogeneous

discourse that refutes the assumptions of the different versions of colonialism. Can we,

then, assume a beginning of a post-colonial discourse right after the colonial retreats?

Ania Loomba, for instance, points to the complexity of the term colonialism which

makes the naming of the era that comes right after “modern” colonialism as “post”

problematic, especially if we know that the process of maintaining colonies has not been

expressed only by Europeans. In historicizing colonialism, one could name, for example,

the Roman, the Islamic, the Mongol, and the Ottoman Empires. Yet European colonialism

is unique, because the empire “ushered in new and different kinds of colonial practices

which altered the whole globe in a way that these other colonialisms did not” (Loomba

2005, 3).

In The Empire Writes Back, the term colonial applies to the period wherein the

indigenous people fell under European control (Ashcroft et al. 2002, 2). Yet, in relation to

the definition offered by Loomba, one could ask, for instance: to what extent have

Europeans established a project of colonialism that is different from past subjugations?

How can we acknowledge these differences after all? Marxists argue that nineteenth-

century colonialism is distinguished in a temporal manner; i.e. earlier colonialism could

be grasped as pre-capitalist, while capitalism formed the basis for modern3 colonialism

(Ashcroft et al. 2002, 9). This explanation renders the term colonial more ambiguous.

Loomba points out that the term colonialism cannot be detached from terms like

imperialism or neo-colonialism. One way to clarify the difference between the terms is to

think of colonialism as a phenomenon that emanates from imperial control: whereas

imperialism does not require any direct conflict with the colony, colonialism does

(Loomba 2005, 12).

In drawing lines between various colonialisms, it is clear that colonialism, or at least

modern colonialism concerns more the way the West colonized the non-Western, hence

2 By Europe and the West I mean the very conception of the era of high colonialism attached

especially to Britain and France and to a lesser degree Germany, Spain, and Italy. 3 I use modern colonialism to refer to the era of 19th century and 20th century colonialism, in contrast

to the old forms of colonialism, which dates back to the pre-19th century.

15

relegating the subject race to an other. On the other hand, this perception coalesces with

other forms of colonialism which can be found within the West. Can we include the case

of Ireland, for instance? Canada? The United States? Malta? Do we need to think of North

America and Australia, as well, in a discourse of what comes after colonialism?

Colonialism from within? There are, as the questions indicate, various forms of

colonialism (or colonialisms); these forms invite us to view the term not only as an act of

power operated by the Europeans over the non-Europeans, but also as a version that “can

be duplicated from within” (Loomba 2002, 16).

Inasmuch as the term colonial in its both senses (colonized/colonizer) complicates

the issues, apparently the answer to write back to the center requires that first one knows

who is entitled to write? Who is eligible to write? Why write at all? According to Said,

when Westerners traveled to the Orient4, they created a discourse through which the

Orient was seen, viewed, and judged: the Orient was confined to this discourse. Further,

through this discourse the “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting

itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self” (Said 1979,

3). In other words, representing the East as the only “real” image obliterates any

“fictitious” other: the colonial discourse promotes colonial hegemony.

This has become, as Said labels it, an “orientalized” version of the Orient. Its subject

race is viewed as being backward and unaware of its history and culture. This “race” was

an idea that rose out of Europe; hence the idea has become knowledge, a narrative on the

basis of which the subject is controlled (Said 1979, 22-3). This narrative has presented

imagined and created cultures with invented histories/stories of a subject race: they are

historyless subjects.

Such narratives have represented the colonized in a way that is different from the

colonial authority, and this dichotomy has become a pretext for Europe to instigate the

dialogical discourse of power that Marx condemned: “they cannot represent themselves,

they must be represented” (cf. Bottomore et al. 1983, 89). This means that the entire image

was based on an other: but other to whom? Alterity, in this regard, assumes a certain

sense of cultural and ideological syncretism: if the West has depicted the rest as other, the

rest, in a similar economy, will see the West as its other. Even during Columbus’s

“explorations”, when the natives welcomed their missionaries as others who came to

“our” land, Columbus saw the natives as cannibals, a way in “which ideologies work by

passing off partial accounts as the whole story” (Hulme 1992, 15).

Through this ideology, the history of the natives has become repudiated and

replaced by the colonizer’s version as “reality itself” (Hulme 1992, 15), and it is at this

specific point that Said introduces Orientalism as

a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made

between ‘the orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the occident’ […] through which a very

large mass of writers […] have accepted the basic distinction between East and West

as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and

4 The Orient is not stated here as an allegory or, say, metonymy of the colonial subject at large, but

only as it informs western colonialism during the 19th and early 20th century in the near Orient.

16

political accounts concerning the orient, its people, customs, ‘mind’, destiny, and so

on. (1979, 2-3; emphasis added)

The idea generated by Orientalism, despite the criticism it has received5, is to point out the

spatial and temporal nuances characterizing the colonial discourse and to find a way out

of the impasse that renders the task of the post-colonial writing back more challenging. It

is challenging, as Benedict Anderson reminds us in his Imagined Communities, because of

the hybrid passage that the colonizer tends to create (1991, 93). This passage is what

Homi K. Bhabha terms as the in-betweenness that blurs the distinction between the

colonized and the colonizer (1986, 165). For Bhabha, the colonized, in addition to placing

the self in the colonizer’s position, want to see the self from the position of the colonizer.

This entails, Bhabha argues, that the colonized is distinguished as splitting and doubling

(Bhabha 1994, 194-7). Bhabha, in this regard, hints at the obliteration of the post-colonial

identity, while emphasizing the rupture that exists in the colonial discourse. Yet there is

still a space in-between: one can yield a hybrid post-colonial identity. Bhabha notes that it

is only through the notion of hybridity that the concepts introduced by the colonizer are

revised. This is so because hybridity modifies the elements of power, “questions

discursive authority”, and proposes a deconstructive perspective vis-à-vis the colonial

discourse (Childs 2006, 84).

The form of hybridity that Bhabha celebrates takes its meaning from Bakhtin’s

theory on language: “It is the mixture of two languages, an encounter of two different

linguistic consciousnesses” (Werbner 1997, 4). The process of the creolization of language

is similar to the production and fertilization of hyphenated identities and cultures. In

their “Introduction” to Reconstructing Hybridity: Post-Colonial Studies in Transition, Kuortti

and Nyman point out that historicizing hybridity denotes its connection to “the discourse

of the biological sciences. The hybrid is commonly thought to be a cross between two

different species” (2007, 4). This cross plays a role in revisiting the colonial discourse in

the way it offers a new reading of history.

In this context, could one assume that hybridity answers to the question that

concerns the notion of the post-colonial other? Can we, then, talk about post-colonialism

in light of colonial ambivalence? Or about the difference that marks both discourses:

colonialism and its aftermath? When Said read the colonial scripts as Orientalism, he was

criticized for detaching the colonial text from its context, which, ultimately, exposes

Orientalism as an incomplete project disengaged from the act of the writing back to the

center (Loomba 2005, 84). In this trajectory, it follows, the intensity of language between

the colonizer and the colonized waxes and wanes, delineating flows and rupture. As a

result, the passage existing between the colonial discourse and post-colonial writing

underlines the paradigm of difference as the key term in the reconstruction of identity.

As one critic suggests, if colonialism came to “wash” and “purify” the natives, conversely

it can be understood that the colonial self can be contaminated, signifying that the purity

of a certain race, the existence of center and margins, etc, is not an operational dialogic

5 Said’s argument has flattened the historical differences of colonialism into a mere division of

East/West or the fluctuated attitudes to non- western, and on this point that Bhabha refuses the

notion of orientalism introduced by Said.

17

(Loomba 2005, 99). In this regard, it can be said that “identity is […] never essential”;

rather, it is a result of a process of shared common values and relationships (Dirlik 1997,

5).

In addition, the ideology of difference seems to reiterate the challenges of the

process and the task of writing back. The ideology of difference may be used to inform

the unification of both discourses: the colonizer’s and the once colonized’s. This ideology

has been hegemonic to the extent that the discourse labeled orientalism has successfully

destabilized the cultural, historical, and linguistic values of the natives. The same

ideology is employed in the discourse of the empire writing back. Nevertheless, in spite

of the ideological “sameness” distinguishing both discourses, the paradox persists. Ella

Shohat queries when exactly the post-colonial begins (1993, 103). Given that colonialism

in its spatial and temporal construction is vague and encoded by uncertainty, the idea of

a discourse that comes after colonialism or anti-colonialism is controversial. Bill Ashcroft

et al. propose a limitation to the term ”post-colonial” and, accordingly, the term post-

colonial is designated to refer to those cultures that have undergone the process of

imperialism from the moment of colonialism up to now (Ashcroft et al. 2002, 2).

Conversely, Jorge Klor De Alva sees that the post-colonial are those

original inhabitants, who logically grouped themselves into separate cultural units

(i.e. ethnicities), all but disappeared after contact, wiped out physically by disease

and abuse, and later, genetically and socially by miscegenation, and lastly,

culturally, by the religious and political practices of the Europeans and their mixed

progeny. (1995, 243)

De Alva’s scope and meaning of the term is wider than that of Ashcroft, in the way that it

emphasizes the role of the culture and history of the natives. He also elaborates the

process of their colonization: either by the destruction of their history (wiped out) or by

the deformed inclusion of mestizage (miscegenation or hybridity). What makes the post-

colonial not clearly defined in De Alva’s view is the location of those who remain under

economic control, which suggests a new phase of colonialism:

Even in the regions where native peoples survived as corporate groups in their own

greatly transformed communities […] within two or three generations they were

greatly reduced in number and politically and socially marginalized from centers of

power. (1995, 243)

Subsequently, there seems to be a great variety in the use of the term post-colonial.

If it is used synonymously with the post-independence era of the once colonized nations,

terms such as anti-colonial or post-colonial discourses could emerge on that basis (Slimon

1991, 13). Yet post-colonialism can mean resistance to the “continuity of preoccupations

and […] a set of theory that rejects the premise of colonial discourse” (Childs 2006, 5).

Aijaz Ahmad argues that, in periodizing the history of the indigenous to pre-colonial,

colonial, and post-colonial, the concept of the post-colonial remains “the infinite

aftermath” that we need to adjust ourselves to. In so doing, this condition obliterates

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even those palimpsests that reside in “our” history, through producing it as a mere

textual history of cannibalism (1995, 7). Dirlik holds the same view, suggesting that the

denial of history is a denial of our present in so far as the past informs the present. This

past needs to be conceived of in its plurality as “alternative historical trajectories that

need to be suppressed so that the present could become a possibility” (1997, 3).

Paradoxically, the lines of discussion within post-colonial discourse appear to be marked

by discontinuity, especially in the forms of the pre-colonial past and the future. From this

rupture it is possible to proceed to reassemble the history on the basis of “our premise”.

This remains an approach with which to reckon and which could enable the post-colonial

discourse to decipher the codes and practices shaped earlier by colonialism (Dirlik 1997,

169).

As the term post-colonialism remains ambiguous, it is said to cover two main areas:

it is used, first, to describe the condition that comes after, or begins with colonialism, and

yet, it never ends with it. Second, it is a designation of the movement whose

epistemology reflects the antagonism to colonialism. These two designations are

contested by Appiah, who notes that a post-colonial critic, like comprador intelligentsia,

is conceived of as a spokesman/woman for the once-colonized, which attempts to

elucidate the native’s perspective for the Western audience (Njubi 2002, n.p.). The post-

colonial comprador introduces a Western commandment in order to reconstruct the lost

harmony of a pre-colonial past. In his study of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Christopher

Wise points out that this sentiment is deemed significant in Achebe’s novel, where he

“aims not only at rehabilitating Africa's pre-colonial past; he also wants [ …] to fulfill a

more primal human need by providing” new forms of modernity (1999, 1057). This

alternate perception aims at restoring the real image that is demolished by exterior

representations of colonialism. The trajectory can only be set by rejecting stereotypes and

reconciling the past. But to what extent is this past significant? The conclusion that

Achebe proposes is that the past perfect (or pre-colonial conditions) “is finally a lost

world, or a world that remains significant only within the immediate context of present

day political struggle within Africa” (Wise 1999, 1065; emphasis original).

If post-colonialism is a condition that exists right after colonialism, why did this

condition not exist before? How can we differentiate between the past and the present in

this context? Can we distinguish between all kinds of colonialisms? Is hybridity a

criterion of colonialism? How could the subject race represent the self? Dirlik denies any

possibility of post-colonialism foregrounding those nuanced articulations without

engagement in the ontological and epistemological considerations of the term. This

ambivalence is a feature of post-colonial theory, whose basis stresses the text outside its

context. Alternatively, he suggests using the term “post-revolutionary” as a reference to

the contacts and confrontations designating resistance to colonialism in its spatial and

temporal contexts (1997, 167). Although the idea seems creative, it does not clarify or

limit the scope of post-colonialism. It renders the terminology of the past blocked within

the epistemology of resistance, and within the debate on cultural and materialist critique.

This polemical debate retains its currency only in accounting for colonial and post-

colonial resistance (such as that taking place in Palestine or the anti-government

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movements of Africa and South-East Asia), and yet it can hardly be a designation for the

democratic movements that aim to establish a modern state.

In this context, the act of writing back may entail differnt meanings: to write back

may mean that one confirms the importance of the ideological concepts designated for

post-colonial consumption. Similarly, it can also suggest that one needs to corroborate the

authority of the topic, and to write back to the center would imply that one has already

accepted the predefined division of the world into center and margin. It is significant to

note that in order to contest this aspect, otherness need be seen as a means of affirming

the self and confirming its neglect. Writing from an “other” perspective may show how,

after the colonial era, the writing back often deals with a self-assertion but neglects the

other ”other”, which exists inside the post-colonial text itself. It is by concentrating on

reassuring colonialism indirectly that post-colonialism overlooks the other sort of

discrimination and the cultural violence that subsists inside the post-colonial societies,

the minoritarian.

As a result, the question of writing back indicates that “post-colonial studies seem

to have reached the limit – and hence must confront the limitations – of theorizing

political struggles organized around notions, however complex, of identity and

difference” (Grossberg 2001, 169). Or, as Dallo notes, the post-colonial seems to be “at a

crossroads” (2004, 129). The state of ambiguity, which has helped blur the lines between

fact and fiction in history and narrative in colonial fiction, has hindered the promotion of

a unified post-colonial theory and criticism. This unification is not possible at this

moment. Yet this ambiguity has armed post-colonial writers with methods for starting

the narrativization of their history, using their own story. The language (the colonial

language) has retained its power in post-colonialism because, according to Ashcroft,

“colonialism occurs most subtly and comprehensively in language, because language

itself is so manifestly connected to power” (2009, 3). Language – major or minor – is the

medium around which identities debate their hybridity.

On the one hand, the labels that set post-colonial narratives in a ghettoized praxis

such as that of Commonwealth literature play significant roles in preventing the

continuity of post-colonial studies. On the other hand, as location and dislocation hold

the spirit of the post-colonial subjectivity in the global era, reflection on minorities and

their emerging literature in major languages transcends the debate about nation and

community-based rhetoric and leads to the question of transnationalism and

transcultural identities. This reflection aims, first, at re-routing the post-colonial beyond

the center/periphery paradigm. Second, it is a way of looking for possible theories that

propagate the assumption of post-colonial studies and simultaneously elucidate the

contemporary dislocation that generates our world today.

Part of the problem can be solved by engaging with Stuart Hall’s critique of the

post-colonial question. In his “When Was ‘the Post-colonial?’ Thinking at the Limit”, Hall

argues that the transcultural moment has partly dismantled the notion of post-

colonialism by offering a new medium in which difference is repositioned and not

overcome (1996, 251). Hall further explains that

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In this ‘post-colonial’ moment, these transverse, transnational, transcultural

movements, which were always inscribed in the history of ‘colonisation’, but

carefully overwritten by more binary forms of narrativisation, have, of course,

emerged in new forms to disrupt the settled relations of domination and resistance

inscribed in other ways of living and telling these stories. They reposition and dis-

place ‘difference’ without, in the Hegelian sense, ‘overcoming’ it. (1996, 251)

The transformation moment in post-colonialism continues to flourish today. Cultural

globalization illustrates this transformational process as the post-colonial discourse is

now experiencing spatial and temporal twists that enforce the delimitation of the post-

colonial paradigm (Hall 1996, 258).

Accordingly, John Thieme explains that terms such as “writing back”, “counter-

discourse”, and “con-text” have been extensively used to “identify a body of post-

colonial works that take a classic English text as a departure point” (2001, 1). Although

Thieme’s categorization might be applied to the “Anglophone writing from societies that

have experienced some form of colonialism in recent centuries” (2001, 4), it does not align

with recent calls that contest the term by viewing the “con-text” as a mere re-turn to the

canon. Maes-Jelinek observes that the “New Literature in English” is in “crisis” (2004, 2).

The reason behind this affliction, Maes-Jelinek argues, can be summarized in three main

terms: text, terminology, and theory. Literary texts, she argues, are important for the

post-colonial individual in order to “re-figure” the post-colonial discourse, and one way

to proceed with this reconfiguration is to reconcile “several methodologies” in analyzing

literary texts (2004, 11). Second, since the post-colonial is a “process”, it is important to re-

think the post-colonial terminology, because “the terminology we use and the encoding

of certain meanings to the exclusion of others” might prevent the creation of “a new

orthodoxy” (2004, 12). Finally, theory evokes the criteria that lead to a better

understanding of literary texts. Maes-Jelinek suggests that “because of the contemporary

implications of the word and its practice”, the objection to theory becomes widely

articulated, since the importance rests more, not on terminologies, but on the unearthing

of “wholeness” (2004, 14). Huggan confirms this view by stating that, because of the

“current debates on the interrelatedness of postcolonialism and globalization”, it becomes

crucial to “hinge on alternative views of the transnational ethos” in the ways

transnationalization is perceived as the “outlet […] for new, deterritorialized forms of

social/cultural expression and political allegiance” (2004, 31-2; emphasis original).

Like Huggan and Maes-Jelinek, Schulze-Engler points that engaging with post-

colonialism “almost includes a survey of its discontents” and in order to resolve such

“crises” in post-colonial studies he proposes an exploration of “more fruitful areas of

research and critical debate” beyond the “detailed critique of postcolonial theory” (2004,

50). Schulze-Engler postulates that the engagement with post-colonialism has accelerated

a process of modernization, which becomes visible not from “tradition” to “modernity”

but as “a transition within modernity that has been greatly accelerated by the

globalization process and that has led to the emergence of ‘reflexive’ or ‘late’ forms of

modernity” (2004, 60-1; emphasis original). It is therefore this notion of transition within

modernity that makes “sense to talk of the resurgence of modernity […] as a set of shared

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problems and predicaments that increasingly need to be addressed in global contexts”

(Schulze-Engler 2004, 61). In a vein similar to Sculze-Engler’s pardigm, John McLeod

reminds us that

in a brave new world of liquid modernities, nations apparently no longer form the

backbone of international relations. We are urged to think instead across and

beyond the tidy, holistic entities of nations and cultures – transnationally,

transculturally – if we hope to capture and critique the conditions of our

contemporaneity. (2011, 1)

Yet, to think of postcolonialism as an area of research that has merely “prioritised matters

of nation and narration” (McLeod 2011, 1) does not necessarily mean “sending the

wisdom of the old prematurely into cold storage” as McLeod points out (2011, 2). The

promotion of a specific field sometimes requires critiquing “the wisdom of the old” in

order to integrate new vocabularies for transition can take place. One way to account for

such transition in a transcultural context, we have to reconcile, as Maes-Jelinek suggests,

different methodologies so as to account for the current changes in the global world

today. The engagement assumes that, in order to re-write modernity, it is imperative to

think of new epistemologies that make of the post-colonial and the transcultural, the

modern and the postmodern, and the poststructuralist the methodological “panacea”

with which to approach the emerging literature in English (cf. Schulze-Engler 2009, xiii).

As a result, post-colonial criticism need not depend on a single theory, but on a

notion of bricolage. This could be one way to address the limitations and also those

negative colonial emblems critical of the Euro-American terminologies. It is the belief that

each theory incorporates a certain weight of radicalism, which the post-colonial critic

would overcome if s/he refrains from the rhetoric of the culturalist/materialist debate and

constructs a more methodological and conceptual framework. We are, therefore, in

agreement with Louis Gates when he says that our task is not to choose between “Spivak

and Said […] Bhabha or JanMohamed or Parry, even between Fanon or Memmi” because

the epistemology “requires a recognition that we, too, just as much as Fanon, may be

fated to rehearse the agonisms of a culture that may never earn the title of

postcolonialism” (Gates 1991, 470). In order for such recognition to be established, the

post-colonial text has been considered as that which controlled the colonized. Yet it is

from the same text that the once-colonized begins the process of re-writing and engages

in the process of identity construction.

2.2 BRICOLAGE AND MINORITY LITERATURE

The challenges of redefining the aspects of the post-colonial text or delineating the act of

writing back render the text itself an exemplar of theoretical contestation. The discussion

of terms such as the post-colonial or new literatures in English exemplifies an abstraction

more than concreteness. In other words, to think of post-colonialism as a discourse that

defines the new literatures that challenge the colonial discourse is to accept the argument

that makes indigeneity an aspect of pre-colonial modernity, since the colonial discourse

22

has already defined the limits of modernity. Nonetheless, the same post-colonial text may

not permit the emergence of North African Anglophone narrative to be included in this

categorization because such literature needs to be written in French in order to carry the

weight of the title post-colonial. Regardless of these con/textual challenges, I will argue

that to regard the post-colonial text as a textual bricolage can be viewed as the

intersecting approach between the post-colonial text and its other, i.e., “the other other

literature” by which Lennon refers to the body of literature existing in the major culture

in the metropolis and which uses the language of the homeland without necessarily

translating it into the dominant language (Lennon 2010, 141; 217). What is significant in

this literature is the notion of incommensurability that helps in positioning such a

literature in the major culture. This meticulous suggestion aims mainly to work in-

between the text and its context, between language and its others, in order to emphasize

the dialectical process underway in the “other other literature”.

Edward Said carefully demarcates this “mobile” aspect of the text by arguing that

the text exists in the world, and that its worldliness is a textual construction, because each

aspect reflects on the other, and each confirms the other’s construction (1983, 183). In an

attempt to bridge Derrida’s attitude toward the notion of the text and Foucault’s, Said

aims to construct the notion of textual worldliness by arguing that since

Derrida is concerned only with reading text, and that a text is important […]

because its real situation is literally a textual element with no ground in actuality […]

for Foucault the text is important in as much as it inhabits an element of power […]

with decisive claim on actuality, even though that power is invisible or implied.

(1983, 183)

The difference concerns the notions of text and context. Whereas Derrida claims that

there is nothing outside the discourse, and hence stresses the writing, Foucault insists

that the inside of the discourse is already implied by an external power, i.e. the outside

informs the inside. Significant in this problematization is the way in which each

endeavors to discover the invisible in the text (Said 1983, 183-4). This iconoclastic

perception of the text induces a more objective perspective on the interchange of textual

meaning vis-à-vis the context.

The text is considered a social construct wherein communication with the social

strata exemplifies the balance of power that operates in the post-colonial text in

accordance with its social context. However, Derrida notes that the text must deconstruct

itself and that “play” remains the moment at which the center limits the movement of the

elements in the system and structure. The operation of the system is located between two

axes: a complete obedience or a full chaos; an absolute stagnation or a complete progress.

Language is a system in which the center controls the operation of its elements. Derrida

argues that Western philosophy has emphasized the single signification –

signifier/signified – where the multiplicity of meaning is blocked, restraining the motion

of signification. When the weight is placed on the center, all the meanings or other extra

elements within a single structure or system are blurred: the result is the ideological

construct of that center, the originator of meaning, the fixed meaning (1967, 352-4).

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The relationship between the signifier and the signified is never absolute. The

binary opposition such as good/evil or day/night assumes that the first part of the binary

is privileged in a system and that its meaning is regulated by the center. It also postulates

that all of the elements within the system are stable. In other words, one can only define

good, for instance, when evil is not, or minor when the subject is not part of the major; the

absence of one term assumes the presence of one. Yet a rupture occurs when one of the

elements within the system starts to “revolt” (1967, 13). It is at this specific point that the

fixed meaning of the text becomes blurred, but the alleged need for finding other systems

might only replace one center with another one. As Derrida puts it,

it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the center could not

be thought of in the form of a present-being, that the center had no natural site, that

it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite

number of sign-substitutions came into play. (1967, 354)

The structure of the text is collapsed, and the logic of meaning is replaced by unlimited

processes of signification. Thus the need to read the text against itself can be an argument

that impedes any intimation of other approaches within a central locus of post-

colonialism. Focusing on the ruptures and inconsistencies aims at decentering the center

and de-constructing the meaning of the post-colonial text in its context. Dependence on

the anatomy of the center is no longer a choice, but it is a call for a counter-process to use

multiplicity as it informs the instability within a certain text. The other post-colonial text is

subverted by the post-colonial text: it is the substitution of one center (colonial) with

another center (post-colonial). In order to reshape the elements within this structure,

Derrida notes that the term bricolage might provide the possibility of transcending the

logic of the center (1967, 360). The proposal is a matter of fluctuation rather than stability.

It is a designation of the system that is a construct of an absolute movement that cannot

keep all the elements in place because a bricoleur does not hesitate “to change them

whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of them at once, even if their form and

their origin are heterogeneous – and so forth” (Derrida 1967, 360).

The term is borrowed from Lévi-Strauss who defines the bricoleur while he

discusses the difference between scientific knowledge and mythical thought. In his The

Savage Mind, Lévi-Strauss explains that

in our own time the ’bricoleur’ is still someone who works with his hands and uses

devious means compared to those of a craftsman. The characteristic feature of

mythical thought is that it expresses itself by means of a heterogeneous repertoire

which, even if extensive, is nevertheless limited. It has to use this repertoire,

however, whatever the task in hand because it has nothing else at its disposal.

Mythical thought is therefore a kind of intellectual ’bricolage’ – which explains the

relation which can be perceived between the two. (1966, 16-7)

Both Derrida and Lévi-Strauss confirm “heterogeneity” as a feature of the bricoleur

because even bricolage “does not proceed in a straightforward manner; it seems to stray

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or wander from one thing to another with concepts bouncing this way and that, as

interrelations and connections abound” (Pohen 2003, np.). This bouncing characteristic

advances the interplay between the center and the periphery, wherein each approaches

the other in a constant movement.

Despite this, a bricoleur does not have much concern for the coherence of the

structure and the choice of words. The use of words does not necessarily comply with the

notion of “truth”, so long as the words fit. The reciprocal process of code deciphering

permeates the understanding of words not as stable but shifting. In this regard, each

bricoleur sees her/himself as the center and the language as her/his. This system provides

new approaches to reading the text outside the stabilizing motives of the center. The

premise is twofold: when we use a word, we aim at discerning its meaning without

interpretations. But the aim is also for the meaning to hover, without any constraints and

hindrances. Bricolage, therefore, is a matter of “play” in the Derridian sense (Derrida

1967, 365). No meaning is concrete in itself, and the need for this “play” is indispensable

to the operation of the signification of meanings.

The concepts of bricolage and play do not, however, inscribe chaos in the

understanding of text (literary or non-literary). The very idea behind the word

deconstruction rests on an analysis of the dichotomies in a deconstructive paradigm and

“to show that the lesser or weaker part is necessary for the whole existence of the

stronger part” (Simon-López 2010, 35). The notion of bricolage is important to the

operation of the textual inclusion of the post-colonial minority, especially that the

bricoleur deconstructs the text, decenters the center, and revolts against its elements.

Bricolage thus aligns the new post-colonial literature to the status of minoritarian

literature. West-Pavlov notes that, post-colonial marginality, sometimes, offers

“possibilities of intervention – transversal intervention – in the world of which it is a part”,

in the way that it offers a “metonymic dialogue with the social context” (2005, 43;

emphasis original). West-Pavlov’s suggestion confirms this alignment and he further

suggests that the post-colonial marginality that emerges “within the ‘mainstream’ of

global English” problematizes the domination of mainstream literature (2005, 45). The

implicit emergence of minority literature in a “postcolonial bricolage” is meant, at least

methodologically, to problematize “the centrality of the dominant literary post-colonial

tradition” (2005, 45; emphasis added).

The work that a bricoleur produces might not correspond to the tradition of the

engineer (mainstream production), “because he doesn’t subordinate each of [the tasks] to

the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purposes of the

project” (Lévi-Strauss 1966, 17). The same approach can be applied to the work of a minor

writer who seeks to deterritorialize his position within the post-colonial canonized

literatures. What a bricoleur produces is similar to that of a minor writer, because their

productions cannot be isolated from the general web of any significant, post-colonial

“production”; they complement the meaning in the “context of production” (West-Pavlov

2005, 47). In this vein, the work of a bricoleur (in the sense introduced by Lévi-Strauss

and Derrida) constitutes the basic element of the minoritarian (in the context of Deleuze

and Guattari) and represents a set of possible relations that can “be used for any

operations of the same type” (Lévi-Strauss 2005, 17). From the interstice of bricolage and

25

post-colonialism emerges the notion of minority literature that Deleuze and Guattari offer

as a possible deterritorialized version of post-colonial literature.

In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari detail the

progress and the linear accumulation of the term minor literature, a term that is far from

conventional. A minor literature, they note in their analysis of the works of Kafka, has no

major authors, and a minor writer does not intimidate those “major” writers or their

canonical works. Lewis Renza points out that this “new” literature “is politically and

metaphorically a ‘third world’ kind of writing which eludes the totalizing formulations of

formalist, oedipal, and bourgeois or Marxist modes of organization” (1984, 29). The

preservation of the literary tradition is central to public life and more in sympathy with

the concern of the people than literary history (Bogue 1989, 114).

The function of minority literature, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is to describe

the social and political spheres of minoritarians in a “major” language that is “affected

with a high coefficient of deterritorialization” (1986, 16). In this regard, minority literature

does not represent the writer’s individual feeling, but subscribes to a more generalized

view of social representations. Subsequently, minority literature not merely focuses its

attention on the text, but it combines the social with the political and the textual with the

contextual in such a way that the author and the implied narrator work dialogically to

deterritorialize the “major” literature. To put it simply, Deleuze and Guattari name three

characteristics of a minor literature. The first is that a minor literature is a new and

“different” mode of literature that “a minority constructs within a major language”,

wherein its language “is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization” (1986, 16).

The second “is that everything in them is political”. The third characteristic concerns the

collective value of minority literature (1986, 7).

Crucial to these characteristics is that Deleuze and Guattari “locate in minor

literature the repressed and censored dimensions of the major language” (Seyhan 2001,

26). Producing a minor literature perpetuates a deconstructive proximity to the text from

within, using a major language. As a Jew from Prague, Kafka appropriates German as a

“paper language” for a minor usage. In the first place, minor literature faces three

impossibilities in relation to language: “the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility

of writing [and] the impossibility of writing differently” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 16).

The result is a celebration of a literature that is gypsy-like, not possible at all, with a

linguistic dispossession that is unique to the marginalized inside their culture.

Deleuze and Guattari argue that “[t]wo conjoined tendencies in so-called minor

languages have often been noted: an impoverishment, a shedding of syntactic and lexical

forms; but simultaneously a strange proliferation of shifting effects, a taste for overload

and paraphrase” (2004, 115). This would make “major” and “minor” languages: not two

different languages, but “two possible treatments of the same language” (Deleuze and

Guattari 2004, 114). Bogue points out that

[w]hen writers efficaciously experiment with language, then, they do not simply

manipulate signifiers. They experiment on the real; they activate lines of continuous

variation immanent within language. And in doing so they engage the same forces

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of creative deformation that various minorities utilize in fashioning their own

speech within a dominant language. (1997, 108)

The linguistic impoverishment is not regarded as a defect, but is seen as a source of

creativity that shifts the conceptualization and exploits the major text. Each minor writer

has methodological tools to use to deterritorialize the major language. Consequently, the

“minor usage” of the language is primarily an attempt to be independent from any

linguistic, cultural or social construct. It is like being “a foreigner, but in one’s own

tongue” (2004, 109). Collectivity conflates within the writer a notion of liberation with

deterritorialization in order to form an asignifying 6 aspect. However, it does not

necessarily denote reducing a certain language to the state of a senseless language. As has

been noted, minor “languages are characterized not by overload and poverty in relation

to a standard or major language, but by a sobriety and variation that are like a minor

treatment of the standard language, a becoming minor of the major language” (Deleuze

and Guattari 2004, 116). The question concerns transforming the “major” language: the

“intrusion” is not to enrich the major language, but to expand its horizon and make

access to it problematic for the major “through all the resources of symbolism […] of

hidden signifiers” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 19).

While in major literature thoughts precede articulation (content/expression), “a

minor, or revolutionary, literature begins by expressing itself and doesn’t conceptualize

until afterward” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 28). Through this process, the

reconstruction of content will be resumed. To make it readable, other elements are added

to the post-colonial minority text so that the minoritarian text can fashion the notion of

the becoming. Yet this perception leads to a configuration of self-doubling. To dissociate

the fictional construct from the actual meaning in a text ascribes duality of meanings to

the textual context leading to a split of identities. To write differently would presume a

different understanding of the meaning of the text. The most startling fact of this split

resonates in the writer her/himself: between the subject of statement and that of

enunciation. According to Clayton Koelb, “the writer is split into two functions, one of

which can remain at home while the epistolary “subject of the statement” flits about” the

outside, whatever it means for the writer (1987, 377). This feature is a typical

characteristic of many post-colonial diaspora.

Minority literature offers the consolidation that is needed for the diasporan subject.

Even though the diasporan is “split into two functions”, Deleuze and Guattari explain

that minority literature “produces an active solidarity in spite of skepticism; and if the

writer is in the margins or completely outside his or her fragile community”,

deterritorialization offers “the possibility to express another possible community” (1986,

17). Deterritorialization is defined as “the movement by which ‘one’ leaves the territory”

(2004, 559). This movement can be either absolute (deterritorialization), denying any

possibility of territorializing anew, or relative, according to which one retains her/his

territory (reterritorialization). As a result, deterritorialization is “said to be negative” (2004,

6 Asignifying elements refer to elements in the text that signify nothing but themselves. According to

Deleuze and Guattari, the “asignifying rupture” is the space of the "text" where the presence of

asignifying elements force the text to its metamorphosis and writing to its death (2004, 9).

27

559-60; emphasis original). It is also argued that the moment at which deterritorialization

is achieved, it is followed by reterritorialization, i.e., one shows the ability to demarcate

the zone of her/his newly established space. Whereas deterritorialization might be

intrinsic in the emerging fiction from the former British and French colonies named post-

colonial (e.g. India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Cameron, Algeria, and Morocco), for minority,

diasporan writers the language is “one that still occupies its natural territory and […] the

literary history of the host country” (Seyhan 2001, 27). The term of “literary zone” I

invoke here, and which corresponds to that which Deleuze and Guattari describe as a

minority literature, resonates with frequency of the level of language deterritorialization

within its national territory. This could apply to the North African writers residing in the

United States, Britain or elsewhere, and their writing in English or in another major

language. In this particular aspect, the notion of minor literature introduced by Deleuze

and Guattari seems to be open to scrutiny.

In her study of minority literature in Germany in the early 1980s, Heidrun Suhr

voices her skepticism in regard to the “hasty” generalization indexed in Deleuze and

Guattari’s conceptualization of the term. She argues that the authors whom they used as

examples (Joyce, Beckett, and Kafka) may not be accurate instances of the generalization

in which they consider the problem of the literature of the minority to be a “problem for

all of us”( 1989, 73). The reason Suhr cites for her critique is more related to the new

movements of economic migration that spanned the last century and spurred a new

understanding and thematization of the term minority. These minorities “who were

forced to leave their home countries mainly for economic reasons, have produced

significant numbers of minority writers” (Suhr 1989, 73).

Although critiques of generalization are frequent in debating Deleuze and

Guattari’s notion of a minor literature, the concept retains its originality, at least, in its

rapprochement of three distinct categories: secondary literature, whether it be that of

a minor nation or linguistic group in relation to a major tradition, or that of a

humble, minor movement or tendency (e.g., American local colorists) within a

larger tradition; marginal literature, or the literature of minorities; and experimental

literature, which “minorizes” a major language (in the sense that a minor key in

music may be said to chromaticize and destabilize the harmonic order of a major

key). (Bogue 1997, 105; emphasis original)

The consequences of these rapprochements evoke a new paradigm within which to

regard the writing from the margin of post-colonialism as an experimental, contrapuntal

discourse. The most predictable way to approach such discourse is to transcend the

limitations of the binary minor/major as much as those of ethnic minority, and to think

instead of the term Becoming. These implications presume, according to Renza, that a

minor writer would help in delineating a fragmented, different, and imaginative world

that is anchored in collective enunciation of the minor community (1984, 29).

Consequently, it seems that these concepts – minority, minor literature, minor writings,

or minor writer – can retain their effectiveness when they are applied to post-colonial

literature. Politics, in this respect, is part of the literature of the minority. Deleuze and

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Guattari have overstated the role of politics in a minor literature, and by doing so, they

have denied its notion in works by “great” writers, which, they say, are overwhelmed by

the “social milieu” that serves “as a mere environment or a background” (1986, 17). The

political significance of minority literature is apparent in many aspects, yet the use of

Kafka as an example of this dynamic calls it into question.

The discussion of minority in relation to literature stands as a paradigm within

which to consider the term minority, which in this case is rendered problematic in its

own right. The minority or minoritarian is not understood in its literal sense: the word

connotes a different conceptualization. But who can be included in or excluded from the

term minoritarian? For Deleuze and Guattari, minority is not based on a quantitative

scale. It is, by definition, based on the idea of “becoming-minor”, which blurs any

distinction between the major and the minor: “What defines a minority, then, is not the

number but the relations internal to the number. A minority can be numerous, or even

infinite; so can a majority. What distinguishes them is” the “included middle” that

designates the connection between the two (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 518-9). Such a

location is similar to, but not reflective of, Homi Bhabha’s notion of the “third space”,

whose economy is built on new epistemologies of liberating the post-colonial identity

from colonial thought. Bhabha’s “space” is imaginative, whereas Deleuze and Guattari’s

space seems to be contextual. Everyone can operate in the state of becoming minor: minor

to major, women to men, and children to parents (Deleuze and Guattari 1993, 11).

Deleuze and Guattari’s is not an aspect of “dispersion or a fragmentation”, but, as they

suggest, it is a movement back to the conflict between the “coexistence and

inseparability” (2004, 522): one that is also characteristic of the transcultural identity.

Caren Kaplan, however, voices her discomfort with the notion of Becoming. This

uneasiness is mainly directed toward seeing “becoming minor” not as a choice but as

coercion. For her the choice is based on a power relation that “stems from the daily, lived

experience of oppression” (1987, 191). Oppression is the key element in Kaplan’s critique,

in which a minor in the sense proposed by Deleuze and Guattari blurs the distinction

between the major and the minor at this level (Bogue 1997, 5). The idea of oppression is

also critical when it comes to the question of minorities. Many critics aim at discussing

the notion of oppression as a factor relative to ethnic conflicts arising in certain nations.

To a certain degree, Anouar Majid in his We Are All Moors: Ending Centuries of Crusades

Against Muslims and Other Minorities holds this view. Majid explains: “[t]he Moor, I want

to show in this book, is not only someone who is religiously Muslim; even more

importantly, he or she is also a figure that stands for anyone who is not considered to be

part of the social mainstream” (2009, 5).

In other words, the Moor is not only those minority groups who were dispersed

from Spain to Morocco. The concept is extended to include all those immigrants living in

the United States (Hispanic and nonwhites), Asian migrant workers in the Gulf region,

and other minorities in Europe, including North Africans and Africans, whose fate is to

experience exclusion and oppression. Nevertheless, Lawrence points out that

in these conditions, the traditional binary models of political struggle – simple

models of coloniser/colonised, of oppressor/oppressed – seem inapplicable to a

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spatial economy of power which cannot be reduced to simple geographical

dichotomies – First/Third, Centre/Margin, Metropolitan/Peripheral, Local/Global –

nor, at least in the first instance, to questions of personal identity. (2001, 170)

But these suggestions do not solve the problem posed earlier by Seyhan: if

deterritorialization can be a feature of post-colonial literature emerging out of the British

or French Empires, where can one locate the emerging literature in English from writers

who have not been directly influenced by British colonialism, such as the North African,

for instance? Even though Deleuze and Guattari make a comparison between Kafka and

the African American writers, the comparison seems to be inapplicable on this basis.

These writers are rooted in their “locales of origin” and do not experiment with an

imported language. The language is theirs (Seyhan 2001, 27). The difficulty of localization

is also articulated by Suhr in her “Ausländerliteratur”. Focusing on German literature

produced by immigrant authors especially in the 1980s, Suhr outlines a number of

concepts that may denote this emerging literature in Germany. These include

“Migrantenliteratur”, signifying literature by migrants; “Gastarbeiterliteratur”, implying

guest worker literature, and “ein nicht nur deutsche Literatur” a sentence that is

translated as a “not-just-German literature”. None of these definitions encompass the

germane concepts of the emerging German literature by non-native authors. If the first

title renders a vast area to characterize this emerging literature, the second one preserves

its limitation, and the third title seems to be absurd (Suhr 1989, 74-5).

However, when the Eastern part of Germany united with its Western counterpart,

radical changes reformed German migrant literature. The calls for national integration

become the main arena for discussing “an alternative community”, one that is marked by

multiple ethnicities wherein language itself has become “hybridized” (Hakkarainen 2004,

194). If literature of the 1960s and 1970s was “called affected literature” to symbolize its

impurity, Hakkarainen notes, the production of literature by non-Germans creates “a

hybrid language” that sustains “the polyphony of various voices” and enlarges the circle

of questioning the construction of identities in the plural (2004, 196-7). Such a shift in

emphasis can be an effect of the changes that alter the concept of the nation state, and

allow for a broader discussion on the “aesthetic of the hybrid” and cultural globalization

in Germany (Hakkarainen 2004, 200).

Subsequently, the fluidity of these titles can be viewed as problematizing the scope

of the emerging literature in North Africa. Migration, a term that has tenaciously

permeated the formulation of the emerging literature in a major language, is what

characterizes this literature. It is a literature that underlies, after all, the name of a post-

colonial literature. It is also a literature that comes out of migration. Either concept seems

to represent thematic limitations. These need be addressed in the following sections.

What is of central importance is that this age is characterized by a high degree of

migration, in the course which language is to be transformed. Transformation is a result

of the power relations that marked the era of high colonialism. Ashcroft ascertains this by

noting “that the colonizing language is taught and disseminated in a way that entrenches

difference: the colonized speak dialect or marginal varieties, while the colonizer speaks,

and has the status of, Standard English” (2009, 31). Ashcroft further problematizes this

30

“difference” by referring to the colonized in the plural and the colonizer in the singular,

as if to state that a colonial relationship is marked by efficiency, not by number. In other

words, one colonizer can speak the language that, for instance, a hundred of the

colonized cannot speak. And because the emphasis is not shifted from the mere binary of

colonizer and colonized, the roles and regulation of the use of language have been

changed. It is also a result of the growing number of those people who live today “in a

language that is not their own […] or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and

know poorly the major language that they are forced to serve […] this is a problem of

immigrants […] the problem of minorities” (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 19).

