The Tunic of Nessus: Part II.

Writing the enemy's language is more than just a matter of scribbling down a muttered monologue under your very nose; to use this alphabet involves placing your elbow some distance in front of you to form a bulwark - however, in this twisted position, the writing is washed back to you.

  This language was imported in the murky, obscure past, spoils taken from the enemy with whom no fond word was ever exchanged... French, formerly the language of the law courts, used alike by judges and the convicted. Words of accusation, legal procedure, violence - that is the oral source of colonized people's French.

   As I come to the inevitable ceasefire at the end of every war, my writing is washed up on the deserted seashores of the present day and looks for a place where a linguistic armistice can be arranged, a patio with fountains playing where people come and go.

  This language was formerly used to entomb my people; when I write it today, I feel like the messenger of old, who bore a sealed missive which might sentence him to death or to the dungeon.

   By laying myself bare in this language I start a fire which may consume me. For attempting an autobiography in the former enemy's language....

After five centuries of Roman occupation, an Algerian named Augustine undertakes to write his own biography in Latin. Speaks of his childhood, declares his love for his mother and his concubine, regrets his youthful wild oats and tells how he was eventually consumed with passion for a Christian god .  And his writing presses into service, in all innocence, the same language as Caesar or Sulla - writers and generals of the successful 'African campaign'.

  The same language has passed from the conquerors to the assimilated people; has grown more flexible after the corpses of the past have been enshrouded in words... Saint Augustine's style is borne along his ecstatic search for God. Without this passion, he would be destitute again: 'I have become to myself the country of destitution.' If this love did not maintain him in a blissful transport, his writing would be a self-laceration!

  After the Bishop of Hippo Regius, a thousand years elapse. The Maghrib sees a procession of new invasions, new occupations... Repeated raids by the Banu Hilal tribesmen finally bleed the country white. Soon after this fatal turning point, the historian Ibn Khaldun, the innovatory author of The History of the Berbers, as great a figure as Augustine, rounds off a life of adventure and meditation by composing his autobiography in Arabic.  He calls it Ta' arif, that is to say, 'Identity'.

   As with Augustine, it matters little to him that he writes in a language introduced into the land of his fathers by conquest and accompanied by bloodshed! A language imposed by rape as much as by love...

  Ibn Khaldun is now nearly seventy years of age:  after an encounter with Tamerlane - his last exploit - he prepares to die in exile in Egypt.  He suddenly obeys a yearning to turn back on himself: and he becomes the subject and object of a dispassionate autopsy.

For my part, even where I am composing the most commonplace of sentences, my writing is immediately caught in the snare of  the old war between two peoples.  So I swing like a pendulum from the images of war (war of conquest or of liberation, but always in the past) to the expression of a contradictory, ambiguous love.

   My memory hides in a black mound of decomposing debris;  the sound which carries it swirls upward out of reach of my pen. 'I write', declares Michaux, 'to undertake a journey through myself.' I journey through myself at the whim of the former enemy, the enemy whose language I have stolen...

   Autobiography practised in the enemy's language has the texture of fiction, at least as long as you are desensitized by forgetting the dead the writing resurrects. While I thought I was undertaking a 'journey through myself', I find I am simply choosing another veil.  While I intended every step forward to make me more clearly identifiable, I find myself progressively sucked down into the anonymity of those women of old - my ancestors!

I am forced to acknowledge a curious fact:  the date of my birth  is eighteen hundred forty two, the year when General Saint- Arnaud arrives to burn down the zaouia of the Beni Menacer, the tribe from which I am descended, and he goes into raptures over the orchards, the olive groves, 'the finest in the whole of Algeria', as he writes in a letter to his brother - orchards which have now disappeared.

   It is Saint-Arnaud's fire that lights my way out of the harem one hundred years later: because its glow still surrounds me  I find the strength to speak. Before I catch the sound of my own voice I can hear the death-rattles, the moans of those immured in the Dahra mountains and the prisoners on the island of Sainte-Marguerite; they provide my orchestral accompaniment.  They summon me, encourage my faltering steps, so that at the given signal my solitary song takes off.

