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Of Human Flesh: An Interview with R.A. Judy by Fred Moten

This is the second part of an interview of R.A. Judy conducted by Fred Moten in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, over the course of two days, May 26-27, 2017. The first half of this interview appears in boundary 2, vol. 47, no. 2 (May 2020): 227-62.

Fred Moten: I want to return again, now, to the question concerning the fate of (Dis)forming the American Canon. The question of the fate of how it will be read in the future is obviously connected to the question of how it was read when it first came out. So, let’s revisit a little bit the reception and maybe think in a very specific way about the different ways in which it was received in different disciplines and in different intellectual formations.

RA Judy: Well, yes my earlier response to the same question focused on the idea of the book; that is, how that idea was received or not received in the discipline or field of black studies. In fact, the book had quite a different reception in the fields of cultural studies, comparative literature, and what was then being called critical race studies, or what became known as critical race theory and Africana philosophy. In some sense, this was understandable, given that I am a comparativist, and it was composed as a comparativist essay meant to be a bringing of the issues of what you and I call Black Study into the ambit of comparative literature, even though it ended up being marketed as a particular kind of Afro-centric work, which it never was, at least not in the political or academic position of Afro-centrism. For instance, the first chapter of the book which is a very careful critique and analysis of the formation of black studies, is about the university and the formation of the university, and McGeorge Bundy’s intervention at that important 1977 Yale seminar on Afro-American literary theory, which Henry Louis Gates and Robert Stepto were instrumental in organizing as a sort of laying of the foundation of what would become African American Studies. Bill Readings in his University in Ruins, found that chapter to be an important account, anticipating the neoliberalization of the university as he was trying to analyze it, and his taking it up became important; it led to not only a citation in his book, but other work that I began to do in boundary 2 and elsewhere. So that’s one point of, if you will, positive reception where (Dis)forming was taken up. The fourth chapter, “Kant and the Negro,” got a tremendous amount of positive reception and prominence, and was even been translated into Russian and was published as an essay in Readings’ pioneering online journal Surfaces out of the University of Montreal.[1] And then it got republished by Valentin Mudimbe in the Journal for the Society for African Philosophy in North America (SAPINA) in 2002. “Kant and the Negro” circulated widely and it got a great deal of attention from people like Tommy Lott, and Lucius Outlaw, and Charles Mills. In other words, it was well received and proved to be an important piece in the area of African and Africana philosophy. Lewis Gordon, as a result of that work, and this is when I was still very much involved with the American Philosophical Association, ended up producing one of my pieces in his Fanon Reader.[2] In Cynthia Willett’s Theorizing Multiculturalism, there’s a prominent piece, “Fanon and the Subject of Experience,”[3] which kind of refers to one of the points I was trying to make yesterday about individuation. I want to read to you, if I may, the opening passage from that 1998 essay:

If we accept along with Edward Said that was is irreducible and essential to human experience is subjective, and that this experience is also historical, then we are certainly brought to a vexing problem of thought. The problem is how to give an account of the relationship between the subjective and historical. It can be pointed out that Said’s claim is obviously not the polarity of the subjective and the historical, but only that the subjective is historical. It is historical as opposed to being transcendent, either in accordance with the metaphysics of scholasticism and idealism, or the positivist empiricism of scientism. Yet to simply state that subjective experience is also historical, is not only uninteresting, but begs the question, “how is historical experience possible?” The weight of this question increases when we recall the assumption that the subjective is essential to human experience. Whatever may be the relationship between subjective and historical experience, to think the latter without the former is to think an experience that is fundamentally inhuman. Would it then be “experience”? That is, to what extent is our thinking about experience, even about the historical, contingent upon our thinking about the subject?

This is how, then, I take up the approach to Fanon as bringing us to this question. And we see that already there I’m trying to interrogate the inadequacy of the notion of the subject in accounting for the question of the historical nature of thinking-in-action, and that thinking-in-action always entails what we were talking about yesterday as the individual as discrete multiplicity in action. And how we think about it, and that’s where I’m trying to go with the second book which I’m sure we’ll talk about in a minute, and also the third book with Fanon, but that’s coming out of (Dis)forming as a formulation of individuation. Again, this is in the Willett piece that is an elaboration on what is at the crux of the project in “Kant and the Negro.” That is to say, it’s not that there is no discrete articulation of multiplicity that is fundamental to what we may consider experience, or what others might call the situation or the situational; the question is how we think about it, and whether the current discourse we have of it is adequate or even if its’s possible to still think about it once we dispense with that discourse. I mark the latter by trying to make a differentiation between what I consider the historical formation of bourgeois subjectivity as a particular way of understanding the relationship between thinking and history, of thinking the event, and other formations that I think are inadequately accounted for because we don’t have the language for it, and that’s the point of the current work, is to try to formulate such a language. Tommy Lott, as well found “Kant and the Negro” very important; I ended up doing a piece in his volume, A Companion to African-American Philosophy, and I believe it was called . . . Yes! “Kant and Knowledge of Disappearing Expression.”[4] In that piece I, at Tommy’s invitation, took up the philological problematic that Ben Ali posed as an important case or instance of not really the limitations of Enlightenment theories of the subject, but also as pointing to other possibilities as a concrete instance in Ben Ali’s stories.

FM: So, this leads me to two questions, one that emerges from this different reception. It has to do with the relationship between black studies and other disciplines, specifically with comparative literature but also with philosophy, and then with mathematics, and, finally, with their convergence. So, the question is what do those disciplines have to do with black studies? How does that relation manifest itself, not only in your work but in a general way? So, that’s one question. The other question, which is connected to it, is this: once one begins to think about the confluence of black study, mathematics, philosophy, how does that coincide with a project, or at least what I take to be part of your project, which is not a renewal or a rescue of the subject of experience but is, rather, a new way of thinking the the relation between individuation, as you have elaborated it here, and historical experience?

RAJ: I’ll first make a remark about “the subject of experience.” In the Lott piece and in another piece that I did at the invitation of Robert Gooding-Williams in the special issue of the Massachusetts Review he edited, on Du Bois, “Hephaestus Limping, W.E.B. Du Bois and the New Black Aesthetics,”’[5]in which the work of Trey Ellis is my point of reference, I talk about what I designate, the subject of narrativity, as distinct from the subject of experience, or the scientific subject. And in an effort to try to elaborate how I think what’s at play in a whole series of texts, Ellis’ Platitudes and others, the Ben Ali texts, I’ve gone on to other novels and such that are doing this thing, including Darius James’ Negrophobia, and Aṭ-ṭāhir wa ṭṭār’s book that has yet to be translated into English, Tajriba fī al-‘ašq (Experiment in Love) to Ibrahīm al-Konī’s work, and of course Naguib Mahfouz’s Tulāthīya (The Cairo Trilogy). In each of these cases, I’m trying to show that what’s at work is the formulation of a kind of subject, a representation of it; in calling it the subject of narrativity, that’s a precursor to what I referred to yesterday as the subject of semiosis. And in that working through, the thinking of Charles Sanders Peirce is really central and instrumental. I mentioned Vico earlier, and Spinoza, Peirce and Du Bois, these are principal texts for me in the Western tradition, as is al-Ghazālī, as well as the Tunisian writer, al-Mas’adī, as well as Risāla al-ghufrān by al-Ma’arrī, and the work of al-Jāḥiẓ, particularly his Kitāb al-hayawān (Book of the Animals), and Kitāb al-bayan wa a-tabiyīn (Book of Eloquence and Demonstration). This is kind of like my library, as it were. And Peirce, to stay focused on the question about the philosophical and the mathematical, in his effort to try to arrive at a logical-mathematical basis for human knowledge in a very broad sense, which he calls “semiosis” around the same time de Saussure discovers “sémiologie, gives us a very specific conceptualization of community in narrative, community in process, whereby truth is generated in the dynamics of ongoing open-ended signification. I come to Peirce through my formation as a comparativist— Peirce’s work was of some importance in Godzich’s Comparative Literature Core Seminar at the University of Minnesota in a particular kind of engagement with Husserl, Derrida and Lyotard and others who had looked over at Peirce—but more importantly through Du Bois. In reading through Du Bois’ student notebooks, I find clear traces . . . echoes of Peirce. Although Peirce isn’t named in those note books, Royce, with whom Du Bois studies and whose theory of community he was critically engaged in, was. And Royce expressly admitted he was using Peirce’s semiosis in elaborating his theory of community. This is one of the portals of the mathematical concern for me, with respect to the question of individuation, minus Peirce’s agapism; that is to say, minus Peirce’s teleology. Once again, Du Bois instructed me in a major way; this time to be critical of teleology, understanding the fact that it is the persistence of the teleological that leads to particular ethical impasses, or what I like to call the crisis in and of ontology. A crisis in which the event of the Negro always highlights, always marks the break, the gap, the hole in the ontological project. So, that even the invention of the Negro in seventeenth-century legislation of slavery is an effort to try and fill that gap. And that’s where I begin to situate the question of what you like to call Black Study. Now, that’s my way of thinking, to begin to address your question about the different disciplinary responses. To my recollection something begins to happen around the work of black philosophy in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I’m thinking of the of work Nathaniel Hare and what he began publishing in The Black Scholar from its inaugural issue in November 1969, where we find Sékou Touré’s “A Dialectical Approach to Culture,” and Stanislas Adotevi’s “The Strategy of Culture.” The next year in volume 2, issue 1 of that same journal, we find the remarkably provocative the interview with C. L. R. James, in which he challenges the then prevailing identitarian notion of black study. That same issue had an essay that, at the time—1970 when I was a sophomore in High School still aspiring to be a physicist and astronaut—so caught my attention that I’ve keep a copy of it, S.E. Anderson’s “Mathematics and the Struggle for Black Liberation,” in which he states something to the effect that “Black Studies programs then being instituted were white studies programs in blackface aimed at engendering American patriotism through militant integrationism. What he argued for instead was a revolutionary humanism. My point is there was a radical intellectual tradition that lay the foundations of much of what is being done now as Black Study, that most certainly was foundational to my thinking and work. Essays published in The Black Scholar during the early 1970s that still reverberate with me are

Abdl-Hakimu Ibn Alkalimat’s “The Ideology of Black Social Science,” Sonia Sanchez’s “Queens of the Universe,” Dennis Forsythe’s “Frantz Fanon: Black Theoretician,” and George Jackson’s “Struggle and the Black Man.” Just as important are people like Cedric Robinson, Tommy Lott and Lucius Outlaw, who are approaching the question of blackness in a vein that I think is a continuation of what Du Bois was trying to do, and what people like Harold Cruse and Alain Locke were trying to do.

FM: Would you include the folks who were doing a certain kind of theological reflection that at some point came to be known as black liberation theology, people like James Cone, and even his great precursor Howard Thurman? Was that work that you were attuned to at that same time too? Because they were concerned with these kinds of ontological questions as well.

RAJ: Yes, I was reading James Cone and Howard Thurman; and before that, William Jones’s 1973 book, Is God a White Racist? While they were concerned with the same questions, they were emphatically still invested in the teleological. But yes, I include that, although that part of the reception of (Dis)forming is complicated—I’m thinking of Corey T. Walker’s reading of it— because the canon that they’re trying to form is—what can I say—is around the church, and around the theological questions of the church and the performance of community in the church, the church as community. It is post-secular in a way that (Dis)forming is not. And so, the question of style is an important question for me and the question of the forms that are being explored is an important question for me, and I couldn’t follow them in those forms. Significantly enough, Hortense Spillers does both anticipate and follow because one of Spillers’ earliest concerns is to understand the genealogy of the sermon, in all of its various forms including its forms among early English Protestants and its rhetorical structures. You can see this in what she’s doing with Roland Barthes and the question of structuralism in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” You can also see it in her essay on Harold Cruse, “The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual; A Post-Date,” a long meditation on the question of style and the analogy between musical style, and the question of whether or not the black intellectual can be capable of a certain kind of thinking, which, by the way, is a very interesting engagement with Althusser and Balibar’s Reading Capital. “America and Powerless Potentialities”[6] considers Spillers’ engagement with these questions along these lines in tandem with Du Bois’ 1890 Harvard commencement speech. So yeah, there’s a certain engagement, but one that is, let us say, appositional, a certain . . . I have an allergy to the teleological, to the extent that I keep trying to make sure that I can ferret out its persistent or residual workings in my own thinking.

FM: Yeah, I was thinking of them, just because sometimes when I go back and look at that stuff, it seems like teleology gives them the sniffles sometimes, too, you know?

RAJ: Cone’s work, for example, has led to a very particular swing over the past 8 years now of trying to reclaim Du Bois as a Christian thinker. I’m thinking, for instance, of work by Jonathon Kahn, who takes into account the arguments of Cone, but also Dolores Williams and Anthony Pinn, in his reading of Du Bois work. Or that of Edward Blum and Phil Zuckerman. The work of Cone and company is there yes, but in a particular kind of way, as that with which I’m flying but out of alignment. On the issue of the disciplines, it’s very interesting that (Dis)forming was well-received by African American philosophers, such as Lott and Outlaw, Paget Henry and Lewis Gordon, Robert Gooding-Williams, Tony Bogues and Charles Mills, all of who are doing significant work, trying to take up these issues, as issues relating to, forgive the phrase, the general human condition. These issues, referring to the problematics of blackness, or black study, where black study is about a particular tradition of thinking and thinking in the world, proved to be quite enabling, and proved to be one of the initial fronts, or at least openings, for a, I don’t want to quite simply say “revitalization” because that gives a certain weight, perhaps disproportionately, to what was happening at San Francisco State in 1968-69, although I think it’s important when you go over the material being generated in the 1980s and 1990s to bear in mind that that movement in ’68 initiated by the Third World Liberation Front—a coalition of the Black Students Union, the Latin American Students Organization, the Filipino-American Students Organization, and El Renacimiento —was expressly predicated upon Fanon’s understanding of the prospects of a new humanism, and so its ambition was to try to model, what would be broadly speaking, a new humanism, which is why that is going to eventually lead to the creation of what I believe was the first autonomous department of Black Studies and Ethnic Studies under Hare’s directorship. It’s no small matter that the Black Panther Party’s National Minister of Education, George Mason Murray, was central to that movement. So, that initial institution of Black Studies conceived itself, presented itself, and aspired to be a reimagining of the history of humanity along a very specific radical epistemological trajectory. Now, how that gets lost is another question, and we can talk about the difference between San Francisco State in 1968 and the establishment of a black studies program at Yale in the same year. But, to stay focused, I don’t want to say that what Lucius Outlaw, Tommy Lott, Lewis Gordon, Charles Mills, Tony Bogues and others are doing is simply a revival of San Francisco State in 68; although I do think it is taking up that epistemological project. We see this, for instance, with Hussein Bulhan’s 1985 book, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression, which was trying to lay down a radical humanist conception of humanity predicated upon psychoanalysis, in that way, taking up Lacan’s anti-philosophy. Not so much the anti-philosophy, but trying to make philosophy do something different, and think about the individual in ways that was more complicated and more adequate than the theory of the subject that people were rallying against. All of those were efforts that come out of Fanon and were expressly thinking about the question of, what you and I call Black Study, as an instantiation of the question of the human, in which the particularities of the style of response of black people to certain things, the forms of thinking that those we call “black” were engaging in, said something, or had resonances, broad resonances. Without, then, just simply assuming to occupy the position of the normative subject, the transcendental subject, into which the hypostatized bourgeois had been placed in the philosophical discourse of the Enlightenment: the convergence of the subject of science with that historical bourgeois subject, or the subject of knowledge with that historical bourgeois subject, or even the subject of experience with that historical bourgeois subject, or even the subject of the spectacle, the subject who is seeing Merleau-Ponty tries to problematize. That Black Study attends to those particularities of style and thinking without trying to simply have the “black” occupy that subject position. The aim, instead, is to open up the project of thinking so that there isn’t that positionality at all. This goes back to what we were talking about earlier as displacement, that the Negro has no place, and is not about making place. But I like your phrasing, the “consistent and intense activity of displacement.” So, they’re doing that, these black philosophers, and they open up a front, they open up a Black Studies, in a way that retrieves the momentum of 68’ in a powerful way. And that work finds a particular institutional toehold. Bulhan will subsequently establish the Frantz Fanon University in Somaliland in, I think, 2010. And at Brown University’s Africana Studies Department, in contrast to what takes place at Temple and the creation of Africana Studies there, will include the work of Lewis Gordon, Tony Bogues, and Paget Henry . . . So, the reception of (Dis)forming in those quarters was predictable. Those quarters were quarters of important experimentation, that have played no small role in the kind of transformation we have seen in Black Study, where increasingly this kind of work is becoming important. What’s interesting is what begins to occur in this century. One can begin to look at works that you’re starting to produce around 2000, where the revivification of that initial articulation I’m talking about, is taken up in poetic discourse. And in that form, begins to find its way, slowly—and it’s a struggle— into traditional institutional programs of what we now refer to as African American or African Studies. But it only begins to do so, because we’re still looking at a situation, if we look at Harvard, or Yale, or Princeton, or UC San Diego, we’re looking at programs that are still pretty much organized around the sociological model, that aren’t taking up these questions in this way. So that’s how I understand the institutional relationships, the disciplinary relationships, and account for the difference in reception of (Dis)forming.

FM: The way you’re characterizing this raises a couple of questions for me, because I’m thinking specifically now of a particular work by Du Bois, which you first made available to contemporary readers some years ago, “Sociology Hesitant,” in which it appears to be the case that Du Bois is making a distinction within sociology, or between modes of sociology, or between possible modes of sociological reflection. It is that distinction we talked about a little bit earlier, a distinction regarding the difference between the calculable and the incalculable. My understanding of the essay is that it allows for maybe a couple of different modalities of the sociological, one that operates along a certain kind of positivist axis, and another that would take up what he talks about under the rubric of “the incalculable,” which would allow us to pay attention to these modalities of style you touched on earlier. Well, in that essay he talks about it in relation to the activities of the women’s club, but we could imagine he might also assert those activities as extensions of the church service as a scene in which the exegetical and the devotional are joined and shared. But the point is that there are a couple of different modalities of sociological reflection, one of which would entail something you would talk about under the rubric of the humanistic, or the philosophical, or the literary.

RAJ: A prefatory remark about how I came to that essay. I just handed you an envelope from the W. E. B. Du Bois Papers at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, dated, as you can see January 20, 1987. At that time, reading through the scholarship on Du Bois, I encountered many references to “Sociology Hesitant,” which reported its being lost. And I wanted to read this piece so badly because of the references. Anyway, in the course of reading through the microfilms of the W.E.B. Du Bois Collection, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Library, which the University of Minnesota Library owned, I came across a reference to “Sociology Hesitant,” in Robert W. McDonnell’s Guide and found it there in the microfilms. So I wrote the Special Collections and Archives office at Amherst, requesting the certified copy of it you’ve just looked at. I was like blown away when I actually read the essay, and blown away for the reasons that you’re posing right now. This does indeed go to our remarks earlier about individuation and what I was trying to say about the issues of paradox. In “Sociology Hesitant,” which is written in 1904-1905 in the context of the St. Louis world’s fair, Du Bois critiques sociology for a confusion of field and method. He traces that confusion back to Comte’s Positivism which, reducing the dynamics of human action to axiomatic law, postulates society as an abstraction; something that is “measureable . . . in mathematical formula,” as Du Bois puts it. Indeed, a fundamental dictum of Comte’s Positivism is that there is no question whatever which cannot ultimately be reduced, in the final analysis, to a simple question of numbers. And in this regard, we should bear in mind that his sociology entailed two orders of mathematical operations, which he calls “concrete mathematics” and “abstract mathematics” respectively. Du Bois tracks how this axiomatic arithmetization of human action gets deployed in Herbert Spencer’s descriptive sociology, and Franklin Gidding’s theory of consciousness of kind, as well as Gabriel Tarde’s theory of imitation. Regarding these various attempts at reducing human action to mathematical formula, he writes, “The New Humanism of the 19^th century was burning with new interest in human deeds: Law, Religion, Education. . . . . A Categorical Imperative pushed all thought toward the paradox; the evident rhythm of all human action; and the evident incalculability in human action.” The phrase, “New Humanism,” translates Friedrich Paulsen’s designation, “Neue Humanismus,” which he also conflated as “Neuhumanismus”,” and so is usually rendered in English as “Neohumanism.” Paulsen coined the term in 1885 to designate the nineteenth century German cultural movement stemming from Wilhelm von Humboldt’s and Friedrich August Wolf’s ideas that classical Greek language and literature was to be studied because of its absolute value as the exemplary representation of the idea of man.” The Neohumanists held that nothing was more important than knowledge of Greek in acquiring self-knowledge (Selbsterkenntnis) and self-education (Selbstbildung). This Hellenophilia, bolstered by Christian Gottlob Heyne’s “scientific” philology, informed Friederich Gauss’s work in the arithmetization of analysis. We know about Du Bois’ German connections. His usage of the phrase strongly suggests that he’s thinking about the arithmetization of analysis, and he talks about what he calls “the paradox of Law and Chance” in terms of physics, and the developments of physics, and those who try to model the social on the physics. He maintains that the very project of the measurement exposes that there is something that is working here that is not measureable, that cannot be reduced to arithmetic expression, pace Comte’s positivist dictum. Du Bois effectively argues that Comte is wrong about mathematics. It does not tell us everything.” What it does is tell us a great deal about the physical world, even the physical nature of the human if we want to bring in the biological. But, while it tells us all of that, what keeps being exposed in the course of its discoveries is something that exceeds it in a way that really echoes Dedekind’s understanding of arithmetic definition and the limit problem, where something else emerges; which is what Du Bois pointedly calls, “the incalculable.” He proposes a different way of doing sociology. He says, “the true students of sociology accept the paradox of . . . the Hypothesis of Law and the Assumption of Chance.” They do not try to resolve this paradox, but rather look at the limit of the measureable and the activity of the incalculable in tandem, to, as it were, measure “the Kantian Absolute and Undetermined Ego.” Du Bois says this rather tongue-in-cheek because he’s continually challenging the Kantian proposition that this ego is not measureable to say that indeed we can say something about it and its traces, we just can’t say it in terms of numbers, we can’t count it. So, his proposition for sociology is one where we have the mathematical working and then we have these other incalculable activities. And in the space of the paradox, the break, he situates, 1) the event of human social organization; 2) that event can be seen from the perspective of a mediating discourse that will help mathematics recognize what it’s doing as an ontological project—which he wants to be critical of—and also will help chance appear in an important dynamic relationship to that ontological project. There is a way in which Du Bois is challenging not only Comte’s basing sociology so absolutely on arithmetic analysis but the predominate trend of statistical sociology—of which he was a leading practitioner, producing the second major statistical sociological study in the English language of an urban population, The Philadelphia Negro, in 1899— for, as he says in a 1956 letter to Herbert Aptheker, “changing man to an automaton and making ethics unmeaning and reform a contradiction in terms.” In that same letter, he effectively summarizes the critique of knowledge in “Sociology Hesitant” as the crux of his life-long intellectual project, or “philosophy,” as he calls it; which he characterizes as the belief that the human mind, human knowledge, and absolute provable truth approach each other like the asymptotes of the hyperbola. Although Du Bois attributes this analogy to lessons learned in High School mathematics, it is also a deployment or reference to the Poincaré asymptote, which is something he would have known very well as one of the premiere statisticians of his moment. The significance of Du Bois’ situating his thinking at the crux of paradox, the crossroad where the measurable and incalculable meet, to his thinking on the Negro is one of the things explored rather carefully in the book manuscript I’ve just finished, Sentient Flesh (Thinking in Disorder/Poiēsis in Black).

FM: Earlier you expressed a certain kind of critical skepticism with regard to the very idea of a mediating discourse, or a third discursive frame, or a conceptual frame from which to adjudicate between these two.

RAJ: Yeah, there I depart from Du Bois, hence, my remarks about the sociological, in the sense of the academic discipline.

FM: So, you’re not advocating or enacting in your work anything like what he might call the “truly sociological.”

RAJ: No, I am, but not in the sense of a normative disciplinary methodology, a unifying theory. Remember, Du Bois says “true students of sociology embrace the paradox.” I would paraphrase this as “true student of sociality,” because he is expressly arguing against “sociology” for not be capable of adequately studying the dynamic relationship between the ideological elements and the material practices constituting society. Anyways, when he says this, he is pushing against axiomatic absoluteness and not the tendency to generate law or axiomatic definition. The true student of sociality, then, is not hyper-invested in a transcendent disciplinary methodology, but rather in constantly moving along asymptotic lines. In that respect, I’m also taking up something that Du Bois does in his literary work. I offer as example, two texts: “Of the Coming of John,” and Dark Princess. One could pick more, including a wild piece of experimental writing that I found at Fisk back in 2011. In Sentient Flesh, I focus on “Of the Coming of John,” a very rich and important piece. I look at something he’s doing in that literary work, which is different from what he does, or let’s say stands in a particular kind of dynamic relationship to what he’s doing in his theoretical, sociological, political and editorial work. The nature of that relationship is indicated by his remarks in the 1956 Aptheker letter, but it is clarified in a piece that is arguably one of the scattered fragments he’s written that he alludes to there, in which he expressly theorizes the relationship between human mind and provable truth. That piece is the 56 page-long student essay he wrote in 1890 while studying at Harvard, “The Renaissance of Ethics,” for the year-long course, Philosophy VI, taught that year by William James. What one finds in that essay is a very sustained, very cogent critique of the history of modern philosophy from Bacon on. Actually, it begins with scholasticism to lay out what’s at stake in theistic teleology, and then talks about the extent to which the Galilean-Baconian revolution achieves a certain kind of transformation in the area of natural philosophy, the arithmetization of nature, but ethics lags behind. Ethics becomes metaphysics, and metaphysics just continues the teleological, and hence there is no renaissance of ethics that is comparable to what has happened in the physical sciences through arithmetization. Du Bois then claims the ascendency of the novel as evidence of what he calls the demand for a “science of mind” as the basis for a “science of ethics.” What I’m getting at with all of this is that what Du Bois is working towards in his account of the novel— and I would say also in the formal composition of The Souls of Black Folk —is illustrating there’s not so much a confrontation or a tension between, let us say, the mathematical and the poetic, but that they are working together. What I’m trying to point out is that, in Du Bois’ own account and performance, their working together, their relationship is not mediated by a transcendent third disciplinary discourse: the sociological. But rather, their working together is expressed in the activity of intellect-in-action, which is not disciplinary. In fact, I would say it is a thinking-in-disorder, which is what I’m calling “para-semiosis;” where semiosis is not a position—this relates to what I’ve said about the subject of narrativity—but is the activity of signification that is always multiple in its movements, multi-linear, and again even in terms of the individual expressions of elements, they themselves are multiple multiplicities; which are, as you say, “consistent and insistent.”

FM: Is what Du Bois calls the science of mind in “The Renaissance of Ethics” differentiated from what he calls true sociology? And if it is, is it differentiated at the level of its objects of analysis?

RAJ: Yes. And if you look again at “Sociology Hesitant,” he also makes that differentiation. They’re both speculative texts. And he’s calling for a different way of thinking. The distinction, is part of a distinction of his thinking. Du Bois is full of all kinds of contradictions, right? And in trying to follow that distinction, in “Sociology Hesitant,” he’s talking about the prospects of a scholarly discipline, and he’s arguing for the discipline to be better oriented. That’s how he begins. And the reason that discipline is poorly oriented is because it’s grounded in a particular kind of idealism. That’s his charge against Comte and Spencer, against Gidding and Tarde; they’ve postulated a totality, a whole, without any conceptualization of relationships between elements. And so they’re not actually studying the multiplicities that constitute human reality, they’re putting forward an abstraction, and it’s an abstraction that’s driven by Comte’s commitment to number, as I’ve already remarked. So, the discipline has to be corrected if it is to actually consider what is of importance in this moment of modernity and capitalism; and that is the ways in which . . . how socialities are being constituted. Du Bois’ point is to critique sociology, and when he says true students of sociology, he says if you’re going to do sociology, you would have to do it in a way that attends to the paradox. But the moment you begin to do that, then you’re doing something quite different from sociology as we understand it, because that’s going to take you, as it takes him, to questions about epistemology, about what’s the nature of intelligence, what’s the nature of thinking in the world, what is the nature of duty, what, indeed, is our theory of mind. He comes to these questions in “The Renaissance of Ethics” in the course of trying to understand duty in terms of interpersonal relationship, or reciprocity, sociality. What is the good and how do we get at the good? On that score, there is a very subtle, profoundly important move he makes. Taking on Hume’s theory of causality—according to which the human mind, incapable of directly observing causal relations only conceptualizes sequences of events, one following another—Du Bois argues that it’s all about structural process and movement, stressing the point that if one element in the process shifts, the relationship shifts, so that not even sequence is consistently necessary. He offers in illustration a grammatical example. If you change the term “bonus” in the phrase vir bonus (“good man”) to “bona,” the alteration changes the terms of relation—in accordance with Latin grammatical rule, making the adjective in this phrase feminine, bona, dictates that the noun vir (“man”) becomes mulier (“woman”). But this changes a great deal more, given the provenance of the phrase. In classical Latin, vir means interchangeably “hero,” “man,” “grown-man,” and “husband.” Vir bonus, “the good man,” belongs to the discourse of public conduct. In short, vir bonus is the virtuous man of masculine polity. If you feminize this statement of the virtuous political conduct, it becomes something else. This is no offhanded remark on Du Bois’ part—remember that for two years in his first job at Wilberforce, he taught Latin and Greek—and when you explore it in the context of the essay’s topic, renaissance of ethics, what he’s suggesting is a critique of the fundamentals of the millennia-long tradition of virtue ethics. Much of “The Renaissance of Ethics” is committed to deconstructing the phrase, summum bonum (“the highest “good”), which is Cicero’s Latin rendering of the Platonic /Aristotelian Greek term, eudaimonia. He’s saying that we must begin to reimagine what and how we conceive to be the human. He gives considerable emphasis to “how” we conceive; and that’s where the question of duty comes up. It’s in trying to think about how we can think duty that he starts to shift into questions about how we think about intelligence. Accordingly, he ends up with this call for the need of a science of mind.

FM: So, are you then saying at a certain point there is a convergence between true sociology and science of mind, insofar as true sociology’s actual object of study is mind?

RAJ: Yeah. And here’s where he’s following Comte. Comte’s whole positivist science is about epistemology, about the structure of knowledge. Du Bois point is that Comte is approaching the question of intelligence on a false premise. We have to understand and begin to think about it differently as a practice, which for Du Bois means attending closely to life practices: the multiplicities of discrete things that people do. He approaches these in a way that’s really quasi-structuralist. Here, there’s an echo of Aristotle, he begins to use Aristotelian terms and movement, beginning from there to track patterns and structures. We’re talking, then, about what is thinking, what is intelligence. What and how are we? So the statement about true students of sociology is somewhat ironic, as well as being critical and corrective. Spencer, Giddings, Tarde, and their respective disciples aren’t true students of sociology, if they were, they would do this. And if they did this, it’s would take them beyond the numeric, beyond just counting.

FM: So then, is the true student of sociology a scientist of mind?

RAJ: Well, I’m not prepared to say that. If one took Du Bois at his word, one could, in a certain way, say that. I’m not prepared to say it because there’s a great deal of slippage and movement in both these texts I’m referring to. As I say, they’re speculative. He’s reaching, he’s trying to find a way to give a sort of coherent and adequate expression to what he imagines to be the project. So I’m not prepared to say that the true student of sociology is a cognitive scientist. But I am prepared to say that in Du Bois’ conceptualization of what the nature of the project is, he’s not, in the end, positing sociology as a transcendent mediating discourse that’s going to make mathematics work with poetry. And so what I am saying is that in his performance—and this is where I take a cue for the idea I have of semiosis and para-semiosis—in his performance and the reaching for I’ve just described, in which he’s situating these things in a certain kind of relationship, this is where the thinking is taking place. What he calls intellect-in-action is what he’s reaching for, what he’s performing. What I’m saying, in addendum, is if we focus on intellect-in-action as process, as semiosis, and think about the problematic he is approaching, which is the problematic of blackness, in those terms, we arrive at what I call the poiēsis of blackness. The poiēsis of blackness is itself a process of thinking, of thinking in and with signification. We could very-well consider it a practice of Black Study.

FM: When we go to look for the poiēsis of blackness, when we seek it out as an object of study, where do we seek it out? In other words, let’s say that there must be slippage between ‘true sociology’ and ‘science of mind’; then, by the same token we could say that in spite of the fact that there is this precarious pathway from one to the other, that precarious pathway is a pathway that Du Bois takes, and that he encourages us to take, so that we are on our way, as it were, towards a science of mind, which would take up and be interested in, and be concerned with, while also enacting in that study, what you’re calling, after Du Bois, intellect-in-action, but what you would also call a poetic sociality. I want to hear you say a little bit more, and be a little bit more emphatic, about what the object of study is or whether there is, in fact, an object of study that can be differentiated from the mode of study. Where do we go to look for this intellect-in-action? Where do we go to look for this black poetic sociality? Am I right in assuming that where we go to look for it is in what you described earlier as these discrete multiplicities, which we are, in fact, enacting in that search?

RAJ: The poiēsis of blackness, and this is what I argue Du Bois performs, I want to be emphatic here, is process and object. It’s doing what it’s talking about. As I’ve already said, I paraphrase Du Bois’ term, intellect-in-action, as “thinking- in-action.” Hence, the title of my new book is, Sentient Flesh (Thinking in Disorder/ Poiesis in Black). There is an emphasis on disorder, precisely because this thinking is not already circumscribed—and here I have in mind Heidegger’s notion of the concept’s circumscription by order. But it’s a thinking that occurs in the fluidity of multiplicities, and in its articulation, articulates discrete orders that have a particular life in activity but aren’t eternal. They’re always on their way to the next. This is what Du Bois talks about as the asymptotes of the hyperbola, invoking the continuum hypothesis; that these things approach one another toward infinity without ever touching. Assuming human knowledge and provable absolute truth to be the hyperbola in Du Bois’ analogy, there’s a long discussion we can have about ethics being the point at the center of the hyperbola where the transverse axis, “law,” and the conjugate axis, “chance,” meet. Any such point of conjunction becoming what Comte calls états, “states,” and we can call orders of knowledge. We might, in that Comtean way, understand these états as expressions that articulate specific institutions— now I’m speaking very much like Vico— that have material traces, that we can call “culture” or “civilization,” we have all kinds of names for these, but that are fundamentally dynamic, and so are not enduring in themselves. What endures is the process. So, the object is precisely these discrete multiplicities at many registers. We could talk about this in terms of sets. But as the object of knowledge and analysis, it is so performatively. One does not come at that object from someplace else, but one is doing the very thing that one is talking about, and so it becomes a way of attending to one’s thinking in action which I’ve called elsewhere “eventful thinking.”

FM: You just said it is a way for one to attend to one’s thinking in action. But earlier you spoke of thinking-in-action, intellect-in-action, discrete multiplicity, in what might be called set-theoretical terms. Is it, in fact, more accurate to say that it is the individual who is engaged in both the enactment and the study of intellect-in-action?

RAJ: It’s the individual, as I said in our earlier discussion of this, in relation; and it’s a dynamic relation. So, it’s not the individual standing alone; it’s not the individual as one, but the individual as an articulation of the semiosis in tandem with other individuals. And I put it that way because one must be careful . . . I’m not arguing for what Husserl calls the transcendental subject, where there is this notion of the articulation of the individual in relation to others, but it’s raised up to another, again, transcendent level at which there is a particular kind of integrity that then filters down. There is no transcendence here. By my reading, there is no transcendent position in what Du Bois is trying to do, and what I’m trying to do with what Du Bois is trying to do. The reason there is no transcendent position in what Du Bois is trying to do specifically, and this is expressly in his work, is because his immediate object of concern is “the Negro.” And he’s trying very hard to understand how the Negro is, what the Negro is.

FM: When you say “the Negro,” do you mean a Negro?

RAJ: No. Because Du Bois doesn’t mean a Negro. He’s talking about what one could call an event. And when he’s asking how it is, he’s trying to understand the situation of the event. In other words, he’s trying to understand the ways in which what we would call modernity has articulated this event, and not only what that event is, but how that event is articulated, how that event works, how it acts. What is activity within, around that event? Or to put it differently, this is why when he talks about it in terms of “the souls of black folks,” he’s not being Hegelian, he’s not talking about Geist. He’s concerned with the ways in which that event, in its historical specificity, permits, enables, and encourages particular sorts of activity; and he wants to know what that activity tells us or says about the human condition or possibility. Nahum Chandler talks about situatedness at that level in Du Bois, and what he says it does is, “engenders a paraontological discourse.” I want to avoid, for reasons we can go into, the paraontological. Some of the reason has been indicated in what I’ve been saying about Du Bois’ critique of teleology, his critique of the limitations of number, which has to do with eschewing a very specific investment in a transcendent discourse of being qua being. And I’m thinking very specifically about the provenance of the term “paraontology.” Oskar Becker coins the term, “Paraontologie,” or “paraontology” as a corrective augmentation to Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis. A mathematician, Becker was also one of Husserl’s students, along with Heidegger at Freiburg. In fact, both served as his assistant, and his expectation was that the two of them would continue his phenomenological research, with Heidegger doing so in the human sciences and Becker in the natural sciences. Anyway, Becker coined the term in his 1937 essay, “Transzendenz und Paratranszendenz” (“Transcendence and Paratranscendence”), to counter Heidegger’s displacement of Husserl’s eidetic reduction in favor of the existential analytic. Becker tries to counter Heidegger by reconstructing eidos as the primordial instance when the possibility of interpretation is presented. He calls this primordial presentation of presentation a Paraexistenz, “paraexistence,” and its phenomenological investigation is the Paraontologie, “paraontology.” This is a challenge to Heidegger’s claim that existential analytic of Dasein brings us to fundamental ontology. Becker wishes, thereby, to redeem the possibilities of a super discourse of being qua being. A key element in his argument with Heidegger is the identification of mathematics and ontology. Along those lines, he was making a particular kind of intervention into set theory. When Lacan some years later begins to pick up the issues of set theory before moving onto topology, he deploys a term that is very similar in connotation to Becker’s paraontology, par-être, “the being beside.” But even Lacan’s articulation of par-être, as a way of trying to move against the philosophical discourse of ontology— psychoanalysis as the anti-philosophy—runs the risk, as Lorenzo Chiesa has said, of slipping back into the ontological. Of course we know Badiou, who follows Lacan expressly in this, like Becker, identifies mathematics with ontology, maintaining that while mathematics does not recognize it is ontological in its project, philosophy is there to recognize it and to mediate between it and poetry. This is one of the reasons I have a problem with paraontology, it takes us back to the position wherein the discourse of philosophical ontology is reaffirmed as dominant. While I trouble Chandler’s sense of the situatedness of the Negro generating the discourse of the paraontological, I concur with his gesture to try and find the adequate language to denote the same process I’m calling para-semiosis. This process is what I think he’s reaching for when he says the paraontological. I just wouldn’t want to call it paraontological, I would want to call it precisely para-semiosis, or para-individuation; where, again, it is not the individual as the one, but the way in which the individual— we talked about it in terms of impersonation earlier—is in relationship to others who are being articulated; and their articulation exposes the conjunction of law and chance, as Du Bois would put it. I say, the conjunction of multiplicities of semiosis, or para-semiosis.

FM: So, when we seek to pay attention to the event of the Negro, or try to understand the way in which the event of the Negro is articulated, what we must seek out and what we are trying to pay attention to are Negroes-in-relation, or a-Negro-in-relation?

RAJ: I would put it somewhat differently. I wouldn’t say the event of the Negro. I said Du Bois was focused on the Negro as event. He’s very emphatic on using the term, “Negro,” and his emphasis is instructive. In his argument with Roland Barton about it, he’s actually arguing for multiplicity, that the term “Negro” designates multiple multiplicities. It’s a term that in its usage connotes multiplicities; and it connotes the historicity of multiplicities, and that’s why he wants to keep it. And so when I say that the immediate object of his concern is the Negro as event, I mean multiplicities as event. So one can say that Du Bois’ is really concerned with the event. Not the only event, but Negro as event, Negro as an instantiation of event, and in understanding the particularities of that instantiation, we begin to understand the situatedness and the eventfulness of thinking.

FM: And what do these particularities of instantiation look like? Where do we seek them out? How do we recognize them?

RAJ: This is where I agree with Du Bois, in the million life practices of those pressed into embodiment as Negro . . . that flesh which is disciplined and pressed into those bodies, which can purport this eventfulness in all of its historicity, what you would be calling “a Negro,” or in another sense, Negroes, or black. In being so disciplined to embody the event in this way, as Negro, that flesh manifests this eventfulness in its life practices and performances. And we can begin to look at specific discrete forms in dance, juba dance, or the Buzzard Lope dance— something I always talk about because I’m preoccupied with it a bit lately—and, as we talked about earlier, musical forms in which this enactment of eventful thinking is formally immanent. Not only formally but conceptually. I mean that those performing these activities have an expressed poetic knowledge, a technē poiētikē, wherein there is no hard distinction between fleshly performance and conceptualization of being-in-the-world. In other words, the performance articulates a conscious existential orientation. Take, for instance, the Buzzard Lope. Referring back to Bess Lomax Hawes’ 1960 film of the Georgia Sea Island Singers of Sapelo island performing the dance, in her interviews with them, they explain the choreography and what is the significance of what they’re doing in great detail; we would say, they’re theorizing it in a way that exhibits how they are cognizant of the event of the thinking.

FM: But what’s crucial, what is absolutely essential to this articulation, is the disciplining of flesh into discrete and separable bodies. It seems to me that what you were saying, and I’m trying to make sure I’ve got it straight, is that what’s absolutely essential, or what is a fundamental prerequisite for paying attention to this thinking, or this intellect in action, is a process through which flesh is disciplined. And by disciplined, I take that to mean also separated into individual bodies, which can, then, become an object of analysis and understanding and accounting at the same time that they can also becomes a condition for this other, anti-disciplinary articulation.

RAJ: And then it becomes an object. Yes, this is central to my thinking. Here I want to mark again a difference between me and Du Bois. For Du Bois, it is an unavoidable irreducible historical event and fact itself; which is the reason why he thinks the Negro is an important instance for understanding how humanity constitutes itself. He talks about this in “My Evolving Program,” where he says something to the effect, “that here we have human beings whose conditions of formation under tremendous violence are a matter of documented record. The juridical discourse is rich; the commercial discourse is rich. And what they’ve done under those circumstances, tells us something about how and what humans are.” This was behind his directing of the projected 100 year Atlanta Study project. When I talk about this in terms of the existential issue of the flesh being disciplined I’m paying very close attention to Spillers’ “Mama’s Baby and Papa’s Maybe” in this regard, because one of the things that I think needs to be attended to in that essay is that there is no moment in which flesh is not already entailed in some sort of semiosis, that it isn’t written upon or written into some order of signification. In other words, that flesh coming out of Africa is not a tabula rasa. There is no such thing as a homo sapiens tabula rasa. By definition, homo sapiens is that creature of semiosis, so it becomes then an issue of multiple orders of signification and semiosis in relationship to one another. And of course in the history of the constitution of the Negro, it becomes one of a putative hierarchy of semiosis and the conceit that it is possible to eradicate other semiosis in the favor of one. The fact that this flesh isn’t tabula rasa, it is always baring some hieroglyphic traces as it were, and we should not confuse those hieroglyphic traces, embodiment, with the flesh. So the flesh does not disappear. Here’s where I’m riffing on Spillers –flesh does not come before the body; flesh is always beside the semiosis. There’s a very particular statement from a 1938 WPA slave narrative that I find very useful, and that is Thomas Windham’s remark: “Us deserve our freedom because us is human flesh,” in which he’s articulating a conceptualization of a taxonomy of flesh, of humanity, in which fleshiness is not a substance underneath in which other things are written over, but it is an ineraseable constitutive element in the articulation of thinking, of being. Also inerasable—think of this in terms of a palimpsest— are all of the various ways in which there has been a writing with the flesh.

FM: When Windham says, “Us is human flesh,” is this “us” to which he refers, and this “human flesh” to which he refers, didivdual or individual? Or a better way to put it would be, is it separable from itself? In other words, is there discretion in and of the flesh before the imposition of body as a specific modality of semiosis?

RAJ: I’m not sure I understand your question, if I take it at its face value, either I’m suggesting or you’re construing me as positing the flesh as some sort of ideal substance. I thought I just said it’s not a tabula rasa.

