transcolonial maghreb
Cultural Memory
in
the
Present
Hent de Vries, Editor
TRANSCOLONIAL MAGHREB
Imagining Palestine in the Era of Decolonization
Olivia C. Harrison
stanford university press
stanford, california
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
©2016 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.
All rights reserved.
Parts of Chapter One originally appeared as “Cross-Colonial Poetics: Souffles-Anfas
and the Figure of Palestine” in PMLA 128.2 (March 2013): 353–69, published by the
Modern Language Association of America. Reprinted by permission.
Parts of Chapter Two were originally published as “Staging Palestine in FranceAlgeria: Popular Theater and the Politics of Transcolonial Comparison,” in Social
Text, Vol. 30, issue. 112, pp. 27–47. Copyright 2012, Duke University Press. All
rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the present publisher, Duke University
Press. www.dukeupress.edu
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of
Stanford University Press.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Harrison, Olivia C., 1980- author.
Transcolonial Maghreb : imagining Palestine in the era of decolonization /
Olivia C. Harrison.
pages cm--(Cultural memory in the present)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8047-9421-3 (cloth : alk. paper)-isbn 978-0-8047-9682-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)-isbn 978-0-8047-9685-9 (eBook)
1. North African literature--20th century--History and criticism. 2. Arab-Israeli
conflict--Literature and the conflict. 3. Palestine--In literature. 4. Colonies in
literature. I. Title. II. Series: Cultural memory in the present.
pn849.a355h37 2015
809'.933585694--dc23
2015026356
Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 11/13.5 Adobe Garamond
in memory of James Pinckney Harrison (1932–2010)
to Arne, Ada, and Louise, for life
Contents
List of Illustrations
xi
Acknowledgments
xiii
Introduction: Palestine as Metaphor
1
part i. decolonizing the maghreb
1. Souffles-Anfas: Palestine and the Decolonization of Culture
17
2. Transcolonial Hospitality: Kateb Yacine’s Experiments
in Popular Theater
41
3. The Transcolonial Exotic: Allegories of Palestine in
Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s Algerian Trilogy
61
part ii. jews, arabs, and the principle of separation
4. Portrait of an Arab Jew: Albert Memmi and the
Politics of Indigeneity
81
5. Abrahamic Tongues: Abdelkebir Khatibi,
Jacques Hassoun, Jacques Derrida
101
6. Edmond Amran El Maleh and the Cause of the Other
129
Epilogue: Palestine and the Syrian Intifada
143
Notes
153
Index
187
Illustrations
Figure 1. Front cover of Souffles 15 (1969), special issue
“For the Palestinian Revolution,” by Mohamed Chebaa
22
Figure 2. Poster by Mohamed Melehi, “Palestine,” Souffles 15
24
Figure 3. Poster by Tahar Ben Jelloun, “Fath,” Souffles 15
25
Figure 4. Palestine cartoons by George Wolinski, Souffles 15
26
Figure 5. Photograph of a literacy lesson in a Palestinian
training camp, Souffles 20–21 (1971)
33
Figure 6. Undated photograph of Kateb Yacine and
Mahmoud Darwish
43
Figure 7. Performance of Mohamed prends ta valise ca. 1972
45
Figure 8. Poster of Mohamed prends ta valise
46
Figure 9. Ziyad in combat gear, opening credits of
Dhakirat al-jasad
75
Figure 10. Ahlam in traditional garb, opening credits of
Dhakirat al-jasad
75
Acknowledgments
Columbia University’s Department of French and Romance Philology and the Center (now Institute) for Comparative Literature and Society were an ideal intellectual haven for the genesis of this project. My first
thanks go to Madeleine Dobie, whose infallible support, generous engagement, and copious comments on innumerable chapter drafts were instrumental in making this book a reality. Gil Anidjar had a decisive impact on
the final shape the project has taken, and I am endlessly grateful for his
incisive readings and intellectual example. Noha Radwan provided much
needed guidance with the Arabic corpus, and rightly insisted that I include
Ahlam ­Mosteghanemi in the final draft of the book. The much regretted
Philip Watts was a belated but essential interlocutor for this project and
the next, as was Kristen Ross. It is thanks to them both that Transcolonial
Maghreb will, I hope, have a French sequel.