The transformation, i.e. the deterritorialization of the language, is “infected” by a

series of errors in grammar and “defects” in pronunciations and orthography. As

Ashcroft suggests, these defects are contaminations of the mother language, whereas,

from a minor perspective, this is the reconstruction of a new language against the very

essence of cultural and ideological hegemonies indexed in the language of the colonizer

(2009, 8). But why is language transformation accepted as crucial to the formation of

identity? And is it true that any change of language is a change of identity and life, as

Derek Walcott once claimed (1965, 61)?

According to Ashcroft, language plays a role in forming identity. The very essence

of naming is a sign of domination. To name in a certain language presupposes that

indigeneity needs to be “dehumanized” and “the capacity for naming erased” (Ashcroft

2009, 27). This erasure means that the spaces that have been occupied were empty spaces,

where notions of place and space involve the denial of any participation on the part of the

native in articulating her/his indigeneity. In this way the acts both of naming and of

renaming retain their currency in post-colonial, minor literature, “for to name reality is in

some mysterious way to assume control of it” (Ashcroft 2009, 28). Consideration of

language transformation may be more pressing to adopt in post-colonial, minor literature

today than it was in the past. Various terms have been considered to effectively highlight

the “metonymic gap”, including glossing, untranslated words, interlanguage and

syntactic fusion, code-switching, and vernacular transcription (Ashcroft 2009, 174-6).

Together, all of these give a sense of “originality” to identity formation. This is clearly

indicated, for instance, in Kamala Das’s poem “An Introduction” when she says that

The language I speak

Becomes mine, its distortions, its queerness

All mine, mine alone. It is half English, half

Indian, funny perhaps, but it is honest

It is human as I am human. (1986, 7)

When we discuss the forms of language transformation, we are ultimately probing those

language vessels that carry a sense of “authenticity” and identity formation. We are also

interested in the role they play in filling the gap between languages in the global space.

These textual lacunae are wide to the extent that translation is perceived as akin to the

violence of transparency. Iain Chambers in “Signs of Silences, Lines of Listening” reflects

on the crux of this problem at length:

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We are perhaps beginning to learn that in order to look towards this potential

horizon it is no longer possible to seek refuge, what used to be called critical

distance, in the supposedly neutral languages of science and knowledge: those

discourses that previously nominated alterity and then reduced it to the tyranny of

the logic of the same in the name of civilisation, culture and progress. We are

learning to substitute the violence of that translation with the disturbing recognition

that translation – mine of an other, an other’s of me – is never a transparent activity

but always involves a process of re-citing, hence cultural and historical re-siting,

and is therefore a travesty, a betrayal, of any ‘original’ or ‘authentic’ intention. (2001,

49)

The transparency of translation pertinent to the language of the national identity,

literature, and cultural hegemony has now been enveloped as the act of re-writing taking

place everywhere. Writers from elsewhere, whom Salman Rushdie describes in his

Imaginary Homelands – those who are caught between two shores, people whose existence

are determined “by an endless fluctuation between two polarities” (Manferlotti 2001, 190)

– are the hope that “energises post-colonial studies writing”, whose language

transformation is a “strategy of possibility” (Ashcroft 2009, 183). Their constructed

identity is derived from the filling of the gap between the text and the context, between

space and place, between major and minor, and between the center and the periphery.

They would perform what Deleuze and Guattari call the becoming and the included

middle, in that “Becoming is the spatialisation of transformation” (Grossberg 2001, 180).

Accordingly, Bassnett and Trivedi claim that the “original” or “authentic” are no

longer criteria for evaluating translation: “they are being questioned”, because translation

becomes the mechanism that allows one to understand the world where s/he dwells

(1999, 2). Bassnett and Trivedi further explain that if the colonial discourse has

represented the colony as merely a discourse duplicating the original, it has failed to

pinpoint the essential feature that undermines the process of translation, i.e. “value

judgement”, which can also include a process of “gain” (1999, 4). However, the one-way

translation that used to encode the relation between the colonizer and the colony has now

been adjusted to include the other-way-translation in which the post-colonial has come to

define her/his other. At this point, it is imperative to note that translation not only

features post-colonial writing so as to become the new original that speaks in an

“authentic” voice, but it also contributes to a process that has been under scrutiny for

years: the act of writing back.

2.3 GLOBAL SPACES, TRANSCULTURAL LOCATIONS

Since translation is becoming an important aspect in the post-colonial discourse, it remains

a sensible topic for the emerging literature in English; as soon as the act of writing in a

major language is questioned, the importance of space emerges. It is argued that the

interconnectedness between language and translation, and place and space is a salient

characteristic of colonialism. In the English language the difference between space and

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place reveals an idea of manipulation that is not configured in other languages: in

German, for instance, the word Raum stands for both place and space. Space can be

emptied, and place can be “appropriated”, theoretically and practically. These

appropriations reflect on the sense of control maintained over “space through

cartography” and place as a site of colonial domination (Ashcroft 2009, 76). The tonality

of this textual relationship demonstrates the value and metaphorical meaning of the

palimpsest, which Ashcroft defines as “a text on which previous inscriptions have been

erased but remain as traces in the present” (2009, 77).

If we project the concepts of place, space, and location onto the notion of the post-

colonial transformation, we can summarize our project in terms of the following points:

first, the space introduced by Ashcroft for the colonial is perceived as empty. The process

of naming gives power to the colonial to manipulate that which becomes at a specific

moment place. Place is there because of the new space. However, it can be noted that

both place and space exist only as results of location. Second, location – the point from

which the post-colonial writes and the language s/he transforms – seems to connect the

two shores of writing in/outside the nation. The space becomes the horizon that enables

the minorities to negotiate their identities, and the place is the medium of this articulation.

Both space and place exist because of the deterritorialized language: the language as

location. Third, it is important to note that with the notion of place, space, and location,

the notion of home may be understood as neither stable nor definitive. The instability of

the notion of home can be defined in relation to the different locations that the post-

colonial inhabits. It is not definitive because the notion of home that the post-colonial

aims to re-construct might not be connected to a certain place, but home remains in the

space of language and translation.

In addition, location may be understood as a sequence of transcultural hybridity

wherein the subject occupies a number of “different positions”, suggesting that passing

through these locations would only provide temporary meanings for defining “home”

(Nyman 2009, 73). Sara Ahmed points out that “home is not simply about fantasies of

belonging (where do I originate from?) but that it is sentimentalized as a space of

belonging (“home is where the heart is”)” (qtd in Nyman 2009, 81). The implications of

location also suggest that the notion of home is mobile, and through its mobility that

identity is re-constructed. Place can no longer be perceived as determinant of fixed

identity, “neither is it envisioned as a locale in which difference fuses into a melting pot,

nor is it perceived as a new frontier of exceptional cultural status” (Raussert and Isensee

2008, 4). Place as a site of transcultural interchange has accumulated a new

understanding of the multiple temporalities in which identities are constructed. It has

significantly shifted the emphasis from the position of place as a closed space of national

and cultural identity to a more general framework that places identity beyond cultural

and national traditions.

The notions of location, place, and space are concepts through which to approach

the emerging North African novel in English. The construction of such concepts is

intrinsic to writing in the language of deterritorialization: English, for the north African

writer, is not her/his mother tongue, nor is it a language of colonialism, but it is one that

its presence is marked and conditioned by the existence of other major languages, such as

33

that of English (new medium of writing) and Arabic or Amazigh (mother tongue(s)).

Arabic and French have always been present, and much literature is written using one of

the two languages. But to write in English in this geographical space, or to recognize

these writings in a global sphere has been conditioned by numerous obstacles, which

need to be included in any analysis.

Arguably, a text in relation to globalization does not mean “text” in itself, so much

as an emblem of other textual events that connect to history (Gupta 2009, 76-7). As many

critics have suggested, the complex relations that interweave textual events with history –

these include authorship, the reader, social construction, and the history of reception –

exemplify a protean analogy for the function of literature qua globalization. Critics

suggest different meanings and approaches to globalization. Gupta, for example, assigns

disjunction to globalization as one of its characteristics. He points out that

‘globalization’ is one of those extraordinarily protean terms of our time, which

seems to be relevant, and is increasingly accepted as meaningful, everywhere. In the

absolute embrace of the core word, the ‘globe’ itself, struggles against the

modification of the suffix, the process marked by ‘-ization’. A wide variety of

possibilities slips through that slight disjuncture between the absolute and the

potential. (2009, 13)

In Gupta’s view, these include, for instance, the possibility to engage with the global

construction of concepts and the enunciation of the global and the local (2009, 14). Within

these possibilities, uniformity is not an option for homogenizing the post-colonial novel,

even though post-colonial literature may discuss globalization as an instrument of

transcultural identities. The absolute, nonetheless, is not parallel to the possibility of

restructuring a literature, and yet a potential solution perhaps remains in the possibility

for literature to dwell on global issues such as location. As a result, global movements

and the intense flux of identities are events characterizing globalization, which,

ultimately, connect them with the local events. Giddens reminds us that globalization is

“the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a

way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away” (1990, 64).

From the perspective of Giddens, both the local and the global interact in a rather

complex process that reflects on the subject of enunciation.

In addition, the discourse of the minoritarian that bases its rhetoric on the

dichotomy of minority/majority has been replaced by the discourse of transcultural

hybridity (Butler 2001, 190). Because of its connection to concepts such as

transnationalism and cosmopolitanism, tranculturality echoes the complexity and

nuances of globalization. In his “On Minorities: Cultural Rights”, Bhabha notes that the

emergence or the creation of the new minority group – “the partial cultural milieu” –

underlines a systematic operation that links the outside and the minor to the inside and

the major. This creation need not be understood in the sense that it restrains the

prosperity of the “nation”, but in the

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[c]reation reveals a liminal, interstitial public sphere that emerges in-between the

state and the non-state, in-between individual rights and group needs; not in the

simpler dialectic between global and local. Subjects […] occupy an analytic and

ethical borderland of ‘hybridization’ in a partial and double identification across a

minority milieu. (Bhabha 2000, np.; emphasis original)

The “partial cultural milieu” for Bhabha refers to the transcultural subject, whose

intrusion in the cultural “uniformity” and national “stability” brings the idea of “loyalty”

into question. These new minority groups are conceived of as a political construct charted

in Article 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. This quilt-like

definition sets up minorities between the two affiliations: loyalty to the host society and

the preservation of their distinctive cultures. In this remarkable note on the “partial

cultural milieu”, minorities, to a varying degree, come to experience the malevolence

hermeneutic of the “nation”. Thus, Bhabha has justified the importance of this “partial

milieu” in relation to the “‘non-state’ social actors” as “they are increasingly relevant,

nationally and internationally, in the fight for cultural rights and social justice” (Bhabha

2000, np.).

In addition, the minoritarian seem to accept – in their fight for recognition inside or

outside of the imagined community – to engage in a dialogue in pursuit of recognition

through multiple processes of refining the discourse of the majority. As a result, the

minority text remains the space of liminal hybridity in which the transcultural subject

negotiates his/her position. Accordingly, it is argued that the literary text can be viewed

as a site of rewriting home and reconstructing new identities for an imagined homeland.

As such, the process of redefining concepts of home and identity seeps into “critiques of

origins and of national identity” (Nyman 2009, 25-6). The hybridized notion of identity

formation in relation to home in such texts is important in constructing the new

paradigm(s) of a nation, imagined or actual. It also creates a new meaning for nation and

mixes the local with the global at once. An affiliation such as this propagates the

discourse that homogenizes identity and nation, using transnational hybridity as a

substituting construction. Thus, between home and away, hybridity remains a tool with

which identity is refined, reconstructed, and imagined anew. This process of re-

construction locates the diaspora qua hybridity and liminality. Liminality recurs as a

salient feature of the diasporic identity. William Safran argues that to be in diaspora

implies that you are in two places at one time. It “implies tension between being in one

place physically—the place where one lives and works—and thinking regularly of

another place far away” (2004, 14).

It is imperative to note that this liminal space is not a result of the constant move

between two distinct constructions – home and away – but an aspect of transcultural

belonging. Liminality for Victor Turner (1974) is “transition rites” and it incorporates

three distinct phases: “separation”, “margin”, and “reaggregation”. The margin phase is

the most important period, in which one moves from the symbolic phase to the threshold,

“being in a tunnel” (Turner 1974, 80). Hybridity and liminality do not signify a single

emblem, i.e., inbetweenness. Inbetwixity refers to the movement that charts the transition

from being at the stage of symbolism to that of the threshold (the tunnel). The

35

inbetweenness, nonetheless, correlates with the locale in which two identities negotiate

their space of ambivalence. On the one hand, liminality signifies a complete “separation”

from the earlier point of social structure, and creates a dissolved identity of “neither here

nor there”: a state of ambiguity (Turner 1974, 80). On the other hand, hybridity connotes

a mixture rather than a detachment, and its usage in cultural studies aims to reduce the

discourse of imperialism to a stage of ambivalence, in order to weaken its power. To

become a hybrid may suggest the occupation of a new space, which Bhabha (1999) terms

the “third space”. As I have pointed out earlier in this Chapter, the “third space”

indicates that this newness might not be absolute because of the constant motion of in-

between the two cultural forms: colonizer and colonized. Rather, being in a liminal space

can cultivate a new understanding of the emerging of the transcultural space. When

leaving (the territory), the subject “becomes ambiguous, neither here nor there, betwixt

and between all fixed points of classification”. S/he has entered a territory, whose history

has no link with it. Once entered, the liminal is invisible, “there in the state of

outsiderhood” (Turner 1974, 231-3).

The process of being on the threshold suggests a change in the post-colonial attitude

that the subject needs to replace longing for belonging with that of “unbelonging”. In this

vein, since cultures become liable to global changes (Welsch 1999, np.), the post-colonial

subject strives to belong to a notion of home beyond that which is prescribed by single

cultures. The notion of “elsewhere” does not necessarily imply “home” in its traditional

cultural definition, but transculturality might imply that the cultural formation of the

post-colonial subject becomes that of a hybrid. Accordingly, Welsch points out that the

consequential aspects of global cultural interchange imply that contemporary writers, for

instance, “emphasize that they're shaped not by a single homeland, but by differing

reference countries” and that their cultural belonging is replaced by a transcultural

formation (1999, n.p.). Transculturality not only goes beyond the prescribed notion of

culture and globalism, it generates an affiliation to the local while comprehending a

“cosmopolitan side”: “Transcultural people combine both” (Welsch 1999, n.p.). This new

mode of belonging sets identity “independent of any determinate milieu”, whereas the

notion of “home” and “homeland” can be established elsewhere (Welsch 1999, n.p.).

David Attwell defines transculturality as a “counterpoint” that redefines the “myth

of essentialism and uniformity” in both colonial and post-colonial “forms of self-

representation” (2005, 19). Attwell further illustrates that transculturality “suggests

multiple processes […] of cultural destruction followed by reconstruction on entirely new

terms. Transculturation goes further than the weaker concept of cultural translation,

which would be the translation of material from one culture into the terms of another”

(2005, 18). The term has first appeared in the work of Fernando Ortiz in his Cuban

Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, in which he offers alternative forms of modernity in post-

colonial societies (1995, 98). He suggests that the history of the post-colonial societies is

no longer defined by its acculturation but by its “transculturations”. Taking Cuba as an

example, he points out that

[f]irst came the transculturation of the paleolithic Indian to the neolithic, and the

disappearance of the latter because of his inability to adjust himself to the culture

36

brought by the Spaniards. Then the transculturation of an unbroken stream of white

immigrants. They were Spaniards but representative of different cultures and

themselves torn loose […] At the same time there was going on the transculturation

of a steady human stream of African Negroes coming from all the coastal regions of

Africa […] all of them snatched from their original social groups, their own cultures

destroyed and crushed under the weight of the cultures in existence here […] And

still other immigrant cultures of the most varying origins arrive, either in sporadic

waves or a continuous flow, always exerting an influence and being influenced in

turn. (Ortiz 1995, 98)

It is a new beginning for the act of writing back to the center. The history that Ortiz maps

for Cuba is one that repudiates forms such as “acculturation” and “deculturation” by a

process of “readjustment” in which the minor and the major exert “an influence and

being influenced in turn”.

The history now works in either way, and the dialogue, as Attwell suggests, is a

“dialogue in both directions” (2005, 19). Ortiz points to the importance of immigration in

the process of deconstructing what Attwell calls “the myth of essentialism” (2005, 19), in

the ways that the direction of the process is no longer characterized by its linearity, but

by its ubiquity. In his “The Location of Transculture”, Mark Stein points out that the main

objective for Ortiz is to delineate the ways in which the oppressed and minority cultures

operate within the host or major cultures beyond certain constructions such as

assimilation (2009, 254). In this vein, transculturation is seen as a model that modifies and

analyzes phenomena such as “the hybrid, hyphenated, [and] syncretic global diaspora”

that characterize our world today (Mirzoeff 1999, 131). Even though the term might not

account fully for the emergence of North African Anglophone fiction in diaspora, the

condition of transculturality can be significant in delimiting the discourse of the

majorities in marginalizing the minoritarian discourse in the post-colonial era. The

contemporary global condition proposes instead different types of migrants besides those

introduced by Ortiz, and yet transculturality remains the contingent space out of which

the minor voices emerge to re-write modernity.

Since transculturality is seen as the mechanism for re-writing modernity, it may

sound curious that the post-colonial writer needs to creatively invent new approaches to

sustain such a process. Svetlana Boym reminds us that to be “stripped of history” has

been replaced by nostalgia – nostos meaning return and algia meaning longing:

homesickness – as a search for home that may or may not exist after all (2001, xiv).

Nostalgia is a feeling of loss, but also a strategy for the minoritarian to produce a

countermemory. In the meantime, nostalgia is both inspiring and elusive. Sometimes it is

no longer connected with the past “but [it is] rather sideways. The nostalgic feels stifled

within the conventional confines of time and space” (2001, xiv ). Nostalgia is the art of

memory; it is the desire to re-construct the post-colonial identity and the attempt to re-

imagine home. It is an escape from trauma and a longing for a transcultural space in

cultural globalization. Accordingly, Jeffrey Blustein considers that the role of memory lies

in bringing the past into discussion in the real social world. Making sense of the past is as

if bringing justice to it (2008, 38). However, “memory does not consist in subordinating

37

the past necessarily to the needs of the present […] for he who looks to gather the

materials of memory places himself at the service of the dead, and not the other way

around” (Blustein 2008, 110; emphasis original).

Memory can be a site of continuity and a space for a countermemory (Baronian 2007,

12). Memory has two dimensions – the power to hide is equal to the power to reveal –

that place it in contrast to history. The ability to gain access to history is no longer a

matter of choice, since all that remains are representations and palimpsests. Memory

negotiates self-representation and self-awareness of that past. What is at stake here is that

the operation of memory is always practiced at the level of the unconscious,

subordinating authenticity to history. When wounded bodies proclaim historical events,

memory is no longer a matter of the unconscious but becomes the identity itself. At this

point nostalgia intersects with memory. Subsequently, nostalgia becomes the norm of the

minoritarian in the global world, and transculturality is the mechanism for applying it.

This mechanism seems to deconstruct the apparatus of control between the center and

the periphery: “There is no longer the norm or the center […] there is no one geographic

center pulling the world together […] there are, instead, scattered nodules competing for

our attention. [E]very competing center makes us marginal” (Hoffman 1998, 274-5). The

emphasis on transculturality in the post-colonial condition does not induce writing

between exile and diaspora. On the contrary, this emphasis aims at locating the

theoretical framework that problematizes the issues of memory, identity, and belonging

in the imagined communities, which literary critics localize under the rubric of

hegemony.

To use a variety of approaches to explore contemporary North African Anglophone

writing is to examine the nuances of literary techniques used to problematize these issues

in a foreign language. The post-colonial approach is significant in deconstructing the

novels that I seek to analyze. As a post-colonial narrative, it is important to establish a

locale for analysis in contrast to their location of culture. What is significant in this

analysis is the metaphorical aspect of the term minority as a tool that places these novels

in a position in-between. Consequently, I aim to write between minority discourse and

transculturality in order to chart new phases in the act of re-writing and to correspond to

the dialogue of re-defining transcultural identities of the imagined communities as the

North African Anglophone novel presents. In other words, I will define North African

Anglophone narrative as the production of the minoritarian with the intention of

demonstrating that they are minorities whose economy breeds hybrid identities in the

space of transculturality. In addition, between the language of transculturality and the

discourse of post-colonialism, it becomes the minority literature whose language is that

of transformational deterritorialization: a rhetoric that is relative to the notion of the

“included middle” that offers new possibilities concerning alternative forms of

modernity.

***

In conclusion, to discuss the North African Anglophone novel is both stimulating and

challenging. It is challenging because new approaches need to be introduced to locate this

38

literary fiction within post-colonialism. Many critics working between the axes of Arabs

in diaspora and the discourse of English call for new tools to dismantle the emerging

Arab literature in English. This attitude is vividly engendered in the post-colonial

counter-discourse, which calls for an end to the ghettoized labels that see the emerging

literature in English as marginal. For instance, Steven Salaita’s Arab American Literary

Fictions, Cultures, and Politics illustrates that the need for new approaches becomes the

new demand in literary studies when the subject matter is Arab Anglophone writers. It is

not easy to postulate this appeal in light of the challenges empowered by the act of re-

writing. Salaita argues that, since the events of 9/11, Arabs in America have become “an

unwilling addition to a racialized taxonomy packed with unwilling participants” (2007,

22). The discourse of racialism raises Arabs from the invisibility syndrome to the visible,

while the discourse of English has lifted Arabs as an ethnic group from the margin of

silence into a discourse of resistance. A literature that grows out of marginality addresses

complex issues such as identity, inclusion and representation, in a non-hegemonic way,

and “[a]s a result, the literature of Arab America does not quite bespeak a unified

tradition, but rather a communal grouping” (Salaita 2007, 57). Within this project, Salaita

asks “where might Arab American Studies leads us?” (2007, 146). Sailata’s question

addresses the possibility of new forms of pragmatic analysis in which Arab American

studies could influence the continuity of such a domain beyond area studies and the

discourse of racialism.

Another argument, but a more protean one, can be found in Amin Malak’s Muslim

Narrative and the Discourse of English. Malak argues that “in such conditions of flux and

ambivalent affiliations no neat discursive closure is possible” (2005, 89). Of course, when

Malak refers to this “flux”, he establishes the basis for an identity that exists in the age of

exile and diaspora. “No possible discursive closure” can be a hasty argument, since he

acknowledges that the need to find “a stable terrain to accommodate their hybridized,

evolving sensibilities” (Malak 2005, 89) is a timely and untimely project simultaneously.

In this vein, it appears that Malak’s project is a rather inclusive one where non-Muslim

writers would be able to participate in this discussion. Nevertheless, the approach

appears elusive: whereas the argument constructs itself on the “aching search for the

voices that articulate the point of view of the disadvantaged” (Malak 2005, 2), the

framework of the book seems to be based mainly on Islamic voices, excluding non-

Muslims (among them Kurds, Dalits, the Palestinians, and other minorities).

It should be clear by now that, regardless of the approach that I select, the notion of

bricolage, which I have discussed above, is a key concept in my study of these novels.

Through problematizing these concepts, I aim at locating the North African Anglophone

writing within a predefined scope of post-colonial transcultural minorities. This concept

makes it possible for a North African to write in a major language – a global language –

that is characterized by transcultural de-territorialization.

In addition, the relative emphasis on language as location has expressed a

contrapuntal balance in the process of identity self-construction and in the imagining of

communities. On the one hand, the use of a major language thrives on the optimism of

inclusion within the majority, especially in the hope of deconstructing the potential

danger of exclusion from cultural memory. Language connects two distinct facades

39

harmoniously. It connects the minor with the host land, whereas connection to the

homeland is a matter of cultural memory. On the other hand, it is hardly definite to seek

elements of visibility as markers of communities. Place, any place, connects people

without borders. Hybridity equally regards communities as imagined. What is

remarkable in this regard is that bodies are in constant motion; language is creolized,

borders and spaces are marked by the notion of liminality, identities are in flux, and

communities are imagined. While these contrapuntal inferences, remarkably, may belie

the arguments that call for a post-colonial, hegemonic community, they certainly direct

the internal stratification of (regional) dialects into a condition for the existence of both

language and place. My view of these relations as contrapuntal resides in the dynamic

recurrences of liminal spaces and hybrid identities – major or minor – negotiating the

locale of diaspora in a different language.

Post-colonial subjectivity is not a priori the study of diaspora, but it is part and

parcel of the treatment of (dis)placement in other tongues. The multifarious forms of

literature in English require a theoretical outlook that takes into consideration all the

responses and exigencies related to the text. A text can sometimes reproduce instability

and language may provoke this instability by reliance on the social space.

Transculturality, therefore, remains the space in which stability is negotiated, thereby

providing the basis for an alternative form of modernity.

40

41

3 The Moor Speaks: Memory,

Identity, and Space in

Anouar Majid’s Si Yussef

I began this study by arguing that labels such as “post-colonialism” or “new literatures in

English” either designate narrow areas or concern homogenizing discourses in literary

and cultural studies. These constructions are circulated to limit the inclusion of an

emerging literature in languages that are not simply colonial per se. That the scope of

English Studies, Post-colonial Studies, or the New Literatures in English deals with the

overarching contemporary English fiction in/outside the former British Empire does not

seem to help in any engagement with aspects of certain literary and cultural

contemporaneity, such as the case of the North African Anglophone novel. The cultural,

political, economic, and ideological specificities of this geographical space render the

intersection between the colonial and the post-colonial problematic.

I have also argued that English literature today is not tied to a certain geographical

space. Rather, its production has largely become transcultural as a result of

“multicultural groups of writers, working in disparate parts of the world, whose works

explore the intersecting effects of colonialism, decolonialism, migration, and economic

and cultural globalization” (Jay 2010, 91). As the forces of globalization have inspired

new routes in the post-colonial and English studies, the same forces can be used in the

Anglophone narrative produced by writers of North African origin. It is imperative to

our understanding that we forge new horizons with which to cope with issues of history,

identity, and belonging in a more specific and subtle way.

In order to direct attention toward such specificities, I will argue that such a model

consists of a theoretical level and a methodological level. At the theoretical level, the

notion of bricolage that I introduced in Chapter 2 construes the North African

Anglophone novel as a transcultural literature of the minoritarian. The transformational

aspect permits flexibility as a mechanism for analyzing such fiction beyond the standards

of all that is post-colonial. At the methodological level, Deleuze and Guattari’s approach

remains the framework for my analysis (cf. Aldea 2011). In defining my field of study, I

aim to reconstruct a new paradigm for approaching North African literary studies by

emphasizing the aspect of re-writing. In this way, my understanding of the abrupt

changes in North Africa will be based mainly on the transformational aspect that such

approaches could engender. There are different layers that constitute the production of

the Anglophone novel of North Africa, and such layers can only be thought of if we

accept the notion of translation offered as “being between” (Lennon 2010, 84).

42

In the following chapter, I will argue that questions such as those of history,

language, and identity can be seen as constituent elements in analyzing the emerging

North African novel in English. In paying these questions careful attention I would like to

start with Anouar Majid’s Si Yussef as an exemplary narrative that aims at re-writing

identity at the same time as it re-imagines its view of history.

3.1 WHOSE STORY? THE MOOR FILLS THE VOID BETWEEN MEMORY

AND HISTORY

When we talk about the act of writing in the geographical space of Morocco and,

especially, Tangier in this present narrative, the reader might anticipate a discussion of

the construction of Moor and/or the Moorish culture. At the same time, to talk of the new

Moor presupposes the existence of an old Moor, because the Moor I use in my discussion

resembles the construct of the Moor used during the Spanish Reconquesta. This includes

especially the expulsion of the Muslims and the Jews from Al-Andalus, now the Iberian

Peninsula. In contrast, to question the legitimacy of the act of writing is akin to the

epistemological debate that pertains to the construct of the “Moor”. Yet the invocation of

the Moor insists on the imaginative and mythological, but remains important to the act of

writing in North Africa. To do this, I would like to elaborate on three main aspects.

First, I will argue that the act of writing in the novel Si Yussef is inseparable from the

process of reconstructing the post-colonial identity. To elaborate on this, I suggest that

hybridity becomes a double-edged source of identity construction: the moment it

originates a new identity that helps the incorporation of the self into the milieu of

memory, the older construction of identity is obliterated. The process of hybridizing

systematically deconstructs the notion of indigeneity, the source of its birth. The second

aim is to contribute to the literary and cultural debate on the notion of cross-cultural

memory. To do so, I seek to show that in the interstices of the psychological struggle over

constructing identity vis-à-vis the changes that take place in the post-colonial space of

Tangier, there emerges a nostalgic feeling toward recuperating the lost past of the

minoritarian. It is a dichotomy that invites us, readers, students, and literary and cultural

critics, to explicate and develop new epistemologies beyond those preserved in post-

colonialism. Third, it is critical to the minoritarian voices and the methods of writing their

history to recognize inventiveness when approaching history. It is essentially pertinent

for identity to emerge, that history be discussed in the present. This becomes a “U-turn”

back to the past, as Si Yussef, in the novel Si Yussef, indicates. In brief, I would like to start

from this point (identity in colonial Tangier) and indicate how it maps and remaps the

space of Tangier in the narrative of Si Yussef. This narrative structure can be seen as a

combination of how the young Lamin defines Tangier and how Si Yussef represents it in

different ways.

Si Yussef, the first and hitherto only novel by Anouar Majid, was first published in

1992 by Quartet Books and republished by Interlink World Fiction in 2005. It tells the

story of an old man called Yussef, honored by the narrator by adding the title “Si” (sir).

The story tells itself, as Lamin suggests, trying to distance himself on his first encounter

with the reader, mentioning that he is a mere recorder of Si Yussef’s story. As the

43

narrative moves back and forth, relying on the modernist techniques of stream of

consciousness and flashbacks, it is evident that the aims are twofold: first it seems to

dismantle the discourse of modernity, and second it aims to introduce a new form of

memory that re-writes the history of the city of Tangier in Morocco. Between the two

representations, the story of Si Yussef unfolds, but remains a crossroads whereby the

notion of identity is problematized; meanwhile the gap between history and memory is

filled with a transcultural memory. This chapter therefore is about these issues, and how

they all function to offer an account of the erasure and re-imagining of a space that no

longer exists except in the narrative: Si Yussef’s Tangier.

On a gloomy day, Lamin, a university student in Fes, meets with Si Yussef – a

meeting of which he “had been expecting the honour for seven years” (Majid 2005, 1).

The narrative spans “exactly twelve days after that gloomy afternoon” (Majid 2005, 15).

The opening of the novel reveals that the quest for re-reading identity vis-à-vis history

remains a space to be explored in this narrative. Two parallel principles characterize this

moment: first, it is a quest to record the past of Tangier and, second, it is an emblem to

reconstruct identity. The first meeting illustrates two different yet connected objectives. Si

Yussef wants the narrator to be the recorder of his story because, as Si Yussef says, his

“mission is done” (Majid 2005, 6) and the next generation ought to know part of their

past. As a university student, Lamin is qualified for this mission. Nonetheless, Lamin

seems to be overwhelmed by Si Yussef’s stories:

For the fifteen minutes that I had spent with Si Yussef, I was suddenly introduced,

for the first time in my life, to a world not of Herculeses and gladiators and other

mythical or semi-mythical heroes that history creates everywhere, at any time, but

to the world of anonymous men on the verge of extinction, and these men talking of

the fabulous wonders of their collective unrecorded past, suddenly making of the

legitimate knowledge I had been acquiring for years in public and private

institutions, an intolerable lie. (Majid 2005, 7)

The implication of this passage concerns the denial of the notion of history – the one that

is produced by the state – by referring to its production as “an intolerable lie”.

The conversation with Si Yussef for the entire fifteen minutes is enough for Lamin

to build up his assumption: the knowledge of the history he “had been acquiring for

years” is limited and contingent, since the collective memory of certain individuals has

been left unrecorded, unheard. Most problematic in this moment is a belief in the need to

de-historicize history itself, of which the act of re-writing needs to lean proportionally, at

least, on those in the margins. In this way it is possible, as Lamin shows, to encroach on

the territory of the predefined notion of the history of Tangier. The institutionalization of

history has discarded a remarkable archive, which memory alone preserves.

Consequently it could be suggested that the past is marked by its discontinuity in the

present. In her “Writing the Individual Back into the Collective”, Crane argues that “[i]f

history is both the past(s) and the narratives that represent past as historical memory in

relation to present/presence, collective memory is a conceptualization that expresses a

sense of the continual presence of the past” (1997, 1373). Such representation is ultimately

44

what both Lamin and Si Yussef aim to emphasize, but each in his own way. Collective

memory is an important aspect that brings the past into current discussions, and it is

through this collective notion of memory that each individual becomes her/his own

historian, as Pierre Nora emphasizes (1989, 14). However, between the notion of

collective memory and Nora’s lieux de mémoire, a void characterizes the transition

between the experienced version of memory (Si Yussef) and the learned one (Lamin).

Nora’s argument concerning lieux de mémoire has been useful for post-colonial

criticism. Maria Lauret, for instance, argues that sites of memory remain significant for an

understanding of Alice Walker’s novel The Temple of My Familiar in its way of preserving

history “which does not try to suppress or eliminate memory but actively incorporates it

and infuses it with imagination” (2000, 158). In the context of North Africa, the notion of

the lieux examplifies a tool that edifies the notion of collective memory. In his study of

Assia Djebar’s La femme sans sepulture, O'Riley notes that the text can be seen as a site of

memory that “articulates a national commemoration of resistance to Western imperialism

ultimately ’illuminated’ by its spectral light and ethereal staging” (2004, 75). Djiar also

notes that some sites of memory in Algeria constitute the mechanisms through which

Algeria re-writes its history (2009, 186). Just as the notion of lieux de mémoire remains

significant for the North African subject to re-write her/his own history, it also becomes

an important aspect in the study of Si Yussef.

In his “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire”, Pierre Nora argues

that memory is seized by history because the search for “memory is the search for one’s

history” (1989, 13). Such transition from memory to history is dramatized in the sense

that speaking of memory becomes primarily a factor of its own diminishing (Nora 1989,

7). Accordingly, an interest in lieux de mémoire becomes an obligation the moment after

which memory “secrets itself […] a turning point where consciousness of a break with

the past is bound up with the sense that memory has been torn” (1989, 7). Susan Crane,

in this vein, asks a timely question: “[d]o we write history because we have experienced it

ourselves, or do we see ourselves as looking at something that is distant and virtually lost

to us?” (1997, 1374).

An explicit distinction between the two questions leads us to explore how history

and memory operate in the novel. Whereas Lamin looks at history from a “distance” (the

consequences of which he is able to interpret only through his interlocutor), the history

that Si Yussef represents is part of an “experienced” memory. The difference between the

two positions is significant but one that takes the shape of the old debate concerning

history and memory. The paradigm that Crane presents exhibits a channel of

interchangeabilities. It is difficult to state from which position history can be viewed, as

Crane asks, but we may assume that history can be retold as operating in both directions.

To conceptualize the difference, one needs to measure out her/his own involvement in

the preservation of memory (which she calls historical memory) and the involvement

with the experience of that memory (1997, 1375). To emphasize this paradigm, I will term

these Si Yussef’s and Lamin’s histories. For Si Yussef we may argue that his past

experiences are historical traces in themselves, and yet the distance that stands between

Lamin and his account of Si Yussef’s history does not imply that this past is “virtually

lost” to Lamin.

45

What interests Si Yussef is memory as a recorder of a lost past. Si Yussef refuses to

regard history as merely a book to read or as an archive to become enchanted by. History,

as Si Yussef defines it, can be grasped only through memory. Yet Si Yussef regards

history as the essential part of memory, since, for Si Yussef, that

memory is not the past, no; it is the present struggling with the past. And the

present is a point of return, a U-turn to the past, because one day you will

understand that the future is the biggest lie of human history […] the future is

where the past is projected, and when we reach that projection, that frightening

screen, we attain the recycled past again. (Majid 2005, 59-60)

History must be brought into the present discussion through memory, and Si Yussef in

this passage seems to recall his memory. Si Yussef suggests that it is always important to

go back to history: history alone grants access to the present in the ways that lessons can

be extracted from such memories. To understand this movement, Halbwachs suggests

that we need to distinguish between two forms of memory: one that is historical and the

other collective. The “U-turn” to the past explains “[t]he need to write the history of a

period, a society, or even a person [that] is only aroused when the subject is too distant in

the past to allow for those who preserve some remembrance of it” (1980, 78). Distance

from the past does correlate with the position that Lamin inhabits, and yet it seems as if

Si Yussef’s experience of history is becoming distanced as well. In addition, both

positions towards the past differ significantly. Halbwachs points to the way that

proximity vis-à-vis the past is understood as distant from memory; in other words, “the

historical memory is the representation of a lost past” and that “[t]he past no longer exists

as collective memory” (Crane 1997, 1377; emphasis original). It could be true that history

is not the past or even part of it. Besides, there is an experienced history that alters and

renews itself every now and then, “and permits the recovery of many old currents that

have seemingly disappeared”, leading to the assumption that this is the collective

memory (Halbwachs 1980, 64).

In the Moroccan discourse of memory, memory operates between the individual

experience and symbolic incorporation of collective memory. Mohammed Melyani points

out that “collective memory gravitates between two modes of reminiscences”, one in

which the singularity of perspectives causes the collective experience to appear as that of

the individual, and the other which makes the symbolic incorporation of memory

meaningful beyond the individual through its transmission at the national level (2007, 6;

translation mine). In other words, Melyani argues that collective memory “gravitates”

between national allegiances and personal experiences in order to dictate a history of the

Moroccan imagined community. The codification of such history might abandon the

resurgence of minor memory such as that of Si Yussef, and it is because of this negligence

that Si Yussef feels the need to discuss the past in the present. What is left to the reader in

the end is a new version of the past, a “recycled” past of a minoritarian. Accordingly,

Orlando reminds us that “for a nation to construct a collective conscious in the present, it

must never forget the events of the past” and that only the notion of the “collective” lieux

can sustain this consciousness (2010, 287).

46

To incorporate such a process of inclusion, Si Yussef considers the present to be a

mere process of turning to the past. He explains this aspect by asking:

what about the light in between? That is the present: an emanation of memory

bouncing on the illusion of the future. “Live your present!” Do you realize that this

is a criminal philosophy? It is as if you asked the projected light to enjoy itself in its

trajectory! No, the moment is useless, because the moment has a goal that started in

the past. (2005, 60)

The passage above explains that the present, without a recovery of the lost past, without

the collective memory, is not a present but an illusion. The search to long for the

trajectory of the present without “projecting” on the past is to enjoy a “useless” moment,

because “the moment has a goal that started in the past”. This is a call for a revisionist

reading of the past through the narrative of the minorities, in a way to provide a

countermemory. To live the present, one needs to know how much of this present

belongs to the past, or, rather, to what extent the memory of the past is preserved in the

present. The movement from the past to the present thus prevails when Si Yussef claims

that the transition needs a more focused and inclusive approach to history and memory.

This includes, as the passage shows, the individual, whenever s/he has the chance to,

penetrating the historical consciousness of the collective. It is through a historical reading

that memory becomes important, but that does not suggest that there is a need to

“supplant the continuity of the collective” (Crane 1997, 1381).

Consequently, to define the present demands “justification through the illumination

of the past” (Nora 1989, 10), and that is exactly what Si Yussef calls for:

I hoped that remembrance would be taught at schools, but there they only teach

them big events like wars and state affairs and plagues and dates. Take Sheikh El-

Mdini, for example: why is he never mentioned in our history books? Why would

an American scholar cross the Atlantic to interview him while we abandoned him to

the winds of the sea? (Majid 2005, 59)

The possibility that Si Yussef articulates concerns remembrance perceived as a continuing

act in the present. Since at schools “they only teach them big events”, history remains

destructive of memory. However, does it essentially mean an end to Si Yussef’s and his

generation’s memory? If so, what, as Si Yussef’s question indicates, drives an American

to cross the Atlantic in order to interview an old man about a vanished past and its

world? This is an interest in the history of Tangier as a way to forge an understanding by

indulging in the act of writing a past in an unconventional way. The idea of lieux de

mémoire in this way is pertinent to the memory of Si Yussef. It does not forecast the end of

memory but reinforces it, because it is through memory that transition from an actual

past to a preserved one could take place.

Since Si Yussef understands that his life is about to end, he looks for someone (but

not simply anyone) to record this part of the history of Morocco. He relies on his memory

and the lieux de mémoire without interrupting the transition from memory to history. But

47

how does such transition work? In my view, it is precisely the narrative voice that fills the

gaps left open in this transition. It is the voice of Lamin himself, who beholds the remote

past of Si Yussef.

Subsequently, Lamin regards himself as “the seeker of truth” who analyzes himself

to recapture the past, a past that has retreated in anger and shame, spreading its

curse on the future with the vindictiveness of hurt orphans and brutally mistreated

widows; it is neither the French ‘involuntary consciousness’ nor the meticulous

picture of scholarship, but a past shrouded in the divine protection appointed for

innocents, a past that is forever closed to the insufficiently trained, a past that

certainly exists, but which now requires the supersensory and epileptic vision of

prophets and saviours. (Majid 2005, 34)

Is it legitimate to use the word “deconstruct” in the case of such a representation? The

manifestation of the past that Lamin prefers to elaborate on is a deconstructive version of

mainstream history. There is an incisive claim to vocalize a reconstructed self that is

conceded Si Yussef’s memory. The narrator has first deconstructed his preoccupation

with the history propagated in Moroccan national institutions in order to explore other

“histories” torn by the “legitimacy” of the monolithic, majority history. To argue in this

way is to accept that both Lamin and the main character are in dialogic connection. They

are indeed, because, after all, this is a dialogue between two different generations, one

past and one present, discussing the “myth” of the future. At this same time, though

contradictory at the surface level, the two manifestations of history complement each

other. Memory is in need of history, and, as Nora notes, “it is memory that dictates while

history writes” (1989, 21). Memory seems to become ephemeral, and Lamin

acknowledges this idea, because the memory of a certain minority group has been

marginalized to the national remembering. Lamin, in contrast, suggests a history that is

distinguished neither as an “involuntary consciousness” 7 nor as a part of his own

scholarship, but as one that designates the notion of a countermemory of a marginalized

people.

The term countermemory was coined by Michel Foucault in his essay “Nietzsche,

Genealogy, History” to call for a separation between memory and history, with an

insistence on considering memories from the margin, and to negate those of the

mainstream. It implies “a use of history that severs its connection to memory, its

metaphysical and anthropological model, and constructs a countermemory – a

transformation of history into a totally different form of time” (1977, 160).

Countermemory, according to Marie Law, is not memory itself but a designation of the

“role a particular memory is playing in a larger construct of remembrance […] It can be a

memory whose job is to subvert the dominant memory, or it can dislodge the tenacity of

the mainstream or obvious memory” and it might function as an act “of re-remembering

7 Cf. Marcel Proust’s novel in seven volumes (1913-1927), entitled À la Recherche du Temps Perdu is

known in English as In Search of Lost Time and also known as Remembrance of Things Lost. The

concept of involuntary memory is introduced to indicate that certain encountered events in daily life

might evoke the past consciously.

48

the past” through its projection in the present (2005, 9). To this we must add that

countermemory becomes the potential tool, or the “supersensory” vision, that saves those

marginal memories, like those of Si Yussef, from present oppressions.

