Narratives of Conflict and the Emergence of Community:

Recognition, Responsibility, Reconfiguration

By

Maya S. Anbar Aghasi

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

(Comparative Literature)

at the

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON

2012

Date of final oral examination: 05/22/12

The dissertation is approved by the following members of the Final Oral Committee: Mary N. Layoun, Professor, Department of Comparative Literature Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa Santos, Professor, Department of Comparative Literature Hans Adler, Professor, Departments of Comparative Literature and German Rachel Brenner, Professor, Department of Hebrew and Semitic Studies, Honorary Affiliate, Department of Comparative Literature Myra Marx Ferree, Professor, Sociology

© Copyright by Maya S. Anbar Aghasi 2012 All Rights Reserved

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For my mother,

whose love for others, ever open door, and spirit for life taught me

what it is to be human

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ...... iii Introduction ...... 1 Chapter One: Recognition ...... 20 Invisible Man: Recognition of the Self in the Uncanny ...... 20 Al-mutashāʻel: The Paradox of Disappearance, the Paradox of the Addressee ...... 51 Chapter Two: Responsibility ...... 79 Heremakhonon: Failed Quest for the Self, Failed Responsibility ...... 82 Palestine: “Shake hands!” Responsibility as an Agreement of Recognition ...... 109 Chapter Three: Reconfiguration ...... 146 Sitt Marie Rose: “We first Conquer and Defeat. Later We Talk.” Failed Communication, Failed Community ...... 148 The Madonna of Excelsior: Creative Distortions, Community Reconfigured ...... 171 Conclusions ...... 202 Bibliography ...... 206

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Acknowledgements

Writing is a very contradictory experience: one needs to be in complete isolation to remain focused and get words on a page, but at the same time, ideas can only come from constant interaction with people. For this reason, I would like to thank the very important people who were a part of my life in the past few years, without whom writing this dissertation would not have been possible.

First and foremost, I would like to thank my mother Hala, father Samir, sister Laila, and brother Joe. Your constant encouragement, belief in my potential, and many personal sacrifices allowed me to formally pursue my love for literature, philosophy, and the understanding of other peoples and cultures in the very distant place of Madison, Wisconsin. To you, I am forever grateful and indebted. I would also like to thank my aunt Samira Aghacy. You have been invaluable support throughout my undergraduate and graduate learning. You took the time to read every word I wrote, gave me feedback on my work, and helped me improve my writing and refine the ideas I struggled with over the past seven years in graduate school.

To the first teacher I encountered in Wisconsin, Professor Mary N. Layoun: words will always fail to express the gratitude I have for all you taught me. Thank you for opening my eyes when I first arrived in Madison in 2005, young and optimistic. Thank you for teaching me how to read critically, to understand the cruelty of politics, but to also appreciate the endless beauty of the world. Thank you for exposing me to literatures in many, many languages, and for sharing meals, deserts, and endless, engaging and fascinating conversations. I am humbled by your endless encouragement and advocacy for my work, and can only hope to become as wonderful a scholar, researcher, teacher, adviser, friend, and human being as you are.

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Professor Irene Santos, thank you for writing in support of my work, for patiently reading numerous drafts of my dissertation, and for encouraging me to pursue my ideas in moments of doubt. Professor Rachel Brenner, thank you for drawing my attention to the politics of our profession, and for being my intellectual liaison to a culture whose people and territory I can only access through books and conversation. I would also like to extend many thanks to

Professor Hans Adler, whose support for my work began in the very early years of my graduate career and continues today. Thank you for never holding back on criticism, and for making me a better scholar as a result.

I am immensely grateful to directors of the University of Wisconsin- Madison’s Sawyer

Seminar at the Center for Research on Gender and Women, Professors Aili Mari Tripp and Myra

Marx Ferree. Without your support, and the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon

Foundation, which funded me as the humanities dissertation fellow Sawyer Seminar, I would not have been able to complete the dissertation. During the course of the year-long Sawyer Seminar, you not only provided me with a broad, interdisciplinary context to situate my project, but you also recognized the potential of my work in its early stages and welcomed me into a diverse, interdisciplinary, intellectual community, without which I would not have been able to complete my project.

I am grateful to my intelligent peers in the Department of Comparative Literature at the

University of Wisconsin-Madison, for their learned conversations and discussions, their intellectual insight, and their diverse curiosities that enriched my own learning; the department administrator Diane Bollant, for her impeccable organization and patience; the UW Law Library, for providing me with part-time employment in harder times; and the wonderful people at

Villari’s Martial Arts Centers in Madison, for the mind cannot be strong if the body is weak.

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To the amazing woman who challenged me intellectually whilst we cooked together, who played with etymologies with me over jogs by the lake, who I danced with to take a break from grading, and whose shoulders I cried on when life did not go as planned: Emily Brown, Mary

Claypool, and Jennifer Wacek. You gave me the gifts of laughter, love, joy, and friendship, and never cease to remind me of the important things in life. My Madison sisters, I am so blessed to have met you, and am forever indebted to all you gave and continue to give me.

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Introduction

In Ralph Ellison’s 1947 novel Invisible Man, the narrator writes

“I am one of the most irresponsible beings that ever lived. Irresponsibility is part of my

invisibility; any way you face it, it is a denial. But to whom can I be responsible, and why

would I be, when you refuse to see me? And wait until I reveal how truly irresponsible I

am. Responsibility rests upon recognition and recognition is a form of agreement [...]. All

dreamers and sleepwalkers must pay the price, and even the invisible victim is

responsible for the fate of all. But I shirked that responsibility. I became too snarled in the

incompatible notions that buzzed within my brain. I was a coward...” (14).

In this excerpt, the narrator raises difficult questions regarding responsibility. He admits that responsibility is demanding as he “shirks” his, but that everyone pays the price of shirking responsibility. Responsibility is difficult for him in particular because when it comes to and for whom he is responsible, he feels like perhaps he is justified in shirking responsibility, especially regarding those who do not “see” him, who fail to acknowledge him as an equal human being.

The narrator of Invisible Man is an African American man living in the U.S. in the 1940s.

In the novel, he moves from the Southern United States to New York City and in the process experiences the explicit and physically violent racism of the South, and the covert, demeaning and dehumanizing version in the North. He finds that in both places, he is deprived of personal agency, his voice unheard, and his existence reduced to being a representative for his “race”. In the South, he is told what to do and is violently beaten when he does not; in the North, he is a token representative, coaxed into believing what he does is his choice, but is barred from opportunity if he does not comply with the status quo. His question is therefore well taken, why

2 should he be responsible, especially to those who render him invisible, when he himself is not seen, or recognized?

It is that difficult question of responsibility in which “Narratives of Conflict and the

Emergence of Community” is grounded, asking, to whom is one responsible? For whom? Who is responsible? Is responsibility different for invisible victims? For those in power? How so?

Taking my cue from the narrator of Invisible Man and his assertion that “responsibility rests upon recognition and recognition is a form of agreement,” the project begins not with responsibility, but recognition. What does the narrator of Invisible Man mean by recognition?

What is the form of agreement that recognition takes? These questions are taken up in chapter one in an exploration of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1947) and Emile Habibi’s Al-mutashāʻel

(1974). The second chapter asks how responsibility depends on agreement, and, what responsibility would look like in a comparison of Maryse Condé’s Heremakhonon (1975) and

Joe Sacco’s Palestine (1993-5). The third chapter takes a turn to rethink configurations of community given recognition and responsibility. Thus, it looks at literary renditions of social structure to explore a reconfiguration of community that could accommodate difficult responsibility in Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie Rose (1977) and Zakes Mda’s The Madonna of

Excelsior (2005).

The narrator of Invisible Man is rendered invisible because of visible characteristics that mark him racially and that become both his political and social identity. In all the narratives under study, ways of rendering others invisible have to do with outlining the boundaries of identity groups based on race, ethnicity, religion, nationality. The categorization is both social and political with material, violent effects on those “invisible victims” who do not conform to, or

3 fit the criteria of the projected image of the identity group. In all the narratives, these categories of difference are gendered, with the projected image of the identity group gendered male, that is, strong, powerful, and having agency, and the invisible victims, effeminate, puerile, weak, and sometimes not even granted the privilege of being human.1

In times of conflict, the violence the invisible victims have to endure is heightened because it is during these times that the boundaries that outline the identity of groups are challenged and the group perceived to be under threat. The war veteran who returns from serving in France during World War I signals the conflict in Invisible Man. During the war, he was a successful surgeon, but upon returning to the U.S., he is prohibited from practicing his profession because of his race (Ellison, Invisible Man, 93).2 The injustices of segregation and the hypocrisy of society become instigators of conflict, notably in the riots that take place in the novel. In Al- mutashāʻel, the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948 is the primary event that instigates conflict in the novel. There were confrontations at all levels of society to ensure the tripartite territory/nation/state,3 and so as a result, the Jewish state as Jewish refused Palestinians equal citizenship, and they were forced out of their homes by the state authorities. Heremakhonon is set in the 1960s during the confrontations between students and teachers against the authoritarian

1 V. Spike Peterson compellingly argues: “identity groups (whether based on race/ethnicity, religion, or nationality) that have been most closely associated with (state-centric) political power have also been based on (heterosexist) gender inequality” (38). See below. See also S. Aghacy’s Masculine Identity, which shows how this gendering works in the Arab world since 1967.

2 See Du Bois, “Returning Soldiers,” where he says, “we fought gladly and to the last drop of blood; for America and her highest ideals […] for the America that represents and gloats in lynching, disenfranchisement, caste, brutality, and devilish insult” (13).

3 This trinity I borrow from Agamben, although I reorder the terms to show how territory is used to justify the existence of a unified nation, which is consolidated by a sovereign state on that territory. “[N]ation- states must find the courage to call into question the very principle of nativity and the trinity state/nation/territory which is based on it” (Agamben 118).

4 government in Guinea. The government had been revolutionary in that it succeeded in shaking

French colonialism, but after the acquisition of independent statehood, differing conceptions of the identity of the nation emerged. The government, though, had its own conception of the national identity, and went about enforcing it primarily through education and the performative arts. Conflict erupted especially as government officials became more authoritative, inflexible, and corrupt. Palestine covers the conflict in the immediate aftermath of the first Palestinian

Intifada, or uprising (1987-1990). It was a spontaneous and organic resistance to Israeli occupation that emerged from within the occupied territories, and it provoked harsh backlash from the Israeli military. Sitt Marie Rose is set in the first couple of years of the Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990. A group of hooded gunmen affiliated with the Lebanese Phalange party shot down Palestinian civilians on a bus in Lebanon to signal that these predominantly Muslim foreigners are unwelcome in this Christian state. Given internal tensions amongst differing religious denominations, and regional tensions, particularly the Israel-Palestine conflict, war erupted, and lasted over fifteen years. Finally, The Madonna of Excelsior spans over forty years, narrating the story of a small town named Excelsior during and through the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa.

In each of the narratives, the question of who is a member of the nation or identity group, and who is a foreigner or outsider takes on increased importance, particularly as conflicts erupt because differing identity groups are pitted against one another. Whether it is the woman from

Guadeloupe who refuses to aid the victims of the conflict because considers herself a foreigner, and as such, not involved in the local conflict, or whether it is the Christian woman in Beirut who defies her community’s vision of Lebanon by participating in the Palestinian resistance movement, each narrative represents the problems that arise from exclusionary politics of

5 identity. At the same time, conflict also shows how the status quo is no longer sustainable, forcing people to rethink social organization across categories of identity. As one character in the novel Sitt Marie Rose admits,

« Oui ; il a fallu presque un an de guerre civile, une centaine de morts par jour dans

Beyrouth, un renversement de la vielle alliance entre le ciel et la terre, pour que je

conçoive qu’une femme puisse être un interlocuteur valable, une alliée ou une ennemie.

Mais je suis l’un des rares à l’admettre » (43).

