FROM EL BARRIO TO LA BANLIEUE: FICTIONS OF IDENTITY IN NUYORICAN AND BEUR LITERATURE
By
Laura Valle-Gutierrez
A Senior Honors Thesis
submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Comparative Literature
Brown University
May 2017
Thesis Director: Professor Emily Drumsta
Second Reader: Professor Leticia Alvarado
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Abstract
This thesis explores two distinct literary bodies, Nuyorican and Beur literature, as characterized in four foundational novels in the genre: Down These Mean Streets, Le Gône du
Chaâba, When the Spirits Dance Mambo and La Seine était rouge. I pair literary criticism with sociological and geographical frameworks, to examine the way that second-generation migrants try to construct cohesive subjectivities in these texts. Constantly negotiating the unifying and discriminatory forces of language, race, and space, these texts nuance the reader’s understanding of a need for strategic essentialism.
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Table of Contents Abstract ...... 2
Table of Contents ...... 3
Introduction ...... 4
Defining ‘Beur’ and ‘Nuyorican’ ...... 11
Historical Contexts ...... 13
Critical Frameworks ...... 19
Chapter 1: Outward Bound ...... 24
Introduction ...... 24
The Politics of Language ...... 28
Street Theater ...... 38
Race and Space ...... 49
Gender and Genre ...... 54
Conclusion ...... 58
Chapter 2: Journeys of Remembrance ...... 60
Introduction ...... 60
Territorializing the Female Body ...... 63
Language Borders ...... 72
Truth and Knowledge ...... 75
Forming Memory ...... 83
Conclusion ...... 90
Conclusion ...... 92
Bibliography ...... 96 Valle-Gutierrez 4
Introduction Since 1993 Puerto Rico’s Banco Popular, a prominent bank on the island, has produced an annual televised Christmas Special that highlights the culture and spirit of the island through a medium that is central to Puerto Rican life and culture: music and dance (Arroyo 196). Often, these specials bring primarily Puerto Rican celebrities – well-known stars like Marc Anthony, Danny
Rivera, Ricky Martin, and most recently Flaco Navaja – to celebrate the quotidian lives of Puerto
Ricans. The specials venerate idealized figures like el jíbaro, the hard-working farmer who lives off the land, and focus on the roots of Puerto Rico, often using the rhetoric of Puerto Rico as a village, un pueblo, that is united by tradition, diversity, and most of all, music.
The especiales de navidad celebrate Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans, with nationalistic themes every year. This past year, the Christmas Special centered on Puerto Ricans who live off the island, focusing on the diaspora of Puerto Rico, as almost twice as many Puerto Ricans live on the mainland United States, relative to the island (Krogstad 2015).1 The special, like those in the past, used music and dance to illustrate that Puerto Ricans, and their spirit, thrive everywhere – from well-documented sites of migration like New York City and Chicago, to less thought-of places, such as Hawaii. The special chose not to emphasize how so many Puerto Ricans ended up in places like Hawaii (in part, the result of a formal request by the first U.S. appointed governor of
Puerto Rico, to work the Hawaiian sugar fields) (Gonzalez 58). Instead, like the texts dealt with in this thesis, the Christmas special emphasized the way that what I am calling “second-generation”
Puerto Ricans, individuals who are Puerto Rican but were born and raised on the mainland, recognize that music, community, and language, are what define their spaces and identity as
1 “As of 2013, there were more Puerto Ricans living in the U.S. mainland (5.1 million) than on the island itself (3.5 million)” (Krogstad 2015). Valle-Gutierrez 5
“Puerto Rican.” The special thus continues the tradition started by these novels, an effort to create a cohesive sense of self that recognizes past, present, and future.
In a completely different context, across the Atlantic Ocean, following the Paris attacks in
November 2015,2 some journalists called attention to the persistent erasure of French-Algerian history in the reporting of the attacks.3 Robert Fisk, writing for The Independent, wrote:
Whenever the West is attacked and our innocents are killed, we usually wipe the memory bank. Thus, when reporters told us that the 129 dead in Paris represented the worst atrocity in France since the Second World War, they failed to mention the 1961 Paris massacre of up to 200 Algerians participating in an illegal march against France’s savage colonial war in Algeria. Most were murdered by the French police, many were tortured in the Palais des Sports and their bodies thrown into the Seine. The French only admit 40 dead. (Independent.co.uk) Current events are thus problematically construed in a way that erases the history of a critical, and growing, portion of the French population – French citizens of Algerian descent. While Puerto
Ricans contend with defining self and national identity, in light of a growing diaspora, French citizens of Algerian descent continue to be marginalized in French cities, through such instances of erasure. While some French-Algerians have turned to music (the genres of raï and rap in particular) to centralize their narratives and liminal positions (Swedenburg 120), these identities remain largely ignored or misunderstood. The texts in this thesis offer the first steps towards understanding the lives of second-generation migrants, who grew up outside the direct experience of colonial violence, that their parents or first-generation migrants may have experienced, but who are still impacted by reverberations of colonialism in their daily lives.
2 The series of attacks, for which ISIS claimed responsibility, left 130 dead, and hundreds of more wounded. The sites of attacks included a music venue where a band was performing, and the French soccer arena, Le Stade de France, during a soccer match (BBC News). 3 In 2012, President François Hollande acknowledged the suffering that Algerians were subjected to by French colonization (Le Monde). Valle-Gutierrez 6
In this thesis, I look at two Nuyorican novels as foundational texts for understanding the experiences of second-generation Puerto Ricans in the United States: Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas and When the Spirits Dance Mambo by Marta Moreno Vega,4 and compare them with two texts by Beur writers: Azouz Begag’s Le Gone du Chaâba and Leïla Sebbar’s La Seine
était rouge. I compare these four texts in two chapters, along gendered lines, to analyze how language, race, and space all inform the way that identity is constructed for these different groups.
These juxtapositions illustrate the recurrence of certain second-generation migratory experiences such as linguistic alterity, which evidently transcends one historical or geographical situation.
However, these frameworks of comparison also allow for different experiences of race and religion, which don’t translate across historical contexts, to be considered within their own right.
Down These Mean Streets was published by Piri Thomas in 1967. It is an autobiographical novel that recounts the author’s life in New York City’s East Harlem – referred to by these
Nuyorican authors as El Barrio, the Spanish word for neighborhood. El Barrio, as both Thomas and Moreno Vega constantly bring the reader’s attention to in their texts, is in the northeastern part of Manhattan. After worsening poverty, unemployment and violence many Puerto Ricans migrated to New York and settled in El Barrio (Gonzalez 85). Thomas’ novel, which focuses on his formative years growing up in this space, begins in the midst of this en masse migration. Although the scene of his family’s migration is never shown, and Piri – the novel’s protagonist – is born in
Harlem Hospital, Puerto Ricans of multiple generations are depicted throughout the novel.
Le Gone du Chaâba by Azouz Begag is another novel that begins after a large-scale migration of Algerians to France. Begag’s family, like Thomas’, belonged to one of the earlier waves of economically-driven migration from Algeria to France (Hargreaves 2007, 13). Begag’s
4 For a discussion on why I use the term Nuyorican and Beur and apply it to these authors and novels see “Defining ‘Beur’ and ‘Nuyorican’,” below. Valle-Gutierrez 7 text is similarly autobiographical, and was published in 1986. The text’s protragonist and narrator, the eponymous Azouz, relays the story of his childhood in the shantytown outside of Lyon, near the Rhône river (Duchene 323). The end of the novel focuses on the family’s migration to la banlieue.
When the Spirits Dance Mambo is a more recent autobiographical novel by Marta Moreno
Vega, first published in 2004. However, despite its recent publication, Moreno Vega and Thomas are only about a decade apart, and lived in versions of El Barrio that were similar. Her autobiographical protagonist who goes by the name Coty or Cotito (although her given name,
Marta, also appears in the text) focuses on her experiences in El Barrio, particularly tied to music and her family.
The last novel, Leïla Sebbar’s La Seine était rouge was published in 1999. It recounts, from multiple perspectives, the events up to and including the massacre of October 17 1961, although it is set in the present. The novel has three protagonists, Amel (who in some ways doubles Sebbar, but is far from being an autobiographical representation of the author), Louis – a French filmmaker
– and Omer who is Algerian, and accompanies Amel throughout Paris. These three individuals traverse Paris and try to reconstitute this moment in history through conversations with multiple people, and through interactions with several different sites of memory.
The defining commonality of the authors dealt with in this thesis is that they grew up in the countries that their parents migrated to. This results in an evident effort to create a unified subject in their literatures, despite social conditions that are constantly pushing subjects towards one identity position or another (i.e. French or Algerian; Puerto Rican or Black). This thesis examines how society attempts to categorize these subjects, and their own resistance to such delimitations. Valle-Gutierrez 8
By limiting my comparison to second-generation migrants, across both literary fields I am analyzing texts that deal with a specific relationship between “homeland” (the country the protagonists were born or raised in) and “motherland” (their parents’ country). I use these terms, rather than using “homeland/motherland” to denote a “country of origin” in contrast to “host country” because these terms are inapplicable to the experiences relayed by these authors. While the dictionary defines homeland and motherland as synonyms, I find it the best way to differentiate between the writer’s and character’s relationships between Puerto Rico and New York, and Algeria and Paris and Lyon.5
Both Nuyorican and Beur literature deal with questions of identity formation, migration, politics, structural racism and the contestation of normative national histories. These literatures narrate a shared a history of colonization and oppression, often driven by linguistic (and therefore cultural) imperialism. Beyond the contextual similarities these groups share, both literary fields privilege certain structures and themes: genres like memoir and bildungsroman, ideologies of social mobility, and memory. An emphasis on space serves as a metalanguage between these different critical frameworks, which I expand on below.
New York was one of the main cities that Puerto Ricans migrated to, eventually leading to the term Nuyorican, perhaps the closest Puerto Rican equivalent to Beur, being a term that encompasses belonging to both home and motherland. The Nuyorican authors are writing about experiences in New York and were born about a decade apart. Their novels insist on the degree to which blackness is tied to Puerto Rican identity. However, their experience of blackness is also inextricable from their position in El Barrio, and its proximity to Harlem. These two texts refer to a time when El Barrio was a vibrant and changing space, with increasing fluidity across spaces in
5 To that end, I use the terms homeland and motherland consistently throughout my writing – however some citations do use homeland in contrast to host country or specific place names, which I leave unchanged. Valle-Gutierrez 9
Manhattan. Throughout the texts we witness cultural, economic, and affective shifts in El Barrio, as the protagonists grow up.6
Beyond these shared themes, both Nuyorican authors use the memoir genre. They both have protagonists that are named after themselves, and draw on their own experiences. This is a characteristic that is shared with Azouz Begag’s novel Le gone du Chaâba. While Sebbar’s novel is not a bildungsroman, Sebbar has written, in other texts, from an autobiographical perspective.
However, this trend, favoring autobiography, is perhaps one of the defining characteristics of second-generation migrant texts, given that “migration” itself isn’t necessarily a lived experience of these writers. Privileging this genre is in part due to the political project of these texts, to illuminate oft-ignored histories and desubjugate certain knowledges as solely belonging to minority literatures. This genre thus offers clear benefits from a political, historical, and didactic perspective. Further, in analyzing these texts using a comparatist framework these literatures reveal shared experiences of racially-determined alterity (including the peculiar gesture in both
Puerto Rican texts towards Islam and the Maghreb) beyond the generic similarities (that is, the structural components of the texts).
Azouz Begag and Leïla Sebbar, the two French-Algerian authors whose works are discussed in this thesis, are also approximate contemporaries. Beur literature deals with similar themes to the Nuyorican literature, hence the initial basis of comparison between the two canons.
However, Beur literature has an even more tenuous relationship to space and dominant culture than the Puerto Rican texts describe. Both authors show the shantytowns as spaces of extreme
6 Ernesto Quiñonez’s recent novel, Bodega Dreams is one example that looks at the impact of these changes and meditates on how this space has become an economic wasteland in light of the heroin epidemic that is described in When the Spirits Dance Mambo. Arlene Davila discusses some current problems faced by El Barrio, writing, “East Harlem's architectural deficit worsened after it became a target of urban renewal. East Harlem is home to the largest concentration of public housing projects in Manhattan” (54).
Valle-Gutierrez 10 poverty – yet even these spaces have been physically erased. The shantyown, which simply doesn’t exist for Puerto Rican migrants, is the precursor to French-Algerian experience in La Banlieue, which is the closest French equivalent to El Barrio.
In the first chapter, I address the role that public spaces, including the streets and school, play in the male bildungsroman. Looking at the narratives of Piri Thomas and Azouz Begag, children to some of the first-wave migrants in their respective regions, I analyze how performance of identity is crucial to subsequent individual identity construction. I characterize these texts as male-centric bildungsromans, since beyond the use of male protagonists, these texts focus on predominantly homosocial spaces to define masculinity and the self. Further, these texts emphasize how the self is defined by coming to terms with the structures of society.
The second chapter turns to texts by Marta Moreno Vega and Leïla Sebbar. These writers are more concerned with “borderlands” and the cultural imaginary that female bodies occupy and construct. I look at these tensions through a framework of territorialization. The two texts dramatize how the female body is infantilized, and becomes a contested space of past, present and future. These texts are defined by memory that is both personal and collective. While Moreno
Vega weaves family histories into her own, and focuses on recollecting, Sebbar’s text emphasizes discovery through an externalized journey of remembrance.
Throughout the chapters I analyze how similarities and differences of experience
(geographical, social, and cultural, amongst others) help determine these groups’ perceptions of selfhood and their place in the world. Today, both the U.S. and France continue to struggle with conversations about these ethnic groups. Notably, structural racism in both countries continues to ensure that these groups remain second-class citizens. Beur and Nuyorican subjectivities are thus important to understand, prior to addressing complex issues like structural racism and its Valle-Gutierrez 11 intersection with gender.7 Beur and Nuyorican literatures provide a way to understand their realities and histories, which have been so critically underrepresented in dominant historiographies.
Defining ‘Beur’ and ‘Nuyorican’
Placing these novels and bodies of work into any one category is a difficult, contentious, task because it often carries political implications.8 I am intentionally using these texts for an
English-French comparative literature thesis because these narratives have traditionally been omitted from dominant historiographies. However, any single one of these texts has been read from several different perspectives, and to different ends. Down These Mean Streets, Le Seine était
Rouge and Le Gone du Chaâba are foundational in the canons of Nuyorican and Beur literature, often appearing on syllabi or literature on the subject. Yet, these categories themselves are disputed territories, and while I employ these terms in my thesis because I am interested in the positionality of these subjectivities in relation to other identity constructs, limiting any text to these canons would ring false.
The terms Beur and Nuyorican attest to this. I use these terms, first because they are as specific as I can be while still making space for the flux and particularity of the literatures. I could have used broader terms, and not seen a contradiction – Puerto Rican, for instance, instead of
Nuyorican, and French-Algerian rather than Beur – however Beur and Nuyorican are also the closest equivalents to each other in terms of how they apply to each group.
7 These groups are unique in terms of their histories and the way they are racialized and identified within the homeland. However, these literatures might also provide useful contrasts to other subjugated positions that are related but not identical to those discussed in this thesis. In the United States, other Latinx groups like Cubans and Dominicans certainly share some experiences for which contrast with Nuyorican literature might be illuminating. In France, Beur literature could be contrasted with the experiences of sub-Saharan African migrants to France. 8 i.e. One of these novels could reasonably be defined, simultaneously as, Nuyorican, Puerto Rican, American, etc. The categories are plural, and while they are not mutually exclusive they do carry implications about the politics of nationhood and identity. Valle-Gutierrez 12
It is useful to briefly comment on the term Nuyorican which is a combination of New York
Puerto Rican. Again, this terminology is closely tied to the question of nationhood, which this thesis cannot fully discuss, but which does critically inform the status of these groups (and will be touched on briefly below). To say “Nuyorican” could suggest that there is something un-Puerto
Rican (or less Puerto Rican) about these writers – this is not my intention.9 What is useful about the term “Nuyorican” is that it defines these same conditions of in-between relationality between homeland and motherland. It was originally a somewhat derogatory term (again tied to notions of nationhood), until it was taken on by the Nuyorican Poets’ Café – a major artistic movement which started in the mid-70s in New York (Acosta-Belen 2009). While this thesis, regretfully, doesn’t deal with forms beyond the novel (and a narrow sub-genre of the novel) poetry and music are central to the artistic development of both Beur and Nuyorican cultural production. However, this term, and its timeline, does bring attention to the fact that these terms are being applied ex post facto. While both Piri Thomas and Marta Moreno Vega (and Leïla Sebbar and Azouz Begag) describe situations and experiences that are encompassed by these groups and terminologies, the events they relay occurred prior to the existence of the terms themselves.
A comparable history can be traced for the term Beur which originally applied primarily to Algerians and was self-assigned by second-generation migrants in the 1980s (Aitel 298). This term is often defined as a reappropriation of the term “Arabe,” which can be perceived as derogatory depending on context. This term, like many slang terms which define an ethnic group,
9 Edna Acosta-Belen has written extensively on the subject of Puerto Rican literature and Puerto Ricans in the United States. As she says, “Puerto Rican history would be incomplete if the experience of the Puerto Ricans who have immigrated to the United States were not fully considered” (Acosta-Belen 1978, 110). David Colón is particularly useful for understanding the term Nuyorican, and discusses how Miguel Algarín – a founder of the Nuyorican Poets’ café used the term to describe a language of interstices. Valle-Gutierrez 13 is not equally received by all writers or persons who may fall within this criteria.10 I use this term throughout the thesis because “Beur literature” has been so defined by construction of the subject which is the chief concern of this thesis.
Mireille Rosello usefully elucidates how the term “Beur” is tied to certain notions of territory (as is the term Nuyorican), which creates complications when it begins to be tied to particular writers. Sebbar has called attention to the peculiarity of her inclusion in the category,
“being neither ‘beur’ nor ‘Maghrebian’ nor completely French” (Rosello 17), and Piri Thomas’ protagonist would never refer to himself as Nuyorican –in fact the text insists on coming to terms with a blended identity of Puerto Rican and black, a conflict that figures so prominently because of his position in El Barrio. Rosello helpfully posits that the term Beur “is less the founding of a
‘new community’ than a new way of imagining communities. Rather than a dream of integration of belonging, it is the assertion of one’s right to ‘desappartenir’” (Rosello 23).11 Thus, I use these terms not to limit any writer within a category but because these terms open up the discussion to a shared experience, that when compared to Nuyorican elucidates the way children of migrants need to negotiate their positions, which are, at the very least, defined by movement.
Historical Contexts
Puerto Rico has a unique relationship with the United States, relative to other regions in
Latin America. Its political status is complicated as Puerto Ricans are still equally divided on the issue of independence versus U.S. statehood. It is an “unincorporated territory” of the United
States, but it also has the title of “Commonwealth.” Functionally, this means that Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, with all the privileges and immunities that this status carries. All Puerto Ricans,
10Aitel usefully expounds on some of these nuances in her text. However, many authors have intelligently written on the slipperiness of the term, and delineating to whom it applies, including Lia Brozgal who problematizes Azouz Begag’s own attempts to “authenticate” a Beur subject. 11 “To not belong”. Valle-Gutierrez 14 unlike other Latinx migrants, have a U.S. passport. Thus, questions of socially and institutionally constructed illegality regarding migration aren’t as central to the narratives of the Puerto Rican texts examined here. Puerto Rico as a territory doesn’t have the same rights as other U.S. states.
Puerto Rico doesn’t have direct representation in Congress, nor does Puerto Rico have electoral votes. The complicated diplomatic relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States is difficult to resolve as statehood isn’t a certainty, yet Puerto Rico continues to rely on the United
States economically and politically, as the recent PROMESA legislation illustrates.12 However, given the Puerto Rican diasporic experience, which the novels in this thesis represent, changing the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico is extremely difficult, from a subjective point of view, let alone a pragmatic, political, perspective.