Si Yussef knows that Lamin is a potential recorder of history, and the same belief

emerges for Lamin when he acknowledges that he is becoming the recorder of Si Yussef’s

past (Majid 2005, 72). This perhaps becomes more significant when it comes to Si Yussef:

Making confessions of love to a boy who hasn’t even started in life, an unbroken

shell! But this is precisely what I want: not for you to be my disciple or to see

nothing but a beautiful, spotless panorama of history; no, I want you to drive a

lesson – somehow! somehow! – from this tale. It is not, you see, a document with a

message: I wish I could produce such thing. Maybe you can when you’ve listened to

me. (Majid 2005, 68)

The exhaustion of marginal history makes the task problematic for Si Yussef. He does not

want the young Lamin to be overwhelmed by his stories, yet he is in need of some ways

to document them. His inability to produce such a document of his memory inspires him

(Si Yussef) to look for a recorder. At this point, it becomes important to answer Lamin’s

question: “Why he chooses me?” It is perhaps because “he had for some reasons trusted

the serenity [that Lamin] displayed by the act of reading newspapers and playing less

dominoes, and because [he] wasn’t exactly the typical young man of the new generation”

(Majid 2005, 14). But the other main question remains: why is it this urgent to emphasize

the act of recording?

It is critical to the act of writing back that the means of gathering memories of the

past should conform to that of the present. In order to write back, or preserve the history

of the native, such representations become important in the struggle over historical

inscriptions. As I have suggested in Chapter 2, the importance of examining the

authenticity of representations becomes greater when it concerns the question of

colonizer vs. colonized. Modernity is critical in such a process because the discourse of

modernity encloses the major histories within a national archive. Consequently, is

confusion likely to arise in this respect as to why, for instance, Si Yussef wants his story to

be heard? As the last man of the Khaldi family, he feels a sense of obligation to narrate

the story of Tangier in order to preserve what has already been diminished by modernity

and globalization. Of course, Si Yussef has children, but their hybrid identity and their

absolute “loyalty” to the modern machine engage them to a different way of life. This

engagement causes them to be torn apart from their pasts, and consequently renders the

history of Tangier subversive: his children “seem to have inherited a different blood”

(Majid 2005, 139).

It is a serious matter for Si Yussef that he should articulate his memories to a “non-

hybrid” subject in order to preserve them, and later tell them to the world. But the feeling

of reviving his stories is troublesome to Si Yussef:

I feel like digging in my memory to resuscitate my stories and bring them before me

like complicitous ghosts against the present. But who wants to hear them? People

49

my age would think that I am trying to make a big deal of a time that we all lived,

and the young think that I am compensating for my displacement by romanticizing

a past that was as boring as ours. That is what my children told me. (Majid 2005, 59;

emphasis added)

Si Yussef feels that he is in opposition both to his own generation and to more recent ones

(children). If the former think of him as making a big deal out of minor events, the latter

see that he only wants to romanticize a past that has nothing to do with their present

ideals. The question here is not to judge, romanticize, or even to idealize the old, minor

events; rather, it is “to care and understand” (Majid 2005, 13). The passage also hints at

filling the void of displacement: there seems to be awareness among Si Yussef’s friends

that he is displaced, and that the only way to fill in the gap is to imagine his past through

“digging” in his memory. History and place intersect at this moment to problematize the

identity of Si Yussef, to the extent that he feels incapable of living either in his past or in

his present. It seems that the moment the post-colonial minorities emerge to break silence,

they need to take into consideration the difficulties and the ethical encounters that

emanate from this process. It appears to be difficult to arrive at the conclusion that the

past can be negotiated in the present through memories alone. Memories can sometimes

fail to justify ethically a presence or an absence. But Si Yussef’s aim goes beyond a merely

constructed, romanticized version of his own past.

Moreover, it does not seem to be a trumpet call to cherish the history of a place and

time in which Si Yussef lives. Quite the contrary, the call has rightly found a listener

whose education makes him a distinguished figure; such is the case when Si Yussef

chooses Lamin and makes him the listener to his confession. To overcome such obstacles

that may face Si Yussef in his process of re-telling the past, he mentions the history of

Tangier to the Young Lamin. Lamin, the English student in Fes, is overwhelmed by Si

Yussef’s story, and sometimes he regrets the moment he has accepted his invitation to

discuss Si Yussef’s remote past. Lamin confesses that “in the abysmal corners of my

solitude, I wish I had never met the man; I wish I never knew, and I wish I remained the

fortress that I had been, protected by the trenchant and pitiless exaltation of our times”

(Majid 2005, 71-2).

The sense of guilt or remorse springs mainly from the weight that Si Yussef’s past

has on the young Lamin. This moment is significant both to Lamin’s identity and to the

authenticity of the narrative itself. Lamin’s identity is in a liminal position: he can neither

retreat from the imposed obligation nor continue the linearity of the narration. There

seems to be a flattering subjectivity that visualizes the whole narrative as merely Lamin’s

composite. It is difficult, however, to talk about the complexity of Lamin’s identity

without considering the dynamic of temporal differences between himself and Si Yussef.

Lamin later seems to be relaxed about this position, regardless of such complexities, as

long as it helps him to restore his consciousness that modern life confuses. It is this

encounter that “resuscitated in him a natural inclination, long obfuscated by the various

satanic temptations of our modern and developed civilization” (Majid 2005, 72).

The accumulation of historical consciousness with the complexity it leaves on the

narrator’s identity compounds a reading that moves from the question of the history-

50

memory into the filling of the void that exists in the narration process itself. The

determinacy of the void in this narrative does not suggest any inauthenticity or

inappropriateness in Si Yussef. On the contrary, it remains a paradox that designates the

space between the narration and the re-narration, between memory and countermemory,

and between past and present: it is a space of transcultural memory, which fills in the gap

in this narrative, as I will show in the last section of this chapter. Even though Si Yussef’s

story is narrated, and “told in a thousand tongues” (Majid 2005, 71), it seems that the

same story at its outset becomes an obsession with Lamin, providing him with the power

to reconstruct his identity. Si Yussef inhabits the mind of Lamin, and Si Yussef’s presence

remains

a silent ambiguous presence that seems to have sprung spontaneously from the terra

incognita of my soul, requesting utmost visibility with such an urgency that I find

myself sometimes seating and screaming in my privacy […] while my work will be

remnants of myself, the technical self oversees self-preservation and maintains a

certain sociability that, in the long run, keeps us alive. (Majid 2005, 71; emphasis

original)

The “right to narrate”, as Bhabha (2003, 180) reminds us, is similar to the right to read.

Narration is the meaning of Yussef’s own life, and for the young Lamin re-narration can

be viewed as an act of reconstructing identity. The “silent” presence of Si Yussef

resembles the minoritarian past, which is hived off from the mainstream historical

archive. The visibility it requires resuscitates both the collective memory of Si Yussef and

the other minority groups, and provides the possibility of revision of their identities.

More importantly, the present process of identity construction gives credence to the

memory of Si Yussef and also becomes a remnant documentation of a diminished past for

Lamin. However, to become a reminder of the “lost” past and to be at the same time

obsessed with that past is to leave the space open and to regard this optimal picture of

the past as unreliable. Obsession can be applied to both Lamin and Si Yussef, which

permits viewing the narrative of the past as a subjective version of history. Marie-Law

notes that it is the effect of nostalgia that renders the past unreliable, but concludes that

such an effect can also be regarded as “a kind of countermemory” (2006, 10).

The haunting picture of Si Yussef makes the reader uncertain about the story and

the history. To argue this reading, one may recall, for instance, Hayden White’s notion of

“emplotment” where the notion of story and history intertwine to interpret historical

narratives. Such an interpretation creates the trajectory of the story itself, because, as

White reminds us, “[e]mplotment is the way by which a sequence of events fashioned

into a story is gradually revealed to be a story of a particular kind” (1973, 7). Lamin is

aware of this “particular kind” of a story, and this status of uncertainty drives him to

enquire whether the story is “plausible” or the mere fabrication of a “deluded young

man” (Majid 2005, 72). Yet Lamin insists that the story must be told. He does not know all

of the stories, since Si Yussef’s friends and relatives know other stories. Although history

can be decoded, the ethics of the sources from which it can be decoded may be difficult to

ascertain. Lamin and Si Yussef believe that history is dead and so, too, are the people

51

narrating it, but only palimpsests can extract its memories, and perhaps this is what

exemplifies how history should be re-written. Lamin, like Si Yussef, haunted by his

memories, wants to remember this story, to be remembered and taught at schools and

public institutions. He wants to locate

the agents of time the motive of our odyssey. And to record the lives of men for

redemption foreseen […] And to express my unending gratitude to you Si Yussef

[…] to become that past, and to look at later generations with the pain of abandoned

parents, and then know a truth revealed for thousands of years to different nations.

(Majid 2005, 81)

Lamin relentlessly argues for the possibility of the story appearing to belong to Si Yussef

rather than as his invented “propaganda”, and the novel seemingly opts to mask its

inability by separating the two stories: Lamin’s and Si Yussef’s. It is at this point that

filling in the gaps in Si Yussef’s narration becomes plausible. Lamin wants Si Yussef’s

past to be his as well, and when that past is revealed, recognition and understanding

remain two facets of the act of writing. In her reading of Si Yussef, Nasri points out that

the act of writing becomes the psychological space in which identity is negotiated and

reconstructed, whereby identity becomes a process of narration in its own right. Nasri

suggests that “[t]he space of writing unveils a new territory for the exploration of a new

identity” (2005, 29). Nasri further explains that the “new territory” is understood as an

effect of diasporic displacement, which is a vibrant aspect of the novel.

Dislocation operates in the novel on three levels. On the level of the individual, the

recognition of the past becomes the “motive” of the individual’s journey and the purpose

of her/his return to lost origins. On the level of the collective, it is a way to start thinking

about individual histories in a more inclusive way. On the national level, in order for the

story of the marginal species to be recognized, it has to be the individual’s and the

collective’s need that is to be negotiated across cultures and nations. On the first two

levels, Si Yussef’s historical experience seems contradictory but inspires a responsibility

that supersedes the mainstream historical archive. In order for Si Yussef’s story to foresee

its ultimate dimension of what it means to be a Tanjawi in modern Morocco, Lamin

resorts to the space of language, as a possibility for re-narrating Si Yussef’s story.

When Lamin meets with Omar, Si Yussef’s son, in his office, he discusses with him

the possibility of writing a narrative about his father. The conversation begins with

Lamin telling of his plan “to write some kind of document (I said it was a book in order

to impress him) to record my brief encounter with his father. So unusual was my gesture

that he thought it was a joke” (Majid 2005, 114). The narrator clearly indicates that the

purpose behind such document or the book is to tell Omar’s father’s story to the world.

This aspect reminds us of Si Yussef’s plea addressed to Lamin to establish re-memoration

as an educational subject. Lamin points to this meeting by saying that Omar

believed vaguely and gave me enough respect and permission to record these lines.

It was awkward for him to know that his father reflected on his life with a

young man who is not even a Khaldi. (Majid 2005, 114)

52

This is so because neither of his children is willing to reflect on the life of people on the

verge of extinction; the children of history will become fathers of the of late modernity

and globalization. Paradoxically, the English language becomes the vehicle for

transferring the minoritarian memories. When Lamin is asked why he chooses to write in

English and not, for instance, in Spanish, the language that Si Yussef’s offspring have

mastered, he replies that “because I want the whole world to know what your father said,

Mr Omar” (Majid 2005, 115).

The English language offers a significant margin of freedom for the narrator, and, as

I noted in Chapter 2, the English language in North Africa is considered a neutral tool

that enables the North African writer and her/his novel to step away from cultural or

social barriers. To write a book in English about the memory of the marginalized Si

Yussef is to document an era of a place that is no longer available on the map (at least in a

symbolic way). Changes do affect territories: countries have been erased and others

established; people die, and their offspring emerge as part of an economic and cultural

globalization that bifurcates all that is original and pure. As a result, hybridity becomes

the only marker of the newly emergent space. Lamin wants to make of Si Yussef’s story a

timeless “register of accurate descriptions of human actions” (Majid 2005, 115), the

English language incisively offers new directions for approaching of the story of Si

Yussef. Nasri reminds us that through the modification of English, through the insertion

of untranslated words (but for which a glossary is offered in the beginning of the novel),

and its heterogeneity, “a new life is given to a true interweaving of plural histories”

(2005, 31). Since “language embodies the thought processes and values of a culture”

(Ashcroft 2009, 105), it is undoubtedly a persistent reminder of the culture of Si Yussef

precisely because it transforms the language in this way.

However interesting the process might be, the language “is becoming an

unresolved nightmare, precipitating all kinds of moral dilemmas and generating a guilt

whose redemption speaks in a shy stuttering voice” (Majid 2005, 83). The sense of guilt is

projected onto the use of an “imported” language, a language of becoming and dislocated

writers. This passage shares the observation that I made earlier concerning the diasporan

language, in which language becomes the alternative home for the imagined community.

As an American writer of North African origin, Anouar Majid aims to fill in the empty

space of dislocation by writing in the English language. Nevertheless, the fear emerges

because of the language’s inability to carry the weight it should bear in the memory of

the marginal Moroccans, and the new Moors. It is an “unresolved nightmare” and a

“dilemma” that focuses primarily on the sacredness of the Arabic language, its diction,

and the inability to utter the unspeakable. To use English might solve the dilemma of the

unspeakable, but it might not resolve the writer’s displacement or the possibility that Si

Yussef may be interpreted out of context.

In an interview conducted by Ghambu, Majid points out that this story is mostly

about his “home sickness” (2002, np.). This homesickness becomes a priori central to the

transition from memory to history in Si Yussef. Majid’s remark provides a point of

departure to link displacement in diaspora to language and memory. He says:

53

The central question that animates my world is how to envision a world in which

cultures maintain their sustaining traditions while pursuing a progressive agenda of

change and fruitful dialogue with one another. Very often, we find people rightly

criticizing the reactionary tendencies of Islam […] or attacking Western colonialism;

but rarely do people critique both at once. (2002, np.)

At this point, it is significant to our understanding that the novel should limit the milieu

that the language inhabits in this epistemology.

There is of course a general shift from the question of memory/history to that of

identity/language, and yet, I think, they both operate at the same level. The fear that the

English language might prevent the reader from understanding the logic of translating

the undocumented historical events is directed toward the efficiency of the writer’s own

translation. Lennon notes that, in such circumstances, the relationship between

translation and the text (as memory and its script) often turns the reader into her/his own

translator; in other words, the reader is the translator (2010, 75). Moreover, to translate

the oral into the written assumes two processes of translation, which may lead to

historical lacunae and misunderstanding. As a result, it is logical for Lamin to think of

erasing such a document, especially when he feels that the interference of the language

might contaminate the memory of Si Yussef. Thus it turns out to be the task of the reader

to translate/transition these gaps into a less coercive but significant translation, either as a

document or as a transcultural text. The English language not only sometimes fails to

transmit the narration from orality to scripture because of the gaps it leaves, but it

also screams in a long uncompromising whisper, and when it pierces my being, I try

to erase this script, to avoid this deadly responsibility for an activity that is as

meaningless as the illusion of ambition […] I still have the choice of neutralizing the

whole enterprise, of cancelling pretensions. (Majid 2005, 83)

In this regard, Lamin wants to fill these gaps with as many memories as he can, but his

failure to master the language prevents him in this move. Lamin says that, “I would like

to fill these pages with them, but I already feel obliged to my readers. That is to say, the

English-speaking ones” (Majid 2005, 83). To argue in this way is to neglect an important

aspect used in the narrative, which is the insertion of untranslated words. This process

not only refers to the complexity of Lamin’s identity and the writer himself, but it also

foregrounds the possibility of neutralizing the English language, with process making it

one’s own. Such an understanding could probably explain the word “fill”, i.e., to fill in

the narrative with untranslated words, which may confuse the English reader. It has been

argued that the use of untranslated words in post-colonial fiction written in one of the

colonial languages aims at positioning the post-colonial identity as independent of the

colonial power. It also alludes to the social and cultural specificities of the post-colonial

subject (cf. Ashcroft 2009; Ashcroft 2001). In contrast, Lennon points out that the fact of

translating a local story for the contemporary global English reader remains a process of

“untranslation” that shifts the focus of “our” writers (2010, 143). In other words, Lennon

explains that in such circumstances, “‘our’ writers turn – may have turned – from the

54

U.S.-based literary-critical scene toward those of competing modernities” (2010, 142), that

makes globalization a choice for their re-writing.

If writing in English “sounds exotic” in the post-colonial space, probably for

“English-speaking” readers it becomes a tool for highlighting those mechanisms that

sustain the act of re-writing modernity in “other” post-colonial spaces such as North

Africa. This may explain why the writer of Si Yussef resorts to the insertion of

untranslated words and a glossary at the beginning of the novel. Who could fathom the

meaning “that the story of a new generation would be told in English?” (Majid 2005, 83).

As Lamin points out, it is because he seems to become a rebel: to rebel against that is

national and transnational, to offer a critique of both, the traditional and the global, and

to understand all in order to offer a transcultural reading of the past, the present, and the

future. Lamin’s fear, as the translator and the “re-narrator” of Si Yussef, apparently

becomes logical, because the meetings with Si Yussef have been quick as if memory were

marked by the assemblage of time and space. Lamin explains his acquaintance with Si

Yussef at length in the following passage:

There were random meetings, urgent, fast, vague like the ocean, but God forgive me

if I missed a message he had intended. I felt like a vessel for his recollections,

dumped on me with our typical carelessness, and I, for some mysterious reason, the

same reason that justified the writing of old documents and scriptures, struggling

with them as if it was a matter of life and death, I did better than listen. And I hope I

remembered. (Majid 2005, 121)

I may argue that the transmission of this memory at the oral level (from Si Yussef to

Lamin) and then in writing (not an immediate process) might not give credence to this

narrative and its history, because, after all, the story becomes Si Yussef’s, as the narrator

notes. However, orality remains significant in this transition from the memory of Si

Yussef into the scripture entitled Si Yussef. The history of Tangier and the Tanjawi people

has been documented as part of an oral culture. The culture of orality is the space that

stands between memory and history. It is not the destruction of memory by history as

Nora suggests, but it is the hybrid space in which lieux de mémoire play a role through

which it offers a countermemory. Both actors collaborate in the construction of such a

document: Si Yussef with his memory and Lamin with his language. There are moments

in which Lamin fears that he will forget such memories as the passage above suggests,

but forgetting can also be part of the countermemory whereby Lamin provides his own

explanation (not imagination) of the historical events, and translates, or re-narrates, them.

This is a new mode of writing back: writing the history whose legitimacy is not

dependent on the professional historians alone. Everyone can participate in such

documentations, becoming her or his own historian in a collective manner, and write and

document others by referring to the lieux de mémoire without necessarily speaking in their

place. Crane concludes her essay with a poem by Mark Strand8 saying that the future

8 The poem starts with the following: It came in a language/ Untouched by pity, in lines, lavish and

dark, / where death is reborn and sent into the world as a gift, / So the future, with no voice of it own.

55

“with no voice of its own, nor hope of ever becoming more than it will be, might mourn”

(qtd in Crane, 1385). Crane explains that this poem is the “lieux de mémoire. The fourth

great poem will be written by each individual who is thinking historically: and it may or

may not be ‘saved’” (1997, 1385). The reason why Crane considers such a poem as the

fourth lieux lies in her considering a historical document as history. She points out that

Perhaps the most banal thing that could be said about history, in general, is that ‘it

happened,’ or something happened. But of course, history is not only the past or

pasts that ‘happened’ or continue to happen, it is also what is written or produced

about those pasts both then and now. And so whenever we think about history, we

are thinking about […], in Mark Strand’s words, the ‘gift’ sent into the world so that

the future might remember. (1997, 1372; emphasis added)

To answer the question that heads this section, “whose story?”, I would conclude that

this is the story of the new Moor, whose intention is to demarcate the history of Tangier

in a new tongue. This story is told by Si Yussef, written by Lamin, and imagined by the

reader, and all of the participants have their share in figuring out how Tangier (a former

colonial space) is reconstructed in the modern era. A deconstructive version of reality is

on hold, a mere fictitious prototype designates yet another venue to dismantle the

boundaries between fact and fiction, on the basis of which the next section will be

developed.

3.2 THE MOOR WRITES BACK: AN ALTERNATIVE HISTORY

In the previous section, I have sought to explain how the passage between memory and

history undergoes a process of filling and refilling the void in order for the

transition/translation to take place effectively. I have also argued that the new mode of

history proclaimed in this narrative either by Si Yussef, Lamin, or by both remains a

discursive strategy for memory to appear as a counter-account of the mainstream

memory. However, the discussion does not explain precisely the sort of history that the

narrative aims to write back to. Hence, this section aims to delve into this question and

the ways in which the narrative employs magical realism as a device linking Si Yussef,

Lamin, and the other characters with their native past. It also aims to show how the

amalgamation of two conflicting perspectives, the magical and the real, deconstructs the

binaries of past-present, real-imagined, and colonial-post-colonial, and offers a flexible

approach for the role of the presence of the past in the present.

When Lamin claims that his role in Si Yussef does not align with that of realism, he

intends to fashion a new mode of narrative history out of the memory at hand. The claim

that he is not “a realist” because he only knows “that some things are more real” to him

than other things (Majid 2005, 75) foregrounds the demise of yet another mode of history

in North Africa. In this vein, Lamin aims to fill in the void that is left in the remembrance

nor hope,/ Of ever becoming more than it will be, might mourn. “Orpheus Alone.” Mark Strand, The

Continuous Life: Poems (New York, 1990): 9.

56

of Si Yussef and his own memories altogether by claiming that his/Si Yussef’s tale is

“foretold, narrated for salvation of some and the confusion of others” (Majid 2005, 75).

In accepting this new mode of narration, I could argue that Si Yussef is meant to be a

new voice that challenges the epistemology and ontology of Western realism that have

empowered colonialism. Many critics have elaborated on this connection that forestalls

any possibility of writing beyond the cultural baggage of Western terminology. In her

“The Question of the Other: Cultural Critique of Magical Realism”, Wendy Faris argues

that the resurgence of what can be called magical realism is a discursive strategy that

examines the struggle between two contradictory systems. She notes that such positional

struggle “serves to reflect the postcolonial situation especially well. It has therefore

served a decolonizing role, one in which new voices have emerged, an alternative to

European realism” (2002, 103). Faris further notes that the associative link between the

discourse of colonialism and realism is meant to explain the importance of post-colonial

writers’ deconstruction of realism. As she puts it,

whatever a realist text may say, the fact that realism purports to give an accurate

picture of the world, based in fidelity to empirical evidence, and that is European

import, have led to its being experienced by writers in colonized societies […] as the

language of the colonizer. (2002, 103)

Critics of magic realism, however, define the concept as a yearning for the primordial

past characterized by a nostalgic feeling on the part of the writer for “identity and

cultural emancipation. The magical realism […] is shown to develop from an urge to

reclaim a space of otherness by appealing to myths of difference” (Warnes 2009, 5).

Magic realism, by definition, is a mode of narrative that brings the real and the

imagined in a “troublesome tandem”, as Lamin notes (Majid 2005, 71). Dale Carter

suggests four characteristics that define magical realism:

First it is the combination of reality and fantasy and second, it is the transformation

of the real into the awesome and unreal, thirdly an art of surprises, one which

creates a distorted concept of time and space, fourth a literature directed to an

intellectual minority; characterized by a cold cerebral aloofness it does not cater to

popular tastes, but rather to that of those sophisticated individuals instructed in

aesthetic subtleties. (1969, 3-4)

To align magical realism with the minoritarian narrative, we are driven to think more of

the ways in which Deleuze and Guattari connect Kafka with this narrative mode. A

minority literature, from this point of view, suggests both an inclination to create magical

realism and a deconstructive approach to language, history, and to the colonial discursive

tradition. To argue that magical realism is a narrative mode that aims to demystify the

magical in reality is to state that new voices can emerge from such de-mystification.

Whereas Faris reminds us that “magic realism often gives voice in the thematic domain to

indigenous or ancient myths, legends and cultural practices” (2002, 103), Warnes points

out that “magical realism represents the ’writing back’ of the margins to the center”,

57

regardless of the meaning the center might inhabit, and “it blurs the binaries of modern

thought” (2009, 6). It also suggests and “critiques the assumptions” of, and reveals, the

“ethical failings of realism” (Warnes 2009, 6).

We have already hit a snag central to “writing back” in the narrative of Si Yussef, in

the problem of how to account for the potential failure of the process of writing back

without subjectively interfering in the memory of Si Yussef and the Si Yussef story.

Magical realism appears to be introduced in this narrative to suggest the multiplicity of

voices in history in order to incorporate different forms of histories. The aim is threefold:

first, magical realism, as a mode of writing back in this post-colonial text, becomes a

context for the post-colonial identity to renew its mode of reconstruction. The third voice

filling the void becomes a transcultural voice that incorporates the past in the present,

thereby imagining new spaces for constructing new identities without necessarily

restoring that past. Second, the implication of magic realism in this narrative is to account

for the misconception that incarnates the major history by giving credence to the memory

in the margin. Third, as a hint to such formulations, magical realism is grasped as a tool

that introduces new epistemologies toward rerouting post-colonial studies. It is at this

point that a responsible understanding of the present past can take place when Si Yussef

mentions the U-turn to the past.

When Lamin declares that he is “not a realist”, he suggests that something

underneath the structure of the story is employed to account for the act of writing,

something that goes beyond the real: the magical. The story of Si Yussef is constructed on

this basis, mixing the real with the magical without any part dominating the other. Such a

juxtaposition necessitates complexity in the narrative, whereby the identity of the post-

colonial Moor becomes an interwoven complexity of the old, the new, the mythical, the

real, and the minor.

Si Yussef’s identity, as represented in this novel, is a consequence of all these. Si

Yussef’s remembrance revokes the notion of the fixity of identity the moment the

mythical is invoked to construe his identity. As a young boy, Si Yussef describes at length

what his memory could grasp of the encounter between his father and the Maker of

Hearts, a black fortune teller from the south. The prophecy says that Si Yussef’s story will

be “preserved for the future, to be recorded in the oppression crying vengeance” (Majid 2005, 36;

emphasis original). It also suggests that hybridity will attenuate the continuity of the

Khaldi family. Purity of blood is no longer a characteristic of the new Moroccan

generation (not only the Khaldi family), because, as the Maker of Hearts prophesies, there

will be “an irreversible dilution, a mixing more powerful than the therapeutic métissage, a dance

of souls, separated by the sea and the history of our glory and defeat […] El-Andalus” (Majid

2005, 36; emphasis original).

The line between the real and the magical is blurred in this passage, suggesting that

transculturality is the main construct that engulfs the next generations in North Africa.

The Maker of Hearts notes that the mixing of the Khaldi blood is not that of hybridity or

métissage, but something different and new, something in which the power to write the

past is equal to that of constructing new identities. This magical description of reality

reproduces and redefines the linearity between the two shores, Spain and Morocco. It sets

up a history of the Mediterranean crossings as it is marked by stories of hate and love

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and “glory and defeat”, when the Iberian Peninsula was part and parcel of the Almoravid

and the Almohad dynasties under the name of El-Andalus. The space of the invisible

emerges in a total visibility so as to examine this historical subjugation.

The reference to the existence of Islam in Europe highlights a prominent issue that

concerns the coexistence of minorities vis-à-vis the major cultures: the Moor, or Moorish

heritage. The construct of the Moor originally defines those Muslims, Jews, Berbers (the

indigenous people of Morocco), and Arabs who lived in Andalusia before the fall of

Granada in 1492. In the words of Emily Bartels, the

Moors had been subjects of Spain for so long that their history and Spain were

effectively inextricable […] Even after Spanish inquisitors began (in 1492) to

condemn their Muslim beliefs, it would take over a hundred years for the Moors to

be officially banished from Spain. (2008, 14)

Anouar Majid, in his We Are All Moors, extends its usage to include “anyone who is not

considered to be part of the social mainstream” (2009, 5).

We encounter in this narrative a history that is marked by hatred, fear, and a lack of

trust between the two shores. It is not by accident that the Maker of Hearts suggests that

the new history will no longer be marked by the question of purity. If the Muslims and

the Jews were forced either to show an absolute submission to Christianity or to be

expelled from Catholic Spain, the new history of contemporary Morocco and Spain

would be one that is characteristically transcultural. The Moor’s religious and cultural

differences “that allowed sixteenth century Castilian monarchs to forge a slippery notion

of identity” (Majid 2009, 9) have no space in modern nation states, because the

quintessential attribution of religion and/or culture to the construction of identity has

been deconstructed by the new mode of belonging that is defined as transcultural.

Si Yussef, as the prophecy says, will be Khaldi no more, and his father was the last

of the Khaldis. Impurity, the end of a family line, marks the new construct of identity, “a

mixing more powerful than the therapeutic métissage”, which is ultimately confirmed by Si

Yussef’s engagement to Lucia. Impurity is also clearer when Si Yussef acknowledges that

his children born by Lucia “seem to have inherited a different blood” (Majid 2005, 139).

The Maker of Hearts, therefore, testifies to the new space that the post-colonial

subjectivities will inherit, a “space of the invisible forces that move the world: dreams,

legends, myths, emotion, passion, history” (Allende 1991, 54). As the Maker of Hearts

fades away, “he has become a condition, a state of mind, dead nostalgia, a surrealist myth

for the disbeliever” (Majid 2005, 37), with the function of reminding the coming

generations of the new space that exists between the real and the imagined, between

hybridity and purity.

There is an urgency in this narrative to rethink the history between Spain and

Morocco. This is evident, especially at the beginning of the story, when the narrator tries

to testify to the myth he says he “always believes”. When he meets with Si Yussef for the

first time that gloomy afternoon, Lamin is reminded

59

of the myth I always believed: Hercules, standing on top of the caves he carved after

separating the continents of Europe and Africa, saying, ‘Let the winds and the

tempests blow forever on this land,’ and his entourage, then the generations that

followed, then the historians, and now the meteorologists, all acknowledging that

the prayer or prophecy had been fulfilled. (Majid 2005, 7)

Especially Tangier, with its location and cosmopolitan milieu, is rendered as a space of

interaction with a bond that links Africa to Europe. The Myth of Hercules remains a

reality engulfed in a magical way and which contests the “European myth” of whiteness

and superiority. Tangier in this context is the magical reality that helps in the destruction,

followed by the reconstruction of the European identity. Majid, in commenting on the

locality of Tangier, points out that “[t]his ancient, borderline city, renowned for its

laissez-faire attitudes, where calls for any kind of purity keep stumbling over the

imperfections of our human nature and our multiple ethnicities” has certainly affected

his approach to the concepts of history and culture (2009, 25). This is similar to Si Yussef

and Lamin, who regard Tangier as a space of identity reconstruction. In such a place,

identities are in constant flux, and cultures and histories are not stable constructs, but

marked by differentiation, always in motion. If the Maker of Hearts has faded away, it is

because he becomes a reminder to the coming generations that this geographical space is

not strange to Europe, nor is Europe to Africa, but they share a history distinguished by

both hybridity and purity, culturality and transculturality, a crossing of the threshold.

The persisting transculturality produces the character of Si Yussef who himself

becomes transcultural and hybrid at the same time. Many have contributed to the

construction of his identity, a process that ultimately takes him more than seventy-seven

years, in the course of which he encounters, for instance, fortune-tellers, Christians and

Jews, the Spanish, Italians, and French, and the local Tanjawis. In addition to the hybrid

locality of Tangier (to which I will return in the following section), Si Yussef’s identity

becomes one that is constantly changing with place: Tangier. Since his childhood, and his

encounter with the Maker of Hearts, Si Yussef encounters many Europeans who help

directly or indirectly in reconstructing his identity. As a tour-guide in Tangier, Si Yussef

meets with an American anthropologist for whom he arranges a meeting with Sheikh El-

Mdini. The reason behind this meeting rests in Si Yussef’s belief that “the cannons facing

Spain never fired one single shot but that they were placed in that strategic position to

frighten the jinn and the affarit away from our town” (Majid 2005, 41). Si Yussef starts to

become interested in the stories and histories of his ancestors, and later he becomes

obsessed with how history will be narrated for the coming years or centuries. As El-

Mdini narrates his story to the American, he points to his interlocutor to mark his words,

noting that “this story will be told for another hundred years, because it is the same story,

whether it be the damned Portuguese, the Spanish, the French, the Chinese, whatever”

(Majid 2005, 42). It is as if the Sheikh insists on the act of documentation more than in

who is documenting. The importance lies in the act of re-writing, blurring the line

between the weak and the powerful, or the colonizer and the colonized. It is the act of

writing that matters, not who writes.

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In addition, two contradictory elements seem to coalesce here: the magical (jinn and

affarit) and the real (Spanish, Portuguese, and the American anthropologist). The

narrative suggests that the invisible is important if we want to understand the colonial

legacy of the Spanish and the Portuguese in Morocco, and the way the anthropologist

rationalizes the magical. Both colonial powers have wanted to seize Morocco, and yet the

importance of this seizure lies mainly in how to understand such a culture. The reference

to the jinn and affarit is significant for an understanding of certain aspects of Moroccan

culture, and since the Portuguese realize this aspect, they start building a huge cannon.

The Sheikh explains that the Portuguese have built the cannon because they want to

frighten the jinn and the Spanish at the same time. As a consequence, the two elements

seem to be employed to indicate the history of colonialism that is documented by an

anthropologist. It is a counter-history, whose existence cannot be represented by

“ordinary realism […] because ordinary realism looks like an evasion in these contexts”

(Wood 2002, 10; emphasis added).

The re-imagined past of Tangier is combined with the provocation of Western

literature and philosophy. It is as if the narrative tells us that Si Yussef is not a mere

product of Tangier but an amalgam of modern philosophy as well. Si Yussef comes to

know “Baudelaire’s poetry” and the literary tradition of the Jewish Kafka (Majid 2005, 49),

but without necessarily neglecting the Baraka of his culture (Majid 2005, 50). The first

lesson in philosophy comes from the Spaniard Pedro del Sol. At first, Pedro is critical of

Si Yussef’s country, as Si Yussef notes while “listening to his linguistic prejudices – how

the Basque and Catalan were barbaric languages, ‘just like your language,’ he told me

without hesitation” (Majid 2005, 57). These prejudices are part of the history of power

and fear that characterizes Moroccan-Spanish relations. However, mutual understanding

might clear certain ambiguities between the two cultures. As Si Yussef tells Lamin, there

are certain changes that seem to affect del Sol’s view of Morocco:

he started liking this country because he finally understood what it takes a lifetime

for the dumb never to understand, and that is how right del Sol was, how beautiful

this land is, that in our djellabas and rezzas and belghas, that with our unshaven

faces and noisy souks, that at this mysterious crossroads of the forbidden something

of the past, a spirit, a miracle, a persisting hope, a legacy that has been brushed

aside in other places, a victim of too much humanness, has survived. (Majid 2005,

58)

Communication and transcultural understanding may clarify cultural and linguistic

prejudices. It is also noteworthy for an understanding of this passage that transculturality

does not intimidate cultures; rather, it sustains an equilibrium of which

incommensurability becomes a realm in the modern world. Si Yussef becomes interested

in learning Spanish, in the same way as Majid learns it. Majid tells us that he “never

learned Spanish in school” but he tended to “use the language by watching soccer games

and music shows on television, reading magazines, and talking to friends” in order to

gain an understanding from a position closer to Spanish culture (2009, 26). This parallel,

while an interesting intersection between the author and certain characters in his fiction,

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also leads us to believe and understand how Spanish culture comes to inhabit a part of Si

Yussef’s identity.

Pedro eventually disappears, leaving his wallet with Si Yussef, in which he finds a

note “CARLO MARX” (Majid 2005, 59). Si Yussef tries to look for his teacher, and

because neither his age nor his position allows him to go beyond the Mediterranean, he

asks one of the fortune-tellers to spy on Pedro. Again, the parallel between the real and

the imagined remains an important tool for people in his position to extract truths

beyond their reach.

The philosophy of del Sol seems to influence and shape the personality of Si Yussef

for his entire life, and its existence can only become ephemeral in connection with the

faith of the country where he lives. Faith, as Si Yussef notes to Lamin, “is neither past nor

future, it starts in eternity and ends in eternity and makes the present as ephemeral as

desire” (Majid 2005, 60). Pedro’s philosophy makes Si Yussef displaced, “occupied by or

merged with other beings and places” (Faris 2002, 111), and such displacement

encourages him to marry Lucia, and merges with her the first time he sees her: she

becomes his “salvation” (Majid 2005, 61).

His marriage to Lucia remains another stage in the process of Yussef’s identity

construction that continues to the moment of his death. To become engaged to a Spanish

woman in Morocco is a matter of choice that very few dared to consider at the time of

high colonialism. When he is destined to marry her, Si Yussef is left between two

extremes: the refusal of the Christian mother and the denial of the locals. Because he is a

Moor, Lucia’s mother sees this marriage as a sort of blasphemy, an act of contaminating

the Spanish Catholic blood: “When Lucia declared her love for the skinny Moro and

Antonio gave his consent, Isabella made the sign of the Cross and regretted her whole life

[…] One year after Lucia’s wedding, she returned to Spain where she died” (Majid 2005,

79). Neither do the locals accept such an arrangement.

The women in Tangier urge Si Yussef’s mother to “exorcise him and expel him to

the desert before it’s too late” because, following his marriage to a Spanish woman, he

will no longer be one of them (Majid 2005, 66). Fear and suspicion dominate the thinking

of the dwellers on both shores. Each one, Spanish or Moor, is alarmed by the potential

threat the other may cause religiously and culturally, and it is to this that the men in the

Café Nejma object as they are very hesitant to initiate any dealings with Si Yussef. “These

Spanish women are no good” is the sentence Si Yussef hears every time he is in the café,

because “if they can’t suck our blood with guns and malice they suck it by stealing our

best men” (Majid 2005, 16). The inscrutability that seems to be a part of this relationship

is linked to the historical heritage that defines Morocco and Spain. In my view this partly

explains “Spain’s quest for the northbound modernity as an attempt to repudiate its

Moorish legacy, but we also knew that Spain was no typical European country. Spain

was part of who we are; it was our rival and semblable at once” (Majid 2009, 26). This

uncanny relationship suggests that Si Yussef should look for a space where he can start a

new process of what Bartels refers to as “cross-cultural exchange that not only opens out

but also opens in, to the improvised interiors of domestic life” (2008, 189). Thus his

marriage to Lucia is a first step in this process, one that reshapes his identity and opens

up new spaces for negotiations.

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The role of religion is significant in this narrative, especially when it comes to Lucia.

Lamin points out that “the only thing worth mentioning about Lucia’s version is her

absolute devotion to her husband” (Majid 2005, 80) and not to Islam. To begin with,

Lamin is not sure whether Lucia has “given up her Catholic faith, and this fact alone had

intensified the awe that surrounded Si Yussef” (Majid 2005, 6). Later in the narrative,

Lamin disavows such a question, because he believes that this concerns only Si Yussef:

[w]hy should I give my opinion on Lucia and her faith? Of the men at the Nejma

objected to this relationship of cultures, they have their own reasons for doing this.

Their wisdom comes from the time of the affarit and holy men. If wisdom is

timeless, I am from a generation that is not. We speak from invented moments and

we perish like consumer goods. (Majid 2005, 127; emphasis original)

Lamin agrees with the fact that the people in Café Nejma belong to a generation of the

past, a generation that is characterized mainly by religious and cultural purities. These

have no space in the age of cultural globalization, since he himself testifies to a generation

of hybridity and transcultural understanding. The old Tangier and Tanjawi people are

remarkably religious and mythical, and in their world the space for magic is exclusive.

The new testimonies postulate a new paradigm where the magical is imbued with the

real to incarnate the spirit of what is beyond cultural understanding.

Si Yussef clearly underlines the path of his life journey, and his decision not to stick

to the tradition of Tangier and its religion demarcates his identity as hybrid, but also

liminal at the same time. The hybrid space of Tangier facilitates the task of Si Yussef to

meet with diverse people from all parts of the world. The Italian lady who wants to adopt

him as her child is a remarkable incident in this context. It is an event that hovers around

Si Yussef’s memory. Passages such as these serve to complicate the identity of Si Yussef,

and he becomes even more complex in his encounter with the Moroccan Jewish Isaak

Benkalim. In the words of Si Yussef, Isaak Benkalim

was another generation and another faith, so I never had a chance to speak to him. If

you saw him, you’d think the man was living in some other place. He had one of

those uncertain expressions, somewhere between cracking out in hysterical laughter

and hopelessly bursting into tears […] His sunken cheeks and piercing look gave

him the air of a bankrupt gangster, suspicious and deeply hurt. He wore simple

clothes which, like his face, appeared ragged in spite of their newness. (Majid 2005,

84)

This detailed description of Benkalim poses many questions with regard to ways Jews

live in Morocco and their relations with the Muslims. Being part of “another faith” would

mean being either a nassrani (Christian or any European or American) or a Jew. The

importance of faith becomes problematic only when the Moroccan has a religion that is

different from Islam. Subsequently, the narrative does not suggest any tension with the

European Christians who live in Morocco, except for the Spanish, which might not be a

consequence of Christianity but of the historical conflict between the two countries. We

63

can notice the existence of the American, the Italian, the French, and the Germans who

live in Tangier without suffering from any prejudice. But when it concerns the locals

having a different faith or aiming to change their existing faith, they face absolute

isolation. Thus, the narrative describes the incident that occurs when Si Yussef’s proposal

to become engaged to one of the girls in Tangier is rebuffed: “I knew that my love had to

be more sophisticated than the daughter of a man who wanted to become a nassrani in

the land of good Muslims. Who could have guessed that I would fall in love with a

nassrania?” (Majid 2005, 66; emphasis original).

We come to know Isaak Benkalim only through the lens of Si Yussef. Benkalim is

not a foreigner because “[o]lder people knew him well, and some even had known his

father, who was buried in the Jewish cemetery. But his whole person suggested a

distance that made him neither local nor foreigner” (Majid 2005, 85). The same level of

uncertainty that demarcates the relation between the Spanish and the Moroccans seems

to characterize Moroccan Muslims’ view of their Jewish counterpart. Even though he is a

citizen of Morocco and collaborates in business, his partners have “continued to eye him

with suspicion” (Majid 2005, 85). Benkalim’s life is unknown to many of his neighbors,

but his philosophy affects the way in which Si Yussef interprets his life experiences.

When recalling Benkalim, Si Yussef points out that he “spoke out of the blue” and he

“wished he was talking to me”. Then he continues:

It is a strange feeling without addressing you. He was always watching: keeping an

eye on the rough contours of a life that promises so much and gives so little. There

was a deep mistrust in that look. I cannot find the right word for it. It was neither

skepticism nor despair, and it wasn’t dead look either. For Isaak Benkalim was a

lively man at heart. His story, however, is written in deep silence; we never had

access to it. (Majid 2005, 87-8)

It is Benkalim who finds the job for Si Yussef as a book-keeper in the La Gazelle

company. The conversation he has with him reshapes his identity, thereby blurring the

line of suspicion that demarcates Benkalim’s personality. Later in the novel, Si Yussef

comes to realize why Benkalim hides his personality and lives the way he does, to die in

silence. When Si Yussef reads of Hitler’s philosophy he understands “why Isaak had to

die, and why he lived the way he did” (Majid 2005, 90). According to Richard Gunther,

[t]he Holocaust had a traumatic effect on Moroccan Jewry, even though their

community was saved from the devastation which struck the Jews of Europe. When

Jews looked ahead, particularly after Moroccan independence in 1956, and even

though the new Constitution said that only Muslims and Jews could be citizens,

they saw an uncertain future. (1997, np.)