[Yes, it’s taken nearly a year of civil war, hundreds of dead everyday in Beirut, and a

reversal of the old alliance between heaven and earth, for me to conceive that a woman

can be a worthy interlocutor, ally, or enemy. But I am one of the few that would admit it].

(Adnan 43)

Recognition, Responsibility, Reconfiguration

Chapter One: Recognition

In Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler paraphrases Michel Foucault’s notion of the “regime of truth”: “the regime of truth offers a framework for the scene of recognition, delineating who will qualify as a subject of recognition and offering available norms for the act of recognition” (22). If this regime of truth produces categories such as identity, race, or national community, it also produces systems that legitimate these categories as truth, naturalizing them, and making them unquestionable. These systems include anything from religious institutions, governmental policies, and laws, to social behaviors and norms, systems of education, museums, and increasingly, the media. If, therefore, these systems say, for instance, that Palestinians do not

6 exist (Sacco iii, “Introduction” by Said), that lighter skin is beautiful (as with the skin lightening creams used in The Madonna of Excelsior), that women must be controlled in order to protect the purity and sanctity of the nation (as in Sitt Marie Rose), then this becomes truth. According to

Foucault, “‘truth’ is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it,” (“Truth and Power” 74); that is, the regime not only produces these truths, but produces systems that adhere to it and re-produce its truths. In Gender Trouble, Butler asserts that “[t]he juridical structures of language and politics constitute the contemporary field of power; hence, there is no position outside this field but only a critical genealogy of its own legitimating practices” (location 396). Given the structures of politics, if they organize society into separate communities of birth, then the terms of this system do not provide a way for seeing or recognizing peoples outside of these categories, creating blindness. Similarly, the structures of language are limited and incapable of articulating that which is beyond them (such as music, rhythm, or images).4 Because the regime of truth creates systems of power that sustain it, it is not static, and so even though the scene of recognition lacks the terms for recognition, the framework of the scene of recognition is not deterministic: “we are not deterministically decided by norms although they do provide the framework and the point of reference for any set of decisions we subsequently make;” therefore, “norms that govern recognition are [and should be] challenged and transformed” (Butler, Giving an Account 22). But, if the norms that govern recognition need to be challenged, the regime of truth through which they are articulated as well as their legitimating practices must also be critiqued.

4 The idea is that nothing can exist outside of this law, and so, for music or images to enter into language, something is lost because of the very structure of linguistic expression. For Butler, people who dress in drag expose the limits of these structures, and she shows that as soon as they enter into language, they must accommodate to its laws that are “structured by the paternal law and its mechanisms of differentiation,” which is in the dichotomy of male-female.

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The comparison of Invisible Man and Al-mutashāʻel in the first chapter offers insights into the way in which the regime of truth works by highlighting the paradoxes and contradictions that exist within the terms of the regime of truth. Even though the invisible man says, “even the invisible victim is responsible for the fate of all,” he does not at all mean that responsibility lays solely on the shoulders of the invisible. Their responsibility lies in the fact that their positioning with respect to the “regime of truth” allows them to experience and therefore perceive the process of being rendered invisible, the “legitimating practices,” and both Invisible Man and Al- mutashāʻel begin by highlighting these paradoxes. The first paradox is the paradox of the invisibility of the protagonists of each novel: “I say all this to assure you that it is incorrect to assume that, because I’m invisible and live in a hole, I am dead. I am neither dead nor in a state

I tell] ”ابلغ عني اعجب ما وقع النسان … فقد اختفيت. ولكنني لم امت“ ;(of suspended animation” (Ellison 6 you the strangest thing to ever befall man happened to me...I disappeared. But I did not die]

(Habibi 13). Because of the invisible man’s “race,” markedly visual characteristics, and the history of slavery associated with that racial identity, he is rendered invisible; because the protagonist of Al-mutashāʻel is Palestinian/not Jewish/Arab, he is rendered absent from the

Israeli state. In both cases, “invisibility” and “disappearance” come in various forms, ensuring the disappearance of individuals of these “identity” groups—physically and culturally. In both novels, the protagonists undergo violence, physical expulsion, and torture; both protagonist- narrators are officially deprived of a voice to speak of their presence and express their experiences; in both novels, the narrators face dispossession of property, territory, citizenship, education, language, and artistic expression. The terms of regime of the truth legitimize this dispossession. Both novels narrate against the terms of those regimes of truth.

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In Invisible Man, the productive power of these systems of truth can be seen in the way that the narrator fails to recognize himself. The narrator says that being invisible did not only determine how people failed to see him, but also how they made him fail to see himself. He says that when you yourself are invisible, “you often doubt if you really exist” (Ellison 4). Because of that doubt, one begins to treat oneself as though one is in fact invisible, being subject of and becoming subject to that regime of truth that determines the terms of recognition. This is what

W. E. B Du Bois calls double consciousness in The Souls of Black Folk:

[T]he Negro is sort of a seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second sight in this

American world,—a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him

see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this

double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of

others… (3)

One may struggle in a loud and vociferous fight for recognition, but the protagonist of the novel finds that, sometimes, that is not the most effective way of attaining recognition: “You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you’re part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them recognize you. And alas, it’s seldom successful” (4). In order then to achieve recognition, the narrator of Invisible Man must first find a way to see himself. It takes him the full length of narrating his story to discover his own invisibility. Invisible Man is about the process of the protagonist-narrator’s recognition of his own invisibility, which actually emerges as a result of his encounters with white women in particular. Only when he begins to identify with a group of people the regime of truth deems radically different from him—in terms of race and sex—does he discover the contradictions inherent in his society. In living by the terms of this regime of

9 truth that render him invisible also render him a dead automaton. When his double consciousness becomes apparent to him, and when he sees that he looks at himself through a very particular set of “blind” eyes, he comes alive: “I did not become alive until I discovered by invisibility” (7).

He wages his war for recognition, not by striking out with his fists or cursing and swearing, “I learned in this time though that it is possible to carry on a fight against them without their realizing it” (5). His fight is a different kind, having to do with narrative, music, and visual rhythm. The autobiography of the narrator (not Ellison) of his own discovery of his invisibility and his subsequent coming to life reveals that there are possibilities for recognition within the regime of truth. As such, he demands recognition from those who refuse to see him in his narrative and direct address. Knowing now that it is not a closed system, and it is not without its contradictions and paradoxes, he provocatively challenges his narratee to recognize them as well.

The question remains, though, whether the narratee recognizes the demand and whether he responds to it.

In Al-mutashāʻel, the narrative similarly demands recognition from its numerous narratees, and like Invisible Man, ends with a question, suggesting that the narratee of the narrative will not recognize the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in the reality dictated by the regime of truth. Recognition in Al-mutashāʻel is not meant to take place in the protagonist or the narrator, but in the addressee. The protagonist already recognizes his invisibility, and is overwhelmed by the impending abyss into which he is condemned to disappear. The narrator uses irony and biting humor to describe his painful reality, but at the same time, reverses this humor to make fun out of his blind narratee. In the direct address, the narrator is not only calling for the recognition of his presence, but also for the addressee to recognize that it is he who is in fact being addressed. The fact that the narrative ends with an open question implies that the

10 narratee fails to recognize himself as the addressee. Given the tone of the narrative, the novel suggests that the narratee, who is in a position of power, dictating the terms for recognition from above, is actually a fool because in spite of his because he fails to recognize himself as the addressee of the narrator’s story, failing to recognize the contradictions inherent in the system.

A close reading of narratological components of both novels—particularly the positions of narrator, narratee, and implied reader—shows how the narrators call for recognition from those who do not experience the paradox of invisibility. The narratees of each novel are the

“you” that each narrator explicitly addresses, and in each novel, it is also the position that does not recognize the call for recognition at the end of each narrative. The narrator is the position of the voice telling the story, and in both cases, it is an explicitly declared “I”.5

Although Invisible Man and Al-mutashāʻel relate highly individualized stories through the first person narrators, responsibility cannot exist without the communal. This communal dimension is what is being addressed when the invisible man says that recognition is a form of agreement. But, before one can get to the communal, one must first get to agreement. How recognition is a form of agreement is explored in chapter two, particularly in questioning whether the protagonists of the narratives under study recognize themselves in an address, and how they respond to that call.

5 In Story and Discourse, Seymour Chatman outlines these different positions produced by the narrative. There is the implied author, who is not the real authors Ralph Ellison and Emile Habibi, but: the principle that invented the narrator, along with everything else in the narrative, that stacked the cards in this particular way, had things happen to these characters, in these words or images. Unlike the narrator, the implied author can tell us nothing. He, or better, it has no voice, no direct means of communicating. It instructs us silently, through the design of the whole, with all the voices, by all the means it has chosen to let us learn. (148) The implied reader is also produced by the narrative, but is the position of someone who understands all the references the narrator and narrative make. This position is the position of the ideal reader. In both Invisible Man and Al-mutashāʻel, the addressees are not at all ideal readers, but rather, the fool. One could say that these foolish addressees exist as a warning for the implied reader not to occupy their position as fools.

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Chapter Two: Responsibility

In chapter one, the call for recognition is not simply a matter of recognizing those who have been rendered invisible or made to disappear; recognition is also recognizing oneself as the implied addressee of the narrative, identifying with a positioning in relation the invisible. This is difficult because systems of power make it so that the addressee does not consider his or herself to occupy that position. Recognition as identification with the “you” risks a change in one’s own perception of his or her self, to “plunge out” (to use the invisible man’s words, Ellison 438) of what they know about themselves, and come face to face with a moment of absolute uncertainty, not only of who they are, but how to respond to that unfamiliar self with whom they are faced.

The two narratives compared in the second chapter explore the actions of the protagonists of Heremakhonon (1975) by Maryse Condé and the graphic narrative Palestine (1993-5) by Joe

Sacco. If responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition a form of agreement, chapter two explores what agreement looks like. In both narratives, the protagonists are privileged foreigners who arrive in countries in the midst of conflict, each with their own agenda. Therefore, as foreigners, the question of responsibility becomes more urgent: does their foreignness absolve them of responsibility?

In Heremakhonon, the protagonist claims to be in Africa to “find her self.” She considers herself a black woman who is returning to Africa to find her roots. Even though she travels spatially, she expects this geographical relocation to also take her back in time, where she can trace her heritage and solve what she calls her “identity problem”. As a result, while she is in

Guinea, she resists getting involved with the locals she meets. When she arrives, she is greeted as a “sister,” and told she is “at home” in this foreign country, but she resists this appellation, preferring to remain “objective,” uninvolved, and focused on her search for herself.

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While the component of visuality is crucial in chapter one (it is about visibility and disappearance after all), visuality is central in chapter two of “Narratives of Conflict and the

Emergence of Community” because of the way visual markers are mistaken for identity. In

Heremakhonon, the narrator is obsessed with what she looks like as she believes it is a marker of her racial identity. To her surprise and even dismay, she finds in her worldly travels that her so- called identity is precarious when it is based solely on what she looks like. In the Caribbean, her skin color is perceived differently than the way it is perceived in Paris and then again in West

Africa. She is a “négresse rouge” in the Caribbean [literally, a red, black woman] (33), a

“négresse” in France, and a black but non-African woman in Africa, rendering moot any search for an identity that is marked by visually observable characteristics. She nonetheless spends the entire novel trying to find her “self,” only to find that her so-called identity is always impressed by others with whom she does not identify. She vaguely recognizes this at the end of the novel as she senses a causal relationship between herself and the suffering of others. Calling herself a

“false sister,” implying that she has recognized the appellation “sister” but failed to respond to it, at the end of the novel, she finds herself standing face to face with this false sister, responsible for not only the suffering but the death of the very people who greeted her as a sister, and welcomed her to her “home”. Unable to face this unfamiliar self, she flees from Africa to the metropolis Paris. Her running away indicates that she failed to recognize herself in the address, failing in her responsibility.