FM: It doesn’t matter to me if it’s a tabula rasa or not, and I would agree that there’s no flesh independent of semiosis, but we’re talking about a specific semiosis, namely the specific semiosis that imposes upon flesh the discipline of body. The reason I‘m asking the question is because it struck me, though maybe I misunderstood, when you said that when we start to pay attention to whatever you want to call it, black poetic sociality, or intellect- in-action, there’s a specific process by which it comes into relief. And one aspect of that process, which I called crucial—but I’m happy for you to explain why “crucial” is not the right word—is a kind of disciplinary element in which flesh has imposed upon it body, in which flesh has body written onto it or over it. Can you say something more about that process?

RAJ: When I said “crucial,” I meant crucial for me and not crucial for Du Bois. And I was trying to mark how, for Du Bois, the constitution of the Negro is a historical fact; that here we have a population, to put it poorly, which has been stripped bare, and in that moment of being stripped bare, stripped of its own mythology, stripped of its own symbolic orders, is compelled to embody a whole other set of meanings, which it embodies. What they do in those given bodies is what he wants to focus on as showing what humans can do. I will take “crucial;” I say “crucial” because, for me, the intervention of modernity, the moment in 1662 in Virginia, or in the code of Barbados, or in the Code Noir—all of which expressly as juridical discourses define the Negro body—that is the superimposition of embodiment onto the flesh. Remember the Christian missionary-cum-ethnologist, Maurice Leenhardt’s conversation with the Canaque sculptor, Boesoou, on New Caledonia, where he suggests to Melanesian that Christianity’s gift to their thinking was the concept of the spirit. Boesoou has a retort, something like: “The spirit? Bah! You did not bring the spirit. We already knew the existence of the spirit. We were already proceeding according to the spirit. But what you did bring us was the body.” The spirit he refers to is not the Cartesian qua Christian esprit but the Canaque ko, which circumscribed, let’s say, by marvelous ancestral influx. Leenhardt, of course, misconstrues Boesoou’s retort as confirmation that the Canaque had created a new syncretic understanding of human being, combining the circumspection of ko with the epistemology of Cartesianism. The body becomes clearer as the physical delimitation of the person, who is identified with marvelous ancestral world, or as Leenhardt puts it,” the mythical world.” Roger Bastide will rehearse Leenhardt’s exegesis of Boesoou’s response some twenty-six years later and critique it as being no more than a scholastic reformulation of Aristotle’s notion of matter as the primary principle of individuation. Instead of an affirmation that the Canaque had assumed the Western concept of bodily delimited personhood, Bastide reads in Boessou’s retort affirmation of a continuing Canaque semiosis, in which personhood—personal identity, if you want—is not marked by the frontiers of the body. Rather, it’s dispersed at the cross-roads of multiple orders of referential signification, semiosis, which, I would say, are in relation to the flesh. In other words, there are multiplicities of hieroglyphics of the flesh, to use Spillers terms, indicating a divisible person akin to Du Bois’ “double-consciousness,” and which should not be confused with psychosis. So, for me it’s crucial, just as it is for Spillers, that “body” ‘belongs to a very specific symbolic order. We can track its genealogy in what we would call loosely the Judeo-Christian tradition, or if you want, Western Modernity; and by the time it gets to the 17^th century it has a very specific articulation, which Michel Foucault and Sylvia Wynter have tried to trace for us. And so, yes, that moment is crucial because that moment is a beginning moment; not in terms of origin because, in that invention of body, in imposing it upon the flesh in this way, it does indeed reveal, highlight fleshliness, and the inerasibility of flesh, as well as the inevitability and inerasibility of acts of writing on the flesh. So that what Spillers calls “African forms” in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” are semiosis that write the flesh, they don’t write the flesh in terms of body, but they still write the flesh and they don’t go away.

FM: Yes!

RAJ: Even though the moment of the Code Noir is meant to completely suppress them. As Barthes would say, whom Spillers is using in that essay, would somehow steal the symbolic significance from those other semiotic orders for its purpose. The fact of theft notwithstanding, it never quite does completely steal it away. And we know this. To talk about the specifics, when Lucy McKim, William Francis Allen. and Charles P. Ware begin to collect spirituals on the South Carolina Sea Islands during the Civil War, they’re writing in their notes and in their published pieces about how they hear rumors of these worldly songs, or the ways in which looking at those forms that the slaves are performing, there are recognizable Christian traces, structures and forms, but then there’s this other stuff that’s there they call “African,” and their slave informants called “worldly.” Those are indications of not only the continuation of the other semiosis that articulated relation to the flesh, but also a theorization of it in the fact that the informants are saying this is “worldly.” Those early collectors of spirituals borrowed from their informants this sense of, “oh, there are these worldly songs and these work songs that are doing this and that.” Beginning with McKim, who was the first one to actually try to notate the sonics of Negro-song, they all relate a certain “untranslatability” of these worldly forms. She says flat out that she can’t notate them. They are forms and structures and sounds that exceed the laws of musical notations. So we have these express references to the para-semiosis – and that’s why I call it para-semiosis – at work associated with the particularity of those populations called ‘Negro’, and that para-semiosis is brought into relief by the imposition of a body. Yes, it’s crucial, it’s an inaugural moment in the association of those human beings designated and constituted within the political economy of capitalist modernity as “Negro” and the poiēsis of blackness as para-semiosis. But I want to be clear, while the poiēsis of blackness has a particular association with the Negro, as para-semiosis, it is not just particular to the Negro. What is particular to the Negro with respect to para-semiosis is that the imposition of Negro embodiment brings into stark relief—and in a remarkably singular way—para-semiosis as species-activity. Para-semiosis does not begin with the Negro—demonstrably, it is prevalent among the Africans pressed into New World slave bodies, which is why Sidney Mintz called it “pan-Africanization.” I do not mean to suggest para-semiosis is uniquely African, whatever that term connotes, but it is, perhaps distinctively so. Distinctively African para-semiosis notwithstanding, I am in accord with Du Bois: in the very the forcefulness of Negro embodiment, the recognizable persistence of para-semiosis—call it what you may: syncretism, creolization, Africanism, of even poiesis of blackness—is indicative of a species-wide process. To say that poiēsis of blackness equates with pan-Africanization is to mark the historicity of the Negro as a specific embodiment of sentient flesh in space and time. That is to say, the specific situation that instantiates its poiēsis. Yet, insofar as that poiēsis is a function of para-semiosis, it’s a potentiality-of-being that might very-well attend other embodiments of flesh.

FM: It is part of the general history of the imposition of the body which is brought into relief at this moment as a function of our particularity.

RAJ: And what interests me tremendously, and here I am now pushing beyond what Du Bois sets out to do, is the fact that those semiosis not only are continually articulated and become part of improvisation, but they are articulated in a way that is consciously about multiplicities, para-semiosis! So, there’s a way of thinking that attends to the event, that is eventful, that does not forget the event, that does not try to re-cast the event as origin, does not try to re-imagine the flesh as a pre-eventful origin to which one can be returned, and does not try to escape the event; but rather, because the imposition of the flesh necessitates a perpetual movement to escape the deadly effects of the body. One way that I talk about this in Sentient Flesh is in terms of the way in which the disciplining of the body is systematized, legalized, and is about what Derrida calls, the cannibalism inherent to capitalism. And there are numerous stories about the practices of consuming these Negro bodies, acts of torture where they’re consumed for the economy, but also acts of simple pleasure. There’s the story of Thomas Jefferson’s nephew by his sister Lucy, Lilburn Lewis, who butchered alive his seventeen-year-old slave, George, in the kitchen-cabin before all his other slaves by cutting off his limbs one by one, starting with the toes, pausing with each cut to give homily to the gathered slave. Returning home, to the Big-House, he then tells his wife, who has asked about the horrific screams she’d heard, that he had never enjoyed himself so well at a ball as he had enjoyed himself that evening.

FM: This is so interesting. It brings to mind a recent book that I’ve found very instructive, Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told. I think what he’s very effective at showing how what he calls “second slavery” is an intensification of both the economic and erotic investment in the imposition, and then in the subsequent subdivision, of so-called black bodies.

RAJ: And the consumption of them! So the point I‘m making, then, is that precisely while they’re not trying to escape the event, they are in flight from the deadly consequences of embodiment, of the body being consumed. And being in flight, in movement, they continue to articulate eventful thinking. To try and anticipate the question you’re going to raise about specificity and concreteness, Frederick Douglass is upset with what he calls “Juba beating.” He’s scandalized by it because it serves the capitalist consumption of time and of consciousness and it’s barbaric. One of the interesting things about it is that the very thing he doesn’t like is part of what I’m calling “the flight from” that is not escaping the event of the superimposition of body upon flesh, but in fact marking the continuation of other semiosis that is foregrounding the eventfulness of being in the flesh, which is why I take Windham’s remark, “Us is human flesh,” as being very important. Because Juba is about beating the body. Think about it in terms of the story I just told you about Lilburn Lewis. Here we have – and there are many, many stories we know that—here we have a systematic structure that is about disciplining and consuming and torturing the body, beating the body in the service of either commercial consumption or . . . much of the torturing of the body is simply erotic. And with juba, the bodies that are being treated in this way— again the flesh that has been disciplined to be this body – here they’re beating the body, but they’re beating the body in accordance with another semiosis, that of producing rhythmic sounds for dance. And many of the juba lyrics parody the consumption structure of capital, so they are also resistant. In the performance, they are continuing the eventfulness of being in the flesh, and they’re working the flesh.

FM: They’re refusing, in a sense.

RAJ: And in working the flesh in that way, they’re showing that the flesh can be worked, can be written upon in a way that is other than the body.

FM: It is a refusal of the body, in a sense.

RAJ: They can’t refuse the body; which is why I call it para-individuation and para-semiosis.

FM: But I say a refusal of the body in full acknowledgement of the fact that when all is said and done, the body can’t be refused. It’s an ongoing process of refusal that does not produce or finish itself.

RAJ: I hear what you’re saying. I would agree with that. More than the refusal of the body, however, I want to emphasize the articulation of the eventfulness of writing flesh. The reason I want to emphasize this is because, to give a concrete example, when you listen to Peter Davis—who was one of the performers of the Buzzard Lope reported on by Lydia Parrish and subsequently recorded by both Alan Lomax and Bess Lomax Hawes—talk about what they’re doing with juba and what they’re doing with the Buzzard Lope, he’s presenting the aesthetics that they’re invested in, this is the act of poetic creativity, where they’re generating, transmitting and generating, a way of being.

FM: It’s an extension and renewal of a semiosis of the flesh.

RAJ: That is, again, an articulation of those semiosis already there when the semiosis of the body is superimposed on the flesh. Those semiosis have to be modified with the imposition of the body, they have to work with the body. I agree with you about refusal, but I’m wanting to emphasize what it is that they’re creating, that thinking, that eventful thinking; which is something not even more than refusal, but other than refusal. And, it’s in that otherness than refusal; which is my way of seeing in these particulars something of what Fanon talks about in terms of “doing something else.” In that other than refusal, there may—and here I’m again agreeing with Du Bois—there may be there signs of how humans can endure, if you will, capitalist modernity, and that’s why I draw analogies to what happens in Tunis, when the slogan, “Ash-sha‘ab yurīd isqāṭ an-niẓām” (The people want to bring down the regime), which paraphrases a hemistich from Chebbi’s 1933 poem, Itha a sha‘ab yumān arād al-hiyāh—commonly translated as “Will to Live,” but more literally rendered as “If the People One Day Will to Live”— functions as a way of articulating a certain kind of collectivity in relationship to juba and buzzard lope. They’re doing something very analogous to juba and Buzzard Lope.

FM: But the reason why it seems that refusal is an appropriate terms is based on my understanding of something you just said which is that what refusal does is both acknowledge the event of embodiment, while at the same time constituting itself as something like what maybe Derrida would call, after Nietzsche, an active forgetting of the event. Because, as you said, there’s no running away form that event that will have arrived, finally, at something else; there is no simple disavowal of that event, and if there is no simple disavowal of that event, then the event is acknowledged at the very moment, and all throughout the endless career of that refusal, which never coalesces into some kind of absolute overcoming. That’s why I was using the term, which, of course, doesn’t preclude your interest in and elucidation of something more or other than refusal. Maybe there’s always something other than or more than a refusal, though refusal is always there, as well.

RAJ: I’ll accept your account of refusal, and still insist on the particular emphasis I’m giving to the eventfulness of writing flesh. It’s interesting you mention Nietzsche, because in Sentient Flesh, I elaborate on the way in which Du Bois’ 1890 commencement speech critiques the Nietzschean concept and project. First, by paraphrasing Nietzsche very closely in its account of the Teutonic and problematizing the tension or the dyad, Teutonic/submissive, Teutonic/Negro. And then secondly, by foregrounding, at least in my reading of it, the imperative not to forget in the Nietzschean way. So I’m willing to say, yes it is refusing the body, but not forgetting the eventfulness of the imposition of the body, the perpetual imposition of the body, what Tony Bogues refers to as “continual trauma.” But, in that not forgetting, performs other possibilities of being, I’m wanting to avoid the therapeutic gesture of forgetfulness, which for Nietzsche, of course, has to do as well with a need of forgetting the foundational cruelty of man.

FM: There is something that I have thought about a lot, so I’m interested in whether you think this, too. It comes back to Spillers’ work and specifically “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” What you’re talking about alongside Spillers, you recognize it as something that is explicit in Spillers. But there is something about it that could be mistaken for implicit, which therefore makes it vulnerable to being forgotten. It’s this ongoing semiosis that I won’t say is before, or I won’t say precedes, but that shows up, let’s say, or comes into relief, in another semiosis, which is, in fact, this imposition of body. But so many of the readings of Spillers that have become prominent are readings that are really focused on what she talks about elsewhere in that essay under the rubric, “theft of body.” So I wonder if part of what made the reception of (Dis)forming the American Canon so difficult for Afro-American Studies, or for that particular formation in the academic institution, was that those studies had become so primarily focused on what Spillers refers to as the theft of body, which she associates with slavery. This emerges in another way, much later on, without any reference to or acknowledgment of Spillers’ prior formation of it, in the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates who also speaks of this theft of body.

RAJ: Yes, this has become a predominant and unfortunate misreading, in my view, of “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” It is explicit, remember she talks about captive and slave bodies. This is very careful phraseology on her part. She’s marking the movement in which the flesh becomes these bodies so that they can be captured. And so the focus becomes on that second move forgetting that no, no, no she’s giving us an account of how this body gets constituted, which is central to the whole piece. And then there’s her elaborate engagement with Barthes; she says she’s talking about Barthes’ theory of myth. And if you go and you read what Barthes has done there and what she’s doing with it, this is exactly what she’s focusing on, the semiosis of the body’s theft of the signification of the flesh, and then from that point on, this becomes the captive enslaved body.

FM: But there are just so many readings which are so focused on the theft of body, perhaps because “theft of body” is a resonant phrase that has no analogue that shows up in the text say as “imposition of body.” Perhaps the focus on “theft of body,” emerges from the way it resonates with another phrase, “reduction to flesh.”

RAJ: That reception of Spillers’ essay is less a reception in Black Studies than it becomes a reception in Feminist Studies in Critical Studies, and Sedgwick and Butler and many others who have their own critiques and investments in the problematic of the body, investments that are themselves circumscribed within the discourse of the body; so, they read Spillers accordingly. Nevertheless, Spillers’ is quite explicitly attending to the way the semiosis, the symbolic order of the myth of the body, in Barthian terms, steals the signification of the fleshly semiosis.

FM: I’m not trying to make the argument that it is not explicit in Spillers. I’m trying to make the argument that it does not manifest itself with regard to a phrase that is easily detachable from the rest of her argument, from the rest of the article. For some reason, the phrase, “theft of the body,” has been detached from the rest of that essay. And similarly, “reduction to flesh” has been detached from the rest of that article. And what I’m trying to suggest is that this tells us something not only about the reception of her essay in 1987, but the reception of your book in 1993. And I’m not talking about the (white) feminist reading or the women’s studies reading, I’m really specifically trying to zero in on something that happened in Afro-American Studies, including in its crucial and foundational feminist iterations. So when I think through the question of the fate of your first book, my hope for the renewal of a reading of it, is tied to my hope for the taking up, in a much more rigorous way, of the analytic of the flesh that Spillers is a part of, that obviously Du Bois is a part of, that you are a fundamental part of. That hope, with regard to a renewed engagement with Spillers, has been borne out in a lot of recent work. One thinks of Alexander Weheliye in particular, but there are many others. So, it makes me think a renewed engagement with (Dis)Forming the American Canon is sure to follow.

RAJ: I know I’m making a hard case, and I understood your question. When I point to what happens with readers like Sedgwick and Butler, and others along that line, I’m underscoring a fundamental point I make in the opening chapter of (Dis)forming that is a critique of Black Studies, in which I recount the statement made by McGeorge Bundy, in his capacity as president of the Ford Foundation, to those individuals gathered at Yale in 197. What he told them was something to the effect that by instituting the field of Afro-American Studies the way they had, they were subjecting it to the metrics of academic scholarship. That statement was expressly endorsing the way Yale had gone about things, and implicitly differentiating it from the event of rupture at San Francisco State in ‘68 and ‘69, which was about a radical epistemological project breaking up the metrics of the academy, an attempt to reorganize the structures of knowledge in accord with profound dynamic social transformations. The Department of Black and Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State is not about business as usual, it’s about, and this is why they’re expressly invoking Fanon, taking seriously the notion of a new humanism and Fanon’s claim that the European moment is dead and now it is time to attend to our own demons and articulate something else, avoiding tribalism and other forms of reactionary identity such as religious doctrine that pose the greatest threats. In its Yale context, Bundy’s remark is implicitly against that, against the instituting of that. It’s as though he was saying: “No, this African-American Studies is going to be a continuation of the humanities as is.” At which point, what gets instituted is fully in accord with those other disciplinary discourses and it becomes part of the established hierarchical humanities. That continuation, which I refer to as “incorporation” in (Dis)forming, is what I was setting out to trouble, to mark that what was happening in African American Studies, per se, was merely part and parcel of what becomes a certain crises of the humanities in general . . .

FM: It’s a re-imposition of the body.

RAJ: . . . and epistemologically, it is continuing that story. So, it’s counter Fanon’s proclamation that the European epistemic moment is over with, and it’s a revivification and continuation of the European epistemic moment. Consequently, we’re forever talking about, frankly, the crisis and redemption of the bourgeois formation: Nativism versus cosmopolitanism, post-secularism, racial qua cultural authenticity versus appropriation, etc. To go back to the San Francisco State University moment, to take up a project like what I’m arguing is at stake in Spillers’ work, in Sylvia Wynter’s work—and I don’t think these gender issues are irrelevant— is to revive in the way in which the philosophers I was talking about earlier, Tommy Lott, Charles Mills, Tony Bogues, Lewis Gordon, and others, to revive that project of epistemic rupture, which would be a transformation of black studies as we know it.

FM: But this is why I always thought the way Derrida glossed it was pretty cool, because the activity of forgetting is itself more along the lines of what we were talking about before as a kind of consistent and insistent displacement; that insofar as the activity of forgetting persists, it does not produce a thing which is forgotten, or does not produce the forgottenness of the thing. By that same token, the activity of forgetting does in fact manifest itself as memory precisely because it is the condition that allows us to access what comes before the event of embodiment even if at the same time we can never return to the moment of what’s before.

RAJ: I’m trying to avoid the psychoanalytic accounts. Hence, when I say that with the event of the superimposition of the body, there are residual semiosis, those are residual in relationship, in adaption, to the moment of the event. They’re not before, but they’re brought into relief with the event of the body. It brings into relief the fact that the body is always inscribed upon, or rather that flesh is always written. In this moment of the event of the Negro, the Foulah, say, discovers his “Foulahness.” So, to pick an illustration from (Dis)forming, Kebe can say to Theodore Dwight, “I am not a Negro. You think I am a Negro but I am not a Negro because I speak and write Arabic. I am something else.” Now, what is brought into relief is the process by which another semiosis, in this case Foulahness, somehow as related to Arabic—which is why, then, the Foulah become characterized as the intermediary between the Negro and whatever—is brought into relief but only with the event of embodiment, which is one of the fundamental points I’m trying to make about Ben Ali and Lamen Kebe, and others.

FM: The question I have now is about the relationship not between “thinking in disorder” and “sentient flesh,” but that between those two things and “subjective experience.” For me, there appears to be a paradox between subjective experience on the one hand, and thinking in disorder and/or sentient flesh, on the other hand. So can you explain to me why it is the case that these things are in fact not paradoxical?

RAJ: This is a warranted question. In order to answer it I have to go back a bit to what is at stake for me in terms of the history of ideas, or knowledge, in what we’ve been calling “the event,” and specifically the event of the disciplining of the flesh as the body, the event of the Negro. What’s at stake there, and this is one of the points that I elaborate in the third chapter of (Dis)forming, when I start talking about Cugoano’s account of the encounter with the Incas, and Pagden’s account of the crisis that is precipitated by the discovery of the Aztecs. He of course presents this as a profound crisis, and it was, of cosmogony. A very specific understanding of the order of the universe, predicated on scripture, which dictated that there were first and second order principles grounding the world. The ultimate source for the first order was scriptural truths; the second— physical things like cities of masonry, but also symbolic systems such as complex social hierarchy and structures of knowledge— was necessarily grounded in and affirmed the first. The event of the Aztec challenged that cosmogony because they exhibited the second order principles without the first. And this precipitated a huge crisis, manifested with the publication of Cortes’ letters. I understand that cosmogony in relation to the tradition of philosophical ontology—recall my earlier remarks about Du Bois’ critique of theistic teleology in “The Renaissance of Ethics,” in which he sees the crux of the problem in the historical alignment of Christian theology and Platonic-cum-Aristotelean ontology. Going back to the issue of the event of the Negro, I think it as well as the Aztecs are different moments of the same crisis inherent in the foundational elements of that cosmogony. And it is most specifically inherent in the discourse of philosophical ontology precisely because of its account of the relationship between subjective experience and intelligence, and thinking, and the way in which it posits subjective experience as being grounded in some transcendental or transcendent realm, which gets articulated in different ways in the language. The problem inherent in the discourse of philosophical ontology is that it cannot adequately account for the eventfulness of subjective experience, how subjective experience comes to be in the world and how it relates to the diverse events of the world, what we’re calling multiplicities, except that it has to somehow negate or do violence to those multiplicities in order to subsume everything to its proposition, which is the proposition of the ‘I’, of the one. This tension inherent within the discourse of philosophical ontology presents itself at different moments with different resolutions. What occurs with both the Aztec and the Negro is a solution to that crisis reaching a very particular moment. In the case of the Aztec, of those who come to be designated Amerind, among other things, such as Native Americans—a truly oxymoronic designation—the resolution is lost souls, souls whose redemption through evangelizing mission, whether coercive or persuasive, is divine mandate, thereby rescuing the integrity of the theological cosmogony. In the case of the Negro solution is reached in the context of the emergence of an order of political economy, capitalist modernity, which recalibrates and orders things in ways that are departing from the theological cosmogony. And one of the concrete manifestations of this departure is the enslavement of let’s say people from Africa, and they’re being subjected to a particular kind of very systemic and barbaric regimen of discipline. This generates very real crises: How can we do this to these people? What’s at stake in both these cases is precisely this perpetual crisis within the discourse of ontology, which they bring into relief and which must then be solved. The Amerind, the “Native” and “the Negro” become a solution. The problem is old and foundational, as I say. Aristotle is confronted with it in the Politics. In order to resolve the contradiction of a polis fundamentally grounded in anti-despotism and the necessity of patriarchal despotism in the maintenance of that polis, he has to discover a certain binary hierarchy in nature—which he genders— in order to make a distinction between orders of sentience and reason. Thereby he provides the warrant for the natural slave who is essential for the maintenance of the polis that is the ideal space in which the fulfillment of the human can occur. That’s one iteration of how this crisis is fundamental. It presents itself again, however, with the discovery of the New World, and the imposition of capitalist slavery; and the Negro, as well as the Native, are invented as a solution. So, when the Negro is invented, what comes into relief is the flaw in the philosophical ontology’s way of thinking about the experience and the individual, which is what I have been referring to as the concept of subjective experience. And what we’ve been talking about is the way in which, looking at Windham, there are other semiosis that are antecedent in their expression to that moment of invention and that continue within that moment. The confluence of these semiosis is what I refer to as para-semiosis as the event of thinking with the flesh, which involves or entails processes for articulating individuals who have experience, for lack of a better word, who not only don’t look like the subject who falls into the world, but the very material ways in which they express and articulate—the example given earlier was in ring dances and juba—are distinctively different from that. So the question becomes how do we think about or talk about that, and here’s where I want to use individuation because it foregrounds the semiosis, it is a process of semiosis, a way of trying to think about it in its operations, as opposed to slipping back to thinking about it in terms of what I referred to earlier as “white supremacy,” which would simply be preserving the place of that transcendent subject and filling it with a different color, or a different ethnicity. This, I think, is some of the problem of Black Liberation Theology, or the eschatological based notion of social justice that informs a good deal of one tradition of black resistance. In illustration, let me briefly remark the contrast between Windham’s assertion, “Us is Human Flesh,” and the distinction Frederick Douglass makes between hogs, horses and humans. Douglass is asserting that Negroes deserve liberty because they are transcendent beings, are fundamentally like everyone else. Windham asserts we deserve our liberty because we are human flesh. That’s the distinction I want to make between subjective experience and sentient flesh. Individuation, and thinking in disorder becomes a way of trying to, first, in the instance of Du Bois because I associate it with Du Bois’ project, recognize, think with, that kind of process. We don’t want to Africanize America, but nor do we want to lose ourselves in America. What is this process? How do we talk about it? What is it doing? Now, I think that ‘Of the coming of John’, and John Jones, and what happens with John Jones there, becomes a way in which he can try to represent in literary terms such an individual, and precisely in the tension Jones has to the congregation of Altamaha and the terms of that tension.

FM: I guess there’s one other question that I can ask, but you don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to. Insofar as part of what your work entails is a recasting or retooling or reconfiguration of a term like ‘subjective experience’, it also includes a recasting, a reconfiguration, a rescue, whatever you would want to say, of other terms that have been placed under a certain kind of interdiction, like ‘the human’. And so the final question concerns what Nahum Chandler invokes with the term “paleonymy.” Again, I don’t know what the proper word would be—renewal or rescue, or rehabilitation, or re-inhabitation. How do you deal, how are we to deal, with the language of what, and where we’re going through?

RAJ: A point of clarification and it’s important, it’s my slip, I introduced the term subjective experience when I read the passage from “Fanon and the Subject of Experience.” The point there was to mark a certain trajectory of my thinking and how long I’ve been trying to think through this. Fanon is a very particular point of departure where a certain set of questions about what is the nature of subjective experience and the possibility of its being historical occur and I explore them. I don’t talk about “subjective experience” in that way anymore, especially in Sentient Flesh. I concur with Nahum’s sense of paleonymy. I have a very particular investment in philology, which is part of my interest and training. What interests me is the way in which terms, in their changing connotations, still carry traces of antecedent thinking about certain problems. With regard to “the poetic” and “the human,” for example, poiēsis as a modality of generative creative representation, mimesis, specific to the biological species homo sapiens, is a key concept for the way in which Aristotle tried to define anthropos, what it is to be human. As the Islamicate philosophers understood, taking up the Alexandrian School’s inclusion of the Poetics in the Organon, the issue of poiēsis is related to Aristotle’s effort at addressing a problem that is still with us. That’s the problem of, one could say, the relationship between our thinking, our intelligence, and our fleshliness. As a problem of community or polity, it presents a series of questions. What are we? Why are we here, what is our purpose? How are we to be in relation to one another? In the Politics and Nicomachean Ethics, these questions get addressed in terms of the relationship between reason, structures of knowledge, and virtue, or ethics, putting in play a series of discourses and responses that bring us up to the crucial moment of the imposition, the discipline of the body. And all of those responses, all of those moments are still carrying through and are still in play now. Sometime around 1935-36 Heidegger started his effort at overcoming metaphysic, to which he traced the provenance of the concept of race. More specifically, he discovered the metaphysical basis of thinking about race was in subjectivity. He makes this discover just two-years after cofounding the Kulturpolitische Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutscher Hochschullehrer,“Political-Cultural Community of German University Professors,” which was organized to regroup those professors and rectors who were committed to a National Socialist renewal of the German university system—and eight-years before Endlösung, “the Final Solution.” An event about which he cannot otherwise speak, and even speaking about it in this evasive way . . . no, because he speaks about it in this evasive way, he draws full attention to his culpability in suborning the ideology behind it. Nevertheless, there’s a critique there of the aspirations of humanism; not humanism as the Greeks articulated, but humanism as it emerges out of the early modern period, which take the Greeks as their model. And precisely because Heidegger’s effort to correct that taking of the Greeks as their model, to go back to the Greeks of his imagination, is tainted, it is instructive. It reveals the deep roots of European racism, which, Black Notebooks notwithstanding, he traces to the Platonic beginnings of what becomes ontology. Those are moments that are addressing very particular local situations. Albert Murray eloquently explained the general significance of such moments when he describes his coming to realize that all expressions are metaphor, by which, he said, he means poetry. He’s clearly meaning that capacious Greek sense of poiēsis, it’s all art, it’s all creativity, it’s all metaphor. And that includes quantum physics and its attendant mathematical analysis. Murray expressly says that quantum theory understands this, and so it becomes a question of the necessity to constitute orders that are always contingent. This is his argument for the necessity of contingency, and each one of those particular ways of responding are style, and style matters. And the particularities of those styles can have resonance beyond that particular moment. As he says, the social sciences may be able to count and tell us what happened, but it is the metaphor, the poetic that speaks about what is mankind. Baldwin makes a very similar remark in his wonderful 1964 talk on the artist, the task of the artist, where he says that the statistician and the banker and the general may be able to perform all sorts of things but they cannot present to us what we are in the same powerful way that the poet does. So, my persistence in posing the question, who can speak for the human? Or even, how is the human? This is part of the commitment to understanding the multiple situations in which, let us say, human intelligence predicates itself on violence declaring beauty, truth, the good. There can be no generative history of the species if these cancerous growths are banished from sight. We must keep track of their traces. I don’t want to lose track of those traces, and that’s consonant with my notion of para-semiosis. In other words, those questions are still with us, and the controversy around the term is still alive, and it’s a controversy which means it’s unsettled. One particular aspect of its unsettledness, I think, has to do with the fact that, in all of that controversy, there has been disregard or little regard given, except in very specific quarters of black study. How those who were compelled and disciplined to embody Negroness address the question of human being needs to be explored. Not as an object of ethnographic or sociological analysis, or, especially, of primitivist Negrophilia. So that’s my investment, along with Chandler, in the continued commitment, the attentiveness to, the polyvalence, and the resonances, or reverberations to be more precise, of concepts that are attached to terms and the different concepts. And the same thing would apply then to the poetic for the moment along very similar lines. Hence, Windham’s remark, and the way that the tripartite movement you rightly noted is at play. There is there a conceptualization of the human that is useful in its inclusiveness in the same way that the 1805 Haitian constitution will go to extreme extents to forbid the presence of whites on the island, and then exempt Germans and Poles who fought for the cause, and then go on to talk about how Haiti is a family and the state is their father, and that it will now call Haitians ‘black’, and then Dessalines is asserting that Haiti as so named is not just a revolution for this place, but for all oppressed peoples of the world. So there is in that I’m saying an analogous effort to define the human to take up the concept as a broad species encompassing activity, and to name it, and to indeed recognize what is useful in the enlightenment conception of humanitas, which has a very complicated genealogy, and if we go back to Pico Mirandola.[7] who gave us the so-called manifesto of the renaissance, he attributes to the Muslims, to Muhammad. When he asks, ‘What’s the most spectacular spectacle?’, nothing more spectacular than man because of man’s capacity for auto-creativity, etc. etc. That is to mark that ‘humanism’ does not just come from the so-called tainted Greek tradition and its translation, but it comes to a point where we have this idea of a possibility of an inclusive universal species being that eschews, supersedes, family, clan tribe, nation, and if we take Du Bois at his word and his notion of ‘submissive man’ in the 1890 commencement speech, civilization.

FM: Thanks, man, for everything.

R.A. Judy is professor of critical and cultural studies in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh. He authored the groundbreaking book (Dis)forming the American Canon: The Vernacular of African Arabic American Slave Narrative (1992). His latest book is Sentient Flesh (Thinking in Disorder/Poiēsis in Black) (Duke University Press, 2020).

Fred Moten teaches in the Department of Performance Studies at New York University. His latest book is all that beauty (Letter Machine Editions, 2019).

Notes

[1]. “Kant and the Negro,” Surfaces, 1 (October 1991): 1-64; reprinted in (Society for African Philosophy in North America (SAPINA), ed. Valentin Mudimbe.

[2]. “Fanon’s Body of Black Experience,” Fanon Reader, ed. Lewis Gordon (London: Blackwell, 1996), 53-73.

[3]. “Fanon and the Subject of Experience,” Theorizing Multiculturalism: A Guide to the Current Debate, ed. Cynthia Willett (Blackwell, 1998), 301-333.

[4]. “Kant and Knowledge of Disappearing Expression,” A Companion to African-American Philosophy, ed. Tommy L. Lott and John P. Pittman (London: Blackwell, 2006), 110-124.

[5]“The New Black Aesthetic and W.E.B. Du Bois, or Hephaestus, Limping,” Massachusetts Review Vol. 35, No. 2, Summer 1994. Eds. Jules Chametzky and Robert Gooding-Williams.

[6]. “America and Powerless Potentialities,” Theories of American Culture Theories of American Studies, Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, volume 19, ed. Winfried Fluck and Thomas Claviez (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2003), 129-154.

[7] Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, trans. A. Robert Gaponigri (Washington D.C.: Gateway Editions).

May 6, 2020
About the Local and What All Hold in Common: Belarusian Human Rights Activist Ales Bialiatski in Conversation with Olga V. Solovieva

Note on Belarus

Wlad Godzich

Belarus has not figured prominently, if at all, on most anglophone readers’ attention horizon. Things are beginning to change, and Belarus will prove to be interesting geopolitically and even epistemologically.

Belarus is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered by Russia to the East, Poland to the West, Ukraine to the South, and Lithuania and Latvia to the North. It is roughly the size of Spain but has only nine and a half million inhabitants. Forty percent of the land is covered with forests, including the last primeval forest in Europe, shared with Poland. It owes its name to medieval chroniclers who divided the land invaded by Vaerengians (Eastern Vikings), called Rus’, into Black Rus’, White Rus’ and Red Rus’ (Ruthenia in Latin.) The boundaries of these color-coded lands were not clearly established, nor do we know why these three colors were used. Belarus is the contemporary version of White Rus’.

No country existed under that name in the middle ages, when some of it was ruled by a local dynasty. It was absorbed into the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and then into the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania when the two countries merged. It became an object of contestation between the Grand Duchy of Muscovy and the Commonwealth, with many of the battles between the two fought on its territory. It was eventually absorbed into Muscovy, which took on the name of Russia, with the decline of the Commonwealth. When the Russian Revolution broke out, a Byelorussian Soviet Republic was proclaimed, and this Republic joined the Russian Soviet Federation and the Ukrainian Socialist Republic in the foundation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1921. Much of the war between newly independent Poland and the USSR was fought on Byelorussian territory, and large part of the west of it was awarded to the victorious Poles by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

World War II devastated Byelorussia. Under Hitler’s master plan, all of its land was to be cleared of its inhabitants and then accommodate German settlers in need of Lebensraum. All the cities were levelled to the ground and one third of the population was killed by summary execution, including almost all of the Jews. To this day, mass graves are discovered in the Belarusian forests. Belarus rebuilt its cities during the Cold War and, as a result, has some of the most modern cities in Europe. The capital, Minsk, is particularly well-designed with large avenues, parklands, and an excellent subway system. Belarus became an important industrial producer during this period, with raw materials imported from the rest of the USSR and then resold within it. It became one of the world’s largest manufacturer of heavy agricultural equipment and the foremost producer of tractors.

The Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic retained a largely Stalinist structure and ethos up to the end of the Soviet Union. The breakup of the Soviet Union was legally effected by the signing of the foundational charter of the Commonwealth of Independent States (C.I.S.) with headquarters in Minsk and a Byelorussian as its head. Belarus, as it now called itself, was ruled by Aleksandr Lukashenko who described himself as an “authoritarian.” He rejected all attempts and calls to liberalize his country. He entered into a prolonged negotiation with President Yeltsin of Russia to define the relations between the two countries. In 1997, with Yeltsin very diminished by alcoholism and illness, a treaty was signed. It stipulated that the two countries would form a “Union State,” have a single joint parliament, one defense and foreign affairs policy, free circulation of citizens, and a single currency. A rather long and sloppy document, it cribbed the European Union treaties, with some echoes of the treaty that created the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania several centuries earlier. Lukashenko did not hide his ambition to eventually become the President of the Union State, expecting the transition to this position to occur upon Yeltsin’s death. He was taken by surprise by Vladimir Putin’s rise to power. He even went as far as to propose that Putin be Prime Minister of the Union State that he would head. In later years, he claimed it was a joke. What was not a joke was his distrust of Putin.

Putin began to assert his dominance by tightening the screws on Belarus’ economy, raising the price of oil and gas, among other things. During the Soviet period, Byelorussia refined a great deal of Russian oil that it imported as low cost and then resold to Russia at a handsome profit. Putin viewed this arrangement as a subsidy to Belarus and he kept raising the price of the unrefined oil, and thus breaking Belarus’ growth.

Putin’s interest is twofold. The extension of NATO deep into Eastern Europe and the Baltics made him fear what he perceived as a policy of encirclement. It was the prospect of NATO and EU membership for Georgia and Ukraine that led him to wage open war on the former, and semi-covert war on the latter (including the annexation of Crimea). Belarus had to return to its historical role of buffer and glacis between Russia and a hostile West. The largest ever anti-NATO maneuvers were staged on Belarusian territory, and over a hundred thousand Russian troops have stayed in Belarus. Putin has asked Lukashenko openly to give Russia a military base, something that Lukashenko has refused.

Putin’s second interest is personal. By 2024 he will have exhausted his right to stay on as President of Russia legally. For some time now, he has been looking for an escape and he recently proposed amending the Russian Constitution. On the surface, the proposal is surprising: the President would be limited to two terms, whether consecutive or not; his powers would be greatly diminished, with many of them being transferred to a Prime Minister answerable to a greatly reinforced Duma (Parliament). In speeches presenting these proposals, Putin evoked what he called the sad spectacle of the Soviet Union in the eighties when, lacking an orderly mechanism for the transfer of power, it had to go through increasingly ill old leaders waiting for their death. In effect, Putin has coopted the arguments of his opponents. At the same time, he has been holding long and pressing discussions with Lukashenko about the Union State that he now claims must be properly set up. In his view, the Union State, as a new entity, would have to create a new position of Chairman of the Council. In effect, he proposes the return of the Politburo with himself as Chairman for life. Belarusians, including Lukashenko, see this as a step toward the annexation of Belarus within Russia, and his citizens have staged large demonstrations against this prospect. Political demonstrations have been severely repressed by Lukashenko in the past, but these were tolerated, and even surreptitiously encouraged by him. Talks between Putin and Lukashenko have broken down and, by December 31, 2019, Putin cut off oil and gas supplies to Belarus. Their flow has been restored recently when Lukashenko negotiated a makeshift arrangement with Norway (a NATO member.)

Lukashenko understands his predicament well. He may have a hope of staying in power if he is able to establish quickly good relations with the European Union, an organization that has criticized his constant violation of human and civil rights, the rigging of elections, and his maintenance of the death penalty (the last European country to do so), earning him the description of “the last dictator in Europe.” His immediate goal is to show his own population, as well as the European Union, that he has a plan for a viable Belarus independent of Russia. The central element of this plan is drawn from the history of the Varangians, who sailed from the Baltic to the Black Sea (and the Caspian Sea) to trade with, and occasionally raid and sack,

Constantinople and its possessions, and the Arab merchants of what is today Azerbaijan. Lukashenko proposes to enlarge an existing canal in Poland, dredging rivers between

Belarus and central Ukraine and building port facilities on the Black Sea. Belarus has been trading agricultural equipment to Turkey and other nations of the Eastern Mediterranean. It has also developed tourism with the Gulf States, offering mild temperatures and safe surroundings for families during the high-temperature months of the Gulf area. Lukashenko has discussed these plans with the Poles, who seem interested: they are building a Liquid Natural Gas port on the Baltic to bring in American and Norwegian gas, and thus freeing themselves from Russian dependency. He has also held talks with the Ukrainians who are more lukewarm to the idea. Much of the dredging would have to be done in the north of Ukraine in the area of Chernobyl, and the Ukrainian do not see themselves as beneficiaries of the waterway. Lukashenko, with the help of Sweden, has calculated that the canal and river work would cost around six billion Euros, and he has started negotiations with the European Union for this sum. He is aware of the fact that the EU will want action on all the conditions and practices it has condemned. He has not indicated whether he intends to comply with EU demands, stressing instead that he alone can prevent Russian annexation.

The second part of his strategy is to secure the support of his population, a rather daunting task, given his history of repression and his boasts of being an authoritarian. He has released some prisoners as a gesture of good will. His principal tool is to reinvent himself as a Belarusian nationalist and as the leader of a populist movement. On this score, he is falling back on an established historical force in Central and Eastern European history of nation-building: the defense and illustration of the national language.

This is where the epistemological dimension of what may be called, by historical analogy, The Belarus Question emerges on the horizon of attention. Language-grounded arguments for national identity and independence were the products of the German-style national philology that emerged in the eighteenth century and became dominant in the nineteenth. The object of this philology was to identify, describe and purify the “true” language that expressed the “real spirit” of a “people.” These ideas were central to the project of German unification and they animated the Romantic view of language. National philology brought together the resources of historical linguistics and literary studies and fostered nationalism. We may want to recall how French philologists, forced to acknowledge the importance of Germanic tribes such as the Franks in the formation of a country named after this tribe, nonetheless argued that only barbaric elements were inherited from this source and they were offset by the rational and harmonious contribution of Gallo-Romans, apparently evident in the Latin derivation of the language.

Invoking national philology to help create a Belarusian national-populism [no hyphen?] runs quickly into a series of problems: whatever Ruthenian (the preferred designation of philologists) may have been like, its speakers were subjected to forceful acculturation first by the Poles and then by the Russians. The philologists at the universities of Vitebsk and Minsk were trained in German methodology and worked in Russian and saw other “Ruthenian” languages as adjuncts of Russian. We ought to bear in mind that the word ‘ukrainets’ (Ukrainian) designated a nationalist rather than a status. In any case, only one third of the inhabitants of Belarus speak Belarusian at home; the rest speak Russian, with small minorities of Polish, Ukrainian and Lithuanian. Asserting the primacy of Belarusian would require a major effort and many years to succeed.

The major reason that national philology has been retreating is that its foundations have crumbled. These foundations were ontological: there is a language X, there is a spirit X’, there is a people X”, and therefore there is a nation XXX. All of these claims are fictions: their objects have no ontological status. They are constructs of ideologically driven disciplines. It is not surprising that the Poles, who believe they survived the partitions of Poland thanks to their faith in their language and their religion, have supported Belarusian nationalists living in exile in Poland and broadcasting in Belarusian. The revival/invention of Belarusian is not going to save Lukashenko.

What could unite the inhabitants of Belarus is a reflection on the exterminating policies of the Nazis in World War II. Unlike the genocides carried out against Jews and Roma, and the killings of homosexuals, political opponents, and disabled—all of which targeted people because of who they were, that is, on the basis of their ontology— the mass massacres of Belarus were carried out on the basis of where people were. The first, “ontological massacres” were entrusted to the SS; the latter “place-based” genocide to the Sonderkomandos (special units) of the Wehrmacht.

Belarusian, as a language, needs to be described not through an ideal type grammar, but through actual practices and competencies of its speakers. Many areas of the world, from the Middle East to China, would benefit from such an approach. Such areas are inhabited by people who have various levels of competence in the registers and speech genres of more than one ‘language.’ They achieve varying degrees of comprehension and mutual understanding over an area that would best be described through the resources of fuzzy logic rather than clearly delineated maps. Such an approach would bring out the fact that cities are overlaid with many communicational competencies and may well differ from their surroundings.

