Arab, Muslim, Woman: Voice and Vision in Postcolonial Literature and Film

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Arab, Muslim, Woman

Given a long history of representation by others, what themes and techniques do Arab Muslim women writers, filmmakers, and visual artists foreground in their presentation of postcolonial experience? Lindsey Moore demonstrates ways in which women appropriate textual and visual modes of representation, often in cross-fertilizing ways, in challenges to Orientalist/colonialist, nationalist, Islamist and ‘multicultural’ paradigms. She provides an accessible but theoretically-informed analysis, foregrounding tropes of vision, visibility and voice; post-nationalist melancholia and mother/daughter narratives; transformations of ‘homes and harems’; and border crossings in time, space, language and media. In doing so, Moore moves beyond notions of speaking or looking ‘back’ to encompass a diverse feminist poetics and politics and to emphasize ethical forms of representation and reception. Arab, Muslim, Woman is distinctive in terms of the eclectic body of work that it brings together. Discussing Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, the Palestinian territories and Tunisia, as well as postcolonial Europe, Moore argues for better integration of Arab Muslim contexts in the postcolonial canon. In a book for readers interested in women’s studies, history, literature and visual media, we encounter work by Assia Djebar, Mona Hatoum, Fatima Mernissi, Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Nawal el Saadawi, Leïla Sebbar, Zineb Sedira, Ahdaf Soueif, Moufida Tlatli, Fadwa Tuqan and many other women. Lindsey Moore is Lecturer in English at Lancaster University, where she teaches postcolonial literatures, women’s writing, and literary theory. She has published articles on representations of Arab and Muslim women and on Arab women’s writing.

Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism Edited by: Maureen McNeil Institute of Women’s Studies, Lancaster University

Lynne Pearce Department of English, Lancaster University

Other books in the series include: Transformations: Thinking Through Feminism Edited by Sarah Ahmed, Jane Kilby, Celia Lury, Maureen McNeil and Beverley Skeggs Thinking Through the Skin Edited by Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality Sara Ahmed Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Theories, Methods Edited by Tess Cosslett, Celia Lury and Penny Summerfield Advertising and Consumer Citizenship: Gender, Images and Rights Anne M. Cronin Mothering the Self: Mothers, Daughters, Subjects Stephanie Lawler When Women Kill: Questions of Agency and Subjectivity Belinda Morrissey Class, Self, Culture Beverley Skeggs Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalisms Sneja Gunew The Rhetorics of Feminism: Readings in Contemporary Cultural Theory and the Popular Press Lynne Pearce

Women and the Irish Diaspora Breda Gray Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology Kirsten Campbell Judging the Image: Art, Value, Law Alison Young Sexing the Soldier Rachel Woodward and Trish Winter Violent Femmes: Women as Spies in Popular Culture Rosie White Feminist Cultural Studies of Science and Technology Maureen McNeil Arab, Muslim, Woman: Voice and Vision in Postcolonial Literature and Film Lindsey Moore

Arab, Muslim, Woman Voice and vision in postcolonial literature and film

Lindsey Moore

First published 2008 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2008 Lindsey Moore All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Moore, Lindsey. Arab, Muslim, woman : voice and vision in postcolonial literature and film / Lindsey Moore. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Women, Arab. 2. Muslim women 3. Feminism–Arab countries. 4. Postcolonialism–Arab countries. 5. Arab countries–Colonization. I. Title. HQ1784.M66 2008 306.4′2082095609045–dc22 2007044935 ISBN 0-203-92772-9 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN10: 0-415-40416-9 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-92772-9 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-40416-7 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-92772-4 (ebk)

Contents

Acknowledgements Note on transliteration List of plates

ix x xi

Introduction

1

Contexts of production and reception 3 Voice and vision 12 Preliminary case study: Nawal el Saadawi 17 Chapter outline 23

1

Historical contexts: ‘layer after layer’

25

Colonialism and orientalism 25 The Colonial Harem: reframed by Malek Alloula 33 Fanon’s ‘Algeria Unveiled’ and Frantz Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers 36 Early feminism: Huda Shaarawi’s Harem Years 41 Postcolonial (neo-)patriarchies and feminisms 44

2

Visibility, vision, and voice: Algerian women in question (again) Fettouma Touati, Desperate Spring 49 Malika Mokeddem, The Forbidden Woman 51 Assia Djebar: from Children of the New World to A Sister to Scheherazade 55 ‘I am not an odalisque’: Leïla Sebbar’s Sherazade 71 Delacroix revisited (once more): Houria Niati’s No to Torture 75

48

viii 3

Contents Melancholia in the Maghrib: mother–daughter plots

77

Leïla Abouzeid, ‘Year of the Elephant’ 79 Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Memory in the Flesh 81 Moufida Tlatli, The Silences of the Palace and The Season of Men 85 A twist in the tale: Raja Amari, Red Satin 96 Beyond allegory? 97

4

Heterotopias: reimagining home

100

Nina Bouraoui, Forbidden Vision 102 Fadia Faqir, Pillars of Salt 105 Fadwa Tuqan, Mountainous Journey 107 Raymonda Tawil, My Home, My Prison 112 Fatima Mernissi, The Harem Within 116 Farida Ben Lyazid, A Door to the Sky 124

5

Border crossings, translations

128

Zineb Sedira: on witnessing, translatability, and vanishing points 130 Mona Hatoum, Measures of Distance 140 Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love 146

Endnotes Works cited Filmography Index

159 166 181 182

Acknowledgements

This book was made possible by research leave granted by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and a sabbatical by the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. Particular acknowledgement should be made of the women writers and filmmakers who have inspired my work and of those who have permitted me to share their wonderful images: Jananne al Ani, Ghada Amer, Samta Benyahia, Mona Hatoum, Houria Niati, Zineb Sedira, and Ruth Ward. I would like to thank people who helped me access resources at Bridgeman Art Library, the British Film Institute, the Fowler Museum (UCLA), Gagosian Gallery, the Institute of International Visual Arts, Tate Archives, Women Make Movies, and White Cube. A book inevitably requires many different kinds of inspiration and support. Among those who have contributed to the lengthy emergence of this one are Denise DeCaires-Narain, Alison Donnell, Jacqueline Kaye, and Laura Marcus, in the early stages, and Arthur Bradley, Kamilla Elliott, Mike Greaney, Liz Oakley-Brown, Catherine Silverstone, and Catherine Spooner, who helped immensely with the editing and in keeping me sane towards the end. Particular thanks go to Arthur Bradley, Tess Cosslett, Hilary Hinds, Nayanika Mookherjee, Lynne Pearce, and Jackie Stacey for comments on substantial parts of the manuscript. My sincere thanks go also to Abdellah Baïda and Heba Youssef for invaluable help with transliteration and translation. I am indebted to Claudia Esposito and Anastasia Valassopoulos for providing incisive commentary on the whole manuscript. It goes without saying that any remaining errors are my own. Part of Chapter 1 appears as ‘The Veil of Nationalism: Fanon’s “Algeria Unveiled” and Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers’ in Kunapipi: Journal of Post-Colonial Writing 25: 2 (2003): 56–73. Abridged sections of Chapters 1, 2 and 5 have been published as ‘ “Through a Veil Darkly”: Reading Representations of Algerian Women’, in Contested Imaginaries: Reading Muslim Women and Muslim Women Reading Back, Special Issue of Intercultural Education 18:4 (2007): 335–51. A section of Chapter 6 appears as ‘ “Some Internalisation of the Other has Already Begun”: Borderwork/ Translation in Writing by Assia Djebar and Ahdaf Soueif’ in Comparative Literatures and Translation / Littératures comparées et traduction, Conference Proceedings (Rabat: MJB, 2006).

Note on transliteration

This book uses a simplified transliteration style for Arabic words not in quotations, marking long vowels with the French circumflex accent, ‘ayn and hamza with inverted commas (open and closed respectively), and emphatic consonants with a lower dot. Arabic speakers will, in any case, know how to pronounce the vocabulary; my markers are in the interests of Arabic learners such as myself. Transliterating proper names would have resulted in too many inconsistencies, so I have replicated the form commonly used in translation.

List of plates

0.1 View of Samta Benyahia’s installation The Architecture of the Veil at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, from the courtyard at night. Photograph by David Mayo, 2007. Courtesy of the Fowler Museum at UCLA, David Mayo, and Samta Benyahia.

12

1.1 Sans titre / Untitled (1989), Jananne al Ani. Typus-C. © Jananne al Ani.

31

1.2 The Battle of Algiers (1966), dir. Gillo Pontecorvo. Film still. Courtesy of Casbah Entertainment / British Film Institute.

40

2.1 The Women of Algiers in their Harem (1847–49). Oil on canvas by Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863). © Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France/ Giraudon/ The Bridgeman Art Library.

60

2.2 The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua (1978), dir. Assia Djebar. Film still. Courtesy of Women Make Movies, New York. .

64

2.3 No to Torture (After Delacroix, Women of Algiers in their Apartment, 1834) (1982), Houria Niati. Oil on canvas, part of No to Torture installation, 1982–3. © Houria Niati.

75

3.1 The Silences of the Palace (1994), dir. Moufida Tlatli. Film still. Courtesy of ICA Films and British Film Institute.

92

4.1 Untitled illustration from Fatima Mernissi, The Harem Within (1994). Photograph. © Ruth Ward.

118

4.2 Untitled illustration from Fatima Mernissi, The Harem Within (1994). Photograph. © Ruth Ward.

121

5.1 Autobiographical Patterns (1996), dir. Zineb Sedira. Video still. Courtesy of Zineb Sedira and InIVA.

132

5.2 Zineb Sedira, Self Portraits or the Virgin Mary (2000). C-Prints triptych mounted on aluminium. © Zineb Sedira / Courtesy of Zineb Sedira.

134

5.3 Silent Sight (2000), dir. Zineb Sedira. Video still. Courtesy of Zineb Sedira and InIVA.

136

xii

List of plates

5.4 Measures of Distance (1988), dir. Mona Hatoum. Film still. Courtesy of Mona Hatoum / White Cube Gallery.

141

5.5 Ghada Amer, Diane’s Pink (2001). Acrylic, embroidery, and gel medium on textured canvas. © Ghada Amer / Gagosian Gallery.

143

5.6 Measures of Distance (1988), dir. Mona Hatoum. Film still. Courtesy of Mona Hatoum / White Cube Gallery.

144

5.7 The Siesta, c. 1876. Watercolour and gouache over graphite by John Frederick Lewis (1805–76). © Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, UK / The Bridgeman Art Library.

150

Introduction

This book joins other recent interventions (Gauch 2007; Grace 2004; Hillauer 2005; Lloyd 1999; Suhair Majaj et al. 2003; Valassopoulos 2007) in focusing upon a range of postcolonial feminist creative texts by women affiliated to Maghrib, Mashriq,1 and other Arab Muslim contexts.2 With reference to an eclectic body of work produced between 1962 and 2005, I specifically address ways in which women deploy voice and vision in transformations of discursive and scopic paradigms that have attempted to apprehend ‘the Arab Muslim woman’ and continue to do so today. My title flags up constructed categories that are claimed, critiqued, deconstructed, and reformulated by the women discussed here.3 As Tina Sherwell reminds us, women are found in a multitude of different circumstances and their identities tempered by religious beliefs, class backgrounds, the social contexts in which they find themselves, and personal experiences . . . identities do not have a fixed essence but rather are always made and remade [and] power relations are an important part of identities . . . Thus such a broad label as Arab women may at times also encompass conflicting and antagonistic identities and experiences. (1999: 59–60) However, Lamia Ben Youssef Zayzafoon argues that, on another level, ‘the Arab Muslim woman’ is ‘a semiotic subject . . . produced according to the law of supply and demand to serve various political and ideological ends’ (2005: 2). Any attempt to track beyond a structuralist analysis needs also to engage the ‘grid of intelligibility’ (Foster 1997: 216) which women rearticulate as they stake their claim to discursive, artistic, social, and political space. As Mona Fayad puts it, a woman who identifies as Arab and/or Muslim must ‘relocate or dislocate herself from a particular historical context that has always already overdetermined the subject’s identity . . . Postcolonial identity cannot exist . . . without reference to the discourses of knowledge that are propagated about Arab [and Muslim] women’ (2000: 86, 87, original emphasis).

2

Introduction

Europe and the United States continue to have extensive economic, political, and military interests in the region(s) examined in this book and the Israeli–Palestinian context remains emphatically colonial. Indeed, Derek Gregory identifies a continuous ‘colonial present’ most manifest in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories. As he argues, bringing Edward Said’s well-known analysis of Orientalism into the twenty-first century, hegemony is legitimized through ‘mundane cultural forms and cultural practices that mark other people as irredeemably “Other” and that license the unleashing of exemplary violence against them’ (2004: 16). Gregory mobilizes a postcolonial critical framework in order to consider the ongoing ramifications of colonial history in its classic as well as contemporary forms. Robert Young, too, argues that postcolonial studies should take a colonial legacy as its purview to the extent that [colonial] history has determined the configurations and power structures of the present, to the extent that much of the world still lives in the violent disruptions of its wake, and to the extent that anti-colonial liberation movements remain the source and inspiration of its politics. (2001: 4) However, postcolonial analysis is not only concerned with a long history of domination of European or other (for example Ottoman) provenance and with dialectical responses to that history. It is also necessary to attend, as Amilcar Cabral posited in 1969, to the pursuit of liberation after the achievement of political independence (ctd. in Young 2001: 11). Comprehensive emancipation is a universal goal that can involve struggle indexed to gendered, ethnic, classed, religious, and sexual identities and is articulated transnationally as well as more locally. A postcolonial perspective can be used to lever open confining frameworks that persist in the aftermath of colonialism proper because it implies a productive crisis, ‘a lack of closure that prevents identity from being fully inscribed within the terms of tradition and modernity’ that have been central to colonial and nationalist discourses (Fayad 2000: 85; Makdisi 1994). In relation to the contexts that interest me here, Fayad suggests that The advantage of working in terms of a ‘postcolonial’ identity as opposed to a ‘national’ identity is that the terms of the debate can be seen from a different perspective, allowing women a position that differs radically from the limited and restricted role Arab women have been given within national narratives . . . The construction of Arab women’s identities consequently partakes in an attempt to construct the postcolonial. (2000: 85–6; see also Cooke 1999)

Introduction

3

More generally, an individual acquires subjectivity and identity in relation to a defined community through pedagogical and performative as well as strictly political processes. Muhsin Jassim al Musawi draws our attention to what he calls ‘decolonizing and decentering endeavour[s]’ represented by ‘an outlook and a frame of mind’ (2003: 13, 19) that, ideally, also impact upon perceptions, identities, definitions of community, and creative and critical canons in the postcolonial West. Some of the authors, directors, and artists discussed in this book are relatively well known, although only two are the subject of monographs in English to date (Malti-Douglas 1995; Hiddleston 2006). Algerian writer and filmmaker Assia Djebar’s redoubtable corpus has been a particular influence on my approach. It is hoped, though, that attention to a wide selection of work, some of it much less familiar to an Anglophone audience, will help to recontextualize comparatively familiar interventions. In exploring resonances across postcolonial women’s creative work, I take the critical risk of bringing together texts that reflect upon different locations and span a range of genres and media. My choice has not always been dictated by preference: Hanan al Shaykh, to give only one example, is a superb novelist whom I have been unable to engage here but whose work, particularly in relation to women’s writing of the Lebanese civil war period, has received substantial treatment elsewhere (Accad 1990; Adams 2001; Cooke 1988; Ghandour 2003; Valassopoulos 2007: ch. 3). My selection has been based on thematic and structural criteria, availability, and, in the interests of further widening the critical field, a desire to engage some different work from that discussed in the two books most similar to my own project (Suhair Majaj et al. 2003; Valassopoulos 2007). While any map has limits, borders mark points at which inside and outside conjoin, might be bridged, and are marked as unstable; in other words, I hope that the discussion will solicit echoes in work not discussed here and even beyond the geographical area demarcated (see Milani 1992; Dönmez-Colin 2004). Exhaustive coverage of an ever-expanding creative corpus would be impossible. However, in engaging a substantial amount of material that is reasonably available in English (given my primary audience), I contribute to efforts to redress the relative marginalization of Arab Muslim contexts in the postcolonial canon.4

Contexts of production and reception Although Arab Muslim women have rich oral traditions, their literary publication did not begin until the latter end of the nineteenth century (see Badran and Cooke 2004) and entered its ‘formative’ phase in the 1950s (Zeidan 1995). I discuss what is considered to be the first full-length memoir, dictated by Huda Shaarawi in the 1940s, in Chapter 1. Djebar had published three novels by the year of Algerian independence: La Soif (1957), Les Impatients (1958), and Les Enfants du nouveau monde (1962, trans. Children of

4

Introduction

the New World), the latter of which is the earliest postcolonial literary text engaged here (in Chapter 2). Joseph Zeidan describes early Arab women’s writing as highly autobiographical and focused on personal struggle against constraining socio-cultural environments (1995: 140–58). As I will argue, however, seminal texts such as Djebar’s Children of the New World, Leïla Abouzeid’s ‘Year of the Elephant’, originally published as ‘Âm al Fîl (1983) and discussed in Chapter 3, and Fadwa Tuqan’s A Mountainous Journey, originally published as Rih . la Jabalîyya, Rih . la S.a
ba (1985) and analysed in Chapter 4, call for comprehensive emancipation. Despite a relatively short literary history, we should by now have progressed beyond patronizing admiration that Arab Muslim women write at all (Amireh 1996). Indeed, Lisa Suhair Majaj et al. evince a certain wariness about continuing to privilege gender as an analytical category in assessing writing that also engages the complex intersections of religion, class, ethnicity, (to a lesser extent) sexuality, and violence that is not only patriarchal, but colonialist, Zionist, and sectarian (2003: xix). While I sympathize with this argument to a point, women have been subject to constraints and forms of violence as women and artists, including censorship (see Zeidan 1995: 103; Faqir 1998: 13), imprisonment,5 death threats,6 limited translation, and reductive criticism both within and beyond the Arab Muslim world (see Faqir 1998: 176–8). Women’s cinema remains subject to phenomenal constraints in national institutions that are male-dominated and have a weak infrastructure. The first films independently directed by women did not emerge until the 1970s (see Hillauer 2005); again, Djebar provides an early example, discussed in Chapter 2. Women visual artists have been better supported at training, curatorial, and funding levels (see Nashashibi 1999) and most of the visual art discussed in this book has been produced in the diaspora. Arab women’s film remains difficult to view in Britain:7 as I write this, even Moufida Tlatli’s acclaimed S.amt al Qas.r / The Silences of the Palace (1994), discussed in Chapter 3, has gone out of circulation. Arab women’s literature, particularly if originally produced in Arabic or French, is selectively exposed, although recent initiatives are promising (see Valassopoulos 2007: ch. 1). Some might even say ominous, given that the status of Arab Muslim women’s creative work in the West is more complex than a definition of marginality would allow. In the literary field, a minor canon of literature has emerged that foregrounds the work of certain women – particularly Djebar, Nawal el Saadawi, and Fatima Mernissi – but can occlude others, as well as male authors. This tendency is not entirely related to linguistic accessibility (el Saadawi writes in Arabic) but the exigencies of translation certainly play their part, leaving some established writers such as Sahar Khalifeh and Ghada al Samman relatively unexposed outside the Arabophone world. Amal Amireh and Suhair Majaj remind us that contexts of reception ‘significantly influence not only how specific works are read, but also which

Introduction

5

texts are translated, marketed, reviewed, and taught, and which issues are prioritized’ (2000: 3). Women’s texts are thus ‘commodified, as literary decisions come together with marketing strategies and assessments of audience appeal (ranging from interest in the “exotic” to feminist solidarity) to foreground certain texts and repackage or silence others’ (4). Mohja Kahf concurs, arguing that narratives of Arab Muslim women’s resistance to and escape from disabling environments sell because they reflect existing attitudes in the West (2000: 148–9); as Said argued over a decade ago, ‘Arabs and their language [are] somehow not respectable, and consequently dangerous’ (1990: 280). Some critics identify a pre-emptive Orientalist stance by writers and directors who anticipate a European-language reader or spectator: any treatment of the h . arîm (harem), h . ammâm (public bath), polygamy, or ‘the veil’ is subject to particular suspicion (Jacquemond 1992: 155; al Musawi 2003: 3). As I will argue, the aesthetic complexity, citational qualities, linguistic layering, and multiple-sited provenance of much postcolonial creative work should encourage vigilance towards the notion of ‘authenticity’ that such critiques can imply. However, the high profile of some authors is doubtless partly to do with the fact that their work (sometimes deliberately adapted in translation) speaks to Western audience expectations. An ambivalent attraction/rejection remains at stake in the production of Arab Muslim culture ‘in translation’. To give a brief example, interviews between Algerian activist Khalida Messaoudi and journalist Elizabeth Schemla are packaged in immediately problematic ways. Originally published as Une Algérienne debout (an Algerian woman upright or standing) in 1995, the text becomes, in English, Unbowed: An Algerian Woman Confronts Islamic Fundamentalism. This has on its front cover an image, entitled ‘Portrait of a Muslim Woman’, of a 8 woman’s eyes below a white h . aîk which look to the side instead of at the viewer. A photograph on the back cover shows Messaoudi in Western dress and with short curly hair staring straight at the camera. Destabilizing the contrasts which these paratexts set up, Messaoudi refutes Schemla’s suggestion that veiling is inherently disabling for women and the related imputation of Islam as a sexist unchanging tradition, arguing that the challenge for Algerian feminists is the persistence of patriarchal values in all the political macro-discourses available since decolonization: nationalism, socialism, and Islamism (Messaoudi and Schemla 1998: 59–62).9 Amireh and Suhair Majaj signal the equally outrageous misrepresentation of Fadia Faqir’s first novel Nisanit (1987): The [American Penguin] cover features the image of a woman completely draped in black, set against an expanse of geometric tile. The image has a curious familiarity – that of the veiled, faceless Arab woman, her body completely shrouded, moving across an alreadymarked-out space. (2000: 5)

6

Introduction

Expectations are set up here which have nothing to do with a novel that focuses on the Palestinian intifada (uprising). On the cover of the British Penguin edition, a woman with covered hair is foregrounded and backlit; behind her is a man with kalashnikov and face and head swathed in a kuffiyeh (headscarf). This, while doing little to refute another stereotype – the Arab man as terrorist – gets closer to a text with multiple narrators, an important strand of which is a young Palestinian woman’s memories of her absent lover, a mûdjâhid (guerrilla fighter) tortured by Israeli security forces. Perhaps unwittingly, the melancholic, angelic figure of the woman on this cover suggests a different but relevant problematic of the nation embodied as a woman, which I discuss in Chapter 3. The problem is not just presentation, but the ethnographic imperative with which Arab Muslim women’s varied creative labour is often imbued once it crosses borders. As Fatimah Tobing Rony points out, colonial ethnography classically divided the world into ethnographiable ‘people without history, without writing, without civilization, without technology, without archives’ and the historifiable ‘posited audience of the ethnographic [text], those considered to have written archives and thus a history proper’ (1996: 7; Levi-Strauss 1955). The split identified here between speaking subject and iconic object of representation is troubling in its persistence. However, the complex politics of postcolonial counter-representation are also inadequately accounted for by notions of ‘writing back to the center’, as I shall discuss shortly. The Anglo-American academy is not immune to reductive tendencies when it comes to the study of Arab Muslim women, regularly failing to apply the sophisticated methodologies that define gendered analysis closer to home (Amireh 1997; Mohanty 1988). Marnia Lazreg demonstrates that approaches towards Arab Muslim women have often mirrored those of conservative theologians: both reify women with reference to a timeless Islam. Women are thus perceived as ontologically defined by one attribute (their religion), deprived of self-presence, and located in non-evolving, ahistorical time. Western gynocentrism, at least in its ‘second wave’, has tended to involve a unilateral emphasis on gendered oppression and a commensurate blindness vis à vis other indices of identity such as class, ethnicity, and faith. The result can be an emptying out of the specificity of encounter to posit the representing position as normatively feminist (1990: 338). Refuting also a deconstructionist approach that would locate unmediated difference in language, Lazreg argues for an intersubjective ethos. She affirms ‘a certain form of humanism’ that would see all lives as economically, politically, and culturally structured and amenable to adaptation, resistance, and transformation (339). Elleke Boehmer agrees that it should be possible to respect the specificity of difference while advocating feminism as ‘a relational, global process that permits intersubjective exchange’ (2005: 13). Valassopoulos adds that a feminist approach should not just be assumed

Introduction

7

in Arab Muslim women’s creative texts or in modes of critical response (2007: ch. 1). While criticism often emphasizes strategies of ‘writing back’ to patriarchal discourses (Accad 1990; Zeidan 1995; Faqir 1998), patriarchy and feminism are not singular, homogeneous frameworks that can uncritically be imposed on diverse geographical and historical contexts. I broadly agree with Chandra Talpade Mohanty when she suggests that postcolonial creative work can encode new forms of resistance, including ‘the creation of a communal (feminist) political consciousness through the practice of storytelling’ and the expansion of our understanding of political action to include acts of coming-to-consciousness of self (1991: 35). However, I am wary of some unexamined assumptions in this rubric: that a subject defines herself as feminist in a particular way; that she seeks a communal self-definition; that only women able to ‘tell their stories’ can be construed as acceding to agency; and that women’s creative work is consciously grounded in the ‘real’, hence limiting the reach of their artistic endeavours. The term ‘feminism’ remains contested in the Arab Muslim world due to its association with foreign intervention and ambivalent connotations of individualism. Women sometimes reject the categories of women’s and particularly feminist writing, seeing such labels as elitist, reductive, or restrictive. This stance seems, however, partly to be influenced by paternalistic criticism that conflates a female author with her text, or posits a ‘genderneutral’ perspective as aesthetic ideal.10 Lebanese novelist Hoda Barakat remains equivocal and is worth quoting at length: We write, I write, from a dual perspective, because I am a woman and want to resemble a man, to cut short the time for training and amateurism, and prove my intellectual ability to construct and to invent. In order to make my reader forget that I am a qasir, a minor, I have sometimes toyed with the idea of writing under a male pseudonym. Let me mention here a very well-known critic who wrote an article about my novel, The Stone of Laughter, in one of the most widely sold Arab newspapers. He praised it in a way that meant that although I was a woman I had succeeded in writing a good novel and had not sunk to the level of the mechanical writing of feminists. I also write because I am a woman who cannot be anything other, and as someone who does not want to resemble men at all. I know that I am different and that I have my own sensibility, and I embrace these facts gladly. And I write also because I want to resemble no person or thing . . . when I write I step outside my gender, outside any gender. It seems to me that the act of writing is out of the ordinary, beyond the conditioning and characteristics of male and female social behaviour. Or it is at the junction of this restrictive division into male and female. . . . (1998: 44–5)

8

Introduction

Barakat responds tongue-in-cheek to limited definitions of feminist practice imposed by the guardians of high culture, claims an identity as artist, and cannily negotiates the concept of ‘difference’ that remains a conflicted term in feminist theory, at times attesting to the specificity of women’s embodied experiences as women and at others wary of ‘essentialism’. The redolent image with which Barakat entitles and closes her autobiographical piece – ‘I write against my hand’ – suggests concerns that animate many of the interventions discussed in this book: tensions between experience and abstraction, self and community, the body and identity; and questions about self-expression in and through language(s).11 Barakat’s testimony does, however, place questions of gendered identity and subjectivity at its centre, expressing feminist objectives and performing feminist practices, but on its own shifting terms. Fedwa Malti-Douglas reminds us that ‘questions relating to male-female roles, equality of women, and so forth have been part and parcel of AraboIslamic discourse for centuries’ (1995: 16). Badran and Cooke add that an unequivocal word for feminism in Arabic, niswiyya, has now been in circulation for over a decade and is explicitly differentiated from the earlier nisa  iyya (pertaining to women). Citing Latifa al Zayyat’s ‘Testimonial of a Creative Woman’ (1996), included in their collection, they argue that niswiyya indicates a non-apologetic stance towards the inclusion of women’s rights and priorities in nation-building projects and creative canons, and an acknowledgement of gender difference as well as desirable equality (Badran and Cooke 2004: xviii). At the same time, they acknowledge that the term, which they associate particularly with ‘women of the old Left’, can be contested by a ‘rising third-wave of Arab feminists’ who, in calls for gender equality and wider social justice, represent a range of secular and Islamic positions (2004: xviii–xix). It is worth noting here that women may identify as Muslim without practising or even necessarily believing the precepts of religion, in the sense that Islam can also function as a general cultural and epistemological framework (Malak 2005: 7). We should differentiate, then, between women who identify as Muslims and feminists, and feminists for whom Islam is the primary vehicle for redress of gender issues (Islamic feminists). Given that a feminist orientation in creative work might take varied forms, have diverse goals, and may not be overtly defined as feminist, and because we should not conflate authorial and narrative perspectives, even in autobiography, I maintain a flexible definition of what constitutes feminist practice, with woman-centric themes as the minimum requirement. In this book we see an ongoing struggle to claim subject rather than object positions. But when women claim voice and vision as conduits for the expression of women’s realities, they often do so in self-reflexive ways that do not simplistically equate acts of speaking, writing, or viewing with presence, authority, or truth. There is, rather, an observable quest for aesthetic styles and forms adequate to ethical representation. It becomes necessary to

Introduction

9

examine not only how creative work represents women’s issues (most obviously through character, theme, and plot), but also ways in which it foregrounds the fact that gender is mediated in and through language and scopic structures, including those mobilized by a feminist creative worker. Identification of such interrelated thematic and structural/stylistic practices has been my guiding principle in the selection of a work grouped here as feminist. One particular concern that emerges is an attempt to trace an empowering matrilineal legacy often in tension with ambivalent mother–daughter relationships. Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage from Cairo to America – A Woman’s Journey (1999) contains a not atypical scene in which the narrator remembers, as a child, being punished violently by her mother for a sexual transgression for which she was not responsible. This ‘great fracture line dividing my life’ initiates the narrator into knowledge of women’s embodied burden of honour and shame that a mother is obliged to transmit to her daughter (1999: 79–83). In addition, this mother who, in the eyes of the young narrator ‘had “done” nothing, pursued no profession’, focuses the latter’s anxieties about her own future as an Egyptian woman (21). The narrator thus, at fifteen, rejects her mother’s suggestion that she, an aspiring writer, write her mother’s biography, a decision that she will regret (74–5). In the work to be explored, all-female spaces and communities are presented in ways that range from inspiring to radically alienating, thus complicating Mohanty’s ‘communal feminist consciousness’. Notably, lesbian desire, a dominant theme in second-wave Anglo-American feminism, has not featured centrally to date, although representations of homosocial bonding are common.12 Because of the signing exclusions of nation-building projects (illustrated in Chapters 2 and 3), various commentators posit a ‘wave’ model of women’s creative work that moves away from nationalist struggle and towards a postnationalist focus upon marginal identities, including those of women. Such work evokes experiences that are both specific to national context and have transnational resonance (Hillauer 2005: 33; Shohat 2006: 290–329). Badran and Cooke show that Arab Muslim women writers have addressed each other across national boundaries since their modern literary practice began (2004: xxxvii–viii). Sometimes transnational collaboration is the result of necessity: women’s cinema not only tends to be made viable technically and economically through international co-production, but filmmakers may seek to evade constraints, such as censorship, that pertain in the context most familiar to them. For example, Miel et cendres / Honey and Ashes (1996), directed by Swiss-Egyptian Nadia Fares, is set in Tunisia, has a Moroccan lead (Nozha Khouadra), and was a Swiss–Tunisian co-production. Interestingly, while Fares has said that she wanted to combat Western prejudice about the ‘oppression of [Arab] women’ by focusing on their courage and strength, Tunisian director Férid Boughedir warns that the film should not be interpreted as an illustration of Tunisian society, reflecting as it does specifically Egyptian concerns (qtd. in Hillauer 2005: 69; qtd. in Hillauer 2005: 68).13

10 Introduction Border crossings and related ‘translations’ – the particular focus of my final chapter – are not limited to work by women who live outside the Arab Muslim world, but are structurally inherent in linguistically complex societies.14 The use of ‘radical bilingualism’ (see Mehrez 1991) can be a grounded political statement, albeit one most accessible to women from relatively privileged backgrounds: Djebar, for example, rejects Arabization policies in Algeria and the wider Maghrib (qtd. in Zimra 1999: 176) as well as limited definitions of ‘Francophone’ literature. Rhetorical strategies may also be used deliberately to locate work in relation to more than one artistic heritage. Fayad suggests that a reductive discourse pertaining to Arab Muslim women’s oppression and liberation is of most concern to Maghribi writers and artists who, for reasons related to the structures of assimilation common to French colonialism, are steeped in a bilingual heritage (2000: 87). But this is not the whole story: Ahmed received an English-medium education in Egypt and other writers now in the Arab diaspora, such as Ahdaf Soueif, write predominantly in English and are highly conscious of historically established modes of representing Arab Muslim women. Hillauer points out that the women covered in her Encyclopedia of Arab Women Filmmakers are, like such writers, ‘still exceptional in their societies; their observations are seldom an unbroken gaze from within, but have often been shaped by a higher education or experiences from having lived many years abroad, and frequently also by an upbringing in a privileged social class’ (2005: 4). Cultural epiphenomena such as literature and film emerge rarely from sites of genuine disenfranchisement, although they may attempt to represent such sites. The material discussed in this book must then be situated as kinds of knowledge that actively inscribe the meaning of the social and as ‘perspectival, partial, limited, and contestable products, the results of historically specific political, sexual, and epistemological imperatives’ (Grosz 1995: 42, original emphasis). Indeed, subjectivity itself is ‘an ongoing construction . . . an effect of interaction . . . [and] one’s personal, subjective engagement in practices, discourses and institutions that lend significance (value, meaning, and affect) to the events of the world’ and are chosen for negotiation (de Lauretis 1984: 159). The work engaged circulates, moreover, in a context of transnational postmodernity and ‘scattered hegemonies’ that inflect gendered identity with other markers of commonality and difference (Grewal and Kaplan 1994: 7). Creative literary and film work in a globalizing context of production and reception is an apposite site in which to explore the relationship between specificity and affiliation. However, it is important to identify one’s location as reader and/or spectator. ‘Arab’, ‘Muslim’ and even ‘woman’ are categories that place dynamic and heterogeneous identities under erasure and, while this may be done strategically, the position from which one does so matters. I am a teacher and researcher committed to the decolonization of textual canons and to transnational communities of interpretation that attempt to nuance monolithic discourses such as those mobilized in the service of

Introduction

11

(and against) ‘new’ imperialist realities like the ‘war on terror’. I believe feminist criticism remains necessary because women everywhere are still disadvantageously positioned in the cultural canons and because reading other women can inspire affective, intellectual, and political connections. But the task must be approached with caution: as a white British woman, I write from a position partly produced, historically, through contact with the Arab Muslim world. Moreover, my perspective is circumscribed by my lived experience outside of Arab Muslim majority contexts and a limited grasp of Arabic. More generally, as Gayatri Spivak warns, it is difficult fully to transcend the ‘enclosure’ – academic, critical, and public – in which we teach, read, view, and interpret other women’s texts (1999: 362). As an Algerian woman writing on Algerian women, Lazreg nevertheless refuses a ‘social translator’ position that would define her experience as automatically legitimizing; she is particularly concerned about ‘speaking for others’ who are non-literate (1994: 16). This suggests that everyone must earn ‘the right to write’ by putting into practice the ‘difficulty, and necessity, of teaching oneself and allowing oneself to be taught to read’ (Wenzel 2000: 230, my emphasis). An ‘outsider’ point-of-view does encourage a recognition that the imaginative worlds of others can only ever be partially illuminated, not elucidated. Trinh T. Minh-ha warns that ‘the idea that there is a hidden secret in the other’s culture that needs the joint effort of the outsider and the insider to be fully unveiled is highly misleading’ (1989: 238). Taking my cue from Trinh’s terminology, I resist a hermeneutical, ‘unveiling’ approach. However – and here I depart from some of Lazreg’s sterner admonitions – I argue for continued attention to prevalent themes in women’s work such as sartorial practices (including veiling) and all-female spaces. H . arîm are historically dense and conceptually rich signifiers . ijâb and h deployed creatively and critically in feminist texts. The term h . arîm (pl. h . urum) comes from the root h . -r-m which also generates h . aram (sanctuary) and h . arâm (forbidden and sacred); it can refer to one’s wife but more generally denotes a part of the home where women are protected from encounters with men to whom the incest taboo does not apply (see el Guindi 1999: 85). In contemporary art such as Algerian-born, Paris-based Samta Benyahia’s Architecture of the Veil installation (2007), or Egyptian-German Susan Hefuna’s Mashrabiyah photographic series (2000), female spaces are represented as ‘veiled’ from the external gaze by lattice-work screens and inward-facing architectural structures, signalling women’s (traditionally) restricted access to public space, but also sites of women’s collective creative energy (Issa 2003: 154, 157). I will explore these themes in detail in Chapter 4, but it is worth signalling the multiple layers of significance that the veiled female body/collective space can accrue. In The Architecture of the Veil (Plate 0.1), Benyahia overlays images and surfaces of buildings (here the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles) with adhesive film on which are repeated Arab Andalusian motifs such as the fatima (geometic rosace) in

12

Introduction

Plate 0.1 Samta Benyahia, The Architecture of the Veil (2007).

Mediterranean blue, recalling a layered cultural heritage in opposition to monolithic definitions of the Maghrib as Arab and Muslim (see also my discussion of Djebar and Niati). Benyahia’s work signals a structural resonance between women’s dress and architectural space in her context of origin. Her artistic vision is grounded in experience, as the use of photographs of family members and friends suggests. She solicits a Western spectator through use of the historically appealing motif of Arab Muslim female space (discussed in the next chapter). However, we might identify exilic desire: given women’s claims to public space and an acute housing crisis in contemporary Algeria, the piece could be also construed as nostalgic.

Voice and vision Representing the problematic valence of the female body in relation to a masculine gaze as a phenomenon specific to Arab Muslim contexts would wrongly imply that other women occupy normative bodies in liberated social space. The women discussed in this book identify socio-cultural modes of apprehending the female body, but they also question and critique exchanges with the West that reinforce and even produce these frameworks. Much attention has been paid to Mernissi’s argument, first made in 1975, that forms of sartorial and spatial concealment act as curbing forces on women’s sexual desire, which in what she terms the ‘Muslim unconscious’ is assumed to be active and capable of initiating social disorder (2003a: 31–2).15 In her discussion of fitna, which she interprets as chaos provoked by women’s

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desire, Mernissi cites the Egyptian jurist and nationalist Qasim Amin, the putative ‘father of Arab feminism’, who argued at the end of the nineteenth century that men should control their gaze rather than expecting women to conceal in public space. However, Amin’s (contradictory) discourse on women’s rights, which inaugurated a disproportionate focus on women’s sartorial presentation, was compromised by his internalization of European views on Muslim women (see L. Ahmed 1992 and 2003). Mernissi’s critique of the ‘Muslim unconscious’ is therefore most convincing when, as in her autobiographical fiction (discussed in Chapter 4), she historicizes gender norms in relation to processes of colonization and decolonization. The concepts h . ijâb and
awra should similarly be read as both culturally specific and historically produced. H . ijâb, commonly translated as ‘modest dress’ or by the generalization ‘veil’, also refers to a curtain and has three interrelated dimensions of meaning: visual (h . ajaba means ‘to cover’), spatial (‘to separate, to mark a border, to establish a threshold’), and ethical (a space hidden by a h . ijâb is sacred and forbidden) (Mernissi 1991: 93). Anne-Emanuelle Berger translates
awra as ‘stain’ or ‘defect’, and suggests that it refers metonymically to female genitalia; it also means ‘blindness’. She speculates that it is as if ‘by covering up women’s “blindness”, a blindness which in turn risks blinding the onlooker, the h . ijâb made [women] a proper (and clean) sight and enabled others to see (them)’ (1998: 107). To some extent, this economy of (in)visibility and disavowal is commensurate with that evoked in Freudian theory, in which a boy views a girl as symbolic of the possibility of castration, although Mernissi qualifies the Freudian model on the grounds of women’s assumed active desire (2003a: 30–45). But
awra and the correlative injunction to modesty are not exclusively linked to the female body in the sacred texts. Fadwa el Guindi agrees that the term has etymological associations with vulnerability and blindness, but argues that it should be interpreted as part of a wider set of ideas concerning male and female space, modesty, and privacy (1999: 140–3). Moreover, practices of veiling and seclusion accrue and change meaning. H . ijâb today has acquired a valence that is only tenuously linked to the kinds of deep cultural epistemologies that Mernissi and Berger elaborate. In Soueif’s first novel In the Eye of the Sun (1992), the semi-autobiographical protagonist Asya returns from Britain in the early 1980s to take up a teaching post at the University of Cairo and notices an increase in new forms of Islamic dress amongst her students. A fully veiled student writes that she wants to learn English as ‘the language of my enemy’, but rebuffs Asya’s attempts to engage her in dialogue. Another student has to explain that her classmate ‘cannot speak . . . because the voice of a woman is
awra’ (Soueif 1999a: 754). Asya interprets this breakdown in communication in terms of the class difference between herself and her student, but it most obviously signals a shift in ideological affiliation from one generation to the next. Asya feels initially disconcerted: ‘The voice of a woman is
awra. Of course, she’d always known that theoretically, but she’d never come across

14 Introduction anyone for whom it was a living truth before’ (754). But she reflects that the student may have ‘sorted out some kind of answer to what’s happening all around us’ that ‘is genuine, it’s not imported or borrowed from anywhere’ (755). While Asya’s sister Deena queries that interpretation, too, the reader is encouraged to consider diverse modes of self-empowerment in relation to local and geopolitical context. In the Eye of the Sun is also an example of ways in which Arab Muslims’ creative production can be autobiographically informed. As will become evident, I am responding to a corpus of work which shows a predilection for generic boundary-crossing. While limits have realistically to be imposed somewhere, a hard and fast distinction between autobiography and fiction – and, as I shall argue, between scriptive and scopic structures of representation – would be artificial and counter-productive. At times, women embed artistic practice in experience, authenticating testimonies to feminist struggle. At others, they produce texts with a fictional aura in order to ‘veil’ their own experience, ironically rendering visible a heightened anxiety of authorship for women (Zeidan 1995: 232). Speaking of the self, which can be negatively construed as individualism, egotism, and embarrassing exposure of the personal (Abouzeid 1998a: iii), is often seen as a doubly transgressive act for women, who can carry the burden of family honour and be subject to a range of disciplinary obligations that include chastity, concealment, and silence (Faqir 1998: 12–14); as we have seen, these may be internalized and even positively embraced. Moreover, as Inge Boer sensibly argues, ‘context’ itself is produced (2004: 14). This is why sometimes we witness the autobiographical deployed as one register in a polyphonous whole, in conscious acts of generic destabilization that expose the constructed nature of any discourse. An interfacing of autobiographical and fictional modes can be a vital part of a text’s self-staging, facilitating a reflexive approach to representational practices. As I have said, this book looks beyond the thematic in order to engage the structures and styles through which a feminist poetics might articulate voice and vision. The work discussed is sensitive to ways in which women’s bodies have been defined historically, but overwhelmingly asserts tactics of negotiation, subversion, translation, and transformation. I am attentive to what Tobing Rony has termed ‘third eye’ strategies of representation, in which ‘the Other perceives the veil, the process of being visualized as an object, but returns the glance. The gesture of being frozen into a picturesque is deflected’ (1996: 213). As Boer points out and I illustrate in Chapter 1, Orientalist visual and textual representations have been mutually influential (2004: 20–1). By extension, postcolonial writing often answers the gaze, incorporating and reframing Orientalist painting and photography, as well as culturally specific structures of scopic apprehension. Visual media can also challenge the spectator position as invisible locus of power and reconstrue the implications of (in)visibility in different contexts. As we shall see, women often incorporate a mediating layer of writing in their visual

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texts – in the form of script, subtitles, subtexts, and paratexts – in order further to complicate scopic encounters. The mutual imbrication of textual and scopic (and to a lesser extent aural and oral) structures of apprehension and resistance is a conceptual thread that weaves through this book. When women mobilize a cross-fertilizing visual/textual economy, I understand this as a rearticulation of historical modes of framing Arab Muslim women’s bodies that enables women’s oppositional perspectives. The relationship between voice and vision, in particular the use of storytelling to counter Arab and/or Muslim women’s (in)visibility, has been engaged by several critics (Boer 2004; Donadey 2001; Gauch 2007; Grace 2004; Vogl 2003). Suzanne Gauch’s Liberating Shahrazad: Feminism, Postcolonialism, and Islam (2007), for example, joins Mernissi (2001) and Rose Issa (2003) in positing Shahrazad of Alf Layla wa Layla (commonly known in English as Arabian Nights) as prototype of a dissident, female speaking agent.16 The empowering implications of this motif are not limited to the domain of women’s writing; Rose Issa evokes ‘a personal visual language’ in work by contemporary women artists whom she categorizes as ‘new Sheherazades’ (2003: 137). Shahrazad can be seen to impose an alternative economy of desire, transposing it from a voyeuristic to a textual/oral/ auditory plane (Malti-Douglas 1991: ch. 1). She counters authoritarian rule, negates the mastery of time, accords to herself a panoptical vision, and claims a popular cultural form, all in the interests of the wider female community. Al Musawi suggests that she is the paradigmatic boundary-crosser, manipulating narratological, spatial, and temporal thresholds that are, by definition, ‘pregnant with crisis, decision, suspense and ambivalence’ (2003: 4, 5). In its production and reception history, moreover, Alf Layla wa Layla provides a model of fluid meaning produced between languages and cultures. There are, however, caveats to be made about a persistent use of the Shahrazad trope, as Malti-Douglas elaborates (1991: 5–7, 27–8, 52–3). The Nights do not fundamentally challenge a heteronormative trajectory although the relationship between Shahrazad and her sister Dinarzad can be appropriated as an example of female solidarity (see Chapter 2). Most importantly for my purposes, a single scopic/discursive model, in which the female voice overwhelms the masculine fixing gaze, does not adequately account for heterogeneous treatments of the vision/voice nexus in women’s creative work. As my analysis will show, women foreground counter-hegemonic perspectives but also problematize their own acts of speaking and looking. This is partly (and importantly) because of the risks incurred in representing other women, particularly transnationally. But because any body is in a sense a text, the concept of embodiment prompts questions about the agency of self-inscription and, as a result, self-apprehension. A Foucaultian perspective would see bodies as produced by norms to the extent that interiority itself is inscribed by culture. Psychoanalytic theory posits the body as textual surface on which psychic symptoms are projected and can be deciphered or

16 Introduction ‘translated’ back to experience, memory and desire which are, however, also culturally inscribed. Grosz suggests that [w]here psychoanalysis and phenomenology focus on the body as it is experienced and rendered meaningful, the inscriptive model is more concerned with the processes by which the subject is marked, scarred, transformed, and written upon or constructed by the various regimes of institutional, discursive, and non-discursive power as a particular kind of body. (1995: 33) I think it is most helpful to see the body, with the psyche as its interior corollary, as able to shed light back upon the contexts that inform one’s construction. I insist upon the potential of women to transform the contexts in which they live through their use of vision and voice, so want to hold on to Grosz’s notion of the body as ‘a kind of hinge or threshold’ between an ‘interior subject’ and her lived context (33, original emphasis).17 I propose an overarching poetics of the threshold in work that resists in advance a hermeneutical approach. This does not mean tracing a teleological continuum whereby women strive towards ‘coming out’ as feminist, the definition of which is predetermined from elsewhere. Rather, attending to sartorial, temporal, historical, spatial, and translational threshold motifs generated within creative work, I argue with Grosz that a feminist text must not only be critical of or a challenge to the patriarchal norms governing it; it must also help, in whatever way, to facilitate the production of new and perhaps unknown, unthought discursive spaces – new styles, modes of analysis and argument, new genres and forms – that contest the limits and constraints currently at work in the regulation of textual production and reception. (1995: 23) ‘New’ modes of speaking, looking and being, though, can emerge through an oppositional tracing of existing modes of representation. Through citation, performance, parody, translation, and strategic visibility/invisibility, third-eye tactics transform ethnographic objects into self-representing agents and reconfigure the field of apprehension itself. Gregory, drawing on Donna Haraway’s notion of ‘situated knowledges’ (1992), reminds us that ‘vision is always partial and provisional, culturally produced and performed, and it depends on spaces of constructed visibility that – even as they claim to render the opacities of “other spaces” transparent – are always also spaces of constructed invisibility’ (2004: 12). I therefore underline contextual encounters rather than fixed identities, in an attempt to resist reducing ‘an incommensurable and discontinuous other into a domesticated other that consolidates the imperialist self’ (Spivak 1999: 130).

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Zayzafoon offers an apt caveat: ‘[i]f we grant that the image of the “Muslim woman” is invented, does this mean that the different forms of oppression she is subjected to are also invented?’ (2005: 8–9). And Gwendolyn Audrey Foster reframes the issue to ask: ‘if the subaltern speaks, will we listen?’ (1997: 213). However, the question that Foster cites (Spivak 1988) echoes with a productive irony: deconstruction’s critique of voice as index of authenticity. Leela Gandhi warns that a deconstructive approach can enhance the epistemological opacity of the ‘real’ third-world woman. By making her the bearer of meanings/experiences which are always in excess of Western analytic categories, these critics paradoxically re-invest the ‘third-world woman’ with the very iconicity they set out to contest. (1998: 88) But, as Spivak argues, ‘the problem of political subjectivity is not going to be solved by . . . ascribing “other” women a unified subject position that no longer seems accessible to “us” ’ (1990: 90). Refusing to ascertain an ‘authentic’ textual subject should not mean denying the voice, life, or struggle of women; rather, it should alert us to ways in which knowledge is configured and never absolute. Catachresis18 enables us to describe work that reflects a continual movement of translation – across language, media, time, and space – producing aporia as well as connections. The persistent evocation of thresholds (limen) in the work discussed suggests more than a felicitous homonymy between liminal tropes and an overarching attempt to limn (represent visually or textually) women’s lives. Moreover, to evoke an early use of limn – to illuminate a manuscript – we see a deliberate interplay of visual and textual modes of re-presentation. As such, feminist praxis can be discerned as a ‘situated practice within co-implicated and constitutively related histories and communities open to mutual illumination’ (Shohat 2006: 12).

