Writing Queer Identities in Morocco

Abdellah Taïa and Moroccan Committed Literature

Tina Dransfeldt Christensen

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781788315869
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Literatura de Oriente Medio

This book explores queer identity in Morocco through the work of author and LGBT activist Abdellah Taïa, who defied the country's anti-homosexuality laws by publicly coming out in 2006. Engaging postcolonial, queer and literary theory, Tina Dransfeldt Christensen examines Taïa's art and activism in the context of the wider debates around sexuality in Morocco. Placing key novels such as Salvation Army and Infidels in dialogue with Moroccan writers including Driss Chraïbi and Abdelkebir Khatibi, she shows how Taïa draws upon a long tradition of politically committed art in Morocco to subvert traditional notions of heteronormativity. By giving space to silenced or otherwise marginalised voices, she shows how his writings offer a powerful critique of discourses of class, authenticity, culture and nationality in Morocco and North Africa.

Chapter 1

Writing the ‘self-absorbed’ as a site of queer commitment

Within the fields of gender studies, queer studies, postcolonial and diaspora studies, and French and francophone studies, scholars¹ have become increasingly preoccupied with the sexualization of national culture and how a globalized rhetoric of a ‘sexual clash of civilizations’, to quote Éric Fassin,² constructs the Arab-Muslim ‘other’ as both misogynist and homophobic. Within this homonationalist³ rhetoric there is little, if any, room for Arab-Muslim queers, because ‘being queer’ presupposes coming out in public, arriving in the city centre of, for instance, Paris, and leaving one’s religion, culture, family and community behind. Both Denis M. Provencher and Mehammed Amadeus Mack have pointed to the ‘impossible location’ of diasporic Arab-Muslim queers in France and investigated how the politicization of sexuality renders many queer subject positions invisible – whether clandestine and peripheral modes of being queer⁴ or queer ‘coming and goings’ between French and Maghrebin culture.⁵ Both Mack and Provencher combine ethnographic fieldwork in France with analyses of cultural productions by contemporary Arab-Muslim authors, artists and film directors in France, and both have included Abdellah Taïa’s literary work in their investigation of the lives and stories of Arab-Muslim queers in France.

Writing Queer Identities in Morocco forms part of this growing research field with the ambition of exploring how Taïa’s narrations of the ‘self-absorbed’ as a site of queer commitment is grafted upon earlier literary efforts to contaminate monologic and heteronormative narrations of the nation. That is, the ambition is to contribute with a historical perspective on contemporary autofictional works on queer identity formation and with a specific focus on Morocco in order to emphasize that an author, such as Taïa, is operating in-between Morocco and France; while Taïa today resides in France and is published in French, he is nevertheless deeply indebted to Moroccan literary history, and Moroccan culture and history is an inherent part of his life and writing. Moreover, although writing about homosexuality as an identity category is a relatively recent phenomenon in Moroccan literature, writing about queer desire and narrating queer subject positions is not. Moroccan literature has since the 1950s focused on queer identities that are performed and contested on the thresholds of nations, languages and sexualities.

In order to provide the theoretical foundation for an investigation of how the ‘self-absorbed’ may function as a site of queer commitment, this chapter engages with postcolonial theory on nation and literary commitment (Homi K. Bhabha, Réda Bensmaïa and Abdelkébir Khatibi); with autobiographical theory on the relationship between social world and literary work (Philippe Lejeune, Yumna al-Eid and Arnaud Schmitt); and with queer and affect theory on identity formation, political activism, nation building and shame (Joseph A. Massad, Judith Butler and Sara Ahmed).