The subjective dimension of whereness, i.e. hereness, could well be the starting point for building a sense of community and belonging. This starting point already exists: many people in the lands of Rus’ and beyond describe themselves as “tuteyshe,” a word that means “from here.” They do not invoke borders, boundaries, nation states, languages or religions, but the facticity of location, a location defined by a deictic and therefore portable. Deictics do not have coordinates but they do have horizons.

About the Local and What All Hold in Common: Belarusian Human Rights Activist Ales Bialiatski in Conversation with Olga V. Solovieva

This interview took place during the workshop “Cultures of Protest in Contemporary Ukraine, Belarus and Russia” at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago, 03/01/2019.

Transcribed by Ekaterina Lobanova
Translated by Oliver Okun

Olga V. Solovieva

Ales Bialiatksi was born September 25th, 1962, in Vyartsilya, Sortavalskiy District, Karelia, in the Russian Federation. He is a Belarusian human rights activist, a specialist in literature, and an essayist. In 1965 the Bialiatski family returned to the Svietlagorsk District of the Gomel Region of Belarus. Starting in 1982 Ales Bialiatski began taking part in an illegal national-democratic youth movement. In 1984, he completed his studies as a specialist in teaching Belorussian and Russian language literature at Gomelsk University. In that same year he entered the Institute of Literature at AN BSSR in Minsk as a graduate student. In 1985 through 1986 Bialiatski served in the Russian army and simultaneously continued his graduate studies. He became one of the founders of the informal partnerships of young literary specialists, «Тутэйшыя», and actively participated in communal democratic processes during Perestroika. He was one of the organizers of the large-scale civil act known as «Дзяды», in 1988 in Minsk. He was also one of the founders of the first mass protest by the Belorussian People’s Front. In 1989 Bialiatski was elected as the director of the museum of literature Maksim Bogdanovich, and worked there until 1998. In 1990 he became a deputy of the Minsk city council. Bialiatski managed the Human Rights Center «Вeсна», which was engaged in aiding the victims of political repression. In 1998 Bialiatski began working full-time at «Вeсна». He was arrested in 2011 and held in prison until 2014 for his human rights activities. While in prison he received the first human rights award from the European Union Václav Havel. He was nominated several times for a Nobel Peace Prize, and he is the author of eight books.

Olga Solovieva: Ales, to begin with could you please say a few words about Belarus as a state? Even though it is a large country in the very center of Europe many of our readers don’t know about its existence. It is the classic proverbial elephant in the room. What’s going on here?

Ales Bialiatksi: Not long ago a huge area in the east that stretched from Brest to Kamchatka was considered one country, and there lived the Soviet people. But, for various reasons, the Soviet Union collapsed and the citizens of Europe realized, much to their surprise, that to the east there were not only Russians, but also countries like Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova in Eastern Europe, each with its own people, culture, and history. This was the discovery of the Eastern European Atlantis. Throughout the last two-thousand years Belarusians, either independently or in partnership with neighboring peoples made an effort to preserve, establish, and find themselves. They were heavily influenced by their neighbors, who by the way were also influenced by us, but the Belarusians never lost their own identity. Belarus’s development was not simple, and in some historical processes we developed slowly, but we are definitely not outsiders on the map of Europe. While president Lukashenko says that Belarus is the geographical center of Europe, in reality we live along the eastern outskirts of Europe. But Europe itself is made up of such outskirts. Oslo, Lisbon, Istanbul are all on Europe’s outskirts, just as Minsk is.

The problem is that thanks to the post-Soviet politics of the contemporary Belarusian authorities Belarus has long been a closed country, a reserve or a fragment of the Soviet regime, and a terra incognita for the whole world. It was only in 2018 that the visa system was changed, allowing citizens of the EU and the USA to come to Belarus for one month. That is the beginning of the gradual opening of the country.

Olga Solovieva: The whole world knows you as a human rights advocate, but you were not educated as a sociologist, a political scientist, or a lawyer, but as a philologist, and a specialist in Belarusian literature. How did you go from literature to human rights advocacy? What is the link between literature and human rights?

Ales Bialiatksi: It’s natural. Many journalists, and intellectuals with background in humanities end up working in human rights. I’m no exception. Many of my colleagues involved in human rights were also educated in humanities. Actually, the main reason behind human rights activism can be expressed with the rather banal slogan, “let’s make life a little better for the people around us.” This desire to make life better lies at the foundation of all human rights endeavors. Therein lies the motivation for my work. I have been involved with the civil activism for a long time, since I was a student. Back then, in the Soviet Union of the 1970s and 80s, we had groups that tried to stop the processes of denationalization and russification of Belarus. I took part in such groups. They were national-democratic groups. The various values that we searched for and tried to develop were not just nationalist, but also democratic. This connection had always existed. Not long ago I was looking over the documents that we published in the early 80’s. They express an entire series of democratic demands, including freedom of speech, freedom of information, and equal rights. In the Western world these values were so widely accepted, that they are considered incontestable. At the time these values, along with the vision of an independent and democratic Belarus sounded to us like a revolutionary idea. We saw the ideas of independence and democracy as deeply interconnected.

OS: In Belarus as in many other former Tsarist and then Soviet regions, democracy was understood as the right to national self-determination. But what would guarantee that the national-democratic balance would not turn into nationalism? Consider what happened with such revivals of national consciousness in the post-Soviet Russia and Poland, where the cultivation of national specificity turned into nationalism, chauvinism, and racism. Tatars, Jews, Roma, Russians, and Poles all live in Belarus. Where is their place in the national-democratic model?

AS: Vasil Bykov, the famous Belarusian writer, a contemporary of ours, who was very concerned with the future of the Belarusian people said, “a large nation’s nationalism inevitably leads to chauvinism, while a small nation’s nationalism is firstly directed towards its own survival among other nations.” The government has a huge responsibility to preserve the rights of minorities. But in today’s Belarus paradoxical things are happening. Mentally, Belarus remains a post-colonial country. Belarusian language and culture continue to die out, just as they did in the Soviet Union. The government does not support or promote the Belarusian national identity, as if we were further constructing the common “Soviet People.” But as I advocate for the development of Belarusian culture, I don’t want the rabid nationalism ever to come to power in Belarusian politics. In prison, where I served my sentence, one of the major rules of co-existence was “live and let live.” I consider this to be the golden rule of uttermost importance to us as citizens of Belarus, as well as in all other situations in life.

OS: Was your decision to study the Belarusian language and literature in the context of the russification of Belarus a political decision?

AS: In the beginning, no. I simply wanted to study philology and, above all, Belarusian literature, before we, already as students, came to realize through our experience that the government’s politics was directed towards containment and, in fact, destruction of Belarusian culture and language. The government’s position had an impact on schools and the press (which were generally in Russian), and the study of Belarusian history and culture. The official doctrine was that all peoples would integrate. The official doctrine was about the fusion of all nations. We were taught that all nations will merge into one mythical, large nation of “Soviet citizens.”

OS: And nevertheless, this mythical Soviet nation was being created on the foundation of the Russian language, and not on some language like Esperanto. By the way, this truly international language was outlawed in the Soviet Union. But Russian, of course, was served up to the people in the form of the Soviet ideological cult of personality. Do you remember Mayakovsky’s verse “I would learn Russian for that alone that Lenin spoke it…”?

AS: As students of Belarusian philology we did not like this disregard for our culture. We fought back because we understood that with the implementation of this doctrine there would be no place for our and other cultures. This destruction took place right before our eyes and aroused feelings of protest.

OS: And which language did you grow up speaking?

AS: Russian. My parents lived in Russia for a long time. My father lived there for twenty-five years and my mother for fifteen years. And when they returned to Belarus they came back to an industrialized city, Svetlogorsk, where they could find work in the 60s. Kindergarten through high school were all in Russian. I heard Belarusian from the older generation. My grandmothers spoke only Belarusian. One of them lived in Russia for twenty-five years, but never stopped speaking Belarusian. My other grandmother didn’t speak Russian at all. She lived in Polesie her whole life. When I would go and visit her when I was five and chatter in Russian, they would laugh. Older women of my grandmother’s generation would put me on the chair and ask, “Sashik, say something in Russian,” and they would laugh because they so rarely heard Russian. So I always had this ancestral connection to the Belarusian language. It was hurtful when I started realizing that this all was vanishing. My parents spoke Russian. My mother resumed speaking Belarusian when I changed to Belarusian.

OS: What is the difference between Belarusian and Russian? What are the particularities of the Belarusian language? At Moscow State University we learnt that Belarusian was considered a Russian dialect, and only in 1944 earned its status as a separate language.

AS: That’s complete nonsense. I’ve also read how the state “scholars” of the 19th century wrote about Polish as a Russian dialect. In the medieval state of Belarusians, Lithuanians, and western Ukrainians known as the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Belarusian was the language of the government, and they conducted all state affairs in Belarusian. Belarusian was the first East-Slavic language in which the Bible was printed. And where did the folklorists hide the tens of thousands of folk songs, fairy tales, sayings, legends written in poetic Belarusian? Was this all put in an archive and forgotten?

The particularities of all Slavic languages lie in the fact that we all came from rather similar closely related accents and dialects, but that was so long ago! Many common words were preserved, but often these words have entirely different meanings in our languages. For example, the word, благо (good) is добро (good) in Russian.[1] Полночь (midnight) in Russian, as in the middle of the night, is поўнач in Belarusian, which means “north.” Листопад in Russian entails the process of leaves falling, while in Belarusian лістапад means “November.” [2] “Dog,” “medal,” and “steppe” are all masculine in Belarusian, whereas the same words are feminine in Russian. In Belarusian there is no soft “r” (р) or “shch” (щ), sound, but there are “dz” and “dzh” sounds in Belarusian etc. As far as lexicon is concerned Belarusian is much closer to Ukrainian. We understand each other without translation. Perhaps in Belarusian there aren’t as many sonorous sounds as there are in Romance languages, but it is rather soft and with many aspirations. As for pronunciation, Belarusian is somewhere between Russian and Polish. In Belarusian there are very few Old Church Slavonic words, but there are many ancient Slavic words that were long forgotten in other Slavic languages. I very much love the Belarusian language.

OS: It is interesting that you identify with the Belarusian language of your grandmothers and not with Russian of your parents, the language in which you thought and spoke.

AB: It was a certain process, but there was also a trigger that led to all this. After my second year at the university, during my travels around Belarus to visit historical memorials, I encountered artists who spoke Belarusian. It was the first time I saw people who weren’t paid to speak Belarusian. Cultured people, artists, who painted and spoke Belarusian. I stood there with my mouth agape. One of the artists turned to me and asked in Belarusian, “what’s your name?” I said, “Sasha.” He replied, “No, you aren’t Sasha, you are Ales.” And ever since I have been Ales.

I changed to Belarusian when I was nineteen. At the time it was a provocation. In the beginning all of my peers laughed at me, because they knew me as a Russian speaker. In the Belarusian classes we spoke Belarusian, but after class everyone would instantly switch to Russian. Even my good friend, the poet Anatol Sys, would say, “Just give up! You won’t manage it.” All these guys who studied Belarusian philology, like Sys, were from villages and Belarusian was their mother tongue. They always spoke Belarusian. They studied in Belarusian schools. When they went to university they switched to Russian to be like everyone else, or they spoke Trasianka, a mix of Belarusian and Russian. But just in two months everyone was surprised when I had to speak Russian for one reason or another. I started speaking Belarusian alone after that memorable encounter with the artists, but my friends quickly joined in. We formed a group. In our circle there were first just five or six of us. Two years later, by the time we finished our studies at the university there were already about forty people speaking Belarusian.

By speaking Belarusian my friends and I propagated Belarusian culture. Some professors looked at us askance. Even though Belarusian philology was our official specialization, some professors considered us nationalists. I remember how one professor was outraged and tried to convince me that the future lies in Russian. And what is Belarusian? A return to the past? That was the relationship many had to Belarusian.

OS: Belarusian is connected with the idea of challenging the Soviet regime and protest. What is Russian associated with? After all you grew up speaking Russian.

AB: Russian is, first of all, a huge cultural layer – it represents an understanding of things connected with good and evil, with right and wrong, and all that’s connected with classic Russian literature, as a part of European literature. I’ve read through many of the Russian classics many times. But at the same time there was an understanding that Belarusian literature also exists, is quite developed and offers enough material for building one’s character and for grasping some universal human concepts. One could grow and mature as a person by reading it. A rather rich body of literature written in Belarusian was and still is one of the arguments for the Belarusian language. We have medieval literature and modern Belarusian literature, and such authors as Vasil Bykov, Vladimir Karatkevich, Yanka Bryl, Vyacheslav Adamchik, Ivan Shamiakin among dozens and hundreds of others. Literature is what gives languages the right to exist if not for eternity, then at least for a long life, that’s for sure. For me, the switch to the Belarusian platform of world view was a civilizational, cultural, humanitarian, political decision – everything was connected. At one point after university I completely refrained from reading Russian literature in order to better immerse myself in Belarusian culture. To better understand what Belarusian writers were writing and living I needed to limit myself. It was a professional decision.

OS: In the long run the choice to study Belarusian philology became an act of political dissent. But was Russia and the Russian language, besides being the layer of culture and classics, associated with Soviet ideology?

AB: It was and still is. Russian was an instrument of Soviet ideology, and that is why it is important to Lukashenko. It is an ideological symbol, like a flag or emblem, Soviet street names, death penalty. It’s a full set of symbols that underline the continuity of the Soviet Union in today’s Belarusian regime.

OS: This connection brings to mind an analogy. The poet and film director Pierre Paolo Pasolini, as a young man during the Second World War, started studying and eventually writing poetry in Friulian dialect because he considered the literary Italian language to be compromised by the official structures of the government during fascism. It seems to me that your turning to a different language was done in the same spirit.

AB: That’s not entirely the case, in the sense that I never considered Russian to be “my” language. Belarusian was not an alternative, but a return to my own culture. I quickly realized that opposing this governmental system alone is impossible, and so we started broadening our connections and building a network of likeminded individuals. The artists introduced me to a larger group of students in Minsk who were more focused and active. Our group of students at the university in Gomel joined them. We consciously gathered people who spoke the same language and thought about the same things. We were trying to dig things up from our forbidden Belarusian history and shared it with each other through samizdat (underground publications). The first youth organizations in Minsk were formed in 1978 and 1979. The understanding that we were not alone was very important, and these connections have endured to this day.

OS: How did the authorities react to this?

AB: The KGB quickly became interested in our activities because speaking Belarusian at that time was considered suspicious. In the 1930s there were executions, and there was a merciless fight against the Belarusian underground youth organizations in the 1950s. Everything related to the Belarusian language was considered nationalist. There was even such special term as “bourgeois-nationalist.” There was however also a corpus of Soviet Belarusian writers who were permitted to write in Belarusian. Perhaps some of them were not Soviet, but they didn’t demonstrate their sentiments of opposition. The state allowed for one official part of Soviet Belarusian culture, which was kind of Belarusian ghetto.

OS: And you traveled throughout Belarus in order to study the part of the culture which was not sponsored by the state?

AB: Yes, so I could see the historical sites. For me it was a blind study of Belarus. At the time there were no normal travel guides. It was all considered unnecessary and was being destroyed. From various small articles I gathered information about where certain monuments and historical sites might be, and I created a route for myself. For a month I traveled around Belarus, either by foot or hitchhiking.

OS: It is remarkable to see how culture and politics overlap in your personal and Belarusian history, how this purely cultural interest ultimately triggered your conversion to the political activity.

AB: Yes, during this trip I met these artists who put me in touch with my better organized peers. After a year of contacts with them, I learned about the existence of a political and conspiratorial group with its own structure and rules, whose goal was the independence of Belarus. This was already not a merely cultural goal, nor merely cultural program. They called themselves a political party, but in reality they were just about fifteen people. But they were very motivated. I joined them. We paid membership fees, were buying type writers, and circulating samizdat. We often printed the negatives of photographed banned books. A part of Belarusian literature was banned for one reason or another, and was kept in special archives. Those who had access to them photographed them, and then I brought the negatives to Gomel, where the negatives were printed by red light in bathrooms in the old-fashioned way. We then glued the pages into the covers of permitted Belarusian books and read them like underground literature. This was 1982 to 1984. In 1984 I graduated from the university.

OS: And was the liberation of Belarus understood as liberation from the Soviet regime, or from Russia?

AB: Both. We considered liberation as creation of an independent and democratic state. In the 80s dreams of an independent Belarus were completely fantastical, and moreover, very dangerous. If the KGB caught wind of our activities, the whole thing would have ended very badly. We were lucky; in our group there was not a single informant.

OS: That’s rare.

AB: Yes indeed, but the KGB was all around us, because one of the goals that we set for ourselves was the formation of “informal” groups. Perestroika began in 1985. I served in the army for a year and a half from 1985 to 1986. When I returned in the autumn of 1986 the situation had completely changed. It wasn’t clear what direction we were headed, but there were already various informal groups and discussion clubs. Rather quickly a network of informal groups covered all of Belarus. in 1987, with just one year of development, there were already over one hundred organizations involved in preserving monuments, folklore, historical research, restoration, ecology, and culture. For example, a group of technology students started publishing a magazine “Студэнцкая думка” (Student Thought). And two young writers and I who were part of our underground group called “Liberation,” created an organization of young Belarusian writers that created quite a stir. The group was rather scandalous and quite successful. At first there were seven of us, but after three months we were eighty strong. We practically gathered everybody in our generation who wanted a change.

OS: And what did you do?

AB: It was an explosion of freedom. We traveled around Belarus, listened to lectures, helped with excavations and restorations, took part in ecological protests, and, most importantly, we gathered and discussed our texts, and organized group readings. We called ourselves the Comradeship of Young Literati, “Tuteishye” (Тутэйшые), which in translation means, “those who are from here,” or “locals” (in Russian “тутошние”). Instead of saying that we were Belarusians, we referred to ourselves as simply locals. This meant: “Are we Belarusian? The language is dying out, the culture is in shambles. We are simply locals (tuteyshie), not Belarusians. We’re not yet Belarusians.” At the time that name was also a challenge to others.

OS: Locals? This name was meant critically to emphasize the lack of identification with the Soviet State on the one hand, and the lack of Belarusian national identity, on the other.

AB: Yes, locals… One of our goals was to strike the bell and to awaken a sense of national self-consciousness among Belarusians. We met practically every week and discussed what we could accomplish together, what kind of burning questions we had, the questions that we needed to turn our attention to. That was really important because we didn’t have sufficient education in a political sense, and we didn’t have enough new ideas. The youth organization gave us the opportunity to discuss, create, and publish. Then for the first time we openly proclaimed that we had our own coat of arms, our own non-Soviet flag, and that we had our own rather rich history that was withheld from us.

OS: Since your “Belarusian platform” was not merely about language, but also about a worldview and civil stance, I would like to ask you about the concrete topics you were interested in as a literary scholar.

AB: As a specialist in literature, I published several articles about the banned poetry, several dozen poems by the Belarusian classic Yanka Kupala. For the first time in many years, I analyzed the works of Belarusian writers and social activists whose names had been erased from the history of the cultural and political life of Belarus.

OS: Why did they ban Yanka Kupala’s poetry?

AB: Because it was anti-Soviet. In 1918 he wanted an independent Belarus. He was very wary of the arrival of the Bolsheviks. When the Bolsheviks were not there he wrote the marching hymns for the Belarusian army. Yanka Kupala wrote also other poems which were banned for touching on this national problematic.

OS: I would like to ask you about the Perestroika period. What did Perestroika mean for Belarus? How was all this political activity connected with Perestroika? Was it Perestroika that make this all possible?

AB: Yes. All of our activity became possible within the framework of Perestroika, but it seemed to me that we went a step ahead. The generation before us, born right after the war, were also rather active. But they fell under repressions. When the so-called nationalist groups were discovered in the 70s, some of the activists were fired from work, others were removed from their studies, and they even revoked some scholar’s PhD. It also affected artists and historians. Some were permitted to publish and put on exhibitions, but some were prevented from doing the same. Therefore, there were significantly less activists left from that generation, and psychologically they were impeded by their previous negative experience. In the 1960s and 1970s they were in deep defense and constantly under surveillance. When Perestroika began in the mid-1980s they were very wary, and did not believe it was truly happening. Based on their life experience it was not clear to them where this was all going. As for us, well we weren’t afraid and flew forward, and we tried as best as we could to accomplish and seize this opportunity … Although it wasn’t clear to us either how it would all end. Would they arrest us? Would they stop us, or not? In 1987 and 1988 the situation was still very uncertain. For example, they were expelling me from my graduate program. There was a big meeting at the Belarusian Academy of Sciences where I was a graduate student, and the scholar and writer Ivan Naumenko figuratively said, “I can’t understand how one graduate student could screw up two members of the Academy and eight professors!”

OS: Why?

AB: Because in 1988 I was among the organizers of the demonstration called Dzyady (Дзяды), and was detained, brought before a judge, and fined.

OS: What kind of demonstration was it? Can you explain what Dzyady means, and where you got the idea?

AB: The word signifies the traditional commemoration of our dead ancestors. It’s an ancient holiday of sorts that we have for the departed loved ones in our region, in Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belarus. In the 19th century Adam Mickiewicz who was from Novogrudok wrote an entire poem called Dzyady. Evocation of this holiday was one of the ways we used to show the terrifying results of Stalin’s repressions. We first organized a demonstration in 1987. It was fifty years after the mass repressions of 1937, and we demonstrated without state permission. We did however apply for authorization beforehand, but the authorities didn’t even respond. Unexpectedly two hundred people showed up. It was one of the first of those kinds of actions that started to happen in Minsk after a long period of time when nothing was happening.

OS: How did you get the word out?

AB: Well, by word of mouth between informal organizations, writers, artists, and among those who were hooked by the idea, a lot of people who heard about it joined in.

OS: You protested the Stalin era repressions by using a traditional holiday. How did the authorities react to your activities?

AB: Yes. It was, of course, unexpected. The authorities had to outlaw the holiday. Even though we didn’t officially celebrate it in the Soviet Belarus, it still wasn’t explicitly forbidden in the Soviet times. The authorities did not know how to react. They ended up in a very uncomfortable position. We gathered in the center of Minsk at the monument to Yanka Kupala, and we read the names of the poets who were shot on October 30th, 1937, some writers spoke, one of our older friends sang a song. Our guys from “Tuteishye” read poetry. It all turned out quite beautifully.

The next year in 1988 when we started organizing Dzyady, the authorities did not permit our demonstration. We had a month-long fight with the authorities where they tried to somehow prohibit and smear our actions. They formed a security detachment in charge of protecting the monuments in order to control us, and it didn’t work, but in the end they managed to prohibit us. I was one of the organizers along with the poet Anatoly Sys, who also applied for permission for the demonstration. They summoned us to the prosecutor’s office, and officially warned us that we would be held responsible for the possible mass disorder to come. It really felt like they could just imprison us at any moment, provoke some kind of disorder, and that would be it. We put up the announcements all around the city. We secretly printed twelve thousand little invitations somewhere in the institute of physics, where they printed drafts. We had friends there. But the authorities made the mistake of announcing on the radio that our demonstration was prohibited. This is how it became well known from that moment on. As a result, much to our surprise, in 1988 thousands of people came to celebrate Dzyady. The year before, in 1987, only two-hundred people came, but in 1988 ten to twelve thousand people showed up.

OS: That was already after they opened the NKVD execution site in Kurapaty? [3]

AB: Yes, that happened soon thereafter. Information about Kurapaty was made public in the summer of 1988. The information was already gathered and prepared a year before. Zenon Poznyak, the man who had been investigating this issue, did not reveal the truth about Kurapaty earlier because he was afraid that all the evidence could be destroyed. He gathered testimony from eye-witnesses from neighboring villages. He gathered material evidence from the digs of the “shadow” diggers, who were probably looking for gold in the mass graves. There were bones along with the rotting clothes of the executed scattered about. But most importantly, his article about Kurapaty was based on the memories of the people who were young at the time, or even young children, and who saw all this with their own eyes. The area was surrounded by tall fences, but children climbed over it, hunting for berries or mushrooms. They would witness the executions, but didn’t speak of it their entire lives. People who lived nearby would hear the gunfire from the executions, and some of them even had family members in the NKVD who took part in the killings. Poznyak gathered dozens of pieces of living evidence and held on to it in absolute secrecy, and once the opportunity arose and the newspaper “Literature and Art” started publishing bolder things during Perestroika, such as banned poetry and information about the repression of writers, he arranged with the editor to publish his materials… When they published his article it was, of course, an explosion.

OS: It was one of the very first revelations about the execution sites, right?

AB: At the same time there were findings in Ukraine and Katyn. And it became very topical. But for us it was, of course, the place of foremost significance because the scale of it was enormous. Tens of thousands of people were executed there.

OS: Did you learn about this from the newspaper?

AB: Yes, and that newspaper had an edition of twenty or thirty thousand copies, which is pretty large for Belarus. Peole read it to pieces. It was a bestseller, and that information of course significantly changed society. The truth about these mass executions resonated with people in a powerful way. Initially, we didn’t plan to lead the demonstration Dzyady of 1988 to Kurapaty. We gathered at the Moscow Cemetery, where famous Belarusian poets and artists were buried, but the militia dispersed the demonstration with batons and tear gas, and detained dozens of people, including me. It felt like a catastrophe to me, we didn’t even get to hold our rally. However, people organized themselves and divided themselves up; and then one group went to Kurapaty and another group of a few thousand people went to an open field on a hill and held the rally there. There were so many people that militia didn’t know what to do with them.

The community’s reaction was completely different from what the authorities expected. The dispersion of the rally caused intense indignation and anger, and from that moment one a democratic movement began rapidly developing, quickly becoming a social and political movement that had as its goal the removal of the communists from power. By not admitting their crimes the authorities were in fact confirming that they were the successors of the Stalinist ideological foundations of the 1930s. This was a punch in the government’s gut. Plus, at the time the economic situation was so bad that people had nothing to eat. That combined with the state’s desire to cover up the Chernobyl catastrophe, and our efforts to reveal the true picture of what happened there caused everything to evolve very quickly. This all lead to the signing of the 1991 Belovezha Accords. In 1990 the first elections were held, and a few democratic deputies entered the Supreme Soviet. It was a small group, but they were very active. They managed to force the Supreme Soviet to implement democratic reforms in 1990 and 1991. With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 Belarus at last became an independent state.

This all happened right before our eyes. If in 1987 we were an underground organization, four years later in 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed, and I became a deputy of the Minsk City Council, I was twenty-nine years old. We had real opportunities to influence the general situation of our country at various levels.

OS: You became known in connection with Kurapaty and through the organization of these demonstrations?

AB: Well, in narrow circles.

OS: Clearly the circles weren’t that narrow if you were elected for city council…

AB: No, it wasn’t because of Kurapaty. First, they elected me as director of the Literary Museum of Maksim Bogdanovich, who was a classic Belarusian writer, and a modernist. People knew me as the director of the museum, of course, because earlier I worked at the Museum of Belarusian Literary History. There was an election campaign throughout the Soviet Union. Directors were elected at all institutions and levels, directors of factories, businesses, collective farms, etc., and so they happened to select me as the director of the museum.

OS: Did you have to stop your graduate studies then? Or did you complete them?

AB: In 1989 I completed my graduate course work and wrote a dissertation, but I did not defend it, because I became the director of the museum. I ran for municipal elections as part of the Belarusian People’s Front, which was a social movement for Perestroika, and as the director of the museum. The Belarusian People’s Front was a proto-party, we can’t even call it a party because it contained people with many different political views, but it was a large democratic movement. We actively advocated for our campaign, and people believed us and voted. I was, however, very young, but that’s what it was like back then.

OS: I am interested in your experience with official state institutions such as the university, academy, and the museum… On the one hand we have these governmental institutions and on the other hand we have your informal cultural-political activism. How did the two coincide? Did they allow you to do all that within these state-sponsored organizations?

AB: Well, at the university they didn’t come around to expel us by the time we graduated. The KGB did however show up right after our graduation in 1984, but they were too late. They were trying to kick me out of the graduate program at the Academy. But two weeks after they said in a general meeting, “that’s it, you’re expelled!” I went to the director to pick up my documents and he said to me, “just go on working, Ales, go on working.” They played as if they were expelling a black sheep for the Academy’s party committee and for the KGB, but in fact they were protecting me. I was lucky. But the minister of culture didn’t touch me at the museum. I looked at the museum as a platform for realization of my initiatives and ideas.

The museum is in the center of the city, a great location. And everybody was gathering there, and all kinds of things were done there. Uniates gathered there, along with Christian democrats, democrats, youth organizations, the Belarusian People’s Front, and worker movements, and they even held various kinds of concerts there. In the early years the first independent democratic Belarusian newspapers, “Svoboda” (Freedom) and “Nasha Niva” (Our Pasture), worked there. I allowed all the democratic groups and initiatives to use the museum’s address for legal purposes. Several dozens of NGOs were registered in a small room of just eight square meters. The minister of culture did not bother us. The major thing for them was that we did our work in a professional manner. And we worked well, because I had a young collective that was prepared, educated, and motivated to work hard. We opened new branches of the museum, and installed new expositions and exhibitions. We worked really hard, and others took us as their model. We even did an exposition at the museum of Maksim Bogdanovich in Yaroslavl, where the Bogdanovich family lived at the beginning of the 20th century.

OS: How did you go from that type of activity to human rights? And why in 1996? At that time you created a human rights center, what was the reason for doing that?

AB: Already back in 1988 we organized “The Martyrologue of Belarus,” it was an organization dedicated to memorializing the Stalin era repressions. We were collecting information about the repressions. One of the problems our organization was addressing was the question of how to memorialize Kurapaty, and so gathering information, preserving the memory of the repressions, finding survivors and helping them has been part of my work since 1988. Then when I became a deputy of the City Council I joined the city commission for the rehabilitation of the victims of political repressions. We worked on the rehabilitation of the people who, for various reasons, haven’t been rehabilitated yet.

OS: Did you have access to KGB documents?

AB: Yes, the access to the documents of the victims was guaranteed by the format of our work. If there was an official request from people, then KGB would give us information about that person, and we would make decision about rehabilitation, and the decision would become legal.

OS: And now that committee probably doesn’t exist?

AB: No, that committee has been disbanded as soon as Lukashenko took power. Everything was dissolved.

OS: But the committee had worked for several years?

AB: Yes, yes. And while I was a deputy, this all was interesting and important to me, and I took part in it all, but…

OS: 1996?

AB: Lukashenko rose to power in 1994…

OS: And you created a human rights center in 1996?

AB: Yes, he came to power in 1994, and the repressions began. After the first crackdown on demonstrations in 1988, they practically ceased to combat the demonstrations. There were some clashes with the authorities, for example in 1990 there were an anti-communist demonstration. They opened a criminal case about that demonstration, but they still didn’t disperse it. The first demonstration that they actually dispersed in 1996 was a march called the Chernobyl Way (in Belarusian, Чарнoбыльскі шлях), dedicated to the problem of recovery from the atomic disaster in Chernobyl. These marches took place annually since 1989, when the Belarusian People’s Front raised the Chernobyl issue, and showed that tens of thousands of people were still living on contaminated land, where they shouldn’t have been living. The government was concealing this information, and when these facts were made public it really angered people, and so in 1990-1991 the government was forced to relocate those living on polluted land. From that moment on, the Chernobyl Way march became a tradition, and we held it every year to memorialize the catastrophe in Chernobyl. In 1996 the protest took on an anti-Lukashenko character. About forty-thousand people gathered, which is a pretty large crowd for Minsk, and they mercilessly dispersed it. And yet again we found ourselves in the same situation as we were in 1988. We organized a quick response team to gather information about people who were arrested because they would hide them, and no one knew where they were held. Generally, people were imprisoned on administrative charges, two organizers were imprisoned on criminal charges.

OS: And what were these charges?

AB: Public disturbance. “Public disturbance” was a provision of both administrative and criminal law. I attended a few of these legal proceedings as a witness.

OS: Not long ago Arseny Roginsky, the late director of “The Memorial,” spoke of the direct connection between the historical research and political activism, and about a connection between the collection of facts about the crimes the government committed against its citizens and the fight for a different democratic form of government that respects and defends human rights. This is exactly the connection I see here, the connections between recognizing the rights of those killed in Kurapaty and the political activism recognizing the rights of the living citizens and your human rights work for acknowledging the victims of historical and of contemporary crimes of the government. What was your experience in this human rights organization in 1996? How long has it been around?

AB: We have been around for twenty-two years. We started to develop it as a public initiative with practically no money at all. We worked for two years as volunteers as we looked for money. I just grabbed a plastic bag and walked around rallies, and people would toss me “bunnies” (money) – that’s what we called Belarusian currency because some animals were printed on it. Bags because of the inflation money was cheap. We would give out this money to the families of the victims of political repressions, because ever since 1996 there was essentially never a time where there were no political prisoners. And that’s how the bitter opposition between civil society and government began, and it continues to this day.

OS: And the government didn’t object to the existence of this organization?

AB: It was an informal initiative. At first, in 1997, we registered as a city center. It was possible back then. I still worked as the museum director then, and was detained for the first time in 1997 for 24 hours. Several months after I was released, they summoned me to the ministry and said, “Choose; either you continue your political activities, or you are the director, because we’re being strangled from above.

OS: And for what reason did they detain you?

AB: Because we picketed and protested against detaining the activists. They detained me for 24 hours pretty often, or fined me. There were literally dozens of people being detained. I was younger then, and I was eager to fight. The years 1997, 98, 99 and 2000 were very rich in activism.

OS: Those were very liberal years in Russia.

AB: Those were terrible years for us. We were losing one position after another, and it all went along with the tightening of laws. They created even harsher laws regarding public activism, dissemination of information, and public organizations. The first re-registration process began in 1999. But still we continued developing as an organization, because there was such public …

OS: … support …

AB: Need, I would say. We simply saw that our work was needed.

OS: And did you accomplish anything? Did you see any results? Did they release anyone?

AB: Yes, yes, we even had the opportunity to participate in the legal criminal proceedings as public defenders. But then they forbade us to act in this role. We participated in proceedings, we connected with the defense lawyers, and searched for help for the victims of political repression. In 1998 I definitively left the museum and started to work professionally at the Human Rights Center “Viasna” (Spring). We constantly had problems with the authorities. They searched our offices, confiscated our first computers, and oppressed us in various other ways. But the group of people that had gathered around me were truly brave.

OS: And how did you financially support this organization? Through donations?

AB: We received our first grant in 1998. And from then on we searched for legal grant opportunities, whichever we could find. At first it was legal, but eventually the government closed everything and created laws making it impossible. No human rights organization has received a single legal grant since 2000. All of that help is called “humanitarian aid” and it passes through the Office of Presidential Affairs, and nobody ever gets anything. Neither the Helsinki Committee, nor journalist organizations, human rights organizations, nor us for that matter, have received any type of official support.

OS: Are there many human rights organizations in Belarus?

AB: There are quite a few because there is a need for such organizations. In spite of the fact that the government is constantly trying to limit us, there are people who take the risk and continue their work, thank God. I’m not just talking about people in our organization, there are others too. Generally, in the last few years young volunteers have become more and more numerous. For a long time there had been a problem that young people simply didn’t show up. They preferred to get involved with political youth organizations, but now they volunteer for various human rights organizations, and that is really good. This is not political activity, but all the same it is activism and what they are doing is real and effective, and people see that.

OS: And you were the leader of “Viasna”?

AB: Yes, I am still the chair of this organization. We have a council and regional branches. We are active in sixteen cities all over Belarus. We are always looking for support not just in Minsk, but also in every region in Belarus. That fact is important to us because it gives us the opportunity to gather information about human rights violations, and to monitor elections all throughout the country. We work closely with other human rights organizations. The Belarusian Helsinski Committee has branches in various cities. Then PEN International and the Belarusian Association of Journalists defend the freedom of the press and free speech, along with directly defending journalists themselves. We also work in tandem with other human rights organizations who might not be as strong as we are, but nevertheless are quite active. All of this is important for the creation of an environment that is conducive to human rights. It is easier to kill one single organization, but our statements regarding political prisoners are usually signed by ten to twelve different organizations. When many different human rights organizations all declare someone a political prisoner it is very difficult to refuse such declaration. Working together is crucial for us, and life simply forced us to stick together, and for the time being that is how we carry on.

OS: What lead to your arrest specifically, … if I may ask?

AB: Of course. In 2003-2004 the government purged the sector of nongovernment organizations, just as they did in Russia in 2012. In Russia they called them, “foreign agents,” here they withdrew various organizations’ registration and effectively liquidated them. They conducted a concentrated campaign. With the decision of the Supreme Court they eliminated the registration of about three-hundred nongovernmental organizations. And we were affected by this purge. They took away our registration in 2003. As a result, we were yet again an informal organization. For me, psychologically, it was not a catastrophe, because back in the 80s I had experience with exactly the same situation. Back then there was no registration and everything was done de facto.

OS: Under what pretext did they close your organization?

AB: They used a rather formal pretext. The government found fault with us for allegedly breaking law as we observed the elections in 2001. Two years went by, and then they took away our registration. We turned to the United Nations Committee on Human Rights. The Committee found the Belarusian Court’s decision to be unfounded. They requested that the Belarusian government renew our registration, but the government, of course, did nothing. They simply ignored the U.N. Committee and their request regarding our registration. In 2006 the Belarusian authorities criminalized activities organized by unregistered organizations, and things suddenly became really dangerous.

They started to investigate mainly young activists, those involved in informal youth organizations and groups. They still considered whether to harass us or not, but for the time being they didn’t. In 2007-2008 a particularly strong wave of propaganda against us came out in all the government owned means of information, including television, practically implicating us as enemies of the ruling power. But at that same time, in 2007, the government began flirting with the European Union, and Lukashenko was required to release all political prisoners, and so they left us alone as well.

This is how it went on until the presidential elections of 2010 which ended up in a crackdown on all oppositional parties, and many people were imprisoned. Dozens of criminal proceedings were held against political activists, and in the midst of that mess they did not forget about human rights organizations and set their sights on our organization. The problem was that the financial grants were transferred to our accounts in Poland and Lithuania, and we reported directly to these foreign grant giving foundations and organizations. The KGB gathered information on the accounts that belonged to me and to the deputy director of our organization, Valentine Stefanovich, and the Belarusian Ministry of Justice appealed to the governments of Poland and Lithuania. In Poland the General Prosecutor’s Office dealt with this issue, and in Lithuania the Minister of Justice was responsible for doing the same. The Department of Financial Investigations, responsible for conducting the formal review, ended up receiving this information because there was an agreement between these governments about the information exchange in the struggle against corruption. But it was clear that on the Belarusian site, the KGB was behind the Ministry’s audition request.

OS: I heard that the Polish government later apologized for this.

AB: As did the Lithuanian government. They didn’t think that their bureaucratic system under the auspices of the fight against corruption would give up financial information about human rights defenders and their organizations. It was a shock for them too, at least in a political sense. They made an official apology to my wife because I was already in prison.

OS: And what were the accusations against you?

AB: Tax evasion, because the money that went to the organization passed through my personal account and through the account of my deputy. Well, at least what they found. The sum found in Valentin Stefanovich’s account was not large enough to constitute a criminal offense. They punished him through an administrative procedure, whereas the sum in my account was larger. They seized all of our grants and the total sum was large enough to incur a criminal offense for tax evasion. However, before the trial they gave me the opportunity to escape.

OS: Escape, you mean emigrate?

AB: Yes, they just wanted me to leave. Then they would be able to say that this so-called human rights advocate is actually a vicious criminal, who doesn’t pay taxes, and that’s why he left the country. That is how they wanted to compromise my reputation and the reputation of Viasna, and of all human rights organizations. They waited for a month and a half but I didn’t go anywhere. I didn’t do anything on purpose, because I knew that there would be no way to defend my reputation from abroad. No matter what, you’re guilty, if you ran away. I was happy with the court hearing because it came out that this was all a KGB operation. The financial review at the core of the process was indeed requested by the KGB. The information and the xerocopied documents, their argument was based on, were obtained illegally. We didn’t know that! And the KGB documents were all part of the trial. They showed the documents to me and throughout the trial I had been reading them. The documents demonstrated that the head of the KGB wrote to the state inspection agency: “I am requesting permission to review the computers that were confiscated from the “Viasna” offices. Perhaps you would find information about Bialiatksi and Stefanovich that would serve as the foundation for criminal charges against them.” There were such documents in our case. Everyone was in shock. The trial made it clear that there was a meeting between two KGB officers and a prosecutor where they discussed tactics concerning the review of our accounts. All of this information came to light during the trial, as did the documents proving that money from the Dutch government and from our Swedish partners was given in support of our organization’s activities. Still they considered the money to be part of my personal income, even though on the eve of the trial the Dutch government sent an official letter where they confirmed that they received complete records on how the funds were spent, and had no complaints against us. It also became clear during the trial that the majority of the grant was spent in Lithuania.

By sending me to prison the government and the KGB thought that they were sending a message to the entire human rights community in Belarus – look, the same will happen to you if you continue. At that time we were very active because dozens of people were sitting in jail. We were crying out in their support at the top of our lungs, appealing to international organizations such as the OSCE, the European Council (even though we are not the members of the European Council), and the European Union, to do something to get our government to release political prisoners.

OS: Did you return to your literary activities in prison? You published your first book after graduation, and there was a kind of break, or did you continue to write throughout that period?

AB: There was a while when I stopped writing at all. It felt irrelevant, as if the printed word’s time had passed. Nevertheless in 2006 I published a book Пробежки по берегу Женевского озера (Jogging Along the Shore of Lake Geneva), a collection of essays about human rights work, observations, and various travels – so I was still writing. After ending up in prison I suddenly had the time that I didn’t have before … However, paradoxically, I actually didn’t have much time there at all.

OS: Imprisoning intelligentsia is dangerous because in prison they start writing … Think of Gramsci…

AB: If they give them that kind of opportunity, or at least don’t bother them … I was writing and sending off what I wrote in letters, although all letters had to pass through a censoring process, and was sent out with a stamp “checked,” or returned.

OS: So you wrote in the form of letters?

AB: Those were letters that I wrote to my colleagues. Two topics were taboo: anything about Lukashenko, or about the prison location, which at first was the pre-trial detention center and then a penal colony. But we were allowed to write, for example, memoires. I practically wrote an entire book-length essay about the troubled period of 2010 before I was imprisoned, more precisely before August 2011. The book was called Ртутное серебро жизни (The Silver Mercury of Life). There was not much there about Lukashenko. If I wrote about him I would mask it by either writing “he” or something similarly ambiguous. I depicted those troubled months, and each moment connected with their efforts to force me out of Belarus, and everything about the arrests, and the crackdowns on demonstrations during elections. I depicted it all in detail. The searches were endless. They searched our offices three times after the elections. They immediately ripped all of our computers right out of our offices the first night after the elections. A month later they raided our offices again. We were on the ground floor, so my colleagues took their laptops and jumped out the windows in a neighboring kitchen. They evacuated. Valentine Stefanovich and I opened the doors together. Much to the surprise of the KBG agents they found an empty room. Afterwards they summoned me to the Attorney General’s office and gave me a warning. Then they searched us again. I was in Vilnius when they searched us that time. I wildly screamed on the phone, “Don’t let them in!” When my colleagues gave phone to a militia man I yelled at him, so he started apologizing, “oh well, they sent us here…” Strange.

OS: So being imprisoned gave you time to document all this history.

AB: Yes, and support of my colleagues…

OS: During your time in prison did your organization continue its work?

AB: Yes, and this was the strongest moral support for me, because the government’s goal was to destroy our organization, and they failed to do that. The organization remained, and no one left. Everyone continued to work even though they confiscated our office space. The office was registered under my name as personal property, and so they confiscated the apartment. This was a huge challenge for us. We did not know if the organization would survive or not. I did my best to support them through my letters. I would tell them that I was fine. “You guys keep doing your job, and I’ll keep doing mine – sitting in jail.” All that I wrote in prison can be divided into two parts: everything that I wanted to say about literature, because during that time my desire to write about literature came back, and the other part is made up of memories and essays about what was going on in the country. These were memories about the 80’s and 90’s. There I recorded everything that I’m telling you now.

OS: It is considered that you introduced the term “Belarusian prison literature”?

AB: I don’t know if I introduced it or not, however I did write about our poets Vladimir Negliaev’s and Aleksandr Feduta’s first books; they were arrested in December of 2010. They wrote their first books in prison, and when I was imprisoned they sent me their books. I received them and wrote a short essay about them, and recalled that in the past other Belarusian writers wrote from prison as far back as in the Tsarist times, not to mention those who wrote from prison under Stalin between the 30’s and the 50’s.