The language of the Others, in which I was enveloped from childhood, the gift my father lovingly bestowed on me, that language has adhered to me ever since like the Tunic of Nessus:  that gift from my father who, every morning, took me by the hand to accompany me to school. A little Arab girl, in a village of the Algerian Sahel...

Assia Djebar, "Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade".  Published originally in French, in 1985.

From "Fantasia: an Algerian cavalcade". by Assia Djebar

 Fifth Movement:  the Tunic of Nessus.  (Part I)

My father, a tall erect figure in a fez, walks down the village street; he pulls me by the hand and I, who for so long was so proud of myself - the first girl in the family to have French dolls bought for her, the one who had permanently escaped cloistering and never had to stamp and protest at being forced to wear the shroud-veil, or else yield meekly like any of my cousins, I who did deliberately drape myself in a veil for a summer wedding as if it were a fancy dress, thinking it most becoming - I walk down the street, holding my father's hand. Suddenly, I begin to have qualms: isn't it my 'duty' to stay behind with my peers in the gynaeceum? Later, as an adolescent, well nigh intoxicated with the sensation of sunlight on my skin, on my mobile body, a doubt arises in my mind: 'Why me? Why do I alone, of all my tribe, have this opportunity?'

I cohabit with the French language. I may quarrel with it, I may have bursts of affection, I may subside into sudden or angry silences - these are the normal occurrences in the life of any couple.  If I deliberately provoke an outburst, it is less to break the unbearable monotony, than because I am vaguely aware of having been forced into a 'marriage' too young, rather like the other little girls of my town who are 'bespoke' in their earliest childhood.

  Thus, my father, the schoolteacher, for whom a French education provided a means of escape from his family's poverty, had probably 'given ' me before I was 'nubile' - did not certain fathers abandon their daughters to an unknown suitor, or, as in my case, deliver them into the enemy camp? The failure to realize the implications of this traditional behaviour took on for me a different significance:  when I was ten or eleven, it was understood among  my female cousins that I was privileged to be my father's 'favourite' since he had unhesitatingly preserved me from cloistering.

   But marriageable royal princesses also cross the border, often against their will, in terms of treaties which end wars.

French is my 'stepmother' tongue. Which is my long-lost mother-tongue, that left me standing and disappeared? ... Mother tongue, either idealized or unloved, left to fairground barkers and jailers!...Burdened by my inherited taboos, I discover I have no memory of Arabic love-songs. Is it because I was cut off from this impassioned speech that I find the French I use so flat and unprofitable?

  The Arab poet describes the body of his beloved; the Andalusian exquisite composes treatise after treatise, listing a multiplicity of erotic postures; the Muslim mystic, dressed in woolen rags and satisfied with a handful of dates, expresses his thirst for God and his longing for the hereafter with a surfeit of extravagant epithets... The prodigality of this language seems to me somewhat suspect, consoling with empty words... Wealth squandered while they are being dispossessed of their Arab heritage.

  Words of love heard in a wilderness.  After several centuries of cloistering,  the bodies of my sisters have begun to come out of hiding here and there over the last fifty years; they grope around, blinded by the light, before they dare advance. Silence surrounds the first written words, and a few scattered laughs are heard above the groans.

  'L'amour, ses cris (s 'ècrit): my hand as I write in French makes the pun on love affairs that are aired; all my body does is to move forward, stripped naked,  and when it discovers the ululations of my ancestresses on the battlefields of old, it finds that it is itself at stake:  it is no longer a question of writing only to survive.

Long before the French landed in 1830, the Spanish established their presidios (garrison posts) as strategic points along the Maghribin coast - Oran, Bougie, Tangiers, Ceuta; the indigenous rulers in the interior continued to resist and the occupying forces frequently found their food supplies cut off; thus they adopted the tactics of the rebato: an isolated spot could be chosen from which to launch an attack, and to which they could retreat and use in the intervals between hostilities for farming or for replenishing supplies.

  This type of warfare, rapid offensives alternating with as swift retreats, allowed each side to continue fighting indefinitely.

After more than a century of French occupation - which ended not so long ago in such butchery - a similar no-man's land still exists between the French and the indigenous languages, between two national memories: the French tongue, with its body and voice, has established a proud presidio within me, while the mother tongue, all oral tradition, all rags and tatters, resists and attacks between two breathing spaces. In time to the rhythm of the rebato, I am alternately the besieged foreigner and the native swaggering off to die, so there is seemingly endless strife between the spoken and written word. 