Thus, part of the problem faced by Nuyorican authors is that the relationship between motherland and homeland remains so close. Exact population numbers are difficult to assess, especially since, unlike many other Latinx in the United States, given Puerto Rico’s status, returning to the motherland remains a logistically viable option because of citizenship status. This figures into two interrelated issues: the fiction of a nation (by which I mean the construct of a
Puerto Rican nation that is defined culturally and affectively more so than politically or geographically) and multiculturalism. Juan Flores et al.’s article “La Carreta Made a U-Turn:
Puerto Rican Language and Culture in the United States,” is particularly useful for assessing the implications of these questions in terms of Puerto Rican literary production.13
12 PROMESA is an act that was passed by the U.S. Congress in their 2015-2016 session which helps Puerto Rico restructure their debt, through the establishment of an oversight board whose members are appointed by the U.S. executive branch. (www.govtrack.us) 13 Another useful source is Edna Acosta-Belen’s “Haciendo Patria Desde la Métropoli: The Cultural Expression of the Puerto Rican Diaspora”. Juan Gonzalez’s chapter on Puerto Rico in Harvest of Empire is a brief but useful survey history of Puerto Ricans in the United States. Valle-Gutierrez 15
There is, of course, a history of Puerto Rico before the U.S. invasion in 1898 during the
Spanish-American war (Gonzalez 60) – but since this thesis focuses on Puerto Ricans in the United
States, that date is the usual starting point of U.S.-Puerto Rican relations. In reading When the
Spirits Dance Mambo and Down These Mean Streets it is evident that the slave trade and contact with the native peoples of Puerto Rico – now commonly referred to as Tainos – heavily influenced the creation of Puerto Rican culture, as well. Defining this culture without limiting it by language, geography, or ethnicity is a problem of ontology that this thesis doesn’t have the space to examine.
However, there is a Puerto Rican cultural identity which has to some degree changed and been
“Americanized” (if we decide that Puerto Rico is distinct from America), while also “preserved” by the constant flow of migrants.14 This tension between assimilation and preservation is shown in both Nuyorican texts in this thesis. For instance, Piri Thomas’ protagonist is romantically involved with a newly-arrived Puerto Rican migrant, and Marta Moreno Vega’s protagonist is constantly recalling a past in the motherland which she never directly experienced, but which directly informs her sense of self.
There have been several waves of migration from Puerto Rico to the United States
“mainland.” One of the major waves of migration came after the Second World War – it is approximately during this period that Thomas and Moreno Vega are growing up. As two authors who were very concerned with blackness it is useful to bring attention to the prominence of the
Civil Rights Movement and its influence during this time. Neither text explicitly brings attention to this fact, but both texts dwell on a growing interrelatedness between East and West Harlem (and consequently Puerto Ricans and African-Americans). While this appears in Down These Means
Streets via Piri’s friendship with Brew, and in When Spirits Dance Mambo through music and
14 Puerto Ricans were granted citizenship with the Jones Act of 1917 (Gonzelez 62). Valle-Gutierrez 16
Coty’s friendship with Donna, neither text delves deeply into the social welfare issues of the time, but both are marked by it.
This influence is most seen in the Young Lords Organization – a group of second- generation Puerto Ricans in New York whose social welfare platform emphasized gender and race equality. This group was highly active during the time that Thomas and Moreno Vega were living in El Barrio. Their platform – and its myriad iterations overtime emphasized the aforementioned as well an inclusion of Spanish as part of a “true education” (Enck-Wanzer et al 12). I briefly mention the Young Lords here because of the Black Panther Party’s influence on them, but also because of the clear overlap between their values and the themes that are contemplated by the
Nuyorican texts. The Young Lords movement is an exceptional moment of Puerto Rican history where social welfare and cultural pride were put at the forefront, and is one unique component that separates the surprisingly comparable migratory experience between Algeria and France and
Puerto Rico and the United States.15
A central theme examined in Leïla Sebbar’s work, and these texts in general, is that they reveal events that have generally been ill-documented or unacknowledged. This is particularly problematic with the case of French-Algerian colonization and decolonization because, unlike
Puerto Rico which became a part of the United States through referendum,16 there was a violent
French-Algerian War following the Second World War, for Algerian independence. My brief historical survey here focuses on the details that are most important for understanding Begag and
Sebbar’s work.
15 Several scholars have compared the Puerto Rican migratory experience with that of Algerians including Juan Gonzalez and Lucille Gregory. 16 There were episodes of violence and massacres on the island, however, the referendum resulted in Puerto Rico becoming a U.S. territory (Gonzalez 84). The referendum vote following the French-Algerian war resulted in Algerian independence (Stora 27). Valle-Gutierrez 17
France invaded and colonized Algeria in 1830. Many French farmers and soldiers settled in Algeria during this time. French-Algerians (or pieds noirs) mainly stayed in Algeria until the
French-Algerian war in 1954 (Stora 8-9). This was paired with movement from Algerians who migrated to France. This led to the peculiar distinction of “French in/of Algeria” versus “Algerians in/of France” which carried more racial than political implications – some of this tension is exemplified in Le Gone du Chaâba when a pied noir becomes Azouz’s school teacher and teaches him about Algeria.
Foreigners born in Algeria were given French citizenship following an 1889 law, and
Algeria was given a “civil identity” in 1900. Algerians thus had myriad privileges that other French colonial subjects did not have. After a period of turmoil (including two World Wars, changing leadership and political views, as well as economic difficulty and famine) the Front de Libération
Nationale (FLN), a nationalist political faction, led an insurrection which catalyzed the French-
Algerian war, which resulted in Algerian independence in 1962 (Stora 27). Death tolls are imprecise (attesting to the erasure of the history) but range from 200,000-1,000,000 for Algerian forces and around 30,000 for the French, and is thus one of the most violent episodes of decolonization (Ciment 36).
On October 17, 1961, a peaceful protest against the institution of a curfew for Algerians in
Paris, was organized by the FLN. There were thousands of women, children, and elderly persons who took part in this protest (Knox 382). During this protest, Chief of Police Papon enforced a violent suppression of the protest, resulting in hundreds of casualties, however official numbers still range substantially – illustrating France’s reticence to fully acknowledge the violence of their colonial history (Lewis 308). The last book considered in this thesis, La Seine était rouge, by Leïla Valle-Gutierrez 18
Sebbar centers around this particularly violent episode, against peaceful civilian protestors, that remains largely unacknowledged.
This problem of erasure and marginality is central to Beur history. While it is rooted in colonialism, the second-class citizenship experienced by Beurs led to a wave of activism in the
70s and 80s in France. A large protest march in 1983, “pour l’égalité et contre le racisme,”17 came to be known as the Beur march, and largely aided the visibility of Beurs in French society (Cohen
117). Literature, like Azouz Begag’s novels, also played a critical role in increasing the centrality of Beurs in the French city.
It is useful to note that beyond erasure, part of the reason that the Beur subject is difficult to historicize is that second-class citizenship has been more formalized for Algerians in France than Puerto Ricans on the mainland – given that legally Puerto Ricans are U.S. citizens, while not all Algerians in France were French citizens.18 French school systems in particular are cited as mechanisms, which perpetuate structural racism and second-class citizenship.19 Despite the fact that Beur subjects are citizens, even if their parents aren’t, they are still racialized primarily as
“Arabs,” resulting in real structural limitations that not all Puerto Ricans face. Structural racism works differently in both countries and has changed over time. It’s influence on identity construction, however is seen clearly across both literatures. To best understand how these literatures negotiate their characters experiences with structural racism I use several different critical frameworks.
17 March for Equality and Against Racism 18 A useful reading to understand other problems in writing a Beur history is Kfir Cohen. 19 Brinda Mehta writes, “In fact, the decaying school system and the dilapidated housing projects represent living vestiges of the colonial residue to interrogate France’s continued engagement with coloniality and its hypocritical claims to democratic citizenship” (195). Valle-Gutierrez 19
Critical Frameworks
The first major choice I made in this thesis was to classify the works of Piri Thomas and
Azouz Begag as bildungsroman. Both texts are frequently categorized as such without any qualms by scholars. There are contentious debates regarding the bildungsroman genre, particularly in the literary field. Anniken Iversen’s dissertation traces the myriad arguments for and against the different definitions, and I expound further on my choice for these texts as bildungsroman below.
However, what is useful about this genre (much like my use of terms like Beur and Nuyorican) is that it allows for a comparative discussion between the Nuyorican and Beur texts, as well as their position within broader literary canons (i.e. Puerto Rican, English, Spanish, French, Algerian).
There are a few formal components usually attributed to the genre (if one expands it beyond a German-specific and temporally limited term) that are useful for these texts. The first element of the genre that is useful is the emphasis on childhood, and second is the genre’s emphasis on developing a consciousness of the self as a social subject. Iversen usefully points out the way that some scholars have suggested that, “twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors – especially female and minority authors – have reacted against and subverted the traditional bildungsroman in order to assert alternative views of subjectivity and ways of becoming an adult” (11). For instance,
Marta Caminero-Santangelo argues that Down These Mean Streets relies on this categorization of bildungsroman because it centers on Piri being able to come to terms with his racial status (218).
Thus, when viewed as a tool for comparison and understanding the political goal of these texts, bildungsroman becomes a useful term for working with these novels.
I emphasize the male authors in this thesis as using the bildungsroman genre, whereas the female writers, in my view, make less use of this genre – although these are all novels of formation
(perhaps the broadest definition of bildungsroman). While this distinction might be as arbitrary as Valle-Gutierrez 20 other terminological distinctions, I mean to illustrate the focus on self-production in the male- centric novels, as contrasting to female-centric novels which emphasize a greater degree of reflection on collective memory and recovering the past. However, my general purpose in using all the terms in this thesis is to create spaces for comparison and conversation, rather than a strict delimitation of “belonging” – as that would be particularly incongruous with the spirit of these texts.
These texts all discuss or attest to alterity in several ways, and I use myriad frameworks to analyze this affect, whether imagined or structural, accordingly. The primary ways that alterity is underscored in these texts are through race, language, and gender. However, space is a metalanguage that nuances each of these frameworks. Again, Rosello’s discussion of
“departenance/apartenance,”20 is a useful nuance or contrast to the term alterity – because these novels are not novels of the other per se, rather they come from “l’intérieur” [the interior] (Emery
1153, in order to discuss a unique position that isn’t quite inside or outside. These positions of flux are central to all these texts, and the affect of belonging, either through performance (in the Chapter
One texts) or through memory (in the Chapter Two texts) is central to the struggles of these protagonists.
When looking at race, I consider the phenomenon of passing, and the way it destabilizes essentialist claims to race. These authors, for the most part, are describing a time before the contemporary moment, where it wasn’t the commonly accepted that race is socially constructed.
Central to these texts is the characters’ struggle between their awareness that race isn’t a biological fact, and finding a way to succeed in a society where race remains essentialized, and they are in the minority.
20 To clarify, these are French terms based on the French noun, appartenance – a sense of belonging— and its constructed opposite ‘departenance’. Valle-Gutierrez 21
Another critical component of this tension is language, since language is often used by the characters to assert or deny certain identities. Juan Flores says that colonialism interprets bilingualism as “alingual” (Flores et al. 199). This thesis perhaps lacks an emphasis on the nuances of code-switching as a phenomenon and instead looks at the implications of moments where the protagonist succeeds or fails to code-switch (i.e. Begag and Thomas), or where code-switching is consciously rejected (i.e. Moreno Vega) or denied as an option (i.e. Sebbar) in terms of performing an identity – roughly this translates to moments where “passing” is either successful or a failure.
Both literatures emphasize the construction of alterity which is enacted through language and race. In the female writers, I look at how these structures play the specific role of territorializing the female body for political purposes. However, in all four texts the experiences of these characters is defined by their struggle in negotiating the perceived contradiction between being the children of migrants and claiming the national identity of homeland. These conflicts of identification are critically shaped by the intersection of space with identity signifiers.
Language is the clearest example of this relationship between space and the migrant subject-positon and operates on several levels in these texts. For instance, the Puerto Rican authors in this thesis chose to write autobiographical novels in English, a language that may not be accessible to their families, marking a departure from their ancestors, while still remaining outside of the dominant culture.21 The experiences of these authors is defined by Spanglish – a language of in-betweenness and mixing. At home Spanish is dominant. Within the texts language works at both the figural and literal level. These authors put Spanish and Spanglish in a predominantly
English text, and thereby perform a marriage of the different languages at the structural level that
21 Mehdi Charef’s novel, Thé au harem d’Archi Ahmed, is dedicated to his mother, “who can’t read”. These authors are choosing to write in languages that are less accessible to their parents, but perhaps more accessible to a broader audience. Valle-Gutierrez 22 mirrors their lived experiences. Leaning on Gloria Anzaldúa I show how these texts insist on a rich and complex plurilingualism that enriches the experiences of these characters – although maybe at times this comes at the cost of feeling alienated. This plurilingualism is part of the political project of these texts. The same linguistic tensions are present and dramatized in the Algerian novels. Language also functions as a formal border, forming soundscapes that delimit spaces.
Both literatures contemplate a relationship with space that both unifies and separates. Part of this is due to the push and pull forces that act on the metropolis, which is the site these migrant communities are choosing to settle in. Chapter Two uses Paolo Bartoloni’s description of polis and civitas as examples of the centripetal and centrifugal forces that are at play in shaping these communities, individual identities, and their role on artistic production. One critical issue is the
“problem of creating unified identity from the different cultures of the home and host countries”
(Ireland 1023), since many different minority groups are being pushed to the periphery of these cities, yet simultaneously trying to construct a sense of what Bartoloni calls the polis: a culturally homogenous space. Defining these spaces as culturally significant without reinforcing ideas of culture that are ethnically or linguistically defined is a tension that persists today (Arroyo 197).
On the French side, Sebbar emphasizes the political issue of centrifugal forces on migrants. Dawn
Fulton elucidates how Sebbar aims to bring in the migrant experience into the center of the city, in a process that she reads as creolization:
Sebbar’s reflection on the suppressed traumas of Franco-Algerian history investigates both
the spatial and the temporal exigencies of cultural affirmation, presenting a re-reading of
Europe that incorporates its unwanted vestiges into its present, its abandoned exteriors into
its centre. (Fulton 25) Valle-Gutierrez 23
Thus, writing and incorporating these novels into broader, non-niche genres, is a way to centralize subjectivities that are pushed to the margins.
The other critical border that is present in all these texts, and a critical convergence of Beur and Nuyorican literature, is ethnicity and race. Positions of exteriority from both constructs is shared by both Beur and Nuyorican writers. Both groups are racial or ethnic minorities in the homeland. Despite being, respectively, French and U.S. citizens, they continue to face racism. A concern with passing is present in every text considered in this thesis. However, race plays out differently along gender lines in both literary bodies. While race as its own signifier is the chief concern of the male-centric bildungsroman, race folds into double-standards of gender for the female-centric novels.
These literatures provide a focus on spatially-constructed identities that enables us to better understand these individuals and communities. This thesis is accordingly interested in individual subjective experience as a result of broader social structures and how these individuals are giving themselves a voice, while understanding the costs of being heard. Perpetuating second-class citizenship is particularly dangerous given the political situations in the United States and France, considering the growing rhetorical emphasis on immigration, isolationism, and national security in conservative parties in both countries. These literatures help destabilize “authoritative” narratives and historiographies that may perpetuate these xenophobic ideologies. Instead, they bring to the center the voices of these subjects themselves.
Valle-Gutierrez 24
Chapter 1: Outward Bound Introduction
Azouz Begag’s Le Gone du Chaâba and Piri Thomas’ Down These Mean Streets are foundational texts that introduce how minority literatures create spaces for the subaltern to speak.22
While Spivak was frustrated by the subaltern’s incapacity to speak, David Colón offers insight into the way that these literatures, by virtue of their protagonist’s shifting positions, which are demonstrated through language and a thematic focus on race, create spaces for the “other” to speak.23 Colón’s text shows how Latino poetics create a third space, of liminality, that is internalized and can therefore accommodate multiple identity positions (284). These texts are thus part of a political project of desubjugation, by creating an “other” space, through a rejection of narratives that attempt to essentialize identity.24
The novels end with ambiguous outcomes of success for their protagonist’s, bordering on pyrrhic victories, wherein the protagonists successfully engage in broader social structures at the cost of acquiescing to externally-imposed identity positions. By using the bildungsroman genre, these authors illustrate how, despite the clear way in which identity is socially constructed, these characters are tied to social structures which require that they assert an identity to succeed in their communities.25 These authors toe a line between advancing the political standing of their
22 As mentioned earlier, these texts are autobiographical novels. For ease I will use the terms character or protagonist to refer to the lived experiences and plot events of the novels, and use the term “author” to differentiate the rhetorical, aesthetic and critical decisions made by the authors. For events in the author’s lives outside the scope of the novel I will use the term “author”, or the author’s last name. Similarly, I use the character names, “Azouz” and “Piri”, to distinguish between the events in the novel and the work of the writers, for which I use “Begag” and “Thomas”. In using the term character to describe an actual lived experience I do not intend to detract from the personhood of these authors. 23 Further, the connection between a subaltern position and the term he uses, “other” is made on page 269 of his text, where describes the other’s voice as “unintelligible.” 24 I use the terms essentialist and constructivist broadly. I construe essentialism as denoting something innate or biologically based, whereas constructed refers to broader systems (which are often barely visible) that create identities. Judith Butler is particularly formative for my understanding of constructivism. 25 Bell Hooks, in “Postmodern Blackness” expounds the usefulness of socially constructed identities for community building. Moreover, she is astutely reticent towards the total abnegation of postmodernist rhetoric (which erases the Valle-Gutierrez 25 communities while struggling to negotiate at an individual level an external push towards positions of alterity.26
The characters in these novels were born and raised in cities and spaces that their parents migrated to. This creates an omnipresent tension for the protagonists between the migratory experiences of their parents’, which signifies their belonging to a distant motherland, and the protagonists need to belong to their home communities. Both Piri and Azouz name the hospitals they were born in as proof that they belong in the spaces they inhabit (Thomas 25; Begag 201).
The novels emerge from conditions of migration, portray situations of intrastate migration, and are concerned with identity when one is constantly moving between spaces. Residential mobility is thus a critical component of these two texts and is defined by both class and race.
Beurs and Nuyoricans face similar positions regarding class and racially constructed alterity, as well as a strong connection to a functionally homogenous migrant space in the homeland.27 While the themes Begag and Thomas deal with are comparable, there are some critical differences between Down These Mean Streets and Le Gone du Chaâba. First, there is a considerable difference in the age range represented in the texts. Down These Mean Streets covers almost twenty years of Piri’s life, from the age of nine to his late twenties. Le Gone du Chaâba is much more narrow in scope and deals with only three or four years in Azouz’s life. Beyond this difference in scope, the writing styles of these two texts are very different (despite comparable
subject), as these discourses “surface at a historical moment when many subjugated people feel themselves coming to voice for the first time[.]” (2513) This conflict between constructivism and “strategic essentialism” (Spivak 2112) is thus at play in these novels. 26 The dynamics of push/pull forces in terms of spatially-determined communities is central to the texts examined in Chapter 2, and is elaborated on further there. In this chapter, I argue that these external factors are internalized and essential to the inner-conflict of the protagonists. 27 As mentioned, I use homeland and motherland to indicate a difference between the space currently occupied by these second-generation Puerto Ricans and Algerians and the land from which their parents migrated. Thus, Puerto Rico and Algeria are the motherlands referred to, whereas homeland refers to spaces currently occupied (i.e. New York and Lyon or Paris). Valle-Gutierrez 26 linguistically defined political projects). Thomas favors a stream of consciousness narrative voice that is tied to the linguistic project of creating a space for an “other.” By contrast, Begag uses a prose that is denser, and terse, while still emulating a child’s perspective throughout the narrative.
One of the challenges this stylistic difference poses for a comparatist approach is that
Thomas explicitly lays out a substantial portion of his views on race and class, as well as his internal struggle. Understanding Begag’s critical positions requires an analysis of small moments, which lack the same degree of commentary that is offered by Thomas’ protagonist. However, due to these differences, juxtaposing these texts enables a deeper understanding of the individual texts and their broader socio-political implications. By comparing these texts, and their diverging approaches to similar themes, we gain an understanding of how racism and identity construction as social phenomena rely on certain narratives regardless of space.