OS: So Lukashenko, so to say, revitalized this literary genre …

AB: In that essay I first used the expression “Belarusian prison literature,” and it took on. After that other political activists who had been imprisoned published their memoires. We then started publishing an entire series of Belarusian prison literature. Six books came out, all written by former political prisoners. We started this literary process.

OS: It is interesting how in your story the development of literature directly intersects with politics, and how in response to politics new genres appear or reappear, just as the genre of “martyrologue” appeared after the discovery of Kurapaty, and how this genre of prison literature came to be…

AB: That’s not new. A rather large corpus of similar literature exists in Russia, not to mention the books written by Andrey Marchenko, Vladimir Bukovski, Pyotr Grigorenko, and the memoirs of Andrey Sakharov, along with other political prisoners such as Eduard Kuznetsov, and Yuri Orlov among others. They left behind very powerful books that became part of the canon. They aren’t just any ordinary notes. They have been a source of amazement for me for a lont time. I wanted that we also have something similar in order to record what is happening right now, because right now in Belarus this period of political persecutions is not over – it continues. It is vital that this remains in people’s cultural memory.

OS: You found a kindred spirit in the literature of Russian political dissidents.

AB: Yes, and not only in Russia. I admired the collection of poetry called Песня прощания (Farewell Song), written by the former Turkmen minister of foreign affairs Batyr Berdiev who was imprisoned in 2002 by the Turkmen government; he then simply disappeared. But he managed to prepare a small collection of poems which by some miracle made it out of the Turkmen prison and was released in Russia. Aesthetically speaking the poems are not strong, Russian, after all, is not his native tongue, and he wrote there under whatever conditions, but this is definitely a literary testament to the hundreds, if not thousands, of political prisoners in Turkmenistan. Almost twenty years went by and still no one knows Batyr Berdiev’s fate; we do not know if he’s alive or dead, imprisoned or free. These things concern our entire post-Soviet community.

And my Georgian friends. Levan Berdzenishvili, a politician and social activist, wrote his memoirs about the 1980’s. He still managed to experience that period before they imprisoned him for three years. Not long ago, he wrote his memoirs about the 1980’s, and his prison entitled Святая мгла: последние дни ГУЛАГa (The Sacred Darkness: The Final Days of the GULAG). This tradition comes from the severe realities of our lives, starting in the Soviet Union, and then under post-Soviet regimes where a confrontation between civil society and authorities continues to this day.

During my time in prison I wrote, and wrote, and wrote. Some of what I wrote was published while I was still in prison. Some of it is still coming out now, because my goal was to write at least one page a day. While in prison I worked in a garment factory as a packer, and that took up most of my time. Whether you liked it or not you had to work for eight hours in addition to inspections. We had one day off, Sunday, one day to pull yourself back together. On Sundays there was always something to fix, or clean, or what-have-you. There was almost no free time. I adapted, and had about one or two hours a day, sometimes three, where I responded to letters and managed to write my one page a day.

OS: Three-hundred and sixty-five pages a year.

AB: Yes, each year, and I spent almost three years there, so I wrote quite a few pages. That kind of thing doesn’t happen when you’re free.

OS: It is ironic that your imprisonment not only gave you time to record all of this, but also drew international attention to human rights in Belarus, and to you personally, resulting in you becoming well known throughout the world in addition to receiving many international awards.

AB: These awards were sent rather as “black spots” to the Belarusian government: “You should do something! You should release political prisoners, and not just Bialiatski, but others too…” These awards were acts of solidarity and pressure on the Belarusian government. I understood perfectly well that the prize wasn’t as much for me as it was a tool to draw attention to human rights issues in Belarus. The same thing happened with Oyub Titiev in Chechnya. In 2018 he received the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize from Europe, and I received the same award earlier in 2013. I was its first laureate. After me my good friend from Azerbaijan Anar Mammadli won the prize. He was involved in monitoring elections and he too spent time in prison. In 2017, before Oyub, the Turkish lawyer Murat Arslan was awarded the prize, who is in prison now. It is a sad prize to win… It turns out that they only give this award to prisoners and those who have seriously suffered….

OS: All your friends… Your biography gives quite a strong impression of fearlessness from the beginning to the end. Where does this fearlessness come from in a society built on fear?

AB: Well, it is difficult to talk about fearlessness, because we are all products of the society in which we live. Still there are some compromises that you make in life. They’re there and they’re not going anywhere. Uncompromising people don’t last long in Belarus, or in any authoritarian societies. There system either eats them up or tosses them out.

OS: But you knew and understood that you could be arrested at any moment during any of your activities…

AB: I was intensely motivated to change life for the better, and to do my best to at least do something, and that motivation remains to this day, I want to do something more with the time I have.

OS: Does that motivation come from your family, or just from your personal character?

AB: I don’t know. Maybe it comes from a little bit of everything, because I wouldn’t say that my family had a strong spirit of opposition. At the same time my family was cold toward the Soviet Union. My mother just laughed the Soviet reality off whenever she could, even though she was a simple worker. My father however perceived the Soviet power as something foreign. They were forced to leave Belarus because practically everything was taken from them. They escaped Belarus because of the famine that occurred in Belarus at the end of the 30’s. My father suffered from serious trauma his whole life, because at one point they had a financially secure life, but then they ended up fighting for survival. I remember how they dragged him to join the party. He was also a worker. They would come and say, “Come, Ustinovich, you’re such outstanding worker.” But he would always refuse: “No, I’m not worthy.” And then he would discuss it with my mother: “They must think I’m an idiot.” As to my mother, it bothered her that he would have to contribute to the party from the worker’s salary.

OS: The Soviet authorities prohibited any kind of grassroots initiative, along with any kind of activism, and yet your whole life is based on activism and various kinds of initiatives and organizing activities; where does this come from?

AB: It happened gradually. All of my years at the university were a farewell to the Soviet ideology and customs, which had been hand-fed to us since birth. Everything happened quickly, but unevenly. It was not as if I just woke up as a different person one morning. I was in the communist youth party until 1988, until it almost fell apart. It was my way of compromising with Soviet reality. If I were truly and honestly one-hundred percent anti-Soviet I would have left that party a lot sooner, but I didn’t. What really opened my eyes was stumbling upon the archives where I saw the names of banned writers, like Ales Garun, a wonderful Belarusian poet who wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century. This made an impresssion. Garun was banned because he was a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR), and one of the members of the Belarusian Military Commission, which was in charge of creating the army of Belarusian People’s Republic in 1918-1920 to protect Belarus as an independent state. He was simply erased from literature and history. No matter that he served ten years of hard labor in the camps under the Tsarist regime. They imprisoned him when he was barely twenty years old for his work in an underground printing house of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in Minsk. No matter that he became a classic of Belarusian literature and the Belarusian literature of the 1920’s all the way until the Stalin era is unimaginable without him. No matter what enormous talent he had, from 1931 to 1988 this writer was simply erased from our culture. He was only published abroad. And there are dozens of other names that met the same fate. Learning about this shocked me. It was clear that we were being robbed of what we should know, of what should be a normal part of our culture. It incited protest.

OS: Ironically, activism, the desire to change one’s situation was presumably at the foundation of Soviet ideology. Revolutionaries wanted to change the Tsarist regime, and free many national minorities from oppression… But liberating revolutionary ideas of the pre-Bolshevik Russian Empire ultimately transformed into the rigid Soviet dictatorship. To a certain degree your opposition to Soviet oppression goes back to these liberating, revolutionary ideas of the many revolutionary groups fighting for independence already back in the late nineteenth- early twentieth century…

AB: Yes, we also wanted to change Belarusian reality but then Lukashenko came over our shoulders…We still have not achieved our desired outcome. For the moment everything remains uncertain.

OS: Is there any hope?

AB: Well, yes, of course. But it is a slow process. At the end of the 80’s and the beginning of the 90’s we thought we just needed to take one decisive step forward, then the democrats would take power, and all the changes would be final. We thought everything would go the same way as it did in the Baltic countries and in Poland. We saw it happen. These were all demonstrable examples of positive change, that all took place in countries belonging to the so-called socialist camp. It seemed to us that we just needed a bit more time and then it would all change for us. But no. A significant portion of the population lived under different laws, about which Svetlana Aleksievich wrote in Second Hand Time. The majority of people perceived the collapse of the Soviet Union as a catastrophe. For us it was a liberation; the prison of nations fell apart in the end. We couldn’t imagine that this would happen in our lifetime. But 1994 was like being doused in ice water. It was only then that I understood that we had a long march ahead of us. It was a process of returning to the past. It was clear that Lukashenko came not just for a year or two. So we had to be patient and simply do what we felt we should do, and the rest would be what it would be. He was almost impeached in 1996. History could have drastically changed, but not much depended on us. At that time everything depended on the deputies of the Supreme Soviet, and those who were in charge of making decisions. Unfortunately, they were not able to actively prove themselves, and as a result Lukashenko stayed in power and usurped this power completely. We then understood that this will be a long process, and in an open confrontation one would only lose. It means we needed different methods, based on profound societal changes. If we don’t help society to change, after one Lukashenko will simply come another. We see this happening all the time. When the first Orange Revolution took place in Ukraine President Viktor Yshchenko had all the power to make changes. What exactly kept him from enacting democratic reforms? The elites surrounding him were not ready. And the society did not force him to make these changes, as a result they returned to Yanukovich, who practically led Ukraine to catastrophe.

OS: Approximately what happened also in Russia…

AB: And in Syria? Revolutionary spirit passes quickly, but the social problems remain. That is why during the last few years our programs have been directed at supporting democratic activists, education, and at changing such crucial things as the death penalty and torture, which are integral parts of this regime. If changes occur in people’s minds, and in their system of values, only then we will win, but such changes won’t happen in one year’s time. We have to work calmly and diligently and there will be enough work to do for a very long time. Yet again, we see how quickly people return to reactionary positions even in democratic societies in response to problems which have very little to do with you or even your country. One million refugees appear in Europe, and bam! suddenly right parties rise to power. Who would have thought that in France of all places Le Pen’s team would come in second?

OS: Without conscious solidarity nothing will work out.

AB: And that is precisely why we continue with our work and will work further.

OS: Thank you.

[1] Both words exist in both Belarusian and Russian, but have different meanings.

[2] In both cases the two words are almost identical, but have different meanings in Belarusian and Russian. For instance in Russian the word “midnight” is almost the same as the Belarusian word for “north.”

[3] A Stalin era execution site in the forest outside Minsk.

February 5, 2020
Gil Z. Hochberg — Between Orientalisms: Derrida, Cixous, and the Specter of the Arab Jew

This essay is part of a dossier on The Maghreb after Orientalism.

A Judeo-Franco-Maghrebian genealogy does not clarify everything, far from it,

                   but can I ever explain anything without it?

Jacques Derrida, “To Have Lived, and to Remember, as an Algerian”

To depart (so as) not to arrive from Algeria is also, incalculably, a way of not

                      having broken with Algeria

Hélène Cixous, “My Algeriance, in other words: to depart not to arrive

from Algeria”

Algeria is an unfinished story, no doubt for Algerians, but also for France. And for all those who cannot but continue to think through Algeria’s recent and long history of colonialism, as they think not only about Algeria and France but also about modernity, military occupation, Orientalism, Europe, armed resistance, war, and also about Zionism, Jews and Arabs, Palestine, missed opportunities, and possible outcomes. So much and more is contained in the name “Algeria”.

In the mid 1990s both Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous began to write about “Algeria” (about their “Algeria”), each investing in a writing both autobiographical and politically contemplative.[1] In their writings—primarily Le monolinguisme de l’autre ou la prothèse d’origine (The Monolingualism of the Other) (Derrida [1996] 1998)), “Mon algériance” (“My Algeriance”), “Stigmata, or Job the dog” (both printed in Cixous’s 1998 Stigmata Escaping Texts), and “Bare Feet” (Cixous 2001)—“Algeria” is a specific place: their place of birth, a nation with a particularly violent and complex history of colonial occupation, but also a name and figure of speech hosting a vast and explosive web of memories, desires, attachments, fears, projections, and identifications both personal and public.

Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other is a short reflection on the relationship between language and mastery, identity, citizenship, and colonialism. It is also an intervention into the legacy of the relations between Arabs, Jews, and “Europe” under the conditions of French colonialism in the Maghreb, and above all a commentary about the still contested figure of the Arab Jew.[2] Derrida focuses on the particular case of Maghrebi Jews (Jews of Algeria who were granted French citizenship in 1870, lost their French citizenship under the Vichy regime in October 1940, and regained it in 1943) to talk about matters of possession and being possessed by language, memory, culture, religion, and ethnicity. But Derrida both tells and doesn’t tell the story of Algerian Jews. He both tells and doesn’t tell his story as an Algerian Jew, when he speaks of his “nostalgeria” and of his “independence from Algeria” (1998: 52) and of a “French Jewish child from Algeria” (1998: 49).

Cixous’s writings about Algeria similarly focus on her experience as a Jew, holding an outsider position in colonial Algeria, to which she belongs only through the direct touch of dust: “a sort of invisible belonging to the land to which I am bound by my atoms without nationality” (1998a: 154). Like Derrida, she centers on the drama of citizenship experienced by herself and other Jews of Algeria (“in 1940 we were thrown out as Jews” (1998a: 213). This is the pretext for her broader focus on being “at home, nowhere” (1998a: 155) and the history of colonial Algeria as a history of “brutal Algeriad . . . crudely fashioned by the demon of Coloniality” (1998a: 156).

“Algeria” is for both thinkers a way to speak the past in(to) the present, the personal in(to) the public, Algeria in(to) France, and the “Jew” (or the forbidden “J” to borrow Cixous’s expression)[3] in(to) the colonial drama as a third member along with the Arab and the French. It is also a way to speak of loss, of exile, of the limits of national belonging, the limits of origins and narratives of origins, possessing, and possession.

Both Derrida and Cixous came to “Algeria” late in their lives and writing careers. Their upbringing in colonized Algeria was for the most part absent from their texts until they began to write semi-autobiographies; until, that is, they turned their personal memories and narratives into new modes of political intervention. Indeed, as long as the two prolific writers were engaged in deconstructing Western philosophical metaphysics (Derrida) and advocating “feminine writing” (écriture féminine) (Cixous), they were unquestionably recognized as “French”: deconstruction was French; feminine writing was very French. But to continue to undo European hegemony without questioning “Europe” from its margins (and not only from “within,” by means of deconstructing key European texts) had become by the mid 1990s truly impossible. Certainly in France, which was watching the ongoing civil war in Algeria, while facing a whole series of heated legal debates about “immigration” in France itself. The critical need to question French identity and destabilize French language and citizenship is what led Derrida and Cixous “back to Algeria,” as a site (a memory, a place, a time, a past, and a future) through which to rethink the meaning of being European, and, more specifically, French.

Addressing the “traumatizing brutality of what is called the colonial war” Derrida, in a later text (“To Have Lived, and to Remember, as an Algerian”) writes: “some, including myself, experienced it from both sides, if I may say so” (Chérif 2008: 35). Writing from both sides, as it were, and from neither, is what Cixous’s and Derrida’s texts about Algeria perform textually by centering on the impossible figure of the Arab Jew. A figure that has become and then “become undone” through the not-so-subtle mechanisms of partition exercised by the French colonial administration. The “Franco-Maghrebi” is Derrida’s name for himself as the French-speaking-Maghrebi-Jew, who as such, is from Algeria but not of Algerian nationality, and who is a French citizen (at times) but who is not, cannot be, quite French. This Jew, not quite Algerian, certainly not quite Arab, can only appear in relation to French (language, citizenship, identity) given the colonial conditions dividing populations by ethnicities and policing language acquisition and national affiliations. The missing figure of the Arab Jew, the fact of its missing, the making of its impossibility, is, however, at the heart of The Monolingualism of the Other just as it is the nexus of Cixous’s Algerian texts. It is the ghostly impossible figure, whose impossibility haunts the historical narrative of colonialism told, most commonly, in terms of a binary division between two positions. In this case: colonizer and colonized, French and Arab, French and Arabic. Accounting for the impossibility of the Arab Jew in Algeria, Cixous writes: “There was not enough time. . . . There was no time. (If there had been time between Arabs and ourselves . . . the two destinal durations would have found themselves in concordance at a certain moment)” (Cixous 1998: 184).

Writing about their Algerian origins, about their early years in Algeria, about their childhood memories, and also about their becoming French (but never quite French); about their relationship to the French language, French citizenship, and writing (in French); but also about their Jewishness, about being Jewish, about being not-quite Jewish, and certainly not quite Algerian, but also not fully French. This is the similar manner in which Derrida and Cixous write about colonialism: about the colonialisms embedded in language (Derrida) but most certainly about French colonialism and its impact on them, on their own writings, on Jews, on Arabs, and on the making of the Arab Jew in Algeria. Colonialism is at the center of their texts, in the sense that is it said to be responsible for it all: responsible for everything that shaped their own personal experiences, responsible for the matrix of life in Algeria, and responsible for their writing—its content and its style. French colonialism created fractures between Arabs and Jews; it is responsible for the misery of most indigenous Algerians, and for the creation of “the Jew” as a specific figure of difference and alterity: at times more French than the Arab and other times less French, even less French than the Arab. In the context of French colonial Algeria, “Jew” is always already in relationship to Frenchness: “now we were Jews,” “now we were French” “now we were Jewfrench” (Cixous 1998b: 189).

Within this profound exposition of the nature of French colonialism in the Maghreb, Derrida and Cixous focus on the very unhappy triangle: the French, the Arab, and the Jew (“an utterly unworkable junction” (Cixous 1998b: 183). I have written elsewhere about the mobilization of animosity between Jews and Arabs/Muslims in Europe in the service of “Europe” as (Christian) secular protector (Hochberg 2006). Here it is sufficient to say that the manufactured rivalry between Jews and Arabs created under French colonial conditions is not a side narrative or a minor outcome but a profound and central aspect of the colonial structure as such. A structure very much still in operation, as a recent text by Houria Bouteldja, Whites, Jews, and Us (2016) reminds us. Regarding the ambiguous position of the Jew in France today, Bouteldja cleverly observes that the Jews are “on the one hand, dhimmis of the Republic to satisfy the internal needs of the nation state, and on the other, Senegalese riflemen to satisfy the needs of Western imperialism” (55-56, original italics). As observed by Ben Ratskoff, “the phrase ‘dhimmis of the Republic’ paints France with its own Orientalist brush—as pre-modern, religious, oppressive—and suggests that, despite their so-called emancipation, the functional role of Jews in Europe has not changed. At the same time, Jews are made into ‘Senegalese riflemen,’ the colonized colonizers to whom the perpetuation of imperial violence is outsourced” (2018).[4]

Derrida and Cixous’s texts invite us to see how colonialism and, more specifically, Orientalism create the “Jew” (as a double agent, both dhimmi and Senegalese rifleman) and at the same time create the impossibility of the “Arab Jew.” In a recent essay (delivered as a lecture), Ella Shohat shows that this process involves the ongoing production of the Jew as “less Arab” and “more French.” She calls this process “the de-orientalization of Jews” and locates it, like Derrida and Cixous, in the midst of the French colonial drama in Algeria (Shohat 2016).[5] In Orientalism, Edward Said already argued that Orientalism was responsible first for bonding Jews and Muslims together under the rubric of “Semites”—subjects of Orientalist study readily understandable in view of their primitive origins—and later for setting these two figures apart as different kinds of Orientals, managed differently by colonial forces (1979: 234). If Orientalism sometimes brings Jews and Muslims or Jews and Arabs together and sometimes sets them apart, Derrida and Cixous’s texts invite us to follow the production of what, in her analysis of French nineteenth century painting, Shohat calls “the split Arab/Jew figure” in becoming. (See Fig. 1-3) Examining French Orientalist representations of Jews from North Africa and the Middle East, Shohat demonstrates how these images tend to be familiar Orientalist images, with no distinction made between Jews and Arabs. “When and how,” she asks, do we begin to see the “Arab Jew” as a distinct figure of Orientalist imagination and colonial control? Her answer, based on a survey of Orientalist paintings, is that this happens only in the early twentieth century, “when Jews in Algeria suddenly appear to have a lighter skin tone than Muslims, and Jewish women appear without head covers.” Around the 1930s, she notes, Jews begin to be visualized as modernized, and Jewish women begin to look more French. “The split of the Jew and the Arab/Muslim is a product of the colonial area,” she concludes. “It is a cut that has not even begun to heal.” <Figures 1-3 about here>

Cixous and Derrida write about this cut. They write from the place of this cut. They write from this cut and as its outcome. They write as Jews-already-not-Arabs, already (almost) French. They try to recapture the becoming of this writing position without, however, naturalizing any pre-given identity positions (i.e., “Jew,” “Arab,” “French,” “native”). Writing about identities in becoming, about Jews becoming less Arab and more French, both writers attempt to write from a different position: not “as a Jew” or “as an Algerian” or “as a French person.” Their writing seeks to undo these identities while recognizing they cannot be undone: “Certain Jews truly wanted to love France. But it was a love by force. We wanted to love Algeria. But it was too early or too late” (Cixous 1998a: 163).

The focus on the Jew, which is obviously an autobiographic detail, is not just that. It is also an opportunity to speak a different language: to speak from within the colonial cut and within the Orientalist operation as both an outcome and a resistant trace. To speak not the language of historicity, not the language of the law, not even the language of literature, but a language of a cut as prefigured through the figure of the always already impossible Arab Jew. Stigmata, “the fertile wound” (Cixous 1998b: 182).

The term Orientalism is not a term either Derrida or Cixous use. Said’s work Orientalism is similarly missing from Derrida and Cixous’s autobiographical texts. And this is perhaps not surprising. Said’s style and framework of analysis are utterly foreign to their writings. Orientalism doesn’t leave a lot of room for thinking in the spaces between binaries and that is precisely what both Cixous and Derrida do, albeit differently. If anything, one could say that both Cixous and Derrida, at times, mobilize an overtly Orientalist language to talk about France, Algeria, Arabs, and Jews (see, for instance, Cixous’s “unshakable certainty that ‘the Arabs’ were the true offspring of this dusty and perfumed soil” or her observation: “when I walked barefoot with my brother on the hot trails of Oran, I felt the sole of my body caressed by the welcoming palms of the country’s ancient dead…” (Cixous 1998a: 153)). But they recognize these Orientalist words as French (“the word Arab belonged to French colonialism” (Cixous 1998b: 183)). Orientalism is a borrowed framework, a borrowed language, a borrowed way of speaking and thinking but not an escapable one per se. Certainly not when speaking from the place of the cut. Not when speaking of the becoming of the separation and the making of the Jew and of the Arab.[6]

For Cixous, Algeria is primarily a stage on which the colonial drama unfolds: a “perfumed theater, salt, jasmine, orange blossoms, where violent plays were staged” (1998a, 155), where “the scene was always war” (1998a: 156). And on this stage there are roles and positions: “one said: ‘the Arabs,’ ‘the French,’” everyone was forced to play “in the play, with a false identity” (1998a: 156). The colonial stage produces caricature figures. People said: “the Arabs and the French, and also the Jews and the Catholics” (1998a: 156). Names, words, identities have limited freedom on the colonial stage, and very little room for innovation. Thus we get “Fatma,” the Arab maid, the “dirty Jew,” the Frenchman, and the “little Arabs” (1998a: 164). Against this discursive, linguistic, and political fixation—the outcome of colonial administration and Orientalist imagination—but also from within it, Cixous and Derrida attempt to generate a discourse that highlights instability, fragmentation, ambiguity, and loss in the figure of the always already displaced and the always already lost: lost home, lost Jew, lost Arab, and lost Algeria. As a result, we are left with a discourse that is both more intimate and less (overtly) political than the carefully measured discourse commonly modeled on the analysis of Orientalism.

But I would like to suggest that writing from the place of the cut is an unwritten chapter in Orientalism. Said’s theory, because it insists on a macro-political notion of history and a structural analysis of binary power positions, leaves little room for nuances, differences, and liminal positions that speak from the place of the cut. It is not simply that Derrida and Cixous’s texts bring in, as it where, the missing Maghreb, or the missing figure of the (impossible) Arab Jew and thus complicate an otherwise more coherent, binary formulation of colonial power. It is also that, unlike the discourse of the Arab Jew, developed for example in the writings of Albert Memmi (not just in La statue de sel but in his later essays such as “Who is the Arab Jew?”),[7] Derrida and Cixous’s Arab Jew is not so much a figure (an ethnic figure), but the theoretical elaboration on the production of this historical figure as an impossibility brought about by colonialism and Orientalism. A melancholic underlining precondition that runs through the Orientalist discourse and remains both key to the Orientalist dualistic imagination and invisible in its centrality.

I am not suggesting that the Arab Jew is central to Orientalism, which presents a rather coherent picture of the Orient, often conflating “Arab” and “Muslim.” And yet this figure is not marginal to the text either. It is a figure that demonstrates the triangulated operation within the (Orientalist) binary imagination. Reading Cixous’s and Derrida’s impossible Arab Jew into Said’s book is not only to challenge its binary structure, criticized by many in the past (Homi Bhabhba 1994, Ali Behdad 1994, Lisa Lowe 1991). It is also to develop a different language, one whose power resides in its ambivalence and non-identitarianism. A language which certainly can sound and read as self-centered, beautified, and sublimated (perhaps too French?) but which gains its importance from its ability to speak from the cut and about the cut.

The Arab Jew here is a figure of political failure and a failed figure. And this failure itself, visited and revisited as loss, impossibility, “fertile wound” and the outcome of Orientalist imagination is also to gesture towards a different future. One that takes a leap of faith away from but also back to the binary and structured world of fantasy-making reality, which Said left us with forty years ago; a fertile ground from which to “depart (so as) not to arrive from.”

Gil Hochberg is Ransford Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies at Columbia University. Her first book, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination (2007), examines the complex relationship between the signifiers “Arab” and “Jew” in contemporary Jewish and Arab literatures. Her most recent book, Visual Occupations: Vision and Visibility in a Conflict Zone (2015), is a study of the visual politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She is currently writing a book on art, archives and the production of the future.

References

Ahluwalia, Pal. 2010. Out of Africa: Post-Structuralism’s Colonial Roots. London and New    York: Routledge.

Behdad, Ali. 1994. Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution. Duke: Duke University Press.

Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge.

Bouteldja, Houria. [2016] 2017. Whites, Jews, and Us: Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love. Translated by Rachel Valinsky. South Pasadena : Semiotext(e).

Chérif, Mustapha. 2008. Islam and the West: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida. Translated by Teresa Lavender Fagan. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chow, Rey. 2001. “How (the) Inscrutable Chinese Led to Globalized Theory.” PMLA 116, no. 1: 69-74.

Cixous, Hélène. 1998a. “Mon algériance” (“My Algeriance”). In Stigmata Escaping Texts, 153-172. New York: Routledge.

——-. 1998b. “Stigmata, or Job the dog.” In Stigmata Escaping Texts, 181-194. New York: Routledge.

——–. [1999] 2001. An Algerian Childhood: A Collection of Autobiographical Narratives. Translated by Marjolijn de Jager. St. Paul, MN: Ruminator Books.

Derrida, Jacques. [1996] 1998. Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Translated by Patrick Mensah. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Di Cesare, Donatella Ester. 2012. Utopia of Understanding: Between Babel and Auschwitz. Translated by Niall Keane. Albany: SUNY Press.

Egéa-Kuehne, Denise. 2001. “La langue de l’autre au croisement des cultures: Derrida et Le Monolinguisme de l’autre.” In Changements politiques et statut des langues: histoire et épistémologie, 1780–1945, edited by Marie-Christine Kok Escalle and Francine Melka, 175-98. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Herzog, Annabel. 2009. “‘Monolingualism’ or the Language of God: Scholem and Derrida on Hebrew and Politics.” Modern Judaism 29, no. 2: 226–38.

Hiddleston, Jane. 2010. Poststructuralism and Postcoloniality: The Anxiety of Theory. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Hochberg, Gil Z. 2007. In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs and the Limits of Separatist       Imagination. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

——. 2016. “‘Remembering Semitism’ or ‘On the Prospect of Re-Membering the            Semites.’” ReOrient 1, no. 2: 192–223.

Memmi, Albert. [1953] 1972. La Statue de sel. Paris: Gallimard. Translated by Edouard Roditi as The Pillar of Salt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992).

Laroussi, Farid. 2016. Postcolonial Counterpoint: Orientalism, France, and the Maghreb Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Lowe, Lisa. 1991. Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

Naas, Michael. 2009. Derrida from Now On. New York: Fordham University Press.

Quayson, Ato. 2000. “Postcolonialism and Postmodernism.” In A Companion to Postcolonial
Studies, edited by Henry Schwarz and Sangeeta Ray, 87-111. Oxford: Blackwell.

Ratskoff, Ben. 2018. “Liberation Utopias: Houria Bouteldja on Feminism, Anti-Semitism, and the Politics of Decolonization.” Los Angeles Review of Books, April 5.       lareviewofbooks.org/article/liberation-utopias-houria-bouteldja-on-feminism-anti-semitism-and-the-politics-of-decolonization/

Saito, Naoko. 2009. “Beyond Monolingualism: Philosophy as Translation and the Understanding of Other Cultures.” Ethics and Education 4, no. 2: 131–39.

Shohat, Ella. 2016. “Orientalist Genealogies: The Split Arab/Jew Figure Revisited.” Paper presented at the Qattan Foundation in London, November 17, 2015. Video recording available at vimeo.com/154166534.

Young, Robert. 1990. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. London and New York: Routledge.

[1] Not everyone welcomed this intervention. And some accused the French intellectuals for “asserting their authority over Algeria” and for ignoring “hard political questions” by choosing instead to write about their personal and privileged experiences and not about colonialism and its impact on the majority of the colonized people. See for example Laroussi (2016: 65).

[2] For readings of Monolingualism see, among many others: Di Cesare 2012; Naas 2008; Saito 2009; Egéa-Kuehne 2012; and Herzog 2009.

[3] “During the war . . . the word that begins with ‘j’ was not spoken it was a forbidden, dangerous poisonous word. . . . My mother . . . never said the word Jew in the street. Naïve, she said that a J. Exorcism. Taboo” (Cixous 1998a: 156).

[4] Dhimmis are non-Muslims under protection of Muslim law. The protection was historically extended to the “Peoples of the Book” (Ahl al-Kitab), which included Jews, Christians, and sometimes Zoroastrians and Hindus. Protection, communal self-government, and freedom of religious practice were provided to dhimmis in return for tax. Dhimmis were also placed under restrictions and regulations in dress, occupation, and residence. The Senegalese riflemen (tirailleurs sénégalais) were among the many colonized peoples allured to serve in the French army during the First World War. By 1918, France had recruited some 192,000 tirailleurs from French West Africa, mostly from Senegal. It was only last year that France finally recognized a handful of these men and granted them French citizenship.

[5] At the time of writing this essay, Shohat was preparing her essay for publication but had not yet published a written version. A video recording of a talk version of the paper, “Orientalist Genealogies: The Split Arab /Jew Figure Revisited,” is available online at vimeo.com/154166534.

[6] It would be easy to do one of two things: 1. To accuse Derrida and Cixous of Orientalism. Their writings render themselves easily to such accusation. The most elaborate critique of Derrida’s Orientalism is famously provided by Rey Chow. Accounting for Derrida’s representation of Chinese writing in Of Grammatology, Chow deconstructs Derrida’s own European Orientalist approach. Derrida’s seminal text of deconstruction, she argues, orientalizes Chinese writing as an ideographic language and represents it as the West’s other, which as such escapes scrutiny. The East thus becomes represented by “a spectre, a kind of living dead that must, in his philosophizing, be preserved in its spectrality to remain a Utopian inspiration” (Chow 2001: 72). Cixous too has been blamed more than once, especially in her writings about Algeria. Farid Laroussi, for example, argues that Cixous’s very description of the Arab Jew is based on “an archaic type of Orientalism” (Laroussi 2016: 65). 2. The opposite tendency is to praise Derrida and Cixous (perhaps Deconstruction as such) for generating new ways of thinking and writing that directly challenge Orientalism, confront the superiority of the West, and disable the homogeneity of its “other,” the Orient. Since the early 1990s, several studies have emphasized the deep theoretical and political connections between deconstruction and postcolonialism. In 1990, Robert Young argued that at the heart of French deconstruction one finds “Algeria” as a postcolonial event. He famously opens his White Mythologies by proposing that “if so-called ‘so-called post-structuralism’ is the product of a single historical event, then that moment is probably not May 1968 but rather the Algerian War of Independence—no doubt itself both a symptom and a product” (Young 1990: 1). Since then, several critics have made similar arguments and connections. See, for example, Ahluwalia 2010 and Quayson 2000.

[7] In this sense these texts both continue and break away from the legacy of Albert Memmi, whose memoir The Pillar of Salt was perhaps the first to document the colonial tragedy in North Africa (Tunis in this case) through the figure of the Arab/Berber Jew as the failed figure of in-betweenness: indigenous but not quite, westernized but not enough. Memmi’s fragmented, displaced, exiled protagonist, Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche, is a tragic anti-hero and a true victim of colonial estrangement. Several years later Memmi would publish his essay on the impossibility of the Arab Jew, “Why we are not Arab Jews,” concluding that despite the end of colonialism, the figure of the indigenous Arab Jew is not and can no longer be, a possibility. As is well known, Memmi would also become, over the years, an adamant supporter of Zionism, despite choosing to live in France himself. Both Derrida and Cixous follow Memmi’s legacy in many ways, in their own autobiographical writings about Algeria, but they break away from his determined position, replacing it with ambiguity and open-ended futures. While Memmi presents a tragic image of displacement and exile, Derrida and Cixous, each in their own way, celebrate exile, displacement and the position of the outsider (with no mother tongue and no sense of belonging) as a privileged critical position. And as a position from which colonialism may appear not as a coherent subject matter based on monolithic power binarism but as a system based on the creation and generation of differences within. For a comprehensive reading of Memmi’s novel and other writings on the figure of the Arab Jew, see my chapter dedicated to his work (Hochberg 2007: 20-43).

December 17, 2018
Susan Slyomovics — “The Ethnologist-Spy Was Hanged, at That Time We Were a Little Savage”: Anthropology in Algeria with Habib Tengour

This essay is part of a dossier on The Maghreb after Orientalism.

Il fut pendu l’ethnologue-espion, writes poet-novelist-anthropologist Habib Tengour, En ce temps-là nous étions un peu sauvages (1976 : 131).[1] Tengour’s sly voicing of the violent indigene consigning ethnology to the gallows asks us to rethink authority and expertise in the social sciences. Tengour was born in Mostaganem in 1947, a town he registers in rhymed Algerian Arabic as vingt-sept makla we sket, “zip code twenty-seven food and silence” (2012: 36). His father Mohamed Tengour was a member of the Parti du Peuple Algérien (PPA) and head of the Organisation secrète (OS) for the Mostaganem region, both crucial entities to the formation of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN). Twice arrested and imprisoned for nationalist political activities, Mohamed Tengour was banished from his home region. Forced to relocate to France, he resumed activities on behalf of an independent Algeria and brought his family to Paris.[2]

Figure 1. At his father’s tomb, 2015. Habib Tengour (front left), his uncle Ghali (front right) and uncle’s friend (back). Photo by Mansour Benchehida. Reproduced by permission of Mansour Benchehida and Habib Tengour

Raised and educated between Algeria and France, Habib Tengour will crisscross the Mediterranean Sea calling himself Ulysses, another consummate ethnographer whose life depends on fieldwork and literature in a quest for a restoration to homeland and identity (Yelles 2012): “My name is Ulysses I am 22 years old and I am doing sociology because I failed law” (Je m’appelle ULYSSE j’ai vingt-deux ans je fais de la sociologie parce que j’ai echoué en Droit) (9). He returns to Algeria in 1972 to complete military service, then becomes director of the newly established Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Constantine. He resigns in 1975 in opposition to proliferating provincial university graduate programs created in the absence of trained social sciences professors, each new one producing “a parody of Lin Biao! Encircling the cities by the countryside. That’s a little how the University of Algiers was gradually encircled by provincial universities” (1995: 71-72).

A year before Tengour’s homecoming, Mohammed Seddik Benyahia, a member of Algeria’s first provisional government and minister of higher education and research from 1971-77, declares that ethnologie, “contaminated by colonialism,” must be “submitted to a process of decolonization.”[3] A forerunner document to Benyahia’s call was the Tripoli Plan of 1962 elaborated by the National Council of the Algerian Revolution (CNRA) on the eve of independence. Dismantling former European settler colonial structures called for more appropriate post-independence measures of redress and reconstruction than ethnology imparts:

French colonialists undertook, by war, extermination, looting and confiscation, to systematically destroy the Algerian nation and society. More than a mere colonial conquest to ensure control of the country’s natural wealth, this enterprise sought, by all means, to substitute foreign settlement for the autochthonous people. (Colonna 1972: 260)

The French conquests of Algeria in 1830, Tunisia in 1881, and Morocco in 1912 also resulted in France establishing journals, institutes, scholarly organizations and universities instigated by metropolitan exigencies over its overseas colonies. France was the preeminent social scientific model for the Maghreb and the Maghreb contributed to shaping French social sciences (Slyomovics 2013). The Commission Scientifique de l’Algérie (1839-41), modeled on Napoleon’s scientific expedition to Egypt, was created to map Algeria’s culture and geography, as were the 1904 Mission Scientifique to Morocco and the creation of the French institute in Cairo in 1909. In 1925, the Institut d’Ethnologie in Paris established by Marcel Mauss, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and Paul Rivet arrived on the social science scene at the apogee of close to one hundred years of research on the native following in the wake of military officers and colonial civil servants whom Bourdieu calls ethnologues spontanés, “spontaneous ethnologists” (Mammeri 1985: 8). Engaged in ethnology, folklore, and collecting on behalf of metropolitan museums, Tengour’s legions of ethnologist-spies were effective in spoliating native material and intangible cultures.

Anthropology, according to Talal Asad (who prefigured Edward Said’s critique of the West’s Orientalism), is an intellectual agent of colonialism inevitably embedded in hegemonic and imperial power relations because “the world also determines how anthropology will apprehend it” (1973: 12). And that ethnographic world of inquiry ended, dissipating the colonial regime of Francophone scientific researchers in the Maghreb enraptured by North African ethnology (Slyomovics 2014). It is not surprising, therefore, that postcolonial theory owes a debt to Maghreb-based thinkers. Among them on any list are Abdelkebir Khatibi, Albert Memmi, Abdelmalek Sayad, Paul Sebag, Abdelkader Zghal, Habib Tengour, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, and Frantz Fanon, all “provincializing” Europe (Chakrabarty 2000) from the Mediterranean’s North African shores.

Following Benyahia’s call to boycott ethnology, debates swirled around a post-independence anthropology inquiring, in fact, what is to be done? Would linking the identity of the indigenous social scientist to the discipline of anthropology produce more relevant, less universalizing, unbiased “Arab social science”? Or another intellectual path, should Islamic and Arab sources reanimate social theories derived from the fourteenth-century Maghrebi thinker Ibn Khaldun? (Morsy et al. 1991: 81-115). What if decolonizing the social sciences in Algeria became the means to hijack and manipulate the path of Arabization (ta’rib), thereby blocking progressive movements such as student or Berberophone rights, as Tengour suggests? (1995: 68) In contrast to tortuous attempts throughout the Arab world to reconcile nascent academic social sciences with Western Orientalist anthropology, at least on the official level, Algerian authorities said no. Ethnology was banned outright at the twenty-fourth International Conference of Sociology in Algiers in March 1974:

Ethnology fully participated in the colonial system. Created by colonialism, it accepted its presuppositions. You might even say it served as an ideology for this system. . . . Decolonization has scientific aspects. The rejection of ethnology as a discipline of study specific to developing countries is one of them. As a method and an ideology, it has developed a logic and thus it constitutes a scientific danger, an ideological screen between the social reality of third world countries and those who want to study them. (L’ethnologie a participé totalement du système colonial, dont elle est la création et dont elle a accepté les présupposés. Elle tenait même lieu à la limite d’idéologie à ce système. . . . La décolonisation a des aspects scientifiques. Le rejet d’ethnologie comme discipline d’étude propre aux pays en voie de développements en est un. . . . Comme méthode et comme idéologie elle a développé une logique et par là même elle constitue un danger scientifique, un écran idéologique entre la réalité sociale des pays du tiers monde et ceux qui veulent les étudier. (Mammeri 1989 : 18))

A Detour

It is worth recalling that one of the largest colonial resettlement programs occurred in wartime Algeria (1954-62), merely a dozen years before Benyahia spoke out. To dismantle peasant support for independence fighters, approximately one quarter of the indigenous rural population was displaced. The French military process of forcible removal was overseen by the army’s Specialized Administrative Sections (Sections Administratives Spécialisées, SAS). Officers apprenticed in so-called Muslim sociology were charged with the study of villagers before and after resettlement. Social science was implicated, as early as Émile Durkheim’s The Division of Labor in Society that depicted an Algerian traditional Kabyle society frozen in premodernity: “The Hebrews remained in it [segmentary social organization] to a late date and the Kabyles never passed beyond it” (Durkheim 1997 [1893], 175-178). The French army, attentive to lessons in Durkheimian sociology on tribal solidarities, imbibed Orientalist perversions of fourteenth-century thinker Ibn Khaldun in which forced sedentarization and relocation consolidated their state power (Mamdani 2017). French Algeria’s wholesale destruction of a rural agrarian world through land dispossession was updated to align with wartime scorched earth policies, then cynically relabeled modernization. A significant portion of Algerian society endured internal exile and immiseration on a vast scale as victims of controlled experiments to discover the viability of the so-called pacification programs in regroupement camps that were never more than outdoor prisons (Omouri 2001; Henni 2018). The recurring figure of the embedded anthropologist within the military is not new. Moreover, it could be said that Benyahia was operating well within Durkheimian paradigms: in France, ethnology and sociology were intertwined, thus eerily presaging Benyahia’s judgments about ethnologie versus sociologie despite Durkheim’s attempts to distinguish sociology as meta-theorizing from ethnology’s empirical data-driven practices:

The customs, beliefs, institutions of peoples are matters too profound to be judged like this, so lightly. This is why sociology must focus its research primarily on societies that can be studied from genuine historical documents, while ethnographic information should be used only to corroborate and, to a certain extent, illuminate precedents. (Durkheim [1895] 1975, 1: 76-81)

Presciently, this Algerian post-independence rejection of ethnology, understood by Benyahia as a body of knowledge predicated on the colonizer’s description to better police the population, had been foretold by Albert Memmi. Refusal is a rite of decolonization:

We then witness a reversal of terms. Assimilation being abandoned, the colonized’s liberation must be carried out through a recovery of self and of autonomous dignity. Attempts at imitating the colonizer required self-denial; the colonizer’s rejection is the indispensable prelude to self-discovery. That accusing and annihilating image must be shaken off; oppression must be attacked boldly since it is impossible to go around it. After having been rejected for so long by the colonizer, the day has come when it is the colonized who must refuse the colonizer. . . . Henceforth, the colonizer adopts a negative approach. . . . He does without tobacco if it bears the colonialist’s stamp! These are pressure methods and economic sanctions, but they are, equally, sacrificial rites of colonization. (Memmi 1965: 172-173)

Benyahia maintained an equipoise between rejecting colonial ethnology and establishing a comprehensive pedagogical program from kindergarten to conservatory and an advanced research institute for the study and preservation of Algeria’s magnificant heritage of Arab-Andalusian music. His advocacy for “decolonizing the social sciences” along with the rise of critical reissues of colonial-era ethnography, which led to reassessing Algeria’s colonial-era anthropology, cast Bourdieu, whose Algeria writings continue to be published posthumously to this day, as a key figure. Bourdieu founded an Algerian association of research in demography, economy and sociology; he collaborated and coauthored important studies with his colleague Abdelmalek Sayad; and his military experiences in wartime Algeria for the information services of the French army and the French government statistics office in Algiers led to discussions about instrumentalizing ethnographic research. Bourdieu and Sayad’s angry depictions of French Algeria’s wartime forced dislocations resulted in a publication ban of their book, Le déracinement (The Uprooting) that lasted until after the Algerian War of Independence. They describe the pauperization of Kabyle farmers herded into “regroupment” camps by the French military, “as if the colonizer instinctively found the ethnological law in which the reorganization of the habitat, a projection of the most fundamental structures of culture, leads to a generalized transformation of the cultural system. . . . The politics of regroupment, a pathological response to the deadly crisis of the colonial system, brings to light the pathological intent that inhabits the colonial system” (Comme si le colonisateur retrouvait d’instinct la loi ethnologique qui veut que la réorganisation de l’habitat, projection des structures les plus fondamentales de la culture, entraîne une transformation généralisée du système culturel. . . . La politique de regroupement, réponse pathologique à la crise mortelle du système colonial, fait éclater au grand jour l’intention pathologique qui habitait le système colonial (Bourdieu and Sayad 1964 : 26-27)). While describing the army’s strategies to coerce, supply, and rehearse informants in camps, Bourdieu takes note of the natives, perennially under investigation, who resisted their French questioners despite an “atmosphere of police inquisition and psychological action” (Bourdieu 1963: 261). Defying the social scientist under colonialism transforms into a fixation against ethnology.