My years at Columbia would not have been nearly as rewarding without the example, support, and camaraderie of many individuals I would
like to acknowledge here, though I cannot possibly name them all: Bashir
Abu-Manneh, Seth Anziska, Étienne Balibar, Taoufik Ben Amor, Maria
Boletsi, Peter Connor, Hamid Dabashi, Patricia Dailey, Vincent Debaene,
Souleymane Bashir Diagne, Brent Edwards, Avishek Ganguly, Alysia
Garrison, Stathis Gourgouris, Zeina Hakim, Alvan Ikoku, Simon Jackson,
Mehammed Mack, Marc Nichanian, Neni Panourgia, Bruce Robbins,
Emmanuelle Saada, Gayatri Spivak, Mathew Udkovitch, and Ali Wick.
Though I did not arrive in time to meet Edward Said, this book is deeply
indebted to his work. UCLA’s departments of French and Francophone
Studies and Comparative Literature offered me visiting scholar status during my first year in Los Angeles, and I thank Dominic Thomas and Ali
Behdad for their academic hospitality. Meeting Gil ­Hochberg, Lia ­Brozgal,
Aamir Mufti, Nouri Gana, Susan Slyomovics, and Françoise Lionnet d
­ uring
xiv Acknowledgments
that formative year was crucial. I am especially grateful to Françoise for her
continued mentorship.
At the University of Southern California I have found an incredibly stimulating and collegial intellectual community. Natania Meeker and
­Panivong Norindr have been exemplary mentors from the start, and I feel
very fortunate to count them as my close colleagues and friends. Ramzi
Rouighi, Laurie Brand, Sarah Gualtieri, and Kevin van Bladel gave me a
very warm welcome to the Middle East Studies Program as soon as I arrived on campus. I am especially grateful to Ramzi for entertaining my
nostalgia for Columbia, and to Laurie for inviting me to present my work
at the MESP faculty seminar. My research assistant, Nada Ayad, provided
invaluable help with my Arabic corpus. I have been very fortunate to work
with Nada as well as Sophia Azeb and Umayyah Cable, whose dissertation projects have helped me think through my own research. Last but
not least, the interdepartmental postcolonial reading group my colleague
Neetu Khanna launched in 2012 has been an ideal venue to discuss new
work, and I am grateful to all its participants for their helpful feedback.
I am especially indebted to Neetu for reading numerous drafts as well as
the final version of this book, which very much bears the imprint of her
careful scrutiny. More rewarding still has been her unflagging camaraderie
and sense of humor. USC’s Zumberge Award and the Office of the Dean
of USC Dornsife, as well as numerous course releases and a luxurious junior leave, were instrumental in creating the conditions for the completion of this work.
Parts of this book have been presented at many venues over the years
and I am indebted to the many people who engaged with it on those occasions, some of whom I am able to thank by name: Nadia Abu El-Haj, Lila
Abu-Lughod, Safoi Babana-Hampton, Maya Boutaghou, Thierry Durand,
Jason Earle, Yasser Elhariry, Robeson Taj Frazier, Nitin Govil, Erin GraffZivin, Kifah Hanna, Nicholas Harrison, Alma Heckman, Cheryl Higadisha,
Anikó Imre, David Lloyd, Megan MacDonald, Jessica Marglin, Richard
McLaughlin, Anne-Marie McManus, Sofian Merabet, Timothy Mitchell,
Valérie Orlando, David Palumbo-Liu, Theri Pickens, Guilan Siassi, Robert
Stam, Edwige Tamalet-Talbayev, and Teresa Villa-Ignacio. Research and
writing would truly mean very little without such a hospitable intellectual
community. I am grateful to Ella Shohat and the anonymous readers of
Social Text for their initial feedback on the second chapter of this book,
Acknowledgments xv
and for permission to reprint portions thereof, as well as to the anonymous
readers and editorial staff of PMLA, where the first version of Chapter One
appeared. Emily-Jane Cohen of Stanford University Press energetically supported the publication of this book from beginning to end, and I thank her
and her tireless editorial assistant Friederike Sundaram for their patience
with my endless queries. I couldn’t imagine a better home than Hent de
Vries’ Cultural Memory in the Present series, and feel truly honored to be
in such distinguished company. Most decisively, I thank Gil Hochberg, my
then anonymous reader, for lending such a careful eye to the manuscript,
and for sustaining the conversation well beyond the initial report. This book
is dramatically improved as a result of her incisive comments and generous
feedback, though of course any errors remain my own.