These second-generation writers negotiate myriad borders. However, both male authors write bildungsromans that are spatially defined. Thomas’ text is hyper-conscious of space and is divided into several sections and chapters therein, that explicitly refer to space. The overt attempt to delimit and break down his experiences is one unique structural contrast with Begag’s text, which has no chapter divisions, complicating the reader’s understanding of the passage of time.
Thomas’ text also obfuscates the passage of time – seldom mentioning it explicitly. Given how quickly Piri is forced to mature and his experiences on the streets, Thomas occasionally hints at time to shock the reader and emphasize the “meanness” of the streets. For instance, a chapter about sexuality and drug use is immediately followed by a chapter entitled “Little Red Schoolhouse,” where Piri’s youth is emphasized (Thomas 47-69). Thus, language and content seem to be at odds with each other to comment on the social conditions in El Barrio. Begag, on the other hand, tends to emphasize Azouz’s naiveté to bring attention to his age, as is evidenced in particular during the Valle-Gutierrez 27 scene where Azouz’s first sexual encounter is described (115-117). The uncomfortable relationship between age and experiences is one of the difficulties these texts pose for the reader, and is one of the rhetorical techniques used by these authors to illustrate the necessary hardships endured by their protagonists in order to “survive.”
Further, while these texts share various themes and structures, it’s important to distinguish between the different environments that Piri and Azouz are occupying. Most of Begag’s novel takes place in the country rather than in the city. This changes the way that the characters and their communities experience poverty.28 The implications of these differences are most prominent when
Piri and Azouz try to construct or perform identities that are inconsistent with the space they are inhabiting.
Beyond the differences in scope and style, reading Le Gone du Chaâba and Down These
Mean Streets together allows us to contextualize and better grasp how each text is responding to the difficult circumstances second-generation migrants face. Juxtaposed, these texts enrich each other. Begag’s text is more easily understood, and his representation of a child’s perspective becomes a nuanced portrayal of the limitations to verbalizing difficult concepts and situations that perhaps at the time he didn’t fully grasp. Further, when considered in context (and outside its own internal logic), we can comprehend the way that Thomas’ geographical condition forces him to mature more rapidly, despite his age. Moreover, these texts share a comparable agenda of desubjugation and integration, or acceptance that is achieved in different ways. Piri must come to
28 Mehdi Charef’s novel, Le thé au harem d’Archi Ahmed, deals with boys in their late teens and early twenties in the Parisian banlieue, and mirrors the shocking representations of violence, drugs, and sexuality that Thomas’ text contemplates. Charef’s text, however, isn't a bildungsroman and lacks the emphasis on self-development that it is central to the texts in this chapter.
Valle-Gutierrez 28 terms with his inability to pass, whereas Azouz, with his ability to pass, contends with a constant oscillation between belonging to groups that decry the other half of his identity.
There are three interrelated endeavors –political projects, identity construction, and strategic essentialism – which these authors examine, and that I discuss in four sections. The first section, “The Politics of Language,” addresses how the lexicons used by these authors constitutes a form of ideological activism. The next two sections: “Street Theater” and “Race and Space,” address how identities are constructed by socially determined ideals of masculinity on one hand, and geography on the other. The last section, “Gender and Genre,” addresses how the novels use the bildungsroman genre to subvert dominant narratives of failure that push minorities towards the periphery. These sections exemplify the degree to which identity is non-essential (that is, neither biological nor innate). Despite this, however, both authors invite us to consider how their characters integrate themselves into social structures that they had rejected or were rejected by, in order to feel like they belong. Ultimately, the texts show that to accomplish this goal they must abandon a true cohesion of the self for a fiction of the self that functions more cohesively in society.
The Politics of Language
In both texts, language plays a critical role in defining the spaces the protagonists inhabit and asserts collective and individual identity. The lexicons that are used in both texts are more than the representation of a minority dialect, rather they constitute political acts that refuse to reinforce non-standard dialects as solely belonging to one economic and ethnic caste. These bilingual authors illustrate mastery of a “master tongue” (standardized language of the home country), while also moving beyond that to create new critical discourses in languages of their own, and of their Valle-Gutierrez 29 own people.29 The destabilization of essentialism, in both texts, thus begins with a refusal to translate non-standard English in the work of each of these authors, and is furthered by the didactic glossaries at the end of the novels, which formalize the languages they use.
Linguistic heterogeneity in the novels is one of the first cues to the reader of the myriad spaces that these characters occupy. In Down These Mean Streets, Thomas uses a lexicon comprised primarily of a phonetically-spelled slang combining colloquial English and colloquial
Spanish. There are instances of standard Spanish, which usually reserved for the older Puerto
Rican generation. Moments of standard English tend to be reserved for older White characters.
The text also uses phonetic and transliterated Arabic, which is tied to racial and religious developments in Piri’s consciousness while he is in prison. The Spanish he uses is primarily derived from Puerto Rican dialects, and the English is influenced by African-American dialects of
English. Three consecutive entries in the glossary Thomas provides at the end of the novel, show that standard Spanish is not the primary language he is interested in desubjugating: “[1] stud: any hip male [2] suave: smooth; easy [3] tapita: bottle cap” (Thomas 340). These are all words that could appear in one sentence, even though they belong to three different dialects (English slang, standard Spanish, and colloquial Spanish). The combination of languages and dialects illustrates the inextricability of different national, racial, and class influences on Thomas. By writing an entire novel in this lexicon, Thomas legitimizes (and helps desubjugate) a non-standard language.30 The
29 Henry Louis Gates Jr., in “Talking Black: Critical Signs of the Times,” describes the need for black persons to master a Western-determined syntax and literature so as to “prove their full humanity.” While he states that this dynamic is clearly racist he concedes that “learning the master’s tongue…has been an act of empowerment” historically. In this section, I’m using Gates’ construction of the dynamic between white and black discourses, and am leaning on his discussion of “re-creating” new “black-, text-specific theories…to read a black text within a black formal cultural matrix, as well as its “white” matrix” (Gates 2435). While Gates is writing specifically about the black experience, literature, and criticism, the same dynamics are usefully applied to the sub-altern/master constructs encountered in Beur literature as well. Edward Said in Orientalism discusses similar dynamics and problems in the European construction of the “Orient”. 30Thomas’s lexicon is precisely the language that Colón is describing as Nuyorican, when discussing Latino poetics (Colón 272). Valle-Gutierrez 30 process of writing itself, therefore, centralizes language by mass-producing, through representation, for mass consumption, a unique minority language, defined by the mixing of minority, unofficial, dialects and spellings.
Begag similarly refuses to translate non-standard French. Besides the colloquial French that is omnipresent there are “Bouzidien” words. This is Begag’s term for either standard or colloquial Arabic words. This contrasts the “Azouzian” words in the glossary, which are French slang terms. Beyond a combination of Arabic and French that occurs in dialogue, Begag’s expository prose also uses this Bouzidien-Azouzian dialect, which helps formalize it as an integral aspect of the text. The French and Bouzidien are both complementary and untranslatable in many respects. Begag’s text incorporates the phrases in a way that makes it difficult to distinguish between an Arabic word or a colloquial French word.
This project of mixing creates the possibility of confusion, but is essential to the way that
Azouz negotiates different positions throughout the text. Thus, Begag warns French readers in language guides at the end of the novel to be mindful of faux-amis – homophones – between the
Bouzidien dialect and standard French, indicating a degree of aural similarity between the two languages, such as “filou,” which is Bouzidien spelling of the French word “vélo” – bicycle – but in French means “crook” or “rascal” (Begag 234). However, beyond distinguishing between the
French faux-amis and the Bouzidien word, there is the French slang word, “braque,” which also means bicycle—all three words appear in the text. Thus, changing the word for bike marks a different relationship between Azouz and the character, as well as Azouz and the space he is occupying. These different words for bicycle are woven into the text without being translated in the moment. Instead, at the end of the novel two glossaries are provided, as well as a guide to understanding how he wrote the colloquial phrases, by explaining the sounds that are available in Valle-Gutierrez 31
Arabic (Thomas, similarly, provides a glossary of Spanish and slang words at the end of his novel).
Begag’s guides are thus also didactic so that the French reader can learn how to understand and translate the Bouzidien dialect, further desubjugating it. The result, in both novels, is a space that is uniquely dedicated to plurilingualism and heterogeneity of identity and culture that doesn’t defer to the epistemic violence of standardized languages.
Literary (and sociological) theory is concerned with the politics of standard or dominant languages that are constructed to perpetuate systems of oppression. Addressing this question is a critical component of Gloria Anzaldúa's project in Borderlands, wherein different and mixed tongues define a border space. What is unique about Anzaldúa’s text is the combination of theory, literature, history and poetry to advance this argument. This stylistic and substantive mixing is inherent to representing the mixing of identities and is a critical component of Begag and Thomas’ work. Their use of language shows that they, like Anzaldúa, are shaped by conflicting perceptions of identity, and demonstrate a political goal of abrogating the normative effects of these power structures by refusing to write in a master tongue.
Beyond formalizing a non-standard dialect, both authors create a lexicon that cannot simply be translated into a standard language. The combination of standard and non-standard languages itself becomes way to represent the multiple spaces inhabited by one character. The plurilingualism that is presented by these authors –i.e. Begag’s three different words for bicycle – all reveal a relationship that Azouz has with different characters. Because code-switching is integral to the experiences that these texts are trying to narrate, the authors make it necessary for the reader to learn how to code-switch alongside the protagonists, by combining colloquial and migrant languages throughout the text. This leads to an immersive experience in the world of the protagonist, such that their point of view dominates the text. Valle-Gutierrez 32
One consequence of this extremely particular point of view in Thomas’ novel is that moments of standard English stand out as deviating from the norm – such as the principal’s speech, below. Because standard English often comes from White characters there are often political implications to what is being said and how it is being said. However, the literal preponderance of slang and Spanish in the text also subtly inverts the structure of alterity by minoritizing standard
English in the text. Standard English is often tied to a negative or unsympathetic character, from the point of view of the characters in the scenes (as is shown in each example, below). Language figures centrally in either surmounting these characters (like the principal) or problematizing and critiquing them (like Gerald Andrew West). Hierarchical inversions of the status of language illuminate power dynamics that are defined by contrasting experiences of race and class.31 For example, Thomas describes the way that Piri’s principal tries to veil his language as a mode of epistemic violence. The principal of Piri’s school chases after him, when Piri runs away after punching a teacher. In this scene Piri runs to his apartment building. This space is ethnically diverse and he is protected by Ms. Washington, a large African-American woman. In this moment, the principal uses complex language to conceal his true meaning:
“I—I—I—er, assure your you, madam, this young man is gifted with the most wonderful talent for prevarication I’ve ever seen.” “What’s that mean?” Miss Washington asked suspiciously. “Er, it means a good imagination, madam. A-ha-ha—yes, a-hurmph.” “That’s a lie, Miss Washington,” I said. “He’s always telling the kids that. We asked Mrs. Wagner, the history teacher, and she said means to lie. Like he means I’m a liar.” (Thomas 68) By falsely stating that the word “prevarication” means to have “a good imagination,” the principal tries to hide his meaning so that he is better able to control the situation and its outcome. However,
31 Anzaldúa’s, Borderlands has a literal hierarchy of languages, starting with Standard English and ending with ‘pachuco’ a “secret language” that combines English and Spanish – approximating, perhaps the Nuyorican language of Thomas’ text. Borderlands’ Chapter 5, “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” equates language to cultural values and identities, which constitutes a critical component of Thomas’ lexicon here. Valle-Gutierrez 33 this power structure is inverted when Piri is shown to have a mastery over the master tongue, and can protect himself from the principal.
Academic language thus poses a problem in Thomas’ text, not because of its content, but because of its form and the relationship it asserts between certain racially defined groups. When
Piri travels to the South, he finds a light-skinned, mixed-race African-American from
Pennsylvania, Gerald Andrew West.32 Gerald is writing a book on “the Negro situation” (Thomas
170), and his language is conspicuously academic. This scene falls in a chapter entitled “Barroom
Sociology”, which perfectly describes the tone of the language in this chapter. The differences in the dialogue between Gerald and Brew, a southern African-American, marks a distinct cultural experience. This scene, by being staged in the South, dramatizes the tangible consequences or racial constructivism. Gerald sounds like many of the African-American theorists from the Harlem
Renaissance, saying at one point: “I believe that the southern Negro of today is marshaling his dignity and preparing himself for a great social revolution” (Thomas 171). 33 In this scene Piri finds himself struggling with his dislike of Gerald because they share the same insecurities and internal conflicts (177). However, Brew, Piri’s Black friend from the South, condemns Gerald’s writing due to its inauthenticity, given Gerald’s distance from a lived experience of racism, and the added distance of Gerald’s academic tone. Thomas emphasizes, through Brew’s interjections, Gerald’s lack of claim to Black identity, despite Gerald’s assertion that he is one-eighth Black (175). Brew’s most telling question, “is the book you’re writin’ gonna be frum the Negro’s point o’ view,” (175)
32 A substantial amount of criticism on Down These Mean Streets centers on this scene between Piri and Gerald, particularly in regards to how the novel deals with race. The most insightful texts are Alfredo Sosa-Velasco’s which focuses on this scene as a metaphor for the novel Thomas writes (298), Marta Caminero-Santangelo’s text which focuses intensely on race, and Marta Sánchez’s which does a Chicana feminist reading of this scene. All these texts primarily read this scene as one that dramatizes Piri’s concern with race. 33 cf. Alain Locke's The New Negro: “The thinking Negro even has been induced to share this same general attitude, to focus his attention on controversial issues, to see himself in the distorted perspective of a social problem.” (Locke 4) Valle-Gutierrez 34 calls attention to the real tension in the chapter. The problem is not that writing itself is a valueless tool for activism, rather that Gerald writes black experiences in the master’s tongue, without directly experiencing the consequences of blackness, in a language that excludes Blacks in
America. This tension is illuminated by the different lexicons that Brew and Gerald use.
However, later in the novel, Piri consciously makes the choice to begin to learn this academic language due to his growing interest in philosophy and religion while he is in prison
(Thomas 288). While there he begins to emulate the professorial language of his role model, Kent.
This stage marks a period of intense of self-education, which is an essential part of Down These
Mean Streets as a bildungsroman (discussed further below in “Gender and Genre”). During this period, Kent helps Piri learn correct grammar and the correct pronunciation of words. Thus, while no negative value judgment is placed on academic language while Piri is in prison, because it is tied with empowering religion and race (unlike the scene with the principal where language is used as a tool of manipulation), standard English remains tied to the act of writing and academia, which carries discursive power. The confluence of colloquial dialects with standard languages in of Down
These Mean Streets (and in Le Gone du Chaâba) create a new literary language that can nuance the different experiences of these characters as they negotiate race or space and their identities.
Further, these lexicons demonstrate the homogenization of a necessarily heterogeneous language based on region and class, which is perceived differently, depending on how the character is racialized. In Thomas’s text, one notices that the Italians, African-Americans and Whites (except the school staff) in Harlem share a similar linguistic foundation with few deviations based on home country. Differences in language occur when there is a large shift in geography, or in class. Both factors are present when the family moves to Long Island, and there is a subtle difference between the English spoken by Piri and the other kids at the school. Notably, Piri’s choice to leave Long Valle-Gutierrez 35
Island is preceded by a moment of linguistic misunderstanding between himself and a girl named
Marcia. She doesn't understand the Spanish word: “suerte,” but she compliments his ability to
“talk English very well” (Thomas 83). However, this moment instantly becomes racialized because his accent is “like Jerry’s,” an African-American student. The climax of this confrontation is
Thomas overhearing Marcia and her friends talking about how Piri is Black, and how “Black” is a mutually exclusive category from any other identity (“‘I heard he’s a Puerto Rican, and they’re not like Neg—’ ‘There’s no difference’” (86). The racism he encounters in Long Island which identifies him as Black and not Puerto Rican ultimately drives Piri to move back to Harlem on his own (88-91). His sense of alterity in “Babylon” is construed in terms of language: “Long Island was a foreign country. It looked so pretty and clean but it spoke a language you couldn’t dig” (88).
This linguistic access is something he shared with those in Harlem. However, the earlier scene at the school dance shows that the intelligibility of language is tied to race. While these kids all belong to the same economic and geographical space, Piri’s sibling experience a lesser level of discrimination because they are White.34 Piri interprets his alterity from a linguistic level throughout the chapter, showing how a perceived racial identity informs a perceived linguistic identity.35 Thomas thus shows how language is limited by race. In the next section, I show how
Azouz tries to use language to overcome some of the limitations imposed by race.
Begag’s language throughout Le Gone du Chaâba is defined by his narrator’s distinctively childish point of view which reveals an internalized racism and shame towards his identity. There
34 This tension results in a physical confrontation in “Brothers Under the Skin” (142-148). While his brothers’ insist that they’re all Puerto Rican, Piri’s attempt to “take away his [brother’s] white status” (145) by asserting his own blackness leads to Piri’s decision to go to the South. 35 Emphasizing, perhaps, Colón’s conclusion: “Latino poetics need to be abrupt, need to have an accent, need to fall on deaf ears” (284). Valle-Gutierrez 36 is an apparent naïveté in the way that Azouz describes the events in the novel. 36 Azouz’s epiphany of his linguistic limitations reveals his childish point of view, but the veracity of his conclusions also strike the reader as unjust, and add to the force of the text:
Je me suis rendu compte aussi qu’il y a des mots que je ne savais dire qu’en arabe: le kaissa par exemple (gant de toilette). J’ai honte de mon ignorance. Depuis quelques mois, j’ai décidé de changer de peau. Je n’aime pas être avec les pauvres, les faibles de la classe. Je veux être dans les premières places du classement, comme les Français. (Begag 58)37 The simplistic “if x, then y” structure Azouz’s logic on one hand shows his naïveté. However, it also illustrates an innate understanding of the system. The logic of structural racism dictates that if one is part of the minority group then they are poor and will fail academically because they are ignorant. If one is successful, they are part of the majority. This knowledge is shown as indisputable, yet Azouz is constantly resisting it – trying to combine both worlds – and finds it impossible to do so. Begag emphasizes this injustice through the narrative voice that accepts the structures of racism while fighting to preserve parts of his identity.
Part of this tension between identities and broader social structures is Azouz’s ambivalence between the master language and his native Bouzidien-French lexicon, at times trying to integrate
Bouzidien into his French classroom (by teaching his class words like kaissa (95)), while still desiring a mastery of standard French. This ambivalence is related to the value judgments he makes based on language, and its connection to class, and race. This is evident when he tries to look for work at the market and finds it difficult to ask people for work, because of the demeaning phraseology: “‘Y a de l’embauche, m’sieur, s’il vous plaît’ En voilà une phrase ridicule. Je ne me
36 The most striking example, a scene of sexual exploration that is filled with euphemisms, is described below in “Street Theater.” 37 “I had also realized that there were some words that I knew only in Arabic, such as kassa [facecloth]. I was ashamed of my ignorance. For a few months now I had been resolved on changing sides. I did not like being with the poor and the weak pupils in class. I wanted to be among the top of the class alongside the French children” (Hargreaves 46). Valle-Gutierrez 37 sens pas assez d’audace pour prononcer de telles mots” (Begag 24).38 Thus, in both this instance of looking for work, and the above example where he realizes that his French is limited, the reader is shown that his desire for metamorphosis is driven by a sense of shame at his lack of knowledge or access to the master language.
Knowledge of French is overtly tied to exercises of power. These dynamics are often dramatized in the school house. However, one unique example that Begag offers is a scene when police officers come to Le Chaâba to shut down the illegal slaughterhouse run by Azouz's uncle.
This moment deals with linguistic dominance, which is imbricated with the power exerted by the police officers, with gender dynamics folding into these interactions. The officers are looking for anyone who speaks French, to try and find those responsible for the slaughterhouse. The dialogue between the officers and the people of Le Chaâba illustrates the racial and power structures at work in these interactions:
L’inspecteur perd patience, agacée par ma mère qui ne cesse de répéter: “Bas couprand! Bas couprand!” – Vous êtes tous les mêmes. Vous ne comprenez jamais le français devant les flics…. Y a que pour leur intérêt qu'ils savent parler français.” 39 (Begag 119) The police officers are a clear representation of the authority of the state. Here, they use the failure to speak French to reinforce a structure of alterity. The “they” in this passage is clearly an “other” who is defined by nationality and race.