In Palestine, responsibility is premised on two questions the protagonist is asked repeatedly while in Palestine: given what you have seen, will you tell about what is happening here? And, how would you feel if this were done to you? The protagonist gets asked these questions precisely because he is a foreigner in the hopes that he will alert the world to the

13 suffering he witnesses in Palestine, which would consequently help to alleviate it. He claims that he has come to Palestine to see for himself what is going on, but he recognizes that seeing is always distorted (by the terms for seeing as outlined by the regime of truth). In the graphic narrative, the protagonist is asked to report what he has seen, raising the stakes of looking, but he is depicted wearing opaque glasses, his eyes and presumably his vision both obscured by the opacity of his eyeglass lenses. This visual characteristic serves to emphasize the ways in which his positioning makes him blind to many things that happen before his eyes but that he may not register. But, in doing so, the narrative powerfully suggests through the juxtaposition of image and language that in spite of blindness, in spite of privilege and positioning, in spite of the institutions that produce truth, he is still responsible.

The narrator does this through the narrative technique of focalization. According Mieke

Bal in Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, focalization is the various nuanced factors that determine a vision, which is what is seen with the eye along with what is narrated about what is seen. The object of the eye along with the factors that go into how the object exists in narrative, together, make up a vision. Focalization can never be what is “objectively” perceived by the ocular senses:

Perception depends on so many factors that striving for objectivity is pointless. To

mention only a few factors: one’s position with respect to the perceived object, the fall of

the light, the distance, previous knowledge, psychological attitude towards the object; all

this and more affects the picture one forms and passes on to others… Focalization is,

then, the relation between the vision and that which is ‘seen,’ perceived (142).

In this narrative, responsibility depends on whether the protagonist responds to the questions the

Palestinians ask him, which have to do with looking and telling, the vision he is to create of what

14 is going on in Palestine. In the narrative, the protagonist not only fulfills his part of the agreement by telling about what he has seen, but through narrative focalization, the narrator thematizes the process of creating a vision. Through this thematization, the narrator creates a persona the narratee could potentially identify with, implicating him or her in the suffering of

Palestinians. The question that remains open at the end of that narrative is whether the narratee will recognize that implicit relationship, enter into an agreement with Palestinians, and, like Joe, tell of what he or she has seen in the visual narrative—in the hope of alleviating suffering.

Chapter Three: Reconfiguration

In the final chapter of “Narratives of Conflict and the Emergence of Community,” the communal becomes central in order to explore the workings of recognition and responsibility on a collective—rather than individual—level. According to Jean-Luc Nancy in The Inoperative

Community, community is not communion in the sense of a simple association of forces, needs, or a submission of people to an enterprise; rather, it is “identity by a plurality wherein each member identifies himself only through a supplementary mediation of his identification with the living body of the community” (Nancy 9). Chapter one shows the violent consequences of community as communion, particularly in the way it renders invisible those who do not partake in the communion. Nancy continues to argue that community is the interruption of the self and the recognition that the self can only emerge through others (19). The emergence of the self through others is developed in chapter two as agreement and responsibility. The analyses of the narratives in the first two chapters show that community cannot be sustained when it is conceived of as a community of sameness or so-called identity. But, how, then, does one break out of this notion of community? To begin, then, one must explore the structure of society; given

15 recognition and responsibility, literary renditions of the structures of society are therefore explored in this final chapter in order to rethink community. The first four narratives under study are narrated by single narrators, making the processes of recognition and responsibility a function of the individual. While this has been a productive way to think about these two processes, particularly as they need to start at the individual level, keeping the focus on the individual limits the potentials of recognition and responsibility, especially when it comes to reconfiguring community. Indeed, each of the four narratives end without closure, demonstrating the “dead end” a focus on the individual brings: Invisible Man and the Pessoptimist both end with unanswered questions; in Heremakhonon, the individual narrator returns to the metropolis

Paris, but never actually arrives within the scope of the narrative; and in Palestine, the narrative ends with the main character Joe getting lost in the labyrinth of Gaza without ever leaving in the space of the plot. In order to emerge from this impasse, recognition and responsibility must be considered on a collective, plural level.

For this reason, the texts under study in “Reconfiguration” make the collective the formal center of the narrative; that is, the narrators of each of the texts are multiple—albeit in different ways—making visions of alternatives community emerge as collective and inclusive. In Sitt

Marie Rose by Etel Adnan, multiple narrators tell the story of the same events; in The Madonna of Excelsior by Zakes Mda, the narrator is a collective “we” that subversively speaks on behalf of all who are part of the town of Excelsior. This narrative technique shifts the focus away from the individual revealing how internally, community is heterogeneous, urging the question of community to no longer be about “what” constitutes the community.

Moreover, mothers figure centrally in each text. Feminist scholarship on the nation has argued that, to borrow from Anne McClintock, “nations have historically amounted to the

16 sanctioned institutionalization of gender difference” (89). Not only that, but the central figure for national unity has been the family. Gender difference also become the basis for social hierarchies, and

male-male rape exemplifies heterosexism’s objectification of the feminine even though

no females are involved. Stated differently, the willingness/desire to rape is not

established by the presence of a [] penis but by the internalization of a

masculinist/heterosexist identity that promotes aggressive male penetration as an

expression of sexuality, power, and dominance. (Peterson 40-1)

The two novels under study here make women the central event of each of the stories, which highlights the gendered nature of community constitution. In doing so, the narratives point to how much an evaluation of gender and gender roles is important to the reconfiguration of community (showing that the triangulation of territory/nation/state lacks the crucial component of gender, and would be more aptly expressed as woman/territory/nation/state). While the communities in the narratives under study thus far are divided across lines of “race”, ethnicity, and religion, the comparison of Adnan and Mda’s novels shows that rethinking community outside of these categories of identity must begin with a serious consideration of gender.

Sitt Marie Rose depicts the dangers of community as communion, primarily in a country where community communion is based on religion (by birth). Set during the Lebanese civil war of 1975, the novel focuses on an elite Christian group that perceives the influx of Palestinian foreigners in Lebanon as a threat to Lebanon and the authority of the (Christian) state.

Community is conceived as a brotherhood in this narrative, a kinship relation modeled after the

Christian family of God the Father, the pure, Virgin mother, and the godly son, who needs His mother’s love, protection, and eternal purity. The body of the Virgin Mother must remain pure

17 because it represents the purity and the sanctity of the Christian community. The main female character defies this communion by participating in the Palestinian Resistance. This provokes the group, testing its sovereignty and authority, and so a militia group who claims to represent the state kidnaps and murders her in front of her deaf-mute students.

In her participation with the Palestinian Resistance, this woman claims to be working for a greater brotherhood, not limited to the boundaries of religion or state, but a Pan-Arab community that shares a language, culture, and history. Given her reasoning, it is clear that her conception of community is still determined by the framework of the system of power, a patriarchal fraternity. When her kidnappers interrogate her for her so-called transgressions, she explains her version of community includes Palestinian “brothers.” During the entire proceedings, her and her kidnappers do not communicate. They talk, but they fail to listen to one another, each stubbornly adhering to their own version of “what” the community should consist.

The structural organization of the novel and its chapter divisions formally reflect how community as communion is actually fragmenting, and because of its fragmenting effect, the woman is murdered, her death symbolizing the failure of a reconfiguration of community.

In The Madonna of Excelsior, the narrative focuses on a trial that took place in the early

1970s in South Africa. Five Afrikaner men and fifteen black women were tried for breaking the

Immorality Act, that is, they were caught having interracial sexual relations because many of the women bore “coloured” babies. While the narrative focuses mainly on one woman’s experience in the trial, and it may be tempting to say that the novel is about her and her children, the narrative actually works against such individuation in that its narrator is a collective “we” of

Excelsior. The “we” is the non-white population of Excelsior’s adjacent location, but it subversively speaks on behalf of all who make up the town of Excelsior: those who are not

18 allowed to live in it because of laws of segregation and those Afrikaners who inhabit it. One can say that the town of Excelsior, which includes the location according to the narrating “we”, is the central character of the novel. This makes the reconfiguration of that community possible through the way that narrative voice listens, sees, and tells of the events that take place in and make up the town of Excelsior.

Even though “Madonna” appears in the title of Mda’s novel, and in the singular, there are various madonnas in the text (as will be shown), emphasizing the collective character of the narrative. The figure of the Madonna works to subvert community as communion, particularly as it figures in Sitt Marie Rose, disrupting the configuration of community as based on the institutionalization of gender difference. While brotherhood and the Christian family serve as models for community in Adnan’s novel, in The Madonna of Excelsior, this figure—a mother with an absent husband, who has “coloured” babies, girls and boys, and who is a mother to those she has not borne herself—becomes a new way of thinking about community. The Madonna of

Excelsior therefore modifies the metaphor, retaining only the component of the madonna without the patriarchal figure head as the authority of community. If “metaphors of nation-as-woman and woman-as-nation suggest how women—as bodies and cultural repositories—become the battleground of group struggles” (Peterson 48), then changing these metaphors could potentially change gender and hierarchical relations within the nation.

The novel modifies the metaphor by no longer working on the terms of the nation; while the novel clearly shows that the private and political are inseparable, it also shows that there are alternative domains that allow for creative ways of thinking, which could constructively affect the political. The reconfiguration of community in the novel takes place in the realm of art as creative distortions, a shift that refuses to allow political categories of identity to determine the

19 nature of community. Maneuvering in the framework of the creative, as figured by the abstract impressionist paintings that appear in the novel, the narrative creatively distorts what appears to be truth by the systems in power. Indeed, it rejects the separation of the fictional and the everyday, showing that through the imaginative and fictional, systems of truth and power can be challenged. While it takes the characters in the novel a lifetime of mistakes, political uprisings, arrests, rapes, and violence to recognize the “multi-coloured” nature of the “we” of this supposedly white town, the recognition of its character as such comes through the creative distortions of impressionist paintings in the text. In this manner, the narrative shows how art allows for a shift in one’s notion of the possible and the real, which effects political change. By the end of the narrative, it is not only the creative distortions of the paintings figured in the novel, but also others, including narrative fiction. After all, the two narratives under study in this chapter are not only based on historical conflicts, but they are based on historical personages who seamlessly move into and beyond the narrative text. The inseparability of the fictional,

“real”, private and public in the creative distortions of the historical in art makes for a way of seeing that recognizes the invisible, responsibility, and the reconfiguration of community that is inclusive, tolerant, heterogeneous and in constant communication.

20

Chapter One: Recognition

The feeling of something uncanny is directly

attached to … the idea of being robbed of one’s

eyes [...]. This uncanny is in reality nothing new or

foreign, but something familiar and old. (Freud,

“The Uncanny”)

Invisible Man: Recognition of the Self in the Uncanny

At the beginning of the American novel Invisible Man (1947) by Ralph Ellison, the narrator of the novel writes that he is invisible “simply because people refuse to see me” (3). He continues saying that his invisibility is not an essential fact of his material being, but rather, “a matter of the construction of those inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality” (3). Even though the narrator says that he is invisible, “I am an invisible man” (3), he inverts the source of invisibility, making it not an essential aspect of his existence, but rather, a flaw in the eyes of those who look at him and still fail to register his presence. As a result he suffers the violent corporeal and psychological processes of being rendered “invisible.” The question, then, is how will he come to be seen, or recognized as living and present if his invisibility is not a fact of his existence, but rather a flaw in the eyes of those in power, who look but fail to see?