It was an immense pleasure to research and write this book, in no
small part due to its conditions of production: Morning Side Heights in
New York City, Columbia’s Butler Library, la Bibliothèque Nationale de
France, site Henri Mitterrand in Paris, l’Institut Mémoires de l’édition
contemporaine in Normandy, the 11e and 12e arrondissements of Paris,
USC’s Doheny Library, UCLA’s Young Research Library, and Echo Park
and Highland Park in Los Angeles. I am grateful to the staff of the BnF
and IMEC, particularly Albert Dichy, IMEC’s director, for their expert
guidance in navigating the archive, and for maintaining such beautiful
collections.
My travels allowed me to cross paths with several of the writers I discuss in these pages, as well as France- and Morocco-based scholars. Thanks
to Samuel Weber and Lucy Stone McNeece, I had several decisive conversations with Abdelkebir Khatibi, first in Morocco in 2004 and then
in Paris in 2008. I was also fortunate to correspond with the writer and
artist Etel Adnan, an early Souffles collaborator, when I was still a graduate student. Since then she has more than once shared her memories of
Souffles and her thoughts on Palestine with me. In 2013 I had the pleasure of meeting Abdellatif and Jocelyne Laâbi, after several years of very
helpful email exchanges. I am indebted to them both for their hospitality and enthusiasm about the project. Thanks to Luc-Willy Deheuvels at
l’Institut National des Langues et Cultures Orientales, I was able to meet
Kenza Sefrioui at an early stage in this project. She has been incredibly
forthcoming with her work on Souffles ever since. Benjamin Stora, then
also at l’INALCO, was most generous with his time from the beginning.
xvi Acknowledgments
Thanks to Madeleine Dobie and Ali Guenoun, in 2013 I was able to study
Kabyle with Nacima Abbane and meet the Kabyle poet Ben Mohamed, a
close companion and translator of Kateb Yacine. I am especially indebted
to Nacima and Ben for responding to my queries about Palestine, Berber
politics, and Kateb’s popular theater over the years. I am also grateful to
Amazigh Kateb and his mother, Zebeida Chergui, who graciously gave me
permission at the eleventh hour to reprint a photograph of Kateb in this
book. I am immensely grateful to all of my interlocutors for giving so unsparingly of their time, and for making the experience of writing this book
such a richly collaborative one.
Since 2004 Arne De Boever has been my traveling companion,
first interlocutor, staunchest supporter, and so many things more. I dedicate this book to him and to our daughters, Ada and Louise, as well as to
my father, James Pinckney Harrison, who was, in more ways than I could
have ever imagined, my first example and source of inspiration. I am forever ­indebted to my mother, Chantal Dubertret Harrison, and to my sister,
­Alicia ­Harrison. This book is for them, too.
transcolonial maghreb
Introduction
Palestine as Metaphor
Among the chorus of chants and slogans echoing from Tunisia to
Egypt, Syria, and beyond starting in late 2010, popular expressions of support for Palestine have been a remarkably persistent leitmotiv. From Sidi
Bouzid, the site of the first Tunisian protests, to Tahrir Square in the heart
of Cairo, Palestine has been invoked as a galvanizing issue by protestors
hailing from all class, religious, and ethnic backgrounds. At first flush this
is hardly surprising. After all, Palestine has been the most recognizable
symbol of Arab and Muslim unity in Arab state rhetoric for the past halfcentury. Yet recent invocations of Palestine as rallying cry in the Maghreb
and Mashriq invite us to look more closely at the kind of work “Palestine”
does in the decolonizing world.1 Beyond the well-worn cliché of ArabMuslim solidarity with colonized Palestine, what does the word mean for
postcolonial subjects protesting their continued disenfranchisement and
oppression decades after the end of European colonization?
Variously termed revolt or revolution (thawra) and uprising (intifada)
in Arabic, the mass protests of the 2010s are, by their very name, inscribed
within a decadeslong transnational history marked by two iconic anticolonial struggles, those of Algeria and Palestine.2 As the most visible and enduring symbol of colonial rule and military occupation in the twenty-first
century, Palestine has played an important role in popular protests against
authoritarian postcolonial regimes, revealing a much longer history of
transnational mobilization for Palestine across the region, one that implicates corrupt postcolonial and military regimes in the oppression of nominally sovereign subjects. This book is concerned with the range of meanings
2 Introduction
and mobilizations of “Palestine as metaphor” for non-­Palestinians, specifically, Palestine as a metaphor of the colonial, writ large to include Western/
European, Zionist/Israeli, and postcolonial state discourses and practices in
the colonial past and in the purportedly postcolonial present.3 It may seem
counterintuitive or even objectionable to speak of Palestine as a metaphor
of the colonial as opposed to an actually colonized place. And yet I argue
that it is precisely because it remains colonized that Palestine enables a sustained reflection on the afterlives of colonialism in the present, including
the legacies of European colonial rule, the on­going effects of Zionist ideology and Israeli occupation, and “internal” or neocolonization by nominally
independent states.