Language, however, does more than contest master/slave dynamics and desubjugate migrant experiences. In both texts, language acts as a performative utterance to assert certain
38 “‘Please, Monsieur, are you hiring?’ What a stupid thing to say. I didn’t feel brave enough to utter those words”(Hargreaves 16). 39 “No understan’! No understand!” — You’re all the same. You never understand French when the police are around.’ Then turning toward a colleague, he added: ‘It’s only when they want something that they can speak French”” (Hargreaves, 99). Valle-Gutierrez 38 identity positions.40 This is seen in the next section as language becomes a way to claim belonging or disclaim belonging in myriad situations. Language goes beyond serving as an indicator of identities and experiences, rather it becomes a tool used to construct and preserve identities themselves.
Street Theater
Language is one axis through which identities are formed and enacted in these texts. The other primary axis which determines the formation and enactment of certain subjectivities is the performance of identity in public settings. Performative utterances, broadly defined, converge with spatially catalyzed performative actions to form a stage of identity production and enactment.
These public spaces determine and facilitate the enactment of identity. Partly, public spaces are spaces that “belong” to these children. Both Thomas and Begag describe “turf warfare” to varying degrees. As such, the need to protect space becomes a litmus test for masculinity and “belonging.”
Beyond this, public spaces that are primarily absent of adults are the spaces where they can perform and prove identities. Performance of identity doesn’t uniquely occur in public spaces, but in both texts it is represented as occurring in homosocial spaces. Begag refers, early in the text, to the
“theater” of women insulting each other as creatively as possible (9) – an early indication that he, like Thomas, is emphasizing a performance of identity in these public settings.41 The woman in
Begag’s opening are doing laundry. However, disputes over access to the water pump are described as acts of war:
A chaque fois que la guerre éclate, ells se déchirent la peau et les binouars, ells s’arrachent les scalps, ells jettent dans la boue du jardin les draps et le linge tout
40 A type of statement that tries to enact that which it means. J. L. Austin itemizes the necessary conditions for a performative utterances to be successful in his essay, “Performative Utterances”.
Valle-Gutierrez 39
juste laves, raclent le fond de leur gorge pour sortir leur mépris le plus expressif et le plus coloré; ells se lancent même des mauvais sorts. J’aime bien ce théâtre.”42 (9) Begag’s early emphasis on performance not only brings the reader’s attention to the way that the quotidian is metamorphosed into a dramatic fiction, but also frames these instances of street theater as largely homosocial.
The term “street theater” connotes myriad aspects of social interaction, however its chief values is the enactment, through performance, of an identity, in a homosocial (and at times public) environment. Thomas and Begag both use the notion of street theater to emphasize the production of a masculine identity in three types of scenes. There are scenes wherein a “heterosexual” protagonist enacts sexuality and sexual pleasure in a homosocial space, there are scenes where violence enacts masculinity, and there are scenes where solidarity is constructed, to varying degrees of success. Consequently, both authors use street theater to dramatize a socially- determined development of their protagonists.
Both Begag and Thomas emphasize space because it metonymically indicates a social and economic condition, and indicates a sense of belonging (or not belonging). Begag describes
Azouz’s isolation and out-of-place-ness when the family moves to la banlieue Lyonnaise. When
Azouz’s mother insists that he leave the apartment and go enjoy himself he responds, “Je n’ai pas de copains, ici” (169).43 Azouz ultimately “resigns” and goes out. However, the passage emphasizes the unwelcoming nature of the new neighborhood:
Le quartier est mort, étouffé par la chaleur qui s’écrase contre les façades des immeubles…Deux vieux traînant leurs godasses sur le pave fumant me croisent sans me regarder….Toutes les vitrines des magasins sont closes: “Réouverture le 3 septembre”… Que faire dans ce désert?...Ma mère n’a pas réalisé que nous ne
42 “I didn’t know women were so resourceful…Each time war broke out between them, they tore into each other, ripping their binouars [dresses], and pulling out each other’s hair. They flung newly washed sheets and clothes into the mud, spat out the most colorful and expressive insults from the depths of their throats, and hurled curses against each other. I enjoyed this street theater” (Hargreaves, 3). 43 “I don’t have any friends here” (Hargreaves 144). Valle-Gutierrez 40
sommes plus chez nous, au Chaâba. Elle se tient là, à l’aise dans son binouar au beau milieau de la rue…J’aurais préférée habiter prèz de chez eux [Zidouma]…continuer à vivre comme au Chaâba. Ici, les temps vont être difficiles pour nous. (170 -171) 44 This passage portrays the new neighborhood like a ghost town. He desires Le Chaâba because it was an egalitarian space where he had friends and belonged. By focusing on a description of the neighborhood to explain why his family would have a hard time, Azouz relies on places to convey a deeper understanding of experiences. Le Chaâba was homogenous and where he belonged. This new place is not only described as “dead” but is a space where he is invisible – as is shown by the reference to two men walking down the streets. At the same time, he has to contend an increased visibility of his mother. All of this leads to his conclusion that they were not at home.
Piri faces a similar concern with space when he moves to the Italian neighborhood in a chapter entitled “Alien Turf.” The chapter opens with a paragraph emphasizing his isolation. Piri’s move to the Italian neighborhood illustrates how despite the small distance separating the Italian and Puerto Rican blocks, the racial definition of these spaces is real and tangible. Piri’s family moves three blocks uptown. This places him in an Italian space, which leads to multiple physical confrontations with the Italian kids. These two groups share commensurate economic and social conditions. While both groups of children are either first or second-generation migrants, the text doesn’t show self-identification as American. When Piri is asked what his “nationality” is, he replies, “I'm Puerto Rican…I was born here” (Thomas 24). However, the fact that he was born in
Harlem Hospital becomes proof of his Blackness to the Italians, illustrating how space determines
44 “The neighborhood was dead, stifled by the heat beating down on the fronts of the apartment blocks…Two old men dawdling along the road in the baking heat went past me without looking at me…All the store windows were shut. ‘Will reopen on September 3.’…What was there to do in this desert?...My mother had forgotten that we were no longer in Le Chaâba . She stood there, entirely at ease in her binouar, right in the middle of the road…I would have preferred to live near them [Zidouma]…as we used to in Le Chaâba. Here times were going to be hard for us” (Hargreaves 145- 146). Valle-Gutierrez 41 race, perhaps more than nationality, rendering Puerto Rican and Black as seemingly exclusive identities.
Ultimately the tension of a black Puerto Rican living in the Italian block results in a fight between Piri and the Italians. Piri is hospitalized, but he doesn't tell his parents that the Italians were the ones that he fought with, earning him respect from the Italians. Thereafter, he could “walk that mean street and not get hurt; [he] was king shit and bottle washer” (Thomas 39). This moment is foundational for Piri’s subsequent interactions. In the street, when he moves back to Harlem, and finally to prison, he always has to fight, prove his “heart” and earn respect and security. This perhaps suggests that there are ways to move beyond racial difference, towards solidarity, however, the logos of Thomas’ text is that violence precedes any possibility for harmony.
The need to fight in the Down These Mean Streets generally arises not out of racially-driven tension, but out of the “need to protect [their] reps” (Thomas 52). The juvenile names of their clubs, such as “The Jolly Rogers” or the “TNT’s” (52), complicates the violence that the text describes, reminding the reader how young Piri and his friends are. While we read these experiences that are typically associated with the violence of street gangs (into which it does evolve as Piri grows up) there is a discomfort for the reader, due to this disconnect between age and action, that serves to denormalize violence, which the reader may have grown accustomed to at this point in the novel. Regardless, the need to fight, even at such a young age, illustrates the imbrication of masculinity with homosocial group performance of violence, in a system that imitates war-time conquest. Spaces in Thomas’ novel are defined as either “alien” or “home” turfs. Borderlands are spaces where battle for conquest occurs. However, the aim in these condensed city blocks is not territorial gain but the preservation of one’s reputation, which is key to having the support of the group. As Piri understands it, “only my boys were the important kick, and for good reasons –if I Valle-Gutierrez 42 had boys, I had respect and no other clique would make me open game. Besides, they gave me a feeling of belonging, of prestige, of accomplishment” (106). Belonging, is the highest need and everything else falls second.
However, Piri’s literal statement is problematized by Thomas’ insistence that street rep and the relationships formed between the different club members is demonstrably performative.
Thomas uses language that denotes acting, alluding to an awareness that the intragroup interactions are performative. This consciousness of performance is immediately evident when he proves himself (or auditions) to a group of boys that end up becoming his friends when he returns to El
Barrio from the Italian block. The process of moving is significant for anyone, but for Piri there is an additional significance:
Moving into a new block is a big jump for a Harlem kid. You're torn up from your hard-won turf and brought into an ‘I don’t know you’ block where every kid is some kind of enemy. Even when the block belongs to your own people, you are still an outsider who has to prove himself a down stud with heart. (Thomas 47) Thus, this process of acceptance and belonging relies on violence, but more importantly, on proving one has “heart.” The term heart is ubiquitous in this novel. It denotes courage and bravery while also conveying a certain ethos of toughness, coolness, wit, and pride (Thomas 48). In the scene where Piri proves his heart there is a focus on performance and interpellation. When one kid asks him for his name, Piri replies: “‘You name me, man,’ I answered, playing my role like a champ” (Thomas 48). The fight that follows is described as largely performative. Piri applauds himself for luring the “president” into a fair fight, yet neither of them want to fight (which isn't always the case— there is an apparent pleasure in fighting, at a later point Piri says “I wanted to Valle-Gutierrez 43 fight anybody. I had the fever” (53)), rather Piri needs to gain his place in the gang through this performance.45
Belonging carries tangible consequences for their safety to the point where it is a coercive force. One moment, that is framed by the text as coercive, is when the gang goes to the apartment of several homosexual men to get marijuana. As they head to the apartment, Piri frames their actions in the context of belonging, “we wanted to belong, and belonging meant doing whatever had to be done” (55). He describes “forced happy talk” to further illustrate a degree of reticence.
In the following scene three rhetorical moves employed by Thomas stand out. First there is the distancing of the mind from the body. Piri, ostensibly aided by the effects of alcohol and marijuana describes being in a dream-like state. Thomas’ language in this section is figurative and distancing, stating early on that “the scene continued like it wasn’t for real” (Thomas 56). Piri makes a distinction, at several moments, between body parts and people, “I saw a hand, and between its fingers was a stick of pot. I didn’t look up at the face. I just plucked the stick from the fingers. I heard the feminine voice saying, ‘You gonna like these pot. Eet’s good stuff’” (59). Here, the narrative shifts to italics for the longest section in the whole novel, visually insicating a separate internal dialogue; a glimpse into his thoughts, as if the whole of the prose was something distinctly different. In this internal dialogue, there is a shift from first person to second person narration.
Piri’s thoughts are about the interrelated pleasures of fighting, having a group of boys, and walking through Harlem:
There’s good things, too, man. Like standing together with your boys, and feeling like king…You walk down them streets and you feel tall and tough…Music pours out of candy stores, restaurants and open windows and you feel good-o at the greatness of the sounds. (59)
45 Violence is chiefly portrayed as a performance of masculinity for other men, but it also serves other purposes in the text. Sometimes violence relates to security, especially when Piri is in prison (268). Moreover, domestic violence against women is performed frequently in the text to assert power structures of male dominance (160). Valle-Gutierrez 44
The juxtaposition between his “thoughts” and his present illustrate the need to justify his actions.
The text offers the rationale for taking part in a scene that would otherwise seem to undermine the overarching code of masculinity. Once Piri is pulled out of his reverie he instantly reconstructs the binary between himself, and his body and thus between essence and performance: “I came back, but my body was still relaxed” (60).
This distinction between body and essence invokes a distinction between performance of homosexual acts and an essential identity. Piri says to himself “I like girls” (61), as he receives oral sex. However, whether the performative utterance is subverted by his physical response to engaging in these sexual acts is complicated.46 Part of Piri’s reaction to the scene is impacted by his youth. Yet, the distinction Piri is trying to make, by making essentialist claims to sexuality, complicates the line between action and identity, which undermines the basis of the group ethos.
Piri describes the scene in front of him as a lie (61). This seems to indicate that the actions of the boys were somehow false. This claim of falseness might be necessary within a paradigm where identity relies on action and the constant performance of masculinity is the only safeguard of one’s rep. Thus, Piri struggles to distinguish between essential racial identities, essential sexual identities, and performativity. Performances of violence and heart are sufficient to establish one’s identity and belonging. Yet, it seems that sexuality is essentialized, and performance of homosexual acts doesn’t fully destabilize this position.
The value placed on masculinity means that the boys need to reassert their maleness after partaking in sexual acts with homosexual (but female-presenting) men. Thomas does several things to illustrate how these actions don’t undermine the masculinity of the boys in the gang. Chief amongst these is the description of reluctance and body-mind separation described above.
46 Sánchez states that, “Puerto Rican notions of masculinity allow for a man to engage in homosexual acts if he takes the inserter role” (124). Valle-Gutierrez 45
However, there is also a feminization of the homosexual men, all of whom have feminine names
(ending in “a”) or the article “La” (which in Spanish indicates femininity). Their femininity is further reinforced by the way he writes their dialogue so that it resembles an effeminate Spanish accent: “I’m sor-ree…I no could help eet” (Thomas 61). The last assertion of masculinity by Piri's gang is, unsurprisingly, an act of violence – Alfredo hitting “La Vieja” after he finished having sex with him(61). Thus, despite a public display of homosexual acts (which are distinct from being homosexual), masculinity is performed by relying on misogyny and violence. The text frames this whole scene under a chapter that asserts the need to have “heart” – a chapter which delimits a framework for the ethos and values of masculinity, in order to belong47.
Performance of identity appears very differently in Begag’s text, however it’s primary purpose is still to justify a sense of belonging. In Thomas’ text performance is always about masculinity, race, and space. In Le Gone du Chaâba performance centers on either constructing or deconstructing class and race, which are equated with each other in cultural imaginaries, if not in practice, as the byproduct of structural racism. Azouz struggles to assert an identity so that he can belong to a group from which he feels he is excluded. This need to belong is most often racially determined and defines the nature of performance in the Begag’s text (much like performance based on an ethos of masculinity is central to identity construction in Thomas’ text).
The identity problems that Azouz experiences are inextricable from structural racism as embodied by the French school system. Azouz acts as both representative for the Arab students yet is uniquely successful, in a hyper-racialized school setting. Azouz’s success is used by the teacher to evidence stereotypes that the other Arabic students are lazy and misbehave, because
47 Chapter 6 of Thomas’ text, called “If You Ain’t Got Heart, You Ain’t Got Nada” (47-61), includes the scenes where Piri fights the Italians and engages in homosexual acts, as well as his ruminations on the need to belong – and thus, as a whole, serves as a framework for understanding the internal logic of the novel. Valle-Gutierrez 46
Azouz participate succesfully in class. This ignores the structural difficulties that the students face in their home life as they try to study for classes, such as when Nasser’s father sends him out of the house before the compositions are due – making it impossible for him to finish them on time, and study for exams (79-80). However, other Arab students don’t consider Azouz representing them, and his actions prove that he is an “other” – that he is not an Arab, and is in fact French.
Thus, Azouz’s attempt to enact a mediatory identity fails and he becomes, for each group, evidence for their respective arguments. This ultimately leads to Azouz’s expulsion from the group, via the accusatory performative utterance: “C’est pas un Arabe” (Begag 102).48 This encounter thus dramatizes the consequences of a failure of performance.
Azouz constantly tries to negate the mutual exclusivity of these identities. In the school that he attends while he lives in Le Chaâba, Azouz tries to incorporate knowledge from Le Chaâba into the classroom, so that he can belong to the top of the class while maintaining his claims to an
Arab identity. Following accusations of not being an Arab, during a hygiene lesson, Azouz is excited by a perceived solution to the incompatibility of being in the top of his class, and therefore not an Arab (95). Responding to his teacher’s question, “Avec quoi vous lavez-vous tous les matins” (94),49 Azouz responds, “Un chritte et une kaissa” (95).50 These words are Bouzidien words for washcloth and bath sponge. The teacher, asks for an explanation, which Azouz offers: “Eh ben, m’sieur, c’est comme beaucoup de bouts de ficelle qui sont entortillés ensemble et ça grate beaucoup. Ma mère, elle me frotte avec ça et je deviens même tout rouge” (95).51 The language here strikes the reader as particularly youthful and deferent, however, the performance is for the
48 “He’s not an Arab” (Hargreaves 84). 49 “What do you use to wash every morning” (Hargreaves 78). 50 “A chritte and a kaissa” (Hargreaves 78). 51 “Well, Sir, it’s like lots of bits of string that are tangled together, and it scratches a lot. When my mother scrubs me with it, my skin goes really red” (Hargreaves 79). Valle-Gutierrez 47 benefit of his classmates, more so than the teacher. Begag stresses that the rules of hygiene are different between the two cultures, “Au Chaâba, si l’on avait su que les règles de la propreté nécessitaient une telle minutie, on aurait beaucoup ri…pas besoin de brosse à dents ni de
Colgate”(94).52 Hygiene is a set of social norms that are used to prove the uncleanliness (and subsequent inferiority) of the Algerian immigrants. Azouz and the other students understand that these lessons are the byproduct of a racist school system, evidenced by his comic comment on toothpaste. It is clear that the students from the Chaâba aren’t responding to the teacher because their knowledges of hygiene are different. Azouz casually tries to prove to his classmates from Le
Chaâba that he is in fact an Arab, while also showing that Le Chaâba has standards of hygiene that are comparable to the French. Thus, during the hygiene lesson he tries to balance his Arab identity and his desire to belong with and even surmount the French students in his class. Azouz tries to enact both identity positions simultaneously (and consciously) by being an active student, but discussing, and thereby trying to desubjugate, the hygiene knowledge of Le Chaâba.
One essential components of street theater is the protection of “turf”, but “turf warfare” is substantially different in Begag’s text than it is in Thomas’. Beyond different physical spaces (city versus country) Azouz and Piri have different positions within their friend groups. Piri and Azouz do not have access to the same tools or techniques to assert their belonging within each group.
While Piri is the “war counselor,” Azouz seems to be a reluctant participant in many instances. He tags along, and participates, but his goals go beyond a mastery of the street. La Louise instructs the kids to help drive out the prostitutes, when they “invade” Le Chaâba (46-53). This scene of expulsion occurs twice. La Louise is with them the first time and the kids, under her instruction, successfully get the prostitutes to leave. The language in this scene is comic with its military
52 “If folks in Le Chaâba had been told that rules of cleanliness needed so much attention, they would have laughed out loud….No need for tooth brushes or Colgate” (Hargreaves 77). Valle-Gutierrez 48 overtures: “Un peu plus tard, une opération de commando sauvage se met en route” (66).53
However, the use of military language reveals rather than obscures their youth. While this first episode results in the prostitutes leaving, because la Louise is present, the failure of the boys to drive out the prostitutes on their own, upon the prostitutes’ return, exposes their youth. Thus, despite their violent actions (throwing rocks at the cars), when they are on their own they are ultimately unsuccessful.
Part of the failure of these performances of identity, in contrast to their success in Thomas’ text, is the fact that in all the scenes in Begag’s text, children have to contend with adults. Piri’s social sphere is largely limited to the interaction between children. Both authors are describing events that are mediated through a lens of childhood. However, in Thomas’ novel, because their wars are equally fought between children of similar economic conditions, they are fighting on equal terms and can therefore be successful. Azouz’s performances are constantly constrained by the external intervention of adults – which superimposes a world that has different rules and values than those experienced by the children.
Developing sexuality is another critical component of identity construction in both texts.