This question of recognition is the focus of this chapter, and in order to explore it, we must first ask, what in fact has made the invisible man, invisible? Two novels that expose this problem of invisibility, that is, that it is not an essential trait of the invisible but rather a flaw in the eyes of those looking, will be compared: Ellison’s Invisible Man and Emile Habibi’s Al-

21 mutashāʻel, the former about an African American man in the United States, and the latter, a

Palestinian in Israel. In both novels, invisibility and disappearance emerge in the context of modern nations where inclusion is based on a notion of “biological stock;” 6 as a result, they are rendered invisible—they have “disappeared”7 because of the cruel game of imagined national communities8 and the material violence that goes into realizing those homogenous groups. The narrators of both novels are refused full participation in the national community because they are imagined as being part of a different national community which does not merit equal political membership because their historical “roots” lie elsewhere. Certain markers, such as visible characteristics in the case of Invisible Man,9 and culture, like language and religious practice in

Al-mutashāʻel, put the narrators outside the imagined national community, rendering them

“other” and justifying their “invisibility” in the countries they inhabit—even though it is the only country they know, the only one they have to call their “home.” The recognition they call for, though, is not one that solely calls for the recognition of identity groups, which would reify the differences of each group, essentializing characteristics of the group identity and ignoring

6 See Yuval-Davis, “Nationalism, Racism, and Gender Relations,” 4.

Disappearance is .”خ-ف-و“ ,The words disappearance and invisible in Arabic come from the same root 7 ”.مخفي“ and the state of being invisible is ,”اختفاء“

8 Benedict Anderson defines the nation as an “imagined political community” that is limited in that is has “finite, if elastic boundaries,” that is sovereign in that “nations dream of being free, and, if under God, directly so. The gage and emblem of this freedom is the sovereign state,” and finally, that it is a community because “the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (6-7).

9 Skin color and other visible, inherited characteristics are not generationally-specific attributes, and so biologically mark people as different because these features that are inherited and continue to appear over several generations, signaling different geographical and cultural origins—however vague the specific geographical and cultural origin and disregarding the extreme likelihood of “mixed” ancestry. These features accrue importance as signifiers of origin and biological stock especially with respect to biological right to membership in the national community (Yuval-Davis 5).

22 internal heterogeneity.10 In each narrative, the narrators expose the ironies and contradictions involved in this kind of invisibility, calling first for the recognition that they are not invisible, but rather those in power are blind, and second, for the acknowledgement that they are fundamental to constitution of the country, putting into question a nation-based or biology-based community, challenging the imagined notions of what it is to be American or Israeli. 11

The narrator of Invisible Man is an African American who knows no “home” other than the United States. He is nonetheless rendered invisible because he is not perceived as white, which justifies refusing him his Americanness. Similarly, the protagonist of Al-mutashāʻel was born in Haifa, a port city in Historic Palestine when the State of Israel was founded, making

Haifa a central town of Israel, but he is rendered invisible because he is not Jewish. In the novels, the narrators question possibilities of a new nation disrupting the idea that national identity must be racial, religious, or ethnic. By shifting invisibility to the eye of the looking subject, the narrators provocatively suggest a kind of community where both the invisible and those in the position looking have a stake. Furthermore, gender relations in the novels show that invisibility

10 For a compelling argument against recognition as recognition of a distinct identity group, see Fraser. The problem of (violent) homogenizing tendencies of groups has been explored in many discussions of identity and identity politics. See for instance, Fraser, again, Peterson, and Ella Shohat in “Sephardim in Israel” in Dangerous Liaisons, where she discusses the heterogeneity of the Jewish populations what immigrated to Israel in the early 1950s. She focuses on the populations that came from the supposed “east:” Yemen, Iraq, Iran, and from countries in North Africa such as Egypt, Morocco and Algeria, and outlines the so-called backwardness of these populations in the eyes of the Jewish Zionists who came from Europe.

11 In Blues People, Amiri Baraka notes how African Americans in the army are considered Americans overseas, defending an America that is their own, but in the U.S., they are treated as second class citizens, deprived of this very Americanness they were risking their lives to defend. He writes: “The American Negro is being asked to defend the American system as energetically as the American white man… But there is a question mark in the minds of many poor blacks and also now in the minds of many young Negro intellectuals. What is it that they are being asked to save? It is a good question, and American had better come up with an answer” (236). Indeed, what is this “Americanness,” especially from the perspective of those other Americans?

23 and recognition are not only at work on a two-level plane. The roles that women play in each novel—whether allegorical in their names, or in the way that the characters act—disrupts further the identity of the imagined community. The workings of gender in the novels remind us that recognition does not take place in a dichotomous relation of inside/outside, but rather on the vertical as well as horizontal planes of imagined community. The narratives thus are not arguing for new national identities, but rather, modes of recognition that avoid “the identity model’s tendency to reification, which fosters repressive communitarianism” (Fraser 377).

Invisible Man begins with the narrator declaring, “I am an invisible man” (3). His very

“being,” since he uses the verb “to be” when he says he is invisible, though, is paradoxical; just because he is invisible, that does not mean that he does not exist. He assures his addressee that he is “a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids-- and I might even be said to possess a mind” (Ellison 3). He asserts: “I say all this to assure you that it is incorrect to assume that, because I’m invisible and live in a hole, I am dead. I am neither dead nor in a state of suspended animation” (Ellison 6). It is thus easy to misplace invisibility says the narrator of Invisible Man, assuming that it is essential to the being who is invisible, or who has disappeared. The narrator asserts that invisibility is actually a flaw in the eyes of those looking and not the condition of the invisible, but misplacing the problem of invisibility is so powerful that even those who are rendered invisible do it, mistaking invisibility for an essential fact of their being: “you often doubt if you really exist” (4). It takes the narrator of Invisible Man the entire course of the novel to recognize he had misplaced invisibility. For him, recognition therefore entails recognizing that invisibility is not essential to his being, but rather that it is a product of the framework for the scene of recognition offered by the regime of truth. Unfortunately, the process of that recognition is long and arduous because it entails being ejected out of what is familiar, comfortable, and

24 what appears to be “truth”. This ejection from the familiar is poignant in the narrator’s encounters with white women.

Similarly, Al-mutashāʻel begins with the narrator Saʼīd proclaiming the paradox of his being. He uses exaggerated superlatives, assuring his reader that just because he has disappeared,

I tell you the] ”ابلغ عني اعجب ما وقع النسان … فقد اختفيت. ولكنني لم امت“ :he is still a living man strangest12 thing to ever befall man happened to me...I disappeared. But I did not die] (Habibi

13).The narrator of Al-mutashāʻel already knows that his disappearance is a result of the blindness of those in power. He mocks them for their blindness, making fun of the fact that their power to render him invisible has nothing to do with truth, historical right to territory, or superior intelligence. His disappearance is a result of brute force and historical forgetting, and the tragic irony is that this effectively renders him invisible even though he is still present. In the novels, the disappearance of the narrators exposes the cruel irony of a world in which brute force and power can rendering those present and alive, invisible, dispossessing them of property, civil rights, and even their humanity, as the following two examples illustrate.

In a powerful scene in Invisible Man, the protagonist witnesses an elderly African

American couple being evicted from their home in New York. Their belongings strewn across the curb, the invisible man notices old, yellowed emancipation papers, and he thinks, “It has been longer than that, further removed in time, I told myself, and yet I knew that it hadn’t been”

(272, emphasis in original). Upon witnessing this, the invisible man is spurred to give a speech, and in his speech, he says: “‘Dispossessed!’ ‘Dispossessed,’ eighty-seven years and dispossessed

”.ajîba, which comes from the root for “to awe” or “to cause wonder’ ”عجيبة“ The Arabic for this is 12 Strange is the most fitting translation in this context, but the word also signifies something out of the ordinary, unbelievable, wonderful, awe-inspiring, and even miraculous. Accounting for this array of signification is important given the exaggerated, ironic tone the narrator uses to convey the absurdity of his disappearance.

25 of what? They ain’t got nothing, they caint get nothing, they never had nothing. So who was dispossessed?’ I growled. ‘We’re law-abiding. So who’s being dispossessed? Can it be us?”

(279). In his anger, the invisible man points to how, in spite of emancipation, certain groups of people cannot actually be dispossessed because they never owned anything to begin with.

In Al-mutashāʻel, a similar incident occurs in which the protagonist-narrator Saʼīd is moving from one residence to another. After having to pay the very expensive “key money” in order to move into his new apartment, Saʼīd could no longer afford to hire a pack animal to move his belongings, and so had to move them on his back, being rendered a pack animal himself. While moving his belongings, a representative of the Jewish Agency stops him and asks him to prove that the furniture he is carrying is in fact his own. Confused, the protagonist

since when do people have] ”متى حفظت الناس شهدات تثبت ان متاع بيتهم هو متاع بيتهم ولم يسرقه؟“ ,wonders to carry proof that their own furniture is in fact theirs and not stolen?] (122). The custodian of the

Jewish Agency then declares that since the furniture is from an Arab home, which in fact it is as

become the property of the] ”فقد اصبح ملك الدولة“ Saʼīd is Palestinian, he proclaims it has now state] (122). Immediately, the protagonist worries that his pants might be also confiscated, as they too belong to an Arab (122). This scene is narrated rather humorously, as though it is the only mechanism that can communicate the absurdity of the protagonist’s reality: the furniture is his property, but because it comes from an Arab home, it must be confiscated by the state. The clear implication is that Arabs, not because they lack proof of ownership, but because they are

Arab, cannot own anything—hence, he fears for his pants as well.

While invisibility and disappearance are the explicit, operating metaphors in the narratives, the implicit metaphor of blindness is what needs to be addressed, the blindness that reveals how misconceptions and prejudices interfere with literal seeing with the ocular senses.

26

Recognition of the invisible is also recognition of one’s blindness, which is necessary not only for the sake of the invisible, but also for the sake of the blind. The invisible man recounts a time when a white man runs into him in the night. At first, the fact that the man does not literally see him in the dark outrages the invisible man, causing him to beat him up to the point that he almost kills him. Then, all of a sudden, he bursts into a fit of laughter, “I ran away into the dark, laughing so hard I feared I might rupture myself” (5). The invisible man suddenly recognizes the irony of his condition: his invisibility is a result of highly visible features that mark his racial identity as black in the particular context of the United States, “‘high visibility’ actually rendered one un-visible” (xv). Indeed, because these features are displayed on his body, it is also his body that accrues the violence and suffering of invisibility, in a very real and corporeal sense. The invisible man is absolutely visible but utterly unseen. To add insult to injury, the white man wrongly believes, even though it is he who bumped into the black man, that the black man is mugging him. The invisible man reflects: “Poor fool, poor blind fool, I thought with sincere compassion, mugged by an invisible man” (5). In spite of the superior social and political position of the white man, who is superior because of his whiteness and the invisible man’s blackness, and in spite of his perfectly functioning organs of vision, the white man cannot correctly apprehend his reality. He believes he can know and understand the situation as a result of what see sees, but what he sees, or rather does not see prevents him from understanding his reality. The flaw in his “inner eyes” therefore not only hurts the invisible man, but also the white man who almost dies as a result of his racist vision. The white man’s blindness therefore almost kills him.

Invisibility and disappearance have to do with the way one sees, or rather, fails to see, and involves both the subordinated and those in power. Recognition brings into question the

27 fundamental epistemological assumptions about the way we sensually perceive the world and how we understand what we apprehend, thereby also bringing into question the way we perform in the world, how we are constituted, and the material realities, policies, and practices that are affected by our failure to see. Recognition requires an adjustment of the interpretation of what one sees, but also, an ability to pay attention to what may go unregistered even though the eyes literally observe it. How does one get to this different way of seeing? What are the possibilities of achieving it, particularly for those in the position of power?