From Assia Djebar, "Fantasia: an Algerian cavalcade".

"When I am growing up, shortly before my native land throws off the colonial yoke - while the man still has the right to four legitimate wives, we girls, big and little, have at our command four languages to express desire before all that is left to us is sighs and moans:  French for secret missives; Arabic for our stifled aspirations toward God-the-father, the God of the religions of the Book; Lybico-Berber which takes us back to the pagan idols - mother-gods - of pre-Islamic  Mecca.  The fourth language, for all females,  young or old, cloistered or half-emancipated, remains that of the body;  the body which male neighbors' and cousins' eyes require to be deaf and blind, since they cannot completely incarcerate it; the body which, in trances, dances or vociferations, in fits of hope or despair, rebels, and unable to read or write, seeks some unknown shore as destination for its message of love".

"

Part II of “Telling stories, connecting lives”

“Walls, veils and other social norms...” (Mounira Charrad)

In Brazil, where post-modern freedoms, highly unequal opportunity structures and much discursive ambivalence regarding feminism produce a complex scenario for gender politics and change, the horsewomen I have interviewed over the course of the years see themselves as unconventional, openly or covertly challenging customs and norms that attempt to impose meanings of womanhood on everyone.*

On the other hand, the riding women I interviewed in Spain (Barcelona and Andalucía), especially those of the younger generations, tended not to see their activities in this sporting field as anything that made them stand out from other countrywomen. The patriarchal past that threw innumerous obstacles in the path of women’s choices and public sphere roles and activities is portrayed as largely overcome or surpassed. In fact, when I asked them a question that usually elicited an assertion of “difference” from Brazilian equestriennes, my Spanish interviewees would look at me with perplexity and often ask me to explain what I meant. “Different from others?? Braver than others?? No, we are all like this today”** was the response I got from one quite successful young Andalusian horsewoman - herself the only woman on a prominent equestrian team – after I had had my chance to clarify my admittedly tendentious query.

In the history of Western modernity, the passage from the Victorian or romantic era in which women were viewed as sexless bearers of a natural “virtuous” proclivity toward abnegation, service and love (but not sex) to a “post-modernity” in which ambiguous messages about women’s bodies and sexualities abound, new forms of social control emerge which, we could argue, take advantage of such ambiguities. The most difficult and paradoxical aspect of this situation is that it involves, or tends to generate, considerable complicity from women themselves, who so often desire to be exactly what contemporary hegemonic discourses tell them they should (must) be.

Some non-Western histories, it seems, have quite a different point of departure. Mounira Charrad and Fatima Mernissi have written about how traditional Islamic notions of women as sexual and dangerous underlie the institutional constructions of the “walls and veils” that are meant as material and symbolic barriers to the spaces and places where they would come into contact with men outside the closest kin circles. Western discourse has thus seized the opportunity to construct a simplifying dichotomy of “western freedoms” vs. “non-western bondage”, which – for all I have stated above and many other things that I need not repeat here – is at best, highly contentious. At any rate, as women around the non-Western world struggle to build their own idioms of emancipation - which include elements shared with Western feminism as well as particular, contextual ones – it should come as no surprise that some continue to include headscarves and protectively modest forms of bodily exposure.

*In recent (forthcoming) work, I have tried to show some of the ways in which women involved in different arenas of equestrian sport construct discourses on the body, on subjectivity and identity that pose a challenge to conventional ‘technologies of gender’, de-emphasizing historical notions of delicate, maternal or otherwise “controllable” female bodies and emphasizing such elements as strength and courage in facing risk and adventure - in ways which are radical enough to take them beyond accepted normative paths. Coupled with my informants’ discourse of physical competence, skill and bravery, was a relative lack of (openly expressed) concern for bodily appearance/perfection.
** This coincides with anthropologist Sara Pink’s comments emerging from her work on Spanish women bullfighters: “… a woman’s performance represents a statement about female body-use and body-image. The performance must be seen as a ritual statement about these notions of the female body through which it is relocated in a new position in society and culture -both physically in the bullring and metaphorically. The new body use symbolizes a new body-relationship to the rest of society by which the female body stands for not a reproducing body, but a publicly proven, physically fit body, and a successful, ‘dominating’ body."