Bourdieu himself began as an ethnologist later announcing a switch to sociology. Reductively speaking, physical anthropology was “anthropologie” while empirical fieldwork research in the human sciences was “ethnologie” in France, its analogue in England “social anthropology” and “cultural anthropology” in the US. In many Anglophone academic environments, the latter two melded into “sociocultural anthropology.” Even in France, Georges Balandier, among the founders of the Centre d’études sociologiques (Center for studies in sociology) in 1946, called for more convergences (Balandier 1948; Siebaud 2006).

“The Poetic Discovery of the Real”

If the terms ethnology, sociology, folklore and anthropology are often deployed interchangeably, in turn, Tengour’s poetic discovery of the real (1985: 13) and deadpan black humor play with the overlapping homophony of the word “social.” In This Particular Tartar 2 (1997–1998), his sociologist persona is mistaken for a social worker by a Tartar stranded in Paris. The Tartar, a recurring protagonist in the Tengourian corpus, becomes the exonym for Western social science in its petty bureaucratic actualizations; he is coded the migrant perennially flooding Europe like his fierce ancestral hordes, “invaders from the East whom they called, without distinction, Tartars” (2010: 122):

The city planning bureau asked me to interview him in the context of a study on gypsies and other travelers.

This particular Tartar distrusts sociologists. I think he confuses us with social workers.

My interview was limited to brief questions/answers.

I didnʼt succeed in getting a serviceable life story out of him.

I had read up on the Tartars beforehand, to help me establish contact.

He didnʼt appreciate my empathy. (130)

Unlike long-standing Orientalist studies from anthropology, folklore and ethnology about so-called “primitive” non-European peoples, languages and customs, sociology in Algeria was considered less tainted by the colonizer’s cultural depredations (Ben Naoum 2002). Mobilized on behalf of practical socioeconomic and political orientations and marching to state-inflected parameters on proletarianization, pauperization, unemployment, and shantytowns, post-independence Algerian sociology was brought to bear on topics such as development, detribalization, migration, newly launched agricultural programs, urbanization and industrialization (Madoui 2007).

In 1985, the year Tengour obtained a French doctorate in ethnology, Algeria was in the midst of state-mandated programs ensuring university teaching in Modern Standard Arabic, MSA (al-‘arabiya al-mu‘asira), no one’s native tongue and as yet linguistically lesser in the face of Algerians’ trilingual usage of Algerian Arabic (darija), French, and Amazigh/Berber languages. More government interventions followed the ban on ethnology and mandated Arabic in university social sciences faculties. Algeria’s Minister of Higher Education Abdelhak Rafik Brerhi, following a recommendation of FLN chief Mohamed-Cherif Messadia, proposed an addendum to mandated FLN party membership for state employees. A 1985 directive added a provision that professors disrespecting the regime’s political choices were liable to court actions and lawsuits, followed by decrees not only mandating MSA’s preeminence but attempting to substitute English for French. Although research conducted within Algeria has never been isolated from Western paradigms, political sociologist Lahouari Addi concludes that because university critics of the regime like himself were either in exile or teaching outside the country, government strictures on political and linguistic allegiances became moot in the face of the brain drain of Algerian intellectuals (Addi 1991 and 2002: 71-77 and Ayoub 2000).

Likewise, ethnographic studies of the tribe were taboo in Algeria during decades of the FLN single-party state (1962-89). Although tribal values were admired, the tribe as a social institution was deemed archaic and divisive. Research on Algeria’s tribes shows that despite interventions through mass education and compulsory army service, the tribe is not in opposition to the Algerian state but remains an important sociopolitical entity, hence a worthy object of study (Hachmaoui 2012; Ben Hounet 2008; Tengour 1980: 1985). In his own way, Tengour intervenes in the debate about what is to be done with ethnology in his doctoral thesis on the Beni Zeroual tribal confederations of the Chlef plain surrounding his Mostaganem home region. His ethnological propositions move away from static social science categories about la tribu towards a complex story of doubled and parallel origins, one in which the Beni Zeroual tribe’s history counterintuitively does not reside in the powerful eponymous founding ancestor figure. Unlike Algerians in Paris whose connections to any tribal group solidarity has melted away in the world of the banlieues (housing projects on the outskirts of French cities where migrant workers were concentrated), Tengour’s hypothesis is instead that, in Algeria, this fabled past was and is sustained by the local patron saint, the marabout. As Tengour unfolds generations of tribal formations, he recounts the inevitable subdividing of the tribe (qabila) into the fraction (ferqa), then further devolving into sub-fractions, clans and extended households. For him, only the last stage exhibits genuine value in terms of economic, social, and affective kinship. This means that if the tribe exists in name through reference to their eponymous ancestor Zeroual, it does so primarily to attach descendants to imagined Arab and Arabian peninsular origins. Intervening disruptive factors in the Maghreb’s history were long-standing, fluid pre-colonial affiliations and cross-border tribal movement frozen by subsequent French colonial insistence on naming, registering and refashioning tribal structures (1985: 139-142). Such factors lead Tengour to place the tribe’s memory, history, and very soul in the hands of the non-tribal marabout. These saintly spiritual leaders, whose descendants to this day transmit the tribe’s written history orally, are uniquely able to trace origins to Arab progenitors and wandering Sufi adepts, all the while ministering to the Beni Zeroual, who are in fact not Arabs, according to Tengour, but rather Arabized Berbers (1982). Taken to its conclusion, Tengour’s thesis reconfigures the marabout as an imaginative storyteller, religious leader, and tribal ethnologist, the one who does not belong to the tribe, irrespective of the tribe as imaginary traditional system or colonially distorted institution. The marabout does so by preserving written history, thereby keeping alive publicly and orally for the tribe its own genealogy and origins. Finally, the question is not if tribal lineages are socially imagined and culturally invented, but rather who tells the tale of segmenting lineages and who listens. Writing and history, story and voice, tribe and tribal memory, storytelling and identity are structurally and productively inverted. Most of all, nothing memorable is lost in Gens de Mosta, Tengour’s hometown chronicles where his concept of cultural memory is on offer to his younger, skeptical narrator by another storyteller, Allal, the venerable mujahid, communist, and International Brigade fighter:

Figure 2. Tengour home in Tigditt neighborhood, Mostaganem, June 20, 2018. Photo by Susan Slyomovics

Open your ears wide and remember what you are told. And learn to tell a story … a people never forgets what’s essential to its being. No people can be fucked all the time! Memory is a very complicated thing. In fact nothing ever is really lost. Memory works in the shadows. It loves secrecy. Apparent forgetfulness is its refuge during hard times. It waits for its hour to come and while the stomach is rumbling it does not stop digging. There isn’t only what’s written down that remains. Spoken words also leave traces. (2011 [1997]: 214)

Collective embodied forms of recognition, acceptance, and transmission that are performatively enacted by the storyteller need not entirely align with official social worldviews of the Algerian nation-state, but artfully circumvent them while giving narrative pleasure to the listener.

Doubling and Exile: Both Ethnologist and Novelist

Tengour turned back to France in the early nineties to teach at the University of Evry until his retirement in 2017, believing that “there exists a divided space called the Maghreb but the Maghrebian is always elsewhere. And that’s where he makes himself come true” (2011: 262). His departure from the Algerian academy coincided with the onset of the “Black Decade” (decénnie noire) and internal strife beginning in the early 1990s. Tengour’s “elsewhere” highlights cultural hybridity and ambivalence, métissage and dichotomy, rupture and orphanhood, schizophrenia and doubles that continue to bind and underpin those who engage simultaneously in literary and ethnographic writings about the Maghreb. Such doubling and multilingual heritages are historically conjoined to displacement and exile for Algerian writers. As Maghrebi intellectuals move between the homeland and the metropole of the former colonizer, familiar tropes of splitting and separation emerge: Malek Chebel invokes “Algerian schizophrenias” (1995: 287) reminiscent of Albert Memmi who, three decades earlier, picked at the “painful discord within oneself” (le douloureux décalage d’avec soi), a cleavage that measures the self in relation to a colonizer forever deemed the model or its antithesis (1965: 140). Abdelkebir Khatibi seems to solve these conundrums of the formerly colonized writer from the Maghreb region by evoking an initial positive role as producers of the “ethnographic novel. . . . The novel as a witness to its era, in a period of oppression and the absence of a free press, the novel plays the role of informant” (le roman ethnographique . . . un témoignage sur une époque ; en période d’oppression et en l’absence d’une presse nationale non officielle, il peut jouer le rôle d’informateur (Khatibi 1968 : 28)). While Khatibi sees the ethnographic novel genealogically as a necessary early literary stage, Réda Bensmaïa argues powerfully against any continued tendency to view Maghrebi works not as literary creations worth considering for their innovative style and language but as “ethnographic evidence” extraneous to some hypothetical French literary canon (Bensmaïa 2003: 7). For literary critic Zineb Ali Benali, it seems that the evident richness of post-independence studies in linguistics, sociology, and history from and about the Maghreb results in studies that do not reach beyond local North African university circuits to wider publics. Consequently, “the novel is more than an informant” writes Ali Benali returning to Khatibi’s famous formulation, “it is the nation’s archivist. . . . We can then say that fiction is a sort of an archivoir for a story not yet, or insufficiently, unlocked” (Le roman, cet archiviste de l’histoire. . . . On pourra alors dire que la fiction est une sorte ‘d’archivoir’ pour une histoire non encore, ou insuffisamment, déverrouillée (Ali Benali 2003)).

Does that mean that literary realism is the vehicle for the native just as scientific inquiry into the life of the native is for European ethnographers? Through poetry, performance, and prose as well as anthropology, Tengour belongs to a stellar lineage in which generations of Algerian novelists and poets consider contemporary social science topics even as they conduct fieldwork in ethnology and oral literature. Assia Djebar, for example, appears as an ethnologist of the intimate, everyday interior worlds of women, visually documenting stories, festivals, and songs of women in her film, La nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua) (1977). Other notable ethnologist-novelists are Mouloud Mammeri and Mouloud Feraoun. A recent literary phenomenon is Amara Lakhous, novelist and anthropologist trained at the Sapienza University of Rome. His book, Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio was originally published in 2003 in Arabic, Kayfa tarda min al-ziba duna ‘an tawdak (How to Be Breastfed by a She-Wolf Without Being Bitten). Recast by the author into Italian, it is now widely read in English translation (2008). When asked about his writing process, the multilingual self-translating Lakhous explains how he moves from right to left on the page just as he maintains a south-to-north cross-Mediterranean presence:

I wrote the first version of Divorzio all’Islamica a viale Marconi (Divorce Islamic Style), which was published in 2010, in Italian (I work on multiple versions — for example, Clash of Civilizations . . . had about twenty versions). When I finished — as you know, in Arabic you write from right to left — I divided the file and made two tables: Italian text on the left and Arabic text on the right. I have a multi-language keyboard, so I can go from one language to the other. And I would look at the Italian text, and write in Arabic, and if I found something that seemed more convincing as an image in Italian, I would change it. So the two texts were born together, and published within a month of one another: the Arabic text was published in August and the Italian text in September. They’re twins. (Ray 2014)

Ethnographic Surrealism

Looking back thirty years on a career in ethnology and literature, Tengour reflects on his “taste for fieldwork” and “listening to the other” combined with “poetic impetus” and “discipline and rigor essential to grasp things”: “Je me suis spécialisé en anthropologie par goût du terrain et aussi pour être à l’écoute de l’autre. Il y a dans la posture de l’anthropologue un maintien qui permet l’élan poétique tout en obligeant le regard à une discipline et une rigueur indispensables à la saisie des choses” (Agour 2008). His lifelong engagement with anthropology emphasizes local and historical terrains that do not confine him to the role of informant or mere chronicler of his Algerian interlocutors. He navigates the spaces of social science with exceptional autonomy and surrealist subversion, by turns wildly innovative and corrosively comic. Tengour’s influential manifesto “Maghrebin Surrealism” (2011 [1981]: 261-269) is intertextually alive to surrealist antecedents. He layers a “homage” to André Breton embedding the latter’s definition of surrealism in italics in his own text to guide him to “the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern” (Breton 1924 in Tengour 1981: 269). This practice finds echoes in anthropology exemplified in the concept of “ethnographic surrealism” as defined by James Clifford:

To state the contrast schematically, ethnographic humanism begins with the different and renders it (through naming, classifying, describing, interpreting) comprehensible. It familiarizes. A surrealist practice, on the other hand, attacks the familiar, provoking the irruption of otherness—the unexpected. The two attitudes presuppose one another; both are elements within a complex process that generates cultural meanings, definitions of self and other (1981: 562).

Tengour’s ethnographic attitude is shaped by surrealism and shapes it in turn. Consider that his initial fieldwork and teaching forays were framed by Benyahia’s illocutionary speech act against ethnology. That an academic field was made off limits is surely as surrealist as any Breton manifesto. Beyond ill-conceived, widely disregarded nation-building diktats by higher education bureaucrats, Tengour’s arguments about ethnographic participant-observations are infused with “the unbearable limits of a dailyness so difficult to bear.” Besides, he notes that given Algeria’s post-independence trajectories, who needs writers to chase after fictional madmen to populate their Maghrebi novels?

I council the reasonable man to go sit by the river and he will see pass by all the madmen he ever wanted to meet; provided that he live long enough. All Maghrebians know the subversive power of madness; their artists (with rare exceptions) know it less well than they do, as shown by the sugary and lukewarm use they make of it in their works trying to compel the unbearable limits of a dailyness so difficult to bear.

The madman, the mahbûl, the medjnûn, the dervish, the makhbût, the msaqqaf, the mtaktak, etcetera, belongs to folklore, alas. This reduction reveals the narrowness of the outlook. . . . The Algerians in particular — are seduced by the image of the madman: he is thought to speak what had been silenced. In most cases we are dealing with postcard-madmen (colonial exoticism was fond of this sort of postcard), boring and pompous. (Tengour 2011 [1981]: 263)

Tengour follows through with a multitude of research and writing projects in which Maghrebi Sufism is where “surrealist subversion asserts itself . . . there where the exterior observer sees only heresy, sexual dissoluteness, coarse language, incoherent acts, etcetera.” All that might be labeled spiritually heterodox or ethnographically unworthy – the particularity of North African Sufism, the textures of his childhood Tigditt Mostaganem neighborhood, Algeria’s magnificent gut-wrenching rai music – these are Tengour’s fields of inquiry. While Breton’s manifesto ends with “existence is elsewhere,” Tengour’s remake of a modernist rhetorical genre will posit “that despite my perverse attachment to art, it is ‘elsewhere’ that I hope to sojourn,” a narrative flourish that enticed him toward ethnography.

Susan Slyomovics is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her current research
project is on the fates of French colonial monuments in Algeria. She is editor of several
volumes and the author of How to Accept German Reparations (2014), The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco (2005), and The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (1998).

References

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Ali Benali, Zineb. 2003. “Le roman, cet archiviste de l’histoire,” Insaniyat 21:

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Asad, Talal, ed. 1973. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. London: Ithaca.

Balandier, Georges. 1948. “Recherches de convergences entre psychologie, sociologie et ethnologie,” Les Études philosophiques n.s. 3, nos. 3 and 4 : 281–92.

Ben Hounet, Yazid. 2008. “Gérer la tribu ?” Cahiers d’études africaines 191: http://journals.openedition.org/etudesafricaines/11982

Ben Naoum, Ahmed. 2002. “L’anthropodycée coloniale dans la perception officielle de l’anthropologie en Algérie.” In Quel devenir pour l’anthropologie en Algérie? edited by Nadir Maarouf, Faouzi and Khedidja Adel, 47-56. Oran: Éditions CRASC.

Bensmaïa, Réda. 2003. Experimental nations, or, The Invention of the Maghreb. Translated by Alyson Waters. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1963. “Étude sociologique.” In Travail et travailleurs en Algérie by Alain Darbel, Jean-Paul Rivet, Claude Seibel, and Pierre Bourdieu, 253-562. Paris: Mouton.

Bourdieu, Pierre and Abdelmalek Sayad. 1964. Le déracinement: La crise de l’agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie. Paris: Éditions de Minuit.

Breton, André. 1972 [1924]. Manifestoes of surrealism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Chebel, Malek. 1995. “Schizophrénies algériennes,” Peuples Méditerranéens 70-71 : 287-92.

Clifford, James. 1981. “On Ethnographic Surrealism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23, no. 4: 539-64.

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Colonna, Fanny. 1972. “Une fonction coloniale de l’ethnographie dans l’Algérie de l’entre deux-guerres: La programmation des élites moyennes,” Libyca 20: 259–67.

Djebar, Assia. 1977. La nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua. The Algerian Television; written and directed by Assia Djebar. Distributed by New York : Women Make Movies, 115 minutes.

Durkheim, Émile. 1997 [1893]. The Division of Labour in Society. New York: Free Press.

—. 1975 [1895]. “L’état actuel des études sociologiques en France.” In Textes, vol. I, 73-108. Paris, Éditions de Minuit.

Hachmaoui, Mohamed. 2012. “Y-a-t-il des tribus dans l’urne?” Cahiers d’études africaines 205: 103-63.

Henni, Samia. 2018. Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria. Zurich: gTa Verlag.

Khatibi, Abdelkebir. 1968. Le Roman maghrébin. Paris: Maspero.

Lakhous, Amara. 2008. Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio. Translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein. New York: Europa.

Madoui, Mohamed. 2007. “Les sciences sociales en Algérie. Regards sur les usages de la sociologie,” Sociologies pratiques 15, no. 2 : 149-60.

Mamdani, Mahmood. 2017. “Reading Ibn Khaldun in Kampala,” Journal of Historical Sociology 30: 7-26.

Mammeri, Mouloud. 1985. “Du bon usage de l’ethnologie: entretien avec Pierre Bourdieu,” Awal: Cahiers d’Études Berbères 1: 7-29.

—. 1989. “Une expérience de recherche anthropologique en Algérie,” Awal: Cahiers d’Études Berbères 5: 15-23.

Memmi, Albert. 1965 [1957]. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Translated by Howard Greenfeld. New York: Orion Press.

Morsy, Soheir, Cynthia Nelson, Reem Saad, and Hania Sholkamy. 1991. “Anthropology and the Call for Indigenization of Social Science in the Arab World.” In The Contemporary Study of the Arab World, edited by Earl T. Sullivan and Jaqueline S. Ismael, 81-115. Edmonton, Alberta: The University of Alberta Press.

Omouri, Noara. 2001. “Les Sections Administratives Spécialisées et les sciences sociales: Études et actions sociales de terrain des officiers SAS et des personnels des Affaires algériennes.” In Militaires et guérillas dans la guerre d’Algérie, edited by Jean-Charles Jauffret and Maurice Vaïse, 383-98. Paris: Éditions Complexe.

Ray, Meredith K. 2014. “Interview with Amara Lakhous.” Full Stop:
http://www.full-stop.net/2014/04/09/interviews/meredith-k-ray/amara-lakhous/

Siebeud, Emanuelle. 2006. “Ethnographie, ethnologie et africanisme: La ‘disciplinarisation’ de l’ethnologie française dans le premier tiers du XXe siècle.” In Qu’est-ce qu’une discipline? edited by Jean Boutier, Jean-Claude Passeron, and Jacques Revel, 229-45. Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS.

Slyomovics, Susan. 2013. “State of the State of the Art Studies: An Introduction to the Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa. In The Anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa: Into the New Millennium, edited by Sherine Hafez and Susan Slyomovics, 3-22. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

—. 2014. “Algerian Women’s Būqālah Poems: Cultural Politics, Oral Literature and Anti-Colonial Resistance,” Journal of Arabic Literature 45: 145-68.

Tengour, Habib. 1976. Tapapakitaques. Paris: Oswald.

—. 1980. “L’Ancêtre fondateur dans la tradition orale maghrébine,” Peuples méditerranéens 17: 67-75.

—. 1980. “La notion de tribu en Algérie.” Cirta 4: 2-6.

—. 1981. “Le surréalisme maghrébin,” Peuples méditerranéens 17: 77-81.

—. 1985. “Spatialités maghrébines traditionelles, Étude d’un cas: les Béni-Zéroual.” PhD dissertation, University of Paris VII.

—. 1995. “Le fourvoiement des élites: entretien,” Intersignes 10: 67-78.

—. 1997. Gens de Mosta. Arles: Actes Sud / Sindbad.

—. 2010. “This Particular Tartar.” Translated by Marilyn Hacker. Virginia Quarterly Review 86, no. 3: 122–31.

—. 2011. “Exile is my Trade”: The Habib Tengour Reader. Translated by Pierre Joris. Boston: Black Widow Press. https://issuu.com/pjoris/docs/exile_is_my_trade

—. 2012. Dans le soulèvement: Algérie et retours. Paris: Éditions de la Différence.

Yelles, Mourad. 2003. “Introduction.” In Habib Tengour ou l’ancre et la vague, edited by Mourad Yelles. Paris: Karthala.

—. 2012. “‘Personne, voilà mon nom’: jeux de masques et fictions identitaires chez Habib Tengour,” Expressions maghrébines 11, no. 1: 43–58

[1] For texts not translated into English, translations are mine. Otherwise, in-text references are to English translations by Pierre Joris (Tengour 2011) or Marilyn Hacker (Tengour 2010), neither year reflecting Tengour’s original publication dates.

[2] Habib Tengour, personal communication with the author, July 1, 2018, and Archives nationales d’outre-mer, 5H1 106 Oranie.

[3] Until E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s The Sanusi of Cyrenaica (1949), Anglophone anthropology of the Middle East and North Africa had been equally castigated as “folklorism and trait distribution surveys of a more naïve anthropology” (Slyomovics 2013: 9).

December 10, 2018
Gretchen Soderlund — Futures of Journalisms Past (or, Pasts of Journalism’s Future)
Gretchen Soderlund

Journalists might be chroniclers of the present, but two decades of books, conferences, symposia, interviews, talks, special issues, and end-of-year features on the future of news suggests they are also preoccupied with what lies ahead. Still, few of today’s media workers are as prescient as William T. Stead, the English journalist and amateur occultist who came close to predicting the 1912 Titanic disaster twenty years before he died in it. In his 1893 short story, “From the Old World to the New,” a transatlantic ocean liner collides with an iceberg and erupts in flames, leaving the vessel’s desperate passengers clinging to a sheet of ice. Unlike the Titanic, everyone in the story lives. Two passengers on a nearby ship receive telepathic distress signals. One has haunting visions of the accident in her sleep, and the other finds a written plea for help in the handwriting of a friend travelling aboard the sinking ship. The clairvoyants relay this information to their captain, who steers a perilous course through the icebergs and rescues the shipwrecked passengers. In 1893 wireless telegraphy, the early term for radio, did not yet exist (even if, as an idea, it electrified the Victorian imagination). By the time of the Titanic’s maiden voyage, radio was a standard maritime communication device. The technology helped, but was no panacea: the closest ship to receive the Titanic’s SOS signals arrived too late for Stead and many of his fellow passengers.

Stead was at the forefront of thinking about new technologies as well as his own demise. He also had a keen interest in journalism’s future, one shared by many of today’s news workers. Even people who failed to predict the collision of twentieth-century news models with the Web are now regularly called upon to forecast the profession’s future. Answering the future-of-news question requires experts to project past experience and current knowledge onto a forthcoming period of time. But does this question have a history of its own? Did earlier news workers prognosticate as often and with the same urgency? What anxieties or opportunities provoked past future thought? To answer these questions, I explore some future-oriented predictions, assessments, and directives of nineteenth and twentieth-century reporters, editors, and media entrepreneurs in the United States and England. Their claims about the future of journalism serve as windows into the relationship between technology and news work at different historical moments and offer insights into today’s prognoses.

The Current Crisis

In the U.S., mainstream news agencies have been dealt a series of technological, economic, and political blows that have changed the way news is written, distributed, consumed, funded, and understood. Anxiety about the future can be understood in light of three interrelated challenges to the post-World War II information order: twenty years of digital technological disruption, the 2008 economic crisis, and politically and economically motivated challenges to the industrial news media.

By now it is a truism that screen-based digital technologies have transformed journalism. Newspapers, in particular, have experienced an advertising and readership decline more existentially threatening than the threat posed to print from radio in the 1920s or from television in the 1950s. The net presented a challenge to print media even before it became a major platform for news; in the mid-1990s, Craigslist disrupted the long-standing classified ad revenue streams of daily papers and newspapers (Seamans and Zhu 2013). The incorporation of print news functions into the digital has only intensified since then. Internet saturation in U.S. households is at 84 percent and climbing (Pew Research Center 2015). News consumers are no longer tethered to a small set of news organizations; sixty-two percent read disparate stories they happen across on social media and Twitter feeds and do not subscribe to a single newspaper or news magazine (Gottfried and Shearer 2016).

Newspapers were already on shaky ground when the 2008 financial crisis struck. Economic downturn coupled with technological displacement led to a crisis of near Darwinian proportions for an industry that had seen outsized profit margins for much of the twentieth century. Closures, bankruptcies, and mergers ensued. Historic papers like the Rocky Mountain News and Ann Arbor News shut their doors, and many other dailies and weeklies reverted to web-only formats (Rogers 2009). Over a hundred papers ceased publication between 2004 and 2016 (Barthel 2016). Papers that endured the techno-economic struggles of the 2000s had to rethink the nature of the news enterprise from the ground up, devising survival strategies in a new Mad Max-style advertising and subscriber-depleted media terrain.

Journalism never regained its footing after the financial crisis. As a Pew Research Center study suggests, “2015 might as well have been a recession year” for the traditional news media (Barthel 2016). The study paints a grim picture of the news industry. In 2014 and 2015, the number of print media consumers continued to drop. Even revenue from digital ads fell as advertisers migrated to social media sites like Facebook. And full-time jobs in journalism continued their steady decline: today there are 39 percent fewer positions than there were two decades ago. News consumption also began to shift from personal computers to mobile devices. Readers increasingly access news items on their phones, while standing in line, waiting at red lights, and at other spare moments of the day. In a metric-driven world, mobile news consumption has a silver lining: many sites are receiving more visits than before. However, the average mobile-device reader spends less time with each article than they did on PCs (Barthel 2016). Demand for news exists, albeit in ever-smaller and dislocated chunks.

At the same time, insurgent news entrepreneurs have altered the media field by leveraging weaknesses in the system and taking advantage of emerging technological possibilities. Just as the most successful nineteenth-century “startups” were enabled by new technologies like the steam press that sped up and lowered the cost of printing,[1] today’s media insurgents – people like Matt Drudge, Steve Bannon, the late Andrew Brietbart, and others – moved straight to digital news and data formats without prior institutional baggage. Since initial start-up costs on the Web are low and news production and dissemination is relatively easy, they were able to offer a trimmed-down model of news production that did not require reporting in the strict sense.

Some of these insurgents imagine a future for news unfettered by past or existing structures. They claim they want to take a sledgehammer to old media, but it really serves as their foil. In the current context, the terms old media, establishment media, and mainstream media are thrown around by new media players jockeying for position in a changing media field. The White House is currently engaged in a hostile yet mutually beneficial battle with mainstream news outlets, and it echoes the position that the news media is a liberal monolith that censors alternative positions.[2] At the same time, establishment journalism is enjoying a period of unpredicted growth due to the Trump bubble, and has been reinventing and reimagining itself as the Fourth Estate in the wake of the 2016 election.

Future-of news experts reduce professional and public uncertainty in times of flux (Lowery and Shan, 2016). But it is important to note that not all contemporary observers are worried. The late David Carr, for instance, believed Web startups like Buzzfeed would eventually become more like traditional news outlets. “The first thing they do when they get a little money is hire some journalists,” he said in 2014. He was confident news audiences had an intrinsic desire for quality and that the business end of things would eventually sort itself out.

Similarly, people who express anxieties about the state of journalism are more likely to have experienced journalism as a stable and predictable field, and to have lost something when the old model collapsed. Those who are concerned worry that a digital-age business model will never arise to solve journalism’s funding problem. They worry that automation will replace journalists. They fear ideological bubbles and distracted audiences. They lament eroding legitimacy and credibility in an era of so-called fake news. And they hope prognosticators possess special knowledge or have more crystalline vision than others in the profession. But did past reporters and editors worry about the fate of their profession in the same way?

The Nineteenth Century

In the nineteenth century, journalism was a wide-open, experimental field on both sides of the Atlantic. Literacy rates were climbing. Print technologies had improved. Paper was cheaper to produce than ever before. Newspapers, book publishers, and the public were experiencing the power of mass dissemination. By the second half of the nineteenth century, newspapers’ social standing had improved. Some observers believed they were institutions on the ascent that would eventually play a social role on par with educators, clergy, or government officials.

However, concerns about the accelerated pace of newspaper work, the constant demand for “newness,” and the unremitting imperative to scoop rival papers were refrains in nineteenth-century journalistic commentary. In his biography of Henry Raymond, the journalist and author Augustus Maverick characterized news work in 1840s New York as an unceasing “treadmill”:

Only those who have been placed upon the treadmill of a daily newspaper in New York know the severity of the strain it imposes on the mental and physical powers. ‘There is no cessation,’ one newsman explained. ‘A good newspaper never publishes that which is technically denominated ‘old news,’ – a phrase so significant in journalism as to be invested with untold horrors. All must be daily fresh, daily complete, daily polished and perfect; else the journal falls into disrepute, is distanced by its rivals, and, becoming ‘dull,’ dies. (1870, 220)

I will return to the issue of acceleration later in the paper. For now, it is important to note that perceptions of speedup and fears of being outmoded were embedded in the experience of journalism as early as the 1840s.

Despite journalism’s daily stresses, Maverick felt the quality and legitimacy of papers was on the rise. The press had successfully overcome early-nineteenth century threats to credibility like partisanship and the sensationalism of the penny press, which printed fantastical, fabricated stories like the New York Sun’s Great Moon Hoax. Maverick believed this progress would continue unabated:

Accepting the promise of the Present, the prospect of the Future brightens. For, as men come to know each other better, through the rapid annihilation of time and space, they will be plunged deeper into affairs of trade and finance and commerce, and be burdened with a thousand cares, – and the Press, as the reflector of the popular mind, will then take a broader view, and reach forth towards a higher aim; becoming, even more than now, the living photograph of the time, the sympathetic adviser, the conservator, regulator, and guide of American society. (1870, 358)

Maverick envisioned a future in which the press would both facilitate and temper the social changes wrought by connectivity (changes that he analyzed in his 1858 book on the telegraph).

The same year Maverick predicted a role for the press as guide and advisor in an increasingly complex and interconnected world, William T. Stead began his career as a fledgling reporter. Few journalists tested, challenged, and wielded the power of the press quite like Stead. In his essay “The Future of Journalism” (1887), he envisioned radical and expansive new plans for the press. His own journalistic experiments had convinced him that editors “could become the most permanently influential Englishmen in the Empire.” But to ascend to this level one had to become a “master of the facts – especially the most dominant fact of all, the state of public opinion.” Editors guessed at public opinion, but had no way of gauging it. To remedy this, Stead suggested journalists be allowed twenty-four hour access to everyone “from the Queen downward.” His news workers of the future would be intimately connected to public opinion across the social system. They would have unfettered access to powerful people, which would diminish the unquestioned authority and privacy of the aristocracy.

Since the system Stead imagined would be impossible for one person to manage, it would be held in place by travelers who would preach the importance of journalistic work with a missionary zeal. The travelers would eventually be “entrusted the further and more delicate duty of collecting the opinions of those who form the public opinion of their locality.” Stead was certain the enactment of his plan would result in the greatest “spiritual and educational and governing agency which England has yet seen.”

“The Future of Journalism” demonstrates a keen awareness of print’s power in an era of mass distribution and rapid news diffusion. It was grandiose because it imagined a far greater political role for journalists than they would ever possess. In some respects, though, Stead was a superior prognosticator. In 1887, the communications field was undifferentiated. His journalistic travelers and major-generals would ultimately manifest themselves in the twentieth century as pollsters, social scientists, and public relations specialists. But the editor would not sit at the helm, overseeing these efforts. Instead, journalist/editors would report their findings and beliefs, and serve as conduits in the flow of ideas between these professionals and the public. Despite their inadequacies, Stead’s writings on the future were more prescriptive and imaginative than many of today’s commentaries on the topic.

Twentieth-Century Futures

Nineteenth-century commentators on the news profession lamented acceleration, railed against partisanship, and decried certain forms of sensationalism, but they also believed in progress. This changed in the twentieth century. Frank Munsey’s career began by selling low-cost magazines and pulp fiction. In 1889 he launched the popular general-interest magazine Munsey’s Magazine, and he went on to amass a fortune between 1900 and 1920 purchasing and selling ten different newspapers, including The New York Daily News, The Boston Journal, and The Washington Times. He was a businessman first and journalist second. Munsey’s contemporaries viewed him as journalism’s undertaker: his very appearance on the scene heralded a newspaper’s demise. His contemporary, Oswald Garrison Villard, described him as “a dealer in dailies – little else and little more” (1923, 81).[3]

Munsey’s “Journalism of the Future” appeared in 1903 in Munsey’s Magazine. In it, he suggests that the common editors’ refrain about “lack of good men” misses the real problem. The threat facing journalism is not a lack of well-trained workers, but the size of daily papers. Newspapers, which had been expanding since the 1890s, contained more sections, lengthier features, and larger Sunday editions than ever before. As papers grew, readers became rushed. The problem with news circa 1903 was that there was too much to write about and too much to read. Because they had to absorb so much, readers’ attention was at all all-time low (a concern that resonates with today’s news producers). For Munsey, the solution to the problem of the rushed and inattentive reader lay in condensation and conglomeration. Predicting extreme media consolidation long before it occurred, Munsey speculated that within four years (i.e., by 1907) the entire media field would be whittled down to three or four firms that would publish every newspaper, periodical, magazine, and book:

The journalism of the future will be of a higher order than the journalism of the past or the present. Existing conditions of competition and waste, under individual ownership, make the ideal newspaper impossible. But with a central ownership big enough and strong enough to encompass the whole country, our newspapers can afford to be independent, fearless, and honest. (1903, 830)

For Munsey, consolidation, quality, and independence are linked through the efficiency and scope of large-scale production and the nationalization of mass audiences. He does not foresee problems caused by monopolization or threats to newspapers from radio. He imagines technology only as it relates to its effects on the productive capacity of print news, which he thought was fettered by local ownership.

Writing during World War I, Willard Grosvenor Bleyer, founder of the University of Wisconsin journalism school and advocate of professional training, took a more modest view of journalism’s future. His primary concern was wartime press censorship and the spread of propaganda through semi-official news agencies. However, he considered these developments temporary deviations from the normal function of the press in a democratic society: eventually the profession would return to its pre-war normalcy. “The world war,” he wrote, “has given rise to peculiar problems, none of which, however, seems likely to have permanent effects on our newspapers” (1918, 14). Wartime austerity, especially the high price of paper, posed problems for the news industry. But there was a bright side. People wanted news from Europe, so the higher cost of newspapers had not decreased circulation rates.

Some early-twentieth century observers were concerned about sensationalism and editorial independence or the effects of war on the press, while others worried about the future of democracy in the context of Munsey-wrought newspaper industry mergers. Oswald Villard, writer for The Nation and The NY Evening Post, founder of the American Anti-Imperialist League, and the first treasurer of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, argued that consolidation threatened democracy. Most newspapers lacked commercial independence and were beholden to advertisers who limited what they could publish. He was also concerned about the political implications of audience fragmentation: “Not today can one, no matter how trenchant their pen, be in a garret and expect to reach the conscience of a public by seventy millions larger than the America of Garrison and Lincoln.” Villard, however, held out hope that the views of ‘great men’ would find an audience, even if it meant bypassing the press. He did not predict new media forms, but looked back at old ones: “the prophet of the future will make his message heard, if not by a daily, then by a weekly; if not by a weekly, then by pamphleteering in the manner of Alexander Hamilton; if not by pamphleteering then by speech in the market-place” (1923, 315).

After World War II, journalism experienced a period of stability that gave it an aura of permanence, as if media institutions were constants amidst other economic, social, and cultural changes. Future concerns during this period centered on issues of technology and media consolidation. In 1947, for example, the Hutchins Commission on Freedom of the Press predicted that newspapers would soon be sent from FM radio stations to personal facsimile machines. These devices would print, fold, and deposit them in the hands of U.S. householders each morning (34-45). News workers and industry analysts predicted that technologies as diverse as citizens band radio, cable TV, camcorders, and CD ROMS would, for better or worse, alter the production or consumption of news and either enhance or impede democratic processes (Curran 2010a). In the 1980s and 90s, journalists and media critics pointed to the pernicious effects of monopolization in national and regional markets. They feared the one-newspaper town and the absorption of local newspapers by media franchises. Michael Kinsley recalls that, in the pre-Internet period, “at symposia and seminars on the Future of Newspapers, professional worriers used to worry that these monopoly or near-monopoly newspapers were too powerful for society’s good” (2014).

Time, Space, and Journalism

Time is not a natural resource that springs from the Earth, but a cultural and social construct imagined and experienced in multiple ways (Fabien 1983).[4] Some social theorists argue that the sensation of rapid acceleration is a key feature of the modern experience of time (Crary 2013; Rosa 2013). Harmut Rosa, for example, has argued that time compression has reached a point where the hamster wheel or treadmill has become an apt metaphor for modern life. Work speedups and technological immersion are necessary just to maintain social stasis, without the possibility of advancement or breaking free (Rosa 2010). For Rosa and other accelerationists, acceleration leaves you mired in the present, anticipating the future with a sense of dread. The reality is that there is no uniform experience of time; our experience depends upon our position within circuits of information and capital (Sharma 2014). But when it comes to technological and economic speedup, journalism may be the canary in the mine. Reporters like Maverick experienced this treadmill effect as early as the 1840s. In 1918, Francis Leupp described the quickening pace of news work in the electric age:

We must reckon with the progressive acceleration of the pace of our 20^th century life generally. Where we walked in the old times we run in these; where we ambled then, we gallop now. In the age of electric power, high explosives, articulated steel frames, in the larger world; of the long-distance telephone, the taxicab, and the card-index, in the narrower. The problem of existence is reduced to terms of time-measurement. (39)

Like Maverick, Leupp experienced the dynamism of modern life and the dual pressures of accuracy and speed in journalism.

It makes sense that journalism would experience the present this way. As the quintessential modern form, news embodies planned obsolescence (Schwartz 1999). Journalism has undergone two centuries of shrinking intervals of newness and relevance: six-months, a week, a day, an hour. With the rise of social media and Twitter, the intervals between news cycles have grown even shorter. In the twentieth century, edition release times and broadcast schedules helped carve the day into identifiable units with firm deadlines. But in a context where news can be posted around the clock and updated every minute, the clock is no longer a structuring device for journalism. Minutes, seconds, and the calendar click-over from one day to the next are the only salient units of time. News stories that were relevant and new last week often seem ancient a week later. A newsworthy event like President Trump pulling out of the Paris climate agreement can feel as distant as the Vietnam War the following week. New communication forms like Twitter coupled with strategies of disinformation and the routinization of scandal shatter perceptions of continuity. What we are experiencing now is not the death of history, as was proclaimed after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but the death of the present. In news, rapid acceleration has amnestic effects, similar to the experience of sleep deprivation.

If the main time/space vectors in journalism used to be deadlines and beats, the latter may also be losing their importance, giving way to a more fluid cut-and-run style of journalism. For example, the Washington Post’s Chris Cilizza suggests that young reporters should not decline stories saying, “that’s not my beat” (2016). Rather, in a context of dwindling opportunities, journalists should pursue any story available, whether or not it fits into the old-fashioned logic of beat work or the range of competence of individual journalists.[5] But while traditional beats may be losing their cogency, reporters must add a new online “beat” to their repertoire that entails close surveillance of social media and online news, a dynamic that some critics have argued creates a house of mirrors effect in the news industry (Reinemann and Baugut 2013).

Technology and Uncertainty in the Professions

Journalism may be the paradigmatic case of a profession imperiled by a new technology, but its concerns about time and technological displacement cannot be generalized to other spheres. Take lawyers, social workers, and physicians. Uncertainty within the legal profession is largely unrelated to the digital. It was caused by the recent financial crisis coupled with the overtraining of new professionals. Jobs for newly minted JDs evaporated during the recession, leading to a decline in the number of law school applicants after 2010. With enrollment down, the future of smaller law schools became uncertain, and many schools lowered admission standards to stay afloat (Olson 2015; Pistone and Horn 2016). The profession has been in crisis, but not because of the Internet, and there is even some evidence that law positions are coming back (Solomon 2015). Uncertainty for social workers began even earlier, when the Clinton administration began dismantling the welfare state. Despite the obvious need for such professionals, government, non-profit, and other social service jobs have seen a quarter-century decline because of deep budgetary cuts that began in the 1990s (Reisch 2013).

Physicians seem least concerned with the future. They worry more about burnout than they do the fate of their profession. The future is typically invoked in discussions about labor shortages and descriptions of new developments at the intersection of medicine and technology. Articles on the future of medicine routinely tout new developments like 3D printers that can form living cells into new organs (Mellgard 2015). Digitalization has changed many aspects of medicine: electronic medical records and charting alters the way nurses and physicians access information, for instance. But it has not led to credible speculation about replacing physicians with bots. Contrast this with some news workers’ worries about replacement by computer programs like Automated Insight’s narrative generation system, Wordsmith. The Associated Press now employs Wordsmith to do its quarterly earnings reports and other stories, and has become so confident in these auto-generated stories that it runs many of them without prior vetting (the rare human-edited AI story is said to have had “the human touch”) (Miller 2015). Nor have drones been proposed as a viable alternative to human physicians, as they have been for newsgatherer/photojournalists (Etzler 2016).[6]

In none of these other cases is technology the primary motor of destabilization. The character of future angst in the professions, therefore, is occupation dependent. And journalism, it seems, is uniquely sensitive and vulnerable to technology. Every widely-adopted communications technology – the steam press, radio, the net – has restructured news and led to audience expansion or contraction. In this sense, there is nothing new to journalist’s dependence on and transformation by technologies. The one constant is that journalists work in a field of technological contingency.

Conclusion: Euphoria and Dysphoria in Journalism

Visions of the future are also statements about the present. Political and economic conditions, labor concerns, and beliefs about the nature of time are contained within predictive thought. The future of journalism has been asked when a number of possibilities are on the table and when fewer options are imaginable. Sometimes predictions are made when a journalist has a stake in seeing a particular vision enacted. There was no social stasis or treadmill for Munsey, who saw conglomeration as the key to good journalism, or for Stead, who imagined himself as the heroic journalist proselytizer. Both saw themselves as leaders of the free world. Feelings of euphoria and dysphoria, therefore, come and go and are not unique to one era. Nineteenth-century journalists like Stead and Maverick imagined their field’s future and the journalist’s future roles in society. Both were “feeling it,” riding high on the wave of mechanization.

William T. Stead, 1909 (image source: Wikipedia and GIPHY

Social roles are also embedded within occupational visions of the future. Will tomorrow’s journalists be tellers of truth, interpreters of data, shapers of public opinion, informers of policy makers, imaginers of social utopias? Some commentators insist that news must change to remain relevant in the digital age. In a world of abundant facts, reporters should be master interpreters, explaining the “what” and “how” to the public rather than reciting basic information (Cilizza 2016; Stephens 2014). As older models of journalism become outmoded, either by the Web or by computer programs, the hope is that professional journalists will find a niche explaining events. A similar impulse lies behind data-driven journalism, but in this case the journalists refashion themselves as computer workers, scraping the Web for reams of data, interpreting it, and presenting it to audiences in visually and narratively compelling ways. In solutions-based journalism, the reporter is a meta-social worker or public policy specialist, proposing potential solutions to local social problems based on what other locales have found successful.