(It may be tempting to read Hegelian recognition into this, as some scholars have,13 particularly in reference to the example of the landowner and farmhand dialectic.14 While aspects of Hegel’s dialectic exist in the relationship, recognition works across intersections of power dynamics, that is, not only in the dual framework of landowner and farmhand, or white and black, but also cutting across age, class, geography, and most importantly, gender—which itself is inflected intersectionally15. In Hegel, the subordinated farmhand achieves self-consciousness

13 For example, see “Ralph Ellison’s Sociological Imagination” by Doane, Randall.

14 Briefly, in Hegel, the aim is achieving independent self-consciousness, which depends on mutual recognition of two self-consciousnesses. But, because the farmhand is in servitude, he gives up his self- consciousness in servitude of the landowner. Since mutual recognition is needed for self-consciousness, though, the landowner, by making the farmhand absolutely fearful of him in his subordination, cannot get reciprocal recognition and so also forfeits achieving self-consciousness. In his desire for self- identification, the landowner negates that which he needs [the self-consciousness of the farmhand] in order to achieve self-consciousness, which depends on recognition. It is actually the farmhand, who, in putting aside his self-consciousness because of his servitude, rises above narrow self-identification, becomes disinterested, and through his work on other objects as objects in them selves (and not a means to self-identification) that the farmhand’s consciousness “comes to see in the independent being [of the object] its own independence” (118). He is thus shaken out of mere self-identification and rises above his fear of absolute otherness of lord (§178-§196).

15 Intersectionality is a concept that was originally coined to address the fact that the particular experiences of women of color were left untouched, unexplored, and unacknowledged in both feminist and antiracist discourses and debates. Kathy Davis provides the following definition of the concept: “‘Intersectionality’ refers to the interaction between gender, race, and other categories of difference in

28 through his work, but what happens, if, for instance, the farmhand achieves self-consciousness through others that have been subordinated to him instead of through his work on objects? And, how does this unfold in a modern context of nationalism, statehood, and collectivities that make claims to identity by rendering others who are different invisible, and exclude them from what they consider communities of national communion, communion implying togetherness because of sameness).

Invisible Man was written between 1945 and 1950, and is in part a response to the sentiments of African American war veterans who, after World War I, found they had returned to a country that does not consider them equals. After hearing stories from other soldiers who served, Ellison questions in the introduction to the novel, written in 1981: “How could you treat a Negro as equal in war and then deny him equality during times of peace?” (xiii). In fact, what appeared to be “peace” was the beginnings of the internal confrontation, if not conflict, that was bring as a result of this injustice.

The first chapter of the novel was published in the English magazine Horizon in 1947, and only after being published overseas, outside the United States, that it began to appear in national magazines in 1948, and in 1952, the novel came out in its complete form. It is about a young African American who moves from the south to New York, and in the process, undergoes a series of experiences, mostly violent and corporeal, that manifest social relations as dictated by race relations in the United States. As a young man in the South, the invisible man receives a scholarship to go to the black college to fulfill his dream of becoming an educator, but after an incident with a white founder—where the latter comes into contact with a black sharecropper—

individual lives, social practices, institutional arrangements, and cultural ideologies and the outcomes of these intersections in terms of power” (68).

29 the invisible man gets expelled from the school. As a result, he travels north to New York and joins an interracial labor union named the Brotherhood. He becomes a public speech-maker for the party, but eventually finds, despite the façade of equality, that he is as much a puppet to this party because of his skin color as he was to the racist and segregated system in the South. Amidst the riots in Harlem, the invisible man tries to get away from the chaos and literally falls into a hole in the ground, which is where he reflects on his life, and in that retrospective distance, narrates his story. Structurally, the prologue and epilogue take place in the present, in his underground apartment in Harlem, where he says he is hibernating, waiting to come out of his bear-hole. The main chapters are the story he tells of the process of his recognition from that basement apartment. In the prologue, he declares that he is an invisible man, but that he has finally recognized his invisibility. The process of that recognition he proceeds to disclose in the twenty-five embedded chapters. In the epilogue, the narrator prepares to emerge from his basement with his new-found recognition. In the twenty-five chapters, the narrator figures himself as a naive, hopeful, nameless character who has blind faith in the American system in which he, as an individual, can socially rise up and “lead his people in the proper paths” (32), so long as he knows “his place at all times” (31). Throughout this embedded narrative, the invisible man says what is expected of him, acts like he is supposed to, and even when he thinks he is on the road to independence and freedom from the burdens of his “race,” he remains within the borders of those “proper paths.” By looking back at his life and how he performed in it, and by telling his story, the narrator learns to no longer see himself through the eyes of those in power, but, rather, to observe, from a distance of space and time, the way they see him and themselves in relation to him. In so doing, the narrator comes to his own recognition. Hereafter, “narrator” refers to the invisible man of the prologue and epilogue, the one who has recognized what

30 invisibility entails; “invisible man” or “protagonist” refer to the character in the narrator’s story, the one in the embedded chapters of the novel. Most important about the narrative is the fact that the narrator has a direct addressee, a “you” to whom he targets his story. By identifying this addressee, we can answer the more important question of who recognition is intended for, how this can be a form of agreement, and how it is crucial to a different American community.

Embedded in the term recognition is cognizance, so re-cognition is understanding anew.

Recognition is to “plunge out of” institutionalized, “correct” ways of knowing, which includes ways of knowing history (which can be naturalized through violent means), and that is the only way recognition is possible. Again, invisibility is not a condition of his existence, but a flaw in the way those who look at him interpret what they see, and so, to correct the malfunction of the inner eyes, the narrator tells the addressee to “Step outside the narrow borders of what men call reality and you step into chaos [] or imagination” (576, my emphasis). While there may be a fear of the chaos that may ensue when one “plunges out,” the possibility of seeing differently, understanding anew lies in the potential of taking the plunge, but finding oneself not in chaos, but stepping into imagination. But how to “plunge out” of hegemonic and naturalized narratives that determine knowledge and ways of seeing, and more importantly, not seeing? It takes a painful fall for the invisible man to come to recognition, but plunging and stepping out are much more deliberate actions. The invisible man models this “plunge” in his own narrative when it was he whose inner eyes were “blind.” For the invisible man to “steps out” of what men call reality, he falls into a dark hole and “aw[akes] in the blackness” (570). But, he finds that instead of falling into an abyss of chaos, he falls into a hole of literal enlightenment, “My hole is warm and full of light. Yes, full of light” (6). By telling his story he solicits his addressee to take a risk, to plunge out of what is familiar and known and allow himself to be “robbed of one’s eyes,” as per

31 the epigraph, in order to see better. The important question is can the addressee of his narrative heed his experience, and more deliberately, step out of his reality instead of “fall.”

The invisible man “steps out” in sporadic moments throughout the narrative—by accident—most notably in his he encounters with white women, particularly because he finds himself complicit in the process of rendering them invisible. Recognition and responsibility are therefore inextricable. In these encounters, time stands still and narrative time is prolonged, disrupting the rhythm of “what men call reality.” In that disrupted time, the protagonist can

“better understand my relation to [the world] and it to me” (576). The narrator begins his story of

“stepping out” with a scene of excess visibility: the scene of the battle royal. The spatial set-up of the scene and the positioning of the actors in it speak to a relationship between vision and power.

It also reveals that the American nation is raced white and gendered male. Young African

American men are brought to participate in a battle where they are blindfolded and forced to fight one another strictly for the entertainment of older white men, the “town’s leading white citizens” (17). After the battle, a naked white woman is brought onto the scene to dance as added entertainment. The scene unfolds in a room made up of three rings, each of which is a focal point of vision that corresponds to the power hierarchy in society. At the center of the room, “stood a magnificent blond—stark naked” (19); the invisible man and his school mates stand in a circle surrounding the woman, and the white men, in turn, are “ringed around us” (19), forming the outermost circle. The young African Americans’ position makes them the object of vision of the white men, but they also occupy the dangerous position of being able to look at white womanhood, fully aware of the “real life public circumstances wherein black men were

32 murdered/lynched for looking at white womanhood, where the black male gaze was always subject to control and/or punishment by the powerful white[s]” (hooks 109).

The position of the white men at the outermost circle of vision points to their social power over African Americans and women, and it manifests in their control over how the events in scene unfold. They dictate the action that takes place, they control the pace and order of the events that unfold, the scene’s rhythm, they even control what the other actors on the scene can look at, and what they can say. For instance, the invisible man is here in the first place only because he is supposed to give his graduation speech, but the white men decide that he must participate in the battle royal “since I was to be there anyway” (17). They also decide that “The battle royal [comes] first” (17), and not the speech. Furthermore, every action the African

Americans undertake in this scene is narrated in the passive voice, emphasizing their subordination to the white men’s direction, and their lack of volition, agency, and power: “we were led out,” “we were rushed up,” “we were stopped and ordered” (17, 18, 21). In this spatial set-up, the African Americans move like puppets, a positioning that allows them “nothing to do but what we were told” (21).

When the white woman is brought onto the scene, things get much worse for the African

American men, as they are given contradictory orders that they must obey, subject to the control and punishment of these white men: “the big shots yelling at us. Some threatened us if we looked and others if we did not” (20). This dangerous situation elicits contradictory feelings in the invisible man:

I felt a desire to spit upon her as my eyes brushed slowly over her body... I wanted at one

and the same time to run from the room, to sink through the floor, or to go to her and

cover her from my eyes and the eyes of the others with my body; to feel the soft thighs, to

33

caress her and destroy her, to love her and murder her. To hide from her, and yet to stroke

where below the small American flag tattooed upon her belly her thighs formed a capital

V. (19)

The African Americans’ subordination is acutely sexualized. The invisible man can neither protect the white woman from the gaze of all the men surrounding her, nor possess her, robbed of his sexual prowess, a masculine trait that is usually associated with power. The African

Americans become the symbolic negative of the white citizens, the radically impotent other, and as such, they must be emasculated in order to reify the white, patriarchal social order in the

U.S.16 The African Americans are referred to as “boys” while the white men are the “leading white citizens,” which conveys their subordination at the level of civil society, and that the category of citizen encompasses only white men. Indeed, signposts of America, flags, veterans, and icons of Americana appear throughout the novel, and the tattoo of the American flag above the naked white woman’s genitalia sexualizes power, position, and citizenship in the country.

Thus, the African Americans’ desire for the woman can never be satisfied in these conditions; they can never possess the “V” for victory tattooed above her genitalia.

The woman appears as nothing more than an inanimate object, a doll, at the center of exhibition. She becomes a vehicle for displaying power hierarchies, the site where these power relations unfold, losing agency and even personhood. Both the white and African American men see her through the “white inner eyes” that dominate society, rendering her invisible. When the narrator describes her, he talks about her in pieces, as impersonal body parts: her flesh is “the”

16 Social hierarchy and positioning has long been associated with an expression and performance of masculinity. For instance, W.E.B. Du Bois writes in Double Consciousness that African Americans are “longing to attain self-conscious manhood,” in a nation expecting them to remain “half-men” (Du Bois 3, 7, my emphasis).

34 flesh, her eyes, “impersonal” (19). In spite of her central visibility in the scene, or rather because of it, she is rendered invisible, absolutely symbolic under the gaze of all the men present. For the white men, she is the vehicle through which to assert their power and position; for the African

American men, she is a symbol of their impotence and subordination. The invisible man develops the impossible desires to both sexually possess and protect her from exhibition, the impossibility of which breeds his conflicted desire to destroy her. This scene turns out to be is a circus display of the nation, sexualized, gendered female, and raced white.

It is not long before the neat circles of visibility and looking collapse because of an unrestrained animalistic desire for the women, which the narrator describes as a “hazing:” “It was mad. Chairs went crashing, drinks were spilt, as they ran laughing and howling after her.

They caught her just as she reached a door, raised her from the floor, and tossed her as college boys are tossed at a hazing” (20). Within the chaos, the white “citizens” retain the power to grope the white nation personified as well as prohibit the movements and actions of the African

American men. They flaunt their power by flaunting their masculine sexuality, their acts asserting their power against the country as symbolized by the woman, their “beefy fingers sink into the soft flesh” (20). The narrator, though, describes the scene as a sick, primitive display of violence against, not the sexualized symbol of the country, but this particular woman. He describes the white men as pouncing on the woman like animals out of control, chasing her as she tries to flee their grasp: “she began to move around the floor in circles as they gave chase, slipping and sliding over the polished floor” (20, my emphasis).