Gunther is partly right in this point, especially that this is used as a rationale behind the

outflow of the Jews from Morocco to the established state of Israel in Palestine. In

addition, the Jews in Morocco “relied on an already existing religious feeling of

membership in a diasporic community forced to settle in Morocco” (Boum 2009, 55), and

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the conjunction of both (diaspora and Nazi) forced the Jews, such as Benkalim, to remain

hidden in “his deep silence”. However, it is argued that the Moroccan and the Muslim

share more than they can think. The Moroccan flag used to include the Star of David, and

when the French took over the protectorate of Morocco, they banned the star and

replaced it with the pentagram of today’s flag. The terrorist’s attack on a Jewish

Synagogue in Casablanca and other targets in May 2003 alarmed a million Muslims and

Jews. They marched in the streets of Casablanca together in protest, in a refusal to be

“intimidated or divided” (Majid 2009, 25).

The Holocaust has become a site of memory that Si Yussef invokes to chart his

memory. In this respect, Si Yussef’s will to reshape his identity according to Benkalim’s

philosophy is a significant call in this narrative to cease cultural prejudices, because there

may be “a risk that today’s youth will grow up believing that Arabs and Jews were

simply meant to coexist rather than living together” (Moroccan Jewish Community

Council; qtd in Majid 2009, 25; emphasis added). Consequently, as a site of memory, the

Holocaust might not belie Si Yussef’s memory but supplement it, and may give credence

to its existence as a major minority narrative.

It seems that all these figures and others enlisted in this novel collaborate in the

process of reconstructing Si Yussef’s identity and re-writing the history of Tangier.

However, as the memory of Si Yussef moves to its end, an anecdote about

disenchantment emerges to demonize, indirectly, the space of hybridity. Even though Si

Yussef’s story corroborates the importance of the space in-between for the construction of

identity and for the epistemic model of the nation (which emulates the predefined notion

of a nation in modernity), he feels that the goal is in essence utopic. His marriage to

Lucia, regardless of its success in an era that is marked by high nationalism and where

the question of purity and hegemony are significant paradigms to Tanjawi people, leaves

in him “an emptiness that she cannot fill” (Majid 2005, 129). His engagement to Lucia

gives him the support to live in Tangier, but it also, in a significant way, deprives him of

the need to perform his religious prayers. This is evident when he sighs as he mentions

Isaak Benkalim’s daughter’s conversion to Islam:

Si Yussef sighed like a wounded wolf. His face sank into a deep expression of pain.

It was beyond, far beyond the restlessness of unresolved trauma. The pain seemed

engraved with insistence on his soul, raging soul behind the carcass of fatal age,

desperately seeking space for air and relief in his random and unexpected narration.

Suddenly, he looked defeated, frantically reaching back for an irrevocable,

irrecuperable past, negotiating with a passion that only such sudden dead look

could generate or cause. He had frequent bouts of depression, but I couldn’t tell

how much they had to do with his old age. Yet this interruption, this agonizing sigh

struck me with so much urgency that I spent the following four years speculating

on it. (Majid 2005, 87)

Lamin is not able to fathom the meaning of this sigh, though it comes right after Si Yussef

mentions Benkalim’s daughter’s conversion. This incident will be repeated in the novel,

but with a much clearer view of how depressed Si Yussef becomes, because neither does

65

his wife convert nor does he perform his prayers. Si Yussef feels the need and the desire

to recover the culture of his origin. Si Yussef believes that “good luck” denies him “the

chance [and] the passion to regain and to continue to recite the Qur’an” (Majid 2005,

139), and in light of this he confesses to Lamin that “he hadn’t performed his prayers

since he was twenty or so” (Majid 2005, 139).

The narrative positions the notion of hybridity in a paradox. Si Yussef’s devotion to

his wife Lucia prevents him from living within his cultural milieu in Tangier. This liminal

space, within which Si Yussef partly rejects his own culture the moment he encounters

the new one, ultimately becomes the weak spot in the process of identity construction. Si

Yussef tries to explain that his need to pray is not a choice for him, because he believes

that “people pray when they are under some kind of pressure. They pray to seek help

and they pray to show gratitude” (Majid 2005, 140). It suggests that people sometimes do

not need their culture to balance the old with the new, and yet he later assumes that the

culture of origins becomes an important aspect of the identity of the post-colonial.

Si Yussef points out that he “wavered between these two extremes, solidly stable in

the middle, as if he had no big passions or needs. It was like early autumn: no storms, no

upheavals, but good steady predictable weather” (Majid 2005, 140; emphasis added).

Such cultural detachment suggests that there are at least two forms of hybridity: the first

is liminal and the other transcultural. Liminal hybridity is performed by Si Yussef, who

stands “solidly in the middle” but at the same time nullifies his cultural tradition upon

the moment of encounter with the other culture. However, this does not necessarily

means that Si Yussef adopts the other culture totally. Quite the contrary, his engagement

with Lucia is Si Yussef’s life journey to choose from her culture what he needs in order to

live in his own cultural medium. Here, Si Yussef is at the threshold, as Turner reminds

us, “neither here nor there” (1974, 80).

The second aspect of hybridity is that of transculturality, which is performed by

Lamin, and Tangier can be seen as an aspect of it. Lamin’s refusal to comment on Lucia’s

faith is a key in this context. He does not want to comment on her Catholic faith, or to the

question why she does not convert to Islam, and even though he inquires about this at

the beginning of the novel, Lamin later feels that he belongs to a different world of

otherness, not that of faith or culture, but one that is transcultural. We can observe such

identity transformation by the end of the novel, when Lamin falls asleep in the mosque in

the old Medina (the name of the old towns in Morocco) after his afternoon prayers. When

he wakes up, he sees a gathering waiting for him to regain consciousness. The people’s

faces are not recognizable; some of them speak in a language that he cannot fathom,

while at the same time they start whispering. The strangers turn their faces towards the

mihrab in the mosque and apparently start talking in the language of the locals, “making

an intense supplication for salvation” (Majid 2005, 151). These strangers (who are defined

as the affarit or jinn) address Lamin to help them take the faith (Si Yussef’s) back from the

nassara. The lost heritage of Si Yussef, his lost culture and past, needs to be restored so

that he can align with the new, modern aspects of Tangier and Morocco in general. The

affarit say that they “cannot remain in that dungeon forever” (Majid 2005, 151), a

statement that forecasts change in the social and cultural sphere in Morocco. The modern

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changes that affect the life of Tangier no longer accept that a single cultural tradition can

dominate, and the affarit urgency to be released is a case in point.

In the course of this conversation, Lamin hears the voice of Si Yussef calling him,

and immediately he starts his prayers on Si Yussef, joined with his “visitors”: “we pray

that you keep our memory alive, in this and other men, so that OUR STORY, not someone else’s,

drifts along the banks of this curse, until Your mercy engulfs us” (Majid 2005, 153; emphasis

original). Again, two points are worth noting with regard to this passage: first, that the

prayers performed after a death in Islam are not performed for a non-Muslim, and

Lamin’s prayers for Lucia can be understood as a call for an end to the tradition. In other

words, to use one’s own culture to account for others becomes part of the past, while also

suggesting that the destiny of the new Morocco is to engage in cross-cultural

understanding. This can only be achieved through education as the affarits note

addressing Lamin in their prayers: “You show us the way to our old selves, now mutilated by

too much knowledge, because don’t they know that it is a sign of your mercy not to give that

knowledge to those You favour?” (Majid 2005, 153; emphasis original). The second aspect

concerns the way in which Lamin engages in a dialogue with the affarit. In order to

understand this amalgamation of the real and the imagined in this passage I would like

to refer to Faris, who suggests that the combination of the real and the magical in the

modern world “means that the cultural function of the mode as it has developed is not, or

certainly is no longer, only to allow its readers to indulge in nostalgic return to a

vanished past” leading to a triumph over modernity (2002, 114-5). Or, rather, the

narrator’s awaking from his midday dreams supports what Gerald Martin suggests,

namely that “life is a dream - the ‘unreality’ and ‘unauthenticity’ imposed by almost five

hundred years of colonialism - and that when a dream becomes a permanent living

nightmare it is probably time to wake up” (1995, 108). The combination of the magical

(affarit and jinn) with the real (Lamin’s conversation with them) informs about the

possibility of reconstructing the history and space of Tangier. Lamin feels that it is time to

”awake” from the dream of subverting the minoritarian narratives and histories, and in

order to do so, he shifts to the text as the space to write space and history.

In a significantly more vehement manner, the text in itself has become an example

of magical realism. The gaps that appear in the narration are left unfilled. At this stage, it

seems that Lamin cannot control the linearity of the narrative, and this inability can be

interpreted as a consequence of magical realism. There are many narrators who tell the

story of Si Yussef, some of whom we know, such as Lucia, Omar, Lamin, and some at the

Café Ashab, but there are also many others whom we do not know, such as jinn, affarit,

and fortune-tellers. To illustrate the ambiguity of the version of history that the narrative

aims to present, there are passages in which metatexts intrude on the narration,

concluding that magical realism refutes the idea that “we” know history. The basic

assumption that history can only be represented in a magical way may provide

opportunities for Si Yussef and Lamin to engage, each in his own way, in representing

the Tangier that each of them sees, and this is the point the next section is intended to

highlight.

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3.3 TANGIER: A CONTACT ZONE

Si Yussef is intended to contest Euro-American representations of Tangier in the ways in

which its narrative re-imagines the space of Tangier as a contact zone in the sense

understood by Mary Louise Pratt (1995). Greg Mullins, in his Colonial Affairs: Bowles,

Burroughs, and Chester Write Tangier, for instance, cites some of these representations

through which the three American writers construct their Tangier. He points out that

Burroughs defines Tangier as an “interzone” “of intermediacy and ambiguity, a place

that remains outside standard narratives” of Moroccan identity (2002, 3). And yet each of

the three writers Mullins cites creates his own notion of the interzone because the Tangier

of the postwar period was “an attractive place for foreigners to live” (2002, 6). Especially

for Paul Bowles, Tangier has “represented the possibility of living [the] idealized lifestyle

[…] a ‘colonial’ setting” that he has desired (2002, 20). Because the Tangier of Paul Bowles

has been viewed as a space of sexuality and a version of an “orientalized” North Africa,

Si Yussef can be seen as a narrative that re-writes Tangier by offering different

constructions of Tangier. In this way, the act of writing forms a part of the continuous

process of representations and counter-representation, especially those of Si Yussef and

Lamin. It also shifts the focus from the writing back to re-writing.

Significant in these constructions are the ways in which, on the one hand, identity

and space overlap to produce new meanings and opportunities to view the past from a

minor perspective. On the other hand, it seems that the language of magical realism

becomes the narrative mode that substitutes the idea of Tangier as past with a

transcultural space in the present. These two representations replace the old Tangier, but

also add a new version of Tangier that aligns with the new mode of writing back. Si

Yussef’s Tangier is one that becomes “surplus” in the history of Morocco and reveals the

inherent and hidden sites in Si Yussef’s memory. Nevertheless, the way in which Tangier

is perceived by Lamin is different, and its name signifies nothing except itself. The

narrative thus juxtaposes itself with the two modes of narrative, coalescing in a

supplementary way. In order to explain this paradox, I will refer to Tangier as a site of

memory and Tangier as a space for criticizing modernity.

While this novel focuses on the notion of representation from a native point of view

(Si Yussef, Lamin, and the locals), a parallel emerges to indicate another version of

narration contributing to the invention of “another idea of Europe” (Ash 2004, 13). Many

tend to claim for a European modernity whose “idea”, as Ash Amin notes, is built “on

four myths of origin” and which includes “the supremacy of a legal system based on

Roman law”, ethics based on “Christian piety”, a political system based on democracy,

and “a universalism based on Reason and other Enlightenment principles of

cosmopolitan belonging” (2004, 2). Such a classification, or definition, of Europe might be

“pitched against” any other individual, racial, and religious communities that do not fall

under such European standards (Ash 2004, 2). However, some critics claim that this “old”

idea of Europe does not allow for the imagining of a “different Europe” (Dainotto 2007, 5),

among whom we can find Iain Chambers.

In his Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted Modernity, Iain Chambers

extensively discusses the importance of the space between Europe and Africa in the

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formulation of new understandings of the role played by Africa in Europe. Because

Africa has essentially been silenced in the colonial period, the post-colonial aura becomes

significant in providing this geographical space with the mechanisms to contradict the

notion of modernity that engulfs it. Chambers, however, postulates that such a shift

remains evasive, in as much as the strait at Gibraltar is excluded from this post-colonial

preamble. He notes that there is “unfinished business” in the narrative of history between

Europe and Africa, a matter that is remarkable for its silence, but for which its insistence

could mean “interrogation” rather than a mere void (2008, 8). Chambers also points out

that “[s]uch an insistence supplements [and] challenges the fixity of the past and the

reification of its authority deposited in a one-sided remembering and representation”

(2008, 23). Between Europe and Africa, the Mediterranean Sea becomes the oxymoron

that divides and links the two continents, which are mostly characterized by a history of

enmity and of linguistic, religious, and cultural differences. The signification of the space

of Tangier in this narrative forces us to think beyond the national allegiances of each, and

to open, rather than to close, a new chapter in history of a “contemporary presence

molding and modifying the horizon of possibilities” (Chambers 2008, 8).

Tangier, in this construction, is rendered as a contact zone. Pratt defines such zones

as “spaces where desperate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in

highly asymmetrical relations of dominations” (1995, 4). In this description Tangier seems

to conform to the space that Pratt sees and which “invoke[s] the spatial and temporal co-

presence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and

whose trajectories now intersect” (1995, 7).

One could claim that this is, then, the “Yussefian” Tangier (if such a label were to

exist) that would link parts of Morocco and North Africa to Europe through Spain, while

its route is rooted in Africa. To say that Si Yussef’s Tangier belongs more to Europe than

to North Africa is to reiterate a discursive power that has long been part of the orientalist

strategy of remapping the orient (cf. Said 1979). But what I would like to offer instead is a

new reading of the relationship that crisscrosses the linked geographical spaces from a

minority perspective. We come to know Tangier, its history and its people through Si

Yussef’s memory. Si Yussef’s Tangier becomes, through narration, an imagined presence

of an absent space that lives only in his memory. We also come to know Tangier from the

location of the Ashab Café, as if the reader were exposed to a screening in which flashes

from the past were projected onto its presence, or that s/he would be sitting in a corner

from which all of the events could be seen.

Si Yussef’s choice to spend his leisure time in the Ashab Café resonates in him a

local reality that implies that changing locations may accidentally announce a potential

caesura in the revision of identity. The move he makes from the Café Nejma to the Ashab

Café may be understood in light of the process of the (re-) construction of his identity,

since his attachment to the Ashab Café is reminiscent of his own past. The Ashab Café

becomes a vivid light in Si Yussef’s world, since it “gave Si Yussef the assurance he never

had in the Nejma” (Majid 2005, 20). The same desire (assurance) justifies Si Yussef’s secret

plea to think of this oblique corner as a site where he can tell his stories to a young man.

The Ashab Café becomes a driving force in the narrative of Si Yussef and the point from

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which to rethink the history of North Africa. Lamin explains this aspect in conjunction

with what he knows of Si Yussef:

Ashab’s café offered a timely revisionism: at the age of fifty seven, Si Yussef came to

see his friend Laarbi in the newly opened café, Si Yussef was already reminiscing

about a past whose traces he gently felt and assessed. For the next twenty years, he

would also follow with an intense curiosity the newly laid path of the future. (Majid

2005, 22)

In order to understand the embeddedness of the Ashab Café in the history of Si Yussef,

we have to be aware, first, of the significance of the space of the café in Moroccan culture.

In his study of café culture in Morocco, entitled “A Place on the Terrace: Café Culture and

the Public Sphere in Morocco”, Graiouid argues that it can be characterized by two

significant aspects: equality and identity re-construction (2007, 532). He points out that in

the café the individual “engages the notion of privacy in a dynamic whereby the

economic, social, cultural, ethical and psychological identity of the individual is not

marginalized or silenced, but empowered and given voice in the collective space” (2007,

537). This might also be the case of Si Yussef, because it is from this marginal space that

we come to encounter a marginal history documented by a young college student.

Different figures can be found in the Ashab Café: students, diplomats, spies,

workers, teachers, and so on. The Ashab Café, as the novel puts it,

promised a cosmopolitanism that no other could challenge. There were, of course,

whorehouses, hotels, and casinos that offered more than liberalism and more than a

refuge from the unendurable miseries that the European and American people who

frequented them suffered in their own countries, but these were zonas francas, places

outside the logic of our lives, where men drifted in and out with the same mystery

that condemned them to the life of peripheries and edges, for reasons that were too

complex for us to understand, except for the foreign habitués who knew these places

and wrote about them with the same authority and scholarship that allowed them

to gain the respect that they were now forfeiting in the forbidden territories of our

lives. (Majid 2005, 20)

On the basis of this passage, we come to understand that the function of the café in

Moroccan culture is not merely limited to friendly conversation during people’s free

time. Rather, it becomes the space wherein people could share their views and,

sometimes, “fill in the gaps in the mainstream media text” as if the act became a process

of rewriting mediatized discourse (Graouidi 2007, 545). The café itself becomes a

document that uncovers the different sites of memory that constructed the space of

Tangier before the independence of Morocco was declared. There are places the locals are

not permitted, or are unable, to visit, and these are the “Zonas Francas”, an historical

reference to the position that Tangier used to occupy before World War II.

In 1923, Tangier became an international free zone under the control of the

European powers, mainly France, Spain, and Britain, making of Tangier and Morocco

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two separate geographical spaces. This process of internationalization has pushed many

to flee to Tangier as the war begins in Europe. Si Yussef describes this at length:

The war, you see, had sent us all kinds of people: intellectuals who believed in the

philosophy of a disenchanted Frenchman who lived in Algeria, war criminals,

wealthy men and women who didn’t know what to do with their money back

home, spies hunting men with a past, divorced women who had made up their

minds that to be kidnapped and sold in the market is ultimately better than to

spend their lives reading Baudelaire’s poetry, separated women who had had

enough of their civilized husbands, deposed princes who came to enhance their

tragic destinies with the stimulation of kif, excommunicated priests leaving their

parishes to form some kind of club called Kafta or Kafka, I don’t remember, exiles,

passionate men and women who were convinced that one of our people had the

passion of twenty Europeans, renegades who believed in the struggle for the

liberation of our country, thieves who had run away with millions to enjoy the

protection of your grandfather, pathetic painters who were said to be famous in

their countries. (Majid 2005, 49)

The narrative becomes a vibrant memorial to certain historical events and, in so doing, it

makes of Tangier its lieux de mémoire. Si Yussef aims to tell the reader that the Tangier that

he is speaking about at this moment has been a witness of the brutality of French

colonialism in Algeria since the invasion of Algiers in 1830. The allusion to Baudelaire is

also significant in the ways the narrative suggests that people are no longer interested in

Romanticism but have drifted into a world of modernity instead. Through this passage,

Si Yussef wants to tell his interlocutor that Europe at that time was a space in a state of

absolute chaos and political turmoil, which affected the position of Tangier in all possible

ways.

In my reading of the novel, Tangier becomes, not only a cosmopolitan city, but a

city of hybrid identities. It welcomes the Jew and the Christian, the French, the Spanish,

and the Italian, men and women, the poor and the rich, and invites all of them to dwell in

Tangier. What ultimately emerges from this constructivist notion of Tangier is a city that

becomes a site of memory witnessing its transformation from traditionalism into a world

of modernity, as the name “Kafka” may suggest, and Tangier is “renowned for its laissez-

fair attitudes”as Majid reminds us (2009, 25). The consequence is an influx of migrants,

refugees, and spies into the city, whereby foreign things and people become intertwined,

and identities become more hybridized (Laamiri 2009, 14).

Si Yussef’s way of describing the old Tangier to Lamin not only aims at rewriting a

probably undocumented past but also at using it as a palimpsestic episode that constructs

his memory as a countermemory. Si Yussef reminds his interlocutor that it is Sheikh El-

Mdini who tells us about the roots of the city of Tangier because “it was our people who

had welcomed the blessed ship of God’s chosen; it was he who pointed to the ship and

yelled Tin ja! Tin ja! And the Romans and probably other nations calling it Tingis, and

now, you know, Tanja, Tangier, Tanger, ta ta tat” (Majid 2005, 116). This episode seems to

fill in the interval or the gap that might exist between the sites of memory and the notion

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of countermemory. On the one hand, Si Yussef wants to project a history from the

margin, whereby the use of magical realism embodied in Noah’s ship becomes

inseparable from the dynamic deconstruction of the history of Tangier. In this vein,

magical realism becomes the way in which the history of Tangier undergoes a process of

re-writing. On the other hand, Tangier becomes the geographical space that exists not in

isolation from, but in conjunction to, the many sites that may or may not exist at all as a

historical archive for Si Yussef’s memory.

The memorial and memory form a linear movement, and yet it should be noted that

such a movement does not necessarily exist at a concrete level, or rather it influences the

flexibility of the lieux de mémoire. Whereas Si Yussef himself might be understood as lieu,

his memory becomes precisely a counter-version of the mainstream history. Nora tells us

that “lieux de mémoire have no referent in reality; or, rather they are their own referent:

pure, self-referential signs” (1989, 23), and to this it may be added that self-referentiality

in the narrative of Si Yussef operates on a horizontal level together with memory. The

horizontal representation provides the mechanism for deterritorilizing the mainstream

history and suggests that the minoritarian is no longer vulnerable to destruction but it

sustains deterritorialization through ways in which such representation connects the

archival with memory.

As a site of memory, Tangier remains, for Si Yussef, a powerful memory tool, the

use of which aims first at rewriting Moroccan history and, second, at writing back.

Tangier’s Si Yussef attempts to tell us about colonial Algeria and the political turmoil in

Europe, and how the Moroccans from the Rif region were dragged into participating in a

war that was not theirs, the Spanish Civil War. Si Yussef recounts this episode when he

meets with Juan Frederico, who confesses to him that “‘Riffi men who guarded Our

Saviour, Francisco Franco, the man of genius who knew better than to bow to economic

pressure and preserve ambition,’ were the only Moros worthy of praise and respect”

(Majid 2005, 109), a war in which many Moroccans from the Rif were killed (cf. Graham

2005). Si Yussef remembers these incidents because they are sites of memory that are

significant in the reshaping of the new Tangier. He claims that, immediately after the war

ended in Spain in 1939: “ [p]eople said that it was our men who had made the difference”

(Majid 2005, 11).

The War in Spain, moreover, is another lieux de mémoire by means of which the

narrative revives the memory in the margin. It suggests that whatever happens in Spain

directly influences Tangier and simultaneously contributes to the historical discourse

concerning the enmity and friendliness between Spain and Morocco. Spain, as some

would argue, is “a great, detached fragment of Africa, and the Spaniard is the first-born

child of the ancient white North Africa” (Havelock Ellis, qtd in Majid 2009, 161). The

same feeling resonates in Speaking of the Moor, as Bartels argues that “Europeans were no

strangers to Morocco [...] Nor were Moors strangers within Europe” (2008, 14).

The memory that Si Yussef charts in this narrative is rooted in a global and

transnational context. The narrative constantly moves between different pasts, one that is

marked by global conflicts and another that is national. In so doing, it aims at rerouting

the history of Tangier and Morocco in a new way. When Si Yussef talks about the conflict

of the Riff region and relates it indirectly to the first wave of immigrants to Tangier, Si

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Yussef refers to the Spanish defeat by the Riffi people under the command of Abd El-

Karim El-khattabi in 1921, after which riots spread in Spain. Much of what Si Yussef tells

his interlocutor happened either in Morocco or in Europe, but in either case the events

influence Tangier and its people. The creation of the Riff Republic in September 1921 and

its forced collapse in May 1926 becomes another site of memory that Si Yussef invokes to

give credence to his own memory.

Moreover, the end of World War II was significant in the history of Tangier. Even

though the narrative represents a Tangier that is torn away from its motherland,

Morocco, Si Yussef insists that Tangier is an important site of memory that contributes to

the re-writing of Moroccan history. Si Yussef’s memory of the French protectorate that

forced the king of Morocco Mohammed the Fifh and his family into exile on Corsica in

1953 and later to Madagascar, is triggered when he recounts the incident of the atomic

bomb attacks on Japan.

The war ended in Europe and the Americans had dropped two atomic bombs on

the Japanese […] The French had stolen our king and put him on some island in

Africa. And that was it: the French were suddenly confronted by our wounded will,

a will bigger than technology itself. (Majid 2005, 118)

Tangier at the beginning of the narrative is not a part of Morocco but something that

springs from Si Yussef’s memories. This Tangier exists as a space in which transcultural

identities enjoy a certain level of freedom and peace. As the narrative reaches its end, we

come across a Tangier that belongs to Morocco, but it is also transcultural. It is as if Si

Yussef wants to tell his interlocutor that the notion of Tangier that he has in his memory

also exists in the historical archive. It is history that proves the existence of Tangier, and it

needs to comply with its hybrid space. In the end, to belong to Morocco suggests that

identity, since it is transcultural, does not necessarily deny its roots, but only reroutes its

ambitions to reconstruct itself in order to live in the contemporary world. It is significant

to mention here that Si Yussef insists on the difference that exists between his generation,

his children, and Lamin. In the meantime, the difference is incommensurable, because the

possibility to become cosmopolitan in the matter of Tangier means the denial of the

cultural baggage on the first occasion that the history has to be accounted for and

reclaimed.

Although the Tangier that Si Yussef devises for his interlocutor suggests that it

exists, at least symbolically, for Lamin it remains a name with no relevance in any major

history. The equivocal aspect of Tangier suggests a gap that exists between two different

narratives, or histories. When Lamin visits the soap factory in Tangier he does not intend

to locate the factory in the city of Tangier. Rather, his aim is to adapt the image that he

has grasped from Si Yussef’s memory to that of the existing factory as a site of memory.

In other words, Lamin’s unstable, fragmented attitude towards Si Yussef’s memory,

whether it is an extract of history or merely a notable disposition of his story, reverses the

role of power from that of space (Tangier) into that of the discourse (the narrative).

Lamin’s arrival at the soap factory where Si Yussef used to work can be interpreted in

two different ways: on the one hand, Lamin’s arrival might be intended to assure himself

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of Si Yussef’s existence, and thus of the existence of his memory. On the other hand, none

of what Lamin hears from Si Yussef exists the moment he visits the factory, because Si

Yussef’s Tangier is not that of Lamin. Lamin is struck by the numbers of Tangiers in

existence. Instead of one, Tangier becomes multiple and therefore offers multiple

histories, among which we can find those of Si Yussef and of Lamin. This is evident when

Lamin starts describing the beach in Tangier, on his way to the factory:

The whole area had the look of an abandoned industrial site, although, as far as I

know, only Coca-Cola had an operating plant there. The beach was, unlike the main

one that is connected to the main part of the city, open to the poor. Old men and

women dressed in Jellabas would bring their children to swim, while they sliced

watermelons, ate hot and dry egg sandwiches. (Majid 2005, 92)

The deserted place in the new Tangier is now open to the poor, but it is a place that once

played a significant role in the history of Tangier itself. The desertion of the area may also

suggest that it is people in the margin who might preserve, albeit indirectly, the history of

places and their meanings. Lamin tells his reader how the progeny of Si Yussef, for

instance, do not visit the old town in Tangier, because their life is preoccupied with the

intensity of modernity. In contrast, these people (the poor, minorities, etc) have no access

to the new Tangier and its beaches, because, like history, certain spaces are not open to

everyone. The other beach is already separated by a fence that makes it difficult for the

masses to access the new Tangier (history). It is “accessible only to tourists, cabin renters

and naked people, glowed with false promise. It glowed in the distance like a beautiful

European woman” (Majid 2005, 92-3). In the same way, history is restricted to

monuments and museums.

In addition, it is worth noting that the fact “only Coca-Cola had an operating plant

there” assumes that Americanization is a fact in North Africa. It is as if Lamin wants to

tell the reader that in the process of cultural globalization only Americanization can

survive in post-colonial spaces such as Tangier. This probably refers to the end of Si

Yussef’s story, suggesting that globalization may deter minoritarian history, thereby

distorting the authenticity of minoritarians themselves.

The elements that make Si Yussef’s history “authentic” are the same that might

cause its destruction, because they are liable to disappear. The soap factory, for instance,

“was slowly dying; the major business had been relocated to the suburbs or to other

towns and cities” (Majid 2005, 93), while Si Yussef’s memory, if it is not documented, will

no longer be viable. Lamin is aware of this aspect, especially when he starts thinking of

taking a picture of Si Yussef’s boss and thinks that, by taking the picture, he might give

“Si Yussef’s story the solidity that it lacks” (2005, 93). But because of the ethical issues

that the photo might need to “acquire the historical legitimacy that scrupulous academics

demand” (Majid 2005, 93) he decides not to take it.

Unable as he may be to escape from the lieux de mémoire, Lamin insists that their

effect on the legitimacy of Si Yussef’s story in Moroccan history is feasible. The question

may not be whether to take the photo or not, or whether the factory remains in its place

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or not, but the palimpsestic existence of such reality remains a remnant of Tangier’s

history. Lamin thinks that

the picture accuses; insists on remembrance: the factory, the soap, the workers, the

hope, the ambition, the retirement, the ups and downs, historic moments of glory,

death, the struggle of the unprotected protégé, his demise, partnership, the

unheralded rise of a new version of Reason, threatening claims to privilege, and

more. (Majid 2005, 93-4)

Bill Ashcroft reminds us that “[p]lace is never simply location, nor is it static, a cultural

memory which colonization buries. For, like culture itself, place is in a continual and

dynamic state of formation, a process intimately bound up with the culture and the

identity of its inhabitants” (2001, 156). The dynamism of space and its susceptibility to

transformation impose new visions on the reconstruction of old places in new spaces.

This may also be applicable, as Nora suggests, in the use of memory. In Nora’s view it is

important for the individual to record, because something in the end will remain (1989,

14), and something of the old places will emerge once more.

Even though history and memory are viewed as incompatible elements with the

restoration of the past, it is argued that to represent the past may suggest the need to rely

on “the traces that remain. We do so through memory, and the writing and reading of

history” (Touaf 2005, 150). This contradictory aspect between memory and history is also

triggered by the ways in which Si Yussef and Lamin approach historical accounts of their

stories. If Si Yussef’s countermemory comes into existence mainly through multiple sites

of memories that bear the notion of Tangier as a historical construct, the latter, according

to Lamin, exists only as an indication of its absence.

The Tangier of the past becomes a mere name that signifies nothing except itself, a

concept which Deleuze and Guattari call the asignifiying element in representation. The

photograph that Si Yussef finds in Monsieur Francois Sardon’s office at the La Gazelle

factory visualizes Tangier as empty. Indeed, Si Yussef mentions to Lamin that he has

never seen any photograph of his town apart from the one he finds in the office. The story

of the empty Tangier reminds each of the characters of incidents similar to this one. Si

Yussef remembers how, for instance, a picture taken of Tangier by an English

photographer raised a controversy among the residents of Tangier: “It started with two

men arguing about whether the picture was indeed a photograph of Tangier, or whether

it was just another satanic deception. “‘It has no spirit,’ argued the man who refused to

believe that he was seeing his own town. ‘It looks barren empty’” (Majid 2005, 94).

Furthermore, the Englishman insists that the picture is real, and he argues that “If you go,

I bet you’ll have exactly the same view” (Majid 2005, 94). The locals see the picture as a

simulacrum that has no traces in reality. The locals corroborate the fact that the picture

represents a denial of their town of Tangier, which could be interpreted as yet another

process of colonialism, in which the old, the historical, is erased and renamed to serve the

new.

The second incident concerns the teacher who elaborates on the importance of place

and the existence of Tangier. A frustrated student argues that “I’ve never seen the

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damned place […] All I know are the streets and the people. I don’t care what they call it:

Tangier or Tetouan” (Majid 2005, 108). The teacher tries to warn his students about the

possibility of erasing their places by teaching them how to retain the names of places on

the map. The teacher also points out that, if the progeny of post-colonialism are not

aware of their spaces and the names of the places, their towns will be erased from the

map, named and renamed. What is startling in this picture is the way in which the

teacher erases a whole continent from the map. The real map for him consists of the

British Empire and only “tiny dots in the middle of a blank surface” (Majid 2005, 109).

The power of space is significant in this passage. The students do not recognize the

existence of this geography, because their experience of it springs from the place itself.

Whichever name is given to the city of Tangier, it becomes theirs. In other words, the acts

of naming and renaming do not affect the students’ consciousness of the city, and to be

named, for instance, as Granada or Algiers does not make any difference. And yet the

process of naming is as significant for the teacher as it is for the post-colonial subject

because, unless the student consciously realizes that Tangier is a space and a place, the

history will be demolished by the colonial systems. This probably explains why the

teacher leaves the British Empire on the map, since it was the main colonial power during

the 18th and 19th centuries.

But such a method and the teacher’s typology do not hold for the others, especially

when we learn that he is forced to permanently leave his job as a teacher. Neither is this

applicable to Lamin. Lamin comes to know Tangier in its modern phase. The old Tangier

has no existence in the global space because its existence is marked by

deterritorialization. Globalization creates a city that “will vanish into a large sprawling

metropolis, erasing all memory of its beginnings, naked and vulnerable, exposed to a

thousand bureaucratic schemes” (Majid 2005, 89). John Tomlinson explains that

“globalization promotes much more physical mobility than before, but the key to its

cultural impact is the transformation of localities themselves” (1999, 29). In addition,

Tomlinson points out that this act of cultural deterritorialization leads a life that results in

“the various forces of global modernity removing its connection with locality” (1999, 137;

emphasis added). Deterritorialization pinpoints the changes that affect Tangier and, in so

doing, Tangier is transformed from a mere historical place into a global space detached

from its “social and cultural practices” but linked to a more transcultural milieu (Heise

2011, 158).

The reshaping of Tangier from a place into a space suggests new configurations in

the construction of the city of Tangier and of Lamin’s identity. Nasri explains this

transition in two distinctive ways: first, she argues that Lamin’s understanding of Si

Yussef’s historical trajectory means that Lamin’s identity undergoes a process of

dislocation and displacement; and, second, being dissatisfied with the present, he wishes

to “recover lost origins” (2005, 32). At this point Nasri suggests that Lamin might act as

the implied author for Majid himself, because “Lamin clings to the old world and his life

is split in two separate halves: the present, real and unsatisfactory and the past, remote

and unattainable” (2005, 32). Gérard Genette terms this aspect “internal focalization”,

whereby the implied author becomes part of the story that s/he tells through monologues

(cf. Bamberg 2009; Coste and Pier 2009). It is precisely this aspect that pushes the narrator

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to invoke magical realism in order to emphasize the role of his ancestors in making sense

of his past. This split is clearly indicated when he mentions that

the brutal and unannounced clash of cultures that it engendered, leaving behind it

the fatal trail of homelessness, the feeling of being suspended in a no man’s land

forever, of fighting against self-made demons, and that is why he sounded unlike

himself, too nationalistic […] and besides, Didn’t we stay in Spain for centuries (Majid

2005, 112-3; emphasis original)

In other words, the “clash of cultures” might well suggest the writer’s displacement as a

Moroccan living in the United States of America. The “clash” also refers to El-Andalus as

a territory to be reclaimed as the past of his ancestors. But the “clash” may also refer to

Huntington’s seminal work “The Clash of Civilizations?” in which he forecasts that “the

fundamental source of conflict in this new world” will be primarily religious (1993, 22).

Despite such an exordium, Si Yussef can be said to envisage a new phase in world politics

far from that of the disputed “clash of civilizations”. Both Si Yussef and his interlocutor

want to re-imagine the relations that North Africa can have with the adjacent Europe.

In order to reclaim his past as a Tanjawi, Majid uses different modes of

representation, including magical realism, dialogue between generations and across

cultures, and language itself. The invocation of mythical symbols, like Affarit, hajjouj and

majjouj, and jinn is interpreted by Elkhouche, for instance, as a mode of articulating the

absence of Tangier in Majid’s displacement (2008, np.). The aspect of combining the

magical with the real may also be used to account for uninterest in the past since

globalization has deconstructed all forms of representation. The legacy of colonialism can

easily be traced in modern Tangier, and direct colonialism may no longer be needed in

“the wonderland of high-tech and monetarism and huge sprawling banks and more and

more and more Europeanized and Americanized men and women, edified by progress,

measured by GNPs” (Majid 2005, 81). Language, the novel suggests, becomes a

“nightmare”, and to solve the problem he aims at transforming it, which appears also to

confirm the writer’s displacement.

As a result, Lamin represents a Tangier that no longer exists, because his dislocation

requires him to figure out other modes of belonging. Lamin, through this representation,

wants to belong as he digs in the past of Tangier. But as soon as he realizes that the

Tangier of the past does not exist in the present, he retreats to a new phase of

representation, i.e., narrative itself. Lamin, by the end of the novel, points out that the

Tangier he has left behind, probably when Majid left for America, “was no more” (Majid

2005, 144), which might suggest that Majid’s belonging to Tangier is replaced by his

unbelonging, apart from the memory of Tangier that Si Yussef constructs for him. Not far

from this, the narrative is condensed by the characters’ soliloquy, monologues, and

stream of consciousness. In these remarks, it appears that the narrative is critical of the

way history is approached in the major narrative, especially its linguistic aspect. To

suggest that the narrator is lamenting his belonging to a Tangier that no longer exists is to

propose a certain sense of legitimacy for the history of Si Yussef. Its existence

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deterritorializes from the periphery to becoming a minor history: a history that overrides

the present and the past through memory in a deterritorialized language.

It should be noted that Lamin’s criticism of how history is represented, especially in

the point that concerns Tangier in the global era, has been central in bringing the concept

to the fore in this discussion. Following this line of argument, it should be clear that

Lamin does not feel at home while he is in Tangier. However, it is hard to state this

directly, since no such incident is represented until the end of the Chapter 4, entitled

“Not Freedom”. At this point, Lamin describes the way in which he sees Tangier as

follows:

I saw Spain, the seductress, whispering a future I hadn’t imagined yet. And to my

right, tall hotels were rising furiously from the ground. The yellow Express raced

on, emitting dire warnings to the children who drift down the hills of Mghougha

and the new sprawling neighbourhoods which seem to spring into existence from

the earth, without building licences. (Majid 2005, 144)

Four elements overlap in this passage: Spain, hotels, the slum, and the express train. The

first indicates that Lamin’s destiny is already determined by his travel, which the train

symbolizes. The determinacy is represented by the speedy train that Lamin chooses for

his journey. Lamin is placed between two adjacent, though contradictory, spaces: one

marked by arbitrariness (a slum) and the other by engagement with the new

globalization (hotels) that widens the gap between the rich and the poor. In the same

way, he chooses not to comment on Si Yussef’s marriage to Lucia and the latter’s faith,

Lamin decides to make his journey “to the dark blue heart of mystery in the westward

horizon” (Majid 2005, 7). To tighten the link with his homeland, he overturns the

narrative in a magical way.

When we learn that magical realism is significant in the post-colonial narrative,

especially that of Latin America through the work of Gabriel García Márquez, it becomes

a necessity to examine the underlying structure of this novel. The author of Si Yussef tries

to weave his identity into this geographical space, the diaspora, and the mythic Moroccan

culture. Majid’s alignment with the Hispanics is clearly delineated in his We Are All

Moors, in the ways they are represented as victimized in the United States. According to

Majid:

Given that minorities presume the existence of a nation united around a common

heritage […] they are like the Moors of old, both indispensable sacrificial bodies

(burnt offerings) and the target of exclusionary policies raging from expulsion to

genocide. (2009, 9)

This parallel assumes a tension between minor and major cultures in the host countries,

and to use magical realism in this context is to make a call for the cultural artifact to fill

the gap left by the notion of scattering. Whereas magical realism is used in the narrative

to interpret this process, the intersection between history and memory in the post-

colonial space of Tangier is filled by the story of the minoritarian, let alone the

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engagement of the narrative in a diachronic activity. Warnes notes that diachronic

engagement permits the contextualization of the narrative and locating it within its

“social, literary and cultural trajectories” (2009, 18).

Si Yussef’s multilinguality, transculturality, and re-imagining of space can be

claimed to be aspects of magical realism: “[m]agical realism’s greatest claim of usefulness

is that it enables comparison of texts across periods, languages and regions” (Warnes

2009, 18). The reality that Si Yussef desires to deliver is not imaginary in a literal sense,

but in a real one, whose existence can only be constructed by the minoritarians, those in a

state of becoming. It is a call for the minoritarian to “wake up from the dream” and

engage in a discussion of the past, present, and future in an incommensurable way.

Magical realism as a narrative strategy in Si Yussef does not spring from the vacuum but

from a void, and its existence is to fill in that void which scattering leaves in Lamin’s

identity: it is a cultural product. Thus, affiliation with Latin Americans, through magic

realism, can be seen as a new mode of attack on modernity and borders, and this

narrative can be thought of as a product of globalization, a new wave of

deterritorialization.

***

In sum, Si Yussef engages with prominent issues that are in common in post-colonial

societies. As cited by Warnes, these include “the urge to reclaim what has been stolen or

lost, to critique the assumptions and conventions of the metropolis, to recover and affirm

identities and to assert autonomy in the face of hegemony” (2009, 40). It is a way of

critiquing both the colonial and the post-colonial discourse of hegemony.

Consequently, since place is “uttered into being and maintained by narrative”

(Ashcroft 2009, 75), it becomes pivotal in the narrative of Si Yussef for carving out

opportunities to retell the peculiarities of a history that may not (yet) be told. At the same

time, the textuality of place can also render the very term of place as text in itself. Place,

in this view, is “a network of meaning, a production of discourse that may be read”

(Ashcroft 2009, 76) and is thus reconstructed. Si Yussef’s Tangier is a place that is created

anew, reconstructed by a minor narrative and embedded in the collective culture of

Morocco. Because place in the individual understanding is subject to narration in a

collective assemblage of enunciation, Si Yussef, through memory, invents a Tangier that

has been erased from the history of Morocco, enabling at the same time the flow of

memory to enchant an imagined community of Tangawi dwellers. According to Ashcroft,

[s]ystems of speaking and writing, which are operated through memory, invent, rather

than reflect, the reality of place, and spatial discourse enables observers to imagine

their worlds (including its significant places) as stable, reliable, and certain […]

Places are always in the process of being created, always provisional and uncertain

[…] Just like the place may be ‘created, reproduced and defended’ by the colonizer,

it may also be produced and reproduced by the colonized. (Ashcroft 2009, 77;

emphasis added)

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Furthermore, magical realism suggests that the notion of place can be brought into

existence even after erasure in re-writing modernity. In saying this, the use of stream of

consciousness as a narrative technique, which aligns the novel with magical realism,

suggests different representations of the place. Si Yussef represents different stories of

Tangier from various points of view. It is, however, noteworthy that magical realism in Si

Yussef remains the narrative’s site of memory that aims at preserving minoritarian history

from the margin.