Begag’s text, similar to Thomas’ discusses a performance of sexuality whose primary purpose is to establish an identity in terms of the group. This performance of sexual acts is one of the moments where the youth of the narrator becomes apparent. While the children frequently discuss and spy on the female teachers, a moment of sexual discovery with a girl who is their own age reveals their innocence. Their youth is emphasized by euphemistic language. Hacène and Azouz, together, are playing with Saïda, and then decide to “have sex” like grown-ups:
Je m’approche d’elle, ma zénana entre les doigts. Alors Saïda s’assied sur ses fesses, entrouvre ses jambes pour m’offrir son intimité. Je dépose délicatement mon
53 “A little later an unofficial commando unit set off” (Hargreaves 53). Valle-Gutierrez 49
marteau sur son enclume et j’attends, dans cette étrange position, que les choses se fassent. (Begag 116)54 Afterwards the children, knowing nothing besides the fact that their genitals are supposed to touch in order to have sex, ask themselves if that’s what their parents do. They don’t actually have sexual intercourse, but both boys perform this act as if it were sexual intercourse, and then tell all the other boys in the town that they had had sex. Begag doesn’t offer us whether the intention of these sexual behaviors was childish curiosity, or genuine desire. However, the act of sexual intention is immediately framed as a performance for the benefit of the group, thus emphasizing the way that even private actions are recounted in public to constitute solidarity and enact an identity.
The need to engage in street theater is critically related to a sense of belonging. While Piri successfully performs masculine identities in myriad settings, Azouz’s project of marrying different identities through performance is less successful. However, he is successful in passing as a Jew in Lyon. The success of performance is thus contingent on myriad conditions including geographical circumstance and social context.
Race and Space
If all “essential” categories are in fact constructed socially through performativity, then
“passing” can be defined as a successful enactment of an identity through these means. When a character’s performance fails to constitute the desired identity, he isn’t passing. Passing thus dramatizes an interior/exterior conflict experienced by these characters that is spatially determined.
Passing as a phenomenon is an important destabilization of essential identity categories. Questions of self-representation in a political context, beyond the successful enactment of an identity through performance, fold into these moments of passing. Race and ethnicity depend on their context, and
54 “I went up to her, holding my zenana. Then Saïda sat down, opened her legs, and offered me a private show. I delicately laid my hammer on her anvil and waited, in that strange position, for something to happen.” (Hargreaves 97). Valle-Gutierrez 50 in these texts, are geographically determined.55 Begag cannot pass as non-Arab until he moves to the banlieue of Lyon, yet he struggles to maintain an Arab identity in Le Chaâba. Thomas is constantly negotiating different identities but mainly fails to pass as Puerto Rican and is forced to identify as black. However, it is while Piri is in Texas where he “passes” as Puerto Rican before
“revealing” himself to be Black. Of course, he is both, but he frames this moment as both performative and revelatory. These moments of passing and non-passing are thus political acts wherein Begag and Thomas illustrate the fallibility of racial constructs. In both texts Azouz’s and
Piri’s passing constitute critical abnegations of the self, such that passing isn’t merely a successful or failed enactment of identity, but rather an uneasy production of self that is originally rejected because of historical power dynamics that the passing ignores.
The main point of contention, for most of Down These Mean Streets, which is emerging here, is whether Piri’s Puerto Rican-ness is reconcilable with the darkness of his skin. He is accused of “passing” as Puerto Rican and this bildungsroman prioritizes the process of coming to terms with his blackness, a process which the novel portrays whenever he moves to a new space. Piri’s time in the Italian block is uniquely defined by out-of-place-ness; but in other spaces either defined by blackness or latinidad he occupies a half or in-between position. There are few liminal spaces where these two groups naturally intersect. The period spent in the Italian neighborhood shows one of the violent outcomes of confrontations in a fully “alien” space. In this conflict, he finds himself wishing that he was occupying a liminal (border) space, so that he could have the support of his Puerto Rican friends. The need for support is not unique to interracial space conflicts, but also applies to intraracial conflicts in Spanish Harlem.
55 Shifts of self-identity based on geography are still of critical importance today. Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche, for instance, shows at length in Americanah, some of the nuances of how much racial identity changes based on whether she is in the United States or Africa. Valle-Gutierrez 51
Le gone du Chaâba shows the degree to which Azouz can “pass” as non-Arab. However, passing isn’t as much of a concern as an irreconcilability between French and Arab identities, grounding his desire to be ‘better’ than the French students. This is the driving force of his bildungsroman. Thus, when he is at school, he wants to be like the French students and sit in the front of the classroom, be at the top of the class, and succeed. He wants to be better them, “même si j’habite au Chaâba” (Begag 58).56 His success leads the other students to accuse him – “Tu es pas une arabe, toi!” (Begag 91).57 This accusation is made several times and aligns Azouz with the
French teacher, M. Grande, which in turn negates his Arab identity. Azouz, wants to be “better” than the French, academically proving himself (thereby realizing his parents’ dream for him: “Ses enfants ne seront pas manœuvres comme lui. Un jour, ils porteront la blouse blanche de médecin ou d'ingénieur et retourneront à Sétif” (Begag 220));58 but he also wants to preserve his identity under the ethnic category of “Arab.” He tries to combine these two identities by using Arabic words in his class, sharing his culture while simultaneously illustrating his intellectual prowess.
The lessons ostensibly instruct the students on how to be productive and functional members of society (the type of development is essential to the genre of bildungsroman). However, these lessons are biased towards the French students and are based on the ethos and values typically associated with “Western Culture”. Azouz's attempts to apply these lessons to his life and the standards in Le Chaâba, while informed by an attempt to unify his disparate identities, are maladroit or inapplicable.
These French and Arab identities are shown to be mutually exclusive throughout the text.
Azouz describes a couple of his essays that he wrote in his childhood. The first prompt he is given
56 “Even though I lived in Le Chaâba” (Hargreaves, 46). 57 “You're not an Arab!" (Hargreaves, 75). 58 “One day they would wear a doctor’s or an engineer’s white overall and return to Sétif”( Hargreaves 189). Valle-Gutierrez 52 is to describe vacations in the countryside. Azouz portrays Le Chaâba without naming it, and writes about fishing, and berry-picking, and other activities that make a boy “heureux à la campagne”
(Begag 65).59 This essay illustrates Azouz's capacity to write for his teacher and to meet his expectations. However, the essay further demonstrates how perceptions shift based only on the association of a racially-influenced economic condition. Without the association with racially- determined poverty, Azouz’s weekend activities are the same as a country vacation.
Begag portrays Le Chaâba as a space wherein one can authentically perform one’s culture and religion. This is the reason Azouz’s father gives for his reluctance to move (Begag 143). Yet everyone leaves Le Chaâba for the city. Begag’s descriptions of Le Chaâba during this period vary: being a paradise, but at the same time dead (Begag 142-143). In this scene where the family debates moving Azouz’s father is portrayed as slightly naïve: “Bouzid a mal saisi le déroulement de l'histoire. Il ne se pose pas la question de savoir pourquoi les gens ont fui son paradis” (Begag
143).60 Despite its sanctuary-like portrayal by Azouz’s father, (“dans quelle autre endroit vont-ils fêter l’Aïd?”(142)),61 Azouz's family eventually leaves Le Chaâba as well. Ironically it is the move to Lyon's banlieue that led to Azouz learning more about Arabic and himself — it leads to a stage of self-discovery — because he finds a teacher who is a pied noir, and invested Azouz’s success.
However, the move to the city also comes with Azouz having to deal with racial biases to a greater degree. It’s in la Banlieue that he passes as a Jew, avoids his mother in public, and steals a bike:
Je suis juif, j’ai dit. Parce que les Taboul sont deux, qu’ils connaissent bien la maîtressese et beaucoup d’autres élèves. Si j’avais avoué que j’étais arabe, tout le monde m’aurait mis en qurantaine, à part Babar, bien sûr. Et puis les Taboul racontent aussi que dans le desert, là-bas, un million d’Israéliens ont mis en déroute
59 “Happy in the countryside” (Hargreaves 52). 60 “Bouzid hadn't really understood what had happened. He didn't stop to think why everyone else had fled from his paradise” (Hargreaves 120). 61 “To what other place can they go to celebrate the Aïd?” (Hargreaves 120). Valle-Gutierrez 53
plusieurs millions d’Arabes, et je me sens humilié à l’intérieur, Alors il valait mieux que je sois juif. (182)62 Azouz is thus aware that by passing as a Jew he is aligning himself with Jews in direct opposition to Arabs. However, again, the logic of the racist school system, bluntly summarized in the conditional statement above, dictates that he must pass as a Jew. Further, Azouz cites internalized sense of shame as a validation for his passing. By moving to La Banlieue he is forced to contend with nuances to the Arab-French dichotomy which didn’t exist when he lived in La Chaâba. The other two scenes referenced above (183-186; 187-188) also contend with issues of visibility of gender – “Impossible de faire croire qu’elle est juive et encore moins française,” (183)63 — and an increasingly coercive need to belong. Some of these spatial consequences also coincide with adolescence. However, it's notable that both Begag and Thomas address residential mobility. In both cases, by moving from an essentially homogenous space into a place where they are deemed the “other” (in Thomas’s this is the move to the Long Island) they are forced to confront new external perceptions of their identity.
These two texts seem to suggest that there are only two paths available for the migrant of color and their children of color: continued minority status within a structure of alterity or assimilation and rejecting their dual identities and choosing to adopt one ethnic or racial identity.
Passing is shown to be a necessity to be able to engage in the social structures that these young men encountered daily. There are moments, like in Down These Mean Streets, where passing is used consciously to invert power structures, however passing in these two texts is always shown to be a choice that is engendered from a broader socially-imposed necessity rather than an internal
62 “I was a Jew, I said. Because there were two of them, the Tabouls, and because they knew the teachers and a lot of other pupils well. If I had admitted that I was an Arab, everybody would have frozen me out, apart from Babar, of course. And then the Tabouls also trotted out the fact that, in the desert, over there, a million Israelis had routed out several million Arab, and I felt humiliated inside. So it was better to be Jewish” (Hargreaves 156). 63 “There was no way to pass her off as Jewish and still less as French” (Hargreaves 156). Valle-Gutierrez 54 desire.
Gender and Genre
The disparate impact of race and class on persons of different genders is largely ignored in both texts, in part, because both texts are written by male authors. Thomas’ novel briefly mentions a conversation between Brew and his girlfriend where she says that it’s harder to be black if you’re a woman – the result of that conversation is domestic violence. Begag’s text alludes to gender difference primarily from an axis religious difference and visibility. However, both texts largely ignore female experiences, and describe their individual development, particularly as young boys trying to assert their belonging within these groups. While the next chapter discusses the texts of some women writers, it is clear from looking at these two texts that the bildungsroman genre privileges the sort of experiences that these male protagonists experience. By rewriting the bildungsroman (in two very different ways) both these authors use the genre to incorporate
(masculine) subjugated identities into a dominant narrative.64
The bildungsroman genre arose from a German context, however these “migrant” texts use that genre and through subversions or affirmations illustrate the achievability of social mobility, in these democratic countries, for those that fall outside of the majority. Moreover, the bildungsroman as a generic choice is particularly apt for these inter-generational, inter-racial, inter-community authors who are trying to establish cohesive identities. M.H. Gottfried’s stringent definition of the genre, as a text that “concentrates on actions, thoughts, and reflections equally and attempts to portray a total personality: physical, emotional, intellectual, and moral…[and] maintains a peculiar balance between the social and the personal and explores their interaction”
64 While these narratives are important for the political advancement of these groups as a whole, it would be an error not to mention here that there are identity positions that continue to be forgotten and continue to be subjugated in these texts, namely, women of color. Valle-Gutierrez 55
(122), emphasizes the pertinence of this genre. Both texts are interested in the way that socially- produced subjectivities are negotiated when a person occupies a unique position of in- betweenness.
An essential component of the bildungsroman genre is individual development through apprenticeship. Both texts include elements of apprenticeship; however, they deviate from the genre’s archetypical conclusion of mastery and success (with an element of social integration) to demonstrate the degree to which myths of social mobility via apprenticeship are limited when one belongs to a minority group. Thomas' text arrives to the education component late when he is in prison. Begag, however, is constantly questioning this dynamic and balancing his internal desire to surpass the French students, with his parents’ dreams for him. Thus, while Begag and Thomas invoke the bildungsroman genre as structure to reflect on relationships and processes of individual development in relation to society at large, these authors also subvert the genre in subtle ways to critique the normative narrative of success through learning which itself constitutes epistemic violence as it is used to evidence the failure of the subaltern through no fault of society itself.
The genre relies on the notion of apprenticeship. Both texts thus feature role models for the protagonists, who help them integrate more successfully into mainstream forms of success. For
Azouz these role models are his teachers – M. Grand and M. Loubon – whereas Piri’s primary role model is Kent. It is late in Down These Mean Streets, while in prison, that Piri is given space to be self-reflective, get an education, and find role models who encourage his learning. Prison, despite the challenges to masculinity, and very concrete threats to his safety, provides a key stage of psychosocial development for Thomas’ bildungsroman.
While most of the novel prior to his time in prison contemplates his coming to terms with his blackness, and identifying as such, it’s not until prison in the last quarter of the novel, that Piri Valle-Gutierrez 56 finally engages in the essential stage of the bildungsroman: a ‘formal’ education, influenced by
Islam. As mentioned above, Kent encourages Piri to write, and learn standard grammar. A crucial aspect of Piri’s intellectual development in prison is his interest in Islam, the religion “the Arabs believed in” (Thomas 289). His understanding of Islam is completely racialized. Piri is told that,
“Christianity is the white devil's religion…[he] use[s] his Christianity as a main weapon against the dark-skinned inhabitants of this world” (Thomas 291). Christianity is thus described as a tool to perpetuate white supremacy and slave-master dynamics. Islam as described by Muhammed – the man in prison that introduced Piri to Islam – is about revealing the rich history and racial pride of black persons. Christianity purports universality, but in reality, he argues, only includes white men. Piri states that this process of learning in prison made him aware of what he lacked, and a desire to know himself better. It is in this state of mind that he is finally released from prison and ends the novel. While formal education takes up a relatively small amount of space in Thomas’ text, this presence of this moment is necessary for his invocation and subversion of the bildungsroman genre.
Thomas’ text is often dealt with as a foundational bildungsroman for Nuyoricans, as evidenced by an explicit reference to it in a contemporary novel, Ernesto Quiñonez’s Bodega
Dreams. However, given that this bildungsroman is responding to space, it is these very elements of development that problematize the category of bildungsroman as an innate representation of individual success. The need for psychosocial development is imposed by socially constructed positions of alterity. The novel ends in a stage where his development continues and is being put to the test. The text doesn’t show an apotheosis of his success following the apprenticeship stage in prison. The reader is shown a character who struggles to stay clean but is succeeding in doing so. He is back in El Barrio and is “making it” (Thomas 331), but again this individual victory of Valle-Gutierrez 57 sobriety hasn’t changed the conditions of the street. Further, the text ends with one of his friends struggling to beat the streets. The novel’s afterword doesn’t inspire resolution of these broader social structures. Thus, while Piri ostensibly succeeds, and has come to terms with his identity by the end of the novel, we are reminded that society itself remains flawed. The indictment of society at large is a critical deviation from the bildungsroman genre that this Nuyorican text is providing.
Similarly, Begag’s text ends in a way that forces us to question the bildungsroman genre.
The novel has a relatively heavy focus on his education and his development in his early years.
Begag affirms the capacity of a person who is typically deemed as part of the subaltern to invoke this literary tradition of bildungsroman by overemphasizing his time in school relative to other experiences in Le Chaâba. The apprenticeship novel can in fact be used to define oneself according to mainstream models of success. Azouz, through his academic success, shows that he is as capable as other French students who are not racialized as Arab. Throughout the novel, Azouz notably rejects invitations to engage in apprenticeship positions of his fellow French-Algerian friends and neighbors (such as the earlier example where he initially refuses to ask for work at the market).
Instead he consciously chooses to learn from his teachers, and align himself with the French students. The consequences of this decision are substantial for Azouz’s personal life –he is constantly citing internalized shame, and trying to belong — but the political implications are also significant. By succeeding in this system Azouz subverts the lessons that are being taught in the school. The reader understands, even if Azouz’s father doesn’t, that his position from first to seventeenth in the class is a byproduct of his teacher’s racism (186). However, Azouz’s preference for the streets during this time illustrates the impossibility of succeeding if one doesn’t have the right people in one’s life: “c’est la faute de Mme Valard si je suis dix-septième. Alors, je me sauve Valle-Gutierrez 58 dehors, rue de la Vieille, et tant pis pour les désagréments du retour” (186).65 Azouz’s intellect is well established at this point. Thus, his attitude in this moment of introspection emphasizes that there is no way to prove to this teacher that he deserves a higher place in this class. Like Piri,
Azouz characterizes the streets as a savior. During the closing of the novel, Azouz’s actions resemble Piri’s, however, when Azouz graduates to High School, an invested teacher realigns
Azouz onto the path of success. This moment of rebellion, prior to M. Loubon’s intervention, hints at the appeal of an alternative path on the streets.
Both authors, however, reject a conclusion that ends with a clear success. In fact, both novels conclude ambiguously. In part, the autobiographical details of these authors inform the success of these bildungsromans and the characters which they write. However, by rejecting to end more conclusively as a successful rags-to-riches story, the authors shift the emphasis of their texts away from focusing on just the individual and economic development of these characters – which isn’t fully achieved over the course of the novels – towards texts that center on a protagonist’s struggle to belong in a group or space that rejects them. Thus, while both novels can be read as bildungsromans, where space determines all facets of development, they are also political statements about the capacity of a minority group to successfully invoke comparable paradigms of growth and success.
Conclusion
From these texts, we can see that the male bildungsroman places a heavy focus on how public spaces inform the protagonists’ psychosocial development. While there is a heavy influence played by mother and father figures, and home life, both of these texts illustrate an out-of-placeness
65 “It was Madame Valard’s fault that I was seventeenth in the class. So I went off to the rue de la Vieille, and too bad if I got into trouble on my return” (Hargreaves 159). Valle-Gutierrez 59 at home that leads these individuals to rely on liminal spaces as a catalyst to negotiate distinct socially-constructed identities imposed upon them, at least in part, by their parent’s immigrant status. In the female-centric novels examined in the next chapter, there is a slight shift away from these foci, and in turn there is a larger emphasis on memory and the converging spaces of past and present. Furthermore, the female- authored texts illustrate the difficulty of balancing the cultural values of the parent’s land – the motherland – with those of a new homeland.
Valle-Gutierrez 60
Chapter 2: Journeys of Remembrance Introduction
James Joyce, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, describes Stephen’s “outward and homeward journey” (65). If the male authored texts considered in Chapter 1 are characterized by an outward journey, a journey of the self into broader social structures, the women writers discussed in this chapter, convey a homeward journey from the self, back to the “motherland.”
While Marta Moreno Vega's novel, When the Spirits Dance Mambo invokes the tradition of bildungsroman, Leila Sebbar's novel, La Seine était rouge is a sharp departure from that genre, however like When the Spirits Dance Mambo, it emphasizes the role of memory for identity construction of persons in these liminal subject positions, and insists on the palimpsestic nature of this work. La Seine était rouge is unique amongst the four novels in this thesis, as it is the only one that contains narrative from multiple points of view. The use of multiple perspectives is crucial to Sebbar’s larger project of recovering and reconstituting the lost history of October 17, 1961.66
Both La Seine était rouge and When the Spirits Dance Mambo, however, emphasize the way that female protagonists search to recuperate the lost narratives of their female parents and grandparents. While these texts could be placed within other literary contexts,67 it becomes evident when juxtaposed that these women writers are not only attuned to history in a unique way, but also that cultural mores surrounding gender and race continue to be contested on the bodies of women.
66 Many critical texts on Sebbar emphasize this political project. By contrast, this thesis focuses more on the protagonist, Amel’s journey for self-construction, and the relationship between the individual and the community. However, regarding the political project of recovery and rewriting that Sebbar undertakes, Jonathan Lewis, Helen Vassallo and Mildred Mortimer’s texts are useful. 67 For instance, Kathryn Jones places Sebbar work in the travel narrative genre (43); Edna Acosta-Belen cites Moreno Vega’s focus on spirituality in her writing, (2009; 61) Valle-Gutierrez 61
Both novels draw on the experiences of the authors, similarly to the texts in the first chapter.