In a brief moment right after the “hazing”, though, time suddenly elongates for the narrator because in the midst of the chaos, he sees something that he could not standing in the middle of the neat circles of hierarchical power and visibility. Observing the actions of the white

35 men from his subordinated and emasculated position, he falls into a moment of clarity. He suddenly identifies with the suffering of the woman that he has just been complicit in rendering invisible because she appears to be absolutely different from him as well as absolutely untouchable. He recognizes an affinity with the white women that stops him from regarding her as a symbol of his impotence and exclusion from the nation. He begins to see her as a person, and even though she is white and female, he identifies with her suffering at the hands of the white men. While the white men toss her in the air, “her soft breasts seemed to flatten against the air and her legs flung wildly as she spun,” his eyes meet hers (20-1), and “above her red, fixed- smiling lips I saw terror and disgust in her eyes, almost like my own terror and that which I saw in some of the other boys” (20, my emphasis). In this moment, the invisible man sees her outside the time and space of the “reality” of white men. She is no longer the embodiment of that which he cannot possess; she is no longer simply a dancing doll, but someone like himself. The shared suffering between the invisible man and the woman is exemplified in the imagery the narrator uses to describe it. When the electrocuted rug is brought out with coins strewed on it, the white men order the young African Americans to collect as many of these coins as possible. The electric shocks they suffer make them like the white woman who was chased by the howling white men: “we were all wet and slippery to hold. Suddenly I saw a boy lifted into the air, glistening with sweat like a circus seal, and dropped, wet back landing flush upon the charged rug” (27, my emphasis).

During the fight of battle royal, where the African Americans are blindfolded as they are forced to physically fight one another, the narrator briefly realizes that he actually can see through the white blindfold covering his eyes. His ability to see is described in sexual terms, strengthening the relationship between visuality and male sexual prowess, and in repossessing

36 his masculinity, the invisible man sees the other African American men, like himself, moving just like the naked white woman: “I finally pulled erect and discovered that I could see the black, sweat-washed forms weaving in the smoky-blue atmosphere, like drunken dancers weaving to the rapid drum like dancers” (23, my emphasis). Here, the invisible man demonstrates that is possible to see differently within the space and time of what “men call reality,” but only by recognizing an affiliation with what appears to be other. The white woman complicates the black-white power dichotomy of the outer two rings, disrupting a neat dialectical reading of the relationship of visuality and power.

Because “stepping out” is a stepping out of “reality,” it cannot be achieved in a singular moment of recognition. The invisible man therefore repeatedly takes the blows of falling into recognition, and so for him, recognition is a violent and painful process that must recur for the invisible man. Recognition becomes inextricable from repetition, rhythm, and time. Near the end of the narrative, another sexual encounter with an older white woman named Sybil jolts him out of what is familiar, provoking another moment of recognition.. By now, the invisible man has moved to New York and joined the Brotherhood, the integrated organization that has made use of his ability to move people to action through his speeches. He has spoken on racial dispossession as well as, significantly, the “women” question. Although he has had good times with the Brotherhood, feeling a sense of (false) recognition, in his encounter with Sybil, he slowly realizes that despite this apparent equal treatment in this supposedly integrated union, he still lacks agency and the space to have and voice an opinion. He finds that he is invisible to the members, particularly the white members such as Brother Jack. He meets Sybil at a Brotherhood party celebrating the Fourth of July, another moment in which the question of a new American nation in directly connected to sexuality and women. Sybil is the wife of one of the “big shots”

37 in the Brotherhood, which makes her what he calls an “ideal choice” to pursue because he can get back at the Brotherhood by sexually possessing this woman, or more like, “his” woman—the big shot’s woman (516). When he goes home with her, he does not realize that, by choosing a white woman as the site of his revenge, he is still moving on the terms of the white men, locked in the ways of seeing of the white “inner eyes”—that is, the gendered nation where power is masculine and white—rendering Sybil invisible.

Both he and Sybil skip the Brotherhood party and celebrate the birth of the U.S. by enacting a theatrical farce. In bed, they find themselves performing the parts delegated to them as a black man and a white woman, by the white, patriarchal order. The invisible man plays the minstrel entertainer and her, the victim of black lasciviousness (520, 521). Exaggerating their performances of the roles, Sybil asks the invisible man to rape her. As soon as she asks him that, he freezes and thinks about this little performance they are enacting. He realizes that taking revenge on white men through this white woman may not be revenge at all. He worries that he too may be participating in the cruel machinery of rendering others invisible, seeing Sybil only as the vulnerable, unhappy wife of a member of the brotherhood through whom he can repossess his manhood, agency, and sense of personhood. He worries that he too is responsible for rendering others invisible: “What had I done to her, allowed her to do? Had all of it filtered down to me? My action… my—the painful word formed as disconnectedly as her wobbly smile—my responsibility? All of it? I’m invisible” (525-6). He then begins to entertain the possibility that he too may be what she was to him, the perfect choice for her revenge. As a neglected white woman, she can take revenge on her big shot white husband by sleeping with a black man, stripping her husband of his masculine power and possession over her body, by not only giving it to someone else, but someone who is supposedly inferior because of his apparent race: “Who’s

38 taking revenge on whom?” (520). In this enactment, the invisible man begins to recognize the workings of society, and with this new-found recognition, he admits, “I no longer deluded myself that I either knew the society or where I fitted into it” (525). The possibility that his encounter with Sybil could be the “new birth of a nation?” begins to float through his mind

(522). The possibility of the birth of a new nation must come from recognition; by seeing the underlying workings of the country, the invisible man is able to step into imagination, no longer trying to play the correct role assigned to him, but rather, concerned with how to restructure all the roles in the play.

Because he does come to this recognition, he does not rape Sybil. Within the terms of the performance of the “white inner eye,” he leaves a “gift” for her big shot husband. Using lipstick, he writes on her belly—in the same location as the magnificent blonde’s tattoo of the American flag—“Sybil, you were raped/ by/ Santa Claus/ Surprise” (522). His sarcastic message is that she is raped not by a black man, but by a white man who claims to come bearing gifts. His gesture subversively articulates that the white patriarchal order has, in effect, “raped” the nation.

Furthermore, if he is to be emasculated and even feminized, he too could potentially symbolize the nation. Along with the white women with whom he identifies, he experiences only violence in this nation as its symbol. If a new nation is to emerge, there needs to be recognition that the current terms of performance inflict destructive violence on the idea of United States as a nation, and that the metaphors for the nation are violent to both the human bearers of the image as well as the larger community that is to make up the nation.

Along with recognition, the invisible man also recognizes that he is responsible for rendering her invisible. He realizes the necessity of responding to his responsibility haunts him, and amidst the Harlem riots, in the chaos of fire and rioting, when he sees a body that has been

39 lynched, he interprets is as a “body hung, white, naked, and horribly feminine from the lamp- post” (556). The vision of the body hanging from the lamp post worries the invisible man because he fears it is Sybil’s. Even after he learns that the bodies are just dummies, he vision still haunts him and he dreads the mere possibility that even one of them could be her: “What if one, even one is real—is… Sybil?” (556). He runs away from the scene as fast as he can, making his way out of the riot, “slipping and sliding out of their hands,” just as the magnificent blond in the battle royal tries gets away as the white “citizens” chase her (560). Recognition then is not only identifying oneself in someone who is apparently other, but it is also acknowledging one’s responsibility for making that other invisible. The very chance that he could be responsible for the mere possibility that even one of the lynched dolls is Sybil, then he has endangered the possibility of the birth of a new nation.

Through these women, the invisible man recognizes both that he shares their suffering, but also that he is complicit in rendering them invisible. But, how is it that these women provoke a different way of seeing in him, and not, for instance, other African Americans, men and women alike? At one point in the novel, the invisible man learns that Clifton, another African American member of the Brotherhood, “disappears,” but that the Brotherhood is unconcerned with his disappearance. When the invisible man goes to look for Clifton, he realizes that he has deliberately left the Brotherhood. Unsure of why he would do this, the invisible man angrily questions this decision: “Why should a man deliberately plunge outside of history and peddle an obscenity []? Why should he choose to disarm himself, give up his voice and leave the only organization offering him a chance to ‘define’ himself?” (438). The invisible man perceives the

Brotherhood as the only place that can afford African Americans like himself and Clifton a chance to “define” themselves. This perception complies perfectly with the terms of the

40 performance of the white inner eyes as he believes the organization is the only chance for

African Americans to fulfill the American dream of rising up and “leading his people in the proper paths,” as the leading white citizens of the battle royal once made clear to him (32). The invisible man therefore judges Clifton according to the white inner eyes that make up reality because he presumes to identify with Clifton because he is both African American and a member of the Brotherhood. Such identification makes him blind to the workings of this so-called history out of which Clifton plunges.

The invisible man does finally find Clifton, who has made a living for himself selling dancing Sambo dolls. Observing the dolls dance, the invisible man experiences a sense of perplexity and even dread. He is disturbed by the dolls’ movements, but he is also drawn to them, these conflicting emotions reminiscent of how the white woman in the scene of the battle royal makes him feel: “I was held by the inanimate, boneless bouncing of the grinning doll and struggled between the desire to join in the laughter and to leap upon it with both feet” (432). The invisible man is unable to distance himself from the inanimate dolls, which would allow him to objectify them and join the rest of people gathered in laughing at them. He is so perplexed by their movements because the Sambo dolls, beyond all reason, not only resemble living figures, but resemble him. He perceives them as a reflection of himself, a “ginger-colored nigger,” as the leading white citizens refer to him (4):

A grinning doll of orange-and-black tissue paper with thin flat cardboard disks forming

its head and feet which some mysterious mechanism was causing to move up and down

in a loose-jointed, shoulder-shaking, infuriatingly sensuous motion, a dance that was

completely detached from the black, mask-like face. (431)

41

The way he describes the dancing is a repetition of the description of the woman in the scene of the battle royal, he titillating movements completely detached from her lifeless eyes. Worse here, though, the movements of the dolls are not only similar to the movements of a living, human being, or the movements of a white woman whose suffering reminded him of his own; Clifton’s dolls remind him so much of himself that he struggles with the “intellectual uncertainty [of] whether an object is alive or not […] when an inanimate object becomes too much like an animate one” (233). The vision of the dolls allows him to see the very possibility that he is an inanimate Sambo doll, a dreadful notion which he would like to suppress, and so feels the urge to destroy them under his feet. The invisible man resists the urge, though, because he sees in them his double, a repetition of himself in a grotesque, lifeless circus toy, enthusiastically performing for the entertainment and ridicule of those present.

In the essay “The Uncanny,” Freud describes the uncanny as an un-namable feeling of dread and horror that cannot be isolated, named, or defined: “the uncanny is that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (220). Freud explains that the German word for the feeling, unheimliche, is the opposite of the “homely,” heimliche.

The uncanny is thus an “unhousing,” an ejection from what is familiar and known, as is symbolized by the “home.” It is not simply an encounter with the unfamiliar that provokes fear

(because, as Freud points out, not everything that is unknown is frightening). The sense of dread emerges because one encounters something that was once familiar, but through a process of repression, has become estranged and unrecognizable because is taboo. To use the language of

Foucault and Butler, the realm of the taboo is also the realm of regime of truth that lacks the terms for recognition of this thing, the “what men call reality” of which the invisible man tries so hard to become a part. The feeling of the uncanny emerges in the realm of social taboo, where

42 what “ought to have remained hidden [] has come to light” (225). For Freud, what is repressed is the knowledge of mortality, which is the related to the fear of castration. Via a reading of the

Oedipus tragedy, Freud links the fear of castration to the fear “of being robbed on one’s eyes”

(230). Implicit then is that the feeling of the uncanny that the invisible man experiences in his recognition of himself in the dolls is that being in the outermost circle of looking, like the white citizens at the beginning of the scene of the battle royal, does not necessarily afford an ability to see. While the frightening feeling of the uncanny makes one feel that he is being robbed of his eyes, and indeed, robbed of his masculinity, it also brings with it clarity—a more perceptive and acute ability to see.