Palestine has operated as a catalyzing issue across the decolonizing
world, and particularly the Maghreb and Mashriq, for decades. As the sole
part of the region formerly controlled by France and Britain that was never
decolonized, Palestine has been, at least since the coalescence of the Palestinian national movement in the mid-1960s and Israel’s annexation of the West
Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem in June 1967, a point of acute concern for
the “Arab street,” often in direct conflict with state interests, if not rhetoric
(most states in the region pay lip service to Palestine, few follow through
with actual support, and many actively hinder Palestinian rights).4 As activists and scholars have noted, civil society groups that had been mobilizing
around Palestine for years were instrumental in organizing protests in the
early days of the revolts, demonstrating the political use-value of the Palestinian question in facilitating democratic movements across the region.5 But
Palestine must also be understood as a powerful metaphor of political disenfranchisement in the purportedly postcolonial present, as forcefully demonstrated by Samar Yazbek’s memoir of the Syrian uprising, which compares
Syrians fleeing state violence to Palestinian refugees.6 Collapsing postcolonial Syrian subjects and Palestinians under occupation, Yazbek’s memoir, to
which I return in the Epilogue, exemplifies what I call “transcolonial identification” with Palestine: processes of identification that are rooted in a common colonial genealogy and a shared perception of (neo)colonial subjection.7
The central argument of this book is that Palestine has been, and continues to be, deployed as a figure of the colonial, expanded to include not
only the “classic” forms of colonization exemplified in French and British
rule over the Maghreb and Mashriq but also various instances of neocolonialism, including continued foreign control as well as the repressive tactics
Palestine as Metaphor 3
of the postcolonial state. I argue that the three countries of the Maghreb—
Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia—form a privileged site of transcolonial identification with Palestine, illuminating with particular salience the ways in
which Palestine has become a figure of the colonial in the past half-­century.
France colonized Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia in the long nineteenth
century, which saw the rise of political Zionism and the imperial settlement
of the Jewish question. Though French colonialism and Z
­ ionism/­Israeli
expansionism differ on a number of points, they intersect historically and
discursively in ways that have yet to be fully explored. As I will detail in
individual chapters, the legal and cultural distinctions France instated between Jews and Muslims in the Maghreb (particularly in its prized settler
colony, Algeria) bear strong resemblance to the construction of Jews and
Arabs as opposite categories in Zionist discourse. Although Israel’s “principle of separation” between Jews and Arabs appears to be at the antipodes
of the colonial myth of assimilation whereby natives must become French,
my readings reveal that the borders between these two types of colonial
discourse (separation and assimilation) are more porous than they first appear.8 The archive of texts I uncover brings a distinctly trans­colonial sensibility to bear on the question of Palestine, revealing overlapping modalities
and discourses of colonization across the decolonizing world.
The metaphoric import of Palestine is hardly confined to the Maghreb,
however. Keith P. Feldman and Alex Lubin have unearthed a rich archive
of African American writings on Palestine, most prominently those of the
Black Panthers, who “recognized the shared conditions of racial capitalism
and possibilities for anti-imperialism among local communities across the
world,” including “the Palestinian nationalist movement, and the struggle
among black Arab Jews within Israel who formed the Israeli Black Panther Party.”9 Other, more recent examples include the Zapatista and other
indigenous movements in the Americas as well as disenfranchised ethnic
minorities in Europe and, of course, protestors and activists from Tunisia
to Syria and beyond.10 Transcolonial Maghreb is in conversation, explicitly
and implicitly, with studies of Palestine as metaphor in the decolonizing
Global South, and among minority and other disenfranchised communities in the Global North.