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4 Gender and Space in North

Africa: House, Rememory,

and Hospitality in Sabiha Al

Khemir’s Waiting in the

Future for the Past to

Come

Waiting in the Future for the Past to Come is a narrative that delves into questions of voice

and belonging and how these operate contrapuntally with reading the past in a third

language. It tells the story of Amina’s return to her village of Kurba (in Tunisia) and the

way in which her mother, Ommzine, celebrates her return home as a recently graduated

doctor of architecture. The narrative is told through Amina’s voice, and the events move

back and forth in time. Amina depends mostly on her mother’s memory to bridge the

past perfect with her own simple past and present. The narrative also describes the ways

in which cultural politics in Tunisia inscribe the notion of the unspeakable on the female

voice. Through the notion of female imprisonment in the house, the novel engages in a

debate that envisions the discourse of nationalism as a means of preventing the post-

colonial female subject from negotiating a sense of her belonging. The narrative uses the

trope of the house as a symbol of the delineation of a longing to belong on the part of

women in the North African context, where in Tunisia patriarchy seems to be the

dominant discourse. Knitting together different stories in different times, the narrative

offers three readings seeking to release the female body from the anxiety induced by the

tyranny of the four walls of the house.

First, since the house is pictured as a site of confinement of the female voice, it is

precisely through the changing of locations, or “paranational” self-exile, that the post-

colonial identity can start the process of negotiation. The second reading rests on the way

the novel presents the notion of rememory. Its deployment is considered a tool that helps

free the North African woman from the pressure of the past, and offers a re-reading of

identity enabling her to live in the present. However, the two readings may not correlate

with the general atmosphere in North Africa, since both the social and the cultural

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dynamics governing gender relations affect the process of belonging in the region. Third,

the novel suggests that absolute hospitality can be a site of liberation for the North

African woman, and where identities can communicate, re-read the self, and look for

alternative facets of belonging. With all these in mind, Waiting in the Future for the Past to

Come problematizes the notions of identity and belonging, and suggests that writing in

one’s third language can be regarded as a bridge that connects one’s past with the present

in North Africa.

In this chapter, I aim to delve into these questions and the implications that

language, memory, and hospitality have on North African woman in order to understand

the instability of post-colonial identities in a transcultural context. My intention is to

show how the split of identities may not be a factor of dislocation, but the dislocation

forms a part in the process of reconstructing identities. In addition, I intend to argue that,

since the novel represents the female as successfully transcending her imprisonment

through the act of deterritorialization the notion of the house, it aspires to articulate the

sub-merged, unvoiced subjectivities in a third language and in collective enunciation.

However, this progression locates female characters in a liminal space and, to a certain

degree, shows that they are unable to compensate for the split that this process leaves in

their identities. As I will show in my discussion of the novel, it is hospitality that offers a

medium through which the act of deterritorialization can be achieved. Hospitality

suggests a new horizon for questioning the epistemological aspects of the notion of the

house and problematizing the discourse of nationalism and patriarchy. It also offers a

deconstructive approach to free the self and enable the submerged voice to reach a larger

audience. In addition, through a deterritorialized language, North African woman may

be able to designate her space of enunciation, and writing in English is the tool that

permits the existence of this space in the novel.

With the help of Young’s approach (2005) to the experience of the female body and

Attridge’s notion of “creative inventiveness” (2004), this chapter aims to investigate the

notion of the post-colonial house, rememory, and hospitality in relation to the re-

construction of identity in Al Khemir’s narrative. My purpose in this chapter is threefold:

First, I aim to explore the ways in which the act of “travel” and hospitality stimulate the

process of re-reading history. Second, I will investigate the ways in which the notion of

rememory opens up alternative sites for negotiating identity in a post-colonial space, and

show how this process charts opportunities to reconstruct the past from a minoritarian

perspective. Finally, in negotiating the post-colonial space through the notion of

hospitality, I will show that the act of re-reading stimulates a deterritorialized space for

the unspeakable to become widely spoken about.

4.1 NEGOTIATING SPACE IN THE POST-COLONIAL HOUSE

On her address to the 2009 National Book Festival, Al Khemir explains her choice to write

in English by stating that,

I was born in Tunisia, a small country in North African where Arabic is the first

language, French is the second language. French happened to be the second

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language because Tunisia was colonized by the French. So, when you grow up in

Tunisia, speaking two languages, being bilingual means that the other is part of you.

But for me to meet the other I crossed to Englishness. The English language is really

foreignness. To actually write in one’s third language it means that you are

constantly on the bridge. And on the bridge is really where I would like to be. (2009,

n.p.)

Al Khemir in this passage rejects to be part of the culture of the colonizer and to choose

English, rather than French, in order to write her first novel is to seek a neutral tool

through which she can re-write her past and her identity. Alterity for Al Khemir lies in

Englishness because English offers her the opportunity to be “on the bridge”. If Al

Khemir has “crossed to Englishness” to meet with foreignness, it is because her identity

construction is problematized in that same foreign language.

Al Khemir’s choice of language shows her desire to be “on the bridge” because

French may carry with it the colonial legacy that she wants to prevent in her writing. This

has also been noticeable in her first novel. Both the notion of language and belonging are

problematized in Al Khemir’s Watiting in the Future for the Past to Come. There are three

alignments that estrange subjectivities in relation to identity: the gendered, the cultural,

and the social. This section aims to interconnect these alignments and link them together

with other key elements in the novel in order to broach the issue of speaking the

unspeakable. The body can be a site for expressing the reconstruction of identity, and the

idea of re-turn (a “U-turn” to the imagined community) is projected through memory.

The notion of re-turn highlights two journeys. It can be a return home or the refusal of a

total return while at the same time emphasizing the act of going back to the original

home. The point of such a re-turn is to view the notion of return as a simple journey to

home, while the idea rests in the return to the host home. The effects of living in diaspora

represent the characters as adrift from stability. To identify the self with the minoritarian

and to emphasize the importance of language in this identification exemplifies a

prototype of a subject who can experience alienation at home. Whereas hospitality can

provide a paranational context for re-visiting the elements of ethics in historical

representation, rememory can play a role in this revision. I use “paranational” in the

sense understood by Seyhan, which refers to the deterritorialized communities that exist

“within national borders or alongside the citizens of the host country but remain

culturally or linguistically distanced from them” or “estranged” from the “home” culture

(2001, 10).

As I will show, Waiting in the Future for the Past to Come can be viewed as a site of

communication between the past and its “post” as understood in Bhabha’s sense (1994, 1-

3), and it is through these communicative frameworks that the renewal of life and

existence appears to take place in the novel. In addition, the novel seems to focus on the

personal memories of Amina in dialogue with other women’s personal memories in the

village of Kurba. In her study of Abuzeid’s The Memoir of a Modern Moroccan Woman, Diya

Abdou points out that personal memory in North Africa can be seen not as memory in

itself but as an image of imagined pasts, because “the things mentioned are not memories

but rather just ‘images’ produced in a collage, recorded by a voice” (2009, 16). The

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similarity between Abdou’s description and Amina’s flashes or “pictures” is consistent

with Amina’s need to realign with the minoritarian in Tunisia and with her engagement

with them in a dialogue out of which their voice may emerge. Consequently, Amina

seems to be aware of the fact that speaking for the minoritarian may only produce what

Spivak terms “epistemic violence”, and yet presenting personal experiences of history

becomes a strategy that help deconstruct the discourse of nationalism.

The novel opens with a description of the street leading to the house where the

main character, Amina, has grown up. As Amina enters the house, the narrative imagines

the house as one of memory, in which events in the past explain contrapuntally the

present histories of the minoritarians. The effect of the house of memory on the identity

of the narrator is revealed in the following passage:

I passed the rooms which occupied the right side of the courtyard, went down the

corridor and opened the big iron gate into what was originally the entrance hall to

this house. I leaned against the huge wooden doors, closed my eyes and took a deep

breath, a breath from the past. Behind these doors, across the road, was the main

bakery of the village. (Al Khemir 1993, 9-10)

On the basis of this passage, it can be argued that the notion of the house in this narrative

is important for an understanding of the flux of identity in a post-colonial context. The

emphasis placed on the “iron gate” and “the huge wooden doors” suggests that the

female subject in Tunisia is mastered by the male connotations of the words. The fact that

Amina closes her eyes may be interpreted as the need to generate new readings of the

elements of the past. To dwell in a house may entail reading the unconscious of the self,

which would compel readers to believe in its importance for an understanding of identity.

In his Poetics of Space, Bachelard points out that the person or reader who is “reading a

room”, writing a room, or reading a house “leaves off reading and starts to think of some

place in his own past” (1958, 14). The act of memory is important for the unconscious.

According to Bachelard, “by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams” all

those elements that help in restoring the unconscious in the process of reconstructing

identity (1958, 6). The argument that Bachelard attempts to emphasize resides in the

importance of the house in causing thoughts and memories to live not only in the past

but also in the present and the future as well (1958, 6). Amina’s identity seems to dwell in

the past, and to understand such a past she starts reading it through the elements that

constitute the house.

When Amina makes her journey back home, her memory of the house where she

has resided deprives her of any sense of belonging. For Amina, the house is a liminal

space in which the spatial and temporal edifices of identity and history remain as

indelible residues of the deferred process of rereading and restructuring her identity. The

events that have taken place inside and outside the house are reminiscent of the

deferment of a potential release from oppressive powers. In the house reside those

elements that tempt the reader to construct an ethical reading of identity. For Amina, the

house is the threshold to the memory of oppression. It is a point from which she starts

(re-)membering her past in order to negotiate her identity in the future.

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At night, a deep feeling emerges, placing Amina’s identity in a perilous position in

this context. This position is critical when she manages to sleep:

The night stretches becoming longer and longer, colder and colder and you lose

sense of yourself, your physical existence, you can’t relate to your body. you are so

wrapped up that your body becomes a mere layer of the whole bandage and your

head is taken over by ideas, it’s so crammed with thoughts, running, spinning, you

can no longer stop them. You can’t run away […] who are you? You probably don’t

recognize yourself because you’re too frightened. It might be that you haven’t met

yourself for a long time. Maybe you have lost all those sensations and associations

which make you feel it’s you. And here you block everything. You freeze. (Al

Khemir 1993, 21)

This moment of silence, which is symbolized in words such as “night”, “colder”, and

“frightened”, pressurizes Amina to read her present identity in relation to the house of

memory. It is by causing her head to be “taken over by ideas” that every possibility of

deterritorializing home is blocked. This passage, located at the very beginning of the

novel, reveals the extent to which Amina is struggling to position her scattered identity

between the past and the present. Her identity seems to be broken up and dispersed, and

her body is fixed and her mind is “crammed with thoughts”. Spending the first night in

the house of memory stimulates stories from the past to be acted out in the present. This

longing for the self is turned into a search for belonging marked by the question “who are

you?” According to Svetlana Boym, the return to the imagined community is understood

as “a way of patching up the gap of alienation, turning intimate longing into belonging”

(2001, 255). Yet Amina does not seem to search for replacing longing with belonging. On

the contrary, the process of integrating the body into a self-reading of identity leaves

Amina in a state of oblivion. She does not feel any sense of belonging to the imagined

community, which ultimately ends in personal deadlock, or as she says: “You freeze”.

Amina is, to borrow from Martin and Mohanty, “not being home”. Martin and Mohanty

remind us that

‘Being home’ refers to the place where one lives within the familiar, safe, protected

boundaries; ‘not being home’ is a matter of realizing that home was an illusion of

coherence and safety based on the exclusion of specific histories of oppression and

resistance. (1988, 196)

Amina’s negotiation of the elements of silence, fear, and stagnation seem to force

her to create two different constructions of house; in other words, house and home

become two different things. Accordingly, a house could function as the material

structure of a phenomenon called home, consisting simply of daily activities and intimate

relations which make a house become home (Gram-Hanssen and Bech-Danielsen 2004,

25). A house, therefore, stands as the materialization of identity. Young holds this view

when she argues for a two-level paradigm in which the notion of house/home may work.

She points out that

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There are two levels in the process of the materialization of identity in the home: (1)

my belongings are arranged in a space as an extension of my bodily habits and as

support for my routines, and (2) many of the things in the home, as well as the

space itself, carry sedimented personal meaning as retainers of personal narrative.

(2005, 139)

Objects in the house can become sediments of a particular past, and this can only work

prior to the spaces that “the material belongings of my life” inhabit (Young 2005, 139).

Whereas Amina’s house may be interpreted as the “sediment” of her past, it remains

problematic for her identity construction, especially if one notes that, in North African

terms, a house can hardly become a home. Reflecting on the terms dar (house) and Blad

(hometown/home) in colloquial North African Arabic, it would seem to be impossible to

correlate the significance of dar with that of blad (cf. Harrell and Sobelman 1983). The

interaction between the two does not seem to resonate with the meanings that “home”

inhabits in English. Dar signifies an idea, whereas blad signifies a concept. This aspect is

clearly indicated by Young in distinguishing between the idea of “home that reinforce[s]

oppression and domination from a concept of home as an important materialization of

personal, and sometimes group, identity” (2005, 156). Dar is a place to which people go

back after work and which they consider as a shelter, a safe place. Blad is a concept used

by an émigré of North African origin residing in France. It signifies the notion of

homesickness characteristic of diasporic identity.

People can settle everywhere, but they hardly feel at home. When an immigrant of

North African origin journeys back to her/his home country, the answer one could

receive to the question “where are you going?” is “going to blad”. This answer might not

be repeated while at “home” and returning to Europe, for instance. The probable answer

would be “going back”. Where? It might not be specified. Going to blad, and not dar, is

the key issue here, and the connotations of the two terms part company.

Nevertheless, the notion of house may not emancipate Amina from the feeling of

being at home. The epistemology of “being at home” in a house emanates from the

impact of the memories that a house may bear for Amina; because of the past memories,

Amina decides not to stay at “home”. If the notion of house problematizes Amina’s

identity and silences her, it remains for some the source of this construction. This is

exactly what happens in the novel for a character called Al-Hajj, who refuses to be

compensated for his old house with a new apartment in a new location. “Hajj rejected the

new plan, he sat in his café and refused to leave. ‘This is the café of my great-

grandfather,’ he said, ‘I grew up here as a boy and I spent all my life here. Here is my

heart and my life’” (Al Khemir 1993, 264). The refusal to change location is equal to that

of exile. To be exiled is to bring the past into the labyrinth of the present. Here, the house

as home signifies what Avtar Brah terms the network of “significant others”. House, like

home, connotes “various other ‘significant others’. It signifies the social and the psychic

geography of space that is experienced in terms of a neighborhood or a hometown. That

is, a community ‘imagined’” (1996, 4).

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The house, as also the café for Al-Hajj, is not merely a symbol of the geographical

location in which people used to reside and interact socially and intimately with each

other, or as merely a place to return into the “nostalgic” past. Rather, there are memories

that “engender […] a healing process” that enforce a re-unification of “the subject’s

disparate parts and the subject’s spiritual reconnection” to the house as the

materialization of identity (Greene 2008, 76). Thus, Al-Hajj does not move with the others

to the new location, and “when the wall collapsed, Al-Hajj collapsed too” (Al Khemir

1993, 264).

Accordingly, the house can also be seen as a site for constructing an imagined

community among the female dwellers because, as the narrative tells us:

There was something that weighed heavily in this enclosed world of women. An

absence rather than a presence. There was an intrinsic feeling of something

understood but never spoken of: that everything around me, everything in this

enclosed world had a feminine sex; every object, chair, cup, mat, everything, except

the walls that contained them. (Al Khemir 1993, 117)

What seems overarching in this passage is that the notion of the house predefines the

female identity in North Africa. The “world of women” is already “enclosed” in the

house. The feminine construct bears a monolithic identity that is subjected by

masculinity. “Understood but never spoken of” may suggest that the issue of gender is a

taboo central to the cultural politics of the region. The woman is there, but scarcely

noticed, and her presence indicates her absence. In either case, the possibility of resisting

the materiality of subversion might end in a split identity. In addition, Young explains

such a relationship within the house between man and woman as a return to “nostalgic”

feelings, where he has the power to put the woman in “her place, so that he can return to

the original maternal home” (2005, 129).

In this construction, the house becomes a symbol of oppression and extravagant

patriarchy, and for Ommzine to move to the new flat, is to liberate her self from the

despotism of the past. Meanwhile, oppression may be governed by tradition to the extent

that the notion of house represented in this narrative links two elements in the threshold.

To use reason in order to explain such a trajectory may not work in this constructive

discourse. Amina is unable to understand, for instance, why the door of her family house

is always locked. Nevertheless, she supposes that “there were things that were not done

for one reason or another but simply because they had to be done, just for themselves”

(Al Khemir 1993, 91). Oppression in this regard is viewed in the novel as a tradition in

Tunisia, where women are relegated to the secondary level below men.

Accordingly, the house is not considered as a mere location but it can also be

considered as a locale for its dwelling identities. What is important for the discussion at

hand is the way these identities demonstrate a nuanced search for one’s self: they

enunciate the potential to re-read the identity and point toward a new alternative

interpretation for the past to live in the future. The old house may carry memories that

are characteristic of post-colonial identity, but it can also signify a trauma that the post-

colonial subject needs to redeem if s/he wants to live in the future. The dream of lodging

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in the new apartments in the new city of Tunis can be one way to cure psychologically

the wounds of the past. Ommzine sees the modern flats as a passage that traverses and

deterritorializes the agonizing memories, and by changing places and locations a new

space can emerge for Ommzine to enjoy her present and future, one in which forgetting

replaces remembrance. Talking with Amina of how proud a woman could be when

moving to the new houses, the mother recounts:

‘Oh daughter’, she said, ‘if only you’d come with me last night and seen what my

eyes witnessed. May every believer have the same’. His mother was so proud, she

was covered with gold. The modern flat was equipped with everything, washing

machine, electric cooker, modern utensils in “aliminom”. Sets of glasses, you know,

everything the eye desires was there. He even brought with him the “raspiratu” for

the carpet. The whole flat is covered with wall-to-wall carpets. (Al Khemir 1993,

220-1)

For the mother, the house is no longer a site for identity re-construction or an emblem of

re-membrance. The notion of house is transformed from being a place of sanctuary into a

space in which to exile identities. The memory of the house connotes a mixed feeling of

nostalgia and the insecurity of old age (Murray 2009, 438). In this regard, home becomes,

for Ommzine, what Murray terms a critique “of pure origins and national identity” (2009,

26). Of course, there is something more to this insistence on relocating the self, but the

common memory stock that the notion of the house bestows upon the narrative is its

credibility in looking for alternative sites for re-membering the self. It can be argued that

the mother’s dream of moving to the new flats is a part of identity formation, because

moving, as Bhabha suggests, is a new way of reading the self (1996, 199), and the new

house can afford this opportunity.

During this subject formation and identity re-construction that the notion of house

offers in this narrative, intimacy seems to interpolate the ongoing process of negotiating

the polarity of home and abroad. When Amina comes back home to Kurba (blad) she

stays in the house (dar). The house validates this sense of what Boym terms “diasporic

intimacy” (2001, 251). Celebrating the return home in the house with the family members

(in the house and the “other house”) does not postulate the feeling of being at home

because “intimacy”, as Boym argues, might bear the weight to “desire most what we fear

most, and the familiar often comes to us to disguise” (2001, 251). The novel describes this

as follows:

I found myself amidst cousins, aunts and other relatives, thrown into the surprising

world of familiarity. Drums were played and old tunes were sung, gradually

awakening a familiar energy that had long been in hibernation. My feet were

carrying me into another world, or were they carrying someone else, a revived

dummy, an image of me, perhaps in a role I had played for years and found no

difficulty in taking again? This was Amina everybody knew and was happy to

know, the energy, with its powerful quality, was somehow unreal. (Al Khemir 1993,

14)

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This passage projects the feeling of a scattered identity. It shows that the moment the self

desires certain intimacies, it reaches a conclusion that confuses the construction of the

same identity.

As diasporic subject, Amina is disguised by the “dystopic intimacy […] rooted in

the suspicion of single home, in shared longing without belonging” (Boym 2001, 252).

The warmth of hospitality and memories evoked in this passage no longer connects

characters with their roots; on the contrary, they both split the subjectivity in the process

of re/membering. At certain points, Amina silently starts another process of membering

and remembering, and the moment drums are played, it revives in her “an image” of “a

role” that she played many years ago. And yet this role is no longer suited to her, since

the Amina of the past is different from the Amina that has emerged after she makes her

voyage to Britain. This suggests that memories of the house create a palimpsest of stories

that intensify the polarity of identities. The nurturing of characters’ consciousness begins

at home, but at the moment when location is followed with a movement of relocation, the

idea of rereading begins. In order to understand such a process, Homi Bhabha suggests

that the trajectory of a voyage between different locations implies a desire to think over

those ideas, decisions, and interpretations being held in the first place (1996, 200). To

move to a new place is the same as the way , to borrow from Bhabha, that one has to

“unpack” her/his library. The attempt to “unpack” is relevant to the way one reads a

book in a new place, as Benjamin suggests (1982, 59).

In addition, the act of reading remains a forceful medium to give credentials to

Amina’s past. Many events seem to be interrupted, and Amina’s engagement with

history through memory may not redress the ruptures that occur in her narrative of the

past. As Seyhan reminds us, “[o]ur understanding of the present is invariably predicated

on actual or imagined links to, or ruptures from, a recalled past” (2001, 4). Amina’s

notion of re-reading can be seen in the ways in which she begins to re-imagine her past

through sites of memories such as the house. This act of re-reading might not have been

achieved if Amina had stayed at home and had not traveled to Britain. Amina “unpacks”

her identity the moment she arrives in Korba. She believes that a moment of re-reading is

necessary in order to reconstruct female identity in post-colonial Tunisia, and that is

probably the reason why the narrative starts with a description of Amina’s family house.

However, the events that have occurred in the past seem to be interrupted, and in order

to form a new version of history Amina refers to her mother’s past, to Yassmin’s past,

and to the past of the other women inside the house.

It can be argued that the movements the narrator makes between past and present

are not ways merely to retell Amina’s past. Amina seems to be displaced from her origins

spatially and temporally. The feeling of being “lost” may not be replaced the return to the

origin, because both the self and the other within the imagined community experience

processes of transformation. In the part of Amina, her identity is now being reconstituted,

as if she were a host to Tunisia and not a local inhabitant. Amina’s intention not to stay in

Tunisia is nurtured by two main aspects: patriarchy and colonialism.

Subsequently, the house can be regarded as a site of ambivalence that offers

different meanings attached to the past. The memory of the house recalled by Amina

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confounds her personal collection of stories with collective memory. While her mother’s

account of “house” varies between colonialism and patriarchy, Amina sees it mainly as a

ritual of patriarchy. Many critics relate the notion of house to either patriarchy or

colonialism, or to both. In analyzing Gunesekera’s The Sandglass (1998) and

Arasanyagam’s “Time the Destroyer” (1995), Murray metaphorizes the colonial house as

a “bounded colonial space” embodying capture and containment (2009, 439-40). In a

similar fashion, Young’s approach to the house is based mainly on feminist critics’

reading of the house as a place of imprisonment (2005, 129). Both approaches to the house

are observed in this narrative as means of gendered seclusion. Abdo points out that

“even before independence the situation of North African women was grim. Not only did

the French colonists do nothing to advance the situation of women, they contributed to

their marginalization” (2009, 4; emphasis added).

Furthermore, the colonial past associated with the authoritative memory of the

house represents an aspect of the past that the mother aims to regenerate. Her

remembrance of the brutality of the colonial authority and how they tortured the

members of the resistant groups in their village Kurba, and the way that her husband

communicates with her (authority mixed with perplexity), suggests what La Capra calls a

process of liberation. It can be said that Amina’s mother follows the trajectories that La

Capra explains as follows: to remember and “actively” forget is to allow “for critical

judgment and a reinvestment in life” (2001, 70). Consequently, the remembrance of the

colonial past in the novel is associated with the memory of the husband. In many parts of

the novel, the father, colonialism, and/or resistance are instances in which the past is

brought into the negotiation of the future. The mother, as she knits, relies on memory and

imagination in order to recount how the colonial power brutally punishes her husband as

a member of the Tunisian resistance. In other words, Ommzine seeks to recall her past,

judge it, and forget it, and when the process is complete she can re-member with her

daughter.

However, in the course of remembering, Ommzine seems to be incapable of

forgetting her past, because different elements intertwine: colonialism and patriarchy.

The story retells the past of colonialism in which the French policemen used to arrive in

the middle of the night and take the active members of resistance groups to prison:

‘we were fast asleep, the doors were suddenly pushed wide open. The courtyard

was surrounded by them, French policemen in black […] I burst into tears… ‘Don’t

cry,’ he said as he folded his prayer mat, ‘have faith. Women in Algeria see their

men off with joyful ululation’. (Al Khemir 1993, 105)

This is not typical only of Tunisia, as he ordered the mother to remain silent; the father

uses Algeria as an allegory for reflecting on similar punishments and colonial brutality

elsewhere in the North African region.

In the post-independence era, the image of the father does not change: “your father

sat in the hall for the whole day. He only came in for his prayers and went back

immediately. Every time I spoke to him, he did not answer” (Al Khemir 1993, 50). A

silent father, who hardly talks to his wife apart from giving orders, makes the disparity

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bigger between the husband and the wife in the same house. Even though the house is

meant to link the elements of the family in the same space, the contrary seems applicable

in the novel. Nowhere in the novel could the emphasis of the power of such a discourse

(of an authoritative father) be better described than when the mother says that “we were

not allowed to come face to face with a strange man at that time” (Al Khemir 1993, 51),

and at this point, Ommzine becomes the witness. The mother’s invocation of memory of

the past does not intend to refute that past by remembering it differently, and thus

forgetting it. Rather, her aim is to forge an understanding of a certain situation that

happened in the past in order to create a “perspective” on that “experience” in the future.

However, since remembering can be seen as “the pathway to liberation” (Woods 2007,

34), it is through memory that the mother aims at gaining a certain level of liberation.

As for her mother, the house, for Amina, is also haunted by patriarchal power that

endorses the indeterminacy of the discourse of silence and gendered discrimination.

Amina’s childhood has been nurtured by silence: “‘Shsh…your father is asleep’ was the

motto” (Al Khemir 1993, 36). In Amina’s memory, the father, the authority of the house,

is “always asleep. The door to the main room was kept constantly closed and only my

mother was allowed in and out” (Al Khemir 1993, 36). Silence is perceived as a

permanent phenomenon and is symbolically associated with the patriarchal house. For

Amina, as for her mother, the father is the man of the house, and to the family member

his existence means silence.

Even though Amina tries to open up new horizons to liberate herself and the

women in the village of Kurba, it seems that silence, which permeates the narrative

structure, prevents her from fulfilling this process. The narrative is told through Amina’s

voice, and the events are seen through her eyes. Silence becomes the main language for

telling the story of the minoritarian in Tunisia, but, as the novel shows us, it is only

through the act of deterritorialization that the woman can break this silence and

“unpack” their female identity again. The dim light, silent, “frightening” nights, and the

narrative of the house are elements that work together in the narrative to indicate the

impossibility for the North African woman to deterritorialize her position if she still lives

in the house of the family. In addition, confining the female body to the house makes the

woman in North Africa revert to her imagination to demarcate the spaces that she wants

to inhabit, and Amina’s wish to see the sea could be one of these examples.

Amina always hopes to see the sea, but as she is unable to do so she has to imagine

it: “I decided to resort to my imaginary pen. Decided? No, it just happened” (Al Khemir

1993, 71). The role of the women in the house is to imagine the space, but she is not

capable of using it. When Amina’s father dies, her uncles become the authorities in the

family house. This can best be described through the structure of Amina’s house within a

house, called “the other house”, as a way of re-defining the shift of positions of the

patriarchy within the same house. “The other house” refers to a segment of the family

house. The house of the family consists of the main house, and within it there is another

house constructed for Amina’s cousins to inhabit. As a result, two families live within the

same house, and the division inside the house signifies the partition of authority between

the two men (Father and Uncle).

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Consequently, to imagine sometimes brings a feeling of release from the power that

restrains the movements of the body. In such societies as Tunisia, which are ruled by the

uncanny cultural politics of gender, patriarchy has permeated the social strata, resulting

in control of the female body. To keep the woman, to “tame her” in the social system, the

narrative represents the house in a manner that simulates the notion of the Panopticon as

a model of imprisonment. The desire to liberate the woman from patriarchy is confronted

by the authority in the house, whose role is to authorize imagination indirectly as a way

of gaining contact with the outer world:

And inside me, grew a desire for the sea. To see the sea and die, I thought. Our

house was not far from the sea, it was in fact ten minutes away, I was told; but

Uncle Ali surveyed the road to school and back to our house, or so did many eyes

and mouths which reported to him. So what was near felt thousands of miles away.

The forbidden, the unattainable, is always far, however close it is. (Al Khemir 1993,

49)

The metaphor of the sea in women’s writing is important for identity construction. As

opposed to the soil, the sea or the ocean is not stable but can be viewed as a location of

change, and it is this sense of change that humankind cannot control. For Amina the sea

designates the moment when she can liberate herself, re-construct her identity, and gain

masculine power. It can be viewed as the moment when she renews her thought, and

“unpacks” her identity again. According to Julia Kristeva, the word “sea” is a construct

that connotes an emblem of freedom that may be “larger than the first object of desire”

(2010, n.p.). Kristeva adds: “The word ‘sea’ (mer) is larger than water or larger than

mommy (maman)” (2010, np.; emphasis added). But “[t]o see the sea and die” may

involve a certain sense of risk. In terms of space, Amina, as a child, is aware that she is

unable to use all the space she has; she is unable to surpass the bounded geographical

space that is given to her. That is, to quote Young, “[t]he space, that is physically

available to the feminine body, is frequently of greater radius than the space that she uses

and inhabits” (2005, 40). The notion of the sea can be one possibility for women in North

Africa to deterritorialize themselves. Whereas the passage constructs gender relations

between men and women and points to the disparity that exists in this construction of

binaries in the house, it also suggests that there are at least some possibilities for women

to liberate themselves. But the passage also suggests that, unless women can configure

such possibilities, the case will be the following: it points to the torturing of the body if

the woman does not confine herself to the space demarcated for her.

Pointing out the presence of such encounters in the past, the narrator represents the

female body as an apparatus for resistance, and the breaking of silence anticipates a

certain sense of violence. Such an incident is described at length in the following passage:

He sat down on the chair. We stood up opposite him and silence reigned. Black

coffee with no sugar had been prepared by my eldest sister [...] I stole a look at my

uncle’s face. There was not a single disturbance. There are men who are just human

beings and there are men who are like monuments. Uncle Ali was a monument […]

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we waited. He took a sip of his coffee and put it down, placed his cigarette in his

mouth and took a puff [...] And full came the slap on my face, making me go dizzy,

and for a second, I thought I was going to land on the other side of the wall. (Al

Khemir 1993, 127-130)

This detailed description of the incident not only points to the disparity of physical

existence and the use of space between the “master” of the house and the female

dwellers, but it also maps the encounter and its side effects on the female body when

breaking the “law of space”. The motto “the man is the center and the woman is the

margin” is the argument maintained by Young. In societies predefined by a patriarchy

endorsed by tradition, the woman is conceptualized as the other: “the inessential

correlate to man” (2005, 31). She is, as Young suggests,

both culturally and socially denied the subjectivity, autonomy, and creativity that

are definitive of being human and that in patriarchal society are accorded the man

[…] The female person who enacts the existence of women in patriarchal society

must therefore live a contradiction: as human she is a free subject who participates

in transcendence, but her situation as a woman denies her that subjectivity and

transcendence. (2005, 31-2)

In addition, we may apply Mills’s view of the spatial relations that guide colonial

subjectivity in order to explain relations in a post-colonial context such as Tunisia. Mills

points out that forms of subjectivity “are closely linked with the forms of spatiality and

movement/restriction which developed in colonial societies” (2005, 44). Such modes have

also been developed in post-colonial societies. Amina’s uncles want to control her

movement through demarcating her space, and, by so doing, they aim to develop an

identity for her, the construction of which she refuses. To redress this situation, to

reconstruct and represent female identity, Marie-Laure Sauty de Chalon, in an interview

in the International Herald Tribune, suggests “that women need to talk and that is the same

everywhere in the world” (2010, 14).

By allowing the feelings of the past to flow into present encounters, Amina is able to

see and discover the imagined space of the sea through travel. Her voyage to continue

her studies in Tunis imbues her identity with the power to transcend the polarity of

gender, and leads her to realize that the sea has a voice. It becomes a surprise for her to

compare her dreams with reality (even though reality could be mere interpretations as

she sees it): “The sea spoke. It uttered different sounds, the waves, the movements […] all

that, I had not taken into account. It spoke in a language I responded to though I did not

understand” (Al Khemir 1993, 215). That distance from the house releases her from

patriarchal authority. The body now has to express inherent sedimentation, using its

unique language. The “sound” of the sea suggests the potential homogeneity that a

female identity would inhabit if she were released from spatial boundaries. The changing

waves of the sea give Amina the sense of power that she lacks to reconstruct her identity

(cf. Cora Kaplan 1986). Furthermore, the passage suggests that Amina’s identity is in the

process of reconstruction, and that the conventions of the patriarchal family are no longer

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working. Consequently, Amina seeks to liberate herself by contesting the pre-existing

spatial relation in a post-colonial milieu.

To say that Amina responds to the voice of the sea is to suggest that she feels the

ability to move freely in the spaces available to her, and that the move from Kurba to

Tunis provides her with the feeling of belonging to what Seyhan terms the

“paranational” community (2001, 10). The moment Amina sees the sea she starts the

process of re-reading, which drives her to make her first “voyage” and subverts the

male/female praxis. The changing nature of the sea gives the woman the hope and

promise that her identity will be redefined in a new language, the language of change

(Kaplan 1986, 71). Her first voyage, therefore, becomes her first step toward a

transcultural belonging where the post-colonial subject demarcates the notion of home as

a new space of becoming. It is the new language that enables Amina to gain her freedom

from the memory of the past. When the narrative recounts Amina’s journey to the sea, it

presents her as a post-colonial subject looking for a counter-discourse to patriarchy. She

does not go alone to the sea, nor with her roommates, but it is Antoine who surprises her

with the idea of the trip. The narrative does not suggest a total rejection of the past if the

characters want to live up the future. Besides, how can a woman liberate herself from the

notion of an oppressive past? What role does memory play in this context? Can

rememory be considered a possibility for the notion of the “becoming” to take place?

4.2 REMEMORY: LIBERATING THE NORTH AFRICAN WOMAN

In the previous section, I have demonstrated that the house represents a liminal hybridity

that links the past to the present and subject to object, providing the narrative with a new

route to the re-membering of identities. As I will show in this section, the house becomes

a symbolic reference to those conscious structures on two levels: On the first level, the

notion of the house undermines the process of identity construction, while on the second

level it indicates a process of reuniting the memory of the house with the act of

remembering (Amina and her mother). On both levels, rememory emerges as a

contrapuntal regeneration of the self from its other. This dual process of reconfiguration

installs the discursive device so that it can liberate the past and restore it for the needs of

the future. In this respect, the notion of the “beyond” that Bhabha advocates in his

“Introduction” to The Location of Culture, at least to a certain degree, fits into the

discursive strategy of the novel. The fusion of the past with the present in this narrative

provides an essential basis for the present to function, not as a break with the past but, as

a “beyond”, a liminal hybridity that bridges multiple temporalities. As Bhabha indicates,

[t]he present can no longer be simply envisaged as a break or a bonding with the

past and the future, no longer a synchronic presence: our proximate self-presence,

our public image, comes to be revealed for its discontinuities, its inequalities, its

minorities. (1994, 4)

The reunification of temporalities from the geophysical space of the family house is a

succinct feature that inextricably binds subject to object. Dwelling in this intervening

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space of the house expresses the notion of being “part of a revisionary time, a return to

the present to redescribe our cultural contemporaneity […] to touch the future on its hither

side” (1994, 7; emphasis original). The formation of this epistemological principle brings,

again, to the surface progressive elements of the house of memory in terms of the

language of diaspora. This is so because, according to Bhabha, “the encounter with

‘newness’” (1994, 7) and the process of renewing the past are mere contingent layers of

the temporality that emerges from the notion of the “beyond”: to “turn the present into

the ‘post’” (1994, 18). “Beyond”, however, does not connote merely this temporal

symbiosis. Rather, it also describes how life in the margins happens to be a remnant of

the bodies living in-between.

Rememory, as I will show, brings the individual’s past into the present. It is a

painstaking choice that invites the subject to revise her/his past identities in order to live,

and make sense of, the future. The painstaking element involved in the process of

rememory resides in its power either to allow identities in the past to live in the future or

simply to neglect those identities for a new (rather than renewed) identity construction.

The term has been coined by Toni Morrison and it is explained through the character of

Sethe in the novel Beloved (1988). In addressing Denver, Sethe explains that rememory is

the moment when the subject is incapable of escaping the past. In other words, rememory

remains the remembrance of memory itself, and if, for instance,

a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place – the picture of it – stays, and not just in

my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating

around there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think about it, even if I die,

the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. (1988, 36)

Rememory functions in a way that adds to remembrance the aspect of bringing memory

into the present through imagination, as it is only imagination that grants access to the

“unwritten interior life” of its people (Morrison 1987, 111). Consequently, rememory

concerns the past, the present, and the future, and also the way in which identities can

forge new possibilities for living. Rememory is not only a question of remembrance of the

past but also a question of re-membering selves, identities, and memories of the past in

the present. The interaction of these elements shifts the emphasis from being a single

action of memory onto a web of interactive facets, including memory and re-membering.

In the novel, revisiting memory functions at two levels: re-membering and

dismembering. Amina’s memory of the house equals the process of bringing her past into

the present discussion. This process would not have been achieved if Amina had not

traveled abroad. It can be argued that Amina’s travel to Britain provides her with the

mechanism to “unpack” her identity and the ability to revisit her past, which she sees as

preventing the Tunisian woman from achieving freedom: travel in this sense predates the

notion of revisiting the past (memory).

Furthermore, the “re-meeting” between Amina and her mother reveals Amina’s

bifurcation as a memento of the split that a diasporic identity undergoes. It also forges the

consciousness of a dual process that is taking place: memory and dis-membering.

Memory is described through the novel’s opening: when Amina arrives at her home-

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town of Kurba, she realizes that her journey is a mere remembrance of a memory, that

Svetlana Boym explains as a process “that no longer has a single anchor in the native city

but unfolds through superimposition of native and foreign land” (2001, 258). Dis-

membering functions in the novel in the impossibility of Amina’s mother rejoining her

daughter.

Although the mother uses Amina as a trace of her past, the process of re-membering

that she needs seems to specify a disunification of both characters. Knitting the strand

while remembering and recounting past stories to Amina, the mother aims at a trace

through which she might be able to deterritorialize her past. The knitting does not seem

to be completed since the aim behind each thread is to re-read memory. Through her

memory, the mother is able to retell her past to Amina, and through this act she seeks to

liberate herself from the authority that oppresses her and to re-member with her

daughter.

In the course of recognizing the need to re-integrate the past, the mother seeks a

total re-membering with her daughter Amina. Thus, the mother’s dream prevails: to re-

member with her daughter: “Now I’ve got you. I’ll start a new life with you. I am

waiting” (Al Khemir 1993, 53). Waiting for the moment “to start a new life” almost

suggests that the things of the past need to remain in the past, as long as they are

discussed in the future. To say this may explain, for instance, that the novel’s title

indicates the impossibility of recalling the past in the future and that it is better not to

wait for the past to arrive in the future. To start a new life might suggest that the present

should remain an aspect of what Bhabha terms the “beyond”, a link between past and

future. The same implication is constantly repeated by the mother in the novel (Al

Khemir 1993, 35; 42; 225; 243): in other words, the future of the mother is replicated

through her re-embodiment with her daughter, and the past is re-created to release the

self from its imprisonment. For the mother, the future is an inextricable knot that

connects her past in the present. She is then said to be “waiting in the future for the past

to come”. In this vein, the mother desires to successfully achieve at least a part of her

rememory, which Greene terms “re-membering” (2008, 79).

The relation that the mother aims to construct through the notion of rememory

suggests that the mother and her daughter aim to speak with a collective voice. However,

rememory seems to fail to thrive in this novel on the first level, because one part of the

process of rememory does not consistently fit into the process of identity reconstruction.

While the mother is using her memory and imagination to re-member with her daughter,

Amina seems to use different temporalities (past perfect, simple past, and future) in order

to re-read her identity, to dis-remember, and therefore she reconstructs the past in an

alternative fashion.

Amina does not seem to be imprisoned in the past as her mother is, but her

articulation of the past means a re-reading of identity and not merely a jettisoning of that

past. It is the notion of selective memory that Amina uses in “uncovering” the past and

reading identity in the future. Thus, the novel does not imagine the past as a mere

instance of memory. Instead, it demonstrates various potential aspects so that the act of

rememory can succeed. These aspects include the notion that subjectivities need to

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experience a successive process of the “unpacking” identities, which can only be achieved

through constant relocation and dislocation (1996, 200).

It should be noted that the use of rememory as a mechanism for releasing woman

from the notion of imprisonment may suggest that hospitality can function in this

narrative as a way of criticizing the absolutism of the discourse of patriarchy monitored

in the house. Its use as a narrative device gives a voice to the female and releases her

body. It perpetuates the notion of deterritorialization characteristic of minority literature,

as understood in the sense presented by Deleuze and Guatarri. Becoming heard presumes

a certain authority over voice in this narrative. As Amina notes, “It doesn’t matter what

language does the world speak, a scream is a scream is a scream” (Al Khemir 1993, 22).

In Derrida’s sense, hospitality is both an ethic and a cultural construct. As an ethic,

hospitality releases itself from its conditioning structures. Hospitality is regarded as “the

principle of ethics” (Derrida 2000, 50), and as such it can be seen as an interruption of the

self. According to Westmoreland, hospitality as an interruption to the self brings the self

and the other into question (2008, 7-9). Through the notion of hospitality, the act of

creating the other at the threshold illustrates an experience of confrontation between the

host and the guest. On this level, the act of hospitality is perceived as the possibility of

dismantling the notion of the house presented in the novel, in the way (absolute)

hospitality dwells in-between unconditional and conditional hospitality. Attridge points

out that, during the course of action of creating the other as an effect of hospitality, the

self could “be said to be a creation of the other” (2004, 24).

If rememory provides Amina with the mechanism to revisit her past, the notion of

hospitality can be said to be a chasm that enables Amina to monitor her identity

construction. To do this, it can be noted that hospitality is manifested in this novel on two

multifaceted levels: the conditional (factored by transnational travel) and the

unconditional (factored by foreignness). At the conditional level, the journey that Amina

makes from her village Kurba to Tunis inspires her to consider new possibilities of

contesting the predefined identity of her childhood. This national journey stimulates her

to transgress the notion of national oppression and starts a process of transformation and

reformation that will take place on a transnational level. The journey to England is a vivid

experience that stems from the need to explore one’s identity outside the nation. It

postulates the process of being on the outside that imbues identity with the feeling of

liminality, and the “creation of the other”. In such circumstances, Homi Bhabha reminds

us that

the borderline work of culture demands an encounter with ‘newness’ that is not

part of the continuum of past and present. It creates a sense of the new as an

insurgent act of cultural translation. Such art does not merely recall the past as

social cause or aesthetic precedent; it renews that past, refiguring it as a contingent

‘in-between’ space, that innovates and interrupts the performance of the present.