Preliminary case study: Nawal el Saadawi Outspoken and prolific, el Saadawi (b. 1931) has been the best-known expositor of Arab Muslim female experience to Western audiences since the 1980 translation of The Hidden Face of Eve, first published as Al Wajh al
Ari lil Mar a al
Arabiyya (1977, literally ‘the bare face of the Arab woman’). She is also ‘the most visible woman intellectual in the Arab world’ (Malti-Douglas 1995: 11). Born to a family of modest means and educated in Arabic, she trained as a physician and was employed by the Egyptian Ministry of Health until dismissal on account of her controversial publications on women’s sexual health and sexuality. She was imprisoned in the early 1980s, her Arab Women’s Solidarity Association was closed down by the state in 1991, and she was the recipient of death threats from Islamist

18 Introduction groups in the early 1990s after the publication of The Fall of the Imam, first published as Suqût al Imâm (1987). She now lives in semi-permanent exile in the United States. El Saadawi’s work is no less hotly debated by literary critics: Said describes her as ‘overexposed (and overcited)’ (1990: 280); Sabry Hafez finds her fiction politically powerful but stylistically weak (ctd. in Zeidan 1995: 138); and younger Arab women writers have questioned her literary credentials and popularity with an Anglo-American audience (Amireh 2003: 59). I discuss elements of her work here in order to embed some thematic and theoretical signposts. Consistently in el Saadawi’s fictional world, ‘the primary vector of [social and male] power is the gaze’ (Malti-Douglas 1995: 26). Her first novel, Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, first published as Mudhakkirât T . abîba (1957),19 establishes ‘eyes examining me relentlessly’ as emblematic of restrictions placed upon a woman’s presentation and choices in a patriarchal culture: ‘Society impaled me with looks as sharp as daggers’, the narrator claims (el Saadawi 1989a: 15, 78). This motivates precocious analysis of the implications of a body gendered female. Observing her budding breasts in the mirror, the narrator wonders: ‘What would grow on my body next? What other new symptom would my tyrannical femininity break out in?’ (12). El Saadawi’s prototypical protagonist decides that her eyes will be her primary weapons, her use of an oppositional gaze consciously rebutting the Qur anic injunction to avert the gaze from a member of the opposite sex.20 As she matures, her gaze turns outwards: ‘I began to search constantly for weak spots in males to console myself for the powerlessness imposed on me by the fact of being female’ (11). Memoirs of a Woman Doctor charts a progression through different modes of counter-perception. The narrator first appropriates the gaze of a medical doctor in order ‘steadily and unflinchingly’ to dissect men’s corpses and, by association, the patriarchal body social (25). She moves to an honest examination of her ‘naked self’ and its repressed desires in a remote village (41). Later turning the ‘searchlight of my gaze’ upon a potential suitor, she dismisses him because he is unable to make eye contact, thereby acknowledging her as autonomous and equal (76). She also critiques her own position of privilege ‘looking down’ on society (82). The novel closes upon emotional and political transformation, when she saves the life of a destitute man and cries in the arms of her lover whose ‘eyes met mine’ (88). As Nawar al Hassan Golley argues, this novel progressively complicates a ‘social dualistic construction of notions like femininity versus masculinity, woman versus man . . . body versus mind, and nature versus science’, although a heteronormative trajectory (and sentimental denouement) is privileged. The narrative’s progression from conflict to relief should be seen in terms of a longer process; given the cyclical structure of the novel, the narrator’s metaphorical rebirth is not necessarily conclusive (2003: 135). Golley’s argument is borne out by el Saadawi’s repeated return, in subsequent work, to scopic, sartorial, and spatial delimitations of the female

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body and to attempted appropriations of the voice and gaze by female heroes. The author typically figures veiling as psychologically damaging and as metonymy of the patriarchal control of social space.21 In the short story ‘Eyes’ (first published in 1988), for example, a young woman suffering from psychosis comes to the narrator/doctor for treatment. She is fully veiled and, in accordance with the dictates of her violent father, works in complete isolation from men as an archivist of mummies (with obvious symbolic resonances). The catalyst for a change in perception is the analysand’s discovery of a small Pharaonic statue. She becomes obsessed with its eyes, which are ‘continually looking at her’, and with its imagined movements, which cause ‘her closed lips underneath the black cloth [to] part with a faint sigh’ (el Saadawi 2004: 207). She begins to seek this reciprocal look and the human incarnation of the statue in passersby on the street. However, upon approaching a man, she recoils in alarm at the moustache that signals irrefutably that he is ‘Male!’, concealing her eye-holes with a glove (211). As Peter Hitchcock suggests, this protagonist, controlled by the superego as surrogate for the father, cannot assimilate the fantasy of a dialogical look (1997: 79). Nor can she transpose her desire on to an available Arabo-Islamic (rather than Pharaonic) reality. In Woman at Point Zero (1990), first published as Imra a
ind Nuqt.at al S.ifr (1975), Firdaus narrates her life from childhood in a rural village, through a failed arranged marriage, to a career as a prostitute. Firdaus becomes literally a streetwalker, ironically exemplifying attitudes attached to all women ‘transgressing’ into public space (see Djebar 2004). In both the family/marital home and public space, Firdaus is repeatedly terrorized by ‘two eyes’ with ‘cold intent’ that send a ‘shudder . . . like death’ through her body (el Saadawi 1990: 42; see also 49–50). The plot therefore incorporates a series of flights and transient settlements. Firdaus’s career as a high-class prostitute represents the most empowering phase of her life as it gives her economic freedom; specifically, the means to establish her own private space. ‘Home’, however, is symbolically, then literally conflated with ‘prison’ when Firdaus murders a client, an act that semi-consciously avenges abuses by men throughout her life. This act of violence and Firdaus’s resulting incarceration and execution ostensibly mark the limit of women’s capacity to exert agency on the margins of social life (I shall return to this point). Firdaus is also haunted by eyes belonging to her birth mother, ‘eyes that I watched . . . eyes that watched me’ (16). She recalls seeking support from this woman who favoured her husband, then was replaced by another woman. The mother is also remembered as delegate of men’s control over women’s sexuality: she ‘brought a woman who was carrying a small knife or maybe a razor blade. They cut off a piece of flesh from between my thighs’ (13). Similarly, when the narrator of Memoirs of a Woman Doctor complains of a mother who ‘put chains on my arms and legs and round my neck every day’ (el Saadawi 1989a: 17), she refers both to the complicity of

20

Introduction

mothers in perpetuating gendered inequalities in the home and to ways in which a daughter’s body is obliged to mirror that of her mother in its social construction. The first volume of el Saadawi’s autobiography, A Daughter of Isis (Awraqi . . . H . ayâti, 1999), contains the bitter observation that ‘[n]othing happened to a female when she was born. Life just came to a standstill. People were simply sad, and sorrow is easier to bear than infanticide’ (el Saadawi 1999: 17).22 The narrator Nawal’s mother leaves her to foil death alone after her birth (21) and dies ‘a young woman’ after giving birth to nine children and inducing an abortion before the age of thirty, ‘without ever having known that thing which is described as sexual pleasure’ (23, 22). Her daughter’s conclusion is that ‘I had been born a female in a world that wanted only males’ (52). Despite moments of ‘hatred’ against her mother, Nawal remembers her as ‘at her best, once more a shining star, the real mother that I knew, her head held high, a woman full of pride, a goddess like Isis’ (4). Her mother supports her daughter’s right to education and colludes with her to prevent an early marriage. She is also cast in terms evocative of a lost pre-Oedipal dyad. The mother’s body, remembered as smell and sensation, is repeatedly compared to the sea, in contrast to the solid contours of her father that represent ‘the outer world . . . of land, country, religion, language, moral codes’ (57). As both negative and idealized example, the mother is the ground for Nawal’s ‘almost constant alienation’ (6) both in Egypt and exile. This inculcation of the daughter’s identity on a founding lack underpins her struggle with writing which, in a phallogocentric universe, imposes a gap between her self-image and that produced by others. However, looking at herself in the mirror in an attempt to reanimate a pre-symbolic self, the narrator tries ‘to abolish the difference between the image and the original’ by going ‘back to writing, like a child to the breast of her mother’ (53), despite the fact that speaking intimately of her female self is akin to ‘a scalpel which cuts through the outer skin’ (293). The author’s use of Arabic, the language of the Qur an, becomes a deliberately rebellious tactic; autobiography is defined as anamnesis in contrast with sanctioned memories surveyed by a censorious ‘single eye that stares at me, the eye of God or Satan’ (9). Having held (‘nursed’) her dying mother in her arms, Nawal attempts to translate her speech into writing (24–5). She extends this activity to encompass a latent feminist genealogy that includes ‘an unknown woman I had never seen, a grandmother, or a female antecedent of hers born many years ago, a descendant of Isis or her mother Noot’ (4), a pre-Islamic Arab warrior (Zarqa al Yamama) who had enhanced vision and was blinded as punishment, and the pre-Islamic poet al Khansa. Nawal credits her first lessons in philosophy, religion and politics and her ability to reason and recognize justice to her illiterate paternal grandmother – who, however, bemoans the ‘catastrophe of girls’ to whom she gave birth (7, 32) – and her strength to her peasant great-grandmother. Nawal’s father, by contrast, is aligned with the Prophet and a patriarchal god (5). Although the father is

Introduction

21

an anti-establishment figure, has a close relationship with his daughter, and is recuperated at one point as ‘not a male’ (127), it is the patronymic that is ‘carried on [Nawal’s] body’ (29). Her mother’s name, conversely, is ‘buried with her . . . lost’ unless the daughter intervenes to reinscribe it (4). The autobiography, which also closes upon a memory of the mother, begins: It was my mother who taught me how to read and write. The first word I wrote was my name, Nawal. I loved the way it looked. It meant a ‘gift’. My name became a part of me. Then I learnt my mother’s name, Zaynab. I wrote it down next to mine. Her name and mine became inseparable. I loved the way they looked, side by side, and what they meant. Every day she taught me to write new words. I loved my mother more than my father. But he removed my mother’s name from next to mine, and wrote down his instead. I kept asking myself why he had done that. When I asked him, he said ‘It is God’s will’. That was the first time I heard the word God . . . I could not love anyone who removed my mother’s name from next to mine, who abolished her as if she did not exist. (1) The lost mother is thus (pre-)figured as the scene of another kind of writing. Before her death, Firdaus in Woman at Point Zero relays her story to a doctor researching the neuroses of women prisoners, who can be seen as approximate to el Saadawi who, as the Author’s Preface points out, conducted similar research) (el Saadawi 1990: i–iii). No passive interviewee, Firdaus challenges the perspective of her interlocutor. The narrator realizes that she needs new words with which to transmit the other woman’s story: ‘Who is this woman called Firdaus? She is only [a prostitute] . . .’ But the words within me stopped short. Suddenly we were face to face. I stood rooted to the ground, silent, motionless . . . It was as though I died at the moment her eyes looked into mine . . . I was brought back suddenly by a voice. (el Saadawi 1990: 6) Firdaus’s voice is then depicted in terms reminiscent of el Saadawi’s figuring, in her autobiography, of her mother’s body. Both are associated with the sea, the depths of the earth, the air moving in space, and dreams. However, the narrator of Woman at Point Zero realizes that ‘this was no dream’ (7). Firdaus’s voice is, above all, a demand, as her first sentence indicates: ‘Let me speak. Do not interrupt me’ (11). We observe also the re-presentation of searching eyes, previously associated with the tyrannical male gaze and/or lost mothers. Vision and voice, here, become vehicles for potential collaboration between two women ‘face to face’. However, while the narrator/ doctor transmits Firdaus’s story, enabling it to testify beyond the prison

22

Introduction

walls and her physical death, she can never entirely apprehend the other woman. Adding a further link to the chain of feminist transmission, Djebar translated this text into French in 1981 and defines it, in her Preface, as a prototypical feminist novel in Arabic, first and foremost ‘a voice’. The voice of Ferdaous23 (which means ‘Paradise’) emerges from the night or from hell, equated by Djebar with a history of entombment in the seraglio (h . arîm), as a nocturnal murmur, a lament, and ‘an ancient wound finally and gradually opened up to assume its song’ (Djebar 2004: 388). As such, Djebar believes (somewhat modestly given her own extensive oeuvre) that el Saadawi establishes a modern Arab women’s literature based on a ‘restoration of body’ and ‘a look that upsets and cuts through the traditional dichotomy of space’ (387, 392). Both authors, in fact, attempt to repair a schism between body and voice in terms reminiscent of Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine (Suhair Majaj et al. 2003: xxvii). On a more concrete level, as Malti-Douglas admits, ‘[w]oman in the Saadawian feminist literary construct is doomed to fight a battle she rarely wins’ (1995: 208). It is also the case that el Saadawi’s fiction tends to present a holistic patriarchy not pinned closely to specificities of time and place, although Amireh argues that her work reflects a pervasive, inward critical gaze inaugurated by the pan-Arab defeat of 1967 (2003: 51). El Saadawi has, in addition, been criticized for the representation of one-dimensional character ‘types’ and an individualist philosophy (Amireh 2003: 57–8). To some extent, certainly, her writing reflects, but struggles to exceed an odd, artificial contest in which the woman faces the man alone, but the man stands barricaded by tradition, laws and creeds, backed up by generations and æons of history, and row upon row of men, women and children, all with sharp tongues extended like the blades of a sword, eyes aimed like gun-barrels and mouths blazing away like machine-guns. (el Saadawi 1989a: 75) I hope to have shown, though, that her work also demonstrates awareness of the politics of representation. A reader coming to Woman at Point Zero (or Djebar’s anthologized introduction to it) as a first encounter with Arab Muslim women’s writing might be tempted to forgo the layers of textuality at stake for the payoff of the pseudo-sociological text that begins, by repetition, to emerge. This should be guarded against, or women from Egypt to Algeria and beyond will be ‘read’ as permanently incarcerated, subjected to an implacable structural violence, and in need of rescuing, ideally by an Arabic-speaking ‘native informant’. I would stress the relaying of voice exemplified in Woman at Point Zero in and through its different versions that, even without access to the original Arabic text, reminds us that efforts to transmit ‘the other woman’s story’ are always both contingent and transformative acts.

Introduction

23

Chapter outline I anticipate readers new to this field, as well as experts, and have structured the book accordingly, first introducing key representational paradigms, then building from a single national to comparative and transnational frameworks. Chapter 1 examines aspects of the historical production of ‘the Arab Muslim woman’, including colonialism and Orientalism as complementary structures of power/knowledge and the contribution of women travellers to the imaginative shaping of ‘the Orient’. I revisit Malek Alloula’s The Colonial Harem, first published in 1981, Frantz Fanon’s ‘Algeria Unveiled’, first published in 1959, and the Italian–Algerian coproduction The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvo (1966), all of which prompt an exploration of the ongoing struggle between nationalist, (neo-)patriarchal, and feminist discourses in parts of the Arab Muslim world. Subsequently, the focus is upon women’s postcolonial texts. In Chapter 2, I engage work by women affiliated (in different ways) to Algeria: Fettouma Touati, Malika Mokeddem, Assia Djebar, Leïla Sebbar, and Houria Niati. My analysis centres upon an interlacing thematics of visibility, vision, and voice, sometimes supplemented by the motif of (un)veiling. Much of this work testifies to the challenges posed by the postcolonial Algerian setting for feminist commentators; indeed, the gravity of the political situation there since the late 1980s is one reason why all the women discussed represent Algeria from elsewhere. The implications of this simultaneous affiliation and distance receive extensive treatment in Djebar’s work, as I illustrate with reference to a selection of her literary and film texts. In the latter part of the chapter, I consider the construction and contestation of Algerian and ‘Beur’ identities in France, a focus that will be extended in Chapter 5, somewhat unconventionally, to contemporary Britain. In Chapters 3 and 4, I emphasize the relevance of what Griselda Pollock (1996) has called ‘generations and geographies’. Exploring ‘space-time, the inhabiting of places and of containers, or envelopes of identity’ (Irigaray 1993: 7, original emphasis) is necessary because ‘bodies [should] always [be] understood within a spatial and temporal context, and space and time remain conceivable only insofar as corporeality provides the basis for our perception and representation of them’ (Grosz 1995: 84). Recognizing that subjectivity is anchored in a located body enables us to interpret voice, vision, and visibility as grounded practices. Chapter 3 discusses memory work, melancholia, and mourning as modes of transmitting histories of women’s exclusion in the Maghrib. Drawing upon literature and film by Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Leïla Abouzeid, Moufida Tlatli, and (briefly) Raja Amari, I consider the implications of an interrupted matrilineal legacy of struggle for individual and communal selfdetermination. An ascertainable generational tension underpins processes of postcolonial self-definition, prompting me to engage both with enduring

24 Introduction allegories of the nation-as-mother and with the representation of often radically disempowered mothers by daughters. Chapter 4 then turns to efforts to decolonize space, highlighting the creative transformation of ‘homes and harems’ in work by Nina Bouraoui, Fadia Faqir, Fadwa Tuqan, Raymonda Tawil, Fatima Mernissi, and Farida Ben Lyazid. I have chosen deliberately to focus on the ‘private’ domain because while the home is a repeated symbol of incarceration, it is also an under-examined site of emancipation, a threshold space or ‘heterotopia’. Reference to a group of texts that reflect upon a range of national settings allows me to demonstrate both that women’s projects of individual emancipation tend to have a wider, decolonizing significance, and that a movement from the private to the public sphere, while obviously desirable in some ways, is not the only possible feminist trajectory. Chapter 5 consolidates the foregoing themes, focusing on work produced in Britain by Zineb Sedira, Mona Hatoum, and Ahdaf Soueif, with more selective reference to one of Leila Aboulela’s novels. I emphasize the affective, historical, and political potential of forms of border crossing and translation, with attendant aporetic effects. Again, I stress ways in which women reframe established modes of apprehension of the Arab Muslim woman in the process of rearticulating the past and consider the implications of this for ways in which we might conceive of personal, intersubjective, and collective identities in the present. I end by contemplating what readers/viewers may take from and bring to encounters with the material discussed throughout Arab, Muslim, Woman: Voice and Vision in Postcolonial Literature and Film.

1

Historical contexts ‘Layer after layer’

The protagonists in absentia of Ayesha Rafaele’s documentary Veil (2000) are young British-Asian Muslim women who have decided to observe strict h . ijâb and decline to appear on either the visual- or soundtracks of the film. Their personal scripts about life in Britain and their veiled bodies are represented by proxy. The film purveys imagery of Muslim women from the past and present generated in Europe, the United States, and the Arab and Muslim worlds that culminates in footage of the burning of televisions in Taliban-run Afghanistan, an act intended to combat ‘idolatrous imagery’. The substitute narrator (Parminder K. Nagra) concludes in one woman’s words: Layer after layer, image after image, all repeating the same old story. In every place around the world there are people at the top, the people in control . . . they want to leave you no place to hide, they want to get inside you . . . How can you judge? Who can you believe? How can you ever know what the true story is . . .? They say they have authority. But it means nothing to me. (Rafaele 2000) Although Rafaele’s protagonists are not Arab women, the film signals a highly contested visual and discursive field of representation closely related to the one which this book takes as its purview. Veil raises issues pertaining to an individual’s capacity to self-represent, contrasting surface with depth and exterior production with experience, but disarticulating first-person testimony from visual and oral presence. I will discuss many more instances in which testimony, ventriloquism, translation, (in)visibility, and oppositional looks are deployed in feminist projects that are sometimes, as here, wary of the act of representation itself. But first, we should remind ourselves of some of the historical layers of production of ‘the Arab, Muslim woman’.

Colonialism and orientalism Colonial intervention in the Maghrib and the Mashriq was both direct and took on less tangible forms, including finance imperialism, missionary

26

Historical contexts

activity, and ‘the enormous collective effort known as “Orientalism” ’ (Melman 2002: 106). Colonial hegemony suited European nations for a number of reasons: strategic positioning against European rivals, protection of already-existing colonial borders and trade routes, the opening up of new markets, commodity production, settlement, and the provision of manpower for armies. However, the Arab world was primarily important for Europe as a source of raw materials, the most important of which would eventually be oil.1 The first major European conquest after Napoleon’s short-lived invasion of Egypt began when the French navy landed in Algeria in 1830. By the late nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was in radical decline, allowing France to intervene in Tunisia in 1881 and Britain in Egypt in 1882, extending into the Sudan in 1884. A French protectorate was established in 1912 in Morocco, with the North and the southern Sahara under Spanish protection, while regions in the south and the Rif remained outside of centralized control for another twenty years. The extent to which colonial control became embedded in the Maghrib varied. The most extreme case, Algeria, has been described as ‘one of the most ignominious examples of systematic colonization that the world has ever seen’ (Stone 1997: 31). There, despite sustained resistance from the indigenous population, a vigorous policy of settlement and assimilation became entrenched. More than a settler colony, l’Algérie française (French Algeria) was embedded politically, economically, and imaginatively in the structure of France itself. Colonial penetration was deep but la mission civilisatrice (the civilizing mission) largely rhetorical. Under the 1881 Code de l’indigénat (Indigenous Code), Algerian Muslims had to renounce their religion in order to acquire French citizenship, civil rights, and local suffrage; the vast majority of the population hence had no legal, political or constitutional protection. On the Arabian peninsular and in the Levant, colonialism assumed less direct forms. While the vestiges of the Ottoman Empire entered World War One on the side of Germany and Austria, a group of Arabs revolted and were supported by Britain (as memorialized in the West through the story of T. E. Lawrence, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’). This group was repaid not with the Arab homeland promised, but by the establishment of spheres of influence in the Pykes-Sicot agreement (1916), followed by the Balfour Declaration (1917) which created a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and the formal recognition of mandates by the League of Nations in 1922. Syria’s Christian-majority coastal area became Lebanon, both proclaimed French protectorates. Iraq and Palestine were British-mandated, with half of Palestine split off to become Transjordan (later Jordan). The remaining half of Palestine also came under the control of Britain and a sharp increase in Jewish immigration was permitted. The small states of the Gulf were British protectorates and Iraq was under British supervision. Only parts of the Arabian peninsula remained independent: Yemen and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the latter established in 1922 and ruled by a British ally.

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Overall, Britain dominated the Mashriq; France, the Maghrib. While colonial practice was heterogeneous on the ground with, for example, France exerting a tighter grip on Algeria than its Maghribian neighbours, a broad contrast can be drawn between British policy, on the one hand, that left indigenous institutions relatively intact and, on the other, French settlement and assimilation. One effect can be perceived in linguistic structures: while Arabic was the language of education and government in the Arabian peninsula and emerged as such in Egypt and the Mashriq, French was more assimilated and within a deeper class structure in the Maghrib. Women’s education was prioritized at an earlier stage in the Mashriq than in the Maghrib or the peninsula. The tendency in all contexts since independence has been to Arabize. Arab nationalism and the nahd.a (cultural renaissance or ‘awakening’) emerged in the latter half of the nineteenth century as much in response to the crumbling Ottoman Empire as to encroachments of European power (Hourani 1991: 309–10). The discourse of modernity then took on an anti-colonial colouring which, in different ways, drew upon Muslim and Arab identity to express cultural integrity. However, due to the complexity of national cultures and the influence of Europe, nationalism tended to be secularist and constitutionalist (343–4). Emerging in the early years of the twentieth century, nationalist politics across the region varied between calls for reform, resistance, power sharing, and ousting of the colonial power. However, European nations did not formally or fully relinquish control of the Arab world until after World War Two. The ‘Orient’ is a construct inseparable as an idea from the proximity of a large portion of the Arab Muslim world to Europe.2 In 1978, Said posited Orientalism as an episteme, a self-fulfilling ‘imaginative geography’ that rationalized European colonial incursions into North Africa, the Levant, and beyond avant la lettre. Fundamentally Foucaultian, but attentive to ways in which European power/knowledge categorized its external Others as meaningful spaces, Said’s model posits a productive discourse: ‘The Orient was Orientalized not only because it was discovered to be “Oriental” in all those ways considered commonplace by an average nineteenth-century European, but also because it could be – that is, submitted to being – made Oriental’ (2003: 5–6, original emphasis). Said’s analysis of the massive scholarly and artistic production of the Arab Muslim world from the late eighteenth century has a double function. First, through attention to ‘the text’s surface, its exteriority to what it describes’ and the way that it speaks on behalf of the Orient (20), he engages culture as a set of representations that underwrite hegemony. Second, he identifies classic ‘signs’ of Oriental presence (some of which I discuss below) and relates them to narrative practices performed by Europeans as part of their self-elaboration. In other words, he considers what Orientalism’s putatively veridic discourse reveals and conceals about European power and Europeans’ conceptions of themselves (6). This necessitates attention both to the idioms and doctrines of

28

Historical contexts

Orientalist discourse (that Said calls its manifest content) and to its structuring economy: a latent set of fears, desires, repressions, and projections. For example, Said argues that the Arab, Muslim world was conceived as terrain beyond the heimlich of one’s own territory, frozen in archaic time (54). This exemplifies what Trinh describes as territorialized knowledge: ‘a mastery which I exert over areas of the unknown as I gather them within the fold of the known’ (1991: 327). Said conceptualizes Orientalism as a masculine epistemological structure, highlighting Gustave Flaubert’s representation of the Egyptian dancer Kuchuk Hanem (whose Turkish name can be translated as ‘little lady’) as a prototype of ‘impressive but verbally inexpressive femininity’ that is located outside progress and can be possessed and spoken for (Said 2003: 187).3 However, while Kuchuk Hanem and a feminized Orient seemed spectacularly graspable, the latter actually presented an epistemological barrier to the European for which the discipline of Orientalism attempted to compensate (189). Gender was therefore not a sub-domain of Orientalism; it was fundamental to the structuring of an epistemology of the Other and ontology of the Western self (Yeg˘enog˘lu 1998: 2–4). The gendered organization of social space in Arab and Muslim urban culture was a particular focus of European prejudice, largely because of the resistance female domestic space implied for hermeneutical investigation. The upper-class/imperial ‘harem’ produced in paintings by Jean-AugusteDominique Ingres, Eugène Delacroix, Edouard Manet, and many others immortalized a languid and desirable Oriental odalisque (from the Turkish oda, or room), typically presented partially or wholly nude and with a narguileh (pipe) and eunuch or female slave. Such representations can be interpreted as compensatory productions of a reality to which, with very few exceptions, European men did not have access. Women sometimes produced similar images as Spanish painter Mary Fortuny’s Odalisque (1861), for example, attests. Jananne al Ani discusses an album of prints, Femmes d’Orient (1893) produced by one Comtesse de Croix-Mesnil, that commends the status of women in Islam, but is littered textually and visually with stereotypes. She suggests that ‘the Comtesse’ might have been a ruse to exploit the demand for women’s travel narratives (2003: 94), which I shall discuss shortly. We may first extrapolate three key implications. First, Gregory argues, drawing on Said, that an intrinsically colonial modernity produces its other, verso to recto, as a way of at once producing and privileging itself. This is not to say that other cultures are the supine creations of the modern, but it is to acknowledge the extraordinary power and performative force of colonial modernity. Its constructions of other cultures – not only the way in which these are understood in an immediate, improvisational sense, but also the way in which more or

Historical contexts

29

less enduring codifications of them are produced – shape its own disposition and deployments. (2004: 4) Second, as Sarah Graham-Brown suggests, the h . arîm performed a set of psychological functions for the European: The first was to indulge in the excitement of an exotic sexual fantasy beyond the reach of the constraints and taboos of European culture. The harem, pictured in this way, was identified with complete male domination over women’s lives and the apparently untrammelled sexual pleasures of four wives and unlimited numbers of concubines. The strict control of women’s appearance and behaviour in public was assumed to be the corollary of unbridled license within the harem. The other reaction to this vision of promiscuity and indulgence was one of disapproval or disgust, and the denigration of a culture which could permit women to live in conditions apparently akin to those of a brothel. (2003: 503) Third, female space defied the scopic regime of European modernity which defined visibility as prerequisite for mastery. The imaginative purchase of the Arabo-Islamic female social world should be understood as politically informed, representing as it did the negative of the transparency deemed necessary to colonial control of territory, urban space, and indigenous populations (Grewal 1996: 26). The production of ‘the harem’ brought together two economies, political and psycho-sexual, around two key Orientalist topoi: an exotic and deviant sexuality and a despotic, even violent system of governance (Melman 1992: 60). Orientalism identifies ‘the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage – and even produce – the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period’ (Said 2003: 3).4 However, staying for now within the parameters of enquiry that Said sets up, we can problematize his idea of the ‘average nineteenth-century European’ by illustrating that Orientalist discourse was not homogeneous.5 Women’s travel writing provides representations of the Arab, Muslim world which, while suggesting an internalized Occidental/Oriental dialectic, are also informed by the gender, class, education, and political affiliations of individual writers and changed over time. Orientalism was, moreover, a reciprocal process (see Lewis 2004). A founding representation of Muslim women by a European woman is found in the Turkish Embassy Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, née Mary Pierrepoint (1689–1762). The (unsent) letters were written in 1716–18 in Ottoman Istanbul, where her husband was English ambassador, and published in 1763 (see Montagu 1965: xiv–xvii). Montagu infamously

30 Historical contexts described Turkish women’s veils in terms that championed ‘Eastern’ women’s relative economic and sexual agency. Enabling them to engage in public anonymity and ‘perpetual Masquerade’, the asmak gave women ‘more Liberty than we have . . . of following their Inclinations without danger of Discovery’ (Montagu 1965: 328). Montagu was the first European woman to gain access to imperial and upper-class h . arîm, establishing a precedent later exploited by an Victorian women travellers. Her letters reflect Enlightenment conceptions of observation as proof of truth that also enabled reflection upon the self. They also claim a perspective that was unavailable in real terms to European men. Montagu consciously establishes a tradition of women’s (re)writing, justifying her intervention on the basis of insights, as the frontispiece to the 1790 version of her text claims: ‘Drawn from Sources that have been inaccessible to other Travellers’. In turn, her letters served as ‘source’ material for Orientalist painters. If her detailed description of women in a h . ammâm in Sophia sounds familiar, it is because Ingres would exploit it in his Turkish Bath (Le Bain turc, 1862):6 There were many amongst them as exactly proportion’d as ever any Goddess was drawn by the pencil of Guido or Titian, and most of their skins shineingly white, only adorn’d by their beautiful Hair . . . I was here convinc’d of the truth of a Refflexion that I had often made, that if twas the fashion to go naked, the face would be hardly observ’d. I perceiv’d that the Ladys with the finest skins and most delicate shapes had the greatest share of my admiration, tho their faces were sometimes less beautifull than those of their companions. To tell you the truth, I had wickedness enough to wish secretly that Mr Gervase [a friend and painter] could have been there invisible. I fancy it would much have improv’d his art to see so many fine Women naked in different postures, some in conversation, some working, others drinking Coffee or sherbet, and many negligently lying on their Cushions while their slaves (generally pritty Girls of 17 or 18) were employed in braiding their hair. (Montagu 1965: 314) On the inside front cover to the 1790 edition is a print of an engraving by one D. Chodowiecki which shows a fully dressed Montagu in the h . ammâm, confronting an arrangement of naked, white, intertwined female bodies (see Almacergui 2003: 14) that strikingly anticipates Le Bain turc’s dense composition of luminous, fleshy bodies. In the passage cited above, Montagu flirts with what we might now perceive as homoerotic desire (‘admiration’), but then subordinates her gaze to an imagined male spectator. The erotic implications of the scene are then foregrounded in Le Bain turc, in which some of the women caress each other and the viewer’s presence is erased. This painting and its implied viewpoint are fabulously satirized by al Ani in

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31

her Untitled (1989) image (Plate 1.1). Al Ani reproduces the circular form of Le Bain turc, which suggests a view through a keyhole and the impossibility of a returned gaze. However, she reframes the optical lens, placing it within, behind, and in front of a photograph of luscious fruit for sale and reversing the perspective of the original (mirroring it so that the dancing figure is on the right instead of the left, as in the original). The women’s bodies merge with the fleshy contours of priced and categorized commodities for consumption, the repeated shape of peaches or apricots refiguring the original as ‘about’ buttocks and breasts. The original scene is thus overlaid, exceeded, and brought into the (Anglophone) present; the ‘lived experience’ (fictionally) captured by Ingres’s voyeur is reconfigured through trompe l’oeil as a construction that renders the ongoing gendered production and consumption of difference transparent. When English governess Emmeline Lott wrote The English Governess in Egypt (1866), it was obligatory to cite her predecessor (Lott 1866: v). But

Plate 1.1 Jananne al Ani, Sans titre / Untitled (1989).

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Historical contexts

Lott also contrasts her perspective with that of Montagu: it is as a ‘humble’ woman in a working capacity that Lott gains access to the interior and quotidian reality of the imperial h . arîm (vii). An opportunity is here afforded a middle-class woman of ‘Asmodeus-like, uplifting that impenetrable veil, to accomplish which had hitherto baffled all the exertions of Eastern travellers’ (viii). Lott claims that she is the first observer to give an ‘impartial yet sympathetic account of the daily life of the far-famed Odalisques . . . those mysterious impersonifications [sic] of Eastern loveliness’ (viii). It is difficult to see how Lott’s response is sympathetic, however, as she is highly critical of women and other members of the h . arîm, of standards of hygiene, and most particularly of ‘Arab food’. It is possible that part of her aim is to distance herself from Montagu whose ‘latitudinarian attitude towards sexual excesses’, Melman suggests, Victorian commentators tended to criticize (1992: 100). Melman argues that Victorian discourses produced codified representations of women’s physique, dress, etiquette, and eating habits. Privileging respectability, harmony, hygiene, and transparency, dominant attitudes were both racialized and classed (1992: 102–3; see also Grewal 1996: 25–40). As women middle-class travellers increased in number in the second half of the nineteenth century, a range of responses towards Muslim domestic space appeared which, nevertheless, tended to share a set of underlying values. In some cases, the h . arîm was desensationalized, desexualized, and considered as a viable alternative space to the English (or French) bourgeois family home (Melman 1992: 99). Alternatively, a construal of Muslim women as passive, lazy and improperly sensual could help European women to assert their own propriety, independence, and mobility. English suffragist Harriet Martineau, who first published a record of her visit to a royal harem in Cairo in 1845, is an example of this latter tendency. Martineau replicates censorious attitudes towards what was assumed – if not always admitted – to be the sexual function of the h . arîm, fixating on ‘that’ which she does not name: I noted all the faces well during our constrained stay; and I saw no trace of mind in any one . . . How should it be otherwise, when the only idea of their whole lives is that which, with all our interests and engagements, we consider too prominent? There cannot be a woman of them all who is not kept dwarfed and withered in mind and soul by being kept wholly engrossed with that one interest . . . The ignorance is fearful enough; but the grossness is revolting. (Martineau 1875: 239) Martineau’s stance, as an early feminist who refuses to accord the possibility of choice and agency to other women, appears now as highly paradoxical.7 Lady Lucie Duff Gordon (1821–69) commented in her Letters from Egypt, published thirty years after Martineau’s first edition, that her predecessor

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‘evidently knew and cared nothing about the people, and had the feeling of most English people here, that the difference of manners is a sort of impassable gulf, the truth being that their feelings and passions are just like our own’ (1902: 111–12). Duff Gordon’s own Letters demonstrate some of the usual characteristics of Orientalist discourse, albeit in more liberal guise. As Mervat Hatem points out, Duff Gordon still portrayed Egyptian rulers as corrupt and Europeans as benevolent, well-governed, and technologically advanced; her Letters, in fact, were required reading in Egyptian public schools during the colonial period (Hatem 1992: 48–9). It is fair to say that European women travel writers underlined their advantage over male ‘forbidden intruders into those castles of pleasure’, as Lott described Muslim female space (1866: 15), because this constituted a justification for writing at all. Boer goes further, suggesting that their writing sometimes provides evidence of a productive ‘transculturation’ (Pratt 1992); she reads Montagu’s repeated focus on ‘braiding’, specifically, as a metaphor for shared female space and transmission of stories (Boer 2004: 68–74). An affirmative reading of European women’s oppositional engagement in Orientalist discourse is also proffered by Soueif’s The Map of Love (1999b), as we shall see in Chapter 5. However, I tend to agree with Yeg˘enog˘lu that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European women travellers did not fundamentally destabilize a structure of knowledge/power which coded the Orient in particular ways. In particular, the repeated insistence upon an essence or truth ‘behind the veil’ implicates women in epistemic violence (Yeg˘enog˘lu 1998: 11).

The Colonial Harem: reframed by Malek Alloula By the end of the nineteenth century, an extensive repertoire of paintings, travel writings, and fiction about Arab and Muslim women had been produced in Europe. As we have seen, pictorial representations of the Orient were particularly selective, with a strong propensity to exclude the European as participant in the scene, except as implied point of origin of the titillated if sometimes moralizing gaze. Erasing evidence of colonial dominance, the Orient was produced and reproduced as timeless and, in certain aspects, femininized (Mackenzie 1995; Nochlin 1991). The combination of racial and sexual differentiation in representational practice binds or consolidates the production of difference. A stereotype, though, is the product of an ambivalent process of identification (Bhabha 1994: 67–70). This negates an assumption of the passive spectator, suggesting that Western observers were sutured as subjects through Orientalist representational practices. Photography, which tends to be read as ‘proof’ of reality (Graham-Brown 1988), now entered the scene and enabled the mass public consumption of the private. Mary Vogl indicates that ‘[o]ne definition of a stereotype is a metal plate cast from a mold and used to produce thousands of impressions. In this sense, stereotyping, like photography, is a mechanically repeated

34 Historical contexts process used to reproduce a fixed image’ (2003: 5).8 Gregory uses an apt visual metaphor in his elaboration of Orientalism: ‘Their’ space is often seen as the inverse of ‘our’ space: a sort of negative, in the photographic sense that ‘they’ might ‘develop’ into something like ‘us’, but also the site of an absence, because ‘they’ are seen somehow to lack the positive tonalities that supposedly distinguish ‘us’. (2004: 17) The Colonial Harem, first published as Le Harem colonial (1981) by Algerian poet Malek Alloula, retrospectively reframes colonial photographs of Algerian women taken in the 1920s and 30s. Alloula, deploying a psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and postcolonial critique of the gaze, suggests that, for the colonial male photographer, the h . aîk represented a leukoma, a white spot in the pupil causing partial blindness, or an aporia in the viewfinder: ‘Whiteness is the absence of a photo, a veiled photograph, a whiteout, in technical terms’ (1986: 7, original emphasis). We can cite the example of French psychiatrist Gaëtan Gatian de Clérambault, who photographed veiled Moroccan women from 1917 to 1920. The compulsive repetition of women’s concealed bodies in his images suggests a perceived inviolability. Clérambault, according to Franco-Algerian writer Leïla Sebbar (discussed in Chapter 2), responds by ‘freezing [women’s bodies] on his glossy paper like corpses stiff with death, stilled in the ritual folds of veils become white shrouds’ even when the photographed subjects are ostensibly in motion in a landscape (ctd. in Vogl 2003: 167).9 The woman’s body is here reframed as ‘not simply the inside of the veil; it is of it; “she” is constituted in and by the fabric-ation of the veil’ (Yeg˘enog˘lu 1998: 118–19, original emphasis). In Sebbar’s terms, the ‘veiled and doubly veiled bodies [signify as] mummies made eternal’ (ctd. in Vogl 2003: 168). Alloula, with reference to the Algerian colonial context, similarly evokes the ‘arrested and fetishistic’ logic of the stereotype (Bhabha 1994: 77) in the obsessive photographing of veiled women. The Algerian woman functions as objet petit a which, in the Lacanian sense that Alloula applies, is ‘the place onto which lack is projected, and through which it is simultaneously disavowed’ (Rose 1982: 48). The h . aîk not only frustrates the male viewer; ‘concentrated by the tiny orifice for the eye’, the returned ‘womanly gaze is a little like the eye of a camera’. The veiled women’s look reverses the scopic structure: These veiled women are not only an embarrassing enigma to the photographer but an outright attack on him . . . Thrust in the presence of a veiled woman, the photographer feels photographed; having himself become an object-to-be-seen, he loses initiative: he is dispossessed of his own gaze. (Alloula 1986: 14, original emphasis)

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Hamid Naficy has similarly suggested that veiling disturbs and even inverts panoptic structures of surveillance because a veiled woman controls what can be seen and looks back (2003: 140). Alloula argues that the French colonial photographer, in response, sought to unveil l’Algérienne, the unapproachable referent, by proxy.10 He hired algériennes – poor women forced by land resettlement to migrate to the urban centres and often to become prostitutes (Alloula 1986: 17; Woodhull 1993: 38) – as his photographic subjects. This algérienne, in Alloula’s rendering, is a domesticated other, ‘an impoverished version of the original’ that stands in for a radical and unverifiable Other (Algérienne) (Alloula 1986: 18). The Algerian postcards should be read as utterances within a wider discourse of high imperialism that included the International Colonial Exhibition in Paris in 1931 and programmes to unveil Algerian women through the 1930s. As such, the ethnographic alibi (the representation of ‘scenes and types’ of Algeria) conceals an attempt to unveil the traditional Algerian family that was seen as stubbornly resistant to colonial pacification. The postcards as an ‘immense compensatory undertaking, a form of revenge’ (Alloula 1986: 122, original emphasis) turn the fantasized harem symbolically into a brothel. Alloula points out that the images inadvertently unveil what colonization cannot name: ‘impotence’ (122, original emphasis), the exotic mise-en-scène thus functioning as an ‘imaginary resolution of the hiatus that differentiates the inside from the outside’ (26, original emphasis). However, while the French photographer only symbolically crosses the harem threshold in order to possess women’s bodies in the place of his potential rivals (Algerian men), the French army was engaged in very real appropriations of women’s bodies, as Zineb Sedira’s work, for example, attests (see Chapter 5). Alloula realizes that ‘lagging far behind History’, he can only partially resist the effects of the evil (colonial masculine) eye by ‘conjur[ing] them with [his] hand spread out like a fan’ and closing that hand ‘back upon a pen to write my exorcism: this text’ (5, original emphasis).11 Compelling as The Colonial Harem is, it has its own blind spots. In his reading of ‘Moorish Women in their Quarters’ (33), Alloula comments on its composition, reminiscent of Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in their Apartment (1849, see Plate 2.1), in which ten women’s gazes ‘converge upon the one who is looking at them’ (35). In fact, ‘Moorish Women in their Quarters’ reveals a spectrum of (dis)engagement with the photographer from distracted looks elsewhere to outright hostile challenge. Because Alloula evokes the colonial ‘attempt at a general disposal of the native, who will reappear in the guise of the colonized’ (129 note 10, original emphasis), traces of agency which could be elaborated in these images are left latent. By contrast, Marc Garanger emphasizes the resistance of women whom he photographed for the French military in 1960. Forced to unveil, ‘[t]hey glared at me from point-blank range; I was the first to witness their mute, violent protest’ (1982: Foreword, my translation). Alloula’s production of an Algérienne for whom the studio models stand in is also troubling. This

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implies that there is an ‘authentic’ Algerian woman haunting the frame of each image and by process of elimination where she might be found: in real h . urum, predominantly the domain of privileged women. As such, economically-deprived women – literally ‘impoverished’ stand-ins (18) – are inadvertently conflated with the inauthentic, colonized subject. Winifred Woodhull suggests that Alloula also appears to be haunted by the possibility of an undivided Algeria (1991: 124). He claims a shared experience, suggesting that his own ‘fixing’ as an Algerian by the colonial gaze is at stake (Alloula 1986: 5). As a result, The Colonial Harem unwittingly ‘disavows . . . conflicts between men and women in [postcolonial] Algeria . . . that cannot be explained away solely in terms of colonial exploitation’ (Woodhull 1993: 38; see Chapter 2). Finally, in the ‘return [of] this immense postcard to its sender’ (Alloula 1986: 5), Algerian women are once again exposed as erotic objects of the – that is, our – gaze.

Fanon’s ‘Algeria Unveiled’ and Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers If Alloula reveals the psycho-scopic economy of colonialism, Frantz Fanon’s ‘Algeria Unveiled’, published as ‘L’Algérie se dévoile’ in 1959 and written in the mid-stages of the Algerian war of independence (1954–62), foregrounds the political effects of female bodies that exceed surveillance. Fanon reiterates the enmeshing of psychological and political desire at stake: ‘The European faced with an Algerian woman wants to see. He reacts in an aggressive way before this limitation of his perception’ (1980: 22). And, as does Alloula, he emphasizes that French colonial attempts to access and identify Algerian women were highly motivated: ‘Converting the woman, winning her over to the foreign values, wrenching her free from her status, was at the same time achieving a real power over the man and attaining a practical, effective means of destructuring Algerian culture’ (17): ‘Every veil that fell . . . was a negative expression of the fact that Algeria was beginning to deny herself and was accepting the rape of the colonizer’ (20).12 ‘Algeria Unveiled’ strategically reframes the conflation of woman, land, and body politic that was implicit in the French colonial gaze. First, Fanon argues that Algerian women continued to wear the h . aîk ‘because the occupier was bent on unveiling Algeria’ (41, original emphasis). In this rendition of events, veiling practice is initially reactionary: ‘[t]o the colonialist offensive against the veil, the colonized opposes the cult of the veil’ (25). This is typical of Fanon’s technique of ‘situational diagnosis’, whereby an action is conceived as a ‘historically situated and socially inflected “utterance” that exists in relation to a speaker and an addressee, both immersed in history, located in a specific place and period’ (Shohat 2006: 252). Fanon overlays what appears to be the culturally authenticating work of re-veiling with the notion of sartorial self-fashioning, a shift neatly encapsulated by the dual signification of ‘cult’: as religious practice and as fashion.13 Subsequently,

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the h . aîk would be ‘[r]emoved and reassumed again and again . . . manipulated, transformed into a technique of camouflage, into a means of struggle’ (1980: 39). In crossing from private to public space, women also traversed the colonial barricades. They concealed weapons beneath the h . aîk, removed it in order to ‘pass’ as French women, and resumed wearing it once the latter ruse became apparent. That which Fanon describes as the ‘historic dynamism of the veil’ (41) can be extrapolated to an increase in the Algerian female body’s performative register. As such, the fidaîa – the female guerrilla (pl. fidayât)14 – ‘relearns her body, re-establishes it in a totally revolutionary fashion’ (37) not necessarily without the veil (as Fanon argues), but in relation to it. As Yeg˘enog˘lu suggests, veiling/unveiling became ‘the embodiment of [Algerian women’s] will to act, their agency’. Through its manipulation, they ‘managed to stay elsewhere, indeed to create an “elsewhere”, an “outside” that displaced the colonial power’ and the surveillance mechanisms on which it relied (1998: 64, original emphasis). This enabled the fidayât increasingly to ‘penetrate’ – Fanon’s term – not only the colonial cities, but the ‘flesh of the Revolution’ itself (Fanon 1980: 32). The equivocations of the FLN (the Front de Libération Nationale or National Liberation Front that coordinated the armed struggle) are described in the past tense, superseded by the irruption of revolutionary women on to the scene. Absorbing and exceeding preceding definitions of Algerian womanhood, women body forth in Fanon’s text as (un)veiled, militant/masquerading, and even masculine/feminine, not as any one thing or another. Diana Fuss takes issue with the fact that ‘the veiled Algerian woman [still] stands in metonymically for the nation . . . the woman’s body is the contested ideological battleground, overburdened and saturated with meaning’ (1994: 27–8). Furthermore, while Fanon’s essay begins with an exposure of colonial politics vis à vis perceived Algerian/female opacity, the move towards masquerade as the essence of embodied womanhood is indeed somewhat tautological. Conversely, there are moments in the essay which equate unveiling with ontological freedom, betraying a universalizing perspective and an admiring male gaze: ‘Her legs are bare, not confined by the veil, given back to themselves, and her hips are free’ (Fanon 1980: 36). Lazreg tempers his claims by alerting us to the fact that the urban struggle attracted women who did not veil in the first place or, if they did, moved in and out of h . ijâb which was never particularly concealing. Fanon’s emphasis on ‘the body caught in the memory of the veil’ is hence ‘overwrought’ (Lazreg 1994: 122). Djamila Amrane concurs that the fidayât represented a tiny and relatively privileged minority (she estimates 2 per cent but records are unreliable) relative to the many thousands of Algerian women who participated in the war in less spectacular forms of resistance (1991: 106). We might further question the value of self-empowerment through acts of violence. I would maintain, though, that Fanon’s essay bodes at least symbolically well for women’s participation in the construction of an independent Algeria.

38 Historical contexts It provides a template for reading postcolonial women as signifying agents, particularly if we remember that the essay is a revolutionary manifesto as much as a historical document. As Young has argued, ‘the colonial apparatus . . . typically produced politically and conceptually ungoverned effects’ (2001: 416). Fanon inflects this insight with what may be described as a feminist consciousness (in this text if not in others), albeit in relation to an overarching existential thesis. When he argues that the militant man and militant woman ‘jointly create new dimensions for Algerian society’ (Fanon 1980: 38), this is a heteronormative but not a phallogocentric vision. If ‘Algeria Unveiled’ unveils Algeria, Algerian women, and ‘the veil’ itself, it does so catachrestically and each term needs to be read in terms of a decolonizing self-inscription. We should note, for a start, that the original title, ‘L’Algérie se dévoile’, locates woman/nation as subject of the phrase. By the end of the essay, the signification of each term exceeds the meaning ascribed by France and that condoned by the architects of Algerian nationalism. This is not to say that a ‘new woman’ was produced, exactly. Rather, Fanon illustrates how gender can be performed in a conditional yet creative sense. As Judith Butler suggests, performativity describes a relation of being implicated in that which one opposes, [yet] turning power against itself to produce alternative modalities of power, to establish a kind of political contestation that is not a ‘pure’ opposition, a ‘transcendence’ of contemporary relations of power, but a difficult labor of forging a future from resources inevitably impure. (1993: 241) My remaining objections are, first, that women in Fanon’s text are viewed from a position that is implicitly masculine, even though the wider structural limitations of that perspective are exposed. Second, although women’s (in)visibility is presented as empowering, their voices, as opposed to their signifying bodies, do not register. This is a crucial point because while the fluid female agency celebrated by Fanon was not necessarily designated by the FLN (cf. McClintock 1997: 98), it was only temporarily incorporated in nationalist discourse, as I discuss in the next chapter. Gillo Pontecorvo’s film The Battle of Algiers (La Bataille d’Alger, 1966) also provides ambivalent representations of women in the Algerian struggle for independence. In an early scene, a veiled gun-bearer crosses the French barricades and one soldier is reprimanded by another for attempting to raise her face-veil: ‘You should never touch their women’.15 The subsequent passing of a blonde woman (modelled on the legendary guerrilla Zohra Drif) at the checkpoint between the Casbah and the ville nouvelle (French city) exemplifies a manipulation of scopic regimes. The crossing of veiled and unveiled women in the colon’s (colonizer’s) field of vision is an instance of irreducible signification and resulting bafflement:

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The FLN use proven revolutionary methods and their own original tactics. They are anonymous, unrecognizable among hundreds. They are everywhere . . . Cameras [which] were hidden at the Casbah exits . . . show the futility of certain methods . . . The terrorists are somewhere in this crowd of Algerian men and women. Which ones are they? How can they be recognized? Watching the soldiers watching the women on screen, we can critically assess the field and blind spots of the gaze. And, in an often-cited scene in which a group of women transform themselves into European lookalikes in the mirror, the use of bird’s-eye view and close-ups seems to orchestrate, almost meta-critically, ‘a gaze, a limit, and its pleasurable transgression’ (Doane 1991: 20). Throughout the film, the unveiled fidayât are desexualized through their facial impassivity and economy of movement. The film does not present unveiled women as being in a more ‘authentic’ state, as does ‘Algeria Unveiled’; rather, the captivation of the women by their mirrored images and their stilted movements outside suggest that the unveiled body is in a strategically inauthentic state: it is being deployed as a war machine. As Shohat and Stam argue, The Battle of Algiers presents ‘the Third World which masquerades as the West, not as an act of self-effacing mimicry but as a way of sabotaging the colonial regime of assimilation’ (1994: 74). Ranjana Khanna believes that the unveiling scene, which is silent, filmed in black and white, and set amidst a room of mirrors, functions ‘as time out from the main drama’ (1998: 20) and gestures reflexively ‘toward a form of politics outside a system of representation and sovereignty’ (2006: n. pag.). Khanna’s reading is problematized, however, by the syntagmatic position of the scene, which follows directly upon another in which Djafar, speaking on behalf of the FLN, swears to avenge the Algerians for an attack on a Casbah residence. To my mind, the (speechless) women can only be interpreted as following FLN orders, although their instruction is not shown. The film generally transposes individual experience on to a broader social canvas and a Marxist-inflected teleological axis. When it deploys identificatory mechanisms on behalf of Algerian women, these are intended to underscore the humanity of the insurgent population as a whole (Shohat and Stam 1994: 251–3). As a result, we have little access to women’s experience of their corporeal/sartorial transformations or their negotiations of colonial space. What is missing here, as opposed to that in Fanon’s essay, is content that would exceed the binary of traditional Algerian/masquerading European. The closing scene of The Battle of Algiers has been a particular focus of feminist critique. Temporally distinct from the main narrative, which is introduced by flashback and set between 1954 and 1956, the final scene is set in 1960. Women emerge from a crowd calling for istiqlal (independence) and ‘l’Algérie pour les Algériens’ (Algeria for Algerions), brandishing the national flag and, in one case, a h . aîk (see Plate 1.2). The ensuing birth of the independent nation is thus allegorized, implications of which I will explore

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Plate 1.2 The Battle of Algiers (1966), dir. Gillo Pontecorvo.

in subsequent chapters. Khanna (2006) comments on the contradictory, doubled, temporality that the ending proposes, particularly from our vantage-point in the present: women’s bodies carry forth the burden of hope from the wreckage, the violence promulgated by both French and Algerians that has defined the retrospective narrative. She thus perceives an ‘excess of historical teleology’, a by-product of which is the remaindering of death in the narrative of the nation’s birth (2006: n. pag.). An earlier critic similarly notes a strong sense of inevitability [in Pontecorvo’s film] culminating in ‘completeness’. It achieves the characteristic of a complete statement . . . confirming itself as a concluded representation of history about which no further questions are to be asked, and presenting an episodic view of history quite alien to the possibility of understanding it as an open horizon of possibilities and alternative realities. (Sainsbury 1971: 7)

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The Battle of Algiers is indicative of a ‘euphoric’ period in anti-colonial cinema. It traces the emergence of an independent nation which rewrites its own history and takes control over its own image (Shohat and Stam 1994: 249, 285–6). While this is obviously desirable, the construed homogeneity of the emergent state (which featured much factionalism before and after the war) merits consideration in relation to the site from which it was produced. As Pier Nico Solinas explains, The Battle of Algiers was conceived as ‘a deliberate rearrangement of chosen fact for a didactic purpose’ and ‘aimed to draw a general critical conclusion from the events depicted’ (1973: ix). The film was made in collaboration with the Algerian studio Casbah Films, whose managing director Yacef Saadi played himself as an FLN leader in Algiers (using his code name Djafar).16 The extent to which Saadi contributed to the final script is debatable: Joan Mellen claims that he made extensive revisions (1973: 16); scriptwriter Franco Solinas refutes the inference of ideological influence (qtd. in P. Solinas 1973: 194); and Pontecorvo comments that Saadi was keen to substitute ‘the camera for the machine gun’ (1967: 269). It seems reasonable to suggest, though, that a pseudodocumentary endorsed by the recently inaugurated FLN government, signalled in its opening credits as ‘the first Algerian cinematic production’, and starring ‘the people of Algeria’, functions as a performative counter-memory and vindicating narrative, participating in the construction of a unified nation. This may also explain why Fanon, an insider/outsider, is not cited in the film’s dialogue (as opposed to Sartre), although his ideas are is everywhere apparent. The emphasis on a minority of fidayât ensures spectacular effect and presents violence as a final option that had the broadest social mandate. However, in its tight geographical and historical purview,17 The Battle of Algiers cannot account for women’s motives for and methods of entry into the war or their participation in the maquis (rural resistance). More disturbingly, it elides evidence of French violence towards women (except indirectly through the bombing in the Casbah). And once again, although women’s sartorial manipulation and resulting mobility is given political purchase, particularly in its capacity to destabilize colonial surveillance mechanisms, women remain almost totally silent.