From ‘national allegory’ to experimental nations

During the 1950s, iltizām (commitment) emerged in the Arab Middle East as a response to the need for creating a new postcolonial identity.⁶ As Arab nationalism fuelled many struggles for decolonization, the question of nation and national identity became a significant site of contestation in committed literature. As Jarrod Hayes points out, the national Algerian slogan – ‘Islam is my religion, Arabic is my language, Algeria is my fatherland’ – was an effective battle cry in the Algerian War of Independence, but while this definition of national identity was perhaps necessary to justify the anti-colonial struggle, it was quite exclusionary, as it implied that only Arabic-speaking Muslims could be truly Algerian.⁷ The most obvious exclusions were Berbers and Algerian Jews, but the idea of a national identity based on a cult of origin did, as argued by Hayes, not exclude on the basis of ethnicity and religion alone: historically, exclusive notions of nationhood have also been based on political belief, gender and sexual orientation as narrations of the ‘nation’ have served to legitimize political power by affirming patriarchy and heterosexuality as essential to national identity. Significant in all of these exclusions is, however, that the need to exclude presupposes that the excluded part is already there.⁸

As Homi K. Bhabha has demonstrated with his neologism ‘dissemiNation’, the fiction of anchoring the nation in an originary past constitutes an act of forgetting, as Ernest Renan pointed out in his famous 1882 Sorbonne lecture ‘Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?’⁹ – that is, forgetting heterogeneous narratives of the nation that conflict with the linear narration of founding events, from ‘birth’ to modern nation.¹⁰ Coupling his own experience of migration with Jacques Derrida’s ‘dissemination’, Bhabha challenges traditional historiography by identifying ‘the event of the everyday’ as an equally important temporality as that of ‘the advent of the epochal’.¹¹ Significantly, he does not substitute everyday time for epochal time, but explores the paradox that links them together: members of a nation live in everyday time, but ground their identity in epochal time. In this sense, people are both the ‘objects’ of nationalist pedagogy – they are what they learn about ‘their’ nation in school – and ‘subjects’ who perform, embody and reproduce the ‘nation’. But as historicist narrative disavows everyday time with its discontinuous and heterogeneous narratives, it simultaneously reveals its own incapacity to ground the nation in the people.¹² In this respect, literary depictions of ‘sexual transgressions’ have, as Hayes has also pointed out, served to contaminate hegemonic narrations of the nation by publicly representing what ‘should’ be kept private and hidden¹³ – in Bhabha’s words, forgotten. In Taïa’s novel Infidéles (2010), for instance, the introducer Saâdia both safeguards and subverts conservative norms of sexual conduct. In Infidèles social norms of honour, worth and virginity presuppose the profession of the introducer, who has the power to create a fiction of purity by making sure that blood appears on the sheets of newlywed couples. For this reason, Saâdia is simultaneously needed and feared, because her profession both upholds and radically destabilizes the entire framework of ‘norm’ and ‘deviance’.

Because ‘national identity’ has been a significant site of contestation in postcolonial literature, a popular analytical strategy within the study of postcolonial Moroccan autobiographical writing has been Fredric Jameson’s ‘national allegory’, which interprets the microcosm of the protagonist as a (multilayered) metaphor of the macrocosm of the people.¹⁴ According to Jameson, ‘all third-world texts are necessarily [. . .] allegorical [. . .] the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society.’¹⁵ Not surprisingly, Jameson’s attempt to place ‘all third-world texts’ under the same analytical umbrella has met considerable critique. Of particular importance with respect to committed literature is Aijaz Ahmad’s critique of the notion ‘third world’ and its implicit homogenizing tendencies, such that ‘the enormous cultural heterogeneity of social formations within the so-called third world is submerged within a singular identity of “experience”’.¹⁶ With respect to Maghrebin literature, Réda Bensmaïa has articulated a similar suspicion of Jameson’s ‘national allegory’, arguing that even if an allegorical dimension exists in so-called postcolonial texts, it is almost never the author’s primary or sole ambition.¹⁷ Taken together, Ahmad’s and Bensmaïa’s critiques point towards both the heterogeneous corpus of ‘third-world’ texts and the multiple determinations within a single ‘third-world’ text.