There is also an emerging patronage system in which billionaires, foundations, and small donations prop up capital-intensive journalistic forms like investigative journalism. This is a good stopgap measure, and much of the work that has been supported by tech giants like Jeff Bezos, Pierre Omidyar, and others has typically been of high quality. But it begs the question: can journalists write exposés today about the very people and their tech companies who are sponsoring our journalism the way the Ida Tarbell wrote about Standard Oil?

The social roles future of news experts imagine might come to pass, but not always in the way they expect. Stead’s call for government by journalism, for instance, is certainly embodied in a figure like Breitbart’s Steve Bannon. Although Stead would disagree with his political vision and journalistic practices, Bannon is also “feeling it,” envisioning a future of infinite possibilities.

Occupational forecasting serves both psychological and pragmatic ends: it reduces anxieties at the same time that it identifies trends to guide present-day action. Because the future is speculative and can only be imagined or modeled, not recreated from memory, artifact, or written record, prediction-based advice runs a high risk of misdirection. We can safely assume that prognosticators will not determine the actual future of journalism. If Stead were really clairvoyant, the Titanic would have been spared and journalism saved. As Robert Heilbroner suggests, prediction is an exercise in futility. It is better to “ask whether it is imaginable… to exercise effective control over the future-shaping forces of Today” (1995, 95). It is only in this sense that discussions of the future and the social experiments they generate do, in fact, transform the field.

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Gretchen Soderlund is Associate Professor of Media History in the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. She is the author of Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism, 1885-1917 (University of Chicago Press) and editor of Charting, Tracking, and Mapping: New Technologies, Labor, and Surveillance, a special issue of Social Semiotics. Her articles have appeared in such journals as American Quarterly, Feminist Formations, The Communication Review, Humanity, and Critical Studies in Media Communication.

Back to the essay

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Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Patrick Jones for his comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

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Notes

[1] The tremendous success of nineteenth-century self-made owner-editors like Benjamin Day or S.S. McClure can be attributed to innovations in content and funding models. In the 1830s, Day lowered the cost of his newspaper to only a penny, making it affordable to more New Yorkers, and made up for the decreased revenue by selling more advertising space. McClure did the same thing for magazines in the 1890s, selling his publication for a nickel instead of the standard quarter while increasing ad revenue. In doing so, both took advantage of untapped opportunities to reshape the news field in their respective eras.

[2] Before the 2016 election, this rhetoric united the libertarian left and the right. In a 2014 interview on Democracy Now that, not coincidentally, got positive play in the rightwing media, Glenn Greenwald lambasted Washington Post editors as, “old-style, old-media, pro-government journalists… the kind who have essentially made journalism in the U.S. neutered and impotent and obsolete” (Watson 2014).

[3] Villard also said of Munsey: “There is not a drop of the reformer’s blood in him; there is in him nothing that cries out in pain in response to the travails of multitudes” (1923, 72).

[4] The representational features of future thought are also culturally and historically specific (Rosenberg and Harding 2005).

[5] This more mobile, targeted approach to news production with fewer fixed duties or beats may offer a more varied work experience. But it has labor implications as well: it edges toward freelancing and it may be difficult to say no for reasons beyond beats. Further, reporters may find themselves over their heads in reporting on topics around which they can claim no expertise.

[6] Indeed, the FAA changed its policy on August 29, 2016 so that journalists do not need pilot’s licenses to fly drones, which will precipitate the increased use of the tool in the future (Etzler 2016).

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August 3, 2018
Annemarie Perez — UndocuDreamers: Public Writing and the Digital Turn
Annemarie Perez [*]

The supposition [is] that higher education and schooling in general serve a democratic society by nourishing hearty citizenship.
– Richard Ohmann (2003)

What are the risks of writing in public in this digital age? Of being a “speaking” subject in the world of public cyberspace? Physical and legal risks are discussed in work such as Nancy Welch’s (2005) recounting of her student’s encounter with the police for literally posting her poems where bills or poems were not meant to be posted. Weisser recounts a “hallway conversation” about public writing as “shared work, shared successes, and, occasionally, shared commiseration” (2002, xii). Likewise, in writing about blogging in the classroom, Charles Tryon writes about the way blogging with interactions from the public provokes “conversations” about the “relationship between writing and audience,” one that can, at times, be uncomfortable (2006, 130). There is an assumption that when discussing the “risks” of writing in public here in the United States, we instructors are discussing the risks of exercising the rights of citizenship, of first amendment disagreement and discord. Yet the assumption that the speaking subject has first amendment rights, that they possess or can express citizenship, is one which nullifies the risks some students face when they write in public, especially in digital spaces where the audience can be a vast everyone. What is the position of one who writes in public literally without the possibility of citizenship? In the absence of US citizenship, their taking the position of subject, and offering testimony about their situation, protesting it as unjust can provoke not simply abuse, which is disturbing enough, but to threats of legal action against them. Public writing opens them and their families up to threats of reporting, detainment and possible deportation by the government. Given these very real risks, I question whether from a Chicanx studies pedagogy we should be advocating for and instructing our students to express their thoughts on their positions, on their lives, in public.[1] This question feels especially urgent when, given the digital turn, to write in “public” can mean a single tweet results in huge consequences, from public humiliation to the horror of doxxing. To paraphrase Eileen Medeiros, who writes about these risks in another context, “was it all worth a few articles and essays” or, to make it more contemporary, is the risk worth a few blog posts or ‘zines? (2007, 4).

This said, I was and am convinced about the power and efficacy of having students write in public, especially for Chicanx studies classrooms. Faced with the possibilities offered by the Internet and their effects on the Chicanx studies classroom, my response has been enthusiasm for the electronic, for electronic writing, of their making our discourse public. Chicanx pedagogy is, in part, based on a repudiation of top-down instruction. As a pedagogy, public writing instead advocates bringing the community into the classroom and the classroom into the community. Blogging is an effective way to do this. Especially given the relative lack of Chicanx digital voices on the ‘net, I yearn for my students to own part of the Internet, to be seen and heard. This enthusiasm for having my Chicanx studies students write for the Internet came first out of my final year of dissertation research when I “discovered” that online terms from the Chicano Movement like “Aztlán,” “La Raza” and so on were being used by reactionary racists to (re)define and revise the history of the Chicano Movement as racist and anti-Semitic and were wildly distorting the goals, philosophies, and accomplishments of revolutionary movements. More disturbing, these mis-definitions were well enough linked to appear on the first few pages of search results, inflating their importance and giving them a sense of being “truth” merely by virtue of their being oft repeated. My students’ writings, my thinking went, would change this. Their work, I imagined, would be interventions in the false discourse, changing, via Google hits, what people would find when they entered Chicanx studies terms into their browsers. Besides, I did my undergraduate degree at a university in the midwest without a Chicanx or Latinx studies department. My independent study classes in Chicanx literature were constructed from syllabi for courses I found online. I was, therefore, imagining our public writing being used by people without access to a Chicanx studies classroom to further their own educations.

Public writing, generally defined as writings for an audience beyond the professor and classroom, can be figured in a variety of ways, but descriptions, especially those in the form of learning objectives and outcomes, tend toward a focus on writing centered around social change and the fostering of citizenship. This concept of “citizenship” is often repeated in composition studies as public writing is discussed as advocacy, as service, as an expression of active citizenship. Indeed the public writer has been figured by theorists as expressions of “citizenship” and an exercise in and demonstration of first amendment rights. Public writing is presented as being, as Christian Weisser wrote, the “discourse of public life,” further writing of his pride in being “a citizen in a self-reforming constitutional democracy” (xiv). Public writing is presented as nurturing citizenship and therefore we are encouraged to foster it in our classrooms, especially in the teaching of writing. Weisser also writes of the teaching of public writing as a “shared” classroom experience, sometimes including hardships, between students and instructors.

However, this discussion of “citizenship” and the idea of creating it through teaching to me rather disturbingly echoes the idea of assimilation to the dominant culture, an idea that Chicana/o studies pedagogy resists (Perez 1993, 276). Rather than a somewhat nationalistic goal of creating and fostering “citizenship” Chicana/o studies, especially since the 1980s publication and adoption of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands, has been for a discourse that “explains the social conditions of subjects with hybrid identities” (Elenes 1997, 359). These hybrid identities and the assumption of the position of subjecthood by those who resist the idea of nation is fraught, especially when combined with public writing. As Anzaldúa writes, “[w]ild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out” (1987, 76). The responses to Chicanx and Latinx students speaking or writing their truth can be demands for their silence.

My students and my use of public writing via blogging and Twitter was productive through upper division classes I taught on Latina coming of age stories, Chicana feminisms and Chicana/o gothic literature. After four courses taught using blogs created on my WordPress multisite installation with author accounts created for each student, I felt that I had the blogging with students / writing in public / student archiving thing down. My students had always had the option to write pseudonymously, but most had chosen to write under their own names, wanting to create a public digital identity. The blogs were on my domain and identified with their specific university and course. had been contacted by authors (and, in one case, an author’s agent), filmmakers and artists, and other bloggers had linked to our work. My students and I could see we had a small but steady traffic of people accessing student writing with their work being read and seen and, on a few topics, our class pages were on the first pages of a Google search. Therefore, when I was scheduled to teach a broader “Introduction to Chicana/o Studies” course, I decide to apply the same structure: students publicly blogging their writings on a common course blog on issues related to Chicanx studies, to this one hundred level survey course. Although, in keeping with my specialization, the course was humanities heavy with a focus on history, literature and visual art, the syllabus also included a significant amount of work in social science, especially sociology and political science, forming the foundations of Chicanx studies theory. The course engaged a number of themes related to Chicanx social and political identity, focusing a significant amount of work on communities and migrations. The demographics of the course were mixed. In the thirty student class, about half identified as Latina/o. The rest were largely white American, with several European international students.

As we read about migrations, studying and discussing the politics behind both the immigrant rights May Day marches in Los Angeles and the generations of migrations back and forth across the border, movements of people which long pre-dated the border wall, we also discussed the contemporary protest writings and art creations by the UndocuQueer Movement. In the course of class discussion, sometimes in response to comments their classmates were making that left them feeling that undocumented people were being stereotyped, several students self-disclosed that they were either the children of undocumented migrants or were undocumented themselves. These students discussed their experience of not being citizens of the country they had lived in since young childhood, the fear of deportation they felt for themselves or their parents, and its effect on them. The students also spoke of their hopes for a future in which they, and / or their families, could apply for and receive legal status, become citizens. This self-disclosure and recounting of personal stories had, as had been my experience in previous courses, a significant effect on the other students in the class, especially for those who had never considered the privileges their legal status afforded them. In the process the undocumented students became witnesses and experts, giving testimony. They made it clear they felt empowered by giving voice to their experience and seeing that their disclosures changed the minds of some of their classmates on who was undocumented and what they looked like.

After seeing the effect the testimonies had in changing the attitudes of their classmates, my undocumented students, especially one who had strongly identified with the UndocuQueer movement (in one case, the student had already participated in demonstrations), began to blog about their experiences, taking issue with stereotypes of migrants and discussing the pain reading or hearing a term like “illegals” could cause. Drawing on the course-assigned examples of writers Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, they used their experiences, their physical bodies, as both evidence and metaphor of the undocumented state of being in-between, not belonging fully to any country or nation. They also wrote of their feelings of invisibility on a majority white campus where equal rights of citizenship were assumed and taken for granted. Their writing was raw and powerful, challenging, passionate and, at times, angry. These student blog posts seemed the classic case of students finding their voices. As an instructor, I was pleased with their work and gave them positive feedback, as did many of their classmates. Yet as their instructor, I was focused on the pedagogy and their learning outcomes relative to the course and had not fully considered the risk they were taking writing their truth in public.

As part of being instructor and WordPress administrator, I was also moderating comments to the blog. The settings had the blog open to public comments, with the first from any email address being hand moderated in order to prevent spamming. However, for the most part, unless an author we were reading had been alerted via Twitter, comments were between and among students in the course, which gave the course blog the feeling of being an extension of the classroom community, an illusion of privacy and intimacy. Due to this closeness, the fact the posts and comments were all coming from class members, the students and I largely lost sight of the fact we were writing in public, as the space came to feel private. This illusion of privacy was shattered when I got a comment for moderation from what turned out to be a troll demanding “illegals” be deported. Although it was not posted, what I read was an attack on one of my students, hinting the poster had done (or would do) enough digging to identify the student and their family. Not only was the comment was abusive, the commenter claimed to have reported my student to ICE.

I was reminded of the comment and the violent anger directed at undocumented students, however worthy they might try and prove themselves, again in June 2016 when Mayte Lara Ibarra, an honors high school student in Texas, tweeted her celebration of her status as valedictorian, her high GPA, her honors at graduation, her scholarship to the University of Texas and her undocumented status. While she received many messages of support, she felt forced to remove her tweet due to abuse and threats of deportation by users who claimed to have reported her and her family to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

When I received this comment for moderation, my first response was to go through and change the status of the blog posts testifying about being undocumented to “drafts” and then to contact the students who had self-disclosed their status to let them know about the comment and the threat. I feared for my students and their families. Had I encouraged behavior–public writing–that made them vulnerable? I wondered whether I should I go to my chair for advice. Guilty self-interest was also present. At the time I was an adjunct instructor at this university, hired semester-to-semester to teach individual classes. How would my chair, the department, the university feel about my having put my students at risk to write for a blog on my own domain? Suddenly the “walls” set up by Blackboard, the university’s learning management software, that I had dismissed for being “closed,” looked appealing as I wondered how to manage this threat. Much of the discourse around public writing for the classroom discusses “risk,” but whose risk are we talking about, and how much of it can students take, and, as their instructor, what sort of risks can I be responsible for allowing them to take? Nancy Welch discusses the “attention toward working with students on public writing” as an expression of our belief as instructors that this writing “can matter in tangible ways” (2005, 474), but I questioned whether it could matter enough to be worth tangible risk to my students’ and their families physical bodies at the hands of a nation-state that has detained and deported more than 2.5 million people since 2009 (Gonzalez-Barrera, and Krogstad 2014). While some of the students in this class qualified for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), giving them something of a shield, their parents, and other members of their families did not all have this protection.

By contrast, perhaps not surprisingly, my students, all of them first and second year students, felt no risk, or at least were sure they were willing to take the risk associated with the public writing. They did not want their writing taken down or hidden. My students felt they were part of a movement, a moment, to expressly leave the shadows. One even argued that the abusive comment should be posted so they could engage with its author. We discussed the risks. Initially I wanted them to be able to make the choice themselves, did not want to take their voice or power from them. Yet that was not true—what I wanted was for them to choose to take the writing down and absolve me of the responsibility for the danger in which my assignments had placed them. On the other hand though, as I explained to them, the power and responsibility rested with me. I could not conscience putting them at risk on a domain I owned, for doing work I had assigned. They agreed, albeit reluctantly. What I find most shameful in this, it was not their own risk, but their understanding mine, of my position in the department and university, that made them agree I needed to take their writing down. We made their posts password protected, shared the password with the other students for the duration of the class, and the course ended uneasily in our mutual discomfort. Nothing was comfortably resolved at this meeting of immigration law with my students’ bodies and their public writing. At the end of the course, after notifying them so they could save their writing if they wished, I did something I had never done before. I removed the students’—all of the students’—blogging from the Internet by archiving the course blog and removing it from public view.

As I began to process and analyze what had happened, I wondered what could be done differently. Was there a way to allow my students to write in public yet somehow shield them from these risks? After I presented and discussed this experience at HASTAC in 2015, I was approached with a number of possible solutions, some of which would help. Very generously, one was to allow my next course blog to be on the HASTAC site where commenting requires registration. This was a partial solution that would protect against trolling, but I questioned whether it could it protect my students from identification, from them and their families being reported to the authorities. The answer was no, it could not.

In 2011, Amy Wan examined traced and problematized the idea of creating citizens and expressing citizenship through the teaching of literacy, a concept which she traces through composition pedagogy, especially as it is expressed on syllabi and through learning objectives. The pedagogy on public writing is imbued with the assumption of citizenship with the production of citizens as a goal of public writing. Taken this way, public writing becomes a duty. Yet there is a problem with this objective of producing citizens and this desire for citizenship when it comes to students in our classes who lack legal citizenship. Anthropology in the 1990s tried to work around and give dignity to those without “full” citizenship by presenting the idea of “cultural citizenship” as a way to refer to shared values of belonging among people without legal citizenship. This was done as a way of trying to de-marginalize the marginalized and reimagine citizenship so no one’s status was second class (Rosaldo 1994, 402). But the situation of undocumented people belies this distinction, however noble and well rooted in social justice its intention. To be undocumented in the United States is to be dispossessed not only of the rights of citizenship, but to have the exercise of either the rights or responsibilities of citizenship through public speaking or writing be taken as incitement against the nation state, with some citizens viewing it as a personal assault.

This problem of the exercise of rights being seen as incitement is demonstrated by the way the display of the Mexican flag at protests for immigrant rights is seen as a rejection of the United States and refusal of US citizenship, despite the protests themselves being demands or pleas for the creation of a citizenship path. The mere display of Mexico’s flag is read as a provocation, an action which, even when done by citizens, destabilizes citizenship, seems to remove protester’s first amendment rights, and prompts cries that they should “Go back to Mexico,” or, more recently, for the government to “Build a wall.” Latinxs displaying national flags are accused of wanting to conquer (or reconquer) the southwest, reclaiming it from the United States for Mexico. This anxiety about being “conquered” by the growing Latinx population is, perhaps, displaying an anxiety that the southwestern states (what Chicanxs call Aztlán) are not so much a stable part of the conquered body, but an expression of how the idea of “nation” is itself unstable within the US borders. When a non-citizen, a subject sin papeles, writes about the experience of being undocumented, they are faced with a backlash of those who believe their existence, if they are allowed existence in the United States at all, is one without rights, without voice. Any attempt to give voice to their position brings overt threats of government action against their tenuous existence in the US, however strong their cultural ties to the United States. My students writing in public about their undocumented status, are reminded that their bodies are not citizens and, that the right to free speech, the right to write one’s truth in public is one given to citizen subjects.

This has left me with a paradox. My students should write in public. Part of what they are learning in Chicanx studies is about the importance of their voices, of their experiences and their stories are ones that should be told. Yet, given the risks in discussing migration and immigration through the use of public writing, I wonder how I as an instructor should either encourage or discourage students from writing their lives, their experiences as undocumented migrants, experiences which have touched, every aspect of their lives. From a practical point of view I could set up stricter anonymity so their identities are better shielded. I could have them create their own blogs, thus rather passing the responsibility to them to protect themselves. Or I could make the writing “public” only in the sense of it being public in the space of the classroom by using learning management software to keep it, them, behind a protective wall.

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Annemarie Perez is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at California State University Dominguez Hills. Her area specialty is Latina/o literature and culture, with a focus on Chicana feminist writer-editors from 1965-to the present, and digital humanities and digital pedagogy and their intersections and divisions within ethnic and cultural studies. She is writing a book on Chicana feminist editorship using digital research to perform close readings across multiple editions and versions of articles and essays..

Back to the essay

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Acknowledgments

[*] This article is an outgrowth of a paper presented at HASTAC 2015 for a session titled: DH: Affordances and Limits of Post/Anti/Decolonial and Indigenous Digital Humanities. The other panel presenters were: Roopika Risam (moderator), Siobhan Senier, Micha Cárdenas and Dhanashree Thorat.

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Notes

[1] “Chicanx” is a gender neutral, sometimes contested, term of self-identification. I use it to mean someone of Mexican origin, raised in the United States, identifying with a politic of resistance to mainstream US hegemony and an identification with indigenous American cultures.

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Works Cited
- Anzaldua, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
- Elenes, C. Alejandra. 1997. “Reclaiming The Borderlands: Chicana/a Identity, Difference, and Critical Pedagogy.” Educational Theory 47:3. 359-75.
- Gonzalez-Barrera, Ana and Jens Manuel Krogstad. 2014. “U.S. Deportations of Immigrants Reach Record High in 2013.” Pew Research Center.
- Medeiros, Eileen. 2007. “Public Writing Inside and Outside the Classroom: A Comparative Analysis of Activist Rhetorics.” Dissertations and Master’s Theses. Paper AAI3298371.
- Moraga, Cherríe. 1983. Loving in the War Years: Lo Que Nunca Pasó Por Sus Labios. Boston, MA: South End Press.
- Ohmann, Richard. 2003. Politics of Knowledge: The Commercialization of the University, the Professions, and Print Culture. Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
- Perez, Laura. 1993. “Opposition and the Education of Chicana/os,” Race Identity and Representation in Education, ed. Cameron McCarthy and Warren Chrichlow. New York: Routledge.
- Rosaldo, Renato. 1994 “Cultural Citizenship and Educational Democracy.” Cultural Anthropology 9:3. 402-411.
- Tryon, Charles. 2006. “Writing and Citizenship: Using Blogs to Teach First-Year Composition.” Pedagogy 6:1. 128-132.
- Wan, Amy J. 2011. “In the Name of Citizenship: The Writing Classroom and the Promise of Citizenship.” College English 74. 28-49.
- Weisser, Christian R. 2002. Moving Beyond Academic Discourse: Composition Studies and the Public Sphere. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
- Welch, Nancy. 2005. “Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Post-Publicity Era.” College Composition and Communication 56:3. 470-492.
August 3, 2018
Anissa Daoudi – Introduction: Narrating and Translating Sexual Violence at Wartime in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA region)

Anissa Daoudi

العربية | Français

So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent – absent or, as in some domains …programmatically refused.

Hayden White (1980), “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality”

“Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the shot; writers frame their world. Mrs Winterson objected to what I had put in, but it seemed to me that what I had left out was the story’s silent twin. There are so many things that we can’t say, because they are too painful. We hope that the things we can say will soothe the rest, or appease it in some way. Stories are compensatory. The world is unfair, unjust, unknowable, out of control. When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. And perhaps we hope that the silences will be heard by someone else, and the story can continue, can be retold. When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken. Mrs Winterson would have preferred it if I had been silent.

Do you remember the story of Philomel who is raped and then has her tongue ripped out by the rapist so that she can never tell? I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words. I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself.”

Jeanette Winterson (2011), Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Narrating and Translating Sexual Violence in the Middle East and North Africa is the overarching theme of this Special Issue, which is guided by the natural impulse, to borrow White’s words, to narrate and translate knowing into telling[1]. Culturally, telling stories of violence has been linked to power struggles and therefore, not all stories could be told, particularly in authoritarian regimes.   Telling stories is an act of power around who is telling what and to whom? (Foucault, 1977).   By telling stories of what really happened, the aim is certainly not to reproduce violence, but to give a voice to the silenced Arab women to tell their stories in order to counter narrate the hegemonic discourse(s) in relation to sexual violence at wartime in the MENA region. The contributors of this special issue; being a combination of academics from different disciplines, activists and feminists from the region and literary writers; are aware of the importance of telling stories that challenge the existing discourses and uncover layers of distortion with a view to the present and the future.   Telling is equally important what is being left out, having an eye for details, framing stores in a specific style and genre, using precise language are also as important. Telling “When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening” as Jeanette Winterson argues. She adds that our story is “a version but never the final one”, yet an important addition to the clusters of stories that form discourse(s). This act of telling or writing is what constructs and produces particular versions of the world. As Baker (2006: 28) puts it “personal stories that we tell ourselves about our place in the world and our own personal history”. By positioning Arab women in the world, we (contributors of this volume) are, as Foucault puts, placing ourselves in the power of network (1978) and agree with   Foucault’s idea of power “we must cease once and for all to describe the effect of power in negative terms, it ‘excludes, it ‘represses’, it ‘sensors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it ‘conceals’. In fact power produces; it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of the truth” (Foucault, 1977: 194).

This Special Issue seeks to make three valuable and original contributions. To begin with, it is the first time the subject of rape at wartime, a topic considered as taboo, is discussed openly in relation to the MENA region by activists, academics and literary writers from the region in three languages; namely French, Arabic and English. As our theoretical framework is based on the importance of translation as a way of challenging established discourses (Apter, 2013), it became crucial that this unique project has to appear in the three working languages of the MENA region to make information available to scholars, activists, policy makers, students locally and globally, as we believe that sexual violence in wartime is a global phenomenon. The second originality of the papers of this issue is about the content it reveals for the first time, especially in relation to Algeria, where there is the Amnesty Law that stands as a barrier against truth.   This special issue is a call for justice and a clear rejection to the Amnesty Law (2005). More importantly, the third point is related to the fight against silencing women and for empowering them to narrate their stories in order to write a complete version of history.   By so doing, women are not only putting the records straight, but also helping other women (locally, regionally and globally) to advance in their just fight against patriarchy, injustice and inequality and not re-invent the wheel.

For this Special Issue, I turn to the past to understand the present and aim to take part in shaping the future. In other words, asking the same question as Turshen’s (2002)
what happened to Algerian women who were once active during the War of Liberation become passive in the Civil War? She starts her article with two quotes: one referring to Mudjahidats describing a site where they planted bombs during the War of Liberation and another referring to an Algerian woman, captured by Islamists during the civil war, where she was used as a slave for sexual and other domestic jobs for ‘the Amir’ (terrorist). The two images seem two centuries apart. The question is indirectly asking the Mudjahidats (female war veterans) about their contributions towards the ‘grand narratives’ of the Algerian War. It is in a way holding them responsible for not telling their stories, for not becoming role models for the coming Algerian generations and for not being agents for change in the same way they acted during the Liberation War. This project aspires to uncover ‘layers of distortions/constructions’ to use Tamboukou’s terms (2013), not only about what did the Mudjahidats not say, but also why and how did their silencing happen. By so doing, the eyes are not only on the past but rather, on the present and future of Algerian women. In the following section, analysis of the reasons and the ways the silencing happened will be provided.

I. Gendering Violence in Algeria: the Role of Language

Algeria, known as the country of The Three Djamilas, an Arabic name, meaning ‘beautiful’ referring to three Algerian women war veterans called (Djamila Bouheird, Djamila Boupasha and Djamila Bouazza), standing for the fighting against the coloniser during the liberation war (1954-1962). While this metaphor ‘the Three Djamilas’ has been used and abused in the whole Arab culture, Algerian women’s contribution to the War of Liberation is present in the Algerian collective memory. The abuse starts, as (Mehta, 2014: 48) states with the image related creation of the “land-female body equation, reducing women to abstract symbols of nation without citizenship rights”. This motherland, as (McMillin, 2007) appears all too frequently in nationalist rhetoric.   It is the same hegemonic strategy that excludes women from taking an active part in the nation building process. In fact, the metaphor of the land can be analysed closer based on the principle of the ‘conceptual metaphor theory’, by Lackoff and Johnson, 1980, in which the target domain is related to the image of ‘cultivation’, ‘strength’ and ‘security’.   This metaphor leaves no room for negative association with al mudjahidats (female war veterans).   However, in framing the Djamilas as ‘French’ educated ‘elite’ Algerian ‘Muslim’ girls, the ‘abuse’, to use Thomas’s word ‘cultural violence’ becomes clearer, particularly with the Algerian Arabicisation movement in post-independence in the 1970s, where the same ‘French’ educated women were sent back to the private sphere because they did not master ‘Standard Arabic’, the official language according to the Algerian constitution. History was written by Arabophone Algerian men, leaving no room for women to narrate or archive their stories. In 1974, Ministry of Mudjahideen (the Ministry of Veterans Affairs) reported that 11,000 Algerian women had fought for the liberation (about 3% of all fighters); Amrane Minne (1993) thinks this is a serious underestimation of women’s participation. She adds that of this number, 22% were urban and 78% came from rural areas; these percentages mirror exactly the rate of urbanization in Algeria at that time. The Mudjahidats battle was not with the colonizer only, but was also to free women from ignorance and servitude. Urban educated women joined the rebel forces and went to the villages where they taught illiterate peasant women, the reasons for their independence struggle. Studies reveal that after independence, many faced rejections from their societies and could not reintegrate, some for being raped, others because they had frequented men). From those who managed to find jobs, some were forced by their husbands to return to their traditional jobs.   Assia Djebbar’s film La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (1978) is a representation of colonialism as well as her own women’s culture. In this film, Djebbar stresses the importance of history and memory and asks questions about: whose history is Algeria’s? Who speaks it and to whom? And in what language? The exclusion of French educated Algerian women was not limited to Mudjahidats but also included a generation of Algerians educated in French; even decades after independence (see Chapter One). The following section will provide an analysis of what it felt like living as a woman in the 1990s, known as the ‘Black Decade’ in Algeria.

II. Memories of Algerian Women in the 1990s

The civil war has been described as one of the most brutal periods in independent Algeria. It has been estimated that more than 200,000 people were killed and thousands “brutally wounded, displaced, abducted and sexually violated, according to the Amnesty International Report of 1996” (Mehta, 2014: 69).   Independent Algeria experienced nothing other than a one party repressive regime, where corruption, unemployment, nepotism, gender discrimination, and minority segregation were commonplace. In the 1980’s, the country was ready for an explosion of some sorts. The crisis was felt economically, politically, and socially and people took to the streets in what is known as ‘the bread riots’ on October the 5^th1988. The uprising started off peacefully but soon the military brutally crushed the protestors.   The Islamists capitalised on the tensions and started to present themselves as the rescuers of the country. They wanted to be seen as the ones to reinvent Algerian identity, which for them was still Francophone. As Zahia Salhi (2010) argues, the military became more militarised and the Islamists engaged in armed struggle, and as a result the country was dragged into one of the most horrific moments of its history. Civilians were the ultimate victims, particularly women. In fact, Salhi believes that women became a deliberate target for the Islamic fundamentalists as early as the 1970s. She explains how the discriminatory provision of the Family Code exacerbated and legitimized violence against women and made it difficult for them to deal with the consequences of widespread human rights abuses (2010). Marnia Lazreg calls 1984^[2] “the year of the rupture between women and their government and women and the radical questioning of the state’s legitimacy”.

Dalila Lamarene Djerbal describes the situation:

Physical violence on a large scale, then murders of women who do not respect the dress code or rules of conduct; assassination of female citizens charged with supporting the authorities(le pouvoir) or women related to the members of the security services; the obligation for women and families to support the armed groups and beginnings of rape through forced marriages, the multiplication of kidnappings, rape in the guise of what is known as zawāj mut’a^[3], abductions of women, segregation, collective rape, torture, murder and mutilation of the entire territory.^[4]

The quote above captures the physical violence exercised against Algerian women, which undoubtedly left psychological scars. It summarizes the different pretexts under which women were targeted.   The first is related to women in the public sphere and to ‘respectable’ dress code and conduct. The concept of hijab^[5] started to circulate in the mid-1970s and the beginning of the 80s, brought by Arab teachers who came to the country under the Arabisation movement and who had links with the Muslim Brotherhood movements. Their aim was the Islamisation of Algeria which according to them was still Francophone.   A large number of Algerian women were forced to wear the hijab (the veil) and those who refused to do so receive death threats and in some cases were killed and used as examples to terrorize other women.   A Fatwa^[6] legalising the kidnapping and temporary marriage of women was issued, in a very similar way to how Yazidi women are treated under ISIS rule today. According to Islamists, hijab^[7] is what distinguishes a Muslim woman from a non-Muslim one. It is also what sets the limits between the private and public spheres. All these strict rules justified the physical violence and the killing of women who refused to abide by the religious rule. The first victim was the famous case of Katia Bengana, a 17 year old high school girl in Blida, who had been warned but told her mother: “even if one day I will be assassinated, I will never wear hijab against my will.   If I must wear something, it will be the traditional dress of Kabylia, rather than the imported hijab they want to force on us” (Turshen, 2002: 898).   Katia’s statement shows how defiant she was, even though, she suspected that she would be killed for her strong views. Additionally, her Kabyle identity was more important to her. She refers to hijab as an ideology imported and forced on Algerians from the Arabian Peninsula in reference to the Wahhabi^[8] ideology. This sentiment was shared by a large number of Algerians who claim that their Algerian Islam, under which they were brought up, had its own particularities and that they did not need lessons about Islam from any other source.

Twenty years later, her sister writes a post on Facebook and says: “I cry, I rage against these veiled women who think they are free while they are muzzled. Katia is a girl who decided for herself, not bend to the macho obscurantism of the Islamists. How many Katia(s) do we so that one day these women can finally be free? Katia should be viewed as a symbol of struggle against the medieval spirits. She was courageous and and was ready to go all the way for her convictions, a free woman, a real Tamazight as was the Queen of the Aures, an example of strength and intelligence”^[9] (26.01.17). At the Birmingham University Conference, October 2014 on ‘Narrating and Translating Sexual Violence in the MENA Region: the role of Language’, Mrs Wassyla Tamzali, referred to Katia’s case and stressed that she should not be remembered as Berber, instead, she should be celebrated as an Algerian woman (see article by Mrs. Tamzali in this issue). She adds that by dividing citizens as Berbers and Arabs, Algerians fall into the colonial ideology of ‘divide and rule’. Katia was not killed because she was Berber, but because she refused ‘political Islam’. For Tamzali, talking on behalf of Katia is crucial and making Katia’s voice heard is just as important. She chose to make Katia’s case a national issue because she is aware that there are more women like Katia in Algeria.   Recent reports from areas in Iraq and Syria, under ISIS control, show how women are still subjected to similar circumstances of rape, killing and sex slavery.   Thus, Tamzali’s call is of global significance and is a result of her years of working for the United Nations, dealing with the plight of Women in Bosnia.

The second issue in Lamarene’s quote relates to the targeting of female citizens “charged with supporting the authorities (le pouvoir) or women related to the members of the security services”. This category of women includes a large segment of the Algerian population, who are wives, sisters or mothers of men working for the security services, police force, army, called by the fundamentalists the ‘tyrants’ – in Arabic taghut^[10]’. The latter is a word from classical Arabic that takes us immediately to the usages of the word in the distant past. The word is mentioned in the Quran (Surat al Nahl/the Bee)^[11]. In this case the ‘tyrant’ or the ruler is referred to as ‘evil’. The eradication of evil thus becomes a duty for the believer. This conceptual metaphor can be used to explain the process by which the extermination of the non-believer becomes normalised.   Using the image of the taghut evokes various images that are directly related to Qur’an and also to the pre-Islamic period where people worshipped other forms of gods, something that differentiates the believer from the non-believer. It recalls the image of the ‘evil’ and the ‘unjust ruler’. The two concepts are sufficient, according to, for example, the grand Mufti (preacher) of Saudi Arabia^[12] to justify the death penalty.

Other concepts started to appear in Algerian society at this time: Dalila Lamarene Djerbal refers to Zawāj al Mut’a, a term introduced by Islamists referring to a form of temporary marriage practised by some Shi’i Muslims in the Middle East but not in North Africa.   This is unknown in Algeria, where the majority of the population are Sunnis. Other forms of marriage also appeared with the rise of Islamism, such as zawāj al misāyr (again a temporary form of marriage accepted in the Sunni sect of Wahhabism). Other forms of attack on women’s bodies under different terminologies started to make their way into Algerian society. Fadhila Al Farouq’s novel, refers to the word rape in Arabic and places it in inverted commas “الاغتصاب” /al ightisāb/ as a controversial term. Yet, she explicitly explains its etymological roots to Classical Arabic. By so doing, Al Farouq implicitly attacks the religious institution for using ‘Islamic concepts’ as symbolic capital (see Chapter One).

Djerbal’s quote captures the atrocities Algerian women went through during the ‘Black Decade’. Violence was both real and symbolic against civilians, particularly women who, as indicated by Djerbal, were collectively raped, tortured and murdered in the most dramatic ways (see below the discussion on the killing of female teachers in the western part of Algeria). In the 1990s, ordinary women in Algeria took to the streets to denounce the violent discourses against them. In 1994, the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) called for a boycott of schools. However, in spite of numerous school burnings and murders of teachers, women still brought their children to classes in acts of defiance. Violence grew as it met resistance from government and citizens, including women. The terrorists “stepped up their activities, establishing roadblocks and killing everyone ambushed in this way” (Turshen, 2002: 897). Other acts directed against women included the issuing of the fatwa    legalising the killing of girls and women who did not wear the hijab. Another fatwa legalised the kidnapping and temporary marriage of women. According to the FIS, hijab is what distinguishes a Muslim from a non-Muslim woman. It is also what puts the limits between the private and public spheres. All these edicts justified the killing of women who refused to abide by the religious rules. The next section will shed light on Algerian women’s organisations and their fight against what was happening.

III. The Role of Women’s Organisations in Algeria in the Black Decade: Resilience

Algerian women were subjugated to the worst kinds of violence way before the civil war. In public discourses by the Islamic party (FIS[13]), some women like feminists were portrayed as non-believers, westerners, immoral and therefore, there was an urgent need to bring them back to their traditional roles. They, according to the FIS, were occupying jobs that were supposed to be for men. Unemployed men favoured this particular discourse at the time where the economic crisis hit the country due to corruption; fall in prices of oil in a country that relied primarily on natural resources. Algeria became more and more hostile to the presence of women in the public sphere. Feminists were harassed, prevented from doing their jobs and even not allowed to live without a male relative (like brother, husband, son, what is called mahram. The 1984 Law, (as explained in Chapter One), did not help either. In fact, it institutionalised violence and discrimination against women. Ait Hamou (2004, 117); one the founding members of Réseau Wassyla argues that the Algerian government co-opted the conservatives, and later, Muslim fundamentalists, to protect their interests and stay in power. Various governments have made compromises and sacrificed women’s rights to keep peace with the fundamentalists[14] . For example, in 1989, “conservatives within the FLN[15] colluded with Islamists to introduce measures against the emancipation of women, for instance more religious education in primary schools; making sports not compulsory for girls; and so on” (ibid). In other words, the complicity of the FLN, in the educational system in Algeria has always been going on for years.

Globally, when women were facing violence on a daily basis, the whole world turned a blind on what was going on. It is, as Ait-Hamou argues, “since 11 September, the world, and particularly, the United State, seems to have suddenly realised that Muslim fundamentalism, in its extreme form of terrorism, is a real threat”. She adds “many of us cannot help feeling bitter about such an attitude, for we fought fundamentalism and terrorism in isolation, with our bare hands for a good number of years, while fundamentalists who committed the most atrocious crimes in our countries were getting support from the same governments that are now dictating to the rest of the world how to ‘fight terrorism”.   This feeling of bitterness about being left alone with no support at all neither from their fellow Arabs nor form the rest of the world is what women and men repeat now when asked about why they did not join the so called ‘Arab Spring’. Another striking issue that Ait-Hamou refers to is the Amnesty Law of 1999, which is to date criticised by most feminist organisations.

The aim of the Amnesty Law was to bring closure to the Algerian Civil War by offering an amnesty for most violence committed in it. The referendum on it was held on September 29, 2005, and it was implemented as law on February 28, 2006. Critics, however call it a denial of truth and justice to the victims of the abuses and their families. One example of the voices against the Amnesty Law is Cherifa Keddar, the founder of Djazairouna Association, created on October 17, 1996, following the assassination of her sister and brother after a targeted attack on her family, including their mother by Islamists.   Cherifa united with the survivors of terrorism to give them a voice that denounces the Amnesty Law and asks for justice.   Bennoune gives detailed information about the work of this organization in this issue.

Feminist organisations were fighting against fundamentalism, based on theocracy and patriarchy, as the source violence. They all believed that the early 1980s was the start of fundamentalism in Algeria. They agree that the Friday Sermons diffused on loudspeakers[16], focusing on women bodies, describing them as immoral for wearing for example, lipstick or going out unveiled. University campuses were also attacked and the authorities kept a low profile. In June 1989, a group of fundamentalists set fire in public to a house that belonged to a divorced woman, who lived with her children. Her three children were burnt to death. Women’s groups denounced the crime and organized the first demonstration in the streets of Algiers. Silence complicity from the State helped Islamism to rise. In years 1992-1993, thousands of men and women were killed and the country lived in terror. The first woman to be murdered was Karima Belhadj, secretary in the General Office of National Security[17]. Women organisations in Algeria had little choice. They had to strategically survive the atrocities, some wore the veil to avoid confrontations others, resisted that. One needs to look at the Algerian society now to realise that more than help of women are veiled. Women’s rights activists had a national strategy to combat fundamentalism by producing counter-discourse, on many occasions, they occupied the street, carrying photos of those who were killed, at a time when people were terrified. The first public meeting was in 1993 organised by the Gathering of Algerian Democratic Women (RAFD), using mock tribunal against terrorism (Ait-Hamou, ibid). Women’s rights organisations also denounced the American and European discourses, under the name of democracy, that the Islamists were victims, by contributing to international debates using foreign media channels and participating at international conferences. They established many women’s associations like SOS Femmes en Detresse, RAFD and RACHDA continue to combat for women’s right and for providing counter-discourse to fundamentalism.

The history of violence on Algerian women by jihadist groups some 20 years ago now, as Bennoune argues in this issue, the way it happened, the way it was overlooked, the way in which victims were overlooked, neglected and forgotten-should spark outrage globally, as this violence on issue is not on Algerian women only but it is a global issue and understanding it, gives insights into understanding ISIS today. Bennoune’s essay, in this issue, addresses rape in Algeria in the ‘Black Decade’ and provides a true picture of what Algeria during the Civil war was like. She scrutinizes the ways rape was narrated by interviewing survivors, which is to date not an easy task under the Amnesty Law. Her expertise in Law and her fieldwork research on the theme of rape in Algeria and in other parts of the Muslim world contributes to the interdisciplinary nature of this issue.   Her essay shows her knowledge of Algeria inside out and her sharp analysis of the events.

To complement Benoune’s article, Daoudi, stresses on the cultural production of the 1990s in Algeria. Her article entitled ‘Untranslatability of Algeria’ challenges Apter’s (2013) concept of untranslatability and presents it not as a homogenous entity but a multiple notion. Translation as a means of disturbing discourses (Apter, 2013) is the basis of the arguments about gender roles and contribution to colonial and postcolonial Algeria. It helps dismantling the narratives that were written by men and bring out the silenced discourses. Through close analysis of the various gender discourses on violence in Algeria, this article shows the manipulations of discourses about Algerian women during colonial and postcolonial Algeria. It also discusses the role of Algerian writers in giving a voice to their voiceless compatriots to help archive their history and to construct their social memory and collective. In addition, it emphasizes the roles of language and translation in the construction of a constantly changing Algeria with an emphasis on the Civil War 1990s.

A specialist in Gender and Islamic Studies, Amel Grami, who worked with Jihadi women in the MENA region brings out an understudied area, I find myself attentive to a number of related themes such as ‘al sabi’ and ‘jihad al-nikah’, on which Grami has published extensively. ‘Jihad al-nikah’, in particular has been a very controversial issue in Tunisia after the Arab Spring. Grami argues that official statements from the Tunisian Home Office declared that indeed there are groups of young Tunisian women who travelled to Syria with the purpose of ‘Jihad al-nikah’. She brings to lights different narratives about sexual violence in Tunisia. The purpose of narrating these stories is not to study the past but to try to understand it in the present, for example, in understanding Yazidi women’s rape in the MENA region (see article by Grami in this Special Issue).

Algerian women’s fight against silence and fundamentalism was not restricted to women’s rights activists on the ground. Other women; writers fought their pens. Djebar, as a pioneer among the generation that lived colonialism and Mokadem are the core of the essay written by Imen Cozzo in this issue. She believes that Algerian women’s silence might be an involuntary social, cultural and ideological act of resistance, a way to bury the atrocious truth and to seal it into a forgotten tomb, she says. Silence was imposed by a colonial reality and continues to be enforced by a postcolonial tradition and society. After independence, many Algerian writers use the same coloniser’s language to resist their assimilation into a backward process or the fight over “outer” and “inner” spaces.[18] Therefore, Cozzo argues that silence becomes a political act through which women subvert the oppressors’ discourse, by retaining their secret world/word.

Violence in the 1990s in Algerian films namely: Rachida, The Harem of Madame Osmane, and Barakat! Is what Rym Quartsi discusses in her article. She looks at films as another medium through which Algerian directors communicated their trauma and pain of the Black Decade.   In her essay, she explores the relationship between gender, violence and language.   The Black decade is the period when most artists fled the country after receiving death threats. This led to the dismantling of the film industry and the films that were produced were done outside Algeria by external funding.