Early feminism: Huda Shaarawi’s Harem Years Early Arab feminism was cross-hatched from indigenous and appropriated sources. The first calls for the emancipation of women in late-nineteenthcentury Egypt arose due to a confrontation between Ottoman and European cultural practices and were part of the wider trend of the nahd.a towards socio-cultural reform. Arab feminism emerged as a double struggle, internally against the established religious, social, and economic order, and externally against European colonization. This has produced an enduring predicament: feminism in the Arab Muslim world is a contested concept that draws upon ideas that are neither entirely indigenous nor imported. Lila Abu-Lughod

42 Historical contexts observes that there are unacknowledged sources in both secular and Islamic definitions of women’s rights (1998: 243). Valassopoulos agrees, suggesting that we recognize a feminism that is transnational and locally reinscribed (2007: ch. 1). As Leila Ahmed explains, when Amin (1865–1908), author of Tah . rîr al Mar a (The Liberation of Woman, 1899), posited unveiling as a prerequisite for national advancement, he replicated the perspective of Lord Cromer, feminist reformists like Eugénie le Brun, and wider European discourses that defined Muslim women’s sartorial practices as evidence of the backward nature of Egyptian society. Rebuttals often appropriated the same terms (veiling and segregation), recasting them as authentic cultural practices in order to negate what was perceived as colonialist intervention (L. Ahmed 2003: 47–8). Debates over Muslim women’s emancipation and the terminology defining the issue echoed beyond Egypt. Zayzafoon shows how in Tunisia, for example, discussion about social reform in general and women’s rights in particular centred upon the work of Amin and other Egyptians and was constrained by the same vocabulary (2005: 98). However, feminist reform promulgated by Egyptian upper-class women was also to become influential across the Arab world. Activist Huda Shaarawi (1879–1947), while not the only influential feminist of the early twentieth century, tends to be cast as sui generis. Raised and educated in a traditional h . arîm, Shaarawi participated in the nationalist uprising against the British at the end of World War One and established the first Egyptian women’s union and its journal, L’Egyptienne. Madame Hussain Rushdi, née Le Brun, the French wife of Egypt’s first Prime Minister, was a close friend and mentor, even substitute mother-figure. Shaarawi depicts her Circassian mother18 as ‘a strong woman, a private person who had firm control over her emotions’ (1986: 25) and makes clear that she was closer to her father’s first wife (Umm Kabira, or ‘big mother’). Shaarawi recalls attending a women’s salon organized by Rushdi, at which There were debates about social practices, especially veiling. [Madame Rushi] confessed that although she admired the dress of Egyptian women, she thought that the veil stood in the way of their advancement. It also gave rise to false impressions in the minds of foreigners. They regarded the veil as a convenient mask for immorality. Plenty of lurid tales were circulated by ignorant outsiders about Egyptian morals. (80) We note the disapproving echo of Montagu almost two centuries later. Shaarawi famously removed her face veil at a Cairo railway station in 1923 after attending the International Women’s Alliance in Rome. In the 1940s, she dictated her mudhakkirât (memoirs) to her secretary, producing what is considered the first autobiographical text by a woman in modern Arabic letters.19 The decision to publish her life-story in Arabic can be interpreted as a

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nationalist gesture and as an effort to reach beyond her own class to a wide domestic audience.20 The memoirs emphasize the intellectual, then political ‘awakening of upper-class women’ (Shaarawi 1986: 98). They trace the author’s movement from the isolation of the h . arîm to a public identity affiliated to the major Egyptian nationalist party (the Wafd, in which her husband was an important figure) and to women’s networks in and beyond Egypt. Badran’s English translation, Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist (1986), tends to privilege the personal over the political, emphasizing the act of writing as a ‘final unveiling’ (1). This sits oddly with the fact that the text includes photographs of Huda taken, for the most part, indoors, unveiled, and in Western dress. Badran posits a commensurate crossing of previously sacrosanct boundaries between private and public space. Her choice of English title (as opposed to the Arabic title, which means ‘The Modern Arab Pioneer’) and the suggestion that the text ‘will appeal to anyone eager to know about life in the harem – a word highly charged in the western popular imagination’ (7) capitalizes on strategies used by European women’s nineteenth-century travel texts, as illustrated earlier. And the text signals from the outset the kind of narrative structure that, as I suggested in my introduction, is familiar and attractive to many twenty-first-century readers, in which an Arab, Muslim woman progressively transcends gendered structures of oppression. Kahf informs us that the issue of seclusion is not, in fact, an organizing principle of the original, much longer text which uses the term h . arîm only once (2000: 165). Moreover, she argues that, in translation, ‘Shaarawi’s engagement with Arab men in relationships that she saw as satisfying and enriching is minimized; her orientation towards Europe is exaggerated; and her command of class privilege is camouflaged’ (149). This is not quite fair because Shaarawi’s close relationship with her brother is evident in the translated text, as are critiques of European women’s views and interventions. Nevertheless, Badran’s framing devices are misleading when we consider that the memoirs, even in translation, subordinate Shaarawi’s private life to a political trajectory. After the initial trauma of early marriage to a much older cousin, the Egyptian was able to impose separate living arrangements for seven years, which she describes as ‘a time for new experiences and for growing into adulthood’ (1986: 62). In this period, she resumed her education and came within Madame Rushdi’s orbit. Shaarawi was later reunited with her husband and, despite acknowledging that the marriage was not ideal, states that her ‘attention was drawn from my private life to serving my country’. Indeed, the national movement ‘brought my husband and me closer to each other’ (111). She also claims an increasingly collective female identity. In a speech delivered to Wafdist women in 1922 immediately after her husband’s death, she promises that Neither illness, grief, nor fear of censure can prevent me from shouldering my duty with you in the continuing fight for our national rights . . .

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Historical contexts Let it never be said that there was a woman in Egypt who failed, for personal reasons, to perform her duty to the nation. I would rather die than bring shame upon myself and my sisters. (126)

Duty and honour, here defined by political commitment, are contrasted with what she describes as the ‘faintheartedness’ of her male colleagues (127). Her demands became more overtly feminist from 1924 due to the failure of the Wafd government to ensure women’s rights and because she thought them weak over the issue of occupied Sudan. She resumed her political activities within the newly formed Egyptian Feminist Union. Shaarawi’s overwhelmingly nationalist agenda and the hybrid autobiographical-documentary tenor of the original memoirs perhaps necessitate Badran’s structural interventions for a non-Egyptian audience. Kahf observes (2000: 152) that two-thirds of the Arabic text focuses on the author’s public persona rather than coming-of-age story and that the memoirs are interspersed with a large number of articles by Shaarawi and others. Badran radically expurgates the narrative and organizes it in four parts: ‘The Family’, ‘Childhood in the Harem’, ‘A Separate Life’, and ‘A Wife in the Harem’, followed by an historical ‘Epilogue’ that contains fragmentary reminiscences of 1919–24, Shaarawi’s most politically active years. Badran produces a text that fits more neatly into Western feminist autobiographical theory emergent in the 1980s which emphasized, for example, ways in which women ‘look back towards the moment at which they found the courage to move forward into as yet unnarrated and unexplored ways of living’ (Heilbrun 1985: 21). Sidonie Smith proposes that in order to qualify as feminist autobiography, a text must involve a challenge to ‘gender ideologies and the boundaries they place around a woman’s proper life script, textual inscription and speaking voice’ (1987: 44). The text in translation does not engage the question of writing, although Kahf tells us that the original inserts itself into an Arabo-Islamic autobiographical tradition by opening with a classical conceit: calling up a deceased person, in this case the author’s father, as witness to the speaker’s testimony (2000: 155).

Postcolonial (neo-)patriarchies and feminisms Shaarawi’s memoirs report the participation of upper-class women, then women across the social spectrum, in unsanctioned and often dangerous protests against British occupation (1986: 112–13, 118). However, Egyptian women were obliged to take to the streets again when the constitution of 1924 failed to mention women’s suffrage; they did not obtain the vote until 1956. The participation of women in nationalist struggle, the subordination of specifically feminist objectives, and the post-independence failure of states to accord equal gendered rights have not been limited to Egypt. On the

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sidelining of feminist agendas in the aftermath of Algerian independence, Marie-Aimée Hélie-Lucas reflects that since there was ‘no humble task in the revolution’ we did not dispute the roles we had. It would have been mean to question the priority of liberating the country, since independence would surely bring an end to discrimination against women . . . This is the real harm which comes with liberation struggles. The overall task of women during liberation is seen as symbolic. (1987: 107) As I elaborate in Chapters 2 and 3, in the process of forging a postcolonial national identity, women can be recuperated as carriers, transmitters, and boundary markers of culturally specific values. Deniz Kandiyoti suggests that the Arab world in the decolonizing period has manifested persistent tensions between the modernist trends in nationalism, which favoured an expansion of women’s citizenship rights and social equality, and the organicist, anti-modernist, strands which were concerned about the dilution and contamination of cultural values and identity in a post-colonial context. (1996: 8–9) These tensions have impacted on the way in which women’s rights and roles are constructed. In an influential intervention, Hisham Sharabi (1988) defines the postcolonial Arab world as neo-patriarchal in structure and outlook, as the effect of what he describes as an incomplete transition to modernity stalled by colonial then neo-imperial domination (with the 1967 defeat as a catalyst for decline). Haleh Afshar, echoing Mernissi, also suggests that political and economic challenges in the postcolonial era have encouraged a nostalgic turn back to an Islamic ‘golden past’ which renders the terms of gender negotiation less flexible (1993: 5). In Arab Muslim nations, a good index of women’s status is family and personal law. Until changes to the Moroccan Mûdawana in 2004, Tunisia’s Majalla was the only legislation in the Arab world specifically aimed at improving the legal, economic, and civil status of women (Tucker 1999: 116). Algeria’s infamous Family Code (Qânûn al Asra), introduced in 1984, radically rolled back women’s rights formerly enshrined in the 1962 Constitution. The issue is not by definition an opposition between feminist and Islamic values, although it can be framed as such in both the Arab Muslim world and the West. (One thinks, to cite a related context, of Western media representations in the aftermath of 9/11 of Afghan women victimized beneath the burqa  , a selective exposure that erases Afghan women’s history of resistance against a range of oppressive regimes). Leila Ahmed suggests that a secularizing and westernizing feminism articulated by the middle and

46

Historical contexts

upper classes was the dominant model in Egypt and the wider Arab world for most of the twentieth century, but that there has always been ‘an alternative voice [which] searched [for] a way to articulate female subjectivity and affirmation within a native, vernacular, Islamic discourse – typically in terms of a general social, cultural, and religious renovation’ (1992: 174–5). Even early ‘dominant’ feminism such as Shaarawi’s can be read as embedded in Islamic modernism and ijtihad, or independent enquiry (from ijtâhada, ‘to exert effort’), particularly into the sacred texts (Badran and Cooke 2004: xxxv).21 More overtly Islamic feminist discourses were articulated by Malak Hifni Nassef, a contemporary of Shaarawi’s, and by Zaynab al Ghazali, her erstwhile protégée. More recently, autocratic governments and increasing socio-economic inequalities have contributed to a renewed upsurge in popular political discourses and welfare structures grounded in Islam. As we saw in the incident in Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun cited in my introduction, Under the impact of Islamic revivalism, many women from North Africa to Southeast Asia have donned Islamic dress and sought to redefine their identity in a manner that they perceive as a more authentic accommodation of modernity to their religion and culture. Like many of their male counterparts in the Islamist movement, they constitute a newly emerging alternative elite, modern educated but more formally Islamically oriented than their mothers and grandmothers. (Esposito 1998: x) Saba Mahmood observes in Egypt, for example, a dramatic increase in attendance at mosques and in displays of religious sociability, including the widespread adoption of h . ijâb (2005: 3). As Lazreg has argued, then, it is most appropriate to address ‘the historical conditions under which religion becomes significant in the production and reproduction of gender difference and inequality’ (1994: 14, original emphasis). In Algeria, Islam was a salient feature of Algerian identity during the war of independence partly because racist citizenship laws had been propagated along religious lines. In the immediate aftermath of independence, it assumed a less political dimension and was superseded by other (primarily Marxist and developmental) discourses (Lazreg 2000: 161). However, Algerian space has subsequently been ‘recolonized’, as Lazreg (2000) puts it, by radical Islamist factions who have violently targeted unveiled women among others. In other contexts, an increased visibility of new forms of Islamic dress cannot be explained by obligation or ‘tradition’. Rather, women adapt established forms of self-presentation, using h . ijâb to enable upward mobility and ‘to negotiate in the new world while affirming the traditional values of their upbringing’ (L. Ahmed 1992: 223). It can be construed by its wearers as religious duty, fashion statement, political protest against corrupt regimes, opposition to neo-imperialism, and practical tactic. Women draw attention, for example, to its advantages as disincentive

Historical contexts

47

to sexual harassment, so ways in which it facilitates women’s movement into the public domain (Abu Odeh 1993: 29–30). These arguments do not, however, destabilize an underlying logic that defines public space as normatively male. Expressions of Islamic (post)modernity are also limited by staying within long-established terms that index women’s self-presentation to the constructed values and definition of their community (Kandiyoti 1991: 7–9). We have already observed, though, ways in which women negotiate space as embodied agents, responding to the exigencies of particular situations and helping to define the contexts in which they live. The category ‘Muslim’ continues to present challenges in terms of describing women’s literature and visual media. The texts discussed in this book mobilize a wide range of religious, secular, and political positions in their engagement with contexts that are culturally grounded in Islam. Examples cited thus far already span rejection (el Saadawi), non-practising acceptance (Soueif’s Asya), adherence (Shaarawi), and radicalism (Asya’s student). Mernissi’s historical work engages in ijtihad through extensive readings of the Qur an and Hadith, but her use of the same principle in The Harem Within (see Chapter 4), principally through a child’s focalization, is more holistic. Djebar focuses on women in the last days and aftermath of the Prophet’s death in Far from Madina, first published as Loin de Médine (1991) performing, as she makes explicit in the Overture to that text, her own ijtihad (1994: xvi). Religious faith as an identity category, nevertheless, remains barely conceptualized in postcolonial studies, particularly when we compare it to the purchase which ethnicity and nationality and modes of marginality, mobility, and hybridity have in the theoretical field (Malak 2005). Spiritual quest narratives remain critically uncharted territory for the most part22 and perspectives perceived as secular tend to be privileged in the publishing domain, although the packaging of Aboulela’s fiction presents the faith positions represented there as both novel and timely.23 My perception is that women writers and filmmakers have tended to take an oppositional stance to dominant discourses, including those associated with Islam. This is with the caveat that I am not able to draw upon Arabic material in the original, so am working within a field partly constructed by a politics of translation already discussed. Islamic feminism is, in addition, a specialized, even at times recondite field. I can only therefore make a modest effort to expand the range of perspectives normally foregrounded in Arab women’s writing, engaging Abouzeid’s ‘Year of the Elephant’ in Chapter 3, Ben Lyazid’s A Door to the Sky in Chapter 4, and Leila Aboulela’s Minaret in Chapter 5, all of which privilege a faith position, if in different ways.

2

Visibility, vision, and voice Algerian women in question (again)

This chapter explores the theme of women’s (in)visibility in conjunction with representations of resistant voices and visions in work by Fettouma Touati, Malika Mokeddem, Assia Djebar, Leïla Sebbar, and Houria Niati, women affiliated by birth or family history to Algeria. Relatively extreme constraints placed upon women’s agency in the post-independence era and selective interpretations of the historical relationship between Algeria and France have inspired a substantial amount of work that attempts to expose and reconfigure discursive and scopic modes of apprehending Algerian women both at home and abroad. However, because Algeria is also unevenly incorporated in Anglophone postcolonial studies, the erosion of postcolonial women’s status and opportunities for self-expression and an ongoing legacy of women’s resistance tend to be inadequately appreciated. I will consider Réda Bensmaïa’s depiction of Algeria as ‘a limit case that may serve as an indicator of what the future holds for the former colonized countries’ particularly, he argues, as it can be seen as ‘an analytical operator in the large ideological movements that are shaking not only the countries of the Maghreb but also the Arab-Muslim world in its totality’ (1998: 4, original emphasis). It should not be seen as a ‘typical’ postcolonial Arab Muslim setting and it should be remembered that as a result of a mass exodus of intellectuals, writers, and artists in recent decades, representations of Algeria are often produced in exile, a factor rendered transparent to varying extents by the writers, filmmaker, and artist discussed here. In an important analysis of gendered rights in the Maghrib, Mounira Charrad suggests that the Algerian anti-colonial struggle temporarily kept in check factionalism grounded in kin-based affiliations and exacerbated by an extensive colonial appropriation of land. After 1962 such latent tensions, in addition to regional and ethnic differences, deteriorating economic conditions, the difficulty in translating the FLN structure into a state organization, and the emergence of an elite class divided between secular Marxist and Islamic values, led to more than two decades of hesitation over the implementation of family law. The process of codification finally started in the early 1980s and was resisted by women’s groups and ex-militants. However, the state was by then subject to a new pressure: the rise of Islamic

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politics across the region. The Algerian Family Code passed in 1984, which sanctions a patrilineal model of the family in which men have extensive privileges and power over women,1 should be seen as a conservative solution to local and wider pressures (see Charrad 2001: ch. 8). In the aftermath of elections annulled in 1988 and the ensuing struggle for power between the FLN government and militant Islamist groups, attempts have been made to extend the implications of the Code to all aspects of civic life. Ali Ben Hadj, leader of the FIS (Front Islamique du Salut or Islamic Salvation Front), stated in 1991 that ‘the natural space of expression for women is the home . . . she produces no material goods but this essential thing which is a Muslim’. This was followed by a communiqué issued by the GIA (Groupe Islamique Armé or Armed Islamic Group)2 in 1994 stating that unveiled women in the street could be assassinated and the closure of ‘female’ places such as public baths and beauty salons enforced (Slyomovics 1995: 11). This is why Lazreg (2000) describes a recolonization of social space by Islamist factions, figured in stark terms in, for example, Yamina Bachir-Chouikh’s film Rachida (2002), which portrays a young female teacher attacked by Islamists in the city and the pervasive atmosphere of terror even in the village to which she retreats with her mother.3 Both unveiled and veiled women have been violently targeted by Islamist and counter-Islamist groups respectively (Slyomovics 1995: 11). Woodhull anticipated this situation when she argued that ‘the Arab and Muslim Algerian woman’ – whether she be Arab or Amazigh, practising Muslim or secular – has been called upon to signify national unity whilst paradoxically being inscribed with the ‘endemic instability’ of Algerian identity (1991: 114). Algeria represents a site of radical contestation over the meaning of women’s bodies, in which the stakes of transmitting oppositional perspectives have been particularly high.

Fettouma Touati, Desperate Spring Fettouma Touati’s only novel Desperate Spring, first published as Le Printemps désespéré (1984), evokes, as its title suggests, the grim aftermath of Algerian independence. Set between the 1960s and 1980s, the novel foregrounds themes of domestic abuse, social exclusion, persecution, and the resulting psychological effects suffered by three generations of women. Touati (b. 1950) moved as an infant to France before the war of independence and returned to Kabylia for several years in her twenties. The character Malika in Desperate Spring also attempts to resettle in Algeria in the 1970s but refuses to tolerate the sexist atmosphere she finds there. Desperate Spring is structured around the experiences of women related by kinship horizontally and vertically in time. The moral anchors of the text are Sekoura and Abdelkader, grandparents to a generation of women whose interweaving stories provide the narrative focus. The grandparents have suffered colonial rule, impoverishment, the departure of one son to France,

50 Visibility, vision, and voice and the death of another after murdering his wife in a psychotic state caused by torture during the war. These weighty factors notwithstanding, the grandparents are presented as ‘above [the] bitterness, futility and baseness’ that, in their view, define their contemporaries who ‘desperately clung to the ideas of our ancestors’ (Touati 1987: 26). Both grandparents support the idea of women’s education, Abdelkader on the grounds that they ‘didn’t acquire Independence solely for the men’ (25) and Sekoura because in independent Algeria there remains no legal or economic protection for a widowed or divorced woman (27). Ironically, however, the next generation of women is complicit in perpetuating traditions that make it almost impossible for their own daughters to live autonomous lives. Their daughter Djohra, for example, ‘repeat[s] patterns that were old as time’ (26), perceiving her daughters solely in terms of their marriage potential and as (untrustworthy) repositories of family honour. Djohra does eventually come to realize the merits of women’s literacy, education, and employment, but only once she accepts that her son is morally beyond redemption and incapable of providing her with financial security. The third generation of sisters and cousins, presented for the most part in their teens and twenties, are faced with highly constrained choices. In the most extreme case Fatiha, the only character to resist ‘society and its masquerades’ and to rebel openly (53), is described as ‘flayed alive’ (139) as much by the prospect of her future in Algeria as by the devastating effects of the war on her family; she eventually commits suicide. Fatma remains ‘enshrouded in principles’ and takes her chance on an arranged marriage (46), while Yasmina becomes highly educated but condemned to what she sees as the ‘idiotic life’ of permanent spinsterhood (144). In each case, the women are exposed to gossip and the threat of violence by husbands and brothers. The teenager Leïla, for example, becomes the object of entirely speculative accusations that she is pregnant and is incarcerated and beaten by her brother for whom ‘honour is at stake’ (84). Women are also portrayed as constantly ‘devoured’ by male eyes due to an enduring supposition that a girl outdoors is a ‘street-walker’ (26). Malika, upon returning to Algeria from France, reflects that A woman walking alone, or even accompanied, is bound to be the subject of conversation of those around her. Indiscreet heads turn conspicuously, they weigh her up and undress her with their eyes, assessing her, keeping up a ribald commentary. Malika realised, to her great surprise, that she had slept with the whole town, old, young, ugly, stupid, imbeciles included. (105) Ironically prostitution, as presented here, is tolerated as long as it is not publicly acknowledged, ‘practised under a veil’ as Malika puts it (106). To Malika, too, go the final thoughts of the novel:

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Today, she realised that there were millions of girls held up to ridicule in Muslim countries. In more or less the same way; with varying degrees of resentment from their mother, herself also an object of ridicule; and more or less accepted on the girl’s part . . . She found it appalling that in an age when men walked on the moon, others were exploiting, destroying and colonising the group of individuals known as the ‘weaker’ sex. (156) Depicting Islam as ‘the capitalism of the weak and the ignorant’ (156), the novel’s conclusion closes down a more nuanced approach attempted earlier, as when Yasmina muses that Kabyles are more conservative than their Arab compatriots and that men too are conditioned to confuse ‘honour and ignorance’ (93), or when Malika reflects that a woman’s independence in Europe can come at a price too. Formerly a teenage runaway dependent on the French welfare state, Malika has also been critical of her categorization in France as ‘North African’. The implications of the term are once again reduced, though, as she comes to what she describes as an ‘understanding’ of the ‘connection between her problems and the words “North African” ’ as primarily gendered (38). This rather didactic and generalizing conclusion is indicative of the limitations of this novel, in which the preponderance of the author’s implied perspective tends to obstruct the development of entirely credible characters. It remains interesting, however, in its ambitious structuring that, in an act of resistance to patriarchal scopic and discursive dominance in Algerian social space, interweaves women’s voices synchronically and diachronically. A fictional construct, the world of Desperate Spring nevertheless chimes with Charrad’s argument that postcolonial Algerian women remain locked into private and public conceptions of the female body that still define it as the symbolic repository of kin-based honour. While the mutual support and ongoing dialogue between Touati’s female characters offer some sustenance, this is ultimately revealed as inadequate. The only real solution posited is to leave for those, like Malika, who are able to.

Malika Mokeddem, The Forbidden Woman Malika Mokeddem’s third novel and the first to be translated into English, The Forbidden Woman, first published as L’Interdite (1993), also portrays the postcolonial Algerian context in highly critical terms. This novel is, however, more nuanced by an awareness of the effects of exile. Mokeddem (b. 1949), born in the southern town of Kenadsa into a large family that had only been sedentary for one generation, left Algeria to complete her medical studies in France. She has remained in Montpellier, where she ran a general medical practice in a largely immigrant neighbourhood, catering particularly to the Maghribi female community, until death threats received in 1995 forced her to close it.

52 Visibility, vision, and voice Like Touati, Mokeddem draws attention to the fact that if an Algerian woman rebels against the traditional family structure, there is no other social support network (qtd. in Marcus 1998: xii). She echoes Touati’s character Fatiha in depicting herself as ‘a woman flayed alive, but also an angry woman’ in relation to a country whose politics she rejects. She does not use Algeria’s official language in her writing, therefore, describing French as liberation from ‘tyrants and retrograde minds’ (qtd. in Marcus 2000: xxvi).4 Mokeddem has also, however, expressed guilt about leaving Algeria. She claims that ‘I write to raise my voice from the Midi [the south of France], a voice other than that put forth by the [Islamist] fanatics, and to rid myself of this feeling of failure’ (qtd. in Marcus 1998: vii). The Forbidden Woman and her subsequent Of Dreams and Assassins, first published as Des Rêves et des assassins (1995), are not exclusively works of fiction. They are also, as journalist Aïssa Khelladi has put it, littérature de témoignage (testimony) and, as Mokeddem claims unapologetically herself, ‘pamphleteer’s novel[s]’ (qtd. in Marcus 2000: xx; xix). Hence, we observe a somewhat erratic style that conjoins lyrical with more didactic passages. The Forbidden Woman is set in the early 1990s and represents the return of its protagonist, the woman doctor Sultana, from France to her village
Ayn Nakhla for the funeral of an ex-lover, Yacine. Sultana’s arrival in Algeria shatters the protective amnesia of exile that conceals the ‘past terror’ (Mokeddem 1998: 6) of her youth, the specific causes of which are not revealed until late in the novel. Her initial impressions are of the street which ‘shamelessly inflicts its masculine plurality and its feminine apartheid . . . pregnant with every frustration possible’. This scene inaugurates a litany of remembering and a desire to avenge Algerian women’s marginal social existence: I have not forgotten that the boys of my country had a sick and gangrenous childhood. I have not forgotten their clear voices that ring only with obscenities. I have not forgotten that from the youngest age, the opposite sex is already a ghost among their desires, a confusing menace . . . I have not forgotten. (7) The insult ‘Whore!’ that ‘drives Algeria into me like a knife’ also, she claims, defined her adolescence, ‘still a virgin and already wounded’ (7). The term is the discursive complement to what is described as ‘eyeballing’, a concentrated social and economical misery manifested in the need to ‘touch, palpate, pinch things like blind people do with their hands’ in order to substantiate a sense of reality (82). This form of attempted scopic mastery is, predictably, highly gendered. Daring to confront the stare of her taxi driver in the rear-view mirror, Sultana realizes that ‘he’ll hold this offense against me’ (8). Sure enough, the driver becomes one of a group of men that attempt to persecute Sultana during her stay in the village, one of the ‘different faces

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of tyranny’ that, at least at first, ‘forced [Sultana] to be blind’ to ‘normal people’ (17). The nostalgia which drives Sultana’s return is quickly stripped away, replaced by the ‘naked exile’ of radical alienation from her place of birth (66). She will eventually, however, form meaningful relationships with others in the village, including Yacine’s friend Salah. He is given some weighty lines in the text, as when he accuses Sultana of returning ‘only to prove yourself in a place and in mourning, both of which are not yours!’ (38). Salah also admits that hatred of women is the deep-rooted source of Algeria’s malaise and that erstwhile ‘revolutionary’ men are complicit in their abandonment of educated women for arranged marriages (39–40). Overcoming his initial resentment, he falls in love with Sultana, as does Vincent, a Frenchman visiting the country after receiving a kidney transplant from an Algerian woman. Vincent experiences his new organ as the assimilation of a double (gendered and cultural) métissage. He is thus allocated part of the narration of the novel although, as he admits, he cannot experience first-hand ‘the burden of these looks [of men at women], their many forms of violence, sharpened by frustration’. Such looks, in his view, make every Algerian woman’s act heroic (53). Mokeddem’s incorporation of differently implicated male perspectives represents a welcome complication of the net division between male and female characters that Touati’s earlier novel sustains. The love triangle in The Forbidden Woman drives the plot, but also serves to depict ways in which the Algerian context and our female returnee are construed from different cultural perspectives. Salah’s complicated attitude to Sultana reflects the underlying affiliation of a compatriot. Vincent’s desire for both woman and country is compromised by the metaphorical implications of his transplanted kidney, an embodiment of the economic disparity which divides France and Algeria and, more pointedly, of the kinds of historical appropriation of unnamed Algerian women’s bodies that we saw exposed in Alloula’s Colonial Harem. The transplanted kidney is one example of ways in which The Forbidden Woman deploys ambivalent tropes. If Vincent’s journey to Algeria is a quest for wholeness after the trauma of surgery, Sultana’s is a ‘flight into dispersal’ in a beleaguered land that mirrors her divided interior landscape (87). Sultana realizes that while in France she is an ‘Arab’, a word that ‘dissolves you in the grayness of a nebula’, in Algeria she is neither Algerian nor French. In both contexts, then, she ‘wear[s] a mask’ and is ‘a moving peculiarity in time, in space’. Categories of perception are, though, double-edged: while Sultana feels unrecognized in both countries, she is also always elsewhere to apprehension by the terms imposed by others. She thus claims that ‘as uncomfortable as this foreign skin can be sometimes, it’s nonetheless an invaluable source of freedom’ (112).5 In related fashion, Sultana condemns monolingual and reductive constructions of Algeria, describing the FIS as ‘an endemic disease that has burst

54 Visibility, vision, and voice from the confines of misery and confusion, and encysts in the fatality and ignorance of the country’ (109) and critiquing the chador, or black (Iranian) head and body cover, that turns women ‘into ravens or nuns’ (113). Mokeddem delineates the nation’s historically and linguistically hybrid nature through Sultana’s memories of the mellah (Jewish quarter) and a substitute Jewish mother-figure, the former now empty and the latter departed or dead, and the use of polyglot speech. Sultana is rebuked by Dalila, a child artist, for translating the latter’s term h’chouma, which Dalila uses in the middle of a French sentence, into ‘shame’. Dalila claims that because ‘real’ Algerians are ‘always mixing words’ or code-switching, Sultana, in translating (‘correcting’) the term, is acting like a ‘roumi’ (Christian/ foreigner). Dalila’s comment challenges, once again, Sultana’s reclamation of an Algerian identity, but also problematizes the glossing by footnotes that occurs in this text in the French original and English translation. The fact that the word at stake pertains to the symbolic value of a female body in kin-based social structures (again recalling Charrad) is also interesting. The implied untranslatability of the term in the sentence: ‘My mom and people say that brothers are good . . . they protect you . . . they’re a barrier against h’chouma’ (77) suggests that gendered codes are culturally specific and, perhaps, intractable. Reflecting Mokeddem’s other profession, The Forbidden Woman is replete with medical motifs. Sultana, who goes to work in the village clinic, realizes that some bodies, unlike Vincent’s, cannot be healed by surgery, notably those of women suffering from koulchites, psychosomatic illnesses linked variously to incest, early marriage, abuse, excessive childbearing, and infertility. She reflects that Such profound and complicated koulchites . . . would necessitate that the needle search in the blood and inject directly the antidote for the ‘stain’. Their eyes, where I can see that the drama has settled forever, tell me that mine would be a superfluous gesture. (107) Here Mokeddem, through the unusual and highlighted choice of the term ‘stain’, implies
awra. This suggests that women’s traumas are the result of excessive demands placed on female bodies that are neither officially acknowledged nor should be spoken. Sultana bears her own trauma that manifests itself in a trance-like state: she is temporarily aphasic and her eyes become ‘frighteningly and incredibly empty’ (128). The repressed memory at stake is that of her father beating her mother to death, then deserting the family (130–1), an event which produced a splitting of Sultana’s identity into a ‘nomad’ and a ‘dead girl’ (87–8). However, Sultana eventually realizes that her past is in fact a path into the country, a ‘link . . . to all those women who are tyrannized’. Their suffering reopens her wounds, thus forging ‘the strongest bond between humans’ across disparities in education, language,

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and mobility (133). She even learns to recognize the hostility of her male compatriots as a product of ‘the abyss of their sadness, their wounded looks’, enabling her to ‘give reality to their flesh again, to approach them in their totality, neither entirely good nor completely bad’ (132). The epiphany of the novel occurs when a group of women from her mother’s clan visit her at the clinic. Their recognition of Sultana and their recollections of her mother, whom Sultana barely remembers, enable the protagonist to reconcile, to some degree, with her past. She learns also that these women are engaged in covert acts of resistance against the FIS. One denounces them as ‘heretics’, but similarly pours scorn on the FLN that has failed to ensure democratic freedom: ‘I’m a former resistance fighter speaking to you. A woman who doesn’t understand by what perversion our country’s independence deprived us of our dignity and our rights, when we fought for it’ (141). The women behind her form ‘a wall of silence, cemented together in unity’ and ‘beautiful in their fury’ (142). Ultimately, however, Sultana can claim no easy solidarity with these powerful women: due to a disparity in experience and education, the ‘expressions of [the women’s] eyes can’t be put into words’ by her and, to them, she ‘speak[s] like a book’ (148). Aware of the difficulties in reversing the effects of departure from Algeria and particularly unwilling to renounce the sexual freedom that she identifies with France, Sultana departs. Mokeddem, who has said that she became a writer due to the need to ‘return’ to her past in Algeria (qtd. in Marcus 2000: xiii), projects her ambivalent desire for the country and resulting interstitial identity on to this character. By extension she recognizes, as does Sultana, an obligation to transmit the lived experience of women in postcolonial Algeria and to emphasize their resilience, but a concurrent limit to the translatability of such realities.

Assia Djebar: from Children of the New World to A Sister to Scheherazade Djebar (b. 1936), historian, writer, and filmmaker, has produced the most sustained creative interrogation of Algerian women’s status and experiences, within a wider arc of historiographical and autobiographical metafiction focusing on Arab Muslim women. Djebar was educated first in colonial Algeria, then in France. She subsequently wrote for the FLN newspaper El Mûdjâhid in Tunis when Fanon was its editor. Born Fatima Zohra Imalayen, she chose her nom de plume on publication of La Soif, which foregrounds the search for female erotic fulfilment. In an (unsuccessful) attempt to avoid identification by her family, she did not use her father’s Amazigh name, instead choosing one of the ninety-nine ritual modes of address to Allah in Arabic, djebbar ‘the intransigent’, but transcribing it incorrectly (Zimra 1999: 160). This is striking, not only because it signals Djebar as a writer most at ease in French, but given the consistent focus in her work on resuscitating traces of suppressed language in an Algerian context that is officially

56 Visibility, vision, and voice Arabophone, Islamic, and patrilineal. Retrospectively, however, she makes a claim that is more in keeping with her literary style and politics, saying that ‘I like the idea of this letter [b], silently hiding between two languages and two cultures’ (qtd. in Zimra 1999: 186).6 After her fourth novel Les Alouettes naïves (1967), Djebar stopped writing for over a decade, with the exception of the collection Poèmes pour l’Algérie heureuse (1969). This is an oft-remarked hiatus which she herself has described as ‘a period of profound self-questioning’ and an attempt at reconnecting with her maternal roots (qtd. in Hillauer 2005: 303) that is perhaps most evident in her first film, discussed shortly. Djebar went into self-elected exile during the civil war period and now divides her time between Europe and North America. She describes herself as ‘a woman with a French education and an Algerian or Arabo-Berber, or even Muslim sensibility’, as such identifying Islam as culture as well as religion (1999b: 26, my translation). The statement also indicates a complex affiliation that informs a high degree of self-reflexivity in her work, particularly as pertains to language choice, use of genre, and deployment of the personal pronoun. Djebar’s creative archaeology of petits récits is evident from Children of the New World. Originally published in the year of Algerian independence as Les Enfants du nouveau monde, the novel recreates a single day in the final stage of the war of decolonization and is set in a small town modelled on Blida. Overshadowed by a mountain on which the resistance movement fights the French and punctuated by the drone of military aircraft overhead, the novel opens from the point of view of ‘the homes that people still think of as unseeing’ which ‘gape at the war, which is masked as a gigantic game etched out in space’ (Djebar 2005: 1). Within a still-restricted chronotope, the author then evokes a myriad of perspectives, instantiating a contrapuntal technique that has become a hallmark of her work and thereby, as Zimra suggests, also ‘posing questions on the future of a nation in the making’ (Zimra 2005: 204). The plot unfolds via three trajectories across town: a young female revolutionary arrives in and traverses the town on her way to join the maquis; a young man follows and murders his sister Touma for collaborating with the French army; and the normally ‘sequestered’ (Djebar 2005: 4) Cherifa crosses public space in order to warn her nationalist husband of a plot by neighbours to denounce him to the authorities. The middle-class heroine critiqued in Djebar’s early work is decentred: Lila, Cherifa’s sister-in-law, is a neurotic character without purpose once her husband leaves to join the struggle. Moreover, the novel problematizes an easy contrast between emancipated and ‘traditional’ women. Cherifa might be confined in the eyes of ‘the omnipotent [colonial] master outside’, but her husband portrays her as ‘freed’ (4) from an earlier marriage to a man whom she did not love or desire, and so deserted. This assertion of independence contextualizes her departure from the house in a decision ‘for the first time . . . to act’ (84, original emphasis). Normally ‘a person at ease with the

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semi-darkness’, Cherifa intuits, in a clear echo of Fanonian existentialism, that she must ‘create a new step, a new approach – a different way of seeing, being seen; of existing’ (84). Because onlookers can easily identify her age (by her slim ankles) and socio-economic status (by her silk veil), her heart ‘beats in haste and shame and she stares at the end of the street as if it were her salvation’ (86). But she finds, alerts, and saves her husband. Djebar’s choice of the name Cherifa, which recurs in other parts of her corpus and means ‘honourable’ with overtones of ‘chaste’, is noteworthy. This Cherifa manifests both meanings of the term while being associated with dynamic agency, in her private life and contribution to the nationalist cause. Cherifa’s existential epiphany also signals Djebar’s sensitivity towards located and contingent tactics of resistance. In ‘Forbidden Gaze, Severed Sound’, the ‘Postface’ to her short story collection Women of Algiers in their Apartment (first published as Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, in 1979), the author implicitly revisits the scene just discussed but relocates it in the aftermath of independence. She again considers the emancipatory potential of corporeal concealment, suggesting that women in public space expose masculine impotence: Since the veil completely covers the body and its extremities, it allows the one who wears it and who circulates outside underneath its cover, to be in turn a potential thief within the masculine space. She appears there above all as a fugitive outline . . . Thus, there is another eye there, the female gaze . . . the feminine eye, when it moves around is now, it seems, feared by the men immobilized in the Moorish cafés of today’s medinas, while the white phantom, unreal but enigmatic, passes through. (Djebar 1999a: 138) Reminiscent of the camera-like, veiled eye in Alloula’s The Colonial Harem, Djebar’s depiction reverses what she sees as a culturally specific structure of scopic mastery, in which typically ‘the eye of the dominator first seeks out the other’s eye, the eye of the dominated, before it takes possession of the body’, thus linking the eye metonymically with ‘the other eyes of the body (breasts, sex, navel)’ (139). In this rendition, the passively observing male is emasculated by the circulating woman who represents a ‘blind spot’ or ‘space-off . . . in the chinks and cracks of the power-knowledge apparati’ (de Lauretis 1987: 25). Reminiscent of the revolutionary fidaîa as presented by Fanon and Pontecorvo, she is a threat because men do not know what her presence means or what she sees. What is more, her single eye signals potential further exposure which is, at bottom, feared by her male compatriots: ‘As if all of a sudden the whole body were to begin to look around, to “defy”, or so men translate it’ (Djebar 1999a: 139). The insight, reminiscent of Mernissi’s fitna, is, of course, double-edged: what visual and mobile, and by extension vocal and sexual, agency women possess is the cause of their pre-emptive social marginalization. A similar ambivalence underpins

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Djebar’s representation of a woman in labour who, in exposing only her genital area, is ‘completely veiled and at the same time delivered naked’. Djebar suggests that women must be made into mothers, in order ‘that the eye-that-is-sex, the one who has given birth, is no longer a threat. Only the birthing mother has the right to look’ (142). She suggests, also, that cultural conceptions of the female body tend to be internalized; echoing Fanon, she describes an unveiled body that ‘moves forward out of the house and is, for the first time, felt as being “exposed” to every look: the gait becomes stiff, the step hasty, the facial expression tightens’ (139). Because the agonistic scene is an entirely Algerian one now, Djebar’s representation of the (un)veiled Algerian female body almost cancels out the accretion of symbolic value adumbrated in Fanon’s ‘Algeria Unveiled’. While ‘Forbidden Gaze’ flags up historical role models such as Messaouda, who challenged a tribal enemy in 1839, and the women warriors of the independence struggle, it proposes a dominant genealogy of invisibility and silence. In a lengthy – and remarkably generalizing – soliloquy upon what she sees as a transnational ‘Moslem’ and ‘Arabic [sic]’ principle, Djebar argues that the concealed female body, arbiter of family honour and shame, cannot utter acquiescence or refusal to marriage but, residing in a ‘world of autism’ (148), requires a male intermediary to speak in its place. A woman’s word is thus ‘deflowered, violated, before the other deflowering, the other violation intervenes’ (145). The ‘orientalizing look’ only exacerbated a ‘spatial tightening’ in which the family closes in protectively around a woman’s body as the fundamental sign of group integrity (146). Djebar surmises, ventriloquizing an Algerian male voice: ‘If only one could force that single [female] spectator body that remains, encircle it more and more tightly in order to forget the defeat!’ (141). The colonial dialectic is here internalized and inverted, so that relationships between men and women are cast as distorted historical effects that women struggle, with limited success, to transform. Djebar is ultimately pessimistic about the relative ‘freedom’ of postcolonial Algerian women who can legitimately uncover only one eye. Even ‘that liberated eye, which could become the sign of a conquest towards the light shared by other people, outside of the enclosure, is now in turn perceived as a threat; and the vicious circle closes itself back up again’ (138). Given this situation, she is emphatic that, when speaking of the Algerian war, she has ‘never used the term revolution, even at the time when it was flooding and drowning every discourse, public or private’ (qtd. in Zimra 1999: 178, original emphasis). While the Women of Algiers collection was conceived as ‘a world without men’ (Djebar qtd. in Zimra 1999: 176), it does contain male characters. Some are sympathetic but ineffectual, but all are portrayed as implicated in the post-independence erosion of women’s rights. The eponymous story opens with Ali’s dream of his wife Sarah, who is blindfolded (perhaps veiled) with a white bandage: ‘the left half [of her face] streaming wet all over in the silence, rather in the severed sound, the gasps stuck in her throat like a

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fishbone’ (Djebar 1999a: 5). The passage is oneiric and filmic in its conception and, by adding the dimension of severed, then reconnected sound, enables a temporal and spatial expansion of context. The dream thus links the torture of Algerians (including women) by the colonial army to the ritual sacrifice of
Eîd: Sarah is conflated with ‘a white goat with a neck stretched out’ as ‘[t]he motor begins to run dangerously, the “gene” – generator – is wired, place of torture’ (6). Ali, a surgeon by profession, is ambiguously located in this dream which implies that women are, transhistorically, sacrificial victims in transactions between men.7 Ali’s identification with his wife is foreclosed. He is unable to prevent her sacrifice in the dream and, upon awakening, becomes ‘the man’ grumbling in the background as Sarah prioritizes the personal crisis of her French friend Anne (7), thus reversing the typical narrative of the white feminist saving ‘the third world woman’ (Djebar qtd. in Zimra 1999: 177). Sarah later visits Leïla, a heroin addict, who recalls her torture at the hands of the French and asks rhetorically: ‘Where are you, you fire carriers [fidayât], you my sisters, who should have liberated the city . . . Barbed wire no longer obstructs the alleys, now it decorates windows, balconies, anything at all that opens onto an outside space’ (Djebar 1999a: 44). Sarah can only mirror Leïla’s words with her body, which bears its own ‘blue scar that started above one of her breasts and stretched down to her abdomen’. The moment of mutual revelation provides an interpersonal epiphany expressed in an initially maternal but increasingly erotic embrace: [Sarah] would have liked to start licking that face and so weep over her, crush her emaciated body with warm vehemence, that body with its hunched shoulders, those scrawny arms, those childlike wrists, that head all angular and corpselike . . . Sarah felt a purely sensual rush. (45) Because Sarah suffers from an aphasia that began when she learnt of her mother’s death, the story appears to promote bonding, specifically through physical contact and the mutual recognition of similar embodied experience, between women of the same generation as an alternative to mother–daughter relations. However, Djebar also seeks traces of presence, desire, and voice along a matrilineal chain defined by violent interruption. ‘Forbidden Gaze’ opens with a re-reading of the two versions of Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in their Apartment. Djebar suggests that the second (1849) painting (see Plate 2.1)8 brings out the latent meaning of the original, foregrounding the women in a claustrophobic space and the shadow at the back of the room which harbours ‘an invisible, omnipresent threat’ (136). She re-creates Delacroix’s memory of advancing down ‘that “dark hallway” at the end of which, in a space without exit, the hieratic prisoners of the secret keep to themselves’ (137). In this sexually charged encounter, the artist uncovers

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Plate 2.1 Eugène Delacroix, The Women of Algiers in their Harem (1847–49).

something that he is not able to interpret: ‘[t]he distant and familiar dream in the faraway eyes of the three Algerian women’. This, if we make an attempt to grasp its nature, makes us in turn dream of sensuality: a nostalgia or vague softness, triggered by their so obvious absence. As if behind those bodies, and before the servant lets the curtain fall once more, a universe is displayed in which they might still live continuously, before they take their pose in front of us, who look on. (137) Djebar here testifies to a female past that was penetrated but not possessed by Delacroix. It is worth considering a comment made by Lisa Lowe: the harem is not merely an orientalist voyeur’s fantasy of imagined female sexuality; it is also a possibility of an erotic universe in which there are no men, a site of social and sexual practices that are not organized around the phallus or a central male authority. (1991: 48) Djebar has said, indeed, ‘that [w]hen I think of the female body, I do not see it as a procreating body but as an erotic body’, although she claims that in

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Women of Algiers she was predominantly interested in the relationship between embodiment, voice, and language (qtd. in Zimra 1999: 177). Djebar’s (and Lowe’s) reinvestment of ‘the harem’ with homoerotic potential might still come as a surprise given its longevity as stereotype. However, the Algerian author’s return to the Delacroix painting aims primarily to reactivate the ‘severed sound’ of the women’s dialogue frozen there and to consider its echoes through history. This scene is also deliberately chosen because it reactivates the kind of gaze elaborated in Chapter 1, ‘a stolen one because it was the stranger’s, the one from outside the harem and outside the city’. Djebar suggests that Delacroix’s painting ‘unconsciously fascinates us’ because ‘by placing us in the position of onlookers in front of these women, it reminds us that ordinarily we have no right to be there’ (Djebar 1999a: 138). The point is to demonstrate awareness of her own ambivalent location as a highly educated Francophone woman looking back historically: she therefore eschews an easy identification by way of shared nationality with the women in the painting. While she knowingly partakes of ‘the instant of unveiling’ from the position of ‘the thief, the spy, the voyeur’, however, her perspective as a woman is still privileged over Delacroix’s ‘stolen glance’ and ‘slight touch’ (137). Pablo Picasso’s Women of Algiers series is read more favourably. The final painting in his series (1955) juxtaposes a monumental figure ‘like a rock of inner power’ with an ‘improvised bursting out into an open space’ (149). Interior and exterior are indistinguishable, light and colour predominate, and there is a mirror instead of a hyper-veiled space in the background. Djebar interprets the predominant nudity of Picasso’s women and the fracturing of their body parts as denotative, ‘recovering the truth of the vernacular language that, in Arabic, designates the “unveiled” as “denuded” women’, and connotative: ‘denuding [is] not only . . . a sign of an “emancipation”, but rather of these women’s rebirth to their own bodies’ in the build-up to the war of independence (149–50). Two of the 1955 drawings (23 January and 7 February) do suggest a spontaneous eruption of female voluptuousness, presided over by a stalwart matriarch who looks directly at the viewer. We sense a transformation, from one generation to another, of women’s relationship to their bodies, which evokes the (temporary) expansion in viable gender roles that accompanied the struggle for national independence. But the bodies tend to be contorted, either in desire or pain, and the juxtaposition of these explicit scenes with the staged absence of a (male) spectator makes for an uncomfortable viewing experience that Djebar fails to remark upon. Woodhull similarly argues that here ‘the genius of the masters [still] holds sway over women’s gaze and directs their future efforts to free themselves’ (1993: 116). Djebar’s film La Nouba des femmes de Mont Chenoua / The Nouba of the Women of Mont Chenoua (1978) refutes the wider applicability of such an argument to her work.9 A nouba is a dance of Andalusian origin with six parts of varying speed and style, in which different performers take it in

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turns to come forward.10 The tenor of the songs which open and close the film suggests that the nouba can be a call for freedom, testimony, lament, or celebration. The film functions loosely as a quest, in which the fictional (but semi-autobiographical)11 protagonist Lila returns to her mother’s community and the sites of her childhood (Tipaza and Cherchell) and talks to women about their experiences in the Algerian war. It encompasses flashbacks, fantasies, dreams, and repeated scenes, combining a fictional diegesis with documentary footage and re-enactments of historical events. It is also polyphonous, with Lila’s narration weaving in and out of commentary by other women and a narrator who is very close to but distinct from Lila. The dialogue and voice-overs are all in Algerian Arabic in the English version (in the French version, the voice-over is in French). Voices and languages are often superimposed, so that the narrator’s voice sometimes partially conceals that of other speakers. Subtitles add a further layer of mediation. The camera moves between Lila, other women, and the enigmatic figure of Lila’s disabled husband, Ali. In So Vast the Prison (Vaste est la prison, 1995), a section of which reflects on the making of The Nouba, the narrator Isma, the filmmaker, explains that the pre-eminent ‘image-symbol’ driving her attempt to engage with (other) Algerian women is, as it was for the French colonists, a ‘female body completely veiled in white cloth’. However, this strange slit that the tourists photograph because they think it is picturesque to have a little black triangle where the eye should be, this miniature gaze will henceforth be my camera. All of us from the world of the shadow women, reversing the process: We are the ones finally who are looking, who are beginning. (Djebar 2001: 180) Djebar thus echoes Alloula’s Colonial Harem, but invests his insight about the veiled gaze with the potential to transmit other narratives. The use of experimental mood music and the intercut frozen and narrative pseudodocumentary scenes are also reminiscent of Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers. Khanna argues though, that if The Battle of Algiers was a classic of ‘third cinema’, The Nouba should be classified as ‘fourth cinema’ that questions the value of documentary style and tenders women as outside existing modes of representation (1998: 25, 19). As Bensmaïa puts it, Djebar’s film ‘proceeds through a succession of delocalized, denarrativized, and/or detemporalized images which are not summed up by any overarching signifier’ or final synthesis (1996: 877). The interplay between image and sound tracks is regulated by juxtaposition rather than synchronization (Armes 2005: 121), it is not always clear where or when the action takes place and voices are not always attached to visual anchors. I agree with Bensmaïa that the point is to evoke a fragmentary, emergent, previously silent, and unseen

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world of women, through the use of a feminine chronotope ‘lightly limned as a tentative outline’ (1996: 878). In So Vast the Prison, the film is described by the author-proxy as seeking to move beyond the husband’s ‘devouring gaze’ that casts the woman as shadow or ‘pretext for anecdotes’, determining a ‘path of alienation for the woman’ (2001: 305). Lila in the film dreams of building transparent houses made of glass filled with unveiled women, but comments that ‘veiled or unveiled it’s all the same, we’re constantly watched’.12 The camera must struggle with this problematic too. While at times it lingers on women in the h . aîk with one or two eyes uncovered, some of the women are interviewed off-screen or with their faces turned away. Lengthy reverse shots denote Lila’s engagement with others without containing them as ethnographic objects of the camera. Lila herself challenges the gaze from the outset, turning her back to the camera and her husband and repeating ‘I speak. I speak. I speak. I don’t want anyone to see me . . . I don’t want anyone to see me as I really am’.13 Ali’s and our own gazes are thus solicited and structurally collocated, but forced to acknowledge their circumscription. Ali, for the large part silent, observes his wife with a mixture of desire, curiosity, and protectiveness. His paralysis and ‘impotence’ (Djebar 2001: 178) is the result not of the war, but of falling beneath a horse while courting Lila on her balcony, a pre-emptive debunking, perhaps, of the virile fantasia central to a later Djebarian text. By contrast, Lila circulates in her car and women are shown outdoors as much as they are in, despite the film moving at one point to the market, ‘the world of men’. Women are most clearly associated with interior space in a re-enactment of a revolt against the French in 1871, in which men went to war while women and children sheltered in caves.14 The leitmotif of The Nouba is a repeated scene in which a girl descends from a tree to recover her brother’s body, shot by the French army, in a ditch. The film more widely cites mothers, daughters and sisters who gave shelter and food to the mûdjâhidîn, carried arms up to the rebels in the mountains, joined the struggle, and were imprisoned (as was Lila), tortured, and murdered (as is the case of Zouleikha, killed by the French in 1959).15 Djebar calls for a more adequate mourning for the unsung heroes of the war, emphasizing women as witnesses and survivors, and as the backbone of the struggle and the social and economic fabric of the country (women are repeatedly shown working and carrying loads). The name of Lila’s grandmother’s tribe is aptly ‘the Revolution’. The narrator of The Nouba, structurally linked with Lila and Djebar, defines her position not as a ‘seeker’, but as a ‘listener’ to ‘the sound of broken memory’ and warns that ‘We must stay awake / Keep watch for fear that the nightmare may return / Say nothing, let others speak’. A feminist archaeology of traces is inaugurated, beginning with the untranslated whispers of women in the Cave of Djahra and continued through flashback scenes in which Lila’s grandmother tells stories of her tribal legacy

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Plate 2.2 The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua (1978), dir. Assia Djebar.