The ‘past-present’ becomes part of the necessity, not the nostalgia, of living. (1994,

7)

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Amina becomes a liminal hybrid subject because of transnationalism and foreignness.

Her first encounter with the culture of the borderline remains a significant reference to

her identity at home. Her role in a paranational community instigates a feeling of being in

a space of in-betweenness that “interrupts the performance” of her actual Being. It is the

experience of being hosted in the other’s home that promises a considerable alignment

between the transnational and paranational embodiment of displaced subjects standing

as the mediator between the two societies.

Subsequently, displacement cannot be singled out from this process, because this

aspect has already been incorporated in the stories and histories of orphaned people,

marginalized minorities, and disconcerted groups. According to Caren Kaplan, “The

prevalence of metaphors of travel” characterized in estrangement and displacement is the

marker of the contemporary world, although “displacement is not universally available

or desirable for many subjects, nor is it evenly experienced” (1996, 1). For Amina

displacement is not considered as a mere action. Many elements have contributed to the

act of travel that Amina initiates. First, as a post-colonial country, Tunisia experiences a

process of transformation and reconstruction of national identity. In several passages,

Omzzine notes that Tunisia in the past is not Tunisia in its present manifestation.

Previously, she says, “we were not allowed to come face to face with a strange man at

that time. Nowadays, women go out everywhere” (Al Khemir 1993, 51). Second,

education has also been a central concern of successive governments, and to study at

university level, one has to travel to the main cities. Third, there is Amina’s educational

ingenuity in being, as her roommates note, “the best student in the whole of the country,

the one who came first in the whole of the country in the Baccalaureate exams” (Al

Khemir 1993, 156). The fourth element that inspires this travel is linked with Amina’s

position in Tunisian society. She is the daughter of a “martyr”, Saleh Ben ‘Abd Slam, who

fought against the colonial regime in order for Tunisia to become an independent nation

(Al Khemir 1993, 2). These elements work actively together to help Amina re-create her

space in new places.

The first time Amina arrives at the École Normale Supérieure, she has the feeling of

being a “guest in a house”. The emblem of foreignness alienates Amina and deprives her

of her own singularity. Alone in room 346, questions start to flow from her unconscious

considering the essence of her being “at home” while the host is away: “what do I do? Start

to unpack my luggage? What if they come while I am in the middle of all this?” (Al

Khemir 1993, 152). Her feeling of insecurity, of breaking what Derrida calls the “law of

hospitality”, the conditioned practice that “governs the general concept of hospitality”

(2000, 25), is haunting. The feeling of such restriction delays Amina’s process of

unpacking her identity; and she postpones it to a later stage: “I’ll wait. I’ll go out and not

come back” (Al Khemir 1993, 152).

The symbolic construction of both host and guest in this novel is important in the

way in which both parts representing the act of hospitality are significantly transformed.

They are symbols because neither part owns the house, since all are hosted for

educational purposes. In the meantime, hospitality takes place in that the old resident has

to welcome the new and the law of hospitality has to be implemented.

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The first encounter between the guest (Amina) and the host (her roommates)

represents the first encounter between the self and her other. Amina recognizes this

aspect when she is surrounded by the other dwellers: “Never had my body felt so small”,

until the time comes for her to be hosted in a different house (Al Khemir 1993, 155).

Accordingly, Attridge explains this by stating that in such circumstances the self

“encounters the limits” of her “own powers to think and to judge, her capacities as a

rational agent” (2004, 33; emphasis added). Amina faces, as a consequence of conditional

hospitality, a series of questions from her roommates. This makes Amina’s body shrink,

as her capacity to judge has been put into question. The ethics of hospitality are

impossible in such a situation, since the act of questioning defers any process of intimacy,

but the act of reading self qua the other takes place. This deferment transforms into a

powerful means for the guest to become a host, and Amina is no longer that other who

comes to interfere with the intimacies of the girls. Amina’s unconditional hospitality, in a

change of roles, makes her become what she calls “a secret box” for the girls. The space in

between is filled with something that neither part could openly talk about:

This was the place where I was to spend four years […] it did not take too long

before we became friends…they liked me for reasons they could not understand,

perhaps like a forgotten part of themselves. I soon became the center of complicity

for every one of them, a secret box, or rather a box of secrets. (Al Khemir 1993, 156-

7)

The girls enjoy Amina’s company because of the ethical principles of her hospitality. She

does not invalidate their identities. Rather, she helps them develop a sense of its

meaning. Intimacy does not come on their own initiative, but it is imposed on them. The

imposition of intimacy fosters an exchange of roles between the host and the guest: the

guest becomes the host and the host becomes the guest, and the functional utility of each

part is defined.

Conditional hospitality in this respect, becomes absolute, as described by Derrida:

the hôte who receives (the host), the one who welcomes the invited or received the

hôte (the guest), the welcoming hôte who considers himself the owner of the place, is

in truth a hôte received in his own home. He receives the hospitality that he offers in

his own home; he receives it from his own home—which, in the end does not belong

to him. The hôte as host is a guest. (1999, 41-2; emphasis original)

Transformation of the self is processed from within its structure of power. The girls come

to enter their house, to recognize their selves through Amina, the guest, the outsider. This

is, according to Derrida, an exchange of roles in which “the guest, the invited hostage,

becomes the one who invites the one who invites” (2000, 125).

In order for these shifts in roles to take place, Amina integrates the roles played by

ethics into hospitality. The girls do not understand why they like Amina, but, as Amina

notes, she represents a “forgotten part of themselves”. She is such a good listener that she

is a “secret box” for them. Listening, here, is not understood in its literal sense. It

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correlates with what Attridge calls “creative reading”. Reading/listening is an activity

and a process at the same time: it is “an attempt to respond to the otherness” (2004, 79).

Amina does not find the girls good readers/listeners. This pact impels Amina to create

other strategies in order to respond creatively to her otherness. Amina does not stay with

her roommates, but she manages to live on her own: “The following year, my room-

mates were surprised and unexpectedly disappointed when I moved elsewhere” (Al

Khemir 1993, 157). She lives in the dormitory. Amina’s decision to live in the dormitory

alone might be interpreted as a process of transition where identity moves from being

static to more flexible where multiplicity is significant for the reformation of that identity.

This is one of the first steps that Amina takes to revisit and re-construct her identity in a

transcultural way.

“Creative inventiveness” resides in performing the past in order to discuss it in the

future. Through the act of performing and performances, Amina instigates a dual

paradigmatic re-constructive self: to re-read minority pasts and to reconstruct future

identity. At this point, it could be meaningful to assume that “the notions of performance

and the performative construction of identity” permit subjectivity to reconstruct identity

in conjunction with the “preexisting cultural scripts and [by] performing them” (Nyman

2009, 97; cf. Butler 1993). Amina’s script is contingent on her recalling of memory, and the

act of performing those events manifests a subconscious process of finding a good

listener to help deconstruct the past of the minoritarian. Amina does not invoke her past

through rememory but it is through performances that she can feel a sense of freedom,

and her body is released from the haunting memory of her past. There seems to be a need

to speak, and to perform, notes Cora Kaplan, so as to present women “with such a

profound split between their social, sexual identity (their ‘human’ identity) and their

artistic practice that the split becomes the insistent subject, sometimes overt, often hidden

or displaced” (1986, 71) of much of their performances.

There seems to be a need for Amina to construct her femininity through

performances, which, to some extent, are not separable from what Nyman calls, the

“preexisting cultural” construction of gender. The past haunts Amina, and in order to

refine that past, she performs it. Her past is acted out before an audience of university

students. At this moment it seems that Amina’s body is haunted by her agonizing

memories and in needing to represent the split in her identity she seeks to perform her

past. This aspect can be understood from the following passage:

This tiny body was haunted as far as they were concerned, though they did not

bring this realization all the way out. This body was inhabited by all sorts of people,

ancient, old and young and by all sorts of beasts, creeping, crawling, flying,

swimming beasts […] And after every performance, my roommates gave me the

space they would give to a considerable number of people. (Al Khemir 1993, 161)

After each performance, Amina’s body seems to be relieved; her identity is in the process

of re-construction: “I felt a sense of relief mixed with perplexity. My body felt lighter and

my mind was perplexed at the show it had witnessed. The lightness of my body often

helped me carry on with life for several weeks” (Al Khemir 1993, 161). Similarly, Amina

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wants to perform her memories so as to find a good listener for her, and the

minoritarian’s, stories. She aims to tell them to the world. University students are a

significant audience at this stage. They can watch performances with critical eyes and, at

the same time, their reading becomes a re-reading of their own personalities.

One could compare Amina when she first enters the university with her identity

after she arrives home: the difference lies in the sense of freedom that she creates for

herself. The space between Amina, her audience, and her friends becomes a space of

shared intimacies; however, it is left unexplored. Neither part wants to explore that

space, because what matters for Amina is that she makes the world inside her familiar to

those around her: “my room-mates grew familiar with the world within and started

feeling frightened of becoming haunted themselves” (Al Khemir 1993, 163). There seems

to be a sense of contamination in a part of her memory. Amina’s memory is not an

individual aspect of her subjectivity; rather, it is the notion of cultural memory that seems

to overwhelm every female identity in North Africa. The audience is composed of

females and males, but only the females are able to interpret Amina’s past in performing

those memories.

Another action helping Amina’s reading of space and time is the notion of

unconditional hospitality. In order to foster a manifest revision of the Tunisian past,

Amina engages in a relationship with Antoine. The novel does not provide any detail

concerning this character, apart from the fact that his name suggests that he is a French

settler in Tunisia. Antoine comes to know Amina on a rainy Sunday when she goes for a

walk. Enchanted by the weather, she is “taken into a whirl […] an abyss of mud

swallowed” her (Al Khemir 1993, 165). Antoine arrives to rescue her, and this is the

second meeting between the two. Amina is a guest for the second time, and Antoine is

the host. At his home, Amina experiences unconditional hospitality, and it is there that

she feels at home while away. Hospitality can be understood from the following passage:

I got up. Antoine brought breakfast and we ate. We talked about the weather, about

the rain, about my walks. We talked and talked. It was late afternoon when I said

that it was high time to go. He nodded, disappeared into the kitchen and came back

with some tangerines. ‘Take these with you,’ he said, ‘the food must be pretty

miserable in that university canteen of yours. (Al Khemir 1993, 168)

This incident suggests that Tunisia is undergoing a process of transformation, and to

welcome a Tunisian girl in the house of a foreigner can be seen as an impossible gesture

in post-independence Tunisia. This transformation may also suggest that Amina’s

identity undergoes this transformation specifically through the ways in which she

interprets things, and that the split between her sexual and social identities is at work.

Antoine’s unconditional hospitality helps blur the line between the native and the

foreigner or the host and the guest. Derrida reminds us that unconditional hospitality

“requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner, but to the

absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come,

that I let them arrive, and take place in the place” (2000, 25). The experience of

unconditional hospitality fosters a sentiment of security that Amina misses while she is at

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home in Kurba. Amina’s identification with Antoine has more than one implication. It is

a call for an objective approach in narrating the colonial past, in which both the colonizer

and the colonized should be engaged in knitting the threads and fathoming the rupture

in the history of North Africa. An example is provided by Antoine’s invitation to show

Amina around the old town. Ironically, Antoine, a foreigner representing the colonial

regime, knows most of the parts of the old town; however, the history of the places is not

configured as part of his identity. His existence in Tunisia can only be seen from the

position of being a foreigner or a guest in Tunisia. His knowledge of places helps Amina

to realize that those places are sites of memory that contribute to the re-writing of the

history of Tunisia. For instance, the Café That al-Sur “was particularly active in the 1930s

and 40s, where writers, poets, singers and all sorts of artists, many of them involved in

the political movement against the French” (Al Khemir 1993, 249).

Hospitality in this novel can be considered as a way of fixing the ruptures of the

past in order to live in the present, thus reintegrating its elements for future generations.

These sites of memory are invoked as subversive of the history that is provided officially:

“‘I knew the story,’ I said, ‘but I’ve never seen Bab Swiqa before’. He laughed and added,

‘And I knew the place but never knew the story. Now we both know the place and we

both know the story!” (Al Khemir 1993, 250). The passage also suggests a counter-version

to history. It is a paradigm that unpacks the different points of view of the hidden sites of

history, wherein all participate in this medium: male, female, host and guest, and so on.

The unconditional hospitality predicts a nexus for the historical sites of resistance. This

temporal oscillation triggered by the notion of place articulates the frequent absence of

these places from history, and presents a model for releasing this blockage so that the

past can be seen as unbiased.

Nevertheless, moving between the two forms of hospitality, unconditional and

conditional, does not seem to link the notion of memory with the image that the novel

aims to visualize for an alternative past in the present. On the one hand, it is through

conditional hospitality that Amina encounters the reconfiguration of her identity. On the

other hand, the unconditional hospitality provides Amina with the medium to represent

her past, to negotiate the past, and to figure the ruptures as possibilities for rerouting

history. It is between these two forms of hospitality that this minority literature aims at

an absolute deterritorialization in order to enunciate the stories to the world. Because of

her first journey from Kurba to Tunis, Amina experiences a series of interruptions in her

identity. As a guest in two different actions, Amina engages in the act of retelling the

history inscribed in the notion of unconditional hospitality. She also carries the burden of

liberating her imprisoned body, inspired by conditional hospitality and creative

performance. In other words, the conjunction of the two processes and the oscillation

between mind and body in time and place offer liberation from the female imprisonment.

At this specific point, Amina bears the agonies of her mother, sisters, female friends and

all those shadowy corners of the unvoiced, and her aim is to tell the world their story.

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4.3 RE-DEFINING THE POST-COLONIAL FEMALE SPACE

Oppression stemming from the notion of house in Tunisia pervades every aspect of

Amina’s life. Her struggle to liberate herself through memory and hospitality can be seen

as a metaphor that helps construct the process of liberating the past from tradition:

because “the past, in the form of tradition, acts as an obstacle” to the subject (Woods 2007,

121). This realization correlates with Amina’s intention of telling her mother’s story to the

world. In addition, what the present narrative aims to refute is the role of the idea of

nationalism in perpetuating patriarchal discourse in North Africa. Rememory, memory,

and hospitality are processes of continuity and interruption, of destruction and

reconstruction, and consequently, Amina succeeds on both levels of liberation resulting

in a re-reading of her identity and herself from the trauma of memory. The fluid, hybrid

conjunction of temporalities (past-present) that the narrative invokes sustains the

possibility of an interminable future, reconstructed metaphorically in the marginal space

beyond the house. Success does not take place inside; it originates from the outside (the

house), enabling subjectivities to work out new strategies for liberation.

Since the feeling of liberation is sustained, Amina travels to Britain to study. She has

been overwhelmed by Antoine’s hospitality, released, partially, from the haunting

memories of the house to begin a first reading of identity. However, a total re-reading of

Amina’s self can only be resonated with her re-turn to Kurba, a place where she manages

not to stay. The notion of re-turn is twofold in this narrative: first, it embodies a refusal to

reunite with her mother; second, it seems to tell the world the story of the marginalized.

This rapprochement suggests that the split Amina experiences by the end of the novel is

not an effect of diaspora. Rather, Amina acknowledges that the choice between home and

away is agonizing, placing her own identity in a state of undecidability. She notices that

and says: “As though I were here but over there and as though I were there but over

here” (Al Khemir 1993, 269). This split originates from Amina’s refusal to identify with

her mother, i.e., her nation. In addition, her decision to practise disidentification

crystallizes her engagement in the urgency of voicing the oppressed subjectivities to the

world. The subject of enunciation may not be stated directly in the novel. It is not merely

a question of a voyage out and a return; rather, it is about a collective struggle against

oppressive powers manifested indirectly in the concept of the house.

To speak out, to communicate with the world, the novel uses English as its means of

communication. In this context we can recall Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of minority

literature, in which they note that the individual speaks in a collective voice, and not for

her/himself. A minor literature constructs the notion of solidarity among the members of

a minority group (in this case Tunisian women). To say so, deterritorialization affects the

nation from within its structure of power, leading it “to express another possible

community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility”

(Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 17). This narrative does not speak for itself even though it

emphasizes the singularity of its character, Amina. However, the narrative technique

seems to problematize the notion of voice itself. The only voice that we encounter is

Amina’s, and the main points of view are represented through her voice. In addition,

there is an inclination toward victimizing woman’s voice in North Africa and this

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tendency is conveyed by Amina as the only narrator voice. The notion of voice becomes

even more problematic when we come to understand that Amina’s voice is not merely

her own, but one that functions in a collective way. There are, as Deleuze and Guattari

note, “only collective assemblages of enunciation” (1986, 18). In saying this, the narrator

provides certain solutions to override such impossibilities.

Amina’s mother, for example, has “walked out of her clothes” and it is time for the

others (females in Tunisia) to follow a similar path and “walk out of their skins” (Al

Khemir, 21). It seems to be an impossibility for Amina to “carry on living” in her body:

her “heart feels desperate to get out of its rib-cage and scream” (Al Khemir 1993, 21). This

impossibility illustrates one of the three impossibilities facing minority literature: the

impossibility of articulation. However, since English is pivotal to this narrative, Amina

has promised her mother to tell her story to the world (Al Khemir 1993, 21). It is not a

single story, but a meaning of collective enunciation, where participants form the core of

the marginalized female subjectivities (mother, Yassmina, and others). Articulation does

not need a specific language for a shared understanding since, for minorities, it is easy to

decipher a narrative of this kind among themselves: “it doesn’t matter” what language

the world speaks, as Amina confesses to her mother: “a scream is a scream is a scream”

(Al Khemir 1993, 22). Amina emerges, to use her own words, from “darkness into a

strange world” (Al Khemir 1993, 23), a world that has inspired her to tell her stories in a

collective manner. The aspects erased from history, given the impossibility of re-writing

ever restoring the memory of its people, have been replaced by a collective version of

memory. The oscillation of temporalities imposes a different interpretation of events that

ultimately affects the ideology of the interpreter. The narrative of history, the use of

memory, sites of memory, and the notion of rememory may not be able to resolve the

ruptures found in history itself. However, marginal elaboration – narratives that stem

from the margin – may be pivotal in fostering an objective approach to history.

Memory has the power to reveal, but the same power can also be used to conceal.

One might not totally depend on memory. Amina may make sense of her past in relation

to her voyage both into and out of the home. In addition, the notion of collective memory

can also help in sharpening this recognition, where storytelling plays a role in this

process. Images that once appeared smaller, and colors, which were once hardly defined,

now become sharpen: “Images only grew bigger, lines got more distinct and tones of

colours more defined. With time, images multiplied and superimposed in my crammed

head” (Al Khemir 1993, 25). The images that become much clearer can be understood as

an aspect of both the collective memory and her voyage out.

Amina does not have direct access to the past, and her memory may be viewed as

incomplete. To remedy this incompleteness, the novel not only recurs and projects itself

in the memory of the ethnic minorities to retell the past, but it uses memory as a tool to

thread the temporal void that exists in the narrative of history. This notion of memory

becomes part of Amina’s identity and her personal memory intervenes in the memories

of the marginal people around her, including her mother, Yasmina, Aisha, and others.

An explicit indication of such representation can be extracted from the song that

Aisha sings while she helps Ommzine in the process of her knitting work: “Oh my

lamentations on Jaris and its girls, the unbelievers have been and destroyed their

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honour” (Al Khemir 1993, 120). Aisha is concerned with the honor of the girls, especially

when the nassara (a word that means non-believers, but which also connotes the colonial

regime) “destroyed” the honor of Tunisian girls. This song seems to reverberate with the

brutality of French colonialism in North Africa; such recognition suggests that collective

memory is significant to the construction of national identity. Although the notion of

collective memory seems to glean individual memories in order to echo the voice of the

minoritarian, it suggests the impossibility of making all these individual memories

unified in a collective way. In other words, collectivity may only operate at the level of

collective memory that is attentive to national identity, but not to provide a

countermemory. Such an aspect makes invisible histories intervene in the mainstream

discourse of history, which results in every individual’s memories emerging before

collective memories. As a second option for voice, the narrative proposes storytelling as

the mechanism for maintaining such a process.

Auntie Houria’s story of the three orphan girls brings “listeners […] from both

worlds, that of reality and that of dreams” (Al Khemir 1993, 103). Auntie Houria’s story

becomes an aspect of liberating the female voice from the colonial and post-colonial

mainstream discourse, because the story is “stretching the realities of those who were

awake into a world of dreams and entering the world of the dreamers, to present them

with different realities” (Al Khemir 1993, 103). The novel seems to accept the possibility

of the minoritarian presenting “different realities”, and Yasmina’s marriage at the age of

59 by the end of the novel may suggest such a hope. In this sense, storytelling allows for

multiple reading of collective memories to help in shaping history by refining individual

memories. Abdo notes that the discourse of nationalism “has betrayed women”, and to

overcome such betrayals (2009, 8) Fatima Sadiqi suggests that, “monolingual illiterate

women use folktales, songs, and gossip to express their inner selves and voice dissent

and dissatisfaction in a heavily patriarchal context”: storytelling becomes a tool for

overriding the binary construction of power in North African culture (Sadiqi 2003, 38).

Amina’s symbolic journey from Kurba to Tunis allows her to refine her memory

with the other minoritarian memories and it is then that she begins the process of reading

the self, and encounters herself and her past. The importance of being a transnational

diasporic figure pushes Amina to accept a transcultural identity as it has inspired her to

opt for a paradigm through which minoritarians can dwell with no potential oppression.

The complexity of such intermediacy, living in-between temporalities and places at the

same time, proliferates in the course of identity recognition, which is perplexed by the

collective enunciation of the minoritarian voice.

The journey Amina experiences during the course of her relationship with Antoine

inspires the possibility of reclaiming her past and adapting it to the needs of the

present/future. It has also inspired in her the audacity of hope to voice a minor narrative.

This aspect does not fully permeate the considerable intimacy represented in the

intonation of the mother/daughter. Amina is no longer that same girl who happened to

receive her portion of beatings from her uncles. She is no longer that girl whose living

depends on an imaginative prospectus of life. She is a woman who, like her mother, has

inherited the pains and agonies of her people, but where the two characters part

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company is that Amina does not want to identify with her mother, or with those like her:

she wants an identity of her own construction, a transcultural identity.

To articulate a voice might presume an awareness of the obstacles that hinder the

insurgence of the subject’s voice, to identify with the subject in question, and to work in a

collective assemblage of enunciation. The problematic of such a paradigm rests in the fact

that Amina’s refusal to identify with this group (Yassmina, her mother, her sisters, etc.)

cannot be attributed to egocentricity. As the novel shows, it is a process of negotiation

and identity transformation that pushes toward this notion of self-identification. In this

context, Amina is unable to discuss this issue with her mother openly. First, Omzzine

depends to a greater extent on Amina because, as the mother says, she is her future.

Second, the cultural politics in Tunisia postpone the act of female travel unless she is

accompanied by a man. Thus, the novel suggests, being a woman in North Africa delays

any such journeys outside her house. In the case of Amina, she only highlights the honor

of her mother the moment she re-turns home to Kurba. However, her decision to leave

after celebrations may only problematize this condition. The third element rests in the

notion of voice itself. To have a voice, to make your voice heard, as a woman in the North

African context, presumes that the subject would propagate all those cultural and social

norms that relegate the woman to a secondary level with regard to the man. All these

elements act together to weave a problematic approach pivotal to communication

between the mother and daughter.

Consequently, Amina is left in a situation of limbo and indecision. Her identity is

split, not as a factor of travel (dislocation), but as one of her re-turn and the possibility of

losing confidence in the act of voicing. This is apparent in the following passage:

What if I pulled the thread and went wherever I wanted to go? Had not the time

come to unknit everything that had been knitted so far? Yes, everything. I had the

feeling that none of the items she had knitted was separate and that if I pulled the

woolen thread as I went away, I would unknit everything. (Al Khemir 1993, 270)

The delicacy of Amina’s identity and the impossibility of articulation are two exemplary

settings that problematize the issue of identity in this novel qua nation. In his

“Nationalism, Gender, and the Narrative of Identity”, Radhakrishnan points out that the

discourse of nationalism articulates the privilege that emerges from woman’s inability “to

produce its own history in response to its inner sense of identity” (1992, 85). In this novel

in imagining “woman as victim […] Woman becomes the allegorical name for a specific

historical failure: the failure to coordinate the political or ontological with the

epistemological within an undivided agency” (Radhakrishnan 1992, 85). It is important to

note that Amina’s refusal to re-member with her mother is set up within this prescribed

framework. To be disunited with the mother bears a salient feature of the rejection of the

nationalist discourse within which the concept of the nation is configured in order to

paralyze women.

This dis-embodiment might also produce a failure to reconstruct identity with the

criteria that Amina chooses. For Amina, the time has come to decide on an alternating

discourse that brings women’s voice to the fore. Her decision to “tell the story to the

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world” pinpoints those complexities of failure and engages women in the remapping of

their “historical failure”. Her aim to “unknit everything” could be understood as a way to

dismantle the discourse of nationalism in order to rectify the history of the minoritarian.

Amina acknowledges that the discourse of patriarchy is woven into that of nationalism

and colonialism. And to “unknit” is to dismantle this discursive structure of oppression.

This process aims at the deconstruction of the discourse that excludes the woman and

opts instead for a rather more inclusive approach of transculturality. In this vein,

nationalism, patriarchy, and colonialism form a unified body that does not allow for any

partial treatment of each discourse on an individual basis. This is so because, when a

deconstructive process is at work, all of the elements in this discursive body will be

dismantled.

Subsequently, to contest this discourse, Amina’s identity has to face certain

impossibilities: these include the impossibility of detaching herself from her mother and

surroundings, and the impossibility of representing herself ethically. However, the

notion of ethics here does not signify that Amina has any authority (symbolic or actual)

over her own representation. The process of speaking about the minorities in the novel

involves both Amina and the other minoritarians in such representation. Recalling

Nnaemeka’s point that “involvement (proximity) and withdrawal (distance) can evolve

into a workable symbiosis that is fashioned in the crucible of mutually determined

temperance” (1997, 163), it can be suggested that the split persists in Amina’s identity.

The refusal of re-membrance in conjunction with “proximity” and “distance” leaves

Amina split and in a liminal space. Her return home is symbolic in that it engulfs the

notion of turning back to Britain. She travels home only for a celebration, which is clearly

seen when she negotiates with herself whether to tell her mother that she is not in Tunisia

to stay:

Now you will have to tell her, tell her that you have not come back, that you never

came back, that this was an image of you, a dead image from the past which was

temporary revived for the celebration, just for her, that it was not possible to revive

it again, that the dummy feeds off your own blood, that for it to live, you would

have to die. (Al Khemir 1993, 268)

As the passage shows, there is a choice of which single element she will have to give up

by a part of her body. The question here deals with choice, but it is that same choice that

places identity in a position of contradiction with the paradigm of not-to-surrender. This

may be critical for Amina, who notes that “[y]ou choose for yourself to live and somehow

that very same choice means the death of part of you, substantial part of you” (Al Khemir

1993, 268). Not-to-surrender is the only possible solution for Amina. It seems possible “to

sneak out of this body, this prison, and go somewhere where I could be”, because she

feels “strange” as she lives within her body and culture (Al Khemir 1993, 269).

To look for the singularity of the self, Amina needs to travel. As this is not possible

in Tunisia because her being in Tunisia has caused her to come adrift, problematizing her

identity, making her sense of belonging more challenging, the possibility of being

released from the memory of the house offers new alternative strategies to articulate the

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voices of the disadvantaged for an Anglophone reader. Amina finds out that she has to

speak and “the story has to be told to the world, the story of those who never find out.

They are born, spend time in this world, die and never live, never know themselves. And

there is never anyone to tell the story. I have to speak” (Al Khemir 1993, 271). According

to Trinh, to talk is to bring “the impossible within reach. It contributes to widening the

horizon of one’s imagination; to constantly shifting the frontier between reality and

fantasy” (1997, 24). While this quotation is a prime example of the notion of transnational

minoritarian discourse, it can also point to the process of dialogism in the sense defined

by Bakhtin (1981). The narrator postulates the importance of globalization in releasing the

bodies of “those never know themselves”. The narrative calls for a contribution from the

educated subjectivities to consider the issues of liberation and liberated female subjects in

the general context of modernity rather than in that of tradition. In similar fashion, it also

suggests that the time has come for Amina and others like her to learn “not to regret” (Al

Khemir 1993, 272).

This story is not about regret; rather, it is about how to turn regret into an act of

successful liberation. It is a quest for transforming the female space from the state of

being conditional into an unconditional horizon for creativity and the singular

subjectivities of a collective enunciation. It is for this reason that the particular trajectory

has been chosen. Although this is not clearly defined, it is situated in the middle, in a

space of in-betweenness. Amina invokes the story of the orphaned girls and decides to

take the third road, which is left untaken in the novel, and this is clearly indicated in the

following passage:

Disguised as knights, they rode until they reached the outskirts of the village. The

road forked into three. ‘I’ll take the first road’, said the eldest, ‘and I’ll take the

second road,’ said the other. At the beginning of the third road, the untraveled road,

lay a jet black feather on which was written in Arabic calligraphy, with silver ink,

‘Take me, you regret, leave me, you regret.’ (Al Khemir 1993, 258)

The story of the orphaned girls clarifies Al Khemir’s notion of the “bridge” that she

mentions in her address to the 2009 National Book Festival, in which she explains that

she chooses to write in English, a third language in Tunisia, because she wants to be “on

the bridge”. English offers her the possibility to encounter foreignness and that “to

actually write in one’s third language it means that you are constantly on the bridge”

(2009, n.p.). Al Khemir believes that the English she is using to write her novels is not

“English English, because it is English with a different spirit that comes from the outside”

(2009, n.p; emphasis added). Yet it is this difference, or the culture of difference, that

enables the disadvantaged to attain their voice: a transcultural English.

This aspect is also characteristic of Amina who chooses the third road as a position

that allows her to be “on the bridge”: neither French nor Arabic. In addition, the passage

postulates a formula that links the identity reconstruction of the female subject with its

ability to open up sites of freedom. The site proposes that woman should unify her

identity with other subjectivities, to engage in a process of confidence, and take the risk of

travel. It is through the notion of travel that the third road could be explored: “Up the

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third road I went, in my lifetime disguise. I went looking for my destiny, for the real self”

(Al Khemir 1993, 258). In this regard, it is possible for the female identity to create the

notion of the “included middle” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 519), through which the

identity would deterritorialize her space. Morrison reminds us that the impossibility for

the woman to restore the past experiences generates in her the need to forge other means

to access collective memory, and to do this Morrison suggests that woman needs to

“trust” her memory and link it with “the recollections of others” (1987, 111). Amina links

her memories with the memories of the women in the house and her university friends.

At the same time Amina seems to differ significantly as she chooses to construct her

identity in the ways that she does. The cultural space she is given cannot behold the

notion of identity that she seeks, and to travel is to choose for her a transcultural identity

that demands a process of destruction followed by reconstruction of all that is cultural,

social, and religious.

***

To seek the self through (in)direct encounters with the other (cf. Huttunen et al. 2008),

and to refuse to speak as a victim (cf. Olaussen 2009), are considered two formalities

through which the subject aims at a complete or partial deconstructive approach to the

discourse of silence. The attribution of such formalities proffers alternative meanings for

the singularity of the subject and thereby offers different (con)textual interpretations of

historical events. In this narrative many elements are intertwined to explore the

problematic of gender and language with respect to voice and silence. The house is

represented in the novel as the silent aspect of the woman. Huttunen et al. point out that

“[i]n a text, silence performs in a different way from that which is narrated or uttered in

language and therefore needs reading strategies of its own” (2008, хv). The narrative not

only tries to interpret the language of silence but also contributes to the process of

“negotiation between the self and the nation, making the question of identity relevant in

a social context” (Huttunen et al. 2008, хvіі). It implies an economy in which the act of

reading/writing is considered, as Amina notes, as “the work of a witness” (Al Khemir

1993, 271). This aspect brings the question of the (un)acceptable to the heart of discussion

as it concerns identity and interpretation (Huttunen et al. 2008, хvіі). What makes it

significant for this narrative is the way in which it provides alternative meanings for the

aforementioned formalities, and how it decodes the subverting discourse of patriarchy.

The narrative, therefore, recognizes the notion of the “third road” as the impetus for

liberating the discourse from patriarchy. As Amina notes at the end of the novel, it is at

the end of the third road that the “sun rose” (Al Khemir 1993, 272). This is the sun of

hope: the female voice that aims at establishing new meaning to contest the male

discursive structures and release the female subject from that authority.

Amina’s refusal to re-member with her mother and her own reminiscences of the

past, often represented as performances, suggests two interpretations. First, the refusal to

re-member with the mother is a refusal to be identified with the nation: the nation in the

African context is symbolically constructed using the hope of the mother. The notion of

the nation that the novel represents is imperative for the notion of patriarchy, and to

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refuse such identification is to refuse the discourse of patriarchy. Yuval-Davis reminds us

that, “a figure of a woman, often a mother, symbolizes in many cultures the spirit of the

collectivity […] she is constructed as the symbolic bearer of collectivity’s identity and

honour” (1997, 45; emphasis added). In the novel, Ommzine seems to represent such a

construction. Second, as a consequence of this refusal, the novel suggests that it is

through a deconstructive approach to the discourse of patriarchy and nationalism that

women can voice their agonies. This epistemology inscribes voice in the construction of

female identity by means of deterritorialization, and further elaborates on the intersection

in which the discourse of the nation and gender tend to construct each other (Yuval-

Davis 1997, 4).

The novel is deeply critical of the way in which the female body is confined in a

patriarchal discourse of which the notion of the house remains an emblem. The ways in

which history is told by men, and the exclusion of the female voice from the re-narration

of the past are also criticized in the novel. This criticism suggests that creative expression

is the only means available to present a literature of a minority as rhetoric unavailable to

those in the majority. This novel is about minoritarians, and how they voice and “rethink

marginality by insisting that he/she listens carefully to ‘marginal discourses’ as

manifested by the silences and other patterns of articulation of the marginalized” (Yuval-

Davis 1997, 1-2). As illustrated through Amina’s voice, recognition of her transculturality

becomes a possibility, because Amina in Kurba is not Amina after she travels. The

recognition of transformation evokes a different persona whose identity construction is

no longer a factor of national identity, but a consequence of liberation and the process of

re-reading this identity. As Amina notes “[y]ou probably doesn’t recognize yourself […]

Maybe you have lost all those sensations and associations which make you feel it’s you”

(Al Khemir 1993, 21). Amina is no longer associated with the cultural memories of the

majority. Her singularity becomes part of the minoritarian whose objective is to

deterritorialize the oppressive elements “knitted” within their culture and, therefore,

within their psyche.

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5 Escaping Postcoloniality,

Reconstructing Identities:

Towards a Transcultural

Belonging in Laila Lalami’s

Secret Son

In Chapter 3 I have demonstrated that the act of writing back is inseparable from the

notion of re-constructing space and identity in post-colonial North Africa: both processes

seem to work together to locate the minority voice vis-à-vis the majority. I have also

shown that in order to write back one needs to question the position of the memory of the

minoritarian in the mainstream notion of history. The conclusion that the North African

subject seems to originate is to stress the notion of memory in the margin as a possibility

for a more inclusive version of history. I have also demonstrated that the act of writing

back requires a revision of the history that the mainstream represents through various

experimental devices. In order to implement such a possibility, I have argued that

thinking transculturally can be an aspect of the way in which the North African subject

writes back through re-writing North Africa. Chapter 4 also engages in the question of

history but places greater emphasis more on the notion of space and memory and how

the North African woman needs to negotiate her space in order to voice her agonies. In

doing so, Chapter 4 shows that travel and hospitality can be viewed as ways of re-

defining space in post-colonial North Africa. In addition, the present chapter aims to

explore how transculturality can be employed and suggested as the mechanism that

drives the North African subject to liberate the self. This chapter also seeks to show the

way this notion of liberation intersects with language and the ability to forge alternative

modernities for the minoritarian in re-writing North Africa.

Since its publication in 2009, Lalami’s Secret Son has attracted a number of readers,

largely American, who have written reviews and commented on its plot, structure, and

language, thereby providing a different reading of the narrative. Many reviewers criticize

the novel for its scant usage of the English language. In his “Review”, John Lingan, for

instance, argues that the narrative’s language is “earnest” (2009, n.p.), meanwhile Nan

Goldberg in “Betrayals expose fragility of family and faith”, regards the language as

“distinctly pedestrian, almost tone-deaf”(2009, n.p.). Such critiques as these either warn

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the American reader to avoid reading the text or indirectly hint at the other’s misuse of

the American native language. In either case, longing for a voice in a deterritorialized

language is critical to Secret Son. Whereas the critiques enlisted above allude indirectly to

the role of translation in multilingual narratives, they also highlight the importance of

authenticity in minority literature in the global space.

Secret Son is about a young Moroccan named Youssef, the son of an orphaned

mother who had fallen, culturally, victim to a taboo relationship with an upper class man.

The sexual relations result in a child, Youssef, and his mother, Rachida, is alienated and

desperate. At the age of seventeen, Youssef discovers that his father is still alive, and that

he is not the orphan that Youssef has thought himself to be. Youssef lives with his mother

in a slum in metropolitan Casablanca; he hardly knows anything about the city apart

from the slum and its surroundings. In pursuit of his father, he discovers that he has a

sister who is studying in the United States of America to become a future director of the

AmraCo.

The novel follows Youssef from poverty to the status of being the son of a rich man,

Nabil Amrani. It also follows his return to the slum and adoption of the role of a terrorist.

However, the novel does not simply unfold the story of Youssef and his familial

relationships. More specifically, the narrative delves into questions of post-coloniality,

neo-liberalism, belonging, and the ways in which the characters’ longing for belonging is

replaced by the notion of unbelonging. The narrative also maps out the importance of

language and class as sites of reterritorialization and deterritorialization, pointing out

that access to a deterritorialized space can only thrive if the characters are supported by

transcultural belonging. Language and translation are the means by which the process of

deterritorialization takes place. Moreover, deterritorialized language is the mechanism to

enable communication and dialogue, and hence yearning for alternative forms of

modernity can be assured.

Subsequently, to move beyond the mother tongue, a vernacular, and its culture

brings the emotional belonging into question. In addressing the issue of language and

authenticity, this chapter aims to contribute to a theoretical standpoint on transcultural

belonging. As I will show, the translational narrative in English, one that uses aspects of a

local culture mixed with those of the host culture contrapuntally in order to create a

unique belonging, rests in the idea of unbelonging. Unbelonging is not necessarily a

refusal to belong to the local culture, neither is it considered a full acceptance of the host

culture: it is a process that works in both directions. Hence, the aim of this chapter is

threefold.

First, it seeks to address the role of authenticity through unmediated translation

(translation with no third party), and the mechanisms used in the novel to represent the

submerged ethically. Second, it seeks to understand the ways the novel emphasizes the

relationship between gender, class, voice, and belonging in post-colonial Morocco, and

the means of achieving deterritorialization. The third aim is to emphasize the importance

of transculturality in minority narratives; that is, in order to deconstruct the condition of

postcoloniality, the post-colonial subject needs to ascribe her/his free space to a

transcultural belonging. In short, the following sections will carve out the potential

elements that Sissy Helff invokes to distinguish what she calls the transcultural novel,

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namely, the domination of uncertainty, individualized realities, and an unreliable

narrator (2009, 81-2). Although, to a greater extent, Secret Son follows the prescribed

patterns of a transcultural narrative, I would like first to begin with questions of language,

authenticity, and translation.

5.1 A MULTILINGUAL TEXT: BETWEEN LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION

It may appear truculent to doubt the sincerity of minority literature struggling over the

years for a position in post-colonial scholarship. To give a voice to the marginalized in the

margin of post-colonialism also appears to be of much concern to the newly established

mode of narratives in North Africa. Nevertheless, the attempt to voice minority

narratives may be delayed in the post-colonial condition. Dirlik reminds us that

postcoloniality designates the process by which Third World scholars traverse into first

world academia (1997, 25). And yet minority literature goes beyond the assimilative

dimension of that travel to become “a powerful ingredient […] that attacks Eurocentric

stronghold” (Morisson 1988, 129; emphasis added). In addition to such dialogical

struggle, the connection between voice and authenticity is hardly an abstract conclusion

of the First/Third World realization, but one in which authenticity attracts critical

judgment with regard to minority literature. The very idea of advocating and labeling

such a narrative as minoritarian attempts to exclude minority narratives from world

scholarship by using the accusation of being inauthentic. As I demonstrated in Chapter 2,

the term minority that I invoke here does not correlate with the construct “minor” versus

“major”.

Becoming minor does not indicate the absence of articulation, since silence may

provide a monologue, and absence does not necessarily imply void. Guignery, in

referring to Midsummer Night’s Dream, argues that Pyramus’s claim “I see a voice” reflects

his experience of the Other through his ability to see “voices on the page but cannot hear

them” (2009, 1). The point that I aim to illustrate here is that the literatures of the minority

have always been present, but it is only the language (be it Arabic, Swahili, Berber or

others) that fails to transmit the message, because the narrative is not written in English

or in French, for example: it is in the process of becoming. The breaking of this silence

through a deterritorialized language such as English is an attempt to discover, rather

than to evaluate, the complexity of such work. A breaking of silence takes a “collective

assemblage of enunciation” wherein the subject shares with the minority a voice of the

collective without necessarily losing her/his singularity.

The use of the English language in Secret Son can be seen as an act of liberation that

opens up opportunities to transcend cultural, social, and/or political constraints. It also

attempts to leave the territoriality of the post/colonial space in which the act of writing is

questioned (Lamming 1984, 27). Yet English (the novel’s language) is not a local but an

alien language, one that is hardly understood by the majority in Morocco. One could

even assume that it is the language of the neo-liberalists or a means of communication

amongst students of English Studies at Moroccan universities. In the meantime, it is

argued, reliance on the English language is an attempt to speak out about the deficiency

of certain complexities within Moroccan society in a major language. Lalami’s choice to

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write in English has been affected by a double mode of disentanglement. Her refusal to

write in French is not a question of ability, since her studies were primarily conducted in

French (2009b, 19-20). Rather, it is the notions of identity and class that steer her away

from writing in French. As Lalami does not want to identify with the “new aristocrats” in

Morocco (whose first language is French and not Arabic), she points out that

French was not just a prominent language in Morocco. It was the language of power;

an indicator of social class; a means to include or exclude people. The education I

had received had emphasized the importance of French to the detriment of Arabic

[…] Writing in French came at a cost; it inevitably brought with it a colonial

baggage that I no longer wanted to carry. (Lalami 2009b, 20)

Lalami’s identity seems to be burdened by the cultural baggage “inherent in the use of

French” (2009b, 20). For Lalami, self-realization should no longer be constructed as part

of her “Frenchness”. This “linguistic imprisonment” remains a constitutive part of many

post-colonial writers who aim at creating alternative possibilities for a voice.

Nevertheless, it is undeniably a congruent aspect of colonialism, the colonial language

bearing with it the power to promote the colonial plans after the colonial invasion, and

this is exactly what Secret Son attempts to emphasize as an aspect of North Africa.