Freud continues that dolls or automatons are most likely to produce the sense of the uncanny because they provoke an “intellectual uncertainty” as to whether the figure encountered is a human being or an automaton (Freud 230), like the lynched dolls the invisible man worries are Sybil, or Clifton’s dancing dolls. This anxiety arises because one is confronted with a figure that is inanimate and inhuman, but moves as though it is human. For Freud, the automaton is a visual reminder of one’s impotence in the face of death, as the lifeless object so closely resembles a living human; for the invisible man, the dolls are a visual reminder that he is, metaphorically, dead, or rather, invisible. The dolls are “the repetition of the same features or character-traits or vicissitudes of the same crimes, or even the same names through several consecutive generations” (Freud 234, my emphasis). Clifton’s dancing dolls are a repetition of dispossession and enslavement, an old, familiar feeling that may seem to have disappeared in the integrated Brotherhood, but what the dancing dolls remind him are fully present, but in a new apparently unfamiliar guise. The invisible man comes to the dreadful realization that he is a dead man, an automaton without agency or volition, kept in place and following the orders of the

43 white men, as the World War I war vet describes him early in the novel, “a walking zombie.

Already he’s learned to repress not only his emotions but his humanity. He’s invisible, a walking personification of the Negative... The mechanical man!” (94).

Seeing himself in the dolls is a kind of repetition, not identical iteration but the appearance of the familiar in an apparently different form. This is why it takes white women, and not Clifton or Mary—the African American woman who provides him with temporary housing after he has been lobotomized—for the invisible man to be ejected out of what feels familiar, and to be able to recognize his affinity with the dolls and the women. Within the realm of the regime of truth, the invisible man falls into the trap of racial identity by assuming his experiences are similar to Clifton’s and Mary’s. He presumes to know them because he presumes to understand himself.

While the white woman in the scene of the battle royal resembled a “kewpie doll” moving at the hands of the white citizens (19), here, he is an equally lifeless, Sambo doll. Except the grotesque movements of the Sambo doll are being controlled by Clifton, and not the white men: “It was Clifton, riding easily back and forth in his knees [] his right shoulder raised at an angle and his arm pointing stiffly at the bouncing doll as he spieled from the corner of his mouth” (433). By plunging out of history, Clifton has shown the invisible man that he is a lifeless doll, but also the workings of the realm of “what men call reality.” Looking at Clifton, he begins to understand what it means to “plunge into nothingness, into the void of faceless faces, of soundless voices, lying outside history” (439). While repetition brings on the sense of the uncanny and recognition, it is creates rhythm, patterns of moments and sounds that are imperceptible to those who do not recognize familiarity with lifeless dolls, for instance, or with the apparently other, such as white women.

44

Clifton plunges outside history because the language and discourse of the white men who dominate society cannot accommodate his existence, his presence, his visibility. When the invisible man witnesses a police officer shoot and kill Clifton, he realizes that there is a different world, a parallel universe, at work around him, but one that he has been blind to it because he has been looking through the white blindfold placed over his eyes by the leading white citizens.

[I]t is only the known, the seen, the heard, and only those events that the recorder regards

as important that are put down, those lies that [Clifton’s] keepers keep their power by.

But the cop would be Clifton’s historian, his judge, his witness, and his executioner, and I

was the only brother watching in the crowd. And I, the only witness for the defense,

knew neither the extent of his guilt nor the nature of his crime. Where were the historians

today? And how would they put it down? [] What did they ever think of us transitory

ones? Ones such as I had been before I found the Brotherhood—birds of passage who

were too obscure for learned classification, too silent for the most sensitive recorders of

sound; of natures too ambiguous for the most ambiguous words and too distant from the

centers of historical decision to sign or even to applaud the signers of historical

documents? We who write no novels, histories or other books. What about us, I thought,

seeing Clifton again in my mind… (439, my emphasis).

This passage puts into question the knowledge and truth that emerge from recorded history.

Given the problematic relationship between one’s positioning, what one’s eyes register as a result of that positioning, and the way one’s inner eyes distort, history is a vision that presents itself as truth. The white policeman has the power to not only choose what to narrate of Clifton’s life, but also what one can “see” as a result of the narrative he produces. The policeman is

Clifton’s historian and judge before he is Clifton’s witness. As a result, in his narrative, he

45 creates blindness to those “too obscure for learned classification,” thereby executing, and rendering invisible—the likes of Clifton. At the same time, the invisible man is also a “witness.”

He witnesses Clifton’s death, and even though he cannot “record” it as the policeman can, he is able to do so in a manner also “too obscure for learned classification.” Punning on the word

“record,” the invisible man records a different way of bearing witness to the presence of these

“birds of passage... too silent for the most sensitive recorders” (439).

At Clifton’s funeral procession, the invisible man begins to understand the possibility of seeing differently, which allows him to register with his eyes the existence of a parallel universe that he hitherto been blind. He sees men in zoot suits for the first time, men he’d “never seen before” and yet “everyone must have seen them,” men “outside of historical time”:

Walking slowly, their shoulders swaying, their legs swinging from their hips []. I stared

as they seemed to move like dancers in some kind of funeral ceremony, swaying, going

forward [], the heavy heel-plated shoes making a rhythmical tapping as they moved.

(440)

The men in zoot suits are moving to a rhythm, not an aural one, a visual one—they dance.

The invisible man then joins the procession, voluntarily stepping out of history. The invisible man puns throughout his description of his participation in the procession, saying that he becomes part of the “groove” of the men in zuit suits, moving to their rhythm which also implies he is for the first time allowing himself to move outside of the “grooves” of history. In this

“groove,” the collective group (and no one individually, contrary to the individuality so lauded by the white citizens) avoids the depressions of history that create “reality” and guide motion, like grooves on a vinyl record do to the needle of the phonograph: “They were outside the groove of history []. I moved with the crowd [] listening to the grinding roar of traffic, the

46 growing sound of record shop loudspeaker blaring a languid blues.” (443). These birds of passage are too silent for the most sensitive of recorders because their music is visual. Since they are invisible, and their music undetected by the recorders of history, they must be listened to in unconventional ways, that is, visually. Looking at the men in zoot suits, the invisible man begins to wonder, “who knew that they were the saviors, the true leaders, the bearers of something precious? The stewards of something uncomfortable, burdensome, which they hated because, living outside the realm of history, there was no one to applaud their value and they themselves failed to understand it” (441, my emphasis). They are the stewa4rds of the “uncomfortable, the uncanny that pierces the white blindfold that is called reality. 17 History is not simply a recording of past events, but a way of creating a reality that guides how the present is to be perceived and apprehended. It is not linear or dialectical, and the narrator warns that one should be aware of this or suffer the repercussions of historical this blindness: “Beware of those who speak of the spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy” (6).18 Failure to recognize this is a detriment not only to the invisible man or the “you” but also to the country.

17 Some have misread the function of the men in zoot suits, for instance, Randal Doane, has written that the invisible man, “in his blind adherence to the scientific classificatory schemes configures the Harlem zoot-suiters as outside history [and] as such denies their condition of operative subjects in driving the engine of progress” (166). Falling outside of history is precisely the point; it is the only way these men can become visible.

18 This point counters Hegel’s perception of history as dialectically progressing toward Spirit. In the essay “Ralph Ellison's Sociological Imagination” by Randal Doane, there is a fundamental misunderstanding of history in the novel. While it gives a valuable description of the “spiral” of history as Hegel outlines it (Doane 162-7), in Invisible Man, such teleological history is problematized, particularly in the metaphor of the boomerang, which the narrator likens history to. The narrator continues, “I know: I have been boomeranged across my head so much that now I can see the darkness of lightness” (6). Doane writes that the boomerang of history “moves through unpredictable contradictions, that like a boomerang, may return to the point of origin, but it is never guaranteed” (166), but he is missing the point of the metaphor. History may very well be dialectical, but it is not headed for completion of the spirit, and nor does it mean that is does not repeat itself and because of our own naiveté be hurt by failing to recognize this repeated movement of history. Doane fails to see the farcical repetition of history embedded in Ellison’s novel.

47

While the narrative that the policeman gives of Clifton’s death will be the history that is remembered, the men in zoot suits are a testament to a different time taking place in the present, simultaneous with the history of the policeman, but undetected by him. In the prologue of the novel, the narrator describes the music of Louis Armstrong as “familiar music [that] demanded action [...]” (12). Music that comes from a “military instrument,” and “gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat” (8). While out of rhythm and off beat, the invisible man learns the “truth of our country,” that “America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let them so remain. It’s winner take nothing that is the great truth of our country or of any country” (577). Listening to this music, the invisible man “discovers a new analytical way of listening to music. The unheard sounds [come] through” (8). The narrator, though, who has experienced recognition, writing his story underground, proposes the possibility that music can also be seen: “you hear this music simply because music is heard and seldom seen, except by musicians” (13). Given the incident with the men in zoot suits, and the repeated moments of recognition with the white women, could the invisible man’s narrative also be a

“military instrument”? In his compulsion to tell the story of his irresponsibility, of how he came to the recognition of his invisibility, is there another narrative too silent to be detected, and yet, if one were to attend to the visual rhythm in his narrative, a different, militant sound can come through?

The narrative is full of rhythm, rhyme, and puns, and so even though the words on the page are silent, their dance is not. More importantly, the invisible man tells his story to an

Indeed, the narrator invokes Marx’s history repeating itself in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, reconfiguring history not as an open always coming but never quite arriving, but one experienced here in the moment amongst people, as a way of seeing. The boomerang will return to hit those who think and preach that history is spiral, just as it has been hitting the invisible man on the head throughout his life.

48 explicit “you”, which he models recognition for? But, this forces one to ask, what is the

“unheard” history the invisible man is recording in his narrative, and who is this “you” that needs to attend to it?

Given that recognition comes from the repetition of something familiar in something that appears to be unfamiliar and other, one can track who the addressee of the narrator is from certain events in his narrative. In the scene in which the invisible man takes one of the college’s white founders, Mr. Norton, out on a drive around campus, Norton talks about his daughter who has passed away, explaining that she is the very reason he founded the college for African

Americans:

[T]here is another reason, a reason more important, more passionate, and yes, even more

sacred than all the others []. A girl, my daughter. She was a being more rare, more

beautiful, purer, more perfect and more delicate than the wildest dream of a poet. I could

never believe her to be my own flesh and blood [...] everything I’ve done since her

passing has been a monument to her memory. (42-3, my emphasis)

Norton’s description of his daughter as sacred, pure, and untouchable is filled with innuendo, implying a repressed sexual desire for his daughter. During the drive, the invisible man and

Norton accidentally come across a sharecropper, Jim Trueblood, who we learn has broken the most forbidden of taboos: he has slept with and impregnated his daughter. While the invisible man driving the car knows of Trublood’s acts, Norton does not, but neither does the addressee.

In the way the story in narrated, the addressee of the invisible man’s narrative sees through

Norton’s eyes. Like Norton, he simply sees two pregnant women standing next to Trueblood, which he assumes are his wife and daughter. Although Norton does not know why they are pregnant at the same time, he assumes because he claims to “understand” African Americans,

49 that it is not abnormal to find a young African American woman pregnant out of wedlock: “Oh, I see. But that shouldn’t be so strange. I understand that your people…” (49). The addressee is thus aligned with Norton, who is assumed to make a similar assumption. The narrative places him in the same position as Norton in what he knows and when he learns it. For instance, Norton claims to want to help the invisible man, but the invisible man cannot understand how this is possible if Norton does not even know his name, “But you don’t even know my name” (45).