(Plate 2.2). The final song of the film is a eulogy to women who ‘speak of freedom and save others from oppression’, including those of her grandmother’s generation: ‘in a silent Algeria, old women whispering by night . . . history revisited by the fireside, in broken words and voices seeking one another’. The song asserts that the daughters of Mount Chenoua ‘shall never return to the shadows’, critiques the continued veiling of women now that ‘the sun of freedom has risen’, and calls for a return from external and internal exile. Similarly, in the ‘Overture’ to Women of Algiers, Djebar’s narrator-proxy promises to listen in and ‘craft words out of so many tones of voice still suspended in the silences of yesterday’s seraglio’ (1999a: 1). She aims for ‘a restoration of the conversation between women, the very one that Delacroix froze in his painting’ (151). We observe here a transnational claim to a repository of ‘Arabic sounds – Iranian, Afghan, Berber, or Bengali . . . but always in feminine tones’ equated with what Djebar terms ‘the veiled body’ (1). Part of the project is to resuscitate and transmit women’s oral narratives and related forms, although Djebar’s work is also ‘an attempt to bring . . . the qalam [pen/pencil]’ to the female ‘hand of mutilation and memory’ (Djebar 1985: 226). Interlocution is not a straightforward task, however. In a parabastic address, the narrator of the ‘Overture’ to Women of Algiers warns: Don’t claim to ‘speak for’ or, worse, to ‘speak on’, barely speaking next to, and if possible very close to: these are the first of the solidarities to be

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taken on by the few Arabic [sic] women who obtain or acquire freedom of movement, of body and of mind. (Djebar 1999a: 2, original emphasis) At times, Djebar proposes a permeable membrane between narrating subject and historical others. For example, Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, originally published as L’Amour, la fantasia (1985), presents the story (amongst many others) of a Saint-Simonian suffragist, Pauline Rolland, who was deported from France to Algeria. The semi-autobiographical narrator claims that ‘I met this woman on the terrain of her writings: she and I are now clasped in each other’s arms, our roots entwined in the rich soil of the French vocabulary’ (1985: 223).16 By contrast Sarah, in ‘Women of Algiers’, avoids explaining how she received her scars in front of Anne because, unlike fellow fidaîa Leïla, the Frenchwoman ‘knew nothing about the city during the period of fire and murders just past [the 1954–62 war]’ (Djebar 1999a: 34). However, Sarah rescinds her original stance, stating to Anne that ‘I see no other way out for us except through an encounter like this: a woman speaking in front of another one who’s watching . . . She who watches, is it by means of listening, of listening and remembering that she ends up seeing herself, with her own eyes, unveiled at last . . . [?]’ (47) Sarah’s use of the collective pronoun and evocation of a democratic space in which women might share looks, memories, and speech suggests that she hails Anne as witness to Algerian women’s history, but also that the Frenchwoman could translate the encounter into a reflection on her own identity. This is particularly reminiscent of the productive, if difficult, encounter between Ferdaus and her interlocutor/translator that I discussed in my introduction (the translation of which, of course, Djebar was involved in just after publication of Women of Algiers). Djebar has described filming as a way of ‘apprehending words in space and letting them emerge’ (1999b: 100, my translation). Post-Nouba, she positioned herself, echoing her character Sarah, ‘neither as an outside observer, nor as an Algerian woman, nor as a colonized being. I defined myself as a gaze, a way of looking upon my very own space’ (qtd in Zimra 1999: 173, original emphasis). Combining these insights, she has explained that a voice inspires memory through the mediating influence of an image (ctd. in Donadey 2001: 56–7). Her own position, in hearing and attempting to transmit these voice-images in French, is a split space. The narrator of the ‘Overture’ moves between first- and third-person plural pronouns and defines the stories (histoire) to come as reinterpreted and invented, ‘a listening in’ and ‘a new abstraction’ of the subaltern archives (1). However, the stories in the Women of Algiers collection, narrated largely in the third person, do

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not so obviously demonstrate this technique as does her next book, the magisterial Fantasia. This trans-generic text intertwines autobiography with recreated historical narratives, sustaining a contrapuntal structure until the third section, when translated women’s narratives (from interviews garnered during the making of The Nouba) merge with the ‘I’ of the unnamed, but clearly semi-autobiographical narrator.17 In Fantasia, as Spivak has argued, Djebar translates a ‘divided field of identity’ as part of ‘a meditation on the possibility that to achieve autobiography in the double bind of the practice of the conqueror’s writing is to learn to be taken seriously by the gendered subaltern who has not mastered that practice’ (1992: 771, 770–1). In part three, the narrator claims that ‘I try myself out, as ephemeral teller’ in front of the ex-mûdjâhida Zohra (Djebar 1985: 167). Djebar’s self-staging here is, I agree, as a feminist-indecolonization under the sign of
a(n) (l)earned perspective, not an autobiographical identity (Spivak 1992: 771). Her ‘I’ is at once subject and object of this text and strives for a relational rather than individualistic, bordered subjectivity. Moreover, Djebar repeatedly evokes ambivalent authority through the use of mise-en-abyme. Aware of her position as interlocutor between other Algerian women and a Francophone/Anglophone audience, she highlights ‘the artificiality of the imaginary compact and calls into question the very conditions of its own production’ (Zimra 1999: 209). Fantasia begins with a re-creation of the French landing in Algiers in 1830. From the perspective of the first officer of the Ville de Marseille, the ‘Impregnable City confronts them with its many invisible eyes . . . the dazzling white panorama freezes before them in its disturbing proximity’. He ‘gazes at the city which returns his gaze’ but writes of the scene ‘dispassionately, objectively’. A narrator approximate to the author then intervenes in the first person, strategically ‘using his language’ (1985: 7). Through the use of what Gérard Genette has termed narrative transfocalization (transfocalisation narrative) (1982: 285), Djebar cites a feminized Algeria as projection of colonial desire: As the majestic fleet rends the horizon the Impregnable City sheds her veils and emerges, a wraith-like apparition, through the blue-grey haze. A distant triangle aslant, glinting in the last shreds of nocturnal mist and then settling softly, like a figure sprawling on a carpet of muted greens. (1985: 6) The narrator then inscribes female perspectives occluded from the historical archives:18 I can imagine [the Dey] Hussein’s wife neglecting her dawn prayer to climb up too on to the terrace. How many other women, who normally only retreated to their terraces at the end of the day, must also have gathered there to catch a glimpse of the dazzling French fleet?

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Fantasia goes on to trace an arabesque of intertwined passion and violence. The French fleet and the Algerian city are ‘blinded by mutual love at first sight’, a mutual dependency that will be ‘prelude to the cavalcade of screams and carnage which will fill the ensuing decades’ (8). In the opening chapter, the narrator ‘slip[s] into the antechamber’ of the past ‘like an importunate visitor, removing my sandals . . . holding my breath in an attempt to overhear everything’ (8). Her mastery of the colonial language has enabled a permanent emancipation from domestic space; as a child, she was allowed to unveil because she ‘read’ (studied) (179–80). But the narrator remains ‘veiled’ by conventions that define women’s embodiment and censor their private speech; love letters received in French, for example, are described as ‘a dagger threatening me’ (126). Her body still bears the inherited traces of cultural injunctions to feminine modesty reinforced by the ‘matriarchs’ of her extended family. Less-than-tangible veils operate, particularly when the desiring eyes of an outsider enter the frame: ‘Should a man venture to describe my eyes, my laughter or my hands, should I hear him speak of me in this way, I risked losing my composure; then I immediately felt I had to shut him out’. The narrator ‘discovered that I too was veiled . . . Although I had a body just like that of a Western girl, I had thought it to be invisible . . . I suffered because this illusion did not turn out to be shared’ (126). Djebar here evokes deep cultural structures but also realizes that unveiling makes her narrator vulnerable to desire in a different but still objectifying visual economy. In claiming a dual cultural location, the narrator cannot predict or control the way in which her body signifies, whether veiled or unveiled. This ambivalent empowerment conjoined to vision and visibility is explicitly linked to language. If the French language ‘had eyes, and lent them me to see into liberty’, as if it ‘blinded the peeping-toms of my clan and, at this price, I could move freely, run headlong down every street, annex the outdoors for my cloistered companions, for the matriarchs of my family who endured a living death’, it simultaneously exposes her to ‘a public unveiling in front of sniggering onlookers’ (181), implicitly on either side of the Mediterranean. Writing autobiographically in French thus represents a paradoxical and doubled risk. The narrator queries: How could a woman speak aloud, even in Arabic, unless on the threshold of extreme age? How could she say ‘I’, since that would be to scorn the blanket-formulae which ensure that each individual journeys through life in a collective resignation? (156) French to some extent ‘veils’ the narrator and the women whom she represents. However, like the legendary Tunic of Nessus with which she compares it, this veil is deadly. To use it is

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Visibility, vision, and voice to lend oneself to the vivisector’s scalpel, revealing what lies beneath the skin. The flesh flakes off and with it, seemingly, the last shreds of the unwritten language of my childhood. Wounds are reopened, veins weep, one’s own blood flows and that of others, which has never dried . . . [T]his stripping naked, when expressed in the language of the former conqueror . . . takes us back oddly enough to the plundering of the preceding century. (156–7)

Djebar’s work should be read as ‘a painful expression of the division, the dismantling, and the despair of [Algeria] with which the author identifies not only her life but also her practice as a writer’ (Gafaïti 1996: 815). As Gafaïti observes, her work ‘is illuminated by the principle that the story [histoire] of the subject is a text inscribed in the wider field of history [Histoire] . . . the “I” is not only personal but collective’ (1991: 96–7). Reinscribing her Algerian body as historical battleground, as veiled, denuded, emancipated, and excoriated by a legacy of colonial domination which also produced her as a member of the Francophone elite, Djebar assumes her split position. Hence the leitmotif of Fantasia, the untranslatable ‘l’amour, ses cris (s’écrit)’ (Djebar 1985: 214), that implies a cry of passion and pain that cannot not write itself. Drawing on the colonial, Orientalist, and Algerian archives, the narrator of Fantasia ‘wait[s] amidst the scattered sheaf of sounds’ (227) and ‘intervene[s], with nomad memory and intermittent voice’ (226) to re-create the histories of Algerian women whose bodies function as traces. As Spivak argues, autobiography here is also the ‘the possibility of writing or giving writing to the other, identifiable only as a mutilated metonym of violence’ (1992: 772). This violence is not only produced in the colonial encounter, but reproduced in a patriarchal postcolonial context. As such, l’amour, ses cris reflects the oxymoron which structures the original title of the novel – bringing together love (l’amour) and violence (the fantasia, a ritual on horseback announcing or celebrating war) – and prefigures the final ‘death cry’ in which an Algerian man, during a fantasia, unwittingly kills his lover. This, for the narrator, is an ‘inevitable moment’ with wider significance: she claims that ‘the mare’s hoof will [always] strike down any woman who dares to stand up freely’ (Djebar 1985: 227). The work discussed thus far provides clues as to how to read Djebar’s subsequent and controversial novel A Sister to Scheherazade, originally published as Ombre sultane (1987). More fictional than its immediate predecessor, A Sister to Scheherazade interweaves the stories of Isma and Hajila, both from Isma’s perspective, the former narrated in the first person, the second in the familiar second person (‘tu’ in the original). Isma meets Hajila in the local h . ammâm and sets her up as co-wife in order to secure her own escape from a debilitating marriage. After the wedding, Isma silently encourages Hajila to leave the house and then to ‘go out naked’ (unveiled)

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(Djebar 1987: 32). In an imaginary dialogue, Isma says to her co-wife: ‘You tuck the haïk under your arm; you walk on. You are surprised to find yourself walking so easily, at one fell swoop, out into the real world!’ (31). This passage echoes Fanon’s depiction of the ‘authentic’ unveiled body in public space, but Djebar complicates an equation between visibility and agency: Hajila, unveiled, loses the power of speech (42). Most importantly, Isma’s intervention exposes her lower-class counterpart to violence: the husband, in a drunken rage at Hajila’s ‘naked’ walks, threatens to put out her eyes with a broken bottle. This outcome is mirrored in So Vast the Prison in which the narrator of the first section is accused by her husband of adultery and accosted in the same manner. While this suggests that women from a range of socio-economic backgrounds are vulnerable to male violence, Isma is ambivalently located across the texts as both perpetrator and victim. (To complicate matters, the women in the two texts are not necessarily the same character. The character in question in So Vast the Prison is not unequivocally ‘I, Isma, the narrator’ finally named more than halfway through the book [Djebar 2001: 234] and Isma, which means ‘name’, is a self-reflexive appellation and auto-fictional ruse. The argument I am making here holds, nevertheless.) Djebar introduces the protagonists of A Sister to Scheherazade by means of a visual riddle captured in the original title Ombre sultane or ‘The Sultana’s Shadow’: A shadow and a sultan’s bride; a shadow behind the sultan’s bride. Two women: two wives: Hajila and Isma . . . Isma, Hajila: an arabesque of intertwining names. Which of the two is the shadow who will become the sultan’s bride? Which one is to be the bride at dawn, only to dissolve into a shadow before noon? (Djebar 1987: 1) The English title underlines Djebar’s retrieval of Dinarzad, sister of the famous Shahrazad, from her usual occlusion in the literary archives: ‘her voice under the bed coaxes the story-teller up above, to find unfailing inspiration for her tales, and so keep at bay the nightmares that daybreak would bring’ (95). Because Isma frames Hajila’s story, she can be seen to take Shahrazad’s role in ‘haphazardly weaving a story to free [Hajila]’ (139), the other woman, or, alternatively, she assumes Dinarzad’s place, installing herself as a precaution under the patriarch’s bed. The Sultana is thus the doubled, mirrored figure of Isma/Hajila, interchangeably cast as Shahrazad/ Dinarzad, but the subject of the tales told rather than merely of the frame narrative, as is the case in the famous intertext. Musing that ‘you are – or perhaps it is I who am – the co-wife, the interloper’ (139), Isma attempts to reconfigure rivalry as sorority.19 However, an omniscient narrator ponders an alternative end to Shahrazad, who is ‘killed at the break of every day’ because her sister has relaxed her guard and fallen

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Visibility, vision, and voice

asleep (143). The implications for Djebar should by now be clear. She too uses her ‘intermittent voice’ (Djebar 1985: 226) to take up a risky ‘post in her [Algerian sister’s] shadow, in her voice, in her night’ (Djebar 1987: 143).20 Interestingly, in ‘On the Threshold’, the penultimate section of Sister, it is Isma, more closely associated with the author, who chooses to return to Algeria and to ‘put on the veil, or go into hiding’ while Hajila, after violently terminating an undesired pregnancy, ‘stands on the threshold, devouring [outside] space’ (159). This image too, though, is doubled paratextually, at least in the original French edition of the text, which has an image of Djebar on the back cover, standing inside and looking out of a window (Donadey 2001: 84). As Donadey observes with reference to the wider corpus discussed here, Djebar’s art is structured by the staging of borders that at first seem impassable, such as the division of chapters referring to Isma or Hajila in [Sister] . . . or referring to the personal and the historical in Fantasia. These borders are then methodically deconstructed; the frontier between inside and outside, past and present, personal story and collective history, emancipated and traditional women, is purposefully blurred. (2001: 98) Indeed, this is the point of a threshold, which marks, on the one hand, a limit or boundary and, on the other, the interface between two spaces and the possibility of a passage between them. If at times it seems that the complexity which Djebar’s personal pronoun accrues is accorded less consistently to others, the inter- and intra-textual mirroring and the kinds of doubling and echoing that I have cited here complicate any easy assumption about positions of enunciation and spectatorship staged in her work. To recall another threshold signifier, Djebar describes her early fiction, which has little of the autobiographical inflection of her later work, as demonstrative of ‘writing as a veil [l’écriture comme voile]’ (1999b: 97, my translation); that is to say, she conceals her experience fictionally. However, as Laurence Huughe points out, her later work also deploys a ‘veiling aesthetic’, in the sense that polyphony and a shifting ‘I’ act as screens over narratives that the author ostensibly retrieves and relays (1996: 867). Revelation and veiling should be seen as contrapuntal tendencies held in tension by an author conscious of the risks of representing the self and other women. Lazreg criticizes Djebar’s early work, including Women of Algiers, arguing that women’s lives are abstracted, decontextualized, and emptied of agency (1994: 200–01). Al Musawi sees aspects of her corpus (particularly A Sister to Scheherazade) as catering to ‘a specific reader whose Algeria is a tyrannized land in search of some French savior’ (2003: 3). And, from a different angle, Far from Madina has been criticized as anti-Islamic (see Zimra 1999: 165–6). Djebar has never identified as French and she engages

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in (admittedly radical) Islamic scholarship in Madina. Lazreg’s claim has some purchase, though, given the sweeping depiction of Muslim women in the paratexts of Women of Algiers. While Djebar demonstrates awareness as early as that text and certainly in The Nouba of the implications of her split position, the insight does receive a fuller treatment in her later work. For example, the narrator of Fantasia admits that while she uses ‘[t]orch-words’ to ‘light up my women-companions’, those (French) words also ‘divide me from them once and for all’. This is not because her narrators are the only women to ‘emancipate’ themselves. Rather, as the same narrator admits in a direct address to another woman, in seeming to ‘capture’ her voice, ‘I barely brush the shadow of your footsteps!’ (1985: 142). The chorus of women in Fantasia, in particular, testify as much to activism as they do to confinement. Moreover, ‘emancipation’ proceeds along a trajectory that is not straightforwardly teleological, as both Fantasia and A Sister to Scheherazade demonstrate. The narrator of Fantasia, indeed, reserves the right to remain veiled and silent: ‘For every passer-by, the story-teller remains hidden in the doorway. It is not seemly to raise the curtain and stand exposed in the sunlight. Words that are too explicit become such boastings as the braggard uses; and elected silence implies resistance still intact’ (178).

‘I am not an odalisque’: Leïla Sebbar’s Sherazade Leïla Sebbar (b. 1941) has had a different trajectory away from Algeria than Touati, Mokeddem, or Djebar. Born to an Algerian father and a French mother, Sebbar’s mother tongue is French and she has been resident in France since the 1970s. Her work which, like Djebar’s, spans several decades, tends to focus on the next generation and to be set in France. She has described herself as une croisée – a cross-breed/a crusader/at the crossroads – deliberately exploiting the polysemic term (Donadey 2001: xix) in order to locate herself in relation to a long history of contact, much of it violent, between Europe and the Arab Muslim world. She can be seen as affiliated to a group of writers often categorized as ‘Beur’, given her propensity to use second-generation Franco-Maghribians as protagonists. Originally verlan or ‘backslang’ for ‘Arabe’ (often used in this context in a derogatory sense and misapplied to Berbers), the term ‘Beur’ has, to some extent, been reappropriated. Fiction considered under this rubric tends to foreground minority communities in la banlieue (peri-urban deprived neighbourhoods), to use child or adolescent narrators, and to be steeped in popular culture. There are significant resonances (if substantial differences in setting, style, and genre) between Djebar and Sebbar’s work. These include the use of female protagonists and an exposure of elisions in dominant historiography of the Franco-Algerian (post)colonial relationship. The war of independence, significantly, remains largely a taboo subject in France (see Stora 1991; Dine 1994).21 In Sherazade, Missing: Aged 17, Dark Curly Hair, Green Eyes, first published as Shérazade, 17 ans, brune, frisée, les yeux

72 Visibility, vision, and voice verts (1982), the eponymous protagonist only knows that her grandmother was killed in the war (Sebbar 1999: 158–9). Sherazade, set in Paris in the early 1980s, is Sebbar’s second novel and the first part of a trilogy. Sherazade, who carries a copy of Djebar’s Women of Algiers in her bag (252), has a series of encounters with France’s finest odalisques: Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger, Ingres’s Bain turc, and Matisse’s Odalisque à la culotte rouge (1921). These images will recur in reconstructed form throughout the trilogy. In Sherazade, the protagonist too wears a red ‘culotte’, in this case, shoplifted red underwear (139).22 Delacroix’s Women of Algiers receives its most direct treatment in the final part of the trilogy, Le Fou de Shérazade, in which the protagonist, now in Beirut, takes refuge from the Lebanese civil war in an apartment with an old woman and her Egyptian servant (Sebbar 1991: 164). Djebar describes the servant in Delacroix’s painting as ‘almost a minor character’ (Djebar 1999a: 135), thus failing to engage the classed and ethnic differentials of the scene. In Sebbar’s reframing, by contrast, the servant is one of the central figures, the one holding the narguileh and upon whom the light of the painting is focused (Donadey 2001: 110). However, both Djebar and Sebbar foreground Orientalist gendered stereotypes and modes of scopic apprehension and imbue women imaginatively with the capacity to break free of the frame. The end of Djebar’s Sister to Scheherazade depicts Hajila as ‘an odalisque . . . in flight’ (Djebar 1987: 159) and the elderly Lebanese woman in Sebbar’s Le Fou describes Sherazade and her Moroccan companion as ‘odalisques évadées’ (‘escaped odalisques’) (Sebbar 1991: 202, my translation). Sherazade has been introduced to the odalisque paintings by her pied-noir (Algerian-born French) boyfriend Julien, an Arabophile and collector of Orientalist imagery and texts. Julien falls instantly in love with Sherazade’s green eyes that remind him of Delacroix’s Women of Algiers and of the Berber women of the village in which he spent his childhood. The novel opens with an imperative to identification within recognizable terms. Astounded by her unlikely name, Julien demands: ‘You think you can be called Sherazade, just like that? . . . And why not Aziyade?’ (Sebbar 1999: 1). However, Sherazade refutes a connection between herself and the Turkish female love object of Pierre Loti’s autobiographical romance Aziyadé (1879), ostensibly because green eyes are no grounds for assumed commonality, but implicitly in (partial) alignment with her storytelling namesake. Following the structural principle of Alf Layla wa Layla, Sebbar’s novel is organized as a series of narrative sketches of the protagonist and her peers, the partly assimilated offspring of the immigrant proletariat, and is framed by the ambivalent romance with Julien. Suspending a romantic closure, at least at this stage of the trilogy, Sherazade eventually leaves Julien for an Algeria she has never seen. The ambiguous dénouement in which, after a car crash, the police find only the body of Sherazade’s companion, analeptically clarifies the dominant motifs of this novel. Our female hero deploys ‘steal and fly’ (voler/s’envoler) tactics, frustrating the attempts of others (her lover,

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her parents and brothers, the police, and Parisian men who attempt to exploit her) to apprehend her. Julien is ostensibly ‘sympathetic’ and Sebbar has stated that she identifies most closely with him (ctd. in Donadey 2001: 112) because of similarities in their backgrounds. However, Julien is unable fully to transcend either Orientalist desire or a racist logic. He does not unambiguously distance himself, for example, from jokes about a putatively ‘counter-colonizing’ immigrant community. As a result, Sherazade remains inscrutable to him, an effect which she often encourages. While he is falling in love, she is preoccupied with reading about the Algerian war, an event which does not interest him (Sebbar 1999: 79–80). If their relationship is at times characterized as equal – they are both moderately proficient in Arabic, for example – she also asserts that ‘nobody tells me what to read’ (209). Contact with Julien does, however, expose her to the Franco-Algerian archive. Sherazade is particularly moved by Garanger’s Femmes algériennes 1960 (1982) in which women’s forcibly unveiled faces ‘displayed the severity and violence of people who submit to arbitrary treatment, knowing they will find the inner strength to resist’ (237).23 Sherazade’s oppositional tactics include a strategic foregrounding of her ‘exotic’ appearance. In an amusing scene, she and her friends accept a job with a ‘fashion’ (soft-porn) photographer but turn on him in their erotic ‘jungle’ attire, claiming to be urban guerrillas and threatening him with their (false) pistols (164–7). Even her name is a marker of a métis identity. Aspects of her name are literally lost in translation: a mistransliteration on her birth certificate leads to an erasure of the second ‘h’, a definitively Arabic sound.24 However, such slippage also provides a margin of manoeuvre. As a male character in the second part of the trilogy observes wryly, the storyteller of Alf Layla wa Layla ‘is a gentle and tractable woman, not like [Sherazade]’ (1985: 104, my translation) who can be aggressive in the pursuit of what she wants and when resisting others’ attempts to define her. She destroys the fetishistic collection of photographs which Julien has taken of her and pasted all over his apartment – to compensate, largely, for her repeated absence – and leaves him an unsigned note declaring ‘I’m not an odalisque’ (222). She thus mobilizes diverse forms of resistance to an Orientalizing masculine gaze that include selective affiliation and assimilation, violent opposition, reflecting others’ misconceptions back on them, and a refusal to engage or to appear. These strategies have implications for Sebbar’s audience, who are not always granted access to Sherazade’s motives and reactions. The protagonist’s final encounter with Matisse’s Odalisque is instructive: Sherazade stopped at the bookshop inside the art gallery and bought all the postcards of the Odalisque which remained on the stand. The assistant was astonished. ‘You’re taking them all. You haven’t made a mistake?’ ‘No.’ . . . ‘What is it about her that appeals to you?’ ‘I don’t

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Visibility, vision, and voice know.’ ‘She’s more beautiful in the original, don’t you think?’ ‘No.’ The assistant held out to Sherazade the envelope with the odalisques. ‘Are you perhaps doing a study on Matisse?’ ‘No, no.’ ‘I’m curious.’ ‘That’s true. Goodbye.’ (265)

Sebbar’s novel illustrates once again that the ‘Oriental’, in this case Algerian, woman is the product of fantasies and desires that are ‘powerful constituents of the so-called autonomous and rational Western subject and expose this position as structurally male’ (Yeg˘enog˘lu 1998: 11). But I want to consider Hitchcock’s suggestive comment that ‘while there is something axiomatic about the objectification by the gaze in orientalist discourse it is not always clear what forms a counterdiscourse or disruptive logic may take’ (1997: 69). The female subject might look back, but merely reversing the terms of engagement does not transform the field of vision itself. We can identify a further imperative: the need to disrupt the very logic of Orientalism. Helpful here is Bhabha’s suggestion that the sine qua non of postcolonial response is to insist that ‘the problem of identity returns as a persistent questioning of the frame, the space of representation, where the image – missing person, invisible eye, Oriental stereotype – is confronted with its difference, its Other’ (1994: 46). Refuting the possibility of an epiphanic moment of encounter, Bhabha problematizes a ‘tradition of representation that conceives of identity as the satisfaction of a totalizing, plenitudinous object of vision’ (1994: 46). As does Sebbar, in my opinion. Sherazade intuits the odalisque images as historical antecedents for her position on the margins of French society. She also desires the women in the images, suggesting that she partakes of the construction of an elusive, feminized Algeria. But her repeated refusal to crystallize and transmit the nature of her engagement with the paintings – ‘No, I don’t know, No, No’ – emphasizes that she wilfully takes on the role of ‘missing person, invisible eye, Orientalist stereotype’ in order (not) to tell a different story. The novel’s title, which cites a public notice posted by the police, testifies not only to an officially missing person, but also to a recalcitrant subject who evades surveillance, remains in excess of the terms of description available, and refuses to ‘testify’. As such, Sherazade’s I/eye(s) operate as a reminder of ‘the residues, the remains or the traces of the veiled other which exceed . . . phallocentric and Orientalist representations’ (Yeg˘enog˘lu 1998: 62). Of course Sherazade’s ability to elude every stereotype also adds to her desirability for the men who pursue her. However, [e]ach time the encounter with identity occurs at the point at which something exceeds the frame of the image, it eludes the eye, evacuates the self as site of identity and autonomy and – most important – leaves a resistant trace, a stain of the subject, a sign of resistance. (Bhabha 1994: 49)

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When applied to Sebbar’s novel, this trace/stain should not be read as demarcating a ‘real’ other (the descendant of Alloula’s Algérienne, perhaps!). Rather, Sherazade’s manoeuvres suggest ‘a form of power that is exercised at the very limits of identity and authority, in the mocking spirit of mask and image’ (Bhabha 1994: 62). She makes of herself a mocking image, a mirror of other people’s (neo-)Orientalist preconceptions, thereby reconfiguring the frame of representation and French urban space. Sherazade tactically assumes the role of odalisque évadée in the postcolonial present and refuses to speak for the Algerian women placed under erasure in the odalisque paintings. Hybrid and contingent subaltern enunciations do not necessarily open on to a fixed signified or even necessarily into speech, whether in the present or in relation to a contested past.

Delacroix revisited (once more): Houria Niati’s No to Torture The central image of Houria Niati’s No to Torture (After Delacroix’s Women of Algiers in their Apartment, 1834) triptych painting (1982) provides a sobering contrast.25 In the central image (Plate 2.3) the heads of the women are ‘barred’ by a cage-like structure, a bleeding frame, and a double cross respectively, suggesting a violent curtailment of Algerian women’s ability to speak, but not unequivocally locating the source of that violence. Niati, too, cites the Orientalist visual archives, but overlays Delacroix’s famous image with other layers of significance. The defacing of the figures suggests the structural violence inherent in colonial rule that was taken to

Plate 2.3 Houria Niati, No to Torture (After Delacroix, Women of Algiers in their Apartment, 1834) (central panel) (1982).

76 Visibility, vision, and voice its logical conclusion in the rape and torture of Algerian women by the French colonial army. No to Torture can also be interpreted as a challenge to definitions of the Algerian female body that had become increasingly monolithic by the 1980s (Lloyd 1999: 208). Strikingly more pessimistic than either Djebar’s or Sebbar’s reconstructions of an odalisque évadée, the two side panels show women lying on their sides with their feet bound. Niati recreates women’s embodied experiences of colonial and patriarchal dominance and ways in which their potential narration has continually been placed under erasure. However, I would speculate also that the artist, like other women discussed in this chapter, retains a degree of reticence about ‘unveiling’ Algerian women’s testimonies to European audiences (Niati lives in Britain). In a later installation, Ziriab . . . Another Story (1999), the artist draws upon a longer North African cultural history, evoking its palimpsestic nature through the incorporation of motifs from Andalusian, Islamic, and Amazigh culture. She brings her own body into the gallery space and sings in Arabic. This juxtaposition historicizes the meaning of the artist’s body, rendering it the visible repository of a heterogeneous cultural legacy, but simultaneously suggesting a narrative that can only imperfectly be accessed by a non-Algerian, non-Arabophone audience. Niati’s re-layering of Women of Algiers also supports an argument made by Donadey, that any postcolonial subject in contact with Western traditions of representation – as is the case for all the women discussed here – functions both in and outside the parameters of those traditions (2001: 103). Mustapha Hamil, in a reading of Mokeddem’s Forbidden Woman, identifies what he calls a miserable Hegelianism rather than a felicitous ‘third space’ hybridity, ‘miserable because its dialectics seem to lead nowhere’ (2004: 52). This may be to miss the point; that Mokeddem, in common with the other women discussed in this chapter, seeks to represent her affiliation to Algeria but also the dangers of authenticizing other Algerian women. The women I have drawn upon tend to engage the overdetermined figure of ‘the Algerian woman’ while accepting the possibility of their own complicity, ambivalence, and reciprocal desire. In doing so, they write women back into history in a manner which also teaches us how to read responsibly. We see a strong tendency to challenge essentialist identities, the use of signifiers such as veils and thresholds simultaneously to construct and deconstruct differences between women, and a complication of conventional associations between voice, visibility, and authority. These are important tactics given that a class and language differential, as well as geographical distance, are often at stake between subject and object of representation. Veiling/unveiling the self and others becomes one technique through which women are able to reveal a legacy of marginalization and to expose pre-existing modes of apprehension without claiming absolute authority in redressing such histories.

3

Melancholia in the Maghrib Mother–daughter plots

In So Vast the Prison, Djebar muses Why . . . does feminine memory tirelessly return in concentric circles to the fathers and leave in the shadows (naturally in the silence of the unwritten as well) the real crises, the blacking out, the fall of a woman? As if that were too much, as if it undermined the very roots of strength and hope of the future! (2001: 217) Ironically it is not until this, the third instalment in Djebar’s ‘Algerian Trilogy’ (after Fantasia and A Sister to Scheherazade), that the reader gets any real purchase on the author’s mother. I cite this highly complex text briefly in order to signal some of my interests in this chapter. As always in Djebar’s work, ‘the author’s mother’ is an approximate designation, although her narrative fits chronologically and in terms of its geographical movements. Bahia is presented as a ‘traveller’, first moving to Caesarea (Cherchell) as a child and ‘leaving the Berber language’ for Arabic (231). She later travels to France to visit her imprisoned son during the Algerian war: by this stage she speaks French and can pass as a Frenchwoman (194). Bahia is linked through her linguistic and geographical displacements with (among other women) Tin Hanan, a fourth-century Berber princess, and Kahina, the Berber queen who resisted the Arab conquest. In 1925, Djebar relates, Tin Hanan’s tomb was discovered with inscriptions in the ancient, now indecipherable tifinagh script. The narrator imagines that the text was passed by Tin Hanan to her female friends, perceiving traces of it in contemporary women’s ideolects, embroidery, and music (174). Bahia also transcribes, in Arabic, couplets of the noubas of ancient Andalusia before French soldiers, misperceiving the songs as ‘the message of some nationalist complicity’, destroy them (175). Djebar presents an already palimpsestic Maghreb pluriel (see Khatibi 1983) further layered by women’s voices historically marginalized by Arab, French, and other dominant cultures in the region. The narrator ‘write[s] in the shadow of my mother’ (177) to disinter an archive of traces that Bahia attempts to record and even embodies.

78 Melancholia in the Maghrib In the previous chapter, I explored ways in which Djebar and other Algerian women have addressed the progressive constriction of women’s rights and opportunities in the postcolonial nation-state and the commensurate erasure of women’s experiences in post-independence constructions of history. In many postcolonial and still-decolonizing nations (but not only there), ‘the slogans of nationalism, its mythos of hearth and home, are now the property of national elites that have been increasingly revealed to be corrupt, capitulationist, undemocratic, patriarchal, and homophobic’ (Mufti and Shohat 1997: 3). One effect is that women’s participation in nationalist struggle as active participants tends to be elided in the process of ascribing symbolic roles to ‘woman’ as biological reproducer of citizens, marker of boundaries (through restrictions on sexual and marital relations), transmitter of tradition, and guardian of the home (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1989: 7). The maternal figure is often solicited in attempts to stitch a seamless weave over what is construed retrospectively as a ‘hiatus’ of colonial interruption. As Anne McClintock elaborates, a temporal anomaly in nationalisms, which tend selectively to remember the past in order to posit a viable future, is typically resolved by figuring the contradiction in the representation of time as a natural division of gender. Women are represented as the atavistic and authentic body of national tradition (inert, backwardlooking, and natural), embodying nationalism’s conservative principle of continuity. Men, by contrast, represent the progressive agent of national modernity (forward-thrusting, potent, and historic), embodying nationalism’s progressive, or revolutionary, principle of discontinuity. (1997: 92, original emphasis) A major theme in postcolonial feminist writing and film has been the failed promise of nationalist projects for women’s liberation and, as we have already seen, Arab Muslim women’s creative work, replete with what Ella Shohat has termed ‘post-third-worldist’ critique, is no exception. Shohat refers to a critical stance that, while defining itself in opposition to (neo-) colonialism, ‘also break[s] away from the narrative of the “nation” as a unified entity to articulate a contextualized history for women in specific geographies of identity’ (2006: 292). As Boehmer illustrates in different contexts, women’s writing often engages the ‘transformative instabilities’ of the nation as ‘at once a narrative construct and [a] lived reality’ (2005: 17). Women re-present the nation as a relational space in which libidinal (and, in Djebar’s case, linguistic) energies exceed those legitimized by the state and seek alternative means of affiliating themselves to national postcolonial settings (16–17). Boehmer examines, among other things, what she perceives as the neglected father–daughter relationship (109). I too focus on intergenerational perspectives in this chapter. However, because mothers and maternal avatars are so conspicuous (if at times by their absence) in Arab Muslim women’s work, I address the notion of a matrilineal legacy that is at

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times sustaining, at others fraught and interrupted. I take my cue from Djebar’s suggestion that daughters might return to mothers’ stories instead of leaving them ‘in the shadows’. In addition, we might usefully attend to melancholic hiatuses and moves towards adequate mourning in mother–daughter narratives. Khanna posits postcolonial melancholia as both symptom and reading practice, as a form of critical agency that ‘functions constantly to undo injustices performed in the name of justice and novelty’. The work discussed in this chapter falls ipso facto within Khanna’s definition of ‘the postcolonial’ in the sense that it is traversed by and solicits ‘a constant vigilance concerning palliatives [and] alibis’, particularly in the form of nationalist nostalgia (2006: n. pag.). So Vast the Prison evokes a melancholic remainder to dominant constructions of national space and history more generally. I privilege here what can be described as an archive of traces, ‘the silence[s] of the unwritten’ that is often literally the ‘fall of a woman’ (Djebar 2001: 217; ctd. above). As Spivak points out, the task might be conceived in terms of tracing gaps between historical statements or ‘sentences’ that make some women’s subjectivities difficult, if not impossible, to approach. The archival work required is, among other things, ‘a measuring of silences’ (1988: 286). In seeking to elaborate such an archive, Khanna recommends an interpretative focus on ‘dissonance, contradiction, antinomy, and other manifestations of critical agency as they play out in temporal and spatial terms’ (2006: n. pag.). Whereas Chapter 4 will engage heterotopic space, this chapter focuses upon the antinomial (paradoxical) time of decolonization and its aftermath, in order to highlight ways in which women critically remember the passage from colonization to independence. By rupturing masculinist constructions of the postcolonial nation and posing alternative lines of continuity, women’s work participates in a feminist decolonization of historiography. I explore such themes in work by women affiliated to Maghribi contexts: literature by Leïla Abouzeid (Morocco) and Ahlam Mosteghanemi (Algeria), then films directed by Moufida Tlatli and, more briefly, Raja Amari (Tunisia).

Leïla Abouzeid, ‘Year of the Elephant’ Leïla Abouzeid’s novella ‘Year of the Elephant’, published in 1983 in Arabic, was the first Moroccan woman’s literary text to be translated into English. Abouzeid (b. 1950), originally from the Middle Atlas where her father worked for the French administration, was educated predominantly in a Moroccan-run lycée (high school), a rare institution in the colonial period, and has made a career in writing, radio, and television, championing Arabic as the language of her country and faith (Fernea 1989: xxi). Her writing, at least that available in translation, focuses on the first generation of women to see national independence, achieved in Morocco in 1956. ‘The Year of the Elephant’ presents the last years of the anti-colonial struggle from the ironic, first-person perspective of a woman reminiscing in the 1980s. The narrator

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Zahra undergoes some of the same experiences as the author’s mother, as evoked in Abouzeid’s memoir Return to Childhood: The Memoir of a Modern Moroccan Woman (1998b), published in 1993 as Rujû
ilâ Tufûla. The husband depicted in the novella shares, to a certain extent, Abouzeid’s father’s history: both participated in the nationalist struggle and subsequently deserted their wives for another woman (temporarily, in the case of the author’s father). ‘The Year of the Elephant’ can therefore be read as a fictionalized attempt by a daughter to work through her parents’ and particularly her mother’s story. As Elizabeth Fernea suggests, the bloody struggle over Algerian independence has tended to overshadow the fact that Morocco is notable for a long history of resistance to colonial rule (1989: xiii). Abouzeid emphasizes the participation of much of the Moroccan population in the nationalist struggle, dedicating her text to ‘all those women and men who put their lives in danger for the sake of Morocco and did not expect to be rewarded or thanked for it’. Hence her choice of title, which cites the Qur  anic chapter ‘The Elephant’ (al Fîl), that depicts the vanquishing of the Christian King of Ethiopia in his attack on Mecca as the defeat of an army of elephants by a flock of birds (sura 105). Reminiscent of the diverse contributions to the independence struggle made by Algerian women, Zahra remembers smuggling leaflets, guns, and even a man disguised in a woman’s djellaba and veil in the early 1950s (all events based on the author’s mother’s experiences). Zahra also describes acts of arson against ‘agents of colonialism’ (Abouzeid 1989: 36) and participating in the jih . âd (struggle) of the ordinary woman by organizing and partaking of consciousness-raising and literacy classes (47). While she is as committed to the national struggle as is her husband, in the aftermath of independence he becomes part of a Europeanized elite class whereas his wife, who speaks limited French and maintains some traditional practices, is forced to ‘return to the shadow’ (64). Because in order to ‘properly enjoy the fruits of change . . . he needed a new woman in every sense of the word’ (55), Zahra’s husband divorces her after forty years of marriage, leading the narrator to ask of Moroccan independence: ‘for me, at least, what had changed?’ (60). Legally entitled to only 100 days’ maintenance, Zahra’s attempts to analyse her situation in the aftermath of the divorce are prompted by ‘anxiety’, ‘despair’, and ‘bitterness’ (1). She transforms her crisis, however, into economic independence and spiritual enlightenment. Zahra proceeds by way of an initial return to a ‘town mired in the depths of history’ where ‘[e]verything is gone, every embellishment’ (7, 12). Her hometown and two particular places in it – the local shrine and her small room – come to symbolize a strategic seclusion, in which she can progress from initial despair into contemplation of the terms of survival: ‘In my room, in my father’s house, I spend . . . my hundred nights, counting them as Sheherazade once counted her own’ (11). The return enables the narrator to reconsider and transmit the effects of the national struggle in light of her specifically gendered problems

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but also in terms of the ‘fruits’ of independence for the Moroccan working class and rural majority. Abouzeid’s depiction of Zahra’s hometown, possibly modelled on the author’s place of birth El Ksiba, is symbolically resonant: ‘poised on two chairs’, between a ‘peasant heritage’ and a ‘refined urbanity’ (12), it is where the narrator learns to reconcile aspects of tradition and modernity in reasserting her place in the nation. The narrator’s ‘retreat’ to a simple life in small spaces is thrown into relief by cautionary tales of ex-comrades-in-arms who succumb to the temptations of wealth and status in the aftermath of independence. A positive role model is offered, by contrast, by one Hajj Ali, who resigns his position as Minister of the Interior and resumes his former vocation as a blacksmith: ‘I studied him behind his leather apron, his sleeves rolled up and his face moist with sweat. Laughter came gently and sincerely from his heart, like that of a husband who returns home after an argument with his wife’ (32). The domestic analogy signals a foil to the narrator’s failed marriage and its causes; it is also consistent with the emphasis upon lost and potentially regained principles in this narrative. By redefining independence as complete, not just macro-political struggle, Zahra positions herself against the kinds of superficial reform that her husband represents and resumes a tradition of work and faith in which women have always been ‘armed against calamity from childhood on’ (16). In this, she owes much to her grandmother, who tells her that ‘a woman has nothing but her husband and her property, and . . . husbands cannot be trusted’.1 Conversely, towards her mother, Zahra’s ‘feelings are indifferent . . . as if she were a mere stranger I had chanced to meet in the street’ (13). The reasons for this are not elaborated, but the narrator comments ironically on her status as a daughter and ‘a burden’ defined from birth as a ‘passenger in transit’ (14). This legacy of internalized gendered inferiority at once connotes a compromised beginning for the daughter and the faint limning of a mother’s absent narrative. We see again, as in Djebor’s Nouba, a contrast drawn between a mother cast symbolically as absent and a grandmother who emphasizes women’s survival. While the generational narrative is complicated, in this case, by the fact that the character-narrator Zahra is more approximate to Abouzeid’s mother than she is to the author, we still perceive an ambivalent matrilineal legacy that underpins, at various levels of explicitness, all of the women’s work discussed so far.

Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Memory in the Flesh Ahlam Mosteghanemi (b. 1953) belongs, like Abouzeid, to the first ‘Arabized’ generation of Maghribians, having completed her schooling in Arabic and received her first degree from the University of Algiers. With works issued in 1973 and 1976, respectively Mosteghanemi became the first published Algerian woman poet and novelist in Arabic, a fact which, she has said, ‘fills [her] with horror, not pride’ (Mosteghanemi 1998: 79). She also holds a doctorate

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in Sociology from the Sorbonne. Formerly resident in Paris and currently in Beirut, she is yet another Algerian writer in semi-permanent exile due to ongoing censorship and the ‘anonymous killer’ prevalent in the civil war period (87). She qualifies her own defence of literature, saying that it ‘does not equal one drop of the blood of . . . any of the martyrs to Algerian writing’ (89) and defines herself, with her literary compatriots, as ‘searching for shelter for [our]selves and [our] children and for a small patch a little larger than a tomb, and a little smaller than a homeland, in which to live and write’ (88–9). The author locates her creative ‘birth’ in 1971 when she read romantic poetry to an Algerian audience: I made love and the beautiful word my primary cause, believing that the Algerian character was sick and void within, that all the edifice and the revolutionary slogans erected around it after independence would not help to construct it. Only language and emotions are capable of restoring and rebuilding a new Algeria. Perhaps one of the causes of our present problems is our neglect, after the revolution, of the emotional and psychological make-up of people. (82) Calling for a texturing of the national narrative with psychological and emotional truth rather than tired repetitions of the ‘people as one’ thesis, Mosteghanemi draws attention to the libidinal potential of writing to redefine the nation. This recalls an intervention made by Madhava Prasad in debates over Fredric Jameson’s infamous description of ‘third-worldist allegory’ (that I will return to later). Prasad argues, partly in Jameson’s defence, that texts which claim to be ‘purely’ private actually suggest ‘complete assimilation into the ideology of national subjectivity’, challenging, as does Mosteghanemi, the merits of attempting to separate art from context (1998: 158, 160). Mosteghanemi divulges that her family’s and particularly her father’s inability to read Arabic liberated her narrative voice in that language (Mosteghanemi 1998: 82–3). However, when, in the incident recalled, she was criticized by the audience for not mentioning ‘the revolution’, her father, whose presence at the event she was unaware of, rose to her defence on the grounds that whereas he was a mûdjâhid, the next generation has other concerns (83). His daughter observes the irony that ‘in order to confront a male-dominated society I would have to ensure the presence of a man at my side’ (84). This is perhaps why she argues that her ‘feminine identity’ is a private issue and that she identifies primarily with ‘poetry and country’ (84). However, this claim is overdetermined by Mosteghanemi’s exilic location and, I think, strategic, in line with her rejection of biographically determined interpretations of fiction. She claims that ‘in all our books there is a completely blank page which is our real story’ (87). However, she has also said

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that ‘in order to be a writer I had to live in a glasshouse’ (86) and that ‘I love my nakedness, love the tremor of my naked body before the pool of ink’ (85). There is a certain amount of contradiction here that needs to be negotiated in a critical response to Mosteghanemi’s acclaimed novel Memory in the Flesh (2004), originally published as Dhâkirat al Jasad (1985). Aïda Bamia claims that this is not a feminist text, largely on the grounds that a male narrator screens the author’s gendered voice (1997: 90, 86), but I am inclined to disagree. I concur that the use of a solipsistic first-person male perspective is a tactic, reminiscent of the authorizing presence of the author’s father cited above. But as I will illustrate, it enables the author to place a feminist subtext under erasure rather than eschewing one altogether. Memory in the Flesh is, over and above a wrenching portrayal of masculine desire, a canny deconstruction of the woman-as-nation allegory rather than, as Bamia suggests, ‘purely allegorical’ (90). From Constantine in the 1980s, Khaled writes an epistolary-type account of (and ostensibly to) the much younger Ahlam after their brief and chaste love affair in Paris. In the retrospective narrative transmitted in this manner to the reader, Ahlam (possibly) leaves Khaled for a Palestinian militant and eventually marries the Algerian Minister of Culture, a politically expeditious event arranged between members of the new national elite. Khaled, normally a successful painter, now chooses the pen as ‘a tool that does not know how to lie, how to veil the truth, and is unable to gloss over a gaping wound’ (Mosteghanemi 2004: 3). He is haunted not only by Ahlam, but also by memories of his time in the maquis at the height of the Algerian war under the command of his childhood friend, Si Tahir. Ahlam, Si Tahir’s daughter, was born in Tunis during the struggle just before her father was killed and Khaled was charged with transmitting her father’s choice of a name for her. Khaled’s motive for joining the struggle was the loss of his mother who ‘died from sickness and a broken heart’ when his father took a new, younger bride. The idea of the nation thus ‘took over the character of motherhood’, the prospect of martyrdom compensating for ‘feelings of nausea’, related to his father’s desertion, that ‘were gradually filling me with hatred for everything’ (14). Particularly interesting here is the way in which the nationalist premise is undercut: affiliation to a community of men in the service of the nation-as-mother is presented as palliative for a real mother’s abandonment, suffering, and resulting death. When Khaled later meets Ahlam as an adult in Paris, the encounter is overdetermined by Khaled’s exile, memories of a severed homosocial bond in the service of the nation, and what he describes as his ‘orphaned’ desires for mother and motherland: ‘My constant convictions and the first dreams I have of my country are embodied in one woman, a woman who happens to be you’ (57). Ahlam wears a bracelet identical to one that his mother wore. Ahlam is obviously the nation’s avatar, specifically associated with Khaled’s hometown Constantine, which he describes as palimpsestic, polyvalent

84 Melancholia in the Maghrib in meaning, labyrinthine, and impregnable: ‘a female city’ (189). His love for Ahlam suggests a failed cathexis, reminding me of an argument made by Djebar about the ‘enlarged presence of the mother’ in patriarchal Algerian society and the structural parallel she perceives in the failure to accede to a comprehensively emancipatory independence (1999a: 176), but exacerbated in this case by disillusionment and geographical distance. Khaled’s thinly veiled masturbatory fantasies are founded on physical mutilation (the loss of one arm in the armed struggle), feelings of redundancy (he believes he has been replaced by Ziad, a permanent revolutionary), and a half-knowing complex of loss and failed substitution that produces Ahlam as narcissistic mirror, land, and nation. He describes his obsession, rendered more acute by her frequent absences, in the following manner: If I paint you does that not mean that I am lodging you in the rooms of my house, as well as in my heart? It was an absurdity that I had decided not to commit from the beginning, but then I discovered night after night the vanity of that decision. . . . With my lips I was painting the outline of your body. With my masculinity I was painting the outline of your femininity. With my fingers I was painting all that the brush could not reach. With my one hand I was possessing you, planting you, harvesting you, dressing and undressing you, and changing the curves of your body to make them fit mine. Woman! You became my homeland. Give me another chance to be a hero. (Mosteghanemi 2004: 120–1) Khaled’s love is, perhaps unsurprisingly, doomed to failure. The lover is thus forced to seek revenge on ‘the woman who cloaked my nostalgia with madness, who gradually assumed the features of a city and the contours of a country’ (5). However, this woman will not be contained in ‘the rooms of [the symbolic] house’ of a nation constructed by men. While Khaled attempts to capture Ahlam both in his paintings and in the novel he is writing (the book we are reading), he is framed in turn by her. Ahlam, too, writes novels, in which Khaled is doomed to hunt frantically for evidence of his own existence. He eventually realizes – and the addressee here might be understood as both character and author, who share a first name – that ‘[y]ou decided to kill me by the book’ (183). Ahlam the character refuses to be the consciousness of the nation or a repository of nostalgic values; she ‘mock[s] the commandment of that broken prophet [Khaled] . . . to the end’ (249). In a parallel manner, Mosteghanemi debunks the Algerian literary canon by affiliating Khaled’s perspective with that of his real-life contemporary Kateb Yacine. Kateb’s anti-colonial classic Nedjma (1956) is, for Khaled, the story I would never write but . . . the story that was, in one way or another, my story . . . Yes, in the end, we were one generation with one story: a generation taken up with the madness of mothers who were

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excessive in their love and with the dishonesty of fathers who were excessive in their severity. (213) Khaled’s generation’s experience and, by extension, the construction of the nation through the prism of nationalist male subjectivity, are here construed as one-dimensionally allegorical, fixated, and passé. Ahlam, a postcolonial daughter, remains an elusive character whose perspective and version of the story are inaccessible to the reader. We do know, though, that the name given to her by her mother, Hayat (h . ayât or ‘life’), was replaced with that chosen by her father Ahlam (ah . lam or ‘dreams’). The latter is, as Khaled realizes, topped and tailed by ‘the first letter alif of the word alam, “pain”, and the first letter mim of the word mut a, “pain” ’ (21). The idealized nation, born with Ahlam, is here reconstrued under the sign of the law-of-the-father, bearing traces of its own bloody foundations in violence and the repressed narratives (and name choices) of mothers. To complicate matters further, though, Khaled reflects that ‘[p]erhaps there is another name. Is your name really important?’ (251). This can be read as an indication that Ahlam exceeds the nation that she is called upon to exemplify and the historical and narcissistic significance that her would-be lover projects upon her. It can alternatively be argued that Ahlam continues to symbolize a national dream that has, for Khaled at least, become a chimera. The fact that she capitulates to the new elite in a marriage that exacts the price of her virginity suggests that Ahlam/Algeria remains an object of rivalry and exchange between men. However, the possibility of her ‘other name’ faintly echoes Mosteghanemi’s depiction of the autobiographical ‘blank page’, again suggesting that Ahlam can be associated with the author. This does not mean that either of the Ahlams are absent from the text. Rather, these two postcolonial daughters function as supplements or traces that exert pressure from within the story that Khaled is able to write (or indeed know) and exceed the ‘outline’ that he is able to paint. His memories reside solely in his (disabled) flesh and cannot flesh out the ‘outline of [either woman’s] femininity’ (120). Memory in the Flesh marks the limits of allegory, thereby signalling a threshold moment in Algerian literature. Neither Khaled’s nor Ahlam’s mother, the absent and silent ground upon which this entire critique of Algerian masculinist history and literary history is figured, can on these terms be approached.