Moreno Vega’s novel is autobiographical, like the texts in Chapter One. As such, this text follows certain conventions that are evident in both Down These Mean Streets, and Le Gone du Châaba, which are not present in La Seine était rouge. Both Chapter One texts, and Moreno Vega’s, use a broad bildungsroman structure (and in Moreno Vega’s case a “kunstlerroman” a subgenre of bildungsroman, which focuses on her development as an artist). Moreover, the events in both
Thomas’ and Moreno Vega’s novels are occurring in roughly the same time and same place.
However, while Thomas’ character was quick to escape his nuclear family and establish an identity in the streets, Moreno Vega’s text is defined by a close relationship between her protagonist –
Cotito (or Coty) – and her family, and the profound influence of her ancestors on her own self- construction.
Leila Sebbar’s novel stands alone amongst the texts discussed in this thesis. It is a short and dense text which oscillates between distinct times, places, and voices. To guide the reader through these different points in history, told from different perspectives, Sebbar heads each section with the names of the characters, and at times the place, and the date – resembling the stage directions of a play (such as, “République. Amel et Omer” (50), or “Octobre 1961 L’Amant français Intérieur jour”(69)).68 Further, rather than relying on the character development of one character to drive plot, Sebbar’s text centers around one historical event in French history, the massacre of October 17, 1961, to guide character development.
By providing multiple vignettes of the events of October 1961 from several perspectives
Sebbar emphasizes the need to understand the cross-generational and cross-cultural impact of these. Thus, the text gives voice to the experiences of a diverse range of people affected by the
68 “République. Amel and Omer” (Mortimer 47). “October 1961 The French Lover Inside, daytime” (Mortimer 68). Valle-Gutierrez 62 massacre, including a French policemen, a French student, and a French-Algerian Café owner, all of whom were present in Paris on October 17 1961 (99-100; 81-83; 55-5).69 Sebbar, significantly brings to the forefront of her text the experience of Algerians in France (Omer) and French supporters of Algerians during the Franco-Algerian war (Louis) – two narratives that are both often omitted from mainstream historiographies — to accompany the Beur protagonist, Amel. The journeys of these three characters is focused on in this chapter. The prominence of these characters suggests that it isn’t the Beur subject alone who needs to make sense of these histories. She is showing that the amnesia regarding the event is detrimental to French society as a whole.
Much like When the Spirits Dance Mambo, La Seine était rouge oscillates, across time, through the narratives of the protagonist’s friends and family. An added dimension of spatiality makes this text into a representation of an event that permeates through multiple realms, subjectivities, and spaces. October 17 becomes increasingly omnipresent throughout the novel, and is shown to be critical to the present lives of all three protagonists. However, the novel also insists on the absence of sites of memory: Amel, Omer and Louis travel through Paris, yet no official sites of memory commemorating October 17, and the loss of Algerian lives, exist. Instead, the novel offers Louis’ spray-painted words in honor of the Algerians, throughout the city: “Il lit les lettres rouge fluo: ‘Ici des Algérients ont été matraqués sauvagement par la police du préfet
Papon le 17 Octobre 1961” (68).70 There are however several sites that commemorate other episodes of French history. La Seine était rouge thus provides the event for the reader through fictionalized narratives of individuals, insisting that cultural memory is inextricable from personal history. By rewriting official plaques, Sebbar’s characters “correct” the archive and build sites of
69 This is a limited sampling of the diverse and complicated subjectivities which Sebbar presents in her novel. 70 “He reads red inked letters: On this spot Algerians were savagely beaten by Prefect Papon’s police on October 17 1961” (Mortimer 67). Valle-Gutierrez 63 memory. Moreno Vega’s text offers a similar presentation of an interconnected personal-collective history. Both texts illustrate how past and present converge on the female body, through the process of territorialization.
This chapter focuses on the way that the protagonists in the two novels, Moreno Vega’s
“Coty,” and Sebbar’s “Amel,” need to meld both past and present and homeland and motherland in a way that the characters in chapter one can opt out of. Unlike Piri and Azouz, who largely ignore their family histories, Coty and Amel are constantly balancing history and present. I argue in this chapter that negotiating past and present is necessary to establish a self-identity (and in that sense, is a choice that they make), and to create sites of memory for the community (in which case it is externally imposed). I first establish the critical framework for understanding how sites of memory are built on female bodies through a process of territorialization. I then use this framework to discuss how border maintenance and construction through language, knowledge, and memory, is used by both the protagonists and the community for both individual and collective means.
Territorializing the Female Body
In this section I look at the three analytical and theoretical works which establish one way migrants commemorate the motherland in a new homeland. Based on this framework, I suggest that a key aspect to commemorating the motherland is to territorialize the female body of second- generation migrants, which is shown through the protagonist’s in these two texts.
It is useful to start with Kathryn Jones’ analysis of Sebbar’s work as a travelogue to see how sites of cultural memory are essential to migrant literatures before analyzing how women’s bodies serve as these sites. Sebbar’s work, Jones argues, “implies the necessity of a physical, geographical journey in order to approach the past, underlining the importance of place in relation to memory” (Jones 44). This relationship between physicality and memory is emphasized in Valle-Gutierrez 64
Moreno Vega’s novel as well. Approaching the past is important to these characters because, as will be explained below, this knowledge informs constructions of the self. Sebbar and Moreno
Vega’s texts weave multiple layers of memory and history to establish self-identities.
The relationship between memory and space in these texts goes beyond mere recollection that is engendered by sights and smells. In Spirits and Seine, memory and space are central to the development of events and consciousness. In many ways, the “journeys of remembrance” are the raison d’être of these texts. The plot of Sebbar’s novel centers around a journey of knowledge and remembrance. “Language Borders” below discusses how Sebbar’s novel is framed as a pilgrimage for the protagonist, with this goal of remembrance in mind (Sebbar 11). Similarly, Moreno Vega begins her text by writing, “[m]y memories take me on a spiritual, musical voyage to El Barrio” alerting the reader that the text is a journey of remembrance that is informed by a place that was created by her family (Moreno Vega 2). Unlike the texts in chapter one, where plot is driven by the internal consciousness of one protagonist, remembrance of events outside of the self, guides the plot in Seine and Spirits. However, it is the connection between space and memory that becomes problematic. As Jones states, “Sebbar underlines both the centrality and fragility of the topographical connection between place and memory” (45). Two interrelated features of both
Sebbar’s and Moreno Vega’s texts emphasize this dichotomy.
One of the primary difficulties these protagonists face is the erasure of sites of memory. A remedy for this loss of space is thus the journey itself. Jones argues that, “the physical journey of repetition and the personal voyage of discovery are more important than locating the actual geographical site” (Jones 45). In Seine, the geographical sites that the protagonists visit are changed, or in some cases erased, disconnecting the present from the past:
On habitait au numéro 7. Le chiffre 7 était écrit sur la porte en bois, avec de la peinture blanche. Le facteur, je sais pas comment il s’y retrouvait, pour le courrier. Valle-Gutierrez 65
Des rues sans nom, des noms fantaisistes, souvent illisibles, des rues…si on peut appeler ça des rues. (25)71 The mother’s testimony here, alludes to the difficulty that Amel has in discovering the sites she seeks, because their very names have changed.
Spirits is also concerned with the commemoration of a specific space. However, over the course of the novel, Coty notes the ways in which El Barrio is changing. This forecloses the option of revisiting the geographical imprint of a memory, emphasizing the value of the aesthetic project of the text and the journey of remembrance (the experiences that drive the plot within the texts).
Without her mother, there is a sense that Amel will never be able to find the shantytown, yet her mother and grandmother continually refuse to come. While they say, “Un jour tu sauras” (31),72 it is evident that this knowledge is one they refuse to offer. Coty, uses musical language to convey the changing space of El Barrio: “The high-energy music that had previously set the block dancing now seemed forced, echoing a period that was quickly fading into the past. The block’s mambo had been converted into a slow, sad bolero” (218). Thus, Amel and Coty are actively seeking memories of the spaces in their past out of their individual will, but they encounter the difficulty of finding these spaces which are fading.
The concept of the journey as a mode of memory is further prioritized due to a phenomenon that is described by Alec Hargreaves:
[A]s most economic migrants have lived and worked in places of relatively low social standing, unofficial sites of memory associated with immigrant settlement have often been bulldozed into oblivion. The now demolished bidonvilles that sprang up around many French cities during the 1950s and 1960s are obvious examples. (qtd. in Jones 45)
71 “We lived at number 7. The number 7 was written on the wooden door in white paint. I don’t know how the mailman was able to deliver the mail. Streets without names, other streets with weird names, street signs that were often illegible…those streets…if you could even call them streets” (Mortimer 19). 72 “I’ll tell you one day” (Mortimer 18). Valle-Gutierrez 66
Sebbar and Moreno Vega’s texts contend with such demolished or altered sites of memory. El
Barrio is a clear example of the very phenomenon Hargreaves describes.73 It is a space that changes radically over the approximately ten-year span of Spirits. Beyond this, the intergenerational component of these texts insists on multiple levels of memory that are layered over each other.
The palimpsestic nature of these novels, both literally (through the actual re-writing that Seine shows), and structurally (through the narrative style that layers memory), suggests an inextricability between the experiences of the protagonists in the “present”, and their family history. Further, the multiple levels of memory that the novels document, underscore a problematic loss of official sites of memory, while the journeys serve as sites of memory themselves.74
These texts thus offer one way that migrants construct sites of memory that go beyond the official monuments of commemoration which have been denied or erased due to their positions of alterity. Jones’s relevant conclusion is that,
Sebbar’s travelogue also implies that the concept of sites of memory could be widened further to include everyday objects such as shop signs advertising Singer sewing machines, toy colonial soldiers and playing cards. (47)75 Migrants don’t enjoy the same position in the dominant culture mitigating their ability to build sites of memory.76 Jones suggests that migrants use the quotidian as a site of memory – which is problematic insofar as it fails to escape the question ephemerality. However, when Seine and
Spirits are read together it becomes clear that a critical site of cultural memory, which isn’t
73 While El Barrio hasn’t been “bulldozed into oblivion”, Arlene Dávila’s paper on tourism and its impact on El Barrio calls into question the way that gentrification and the need for economic prosperity cause the deterioration of sites of memory, or the components that made El Barrio a microcosm of Puerto Rico on the mainland. 74 Sites of memory, or lieux de mémoire, is a term that was created by Pierre Nora. He frames it as a particularly French phenomenon. A relevant element he discusses is the need for archival memory and the emergence of lieux de mémoire in response to the push/pull forces of history (12). 75 Jones is not writing about Seine in this passage, but a later “travelogue” entitled Mes Algéries en France. However, Jones’ conclusion about the fragility of memory is relevant, and present in Seine. 76 As is illustrated in more contemporary novels by Nuyorican and Beur writers, such as Bodega Dreams by Ernesto Quiñonez, and Mehdi Charef’s Le Thé au harem d’Archi Ahmed, these groups frequently lack the autonomy to work within the same framework as the dominant cultural group to preserve the sites of memory they do have. Valle-Gutierrez 67 discussed by Jones, is the female body. The female body as a site of cultural memory is dramatized throughout both these texts, and is the root of many of the problems that Amel and Coty encounter in the texts.
Lucy Jackson, in a geographical study,77 provides the definition of “Territory” as, “a portion of geographic space which is claimed or occupied by a person or group of persons or by an institution” (292). Thus, female bodies are ‘claimed’ through the borders that will be further analyzed in this chapter: language, education, knowledge, and movement (broadly defined).
Jackson focuses on “the appearance of the body as ‘other’, [to] highlight the way in which stereotypes are placed on the migrant body, reflecting on the norms and assumptions of bodily practices and performances and how these effectively produce and reproduce particular territorial identities” (Jackson 292). Accordingly, she asserts that territorialization both engenders and is delimited by female subjectivities that are built by this process.78
The notion of territorialization is particularly useful to think through these texts because it corresponds to an emphasis on movement through space and its connection to memory, which is central to both texts. Jackson writes that, “bodies can be read as outcomes of social process and can be seen as sites of action and resistance” (Jackson 293). Thus, reinscribing cultural memory, as a means of regaining what was lost, is particularly effective when practiced through bodies. The body is constantly imbued with markers of culture in a way that no other “object” can be. This demarcation is a constant point of conflict in the texts discussed in this thesis. Jackson explains that, “The border of the body is porous and migrant women actively practice and perform aspects
77 Her text examines how several different borders territorialize Singaporean migrants. 78 Object fetishism is another useful framework to think of this. However, while objectifying the female body and imbuing it with a mystical property of memorialization certainly fulfills this framework, territorialization is more pertinent because it concerns itself with a whole cultural project, rather than an individual object fetish. As Jackson writes, “territory, and the practice of territoriality, is not nation-state bound but is immersed in the local and the everyday” (Jackson 293). Valle-Gutierrez 68 of ‘border maintenance’ as a reaction to being excluded emotionally and physically from the social and cultural territory of the host society” (Jackson 297). This is certainly done through clothing, but also through food, language, dance and music – as is shown in Spirits and Seine. Jackson presents territorialization as a choice by certain migrant women to stake claim to a territory, and to reject the homeland’s culture.79 The territorialization that occurs in Spirits and Seine isn’t always voluntary (nor is it always involuntary). However, in both texts there is an added element of broader cultural memorialization through territorialization of women’s bodies. While Jackson’s paper presents data to support how women’s bodies are functionally territorialized, the paper doesn’t take the theoretical step between the process of territorialization and remembrance, for which it is helpful to turn to Paulo Bartoloni’s theoretical text on migrants in interstitial spaces.
Bartoloni’s text formulates a relationship between territorialization and memory. He uses the language of translation to refer to sites of memory.80 Bartoloni writes that the “primary function
[of translation is] reminding its audience that the original is somewhere else” (Bartoloni 44). El
Barrio could be seen as a “translation” of Puerto Rico in the strictly demarcated space of New
York. However, El Barrio’s relationship to Puerto Rico changes generationally. While it may be a metonym for Puerto Rico for the first-generation, it is a metaphor for the second-generation. For
Coty (and Piri) El Barrio is the source of their primary source of knowledge of Puerto Rico. This complicates El Barrio’s role as a site of memory.81
79 Jackson’s analysis focuses on first-generation migrants, so the situational differences and reasons for territorialization serve different means than those which characterize the territorialization described in Spirits and Seine. 80 His text uses myriad theoretical frameworks to analyze the Italian Forum in Sydney as a cultural site of memory. 81 It is clear in reading both Nuyorican texts, that El Barrio is also a site of memory that is being erased, which their texts try to commemorate. The layers of memory and commemoration are thus constantly multiplying, complicating the project of remembrance. Valle-Gutierrez 69
Bartoloni astutely incorporates a Freudian discussion of uncanniness into this conversation of translation and cultural re-inscription, as it is literally both heimlich and unheimlich.82 Thus, the translation of motherland in the new homeland,
presents a moment and a place where Italy and Australia meet as a result of a process of mutual mediation where the ‘I’ is also the ‘other’ and where the uncanny is located not so much in the feeling of estrangement and displacement as in the curious and rather exciting feeling of being at home outside home. (Bartoloni 45) By replacing Italy and Sydney, with homeland and motherland, which is the relationship he is describing, we see the way that these sites of memory work in the homeland. The problem that
Seine elucidates is the degree to which these sites of memory are missing for French-Algerians.
The only remaining option, in light of shantytowns that no longer exist or have changed name, is to form the narratives of the people themselves into sites of memory. Yet those who experience the histories that need to be memorialized are reticent to share their memories.
Louis, perhaps, succeeds in finding the shrines of homeland, that metaphorically replace the motherland, such as “l’Institut de monde arabe, pas loin du Jardin des Plantes. Il aime se promener dans les serres exotiques et prendre un thé à la mosque dans le petite cour en désordre, un peu sale” (62).83 While none of these places are perfect examples, they could potentially be translations in that they are metonyms for the homeland. However, Sebbar problematizes their status as sites of memory by placing Louis, and not Amel and Omer, in these places, asking the question, for whom do these spaces truly exist?
Bartoloni insists on these sites of memory as spaces that are intrinsically multi-temporal.
For this reason, territorialization of female bodies is particularly helpful for migrant cultures
82 Freud’s essay of the uncanny describes the uncanny as both “homely” and “un-homely”, the German words are simultaneously identical and opposite. 83 “The Institut du Monde Arabe, not far from the botanical gardens. He likes to stroll in the exotic hot houses and have tea at the Mosque in the little courtyard that is messy and somewhat dirty” (Mortimer 61). Valle-Gutierrez 70 because it is a site that can embody multiple periods of time. Bodies as sites of cultural memory encompass an interstitiality that seems less un/heimlich (because public squares, stolen monuments, etc. are intrinsically representing the motherland in a place that isn’t the motherland and will always be unheimlich), while seeming more permanent than other ephemeral sites of memory (like sewing machines, perhaps).
The personal projects of identity construction are tied to place and memory.84 Thus, to establish cohesive selves, which the protagonists acknowledge are tied to their histories (a notion
I expand on in “Forming Memory”, below) they are forced to contend with sites of memory that are unstable. In considering the function of geographical sites of memory, Bartoloni suggests that these diametrical experiences arise, in part, due to competing ideas regarding the city. He distinguishes between two converging ideas of urbanity: polis and civitas. While he expounds the differences in his text, the crucial distinction is that, “while the former [polis] rests on the traditions and mores of a ethnicity, guarding and preserving them, the latter [civitas] is porous, open and constantly fluctuating” (Bartoloni 48). Dawn Fulton’s helpfully reads these push/pull forces as signifying a process of creolization that Sebbar uses to reinscribe the histories that have been pushed towards the periphery into the center of Paris (25). Thus, while in Spirits, El Barrio is a clear example of a polis that is increasingly experiencing the forces of civitas, the struggle of asserting or recovering a history in a civitas is dramatized in Seine. Both texts center around their protagonists’ efforts to contend with these opposing forces for self-identity construction.
These distinctions, of course, are not static. Spirits shows that El Barrio cannot fully reject the forces of civitas. Seine similarly dramatizes the way that the polis, which was embodied by
84 “The case of the migratory and transnational experiences is arrived at through a delicate negotiation of the past and the present… and as such it inhabits a space, which is both interstitial and liminal, simultaneously in-place and out- of-place” (Bartoloni 47).
Valle-Gutierrez 71 shantytowns, is gone or irretrievable. However, there is a generative component to the relationship between polis and civitas on art, language, and other modes of cultural representation – modes that these protagonists are interested in and defined by. Bartoloni describes some of results of these exchanges:
Cultural expression becomes porous not only thanks to an increasing exchange and encounter of cultures embodied by artists inhabiting a plurality of traditions, but also by the concomitant temporal interplay between past, present and future in which the memory of a given culture is played against the background of another culture and vice-versa in a continuous cross-pollination of aesthetic values and symbolic representation. (55) The impact of this “cross-pollination” is evident in Spirits as the narrator describes the relationship between East and West Harlem. The interactionbetween the two adjacent ethnic groups is portrayed positively – from Coty’s point of view, “East and West Harlem appeared to me as part of the same family” (Moreno Vega 240), however, as mentioned in Moreno Vega’s text, the older generations aren’t as zealous regarding the mixing of ethnic groups, which is shown by Chachita’s forced marriage (examined below).85
Female bodies are policed in an effort to maintain a polis, a unified cultural center, which the forces of civitas try to decentralize. Cotito’s older sister’s relationship with a black man dramatizes this tension. Chachita transgresses the social code by having premarital sex, exacerbated by the fact that her choice for this cultural transgression is a black man: “In addition to Socorro’s [Chachita’s] having disrespected our parents and disgraced herself, I knew our parents would be scandalized if they found out that her boyfriend was un negro” (150). As an effort to maintain a sense of propriety her parents force her to marry the man – a simple command is issued by her dad: “find out who he is. Arrange the wedding immediately”(159), a decision which is
85 Arroyo’s paper delineates some of the modern sentiment and debates regarding this “cross-pollination” between African and Black artistic production and Puerto Rican artistic production following the inclusion of hip-hop and rap artists in a Puerto Rican Christmas special. Valle-Gutierrez 72 ominously chastised by the Spirits within the text (197). Chachita’s lack of agency throughout this scene shows that female bodies are being policed differently than male bodies.86
The problem with the territorialization of female bodies as sites of cultural memory is that these bodies are liminal spaces that cannot be fully imbued with the meaning the cultural group tries to assign them. Bartoloni suggests that there are competing ends of memorialization that should be unified in a site of memory: “the dynamic at work between the original culture (the past) and the adopted culture (the present) generates a complex alphabet of sign-meaning … in which the desire to say is triggered by a memory that comes to react with the experience of the present”
(Bartolino 61). Both texts emphasize that women are the bearers of memory. Yet, their desire to say, and trigger a memory, is often limited by an imposed language border. Territorialization of bodies is thus, simultaneously, a means to memorialize culture, reject the homeland, and ‘maintain’ cultural identity. While memory is the stated goal of each text, the subsequent sections examine how territorialization works to both allow for cultural remembrance, as well as resistance of norms and construction of subjectivities for female protagonists whose lives are defined by liminality.