Looking, for instance, at the linguistic structure pertaining in Morocco, Arabic is

accepted as Morocco’s official language along with Berber (in Algeria and Tunisia Arabic

is the official language), whereas French is used as the first foreign language. In practice,

French can be found in the most sensitive structures of society: it is used in the media and

in governmental speeches, for instance, and it is regarded as the language of economics

and communication. Its use is primarily meant to exclude a great proportion of the

population who have not mastered the Arabic language, for how could they afford

learning in French (Boukous 2008, 139). Lalami’s concern with the colonial language does

not merely indicate it as problematic in the post-colonial North Africa, but, as Ashcroft

reminds us, “for the postcolonial people the language is deeply inflected with the

troubling questions littering that liminal space where identity and culture mingle and

scrape against one another” (2009, 101). Lalami’s experience with French has left her in a

space of liminality and, to borrow from McGuire, she is “suffering, schizophrenic,

treacherous, alienated, hybrid, separated from the mother” (1994, 107) and believes that

she is “not good enough […] to produce a novel” (Lalami 2009b, 20).

Lalami demonstrates that it is impossible to imagine a world that is beyond the

language that one masters. In studying with French as the medium of instruction,

growing up in French schools, and reading books that draw on French culture, Lalami’s

world becomes part of that linguistic world, and part of Paris rather than Rabat. The

images and photographs of her childhood, Lalami points out, have “invaded her

imaginary world to such an extent that she never thought they came from an alien place”

(2009b, 19, emphasis added). The statement here expresses a liminal space that the

language has inscribed in Lalami’s identity. Language shapes identity, and the longing

for belonging highlights the urgency to find a space that marks the limits of the colonial

language and inaugurates the birth of a new one.

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Many critics, especially African and Caribbean, demonstrate the need for a

language that imbues the flow of their voice aside from the colonial language. Achebe,

for instance, sees the use of colonial language as an opportunity to “carry the weight” of

the African experience. The language, however, needs to be different (1975, 62). The

difference that embodies social and cultural aspects of the imagined community is

important for claiming a new belonging. In this respect, the orientation of writing in a

transformed language can be comprehended differently. Deleuze and Guattari remind us

that in order to form a community of minoritarians, one which shares similarities in its

use of such a language in a rather “different” way, one needs to deterritorialize the major

language (1986, 28-30) and go beyond the vernacular and/or the colonial language with

appropriation, transformation, and translation.

Lalami may be expected to follow such a path, and Secret Son does, indeed, become

an instance of such appropriation. The author is keen to allude to her cultural origins in

the use of untranslated words in the novel such as “a-mmi” (Lalami 2009a, 5);

“Hshouma” (Lalami 2009a, 9); “Qalt el-hya hadi” (Lalami 2009a, 36); “Was’i Khatrek”

(Lalami 2009a, 261); “Mbarek u mess’ud” (Lalami 2009a, 44), and so on. Bill Ashcroft

points out that the technique of leaving some vernacular words untranslated in the text is

more widely used and a more politically canny device for conveying the sense of

“cultural distinctiveness” (2009, 176). The “cultural distinctiveness” is not only associated

with the author. The aspect is subtly emphasized, especially when the conversation

between characters is held in French, to highlight the social status of certain characters.

This is described at length when the narrator comments on the Amrani family:

“Ordinarily, Amal’s parents spoke French to each other and to her, using Darija Arabic

only with the maid or the driver” (Lalami 2009a, 162). French is the language of power in

Moroccan society; it is the language of the elite, of the new comprador. Darija – a

Moroccan dialect of the Arabic language – is used only to communicate with servants.

The narrative stresses the relations between language and power in Moroccan society.

When Youssef meets Alia, for instance, he generally uses French words to talk with her,

in hopes that he could belong to her community. The following passage describes this

aspect in details when Youssef meets with Alia’s father:

“Bonjour,” he said.

“Bonjour,” Youssef replied, getting up and stretching out his hand.

“Papa, this is Youssef, a copain de classe,” Alia said by way of introduction.

“Youssef comment?”

“El Mekki”. (Lalami 2009a, 67)

In an incident such as this, conversing using French almost inevitably leads to asking the

other for her/his family name. The role of language and the family name might grant

legitimacy to the person in order to gain access to the upper class. Episodes where the

family name and class coalesce are numerous in the novel, and to associate French with

the neo-liberalists is also apparent. Examples of such an association can be cited, such as

when Alia addresses Yussef: “Je suis désolée” (Lalami 2009a, 31); “Salut” (Lalami 2009a, 31);

between Yussef and Alia’s father, as indicated in the passage above; between Yussef and

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his first encounter with his father: “Je vais très bien, merci” (Lalami 2009a, 86), and so on.

But the startling moment in which the power of language is linked to class can be

glimpsed from the following passage, when Amin meets Yussef’s father:

“Amin comment?” Nabil asked as they shook hands.

“Chebana.”

“Are you in the same class as Yussef?”

“No. I’m majoring in law.”

“Oh. What year?”

“Douzième,” Amin said, when of course he meant deuxième. (Lalami 2009a, 121)

To understand such a process in North Africa, Bourdieu concludes that

“legitimacy” is defined as a means of selection that defines upper class people as

speakers or writers of the elite language (1993, 331), which in the case of North Africa is

French. The power of the French language in Moroccan society becomes “symbolic”, and

Bourdieu describes such power as something invisible, “which can be exercised only with

the complicity of those who do not want to know that they are subject to it, or even that

they themselves exercise it” (1991, 164). Youssef seems to be happy to master French and

“[h]e felt a surge of gratitude to his mother, because without her tutoring, his diction in

French would not have been flawless. To listen to him, one would never have known he

lived in Hay An Najat” (Lalami 2009a, 31). Lalami may be aware of such symbolic power

in which language is deployed to mediate between the neo-liberalists and their interest in

society. The power of French is also reflected in the author’s psyche and childhood,

where French is the means of communication with the world inside (school), and the

need to appropriate the language in post-colonial societies is confirmed.

In effect, the appropriation of language through the insertion of untranslated words

can have two contradictory but connected consequences. First, the untranslatability

creates the third space of enunciation, a space that the writer inhabits between her/his

language and the target language (Ashcroft 2009, 161). Saying this is to assume that the

new language offers a new space from which to articulate and construct a new mode of

representation, and engenders new frontiers for belonging beyond one’s own culture. It

also generates a “metonymic gap” that pushes the reader to consider the culture of the

other, yet sometimes it leads to misinterpretation as a consequence of such newness

(Ashcroft 2009, 175; Ashcroft 2001, 75).

However interesting it might be, the “metonymic gap” is perceived as a negative

aspect of translation. In his reading of Secret Son, John Lingan points out that “this may be

the most poorly written novel I’ve read in five years”, because, as he notes, the “writing

here is nothing but earnest” (2009, n.p.). The untranslated words and the direct

translation of sentence structure from Arabic and/or French into English leave the reader

unaware of the transition made from one level to another. The effect of the direct

translation on the American reader, for instance, highlights the deterritorialization of

language, in other words, its transformation. Through this process, the language in Secret

Son has been affected “with a strong coefficient of deterritorialization” (Deleuze and

Guattari 1986, 29), a notion in which that narrative is in a position of Becoming. The

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semantic errors in Secret Son, as Lingan points out, can be considered to be part of a

process that sustains deterritorialization. To make semantic errors in this context is to

deterritorialize the language from its structure of power, and to seek another, yet

different community. Deleuze and Guattari remind us that, when the writer

is in the margins or completely outside his or her fragile community, this situation

allows the writer all the more the possibility to express another possible community

and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility. (1986, 17)

The search for other communities makes the minority novel such as Secret Son

problematic. What makes critics such as Lingan fail to interpret the narrative as a global

novel rests in the notion of multilinguality that makes Secret Son “the other other

literature” in the sense described by Lennon (2010, 144). The language of the novel does

not merely emphasize translation as a “particle aspect” of the language, but it becomes a

practice in its own right (Lennon 2010, 8). In other words, the narrative does not aim to

make a direct translation of the social, cultural, and political issues of the North African

into the English language, but the purpose is to speak of “multiple languages” so as to

place the reader globally. It is this notion of multilinguality that speaks of the

minoritarian in North Africa and not only “speaking in translation” (Lennon 2010, 8).

Nevertheless, when the meaning between the major and the minor collapses, the

terms authenticity and readership retain their currency and remain significant for a

discussion of Secret Son. The issues of the translatability of cultural forms and social

struggles in post-colonial societies for a transcultural reader attract considerable attention

in multilingual novels. As such, authenticity and the ethics of reading permit the

awareness of this position. Ashcroft reminds us that, in order to reach a level of

authenticity and to limit the language defects inherent in the use of an imported language

(such as English or French, for instance), the chosen language “must be one that is itself

syncretic, dynamic, and constantly changing” (2009, 105). Syncretism is an indication of

transculturation, which can be seen in the characters’ attempt to reconcile their cultural

tradition with alternative sites of belonging. The constant shifts in a character’s

perception and the dynamic of the narrative itself might indicate another epistemology

for this belonging.

The narrative depends mostly on the characters’ soliloquy and the interference and

interruptions of the narrator. In either case, the characters cannot be trusted. The reader

becomes aware of the fact that a single event can be repeated and only revealed to the

reader as the true story in the end. A significant part of the novel is told through the

third-person narrator, who “knows everything”, but in fact hardly knows anything about

its characters. This feature can also be seen when the characters hide themselves behind

invented personalities until they are revealed. Although the boundaries of such realities

do unfold in the voice of the narrator as collective, the singularity of characters, and the

unreliability and uncertainty of the narrative seem to reproduce alternative realities in

this context. An example of this can be clearly observed in the story of Youssef’s mother

Rachida. Initially, the reader knows Rachida’s story through the following passage:

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His mother spoke very tersely about her life. The Franciscan nuns at the Bab Ziyyat

orphanage had sent her to train as a nurse in a hospital. She had been there a few

months when a young lawyer by the name of Nabil Amrani came in for a minor

check up. He had been involved in a scuffle with the police at a political rally. They

started to see each other, and she quickly became pregnant. They planned to get

married. The weekend before their wedding, Nabil went to Casablanca to pick up

his brother from the airport, but in the morning fog, his car collided with a truck

and he died. Madam Amrani, Nabil’s mother, had never approved of the marriage,

and when she was told about the pregnancy, she accused Youssef’s mother of

sleeping with one of the doctors at work. Youssef’s mother could not complete her

training and went to live with a friend from the orphanage until after the birth.

Then she left Fes and settled in Casablanca. (Lalami 2009a, 23)

Concisely, the passage tells us that Rachida is an orphaned woman, who has not been

granted her natural position as a wife with her child in the Amrani family. The death of

Nabil Amrani causes drastic social and cultural sufferings for Rachida and her child. We

become suspicious about the invocation of the adverb “tersely”. Why does Rachida talk

in such an effective concise way about her life story? Such reality will be blurred and the

trust in the character no longer operates with the same level of efficiency when another

“reality” emerges, as we discover that Nabil Amrani does not manage to marry Rachida

at all: giving her the money for an abortion is enough for him to forget her and to erase

her from his entire life:

He had given Rachida the money for the abortion, and she had disappeared from

the house almost overnight. Of course, he had never asked his mother about it—it

was not something you talk about—and Malika had no idea; she was on bed rest. In

this way, Nabil had willed himself to forget about this pregnancy, relegating it to a

deep, dark corner of his mind. (Lalami 2009a, 87)

That is not the end of this story. The first reality is the mother’s, whereas the second is

revealed through Nabil Amrani (the father). The narrative, therefore, positions itself in a

state of untruthfulness. Which of the realities is authentic as far as Secret Son is concerned?

We cannot predict the level of authenticity until the end of the novel when each character

is engaged in serious negotiations with the self, with the local culture, and with their

social relations, and it is at this moment that the narrator interferes.

The interference of the narrator helps in blurring this suspicion in the way the

narrative suggests that the only authentic reality is the narrator’s, who functions in

dialogical relation with the implied author. The multiplicity of voices induces the sense of

a decentering of the self. In other words, the narrative implies a multiplicity of voices in

which the singularity of the narrator dwells in the multiplicity of the following voices: the

implied author’s, the narrator’s, and the characters’. These events function in the manner

of a single voice that which points to the characters’ own life. Hermans et al. point out

that “[t]he different voices relate to one another as interacting characters in a story […]

resulting in a complex, narratively structured self […] The dialogical self is composed of a

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multiplicity of motivational voices” (1993, 215-216). This dialogical exchange charts the

character’s life in the social web, because the sociocultural dimensions of this storytelling

rest on the capacity of each character to resist certain anxieties. Consequently, it attempts

to suggest that the only authentic reality can be voiced through the narrator as the voice

representing the implied author. By the end of the novel, Rachida’s “real” story is

revealed through the narrator’s voice:

Many years ago, when Rachida had arrived in the Amrani family home near Fes,

she, too, had been ignorant and innocent. She had let herself believe that Nabil

Amrani was in love with her. Love was new. Love was intoxicating. Love gave

license to the ultimate of taboos: sleeping with a married man, a married man

whose pregnant wife was on bed rest. When Rachida herself became pregnant and

Nabil Amrani’s mother ordered her to get an abortion, Rachida had refused and

had returned to the orphanage with nothing but her dashed dreams and a baby

growing inside her. (Lalami 2009a, 236)

The narrative in this way represents a single event from a different perspective, and this

engagement refers to the modernist technique of experimentation. It is not by accident

that the author, Laila Lalami, speaks of authenticity with the aim of providing an

authentic voice for the American reader from a variety of perspectives. According to

Hermans et al., “a novel where different voices, often of a markedly different character

and representing a multiplicity of relatively independent worlds, interact to create a self-

narrative” (1993, 9) aims at foregrounding aspects of authenticity. Authenticity is what

Lalami seeks through her decision to write in English, in order to represent the multiple

voices and to mark her singularity. To write in English remains a way of liberating the

marginalized voices and to speak, to use Bahadur’s words, “directly to Americans, who

[…] urgently need authentic maps to those parts of the world where inequality has

electroshocked the terrorist id into being” (2009, n.p.).

But why does authenticity matter? It has been argued that authenticity is noticeably

an associative marker in minority literature and post-colonial studies (Erichsen 2000, 193),

and the claim of “pure origin” in imagined communities demands that one has to belong

in order to compensate for one’s alienated identity (Richter 2009, 60). The latter argument

deliberately foregrounds a counterargument maintained by post-structuralists such as

Derrida, specifically at the point concerning the relation between text and context.

Nevertheless, Homi Bhabha maintains that the question more concerns the receiving

audience, because, “[t]he ‘image’ must be measured against the ‘essential’ or ‘original’ in

order to establish its degree of representativeness, the correctness of the image” (1984,

100).

In this vein, the affiliation with a certain culture or nation does not necessarily grant

a certain text, author, or narrative an authentic voice, and thus, Lalami’s claim to provide

an authentic Moroccan voice for American readers might be problematic. On another

level, if authenticity is perceived as a category of reference to representation and as a

claim of national identity, it will gesture towards its failure or, rather, the impossibility of

its existence in the post-colonial condition. Belonging to a certain nation or culture does

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not imply that authenticity is at work. Accordingly, Huggan reminds us that an authentic

voice aims at finding an international audience through which the possibility of reading

identity emerges (2001, 176). Huggan continues that “[t]he search for authenticity […]

involves the reaching out to alternative readerships, including the people one regards as

being one’s own” (2001, 176). Such a process presumes self-engagement in acquainting

the reader with the transcultural codes of representations, and being part of a

transcultural, rather than monoculture, audience. What is at stake in this debate is that

the search for an authentic voice is part of an ongoing process that aims at, on the one

hand, a full engagement in retaining “essentialist notions of culture and identity”

(Erichsen 2000, 202), and, on the other hand, support for the speaking subject and

identification with the minority group. In this vein, the discourse of language is deployed

in this narrative to suggest that translation without mediators facilitates a transcultural

reading of the self and the other, and points to the importance of the language in

multilingual texts.

Subsequently, the question of authenticity for Lalami designates a liminal space in

which the author feels enmeshed. Lalami’s “urgency” to find an authentic voice to speak

directly to Americans can be interpreted in relation to the above approach. In the mean

time, there are certain functionalities that need elaboration. First, there seems to be a

problem of identification and belonging in Secret Son. Belonging is mainly reflected through

the character Amal, who favors living with her “poor”, Brazilian-American boy friend

rather than living with her rich parents in Morocco. Belonging for Amal rests in her

unbelonging and her singularity, which empower her choice with respect to the notion of

home. Lalami sees that she identifies more with Youssef than with any other character in

the novel, for several reasons:

Youssef studies English at a university in Morocco, as did I; his mother is an orphan

who was raised in a French institution in Fès, as was mine; he is gullible, as,

unfortunately, am I; he speaks French fluently, as do I; yet he never quite feels at

home with the French-educated elite, and neither do I. (2009c, n.p.)

Such compatibilities that the author establishes with one of the characters in the novel

impose further questions on the issue of authenticity, to which we will return later in the

course of this analysis. Second, the author sees in Secret Son a transcultural agent that

traverses the cultural boundaries of the nation in order to present a social reality and

represent a voice of the marginalized in Morocco within a rather transcultural

framework. Fadia Faqir sees that works such as this aim largely at threading the division

between cultures by cutting out “the middleman” – the translator (2004, 168). To write in

English, Lalami does not fully submit to its rules, especially the semantic dimensions of

the language, because the source language and culture still have their effects in such

transition/translation. In interview, Lalami points out:

I tend to pay very close attention to language because, although I am writing in

English, my characters interact with one another in Arabic or French, and

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sometimes both at the same time, so I try to keep the nuances that come with

speaking in each language. (Lalami and Otas 2010, n.p.)

Cultural permeation exists and upholds the narrative’s structure, and to shift languages

is to shift the emphasis between cultures, perceptions, and belongings as part of

transcultural movements. Similarly, Hechmi Trabelsi concisely points out that the

position of such writing in a globalized world is critical, because the aspect of

displacement (living in between two worlds) urges transcultural writers to revisit

their culture of origin by the essential questioning of their relationships with their

body, faiths, rites, languages. Their bi-culturalism makes them more sensitive to the

falsity of labels and references and more prone to crossing of cultures. (Trabelsi 2003,

n.p.)

However, authenticity seems to coalesce with the second epigraph of the novel saying

that “the fact that she is writing in English already falsifies what she wanted to tell”9 to the

reader. The existence of such an epigraph in the novel is conspicuous and might suggest

a contradiction between the author’s aim to give voice and the social representations of

gender, voice, and class. How can English, for instance, transmit/translate the trauma and

agonies of people, which she has already hinted at in the language’s inability to do so

(since it already falsifies) before the act of writing takes place? In what follows I would

like to present one such an example of social representation of gender and class and to

discuss the ways in which the novel suggests liberation and voice through the notion of

transculturality.

5.2 GENDER AND TRANSCULTURALITY

In this section, I aim to delve into the questions of gender, representation, and class in

Secret Son, and by doing so I aim to show how transculturality can disentangle the

Moroccan woman from the gendered space created by society. Consequently, Secret Son

invokes a certain level of disentanglement between what is and what is not socially

acceptable in a society that defines itself as Muslim; an issue that may evoke the dispute

discussed by African post-colonial theorists over the years (cf. Ashcroft 2009). It can be

argued that the attempt to represent does not mean that one should choose between two

seemingly antagonistic issues: good or bad. As the narrative shows, when society

privileges the “liberated”, “modern” woman over the “traditional” Moroccan woman, it

points to the conclusion that post-colonial Morocco, for an adequate relation to the

colonial discourse, positions the traditional Moroccan woman in the limited space of

silence. Nevertheless, such representation may not be acceptable to the minority, and

efforts are being made to look for the alternative sites for belonging that transculturality

can offer.

9 Originally it is written as follows: “The fact that I/am writing to you/in English /already falsifies

what I/wanted/to tell you. /My subject:/how to explain to you that I /don't belong to English /though

I belong nowhere else” by Gustavo Perez Firmat.

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To begin with, Youssef is introduced to the reader as a secret in the sense that

legitimacy is a cultural phenomenon that can only be broken through a deterritorialized

language. In addition, the paradox lies in the rhetoric of silence itself in relation to the

text. Nevertheless, the subliminal spirit of Lalami’s Secret Son is the space in which the

tradition makes the Moroccan woman silent, and the act of speaking made “unspoken”

once more. The first epigraph of the novel marks the tone of the novel: breaking the

silence:

Silence is death

And you, if you speak, you die

If you are silent you die

So, speak and die.10

This suggests that nothing can prevent the post-colonial subject from giving a voice.

Initially, it is the act of speaking that seems to hold the spirit of the novel. To speak means

to perform an act of liberation on behalf of the unspeaking self and for the collective.

Lalami reflects on this aspect when she speaks about the reason behind her decision to

write: “I had always told stories, but now I wanted to be heard” (2009b, 20). In her

struggle for voice, Lalami seems to ascribe multilinguality to the text in order to thrive in

her struggle, and we can see such a process clearly in the way in which she makes a

comparison between two women in the text, with respect to language and to belonging.

In this respect, the novel suggests that, despite the prescribed presence of the

radicalism/tolerance binary, the transition of the characters as a result of class seems to

predominate in the novel; meanwhile, disparity between the high and low classes is

ostensibly significant for the novel’s structure. Underlying the silent class-encounter, the

incessant absence of the Moroccan woman’s voice poses certain questions, given that her

presence is noticeably denoted through her silence. The increasing dislocation of the

Moroccan woman in the space of marginality is the topic that Secret Son aims to

investigate, which I would like to discuss in this section.

There are at least two modes of representation in which the Moroccan woman is

introduced in Secret Son. She is either the silenced hardworking woman or the high-class

open-minded woman. What unites both representations are space and body. Youssef’s

mother is a typical example of the first type. When the narrative refers to Rachida, silence

imbues the characteristic atmosphere in which she is made to suffer:

And yet at night, when he lay down in the dark, in the terrible silence of that empty

apartment, he thought of his mother, alone in her little house in Hay An Najat. She

would be watching TV, knitting a sweater or folding laundry or shelling sunflower

seeds or mending a sock or peeling the skins of boiled chickpeas—she could never

stay still. (Lalami 2009a, 135)

10 This epigraph is quoted from the work of the Algerian Novelist and journalist Tahar Djaout. It is

set as the first epigraph to the novel. Originally written in French as “Le silence, c'est la mort / Et toi,

si tu parles, tu meurs / Si tu te tais, tu meurs / Alors, parle et meurs”.

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Youssef’s mother expresses emotions throughout the events of this general description.

In this passage, night symbolizes silence. In addition, it is a metaphor that stands for the

suffering and hopelessness. Ironically, it is only after it is dark and quiet that Youssef

thinks of his mother, Rachida. This contradiction sustains the general description allotted

to the woman that only “tears prove what is true” (Cixous and Clement 1986, 35). Cixous

and Clement argue that for the woman

to escape the misfortune of her economic and familial exploitation, she chose to

suffer spectacularly before an audience of men: it is an attack of spectacle, a crisis of

suffering. And an attack is also a festival, a celebration of her guilt used as a

weapon”. (1986, 10; emphasis added)

The hardworking Moroccan woman is silenced because her fate and “the cultural

demarcation beyond which she will find herself excluded” (Cixous and Clement 1986, 33)

impose such a role upon her in this society. She is also naïve: “she would be watching

TV”, which is all that she is left. The media, in this sense, becomes a relief from anxiety.

The sole way to communicate is to be extracted from the actual reality and to rejoice in a

fictional deterritorialization through Egyptian movies or Mexican series.

The novel offers certain alternatives for the silent woman to speak, and these she

can find mainly in transculturality. Rachida’s addiction to watching the Mexican

television series can be interpreted as a variety of the transcultural aspect of belonging

that she could not find at home. The novel, in this respect, attempts to convey the notion

that the silent woman is a hardworking woman who “never stays still”. For Rachida to

smile, for instance, is an expression that never appears on her face, because “[l]aughter

breaks up, breaks out, splashes over […] it is the moment at which the woman crosses a

dangerous line […] not to cry: refuse jouissance, refuse to emit the precious secretions

that are partial objects for the other desire” (Cixous and Clement 1986, 33-5).

In addition, there seems a way out of this impasse. For a silent Moroccan woman to

step up the ladder, she has to have an aristocratic outlook. Although Youssef’s mother

(and this is the title she is given throughout the novel to signify this single mother) “was

a woman who valued work over pleasure, utility over beauty […] she was beautiful”

(Lalami 2009a, 5), yet she is deemed “unvoiced”. The role of her body allows her at least

to meet the criteria of “aristocracy”. She indulges in the rhetoric of self-negotiation, and

since “appearances are deceiving, Rachida had understood this simple fact long ago, so

she was often surprised to come across people who fell for artifice and good looks, for

sweet words and appealing facades—for lie”( Lalami 2009a, 233).

In order to overcome submissiveness, the Moroccan woman needs, in this sense, to

exist in an overt space of “appealing facades”. While seeking identification through “lies”

problematizes identity, it is assumed to be the only possible way for the Moroccan

woman to negotiate her position within such a society. That is not a working solution. In

this manner, the narrative illustrates that this kind of metaphorical construction of a

desirable space – of an included middle – might for the silent woman be only an illusion.

Whereas the novel’s aim is to “speak the unspeakable”, the social construction of binaries

renders it unspoken in its own right. Meanwhile the effects and continuity of the events

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in the novel act as a threshold for the current situation: “tears prove what is true”, as

Cixous and Clement put it (1986, 33-6).

Rather than victimizing her, Secret Son translates the ways in which the novel’s

Moroccan society describes the high-class woman as a more liberated, decision-making

woman. This territorial binary persuades the reader to adopt a more subjective stance in

relation to one representation at the expense of the other. The contrast between Rachida

and Malika, for instance, emphasizes that the fixedness of identities and the promises of

change are already blurred. Because of the drive to deterritorialize her position, the

woman needs to perform a false identity:

Rachida had worn her best clothes—a navy blue jacket with matching pants, her

only pair of gold earrings—and had come to the door of the Amrani house […]

Malika Amrani recognized her immediately, kissed her cheeks, welcomed her in,

and ordered tea to be served outside. She looked at Rachid with patient eyes,

waiting for a favor to be asked. Why should she think otherwise? Favors were

commonly asked of a woman of her situation. Although Malika was older than

Rachida, she looked younger. Her hair was expertly cut, her face was carefully

made up, her nails were manicured, and she seemed at ease with all comforts

around her. (Lalami 2009a, 237)

This passage is built upon the territorial binary center/margin relation that is

characterized by Malika and Rachida respectively. Regardless of her “appealing facades”,

Rachida is seen as marginal for Malika. Hard work and agony have made the former

appear much older than the latter, which is not the case, as the novel demonstrates. In a

society differentiated by class division, the marginal cannot stand the process of

transition from Being-minor into Becoming-minor in the sense described by Deleuze and

Guattari. The difference is apparent: Becoming-minor is to place a voice in-between the

marginal and the central – it is a way of deterritorializing the social strata (Deleuze and

Guattari 1986, 25-8). When the process fails, it pushes the characters to resume their old

position: to territorialize once more (reterritorialization). The emphasis on the outlook of

both characters aims at appropriating each to a certain social stratum. Youssef’s mother’s

inability to deterritorialize such a position is apparent. The momentary departure from

her territory is not permanent, because her aim is not deterritorialization itself but to

secure her territory. The failure to compete at global level results in closing all available

entrances for her son, which ends in his capture as a terrorist. Malika, on the other hand,

feels safe with her position so that even Rachid’s arrival in her home is considered

beneficial to her.

Secret Son encloses representations of the Moroccan woman within the territorial

binary voice/silence in relation to social class. In this analysis, we can see that resistance

through silence postpones the process of deterritorialization. This case is made apparent

when Youssef’s mother wears the best of her clothes and golden earrings, and converses

with Mrs. Amrani in her house (territory). This is another suggestion the novel provides

for the woman to accomplish her partial deterritorialization, which takes place not

through silence but through a voice.

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In the meantime, Lalami elaborates more on how society represents woman in

relation to class. The proportion of Rachida’s presence in the novel amounts to 60 percent

of the novel’s chapters, while Mrs. Amrani occupies only around 40 percent. Whereas

Rachida is described as a silenced woman, Mrs. Amrani engages in serious negotiations

with her husband and indulges in discussion of the family future. In addition, the

narrative repeatedly stresses Rachida’s background as an adult orphan woman, and as a

single mother, an insistence that becomes problematic for the general representation of

the silenced Moroccan woman. Subsequently, the narrative portrays the gendered

inability to speak as a defect related to class hierarchy and to the borders of culture. In

each case, Secret Son describes the void in communication between the classes as a

vacuum, rather than emptiness. The difference, as Morrison argues, is crucial in that

emptiness may be filled by things, whereas a vacuum cannot (1988, 136).

Even though Rachida’s presence in Moroccan society is marked by silence, there are

instances in which the novel describes her ability to merge into a transcultural, hybrid

singularity as a process of constructing new identities. Rachida’s silence cannot be

interpreted as a defect, but rather as wisdom, in the sense that she can read and speak

French fluently, and raise her child until he becomes an adult. The psychological

“wound” that she has suffered from as a consequence of her relation with Nabil Amrani

has been repaired by her transcultural journey from the Atlas to Casablanca. As a Berber,

she is able to hide part of her identity from her son and from the surroundings, and in the

end it is Youssef that realizes his mother’s mastery of the Berber language. Rachid, at this

specific point, understands that she is “no longer Rachida bent Hammou ben Abdeslam

ben Abdelkader Ouchak”, but she has become only “Rachida Ouchak” (Lalami 2009a,

280), a transcultural subject who recognizes her individual reality as such and not as part

of her imagined community. This version of transculturality is also significant for

Rachida in accommodating all her social defects and the ability to transform them into

points of strength so as to confront Malika and negotiate with her from a position of

power. Based on this, I would argue that transculturality cannot be deemed a solution for

every post-colonial subjectivity. The social and cultural transformation that Rachid

undergoes only limits the construction of her identity to a specific model, i.e., protecting

her son from his father. Rachida’s social and cultural transformation may only refer to the

limits of the notion of transculturality.

Class, as the narrative tries to emphasize, remains the mechanism that silences the

post-colonial subject. The post-colonial elite seems to silence marginal post-colonial

voices. However, based on such binaries as silence/voice, Casablanca/slum, and

home/away, transculturality might offer new meanings and possibilities for post-colonial

deterritorialization, although such possibilities may not be fully achieved and sometimes

may result in failure. Positive reactions to transculturality can be seen in the ways in

which Youssef and Amal refuse to accentuate their current positions. Youssef does not

want to live in the slum, and his willingness to move with his mother to his father’s

apartment is a case in point. Amal’s refusal to stay with her father also problematizes the

issue of identity. She does not want to identify with a social milieu that exemplifies

corruption and power. In what follows, I will illustrate these points in more detail, and

discuss social injustice as an aspect of the aggressive form of modernity in North Africa.

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5.3 AGGRESSIVE MODERNITY: COMPRADORS AND POST-COLONIAL

MINORITIES

I use the term “aggressive modernity” in the sense that David Attwell defines in his

Rewriting Modernity: Studies in Black South African Literary History to describe a historical

condition that accounts “for every aspect of South Africa’s cultural history” (2005, 20).

Even though Attwell employs the term to explain a specifically local phenomenon (2005,

20-1), I find it similarly useful to account for the post-colonial transformation of the

cultural, social, and political aspects of life in Morocco as Secret Son charts it. In other

words, this section will attempt to reiterate the notion of postcoloniality that Bhabha has

advocated: in order to become modern, the cultural tenets of the individual are torn from

the ideology of modern states where inequality in the colonial condition has seeped into

the post-colonial condition (Bhabha and Comaroff 2002, 24). While this description seems

accurate for concluding that the post-colonial condition in Morocco is marked by a stark

domination by the neo-liberalists, the novel explicitly distinguishes this mode of neo-

liberalism as merely an outcome of the comprador intelligentsia. Although the period

after the independence of Morocco in 1956 was marked by a void in the transition of

power between the local authorities and the colonizing power, the new government was

entirely Francophone in its structure. The novel does not elaborate on this transition, but

it is indirectly installed in the characters’ psyches.

The aims of this section are threefold. First, in an attempt to link class to gender, it

seeks to understand the relation between what Bourdieu terms “symbolic power” and

the temptation to limit participation in the neo-liberal grouping to the children of

independence, the fathers of secret sons. Second, it will emphasize how the narrative

links this relation with a decline in social justice, thereby enunciating a new phase of

what I call the post-colony. Third, this section will show that, when the post-colonial

subject is being robbed of her or his belongings as an outcome of this injustice, s/he will

strives for belonging beyond the cultural and social groupings of her/his nation. While

the latter point will only be discussed in a general sense, I aim to conclude with it in

order to prepare a foreground for the novel’s premise on the notion of unbelonging,

which suggests a discussion of new forms of modernity as an aspect of Helff’s typology

of the transcultural novel (2009).

Through the theme of inequality, Secret Son aims to reinscribe the history of

Morocco differently. The narrative is a representation of the children of 1956 (the date of

Moroccan independence) as budding compradors. Central to my reading of Secret Son is

the point that the cohesive power and class relationship in Morocco is a matter of social

as well as cultural capital. This information is eventually introduced in metropolitan

Casablanca, where the family Amrani carries on its business. At the political level, there

is tension between lower-class people and the political figures who, predominantly from

the city of Fez, have taken full control of the country’s economy in the post-independence

era.

The narrative reiterates this relationship, especially when the question concerns

Youssef’s identity:

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You would expect his eyes on a Fassi, a descendant of the Moors, one of those

pedigreed men who had for generations controlled the destiny of the nation […]

you would not expect those eyes in the melting pot of misery and poverty that was

Hay An Najat. (Lalami 2009a, 11-2)

This episode explains that the division is an inextricably Moroccan characterization of

society, where people are divided in terms of their family names, and on the basis of

which the novel insistently claims its contemporaneity. When Youssef sees a photograph

of the man to be his father, the narrative tells us that “there was only one biographical

detail Youssef could glean from the piece: that Amrani was a Fassi. But with a name like

Amrani, of course, he would have to be from Fes” (Lalami 2009a, 38). To be from Fez

does not necessarily denote living in the city of Fez, since only the family name can

guarantee inclusion within a certain social class.

A few family names, mostly from the city of Fez and either descendants of the

Moors or the Shurfa (descendants of the prophet’s family), sway the politics and the

economy in Morocco. Among these names can be found, El Fassi and Amrani, for

instance, as characters in the novel. As I have demonstrated, the family name is

important in North African societies, and the novel describes this at length especially in

relation to Youssef. When Youssef introduces himself to Alia’s father, the father asks for

Youssef’s family name: “Youssef comment?” (Lalami 2009a, 67). When he says El Mekki

the father continues with no further conversation with him. Bourdieu explains this

division as the principle of classification in social class, whereby “the meaning of the

social world is power over the classificatory schemes […] which are the basis of the

representations of the groups and therefore of their mobilization and demobilization”

(1984, 479).

Division based on social class seems to be the principal logic of social relations in

Morocco, but what is significant in this division is its existence as a condition of

postcoloniality that is endorsed in the term comprador. Kwame Anthony Appiah

describes this contemporaneity

as a condition of what we might ungenerously call a comprador intelligentsia: a

relatively small, Western style, Western-trained group of writers and thinkers, who

mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery. In

the West they are known through the Africa they offer; their compatriots know

them through an Africa they have invented for the world, for each other, and for

Africa. (1991, 348)

Ashcroft et al. define postcoloniality as the mechanism through which a “comprador

intelligentsia”, including academics, artists and writers, forges its notions of

independence through their “reliance on, and identification with, colonial power” (2001,

55). Linked with this definition, class is an important variable in the notion of the

comprador. Ashcroft et al. point out that

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The notion of a comprador class, whether of capitalists or intellectuals, assumes the

existence of a clear hierarchical structure of cultural and material relations, for it is

arguable that nobody in a colonized society can ever fully avoid the effects of

colonial and neo-colonial cultural power. In post-colonial societies it is by no means

the bourgeoisie alone who have gained ‘access to’ popular cultural media such as

television or consumables such as Coca-Cola. The assumption that a comprador

class is necessarily and identifiably distinct from the rest of the society is therefore

somewhat questionable. (2001, 55)

The novel is conscious of the relationship between inequality and postcoloniality, which

the persona of Amrani manifestly represents. In the post-independent era, Amrani is an

active political figure “preoccupied with his political work, with the petitions he and

Rafael were drafting, the cases they wanted to bring to court, the articles on worker’s

rights that they were trying to publish” (Lalami 2009a, 87). However, this fact is

systematically changed for two reasons: first, as the narrator informs us, he is a son of a

well-known family in Morocco; and, second, he is required to take care of the family

business. This change brings with it frustration for the new generation who cannot afford

to pay extra bills to secure their living, since those who were seen as the defendants of

liberty and freedom have become symbols of oppression.

As the owner of a bus company in Casablanca, Amrani raises the bus fares, which

leads to a protest staged by university students. Amrani, as he confesses near the end of

the novel, is no longer able to “take the risk of wanting change. He started working for

his father in the family business, like his father before him […] Whatever happened in the

nation or the world was not his concern any longer” (2009, 273). His main uneasiness

resides in raising the benefits of his business, which contributes to the disparity between

the social classes in Morocco. This structural inequality is similar to the inequality

maintained by the colonial regimes in Morocco, and the novel compares the nationalist

project in Morocco with those of the colonial period. Thus, Bhabha and Comaroff

maintain that

being colonial or post-colonial is a way of ‘becoming modern’, of surviving

modernity […] that is so central a tenet of liberal individualism […] The disciplinary

and temporal orders of Progress, Rule, Rationality, and the state become corrupted

in the colonial and the postcolonial conditions, where they play a double, aporetic

role: as norms of value they make emancipatory claims, crucial to the definition of

modern citizenship; however, as part of the power practices of the colonial state

they create inequality, injustice, and indignity. (Bhabha and Comaroff 2002, 24)

As the narrative postulates, inequality, injustice, and indignity beguile post-colonial

Morocco, and the narrative critically addresses the ways in which the notion of colonial

oppression is forged in the post-colonial condition in North Africa. The Amrani family, as

a symbol of the comprador, is keen to maintain the social and cultural disparities among

the class fractions, suggesting that the aggressive form of modernity is structural in post-

colonial societies such as those of North Africa. The end limits of each class fraction are

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clearly observed in the novel in the structuring of Moroccan universities. Universities in

Secret Son are perceived as “jobless factories” (Lalami 2009a, 210), and to have a

university degree may result in their becoming Chômeurs diplômés (unemployed

graduates). The novel demonstrates this aspect in detail when it follows Youssef’s career

as a university student.

Youssef’s university is typical: we meet the offspring of the elite called the Marlboro

and Mercedes group of university students, the Partisans, the Marx-and-Lenin group, the

Berber Student Alliance, and the Sahrawi students (Lalami 2009a, 27-8). When the

protests begin, four groups engage in the events (the Partisans, the Marx-and-Lenins, the

Berbers, and the Sahraouis), while the first group can hardly be seen at events such as

these. Attendance at a university does not necessarily result in the compromise of a

higher education degree. As Alia points out, her attendance is just for fun. She is engaged,

and she is only waiting for her husband to graduate in order to marry him (Lalami 2009a,

68-70). The children of the upper class do not attend national universities. Amal,

Youssef’s sister and Amrani’s legitimate daughter, studies in the United States. Amrani

insistently asks Youssef to think of a better degree because “a degree in English isn’t

going to lead you anywhere” (2009, 138). Lamrani’s request for Youssef to study for a

degree that may “lead” him “somewhere” in his career can be similar to those

compradors who exalt the national education while sending their students to private

schools or abroad for a “better” study. Shapiro explains such an incident as follows:

[i]t has been ironic that those […] who have often been the loudest in their

condemnation of the decline of community and the need for an ethic of social

responsibility, have pursued agendas […] to exert even more dominance in our

social, economic and cultural lives. (2006, 69)

To clarify this aspect, the upper-class families in Morocco prefer to educate their children

at private institutes and colleges: some prefer to send them abroad (Sabour 2003, 165).

The novel represents the university in Morocco as a space denoting the negative aspect of

education. Hence, the presence of policemen at universities becomes part of the

normative discourse. Whenever there is a protest, the police interfere. When, for instance,

the government raises bus fares, all the groups join in the protest against it, and Youssef,

feeling the pleasure of the moment that he belongs with these students, is overjoyed: “he

joined the protestors, letting the excitement of the moment course through him, giving

him the intoxicating feeling that he belonged” (Lalami 2009a, 48). Immediately the police

arrive to break up this group, and many students are injured.

The necessity to unearth inequality factored by postcoloniality is aptly expressed

throughout the narrative. What has originally been simply a resistance group who fought

against inequality and for social justice in the post-independence era are now a group

that enforce social injustice in post-colonial Morocco. There has been a drastic

transformation: members of the post-colonial elite who sought national prosperity now

seek only personal success. It is in no way possible to engage in negotiation after the post-

colonial is transformed into a post-colonial figure: the colonial and the post-colonial are

the same in the context of Secret Son.

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Farid Benaboud, a journalist and a dear friend of Amrani’s, arrives at Amrani’s

apartment. Benaboud’s meeting with Amrani spells out an example of the post-colonial

transformation. Benaboud writes an article accusing a Moroccan minister of gambling but

without mentioning his/her name, and the result is that the “dossier is already with the

prosecutor”, with the minister asking for five hundred thousand Dirhams compensation

because “his reputation has suffered a blow” (Lalami 2009a, 148). In order to put pressure

on the government, Benaboud’s coeditor suggests that they “put together an open letter”

that “academics, intellectuals, human rights activist” should sign in order to indicate

support for the newspaper (Lalami 2009a, 148). Benaboud’s request for Amrani’s

signature is partly inspired by Amrani’s past role as a political activist who used to sign

petitions against the government. Amrani, however, refuses to sign any letter.

Addressing Benaboud, Amrani points out that Farid is “asking for too much”

(Lalami 2009a, 149). At this point, free speech and calls for change become signs of the

past and of impossible responsibilities: Amrani offers instead to merely help pay part of

the fine. There seems to be a juxtaposition of moral values in this meeting: Benaboud’s

aim does not rest on money, because, as he says “it’s not a question of money. We can

always ask for donations” (Lalami 2009a, 149). Amrani understands that to put his name

to the letter is to risk his career and achievement as a businessman. Thus, it is not

surprising that Benaboud reminds Amrani about his engagement in the past:

Journalists in my generation, we all grew up looking up to people like Nabil

Amrani, like Rafael Levy, like Fatima Bourqia, like Hamid Senhaji—all those who

dared to speak up during the Years of Lead. You wrote so many articles for

opposition newspapers when you were my age. And to have your support now

would make all the difference. (Lalami 2009a, 149)

The issue for Amrani is to avoid risking his social rank in society, because political

engagement would only classify and position him at the center of the conflict. The

nation’s problems are no longer his concern: the motto “to change” does not have any

relevance in his new dictionary. Everything becomes part of history, a history that he

invokes only to secure his interests and position in the Moroccan society as a comprador.