Moufida Tlatli, The Silences of the Palace and The Season of Men I perceive a need, nevertheless, to move beyond the maternal figure as symbolic repository of (failed) national aspiration and to this end view two films by Tunisian director Moufida Tlatli (b. 1947) as exemplary models. Tunisia has the smallest of the Maghribian cinemas, but the highest number of

86 Melancholia in the Maghrib women directors (Armes 2005: 159). Tlatli is indisputably the most accomplished. After graduating from the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques (IHEC) in Paris, she worked first for French television, then in production and editing in Tunisia, collaborating on a number of feature films that include the international hit Asfûr Stah / Halfaouine (dir. Férid Boughedir, 1990) and Farida Ben Lyazid’s Bâb al Samâ’ Maftûh . / A Door to the Sky, discussed in the next chapter. Tlatli has described her work as an attempt ‘[t]o understand the silences that surround us [women] in our everyday life’; she has said that she ‘wanted to go back in time and find [their] distant causes, [their] origin’ (qtd. in Gabous 1998: 156, my translation). Tlatli’s work has some affiliations with Djebar’s, notably in terms of ways in which both women archive a matrilineal legacy as ‘an alternative form of community that does not rely on plenitude or organic unity but on suppressed echoes and hints of affinity’ (Hiddleston 2004: 96). Tlatli’s directorial début, S.amt al Qas.r / The Silences of the Palace (1994) is, with Halfaouine, the most widely released Tunisian film to date.2 It presents the fictional story of two working-class women and their companions on the cusp of Tunisian independence. Adolescent, illegitimate Alia (Hend Sabry) and her mother Khedija (Amel Hedhili) are servants in the palace of the beyy (ruler under French colonial control) and are subjected to the sexual whims of his sons, Sid Ali and Si Bechir.3 The majority of the film is set in the mid-1950s and culminates just before 1956, the year in which France recognized Tunisian sovereignty; the beyy was deposed the following year. Framed via scenes set in the mid 1960s when Alia is in her early twenties, the retrospective narrative charts her passage through adolescence. Alia is the constant companion of Sid Ali’s daughter Sarra and lives in a room symbolically midway between upstairs (where the nobles live) and downstairs (the servants’ quarters). Khedija, too, regularly crosses the downstairs/upstairs threshold, in her capacity as – euphemistically – entertainer and personal servant to the Princes. Both mother and daughter represent a transgressive mobility that makes them targets of jealous persecution by the women upstairs and their position precarious. When Sid Ali’s wife Jneina exposes her husband’s attachment to Khedija and Alia, accusing him of having ‘sunk so low’, her slander echoes lyrics sung by the women in the kitchen: ‘I’ve fallen awfully low/ I’ve debased myself for the girl who was once with us/ the girl who left me in a whirl’.4 This should be understood ironically: desire articulated on a vertical class axis results exclusively in the downfall of the servant women in this film, although the security of upper-class women is also presented as tenuous. The fact that Jneina cannot have more children (j’neina, rather cruelly, means ‘garden’) is an open secret; another is that Sid Ali is Khedija’s lover and Alia’s father. The arrival of Alia’s first period signals her vulnerability to the droit de cuissage (or droit du seigneur): the rights of the Princes over the bodies of all women in the palace that epitomizes what Tlatli has described as ‘colonization by the colonized’ (qtd. in Hillauer 2005: 403). Inevitably, Alia is called

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upstairs to perform in her mother’s place, while Khedija’s power to intervene is limited to warnings that ‘You’ve grown up. Be careful. Don’t let anyone come near you. If a man touches you, run away. If anything happens to you, you’re lost. No one can save you afterwards’. Tlatli thus embeds a pervasive anxiety and silence surrounding the adolescent female body as repository of family honour, which we have explored in other work, in a particular context: here, the lack of a legitimate family enhances Alia’s vulnerability. In a tense sequence, Si Bechir finds the adolescent unconscious in the garden – the province of the royal family in which Alia’s presence is always transgressive – and lifts her skirt to admire her thigh before carrying her indoors. When Khedija enters and diverts his attention, he rapes her just as her daughter regains consciousness. Khedija subsequently attempts to induce a miscarriage which results in her death. Roy Armes is right to argue that Tlatli ‘approaches politics only obliquely, through the lives of women who never leave the palace and the beys who are politically inactive’ (2005: 166), but this film is nevertheless a pointed as well as poignant reframing of Tunisian nationalist historiography. In the film’s climax, Alia launches rebelliously into nationalist anthems upstairs while her mother lies dying below; the retrospective narrative ends as Alia rushes to her mother. The cross-cut scenes here signal a historical threshold: the end of the (colonial) past, represented by Khedija’s death, and the beginning of Alia’s (postcolonial) future outside the palace. Khedija’s death is presented as the symbolic counterpart – indeed, the price – of Tunisia’s ‘rebirth’ as independent with all the implications this has for reconstructed roles and rights for women. It gestures, with what we can assume is also the death of the foetus, towards the political redundancy of the royals on the brink of national independence, as well as to a morally bankrupt class system. However, the royal family is internally differentiated. While Si Bechir rapes, Sid Ali has a complex relationship with both Khedija and Alia. Si Bechir dismisses the popular nationalist movement in a smug reference to ‘class which takes generations to nurture’, but his brother snaps that ‘our very right to exist is threatened and you speak of class’. Sid Ali also shares with Alia a love of music, one of the keys to Alia’s potential transcendence of her class status and the fate of her mother. The other is her developing relationship with Lotfi, a young nationalist hiding in the servants’ quarters, who promises that her dubious paternity will not matter in the ‘new Tunisia’. However, these moments of optimism are debunked in the frame narrative. The adult Alia (Ghalia LaCroix), now living outside the palace with Lotfi, is creatively unsuccessful and shunned by their neighbours. Harassed by her (male) and ignored by her (female) audiences, she is presented as aphasic, emotionally disaffected, and strikingly emaciated. (In fact, although the difference in appearance between the two actors who play Alia is initially striking, their similarity, for example when young Alia sings upstairs, is at times uncanny. The adult Alia’s body appears to be shadowed by its earlier, ironically more voluptuous form.)

88 Melancholia in the Maghrib Lotfi will not marry a singer, a marginal profession for a woman, much less an illegitimate one; nor will he allow Alia to have a child that would once again be born out of wedlock. Khedija’s death marks, then, a paradoxical (antinomial) historical moment: while it is collocated with a desirable national renaissance and allows Alia to leave the palace, the ‘new Tunisia’ to which she putatively ‘escapes’ is defined by a continuity in female oppression. Her decision at the end of the film to continue her latest pregnancy against Lotfi’s wishes remains ‘concrete, entangled in taboos and obstacles’ (Shohat 2006: 305). The limitations of nationalist rhetoric are incisively demonstrated through the postcolonial irresolution of female emancipation. As Valassopoulos demonstrates (helpfully, given that the songs are inconsistently subtitled) what Alia sings, where, and for whom matter (2003: 99). Whereas the women in the kitchen sing suggestive popular ballads, Alia appropriates a classical instrument. Her mother, as a dancer, is positioned as sexual object but Alia emerges, at least temporarily, as creative subject. ‘The Hope of My Life’ (Amal H . ayâti) which Alia performs in the opening scene of the film was immortalized by Umm Kulthoum, advocate of pan-Arab aspirations articulated by Gamal abd el Nasir (Nasser). Alia, in aligning herself with Kulthoum, claims a performative ‘legitimacy that allows her to move up from her position of servitude to that of singer and artist’ (Valassopoulos 2003: 101). However, in the retrospective narrative Alia breaks with Kulthoum as role model, when she launches into a militant anthem that she has heard on the radio. The Egyptian was able to sing about supposedly taboo subjects for a woman (particularly love) because she presented herself non-threateningly and non-sexually as mother (Umm) of the nation. As Mernissi describes it in The Harem Within (see Chapter 4), Umm Kulthoum was ‘an unusually determined, self-assured Arab woman who had a purpose in life, and knew what she was doing . . . Solid and well-endowed . . . (in long, flowing robes which hid her motherly bosom), [she] thought about all the right and noble things’ (1994: 110).5 Alia, in a different relationship to royal collaborators, aligns herself with the struggle for independence as a rebellious daughter. Furthermore, whereas Kulthoum rose to celebrity from an Egyptian village, Alia cannot entirely transcend her class origins. When she attempts to recuperate Kulthoum as professional model as an adult, people in the audience no longer listen; she is viewed disapprovingly as a singer in a way that the Egyptian icon managed to transcend (Valassopoulos 2003: 105, 106). Alia’s comment that her songs are ‘stillborn’ is appropriate: her transference of allegiance from Sid Ali to Lotfi is a false choice and our protagonist remains personally and professionally frozen in time. Her decision at the end to give birth is thus somewhat compensatory and gestures towards the potential emancipation of the next generation. This modest conclusion has been foreshadowed and is still relatively empowering. In the hermetically sealed world downstairs, the servant women of Khedija’s generation cannot participate in the independence movement and are privy only to what news their male colleagues choose to pass on or can be heard on

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the (colonial-controlled) radio. When the French impose a state of emergency in order to curtail popular dissidence, one of the women comments wryly: ‘Our lives are [already] like curfews’. Another woman relates more positively to the nationalist struggle, claiming that: ‘I don’t belong to myself. I want to go into the street, run unhindered, naked and barefoot, and scream and shout out loud’. However, the framing narrative suggests that these older women stay at the palace after independence because, as Khedija puts it, ‘I saw the light of day here, spent my life here . . . Where do you want me to go?’ Khanna’s argument that independence movements have tended to ‘remainder’ diverse identities and voices within a limiting binary schema of colonized versus colonizer (2004: 25) illuminates Silences, as does her work on ‘fourth cinema’ (1998). By this latter, which I have already mentioned in relation to Djebar’s Nouba, Khanna refers to work that enables women’s embodied experiences to signify catachrestically, in ways that are not easy to read. This suggests that silence might be read as the enactment of a space of political non-representation (1998: 26). Because silence cannot simply be ‘sutured’ into established discourses, it also reveals the limits of the ‘mirror of representation in which cultural knowledge is customarily revealed’ (Bhabha 1994: 37). Khanna describes the ‘semiotic, representative wounding’ incurred when woman is represented allegorically (as nation), that testifies ‘to the specificities of unrepresented crisis that women experience at the moment of the birth of a nation, when that painful, feminine metaphor of birth is (not) denied’ (1998: 25). She draws our attention to ways in which women’s labour – in all senses – is sublated to a masculinist anti-colonial narrative. ‘Fourth cinema’ proceeds by way of activating a remainder of women’s visions, silences, and embodied experiences, reweaving them in alternative histories. Djebar mobilises the same metaphor that Mathis’ film foregrounds when she suggests ‘a listening in, by means of which I try to grasp the traces of some ruptures that have reached their term’ (1999a: 1). Narratives such as those traced in The Silences of the Palace have the potential, when secured as this film is to a recognizable historical context, to reimagine the national community as a site of repressed memory traces. Particularly striking in Tlatli’s film is the way in which the embodied experiences of women exploited as workers, dancers, barren wives, fertile sex slaves, and mistresses are transmitted. Tlatli has talked about the use of very long takes to represent the servant women chronotopically: I was interested in the bodies of women who move, and work, with all the time in the world. The women, the servants who work in the palace, have the whole day to do the cooking, to wash and to iron. I couldn’t allow myself to show them in an ‘efficient’ montage, which would be false, because the content and the form would not correspond. I had to show them in their own rhythm, in their own way of living and breathing. I had to show the slowness of their lives through my use of the camera. (qtd. in Hillauer 2005: 405)

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In addition, as Tlatli puts it, all of the women in the palace must operate ‘within the tradition of taboo, of silence, but the power of their look is extraordinary’ (qtd. in Mulvey 1995: 19). What their looks signify, though, needs careful consideration. By returning to notions of vision and voice, I want to approach the eponymous silences of this film in a way that departs from Khanna’s model. To my mind, Silences traces a passage from melancholia to mourning, which has implications for the transmission of not only the daughter’s, but also the mother’s story. Psychoanalysis classically proposes a ‘return to the scene’ in order to translate symptoms of trauma into narrative: ‘[w]e cure [patients] of their hysteria by transforming their unconscious memories . . . into conscious ones’ (Freud 1953a: 211). Silences certainly evokes a process of reproducing and rearticulating repressed memories, reinforcing the theme through the use of spatial thresholds (doors, archways, and stairs) to demarcate transitions between temporal frames. The adult Alia also presents hysterical symptoms. In the opening scene, she breaks off in mid performance, raises her hand to her head, and leaves the venue. However, when she returns to the palace, she ‘forgets [her] headache’. Elisabeth Bronfen suggests that the hysterical symptom is the sign of a ‘knot’ of memories which ‘weld[s] together several syntagmatically unconnnected, psychic moments’ (1998: 33). Bronfen also argues that ‘the hysteric’s complaint revolves precisely around a knowledge of fallibility and fragility’ incurred in the separation from the mother (which she describes as a navel cut, replacing the phallus with the navel or omphallus) and ‘goes hand in hand with a need for protective phantasies and a desire for imagining what the condition of happiness and plenitude might be’. As such, what the hysteric broadcasts is a message about vulnerability – the vulnerability of the symbolic (the fallibility of paternal law and social bonds); the vulnerability of identity (the insecurity of gender, ethnic, and class designations); or, and perhaps above all, the vulnerability of the body, given its mutability and mortality. (xiii) Tlatli’s film closely contextualizes birth and death and carefully handles the temporal structure of the symptom. Alia returns to the palace ostensibly to mourn the death of Sid Ali, but her voice-over in the opening scenes addresses her mother: ‘I was scared of your silence’. The quest to unlock the secret of her paternity is, in fact, a red herring. Alia’s headaches are, in a manifest sense, the result of her compromised personal, professional, and social situation. But upon learning that Sid Ali has died, Alia’s voice-over implicitly links her present relationship with Lotfi to her mother’s story: ‘These terrible marriages . . . The old torments resurface, and with them, the past I thought buried with my mother’ (my emphasis). As Alia is pregnant, the opening scenes also implicitly conflate birth and death, as will recur more trenchantly at the end of the retrospective narrative when Khedija dies of a miscarriage.

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There is a missing link here though: the scene in which Alia accidentally observes her mother’s rape. After this event and for the first time she massages her temples, lapses into silence for several days, and rejects her mother. Jane Van Buren interprets elective mutism as a radical extension of the cultural prohibition placed upon women’s speech that begins with the ‘burial’ of the mother’s creative role. A daughter may blame her mother for an inherited powerlessness and adopt a defensive posture, ‘an angry, resentful, guarded presence that walls off and silences [one’s] inner speaking self’ (2000: 139–40, 142). Adrienne Rich has similarly suggested that a matrophobic urge in daughters is related to the mother’s perceived complicity in patriarchal oppression (1976: 236). According to Van Buren, this daughterly hostility often manifests itself in a fear of entombment (2000: 142–3). Immediately after Alia witnesses the rape, the film presents a silent dream sequence, focusing from a long shot of her running through the garden to a close-up on her face as she screams through the locked gate of the palace. When she starts speaking again, she disavows the scene witnessed, appearing to split the paternal imago between Si Bechir and an idealized Sid Ali and demanding insistently of her mother, ‘Who made you pregnant?’ and ‘Who is my father?’ Pursuing a Freudian narrative, we observe an attempt to transfer feelings of identification from her mother to her father as when, in a scene in the garden, Alia seems to verify her genetic bond (underscored by their names) to Sid Ali by aligning their two faces. Freud understood hysterical symptoms as ‘substitutes’ or ‘transcriptions’ for ‘a number of emotionally cathected mental processes, wishes and desires, which, by the operation of a special psychical procedure (repression) have been prevented from obtaining discharge in psychical activity that is admissible to consciousness’ (1953b: 164). He also came to perceive hysteria as the sign of female desire rather than abuse (see Sprengnether 1990: ch. 2). This is a dangerous argument, but one that has some pertinence here. Alia is traumatized in ambivalent identification with her mother. Even as she ‘aspires to the life of the mind, to music and abstraction’ (upstairs) and ‘relegates her mother to the realm of the body’ (downstairs) (Mulvey 1995: 19), she constantly spies on Khedija. She spins and falls first after watching, then imitating Khedija dance (Plate 3.1) and subsequently after observing a private moment between her mother and Sid Ali, Tlatli has confirmed that spinning in this film signifies a ‘moment of desire’ (qtd. in Mulvey 1995: 20). Feminist theorists have argued, in an effort to challenge Freud’s heteronormative schema that, as the mother must be banned as a site of desire, her body represents ‘a domain of homosexuality understood as unlivable passion and ungrievable loss’ (Butler 1997: 137). Madelon Sprengnether suggests that we re-examine Freud’s ‘briefly entertained idea of castration as separation from the mother’, in order to posit the maternal body as a site of melancholic desire (1990: 8): the foundational but silent ground of a daughter’s subjectivity. This is all highly applicable. However, Silences goes further, modelling a

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Plate 3.1 The Silences of the Palace (1994), dir. Moufida Tlatli.

move beyond the complex network of feelings inspired by Alia’s perception of Khedija’s body and the silences that her mother perpetuates. Alia’s eventual acceptance of her mother as role model enables us to exceed diagnoses of the ‘immutable’ socio-cultural positioning of women and consider a more historicized model. This is where a distinction between melancholia and mourning becomes helpful. Freud suggested that in mourning ‘the world becomes poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself’ (1950: 155). In melancholia, the ego ‘swallows’ the object whole, identifying with it and failing to transfer desire to substitute objects. As Freud argued in The Ego and the Id, ‘the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned objectcathexes and . . . it contains the history of those object-choices’ (1953c: 29). The melancholic ego, then, should be read as ‘the archaeological remainder . . . of unresolved grief’ (Butler 1997: 133). When a parent is lost, the process is particularly complicated, because she or he has already been internalized as an ego ideal with a punitive aspect that can emerge in dreams and selfcensorship. This is most commonly characterized as the ‘imaginary father’ (Kristeva 1989: 23; Freud 1953c: 31), but Melanie Klein reconceived it as a ‘combined’ parental object (Kristeva 2001: 12). For Klein, loss revives the depressive position of early childhood that is the result of separation from the mother’s breast. The ‘lost’ object is introjected into the ego, a battleground in which good and bad objects struggle, so that the individual simultaneously ‘pines’ for the lost object, believes she or he has killed it, and anticipates its retaliation against the ego. Thus the same object is ‘split’ between idealization, fear, envy, and guilt (Klein 1986: 150–2). This must

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eventually give way to tolerance of a single object through the acceptance of contradictory feelings towards it (153–5). The Kleinian scenario, which assumes the eventual need for selfdifferentiation, but emphasizes the subject’s ambivalent love of its objects, is most apposite here. Alia’s love/hate relationship with Khedija, her envy of and curiosity about her mother – expressed through her constant surveillance and questions – and her rebellious alignment with her birth father preempt (and retrospectively explain as the film unfolds) the ‘frozen’ complex of loss, guilt and resentment from which she suffers at the beginning of the film. The return to the palace thus initiates a process of reparation, culminating in Alia’s decision to have a baby which she will name after her mother. Their reconciliation is foreshadowed when Khedija, in an attempt to make Alia speak again, uses her savings to buy the lute that her daughter has long desired. Khedija enters the room clutching the lute to her stomach/womb (omphallus) and passes it to her daughter, who holds it in the same position. At the same point in the narrative, Alia steps into her mother’s place as a sexually mature woman and begins to be requested by the beyy. Reversing a scene in which Alia watches her mother making up at the mirror, she is now the one sitting at the dressing table while her mother watches her uneasily. Alia suddenly smashes the mirror, screaming that she is sick of seeing her mother in it every time. However, she then embraces Khedija, who lays her head on her daughter’s shoulder. To some extent the empathic focus of the film shifts from this point by showing Khedija outside the frame of her daughter’s comprehension. In one scene, she bursts out that she hates her (pregnant) body and weeps, while a very long take reveals the silent empathy of her companions in the kitchen as they continue their tasks. If psychoanalytic theory tends to universalize the mother figure as ground for children’s emergence as subjects, mother’s bodies are thoroughly social. Alia’s return to the past necessarily involves an acknowledgement and transmission of her mother’s untold stories, the even more encrypted silences of the palace: her sale as a child to the beyy, manifold labours, desire, and trauma. Indeed, Tlatli has said that Khedija is the real hero of this story. Speaking of her own mother, to whom the film is dedicated, the director explains that: This film was born out of absolute necessity, even dramatically, as it is linked to the sudden and serious illness of my mother. I realized then that we didn’t know very much about her because, like many people of her generation, she didn’t talk about herself, her past, her ordeals and the constraints associated with being a woman. (qtd. in Hillauer 2005: 403) Tunisia has been at the forefront of legal reforms to women’s rights in the Arab world since Habib Bourguiba implemented the 1956 Majalla. Tlatli’s first film might therefore seem an unduly pessimistic diagnosis of women’s

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transition from colonized to postcolonial identity. However Hatem, among others, argues that Tunisia’s relatively liberal personal status laws reflect only superficial reform to prevailing negative attitudes towards women (1993: 35). Zayzafoon contributes a detailed analysis of pre- and postindependence nationalist discourse, taking up the idea that the nation is a ‘Janus’ figure that vacillates between constructions of authenticity and modernity and, once again, foregrounding ‘woman’ as the symbol around which contradictory ideas can cohere. She suggests that ‘in contrast with her function as a metaphor for the dislocation of home and language in French colonial Tunisia, the “Tunisian woman” came to embody the split between modernity and tradition in postcolonial Tunisia’ with the veil, notably, cast as a sign of backwardness (2005: 127). However, she demonstrates that Tunisian women have continued to be assigned roles as wives, mothers, and guardians of tradition in nationalist discourses, despite their partial construction as citizens (121).6 In both Islamic and secular renderings, ‘the Tunisian woman’ has been constructed as at best mediator, not source, of nationalist agency (115). Gendered double standards are never merely ‘imposed’; rather, they become internalized and naturalized. Magda Wassef suggests that sexist traditions, taboos, and prohibitions may be perpetuated by women as ‘absolute rulers of their homes’ (2005: 367–8). The problematic figure of the motherin-law, the inexpressibility of female desire, and the imperative for daughters to become mothers themselves are organizing themes in Tlatli’s second feature film, Mawsim al Rijâl / The Season of Men (2000). If Tlatli identifies with Alia in The Silences of the Palace as part of the first generation to emerge into an uneasy postcolonial modernity, The Season of Men extends its purview to the next generation: Tlatli has said that the impetus for this film was her adolescent daughter’s perceptions of her maturing body (qtd. in Hillauer 2005: 408). As if to emphasize continuity, the actor who plays young Alia in Silences reappears in Season as Emna, a violinist in her early twenties in the 1980s or 90s. Tlatli has described Emna as representative of a ‘bold new generation that takes its status for granted’ (qtd. in Lennon 2001: 11), but elsewhere admits that ‘[m]y daughter’s generation, which I hoped was much freer in spirit than ours had been, did not turn out to be all that free’ (qtd. in Hillauer 2005: 408). Season of Men is structured by linked experiences of women related horizontally and vertically in time. Once again, the narrative focuses to a substantial degree on Emna’s mother Aisha, born and married on the southern island of Djerba. Season shows, in extensive flashback scenes, Aisha’s marriage to Said and the mounting disapproval of his family when she gives birth to two girls, Emna and Meriem. Aisha weaves inspired carpets and is permitted to continue doing this on the condition that she bears a son, but Said resists her pleas to come and live in Tunis with him. His excuse is financial, but there is a suggestion that he has another family in the city: Emna tells him in the frame narrative that the daughters know he is not

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living alone. We also learn that Said’s mother pressured him to repudiate his wife because she had not borne a son. In the present, Emna and Meriem do have a much younger brother, Aziz, who suffers from what appears to be severe autism. The family is now living in Tunis although the film reveals a previous desertion by Said of what he described, in the aftermath of Aziz’s birth, as the Djerbarian ‘house of hell’.7 Due to Aziz’s condition, the women of the family decide to relocate to the old family house on the island: Aisha and her daughters are accompanied by her mother-in-law and sisters-in-law and their erstwhile wet nurse. Using similar techniques to Tlatli’s first film, Season uses physical relocation to effect an excavation of memory. Aisha’s frustrations, sorrows, and battles, notably to ensure that her daughters are educated, are captured in the present and through her daughters’ memories of the past, in which they are positioned primarily as onlookers and listeners. Repressed sexual desire and resulting aphasia and other forms of somatization (immobility, uncontrollable crying, pain) are experienced by women of Aisha’s generation (particularly her sister-in-law Zayneb) and then by their daughters in adulthood. Meriem and Emna are contrasted here: whereas Meriem appears to internalize gendered constraints and obligations (and suffers from migraines), Emna rejects them. These views eventually collide when Emna says that Meriem’s ‘body is dead’, Meriem slaps her, and Emna leaves Djerba for the city. Somewhat surprisingly, whereas Emna is in a relationship with an older man who will not leave his ‘paper wife’ and children, the closing scenes imply that Meriem achieves happiness with her husband. It has been implied that she is infertile, but the ending, in which she sits up naked and happy in bed suggests that, due to the combined trauma of a childhood molestation and a harsh medical examination by her grandmother, Meriem had previously been a virgin. Aisha attempts to empower her daughters through education and storytelling, but the defining unit of the extended family constrains her ability to effect change. The ‘retreat’ to Djerba is to some extent a reappropriation of tradition which posits a community of women singing, cooking, talking, laughing, and caring for each other in a setting close to nature once patriarchal society and conventional medicine have failed them. However, the island is also a claustrophobic environment in which the challenge for women to define themselves apart from men is exemplified. As the title of the film indicates, activities on the island are dominated by the annual return of the patriarchs and, in their absence, the tyrannical mother-in-law monitors behaviour: Aisha confesses to her sister-in-law that she can no longer bear her mother-in-law’s stare. Extreme segregation does not exempt women from the obligation to fall pregnant; neither does it satisfy desire constrained by significant taboos. When Aisha asks her husband to caress her ‘dry, buried alive’ body he is outraged by her frankness; even Emna is restricted, at the film’s end, to dancing sensually but alone in a nightclub. Tlatli’s two films each deploy a fairly extreme mise-en-scène: the palace of

96 Melancholia in the Maghrib the colonial beyy and an island populated almost exclusively by the wives of migrant workers. This is perhaps why neither Franco-Maghribian nor Tunisian female audiences responded positively to the women portrayed in Season of Men, the former group stressing their emancipation and the latter objecting to the continued portrayal of ‘submissive’ women in a country in which women are visible in all aspects of public life. Tlatli’s defence is that women’s (in)ability to express sexual desire, which she sees as the central subject of her second film, does not change as a result of legal reform (qtd. in Hillauer 2005: 410). The experience of a minority is intended to reflect more widely on women’s constraint by internalized gendered norms, exacerbated, in each film, by financial dependence.8

A twist in the tale: Raja Amari, Red Satin Amari’s film Satin Rouge/Red Satin (2002) gives a distinctly ironic and rather risqué twist to a repeated mother–daughter thematics. This film is set in contemporary Tunis and centres upon the trajectory from private to marginal public space of a widow with a teenage daughter. The mother Lilian is visibly melancholic at the start of the film, which opens with a long shot of the interior of her apartment, lingering on the walls and photos of her dead husband. However, Lilian breaks the repetitive stasis of domestic routine through progressive forays into the urban underworld. She gradually embraces music as a sensually liberating force, becomes a belly dancer, and has a passionate love affair (shown in a relatively explicit manner) with a musician. Armes indicates that the film’s portrayal of a sexually active widow outraged some Tunisian critics (2005: 79). The final scene, in which the same man turns out to be her daughter’s suitor, does not necessarily reassure on this front. Rather, as the lover sits uncomfortably between his future bride and mother-in-law/ex-mistress, the possibility is left open that the mother might continue to prioritize her sexual emancipation, literally in her daughter’s place. If Amari’s film confronts familiar themes with a lighter (or more controversial) touch, it also problematizes interpretation via a strictly national frame of analysis. The dialogue is in Tunisian Arabic and occasionally specified locations are in and around Tunis, but the dominant settings – the house, the club, the sûq (market) – suggest a generic urban centre. Lilian’s emergence from domestic space into an equally marginal underworld and the expression of her sexuality largely within the frame of paying male voyeurism is, on the one hand, problematically generalized. The centrality of dance and music to the diegesis and the lingering camera shots on Lilian’s body could also be read as aggressive self-Orientalization, perhaps to appeal to Western audiences. However, it is also possible that subtle referencing of a national film history, hence more specific context, is at play here. When juxtaposed with Tlatli’s films, Red Satin appears as a contemporary and somewhat more optimistic update on what have become rather familiar

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themes and motifs in the Tunisian context: women’s dancing bodies as objects of desire; claustrophobic and competitive, hence ambivalently empowering, bonds between mothers and daughters; and the power of the mother-in-law, as Lilian will theoretically become, to organize and control relationships in domestic space.

Beyond allegory? This chapter has engaged mother–daughter plots from three different national contexts with a view to unpacking ways in which women have reframed history and community from perspectives on the margins of postcolonial states. As Boehmer (2005) suggests, the nation has been a durable concept in postcolonial liberation politics, particularly as the ground for enabling chronologies in the aftermath of colonialism, and can have progressive as well as reactionary uses. Women’s creative work often affiliates itself differently to the nation rather than eschewing the national framework altogether. I hope to have indicated through my combination of texts in this chapter how women’s work resonates simultaneously beyond a single national context, representing women’s labour, desire, oppositional voices, and resonant silences in ways that reflect upon the postcolonial Maghrib (and no doubt beyond). Sonali Pahwa, speaking about contemporary Arab film directors, has posed the question of whether women should remain burdened with an obligation to foreground women protagonists in ‘anthem[s] to thwarted ideals’. Positing a ‘first-wave’ in Arab women’s cinema that extends to the time of her writing, Pahwa identifies a risk that women are forever reduced to ‘emblems of the marginalized’ in post-nationalist narratives. She approves, however, of a rendering tangible of post-nationalist gender politics on an intimate scale and through the texture of women’s lived experiences; she cites Tlatli’s Silences of the Palace as model (Pahwa 2003: unpag.). I therefore suggest that we return to Jameson’s claim that ‘ThirdWorld texts . . . necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory’. Leaving aside the discredited ‘third-world’ label, I would challenge the distinction Jameson makes between work that represents the public and historical domain and that which is ‘private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic’ (1986: 69). His essay, in fact, contains a more useful recognition that ‘the allegorical spirit is [already] profoundly discontinuous, a matter of breaks and heterogeneities’ (73). Bensmaïa reminds us, too, that allegory does not tend to be the singular intention of a postcolonial text that aspires to the status of art; when this is the case, the work will be didactic (1999: 151–2). We should remember, through, that allegorical significance can be imposed at the point of reception. As Prasad points out, even if an entirely libidinal/private narrative were possible in postcolonial work, it might appear to an outside interpreter as expressive of national essence. This is because ‘while defining counternationalities in collective

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terms, the centre defines itself as a “free” space occupied by free individuals’ (1997: 159). None of the work discussed here deploys a ‘mimetic’ mode in which sociocultural realities are transmitted as if without awareness of the mediating influence of textual production. Nor can it be reduced to cynical exploitation of a Western market that anticipates ‘women’s resistance to, and escape from, disabling environments’ (Kahf 2000: 148–9; see my Introduction) given that it has all been produced in Arabic so, at least in the first instance, for local and regional audiences. Gil Hochberg, citing the crosscutting of the scenes in which Alia sings the forbidden anthem while her mother dies downstairs, argues that Tlatli’s Silences of the Palace is allegorical to the extent that it is ‘a representation of a reality that draws attention to itself as a “representation” ’ (2000: 44, original emphasis), an argument that chimes with my reading of Mosteghanemi’s Memory in the Flesh in particular. I would suggest that Abouzeid, Mosteghanemi, and Tlatli all recognize the centrality of national struggle to the construction of postcolonial community and point to the limitations of established ways of telling that history. I view the work discussed in this chapter as representations of the complex passage of individuals into self-differentiation, subjectivity, and social identity and, analogically, as rewritings of collective (counter-)narratives. They are, moreover, acts of representation that engage, critique, and attempt to exceed existing creative canons. Because the nation (or any other form of collectivity) must be imagined into existence and named, allegory will inevitably ‘split between the continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical, and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative’ (Bhabha 1990: 297). That is to say, while received narratives to some extent define our understanding of the place and community in which we live (and its putative limits), identity and (dis-)identification are also constantly performed as part of the ongoing business of living in social space. The meaning of identity, place, and history is always in the process of being produced. Bhabha also usefully invokes the affective dimensions of cultural identity: ‘the metaphoricity of the peoples of imagined communities’ (292, 293). Here he draws our attention to ‘the nonsequential energy of lived historical memory’ (293), to identity as fundamentally iterable, hence capable of resignification (303), and to narcissistic, split, internalized, and projected aspects of identities formed in relation to constitutive others (295). As such, Bhabha locates difference not at the borders of the nation but as traces in its very structure: the ‘barred nation It/Self . . . becomes a liminal form of social representation, a space that is internally marked by cultural difference and the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities, and tense cultural locations’ (299, original emphasis). Khanna also calls for a focus on ‘the unconscious dimensions of nation subjecthood’ that, encrypted and embodied, haunt and exert pressure on dominant definitions of a community through time (2004: 12, 19). But the kinds of subaltern experiences,

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traces, silences, echoes, and ghosts that she signals will also function problematically if perceived as representative and/or able to be ‘sutured’. While it is crucial for women to testify to their active participation in the shaping of history, such testimonies will always run the risk of sublating other stories. We should keep alive a sense of individual and collective narratives constructed in an ongoing fashion and from diverse, even antagonistic positions. This will ideally produce ‘a disposition of knowledges’ that ‘exist beside each other, Abseits, in a form of juxtaposition or contradiction’ (Bhabha 1990: 312). In this chapter, I have therefore tried to indicate productive dissonances as well as connections. The postcolonial daughters discussed represent heterogeneous subject positions and deploy diverse narrative tactics. Abouzeid’s narrator debunks masculine myths of authority but, in asserting principled forms of individual and collective independence, gestures towards solidarity with certain kinds of men. Mosteghanemi’s novel implodes the tenacious woman/nation nexus: it traces the limits of an impotent masculine narrative, but holds women’s bodies and memories in abeyance, out of reach of the various readers addressed. Tlatli’s work charts a particularly vital move through melancholia for postcolonial female protagonists in their negotiations of mothers and the mother (as) nation. In engaging mothers as subjects, Tlatli sustains a critical perspective on the past, but recognizes the need for mothers to be released from the hold of their daughters’ egos. In this manner, mothers, with their own oppositional voices, perspectives, and memories, might emerge from ‘the shadows’ and ‘the unwritten’ past as ‘the very roots of strength and hope [for] the future’ (Djebar 2001: 217).

4

Heterotopias Reimagining home

The melancholic hiatuses discussed in the previous chapter could be glossed as women’s testimonies to not being at home in the postcolonial nation. The texts engaged there mobilize a temporal/historical frame of critical remembering in order to call for the continued decolonization of the nation, its history, and women’s place in both. In this chapter, I want to focus on a specifically spatial thematics in Arab Muslim women’s creative practice. As Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose have argued, any ‘move toward the postcolonial moment’ also necessitates a ‘critique of transparent space and its false claim to mimetic representation’ (1994: 14). From a feminist perspective, the task is not limited to the exposure of macro-grids such as Orientalism that produce and shore up territorialized knowledge. We should also consider micro-spaces generated by overlapping (post)colonial and (neo-)patriarchal power/knowledge systems. Due to the production of ‘women’s spaces’ as cultural boundary markers in colonial and anti-colonial discourses, feminist reconfigurations of home have been central to feminist work that reflects on Arab Muslim contexts. Feminist critics have, more widely, identified the domestic sphere as a setting in which women’s bodies, as objects of patriarchal exchange, are contained. Home is thus critiqued in its association with particular forms of (re)production and relatedness (Irigaray 1985; Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1989; Kandiyoti 1996). However, the construction of postcolonial national identity often involves a ‘homing’ or ‘the reclaiming and reprocessing of habits, objects, names and histories that have been uprooted’ (S. Ahmed et al. 2003: 9). Domestic space can be imagined as a haven of continuity that ameliorates the negative effects of colonial incursion. Nationalist, Islamic, and Islamist discourses have defined woman’s proper labour as the production of national and/or Muslim citizens but some feminisms, too, have appropriated domestic space in order to advance women’s rights (Zayzafoon 2005: 137). Even secular-oriented Djebar reclaims the House of the Prophet in So Far from Madina in order to reinscribe women at the heart of the Muslim community and as transmitters of the Hadith (see Zayzafoon 2005: ch. 5). As Henri Lefebvre has theorized, if space is produced, it is simultaneously

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contestable; it should be seen as ‘a stake, the locus of projects and actions deployed as part of specific strategies, and hence also the object of wagers on the future – wagers which are articulated, if never completely’ (1991: 142–3). It has become common practice to differentiate between place as static location and space as ‘practised place’, an actualization of individual and social operations on a particular terrain (de Certeau 1984: 117). Blunt and Rose recommend that we think of gendered space ‘less as a geography imposed by patriarchal structures, and more as a social process of symbolic encoding and decoding’ that produces homologous spatial, symbolic, and social orders (1994: 3). So Far from Madina is a good example of such recoding because it reconfigures etymological associations between sacredness, inviolability, sanctuary, and sin that cluster around the notion of feminine space. As we have seen, the social semiotics of h . ijâb are rich; as a boundary marker, h . ijâb can be used to extend private space into the public domain. These are examples of ways in which established spatial frameworks can be redressed, enabling us to speak about and view women’s embodied relationship to space in ‘new’ ways. This chapter approaches the concept of private space in three interrelated senses. First, with reference to one novel each by Nina Bouraoui and Fadia Faqir, I explore a repeated homology drawn between home, prison, and asylum that critiques domestic settings that delimit women’s identity and opportunities. In most of the chapter, though, I extrapolate a point made by Dinah Manisty who, with reference to Egyptian women’s autobiographical writing, argues that [t]he notion of space is taken far beyond that of transcending the private world of women to the public and sacred domain of men. Increasingly we observe that space enters a metaphorical domain in which the journey and the struggle involve creating increasingly complex narrative strategies to express the need for psychological space. (1998: 274) This suggests the possibility of reconfiguring domestic settings – which can be both isolating and densely populated – as loci which provide the impetus for the production of private, imaginative space. Private space is also used to recast the public domain, by figuring the former as vantage point and platform from which definitions of community can be entered into and reconfigured. These themes will be engaged with reference to two Palestinian autobiographies, by Fadwa Tuqan and Raymonda Tawil, and two Moroccan texts, Mernissi’s The Harem Within and Ben Lyazid’s film A Door to the Sky. In this chapter, texts are not arranged chronologically either by historical period represented or date of production. Rather, I wish to emphasize the troping of domestic space in ways that link different time frames and national contexts in terms of decolonizing enterprises, while also problematizing a teleological progression from ‘confinement’ to ‘liberation’.

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This is because, as Sara Ahmed et al. point out, staying at home does not necessarily mean being fixed and individual and collective ‘regroundings’ in space can resist hegemonic productions of home (2003: 1, 2). It is worth recalling Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power that manages marginal subjects in what he terms ‘heterotopias of deviation’, such as psychiatric hospitals and prisons (1984: 180). The assignation of place depends on two modes of control: first, the establishment of binaries (such as sane/mad or normal/aberrant) and, second, the assignment of the latter in each pair to an ancillary place in society’s fabric through processes of naming, characterizing, prescribing, and proscribing. The system relies on the production of recursive, docile bodies that behave in a particular way because they may be watched by an observer positioned as invisible and disembodied. Although this implies an internalization of norms that can be difficult to resist, it also means that power operates within a network of social relations rather than from a fixed position (see Foucault 1977). Because women tend to be produced as ‘delegates of men’s materiality’ (Grosz 1995: 122), the home can be seen as a heterotopia. But as a space of crisis, deviation, and temporal discontinuity, home might be reconfigured in oppositional ways rather than merely act as a repository for dissident energy. This chapter will emphasize the ability of inhabitants of domestic spaces to transform the meaning of home, emphasizing rebellious bodies and perspectives that re-inflect the meaning of space in and beyond the home.

Nina Bouraoui, Forbidden Vision A radical troping of the home as prison and asylum is found in Forbidden Vision (first published in 1991 as La Voyeuse interdite), the first novel by Franco-Algerian author Nina Bouraoui (b. 1967). Bouraoui is of mixed French and Algerian parentage; born in France, she spent her childhood in Algeria and has lived in a range of countries, making her even more difficult to classify than Sebbar. However, her first novel, in particular, shares many characteristics with Algerian women’s writing, which include feelings of isolation and consequent need for manifestations of female solidarity . . .; the sense of overwhelming claustrophobia incurred by the domestic realm; the female narrator’s profound corporeal alienation; the negative representation of the maternal role model; and the endeavour to escape the constraints of the present through the imagination.1 (McIlvanney 2004: 106) In Forbidden Vision, Bouraoui presents Algerian domestic space as ‘a silent gynaeceum’ and ‘an infernal huis clos’ (1995: 14). By the latter juridical term, which refers to the taking place of procedures ‘behind closed doors’, Bouraoui figures the family home as a site in which the experiences of

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Algerian women are silenced and encrypted and these acts legitimized. The use of ‘gynaeceum’ (implying, in fact, a Mediterranean rather than a specifically Arabo-Islamic institution) connects, etymologically, the part of a house set aside for women with female genitalia; gynaeceum comes from gunaikeion (Greek), ‘women’s apartments’, thus linking gune¯ , gunaik (woman, female), and oikos (house). Forbidden Vision is narrated from the perspective of a young Algerian woman, Fikria, a ‘woman hidden behind her window’ (1995: 3) and incarcerated in the family home until she crosses the threshold in an arranged marriage. It posits concentric frames of confinement from the house to the street and beyond which erase, silence, and render abject the female body. Although Bouraoui resists ascribing blame definitively, patriarchal Islamic tradition is identified as one cause through the deployment of a double time frame: ‘The men lived in the year 1380 of the Hegira calendar; for us, it was the very beginning of the seventies’ (13). ‘Murderess mother’ is also held accountable due to her internalization of sexist and misogynist norms and projection of these on to her daughters. Once again we see the identification of a more enabling maternal substitute; in this case the housekeeper, Ourdhia, a countrywoman who tells Fikria tales of the desert. The adolescent female body is symptomatically construed here as container of death rather than viable life, but Fikria partially embraces what she perceives as its monstrous aspects, particularly those associated with her sexual organs. She describes her adolescent body as grotesque and libidinal, breaches her own corporeal boundaries through masturbation and fantasies of self-harm and, in the place of speech which she renounces at the onset of puberty, writes in blood on the walls of her room. Fikria speaks through her text, if in problematic ways, for her even more abject sisters. She also mobilizes a resistant gaze under conditions of extreme enclosure. Positioning herself as transgressive voyeuse, as the original title indicates, she claims the position of the panoptical eye in order to dominate public space from her window: ‘I determine the perspective, hold up the horizon; nothing escapes my view through the luminous slits in the chestnut shutters’ (71). As Siobhan McIlvanney argues, Fikria’s reveries (abetted by Ourdhia’s stories) also produce a visionary landscape, thus suggesting a bi-focal visual resistance (2004: 107): Fikria describes her strategy as ‘a clever and malicious juggling between trompe l’oeil and reality’ (Bouraoui 1995: 90). McIlvanney, drawing on the work of Martin Jay, suggests that, in doing so, Fikria appropriates two modes through which Algerian women have historically been framed (as discussed in a previous chapter): the realist perspective of Delacroix’s Women of Algiers paintings and Picasso’s proto-deconstructionalist rendition of the same scene (2004: 107; Jay 1993: 24). Bouraoui cites Jean-Paul Sartre’s play Huis clos (1947), in which hell is defined as other people, but Forbidden Vision has a great deal in common thematically and stylistically with a scandalous Algerian predecessor text, Rashid Boudjedra’s La Répudiation (1969, trans. The Repudiation). Like

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Boudjedra, Bouraoui literalizes misogynist constructions of the female body, la femelle, suggesting that an authoritarian patriarchal society relies on the constant surveillance of female bodies. Both authors represent woman as a site of plenitude that must forcefully be repressed in order for men to accede to the symbolic order. Boudjedra’s narrator, a son, must inherit the father’s position, while Fikria cannot finally usurp it. The alterity of the female body also functions in both texts as cipher for heterogeneous sociocultural elements sublated in the postcolonial nation’s construction; conversely, literature is deployed as a site that can expose and release underlying tensions in the definition of community. Forbidden Vision thus extends its purview beyond Algerian women’s experience to the subjected body-politic in the post-independence period; each woman and man, in this text, ‘has his reserved place, a laughable piece of false liberty!’ (Bouraoui 1995: 12). Bouraoui conflates the female body and postcolonial Algiers as claustrophobic and veiled, but they are also described as liminal spaces: Fikria is usually found at her window and the port city represents a threshold between Africa and Europe. However, the potential porosity of each site is ultimately recuperated. With marriage, Fikria anticipates, ‘the window will be closed, my mind too’ (102) and indeed, when she leaves the house at the end of the novel, she is first veiled with one eye uncovered, then even ‘the windows are filled in’ (103). Fikria is presented as able to mobilize some visual and discursive agency, but her potential for resistance is transient and enmeshed in the dominant terms that define and delimit her body. This extreme construal of Algerian women’s negative experience becomes more disturbing when we consider that Bouraoui writes predominantly for a French audience, as evidenced by the use of footnotes translating Arabic terms. Fikria’s repeated use of the term ‘Mauresques’ (‘Moorish’ women) may signal an internalization of colonial constructions of Algerian womanhood in the postcolonial social imaginary but it can also be argued that Bouraoui unreflexively partakes of an entangled problematic of exoticization and ‘saving the other woman’ through the act of writing her narrative. While I am reluctant to call Bouraoui’s fine writing to account in terms of an obligation to carry the burden of representation, it is nevertheless true that she chooses Algerian women knowingly as controversial subject matter, particularly at the time of this novel’s publication. It is worrying that although Forbidden Vision was written during the period of Islamist resurgence in Algeria, it does not distinguish between historical and more recent contestations over the meaning of the female body, instead positing an unchanging ‘Islam’ to an outside audience. Fikria seems to exist outside history and, due to the ruse of a firstperson narrator (albeit a less than reliable one), the lens through which her first-person perspective is transmitted is left problematically opaque.

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Fadia Faqir, Pillars of Salt Pillars of Salt (1996), the second novel by British-resident Jordanian writer Fadia Faqir (b. 1956) also exploits the trope of women’s confined bodies, conflating the frameworks of home and, in this case, psychiatric asylum in a critique of constructions of woman’s ‘proper place’. Faqir’s novel is, though, grounded in recognizable historical space and, in my opinion, constitutes a more nuanced engagement with intertwined colonial and patriarchal paradigms. It also more explicitly confronts the problematic of framing within its narrative. Pillars of Salt is narrated in three voices and set during and just after the British occupation of Jordan (then Transjordan). The story of one of its protagonists, the peasant woman Maha, begins with her mother’s death in 1921, the year in which the mandated Emirate of Transjordan was created by Britain. The historical chronology provided at the start of the text lists a suppressed rebellion by the villagers of Wadi Musa in 1926, rendered fictionally as the event that killed Maha’s lover Harb (whose name means war), who fights the British forces in their early years on Transjordanian soil. The narrative present, in which Maha is incarcerated in Fuhais psychiatric hospital in Amman, is set just after the independence of Jordan in 1946. Maha’s narrative is framed by that of Sami al Adjnabi, a self-styled guardian of morality gradually revealed as an unreliable storyteller. As the term ajnabi (foreigner) indicates, he is also an outsider. Faqir subtly introduces different forms of mobility calibrated to gendered and political power (or lack thereof). The nomadic and interfering al Adjnabi is allied with ‘[his] friend the English traveller, who turned over every pebble . . . measured the land and . . . called it the “Mandate” ’ (Faqir 1996: 3), whereas Maha is described as ‘a deer that had been roaming the deserts of Arabia since Eve, made out of our father Adam’s crooked rib, was cast out of heaven’ (2). Al Adjnabi also casts her as the avatar of ‘the first female child . . . buried alive by the tribe of Bani-Qur aish’ (2–3), an event that ‘set the blood-feud between men and women’ (3). While this signals Maha’s exclusion from and entombment in definitions of culture, al Adjnabi’s project is further to discredit her as a vengeful figure, a ‘woman who challenged and [eventually] surrendered’ to what he presents uncritically as an unchanging patriarchal order (2). Maha, in turn, relays her more historicized and grounded version of events, as well as the story of her fellow inmate, Um (mother of) Saad, a Syrian-born resident of Amman. Maha’s story, drawn from direct experience, everywhere exceeds and disproves al Adjnabi’s rendering of events. In parallel fashion, her transmission of Um Saad’s narrative belies the latter’s belief that, once incarcerated, she will never be able to cross the threshold in the opposite direction, unlike the character al Shater Hasan in Alf Layla wa Layla who, with his ‘Vanishing Cap’, could ‘roll into another identity, another body, travel to better times and greener places’ (19–20). A more extensive use of a frame narrative, told from the perspective of a supposedly

106 Heterotopias ‘mad’ woman who relays a multiplicity of women’s stories, is found in Salwa Bakr’s The Golden Chariot (1995). Bakr’s use of a prison setting similarly allegorises women’s limited options in wider society, in this case Egypt. In both Faqir’s and Bakr’s texts, then, the prison/asylum functions as metonymy of an unjust society that writes women’s bodies into reductive social scripts and places them under permanent surveillance, but cannot entirely contain their oppositional voices or perspectives.2 In Pillars of Salt, Maha’s counter-narrative emphasizes the desire of the two women for freedom, love, and a stable home. For al Adjnabi, this is proof of powers of ‘spin[ning] and recit[ing] spells all night long’ that Maha inherits from her mother (Faqir 1996: 30). She also weaves carpets, another skill passed on by her mother, in order to ‘protect [the Jordanian valley] from aggressive assaulters, from the forgetful sun and the raids of enemies’ (112). Al Adjnabi, by contrast, sets himself up as ‘yarn-spinner’ (4) in an attempt to entrap and defame his perceived rival. The title of Faqir’s novel evokes the forced exile of Lot’s family in the destruction of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah on the Jordan River; Lot’s wife, looking back on her home, is turned into a pillar of salt and ash (Genesis 19: 23). In al Adjnabi’s patently erroneous version of events, the intertextual link signifies Maha’s putative sinfulness and sexual deviation. Spying on Maha as she receives treatment from a faith healer for her temporary barrenness, he construes her as a lesbian who brings down the wrath of God on her people. However, in depicting Maha increasingly hysterically as shrew, witch, devil, hyena, ghoul, and black widow, al Adjnabi seems to sense that she everywhere exceeds the terms at his disposal. The two women’s shared memories, in related fashion, expose and critique notions of honour that Maha remembers as ‘mud walls imprisoning us’ (14). Um Saad depicts ‘the shutter and the star-shaped holes’ (54) through which she projects her desire for the outside world. Restrictive constructions of woman’s place are therefore shown to transcend class divisions and rural/urban location. Um Saad is forced to leave school once she reaches adolescence, punished for an innocent encounter with her beloved, forced to marry someone else, and eventually rendered homeless when her husband takes a second wife. Maha commits a series of supposed transgressions due to her work on her father’s land, her desire for her husband Harb, a long period of infertility, and immoderate grief when Harb is killed by British forces. Finally cheated of her land and son by her brother Dafash, who collaborates with the British, Maha is forced to flee to the mountainside (cf. Genesis 19: 15). She refuses exile, though, and returns to fight for her rightful inheritance; this is when she is forcibly removed to the asylum. Maha is dispossessed by a brother who accedes to postcolonial modernity literally in her place, whereas Um Saad’s situation is the product of inequalities enshrined in family law that does not change with liberation from the British. Indeed, the status of both women is radically reduced with the advent of Jordanian independence: Um Saad locates ‘the beginning of my

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slavery’ in 1946 (190). Though his narrative is thoroughly debunked, al Adjnabi recounts what remains the ‘authoritative’ version of Maha’s story within the world of the text, in which woman’s ascribed place in ‘a well-closed room’ (22) is literalized in an exemplary manner. The inclusion of a British doctor ‘who rules us like a king’ consolidates an alignment of two contiguous frameworks of dominance, and containment: local patriarchy and (neo-)colonialism. When the doctor threatens to increase the women’s medication if they do not stop talking, they respond with the only other weapon, apart from storytelling, at their disposal: laughter (118). Eventually, however, each woman is given electro-shock treatment and her oppositional irony fades away. Faqir too, then, suggests fragile modes of resistance that only transiently breach the reduced physical and narrative space accorded to women in a society presented as enduringly patriarchal. Both Bouraoui’s and Faqir’s novels suggest that the home as it has been produced in Arab Muslim contexts is legible as prison and/or asylum, but the trope, in its composite nature, draws our attention to the heterotopic nature of marginal space. Bouraoui and Faqir calibrate binaries of private and public, past and present, and sacred and profane on a gendered axis, suggesting that women are called upon to represent the boundary between a culture infiltrated by colonialism and one reconstrued as ‘authentic’. They also posit potentially emancipatory trajectories through the use of oppositional visions and voices which emerge from spaces of radical constraint. This is particularly the case when, as in Pillars of Salt, women’s perspectives can be shared: the fact that Maha’s mother teaches her to spin/recite, which she then deploys in telling Um Saad’s story, once again suggests a relaying of alternative versions of history. Pillars of Salt, too, signals ways in which colonial and patriarchal frameworks of confinement have been conjoined and mutually productive, hence necessitating modes of resistance that can be defined as decolonizing and feminist.