However, it is worth noting that this is not all that different from what Jameson argued himself. Jameson directly refuted any simplified ‘one-to-one table of equivalences’,¹⁸ as he was critical of any presumptuous generalization of the heterogeneous corpus of so-called third-world texts.¹⁹ What is at stake in relation to Jameson’s category ‘third world’ is a question of reading strategy: How to read so-called third-world literature? The problem with Jameson’s ‘national allegory’ might be its unclear position within the dialectic of ‘close reading’ and ‘distant reading’. On the one hand, his ‘national allegory’ seeks to counter methodological colonialism in literary studies, but on the other, it – perhaps unintentionally – isolates third-world literature in its ‘otherness’. Put in other words, Jameson’s theory has been attractive in its questioning of the universal applicability of Western literary theory by emphasizing the importance of the colonial and imperial experiences in the formation of ‘third-world’ literature, but in ‘designing’ a theory for this literature, it simultaneously runs the risk of reducing so-called third-world literature to a social commentary with little literary merit (the exact opposite of Jameson’s declared intention). As argued by Bhabha, ‘pure criticism’ is in reality highly Eurocentric,²⁰ but the counterargument that the ‘historical and ideological determinants of Western narrative – bourgeois individualism, organicism, liberal humanism, autonomy, progression – cannot adequately reflect’²¹ the experiences of the ‘colonial subject’ subscribes to the same epistemological system, in which the opposition to Western narrative then becomes the unmediated reality that an ‘authentic’ literary tradition must reveal through mere mimeticism.

The difference between so-called third-world literature and so-called first-world literature intersects with the difference between ‘art for art’s sake’ and ‘art for society’s sake’ and the related discussion of literary value. In this respect, Jameson’s national allegory, like Franco Moretti’s ‘distant reading’, acknowledges that the world literature system is ‘profoundly unequal’²² as it mirrors the neo-imperial contours of global capitalism, and as such it sets up a significantly different measure for literary value than Western formalism. While Jameson sought to outline the ‘literariness’ of so-called third-world literature by defining the relationship of literary texts to political and historical reality, rather than resorting to ‘Western’ formalism, his ‘grand theory’ unintentionally supported the reductionist readings of Maghrebin literature that Bensmaïa laments:

What has long struck me was the nonchalance with which the work of these writers was analyzed. Whenever these novels were studied, they were almost invariably reduced to anthropological or cultural case studies. Their literariness was rarely taken seriously. And once they were finally integrated into the deconstructed canon of world literature, they were made to serve as tools for political or ideological agendas. This kind of reading resulted more often than not in their being reduced to mere signifiers of other signifiers, with a total disregard for what makes them literary works in and of themselves.²³

The difficult path that an author such as Taïa is treading is precisely between wanting to claim a voice as Moroccan and homosexual and having his literary works reduced to anthropological and cultural case studies. What Bensmaïa in this respect seeks to bring to light is the originality of the aesthetic strategies developed by Maghrebin authors as a means to reappropriate and reconfigure their history, territory, language and community,²⁴ and it is in this respect that he coins the term ‘experimental nations’:

Under today’s postmodern conditions, it is not geographical or even political boundaries that determine identities, but rather a plane of consistency that goes beyond the traditional idea of nation and determines its new transcendental configuration. And it is in this sense that I use the term experimental nations. My nations are experimental in that they are above all nations that writers have had to imagine or explore as if they were territories to rediscover and stake out, step by step, countries to invent and to draw while creating one’s language.²⁵

What is significant about Bensmaïa’s conception of experimental nations is that it, while acknowledging the centrality of ‘national identity’ as a site of contestation, simultaneously displaces Jameson’s national allegory in order to provide room for an analysis of the experimental representational strategies in Maghrebin literature. In so doing, Bensmaïa’s experimental nations – like Abdelkébir Khatibi’s ‘transnation’, as I will elaborate in Chapter 4 – deconstruct any neatly defined national boundaries by focusing on the multiple affiliations of Maghrebin authors and on how their linguistic, cultural and social experiences transcend the idea of the ‘nation’.

Like Bhabha’s ‘double movement’ between everyday time and epochal time as a potential site for resisting totalizing and exclusive ideas of the nation, a double critique in Khatibi’s sense of the term can serve to dismantle the false dualism between ‘art for art’s sake’ and ‘art for society’s sake’ that either deems so-called non-Western literature an imitation of Western literature or reduces it to depicting an unmediated reality and, consequently, labels it ‘poor literature’. Khatibi developed his double critique in Maghreb pluriel (1983) as a methodological tool with which to subvert the relation and discernibility between centre and periphery:

le savoir arabe actuel opère à la marge de l’épistémè occidentale;...