In a comparative study, Bedjaoui recalls the ‘Black Decade’ through the work of the two Francophone female writers Assia Djebar and Maisa Bey. The novels studied, centres on the violence of religious fanaticism that terrified the Algerian society in the 1990s. Similarly, Tamzali writes a letter to katia Benghena, the girl who defied the Islamists and refused to wear the veil. Tamzali warns of the division of the Algerian society into Berber, Arab, Francophone and Aarbophone. She reminds us Katia is an Algerian woman and not just a Berber. In describing how it was living in Algeria during the Black decade, she says: “the country was plunging into civil war, neighbours and brothers killing each other. The pain and the fear overpowered the gaze of our mothers and our lives headed towards barbarism to the sound of heavy boots and the cries of “Allahu Akbar”. Death spread in every corner and the stench of gloomy clouds filled the air.” Finally, a selection of literary texts by Fadhila Al Farouq and Inam Bioud is presented in the three languages. Al Farouq is the first Algerian writer, who chose to fight with her pen, risking her life, to document cases of rape in the 1990s. Bioud’s poem fills our heart with sadness and reminds us of the atrocities of the “Black decade.”

IV. Conclusion

Violence in the recent years has intensified, or at least the advancement in Information Technology made it look intensified. This is to say that violence has always existed but people did not necessarily hear about it and surely did not used to see it happen live. The Internet has facilitated the movement of information, for example, the picture of the Egyptian woman in her bra who was dragged by the Egyptian police officer in Tahrir Square went viral on social media and became known as the ‘the blue bra event’. Other events in the Arab region ‘the so-called Arab Spring/revolution’ are characterised by interesting reactions about the role of women in the fight for freedom, varying from stories about the Egyptian government subjecting female participants to ‘virginity tests’, to horrific stories about collective rape in Tahrir Square (Cairo), to calls by a preacher for sexual holy war in what is known as jihad al nikah (which is basically offering sexual services to comfort fighters against the Syrian regime), using a terminology from Classical Arabic to refer to the wholly war in the new context. All of these stories and many more are narrated and in some cases used and abused to legitimise violent reactions. They are also part of history, which is constructed through narrativation of layers of complex intertwined stories. Homi Bhabha, says “tell stories that create the web of history, and change direction of its flow” (cited in Gana and Härting, 2008: 5). This same view is also shared by Mona Baker who argues that narratives construct realities.   It is this line of thought that drive us (female academics from the region), writers, film directors… etc. to publish this issue, aiming to dismantle official narratives and give voice to the silenced narratives of the 1990s. By so doing, we are not voicing narratives from the other who can be geographically distant but we narrate violence as a global phenomenon, as an ethical issue and more importantly as a continuous search for the truth. Below is Tahar Djaout’s slogan that captures the spirit of this Special Issue.

Silence means death

If you speak out, they kill you.

If you keep silent, they kill you.

So, speak out and die

Tahar Djaout

[1] See Hayden White’s etymological definition of both words ‘knowing and telling’ in his article “the Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality” in Critical Inquiry, Volume 7, No 1 (Autumn, 1980) 5-27

[2] 1984 was the year when Algeria made changes to the constitution. “The Family Code of 1984 makes it a legal duty for Algerian women to obey their husbands, and respect and serve them, their parents, and relatives (Article 39). It institutionalised polygamy and made it the right of men to take up to four wives (Article 8). Women cannot arrange their own marriage contracts unless represented by a matrimonial guardian (Article 11), and they have no right to apply for divorce. While a man needs only to desire a divorce to get one, it is made a most difficult, if not impossible, thing to be obtained by women” (Salhi, 2003: 30). http://www.artsrn.ualberta.ca/amcdouga/Hist247/winter_2011/resources/Algerian%20Women%20and%20the%20’family%20code’.pdf

[3] Zawāj mut’a, also known as Nikāḥ al-mutʿah (Arabic: زواج المتعة‎‎, literally “temporary marriage”), is a type of marriage permitted in Twelver Shia Islam, where the duration of the marriage and the dowry must be specified and agreed upon in advance. The researcher as well as feminists consider this marriage and its equivalent in the Sunni sect (zawāj al misyār) as forms of religiously sanctioned prostitution.

[4] All translations are by the author.

[5] Hijab: consists of wearing a scarf that hides the hair and neck as well as a full length robe.

[6] Fatwa is a religious commandment based on scholarly legal decision.

[7] For more information about the veil, see Marnia Lazreg’s book Questioning the Veil:
Open Letters to Muslim Women (2011).

[8] Wahhabi, in Arabic / al-Wahhābiya(h). Wahhabism is named after an eighteenth-century preacher and scholar, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792). It is a religious movement or branch of Sunni Islam, which started in Saudi Arabia. It is an extremely conservative form of Islam. For more information, see: David Commins (2006) book: Wahhabism and Saudi Arabia (I. B. Taurus).

[9] See, https://www.facebook.com/Chkovein/?hc_ref=SEARCH

[10] Taghut: an unjust ruler who does not follow God’s rules.

[11]

وَلَقَدْ بَعَثْنَا فِي كُلِّ أُمَّةٍ رَّسُولًا أَنِ اعْبُدُوا اللَّهَ وَاجْتَنِبُوا الطَّاغُوتَ ۖ فَمِنْهُم مَّنْ هَدَى اللَّهُ وَمِنْهُم مَّنْ حَقَّتْ عَلَيْهِ الضَّلَالَةُ فَسِيرُوا فِي الْأَرْضِ فَانظُرُوا كَيْفَ كَانَ عَاقِبَةُ الْمُكَذِّبِينَ

“For We assuredly sent amongst every People a messenger, (with the Command), “Serve Allah, and eschew Evil”: of the People were some whom Allah guided, and some on whom error became inevitably (established). So travel through the earth, and see what was the end of those who denied (the Truth)”.

[12] In a question-and-answer programme, Al Fuzan (the grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia) was asked about whether or not the taghut is a kafir, i.e., non-believer. The Mufti replied:

“أنه مخير بين أن يحكم بما أنزل الله أو يحكم بغيره، أو أن الحكم بغير ما أنزل الله جائز، فهذا يعتبر طاغوتًا وهو كافر بالله عز وجل.”‏”.‏

In English: “He (the taghut) is asked to rule using God’s words, but if he decides to disobey God’s words/rules, he then is a non-believer in God the gracious”. The ultimate ruler here is God and his obedience is fundamental in Islam.

[13] FIS: Front Islamique du Salut (Islamic Party)

[14] Ait Hammou, ‘Women’s Struggle against Muslim Fundamentalism in Algeria: Strategies or a Lesson for Survival?’ p. 118.

[15] FLN: Front de Liberation National

[16] For more information on how loudspeakers were used, see film: Bab el Oued City https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jKITX62qCM

[17] For more information, see Ait Hamou’s article: Ait-Hamou_FundamentalismAlgeria.pdf

[18] Amel Grami, “Narrating rape in the Mena region: the role of language”, (Conference: University of Birmingham, School of Arts and Music, Department of Modern Languages, Arabic Section, UK, 10 /10/ 2014.

July 13, 2018

Essays

A tribute to Katia Bengana, assassinated by a young Islamist on 28 February 1994 in Meftah, Algeria.

Wassyla Tamzali

I. In “Women’s Bravery” –

Those were the days of lawlessness and faithlessness; the country plunged into strife and bloodshed as the Islamists who had been deprived of their leaders spread into the cities and the mountains like a metastatic disease, frenziedly sowing death. Under the pretext of their submission to God, they slowly turned into unrecognisable monsters before our incredulous eyes. They formed death squads, imposed their own authority and spread terror. Deprived of their electoral victory, the Islamic Front of Salvation (FIS) and its partisans set about slowly but surely unveiling their hideous disposition.

The country was plunging into civil war, neighbours and brothers killing each other. The pain and the fear overpowered the gaze of our mothers and our lives headed towards barbarism to the sound of heavy boots and the cries of “Allahu Akbar”. Death spread in every corner and the stench of gloomy clouds filled the air.

It was 1994; the walls were littered with posters released by the GIA, the armed wing of the FIS, threatening young girls and women with death if they failed to wear the headscarf in the streets, schools, offices, hospitals, parks, homes, in front of the mirrors and even in bed if they could. The GIA would only tolerate women, from the age of puberty to menopause, in service of their fantasies.

1994 culminated the horror and the unspeakable. Women became the target of collective violence exacerbated by their fragile bodies and panicky gazes. The inebriated sexual instincts of the assassins gave free rein to human barbarism ensued by a long list of unspeakable crimes with the stench of femicide.

We all lived under this menace simply because we were women, or even children and adolescent girls. Up until then, the Islamists would pick their victims for what they did, be it writing, filmmaking, thinking, or singing, and women had already been assassinated for such an ostensible reason.

However, in 1994, the religious fanatics set about assassinating, raping and enslaving women and young girls indiscriminately, veiled or otherwise. Had those women, girls and young girls in these villages, where serial acts of barbarism were perpetrated, including rape, kidnapping, torture and disembowelment, not all been veiled?

Those barbarians found in the religion that nurtured our childhood under the benevolent guardianship of our fathers what made their hatred of women sacred; or their hatred of the female gender should we say, since they denied us any act of compassion. They wanted to force us to wear a distinctive and segregationist sign, namely a headscarf to cover our hair; in other words a veil to unveil, mark and designate our gender before all and sundry, in a manner that reduced women to their erotic bodies and dehumanised them. Dehumanisation is the first step towards barbarism.

But every woman who has her head uncovered while praying or prophesying disgraces her head, for she is one and the same as the woman whose head is shaved. For if a woman does not cover her head, let her also have her hair cut off; but if it is disgraceful for a woman to have her hair cut off or her head shaved, let her cover her head. For a man ought not to have his head covered, since he is the image and glory of God; but the woman is the glory of man…

Saint-Paul Apôtre, Letter to the Corinthians.

Those who dished out the orders sunk to the dark abyss of time. They blindly embraced the dogmas of the most reclusive sects. Acting like disciples of Saint Paul rather than their prophet Mohammed, they would erect their hair as a totem, drone out and issue fatwas on women’s hairs and secretions in order to subvert the most natural laws and allow their predatory and bestial sexuality to run riot.

At the entrance to the opulent Mitidja Valley, Blida, the city of Roses, turned into a hotbed of barbarism. God’s madmen spread their dominion over the surrounding areas they claimed they had liberated. This is where Meftah was, so far a trouble-free small town less than 100 km from Algiers.

However, on 28 February 1994, it was a very young Islamist, surrounded without a doubt by a mob that looked alike in every aspect, hardly older than yourself Katia, who shot you and then fled…

You refused to wear the headscarf and you used to shout out loud and clear why. Those creatures with a deranged spirit and a barbaric soul had been convinced of their right to dictate your way of life Katia and the way of life of all those who came under their control. They were shamed by this unqualified truth that glorified their archaic sexual instincts and their rapacious desire in the name of a bloodthirsty and ruthless god, a god who would loathe women, and yet they alleged him to be the God of Islam.

All it took was for one woman to stand up to them to make them plunge into a world of infernal ideas with the reek of blood and death that came from the hereafter, from under the living world. They were tightly knit with same the obsession, blindly serving a reinvented god and drawing from a book they did not perceive. They have sacrificed you according to their demented order.

You defended until death the way you dressed despite the delirium of these creatures. You knew them; you used to come across them in the streets, outside the school and the shops where they would harass you. These young men had been roaming the streets for days, getting more and more persistent and menacing. “Hooligans” your dad would say. Alas, they were more than that; they were monsters indoctrinated to kill and they were biding their time to ensure the total success of their chore by starting to instil fear among the masses. They invented and imposed laws on the city and the locals chose to believe that this state of affairs would soon come to an end and all they had to do was wait and keep a low profile.

In all the cities and all the districts, people kept a low profile. The whole country kept a low profile. Thousands and thousands kept a low profile, while those who refused to give in were soon dealt with. They would be slain as they tried to stand up and pass on to us a bit of their courage and their hopes. In Meftah, like elsewhere, men chose to lie low and leave the field clear for barbarism. In the small town of this huge country, which was known as “the country of freemen”, where did the claimed courage stop after it had made its escape? On your childlike face and your slender shoulders Katia; and in your eyes, which looked danger straight in the face and which will stay wide open as if they were a perpetual castigation for those who had seen nothing coming, who had chosen not to see and not to do anything to stop the tragedy that had been long before heading towards that town and all the other similar towns. Meftah, an inconsequential town, which your death threw into our faces on 28 February 1994.

I have never been to Meftah and I will never go to Meftah lest I should see nothing, lest I should be once again witness of the work of time, which bit by bit smoothes our daily life, turning it into a slack sea and making us fall again into a grim and hideous “normality”, whereas we ought to keep the episode of barbarism seared into our memories, lest we should relapse.

Your assassin shot you at point blank range with a sawn-off shotgun. I do not exactly know what sawn-off really means; nevertheless, he fired and fled, leaving you lying on the pavement in a pool of blood, red like the carnations of the wreath of carnations and white daisies that the four young men sombrely laid at your grave. They walked close to your father in this BBC documentary that circled the world and which I watched on a TV screen in the corridors of the United Nations where the diplomats were lost for words in attempting to condemn the crimes perpetrated in the name of Islam. It was the wretchedness of politics, the subjection before the inextinguishable sorrow and the victory of barbarism.

“Prayer for Disaster”: Chapter from Fadhila Al Farouq’s novel Taa Al Khajal

Translated by Anissa Daoudi

“Time is the Arab’s wound, they would retreat to the past” and Constantine speak only the language of the past.

I cross the street of Abanne Ramdane and the past is dispersed around me with the call for the Duhur prayer.

Minerets seem in a dream, hugging the violets in the sky, like they were in love, people shouting: “Allah Akbar”

People here do not disagree with what the Minarets say, even when these said:

“Please God, prostitute their daughters”.

People said: Amen

Even when they said:

“Please God make the children orphans”

People said: Amen

And even when minarets said:

“Please God widow their wives”.

They said: Amen

They were all struck down with FIS fever, they all sang with blinded eyes the Prayer for Disaster.

And that’s why Amina sleeps, bleeding at the University Hospital, carrying traces of change.

And that’s why hundreds of flowers are raped, blessed by the people prayers. It should befall the people…and no one else!

Lethal stupidity…!

I noticed that the car nearly ran me down, and I’m trying to cut.

Retreated back horrified, as for the driver’s insult, it had penetrated my ear sharp like a knife.

I was almost angry, but my journey of sadness is in its early days, gazing towards the driver with a look of indifference, and merely echoing something between me and myself “poor thing. He is without moral. ”

We can’t be poor unless we were without moral.

Minarets subsided.

Reduced traffic from the road.

Two birds flying in the sky hugged each other, and Yamina’s singing in my head with her breath, she’s tired, and dreaming of seeing her family.

And I’m all her family for now! And what a strait that caught me?

Here’s the surprise that I didn’t wait for her, to enter the world of victims of rape not as a journalist, but as a family member, what am I going to write about Yamina? Her, laying down on a hope called ‘me’. Sleeping in the hope of receiving no more than a radio, which I will get her, for I am the family, and I am the relatives, the daughter of the tongue that united us in unexpected, and in unforeseen circumstances.

I was thinking all the way about how to write about the topic, in which way, with which heart, in what language, with what pen? The Pens of kin don’t like to transgress.

Pens the same blood, don’t cheat!

So how could I betray those happy breaths of my presence? How could I betray those eyes filled with confidence?

How can one write about a female whose virginity was stolen from her by force?

I don’t know how to write, I no longer know colors

I don’t know the color of the paper.

Everything became like delirium “a novel” and “bleeding” of Yamina.

Everything turned red. Blood. Blood. Blood.

-I won’t write it. It’s over.

Two leaves flew off.

Two friends split up: Bye, Rasheed…

Bye my dear. See you later my dear.

I noticed that in her eyes a glimmer of hope.

I noticed that Constantine became more beautiful.

And the pine trees started babbling, and the air flirting with the girls’ hair. Stories here and there, among school children jogging to their homes.

All I wanted was to be a kid. To be carried by the wind the girls’ school in Ariss, to run on that small bridge, to listen to the whispers of willows, to throw a paper airplane off the bridge and to clap when it goes higher and higher, while avoiding branches.

My favorite game was to make pretty things with paper.

The paper is still necessary in my life, I still make from it my beautiful stuff, and that’s why I won’t write on Yamina and won’t allow the photographer to take a picture of her grief, and covers her eyes so that nobody knows.

There are issues that are not resolved by the cries of the newspaper.

Issues which can only be solved through Justice, law and conscience.

Here, … Justice is made through men’s narrow perceptions. Article 336 of the Algerian Penal Code for defilement “punish anyone who commits rape crime with imprisonment from five to ten years, and if the indecent assault against a minor who is under sixteen years old, then the penalty would be temporary imprisonment from ten to twenty years” law is not strict enough, compared with French law, which provides stricter circumstances lies in infringing on the victim of sexual assault, the penalty is 20 years. Men here, tailor Islam to their tastes.

So, who among those know the mercy of Islam?

No one…!

Some rape women in his name. And some ostracize from his name too.

And some give women compensation “trivial” from the municipality, which equates 2000 dinars ($ 20)

And some deny that they are victims in his name, and women’s associations denounce and scream. And associations of victims of terrorism also condemn and scream.

Only raped women know what it means to violate the body, to violate the self/ego.

Only they know shame, homelessness and prostitution

and suicide; only they know fatwas which have permitted ‘rape’.

The ‘Amir’ is the one to offer her.

Only the one to whom she was offered, who can kiss her and with the Amir’s permission.

She would not be naked in front of brothers.

Not be viewed with lust. Not to be hit by the brothers but only the one who to whom she was offered to, he can do as he pleases, within God’s limits.

If a captive (sabiyya) and her mother, and you have intercourse with the mother, then it is not permissible to have intercourse with her daughter.

If there was a sexual intercourse with a woman, it is not permissible to have an intercourse with her until she has her period. Flirting and caressing are permitted.

Father and son cannot have sexual intercourse with the same sabiyya.

It is not permissible to combine a sabiyya with her sister with the same with Mujahid”

(This document was found after Bentalha and after the arrival of the army to the region of Ouled Allal, a document that regulates the rules of sexual intercourse, delivered on the 5th Muharram 1418 Hijri and the source is anonymous.

Somehow I knew all these things, following a previous investigation. And people know, and law enforcement people know, but who knows the horror of the experience, except those flowers, living today among thorns of shame and madness?

Will I expose Amina? Will I expose myself?

Tomorrow, family and relatives and everyone who knows my name will say: this is Abdul Hafeez Mokran’s daughter who exposes one of us. ”

How did things have gotten me here? How did I think this way?

I chased all those thoughts away from my head and sat in front of the editor silent, him speaking and I don’t hear it, then approached and shouted at me:

What’s wrong with you today?

I stormed off and nearly said:

How did I get here?

Since I no longer remember how I came all the way from downtown to the press.

I looked at him with eyes missing, he told me, pulling out a cigarette and trying to start one:

Where are you with the investigation?

I came back to my reality and I asked him: why don’t people pray as they used to pray before the days of “FIS” and ask for forgiveness and mercy and peace?

(FIS: acronym for Islamic Salvation Front Party)

He stopped moving around a little, blew out his cigarette before smoking it, and returned to his place and then said:

What happened at the hospital?

I came back to a more realistic world and I answered: It is a tragedy!

-Write it then.

-No.

-Yes?

-No. I won’t write anything about them?

-You are not yourself, apparently, are you sick today? I smiled and said to him:

-No, not sick.

Shook his shoulders wondering:

-Then?

-I’ll write about prayer.

-Which prayer?

-Frayer of ‘FIS”, do you remember it? It was echoed in every mosque during days of strikes. The one that says “Please God, prostitute their daughters, Please God make the children orphans, widow their wives to the end of the prayer”. I will ask the people that repeated it, I will ask their conscience, I want to know their level, and did they know what they were saying? Why were they led behind the “FIS” Immams and altogether they asked a strange request as that of Allah.

The editor interrupted me:

Khalida, I want you to write about the experience of these girls?

But I wrote previously, provided statistics, five thousand raped woman since 1994, said that a thousand and seven hundred woman raped outside the circle of terrorism, said that the Ministry doesn’t care, said that the law doesn’t care, said that parents don’t care, they have not accepted their daughters after their return, said they contracted madness, turned to prostitution, committed suicide. Has anyone acted, except Khalida Messoudi and her like (Khalida Messoudi is a feminist militant in Algeria has a book in French entitled “standing woman”?

He interrupted me loudly:

We are not the law. We are the press. I interrupted him too shouting:

We are ridiculous.

Hitting his fist on the table:

-What happened to you today?

Imagine that your daughter was kidnapped one night, raped and she conceived and gave birth to shame, and is now at the University Hospital, bleeding, and I come in as a journalist to say that this happened to so and so daughter, will you accept?

With a Mocking laughter, he approached me:

Since when did we mention people’s names in such cases?

-The truth is to reveal names and surnames, nobody will believe us if we don’t write the whole truth.

-Khalida, be brief, he said angrily.

And I replied quietly: I won’t write about them, I’ll write about the prayer.

He took a deep breath to restore calm and then told me, pressing on every word he says:

-Kidnapping and rapes have become a military strategy since 1995 and an instrument of armed conflict between armed Islamic groups and the defenseless community how will the world understand what is happening here, if we don’t write about?

I laughed with all my heart:

You look funny. (Continued sarcastically) the world will read our newspaper which doesn’t distribute ten thousand copies at home, and does not reach up to our neighbors in Morocco and Tunisia, and doesn’t enter the Internet “come on man, focus with me,” I said it in an Egyptian accent, more sarcastic and left.

Unpublished Poem by Iman Bioud

She (Feminine ‘She’)

On my lips
sorrow dried up
Not unlike a breach
On a petal of rose.
The petal slept on the breach And the breach prevailed. From night dawn
Till dawnset,
I wriggle
Staring in a face I know
I scatter like agate seeds
Their land they forgot.
Lost their way
Land is deserted.
You, Emerging lies
Uttering a wriggled letter From a suspected lips ;
That’s what you are.
You, a linguistic perfection Be fluent.
Here is a woman, here is she With a painful stress on the ‘e’ Conjugated as a weakened
A crucified noun.
Crucifix tool of which

تاء التأنيث

يبس الحزن على شفتي

كالثلمة في بتل الورد

نام البتل على ثلمته

سئد الثلم

أتلوى من فجر الليل

إلى عصر الفجر

أتفرس وجها أعرفه

انفرط كحبات عقيق

نسيت موطنها

ضاع الحب

وبات الموطن مهجورا

يا أنت…

إفك يتمخض

يلفظ حرفا ملويا

مشبوه المخرج

هذا أنت

يا ذاك الإعجاز اللغوي تفصح

هذي امرأة

تتوجع همزتها فوق الألف

هذي امرأة إعربها

(اسم ناقص مصلوب)

وعلامة صلبه

تاء التأنيث بآخره

تاء التأنيث بداخله

تقطر مزجا شهديا

لزجا.

July 12, 2018

Anissa Daoudi – Untranslatability of Algeria in “The Black Decade”

Anissa Daoudi

العربية | Français

مشنقتنا التي علقها اله وهمي صنعه البشر حسب نزواتهم” (ة)”

“(ة) is our gallows, hung by an imaginary God, created by men according to their fancy”

The above quotation was handwritten for me by the Algerian writer Fadhila Al Farouq inside my copy of her novel تاء الخجل Taa al Khajal (2005)[1]. The Arabic letter ‘taa marbuta’ or ‘closed taa’ is the principal indicator of the feminine gender. In its uncial form, it usually appears as a circle under two dots (ة). The handwritten version by Al Farouq has two tilted lines emerging from both sides (δ^[2]), making it look like a hangman’s noose. For her (δ), represents a noose around women’s necks. She uses ‘our’ to refer to all Arab women without exception. She denotes this noose as an imaginary ‘man-made’ tool created according to men’s fancy to represent God or religion in general. Al Farouq uses the ‘closed taa /ة/’ as a metaphor to refer to the closed society she lives in. The circle constituting blockage of her society, in which people are going around in circles, not finding a way out. There is the suggestion of an impasse, a very pessimistic view as it eliminates the possibility of hope for change.

Al Farouq’s novel has been translated into French as La Honte au Feminin (2009)^[3]. The title in French evokes questions about translatability in general and about transferring concepts, rather than words or phrases, from the source to the target text. The translated version into French opts for ‘F’ for the French word ‘feminin’.   Only does this not have the same cognitive image of the ‘closed taa /ة/’ as a circle, but also it distorts the whole concept. Al Farouq devotes a complete chapter to the issue of the feminine gender in the Arabic language, its symbolic significance and how it impacts gender politics. She entitles the chapter “تاء مربوطة لا غير”, “ta’marbuta la ghaira, ‘a closed taa /ة/’ and nothing else”, which has been translated into French as, “F” fermé et rien d’autre. The translated version into ‘F’ for ‘feminin’ is a direct alphabetical interpretation of the original language. However, what the author wants to convey is the indirect and symbolic signification of the circle in the ‘closed taa /ة/’, referring to ‘no exit’ situation.   Al Farouq does not imply the notion of the circle as symbolic of something that is whole, complete, ideal and eternal but as something that has no ending and no beginning. Al Farouq’s reader should understand that the intended meaning is that of the closed Algerian society. The direct alphabetical interpretation, however, relates to the discourse about the Arabic language and feminism, highlighting the masculinity of Arabic through its grammar. This is not a new issue: it has been addressed by scholars such as, Yousra Muqaddam^[4], Zuleikha Abu Risha^[5] and Abdellah Al Ghadhami^[6]. They all start from within the Arabic grammatical system and its feminine indicators to deconstruct the wider patriarchal masculine system in their societies.   Al Farouq’s example and many others make up the core of this article, which discusses the ‘untranslatability’ of Algeria, to borrow Apter’s title (Apter, 2006: 94). Specifically, this article concentrates on the ‘untranslatability’ of Algeria during the 1990s, known as the ‘Black Decade’ during which the whole country descended into turmoil. The ‘untranslatability’ of Algeria exists not only at the linguistic level, as lack of equivalence or mistranslation, but also exists in plural ‘untranslatabilities’, as I shall explain in the course of the article.

This article provides an in-depth study of the concept of ‘untranslatability’, developed by Emily Apter (2013), and challenges its practicality in the case of Algeria, where further refinements to the concept are needed. In her chapter on Algeria, Apter presents the concept of untranslatability as a homogenous notion and explains the reasons that are specific to the Algerian case. This article seeks to challenge the existing framework and adds typologies that help to illustrate the idea further. Attempts (for example, Gleeson, 2015) to propose typologies that may be used as guidelines remain within the limits of language and translation. However, this article proposes a wider look at how language systems or language policies may contribute to types of untranslatabilities, using practical examples from various mediums such as personal interviews conducted by the researcher, novels and testimonies in the two working languages in Algeria, French and Arabic.

While the ‘Untranslatability’ of Algeria is the overarching theme, the article deals with a phase when Algeria went under the radar for a decade.   It is a historical period about which very little is known.    More importantly, very little is mentioned about the role of women in the conflict, either as survivors or as militants. This article has three objectives. The first is to bring to light narratives of Algerian women from the ‘Black Decade’ through different mediums, personal interviews, and cultural production (novels, memoirs and testimonies) in the two working languages of Algeria, Arabic and French.    The second is to challenge the concept of untranslatability as a homogeneous notion, but to show, through using Algeria as a case study, that there are multiple, in some cases interrelated, ‘untranslatabilities’ and at the same time promote ‘translation’ as a way of unsettling and disquieting narratives. The third is to engage with the global discourse of presenting women not as victims or survivors, but as “capable, active and significant participants in conflict zones” (Daphna – Tekoak and Harel – Shalev, 2016: 2). The article will then focus on a theme that is hardly mentioned, let alone studied, and which is related to narratives of sexual violence, namely rape.   The first assumption one might make when dealing with ‘rape’, particularly in traditional conservative countries like Algeria, is that one is dealing with a case of ‘cultural untranslatability’. However, this article challenges some stereotypes and shows that ‘rape’ as a sensitive issue, is rather a universal phenomenon and is treated as being sensitive because of its nature.

Algeria is a country, which had lived through violence of all sorts under the French colonial system, where women were sexually abused by the coloniser. However, in the 1990s, the perpetrator was not the French, but the Algerian ‘brother’. This so-called ‘brother’ raped, tortured and killed according to a different ideology, an ideology which translates ‘rape’ as is known in this modern time into ‘sabi’^[7], a term used in the Crusade, permitting the act of sexual violence against women of different faith, captured in war. The lack of accountability for the time factor is crucial for this article as it explains further what Apter refers to as ‘sacral or theological untranslatability’. For her, “the difficulty remains concerning how to take sacral untranslatability as its word without secularist condescension. I make no pretense of resolving the issue, only to ensuring that it is to be recognized as the major heuristic challenge for the interpretive humanities” (Apter, 2013: 14). This is a well-known phenomenon, which some Arab thinkers spent their lives throughout history researching and providing answers to. For example, projects by Al Jabiri, Al Aroui, Arkoun and many others in the Nahdha period such as Al Tahtawi[8].

The concept of untranslatability is frequently used in the literature of translation theory in a homogeneous way. Classifying a range of untranslatabilities, not necessarily in any order, advances the concept further and opens further discussion.   It also responds to a lack of precision related to the concept. The ideas and examples discussed within each section act as suggestions as to how one can understand and classify untranslatabilities. The discussion draws on the areas of linguistics, semantics, theories of language and power, and literature to explore texts where untranslatability is present. The five categories presented do not all answer the question as to why Algeria is untranslatable, but give account of the most relevant reasons for untranslatability. Linguicide, as one of the reasons for untranslatability is challenged by bringing out one crucial element, which is the elimination of the Algerian dialect and how it played a crucial role in the silencing of the population as well as the eruption of the conflict between Arabophone, Francophone and Berberophone. Intellocide, which is the targeting and killing of Algerian intellectuals in the 1990s, is supported with personal interviews, testimonies, novels and films to give concrete examples that challenge official narratives. Linguicide and intellocide in Algeria are presented as interrelated motives for untranslatability, which are also direct reasons for why external untranslatabilities happen in the case of this country. The point of emphasising the various classifications of the concept of untranslatability is to facilitate a clearer understanding both in theory and in practice.

I. Theoretical Context

Much of the recent discourse in translation studies is about the issue of ‘untranslatability’ (Apter, 2013). Discussions range from ‘everything is translatable and transferred from one language into another (Bellos and Jean-Jacques Lecercle) who claim that in the end nothing is untranslatable’, to all translation is necessary but doomed to failure because of the ‘unachievable nature of the task’, (Barbara Cassin) to everything is ‘untranslatable’, (Apter’s book Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability, 2013). Apter’s idea is based on rejecting the assumption that everything can “be translated, exchanged or substituted into one accessible global idiom” (Apter, 2013). She asks her readers to consider the concept of untranslatability, referring to as she puts it “those thorny, frustrating moments of cultural dissonance and misunderstanding – as the key to translation and cross-cultural engagement” (ibid). Apter considers words as part of a whole system in which meanings of words depend on their relationship to each other just as Ferdinand de Saussure does. She then takes this idea further to locate significant differences in thought that are conditioned by language and culture. For her and for Cassin, the problems faced by translators are a rich site for deeper inquiries. ‘Untranslatability’ here is perceived as a dynamic concept and a necessary one. It is considered as a platform from which hegemonic discourses are challenged. Despite Apter’s attempts to provide examples of untranslatability, further work is still needed to categorise types of ‘untranslatabilities’, to avoid the assumption of the homogeneity of ‘untranslatability’ and to provide more precision.

The theoretical framework proposed by this article is a new way of looking at the concept of ‘untranslatability’ from that used in the field of Translation Studies. It takes the Algerian case as an example through which the concept of untranslatability could be understood and further refined. It presents Apter (2013) with new interpretation and provides multiple ‘untranslatabilities’ on different textual and non-textual levels. In her chapter, “Untranslatable” Algeria: The Politics of Linguicide”, Apter (2006) goes to analyse why Algeria is untranslatable without naming typologies or putting them into categories. The article seeks to respond to this lack of precision and presents new dynamics and new types of ‘untranslatabilities’ that are specific to the Algerian case, but that may also apply to other cases of ‘untranslatabilities’. Unusually, the article not only deals with the supposed typologies that help understand the reasons for the untranslatabilities, but also brings into discussion the different mediums through which the untranslatabilities occur, such as novels, testimonies, and personal interviews in Arabic, in Berber and in French. This combination of languages is a hands-on case of multilingualism in Algeria that provides both theoretical ideas and also practical situations that can be helpful to translators.

The first type of ‘untranslatability’ revolves most of the time around the linguistic aspects that make a text ‘untranslatable’ from one language into another. The focus centres upon structural (im)possibilities of language, where words and their meanings are analysed as secondary elements. For example, “the untranslatability of sound patterns created by phonemes, words and phrases of a text in its original language” (Gleeson, 2015: 3). The second type is cultural ‘untranslatability’, which is the most frequently encountered by translators. Here, the challenge is not only to find an equivalent in terms of meaning, terminology and/or idiomatic expression that equates to the target language, but sometimes goes further to the concepts that might not exist in the target language/culture or which might exist but with different connotations. Apter locates the source of difficulty in “the deferential weight assigned by cultures to common cognates” (Apter, 2013: 35). Cultural untranslatability for this article is supposed to start from the theme of rape/sexual violence, which is inevitably a taboo in traditional Arabo-Muslim culture. However, the sensitivity of the theme is ‘universal’. In other words, the cultural weight assigned to the word ‘rape’ in most Muslim cultures as well as the rest of the world can be hard to translate.   Instead, the difficulty arises from the historical connotation in Islamic societies to the word/concept of ‘rape’ as we know it now, which was allowed and encouraged in wartime as in the case of /sabi/ (see footnote 6 above). Rape is also often associated with female virginity and is loaded with connotations, which make its translation a challenging task. The third type is ‘theological untranslatability’ for which translating into or/and from Arabic is a good example. Apter refers to the book by the prominent Moroccan thinker Abdelfateh Kilito, Thou Shall not Speak my Language^[9], which shows that Arabic is considered a sacred language and therefore, according to Kilito^[10], any attempt at translation could lead to misinterpretation and mistranslation. Kilito’s arguments about the language and its sacredness have been the core of debate for decades in most disciplines.   While Kilito includes this type under the cultural untranslatability^[11], I argue that the root is the difficulty lies in the linguistic gap between Classical and Modern Arabic.   In this article, I shall demonstrate that it is because of the sacredness of the language and the lack of language development that ‘untranslatabilities’ occur and continue to persist, despite modernity.

Voices against the sacredness of the language have been marginalised, for example, Al-Jābirī and Laroui, who think that the way forward for Arabic to flourish and develop as is by cutting off with the ‘glorious past’ and by moving away from the close relationship of Arabic with the Qur’an. Moustapha Safouan (2007) in his book Why Arab are the Arabs not Free? The Politics of writing (2007: 49), demonstrates the power relationship between Classical Arabic and writing throughout the Islamic history. He says: “We are one of the civilisations that invented writing more than five thousand years ago. The state monopolised it and made it an esoteric art reserved for its scribes”. He adds that: “written in a ‘higher’ if not sacred language, works about ideas were similarly constituted as a separate domain to which ordinary people had no access to. The result was that the state could safely eliminate any writers who dared to contradict the prevailing orthodoxies, and that writers, just like the old scribes, only survived within the established order” (ibid).   This same archaic ruse of the state continues to this day (ibid).   This implies that the vernacular is seen as ‘low’ and continues to be used for spoken practices only.   Safouan (2007: 94) thinks that “one of the main disaster of the Middle East to be that it never knew the principle of linguistic humanism as reintroduced in Europe by Dante during the Middle Ages and later intensified thanks to the Reformation and to the creation of European nations”.    Along this line, the Algeria case will be presented, with examples (interviews, novels, testimonies and memoirs) of how Algerian dialect as well as Berber were put a side to silence a whole generation in postcolonial Algeria.

‘External untranslatability’ is related to the contextualisation that affects a text regardless of its linguistic content. External factors may be in a soft form, related to what Toury describes for example as ‘the social role’ of the translator as “fulfilling a function specified by the community”. Gleeson (2015) adds that ‘External untranslatability’ can be in a hard form, in other words, in a more complex form, such as what Bassnett (2002) calls ‘uni-directional’ flows of translation. Here, Bassnett is raising the issue of power relations between the colonised and the coloniser. Translation was used as an instrument to colonise and to deprive the colonised of a voice. Translation reinforces that power hierarchy (ibid, 387). In the same vein, Venuti argues that colonial power plays an important role in maintaining hegemony in translation (Venuti, 1998: 1). Carli Coetzee gives the example of South Africa where much translation aims to extend and affirm the monolingual privilege by translating African Languages into English (Coetzee, 2013). She suggests a ‘reverse flow’. In other words, Coetzee supports the refusal to translate from African languages into English in order to destabilise the hegemony of the English language. In Algeria and other North African countries, like Tunisia and Morocco, the hegemony lies in the French language dominance over native languages. I argue that translation into English, Berber or/and local Arabic dialect would widen readership and help dismantle the hegemonic languages in Algeria (Standard Arabic and French). In this article, these classifications are not in any particular order, for example, ‘linguistic untranslatability’ is argued in terms of the linguistic situation in Algeria, which goes beyond the limits of the language to analyse a broader issue that is specific to Algeria, namely, ‘linguicide’. Linked to this is a topic known as ‘intellocide’, which, as I shall clarify below, could fit under both heads. ‘Theological untranslatability’ and ‘external untranslatability’ can also be interrelated. What is of importance to this article is what I call ‘untranslatability of the Unspeakable’, which is about the formulation and translation of words that can describe and transfer feelings related to sensitive and painful experiences like rape. This inability to translate trauma into words is linked to the inability to comprehend and make sense of what goes on, as was in the case of Algeria in the 1990s.   In the following section, Algeria is taken as a case study to demonstrate the different types of untranslatabilities.

II. ‘Untranslatable Algeria’

a) Algerian linguicide

The title of this section is borrowed from Apter’s chapter “Untranslatable’ Algeria: The politics of Linguicide” in her book: The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006).   I will shed light on what makes Algeria ‘untranslatable’, starting with the linguicide (ibid) and its roots, challenging Apter’s ideas by unravelling the complex layers of the language conflict Algeria and by taking her dichotomy of Arabophones versus Francophones further to include the regional dialect and Tamazight. This will illustrate illustrating not only the effects of the ‘language question’ on the whole of post-independence Algerian society, but also other critical factors, such as the issuing of particular laws which preceded and had direct effects on the 1990s and the years that followed, contributing to the instability of the present situation in Algeria.

In this section I will highlight the ‘untranslatability’ of a whole country through the ‘language question’ as it is always referred to in relation to Algeria (Treacy, 2013: 402). The term comes from French and takes us directly to the point to be made about language as supposedly a unifying characteristic of any nation. In Algeria, however, after independence in 1962, the country slipped into a battlefield of different nationalist and Islamist ideologies, some advocating the return to a strict Arab-Muslim identity, and others claiming resistance this, like the Berbers and the Francophones who needed time to adjust to the new movement of Arabisation^[12]. The ‘language question’^[13] was central to the various discourses in the decades that followed independence. The country has seen multiple – and at times contradictory- attempts to police the language of the Algerian people. While the discourses about the Arabisation project had the ingredients for success, in reality the project became a central element of disunity, as it started by marginalizing the Berbers^[14], who are indigenous citizens of Algeria, as well as the vast majority of Algerians who had a Francophone education.   The French educational system, including the use of French as a medium of education, remained the only educational system for Algeria for a while before being framed and narrated by revolutionary political rhetoric as the language of the enemy that should be eradicated. The Arabisation project was responsible for much of the ‘untranslabability’ of the newly independent Algeria and placed a generation in exile in their own country as French was seen as betraying the nationalist sentiment, known as Pan Arab Nationalism^[15] which was growing not only in Algeria but also in the whole Arab region. Ahlem Mosteghanmi’s novel Memory in the Flesh (1985) starts with the following words:

“To the memory of Malek Haddad, son of Constantine, who swore after the independence of Algeria not to write in a language that is not his. The blank pages assassinated him. He died by the might of his silence to become a martyr of the Arabic language and the first writer to die silent, grieving, and passionate on its behalf”.

Mosteghanmi, a prominent Algerian writer, chose to start her novel recalling the world of Malek Haddad, the famous Francophone writer, and many others who were victims of the linguicide that happened in post-independence Algeria. Malek Hadad refused to write in the colonial language and died of silence. Similarly Malek Hadded who was assassinated by the blank page, Assia Djebar’s Le Blanc de l’Algerie (1995) (The Algerian White) argues for the same blankness of the page. The white in her title refers to the unwritten pages of Algerian history. It refers to the failed revolution, yet to be written in a new language that is yet to be agreed upon. The language issue has been central to Djebar who dreamt of a polylingual society that fits the very multicultural situation of Algeria. Djebar, as Hiddleston (2005: 3) states “uses her writing to uncover the oppressed multilingualism and multi-cultural creativity of Algerian art and literature, and to create a narrative of mourning that appropriately encapsulates the intractable horrors that official and ideological discourses have tried to deny”. Djebar used French, the presumably secular language, to fight back and to disconnect herself from the monolingual ideology claimed by the Islamists. For her, “a nation is an entire bundle of languages and this is especially true of Algeria” (Šukys, 2004: 117).

Anne-Emmanuelle Berger (2002: 72) finds Gilbert Grandguillaume’s parallel between what happened to Algerian women and what happened to the Algerian language in independent Algeria a truthful parallel. Despite Algerian women’s remarkable contribution to the War of Liberation and the “bold steps they took, unveiled, into the public sphere (a process described by Frantz Fanon in his 1959 article ‘l’Algerie se devoile’, Grandguillaume reminds us of the multiple ways in which independent Algeria strove to send the women back ‘home’ and confine them to the domestic sphere” (Berger, 2007: 72). The parallel is drawn between dialectal Arabic and the ‘unveiled’ Algerian women, “who, like the language they speak inside and outside the home with their fellow Algerians, are a symbol or metonymy for ‘true Algerianness’” (ibid). Yet when it comes to the formal usage of Arabic, it is the dialectal which gets sent home, in a sense ‘veiled’, confined to the private space only.   While Standard Arabic (SA), known as fusha is the formal language for writing, regional dialects known as ’ammiya are used informally in the spoken form only^[16]. This imposition of Standard Arabic in Algeria, known as the Arabisation movement, aims not only to eradicate French but also native languages like Berber. This ideology goes back to the Association of Algerian ulama^[17] movement, which started in the 1930s against colonialism and which claimed ‘Islam as the religion in Algeria and Arabic as its only language’.

In Blue, Blanc, Vert (2006), Maissa Bey, another Francophone writer, recalls the post-independence era and narrates the linguistic situation in Algeria and its tight relationship to nationalism. The novel challenges the Arabisation project and sees the imposition of SA as the ‘perseverance of certain colonial modes of domination’ (referring to the Frenchification^[18] policy).   Ali, the main character in the novel and who belongs to the generation of Algerians who opted to stay and study in the country, says:

“In court, the divisions are becoming more and more visible. There are those who studied in the brother countries, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan… Those who, like me and thousands others, stayed in Algeria, who were taught by teachers, French for the most part, but under the guidance of an Algerian minister, and conforming to his directives. Where’s the problem?” (Bey, 2006: 145).

The quote highlights complicated issues related to authenticity, nationalism and Arabness. The country became divided into Francophones, (referred to as Hizb Fransa: French Party), and Arabophones: these were Algerians taught in ‘brother’ countries or by teachers from Arab states brought in to Arabise the country, some of whom were from Egypt and were sympathisers or active members of the Muslim Brotherhood Movement. This linguistic division continued to affect intellectuals and artists in the uprising of the 1980s and the civil war of the 1990s who spoke out and who used French or Berber. Fadhila Al Farouq, a Berber, Arabophone writer says in a personal interview (14/10/2014) that she feels trapped between her native Berber language and the language she uses for writing, which is Arabic. She says: “I now started to hate Arabic…I feel trapped, I can’t publish in the language I was brought up with (Tamazight) and cannot in French either… my only medium is Arabic, which was imposed on me at a very early age, at the primary school. I would only speak Berber privately with a friend in hiding. I felt the pain of the ‘ablation’ from my roots in Arris^[19] and my language Tamazight (Chaoui) to find myself in a new environment (school) forced to speak Arabic”.   She adds: “Tamazight, for me, was for the private sphere and represents intimacy and closeness”. This is illustrated in her novel Taa Al Khajal where Al Farouq’s victim (Yamina) is a Berber woman from Arris and so is the narrator in the novel, who says:

“ابتسمت لها، و اقتربت منها أكثر و حدثتها بالشاوية”

“I smiled at her and I came closer to her and spoke to her in Chaouia” ^[20]

Yamina says:

“لو كنت من غير أهلي لما حدثتك عن شيء”

“If you weren’t from my people, I wouldn’t have told you anything”

Closeness is achieved when words are expressed in the same language of thinking. Words come spontaneously and effortlessly. But the language issue escalated to become a source and means of fear. As Apter rightly argues, “fear of accusation of blasphemy and apostasy; the fear of fatwa unilaterally issued by hardline Islamists against those who would ‘literally’ interpret Koranic references; and finally, the fear of death” (Apter, 2006: 95).   Those who escaped death threats left to become political refugees in France, vacating the cultural scene in Algeria, leaving room for the extremists to implement the Islamisation of the country.

b) Algerian Intellocide

Silence means death

If you speak out, they kill you.