Fadwa Tuqan, Mountainous Journey I turn now to two Palestinian narratives that more trenchantly assert the reclamation of space from feminist positions. In both of the autobiographies discussed, the home is configured first as a barrier, then as a threshold space opening on to women’s participation in nationalist struggle. Given the continuing occupation of the Palestinian territories, a postcolonial rubric would be premature. However, the two autobiographical texts discussed can certainly be seen in terms of a decolonizing endeavour on both personal and political levels in their reframing of the Palestinian experience through a gendered lens. The first volume of Tuqan’s autobiography, A Mountainous Journey: A Poet’s Autobiography was published as Rih . la Jabalîyya, Rih . la S.a
ba (Mountainous Journey, Difficult Journey) in serial form in the late 1970s.3

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Tuqan (1917–2003) was one of the leading poets of the Palestinian resistance known throughout the Arabophone world. Her autobiography has been published in several editions in Arabic, in comparison with Shaarawi’s that has only been published once and has had limited distribution outside Egypt (Golley 2003: 114–15). Born into a wealthy, traditional family in Nablus, Tuqan presents a difficult but necessary passage from confined existence in the ‘harem’ – the author’s term – to public presence. As a member of the elite Palestinian classes, Tuqan inherits a particular set of constraints which determines her narrative focus. A Mountainous Journey posits a trajectory from radical isolation and alienation to the emergence of an individualist and nationalist creative voice. As is the case for many of the protagonists already discussed, the narrator’s ambivalence about female identity is partly due to a mother who perpetuates sexist values such as the preference for sons over daughters. The narrator’s very existence is conceived as a struggle achieved against her mother’s will, who tried to ‘get rid of me’ during the early months of pregnancy (Tuqan 1990: 12). Although her mother later takes her side in family disputes, the mother’s ability to protect her daughter from unfair treatment is once again depicted as ‘debilitated by [her own] subjugation’ (50). The effects of a resulting ‘crushing feeling of injustice’ (50) produce an ontological crisis. We read about an ‘amusing’ childhood pastime in which the narrator concentrates on her left thumb until she becomes alienated from her hand and even ‘a stranger to [her]self’. This represents a struggle to define identity or lack thereof on her terms: In my silent contemplation, I would repeat: Who am I? Who am I? I would repeat my name over and over in my thoughts but my name would seem foreign and meaningless to me. At that point any connection I had to my name, myself, or my surroundings would be cut, leaving me submerged in a very curious state of non-presence and nothingness. When I raised my eyes from my thumb to look around me, I would come back to myself and the outside world, rejoicing at the power I possessed to get out of myself in this inscrutable manner and then come back. (51) The passage signals a perceived need to develop imaginative tactics with which to determine the relationship between self and world and is related, in a manner reminiscent of el Saadawi’s Daughter of Isis, to the problem of naming. The narrator of A Mountainous Journey remains unnamed until she recalls inscribing herself on the cover of an exercise book as the protégé of her brother, an esteemed nationalist poet: Name – Fadwa Tuqan Class – (I crossed out this word, writing in its place: Teacher – Ibrahim Tuqan)

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Subject – Learning Poetry School – The House. (58) Already we sense the reconfiguration of domestic space as a site not only of confinement, hence limited education, but also as a space in which alternative modes of reading and writing the world can be developed. We note that this is made possible by a sympathetic male mentor who is a nationalist poet, hence transmitter of a writing tradition that is condoned in this social context. This is not the only time that Fadwa cites a male name as foil for her self-inscription. Giving an approximate birth date based on her mother’s memory of a male cousin’s funeral (14–15), she subtly overwrites an officially remembered death with a supposedly ‘forgettable’ female birth (Malti-Douglas 1990: 4). The narrator develops her early poetic practice in relation to classical tradition, using elegy (ritha ) to elevate her brother, but this is a tradition that encompasses women orators and writers too, such as al Khansa (Jayussi 1990: x) and, as I noted in Chapter 1, Shaarawi. Fadwa then appropriates the pen-name Dananir, after a fictional jarya (slave girl) poet known for her chastity; this serves ‘to shield [Fadwa] from the shame of love’ that is the subject of her early poetry (73). Writing does not merely ground Fadwa’s experience, though. The act of self-inscription described above elicits an epiphany that enables the protagonist, albeit temporarily at this stage, to transcend domestic, even cultural, space and the present: These were not just words to me; they were suns and moons. Before them, my life had come to a standstill, not moving with time. I had not known what to do with it. Now, here was a feeling of life in motion, its pace quickening . . . How marvellous is the first step . . . I felt as light as a bird . . . In one moment the mountain of ignominy had disappeared. The spaces of the future stretched in its place, bright with sunshine, vast and green like wheat-fields in spring. (Tuqan 1990: 58–9) A Mountainous Journey is structured in terms of a quest which leads to an expansion of the self in time and space and toward the emergence of a poetic voice. Fadwa romanticizes nature – to which she has very limited access in the formative stages of her life – as sensuous, harmonious, ‘virginal’, and ‘unbounded’ (40, 41), contrasting it with the claustrophobic family home, ‘the mould into which the girl’s personality was poured’ (105, 106). She reclaims ‘self-seclusion’ (84) through acts of reading, writing, daydreaming, and reciting poetry from the upper terraces, thereby attempting to transform the ‘thwarted path’ of isolation into a ‘bridge’ towards freedom (57). Her ‘unnatural’ confinement, however, exacerbated once she is taken out of school after receiving the gift of a flower from her first love (47–8), also leads

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to depression, a failed suicide attempt, and an increasing detachment from life around her. What she describes as her ‘melancholic, introverted nature’, then, is produced rather than innate. This justifies the personal tenor of her early poetry: in the ‘bottled-up harem’ with ‘no independent life’ or even ‘a room of my own’ (106), the narrator claims that she ‘could do nothing but stare into the reflection of that self, all repressed’ (111). Even her claim to authorial inscription is challenged when others ascribe her early work to her brother (signalling the risks of male patronage). Most importantly, her claim to a personal poetic voice becomes a source of conflict with her family and leads to a rebellion against her father: I was not in a position to participate actively in the kind of life necessary to a poet . . . I lived with the ideas to be found in books, isolated from the world of people, my femininity whimpering like a wounded animal in a cage, finding no means of expression. While I was in this state of alienation and psychological siege, Father often came and asked me to write political poetry . . . A voice from within would rise up in silent protest: How and with what right or logic does Father ask me to compose political poetry, when I am shut up inside these walls? (107, original emphasis) Golley suggests that Tuqan’s autobiography ‘comes as a shock to the Arab reader’ (2003: 114), contrasting the author’s eventual high profile as a nationalist poet and the private, agonized, ‘feminine’ identity revealed and critiqued in her autobiography.4 We should note that Tuqan chooses not to disclose intimate aspects of her story, claiming from the outset the right to maintain a ‘veil’ over her ‘private affairs’ (1990: 12), despite her critique of social taboos that circumscribe the expression of female desire. Given constraints on a woman’s personal voice in Arab Muslim contexts already discussed, though, we understand why Golley emphasizes that the autobiographical genre presents challenges for a woman writer who earned her reputation as spokesperson for her community (2003: 121). In fact, A Mountainous Journey defines individual and collective struggle as corollaries. Tuqan is alive to the irony that her mother was permitted, as the wife of a nationalist, to belong to the Nabulsi Union of Arab Women, a group affiliated to Shaarawi’s Egyptian organization, but prohibited from travelling to conventions or participating in demonstrations (Tuqan 1990: 109). The daughter’s text progresses towards the emergence of a public poet, but insists on emancipation as an individual woman as prerequisite. This, I would suggest, is the rationale for ending the first volume of the autobiography with the 1967 war that inaugurated her most political phase as a poet. Having said this, a subtle parallel is drawn throughout between women’s seclusion and the circumscribed lives of the Nabulsi population under British and then Israeli occupation. The way in which the narrator is

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(not) named and (not) given a date of birth, for example, is implicitly linked to the early stages of Palestinian disenfranchisement: I arrived at a time when one world was in its death throes and another was about to be born: the Ottoman Empire was breathing its last; and Allied armies were continuing to open the way for a new western colonization – 1917. The British occupation of Palestine was completed in September of that year. (15) Tuqan also conjoins domestic and national frames by tracing a legacy of female seclusion back to her great-grandfather who served in the Ottoman army that dominated the region before the British. The confinement of upper-class women is portrayed as an archaic throwback to a feudal system and linked to imperial domination that is not exclusively European. Fadwa goes on to criticize the hypocritical affinities of her father’s generation of men, split between the West and al Azhar (36).5 She also emphasizes divisions within the major political parties to first call for Palestinian selfdetermination. Tenacious gender norms are described as specific to Nablus, a traditional city, but also one at the centre of the nationalist struggle. Tuqan’s ‘dialectical view of life’ (82) comes to the fore in her depiction of the build-up to the establishment of the state of Israel. In a manner reminiscent of Fanon’s ‘situational diagnosis’, she claims that ‘[w]hen the roof fell in on Palestine in 1948, the veil fell off the face of the Nablus woman’ (113).6 Her mother is one of the first women to remove it (24–5). Her father also dies in 1948 and the two events – the Palestinian nekba (catastrophe) and the death of the patriarch – enable Fadwa’s political consciousness finally to ‘catch fire’ (113). A Mountainous Journey presents a highly critical image of the ‘harem’, rejecting definitions of the home as locus of cultural integrity and arguing that its walls restrict women’s personal, artistic, and social development, hence their ability to contribute or testify to political change. Testimonies such as this insist that the ‘prison of the house’ (12) be read in a manner which takes into account women’s marginalization in wider society (Golley 2003: 122) and that the private/public threshold ultimately be crossed. Focusing on her personal struggle as a woman, Tuqan calls for more inclusive redefinitions of community in a movement beyond ‘an age of subjection, repression and dissolution into nothingness’ (Tuqan 1990: 12). It is true that other Palestinian women’s experiences are only gestured towards and often problematically generalized as, for example, when the narrator comments upon lower-class women when she visits the h . ammâm with her mother: poorer women thought nothing of moving around the bath rooms with naked breasts and buttocks. I was delighted with the spontaneity of

112 Heterotopias these women, who lived in a much freer and down-to-earth atmosphere than that of the bourgeoisie, which was characterised by falsehood and hypocrisy. (23–4) However, Tuqan attempts to expose interlacing frameworks of privilege and exclusion and is particularly critical of her paternal grandmother’s class prejudices. Given seriously limited access to the outside world in her youth, even a trip to the h . ammâm prompts reflection on culturally constructed hierarchies. Remembering seeing her mother undressed on the same occasion, the narrator revises her view of their troubled relationship and recognizes that ‘I can only imagine the extent of the inner torment caused to her [too] by the restrictions laid upon the female members of the family’ (24).

Raymonda Tawil, My Home, My Prison Tawil (b. 1940), born two decades later than Tuqan, nevertheless testifies to many of the same constraints as her compatriot. A journalist and activist, Tawil wrote My Home, My Prison, first published in 1980, during a period of house arrest in 1976 by the Israeli authorities, the first stage in an attempt to censor her reports on West Bank experience under the Occupation. The autobiography was published simultaneously in English and Hebrew with the help of international colleagues, after the author was detained in solitary confinement, interrogated, and physically beaten in 1978. It represents, on one level, a victory over sustained efforts to ‘gag’ her attempts to testify to the plight of the Palestinians (Tawil 1983: 243) and can be read as testimonial literature targeted primarily at external audiences. My Home, My Prison is simultaneously a compelling account of one woman’s struggle against tenacious gendered norms and of the social and political implications of the personal journey documented. As its title signals, the text is premised on a double exposure of the patriarchal structure of the society in which Tawil lives and of the ongoing repression of the Palestinian people. ‘Home/prison’ is here explicitly conceived in both gendered and national senses, enabling the author to challenge the terms by which the Palestinian community has defined itself but simultaneously to assert nationalist affiliation. Beginning with the incarcerated scene of writing in the late 1970s, the autobiographical narrator (Raymonda) asserts that ‘my prison has many walls: no sooner do I scale one of them than I’m faced by another’ (8). Early in the text, she sets up the obstacles to freedom that she has encountered through her life: as a Palestinian, belonging to a people deprived of rights and dignity; as a woman in a semi-feudal, patriarchal society; as a citizen of a territory under foreign military occupation;

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as an individualist in a traditionalist, oppressive environment that restricts individual liberties. (8) The text then proceeds chronologically ‘to record the story of all my prisons, all my walls’ (9), ending with the assertion that ‘[i]f I was to be restricted [once again] to a cage, it would have to be done by force’ (241). Tawil’s narrative identifies her primary role model as her mother, an American-born Palestinian who defies gendered mores by divorcing the narrator’s wealthy father, although the couple are later reunited as friends. Facing homelessness and destitution, the narrator’s mother takes on an unconventional public role: she is employed as a social worker in Arab villages within the post-1948 borders of the new Israeli nation. Her gift for humanitarian aid and dialogue is to have a lasting effect on her daughter. The spatially symbolic resonances of the mother’s passage from domestic security, through homelessness, to bridge-building in the margins of the reconstructed nation-state, are also striking. Mother and daughter are continually separated, first by the divorce which automatically grants custody to the father: her sons will never see her again and her daughter is told that she is dead. They are later divided when, after crossing into Jordan, Raymonda loses the right of re-entry to Palestinian territory. The Mandelbaum Gate separating Jordan from Jerusalem, which will be lost to the Palestinians, becomes a symbol for the narrator’s perceived ‘lack of identity’ (109) that is figured in terms of a disrupted family and national history. Identity is represented as a political and territorial as well as a psychological and social problem. When Raymonda is married with five young children, she has a final meeting with her mother who is disappointed at what she perceives to be her daughter’s failed emancipation. The narrator’s challenges both to domestic seclusion and military occupation are henceforth conceived as ‘a debt to [the] memory’ (71) of her mother, a paradigmatic boundary-crosser. Raymonda marries young in Jordan under the supervision of her brother, because socially and economically there are no other options for a woman. She is not Muslim, but she claims that the burden of family honour, which places men as guardians of women’s bodies (55), is a pervasive characteristic of Arab (and Muslim majority) patriarchal contexts. As her narrator argues, ‘[m]y repression did not come from some amorphous and faceless “society”; it was my own home and immediate social environment that imprisoned me’ (64). In the early years of marriage, she compares herself to Ibsen’s Nora, ‘a doll – beautiful, pampered – and deprived of my free will’ (61). Her ‘proper place’ is defined as raising children and in all-female company and ensured by pervasive surveillance and the threat of gossip. The narrator remembers, as tentative first steps in feminist consciousness-raising, beginning a diary at this point in her life and reading Simone de Beauvoir.7 Heroines such as Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary become other conduits for her frustrated desires, although their fate recalls the high price that transgression can exact.

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The narrator’s growing feminist awareness leads to a profoundly ambivalent belonging once she moves with her husband to Nablus. As does Tuqan, Tawil identifies repressive gender norms with the elite classes, particularly in this Palestinian setting. On the one hand, Raymonda is committed to the nationalist cause; on the other, she feels dehumanized as a woman, hence ‘a stranger’ in her society (67). In Nablus, surrounded by mountains, ‘even the landscape was part of my prison’ (68). Raymonda decides, however, that ‘since I could not escape my environment, I had to make it into the battlefield of my emancipation’ (69). She first spearheads the Arab Women’s Union’s transition from a philanthropist to a political institution, beginning, as did Shaarawi in Egypt, by inaugurating a series of lectures by women.8 Tawil then turns her home, again like Shaarawi (although Tawil aligns her action with that of ‘famous hostesses of eighteenth-century France’), into a ‘“salon” for literary and social gatherings’ (79). It eventually becomes a meeting place for dissidents of various nationalities, faiths, and creeds, transforming the home into an intensely political forum. Raymonda’s network of contacts enables her to take on the role of news gatherer, feeding unreported events to sympathetic journalists in Israel and the West. These processes, however, all involve a slow gaining of trust from her compatriots: as a woman engaging in ‘unladylike’ political affairs (82), a Christian in a majority Muslim community, and a fluent Hebrew speaker with American and Israeli friends, Raymonda is permanently conspicuous. She remains, almost to the end of the narrative, constrained by the expectations of her family and wider society. The ability to cross national borders is again presented as a necessary part of the feminist ‘voyage out’ when her husband scuppers her dream to study in Paris by refusing, as her legal guardian, to give her permission to apply for a passport (166). Gender roles are, however, portrayed as changing in Palestinian society: just as the nationalist activities of the Arab Women’s Union are given impetus in the 1960s by the fact that many Nabulsi male dissidents are in prison or under house arrest, the narrator pinpoints the 1967 ‘defeat of Arab men’ (129, original emphasis) as a catalyst for transformation. The erosion of the economic and social fabric of the Palestinian territories under Occupation is posed as another, but Raymonda emphasizes above all the effect of young women joining the armed resistance (128). Raymonda admires the younger generation of fedayîn who take up arms against the Israeli state,9 but her enduring philosophy is informed by her mother and by memories of the cosmopolitan multi-faith settings of her schooldays in Nazareth, Haifa, and Jerusalem in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Born Greek Orthodox, Raymonda converts to Catholicism, learns fluent English and French in addition to Arabic, and befriends European Jews. As an adult, she continues conscientiously to differentiate between the Israeli military state and the individuals who live within its borders. This fundamentally humanist philosophy and her repeated description of Palestinians as the ‘new Jews’ of the post-war era withstands some terrible

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ironies. On two occasions, in which we observe again the representation of personal and national identity through the use of spatial signifiers, she visits houses that formerly belonged to her extended family and have been reoccupied by Jewish immigrants. In one case, the house has been turned into a museum, but its original Palestinian inhabitants are completely erased from the records. Nevertheless, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is not depicted in binary terms; instead, Raymonda emphasizes the layered history of her land and looks beyond contested national space in order to expose the shortcomings of the wider Arab world in failing to respond to the Palestinian crisis. Jordan and Lebanon are particular targets of her critique: the former because of its rival occupation of Palestinian territory; the latter due to its treatment of the refugee population. Tawil undertakes a multi-axial exposé of her complex location as a subject, emphasizing agency against substantial odds. She construes her multiply-marginal position – as a woman, a Palestinian, a colonized subject, a Christian, and a feminist – as a site of potential translation through which the testimonies of her people can be transmitted. Barbara Harlow has suggested that (what she terms) ‘third-world women’s prison narratives’ constitute a discursive category promoting an ideology of collective experience (1986: 502–3). She discusses narratives, including Tawil’s, which promote secular forms of affiliation over traditional forms of filiation such as family, clan, or ethnic group (507). While women have not only elected a secular politics, Tawil’s is an example of attempted resistance to dogma of any provenance, be it Western (and Israeli) constructions of the ‘passive Oriental woman’, patriarchal constructions of ‘woman’s place’, regional definitions of erstwhile Palestinian territory, or definitions of Palestinian identity as Arab, Muslim and patriarchal. Her border-crossing outlook is the legacy both of a powerful maternal role model and of the intensely diasporic experience of the Palestinian people. Tawil’s individualist perspective is, however, occasionally myopic. When she remembers a conversation with ‘women friends’ in which she expresses frustration at her role as wife and mother and they remind her of the ‘poverty and suffering’ of women in the refugee camps, the potential for an analysis of the intersection of location, gender, and class is foreclosed by her dismissive comment that ‘most women . . . deny their oppression’ (1983: 67). What she describes as ‘the prison where Arab women are condemned to spend their lives’ is a generalization. In her defence, though, she does recognize that her house arrest is a relative privation compared to that of Palestine’s many refugees, deportees, and exiles (19). In what follows, I turn (back) to a national context which illustrates a more conventional path from colonization to postcolonial identity (with the ambivalences that the ‘postcolonial’ implies). The two Moroccan texts to be discussed also foreground concerns about women’s historical and ongoing ‘enclosure’ in rigid gender roles, using the frame of ‘the house’ to critique constructions of the wider national community. They, too, emphasize tactics

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of mobility, transgression, and transcendence through the use of oppositional voices and visions. However, they nuance domestic space somewhat differently, particularly in their finely tuned depictions of female communities.

Fatima Mernissi, The Harem Within Mernissi’s autobiographical fiction, The Harem Within: Tales of a Moroccan Girlhood (1994), is set in an upper-middle-class harem in Fez in the 1940s, against the backdrop of the struggle for Moroccan independence. The English version of the text was first published in Britain, then reissued as Dreams of Trespass (1995) in the United States. Mernissi also wrote, then revised the French version Rêves de femmes: Une enfance au harem (1996, 1998) and collaborated on the Moroccan Arabic version Nissâ  ala Ajnih . at al Hulm (1998). Exploiting and circumventing the publishing power and hegemonic languages of the West, Mernissi’s trilingual authorship also troubles notions of ‘original’ and ‘translation’ (Gauch 2007: 37), encouraging us to read the different versions as adaptations conceived in relation to audience expectations. This translation history is the first sign that, as Donadey puts it, this is a ‘deceptively simple’ text (2001: xxxii). Mernissi uses a first-person narrator with her name and the geographical and historical setting of her childhood. She breaks the autobiographical pact in only one version of the text, warning French readers that the book is a fiction constructed on the basis of her childhood memories.10 The English text also uses the authenticating ruse of photographs, taken neither by nor of the author, that have only a loose connection to the specific location depicted in the writing. Emphasizing traditional architecture and dress and featuring women with their backs to the viewer or veiled/concealed, the images coyly evoke an Orientalist imaginary, promising testimony to an undiscovered world. Gauch thus argues that the text addresses itself to ‘readers at a remove from Morocco’s past’ (2007: 38), but the use of Orientalist indices has both strategic and thematic purpose. The author’s intention is partly pedagogical, stressing the production of meaning in two contexts of cross-cultural contact: the colonial setting depicted and the globalizing one in which her text circulates. In addition, the images, which feature doors, windows, arches, and lattice-work signal borders and thresholds that are not only physical, but historical, temporal, personal, and symbolic. The Harem Within opens with a nod to standard autobiographical form, but embarks immediately upon a defamiliarization of historical and spatial coordinates: I was born in a harem in 1940 in Fez, a ninth-century Moroccan city some five thousand kilometers west of Mecca, and one thousand kilometers south of Madrid, one of the dangerous capitals of the Christians. The problems with the Christians start, said Father, as with women,

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when the hudud, or sacred frontier is not respected. I was born in the midst of chaos, since neither Christians nor women accepted the frontiers. (Mernissi 1994: 1) The narrator posits a religious and geopolitical cartography with Fez at its centre. Illustrating the historical production of cultural difference, but skewing the Orientalist map, Mernissi subtly conflates colonial rule with fitna (see Chapter 1) and jahiliyya (a term conventionally signifying the ‘chaos’ and ‘ignorance’ of the pre-Islamic era), and more overtly juxtaposes Christians and women as transgressive forces in space. Humour is achieved by decentring a Eurocentric point of focalization, by mixing chronological frameworks (Christian and implied Islamic calendars) and slippage from a long history of contact between Africa and Europe to a simple cautionary tale told by a Moroccan father to his daughter. Of course, the key irony of the opening passage is that while European forces have already moved south, this will exacerbate the construction of Moroccan women’s bodies as ‘the site of the border’ rather than simply encouage their mobility. However, colonial and gendered space intersects in complicated ways. The young narrator cannot go to see the elusive frontier not only because it is not necessarily a physical phenomenon, but because a girl of her class and generation ‘does not travel’. At the same time, the patriarchs who transmit this rule, despite being influential figures in the city, have to ask the permission of Spanish soldiers to attend a religious festival in Tangiers, hence to cross a tangible line of demarcation between Spanish and French Protectorates (2). One of the organizing threads of the narrative is the narrator’s increasing separation from her male cousin Samir. Each progressively assumes a gendered identity defined by the body and the spaces in which that body is permitted, with Fatima increasingly preoccupied with beauty treatments in the courtyard, and Samir finally banished from the women’s h . ammâm. Mernissi’s text foregrounds Fatima’s precocious negotiation of gendered, cultural, political, and developmental boundaries (Plate 4.1). The opening passage introduces the main thesis that ‘[t]he frontier is in the mind of the powerful’ (3) and a key textual strategy, the refracting of Fatima’s naïve voice through an adult interlocutor approximate to the author. While in early childhood frontiers seem relatively clear, growing up necessitates vigilance as to their whereabouts and meaning. As the adult narrator observes, ‘looking for the frontier has become my life’s occupation. Anxiety eats at me whenever I cannot situate the geometric line organizing my powerlessness’ (3). Ostensibly linear, the narrative moves back and forth quite loosely in time and is propelled by a maturing engagement with terms, concepts, and codes. These are mediated by, on the one hand, young Fatima’s father, uncle, paternal aunt, and paternal grandmother, who insist on rules and fixed boundaries; on the other hand, women such as Fatima’s mother, maternal

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Plate 4.1 Fatima Mernissi, The Harem Within (1994) / Ruth Ward.

grandmother Yasmina, and maternal cousin Chama rebel against what they perceive as arbitrary spatial limits. The text also contrasts two epistemologies. Fatima’s Qur anic school teacher Lalla (Mrs) Tam attempts to inculcate the conventional one: ‘“Just learn by heart what you have written on your luha [slate]”, she would say. “No one will ask your opinion”’ (103). Several women in the narrator’s family are, by contrast, committed to ijtihad. Yasmina, for example, defends women’s right to break minor rules unless a fatwa (decree) is produced specifically to prohibit them. She also articulates what is the author’s broadly deconstructive approach: ‘“Words are like onions . . . The more skins you peel off, the more meanings you encounter”’ (65). A master signifier, the ‘harem’ – the basic topographical unit of the text, as the British title flags up – is presented in relation to internally and externally generated historical processes of encoding and decoding space. At the most

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prosaic level, the harem denotes the urban residence of an extended family conjoined by two wealthy landowners, the narrator’s father and uncle. To them, the domestic structure represents affluence, tradition, and the protection of women: Fatima’s father describes it as also a haven for ‘troubled’ (here divorced and widowed) women (17). Located at the edge of the madîna ([old] city), the harem also represents a symbolic frontier between the indigenous population and the French. Mernissi inverts this familiar trope, however. Highly rationalized and transparent, the French city implies by inversion that the occupiers fear the labyrinthine madîna: ‘you could be powerful, and still be the prisoner of a frontier’ (23). This said, the French army ‘terrorized the entire Medina. They had power and could hurt us’ (23), as evidenced in a violent suppression of resistance to colonial rule in 1944. The meaning of the harem becomes most ambiguous in relation to the farm on which Yasmina lives, which has no physical frontiers and is home to a diverse group of co-wives that includes the aristocratic Lalla Thor, slaves from Sudan and Morocco, and Tamou, a Berber war heroine from the Rif mountains who remains oblivious to rules and traditions. One definition that Yasmina gives of the harem is as both restricted movement for women and polygamous space.11 A long footnote then historicizes the institution, contrasting the Ottoman imperial h . arîm with domestic h . urum that Mernissi describes (tongue-in-cheek) as ‘rather dull’ (35). One effect of this disquisition upon the h . arîm is to debunk Orientalist discourses and imagery and to emphasize the diverse domestic structures that the institution has accommodated historically. Nevertheless, in its division of domestic from public space, even on Yasmina’s farm, the h . arîm is an object of critique in Mernissi’s text, particularly in terms of the limited access women have to education. Crucially – and here the original English title achieves its resonance – the h . arîm is presented as an internalized structure, a ‘law tattooed in the mind’ (66), related to qâ
ida, a structure, code, or rule (66–7). Young Fatima learns a complicated lesson through the course of this text: space is regulated by qawâ
id (pl.) that deprive women of autonomy and choice, but happiness and h . urrîya (freedom) are attainable even within constraints (66–8). A major focus, and the inspiration for the US title Dreams of Trespass, is upon ways in which, ‘[p]aralyzed by the frontier, women gave birth to whole landscapes and worlds’ through creative practices (1994: 224). In the sobering final statement of The Harem Within, and in a manner that recalls the limitations to subaltern agency articulated by Khedija and her colleagues in Tlatli’s The Silences of the Palace, ex-slave Mina transmits the fundamental truth of any frontier: ‘If you can’t get out, you are on the powerless side’ (254). However, Mernissi’s text presents ways of ‘getting out’ that transcend physical mobility, particularly for the younger members of Fatima’s extended family that have access to education. Mina suggests that for poor women like herself, the h . adra (exorcism) is ‘a rare opportunity to get away, to exist in a different way, to travel’ (169). In an episode that

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recalls Tuqan’s depiction of a similar tactic, the young Fatima plays a solitary game that she terms ‘The Seated Promenade’, in which she contemplates familiar objects and surroundings as if seeing them for the first time (4). If, in Tuqan’s text, the oppositional creation of a more reclusive space ironically underscores her confinement, Fatima’s game enables her to expose lines of power dividing the house horizontally and vertically. She observes that men take centre stage in the lower levels and have the most lavish salon, which houses the (locked) radio. Fatima’s paternal grandmother also imposes strict obedience from the central courtyard. The narrator’s mother, the wife of the second son, insists on equal treatment for her family, but hierarchical power can manifest itself in subtle ways: as the adult narrator observes, ‘in a wellmanaged harem, the more power you have, the more generous you ought to be’ (6). Uncle’s family therefore discreetly enjoys more space on the upper floors. These upper floors and terraces are also home to those located at the bottom of the domestic hierarchy: Mina and divorced and widowed aunts. The narrator’s game enables her to glean insights into a three-dimensional topography of power, but also to intuit interstices in the structure through which women can rebel. She interprets the sky as the sign – reduced from the courtyard – of a limitless exterior: Looking up at the sky from the courtyard was an overwhelming experience. At first, it looked tame because of the man-made square frame. But then the movement of the early morning stars, fading slowly in the deep blue and white, became so intense that it could make you dizzy. (5) This reframing of the sky, which contrasts the architecture of the house with the unlimited potential of outdoors, is captured in one of Ruth Ward’s images; this also identifies the upper terraces as threshold spaces between the interior and exterior of the house (Plate 4.2). Fatima’s game is the harbinger of strategies taught by Fatima’s mother, who emphasizes the need for women to escape ‘via the front gate’, but is prepared to condone descent via the adjoining roofs. Her mother recognizes that ‘even playing is a kind of war’ (4) and Yasmina agrees, suggesting that authority is in fact a ‘game’; resistance involves learning how ‘to shuffle the cards, confuse the roles’ (161). Consolidating these tropes, we read about women embroidering fantastical bird motifs and ‘flights’ to the terraces where ‘subversive’ activities such as smoking American cigarettes take place. Aunt Habiba, non-literate but with a gift for storytelling, lives upstairs and Fatima recalls ‘graceful nights . . . listening to our aunt’s voice opening up magic glass doors, leading to moonlit meadows. And when we awoke in the morning the whole city lay at our feet’ (19). These ‘ways out’ are reflected in the Moroccan title, which translates as ‘women on the wings of a dream’. Fatima’s mother is the architect par excellence of ‘clandestine times and spaces’ in the strictly regulated household (85). These include stolen

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Plate 4.2 Fatima Mernissi, The Harem Within (1994) / Ruth Ward.

moments listening to love songs on Radio Cairo and conspiracies of silence around minor transgressions. Going to the cinema is the ultimate prize and a guaranteed cause of conflict. On these occasions, Fatima’s mother struggles over her attire with the men of the house: she wishes to replace the h . aîk with the more practical djellaba and the white face veil with a litham, ‘a tiny triangular black veil made of sheer silk chiffon’ (124). Because modified dress is championed by the wives of prominent Moroccan nationalists, Fatima’s father must eventually relent or be considered unpatriotic despite his concerns (cited earlier) that women’s threats to the h . udûd will result in fana, or the end of the world (125). Fatima’s mother is, here, presented as relatively fortunate. The divorced and widowed women of the house, without the protection of a husband, cannot even wear a djellaba as this would incur ‘irremediable and irreversible condemnation as loose women’ (127). The men do not see the same contradiction in their own combination of

122 Heterotopias European and Moroccan dress: ‘tradition and modernity coexisted harmoniously side by side’ (95). Eventually, when independence is announced in 1956, Mother will participate in a women’s march and come home with her hair and face uncovered (126), but in the narrative present ten years earlier, more subtle tactics are required. Humorously recalling Mernissi’s discussion of fitna elsewhere, Mother leads the women to the cinema in imitation of the Egyptian film star Leila Mourad as femme fatale: She would walk while starting straight ahead . . . her eyes very wide, as if she had a dangerous eye infection, and then dart her gaze to the left and right, sending deadly magnetic rays, as she whispered in a conspiratorial tone, ‘No men can resist my awesome beauty. A single second of eye contact, and innocent victims will fall wriggling on the ground’. (127) There is a less amusing layer of irony at work here, though. Mother’s comment recalls Amin’s intervention on the issue of veiling but, as Mother is non-literate, the only version of this and other public debates to which she has access is via her husband. As the double struggle for independence and women’s emancipation accelerates across the Arab world, Fatima’s mother feels her isolation acutely: With all the news about the Egyptian feminists marching in the streets and becoming government ministers, the Turkish women being promoted to all kinds of official positions, and our own Princess Aisha [daughter of Mohammed V] urging women, in both Arabic and French, to take up modern ways, courtyard life had become more unbearable to her than ever. Mother cried out that her life was absurd – the world was changing, the walls and gates were not going to be here much longer, and yet, she was still a prisoner. (210–11) While for Fatima, then, the h . arîm is space for play, albeit also a developing philosophy, for Mother its meaning and implications are fixed. Fatima’s cousin Chama is closely aligned with the narrator’s mother. Both suffer from hem, an inarticulate depression linked to limited access to outdoor space and thwarted creative and intellectual aspirations. However, they and the women on Yasmina’s farm each offer partial solutions to the young narrator. Educated Chama transmits an eclectic feminist legacy via plays which she writes and directs in the upper levels of the house. These are female-centric, drawing upon stories of women such as Lebanese singer Asmahan and the ra  idât (‘pioneers’ such as Shaarawi). Unsurprisingly, Shahrazad is a key model in her ability to ‘string [words] artfully together’ (10); Fatima also recalls the film Dananir, in which Umm Kulthoum plays the jarya who outwits her rivals with her superior poetry (122). There is

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a strong emphasis on singing and dancing in the women’s plays, but they extend to cover religious figures such as Khadija and Aisha (first and last wives of the Prophet) and the mystic Rabia al Adawiyya, in keeping with women’s insistence throughout the narrative that Islam is inherently egalitarian. The use of theatre inside the h . arîm is particularly interesting given this text’s preoccupations with space. As Alison Findlay has argued in a different context, drama superimposes setting on the venue of one’s given place; it offers exemplary opportunities for re-citing and re-siting space (2006: 3). The plays, considered ‘trivial’ by the men of the house, are performed in ‘out-of-the-way spaces, top floors and terraces’ (Mernissi 1994: 119). They enable the audience to journey imaginatively across time and the world, in keeping with Aunt Habiba’s credo that ‘[l]iberation starts with images dancing in your little head, and you can translate those images into words’ (120). Tangible frontiers can at least temporarily and imaginatively be transcended. H . urrîya is imagined through the plays in diverse ways: theatre does not have to posit achievable goals; rather, it enables the ‘spelling out of dreams and giving up of body to fantasy’ (117). Staging other women’s lives adds a layer of corporeal expression that merely telling and listening cannot achieve. An interesting example is Princess Budur from Alf Layla wa Layla, counterposed against the storyteller as a model of emancipation through action. One of Budur’s stratagems is to dress as a man; another is to inspire solidarity with the woman to whom she finds herself married. While the latter (implicitly lesbian) theme is too contentious in a house divided between ‘traditionalist’ and ‘modernist’ women, the former is approved as revelatory of the superficial ascription of gender difference. This reminds us that theatre provides opportunities for what Hamid Naficy (1996) has described as ‘haggling spectatorship’. Although Chama has a forceful personality, she cannot always impose her vision on her audience. Tragic Asmahan is a firm favourite whereas – again with a wink at the Western market – the Egyptian feminists are only tolerated as ‘they did not do much besides write, since they were locked up in harems’ (Mernissi 1994: 135). An exception is Shaarawi whose 1919 street march is so exciting that the entire audience invades the stage to re-enact it and Huda’s famous unveiling (136–8). In sum, theatre enables the women of the house to transgress boundaries in space and time, to reveal those lines as arbitrary, and to ground their resistant tactics in a legacy of women’s agency. Mernissi claims ‘a chain of transmission of North-African, MiddleEastern, Arabo-Berber, and Islamic feminism within which she finds her legitimation as the most well-known Moroccan feminist’ (at least to a nonMoroccan audience) (Donadey 2000: 87). This is in keeping with a wider project that seeks to illuminate contemporary debates about Arab Muslim, and particularly Moroccan, women’s social status through reference to enabling historical models. We might question, though, the way in which The Harem Within situates itself on a historical as well as developmental

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threshold: foreclosing upon the postcolonial era gives the author recourse, albeit in nuanced fashion, to the ‘women in the harem’ trope so beloved of Western audiences but outdated in the Moroccan context. As such, The Harem Within only gestures towards ongoing debates in that country and more widely about women’s rights, obligations, and choices.

Farida Ben Lyazid, A Door to the Sky In her Preface to Fantaisies du harem et nouvelles Shéherazade, Mernissi suggests that travel across spatial and temporal boundaries is a staple of Islamic pictorial and narrative traditions (2003b: 11). In Sufi philosophy, she explains, travelling reveals (démasquer / kashfi l qina ) the hidden face or true identity of the traveller (musâfir) (12). Mernissi’s compatriot and contemporary, Farida Ben Lyazid (b. 1948), partakes of this tradition in a visual text in order to show that processes of self-transformation can also happen by travelling home. Ben Lyazid, who had previously worked on films directed by others, wrote and directed her first feature, A Door to the Sky (Bâb 12 al Sama  Maftûh . , literally ‘the door to the sky is open’), in 1989. The film, dedicated to Fatima al Fihriya who founded the first university in Fez in the tenth century, is set in postcolonial Morocco and focuses on the spiritual awakening of a young woman who returns from France to mourn the death of her father. The family home, also in the old city of Fez, is visually reminiscent of the house depicted in Mernissi’s text. In A Door to the Sky, Nadia plans to stay briefly before returning to her job and partner in Paris, but finds solace for the loss of her father and a perceived void in her life under the tutelage of Karina. An itinerant female qarri  a (reciter of the Qur an), Karina is yet another substitute mother-figure (Nadia’s own mother dies outside of the filmic diegesis). Nadia almost immediately rejects her French lover, accusing him of exoticizing her and, in his professional capacity as an international journalist, of ‘salving Western consciences’. She turns most pointedly against capitalist materialism, deciding ‘not to worship money anymore’. Refuting also Moroccan inheritance laws that would give her brother Driss half of the house whereas each sister is entitled only to a quarter, Nadia converts the family home into a zâwiyya, traditionally a Sufi lodge or cloister (Knysh 2000: 174). Nadia converts the concept and the space into a refuge that takes in battered wives, abused daughters, the psychologically ill, and a female ex-convict; women can come and go freely, but men are barred. Nadia, however, meets Abdelkrim, a young man also suffering from spiritual illness, who is accepted by the women of the house once he proposes marriage. The film ends with a reconciliation of the spiritual and romance plots in scenes of the harmonious couple on a pilgrimage and with a shot of the sky. When Nadia first returns, the home is an eclectic space or, rather, one coded via ‘clashing’ cultural signifiers: opera permeates the central courtyard and the walls are covered in Orientalist and modernist paintings,

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including a female nude. Most of the dialogue between the family members takes place in French. Whereas Driss and his French wife insist that their children eat with cutlery and Nadia’s sister Leila insists that she is ‘still Moroccan’, Nadia refuses to choose but admits to feeling like a ‘stranger’. She initially rebels against what she sees as the ‘disguise’ of traditional mourning dress, but her discomfort is temporary. Under Karina’s guidance and through practices that substantiate her father’s comment that one must become a Muslim, Nadia rejects her former smoking13 and whisky-drinking habits and punk attire. She learns to pray and to read the Qur an and dresses in a djellaba, with or without headscarf, for the rest of the film. The preponderance of shots focusing on the interior of the house and below skyline level creates a sense first of claustrophobia, then increasingly of security. Commensurately, doubt is defined by Karina as solitude and confinement, whereas faith is ‘the key that opens everything’. Nadia has an epiphany inspired by the moon during the Night of Destiny or Power (Laylat al Qadr), the 27th night of Ramadan that celebrates the revelation of the Qur an, hence the opening of the door to heaven. The film also includes shots of the old city. In the first instance, the separating French-Moroccan couple is framed by a hotel window that reflects an image of the city, emphasizing the lure of heritage for Nadia and the exteriority of her lover to the scene. The madîna is subsequently shot from the roof terrace of the zâwiyya, usually to the accompaniment of the adh . an (call to prayer). This perspective projects an immutable culture steeped in Islam; indeed, Nadia asserts that ‘Islam doesn’t change’ and opts for its putative stability rather than the changes inspired by commodity fetishism. This can be contrasted with a dialogue with Leila at the beginning of the film when Nadia criticizes Morocco as unchanging (outside progress) while her sister implies that it has already changed for the worse due to an unselective assimilation of Western values. Ben Lyazid has emphasized that the roots of her film are in popular rather than either mainstream or radical Islam (qtd. in Hillauer 205: 338). It foregrounds humanitarian and egalitarian principles drawing, for example, on the Islamic principle that women can use their money to provide charity and shelter, but refuting sexist laws of inheritance. In conversations with Karina and a female lawyer, Nadia criticizes organized religion as patriarchal, oppressive, and egotistical. Citing Angela Davis on Marx, she argues that religion is the opium of the oppressed due to social conditions that exclude genuine spirituality. She locates faith as the proper home of the disenfranchised, rejecting religious ideology that shores up power. This position is enacted in her refusal to attend the mosque and in her support of practices such as the h . adra censored by the state and orthodox Islam. Practised exclusively by women, it provides a parallel to theatre, as I suggested with reference to Mernissi’s text, in that it frees women’s bodies from quotidian constraints and locates a traversable h . udûd between material and spiritual worlds.

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As the parallel romance plot of Door to the Sky indicates, Nadia refuses to separate faith from emotional and erotic attachment, citing the claim of Sufi philosopher Ibn Arabi that ‘Islam is love’. Although this is defined exclusively in heteronormative fashion, Nadia rebels against interpretation of the sacred texts ‘through the narrowest door’. A brief but significant philosophical challenge comes from the ex-prisoner Bahia, who cites Rimbaud’s nihilistic ‘all is farce’ and chooses to leave the refuge in search of a man. While part of Bahia’s decision is then also enacted by Nadia (she meets Abdelkrim immediately after this scene), Rimbaud’s ethos is countered by a text on Nadia’s wall, the authorship of which is not made clear, which claims gnomically that ‘Not to be is a mirror, the world is an image . . . You are the eye of the image and He is the light of the eye. Who has ever seen the eye through which all is seen?’ In Sufism, a veiled person (muh . jab or muh . ajab, fem. sing. muh . âjaba) is one whose consciousness is determined by mental or sensual passion, so is veiled in his or her relation to God. Mernissi explains that the root s-f-r producing ‘voyage’ (safar), ‘traveller’ (musâfir) and ‘ambassador’ (safîr) is linked in the Qur  an with the phrase ‘the morning when it illuminates faces’ (2003b: 12–13). The traveller is one who can undergo a mystical illumination described as unveiling (kashf) or a lifting of the veil (mukâshafa) that separates humans from the extra-sensory world, enabling a direct witnessing of God and one’s human condition without the necessity of intermediaries.14 Ordinary mortals, on the other hand, remain confined to the world of empirical appearances (Knysh 2000: 311–14). These insights enable us to read the zâwiyya in A Door to the Sky as a liminal space socially, legally, spiritually, and metaphysically. Supplementary to the mosque and officially endorsed practices, it is a space that enables vision beyond the tangible, as well as one in which spiritual and erotic desire are reconciled. Viola Shafik remains unconvinced, arguing that: Nadia solves the problem of her national affiliation by taking a onesided decision. She reconciles only with her Moroccan heritage, but cuts her relation to France abruptly and thoroughly, leaving again a wide fissure between tradition and modernity as absolute contradictions, at least on the material level. Hence, her search for identity concentrates on metaphysics. (1998: 207) I agree that the conversion of characters in this film is too rapid to be convincing. However, there are understated moments when other epistemologies (Rimbaud, Davis, Marx) also contribute to Nadia’s self-transformation. Given that national affiliation is not always an issue easily ‘solved’, as Shafik would have it, I would posit that Ben Lyazid posits an accretive quest that interfaces rather than radically fissures worldviews. Nadia’s return to Morocco prompts a redefinition of postcolonial modernity that combines

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insights from both Islamic and Western traditions. As Karina argues, ‘[e]veryone understands through his [sic] own mind and his own era’. My overarching argument in this chapter has been that Arab Muslim women use ‘situated knowledges’ (Haraway 1992) to transform marginal social spaces into heterotopic, palimpsestic, and threshold locations. I have emphasized techniques of ‘reterritorialization’ (Kaplan 1987) that critically combine and redefine diverse spaces – home, prison, asylum, literary salon, theatre, zâwiyya, street, city, nature – as part of the project of investing the home with new meaning. Particularly striking is the way in which the home/h . arîm is transformed into a practised place that encompasses work, play, meditation, literate and non-literate creative practice (storytelling, poetry, and drama), welfare, craft, dialogue, testimony, and feminist struggle. Recurrent references to women poets, mystics, activists, and storytellers recall a legacy of powerful role models who have found ways to transcend confined spaces in the process of redefining individual and collective identities. The production and circulation of the texts discussed reminds us that education, literacy, and access to the public sphere are usually prerequisites for feminist creative practice. But the points of view represented here should, finally, be viewed as orientations that situate themselves on productive thresholds, generate plural meanings, and are relative to the periods and locations that women re-present.

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In his Preface to Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, Young describes his ‘haunting’ by two photographs taken during the Algerian war. The first, of two young, unveiled, and defiant Algerian women, carries the caption ‘Les “porteuses de bombes” des stades: l’âge de Juliette, l’âme de Ravachol’ (the bombers of stadia [in colonial Algiers]: Juliet’s age, Ravachol’s soul). The second shows an Algerian man, borne aloft and naked by four European men in a field, who looks directly at the camera. On the front cover of Young’s book is a third photograph, taken in 1962, of an armed French soldier standing beside a young woman concealed by the haîk. For Young, these images function as ‘traces of the violence, defiance, struggles and suffering of individuals, that represent the political ideals of community, equality, self-determination and dignity for which they fought’ (2001: vii, ix). But, in addition, they hail him in the space of the gaze from whence the camera shots issued; the photographs ‘interpellate [him] with the transgendering force of colonial power, and the brute reality of its realization’. The first image is unable to reconcile the figure of a desirable woman with violent resistance although the reference to Ravachol, an anarchist who opposed the Republic in the late nineteenth century, underscores the contested status of l’Algérie française. The second figures the emasculation of a colonized man in the appropriation of a feminized land and body politic. The images cited here expose the colonial gaze as masculine (with commensurate ‘blind spots’ that permitted ‘cloistered’, ‘veiled’, and ‘emasculated’ Algerians to emerge as revolutionary agents with devastating effect). But does their replication render viewers complicit in the violent construction of a feminized Other? Does a return to the colonial past necessarily partake of what Emily Apter has described as ‘disavowed colonial desire [that possibly] haunts even the most rigorous, well-intentioned efforts to unmask the colonial gaze’? (1999: 176). Michael O’Riley rightly states that ‘[a]s an oppositional practice seeking to unveil the repressed histories of colonialism and to return them to the realm of postcolonial consciousness, postcolonial studies performs a belated history of recovery’ (2001: 48). He stresses, as I have been doing, ‘the imperative of the return and juncture of both voice and image in the endeavour to merge orientalist history within postcolonial consciousness’;

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that is, the necessity of reframing the intertwined scopic and discursive underpinnings of colonialism in the production of oppositional voices and visions. But he reminds us that a critical focus on the production of the stereotype as a means of inaugurating the ‘return of the colonial unconscious’ risks repressing other forms of discrimination that can define identitarian politics, recalling, among other things, my major focus in this book: feminist politics as ‘a major part of the unfinished business of the postcolonial era’ (O’Riley 2001: 50; Young 2001: 381). O’Riley is more generally taxed by the fact that postcolonial studies constantly summons particular representations of the past, and here he refers predominantly to Orientalist imagery. In this reading, postcolonial studies represses its desire for difference and reproduces an enclosed field; in its reiterative structure it is redolent of Orientalism itself (2001: 50–51). Although there is some truth to this, we should maintain some distinction between criticism, always belated in relation to its object of analysis, and creative interventions that intend, whatever their form, to project new interpretative horizons; to be oriented, to use Bhabha’s pithy formulation, ‘back to the future’. Bhabha engages the problem of belatedness differently, defining what he calls ‘the borderline work of culture’ tout court as ‘a contingent “in-between” space’ that interrupts colonial and national discourse through the performance of oppositional memories and histories (1994: 228, 7). In this rendering, the past is always already in the process of rearticulation in both senses of that word: performed in and translated through multiple positions, history connects Europe and its (post)colonial others as hybridized, enmeshed sites (254). Valassopoulos also grapples with O’Riley’s article in her exploration of contemporary Arab women’s writing, and suggests that: Although this image of a ‘haunting’ is quite powerful, it inherently contains the suggestion of a latent or unconscious slipping into discourse; that somehow [writers and critics] are powerless to change the trajectories of their writing within the ‘postcolonial period’ and are somehow unconsciously drawn to revisit the past . . . This sets up a difficult task for those writers who seek to negotiate the colonial site against a postcolonial obligation . . . [However] the frequency of orientalist imagery within contemporary fiction alerts us to the possibility that this haunting not only is deliberate but functions to indeed posit a new direction in postcolonial theory that recognizes and integrates a colonial legacy not without its problems. In other words, it becomes possible to argue for an engagement with colonial and orientalist practice that compels a theorisation of encounters, of how discourses and subjects meet across time and space. (Valassopoulos 2007: 135, original emphasis) This is an apposite critique that meshes with my own emphasis on ways in

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which women claim threshold sites in time and space in order to refigure frameworks of apprehension that are not only colonialist/Orientalist and engage in transformative practices that exceed hegemonic power/knowledge structures. Fran Lloyd identifies points of connection across contemporary Arab women’s art practices that are more widely applicable in women’s creative work, some of which I have demonstrated in previous chapters: metaphors of absence and presence; veiling and unveiling; nearness and farness [sic]; the continuous dialogue with different forms of western art; the matrilinear connections that include the ancient females of mythology, the threads of storytelling and mother/daughter relationships through the imaginary and the real.1 The prevalent theme however is the continuous crossing of territorial boundaries (both through geographical displacement and through the contrapuntal spaces of memory) and the continuous re-inscribing of identity. The coincidence of these two modes of moving is not accidental . . . Both travel and identity . . . imply an active subject, unfixity and a continuous present. (1999: 41, my emphasis) In this chapter I explore, with reference to visual media produced by Zineb Sedira and Mona Hatoum, and to fiction by Ahdaf Soueif and (more selectively) Leila Aboulela, ways in which different modalities of mobility – travel, migration, exile, memory, and translation – are construed in terms of their effects on (post)colonial feminist identities. I use the term ‘identity’ here to evoke intersubjective as well as individual identifications and in the sense of ‘a performative location . . . constitutive and positioning, not enclosing and excluding’ (Bromley 2001: 6). This latter definition is particularly evocative of a diaspora consciousness (see Hall 1990). However, as James Procter has suggested, we should not uncritically promote vocabularies of liminality and itinerancy without also attending to the other side of the etymology of diaspora – speiren, to sow as well as scatter – hence to economies of dwelling, settlement, reterritorialization, and struggles over the definition of ‘home’ (2003: 12–15). In engaging forms of border crossing and re-groundings, as well as transculturation, translation, and attendant aporia, I demonstrate ways in which women return to the past and to other locations in order to reflect upon contemporary postcolonial conditions. In so doing, they translate ‘hauntologies’ (O’Riley 2001: 50) into questions of (be)longing and ethical encounter, as well as reminding us of ‘the outside history that is inside the history of the English’ (Bromley 2001: 15).