Telling stories, connecting lives.

(Part I)

To travel is the best way to learn and empower yourself”, said Yasmina, my grandmother, who was illiterate and lived in a harem, a traditional household with locked gates that women were not supposed to open. “You must focus on the strangers you meet and try to understand them”. The more you understand a stranger and the greater is your knowledge of yourself, the more power you will have”. For Yasmina, the harem was a prison, a place women were forbidden to leave. So she glorified travel and regarded the opportunity to cross boundaries as a sacred privilege, the best way to shed powerlessness.
(Fatema Mernissi, Scheherezade Goes West…)

Of all the authors and writers on my ever-expanding list for this one of my current projects (helping to extend mappings of gender and culture beyond the borders and boundaries of Euro-american paths and patterns; advancing the fusion of feminist and post colonial perspectives for sociology, etc. ), no one has inspired me more than Moroccan feminist, Fatema Mernissi, in her more personally-informed writings, Dreams of Tresspass and Scheherezade Goes West. These two works, which weave their tapestry through a language particularly rich in personal memoir and reflection (and thus show how the fabric of each of our lives is linked up to culture, history and social institutions), render a convincing picture of the common threads, that, moving beyond conventional bias and stereotype, connect women’s struggles for equality, for full access to public space and voice, and for (individual and collective) self-representation (in politics and in art, in media and everyday life), historically and at present, in different parts of the world.


The disabling myths and traps of patriarchy have different faces and versions. We westerners tend to be unaware of the wide array of mechanisms and strategies that women in other parts of the world have developed to thwart and challenge their subordination, as we fall prey to “orientalist” mentalities that have encouraged us to think of Middle Eastern –and non-Western women in general – in monolithic terms, as oppressed victims who have been denied of the opportunities to reflect upon their lives and struggle for better ones. But as Mernissi points out, in Arab and Middle Eastern literary and folk traditions - and in history and society as well-, there is a legacy of intelligent, daring and competent women who not only assert themselves but are also admired for their unconventional attitudes. From a legendary tiger-hunting Persian princess to the clever Scheherezade who used her wit and story-telling skills to change her own fate, as well as that of other women who had been destined to doom , to the many women across the Arab world today who flock into universities, politics and scientific and technological occupations, Mernissi evokes another notion of the feminine: “A woman", she tells us, "must always be ready to jump on a horse and cross alien territories. Uncertainty is a woman´s destiny”. (And the courage to face this uncertainty, a not so uncommon response, I might add here)Yet Western philosophers, writers and painters (men, for the most part), mesmerized by what they had heard about the “harems of the Orient”, let their own imaginations run wild, fantasizing an enigmatic world populated by sensual eastern beauties who existed for and through their almost magical abilities to guarantee men their pleasures. These harem women became an object of male fascination – written about and painted by “masters” over the course of several centuries. As Mernissi’s witty narrative unfolds, she shares with us her unique insights – her own process of uncovering a foreign way of thinking – into Western representations of the harem, which have been cleansed of, or were perhaps always blind to, the intense subjective and relational dynamics in which women acted to assert their own desires, wrest control from men or construct particular forms of “counter-power”.

The worlds of east and west have both been, for many centuries, a “man’s world”. And modernity – as it makes its way over the globe, in different times and rhythms, and full of holes and contradictions of its own – does, in the best of hypotheses, create an important new terrain where women struggle for “subjecthood”. Mernissi evokes the work of other contemporary writers, such as Naomi Wolf and Pierre Bourdieu, who have been particularly brilliant in unmasking the forms of symbolic violence that are at work, in the West today, and run against the grain of modern feminist struggle. These are extremely powerful ways of devaluing women – and doing so through the reproduction of consent. Thus, “Unlike the Muslim man, who uses space to establish male domination by excluding women from the public arena, the Western man manipulates time and light… by putting the spotlight on the female child and framing her as the ideal of beauty, he condemns the mature woman to invisibility…”; the “violence embodied in the Western harem is less visible than in the Eastern harem because is not attacked directly, but masked as an aesthetic choice.”

[to be continued]