If you keep silent, they kill you.

So, speak out and die

Tahar Djaout

Tahar Djaout, was one of the first renowned intellectuals to be assassinated, in 1993. Editor of the francophone newspaper El Watan, and coordinator of the review Ruptures, Djaout’s conscious decision to write in French was to rebel against the oppression of Berber identity imposed through the Arabization project. French for him, like for Djebar, becomes a language of protest, and “Djaout explicitly divorces writing from national identity, using literature and journalism to invent new landscapes and to conceive alternative idiolects” (Hiddleston, 2005: 8).   This decision cost him and many other Francophone writers their lives in what Bensmaia (1997: 86) calls ‘intellectual cleansing’. For the Islamists, it was clear that any opposition to their agenda would mean death, as declared by Mourad Si Ahmed, known as Djamel Al Afghani, the author of this terrible sentence: “Journalists who wage war on Islam with their pens will perish by our swords”.[21] The list includes: Tahar Djaout, Youcef Sebti, Abdelkader Alloula, Lounes Matoub and many more, who were considered infidels.   Women journalists were also targeted.   In a recent interview 15.2.2017, Salima Tlemçani a renowned journalist says:

“To find yourself on a list of journalists sentenced to death was very hard to endure and live. You get to rub shoulders with death on a daily basis and you end up admitting that you will die, your only wish is to be an immediate death. Not a suffering, throat cutting with a non-sharp knife to death or tortured, violated or whatever. For 10 years, yes I got scared. Fear of losing a family member, killed because of me. I lived with fear to find myself in the hands of a group this bloodthirsty and savage. I lived with fear to get to the office and to learn of the death of a colleague, murdered. When the gesture the more banal, like to go and buy some croissants next door, just there at the bottom of the house, becomes dangerous, it’s over.” [22]

Having said that, Benoune (2013: 126) recalls Belhouchet, an outspoken journalist of El Watan (Nation) who witnessed the assassination of his fellow colleagues affirms his determination to continue to work despite the atrocities “Belhouchet decided right that, in honour of those who died at their desks, he and his surviving colleagues would get the next day’s edition out, no matter what”. This determination and defiance is the core theme of a film by Abderahim Laloui, presented in the following section.

As part of my data collection, I attended an event organised by Djazairouna, on the 1st and 2nd November 2016, entitled ‘Notre Memoire, Notre Lutte’ (our memory, our fight), during which three films were chosen. ‘Mémoires de Scènes’ (2016) (Memoirs of Scenes) was one of the films selected. It is by Abderahim Laloui (Algerian film director). It tells a story which takes place at the beginning of what is known as ‘the Black Decade of the 1990s’, during which Algeria had witnessed extreme violence. The film portrays the life of Azzedine, a journalist who loves theatre and prepares an adaptation of the famous play by Molière, entitled ‘Tartuffe’. Helped by a group of friends, all amateur actors, he began rehearsals at the theatre of the city. The Mayor of the city, a fanatic, tries to stop them. However, Azzedine and his friends decided to stick together and ignore the threats made against them. Yousra, Azzedine’s wife, who also plays a role in the play, tries to reassure her husband and create a climate of serenity within his family. The story fluctuates between the ‘tartufferies’ and the daily life of this amateur theatre troupe.   After several months of preparation and rehearsals, on the performance day, while the cast looks forward to the arrival of Azzedine and his wife, the horrible news of their assassination is heard. The play represents the atmosphere of the beginning of the 1990s by referring to the assassination of leading figures in culture, namely the journalist and writer Tahar Djaout and the film director Abdelkader Alloula. The film is played by well-known Algerian actors, such as the icon of the Algerian film, Farida Saboundji and Chafia Boudraa.   From an interview with the co- scenarist Mr. Benkamla (24.03.17), I found out that the film project started off back in 2006 and could not be realised until 2016 due to so many difficulties.

c) ‘Untranslatability’ of the unspeakable

This section focusses on another type of untranslatability, often taken for granted, which is not related to transferring one language into another. It deals with a more complex typology, which is concerned with the act of translating trauma into words. It is about analysing texts that depict the act of translating trauma. Translation in this context is used in its broadest sense and does not only mean the act of rendering a text from a source to a target language, but also the act of transmitting, conveying feelings and converting them into words. When we address the act of translating trauma, a translation activity within the same language takes place; it is the act of converting the unimaginable into words in the same language. It is dealing with the unspeakable, which is ‘not necessarily unrepresentable’ (El Nossery and Hubbell, 2013). Therefore, representing the unspeakable is possible; but as Nietzsche and Bergson

‘[m]aintain that it is an illusion to believe that we can feel or even imagine pain that has not been personally experienced, and that our capacity is limited to observing it with heightened attention’ (cited by El Nossery (ibid: 11).

The unspeakable or the ‘untranslatable,’ in other words, what could not be translated into words of one’s experience is complicated to say the least but to speak on behalf of someone else’s is illusionary, as stated above. What is not illusionary though is the imaginative ways writers depict trauma not necessarily through pain-related lexicon but also through ‘the aesthetic of chaos’ (ibid). Al Farouq, in her novel Taa Al Khajal (2005), considered the first novel to tackle the issue of rape in the 1990s, focuses on the polyrhythmic and polyphonic structure of bodily voices and on syntactic repetition of the traumatic event (ibid). When she says:

وحدهن المغتصبات يعرفن معنى انتهاك الجسد, و انتهاك الأنا.

وحدهن يعرفن وصمة العار, وحدهن يعرفن التشرد, والدعارة

والانتحار, وحدهن يعرفن الفتاوى التي أباحت “الاغتصاب”

Only raped women know what it means to violate the body, to violate the self/ego.

Only they know shame, homelessness and prostitution

and suicide; only they know fatwas which have permitted ‘rape’.

Al Farouq’s style changes into a fragmented one in the above quote and is characterised by repetition and unfinished sentences. The layout of the lines one after the other is similar to a poem rather than prose. She opts for an ellipsis overloaded with defiant words to a culture that finds talking about prostitution a taboo, talking about virginity a taboo and defying a fatwa to articulate the unsaid about rape, a taboo. By bringing up the word fatwa, Al Farouq casts doubts on the integrity of the religious institution as such.

As mentioned earlier, the word rape in Arabic is put between inverted commas “الاغتصاب” because it is a controversial term in Arab culture and because the writer wanted to emphasise the word as it has different connotations in Islamic terminology. Words from Classical Arabic that allow violating women’s bodies such as ‘sabi’, ‘jihad al nikah’[23] and others have re-emerged in recent years in relation to, for example, Yazidi women captured as sex slaves and before that, in Algeria in the 1990s. For Al Farouq, there was one word only that captures the meaning of all those terms. It is “الاغتصاب” (rape) and not any other, as indicated in the quote above. Al Farouq could have used other words from her mother tongues, Berber and Algerian dialect. The use of the Standard Language aims at distinguishing it from the common language used by Algerians. In practical terms, the use of SA in most of the Arabic-speaking region is an “exclusive code mastered by only few intellectuals and not by the mass populations” (Bassiouney, 2014). This is because it is not the spoken language and is different from the dialects. Al Farouq’s use of Standard Arabic indicates the symbolic power the religious institution has and how it manipulates society by disguising words such as rape. Here, the ‘theological untranslatability’ (Apter, 2013) is not only due to the complexity of the language but also to the theological interpretations associated with it.

Chapter Four of Al Farouq’s novel is called دعاء الكارثة   (Prayer for Disaster) in which she directly attacks the religious institution, more precisely the mosque, for inciting violence. She then relates the new gender discourses that call for segregation between Algerians, between those who follow the Islamic party (Front Islamique du Salut; FIS) and the rest of the population. She goes further by considering the FIS as the new vogue/fashion. Al Farouq states:

الناس هنا لا يخالفون ما تقوله المآذن حتى حين قالت:

“اللهم زن بناتهم”.

قالوا: آمين

وحتى حين قالت

“اللهم يتم أولادهم“

قالوا: آمين

وحتى حين قالت:

“اللهم رمل نساءهم“.

قالوا: آمين

كانوا قد اصيبوا بحمى جبهة الانقاذ, فغنوا جميعا بعيون مغمضة دعاء الكارثة.

She adds:

كانت موضة جبهة الانقاذ…

People here do not disagree with what the Minarets say, even when these said:

“Please God, prostitute their daughters”.

People said: Amen

Even when they said:

“Please God make the children orphans”

People said: Amen

And even when minarets said:

“Please God widow their wives”.

They said: Amen

They were all struck down with FIS fever, they all sang with blinded eyes the Prayer for Disaster.

The above sheds lights on religious discourses in Algeria in the 1990s and more importantly on the ‘feminine question’ as it is referred to in Algeria (la question féminine). The ‘othering’ speech in the prayer clearly differentiates between ‘us’ the religious people and ‘them’, the secular and sometimes implying the non-Muslims. The multiplicity of discourses regarding women in Islam is not new; there have always been those who call for the return of Sharia’ and those who call for reforms of civil law and for a clear secular ideology. Tunisia was a notable exception where President Bourguiba banned the Sharia and applied of Civil Law in 1956. This diversity of discourses contributes to the growth of gender-based writings.

Women’s writing in Algeria, as opposed to the male-dominated literature, offer as Brinda (2014: 27) suggests, “gendered perspectives that feminize and complicate Algerian historicity and postcolonial subjectivity”. She adds “Algerian authors dispel monolithic representation of women as passive victims of colonial and nationalist and religious ideology, even as they demonstrate how masculinist ethics of war have ravaged the female body and women’s history through violence, silencing and exclusion”. After independence, female Algerian writers took on board the mission of giving voice to their fellow Algerian women who could not write, among them Assia Djebar, Malika Mokeddem, Leïla Sebbar, Maïssa Bey, Nina Bouraoui and many more. These writers learnt the lesson that “silence is a crime” as stated by Miriam Cooke in her book Women and the War Story (1996: 8).

The inability to translate or the ‘untranslatability’ of feelings of trauma and pain into words is tantamount to resisting comprehension of what goes on around us. This untranslatability is not restricted to one language or another; it is universal. Judith Herman’s book Trauma and Recovery (1992) analyses the universality of the effects of trauma and provides a language for discussing the trauma of rape. Her work has brought to the public sphere an issue considered as a taboo for a long time. Unlike El Nossery and Hubbell (2013), who believe, as mentioned above, that the ‘unspeakable, is ‘not necessarily unrepresentable’, trauma studies is “characterized by unrepresentability, inexpressibility, and its inability to be assimilated into narrative: for Cathy Caruth (1996), for example, trauma is known only in the way it returns to haunt the individual, often many years after the original event” (Kelly and Rye, 2009: 48).

Confirming Caruth’s argument, it was only after nearly twenty years, when the only witness and survivor, decided to talk for the first time about the 12 teachers, from the Western part of Algeria (near Sidi Bel Abbes), who were slaughtered by Islamic Fundamentalists. The only survivor of that carnage was the minibus driver, who was intentionally spared so that the horror could be told in detail. The teachers were young women; the oldest was not yet forty years old.   For Sidi Bel Abbes, the case represents a profound cultural trauma. “As opposed to psychological or physical trauma, which involves a wound and the experience of great emotional anguish by an individual, cultural trauma refers to a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the social fabric, affecting a group of people that has achieved some degree of cohesion”. In this sense, the trauma is not only individual but collective. It may also be called ‘national trauma’. Eyrman (2001: 2) states that “Arthur Neal (1998) defines a ‘national trauma’ according to its ‘enduring effects,’ and as relating to events ‘which cannot be easily dismissed, which will be played over again and again in individual consciousness’, becoming ‘ingrained in collective memory”. The killing of the teachers has been remembered every September by some organisations such as Djzairouna, Réseau Wassyla, SOS Disparus, Observatoire Violence Femme OVIF and some few others from the Education sector, despite the Amnesty Law (1999-2005) that forbids people from commemorating the ‘Black Decade’.   In a personal interview on the 27th September 2016, the driver remembers the event and says:

“I was driving slowly, in the usual routine. Reaching the top of a slope, about 7 km from Ain Adden going to Sfisef, with 6 female and 1male teachers on board, I … came across a fake roadblock set up by terrorists, who already had arrested four more cars, including one carrying 5 teachers”. He adds: “A terrorist ran towards me pointing his ‘Mahchoucha’ and shouted that I should park to the right. He ordered me to get off the vehicle, to hand him the keys and go join the group of people who had gathered on the other side. Then the other terrorists brought down the 5 teachers who were in the other vehicle to put them with those who were in mine, not without having robbed them of their bags and jewellery. …They initially decided to immolate them, after they had sprayed fuel on them. While some were about to prepare the fuel, one bloodthirsty man changed his mind and decided to kill them. When they were all grouped together, Sabeur chose to attempt an escape, hopping off and heading to the forest. Unfortunately he was hit by a burst of the gunfire, and later to be slaughtered. The other assassins killed the 11 teachers pitilessly. At that time, I did not hear the screams and cries. The whole operation took nearly ten minutes, so that all the space was transformed into a pool of blood. I left. Before they released us, the terrorists “preached” to us and insisted that we should absolutely not talk about the killings and especially not to vote. I took to the road, like a robot, absent minded, mentally and physically destroyed wondering if it was just a nightmare and I would wake up, or a sad reality! ” (27/09/2016).

The testimony by the driver, an ordinary person who was driving on a routine journey to Sfisef, a village in the North Western part of Algeria is compelling. Twenty years on, he describes vividly the horrific incident in disbelief. He still wonders whether the brutal incident was just a nightmare. In a way, this disbelief stems from the inability to make sense of what happened, to digest the incident. It is an incomprehensibility of the reality, which offers fewer words, if any, to circumvent its untranslatability. The fact that he was the only survivor meant that he is the only witness to what had happened, which added to the burden of narrating the story and translating his pain into words.

For Anne Whitehead, cited in Kelly and Ryle (2009: 48), “though, by the very nature of its creativity, innovation, literary devices and techniques, fiction is able to represent what ‘cannot be represented by conventional historical, cultural and autobiographical narratives”.

The killing of the teachers was translated into various forms of cultural production, such as the film (El Manara by Belkacem Hedjaj). Djebar was among the first to respond to the killing of the teachers in her short stories Oran, Langue Morte (1997). In a chapter called “La Femme en Morceaux” (The Woman in Pieces), Atyka, a female teacher of French at a high school decides to tell her students a tale from A Thousand and One Nights when four armed men burst into the classroom and executed Atyka in front of the children in her classroom. Atyka is accused of teaching obscene stories to the children.   It is interesting to note that Djebar’s choice of the form of narrative as a tale of A Thousand and One Nights with Shehrazade as narrator has been used extensively in Algerian literature.   The concept of ‘return to the past’, which the Islamists proclaimed in order to oppress women, is employed by Djebar to evoke memories of violence against women through the Muslim past and the present. Djebar portrays the untranslatable past through a similar untranslatable present to argue that there is a need to break with the tradition of violence. More importantly, she depicts the past as ‘untranslatable’ in today’s present. Walter Benjamin refers to this as ‘Cultural untranslatability’, which stands for the inability of translate the past in to our daily activities automatically, without questioning it. ‘Cultural untranslatability’ in the case of Algeria relates to the failure to understand a past that denotes either a future of violence or no future at all.

Untranslatability for Djebar is what drives her to write and translate her ideas and feelings into words by making the traumatic past representable. She is aware that literary and visual arts can be mechanisms for transmitting what can be unspeakable or untranslatable. Literature and the arts can bear witness for those who cannot express themselves and might help them to re-join their communities. For Djebar, what is ‘translatable’ is recording those atrocities and preventing the ‘authority’ (le pouvoir) from writing their own history, something that was done with regard to the War of Liberation in 1962. Aware of the importance of narrative, Djebar needed to ‘translate’ stories, moments, and feelings and to give voices, particularly to women who have been silenced throughout Algerian contemporary history. Djebar is well aware of her mission of combining the literary with historiography.   She is conscious of the tolerance and the openness to interpretation she has over her literary texts, but at the same time she is experienced enough to know that those texts have “a certain integrity, a national inalterability, that poses a fundamental problem for paraphrase and for translation” (Harrison, 2014: 418). This national inalterability for Djebar does not mean the official history; it simply means the national truth that had been eclipsed for Algerians for decades. Harisson argues in in his article, ‘World Literature: What gets lost in Translation?’ (2014) that “it is not ‘translatability’ that decides what gets translated. Indeed, untranslatability, or the ‘impossibility’ of translation, clearly attracts some translators, and may help make their translation compelling creative works”.

As mentioned, the atrocities lived in Algeria in the 1990s were unimaginable. In her novel les Nouvelles d’Algerie (1998), Maissa Bey in the chapter entitled ‘Corps indicible’ ‘indescribable body’ finds it impossible to find words that can describe the horrors of the young girl. She says:

‘C’est ça faire sortir de moi les mots pour dire. Mais je ne peux plus parler. J’ai perdu ma voix’. This is making words come out of me to say. But, I can no longer speak. I lost my voice.’ She adds: “Ya plus que ces mots en moi qui viennent dans ma tête s’entrechoquent me font mal faut les arrêter c’est ça dresser un barrage pierre a pierre une à une ajoutée les empêcher de pénétrer’ (110).

“There are more than these words in me coming into my head, colliding, hurting; I have to stop them through building one stone dam, stone after another, preventing them from penetrating”.

The impossibility of finding words, of completing sentences, finishing an idea is expressed in Bey’s novels. The narrative voice is voiceless, it is rendered silent.

In the same vein, al Farouq, says:

“طوال الطريق و أنا أفكر كيف سأكتب في الموضوع, بأية صيغة, بأي قلب, بأي لغة, بأي قلم؟ أقلام القرابة لا تحب التعدي”.

I was thinking all the way about how to write about the topic, in which way, with which heart, in what language, with what pen? The Pens of kin don’t like to transgress.

She adds:

“كيف هي الكتابة عن أنثى سرقت عذريتها عنوة؟”

“How can one write about a female whose virginity was stolen from her by force?”

In the next section, I will go beyond the language situation in Algeria, the translation of trauma, and the local dynamics of the country to discuss the untranslatability of Algeria globally. In other words, I will try to answer the question: how is Algeria translated or untranslated in the world?

d) External ‘untranslatability’

The low visibility of Algeria in the global market of translation is very similar to other Arabic-speaking as well as French-speaking countries. In fact, the uneven nature of global market forces is a topic that needs further investigation. The visibility “depends firstly on the position of its country of location and language in the world market of translation (central versus peripheral), secondly on its position within the linguistic area (central versus peripheral; for instance the United States versus India in the Anglophone area), and thirdly on its position within the national field (temporally and/or symbolically dominant versus dominated) (Gisèle Sapiro, 2015: 22).   In the case of Algerian literature, belonging to two linguistic sources (Francophone as well as Arabophone) does not really help to enhance its chances of being included among those literatures being translated globally. According to Sapira, between 1990 to 2003, while French literature by French writers reached 858 translations; only 16 titles were by Algerian writers. Among the 16 titles, only authors like Assia Djebar, Kateb Yassine, Rachid Mimmouni, Mouloud Feraoun, Mohamed Dib and a few others are translated into English.   In other words, the first generation of writers largely is the one that got translated. The same applies to Arabic literature as a whole, where the most translated writers are the well-known ones like the Egyptian Nobel Prize Laureate Najib Mahfouz, the Sudanese Tayib Saleh and a few others. The Algerian Tahar Wattar has been translated into English together with others from the first generation of Algerians writing in Arabic.   Ahlem Mosteghanemi has recently been translated into English. As far as literature of 1990s Algeria is concerned, despite the boom of writing, the number of titles translated is very limited, if not to say non-existent. Emily Apter (2006. 2013), Wail Hasan (2006) and a few other scholars have written about the ‘untranslatability’ of Arabic Literature and about the visibility of the same few names who “are universally acclaimed, excellent writers” (Apter, 2006, 98).   In fact, when we talk about ‘untranslatable’ Algeria in terms of its low visibility, one could say that this problem exists not only in relation to translating into the dominant language (centre and periphery) but it is also relevant to translation into Arabic from French, due to the gulf between Arabophone and Francophone writers. In other words, Algerian Francophone writers, even well-known ones like Assia Djebar, are not translated into Arabic. It is only after her death, that the Algerian Ministry of Culture has commissioned Djebar’s books for translation into Arabic. In other words, the ‘untranslatability’ of Algeria is not only external but also internal. A related issue is the gap of knowledge between academic literature written in Arabic and in French, which is fragmentary due to disciplinary constraints and to the complexity of the linguistic situation in Algeria. This is why academic work on, for example, Francophone writers do not give the full national picture due to the nature of the divisions between the languages studied in academia.

III. Conclusion

Although there has been a boom in fictional writing in both Arabic and French, research on the 1990s in Algeria (the Black Decade) dealing with the issue of sexual violence/rape is scarce. This is largely due to the Amnesty Law (1999, 2005), which forbids people from looking into that past period.   These limitations highlight the unusual nature of the research in this article. What is interesting to note is that fictional writing about the 1990s has seen a boom in recent years in both Arabic and French.

In this article, I provide an extensive study of the concept of ‘untranslatability’ (Apter, 2013) from both theoretical and practical perspectives. While Apter presents the concept of untranslatability as a homogenous notion, I expand it by adding typologies that help to illustrate the idea further. This is done using practical examples from various mediums such as personal interviews conducted by the researcher, novels and testimonies in the two working languages in Algeria, French and Arabic. For example, when analysing the language situation in Algeria, the issue of untranslatability is not only confined to the linguistic battle between Arabophones, Berberophones or Francophones, but also is used to illustrate the dynamics of silencing in postcolonial Algeria. By this I mean, that the language politics in Algeria elucidate the manipulations done under the Arabisation movement in for example silencing one group or another. The silencing is a form of untranslatability linked directly to the linguicide in the country. Under the Arabisation movement motive, a number of Francophone and Berberophone intellectuals were killed and others sought refuge in France, which helped emptying the country from its elite in what is known as ‘intellocide’. Theological untranslatability is another type discussed in this article, which is related to the relationship between the theological concepts and their translations in the present time (see the example of sabi discussed above). In fact, the theological interpretations exacerbated a violence regarding what and how concepts are translated or untranslated. In other words, the relationship between what can be translated is not an easy one when one gets to how it can be translated, bearing in mind the historicity as well as the temporality of concepts. The untranslatabilities of Algeria are also intensified by external factors due to the low visibility of Arabic literature in general and Algerian in particular. This low visibility does not only concern writings in Arabic, but also in French (Francophone literature). Among the writers translated, only the first generation ones such as, Tahar Wattar (from Arabic into English) and Kateb Yassine (from French into English).   The case of Algeria represents one example of the ‘imposed’ untranslatability’ is inflicted by unequal power relations in the world. The hegemony of English, which Bassnett describes ‘as uni-directional’ plays a big role in the case of untranslatability. Finally, an important type of untranslatability, which is central to this article, is the complexity of translating feelings of trauma into words. Words used to represent and describe the unspeakable, such as rape in a culture like Arabo-Muslim. The ‘social role’ of the translator (Toury, 1993) is connected to the writer’s intricacy of translating themes like ‘rape’. By this I mean, that the translator is in a similar situation to the writer in that he/she may deem the text untranslatable.

Classifying a range of untranslatabilities, not particularly in any order, advances the concept further and opens further discussion. The ideas and examples discussed within each section act as suggestions as to how we can classify untranslatabilities. Here, untranslatability is recognised as a dynamic concept, which may change and may include other areas. The discussion draws on the areas of linguistics, semantics, theories of language and power, and literature to present texts where untranslatability is present. The point of emphasising the various classifications of the concept of untranslatability is to facilitate a clearer understanding both in theory and in practice.   The concluding remarks of this article is that the concept of untranslatability is an organic concept that affects all languages and a number of disciplines and any attempt to raise discussions on how to develop it will only enhance it.

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Al Farouq, F. (2005). تاء الخجل , Honte au Feminin. Riad El-Rayyes Books.

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Apter, E. (2013). Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London/New York: Verso

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Djebar, A. (1997). Oran, Langue Morte. Arles : Actes Sud.

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Kilito, Abdelfattah, Waïl S. Hassan (trans.), (2008). Thou Shalt not Speak my Language. New York: Syracuse University Press.

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Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, ‘Translate It, Translate It Not’, Translation Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2008, 90-102.

Mehta, B. (2014). Dissident Writings of Arab Women. Routledge Advances in the Middle East and Islamic Studies Series. London: Routledge.

Mosteghanemi, A. (1993). Dhakirat al-Jasad. Manshurāt Ahlem Mosteghanemi.

Muqaddam, Y. (2010). Al Harim al lughawi. All Prints.com

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Salhi, S. (2-10). Gender and Diversity in the Middle East and North Africa. London: Routledge.

Turshen, M. (2002). Social Research. Vol. 69, No. 3. http://www.meredethturshen.com/www/pdf/SR%202002.pdf

Venuti, L. (1998).The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. London/New York: Routledge.

[1] .   In an interview on (14/10/2014), the author mentions that most of the events are not fiction, they are based on testimonies she collected when working as a journalist.

[2] This sign is the nearest I found to represent the ‘closed taa’ and at the same time gives the impression of a noose.

[3] تاء الخجل Taa al Khajal (2005) published by Riad El-Rayyes Books in Arabic was translated into French La Honte au Feminin (2009), published by Editions El-Ikhtilef and Arab Scientific Publishers, Inc.

[4] Yusra Muqaddam (2010) Al Harim al lughawi. All Prints.com

[5] Zuleikha Abu Risha (2009) Untha al lugha. Ninawa Print.

[6]Abdellah Mohamed Al Ghathami (2005) Ta’nith al qasida wa al qari’ al mukhtalif. Arab Cultural Centre.

[7] For more information about the concept of sabi, see Amal Grami’s article in this issue.

[8] For more information, see Tariq Sabry (2013): Cultural Encounters in the Arab World: On Media, the Modern and the Everyday. I. B. Tauris.

[9] Kilito, A. (2008) Thou Shall not Speak my language. Translated from Arabic by Wail S. Hassan.

[10] When Kilito mentions Arabic, he refers to the Standard form (SA).

[11] For a closer understanding, Hassan argues that “Kilito highlights the problem of cultural translation as an interpretive process and as an essential element of comparative literary studies. In close readings of al-Jahiz, Ibn Rushd, al-Saffar, and al-Shidyaq, among others, he traces the shifts in attitude toward language and translation from the centuries of Arab cultural ascendancy to the contemporary period, interrogating along the way how the dynamics of power mediate literary encounters across cultural, linguistic, and political lines”.

[12] Arabisation (Arabic: تعريب‎‎ taʻrīb) is part of the wider movement of decolonisation in Algeria. It aims to impose standard Arabic at the expense of French and other local languages such as Tamazight. This language policy reflected a wider vision of Arab/Muslim leaders, who wanted to break from the colonial past and start afresh while forging alliances with Arab/Muslim states.

[13] For more information about the language question, see: Language Conflict in Algeria by Mohamed Benrabah (2013). Multilingual Matters.

[14] Berber languages, the languages of the indigenous people in North Africa, are called Tamazight; there are variations within the Berber language, such as Tashelhit and Taqbaylit.

[15] Pan Arab Nationalism (Arabic: القومية العربية‎‎ al-Qawmiyya al-`arabiyya) is a nationalist ideology celebrating the glories of Arab civilization, the language and literature of the Arabs, calling for rejuvenation and political union in the Arab world.

[16] This phenomenon is what is referred to as diglossia, which is a linguistic situation where two varieties of the same language exist to fulfil different social functions and are used in the same speech community. For more information about Arabic sociolinguistics, Reem Bassiouney gives a sketch of the main research trends about Diglossia, language contact and language change in her book: Arabic Sociolinguistics (2009), Edinburgh University Press.

[17]Association of Algerian ulama Founded in 1931 by Abd al-Hamid ibn Badis and other religious scholars to educate Algerians, promote the Arab-Islamic culture and national identity of Algeria and to revive and reform Islam. Most importantly, its aim was to protest against colonialism.

[18] Frenchification is the linguistic policy imposing the use of the French language in political, administrative, legal, and educational institutions and relegating Arabic and Berber to the status of a second language.

[19] Arris is a Berber town in the Eastern part of Algeria (Chaouia region)

[20] Chaouia is a variety of the Berber language spoken in the Aurès region (Berber: Awras) of eastern Algeria and surrounding areas.

[21] For more information, see: http://www.humanite.fr/retour-sur-le-massacre-huis-clos-des-journalistes-algeriens-564025

[22] Salima Tlemçani, 15^th Febrauary 2017. For more information, see: http://www.valledaostaglocal.it/2017/02/15/leggi-notizia/argomenti/voix-du-monde/articolo/salima-tlemcani-etre-femme-journaliste-en-algerie.html

[23] Jihad al nikah (جهاد النكاح‎‎) refers to the claimed practice in which Sunni women, sympathetic to the Salafi jihadism, travel to the battlefields and are allegedly voluntarily offering themselves to rebels, fighting for the creation of the Islamic Caliphate. They are expected to be repeatedly in a temporary marriage, serving sexual comfort roles to help boost the fighters’ morale. The practice in modern states is referred to as legalising ‘prostitution’.

July 5, 2018
Tom Eyers – The Matter of Poetry: A Review of Nathan Brown’s “The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics”

by Tom Eyers

The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics
New York: Fordham University Press, 2017

If there is a million dollar question in contemporary theory, it is that of materialism. To declare oneself a materialist remains an attractive proposition, and this despite the tangled confusions that have attended the term since the Ancients. There is something dashing about its implications, although any core definition, even any vaguely related set of appropriate objects or applications, remains stubbornly elusive. Materialism, especially in our flighty anxious present, promises something hard-edged, impatient of airy abstractions – the irony being, of course, that this most apparently earthy of terms seems able only to generate ever more windy attempts to pin it down. Historically, it is most often defined according to what it is not, and this is appropriate enough. There has always been something suspiciously thrusting, positive and hubristic about the idealisms, with their over-eager willingness to propose and impose system upon system, and the various materialisms have most often taken shape in flinty opposition to just such empire building.

This is not to say that materialist philosophers have lacked ambition. Karl Marx, the most recognizable and influential materialist in history, came close to proposing an all-embracing schema for interpreting the general movements of human history, scolding Hegel for downplaying the inconveniences of economy and physicality to human history-making, but reproducing the latter’s theoretical capaciousness all the same. If it is fairly easy, if not without controversy, to identify what the ‘material’ in Marxism is – in shorthand, the historically variable productive processes that shape how human beings live and labor – it is rather more difficult to imagine a ‘materialist poetics’. While poetry may aspire to capture something of the density of living matter within the looser folds of literary language – think, among many other possible examples, of the Romantics’ wrangling with the apparently imperturbable autonomy of nature, of Ponge’s poetics of mid-sized objects – it is less clear that the ‘stuff’ of poetry, figural language, can in any non-analogous sense be considered ‘material’.

Of course, materialisms have rarely been concerned only with matter understood as more or less synonymous with the physical. Materialists have more often located characteristics one usually associates with the material in domains that cannot entirely be reduced to the latter. Marx finds in the manner in which human beings perpetually become through labor a combination of historical permanence and flexibility, one that equally characterizes the physical stuff upon which they work, and through which they are able to achieve a kind of relative autonomy. Viewed from such a vantage, the elusive linguistic compressions that make up modern and contemporary poetry seem evanescent, impermanent, allusive, if not quite ‘ideal’. Nathan Brown’s superb and energizing first book is not the first to attempt to square this circle, of course. There are those for whom deconstruction at its most fastidious approached something like a literary materialism, insofar as it trained its gaze on those aspects of meaning-making in literature that seemed most intransigent, those moments of figural contradiction that refused to yield to any smooth or final translation of non-sense to sense. Marxist literary theory would seem another fruitful source. Since Althusser, and especially since Pierre Macherey provided the elaborated Althusserian literary theory that Althusser never quite did, Marxist critics have been wary of too quickly reading the sturdiness of the economic base into the apparently more ephemeral products of literary culture. Instead, and cannily, the likes of Jameson and Eagleton have found in literary form itself intimations of historical conflict that might more conventionally be sought in political-economic contextualizations of literary content. It is dismaying, given this rich history, that recent, ostensibly Marxist literary-critical readings of, say, the neoliberal, have tended toward just such vulgar historicisms, so wary of a caricatured-in-advance aestheticism that they neglect the very matter of their chosen object of study, literary language itself.

To his credit, Brown largely leaves such polemics to one side, preferring to immanently build a poetics of fabrication from the ground up, tracing suggestive parallels between 20^th and 21^st century avant-garde poetry and materials science. It would do this book a disservice to describe it as a creative reinvention and defense of close reading, not least because the latter has more often obscured the material density of the words on the page than it has illuminated it. Nonetheless, the hard theoretical labor of reading that Brown performs, sweeping from the granular to the scalar, should come to place in stark relief the reigning common sense in literature departments, where the too-easy task of doing history badly has proven far more attractive than any knotty reckoning with the density of the literary signifier. In a virtuosic account of the cross-cutting history of nanoscale carbon chemistry and Ronald Johnson’s ‘architectural’ long poem ARK, Brown quotes the following capitalized line of Johnston’s: “TO GO INTO THE WORDS AND EXPAND THEM”. (142) If a pithy summation of Brown’s practice of reading were possible, it would read something like this: ‘go into the words’, not to extract any pre-ordained ideality of sense, and neither to dwell nostalgically on their ‘literariness’, but rather to expand them, to identify their intersections with practices of fabrication that might at first blush seem entirely unrelated. To read materially in this way is not just to recognize the constructedness of poetry, its crystals and nanotubes and grains, although this is crucial enough, but also to expand such a materiality through creative articulation with other sites of construction.

To be clear, such articulations very rarely occur in this book by means of any simple, contextualist, or symmetrical glomming of literature onto historical or scientific correlates. Instead, this is a book that takes mediation seriously, that resists the now-commonplace assumption that literary artifacts must by default have everything to do with whatever contemporaneous historical event or framework the scholar has decided to foreground. What brings Johnson and carbon chemistry into agonistic dialogue, for instance, is the ambiguous and complicating intervention of a third figure, Buckminster Fuller. Those familiar with Johnson’s poetry will recognize the affinity – the poet has described his verse as “literally an architecture…fitted together with shards of language, in a kind of cement music”. (Johnson quoted in Brown, 99) But there is more at stake here than the mere recognition of a common architecturality across science and recent avant-garde poetry. Brown is equally attuned to the evasive ideologies that couple with these constructions: “At the center of this story”, Brown writes in his chapter on Johnson, “will be the concept (the ideology, in fact) of ‘design’ and its relation to a certain idealist concept of ‘nature’ and the ‘nature poem’”. (99) While idealized conceptions of nature significantly predate even the Romantics, the adhesion of such notions to the ideologeme of ‘design’, itself a trope that in its (post)modern guise tends to be assiduously scrubbed of anything so messy as manufacture, is rather more recent. Brown locates one root of this problematic in Buckminster Fuller’s writings, where design is figured as eternal, as universal, and as exemplarily accessible. He then traces an opposing trend also emerging from Black Mountain College, that of Olson’s ‘objectism’. If Fuller understands the materials of fabrication as being “just exactly where they want to be” (112), the poet instead affirms the ‘proper confusions’ of objects, their giving out onto a fragmentation resistant to the universal. Johnson, in turn, insists on similar tensions between “whole systems and the materials of which they are composed”. (131)

If these intertwined histories of fabrication and the production of ideology are compelling in their own right, Brown is at his best when he registers the materialities of sound and inscription that are particular to poetry, the better to reveal with due emphasis what the matter of poetry does, over against other forms of materiality. There are times reading this book when the particular curvature and atomicity of poetic materiality is rather lost in the mix, as Brown offers example after example of how one practice – nanotechnology, say – accords with, or helps reorient, our understanding of another – poetry. Some of these case studies could profitably have been left in the archive. But for all that, Brown is a strikingly inventive reader, and there emerges across his book a powerful, if largely implicit, theory of materialist reading that rivals the accompanying account of materialist poetic and scientific practice. Take, for instance, the reading of Emily Dickinson that appears in the book’s Prologue. A line of Dickinson’s poem ‘I cannot live with You’ catches Brown’s eye. The line reads ‘You there – I – here –‘.

One finds, of course, those characteristic Dickinsonian dashes, but more than this, “[the poem] is composed entirely of deictic terms, or shifters. The dash is a minimal graphemic unit – pen touching down on paper with an instant’s pressure, leaving the barest trace of furtive contact. Shifters are the piezoelectric transducers of grammar – minutely sensitive to the voltage of voice, expanding to generate an apparent fusion of body, language, world at the interface of the tongue’s tip: ‘there’”. (5). Gradually, the substantiality of that ‘I’ and that ‘You’ seem less important than what Brown refers to as the ‘paragrammatic’, and, one might add, insistently material transformations at the level of the line:

In Dickinson’s line, the paragram operates on a scale below that of even the letter and the phoneme – indeed, below the level of the grapheme. The second half of the line, ‘-I – here – ‘, might be taken to emerge from the subgraphemic elements of ‘there’. Dickinson’s ‘t’ transforms into ‘I’ as the crossbar of the former splits in half to form dashes that both separate and conjoin the vertical stroke of ‘I’ with the remainder of this rupture, ‘there’”. (10).

Ultimately, “grasping this potential significance of the line demands that we read an invisible, subgraphemic dimension of writing operating prior to signification”. (10) These ostensibly invisible elements of transformation are what, for Brown, link materialist poetics to materials science; “to situate these at the limits of fabrication is to open a space between ‘there’ and ‘here’ in which we are approached by bodies and words, in which the poetic image gives way onto invisible structures, wherein text passes over into texture”. (10)

While Brown’s claims here have something in common with all that became bound up with the slogan ‘the materiality of the signifier’, fanning out from French theory of the 1960s, it is rare indeed to see the stakes of the claim unfolded with such finesse and to the fullest of its consequences. It is rarer still to encounter reading pitched at this level of granularity and sensitivity, impervious to the lures of over-contextualization or the widespread fetish for content over form. One wants to know, nonetheless, what the rapid zooms in and out of multiple scales here, from close-ups of the poetic line to widescreen trans-historical tracings, would look like were the question of causality explicitly asked, not at the level of shared metaphors or suggestive parallels but rather according to the very different ontological properties that inhere in the vastly divergent materials that capture Brown’s attention.

From one angle, this is the very question that animates the book, and Brown provides the reader with numerous examples of the transformations of space that the sciences and literature alike are able to induce. Moreover, the problem has an irreducibly political charge. If, as Joshua Clover has claimed, Language poetry and other recent avant-gardes bought their meticulous attention to the minutiae of language at the expense of thinking the ramifications of political totality[1], Brown is concerned to locate a poetics that would be both micro and macro, nano and cosmological. In a bravura chapter on Shanxing Wang’s 2005 collection ‘Mad Science in Imperial City’, Brown finds in its attempted “mathematical formalization of historical processes” (217) a poetic suturing of time and space, drawing together the urban imaginaries of Beijing circa Tiananmen Square and New York following 9/11. More than this, Wang’s collection takes up other oppositions that its initial concern with divergent scales opens up, most pertinently for Brown those between intellectual and manual labor, between the abstract and the concrete – these, one infers, to be understood as implicated in the contrast between the infinitesimally small and the yawningly vast that materials science is especially concerned to explore. Ultimately, Sohn-Rethel’s extension of Marx’s concept of ‘real abstraction’ provides a lens through which Brown is able to historicize the shift in spatial and material imaginaries that Wang’s history-spanning poetry pictures.

And yet, the materialities that compose urban geographies, the nanomaterial, poetry, or collectivities of labor, are anything but equivalent. If one of the characteristics that different forms of matter, in all of their variant forms, may be said to share is a certain resistance, a capacity to elude attempts at their refabrication or repurposing, it may be this most common aspect of materiality that is unwittingly minimized in Brown’s account. To fully foreground this would be to ponder just how that resistance is overcome; how it is that the very different forms of matter in question resonate upon one other or, just as likely, how they are ultimately fated not to do so. The dialectical peculiarity of this logic should not be lost: the characteristic that unites different manifestations of the material, that of resistance, is also that which singularizes, which precludes the formation in material actuality of the very totality that one is nonetheless rightfully enjoined, in theory, to map. One would, in brief, have liked at the level of this book’s concept-production a little more of the spatial noise and constitutive resistance suggested in these lines by Charles Olson, a signal source for Brown:

In the five hindrances men and angels
stay caught in the net, in the immense nets
which spread out across each plane of being, the multiple nets
which hamper at each step of the ladders as the angels
and the demons
and men
go up and down
(‘As the Dead Prey Upon Us’ in The Collected Poems of Charles Olson: Excluding the ‘Maximus’ Poems, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 389).

Leaving aside the post-theistic, ghostly metaphysic that shapes these famous lines, we find a numerical order and a structured kind of spatial disorder in combination here, such that vertical nets and horizontal ladders both enable and disable one another. The nets within which men and angels are caught are immense, and yet somehow limiting; a different order of space, the ladders upon which angels, demons and men ascend, intersects the nets while also being hampered by them. Hindrance and expansiveness; hindrance, perhaps, as expansiveness. Such limitations to possibility are also, potentially, conditions of possibility, and they are not given a sufficient shake in Brown’s otherwise capacious, sometimes too capacious, attention to the movements between various domains of material construction.

For all that, Brown’s practice of reading is tuned to detect precisely such contradictions and aporias, and he often does so beautifully at the level of the line. Nonetheless, the vaulting ambition that supercharges his historical claims occasionally renders artificially smooth what are, one suspects, rather rougher and more incomplete moments of connection and disconnection between the scientific and the poetic, between the minute and the gargantuan. At any rate, this is one of the very finest works of speculative poetics to emerge in quite some time, and one hopes that its highly creative deviations from the historicist-contextualist hegemony in literary studies will spark equally incandescent acts of theoretical disobedience in its wake.

[1] Brown cites this claim on page 222, and takes it seriously. There is certainly something to it, but the argument risks ignoring the over-determined imbrication of historical-political archival work and formal alchemy to be found, for instance, in the Language poetry of Ron Silliman, all the better to boost more recent, performatively militant verse as uniquely and purely radical. I have tried to situate the ambiguous but powerfully formalized political imaginary of Silliman and others in the fifth chapter of my Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present, (Evanston, Il.: Northwestern University Press, 2017). The danger, of course, is any recrudescent nostalgia for modernist, pseudo-formalist invocations of literariness, something that the Language poets, admittedly, were often prone to.

Tom Eyers is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University.

November 9, 2017

Search results for: “tong”

Of Human Flesh: An Interview with R.A. Judy by Fred Moten

About the Local and What All Hold in Common: Belarusian Human Rights Activist Ales Bialiatski in Conversation with Olga V. Solovieva

Gil Z. Hochberg — Between Orientalisms: Derrida, Cixous, and the Specter of the Arab Jew

Susan Slyomovics — “The Ethnologist-Spy Was Hanged, at That Time We Were a Little Savage”: Anthropology in Algeria with Habib Tengour

Gretchen Soderlund — Futures of Journalisms Past (or, Pasts of Journalism’s Future)

The Current Crisis

The Nineteenth Century

Twentieth-Century Futures

Time, Space, and Journalism

Technology and Uncertainty in the Professions

Conclusion: Euphoria and Dysphoria in Journalism

Annemarie Perez — UndocuDreamers: Public Writing and the Digital Turn

Anissa Daoudi – Introduction: Narrating and Translating Sexual Violence at Wartime in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA region)

Essays

Anissa Daoudi – Untranslatability of Algeria in “The Black Decade”

Tom Eyers – The Matter of Poetry: A Review of Nathan Brown’s “The Limits of Fabrication: Materials Science, Materialist Poetics”

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