Language Borders
Language is a border presented in these texts that best fulfills the dual role of uniting and dividing. It is a line that these character’s struggle to cross to access knowledge, or it can be a boundary that they use to reject certain interpellations. Language thus constitutes a border that is superimposed at times, and intentionally constructed in other moments. In both texts, language is a tool that contains and obfuscates maternal knowledge, which is the type of knowledge privileged by the texts. In both texts, this function of language is shown as a tool for infantilizing the female
86 Coty’s brother is never punished for his sexual relations with women, and his promiscuity is in fact encouraged (126). Valle-Gutierrez 73 protagonists, within their home communities. Outside the home communities, language tries to reify perceptions of alterity.
Seine brings attention to the unique sounds of languages to emphasize the different spaces occupied by its several characters. Sebbar writes “Lalla rit dans sa langue, un rire de gorge voluptueux” (Sebbar 10).87 In Seine part of Amel’s anguish is the presence of a sonic border in her home, which inhibits her ability to understand, and simultaneously positions her as an “other”.
Sebbar’s novel opens with a scene of linguistic disconnect for the protagonist, which is an inversion of moments of linguistic alterity seen in the other three texts (where language often connects the protagonists to their families and communities). In Seine’s opening scene Amel cannot understand her parents who are choosing to speak in Arabic so that she won’t be able to understand. The language of the homeland is instantly framed as a language of secrets by Amel’s grandmother – the fact that it remains inaccessible to Amel catalyzes her journey of discovery.
Language is also connected in the opening to being a grown woman. Amel accuses her grandmother and mother of speaking in Arabic so she would remain a little girl:
[E]lles bavardent en français, en arabe. Amel ne comprend pas tout…Si elle demandait ce qu’elles se disent dans l’autre langue, “la langue du pays” dit Lalla, sa grand-mère lui répondrait, comme chaque fois : “Des secrets, ma fille, des secrets, ce que tu ne dois pas savoir, ce que doit être caché, ce que tu apprendras, un jour, quand il faudra. Ce jour viendra…et il ne sera pas bienheureux pour toi.” (Sebbar 9)88 This opening chapter therefore frames the novel as a search for knowledge (or perhaps truth), a desire for communication, and an insistence on continuity with one’s ancestor’s through language.
Language is always a way to codify knowledge. However, this text is unique amongst the other’s
87 “Lalla laughs in her language, a throaty, voluptuous laugh” (Mortimer, 2). 88 “They chat in French and Arabic. Amel doesn’t understand everything they say…If she were to ask them what they were saying in the other language, ‘the language of the homeland’ as Lalla calls it, her grandmother would say as she always does: ‘Secrets, my girl, secrets that you shouldn’t know, that must be kept hidden. But you’ll learn them someday, when you need to…and it won’t be a happy [day] for you’” (Sebbar transl. Mortimer 1). Valle-Gutierrez 74 considered in this thesis, by presenting language as an untraversable border. Amel is the only protagonist who cannot access the language of the motherland. This relationship between language and knowledge is central to both Seine and Spirits.
In Spirits, linguistic alterity isn’t limited to different languages, instead it extends to accents and the sound of a language. Coty fails to respond to a roll call because her teacher uses her given name, rather than the nickname which she identifies as:
Miss White began to call out something that sounded like names. After a monotonous list, she read out ‘Martha Meraino,’ but I was deaf to the flat noise my name had become in her mouth. When other students pointed to me, Miss White walked to my desk and, looking sternly into my eyes, asked ‘Why didn’t you respond?’ I understood her question – at home we spoke Spanish, but I knew English, too – yet I could not answer. (Moreno Vega 33) In this scene Coty is “deaf” to the teacher’s call and doesn’t to respond. However, the rejection of this interpellation is described chiefly in terms of sounds. The emphasis on flatness or monotony becomes particularly significant when one considers David Colón’s conclusion that “[l]atino poetics need to be abrupt, need to have an accent, need to fall on deaf ears” (284). Moreno Vega writes out the teacher’s accent so that it is legible for the reader – showing the teacher’s accent – thus, aligning the reader with Coty’s perspective. However, the deaf ears in this case are Coty’s
— not the teacher or the reader, both of whom know that her given name is Marta Moreno (Moreno
Vega does write, after all “the flat noise my name had become”, and not that her name itself was alien).89 By emphasizing sound as being responsible for Coty’s irresponsiveness, Moreno Vega shifts the structure of alterity, placing the teacher in the position of “other”. Responding to her anglicized name thus seems to be one border that the protagonist is reticent to cross. This is the
89 Although, later in the chapter when Coty’s mom visits the class, Coty says that her name is Cotito, when asked (37). However, here, Moreno Vega chooses to emphasize sound over the cognitive dissonance. Valle-Gutierrez 75 first of several instances where Coty tries to maintain her identity as a Nuyorican through internalized borders.
In each of these two scenes, occurring early on in both texts, sound and language prevents the protagonists from understanding what is being said and engaging with the adults in the scenes.
Language isn’t framed as a unifying force, like it might be in Le Gone du Chaâba and Down These
Mean Streets, rather it serves to isolate the characters. Throughout both La Seine était rouge and
When the Spirits Dance Mambo, there is a concern with knowledge, which is tied to language from the beginning. Language creates landscapes that establish a polis. However, for the female protagonists, language creates borders that infantilizes them. This infantilizing border, which both protagonists try to overcome, frames the journey of remembrance and self-discovery.
Truth and Knowledge
The journeys of knowledge in these two texts are extremely different. Moreno Vega’s text contemplates differences between authoritative and traditional knowledge through a narrator that is resisting both sources at different times. Meanwhile Sebbar’s text provides two physical and parallel journeys of knowledge: Amel’s privileges direct oral histories from the people she encounters, while Louis’ journey focuses on official or authoritative sources of knowledge.
However, in both texts, both sources of knowledge are considered by the different protagonists, further emphasizing the liminal position of these subjectivities. These questions ultimately center around an evaluation of knowledge in the texts that problematizes the status of truth thereby subverting the dominance of either culture, insisting on a mixing of cultures.
Both texts present “truth” as a troubled categorization of knowledge. Many knowledges are purported to be “true” but different characters destabilize these evaluations. In both texts, the relationship between truth and knowledge is presented as essential for the development of the Valle-Gutierrez 76 primary characters, and is contingent on different cultural understandings. In Spirits, “truth” is tied to femininity and complicated by mysticism. Seine, alternatively, focuses on multiculturalism and divergent experiences that are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Thus, while “truth,” in Spirits, seems to be an either/or that results in confusion and whose status is established on the bodies of women, Seine emphasizes the proliferation of truth as inextricable from a journey for knowledge, and therefore variable.
When the Spirits Dance Mambo emphasizes the confusion that is experienced when one needs to negotiate conflicting notions of incontrovertible truth. The revelation of “truth” is often confusing for Coty. This is because pieces of knowledge are never fully explained. These omissions and the resulting confusion are part of the efforts to infantilize Coty. However, Coty’s confusion is also engendered by conflicting notions of truth. The text frames the family’s efforts to infantilize Coty as a denial of the “truth” of her growing body. Her mother is concerned with the need to border her daughter’s body according to social norms, while also maintaining the opposing border of childhood. Coty’s mother is frustrated by the perceived oxymoron: “[i]f I buy
Cotito a bra, she’ll think she’s grown. Imagine! She’s only twelve and already I have to worry about her friend coming” (Moreno Vega 84). The result of this double-edged policing of Coty’s body is her continued ignorance about adolescence and its implications on her body. When she gets her first period Coty is terrified:
I sat frightened and quivering on the toilet seat, not knowing what was happening to my body. I wondered what had caused the bleeding… “Hija… your friend has come to visit. Your friend will visit every month for a week and then go away… Don’t be afraid. This happens to all young girls. It is a sign that you are growing up. But don’t tell anyone. This is our secret.” (Moreno Vega 88-9) Her fear is compounded by confusion. She doesn’t receive a full explanation from her mother, and her older sister is simultaneously undermining her mother’s explanation with her own explanation: Valle-Gutierrez 77
“Don’t worry. Mami’s telling you what her mother must have taught her in the old days. It’s hard to believe she got training as a nurse! In hygiene class I learned the truth about menstruation”
(Moreno Vega 92). Her mother’s explanation of her period is fraught with euphemism and superstitions of how a woman should take care of herself when on her period. The shock at the mother’s obfuscatory language is increased by Moreno Vega’s choice to reveal in this moment that Coty’s mother is a nurse. The implication that a health professional should know the “truth” forces the reader to question the status of truth as well as the mother’s complicity in a territorialization that she may not wholeheartedly agree with.
Coty and her sister hide their use of disposable pads (in lieu of cloths that are safety-pinned into their underwear), and surreptitiously shower because “it’s dangerous to bathe when you have your friend” (90). Her period thus poses a constant choice of one knowledge over another. The logic created in this passage is an implied dismissal of her mother’s superstition in favor of the factual “truth” of the hygiene teacher. This moment in Spirits embodies the complexity of territorializing female bodies through border maintenance when there are conflicting borders being enacted on the body at once. While the older generation may continue to operate under the ethos of the motherland, the second-generation has the ethos of both homeland and motherland simultaneously imposed upon them. Education, in this instance, constitutes a way to subvert the border maintenance that is imposed by the traditional knowledges of the home community.90 When these borders are threated, the ensuing culture wars are primarily fought on the bodies of women.91
90 It is interesting to compare education in the United States with French education systems which are vehicles of. It seems that schools in El Barrio during this period are similar to those described in Le Gone du Chaâba, with emphases on hygiene and cultural mores. 91 For instance, Coty’s mother’s decision to learn to drive emasculates Coty’s father, resulting in domestic violence.
Valle-Gutierrez 78
The prioritization of knowledge from official sources, which is valorized in the period scene, leads to one of the major tragedies in the text. By the end of the novel heroin has inundated
El Barrio. Coty’s mom chastises Coty for ignoring him on the street. Coty’s mom asks, “Why do you not respond to Jimmy when he greets you? He’s like your brother” (222). Coty, conscious that she is citing her hygiene teacher, replies:
“He is dirt, trash, an addict…he’s filthy, a thief, a bum, a good-for-nothing, stealing to buy drugs…. He made a choice, don’t you understand? This is not like catching a cold!” I heard myself screaming out of hurt, rage, and frustration. I realized I was repeating word for word what my hygiene teacher had told my class about drugs.” (222-223) Jimmy is portrayed sympathetically, as a family member, and was the one who named Coty. The emphasis his closeness with Coty, as a surrogate brother, makes his death within a month of that incident particularly tragic. The sense of loss in El Barrio at this time is multifaceted. The last moment that the reader sees Jimmy is a redemptive one where he purchases and returns objects that were stolen from Coty’s family, after a break-in. Coty’s denial of Jimmy on the streets, wherein “official” knowledge was used to rationalize her disavowal, results in a tragic irony as he proves the hygiene teacher wrong – not stealing and in fact purchasing stolen objects at a personal loss. Further, Jimmy’s death is portrayed as symptomatic of a greater problem in El Barrio, rather than a choice. There is a sense that El Barrio is no longer the polis it was, and as the forces of civitas change its culture there is a sense that El Barrio dying, beginning with Jimmy’s death, and ending with Abuela’s death – a figure who throughout the novel has embodied El Barrio for Coty.
Consequently, as the novel begins to close there is a shift away from privileging authorized sources of knowledges in favor of sources of knowledges that come from Coty’s motherland, particularly music. Valle-Gutierrez 79
Towards the end of the novel these two types of knowledge – the official knowledge of the homeland and the traditional knowledge of the motherland – confront each other in a music appreciation class at Coty’s selective art school. Coty and her best friend, Donna, are making the case for including more diverse artists in the course syllabus. The teacher refuses, stating that the only music that needs to be appreciated is Beethoven, Mozart and other classical musicians. The music teacher says that the music the class is appreciating will last forever, and that the artists they cite – artists like Aretha Franklin and Eartha Kitt who are in fact renowned today– “must not be famous or very important [since] I’ve never heard of them” (250). The novel makes full use of the passage of time to accentuate the teacher’s statement as dismissive and racist. Issues of cultural appropriation fold into this scene where the white students don’t engage in the conversation even though they listened to “black music”.
This scene is climactic because Coty disavows, for the first time, official knowledge through an active moment of disobedience. She instigates the conversation with the teacher, asking why they never listen to Spanish (meaning Puerto Rican or Cuban) music, and follows along with
Donna, when she begins to sing in class to show that “black music” is neither unimportant nor temporary:
Then my friend began to sing at the top of her voice, “Oh, when the Saints, come marching in/ Oh, when the saints come marching in/ Lord, I want to be in that number/ When the saints come marching in.”… Repeating the phrases, I joined in, singing and clapping my hands. Donna smiled, her eyes shining with tears that were anything but silly. Donna stood up now and sang. Her melodious voice chimed like church bells on Sunday morning. As she sang, more energy filled her voice, and she started stomping in place…Then Donna started marching out of the classroom, and I followed… From the hallway, the noise we heard was faint at first, but it, too, grew in strength. It was the sound of our classmates clapping for us. (253) In this scene Coty refuses to allow the subjugation of Latinx and African-American music, which forms an essential part of her awareness of her identity as a dark-skinned Puerto Rican with African Valle-Gutierrez 80 ancestry. Notably, as in many scenes describing music throughout the text, language connoting religion are used to describe music and its impact.
Music is thus the means through which Coty is able to have this spiritual journey of remembrance to construct El Barrio into a site of memory. Seine similarly emphasizes that the journeys of knowledge and remembrance which the protagonists undertake are pilgrimages through sites of memory that have been or are being erased. While Spirits emphasizes the female body and music – which in the novel is always contingent on the female body to be produced, both as its subject matter and through female artists singing and/or dancing – Seine uses a spatially- determined journey to emphasize a multiplicity of experiences.
The opening pages of Seine mentions Amel’s grandparent’s journey to Mecca, framing
Amel’s journey as a comparable journey early on, a point Jones uses to argue for the necessity of a physical journey to fully understand an event (Jones 44). More interesting, perhaps, than the fact that Amel’s journey is a comparable to a pilgrimage to Mecca is that Amel cites a desire to no longer hear her grandparents talking as a decision to leave. The seemingly innocuous conditional statement, “Si elle part, elle ne les entendra plus parler de ce fameux pélerinage et répéter les noms des villes et des pays à traverser”(11),92 changes into a concrete resolution after glancing at the map that hung above the television: “Elle n’entendra plus le rire de sa mère et de Lalla, et leurs mots secrets, étrangers”(11). Amel’s linguistic alterity, coupled with a lack of direct knowledge of the places that are being discussed catalyzes her journey. While Spirits is framed as a journey to the past, Seine begins with a physical journey away from the home in order to recover the memory of a place and historical event. This occurs because Amel’s parents and grandparents fail to
92 “If she leaves, she’ll no longer hear them talking about this famous pilgrimage, repeating the names of the cities and the countries they’ll cross. The map is tacked on to the dining room wall, above the TV. She’ll no longer hear her mother and Lalla’s laughter, and their words –secret, foreign” (Mortimer 3) Valle-Gutierrez 81 recognize their history as a necessary knowledge. Amel feels disconnected due to the fact that she knows French, Latin, and Greek, but doesn’t know Arabic. Her family instead argues that when she needs it, the knowledge she wants will come to her. As she leaves she says she will no longer listen to their “secrets”. Thus, while the pilgrimage is a journey to a place (her mother’s shantytown and other places throughout Paris), we understand, through this emphasis on language and understanding, that Amel is primarily seeking knowledge.
The narrator asserts that without Louis and Omer, two of Amel’s friends in her own generation, “Amel n’aurait rien su” (12).93 This moment uses the metaphor of a pilgrimage to
Mecca to raise the stakes of having knowledge. While dying on the pilgrimage to Mecca assures one’s place in paradise, Amel questions what would happen to her, were she to die before gaining the knowledge that her mother and grandmother are reluctant to share (12). The knowledge that she lacks – which is tied to her sense of spiritual or personal completeness is her people’s history with regards to the October massacre. Her friendship with Louis and Omer is the only way she can uncover these histories. The language of discovery and pilgrimage shows that these events aren’t merely moments in the past, rather they consume three different characters in their present lives.
Amel, Omer, and Louis actively seek the past and rely on different types of knowledge, which have perhaps been traditionally deemed as anecdotal, to save their souls.
Different sources of knowledge, in both texts, are either implicitly or explicitly given values. This valuation or devaluation of knowledge (which is perhaps distinct from information) occurs contextually, linguistically, and changes depending on the speaker. The older generation prioritizes certain types of knowledge over other types. However, it is evident that withholding knowledge itself is a border that Amel and her friends need to cross. This is emphasized in a
93 “Amel would never have known anything” (Mortimer 5). Valle-Gutierrez 82 conversation between Amel and her mother: “‘Tu sais lire, écrire et coudre, ça souffit, maintenant tu restes à la maison.’ Comment elle a connu mon père, comment ils se sont mariés ? Je ne sais pas” (Sebbar 32).94 While Amel needs to know her parent’s history, her mother feels that her formal education is sufficient. This sentiment is echoed by Louis’ mother when he asks her to partake in the film:
“Toutes ces histoires, Louis, je t’assure, elles n’intéresseront plus personne, seulement les vieux, les vieilles qui les auront vécues et encore, combien veulent les oublier, les oublient. Vraiment, réfléchis, j’ai peur que tu perdes ton temps. On était jeunes…des idéalistes. Je ne suis pas sûre qu’on ait tellement réfléchi…” “ Vous avez hébergé un déserteur” (Sebbar 19). 95 This conversation between Louis and his mother, however, hints at the particular need for this generation, that is second-generation migrants,96 to be writing these stories. These two texts emphasize the storytelling of the older generation in the context of memory construction for their protagonists. In Seine the need for stories of the past generates a plurality of histories and forms of media. Further, there is a sense that given the individual needs of the protagonists for stories of the past, and their unique position as both educated and close enough to the actual events, without having lived them, the reader gets the sense that this is the final opportunity for these stories to be revealed. Louis, contravening the axiomatic, “write what you know” explains to his mother when she asks, “‘Tu as vraiment besoin de faire ce film ? C’est pas ton histoire…’ ‘Justement je veux le faire, je le ferais parce que c’est pas mon histoire’” (Sebbar 18).97 Thus writing and creation
94 “‘You know how to read, write, and sew. That’s enough. Now you will stay home.’ How did they get married? I don’t know” (Mortimer 27). 95 “All these stories, Louis, I assure you, won’t interest anyone, except the old men and women who lived through them and even them, how many of them wish to forget, and they do forget. Really, think about it. I’m afraid you’re wasting your time. We were young, your father and I …we were idealists. I’m not sure we really gave it much thought.’ ‘You sheltered a deserter’” (Mortimer 13). 96 Louis is not a second-generation migrant – he is French. What I refer to here is the necessary emotional distance and archival proximity between the authors and the situations they describe. 97 “Do you really need to make this film? It isn’t your story…’ ‘Exactly, I want to do it. I’ll do it because it isn’t my story’” (Mortimer 12). Valle-Gutierrez 83 become a means by which Louis (and perhaps the authors themselves) can come to recover these histories.
