”Orientalizing the Western Other: Perceptions of the Female in Youssouf Amine Elalamy’s Une
Marocain à New York”
Angelica-Maria De Angelis
American University of Kuwait, Kuwait
[email protected]
Elalamy’s picaresque novel follows the adventures of a young Moroccan male on an educational
scholarship in pre-9/11 New York. At times utopic (at least from a Moroccan male viewpoint), at others
fantastical, this novel both challenges and reifies gender and cultural binaries that have long been a
source of (mis)understanding of East and West. Yet the novel is more than a description of simple
binaries (East/West; male/female; Moroccan/American), in part because these categories themselves
have been shown to be non-essential constructions of identity, and in part because a global,
transnational world does not support these types of clearly delineated categories. The novel itself
resists this type of easy categorization, for example by constantly bringing the reader’s attention to
similarities between the narrator and his American counterpart, Regi. The narrator even imagines in
one chapter New York as a city colonized by Morocco, renaming it “New York Sidi,” with its “Grande
Mosquée du World Trade Center,” and its metros, quais and plazas peopled by water sellers, melhoun
orchestras and gnaoua troupes. Yet despite the multiple shiftings and fragmentations of the narrative,
the one thing that remains constant is the way the narrator perceives the American female. Yet is this a
re-enactment of the Gaze by a Moroccan male onto Western females? Is this simply a substitution of
male-for-male (“Oriental” for “Western”) and female-for-female (“Western” for “Oriental”)? If so, how
do the power and other relationships between East (in this case a former French colony) and West (a
kind of global imperial power) impact and complicate this exchange? As James Clifford notes, “Said's
‘Traveling Theory’ challenges the propensity of theory to seek a stable place, to float above historical
conjunctures.” Clifford continues, “[Said] proposes a series of important questions about the sites of
production, reception, transmission and resistance to specific theories.” The New Formations
“Introduction: Traveling Theory” adds that Said’s argument is that “theories have no fixed political
meaning, but take on different implications depending on where, when and how they are deployed,”
and hypothesizes that one way that theory does travel is “literally through the movement of people.”
Through a reading of Elalmy’s novel, this paper seeks to explore the possibilities and limitations of this
inverted (subverted?) Orientalist gaze and Said’s “traveling theory,” by considering questions such as:
How does a contextualization in Moroccan theories of gender and sexuality (such as those discussed by
Abdessamad Dialmy and Soumaya Naamane-Guessous) help to understand the actions and attitudes of
the narrator in this novel? How does the religious and cultural background of the narrator enhance a
reading of the text (for example “Surat Yusuf” in the Qur’an; the Moroccan folktale "‫ك يد ال ن ساء؟ ك يد‬
‫ "ال رجال؟‬as written by Fatima Mernissi and later made into the film Les Ruses des femmes by Farida
Belyazid)? To what degree are theories such as Said’s “Orientalism” and Foucault’s “the Gaze” useful in
theorizing un Marocain à New York?