Zineb Sedira: on witnessing, translatability, and vanishing points Young’s book renders Algeria visible as colonial ur-context, but its significance in Anglophone postcolonial studies tends to stop at 1962. This absent/

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present status could be extrapolated, although I can only do so speculatively here, to ways in which Algeria’s history latently structures ways of thinking about the Arab Muslim world that extend beyond the Franco-Algerian interface. Algerian insurgency, in both anti-colonial and Islamist forms, has impacted upon discourse and praxis in African and ‘Middle Eastern’ contexts including Afghanistan and Iran. The Pentagon’s effort to engage The Battle of Algiers in the early stages of Iraqi resistance to the Anglo-American invasion was therefore not entirely unfounded. From the opposite end of the political spectrum, British band Asian Dub Foundation also re-screened the film in the UK in 2004, accompanying it with an original soundtrack, because they perceived it as antidote to Manichean rhetoric and imagery remobilized in ‘the war on terror’. By contrast, on the eve of the AngloAmerican invasion of Iraq, the British Observer featured on its front page a photograph of a machine-gun-wielding veiled woman under the caption ‘Saddam’s Army Unveiled’ (9 February 2003). This last example is reminiscent of the kind of overdetermined production of the Arab Muslim world discussed in my introduction. ‘The Arab Muslim woman’ functions as metonymy of an extreme opacity, particularly in the catachrestical collocation of veil and gun.2 This precludes any real engagement with a transnational history of anti-colonial female activism in which Algeria serves as exemplary case, let alone with other women’s quotidian experiences of the ensuing and prior wars on Iraq.3 Sedira (b. 1963) was born and raised in the suburbs of Paris to Algerian parents who emigrated the year after independence. She has been resident in Britain for more than two decades, producing a range of visual media that reflects (not exclusively) upon her identity and Algerian heritage. Her work recombines and hyphenates settings, positing multi-locationality, interactivity, and transculturation rather than bounded contexts. As Gabriel Cox argues, a problematization of fixed, essential, and singular identities is a precondition for understanding Sedira’s theoretically savvy work;4 questions of who is speaking to and for whom, in what language, and who is watching, are also central. Rather than demonstrating its ‘foreignness’, her art reminds us that the term ‘postcolonial’ applies to all parties implicated in colonial history (2004: 5). There is, therefore, often a lingering insinuation of historical violence in her work.5 An early example is provided by Sedira’s Autobiographical Patterns (1996, Plate 5.1) video performance.6 One hand (which we assume belongs to the artist, given the title of the piece) is inscribed and overinscribed in real time with a marker pen held in another hand (also implicitly the artist’s). The writing is fast, messy, proceeds without hesitation, and pulls roughly at the skin, undermining visual associations with decorative (for example henna) design. Its automatic, confessional quality is enhanced by the few words that can just be deciphered – ‘Je suis née’ (I was born), ‘immigré’ (immigrated), ‘nationalité’ (nationality), ‘Algérienne’ (Algerian [woman]), ‘ton pays’ (your country) – before they disappear beneath other lines of writing. While the piece seems

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Plate 5.1 Autobiographical Patterns (1996), dir. Zineb Sedira.

to signal a diasporic Algerian identity, the autobiography is ultimately illegible. Sedira’s interest in experience that is embodied but can only partly be transmitted and translated is again evident in Mother Tongue (2002). Three simultaneous video screens present inter-generational dialogues: between the artist and her mother (in French and Arabic respectively); the artist and her daughter (in French and English respectively); and the artist’s daughter and mother. In the third screen, Sedira’s British-born daughter cannot communicate in her ‘(grand)mother’ tongue (Arabic), so her side of the dialogue contains awkward silences and she is self-conscious about the camera. Sedira has indicated that as a non-fluent Algerian Arabic speaker, her own dialogue with her mother, who does not speak French, is somewhat interrupted (Sedira undated: InIVA document 1). Part of Sedira’s intention, despite cumulative aporia in the transmission of an intergenerational narrative, is to bear witness to the experience of her significant others, notably her mother’s memories of the Algerian war of independence. In the video Retelling Histories: My Mother Told Me (2003), Sedira and her mother appear in an unembellished setting (at a table in front of a white wall) and speak in French (Sedira) and Arabic (her mother). Her mother calmly recalls the French army’s visits to their village to take identity photographs for the population census. She describes the forced unveiling of

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women, abduction and rape by French soldiers and collaborators, and the risks of resistance that could result in violence and even murder. She developed her own strategies of resistance, particularly necessary given that her husband was away working in France, such as covering her skin with ashes in order to conceal her pale ‘attractive’ skin. Sedira does no ‘retelling’ here, merely posing open questions and translating the conversation into English in the subtitles. Moreover, no contextualizing information or glossing is provided for the viewer, although the dialogue references ‘France’, ‘the war’, the h . aîk, and the mûdjâhidîn. At times, the narrative is temporarily interrupted and the image fades in and out, subtly underscoring the violence of the history being retold. We are complicit, at a certain level, as we partake of a scene in which the mother’s face is once again exposed, unveiled. In a series of twelve tiled prints entitled La Maison de ma mère (2002), the artist ‘wallpapers’ images of her mother’s body and parts of her house in Algeria. The mother’s presence is partial and displaced, through the mirroring of her white garments and headscarf on to textiles, ornaments, and curtains. The figure of the mother is located in relation to a domestic frame, citing conventional associations between women’s bodies and private space that I have already discussed, but always only transiently apprehended in her movement within and beyond the borders of that frame. This also implies that the mother encapsulates but exceeds the meaning of ‘home’ (homeland) for her French-born, British-resident daughter. Sedira’s work thus enters into dialogue with that of other women discussed in this book who present a matrilineal legacy of partial presence. The endowment of the mother-figure with narrative, linguistic, and spatial mobility in various Sedira pieces enables the artist to present an ambivalent relationship of intimacy and distance, enigma and familiarity, which she sees as ‘typical of [any] mother/daughter conversation’ (Sedira undated: InIVA document 1). In other elements of her corpus, Sedira’s Algerian affiliation is signalled less explicitly. Her intention can be construed both as a philosophical reflection on the nature of identity per se and, more specifically, as feminist critique of female embodied experience that cuts across different national and cultural contexts. She has stated that her work is strongly influenced by feminist performance art and identifies what she calls a ‘Western veil’: the objectification and fragmentation of the female body in advertising and popular culture (qtd. in Sotiriadi 2004: 2, 4). Her Self Portraits or the Virgin Mary triptych (1998, Plate 5.2) projects computer-generated full-length images of the artist in full h . aîk. In the two left and right panels, we see the artist in profile; in the central plane, she has her back turned. Her body appears as pristine statue, white against a white background. The partial blending of the figures with the background, particularly at their base, suggests an amorphous, shifting context or resistance to spectator ‘fixing’. Sedira evokes purity through the white-on-white mise-en-scène but, by juxtaposing h . ijâb and Mary, reminds us that chaste female bodies are ideologically imbued in more than one cultural context. She has explained that

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Plate 5.2 Zineb Sedira, Self Portraits or the Virgin Mary (2000).

the series was partly inspired by her frustration with reductive media representations of ‘the veil’ and in order to remind viewers that female veiling did not, in fact, originate with Islam (qtd. in Sotiriadi 2004: 3–4).7 What she has described as the ‘visible and invisible topology of the veil’ is here a figure for ‘the sociality of . . . [any] subject’s construction and the manner of its smooth reproduction’ (Sedira 1999: 217). Sedira simultaneously challenges epistemologies which would make visibility the grounds of selfpresence. Challenging the notion of verisimilitude, she makes her body into a simulacrum of presence. Although female bodies are to some extent constructed by the expectations of others, identity is also partly elsewhere to apprehension. A particularly interesting image in the series comprises a dual or split (conjoined) image of the artist, again in the h . aîk, entitled Self Portrait (1998; see Lloyd 1999: 214). On the left, Sedira has her back turned; on the right, she confronts the camera with her face partially veiled. This image,

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which in its mirroring evokes presence and absence, a returned and an averted gaze, is elaborated in the artist’s vertically split essay entitled ‘The Oblique Gaze: Notes of an Artist/Notes of a Spectator’ (1999). The left column of the essay constitutes a brief autobiography and a discussion of cultural and political influences upon her work, identifying h . ijâb (‘the veil’) this time as a physical, psychological, cultural, religious, and political ‘code’ for Muslim women specifically. However, Sedira also claims there the label ‘beurette’ that signifies a ‘language of mixing, remixing, translating and transforming [which] helps to articulate the dissonance of a particular time and place: to be Arab and French and Parisian’ (Sedira 1999: 216) and, by now, British. She extends this latter insight in the right column of the text, describing multilingualism as the medium of a ‘restless interrogation’ intrinsic to the experience of (more than one) migration. Sedira also claims that, in any case, to speak of one’s personal history is to partake of ‘a translation of memory that is always of the incomplete, the never fully decipherable’. The language employed in which to say ‘I’ is described as multiply shadowed ‘by an “elsewhere”, an unconscious, an “other” text, an “other” voice, an “other” place’ (216). Indeed, Sedira claims that the ‘gap’ between cultures and languages ‘cannot be transmitted in words’. However, neither should we seek to reinstate self-presence and cultural ‘truth’ through the image that only ‘appears to order and contain ambiguous experience’ (217, my emphasis). No looking is neutral or all-powerful, she warns; rather, ‘images enter the realm of lost objects whose vanishing points are linked not to surface but to a place determined by experience; a place not easily located, that holds traces of memory and thought’ (216). Sedira’s equivocal stance, as she moves between notions of différance and experience, should make us wary of reading the artist’s face as the sign of ‘self’ that the title of this image promises. The use of dual figures here, particularly given their spectral form, means that ‘images [of the self] appear and disappear like shifting memories of a performance’ (218). Furthermore, the figure of the veil is undermined as a fixed ‘code’: instead, it becomes a metaphor for translation. If Sedira claims only partial access to her own experience, then we are obliged to consider images of ‘the other woman’, a position which she strategically inhabits in these images, as highly mediated rather than testimonies to a stable truth. This is an intervention that can be construed in relation to the artist’s current lived context. Her recurrent use of spectral imagery can then be interpreted as a rendering of the experience of inhabiting a body produced as Other in public discourses about British citizenship and agency. Sedira’s Jinns (2001–4) series features white shadows on a black background, the reversal of a more predictable contrast of black shadow on white surface reinforcing the ‘ghostly’ theme indicated by the title. Essentialized shapes with non-specific features, these figures suggest reflections of a reductive gaze rather than viable subject positions. Sedira applies very similar techniques (this time using black shadows on a white background) in her

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Exilées d’Algérie series of light boxes (2000), once again suggesting a conjoining of contexts in and across her work and highlighting, in each case, women ‘exiled’ from contexts in which an implicitly violent gaze attempts to frame them. Sedira tends to suggest that reductive image-making is the result of a pervasive gender politics which partly determines the meaning of a woman’s body across contexts and simultaneously to identify the limits of a nonMuslim spectator position. In her short film Silent Sight (2000), the horizontal ‘bars’ above and below a pair of eyes once again evoke the h . aîk, but were actually inspired by rectangles censoring sexual content on French television in the 1970s (Sedira undated: InIVA document 2). If the subject of the film can be construed as desire, though, this pertains in the diegesis specifically to the narrator’s experience as a child, struggling to interpret her mother’s feelings from beneath her h . aîk. She recalls having to learn to identify her mother and establish trust through touch, mood, and smell, and eventually to accept the h . aîk as part of her mother’s embodied identity. Therefore, while Sedira does not normally veil and it could be argued that h . ijâb is not an element of her embodied identity, she has construed it as part of the process of self-individuation and recognition of the (m)other. The spectator, who only has access to Sedira’s voice and eyes (Plate 5.3), is encouraged to replicate the process of establishing trust and intimacy within a limited visual field. A proportion of Sedira’s spectators must be British Muslims and some might still see this as a secular construction and point instead to the wearing of h . ijâb as badge and act of faith. It can also be a means of preventing harassment, asserting privacy, and rejecting constructions of the female as body (that Sedira points out). In Leila Aboulela’s novel Minaret (2005), Najwa, a young Sudanese woman exiled in Britain in the early twenty-first century, chooses to become a mutah . ajîba (a woman who wears h . ijâb). Reclamation of a practising Muslim identity is conceived as an alternative to a

Plate 5.3 Silent Sight (2000), dir. Zineb Sedira.

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‘third space’ existence in Europe characterized as lack. Nawja is first alienated at a deep cultural level due to the unselective assimilation of what are portrayed as Western consumer values by the privileged classes in Sudan. Exiled geographically as a result of her father’s execution for dissidence, she is downwardly mobile economically and further disaffected by a lack of community in Britain. Eventual affiliation to a transnational Islamic community seems, to some extent, to be compensation for a crisis in the family narrative: the death of Najwa’s father, her mother’s passivity, and her brother’s drug addiction or extreme ‘Westoxication’ (an emplotment strikingly similar to that presented in Ben Lyazid’s film). Najwa’s choice to veil is the result of her discovery of a substitute nurturing environment in the mosque and inaugurates a relearning of the relationship between self and world: In the full-length mirror I was another version of myself, regal like my mother, almost mysterious. Perhaps this was attractive in itself, the skill of concealing rather than emphasizing, to restrain rather than to offer . . . Around me was a new gentleness. The builders who had leered down at me from scaffoldings couldn’t see me any more. I was invisible and they were quiet. All the frissons, all the sparks died away. Everything went soft. (Aboulela 2005: 246) Veiling here signifies enhanced dignity, authenticity, tranquillity, and selfempowerment. The scene also suggests an element of self-exoticization but, at another point, Najwa rejects Orientalizing desire, asserting that ‘[t]his is not a fancy-dress party . . . it is as if the hijab is a uniform, the official, outdoor version of us’ (186). Although Najwa suggests that without h . ijâb her ‘nature is exposed’ (186), its wearing can also entail significant risk: in contemporary Britain, this ‘uniform’ can be interpreted as defiant difference. Veiled in public in the aftermath of 9/11, Najwa is insulted and attacked on the bus by an unseen assailant: ‘He says, “You Muslim scum”, then the shock of cool liquid on my head and face. I gasp and taste it, Tizer. He goes back to his friends – they are laughing’ (81). As Alison Donnell observes, subsequent to 2001, attitudes to and representations of the veil [in the West] have overwhelmingly demonstrated the intransigence of the veiled woman as an icon of oppression – an embodiment of the rationale for the continuation of George W. Bush’s war without end, a strategic figure constantly evoked as a visual reminder of the incommensurability of Western and Islamic societies. (2003: 132–4) This suggests that the aura of erotic mystique historically attached to the veil

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(but always, of course, informed by power) has been replaced by a ‘xenophobic, more explicitly Islamophobic, gaze’ (123). H . ijâb is identified as the marker of cultural difference constructed on a global level: we might cite British MP Jack Straw’s rather disingenuous comments about the limited possibility of dialogue with veiled women in 2006 as an example of the way in which non-Muslim majority contexts construe concealed Muslim women as hyper-visible and seemingly ‘unassimilable’.8 Roger Bromley suggests that the ‘visibly different stranger’ threatens concepts of homogeneity, hence indistinctiveness, which continue to underpin definitions of the nation; manifestations of alterity can thus be interpreted, from a racist perspective, as the beginnings of ‘ontological anarchism’ (2001: 12–13). Veiling, which makes difference visible through acts of concealment, might be seen to produce a particularly uncanny effect.9 The body can be read as a hinge between contextual norms and elements of self-apprehension that exceed, negotiate, and remain in tension with those norms. As we know, Butler (1990 and 1993) sees such tension as manifest in the performance of norms and suggests that the act of repetition reproduces the body always somewhat against its grain, so to speak. Performing such performances, as Sedira does, makes the performative nature of the body visible, thereby opening up margins of resistance. This is partly what Tobing Rony (1996) means by ‘third eye’ tactics of oppositional selfpresentation. However, as Sedira is aware, veiled bodies are no more constructed or contestable than other bodies. Yeg˘enog˘lu advocates that we think of ‘the veil’ as ‘a second skin’ but, as Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey have argued, the skin itself is ‘the fleshy interface between bodies and worlds’. As such, skin ‘becomes, rather than simply is, meaningful’ and ‘is always open to being read (and being read differently)’ (2001: 1, my emphasis). We must challenge, then, ideas about the ‘authenticity’ of the unconcealed female body that have so often informed responses to Muslim women. Yeg˘enog˘lu extends her point thus: If veiling is a specific practice of situating the body within the prevailing exigencies of power, so is unveiling . . . the unveiled body is no less marked or inscribed; rather a whole battery of disciplinary techniques and practices have [also] produced Western women’s bodies and therefore not-to-veil is no less inscriptive than being veiled. (1998: 115)10 Sedira uses the traditional h . aîk in her imagery, rather than a more contemporary form of h . ijâb common to the British context (such as Najwa’s headscarf in Minavet). While Sedira’s deployment is an understated marker of specific national affiliation as well as a more conceptual figure, as I have shown, it could also be viewed as a nostalgic representation of ‘traditional’ Algerian womanhood. However, this particular form of veiling evokes a fascinating cluster of associations when placed in a cross-cultural, translin-

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guistic frame. H . aka, ‘to weave’), . aîk literally means ‘woven’ (from the verb h pertinent given that Sedira reveals ways in which all women are stitched into, but can rework, social and cultural codes. This also reminds me of the narratives (woven) by women in Faqir’s Pillars of Salt or Mernissi’s The Harem Within in order to transcend confined spaces. We might, moreover, consider Spivak’s description of text as textile and her definition of the work of translation: ‘the task of the translator is to facilitate this love between the original and its shadow, a love that permits fraying, holds the agency of the translator and the demands of her imagined or actual audience at bay’ (1993: 181). Spivak deploys the term ‘frayages’11 to evoke the fraying that occurs at the selvedges of a text(ile). She then uses this as metaphor for that which is irreducible in any text (its rhetoricity) but can ‘facilitate’ – be woven into – another text(ile); that is, a translation (180). We recall that Sedira aligns the veiled female body with language, depicting both as ‘shadowed’ by experiences and memories that cannot entirely be ascertained, even from the ‘inside’, let alone smoothly translated. We might see her as an ‘intimate reader’ (Spivak 1993: 183) of her own body text(ile) and that of (m)others, rather than as representative and transmitter of ‘fixed’ identity narratives. Djebar’s conflation of the h . aîk, the mourning shroud, and the page as le blanc (white/blank) in Algerian White, first published as Le Blanc de l’Algérie in 2000, provides a more ambivalent representation of the possibility of such frayage. An extended eulogy and memorialization of those who have died in Algeria, particularly in the civil war period, Algerian White enacts the author’s refusal, stated at the end of So Vast the Prison, ‘to call you mother, bitter Algeria’ (Djebar 2001: 359). The ‘words of the quavering, lost language’ of ‘the white procession of ghost-grandmothers’ still ‘rise up’ in Algerian White, but now in a context of linguicide, intellocide, misogyny, and media ‘whiteout’, in which ‘the males out in front gesticulate in the field of death or its masks’ (350). The ‘traces and echoes’ archived in Djebar’s wider corpus are here figured as silences exerting pressure on what is (not) said (officially and abroad) about Algeria. Djebar therefore describes herself as caught between aphasia, ‘the white of writing in an untranslated Algeria’ and the need to write against ‘an Algeria of writing-in-blood [sang-écriture/sans écriture]’ (2003: 229).12 The only role she feels she can ethically assume is as seeker of ‘“the word within” [un “dedans de la parole”]’ (230) that might enable a writing of mourning. This is an extremely ambiguous passage in the original, but I think ‘the word within’ might be better translated as ‘an inside to the word’, or that which remains outside official language and is usually, in Djebar’s work, associated with a matrilineal oral tradition. I also disagree with Khanna about this passage, which she sees as evocative of a melancholic stance (2006: n. pag.). I would translate the relevant clause (‘Comment dès lors porter le deuil’) as ‘How from now to mourn?’ and extrapolate that Djebar calls for a differently constructed Algeria as ‘mother’. She does not deny the possibility of testimony and memorialization – indeed, she suggests

140 Border crossings, translations that (a certain kind of) language alone ‘remains our fertile homeland’ (230) – but she does remind us again of the double-bind that language, so implicated in forms of patriarchal and cross-cultural violence, represents. If Djebar’s summoning of Algerian ghosts recalls what can be the very real risks of ‘trysting dangerously with the untranslatable’ (Apter 2006: 95; Bhabha 1994: 226–7), Sedira’s work suggests more generally that identity and history can only imperfectly be expressed through speaking, writing, remembering, and performative practices, particularly in contexts of crosscultural and linguistic translation. Sedira transmits at least five identity narratives: individual, familial, cultural, national, and diasporic. However, conscious of a persistent desire for the ‘ethnographic truth’ about Arab Muslim women in the context in which she lives, she only partly identifies with established categories and then often strategically, provisionally, and ironically.13 Sedira’s experience of dissonant histories, spaces, and languages is not unique, and neither is Algeria the only traumatic context to be partially transcribed and/or translated with attendant aporia into British cultural space by women affiliated to Arab Muslim contexts. In order to demonstrate this, I turn to Measures of Distance (1988), a short film produced by Mona Hatoum.

Mona Hatoum, Measures of Distance Resident in the UK since 1975, Lebanese-born Palestinian artist Hatoum (b. 1952) attracted particular attention with the exhibition of her Corps étranger/Foreign Body (1994), an installation which presented the artist’s body by way of a recorded endoscopy and colonoscopy, positioning the spectator as an extreme manifestation of the ‘imperialist eye’ of the camera. As its title signals (both bilingually and through the ambiguous étranger/ foreign), the piece presents the body, in all its abjection and visceral beauty, as at once universal and radically Other; the construction of ‘foreign’ in the sense of other national or ethnic bodies is rendered meaningless. Hatoum’s notorious piece is not ‘about’ Lebanon or Palestine per se, but the meanings which it generates and the structures of representation which it contests can be extrapolated to a more grounded narrative. This is most manifest in early parts of her corpus, particularly Measures of Distance (1988).14 Desa Philippi suggests that Measures of Distance consolidates aspects of Hatoum’s earlier work that include: challenges to the primacy of visual cognition; a consideration of the interrelationship between domestic and public space; a focus on and through the lens of desire and memory; and a setting ‘adrift [of] the signifier “Palestinian” as well as “Woman” as inherently unstable and overdetermined’ (1990: 73, 74–6, 76–7, 72). Measures of Distance, as Philippi argues, also transmits the possibility of partial identifications in an intersubjective domain (1990: 78). The film opens with a gradually illuminated image of the artist’s naked mother, partially screened by lines of Arabic script (Plate 5.4). On the soundtrack, two

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Plate 5.4 Measures of Distance (1988), dir. Mona Hatoum.

women’s voices talk and laugh against a backdrop of traffic noise. This is then overlaid by a second soundtrack in which the narrator/addressee ‘Mona’ reads letters from her mother, translating them into English with occasional hesitations. From the outset, the film signals visually, aurally, and through the absent text of Mona’s returned letters, that there is more content at stake than is transmitted, particularly for a non-Arabophone viewer. The letters have been written in the aftermath of Hatoum’s trip to Lebanon in the early 1980s, when the two women discussed ‘women’s things’ and Mona took photographs of her mother in the shower.15 The mother reflects on this experience and uses it to tempt her daughter back to Beirut. Her desire is maternal (‘My dear Mona, I long to see you my little one . . .’) but not exclusively so; she construes the intimate photographic encounter as having brought the two women together ‘like sisters’. The experience initiates an ongoing dialogue between the two women in which the mother discusses sexual desire with humour and increasing frankness as the letters progress. This discussion is presented as one officially placed ‘under erasure’. Mona’s father, on discovering the two women during the process of taking the photos, was embarrassed about and dismissive of what he described as ‘women’s nonsense’. Mona’s mother explains that he felt his daughter had ‘trespassed on his property’ by photographing his wife naked and asks her

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daughter ‘not to mention a thing about [Hatoum using the photos in her work] to your father’. The ‘bar’ of the Arabic script over the mother’s image can therefore be read in a manner that recalls el Saadawi’s depiction of her mother’s name, deferred as source of identity by the intervention of the patronym in the sacred language. And, as it does for el Saadawi, writing in the same script partially compensates for the Oedipal rupture, simultaneously producing the mother–daughter relationship as residue. Hatoum’s use of a visual medium enables a direct juxtaposition of image and text, a relationship that has been historically fraught by conceptions of the sacred word and iconoclastic anxiety. Sedira has explained that her work, too, aims to inaugurate a ‘reclaiming of the feminine text’ within ‘masculine form’, simultaneously challenging classical Islamic prohibitions on verism and Western assumptions that Islamic art is merely ‘decorative’ (1999: 218). As Shohat explains, the Qur an does not forbid the representation of living creatures and a dialogical interchange between Islamic and Western art traditions dates back to the nahd.a. However, a strand of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) views mimetic representation as usurpation of the uniquely creative power attributed to God. Writing, by contrast, is the medium of the sacred, as Arabic was the means through which God revealed himself and communicated his message: the term Qur an derives from q-r-a, which also generates qar  a, ‘to read or recite’. As a recent exhibition of contemporary Arab and Muslim artists entitled Word Into Art (2006) attests, h . urufiyya (from h . arf or ‘word’) is a common art practice ‘which deal[s] with the Arabic language, letter or text, as a visual element of composing’ in an abstract manner (ctd. in Porter 2006: 16). Given an enduring tension attached to veridic representation, by contrast, US-resident Egyptian Ghada Amer’s canvases can be seen as controversial engagements with the female form, if placed (as they do not necessarily need to be) in the context of an Arab Muslim cultural heritage. Amer has recently produced a series of delicately embroidered and serially repeated, sexually explicit images of women partially concealed or ‘veiled’ by hanging threads (Plate 5.5). Amer juxtaposes two female stereotypes with long provenance in the West at least – the angel in the house and the whore – through the combination of form (embroidery) and content (masturbation). The painstaking repetition and partial concealment of the images highlight the ambiguous pleasure of producing always already eroticized female bodies for visual consumption (Issa 2003: 184). Given the names of the women in the titles of her images, she seems to reflect specifically on Western modes of producing and perceiving the female body. Like Amer, Hatoum mediates the image of a naked female body through a partial veiling device which, in Measures of Distance, is Arabic script.16 Although Hatoum is Christian, she brings a tension between ‘sacred text’ and ‘profane imagery’ explicitly into play in an Arabo-Islamic cultural framework. I would suggest that, the layering of image and text in Hatoum’s

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Plate 5.5 Ghada Amer, Diane’s Pink (2001).

film produces the mother’s body as palimpsest that is both specifically located and has more universal provenance. Mona’s mother can only be apprehended by her daughter’s desire through the substitute object of the letter: the mother’s skin is textured by the horizontal and vertical creases of the page, just as that page is illuminated by the skin tone of her body. The mother’s body is also ‘barred’ from the daughter by her father’s claim of ownership of his wife’s body. The resulting prohibition on modes of desire pertaining to the mother–daughter dyad is circumvented after the fact, through the women’s substitution of textual (and in Mona’s case, recorded visual) for embodied contact, but this displacement is not a choice. This substitution is further impelled by geographical distance and the impossibility of Mona’s return which compounds a ‘foundational’ narrative of rupture. Mona’s mother writes that her daughter’s ‘probing questions’

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make her see herself anew, but distract her from the Lebanese war.17 In the fourth letter, her self-analysis opens on to memories of the family’s exile from Palestinian land, home, and community, a radical disruption that she experienced ‘as if I had been stripped naked of my very soul’. This is captured through images of the mother with her arms wrapped across her chest, which could connote either sensuality or pain (Plate 5.6). A manipulation of scale simultaneously occurs, which affects the proximity or distance of the mother’s form: now in an inset screen, her body moves in and out of the framing image of the letter. Here Hatoum links two sites and experiences: the mother’s body, a formerly intimate locus of connection for the daughter that is distanced geographically (and inevitably, in terms of the daughter’s accession to an individual subjectivity), is paralleled with the lost homeland, Palestine, for the mother. The film functions as a psycho-sexual narrative of the daughter’s rupture from but continuous disruptive desire for the preOedipal dyad, but also as a record of the mother’s desire for a geographical location remembered and fetishized through loss. For Mona, born in exile from Palestine and now unable to return to Lebanon, the frame of loss is doubled, then tripled, as she also loses touch with her mother. After the fourth letter, there are two brief breaks in the visual and aural tracks of the film: we learn, in the final letter, that the Post Office was destroyed by a car bomb and that the letter has been transmitted via a relative in Bahrain. As

Plate 5.6 Measures of Distance (1988), dir. Mona Hatoum.

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Mona’s mother warns that the erratic phone lines are now the only way to contact her daughter, the video image fades out. The ‘measures of distance’ and proximity charted in Hatoum’s film invoke, at one level, a universal gendered experience: a daughter’s selfdifferentiation from, but ongoing identification with her mother. This is presented as a narrative shared between the mother’s writing and the daughter’s voice. Each party is, in another sense, absent, with the mother’s body only ascertainable through the daughter’s lens and the daughter’s body not present to the viewer. As Rosemary Betterton argues about Measures of Distance, ‘location, distance and time are always present, defining the self in terms of loss or lack expressed as memory’ (1996: 191). This representation of the relationship between embodiment and subjectivity, desire and loss, is profoundly influenced by the specific experience of exile that Said has described as ‘fundamentally a discontinuous state of being’ (2000: 177). He goes on to suggest, in a manner which neatly depicts the historical and spatial depth of field at stake in Measures of Distance, that exile is a condition in which ‘both the new and the old environments are vivid, actual, held together contrapuntally’ (186). In concrete terms that determine the abrupt termination of Hatoum’s film, a distance is calibrated to Lebanon in the throes of war and beyond that to the 1948 nekbah (Palestinian disaster), but these events are simultaneously brought to British audiences. Notwithstanding its undertow of loss, nostalgia, and foreclosed desire, this film is no lament. Rather, the tenacious presence of the mother indicated by the survival of her letters, her matter-of-fact depiction of the quotidian realities of war, and the greater intimacy achieved between mother and daughter despite the distances involved, ‘lend dignity to a[n exilic] condition legislated to deny dignity – to deny identity to people’ (Said 2000: 175). Awareness of one’s identity as hyphenated (or hybrid) problematizes ideas of self-division (cultural loss, historical silencing) and an easy multiplicity (multilingualism, mobility). The border-crossing work that a hyphen does illuminates the two terms that it conjoins, making their construction appear. As Jacques Derrida observes, reflecting on his Franco-Maghribian-Jewish origins, the hyphen also signals historical violence: ‘relations of force that are concentrated there and actually capitalize themselves there interminably’. Differently migratory identities are variously attenuated by power and those ‘who are sensitive to all the stakes of “creolization”’ – or we might insert exile – ‘assess this better than others’ (1998: 9). Derrida draws on the Moroccan writer Abdelkébir Khatibi, who suggests that the Arab writer of French expression is caught in a chiasmus, a chiasmus between alienation and inalienation . . . this author does not write his own language; he transcribes his proper name transformed; he can possess nothing (if there is the remotest chance that one appropriates any language at all); he possesses neither his maternal dialect, which is not written . . . nor the written Arabic language, which is alienated and

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Hatoum’s Measures of Distance, while reflective of a different national and linguistic context, is illuminated by these arguments and re-inflects them from a feminist perspective. The ‘chiasmus’ between proximity and distance rendered through links and breaks between image, text, and voice connotes connection but slippage between Hatoum’s transNational affiliation and a transLational rendering of the experience of her mother.18 This complicates what might at first sight appear as a reification of the maternal body and/or a nostalgic conception of the lost homeland(s), without losing the impact of bearing witness to Lebanese, and particularly Palestinian, experiences.

Ahdaf Soueif, The Map of Love Hatoum’s film produces something akin to what Khatibi terms ‘radical bilingualism’, which Mehrez glosses as the production of ‘a space that subverts hierarchies, whether they are linguistic or cultural; where separate systems of signification and different symbolic worlds are brought together in a relation of perpetual interference, interdependence and intersignification’ (Mehrez 1991: 260). Such a space ‘hails’ readers who can decode bilingual texts, simultaneously locating institutions of learning and disciplinary boundaries in the West as sites that require decolonization (260). Richard Jacquemond, by contrast, writing of the seemingly insurmountable hegemony of European languages (particularly English and French) in the international publishing industry, has cast a jaded eye upon what he sees as a ‘subtle game of complementary-contradictory exoticization and naturalization’ in the writing and translation of fiction by Arab writers in(to) European languages (1992: 153). Soueif’s The Map of Love (1999b) appears, at first glance, to partake of exactly the ‘game’ that Jacquemond critiques. The frontispiece of the novel connotes a gaze from a domestic interior upon an idyllic landscape and opens onto cross-cultural romance played out in ‘exotic’ locales. However, from the outset, Soueif engages in a politics of translation which, as Lawrence Venuti suggests of good translation proper, ‘engage[s] readers in domestic terms that have been defamiliarized to some extent, made fascinating by a revisionary encounter in a foreign text’ (1998: 5). Most obviously, Soueif deploys elements of the romance genre as a lure into a revisionist historiography. Some reviewers have even suggested that this novel is too freighted by history resulting, in one opinion, in an unsatisfactory meshing of aesthetic and political objectives (King 2000: 453). The novel was

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solicited as an ‘East–West’ romantic ‘pot-boiler’ and, while Soueif rejected this idea, she has said that she wanted to redress Byronic and Hollywood conceptions of ‘Oriental’ masculinity (of which Omar Sharif could be seen as emblematic), through the representation of an Egyptian male character involved in the struggle towards cultural and economic autonomy under British occupation (Soueif 2001: 102). For its two travelling protagonists, the Englishwoman Lady Anna Winterbourne at the end of the nineteenth century and the American Isabel Parkman at the millennium, the romantic appeal of Egypt, and the specific attractions of two Egyptian men, Sharif al Baroudi and Omar Ghamrawi, become points of entry to an enhanced understanding of and commitment to that country. The possibility that the narrative can be skewed to satisfy Western taste is raised within the narrative itself. Our Cairene narrator Amal, Omar’s sister and Isabel’s cousin, is possessive about her English ancestor Lady Anna’s story (the embedded historical narrative) and wary of its potential utility in confirming stereotypes about Egypt, although she alone ‘knows how the story ends’ (Soueif 1999b: 8). When Isabel arrives to investigate Anna’s trunk, Amal is ‘wary and weary’, predisposed to doubt Isabel’s objectives in coming to Egypt, and anticipating an inquisition on the hackneyed themes of ‘the fundamentalists, the veil, the cold peace, polygamy, women’s status in Islam, female genital mutilation – which would it be?’ (6). Amal realises, however, that she too is susceptible to unhelpful stereotyping. Upon recognizing shared aspects of their lives, particularly their family and marital histories, Amal acknowledges that categorizing Isabel as ‘the American’ is inadequate (80). Nevertheless, Amal’s local knowledge potentially conflicts with Isabel’s claims to Anna’s story. In a scene that functions retroactively to debunk the novel’s cover, Isabel envisages Anna’s story as big-budget Hollywood film: ‘ “Then the camera pulls back and back until we’re with Anna in her window, seeing what she sees.” “It was night-time” [Amal responds], stubbornly. “I want to keep Anna for myself; I don’t want her taken over by some actress” ’ (65). This metonymically signals the novel’s tactical appropriation of Orientalist frameworks of perception. Soueif’s meticulous research, refracted through Amal’s explorations of the British Council and Al Ahram archives and Anna’s epistolary dialogue with her liberal uncle in England, provides a structure commensurate to key events in Egypt over a 120-year period. The historical narrative takes in, for example, the
Urabi revolution of 1881–2 and British colonial intervention, the rise of Egyptian nationalist parties and newspapers, and the Amin-led debate over women’s clothing. Setting the frame narrative in the present enables a consideration of Egyptian history in national, regional, and international terms over a longer (post)colonial period. For example, Amal compares Lord Cromer’s colonial regime with ‘the officials of the American embassy and agencies today . . . driving through Cairo in their locked limousines with the smoked-glass windows’ (70). The use of an informed narrator and other engagés enables commentary on the Palestinian crisis, a central

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theme in Soueif’s journalism (see Soueif 2004). This is facilitated by the inclusion of Omar, easily identifiable as a fictional Said, a New York-based classical conductor who vigorously supports the Palestinian cause. The narrative is further structured by epigraphs in various European languages and in translation from Arabic, drawn from English literary romance (George Eliot and Elizabeth Barrett Browning), Egyptian love poetry and classical treatises on love (dating from 1300  and including an anatomy of sensuality by Jalal al Din al Sayuti), historical documents (Lord Cromer, Mustafa Kamel, Hilaire Beloc) and other postcolonial women’s writing (Ama Ata Aidoo), positioning the author as repository of a culturally, linguistically and generically diverse archive. As signalled by the leading epigraph to Soueif’s text taken from Nasir’s memoir The Covenant, published in 1962, the novel excavates individual and socio-political narratives that supplement those extant in colonialist historiography. Referring to the nahd.a, Nasir comments that: It is strange that this period when the Colonialists and their collaborators thought everything was quiet was one of the most fertile in Egypt’s history. A great examination of the self took place, and a great recharging of energy in preparation for a new Renaissance. (Soueif 1999b: unpag.) Also counterposing the testimony of this towering Egyptian figure, Soueif uses historiographic metafictional devices. Amal realises that she ‘need[s] to fill in the gaps, to know who the people are of whom [Anna] speaks, to paint in the backdrop’ so she can ‘piece a story together’ (26). The use of private journals and letters – inherently fragmentary forms with a long affiliation to women’s writing – signals a two-fold strategy: Soueif creates private documents which impel the provision of contextual information. Her contrapuntal method therefore privileges perspectives of the colonized, but particularly of women, structurally echoing an epigraph taken from a George Young text published in 1927, which suggests that ‘in this story of Turkish, Albanian and British rule in Egypt, it is Egypt that is really counting all the time. It [is like the story] of a public man and his clever wife’ (Soueif 1999b: 85). Soueif re-inflects the woman as nation allegory, though, aligning an Egypt nationalist with an English wife. It should come as no surprise that Soueif draws upon the Orientalist/ colonial archives, including documents by European women travellers that provide character models as well as textual precedents for this narrative which stitches together women’s testimonies to participation in history. Amal describes the initially mannered approach of Anna’s letters as ‘a little self-conscious perhaps, a little aware of the [travel-writing] genre – Letters from Egypt, A Nile Voyage, More Letters from Egypt’. ‘Perhaps she was thinking of a future publication’, she adds, enabling the author to circumnavigate a technical difficulty posed by the fact that Amal would not have a

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copy of sent letters (58). Anna’s experiences and views echo several European women. She cross-dresses as a man in order to go into the desert, a common strategy of the Frenchwoman Isabelle Eberhardt in colonial Algeria. She disguises herself, under the patronage of Sharif, in a mixture of male and female clothing, ‘the loose white clothing of an Arab, covered by the black flowing outer garment of an Egyptian woman of the city’ (194). Encountering her compatriots incognita, she comments in a manner reminiscent of Montagu and similarly complicating associations between visibility, vision, and authority, that it is a most liberating thing, this veil. While I was wearing it, I could look wherever I wanted and nobody could look back at me. Nobody would find out where I was. I was one of many black-clad harem in the station and on the train and could have traded places with several of them and no one been the wiser. (195) Anna has most in common, however, with Duff Gordon. Even prior to her meeting with Sharif she, like her near-contemporary, projects a critical perspective upon the colonial establishment. At a picnic at the Great Pyramid with expatriates, Anna relays with a light but satirical touch an English disquisition on ‘the Egyptian character’ and ponders: ‘I wonder whether it is possible for a conquering ruler to truly see into the heart of the people whom he rules’ (98, 99). This leads to an examination of her own relationship to Egypt: as she muses, ‘there is something at the heart of it all that eludes me – something – an intimation of which I felt in the paintings . . . and which, now that I am here, seems far, far from my grasp’ (102). Anna’s visit to Egypt has been inspired by the work of British artist John Frederick Lewis, which evokes a world of concealed women whose perspectives she (and perhaps he) genuinely wants to engage. Upon attendance at the Khedive’s ball, in the early days of her stay, she is fascinated by a ‘grille’, behind which are the women of the house, but hails a reverse gaze: My interest was naturally captured by this and throughout the evening I found myself glancing up at it so that, were I a man, my behaviour would surely be construed as indelicate. And yet, I think that for all my commonplace curiosity about the world behind that screen, my greater wish was somehow to know how we, in the Ballroom, appeared to the hidden eyes which watched us. (93) When Anna is captured by Sharif’s over-zealous supporters, in a realization, as she is aware, of another clichéd fantasy of being ‘kidnapped in the Oriental harem’, she awakens disoriented ‘in one of my beloved paintings . . . or

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Plate 5.7 John Frederick Lewis, The Siesta (c. 1876).

one of the Nights of Edward Lane’ (137). The scene most closely resembles Lewis’s The Siesta (c. 1876, Plate 5.7): as I sat up, my altered perspective brought me once again into the world of those beloved paintings for there, across the room, and on a divan similar to mine, a woman lay sleeping . . . She had pulled a cover of black silk up to her waist, her chemise above that was the purest white, and then again, her hair vied with the silken cover for the depth and lustre of its black. Her skin was the colour of gently roasted chestnut, and she lay on cushions of deep emerald and blue, and the whole tableau was framed, yet again, by the lattice of a mashrabiyya. (134) Anna frames this image knowingly through a recitation of the tropology of Orientalist painting. Most importantly, though, the scene is mirrored from the perspective of the other woman. Sharif’s sister Layla al Baroudi also records, in her diary in Arabic, her initial impression of ‘[a] beautiful European woman, her hair flowing to her shoulders in free golden waves’ (135). Stumped momentarily in their attempt to find a common language, Anna and Layla discover a mutual fluency in French and, as Layla writes, ‘started, in this strange situation in which we found ourselves, to pull at the edges

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of conversation and to weave the edges of our friendship’ (135). French is presented, in a slightly odd elision of France’s colonial ambitions in Egypt at the end of the eighteenth century, as a third language that short-circuits the political power imbalance between English and Egyptian characters. The central romance between Anna and Sharif is also conducted in French, at least until Anna’s Arabic is proficient. As Sharif says to Anna, ‘[French] makes foreigners of us both. It’s good that I should have to come some way to meet you’ (157). Historically plausible given the class status of both characters, this is also in keeping with an ethics of hospitality championed throughout the novel: Sharif’s mother, for example, exhorts her son to ‘never burden [Anna] with the [colonial] guilt of her country’, reminding him that his wife ‘will be your guest and a stranger under your protection’ (282). Their marriage is, nevertheless, entered into with concern on both sides. Sharif wonders, demonstrating an awareness of constructions of cultural and gendered otherness that are also at play in the early stages of this romance, ‘would they always hold fast to what they imagined of each other?’ (272). The fragility of cross-cultural relationships is further alluded to with reference to Amal’s broken marriage with an Englishman and the novel suspends an entirely sentimental dénouement. Sharif’s eventual assassination by political rivals is possibly linked to his marriage to an English woman, Anna decides to raise their daughter outside Egypt and, in the frame narrative, Isabel’s relationship with Omar remains inconclusive. If cross-cultural male–female love relations are portrayed as possible but risky, female friendship is more staunchly advocated through the pairings of Anna/Layla and Amal/Isabel. Correspondence between these women, in the form of dialogue and exchanged diaries, letters, and email, generates the historical and frame narratives via Amal’s interventions as translator. Her informal Arabic lessons to Isabel have both pedagogical and thematic import. Explaining the structure of the language as based on roots, Amal teaches Isabel that one (q-l-b) operates in terms ranging from ‘heart’ (qalb) to ‘invert’ (qalab) to ‘coup’ (inqillab). Amal considers the resonance of these connections: ‘So at the heart of things is the germ of their overthrow; the closer you are to the heart, the closer to the reversal’ (82). This consolidates similar references (cited earlier), suggesting that Anna’s journey does eventually allow her to approach the heart of (elite) Egyptian culture and the anti-colonial struggle. Another root (
a-l-q) is used in terms which mean ‘to become attached, to cling, to become pregnant, to conceive; and in its emphatic form, ‘a, ll, q: to hang, to suspend, but also to comment’ (90). Again, the author, via Amal, mobilizes a selective cluster of associations, this time in order to foreground positive affiliations between Egyptians, British, and American women intra- and inter-generationally. Hence, also, the significance of a hybrid motif, a triptych tapestry woven by Anna that combines Pharaonic, Egyptian nationalist, and Islamic imagery. This artefact (which functions as a kind of mu  allaqah, or hanging poem) is reassembled – ‘attached’ and ‘suspended’, to recall the terms above

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– by her descendants Amal and Isabel at the end of the novel. The complete tapestry shows the goddess Isis, her brother Osiris, and the infant Horus, mirroring the two genealogically connected triads within the narrative: on the one hand, Sharif, his sister Layla, and Sharif and Anna’s baby; and on the other, Amal, her brother Omar, and Omar and Isabel’s baby. As an epigraph citing the critic Ya
qub Atin (1905) suggests, the novel falls into a class of ‘typically Egyptian’ tales insofar as it is ‘distinguished by three characteristics: [it is] picaresque, feminist and pantheist’ (163). Soueif reinscribes Egyptian history through an economy of transnational and translinguistic affect, despite the fact that Amal also gently satirizes ‘that tired phrase, the palimpsest that is Egypt’ (64). Soueif claims to have a positive relationship with an Egyptian and wider Arabophone audience and explains that her representation of Islam as ‘a benign, cohesive force’ makes her work only mildly controversial. She refutes a common assumption that she uses English as subterfuge for transmitting sexual content (qtd. in Pakravan 1995: 281). The Map of Love, due to the nineteenth-century setting of its framed narrative, is in any case rather decorous. In the Eye of the Sun, by contrast, explicitly details the sexual development of its protagonist Asya and has not yet been translated into Arabic.19 More widely in Soueif’s corpus, middle-class female characters often discuss sexual matters openly, if predominantly with working-class women affiliated to their families. The UK-based author writes literary criticism and political commentary in Arabic and English and has translated literary texts from Arabic into English and vice versa. Nevertheless, she claims that Arabic ‘becomes a blunt instrument’ in her hand in the process of writing fiction. She makes a virtue of necessity, claiming – and echoing her character Sharif – that ‘language [can] become, actually, an impediment to communication, when we assume too much, because somebody else speaks the same language’ (Soueif 2001: 100). However, translation is stylistically as well as thematically integral to The Map of Love. In order to transmit a sense of Egyptian Arabic – which itself varies according to period, class, locale, and written and spoken context – Soueif uses various forms of glossing that include echoing, assimilation through repetition, contextualization, and a glossary. Malak identifies a sustained polyphony which includes the recreation of Lady Anna’s Victorian English diction. This is because, he argues, writing ‘back’ to the British colonial enterprise within an uneven global publishing industry involves simultaneous processes of ‘erasure, reconstitution, and reorientation’. As a result, The Map of Love of necessity ‘straddles cultures, interfaces texts and re(de)fines enunciation to fit the requisites of the reinscribed version in English’ (Malak 2000: 161). An example of inter- and translinguistic translation occurs in a conversation between Amal, Isabel and the doorman’s wife Tahiyya: ‘Hallo’, Tayihha says loudly in English, straightening up and smiling,

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raising her hand to her head, miming a greeting in case Isabel doesn’t understand. ‘Hello’, says Isabel. ‘Izzay el-sehha?’ Tahiyya’s eyes widen as she turns to me: ‘She speaks Arabic!’ ‘See the cleverness’, I say. ‘Yakhti brawa
aleiha. She looks intelligent . . . Is she married? . . . Like the moon and not married? Why? Don’t they have men in Amreeka?’ (Soueif 1999b: 78) This passage cites English (of different pronunciations), elementary standard Arabic, idiomatic Egyptian Arabic (‘[beautiful] like the moon’) and body language, all modulated through Amal’s selectively translating, distinctly ironic perspective. It also indicates Soueif’s efforts to include non-middleand upper-class voices, particularly evident in passages in which Amal returns to her village in Upper Egypt. Amal’s function is crucial. Rendering the translator visible in the text, particularly one who transfers the rhetorical qualities of one language into another as Amal seems to (see Hassan 2006), works against the potential of translation to reproduce stereotypes of the source culture and to reinforce a sense of superiority in the target culture (Venuti 1998: 11, 67–87). That which Waïl S. Hassan has termed ‘translational literature’, of which he too views The Map of Love as exemplar, self-reflexively performs, therefore problematizing, the act of translation (2006: 754). As Amal comments at the end of the novel, ‘[i]t is so difficult really to translate from one language to another, from one culture into another; almost impossible really’ (Soueif 1999b: 515). She, as the author-proxy, thereby participates self-consciously ‘in the construction of cultural identities from [an] in-between space’ (Hassan 2006: 754) and is conscious of the inevitable ‘translation failures’ produced in the process. To use the author’s own cartographic metaphor, Soueif redraws the map of (post)colonial encounter. This recalls Mary Louise Pratt’s depiction of colonial ‘contact zones’ that generated processes of transculturation operable in more than one direction (1992: 6). In light of poststructuralist accounts of subjects constituted discursively, the construction of subjectivity in women’s travel narratives must be a central point of enquiry, rather than simply ‘add[ing] a gendered subject’ to the genre (Blunt 1994: 3). Travel undertaken by women in The Map of Love is proffered as a mode of increasingly self-aware subjectivity in which ‘roots’ are refigured as ‘routes’ and identity is indexed to an itinerary of encounters and translations (Clifford 1997: 3). Indeed, by portraying individuals, languages, and texts in transit and dialogue, Soueif proffers an ethics of intersubjectivity. To recall Lazreg’s terms, such an ethics would highlight the fact that other women ‘are engaged in the process of adjusting, often shaping, at times resisting and even transforming their environment’, would alert us ‘to the common bond that ties women and men of different cultures together’, and would serve as ‘a

154 Border crossings, translations reminder that the other is just as entitled as I am to her/his humanity expressed in his/her cultural mode’ (1990: 338, 339). Read in this manner, the theme of love in its manifold forms (romantic, fraternal, sororal, patriotic, and platonic) in The Map of Love achieves real resonance. As Peggy Kamuf appositely describes it, love is always determined by the other, and ‘is not a matter of position, whether of subject or object, and therefore of opposition, but of an address that does not originate from any home’ (2000: 155, 156). Due both to affective bonds and processes of cultural and linguistic cross-assimilation, Anna, Isabel, and Amal embody Kamuf’s characterization of love, in which ‘some internalization of the other has already begun . . . There is at once a division, an other within the self who is not the self, and no division, the other internalized by the self as the self’ (160). This notion of accretive and non-enclosed identity has great purchase for Soueif ’s novel, in which the eponymous map is a product of politics and power, but also of interpersonal, translinguistic, and transnational border-crossing. Implicitly then, the map could be drawn anew. Indeed, Soueif, rebutting the ‘clash of civilizations’ rhetoric so prevalent in the post-9/11 period, invokes Egypt as what she terms a ‘mezzaterra . . . a meeting-point of many cultures and traditions’ (2004: 6). And she implies that Egypt could still function as an enlightening model for the West. Posing the rhetorical question of whether reductive representations of Arabs and Islam prevalent in Britain (and elsewhere) are reciprocally constituted in Egypt and the wider Arab world, she responds with ‘a resounding no’ (3): Where the Arab media is interested in the West it tends to focus on what the West is producing today: politics, technology and art, for example – particularly as those connect to the Arab world. The Arab media has complete access to English and other European languages and to the world’s news agencies. Interpretative or analytic essays are mostly by writers who read the European and American press and have experience of the West. The informed Arab public does not view the West as one monolithic unit; it is aware of dissent, of the fact that people often do not agree with policy, of the role of the judiciary. Above all, an Arab assumes that a Westerner is, at heart, very much like her – or him. (3–4) The veracity (or not) of these claims is somewhat beside the point, which is Soueif’s exposure of the West’s limited knowledge, linked to linguistic deficiency, of the Arab world. This is, at least in part, why The Map of Love returns to Egypt as a site of (neo-)colonial domination, but as also a crossfertilized space. Soueif argues that Arab reformers of the nahd.a selectively assimilated European ideas and ‘a few Westerners’ (she cites Duff Gordon and Wilfrid Blunt) genuinely inhabited Egyptian (multi)cultural space (6). Perhaps this depiction of early twentieth-century Egypt is romantic, but it

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resonates with, for example, Leila Ahmed’s deconstruction, in A Border Passage, of what has become a monolithic Egyptian Arab Muslim identity through her recollection of multi-ethnic, religious, and linguistic national space. Conceptualizations of postcolonial individual and collective identity as hybrid and accretive have theoretical as well as political implications. In a manner which suggests structural similarities between postcolonial writing and translation, Venuti defines the latter as never quite ‘faithful’, always somewhat ‘free’, it never establishes an identity, always a lack and a supplement, and it can never be a transparent representation, only an interpretive transformation that exposes multiple and divided meanings in the [original] text and displaces it with another set of meanings, equally multiple and divided. (1992: 8) Bhabha similarly proposes ‘a need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities’ and instead to ‘focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences’ (1994: 1). He describes history as a series of threshold moments in which the meaning or ‘location’ of culture is contested. Cultural authority, in a postcolonial setting, can be construed as a relay that links, via an underlying dialectical trajectory, colonial and neo-imperialist dominance with official, sometimes reductive definitions of the independent nation-state. Creative work and cultural practices, by contrast, can be solicited to reveal ‘the sign of translation [that] continually tells, or “tolls” the different times and spaces between cultural authority and its performative practices’ (1994: 1, 228). This is why, as Stuart Hall puts it, postcolonial criticism should ‘keep these two ends of the chain in play at the same time – over-determination and difference, condensation and dissemination’ (1996: 249). Postcolonial work performs and translates layered identities engaged in an ongoing negotiation with a colonial past and its aftermath. In other words, the citational ‘problematic’ identified by O’Riley is inevitable, but productive rather than infelicitous. While we might align postcolonial writing and translation as analogous activities of supplementation (Tymoczko 1999), this should not encourage us to reinstate the notion of an original text outside of history and the power/knowledge nexus. Bill Ashcroft reminds us that history, too, is a construction of language and culture. Because ‘[h]istory is a method rather than a truth’, an important ‘strategy of post-colonial writing is to collapse the binarism [between history and fiction] and deploy a method which does not do away with history but which emphasizes its provisionality’ (2001: 136). The construction of history from positions of dominance and the related possibility that speaking across languages can occur in bad faith are engaged in The Map of Love. In one of many episodes grounded in

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historical documents, Anna confronts her husband Sharif in 1906 with a letter which supposedly ‘describes a plan for an uprising’ against the British occupiers. Anna translates this ‘translation-forgery’ (Hassan 2006: 763) (in Arabic) to her husband (in French). To Sharif and his colleagues, the preposterous phrasing can only be ‘the work of . . . an ignorant Englishman who imagines he knows how Arabs think’. The implication is that the letter has been written and planted by the Oriental secretary, Sir Harry Boyle (Soueif 1999b: 419), which seems historically to have been the case (Hassan 2006: 764). The effects at the point of reception are not to be underestimated: as Sharif observes, ‘the Foreign Office . . . will read “camels” and “God is generous” . . . and they will say “fanatical Arabs” and send the troops’ (Soueif 1999b: 419). Anna has already identified the difficulty of establishing a credible nationalist platform, not only because of the challenge of translating Arabic into English, but also because of the perceived imperative ‘to speak as the English themselves would speak, for only then will the justice of what they say – divested of its disguising cloak of foreign idiom – be truly apparent to those who hear it’ (399). Sharif thus constructs a response, to be published simultaneously in Al Ahram, Le Monde and the British press, that is translated by Anna (from Arabic into English) and evokes an economy of resistant colonial enunciation pace Bhabha. The letter has no single author or language and is a dialectical response defined by the (fake) address to which it responds. Sharif couches his response in the rationalist rhetoric of Empire, deploying what Bhabha would call ‘sly civility’, a mode and tone of address in which mimicry is not sycophantic but strategic, and shades into mockery (Bhabha 1994: ch. 5). We might, though, compare Sharif’s (privileged) ability to translate in an oppositional manner with the subaltern implications of a related historical event, discussed by Anna in her diary, that involves a ‘message gone astray’ with deadly repercussions. This concerns a message sent by a British officer to the village of Denshwai, seeking permission for a pigeonshoot that was embarked upon without waiting for a response. The ensuing violent confrontation and the accidental death of one English officer resulted in the hanging of several villagers. Anna rightly fears that this bloody event will be wrongly construed as ‘the beginning of that insurrection promised in [Boyle’s] false and wicked letter’ (Soueif 1999b: 426). On the whole, though, Soueif’s re-presentation of the (neo-)colonial encounter and the Arabic–English interface (or predominant lack thereof) is less beleaguered than say, Djebar’s work, probably in part because Soueif was educated in both languages.20 The Egyptian author’s tendency in combating the tenacious production of an incommensurable difference between the Arab Muslim world and the West is to be inclusive. Hassan queries the use of Arabic competency as an index to character sympathy in The Map of Love, suggesting that this elides the fact that Orientalist scholars tended to be superb linguists (2006: 757), but Soueif represents Orientalism itself as a variegated domain with conflicting affiliations (as does Leila Ahmed’s

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Border Passage). The implications of Soueif’s own deployment of multilingualism as metaphor, theme, structure, style, and political imperative are not negligible. As Spivak puts it, and this resonates uncommonly well with Sedira’s, Hatoum’s and Soueif’s work, language is ‘the clue to where the self loses its boundaries’ (1993: 180). To return to the queries posed at the beginning of this chapter, Soueif’s and Hatoum’s texts, in particular, suggest that desire is a motivating factor in any critical engagement with what is perceived as ‘difference’. But the work discussed in this chapter suggests that desire, like language, can be a threshold, an opening (or perhaps a reopening) of the ‘self’ to the other. Indeed, inflected as it is by gendered, sexual, classed, political, locational, linguistic, religious, ethnic, and other identifications, ‘difference’ can be infinitesimally reduced until it turns out to be not so very different at all. Aboulela gives a tongue-in-cheek rendering of her ‘identity narrative’ as Egyptian-born, Sudanese, British-resident, African, non-Asian practising Muslim, married to a Liverpudlian, English-educated (etc.) writer that spans more than a page and concludes that ultimately, fiction is more true because we all selfcensor, structure personal plots, and ‘give only snippets depending on the questioner’ (2002: 198–9). She emphasizes that her representation of other locations to an Anglophone audience, in this case primarily Sudan, is ‘to show that it is a valid place, a valid way of life beyond the stereotypical images . . . not a backward place to be written off’ (204). But ‘when I write’, she explains, ‘I [also] want to move away from myself, touch something common, universal, something that includes me but is not exclusively me. If I don’t go away from myself how can I produce something strange, surprising, something lifted up from the ordinary [?]’ (207). This appeal to universality is not an uncommon move by creative women who identify with Arab Muslim contexts and we should take it seriously. Creative work can be both a representation of politics and an engagement with the politics of representation, but something will always remain in excess, potentially to be teased out, frayed, rewoven, translated, and entered into differently. Women’s work considered in this chapter underlines processes wherein ‘interpretation is foregrounded . . . [but] something remains at risk, continually troubling and militating against being slotted as autobiographical, political, deconstructive, conceptual and so on’ (Philippi 1990: 71). This risk needs also to be taken by readers/spectators who will, from whatever position they approach, at some point come up against the limits of their knowledge and start to feel their own identity narratives ‘fray’. I hope to have illustrated that the work discussed in this book is aesthetically and theoretically exciting, historically embedded, politically engaged, and future-oriented. It hails a range of readers/spectators who bring diverse demands and will take from the encounter varied levels and forms of knowledge and pleasure. Postcolonial feminist work does often transmit spectral presences, historical traces, and veiled testimonies, alongside other techniques of re-presenting the past. Such tactics should be seen

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as acts of continuous resistance, conceived in ethical terms, to transparency, comprehensive (re-)apprehension, and to a reimposition of borders rather than thresholds. The work produced by the many different women discussed in this book, all affiliated in varied ways to Arab Muslim contexts, testifies to experience in the interstices of crude networks of power/knowledge. We can all learn from the interpersonal and interdisciplinary challenges issued.