The late Palestinian American intellectual Edward Said was the first
to speculate on the global significance of Palestine in his seminal essay The
Question of Palestine, presenting Palestine as exemplary of political subjec-
4 Introduction
tion in the modern era, particularly the kind practiced by postcolonial regimes. For Said,
There is an awareness in the non-white world that the tendency of modern politics
to rule over masses of people as transferable, silent, and politically neutral populations has a specific illustration in what has happened to Palestinians—and what
in different ways is happening to citizens of newly independent, formerly colonial
territories ruled over by antidemocratic army regimes.11
It is difficult not to think of the protests of the 2010s when reading this
passage, which equates, in characteristically dense fashion, modern politics
with colonial rule, exemplified in the fate of Palestine, and both of these
with the postcolonial state. Glossing the racial question (“the non-white
world”) as well as the difference between old and new forms of colonial governance, Said suggests that Palestine is paradoxically illustrative of the (post)
colonial condition. The only remaining colonized nation of the twenty-first
century, Palestine is both exceptional and exemplary of modern political
violence. Put differently, it is the exception that proves the rule, a colonial
remainder that belies the persistence of colonialism writ large in the purportedly postcolonial present.
Yet it is important to note that, for Said, Palestine is not simply a
marker of political disenfranchisement in the era of postcolonial disenchantment. It also and by the same token represents the possibility of radical political change—or, to preview the arguments I make in this book, the
possibility of decolonial thought. Starting from the status of Palestine as a
“nonplace,” Said explores the metaphoric potential of Palestine as utopia,
etymologically derived from the Greek a-topos, nonplace. Without underplaying the acute importance of reclaiming an actual place to inhabit, Said
emphasizes the political significance of Palestine as “a place to be returned
to and . . . an entirely new place, a vision partially of a restored past and of a
novel future, perhaps even a historical disaster transformed into a hope for
a different future.”12 The loss of Palestine becomes, in this reading, a pretext for political reinvention. Though Said is speaking here of Palestine as a
utopia for Palestinians, he immediately opens this metaphor up to others:
Egyptian students and Iranian protestors rising up against their repressive
regimes in the name of Palestine, seen as “a symbol for the struggle against
social injustice.”13 In this sense, Palestine is also a topos, a figure or metaphor, of the colonial writ large.
Palestine as Metaphor 5
Said’s reflections on the metaphoric dimensions of Palestine open
up a rich terrain of investigation for the diverse political imaginaries that
concern me here. Taking my lead from Said, I analyze Palestine as utopia
and topos in Maghrebi literature and intellectual history, from the immediate aftermath of independence to the present day. My subtitle should
not in any way imply that we are living in a postcolonial age in a strictly
chronological or even political sense, however. Palestine’s ever-worsening
situation as well as the ubiquity of Palestine as a metaphor of the colonial,
broadly conceived, in the decolonizing world constitute a bitter testament
to the incomplete nature of the decolonization project in the purportedly
postcolonial age. Yet the continued actuality of the colonial also confirms
that decolonization is not behind us. We are decidedly still living in the
era of decolonization, with all the pain and promise that realization brings.
It should be clear from the above that Palestine is not only topical in
the usual sense of the term, that is, a topic of current interest among others,
as the ubiquitous expressions “question of Palestine,” “Palestinian issue” or
even “Palestinian problem” imply. Certainly, Palestine has been in the news
regularly since the mid-1960s, and it is topical in the sense of a dramatically
unfolding and always current event. Political imaginaries of Palestine in the
Maghreb center round the two most traumatic events of modern Palestinian history. The first is known in Arabic as al-Nakba (“the catastrophe”)
and designates the expulsion of some eight hundred thousand Palestinians
to make way for the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948, an expulsion
the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe characterizes in no uncertain terms as ethnic
cleansing.14 The second is known as al-Naksa (“the reversal”), the IsraeliArab war of June 1967, which resulted in Israel’s annexation of the West
Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Golan Heights, and the Sinai. The 1967
war provoked a veritable intellectual crisis in the world of Arabic letters,
generating an effervescence of writings the Syrian philosopher Sadiq Jalal
al-‘Azm dubbed “the literature of defeat” (adab al-hazima).15 Writers and
intellectuals turned to the past in an attempt to understand what had led to
such a spectacular downfall, mobilizing Orientalist tropes of cultural decadence and intellectual stagnation. This new genre, though best represented
by Israel’s immediate neighbors, had a few illustrious practitioners in the
Maghreb as well.16 For the most part, however, the writers and intellectuals
whose work I discuss here mark their distance from what they consider to
be an occasional or even opportunistic corpus, preferring to look forward