Louis’ journey centers on a discovery of truth. His mother questions this goal, bringing to the forefront the tension between the occurrence of an event and “truth”:
Sa mère avait souri : ‘Alors tu veux tout savoir, tout.’ ‘Je veux savoir la vérité sur cette guerre.’ ‘Quelle vérité ? Tu sais la verité… C’est difficile…’ ‘Ta vérité, celle de papa, ce que vous avez pensé, vécu, souffert… votre vie quoi…’ ‘Mais tu n’auras qu’un aspect, minuscule, trop partiel… Plus de trente-cinq ans… Tu imagines. On aura oublié, ce sera flou, approximatif, sans intérêt, je t’assure. (Sebbar 18) 98 However, Louis’ journey throughout the text purports that this truth is, at least in part, a reconstitution of the formal sites of memory around the city to include those lost narratives. His journey is the process of recreation. Amel, by contrast, journeys through her mother’s past, talking to people, travelling to her grandmother’s shantytown, and recalling or hearing her mother’s own story, combining her family’s history with the present moment through a shared space.
Forming Memory
Spirits and Seine both are works that are dedicated to those who came before them. The dedicatory pages bring the reader’s attention to questions of intergenerationality. The dedication of Spirits reads: “This book is a tribute to all the abuelas/os, parents, and extended family born in
Puerto Rico who created ‘El Barrio’ so that those of us born away from their beloved island would always have a racial and cultural understanding of our place in the world” (Moreno Vega,
Dedication). El Barrio is thus a multigenerational tool for education, created by the first generations for future generations. Moreno Vega suggests in this dedication that understanding
98 “His mother smiled: ‘So you want to know everything, everything.’ ‘I want to know the truth about this war.’ ‘What truth? You know, the truth…that’s difficult…’ ‘Your truth, Dad’s truth, what you thought, experienced, suffered through … your life…’ ‘But you’ll only have one aspect, a tiny one, and it’s too partial…More than thirty-five years ago…Imagine…We’ve forgotten; it will be vague, approximate, uninteresting, I promise…. Ask your father, you’ll see.” (Mortimer 12) Valle-Gutierrez 84 occurs from a knowledge that is spatially and historically determined. Both texts privilege this type of knowledge as essential, and weave personal and cultural memory, in the lives of the protagonists. These woven histories are formative for the individual characters, but also illustrate the way that female bodies are territorialized for cultural memory (beyond the spaces they inhabit).
Integral to conveying a personal history is anchoring the past in a specific place. In Spirits,
Coty describes the process of “recalling” as a “journey back” to El Barrio and the people who created this space. El Barrio is defined by more than its geographical situation (and the subsequent impacts of the economy on this space). The language in the beginning keys into a constant invocation of “spirits” – a term which perhaps connotes a combination of nostalgia, an affective essence, and voluntary or involuntary memory— that define El Barrio for Coty. (However, in the novel there are appearances of real spirits, that is figures who belong to a different, non-earthly realm, and speak to and through characters (51-54; 190-195)).99 Coty states early on that, “the right music calls the spirits” (8), and a few pages later Abuela’s sadness is attributed to the memories that are brought back by a certain song (11). Later, the choice to look at a picture album (12) represents a conscious effort to recall the past. Moreno Vega’s protagonist senses history in every small gesture, “sometimes the smell of Abuela’s cigars permeates a room, and at other times the air fills with Maderas de Oriente, my mother’s favorite perfume; though gone from the everyday world they protect me still” (13). Thus, memory for Coty is tied to minutiae. It is in these ephemera that her family history lives, and her understanding of a place is inextricable from the people that inhabited these spaces. The clearest example of this is Abuela.
In Spirits Abuela’s apartment appears to be a microcosm of El Barrio, and Abuela herself is the embodiment of El Barrio. In Abuela’s apartment statues of African gods and Native
99 I don’t discuss the appearance of the personified spirits, except referentially at two clear points. My use of the term ‘spirits’ throughout the novel thus refer to a simultaneous historical and affective nature of a place or thing. Valle-Gutierrez 85
Americans inhabit the apartment whose walls are adorned with Christian saints. Religious language paints Abuela’s apartment a church or religious sanctuary in El Barrio:
Abuela ushered me into her apartment. She closed the door, and the flame of a candle danced against the narrow foyer walls. Behind the front door, a red candle for the African warrior gods also stayed lit, protecting her home. On a shelf above the doorway, a glass of water, a piece of small bread next to a red apple, an iron horseshoe, and a small golden cross on a piece of red cloth also kept negative forces at bay. (Moreno Vega 7) Abuela is a spiritual leader, and her apartment is a temple. In the apartment, Spanish and African music fills the air and reminds them of Puerto Rico: “for the residents of 330 East 102nd Street in
East Harlem, the scents drifting from my Abuela’s apartment created a climate all our own” (3).
Abuela thus connects the family to the larger space of El Barrio (through smell), and to a spatial imaginary of Puerto Rico (through music) and Africa (through spirituality). The emphasis on spirituality throughout the novel is anchored in Abuela.
Structurally, the novel begins in Abuela’s apartment because it is tied to Coty’s understanding of herself. Abuela’s own story, which defines the Coty’s sense of self, begins with her grandmother’s (Coty’s great-great-grandmother) story. Matrilineal intergenerationality opens the novel and is the only way that the narrator can invoke the spirit of El Barrio, because female bodies are the sites of cultural heritage. In Spirits, Coty says that her grandmother, “wove [her story] seamlessly so that it became a part of me” (16). Coty thus asserts that her grandmother’s personal history is inextricable from herself, and the history of El Barrio. Fittingly, Abuela’s grandmother who raises her, Maria de la O – characterized as a “true African” – is later the name of one of Coty’s own spirits (194). The novel opens with this personal history of Coty’s grandmother and introduces us to the broader issues that Coty is fighting against: racism (through her African roots), machismo and sexism, language, and the inescapable bonds to family. Abuela, being a black woman, “was prey to the roving eyes of her bosses. If she refused the advances of Valle-Gutierrez 86 her white employer she could be brought to court and accused of being una bruja” (22). While
Coty grows up in El Barrio, and there aren’t the same structural difficulties, she still struggles to negotiate being a dark-skinned, Nuyorican woman. However, the opening frames blackness in a positive light, using phrases like “the color of strong dark wood” (21).100 Her position as a woman in El Barrio shapes the way she experiences blackness. Since Coty’s sense of self is tied to her grandmother, then despite the gender dynamics which complicate her experience of blackness, she still constructs an identity that welcomes her African ancestry.
As Coty relays the story of her grandmother, she intertwines moments of her own memory.
The narrative style itself reinforces the degree to which her history is inextricable from her grandmother’s, as it weaves past (her grandmother’s story) and present (her own). Thus, the brief mention of horses in her grandmother’s story reminds Coty of the time she had seen horses in El
Barrio, “during the summer, when vendors brought kiddie rides to the neighborhood. Parents paid five cents each for their children to ride around the block twice on a rickety horse-drawn carriage with two rows of seats” (20). Memory springs from this one mention, and from there Coty paints a picture of El Barrio which is placed in a particular historical moment (when carriage rides cost five cents). Coty is incapable of separating the layers of her individual history, with the space of
El Barrio, and her grandmother’s own history. The palimpsestic histories reveal the need for the novel as a genre. These texts are functions of memory that offer reflections of the past that serve to bring attention to spaces that are fading or lost. However, the only way these female subjects can incorporate the layers of memory is by ignoring linear time, and single perspective. Their histories cannot be distilled into one perspective. Even if every single text in this thesis is unified by a need for the protagonist to build a cohesive sense of self, Sebbar and Moreno Vega illustrate
100 This contrasts the way Piri’s family shies away from blackness by using the term “Indian” to racialize Piri (145). Valle-Gutierrez 87 that their stories cannot be separated from the past. An order beyond the influence of past generations that is present in the novels in Chapter One, these novels insist that the creation of the self is intergenerational. In Spirits, Coty is unable to separate her identity from the memory of her family and a larger collective history. In Seine, the journeys of Louis and Amel show how knowledge of the past is necessary to access the self in the present.
Because Seine represents individual memory as a project of recovery and reconstitution of collective histories, then the memory of the non-I becomes formative for the conception of the self. Louis’ preferred medium – film – relies on representing monuments and the stories of others.
Louis’ search represents traditional methods of knowledge, by searching through archival evidence. He resolves to go to Africa to retrace Bonaparte’s journey, after his research at L’institut du monde Arabe. Beyond this, he decides to learn Arabic, a language which is constantly figured as granting access to knowledge, in order to be able to finish his research on Bonaparte (63). Amel and Omer’s voyage to Egypt is a return to the motherland to continue the search for the secrets of their language. Omer is writing a story for Amel, “l’histoire d’une fille qui creuse la tombe de ses frères la nuit”(102) – which represents Amel’s search for her own family’s history. All three of the protagonists find themselves in Egypt in a Café on the precipice of a new journey of discovery.
Thus, the novel’s end with all three protagonists in Egypt isn’t a conclusion, rather it marks the beginning of a repetition of the digging and searching which characterized the whole novel.
Beyond the harvesting of information, Louis is also concerned with communicating the narratives and history which he has gathered and recovered. The movie which he develops combines visual testimony with oral testimony. In recreating this history, he is described as filming plaques and monuments, which he has spray-painted to commemorate Algerians (90), thus Valle-Gutierrez 88 constructing a corrected, collective memory. At the same time as Amel and Omer walk throughout
Paris collecting stories.
Unlike Spirits where memory is carried in song, movement, or even smell, Seine emphasizes a collective memory that is spatially defined. Part of Amel’s pilgrimage appears futile
– as the places she seeks have literally been erased from space. Omer criticizes Amel during one such moment – a visit to the site of her mother’s old shantytown, “On cherche ton bidonville sans indice, sans repère, comme ça à l’aveugle…Tu perds ton temps. Tu sais pas travailler. Tu seras jamais journaliste.’ ‘Mais je veux pas être journaliste, surtout pas’” (Sebbar 31).101 Omer’s criticism of Amel’s faulty search process assumes that her search for knowledge is purely geographical or literal. He suggests that she return with her mother to find the physical site of the bidonville. Earlier in the scene Amel had criticized Omer’s focus on news reporting and the descriptions of massacres and where they occurred. Both Omer and Amel are seeking a connection to Algeria. Both their searches seem to relate to space to a degree. However, while Omer reads about the present in newspapers, Amel’s cannot ever physically return to her mother’s past, which is what she ultimately seeks. Her matter-of-fact retort, that she doesn’t want to be a journalist, emphasizes that
Omer is missing the point of her journey. She isn’t seeking pure knowledge for an academic purpose, rather she is travelling through these spaces to trigger a memory of the past that her mother will not willingly offer. Crucially, all but two scenes where Amel and Omer are identified in the chapter title end with the invocation of Amel’s mother, “Amel entend sa mère,”102 (Sebbar
31) or some variation thereof. Thus, Amel’s pilgrimmage is successful in that through it she recalls memories of her mother, or her mother’s story from Louis’ film. In this way, her physical journey
101 “We’re looking for your shantytown without a clue, without a signpost, just like that, blindly…You’re wasting your time. You don’t know how to operate. You’ll never be a journalist.’ ‘But I don’t want to be a journalist, I definitely do not’” (Mortimer 26). 102 “Amel hear’s her mother’s voice” (Mortimer 26). Valle-Gutierrez 89 across space is the invocation of the past that she seeks. Sebbar affirms this process by structurally following the scenes between Amel and Omer with memories of the mother on the events leading up to October 17, 1961. Amel’s journey of recollection takes her and Omer all throughout Paris, including some of the most prominent features of the Parisian cityscape.
Amel and Omer call attention to the monuments of memory that are often ignored and transform sites of tourism into symbols of Algerian remembrance. One of Paris’ most recognizable monuments, l’Obélisque at Place de la Concorde is shown to be something that was stolen from their ancestors. Omer says, “Vous avez pillé l’Egypte, Bonaparte le premier et vous êtes fiers”
(Sebbar 64).103.The concept of pillaging other lands’ treasures poses another problem between memory and knowledge, as these artifacts often go to museums for the purpose of conveying knowledge to strangers. Omer’s remark, “je suis pas un touriste” (Sebbar 64), 104 underscores the way that this pillaging serves a voyeuristic pleasure of people who have no connection to the object that they are seeing. L’Obélisque, which could be replicated elsewhere in Paris, by Egyptians, and be thus construed as a translation and site of memory, is instead an object which is fetishized because its use-value has been abnegated.
Artistic media that is defined by female presence connects art and memory in both texts.
As the novel moves to a close there are hints of El Barrio’s death, the passing of its heyday (a fate that is cemented with Abuela’s death), as well as a gesture towards new border-crossing embodied in the younger generation through the medium of music. On her way to see Celia Cruz perform,
Coty says, “the younger generation was beginning to cross the boundaries, My brother and his friends often went to the Savoy, the Audobon Ballroom, and the Apollo Theater to catch their favorite artists, whether African-American, Puerto Rican or Cuban” (240). Notice the attention to
103 “You sacked Egypt, first Bonaparte did, and you’re proud” (Mortimer 63). 104 “I’m not a tourist” (Mortimer 63). Valle-Gutierrez 90 places, as underscoring a deeper relationship between culture and artistic production. In Spirits, music connects spirituality, Africaness, Puerto Ricanness, femininity, and the body in movement.
Music empowers women by representing them holistically, rather than fetishized objects. Celia
Cruz is described as a high priestess – once again using spiritual language to convey respect.
However, Celia Cruz names certain African gods during her performance:
This mention of the divinities that lived in my Abuela’s house startled me. The repertoire honored those warrior spirits that had traveled from Africa to Harlem. I couldn’t wait to tell Abuela that the gods that she worshipped were also at the Apollo. (242) The end of the novel affirms the place of art and the female imaginary as a space of cultural and generational intersection which affirms female power in a new social paradigm. Unlike most of the text, where Coty struggles with the double standards of race and gender, Celia is shown as a religious figure, and also described as “coquettish” (243), suggesting a possible convergence between these different standards for women. In Seine, media is used quite differently.The primary artistic media presence in the novel is Louis’ film. The voice of Amel’s mother seems to comprise the largest part of his film beyond the documenting of different monuments. However, while
Spirits focuses on media in a constructive or performative way, Seine emphasizes the instructive capacity of media. From the beginning of the novel, Louis’ film is a way that the protagonists learn about October 17, as well a way for other people to learn the truth. Media is thus a central way that these texts insist on intergenerationality in one present moment – a song or a film – however, this still does not escape the reliance on women and female bodies for cultural memory and historical instruction.
Conclusion
Both novels assert the need for a memory that is accessible. Memory is embedded in cultural monuments, whether it be music, photography, film, or actual monuments and statues. Valle-Gutierrez 91
The past needs to be accessed by these characters to make sense of their subjectivity in context of violent and difficult pasts. Thus, rather than focusing on belonging or not belonging in their community (like the texts in Chapter One texts) these novels concern themselves with a continuity between the ancestral past and the current moment, and these intergenerational interactions, as the primary way that defines how the protagonists construct their self-identity.
Valle-Gutierrez 92
Conclusion This thesis has examined some foundational themes that arise in Beur and Nuyorican literature, two bodies of work that have been marginalized in broader literary and historical canons.
Understanding these experiences is increasingly relevant given demographic trends and the rise of xenophobic political ideologies. The two body chapters in this thesis lay out frameworks for thinking about these bodies of literature comparatively to illustrate ends and points of convergence between the experiences of Beurs and Nuyoricans, two groups that share similar projects of illuminating the liminal positions which they are forced to inhabit.
The first chapter looked at two male authored texts, Down These Mean Streets and Le Gone du Chaâba, and examined the way they use the bildungsroman genre to emphasize individual identity construction beyond the family. Looking at certain axes of comparison, such as language and the relationship between the marginalized individual and society, we see how these texts open up conversations about making and negotiating spaces for the self. These texts both presented boundaries to the creation of these identities: namely, race and performance. While the novels offer versions of “success,” either through passing or identity performance, they mark the costs at which this success may arrive. The novels are thus useful foundations for examining the ways that each literary body (that is Beur or Nuyorican literature) affirms or departs from the visions these authors establish. However, when placed together, the texts in this chapter emphasize the instability of the categories that are use to define subjects.
The female authored texts considered in Chapter Two, La Seine était rouge and When
Spirits Dance Mambo, emphasized the importance of preserving the motherland in the homeland.
I argue that this is primarily accomplished, in these two texts, by territorializing the female body.
The journey for knowledge and memory is tightly woven with themes of intergenerationality and erasure of history in these texts. Thus, these individual novels themselves become corrective, or Valle-Gutierrez 93 reparative palimpsests of lost narratives. This sense of recovery is tied with a notion of building and newness. The two texts assert the unique position of this generation as one that bridges worlds and experiences. This insistence on interconnection across space and time, which marks the closing passages of each text, is a gesture towards a trend of integration and solidarity that is possible by creating connections between people and spaces.
While the texts in my thesis are divided by gender, both of author and protagonist, the divisions throughout minority and migrant literatures is not so clearly demarcated. Many women writers use bildungsroman structures to frame their protagonists’ psychosocial development.
Nuyorican and Beur literatures are complex bodies of work, however the themes discussed in this thesis continue to be pertinent in contemporary texts within their respective genres.105
The novels that I’ve worked with in this thesis are diverse, multifaceted and can be approached from various disciplines and perspectives. They lend themselves well to ethnic studies, linguistics and sociology, as well as literary analysis. There can be arguments for or against the inclusion of these books in any category, including the ones I have placed them in throughout this thesis. Each book has been construed as foundational within the genres I placed them, yet several of the authors themselves have questioned their aptness within these very categories.
These kaleidoscopic axes of analysis are one of the benefits of approaching these texts within a comparative literature thesis. Within this flexible framework these texts are free to move beyond a single category and their idiosyncrasies nuance our understanding of the way they operate. While part of the energy and salience of these texts is due to their close relationship with the authors, and with realities and experiences that are impacting the United States and France in
105 Two novels, referenced throughout this thesis, Bodega Dreams and Le thé au harem d’Archi Ahmed, are two relatively recent texts that rely on an understanding of the issues discussed in this thesis, racism, memory, and language, to foreground how they address contemporary issues of poverty, urban blight, etc. Valle-Gutierrez 94 the contemporary moment, studying them within a comparative literature framework allows us to see a multitude of perspectives that go beyond the page.
In my mind, this is one way to do justice to these works, whether one categorizes them as fiction, or autobiography, or a combination of both. The analysis of these works within a comparative framework has allowed their primary arguments to be made clear, without forcing the texts into boxes which would subvert the political project of the novels themselves. The subjectivities I have studied through the four novels share many characteristics. These shared elements are perhaps surprising and serve to unify groups of people who are seldom placed together. However, it is also clear that while much is gained by reading Sebbar and Moreno Vega together, or Thomas and Begag, most readers aren’t approaching the individual in this way. When we read these texts together, and in this interdisciplinary fashion, the texts can blossom. We see, thus, the struggle to create a unified self on one level, and then a second, meta-level which suggests that the creation of this self would be a fiction. That the selves created are fictions doesn’t mean that they have any less real impact on the lives that are narrated. Further, the act of writing itself seems to be an additional layer where these authors try to negotiate what a Beur or Nuyorican is, or what Beur and Nuyorican writing is, beyond the issues that their texts focus on.
This thesis focused on Beur and Nuyorican literatures at their genesis, before the terms themselves existed. Their inclusion in certain genres outside their niches is perhaps as important as my work here, where I look at the foundational components of these works as representative of their genres. I have suggested that there are certain elements that are essential to understanding these bodies of literature and focused on the way that space is an inexorable force in shaping the identities of these characters (and thus the authors themselves). However, beyond the role of space, each book emphasizes the role of language for the constitution of identities. My focus was on how Valle-Gutierrez 95 these literatures insist on a formation of the self through these different elements. I looked at specific examples to elucidate experiences that themselves are shared. However, it is the affective scope of these texts, the need or desire to belong and understand, that truly transcends borders. Valle-Gutierrez 96
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