Reflecting on the role of this specific, neo-liberalist group in restructuring social

relations in post-colonial spaces such as Morocco, Lalami’s narrative constantly questions

the notion of the realities on which individuals can base their decision to belong. Nabil

Amrani chooses not to risk the career that has taken him years to achieve as a

businessman and well-established figure in Moroccan society. Identification with the neo-

liberalists – the new bourgeoisie, a class or a category of Moroccans that is a born and

bred part of a resistance group and part of the post-independent movement, indicates a

different perspective to belonging. This is a blatantly attractive example of the space that

a post-colonial elite could inhabit if they were to relegate their national allegiances and

struggles for a minority voice to a secondary level of prioritization. This is not to say that

all the post-colonial elites are in the same mold. However, the novel does not offer any

example of those who might refuse to join the will of the new bourgeoisie cult and

concentrate instead on their struggle for change. The only instance one could draw on

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relates to the journalist Benaboud who, because of his writing on Islamist groups in

Casablanca, is assassinated by a young university student from the slum of Hay An Najat.

Consequently, the narrative suggests another means of transcendence in which the

notion of unbelonging can suggest alternative possibilities for overriding the aggressive

notion of modernity. Amrani takes a risk in leaving his son Youssef on behalf of his

daughter, but only to secure his territoriality. In the end, he has neither a son nor a

daughter, and in a passage echoing the disillusionment evident in some post-colonial

literature, he thinks it is too late to acknowledge that something has gone wrong:

When did things fall apart? Men of his generation were children of ’56, children of

the independence. Like them, he had signed petitions for the release of Saida

Mnebhi, written articles for Lamalif, spent hours in Rafael Levey’s smoky living

room discussing Frantz Fanon or Mehdi Ben Barka, closed down his law office

during general strikes, denounced the imposition by the World Bank and the IMF of

a structural adjustment plan, called these institutions “tools of neocolonialism par

excellence”, collected money for the families of those killed during the bread riots of

1981. Those were years when he still dared to dream, when he was still full of love

for his country. (Lalami 2009a, 272-3)

This passage is a chronicle of the outrageous death of political activists such as Saida

Mnebhi: a human rights activist during the 1970s in Morocco, a member of the “union

nationale des étudiants du Maroc” (student union), and a member of the “union

marocaine du travail” (labor union). During the Years of Lead between 1970s and 1980s,

in 1976 she was sentenced to 6 years in jail. She died in prison after pursuing a hunger

strike with other prisoners for 40 days in 1977 (Orlando 2010, 279). Ben Barka was a

politician, socialist, and mathematics teacher of King Hassan the Second, who was his

principle opponent. Ben Barka, a leader of the “tiers-mondiste et panafricaniste

movements” and the secretary of the “Union Nationale des Forces Populaires (UNFP)”,

disappeared in Paris in 1965. Lamalif was a newspaper that formed a new way of protest

against corruption in Morocco.

In her essay “The Lamalif Years”, Lalami tells the story of a newspaper that was

published for 22 years:

The magazine was a form of challenge (the title comes from the Arabic letters lam

and ‘alif, which together spell out the word “No”). It was the expression of a

homegrown movement. It had amazing art covers. It was ours […] it published

high-quality articles on politics, art, and culture. Its contributors were seasoned

journalists, intellectuals, and, more often than not, university professors. It was

informed and informative, and I have often wondered what it would be like today if

it had survived as a publication. (Constant pressures by the government forced the

magazine to shut down in 1988). (2007, n.p.)

The passage apparently elaborates on a fundamental characteristic that defines minority

literature and its political nature, and corroborates what Deleuze and Guattari postulate:

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its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics.

The individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable,

magnified, because a whole other story is vibrating within it. In this way, the family

triangle connects to other triangles – commercial, economic, bureaucratic, juridical –

that determine its values. (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 17)

The narrative represents the situation between the 1970s and early 1990s in this

geographical space as critical. The more that corruption and injustice is entrenched in the

society, the more the narrative alludes to the collective voices to enunciate their

politically connected perspective. Here the political is amalgamated with the concerns of

the individual in a much larger web of enunciations referring to the power structure of

minority literature. The figures that the narrative names are real, their sacrifice was for

the nation, and their sufferings were for a voice. But what if these historical figures had

survived postcoloniality? They might have become, as the novel tells us, people like

Nabil Amrani, who revolts against the groups’ moral values and indulges, instead, in his

own business. Lamalif chronicles the post-colonial history and the suffering of a group of

people who sacrifice their life for the prosperity of the nation. This might be a reminder

of the narrative for those intellectuals to reconsider their status in the post-colonial

condition in order to accentuate a rather different position in this society.

In a significant way, the narrative techniques and style that Lalami employs

underline two simultaneous processes: re-writing and writing back. In the passage where

Amrani asks the question “When did things fall apart?” is an intertextual reference to the

work of the post-colonial writer Chinua Achebe and his Things Fall Apart. There are

numerous instances in which Lalami aims to re-write the history of Morocco and write

back through intertextuality. The idea of home and homelands is also central to the

structure of the novel; Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands has been considered partly a

bibliography that points to the post-colonial transformation (Lalami 2009a, 260). The title

of Chapter 7 “Son and Lover” is yet another intertextual reference to D. H. Lawrence’s

Sons and Lovers, through which the author aims at comparing the social status of, on the

one hand, Yussef and his mother, and Amrani, his wife and daughter, and, on the other

hand, Gertrude Coppard, Walter Morel, and their family in Sons and Lovers. “Heir to the

Past”, the title of Chapter 8, refers to the Moroccan Francophone writer Driss Chraibi’s

novel Heirs to the Past. In the same way that Driss Chraibi attempts to describe the society

of Morocco after independence in 1956, Laila Lalami tries to make the reader aware of

such a narrative and further explains that Secret Son can contribute to such pre-existing

representations, but only in another tongue. Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent is referred

to in the opening of Part 4 in order to foreground the theme of terrorism that the author

claims to be the concern of globalism.

In this regard, it is possible to assume that Secret Son claims to make new forms of

writing back and re-writing modernity accessible to the new generation to negotiate

belonging in post-colonial Morocco. This will be discussed in the following section. While

the novel charts these possibilities, it voices the assumption that the comprador has

already lost his/her grip in the novel’s new Morocco and that belonging itself is no longer

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a matter of fixity but one of the ubiquity of the notion of unbelonging over post-colonial

subjectivities. The “prosecution” of the Lamalif newspaper indicates the close of a chapter

in Moroccan history and the opening of a new one. This chapter or moment dwells

primarily on the importance of the period of transformation that exists between post-

independence and post-colonialism. Lamalif, as the narrative indicates, is one such

possibility for sustaining the notion of re-writing, dating back as it does to the Years of

Lead in the novel’s Morocco.

To understand this transformation in the post-colonial space and the shift that

transforms identities from belonging into unbelonging, it is necessary to trace the

transition by following the character of Amal, in particular. Amal, Amrani’s daughter,

longs for alternative forms of belonging. These she finds in America first, and secondly in

her Brazilian-American boyfriend, Fernando. Her refusal to belong to the comprador

class and her decision to travel back to the United States to live with Fernando may incur

more than a single interpretation. First, it shows that such an escape is an escape from the

past, which signals a form of refusing to live with her father. This refusal can also be

interpreted as a rejection of the form of modernity introduced by the compradors. Second,

transculturality can offer a new milieu for cross-cultural reading beyond the boundaries

of culture itself. Third, it is the urgency to forge a new sense of belonging that may

position post-colonial identity in the center of transcultural belonging. Nevertheless, the

novel shows that anyone who fails to deterritorialize the post-colonial space also fails to

figure out her/his belonging, and ultimately s/he will also fail to reterritorialize her/his

“old” positions. It is this point – transcultural belonging – on which I would like to

elaborate next.

5.4 TOWARDS A TRANSCULTURAL UN/BELONGING

The colonial legacy of Morocco is remarkably present in the novel in the neo-liberalist

“prospectus” for the nation. But to be part of this general representation might not be a

choice for the new generation. The narrative attempts to reroute postcoloniality in

Morocco in order to carve out possibilities for living beyond the social and cultural

matrix that obstructs the voice of minorities. To shape the contour of the modern

Morocco, the narrative explores the lives of those who choose to live in the margin, like

Amal, whose unbelonging remains an aspect of her identity construction. The novel also

suggests that living transculturally can foster the medium to reroute post-coloniality,

enabling identity to verge on the singularity of the postcolonial subject. In negotiating

globalization, the novel suggests, that to succeed one needs to become a transcultural,

post-colonial subject.

Amal and her brother Youssef each in her/his own way are concrete examples of

this process. On the one hand, Youssef does not want to live in the slums and his mastery

of both French and English is one example of an alternative path to a better life in

Morocco. These facts, coupled with rejuvenation of a paternal relationship (on the part of

his father), inspire Youssef to limit the possibilities of a new form of modernity to class.

In other words, Youssef sees that, in order to reconstruct his identity, he should live with

his father and do what his father asks him to do. Amal, on the other hand, does not rely

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on class to liberate herself from the condition of postcoloniality that her father represents.

Instead, she sees that her belonging dwells in the liminal space of unbelonging. Even

though Amal chooses to live in the diaspora, she refuses to identify with the locals. Yet

her choice to live with a hybrid American generates the understanding that

transculturality is perceived as the ultimate solution for post-colonial belonging.

In addition, it can be noted that Helff’s typology (2009) on the transcultural novel

operates on three levels. On the first level, globalization is noticeable in Yussef’s failure to

negotiate the two main global flows: being recruited by the Party or by the Hotel. His

failure is represented by the end of the novel, when he relents and joins the Party to

become a terrorist. On the second level, the novel focuses on certain individualized

realities to provide the reader with different points of view of the characters and their

identities. On the third level, the narrator is an unreliable source of information. In order

to clarify the processes underlying this typology, I will refer to the characters Yussef and

Amal and the ways in which they negotiate their belonging within global transculturality.

The subliminal aspects in Youssef direct him to consider other sources in order to

overcome the pressures of living in the slums with no relatives, apart from his mother.

These are explicitly featured when Youssef answers the teacher’s question about the

meaning of Daisy in The Great Gatsby: “She is the Dream – Gatsby’s dream” (Lalami 2009a,

31). Precisely, it is also Youssef’s dream to find his path out of the social injustice that is

entrenched in many aspects of Morocco. In reading The Great Gatsby in the atmosphere of

the Moroccan universities, the narrative attempts to connect the local with the global, in

which the new emerges from cultural permeation. Gatsby’s dream is to revive his relation

with Daisy, while for Youssef the apogee of success rests in his climbing out of the slum.

Seeing a photograph of a man whom he later discovers to be his father may be similar to

Nick’s meeting with Gatsby, yet the similarity could only be viewed in terms of the

father’s reunification with the son (old friends, in the case of Gatsby).

Youssef needs urgently to find his identity and his belonging, and the novel

describes this action in respect to his ability to accept the first option available to him.

When he joins the protestors, for instance, he is sure that he will be treated severely by

the university guards (police). The feeling of belonging that he misses may be found in

the university students, and this has overridden his fear: “he joined the protestors, letting

the excitement of the moment course through him, giving him the intoxicating feeling

that he belonged” (Lalami 2009a, 48).

With Alia in her family’s house, Youssef claims an identity that is not his, as he is

careful not to make a single mistake in order not to be identified. Youssef thinks that

intimacy with these people implies conduct that will correlate with their standards. As a

result, when Alia looks at Youssef, he thinks that “something in her expression made him

wonder whether she had recognized him for who he was. He straightened his back and

drank carefully, afraid to make one false move and reveal himself” (Lalami 2009a, 68).

Performing false identities is not a permanent act, but one that saves him from the

demeaning gestures involved in the process of giving his family name.

Thus, it may be useful to consider the instances on which Secret Son represents the

dreams of the new generations in Morocco. At the age of seventeen, Youssef finds his

father, who initially agrees to introduce him to his family. The paternal relation becomes

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significant for Youssef, and the feeling of belonging once again seizes his thought: “He

walked slowly up in the street toward the bus station, wondering what it would be like to

live here, in Anfa, with people like the Alaouis, the Filalis, the El Fassis – and the

Amranis. He could be one of them” (Lalami 2009a, 70). Even though Youssef openly

admires the way of life of the upper-middle class, he does not want to deny totally his

belonging to his mother. This can be seen when Amrani and Youssef discuss the latter’s

future and what he wants to be. Youssef seems not to ask for too much, since he only

wants to be himself and not imitate anyone else (Lalami 2009a, 91).

In effect, Youssef’s decision to live with his father ends in tears. Youssef is placed in

a situation in which he needs to decide between his past and future (mother and father),

resulting in his disguising and concluding his past. At first, the decision is very hard to

take. The father wants him to “make a clean break. Start fresh” (Lalami 2009, 124). But

Youssef is not aware of this choice, because the essential aspect of such a choice dwells in

the ability to replace the old part with the new. He has not also wanted to make a “clean

break” with his friends at all; they have been a part of his life, part of who he has been.

Yet he is tempted by the promise inherent in his father’s words: “a new beginning with

his father, a chance to rewrite his life” (Lalami 2009, 124). Ultimately, an old part of

Youssef’s life has been cleared and replaced with the new, and the past no longer exists in

Youssef’s present. At this point, it is important to ask why it is The Great Gatsby that the

narrative introduces and not any other narrative from the same era, such as Ernest

Hemingway’s, for instance? The Gatsby character recreates his own history in The Great

Gatsby by entirely erasing his real past when he moves to West Egg. No one knows him

in the place, or where he comes from, except for the lavish parties he organizes every

Saturday. Youssef El Mekki wants to do the same: he wants to create a new past, a new

identity, and cut any connection with the history of Hay An Najat.

This aspect may partly explain why Youssef uses the name “Amrani”, rather than

“El Mekki”, when he meets with El Filali (Lalami 2009a, 134). But does this return to the

father and the break with the past (his mother) signify what Chinua Achebe calls “an act

of atonement with the past, the ritual return and homage of a prodigal son"? (1995, 193

emphasis added). If the answer is positive, a return to a copied system of colonization in

post-colonial Morocco is “a dreadful betrayal and produces a guilty feeling” (Achebe

1975, 62). Even though Achebe points here to language, I assume that the mother tongue

is relevant to the notion of the past (mother). Consequently, the rejection of the past in

order to identify with the neo-liberalist comprador is what the narrative attempts to

criticize.

At the very moment that Youssef indulges in the act of forgetting his past, he

foregrounds a new one where past and present no longer formulate the notion of the

“post” that Bhabha advocates. While Youssef can be said to encounter “newness” (cf.

Bhabha 1994, 7-18), such an encounter operates only on the national level. The continuity

of the past in the future through the present does not function here, and the ability to

remain hybrid, to live in-between, is blurred at the moment when Youssef chooses to part

company with his mother and friends in Hay An Najat. Instead of deterritorialization, he

merely reiterates the notion of reterritorialization. As Youssef is unable to negotiate his

past in the present when his father leaves him for the sake of his sister, he starts to look

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for alternative forms of belonging, which he finds, as the narrative explains, in the

fundamentalists’ idea of betrayals and brainwashing. Though the narrative elaborates

only cursorily on this aspect, it shows that the past is an important aspect for identity to

be reconstructed in the present.

Youssef’s failure to deterritorialize his territory can be seen as a failure to

accommodate to his own identity and to negotiate global transformation. The novel

explains this failure on at least three levels. The first level concerns scholarship and how

Yussef fails to earn his college degree. As a student of English, Youssef insistently desires

to be a member of the Marlboro and Mercedes group, and if English symbolizes

globalization, both “Marlboro” and “Mercedes” suggest global trademarks. At some

point Youssef believes that his relationship with Alia can help him to access this global

atmosphere. In breaking with Alia and with his inability to complete his education,

Youssef is forced to look for alternatives. On a second level, Youssef works for his father

in the hotel, but only for a short period. Due to the interference of his mother the

international business does not work for him, resulting in his expulsion from the hotel.

Youssef’s desire for a Green Card becomes the last level on which he is unable to

accommodate his identity with the global transformation that his society undergoes.

When Youssef no longer works in the hotel and after his chance to continue his studies

has been restricted, he intends to apply for a Green Card Lottery through a local agent.

The novel then tells us that the local agent escapes with all the money that he collects

from Youssef and others like him. Such a trajectory forces the mother to imagine travel

for her son when she says, addressing his sister Amal, that Youssef “left for Tangier three

weeks ago. He’s going to start over in Europe” (Lalami 2009a, 264). This imaginary status

does not endorse Youssef’s ambition to become a global subject, and ultimately forces

him to join the Party and indulge in terrorist acts. Youssef fails to become part of the

global system and, as the novel suggests, he is placed in-between two alternative global

flows, i.e., the Party and the Grand Hotel, the mother and the father.

If Yussef fails to negotiate globalization, Amal seems to represent the other form of

transitive belonging. She does not refer to imagination but operates within the system,

and at the moment when she feels that globalization fails in her society Amal manages to

travel to a place where she can re-create her own home. Amal cannot bear inhabiting only

parts of the post-colonial space given to her. This rejection is the result of a long process

of negotiation between the self and the social and cultural aspects of life in Morocco. It is

important to note that the filiations of Amal – to differentiate herself from the

pressurizing milieu of family and class – cannot be excluded from the transcultural

configurations of belonging and the notion of home. There is a contrapuntal process at

work here: cultural identities are replaced by transcultural belonging, and the meaning of

home, from a diasporic perspective, is redefined by the singularity of the subject. Part 3 of

Secret Son begins with an epigraph from James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room to the effect

that “[p]erhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition” (Lalami 2009a,

155). This epigraph is, perhaps, the narrative device through which the notions of

belonging, home, and identity are revisited and reconstructed in various ways.

Amal’s first encounter with Fernando is reminiscent of the discussion on Imaginary

Homelands, and her devotion to “the part about growing up kissing books and bread”

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(Lalami 2009a, 260) is significant for the new meaning of Amal’s home. The allusion to

such work as Salman Rushdie’s implies more than a single interpretation. First, the

notion of home for Amal has been deconstructed, and belonging does not necessarily

emphasize place but the interweaving of locations and the permeation of cultures across

borders. This definition seems to carve out the potential elements that a home could

inhabit. Second, Amal prominently acknowledges the importance of this notion of

unbelonging the first time that she travels to the United States. When Amal wants to sell

her car, she has to confront racist perceptions of her cultural and ethnic origins;

something in her is “telling her she did not belong. So she knew. She knew what it felt

like” (Lalami 2009a, 266). In relation to this constructed notion of home, Salman

Rushdie’s home dwells in his past. To grow up “kissing books and bread” may suggests

that Amal’s present becomes what Salman Rushdie calls “foreign, and that the past is

home” (1991, 9). This tendency to draw comparisons between Rushdie’s home and

Amal’s may emphasize the notion of “mobile homes”, where the past becomes the static

construction of home, while the notion of home in the present remains an example of

mobility.

Third, not to belong does not necessarily imply cancellation of the sense of identity,

but it is a way to renew and reconfigure new sites of belonging. This case is explicit when

Amal indulges in self-negotiation of the new meanings that she wishes to bestow on the

notion of home as part of the process of identity construction. But her preference for

studying at an American university assumes her decision to reconstruct a global identity.

Amal has experience of being both at home and away: “She had known both; found good

in both; loved and hated both. She did not want to have to choose one or another,

because in every choice something is gained but something is also lost” (Lalami 2009a,

266). To understand the act of identity transformation in Amal, it is important to turn to

Beck, who reminds us in his The Cosmopolitan Vision that the life and body of the subject’s

“‘individual existence’ become part of another world, of foreign cultures, religions,

histories and global interdependencies” without the intention of expressing this sense of

belonging (2006, 19).

It is not surprising to encounter the demand for an explicitly deconstructivist notion

of home on the part of the post-colonial subjects in the novel. Amal asks rhetorically

“why home is thought of as a place? What if it were something else?” (Lalami 2009a, 266).

Sabina Brancato justifiably points out that, in such circumstances, when the focus is

shifted from the group identity onto its individual construction, “[t]he focus is often

placed on the concept of home, no longer to be identified as a country but, rather, as a

private space, no matter where it is, where one feels comfortable” (2009, 244).

Moreover, reliance on the singularity of the post-colonial subject is what defines the

notion of unbelonging and describes the process of identity construction from the post-

colonial to the transcultural. Amal rejects her mother’s pleas for her to return home, her

father’s representation of the comprador’s life, and the cultural definition of voice. Her

mother insistently reminds Amal that she belongs in Morocco: “in your country, with

your family. What will you do there?” (Lalami 2009a, 269). Although Amal understands

the risks involved in her choice, her transcultural belonging is thought of as the only way

to liberate the self from the limited notion of culture. To refuse to belong to her nation

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and to her culture is illuminating. First, the understanding that cultural inheritance is

deeply entrenched in the construction of one’s self has been acknowledged by Amal,

especially when she reveals her understanding of such a cultural inheritance to her

mother. This means that rejection is not understood as obliteration, but merely as

transition and translation onto a much larger level where cultures are defined by the

notion of ubiquity and permeation. Second, the importance of anchoring the self as the

source of belonging emphasizes the singularity of subjectivity as an important element in

effectuating such transition/translation from being pos-tcolonial to being transcultural:

home becomes the space where one feels at home.

Another element that is pertinent to this discussion is the importance of the

character Fernando. Half Brazilian and half American, he inspires Amal to revolt against

all the cultural and social aspects that predefine her identity. Early in the novel, Nabil

Amrani’s encounter with Fernando aims at demeaning Fernando’s ethnic background, in

the sense that he does not fit in with “us”, and this is explicitly shown when Amrani tells

his daughter “I thought you said he was American” (Lalami 2009a, 164). The narrator

further describes this incident in a meeting between Fernando and Amal’s parents: “Her

parents were carefully picking Fernando apart, Amal knew, demonstrating to each other

and to her that he did not fit in their world” (Lalami 2009a, 184). This description is an

attempt to make Amal part company with Fernando. For Amal, however, Fernando

represents more than a lover. He is a transcultural figure and a minoritarian in the United

States, and her identification with him seems to offer her consolidation against the

burden of postcoloniality at home. Even though her parents succeed at least, partially, in

convincing her that her essential belonging lies in her home country, such a realization

resides in her search for alternative sites of belonging while in Casablanca.

Home is now Morocco, and America is away, and the smells of her home only

problematize her identity. Guided by similar concerns, Amal decides to look for her

brother Youssef. This has been viewed as the only way to re-identify with those whom

she feels she shares similarities. The failure to reach Youssef rapidly sustains Amal’s

identity reconstruction. The narrative describes this at length:

It was over before it had even begun. There would be no relationship with Youssef,

and life in Casablanca would continue in the same way it had before. Sometimes,

Amal felt like a fish that had been taken out of water and put back; she was finding

it difficult to breath […] In a city of five million, she felt unaccountably, incredibly

alone. What was left? Who was left? (Lalami 2009a, 264; emphasis original)

Amal’s identity is set in a liminal space; she is unable to decide exactly what belonging

would mean for her in Morocco. Though she has to choose between Fernando and her

home, Amal’s choice of Morocco destabilizes her identity. In this vein, Amal

acknowledges that her belonging dwells in the very moment of transculturality and

difference. Thus, the intersection of the notion of belonging with the essential home is not

an aspect of living in a global world. Difference – the main aspect upon which Amal’s

parents have built their decision and force her to choose their home – “no longer emerges

between different kinds of monolithic identities, but between identity configurations that

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have some elements in common while differing in other elements, in their arrangement

as a whole, and often in their complexity” (Welsch 2009, 9).

A certain level of changed realities and life can be understood from this discussion:

the traditional definition of belonging vis-à-vis home is renewed, and identity is tied to

singularity more than it is to the collective. “[T]he idea of cultural origin and home” has

already transformed as an effect of transculturality (Wilfried and Isensee 2008, 3).

However illuminating, this intention does not imply that the present narrative does not

speak in a collective enunciation. Quite the contrary, the singularity of the subject is an

important stage predating minority voices. In other words, in order to tell the stories of

the minoritarians, rather than speaking on their behalf, the character needs to operate

her/his singularity. As a result, silence, as it is argued, is not a matter of absence; rather it

is a yearning to engage with the other, and the incommensurability of living with the

other through the singularity of that individual (McLeod 2010, n.p.).

Subsequently, this argument seems to explain Amal’s longing for an alternative

belonging: “She left him [Fernando] behind, trading his love for the love of father and

mother, the love of country, the love of home. She had been told to make a choice, and

though she still had no idea why, she had chosen” (Lalami 2009a, 260). The notion of

living like the other dismantles the notion of post-colonialism in Amal, and drives her to

start another process of identity construction. She decides to construct another meaning

for her home that goes beyond the imperatives of family and the nation. In other words, a

moment of conversation, as McLeod (2010) calls it, means a yearning for a renewed

notion of transcultural identity. In order for Amal to “renew” her identity, she leaves

behind her father “for the sake of that man, just as he had left Youssef behind for her

sake” (Lalami 2009a, 271), and as Raussert and Isensee remind us, “[y]ou do not have to

live in the same place in order to live together. On the other hand, existence in the same

place does not necessarily mean living together” (2008, 2). It is clear that Amal does not

feel at home either in the United States or in Morocco, and to compare the locations is

essentially not a choice in its own right. It is the notion of engagement with the other

(Fernando) that substantiates the singularity of Amal’s identity in order to communicate

the minoritarian’s struggle at home and overseas.

It is hard, though, to estimate the accuracy of transcultural belonging in

postcolonial Morocco. In the meantime, the novel suggests that being tied to the ordinary

notion of home may not result in a deterritorialized space of enunciation. Instead, it

blocks any notion of liberation and advances the subject to a remote past existing in the

memory. The narrative directs the reader to think of this assumption, and what happens

to Youssef could illuminate such a premise. Taking him as an example, the narrative

implies that Youssef is not capable of transcending the notion of home, which is

represented in his mother. As I mentioned in the previous sections, the silent Moroccan

woman (Rachida) is unable to express her identity beyond the space she is offered, but

she does so when she is commited to the transcultural pardigm of belonging. This

conclusion projects on Youssef’s inability to construct an identity beyond his motherland.

Youssef’s belonging dwells in his mother/home, and meanwhile Youssef remains his

mother’s reason d’être: “In the end, she was his only home” (Lalami 2009a, 283). The

narrative, in a subtle way, assumes that deterritorialization and voice can only succeed

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when the postcolonial subject is able to transform and belong transculturally. Youssef

cannot gain access to this medium, because he fails to negotiate globalization and limits

his belonging to his mother. In contrast, belonging, for Amal, is something different,

going beyond the normative labels of home (mother, country, or family). The novel, in

this regard, suggests that it is only through transculturality that the postcolonial subject

can voice the agonies of the minoritarian in North Africa. In so doing, it points to new

voices that are emerging in the margins of postcolonialism, and which can be heard

through the “other, other literature”.

***

In this chapter, I have sought to demonstrate how the notions of identity and home are

not fixed constructions. Secret Son illustrates that the importance of belonging rests in the

singularity of the post-colonial subject, and that neither Yussef nor Amal is in position to

define what belonging or home mean for the post-colonial subject. Secret Son also

confirms the desire to engage with others without necessarily comparing the self with the

other probable stories. The narrative is critical of postcoloniality in the ways in which the

comprador substitutes the colonial system of oppression with a post-colonial one.

Corruption and domination assume the subordination and submission of the weaker

parts in society. If the weaker part pretends not to break silence against these models,

s/he will only territorialize an earlier position, and she may therefore think of violent

rebuke, as in the case of Amin, who “stuck the knife in Benaboud’s neck” (Lalami 2009a,

288), and Youssef, who is arrested for this murder.

To engage in a “moment of conversation” and to transmit a voice from the margin

of post-colonial North Africa means to deterritorialize language, forming new sites of

belonging and seeking a transcultural identity. These can be exemplified, as the narrative

suggests, in the transformation of the English language, using words from the local

Moroccan language and in self-translating the oppression of post-colonial subjectivities.

Seeking a cosmopolitan readership may assume a certain level of authenticity, an aspect

to which Laila Lalami addresses herself, which the novel has to be a multilingual genre.

Not all translations are perceived as accurate, and not every instance made in

transforming the language can be transcultural. It is, however, worth considering that

Laila Lalami, as a Moroccan/American who lives, teaches, and writes in the United States,

can at least account for and sustain Deleuze and Guattari’s views on minority literature.

Taking, for instance, a review by Bahdur, we can see that appropriating such a narrative

in the American context might lead to an act of deterritorialization:

But something has been lost in her attempt to bypass translation: perhaps it’s the

cadences of the inner courtyards of her upbringing. Her English prose, although

clean and closely observed, lacks music, and her similes can be predictable. (Bahdur

2009, n.p.)

The importance of transcultural belonging emerges in relation to all these aspects, which

the narrative attempts to chart. The only opportunity for the post-colonial minoritarian

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subject to liberate her/his self from the oppression of postcoloniality seems to take place

through seeking refuge in transcultural belonging within a global space. One clue to such

belonging is not-to-bind to the notion of home as a place to return to, which ultimately

means to reterritorialize and submit to the prevalent identity conflict. Nevertheless,

deterritorialization can induce ways out of this impasse and help to transform

subjectivity from being post-colonial to being transcultural, with particular emphasis on

the singularity of the subject.

As Lalami is part of a minority group in the United States, the interweaving of her

cultural aspects into the majority language could be seen as a defect by the majority

groups. This defect has twofold results: first, Deleuze and Guattari remind us that this

defect can be acceptable, since it may be the only route leading to deterritorialization.

Second, when the aspect of deterritorialization occurs, transculturality remains the space

of negotiation within which the singularity of subjectivities is sustained. With her self-

transition/translation of Secret Son, Lalami seeks to find the route to liberate herself from

the nostalgia inherent in the French language and the post-colonial condition of Morocco.

Nevertheless, Bahdur’s critique does not necessarily imply desertion; rather, it postulates

that Lalami’s identity is suffering from dislocation and suggests that she might be lost in

translation. Provided that her narrative is an exemplary novel in which authenticity is

problematized, being lost in translation would only further her unbelonging.

The narrative also suggests that Helff’s typology may explain the constant changes

within identities of the characters in the novel. The narrative structure in which

uncertainty dominates the thoughts of Youssef and his mother, for instance, cultivates

identities in a constant flux. The novel also ïlluminates individualized realities as aspects

of the global identities, where subjectivities dwell in their incommensurability.

Another issue that is relevant to my discussion of Secret Son develops with the role

played by politics. It is important to note that the narrative’s structure is not linear, even

though there are instances where the events can be predictable. This is probably because

of the novel’s dependence on political issues as prominent elements in its structure.

Politics is discussed in this narrative as a tool that pushes characters to seek alternative

modes of modernity. Political inscriptions are either extremist liberalist or radical

Islamists, and in both ways society still suffers from corruption.

The novel also shows that Americanization is begining to permeate the novel’s

Moroccan society. The emphasis on trademarks such as Marlboro represents yet another

process of Americanization of the mind. Such a process is already underway, and to

study in American colleges or to teach American literature such as The Great Gatsby in

English departments may be another example. Ultimately, it should be noted that

transculturality is a significant denominator for the North African novel in English. It

suggests that in order to escape postcoloniality and to long for alternative forms of

modernity, the North African needs to consider alternative sites of belonging, which this

novel suggests can be found in transculturality.

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6 Conclusion

In an attempt to re-imagine the field of North African literary studies, I have focused my

analysis on novels written in the English language by writers from North Africa. I have

initiated my hypothesis by contesting the notion of writing back advocated in The Empire

Writes Back, suggesting that transculturality is a discourse of the major minorities that can

help locate the emerging North African novel in English.

I began my study by examining the novels chronologically: Si Yussef focuses on the

questions of place and history, and the ways in which the past can be deployed to inform

the present and demarcate the post-colonial place. Waiting in the Future for the Past to

Come contributes to the debates on gender, space, and identity. It negotiates the space of

minoritarians in both the colonial and the post-colonial eras, and contributes by

suggesting the means to demarctae the space occupied by the post-colonial woman. Secret

Son mainly discusses postcoloniality and ways to re-route post-colonialism in order to

create a transcultural belonging. The study has explained that the narratives emphasize

location as a way to make deterritorialization absolute in the sense introduced by

Deleuze and Guattari. In order to clarify these aspects, this study has revealed that the

North African Anglophone novel demonstrates that it is able to flourish as a post-colonial

Anglophone narrative: its location as a North African narrative in English

deterritorializes both the French colonial discourse and also the theories that sustain its

power as the main discursive structure in the region. In other words, to argue that French

discourse maintains power over its former colony in North Africa, or that Britain still

haunts, for instance, the Indian discursive structure, may no longer be the case in the era

of cultural globalization. The North African Anglophone writer begins writing in English

because s/he needs to deconstruct the colonial legacy in North Africa away from the

power of its structure. To do so, the North African novel in English creates new

epistemologies that focus mainly on the narrative in the margin of post-colonialism.

These discursive shifts in North African literature have resulted in various

theoretical and methodological challenges that further problematize the process of

generating new approaches and tools so as to locate the emerging literature in English.

This study has attempted to demonstrate that, since the discourse of post-colonialism has

become an aspect of theoretical contestation, post-colonial theory seems to challenge any

possibility of the post-colonial subject starting a process of writing back. This study has

observed that, to regard the post-colonial text as a minoritarian textual bricolage in which

the lines of the binary minor/major are becoming blurred, can be seen as a sign of

theoretical “inventiveness” in the sense introduced by Attridge (cf. 2004). Working

towards achieving this goal, this study has emphasized the notion of transculturality and

suggested that the North African novel needs to contribute to the notion of translation,

where the focus is placed mainly on the multiplicity of languages rather than on the

meaning of translation.

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As a result, translation becomes a significant reference to the spatial and temporal

differences of the post-colonial subject and takes into consideration the variations that

exist across cultures and between the text and its context. The post-colonial

writer/translator may need to redefine the space of translation, because translation as a

mode of writing back remains the means to demarcate the spaces of post-colonial,

imagined communities. This suggestion emerges partly from the weight that the notion

of space has placed on post-colonial writing, especially in the aspect that concerns

translating the original into its Becoming original.

I have also attempted to explain how important the idea of space is for the North

African writer, especially in writing back. Even though I have contested the notion of

writing back established in the study by Ashcroft et al., the present study has confirmed

that the North African does initiate the act of writing in order to justify the existence of

space. Her/his aims reside firstly in redefining the minority discourse and then re-writing

it so as to establish a firm foundation for ways that s/he can engage in debating

alternative forms of modernity.

The North African Anglophone novel is a narrative of the minoritarian in the ways

in which Deleuze and Guattari define the term. This kind of writing represents a

revolutionary notion of a narrative that breaks with all that is cultural, social, and

historical. It also appears to foreground a new history that springs mainly from the

notion of a countermemory emerging as part of the minority novel. In addition, these

minority narratives seem to create different meanings for the notion of place and space.

In Chapter 3, for instance, home becomes the past that the North African subject can refer

to as her/his origin. In this respect, the past that the North African minoritarian attempts

to re-write is not included in the post-colonial archive. Instead, it has been neglected, and

it is because of this neglect that the North African Anglophone writer begins the process

of writing and re-writing spaces that may no longer exist, such as that of Tangier. In

order to reveal the success of this process, this study has explained that the North African

Anglophone novel evokes the notions of lieux de mémoire and magical realism in order to

formulate a counter-version of memory.

The notion of home has also been viewed differently, and sometimes the act of

writing itself becomes the essential home for the writer. The language, the English

language, in which the North African writes her/his text becomes his/her own home that

s/he seeks to refine according to her/his cultural, historical, and political ideals. The text

has become a site of belonging in which identities negotiate their space of belonging

through the insertion of untranslated words, long sentences, and speeches, and in order

to direct the attention of the reader to the origin of the text itself, the language undergoes

transformation. In so doing, the text remains a context for the act of writing back.

Moreover, the notion of home that this present study has offered does not correlate with

the meanings that define home as a fixed construct. On the contrary, Chapter 3 has

elaborated that home can suggest away, and to use the notion of magical realism is to

argue that the North African aims to align rather with post-colonial minorities in a global

context than with canonized post-colonial local subjects. Accordingly, the study has

noted that the use of magical realism suggests a deconstruction of the Euro-American

notions of truth, for instance, and in so doing, it has claimed that the new meanings may

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ever re-route post-colonialism. No one has a total claim on truth and reality, and to claim

that the colonial discourse has shaped the colonies, or that the post-colonial already re-

writes the history of natives, can be contested, because magical realism accentuates a

certain sense of oblivion.

On this level, all of the elements that signify new routes in post-colonialism seem to

deconstruct themselves, and among them we can find the notion of space. Chapter 4 has

presented a different perspective on the notion of space as it signifies diaspora. The

character of Amina, for instance, does not make her return from Britain to stay in Tunisia.

Her return becomes a mere re-turn where the two syllables in the word are emphasized.

The North African does not feel at home either when s/he is in North Africa or when s/he

is away, but the complexities of the cultural politics of the notion of space give it a sense

of mobility suggesting that the North African needs to adapt the self to it. Because home

signifies imprisonment for the woman in North Africa, to make this re-turn is as if one is

forced to confirm the trajectory of diaspora when s/he is separated from home.

Consequently, this study has shown that the notion of space in North Africa can

connote two aspects. The first aspect concerns the space occupied by gender in North

Africa. This study has showed that the North African Anglophone novel is critical of the

notion of space when it is dominated by men, and it has explained that if a woman wants

to act in her space, she needs to deterritorialize the space within which she is embedded.

It seems to be impossible to reiterate such a process in North Africa, especially when the

woman is not educated. As demonstrated in Chapters 4 and 5, only the educated woman

can succeed in deterritorializing her position in society, either by choosing to be

diasporan (the case of Amina) or by becoming a transcultural (the case of Rachid and

Amal) respectively. The second aspect of space concerns the act of writing. This study has

revealed that space in the North African novel is significant to the minority narrative, and

in order to write the history of the native, the palimpsestic aspects of space must be

retained so that a countermemory can be written. Space is important to the North African

subject because it is from space that place can be defined, and history can be written

anew.

In stressing the acts of defining space, writing back, and re-constructing identities in

North Africa, this study has demonstrated that the North African Anglophone novel

engages in yet another process of re-writing modernity. To assume that the novel

emerging from North Africa needs to be approached differently, thus stressing the notion

of bricolage, is to conclude that post-colonialism has lost its grip on cultural globalism

without denying “the wisdom of [the] postcolonial” in “advocacy of new vocabularies”

(McLeod 2011, 1). Chapter 5, for instance, proposes that the model of post-coloniality that

prevails in North Africa only contributes to the replacement of a colonial system and its

figures by a post-colonial model of oppression. In the end, this leads merely to the

fabrication of a new term of Post-Colony. Secret Son explains this in two ways: first, it

demonstrates that, sometimes, not to belong may be the ultimate choice that the North

African has to make. This suggestion runs the risk casting everything that is cultural,

familial, and historical aside while engaging in new processes involving the

reconstruction of a transcultural identity based mainly on global incommensurability.

Such aspects are crucial for Amal, who finds in transcultural hybridity the mechanisms to

146

negotiate her place in spatial globalization. Second, in order to contest such a

formulation, it has been explained that the new language, and, especially the holders of

this language, its students, should be aware of the transition to be made in North Africa.

The protagonists in the three novels I have studied in this dissertation either study

English as their major or travel to an Anglophone country where English becomes, not

only a “nightmare”, as the novel Si Yussef suggests, but a liberating tool in North Africa.

The English language becomes the mechanism through which the North African can

negotiate globalization, and if the process fails (with process of re-writing modernity), the

future may also become grim, as has been suggested in Secret Son. The authors

themselves have been exposed to English either through their profession (as teachers of

English) or through scholarship (as students), and this aspect may confirm the

explanation that this study has offered. Furthermore, this study suggests that the North

African Anglophone narrative contributes to the notion of imagining the North African

community, where students of English remain the new possibility to build such an

imagined community.

What this study has not sought to demonstrate, however, is an analysis of the effect

of diaspora on the authors and their novels all together. As I have explained, the three

authors live abroad and their writing springs from their experience of their living outside

the imagined community. Al Khemir now lives in Britain, and Majid and Lalami are

based in the United States. Because I have focused more on the narrative than the author

of that narrative, I have not addressed this point. Nevertheless, as I have pointed out, my

study has taken into consideration some of its important aspects, and I have referred to

these mainly in Chapters 3 and 5. Meanwhile, my study has concluded that politics plays

an important role in these narratives. In spite of the fact that Deleuze and Guattari’s

approach on minority literature is applicable to the North African novel in English, my

study has also revealed that such an approach lacks solidity as an epistemology to locate

the North African novel in English as a minoritarian narrative per se. Concerning politics

and what Deleuze and Guattari emphasize as one of the main characteristics of the

literature of the minoritarian, it is suggested that the North African novel in English

seems to focus more on questions of identity, history, place and space, and location than

on politics. Politics remains a minor tool in the characterization of this emerging

narrative, albeit an important one, because the issues of refining the discourse of post-

colonialism and delimiting its borders – in the way the narratives aim to re-write

modernity – construe the nuanced aspects that define the North African narrative in

English. In saying this, I assume that the availability of diversified case studies in the

future may suggest a variety of aspects concerning politics and minority narratives in

North Africa.

In addition, a comparative study may provide an interesting project for future

research. The notions of minority literature, transculturality, and cultural globalizations

are aspects that affect the use of language. The focus of this dissertation has been on the

English language and how the notion of translation is approached differently in my

study of the novels. To compare these results with an analysis of narratives written in

French and/or Arabic may demonstrate further the influence of those elements on the

notion of re-writing North Africa, which in turn may help in developing this approach.

147

Frequently, as the novels studied show, there is a tendency to demonstrate the effects of

the global flow and Americanization in North Africa. This theme extends beyond the

scope of the present study, but some of its aspects have already been taken into

consideration.

My study has thus concluded that there may be no minority narrative, nor a

postcolonial one, but a Becoming: one that elucidates the transparency of becoming in-

between, as an included middle. North African literary and cultural studies cannot be

viewed only in terms of either Arab or Francophone narratives. Nevertheless, French

especially remains significant in the shaping of North African literary and cultural

studies. English is therefore a new tool and a new paradigm, and in order for the North

African to re-imagine her/his community, s/he aims to belong to transculturality. In

consequence, it may be assumed that English is becoming another possibility through

which specialists in North African literary studies can imagine this field and contribute to

it in a way that is different from the models that already exist. This hypothesis calls for

recognition of the new voices that are emerging from the margin of post-colonialism so

that spaces can be defined and borders can become more hybridized in the era of global

incommensurability.

148

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160

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Publications of the University of Eastern Finland

Dissertations in Education, Humanities, and Theology

isbn 978-952-61-0678-6

issn 1798-5625

Publications of the University of Eastern FinlandDissertations in Education, Humanities, and Theology No 24

Kamal Sbiri

Voices from the Margin Rethinking History, Identity, and Belonging in the Contemporary North African Anglophone Novel

Voices from the Margin is a study

that seeks to engage in the post-

colonial debate on the notions of

history, identity, and belonging. By

analyzing three contemporary North

African novels in English, the study

attempts to negotiate alternative

modernities in order to accommodate

those histories in the margin in a

transcultural context. The thesis

shows that transcultural belonging

can help capture the voices in the

margin and help them engage in

a process of reconstructing their

identities in a global milieu.

disser

tation

s | No

24 | Ka

ma

l Sb

iri | V

oices from

the M

argin

Kamal SbiriVoices from the Margin

Rethinking History, Identity, and Belonging in the Con-temporary North African

Anglophone Novel