Notes

Introduction 1 The Maghrib (sometimes written Maghreb) designates the North African Arab west and the Mashriq (or Mashreq) the Arab east, including Egypt. 2 I also refer to Leila Aboulela, born in Sudan. The Arab and Muslim worlds are not internally homogeneous or coextensive and should be seen as historically produced (as is, of course, the West which I will also leave unmarked). The Maghrib has large Amazigh (Berber) populations and Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria are multi-denominational. 3 The women discussed cite Arab and Muslim socio-cultural frameworks even when these categories do not define them personally, as is the case for Amazigh, Christian, and secular women. See also, however, my discussion of the category ‘Muslim’ on p. 8 passim. 4 Anglophone postcolonial studies routinely deploys what Young terms ‘FrancoMaghrebian’ theory (2001: 411–16), but remains stubbornly monolingual in its creative purview. Francophone studies have until recently been resistant to postcolonial theory; see Moura (1999). This suggests the potential for a revitalized comparative approach. 5 Egyptian writers Nawal el Saadawi, Salwa Bakr, and Latifa al Zayyat were all imprisoned under President Anwar Sadat. 6 Djebar, Malika Mokeddem, and el Saadawi have received death threats from extreme religious groups. 7 The best source remains Arab Film Distribution in the United States. 8 A Maghribian outer garment and head cover worn so as to conceal the face, leaving one or two eyes uncovered, or accompanied by a face veil (see Chapter 2). 9 I follow Lazreg (2000) in distinguishing Islamic (pertaining to the religion) from Islamism (a form of politics that relies on extreme interpretations of Islam). 10 Hillauer makes the same argument about women filmmakers (2005: 5). 11 Barakat possibly signals a struggle against classical Arabic (fus.h . a). 12 This, I think, is not only because same-sex relationships remain taboo (and illegal) in most Muslim countries, but also due to entrenched external productions of ‘Oriental’ sexuality as always already deviant. The possibility of lesbian desire is sometimes opened up before resumption of a heteronormative narrative trajectory as it is, for example, in el Saadawi’s autobiography (1999). A minority of texts such as Hanan al Shaykh’s Women of Sand and Myrrh, first published in 1988 as Misk al Ghazâl, and Barakat’s The Stone of Laughter, first published in 1990 as H . ah . k, portray same-sex relationships. Nina Bouraoui, an . ajar al D explicitly ‘queer’ writer, is an exception. On the possibilities of a broader ‘critical practice in which non-normative sexualities infiltrate dominant discourses to loosen their political stranglehold’, see Hayes (2000: 7).

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13 Boughedir cites the murder of a young woman who has lost her virginity out of wedlock. 14 Pertinent here is a combination of multilingualism and diglossic Arabic. The first is the effect of the successive historical impact of Islam, Ottoman domination, European colonization, postcolonial Arabization policies, and globalization. The second is due to the fact that Arabic vernaculars do not have standardized scripts and neither modern standard nor literary Arabic is spoken. 15 See also Sabbah (1984). Mernissi contrasts dominant interpretations of the sacred texts that posit women’s passive nature with others, such as the writings of al Ghazali, that highlight women’s sexual voracity and wily power. 16 Alf Layla wa Layla, first translated by Antoine Galland as Les Mille et une nuits: Contes arabes (1704) and by Richard Burton as The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (1885–8), is an ensemble of originally oral tales from Persia, Egypt, and Iraq that now belongs to the tradition of popular Arabic literature rather than adab (belles lettres). Inconsistent transliterations of Shahrazad’s name abound and metonymically reflect, as Gauch argues, the cross-cultural, transnational and translinguistic provenance of this text (2007: 2). I, like Gauch, use Shahrazad when not citing other authors. 17 Psychoanalytic ideas have tended to ‘travel’ most readily to the former French colonies, perhaps due to the extent to which the French colonial system embedded its language and cultural paradigms in the lives of those who emerged as postcolonial elites. When the work discussed foregrounds structures of affect such as melancholia, hysteria, and aphasia, these may be otherwise comprehensible, but many texts reward, even anticipate, a psychoanalytic interpretation (see also Orlando 2003). 18 Spivak suggests that catachresis, the use of a ‘concept-metaphor without an adequate referent’, resists modes of investigation that seek to ‘reveal’ meaning (1990: 225). 19 The novel was first published in serial, partly-expurgated form in the Egyptian magazine Rose al Youssef. El Saadawi claims that it has never appeared in its entirety due to censorship and her subsequent loss of the original manuscript. She denies assumptions that the novel is autobiographical (1989a: 8), but it has autobiographical resonances. 20 The relevant surât are ‘Enjoin believing men to turn their eyes away from temptation and to restrain their carnal desires’ (24: 30) and ‘Enjoin believing women to turn their eyes away from temptation and to preserve their chastity’ (24: 31). 21 The motto of the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association was ‘The power of women – solidarity – lifting the veil from the mind’. 22 A Daughter of Isis identifies female infanticide as a pre-Islamic custom forbidden by the Qur  an (1999: 251). 23 The transliteration of the protagonist’s name is slightly different in the French translation. 1 Historical contexts: ‘layer after layer’ 1 Historical information is drawn from Hourani (1991) and Badran and Cooke (2004). 2 We can distinguish between the ‘older’ Orient, cradle of Judeo-Christian history, and the Indian Orient, although there are areas of overlap in the representation of Muslims (Melman 2002: 105). Said dates the emergence of modern Orientalist scholarship to Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 (2003: 76). 3 Orientalism did not only function in terms of a heteroerotic economy; see Behdad (1994) and Hayes (2000).

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4 Orientalism continues apace, of course, under different guises: see Said (1997) and Gregory (2004). 5 See Lowe (1991) on divergences between French and British Orientalism, although her contrast emphasizes British representations of India. 6 Ingres reproduced passages of Montagu’s text in his diary (see Almarcegui 2003 and Boer 2004: ch. 3). 7 Lord Cromer (Evelyn Baring), British Viceroy in Egypt from 1883 to 1907, also decried veiling and seclusion. However, he obstructed educational incentives for Egyptian women and opposed women’s suffrage in Britain (L. Ahmed 2003: 45–6). 8 Vogl also points out a link between objectif (camera lens) and objectivity and that cliché in French is another word for photograph (2003: 5). 9 Al Ani reads the Clérambault images more positively, noting that they are taken in genuine interiors or outdoors and do not seek to ‘reveal’ the women (2003: 100, 103). 10 The English translators differentiate between ‘the Algerian woman’ and l’algérienne (Alloula 1986: 5 passim). 11 The evil eye is a jealous and covetous gaze: see Dundes (1982). 12 Hélie-Lucas also describes as ‘symbolic public rape’ the forced unveiling programmes imposed by the French during the war (1987: 108). Rape and torture were also employed by the French army (see de Beauvoir and Halimi 1962). 13 Given the common derogatory use of ‘cult’, Fanon could be accused – and has been – of under-estimating the relevance of Islam in codifications of gendered interaction in the Algerian context. 14 Djebar gives a more colloquial rendering (cited in Chapter 2) as ‘fire-carriers’. 15 All quotations are taken from the film’s English subtitles. 16 Saadi at first rejected the famous militant Djamila Bouhired because he ‘did not want mice in the movement’ (qtd. in Lazreg 1994: 121). His later involvement in The Battle of Algiers, which includes perhaps the most iconic representations of the fidayât, is a rather pleasing irony. 17 The film commences in 1957 then flashes back to 1954. Most of the action takes place in 1956 and the whole film is set in Algiers. 18 Marriage to Turko-Circassian women raised in h . urum of the Ottoman elite was a common means by which Egyptian notables acquired status and wealth. 19 Refuting Georges Gusdorf’s well-known claim (1980) that autobiography is generically western, Golley informs us that sîra (biography) in Arabic dates back to the seventh century, although the influence of European models is ascertainable from the nahd.a onwards. However, while women writers of the late nineteenth century used autobiographical elements in their fictional works, there is no known example of a full-length autobiography prior to Shaarawi’s (Golley 2003: 75, 36). 20 There is some debate about Shaarawi’s level of Arabic as opposed to Turkish, Persian, and French (cf. Badran 1986: 15, 17; Golley 2003: 37; Kahf 2000: 157), but her choice to use it here reflects the post-Ottoman construction of the nation as Arab. 21 Badran and Cooke’s title Opening the Gates was inspired by Farida Ben Lyazid’s Bâb al Samâ  Maftûh . , discussed in Chapter 4, and because the authors believe the concept of ijtihad best captures the cross-currents of secular and Islamic feminisms (2004: xix). 22 See Cooke (2001) and particularly Malti-Douglas (2001) for groundbreaking critical work on feminist spiritual geographies. 23 The cover of Aboulela’s second novel cites the description of her first, The

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Notes Translator (1999), in Muslim News as ‘the first h . alâl [permitted, from a religious point of view] novel written in English’.

2 Visibility, vision, and voice: Algerian women in question (again) 1 The Code makes women legal minors with regard to education, employment, marriage, divorce, and inheritance. Debate over its reform was officially reopened in 1998. 2 The GIA was responsible for widespread attacks through the 1990s in Algeria and France. 3 See Khatib (2006) for an analysis of the portrayal of Islamism in this film and more widely. 4 In 1998, a law was passed excluding the use of French and Amazigh in government and education. 5 See also Of Dreams and Assassins, which counterposes the Franco-Algerian métis trickster figure Slim La Glisse against Kenza, an exile painfully divided between Algeria and France. 6 In the Arabic credits to The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua, Djebar’s name appears with the double ‘b’. 7 ‘Eîd celebrates Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son and can be interpreted in terms of the son’s obligatory accession to the place of the father; a very similar treatment occurs in Rachid Boudjedra’s La Répudiation (1969, discussed in Chapter 3). 8 The cover of Djebar’s Women of Algiers shows the earlier version of the painting, perhaps because it shares an exact title with the text. 9 Djebar subsequently made La Zerda ou les chants de l’oubli (1982) with Alloula. 10 The film is structured by three ‘speeds’ (adagio, allegro, and moderato) framed by a Prelude, Overture, and Finale. The soundtrack includes North African instrumentals and songs, and experimental music by Bartók. The songs are not always subtitled (hence translated). 11 Lila, like Djebar, was born in Cherchell and Sawan Noheir, who plays Lila, closely resembled Djebar when the film was made. 12 Citations from the film are taken from the English subtitles. 13 In So Vast the Prison, Isma speaks identical phrases, citing them as the motivation for her filmmaking project (Djebar 2001: 305). 14 Lila informs us that, in 1845, the Ouled Riah tribe was asphyxiated by the enemy as it hid in caves, as Djebar also evokes in Fantasia. The film’s reference points span the ‘first Algerian war’ of 1842–5 (Djebar 1985: 78), the revolt of 1871, the war of independence, and the post-independence gender wars (Donadey 2001: 58). 15 Zouleikha’s story is the subject of Djebar’s La femme sans sépulture (2002). 16 Woodhull observes that Djebar ‘elides the cultural-imperialist ambitions of the Saint-Simonians’ (1993: 82). 17 One of the ‘Voices’ narrating the war belongs to the same Cherifa who descends from the tree to grieve for her brother in The Nouba. Cherifa in Children of the New World is a different character. 18 Fantasia also casts Algerian men, from the point of view of the French invaders, as ‘mute, undocumented’ (1985: 56). 19 The word derra, Djebar interposes in an epigraph, means ‘wound’ as well as ‘co-wife’ (1987: 91). She emphasizes a metaphorical connection, but still seems to conflate two words in Arabic that start with different letters (both, however, transliterated as ‘d’). 20 These lines echo very similar ones quoted from The Nouba earlier.

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21 In 1999 the French government conceded to naming this a ‘war’. 22 Mernissi reminds us that ‘when Matisse was painting Turkish women as harem slaves, Kemal Ataturk was promulgating feminist laws that granted Turkish women the right to education, the right to vote, and the right to hold public office’ (2001: 109). 23 Sebbar provided text to accompany Garanger’s photographs in her Femmes des Hauts-Plateaux: Algérie 1960 (1990). 24 The elderly Lebanese woman in Le Fou de Shérazade describes this lost letter as ‘the sweetest, most Oriental syllable’ (Sebbar 1985/1991: 164, my translation). 25 The triptych painting was accompanied by taped recordings of the artist singing in Arabic and reading poetry written in French and translated into English (Lloyd 1999: 207–8). 3 Melancholia in the Maghrib: mother–daughter plots 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8

The amended Mûdawana provides greater protection for women in relation to polygamy, divorce, custody, and property. The Silences of the Palace was awarded the Prix Camera d’Or at Cannes in 1994. The women downstairs are not able to leave the palace and there is little evidence to suggest that their labour is remunerated. Slavery was formally abolished in Tunisia in 1846, relatively early in relation to other North African contexts, but continued into the twentieth century. All citations are from the English subtitles. Valassopoulos (2003) elaborates on Kulthoum’s use of t.arab (roughly translatable as ‘enchantment’) and ways in which she has been viewed as a repository of asil (the ‘authentic’). The Majalla reiterated that citizenship could only be conferred through the father. All translations are my own from the French subtitles. Other Tunisian films that purvey similar themes are Nejia Ben Mabrouk’s film The Trace (1982–8) and Fares’ Honey and Ashes (1996).

4 Heterotopias: reimagining home 1 McIlvanney refers here to ‘Beur’ women’s writing, but the descriptors she uses are even more relevant to Algerian women’s texts, as Chapter 2 should attest. 2 The fact that Bakr’s original title Al
Arabah al Dhahabiyyah la Tas
ad ilâ l Samâ  translates as ‘the golden chariot does not reach the sky’ signals the provisional nature of emancipation through narration. 3 A second volume of Tuqan’s autobiography was published in Arabic in 1993; Golley translates its title as The Most Difficult Journey (2003: 182). 4 Golley refers to five passages excerpted in an edited collection (Tuqan 1984). 5 Al Azhar University in Cairo is the most important seat of Islamic education in the Arab world. 6 According to Raymonda Tawil, the Union of Arab Women organized a demonstration of veiled women against the partition of Palestine in the preceding year (1983: 72). 7 Tawil later expresses disappointment with de Beauvoir and Sartre for their support of Israel and blindness to the ongoing plight of Palestinians (1983: 170–1). 8 Tawil does not refer to Tuqan in her text, although she does mention a Palestinian woman poet who attended one of the meetings. She becomes close to Sahar Khalifeh, by contrast. 9 Tawil refutes the notion of Palestinian terrorism, arguing that armed resistance

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10 11 12

13

14

Notes was first undertaken by militant Jewish groups against the British and that every other option for the Palestinians had been exhausted. The French text was not marketed as a memoir, while the North American and British editions conflate narrator and author on the back cover blurb. Yasmina believes polygamy will end with independence (Mernissi 1994: 34–5) but it remains legal, although the Mûdawana now specifies that a first wife’s permission is obligatory for a man to marry a second. Ben Lyazid, who subsequently directed Women’s Wiles (Ruses de femmes, 1999), was the only Moroccan woman filmmaker until Yasmine Kassari, who lives in Belgium, made The Sleeping Child (L’Enfant endormi) in 2003 (Hillauer 2005: 328). Cigarettes signify Western imperialism in both Mernissi’s and Ben Lyazid’s texts. In The Harem Within, however, Fatima’s mother thinks that cigarettes and chewing gum become invested with new meaning when they are forbidden to women by men, as they are in this house (Mernissi 1994: 197). Women control the production and use of traditional beauty products, by contrast, so are impervious to the influx of European cosmetics. Rabia al Adawiyya, also cited in Mernissi’s text, was the first to combine the principle of exclusive love for the divine being with the possibility of an unveiled God, hence beatific vision of the world. The depiction of unveiling as light is also associated with al Ghazali, who distinguished between knowledge obtained through ritual practices/fiqh and ultimate truths (Knysh 2000: 31, 313–14).

5 Border crossings, translations 1 Lloyd suggests, with reference to a large cohort of artists, that the first postcolonial generation draws its feminist predecessors from mythology, whereas younger artists establish a more autobiographical lineage. The crucial figure of the mother in work by first-generation women such as Tlatli and Mernissi problematizes this neat distinction. 2 The most disturbing aspect of this kind of representation for some viewers is the conflation of women’s putatively procreative bodies with death-giving agency: see Rose (2004). 3 The updated edition of Nuha al Radi’s Baghdad Diaries 1991–2002 (2003), which records impressions of the first Gulf war and the build-up to the second from the perspective of al Radi’s family and other Iraqi citizens, is a welcome intervention in this latter regard. 4 Sedira indicates that engagement with theorists such as Fanon and Derrida in Anglophone postcolonial studies is something that she has access to in Britain, but would not necessarily in France (qtd. in Sotiriadi 2004: 1–2). 5 See Khanna (2003) for a brilliant reading of Sedira’s Don’t do to her what you did to me! (1998–2001). 6 All of the work discussed in this chapter, with the exception of Self Portrait (which is in Lloyd 1999: 214), can be viewed on Sedira’s website: . Accessed 20 September 2007. 7 Sedira has discussed the exhibition of the triptych in Exeter Cathedral, where it caused controversy and was vandalized (qtd. in Sotiriadi 2004: 4). 8 In debates about women’s right to veil in public places, significant variations pertain to different contexts in Europe and outside it (for example in Turkey). In Britain and France, the debate is calibrated to definitions of ‘multiculturalism’ and intégration and laïcité (secularism) respectively. See Modood et al. (2006) and Donnell (1999). 9 In an analysis of media coverage of the London transport bombings in 2005, Fortier (2008) suggests that photographs of the perpetrators provided proof of

Notes

10 11 12 13

14 15 16

17

18 19 20

165

culpability, but contained a significant punctum: the bombers looked, indeed were, British. Their images were hence both heimlich and unheimlich, Freud’s definition of the uncanny. Fortier compares a ‘Face of Britain’ produced in 2001, morphed out of photographs collected from every region and ethnic group in the country, arguing that the containment of diversity within depth of form in this case offsets the fear of visible difference. This certainly seems to be one of the points addressed in al Ani’s Untitled (Veils Project) (1996), a series of black and white photographs in which women sit in a row, each concealed to a different extent by veils and clothes. The term is the French translation of Freud’s Bahnung, which Spivak uses to evoke a movement from one entity to another that encounters but can reduce resistance (1993: 313–14). Kelley and de Jager’s translation leaves implicit the homonym sans-écriture (‘without writing’ or, perhaps, ‘writingless’) included in the original. A comparison might be made with Aboulela’s first novel The Translator (1999), in which the female protagonist Sammar (a translator) represents a depth model of identity rooted in religious belief. Rae, a Scottish specialist on the Arab world, has to learn to ‘translate’ in her direction; specifically, to convert to Islam in a genuine manner so as to marry her, which he does. See Nash (2002). Aspects of Measures of Distance were originally presented in the performance work Mind the Gap (1986). All quotations are taken from the film soundtrack. This combination of script and veil/curtain is quite a common practice by women affiliated to Arab and/or Muslim contexts. I am thinking, for example, of Shirin Neshat’s Women of Allah photographic series (1993–7; see Moore 2002); Maliheh Afnan’s image ‘Veiled Threats’ (2005; see Porter 2006: 89); and Wijdan’s ‘Rashm I’ (2003; see Porter 2006: 60). While the period between 1975 and 1992 is usually described as a civil war, Lebanon became the centre of a regional struggle for power. Thus, Etel Adnan’s novel Sitt Marie Rose (1982), first published in French in 1978, foregrounds the Muslim and Palestinian versus Maronite Christian conflict that split Beirut into two sectors, whereas Hanan al Shaykh’s novel Beirut Blues (1996), first published in Arabic as Barid Bayrut (1992), evokes the post-1982 context in which the main antagonists were Israeli versus Iranian-backed Palestinian forces. I am grateful to Apter for emphasizing this ‘connecting port’ and ‘cultural caesura’ (2006: 5). The idea comes from Bhabha (1990). Soueif claims that this is due to the length of In the Eye of the Sun (personal conversation with the author, 17 April 2007). Her mother Fatma Moussa translated The Map of Love into Arabic. Unlike in the French Maghrib, Arabic was never banned in Egyptian education.

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Filmography

Amari, Raja (2002) Satin Rouge/Red Satin, France and Tunisia: Agence Nationale de la Production de l’Audiovisuel, ADR Productions, Canal+, Centre National de la Cinématographie, Nomadis Images, and Arte France. Bachir-Chouikh, Yamina (2002) Rachida, Algeria and France: Canal+, Ciel Production, Cinésud Promotion, GAN Cinema Foundation, Ministère de la Culture de la République Française, and Arte France. Boughedir, Férid (1990) Asfûr Stah/Halfaouine, Tunisia, France and Italy: Cinétéléfilms, France Média, Les Films du Scarabée. Djebar, Assia (1978) La Nouba des femmes de Mont Chenoua/The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua, Algeria: Radiotélévision algérienne. Djebar, Assia and Malek Alloula (1982) Al Zerda (La Zerda ou les chants de l’oubli), Algeria: Radiotélévision algérienne. Fares, Nadia (1996) Miel et cendres/Honey and Ashes, Switzerland and Tunisia: Vanguard Films, 7th Art Releasing, and Filmproduktion Ag. Hatoum, Mona (1988) Measures of Distance, video, 15 mins. Hatoum, Mona (1994) Corps étranger/Foreign Body, film installation. Kassari, Yasmine (2003) L’Enfant endormi, Belgium and Morocco: Les Films de la Drève, Les Coquelicots de l’Oriental, RTBF, and SoRead-2M. Ben Lyazid, Farida (1989) Bâb al Samâ  Maftûh . /A Door to the Sky, Morocco and France: SATPEC, France Media SA, and Interfilms. Ben Lyazid, Farida (1999) Keîd Ensa/Les Ruses de femmes/Women’s Wiles, Morocco, France, Switzerland, and Tunisia: Céphéide Productions, Tingitania Films, Touza Productions, and Waka Films. Ben Mabrouk, Nejia (1982–8) Sama/The Trace, Tunisia and Belgium: SATPEC, No Money Company, and ZDF. Pontecorvo, Gillo (1966) The Battle of Algiers/La Bataille d’Alger, Italy and Algeria: Casbah Films and Igor Film. Rafaele, Ayesha (2000) Veil, UK: BBC Arena. Sedira, Zineb (1996) Autobiographical Patterns, video, 9 mins. Sedira, Zineb (1998–2001) Don’t do to her what you did to me!, video, 8 mins. Sedira, Zineb (2000) Silent Sight, video, 12 mins. Sedira, Zineb (2002) Mother Tongue, video triptych, 5 mins. each screen. Sedira, Zineb (2003) Retelling Histories, My Mother Told Me, video, 10 mins. Tlatli, Moufida (1994) S.amt al Qas.r/The Silences of the Palace, France and Tunisia: Cinétéléfilms, Magfilms, and Matfilms. Tlatli, Moufida (2000) Mawsim al Rijâl (The Season of Men), France and Tunisia: Les Films du Losange, Maghrebfilms Carthage, and Arte France.

Index

Aboulela, L. 24, 47, 130, 157, 159n, 161–2n; cf. Ben Lyazid, F. 137; Minaret 47, 136–8; cf. Sedira, Z. 136–8, 165n; The Translator 161–2n, 165n. Abouzeid, L. 14, 23, 79–80; Return to Childhood 80; ‘Year of the Elephant’ 4, 47, 79–81. Abu-Lughod, L. 41–2. Abu Odeh, L. 46. Accad, E. 3, 7. al Adawiyya, R. 123, 164n. Adnan, E. Sitt Marie Rose 165n. Afghanistan 2, 25, 45, 64, 130. Afshar H. 45. Ahmed, L. 10, 13, 42, 45–6, 161n; A Border Passage 9, 155, 156–7. Ahmed, S. 100, 102, 138. Alf Layla wa Layla (Arabian Nights) 15, 72, 73, 105, 123, 160n. Algeria 5, 10, 11, 12, 22, 23, 26, 27, 34–41, 45, 48–76. Algerian Family Code (Qânûn al ’Asra) 45, 49, 162n. Allegory 6, 24, 37–8, 39–40, ch3 148; see also nation. Alloula, M. 162; The Colonial Harem 23, 33–6, 53, 57, 62, 75, 161n; cf. Delacroix, E. 35; and Djebar, A. 162n; cf. Djebar, A. 53, 57, 62. Amari, R. Red Satin 23, 79, 96. Amazigh/Berber (language and ethnicity) 49, 55–6, 64, 71, 72, 76, 77, 119, 123, 159n, 162n. Amer, G. 142; Diane’s Pink 143. Amin, Q. 13, 42, 122, 147. Amireh, A. 4, 5, 6, 18, 22. Amrane, D. 37. al Ani, J. 28, 161n; Untitled 30–31;

Untitled (Veils Project) 165n. Anthias, F. and N. Yuval-Davis 78, 100. Anti-colonial: cinema 41; discourses and practices 2, 27, 36–44, 45, 48, 79–80, 89, 100, 128, 131, 151; literature 84; see also nationalist. Anxiety of authorship 7–8, 14. Aphasia 54, 59, 87, 90, 95, 139, 160n; see also elective mutism. Aporia 17, 24, 34, 130, 132, 140; see also translation. Apter, E. 128, 140, 165n. Arabian peninsula 26–7. Arabic 4, 11, 17, 20, 22, 27, 42–3, 47, 55–6, 61, 64, 67, 73, 76, 77, 79, 81, 82, 98, 104, 108, 116, 132, 140, 142, 145–6, 150–1, 152–3, 155–7, 159n, 160n, 161n, 162n. Arabization 10, 27, 81, 160n. Arab Muslim: as contested categories 1, 6, 10–11, 23, 25, 45, 47, 147, 154; contexts 1, 159n. Armes, R. 62, 86, 87, 96. Ashcroft, B. 155. Asmak 30; see also veiling. Asylum as trope 101, 102, 105–6, 107, 127. Autobiography 3, 4, 8, 13–14, 20–21, 42–4, 55, 62, 65, 66, 67–8, 70, 82–3, 85, 101, 107–15, 116, 131–2, 135, 157, 161n, 164n. ‘Awra 13–14, 54. Bachir-Chouikh, Y. Rachida 49. Badran, M. 3, 8, 9, 43–4, 46, 160n, 161n. Bakr, S. The Golden Chariot 106, 163n. Bamia, A. 83. Barakat, H. 7–8, 159n.

184

Index

de Beauvoir, S. 41–6, 113, 161n, 163n. Belatedness 128–9. Ben Lyazid, F. 24, 47, 101, 161n, 164n; cf. Aboulela, L. 137; A Door to the Sky 124–7; cf. Mernissi, F. 124, 125, 164n; and Tlatli, M. 86. Ben Mabrouk, N. The Trace 163n. Bensmaïa, R. 48, 62–3, 97. Benyahia, S. 11–12. Berger, A-E. 13. Betterton, R. 145. ‘Beur’ 23, 71, 135, 163n. Bhabha, H. K. 33, 34, 74, 75, 89, 98, 99, 129, 140, 155, 156, 165n. Blunt, A. 153; and Rose, G. 100, 101. Boehmer, E. 6, 78, 97. Boer, I. 14, 15, 33, 131, 160n, 161n. Boudjedra, R. La Répudiation 103–4; cf. Bouraoui, N. 103–4; cf. Djebar, A. 162n. Boughedir, F. 9, 86, 160n. Bouraoui, N. 24, 159n; cf. Boudjedra, R. 103–4; cf. Faqir, F. 105, 107; Forbidden Vision 101, 102–4; cf. Sartre, J-P. 103; cf. Sebbar, L. 102. Britain/British 4, 11, 23, 24, 25, 76, 105, 130–1, 133, 135–8, 140, 145, 149, 151, 154, 157, 164–5n; colonialism 26–7, 42, 105–7, 110–11, 147, 148, 152, 156, 161n, 164n; see also English (nationality). Bromley, R. 130, 138. Bronfen, E. 90. le Brun, E. 42. Burqa’ 45; see also veiling. Butler, J. 38, 91, 92, 138. Casbah Films 41. Catachresis 17, 38, 89. de Certeau, M. 101. Chador 54; see also veiling. Charrad, M. 48–9, 51, 54. de Clérambault, G. G. 34, 161n. Clifford, J. 153. Colonial: cities 37, 119; discourses and practices 2, 4, 6, 10, 23, 25–41, 42, 59, 68, 75–6, 89, 100, 104, 117, 128, 148–51, 153, 154–5, 156–7, 160n; present 2, 107, 112–15, 147–8. Cooke, M. 2, 3, 8, 9, 46, 160n, 161n. Cromer, Lord (Evelyn Baring) 42, 147, 148, 161n. Dananir 109, 122.

Delacroix, E. 28, 72, 75, 103; cf. Alloula, M. 35; cf. Djebar, A. 59–61, 64, 162n. Derrida, J. 164n; and Khatibi, A. 145–6. Diaspora 4, 10, 115, 130, 132, 140; see also exile, migration, transculturation. Dinarzad 15, 69. Djebar, A. 3, 23; and Alloula, M. 162n; cf. Alloula, M. 53, 57, 62; Children of the New World 4, 56–7, 162n; cf. Delacroix, E. 59–61, 64, 162n; early writing by 3–4, 55–6; and Fanon, F. 55; cf. Fanon, F. 57, 58, 69; Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade 63, 65, 66–8, 70, 71, 162n; Far From Madina 47, 70; La Femme sans sépultre 162n; ‘Forbidden Gaze, Severed Sound’ 57–8, 59–61; introduction to and translation of el Saadawi, N. 19, 22; The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua 61–4, 65, 66, 71, 162n; cf. Sebbar, L. 71, 72; A Sister to Scheherazade 68–70, 71; So Vast the Prison 62, 63, 69, 162n; Women of Algiers in their Apartment 57–61, 64–5, 71, 162n; La Zerda ou les chants de l’oubli 162n. Donadey, A. 15, 65, 70, 71, 72, 73, 76, 116, 123, 162n. Donnell, A. 137–8, 164n. Duff Gordon, Lady L. 32–3, 149, 154. Elective mutism 91; see also aphasia. English (language) 3, 5, 10, 13, 15, 43, 51, 54, 62, 69, 79, 112, 114, 116, 119, 132, 133, 141, 146, 152–3, 154, 156–7, 162n, 163n. English (nationality) 29–30, 31–3, 105, 130, 147, 148, 149, 151, 156; see also Britain/British. Egypt 9, 10, 13–14, 17–22, 26, 27, 28, 31–3, 41–4, 46, 88, 101, 106, 108, 110, 114, 122, 123, 142, 146–57, 159n, 160n, 161n, 165n. Esposito J. 46. Evil eye 35, 161n. Exile 18, 20, 48, 51, 52, 53, 56, 64, 82, 83–4, 106, 115, 130, 135–6, 136–7, 144–6, 162n; see also diaspora, migration, transculturation. Fanon, F. 41, 55, 57, 111, 164; ‘Algeria Unveiled’ 23, 36–8, 39, 161; and

Index Djebar, A. 55; cf. Djebar, A. 57, 58, 69; cf. Pontecorvo, G. 38–9, 41; cf. Tuqan, F. 111. Faqir, F. 4, 7, 14, 24, 101, 105; cf. Bakr, S. 106; cf. Bouraoui, N. 105, 107; Nisanit 5–6; Pillars of Salt 105–7, 139. Fares, N. Honey and Ashes 9, 163n. Fayad, M. 1, 2, 10. Feminist paradigms 1, 5, 6–9, 11, 13, 14–22, 23–5, passim. Fernea, E. 79, 80. Fidaîa 37–9, 41, 57, 59, 65, 161n. al Fihriya, F. 124. FIS (Islamic Salvation Front, Algeria) 49, 53, 55. Fitna 12–13, 13–14, 57, 117, 122. Flaubert, G. 28. FLN (National Liberation Front, Algeria) 37, 38, 39, 41, 48, 49, 55. Fortier, A-M. 164–5n. Foster, G. A. 1, 17. Foucault, M. 15, 27, 102. Fourth cinema 62, 89. France/French 23, 49, 51, 52, 53, 55, 59, 65, 70, 71, 72–5, 77, 102, 114, 126, 135, 136, 149, 162n, 163n, 164n; colonialism 10, 26–7, 32, 33–41, 38, 56–7, 59, 62, 63, 66–7, 76, 77, 79, 86, 89, 94, 116–7, 119, 129, 132–3, 151, 160n, 161n, 162n, 165n; language 4, 10, 27, 52, 54, 55–6, 62, 65, 67–8, 71, 77, 80, 104, 114, 116, 122, 125, 132, 145–6, 147, 150–1, 156, 161n, 162n, 163n. Franco-Maghribian 71, 96, 145. Freud, S. 13, 90, 91, 92, 165n. Fuss, D. 37. Gafaïti, H. 68. Gandhi, L. 17. Garanger, M. 35, 73, 163n. Gauch, S. 1, 15, 116. al Ghazali 160n, 164n. al Ghazali, Z. 46. GIA (Armed Islamic Group, Algeria) 49, 162n. Golley, N. al Hassan. 18, 108, 110, 111, 161n, 163n. Grace, D. 1, 15. Graham-Brown, S. 29, 33. Gregory, D. 2, 16, 28–9, 34, 161n. Grewal, I. 10, 29, 32. Grosz, E. 10, 16, 23, 102.

185

el Guindi, F. 11, 13. H . adra 119, 125 H . aîk 5, 34–5, 36–9, 63, 69, 121, 128, 133–5, 136–7, 138–9, 159n; see also veiling. Hall, S. 155. Hamil, M. 76. H . ammâm 5, 30–31, 68, 111–12, 117. Haraway, D. 16, 127. Harem 5, 22, 23, 24, 28–9, 33–6, 41–4, 59–61, 108, 110, 111, 116–24, 149–50, 163n, 164n; see also h . arîm, home. H . arîm 5, 11, 22, 28–36, 43–4, 119, 123, 161; see also harem, home. Harlow, B. 115. Hassan, W. S. 153, 156. Hatem, M. 33, 94. Hatoum, M. 24, 131, 157; cf. Amer, G. 142; Corps étranger/Foreign Body 140; Measures of Distance 140–6, 165n; cf. el Saadawi, N. 142; cf. Sedira, Z. 142. Haunting 35–6, 98–9, 128–30, 135–6, 157–8. Hefuna, S. 11. Hélie-Lucas, M-A. 45, 161n. Heterotopias 24, 79, ch4. Hiddleston, J. 3, 86. H . ijâb 11, 13–14, 25, 46–7, 101, 133, 136–8; see also veiling. Hillauer, R. 1, 4, 9, 10, 56, 86, 89, 93, 94, 96, 125, 159n, 164n. Hitchcock, P. 19, 74. Hochberg, G. 98. Home 11–12, 19, 20, 32, 49, 56, 78, 81, 94, 130, 134, 144; as asylum 101, 102–4, 105–7; as gynaeceum 102–3; as heterotopia 24, ch4; as origin of an address 154; as prison 19, 101, 102–4, 106, 111, 112–15; see also homeland, homelessness, harem, h . arîm. Homeland 26, 82, 84, 106, 133, 140, 144–6; see also home. Homelessness 106, 113, 130; see also home. Homosociality 9, 83; see also lesbian desire. Hourani, A. 26–7, 160n. H . urufiyya 142. Huughe, L. 70. Hysteria 90, 92, 160n.

186

Index

Ijtihad 46, 47, 118, 161n. Ingres, J-A-D. 28, 72; cf. Montagu, Lady M. W. 30–31, 161n. Intersubjectivity 6, 24, 130, 140, 153–4. Iraq 2, 26, 131, 160n, 164n. Islam: 5, 6, 8, 19, 45–7, 48–9, 51, 56, 70–1, 76, 103, 104, 117, 124–7, 134, 137, 142, 151, 152, 163n, 165n; Islamic discourse on gender 8, 13–14, 41–2, 45, 94, 100, 123, 161n; Islamic feminism 5, 8, 45–7, 123, 161n; Islamism 17–18, 46, 49, 52, 100, 104, 131, 159n, 162n; Islamophobia 137–8; in Orientalism 29; see also Arab Muslim as contested categories. Israel 2, 6, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114–5, 163n, 165n. Issa, R. 11, 15, 142. Jacquemond, R. 5, 146. Jameson, F. 82, 97. Jayussi, S. 109 Jordan/Transjordan 26, 105–7, 113, 115. Kahf, M. 5, 43, 44, 98, 161n. Kamuf, P. 154. Kandiyoti, D. 45, 47, 100. Kaplan, C. 10, 127. Kassari, Y. The Sleeping Child 164n. Khalifeh, S. 4; and Tawil, R. 163n. Khanna, R. 39, 40, 62, 79, 89–90, 98, 139, 164n. al Khansa 20, 109. Khatibi, A. 77, 145–6. Klein, M. 92–3. Kristeva, J. 92. Kulthoum, Umm. 88, 122, 163n. de Lauretis, T. 10, 57. Laylat al Qadr (Night of Destiny) 125. Lazreg, M. 6, 11, 37, 46, 48, 70, 71, 153–4, 159n, 161n. Lebanon 26, 115, 140–6, 159n, 165n. Lefebvre, H. 100–01. Lesbian desire 9, 123, 159n; see also homosociality. Lewis, J. F. 149–50. Lewis, R. 29. Litham 121; see also veiling. Lloyd, F. 1, 75, 130, 134, 163n, 164n. Lott, E. 31–2, 33. Lowe, L. 60–1.

Maghrib/Maghreb: 1, 10, 12, 25–7, 48–9, 81, 85, 159n, 165n; Maghreb pluriel (Khatibi, A.) 77; melancholia in texts from ch3; see also Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia. Mahmood, S. 46. Majalla (Tunisian Family Code) 45, 93, 163n. Malak, A. 8, 47, 152. Malti-Douglas, F. 3, 8, 15, 17, 18, 22, 109, 161n. Marcus, K. M. 52, 55. Martineau, H. 32–3. Mashriq/Mashreq: 1, 25–7, 159n; see also Egypt, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria. Matisse, H. 72, 73–4, 163n. Matrilineal legacy 6, 9, 23, 59, 63–4, 78–9, 81, 86, 106, 117–8, 120, 122–3, 130, 132, 139–40, 164n; see also mother-daughter relations. Mauresques/‘Moorish’ women 104. McClintock, A. 38, 78. McIlvanney, S. 102, 103, 163n. Mehrez, S. 10, 146. Melancholia 6, 23, ch3, 100, 110, 160n. Melman, B. 26, 29, 32, 160n. Mernissi, F. 4, 13–14, 15, 24, 45, 47, 57, 116, 117, 122, 124, 126, 160n, 163n; cf. Ben Lyazid, F. 124, 125, 164n; cf. Faqir, F. 139; The Harem Within (Dreams of Trespass) 88, 101, 116–24, 164n; cf. Sedira, Z. 139; cf. Tlatli, M. 119, 164n; cf. Tuqan, F. 119–20. Messaoudi, K. 5. Migration 26, 35, 51, 72–3, 96, 115, 130, 131–2, 135, 145; see also diaspora, exile, mobility, translation, travel. Mobility 32, 41, 46–7, 54–5, 86–7, 95, 105, 115–16, 119–20, 130, 133, 145–6; see also diaspora, exile, home, homelessness, transculturation, translation, transnationalism, travel, travel writing. Mohanty, C. T. 6, 7, 9. Mokeddem, M. 23, 47, 51–2; Of Dreams and Assassins 52, 162n; The Forbidden Woman 51–5, 76; cf. Sebbar, L. 71; cf. Touati, F. 52, 53. Montagu, Lady M. W. 29–32, 33, 42, 149, 161n; cf. Ingres, J-A-D. 28, 72. Morocco 26, 79–81, 115–27.

Index Mosteghanemi, A. 23, 79, 98, 99; Memory in the Flesh 81–5; cf. Yacine, K. 84–5. Mother-daughter relations 9, 19–21, 23–4, 42, 50, 51, 54–5, 59, 62, ch3, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 111–12, 113, 114, 120–23, 124, 130, 132–3, 136, 137, 140–42, 143–6, 164n; see also matrilineal legacy. Mourning ch3 139–40. Mûdawana (Moroccan Family Law) 45, 163n, 164n. al Musawi, M. J. 3, 5, 15, 70. Naficy, H. 35, 123. Nahd.a 27, 41–2, 142, 154, 161n. Nashashibi, S. 4. Nassef, M. H. 46. Nation: constructions of 2, 8, 9, 40–41, 49, 54, 56, ch3, ch4, 138, 155, 159n, 161n; see also allegory, national cinemas, nationalism, post-national feminist critique, transnationalism. National cinemas 4, 41, 85–6. Nationalism 2, 5, 13, 23, 27, 38, 42–5, 56–7, ch3, ch4 147–8, 152, 156. Niati, H. 23, 48; cf. Benyahia, S. 12; No to Torture 75–6; Ziriab. . . Another Story 76. Nisa’iyya 8. Niswiyya 8. Objet petit a 34. Odalisque 28, 32, 71, 72, 73–4, 75, 76. Orientalism 2, 5, 14, 23, 28, 100, 156–7, 161n, 165n; and colonialism 23, 25–36, 160n; neo- 160–61n; and postcolonial discourse 129–30; in women’s travel writing 29–33. O’Riley, M. 128–30, 155. Ottoman Empire 2, 26, 27, 29–31, 41, 111, 119, 160n, 161n. Pahwa, S. 97. Painting 14, 28, 30–31, 33, 59–61, 64, 72, 74–5, 75–6, 84, 103, 124–5, 143, 149–50, 162n, 163n. Palestine 2, 6, 26, 107–15, 140, 144, 159n, 162–3n. Performativity 3, 8, 16, 27–8, 28–9, 37–8, 41, 88, 98–9, 122–3, 129, 130, 131–2, 133, 135, 138, 140, 153, 155. Philippi, D. 140, 157. Photography 11–12, 14, 30–31, 33–6,

187

43, 62, 73, 116, 118, 121, 129, 131, 132, 134, 140–5, 161n, 163n, 164–165n, 165n. Picasso, P. 61, 103. Poetry 108, 109–10 Polygamy 5, 147, 163n, 164n. Pontecorvo, G. The Battle of Algiers 23, 36, 57; cf. Djebar, A. 62; cf. Fanon, F. 38–9, 41. Postcards 34–6. Postcolonial: critical framework 2, 6, 7, 14–15, 23–4, 34, 38, 76, 78–9, 97–9, 100, 107, 115, 128–30, 131, 155, 157–8; melancholia 79; struggles over women’s rights 44–7, 48–9, 51, 58, 68, 76, 78–9, 88, 93–4, 100, 106–7; studies 2, 3, 47, 48, 130–1, 159n, 164n. Post-national feminist critique 9, ch3 101, 129; see also nation. Prasad, M. 82, 97. Pratt, M. L. 33, 153. Prison 4, 17, 21, 63, 77, 102, 159n; as trope 19, 21, 59, 62, 101, 102–7, 111, 112–5, 122, 127. Procter, J. 130. Psychoanalytic theory 15–16, 34–5, 90–3, 160n. Publication and translation 4–5, 42–4. Qur’an 18, 20, 47, 80, 124, 125, 126, 142, 160n. al Radi, N. Baghdad Diaries 164n. Radical bilingualism 10, 146. Rafaele, A. Veil 25. Rape 36, 76, 87, 91, 133, 161n. Rose, J. 34, 164n. el Saadawi, N. 4, 17–22, 47; A Daughter of Isis 20–21; early work 17–18; ‘Eyes’ 19; The Fall of the Imam 18; cf. Hatoum, M. 142; Memoirs of a Woman Doctor 18, 19–20, 22, 160n; translation by Djebar, A. 19, 22; cf. Tuqan, F. 108; Woman at Point Zero 19, 21–2. Said, E. 2, 5, 18, 27–9, 145, 148, 160n, 161n. al Samman, G. 4. Sartre, J-P. 41, 104, 163n; cf. Bouraoui, N. 103. Sebbar, L. 23, 34, 48, 71; cf. Bouraoui, N. 102; Les Carnets de Shérazade 73;

188

Index

cf. Djebar, A. 71, 72; Le Fou de Shérazade 72, 163n; and Garanger, M. 73, 163n; cf. Mokeddem, M. 71; cf. Niati, H. 76; Sherazade 71–5. Sedira, Z. 24, 35, 130–40, 161n, 164n; cf. Aboulela, L. 136–8; cf. Amer, G. 142; Autobiographical Patterns 131–2; cf. Djebar, A. 139–40; Don’t do to her what you did to me! 164n; Exilees d’Algerie 135–6; cf. Faqir, F. 139; cf. Hatoum, M. 142; Jinns 135; La Maison de ma mère 133; cf. Mernissi, F. 139; Mother Tongue 132; ‘The Oblique Gaze’ 135; Retelling Histories: My Mother Told Me 132–3; Self Portrait 134–5; Self Portraits or the Virgin Mary 133–4; Silent Sight 136; cf. Soueif, A. 157. Shaarawi, H. 3, 41–6, 47, 108, 109, 110, 114, 122, 123, 161n. Shafik, V. 126. Shahrazad/Scheherazade/ Sheherazade/Sherazade 15, 68–70, 71–5, 77, 80, 122, 160n. Sharabi, H. 45. Al Shaykh, H. 3, 159n, 165n. Shohat, E. 9, 17, 36, 39, 41, 78, 88, 142. Slyomovics, S. 49. Soueif, A. 10, 24; cf. Ahmed, L. 156–7; cf. Djebar, A. 156; In the Eye of the Sun 13–14, 154, 165n; The Map of Love 33, 146–57, 165n; Mezzaterra 154–5; cf. Sedira, Z. 157. Spivak, G. C. 11, 16, 17, 66, 68, 79, 139, 157, 160n, 165n. Sprengnether, M. 91. Stereotype 6, 33–4, 61, 74–5, 129, 147, 154. Sudan 26, 44, 119, 136–7, 157, 159n. Sufi philosophy 124, 126, 164n. Suhair Majaj, L. 1, 3, 4–5, 22. Syria 26, 159n. Tawil, R. 24, 101; and Khalifeh, S. 163n; My Home, My Prison 112–15, 163n, 163–4n; cf. Tuqan, F. 112, 114. Third cinema 62. Third eye 14, 16, 138. Thresholds 13, 15, 16, 17, 24, 35, 70, 76, 85, 86, 87, 90, 103, 104, 105, 107, 111, 116, 120, 124, 125, 127, 130, 155, 158. Tlatli, M. 23, 79, 85–6, 96–8, 164, 163n; cf. Abouzeid, L. 96, 99; cf.

Amari, R. 96; and Ben Lyazid, F. 86; and Boughedir, F. 86; cf. Djebar, A. 86; cf. Mernissi, F. 119, 164n; cf. Mosteghanemi, A. 96, 119; The Season of Men 94–5; The Silences of the Palace 4, 86–93, 163n. Tobing Rony, F. 6, 14, 138. Torture 6, 30, 59, 63, 75–6, 161n. Touati, F. 23, 48; Desperate Spring 49–51; cf. Mokeddem, M. 52, 53; cf. Sebbar, L. 71. Transculturation 33, 130, 131, 153–4; see also diaspora, exile, migration, mobility. Translation 4, 5, 17, 43–4, 47, 54, 65, 73, 79, 116, ch5, 160n, 163n; as metaphor 10, 14–15, 16, 17, 24, 25, 73–5, 115, ch5. Transnationalism 6, 9, 10–11, 15, 23, 42, 58, 64, ch5, 160n. Travel 77, 105, 110, 117, 119, 124, 126, 130, 147, 153–4; see also mobility, translation, travel writing. Travel writing 23, 28, 29–33, 43, 148–9, 153; see also travel. Trinh, T. 11, 28. Tucker, J. 45. Tunisia 9, 26, 42, 45, 79, 85–97, 163n. Tuqan, F. 24, 101, 108, 163n; cf. Fanon, F. 111; cf. Mernissi 119–20; The Most Difficult Journey 163n; A Mountainous Journey 4, 107–12; cf. el Saadawi, N. 108; cf. Shaarawi, H. 108, 114; and Tawil 163n; cf. Tawil 112, 114. Valassopoulos, A. 1, 3, 4, 6–7, 42, 88, 129, 163n. Van Buren, J. 91. Veiling 5, 11–12, 13–14, 19, 23, 30, 34–5, 36–8, 38–41, 42, 43, 45, 57–8, 61–71, 74, 76, 83, 104, 110, 116, 129, 130, 132–7, 139, 140, 142–3, 164n; as creative/critical trope 11, 14, 23, 43, 74, 76, 83, 110, 116, 129, 130, 139, 140, 142–3; forced unveiling in Algeria 35, 73, 132–3; in nationalist discourse 42, 94, 111; in Orientalist discourse 32–3; post-9/11 constructions of 131, 137–8; and prostitution 50; as religious practise 26, 136–7; cf. skin 138; cf. shroud 34, 119; in Sufi philosophy 126; and

Index violence against women in Algeria 46, 49; see also asmak, burqa’, chador, fitna, h . aîk, h . ijâb, litham. Venuti, L. 146, 153, 155. Verism: women’s treatment of Islamic attitudes toward 142–3. Video 131–3, 136, 140–6. Vogl, M. 15, 33–4, 161n. Ward, R. 118, 120, 121. Wenzel, D. 11. Woodhull, W. 35, 36, 49, 61, 162n.

189

Yacine, K. cf. Mosteghanemi, A. 84–5; Nedjma 84–5. al Yamama, Z. 20. Yegenoglu, M. 28, 33, 34, 37, 74, 138. Young, R. 2, 38, 128, 129, 130, 159n. Zâwiyya 124, 125, 126, 127. al Zayyat, L. 8. Zayzafoon, L. B. Y. 1, 16, 42, 94, 100. Zeidan, J. 3, 4, 7, 14, 18. Zimra, C. 10, 55, 56, 58, 59, 61, 65, 66, 70.