Transcolonial Maghreb: Imagining Palestine in the Era of Decolonization

By Olivia C. Harrison

Transcolonial Maghreb offers the first thorough analysis of the ways in which Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian writers have engaged with the Palestinian question and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict for the past fifty years. Arguing that Palestine has become the figure par excellence of the colonial in the purportedly postcolonial present, the book reframes the field of Maghrebi studies to account for transversal political and aesthetic exchanges across North Africa and the Middle East. Olivia C. Harrison examines and contextualizes writings by the likes of Abdellatif Laâbi, Kateb Yacine, Ahlam Mosteghanemi, Albert Memmi, Abdelkebir Khatibi, Jacques Derrida, and Edmond El Maleh, covering a wide range of materials that are, for the most part, unavailable in English translation: popular theater, literary magazines, television series, feminist texts, novels, essays, unpublished manuscripts, letters, and pamphlets written in the three main languages of the Maghreb—Arabic, French, and Berber. The result has wide implications for the study of transcolonial relations across the Global South.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Nov 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9780804796859

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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 France-Algeria: 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

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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 978-0-8047-9685-9 (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

TRANSCOLONIAL MAGHREB

Imagining Palestine in the Era of Decolonization

Olivia C. Harrison

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

Cultural Memory in the Present

Hent de Vries, Editor

in memory of James Pinckney Harrison (1932–2010)

to Arne, Ada, and Louise, for life

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Palestine as Metaphor

PART I. DECOLONIZING THE MAGHREB

1. Souffles-Anfas: Palestine and the Decolonization of Culture

2. Transcolonial Hospitality: Kateb Yacine’s Experiments in Popular Theater

3. The Transcolonial Exotic: Allegories of Palestine in Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s Algerian Trilogy

PART II. JEWS, ARABS, AND THE PRINCIPLE OF SEPARATION

4. Portrait of an Arab Jew: Albert Memmi and the Politics of Indigeneity

5. Abrahamic Tongues: Abdelkebir Khatibi, Jacques Hassoun, Jacques Derrida

6. Edmond Amran El Maleh and the Cause of the Other

Epilogue: Palestine and the Syrian Intifada

Notes

Index

Illustrations

Figure 1. Front cover of Souffles 15 (1969), special issue For the Palestinian Revolution, by Mohamed Chebaa

Figure 2. Poster by Mohamed Melehi, Palestine, Souffles 15

Figure 3. Poster by Tahar Ben Jelloun, Fath, Souffles 15

Figure 4. Palestine cartoons by George Wolinski, Souffles 15

Figure 5. Photograph of a literacy lesson in a Palestinian training camp, Souffles 20–21 (1971)

Figure 6. Undated photograph of Kateb Yacine and Mahmoud Darwish

Figure 7. Performance of Mohamed prends ta valise ca. 1972

Figure 8. Poster of Mohamed prends ta valise

Figure 9. Ziyad in combat gear, opening credits of Dhakirat al-jasad

Figure 10. Ahlam in traditional garb, opening credits of Dhakirat al-jasad

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 during 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 Graff-Zivin, 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, 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. 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.

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 half-century. 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 Arab-Muslim 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 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 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 Zionism/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 subjection 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.

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 Israeli-Arab 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 to the possibility of political change rather than backward on purported Arab shortcomings. Deriding adab al-hazima as a state-sponsored, retrograde form of nostalgia, they choose instead to deploy Palestine as a model for decolonization in the present.

Similarly, the forms of transcolonial identification I analyze in the following chapters distinguish themselves sharply from state representations of Palestine. Though policies have varied widely over the past fifty years according to shifting regional and international alliances, the rhetoric surrounding Palestine is largely one of unmitigated support, usually qualified along the lines of support for our Arab and/or Muslim brethren in Palestine—an obviously problematic formulation that neglects Christian Palestinians as well as the diaspora and refugees, who have fared notoriously badly in Arab host countries. Though Algeria is the only Maghrebi nation-state that unambiguously asserts its