Like Norton, the addressee never learns the narrator’s real name; he is only the invisible man, both an everyman for the invisible as well as this individual who the addressee is incapable of seeing. The addressee only learns that Trueblood has impregnated both his wife and his daughter when the invisible man tells Norton. When Norton hears this, he is horrified, but at the same time he experiences the conflicting, implacable desire to get close to Trueblood and speak with him.

They stop the car and Trueblood tells his story, pointing out that contrary to the punishment that comes from breaking the apex of social taboo, he is actually rewarded as a result: “But what I don’t understand is how I done the worst thing a man can do in his own family and ‘stead of things gittin’ bad, they got better” (68). He explains that, “instead of chasin’ me out of the country, they [“the white folks”] gimme more help than they ever give any other colored man, no matter how good a nigguh he was” (67).

Instead of punishment, Trueblood receives rewards of pity because, in the eyes of the

“white folks,” Trueblood’s actions confirm their moral superiority, a distance between themselves and African Americans. Norton reacts in the same way and gives Trueblood one hundred dollars. Significantly, though, he takes the bill out of the same wallet in which he keeps a picture of his “sacred” daughter, the juxtaposition of the gesture and the image of the daughter betraying an unmistakable similarity between Trueblood and Norton, despite the visible contrast

50 in Trueblood and Norton’s complexions. The way the scene is narrated reveals how Trueblood is

Norton’s double—the personification of that which he has repressed—giving rise to the frightening and dreadful sense of the uncanny. Norton, who is ghostly white in contrast to

Trueblood’s dark skin color, is brought near death when he learns of what Trueblood has done:

“Mr. Norton was staring silently into Jim Trueblood’s eyes. I was startled. His face had drained of color. With his bright eyes burning into Trueblood’s black face, he looked ghostly” (68). He becomes ill and suffers the physical passions of encountering something familiar in something completely other—black, poor, and immoral. It is unclear whether Norton recognizes himself in

Trueblood, but his passionate, corporeal suffering emulates the physical pain of the uncanny, of being taken out of the familiarity of he thinks he knows. Norton exclaims, “‘You did it and are unharmed,’ [] his blue eyes blazing into the black face with something like envy and indignation”

(51, my emphasis). Norton is shocked but also envious of Trueblood because Trueblood has been where Norton could never go, and he has seen what Norton can never see: “You have looked upon chaos and are not destroyed” (51, my emphasis). What Trueblood “sees” by raping his daughter is supposed to produce chaos, but is has granted him nothing but prosperity. Although it is unclear whether Norton recognizes himself in Trueblood, it is likely that he has not as the invisible man bumps into him in the epilogue, but Norton fails to recognize who the invisible man is.

In a rhythmic closing, the narrator provocatively asks his addressee in a visible rhythm

(which the italicized words indicate):

“Ah,” I can hear you say, “so it was all a build-up to bore us with buggy jiving.

He only wanted us to listen to him rave!” But only partially true: Being invisible and

without substance, a disembodied voice, as it were, what else could I do? What else but

51

try to tell you what was really happening when you eyes were looking through? And it is

this which frightens me:

Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you? (581, my

emphasis).

This is the unheard message that the invisible man as the narrator is trying to articulate. He is warning his addressee against being a “poor blind fool,” as was the man that bumps into him in the prologue, and as is Norton in the epilogue when his failure to recognize the invisible man keep him invisible. The narrator provocatively adds, “You won’t believe in my invisibility and you’ll fail to see how any principle that applies to you could apply to me. You’ll fail to see it even though death waits for both of us if you don’t” (580). Like Norton, these closing lines imply that the addressee will fail to recognize that the invisible man’s blindness is not so different to the addressee’s, despite the differences in apparent “race,” class, experience. The novel ends with the unanswered question, “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?” which not only leaves open the possibility of recognition, but also implies that the addressee is the poor, blind fool.

Al-mutashāʻel: The Paradox of Disappearance, the Paradox of the Addressee

Invisible Man ends with an unanswered question, indicating that the addressee has failed to recognize the presence of the invisible man, but also that he himself is the addressee of the invisible man’s narrative. Like Norton and the man that bumps into the invisible man in the prologue, the addressee is the poor blind fool who remains so by the end of the narrative. While this unfortunately implies that he fails in recognition, continuing to be the target of the boomerang of history of which the invisible man warns him (“Beware of those who speak of the

52 spiral of history; they are preparing a boomerang. Keep a steel helmet handy” [6]), it also makes a mockery of the so-called superiority and position of privilege of white men like Norton. They may be in power but they still fail to see. Al-mutashāʻel similarly deals with the problem of invisibility and an addressee who fails in recognition. Unlike the invisible man, the two narrators of the novel are aware that the main character of the novel Saʼīd is invisible. Even though Saʼīd spends his entire life trying to resist disappearance, his daily life at the hands of the Israeli authorities, with their constant threat of physical violence, forces him to comply with their every demand, which inevitably is a mechanism to make him disappear. In an indirect manner, Saʼīd is therefore complicit in rendering himself invisible, and does disappear from the face of the earth at the end of the novel. But, just like invisible man, the twist in his disappearance lies in that he has not in fact disappeared, but rather, is no longer in sight of those who look. In a highly ironic register, the narrative shows that his disappearance has more to do with a fault in the eyes of those who look at him, particularly because of the addressee’s failed recognition, than a condition of his existence.

المتشائل: رواية من االراضي المحتلة: الوقائع الغريبة في اختفاء سعيد أبي The full title of the novel is

Al-mutasha’el: riwāya min al arāḍī al-muḥtaḷa: al-waqāʻiʼ al-gharība fī ikhtifāʻ] النحس المتشائل. saʼīd abī al-naḥs al-mutashāʻel, The Pessoptimist: A Narrative from the Occupied Territories:

The Strange Occurrences on the Disappearance of Saʼīd , the Accursed Pessoptimist].19 This

19 Hereafter, Al-mutashāʻel. While Jayyusi and LeGassick provide an excellent English translation of the Arabic text, because the elaborate word-play of the Arabic is necessary for the identification of the addressee of the narrative and recognition, I have used my own, more literal translations of the text for the purpose of the analysis. A brief note on the author: Emile Habibi was born in Haifa in 1919 in what was then Historic Palestine under the British mandate. He was there when the State of Israel was founded in May 1948, and [Remaining in Haifa] "باق بحيفا" remained there until the day he died in 1996, having the subversive engraved on his tombstone. Habibi was a founding member of the communist party in Israel, and considered it the only channel through which Arabs could have any kind of political voice in Israel (see

53 long and ridiculous title is reminiscent of many other satirical texts such as Cervantes’ The

Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha (El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la

Mancha and Voltaire’s Candide, or Optimism (Candide, ou l'Optimisme), which are invoked in the novel, placing itself in that tradition. Like Invisible Man, the novel first appeared as a newspaper series. It was published in al-Ittihad—the Arabic language newspaper of the Israeli communist party—between 1972 and 1974, and later in book form in 1974.20 The title itself is highly ironic setting the tone for the paradox of the title character's existence in the “occupied territories.” His paradoxical name, Saʼīd abu al-nahs al mutasha’el literally translates as:

Happiness, the father of bad luck (or, simply, the accursed), the pessoptimist. His character embodies the paradox of being both present and invisible, he is both a pessimist and an optimist, and his disappearance both strange and commonplace. The novel is a series of letters written by this certain individual who calls himself Saʼīd the Accursed Pessoptimist. He addresses these letters to a “respectful” or “honored” gentleman, who he interchangeably refers to in the singular and plural, and he narrates the strange realities that lead up to his disappearance. The novel begins with the foundation of the Israeli state in 1948 and tells of the ordeal Saʼīd undergoes in order to remain in his beloved Palestine. In the letters, he writes about what he witnesses as an

Arab in Israel, but he also reveals his shameful participation in effecting the expulsion of his fellow Arabs. Because his survival is in the hands of his executioners, he ends up having to serve and be loyal to the very people who are working to erase him from the face of the earth. Saʼīd relates painful, degrading, and humiliating stories of his unwavering servitude to his enemies as a

Mehrez). He wrote numerous critical essays and articles for its Arabic language publication, al-Ittihad (founded in 1944) and served as its chief editor (until 1989). He also wrote short stories, plays, and novels, and at varying periods of his life, served as a member of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset.

20 The first English translation appeared in 1982, significantly, the year that the Israeli military became involved in the Lebanese civil war of 1975-1991 (what the Israelis refer to as the Lebanon War).

54 coward and emasculated fool, and he does so with such exaggeration and attention to detail, that both he and his suffering at the hands of the Israelis become the objects of immense laughter.

Instead of his conflicted position and his being stripped of all human dignity being tragic, the narrative portrays it as comic, Saʼīd emerging a fool.

In one part of the novel, the protagonist tells the recipient of his letters the following:

"وحيث انكم تؤكدون لنا, يا محترم, ان التاريخ حين يكرر واقعه, ال يعود على نفسه بل تكون الواقعة االولى

مأساة حتى اذا تكررت كانت مهزلة, فأني اسألكم: أيهما المأساة, وأيهما المهزله؟"

[You used to assure us, respectful sirs, that when the events of history repeat themselves,

they do not recur identically; rather, the first time they occur is tragedy, their iteration,

farce. So now, I ask you, which of the two is tragedy, and which of the two, farce?] (58).

In this question, Saʼīd is playing off the opening of Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of

Louis Bonaparte, which says: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce” (15). Marx analyzes and critiquing the events of and leading up to the

French revolution, he shows that not only do the great personages and events of history occur twice, but that their second occurrence is a farce, an ironic, comic repetition of the first occurrence. In the context of the French revolution, Marx shows that the overthrow of the monarchy did not bring about any changes to the system of governance in France, it merely disguised the old one—the system simply donned a costume making it appear as though it is different and new. For Marx, things may appear to be different with the establishment of the new

French republic, but the content of its government, politics, and constitution have in actuality remained the same (Marx 29). If one can recognize that the content is in fact the same but its appearance different, one can recognize the irony in the repetition—that it is in fact a

55 masquerade and one can therefore laugh. Recognition of the repetition as farce, with the laughter that ensues as a symptom of that recognition, is subversive because it makes a mockery of the supposedly great personages and events of history that recur a second time. The intertextual reference to Marx in the form of a question in Saʼīd ’s narrative adds a layer of provocation: it suggests that even the first occurrence of historical personages and events of “great importance” are farcical, stripping them of the very characteristics that make them “great” and “important,” that their occurrence is a first, never before seen in history, and that they are not at all singular in their occurrence. The intertextual reference to Marx implies that the first iteration of great personages and events could be as much farce as they are tragedy, and the same goes for their iteration. Given the way paradox works in the novel, the question implies the possibility that each event is simultaneously tragedy and farce—another dangerous proposition because it suggests that one can laugh at tragedy.

To make a mockery of historical personages and events and their repetition requires recognition, but as invisible man shows, recognition is difficult and painful. The questions that need to be addressed are therefore, can one recognize the farce of “great” events and personages?

What are the so-called “firsts?” And the recurrences? More importantly, to whom does the narrator address this question regarding the repetition of history? Would this addressee be able to recognize himself as Saʼīd’s addressee? Or does he miss the address as does the addressee in

Invisible Man, becoming the butt of the narrator’s joke? Does laughter offer possible advantages for recognition in exposing the repetition of “great” events as farce?

The formal structure of the novel is telling of the events of history that occur as both tragedy and farce. The novel is divided into three “books” or parts, and each is named after the women in Saʼīd’s life that he has loved and lost: Book I: Yuʼād [repeatable], Book II: Bāqiya

56

[She is remaining, or she remains], and Book III: Yuʼād al-Thāniya [literally, the Second

Repeatable]. The first book contains many chapters describing the protagonist’s numerous

“firsts” in the State of Israel. Chapter titles in Book I include: “Saʼīd enters Israel for the First

Time,” “How Saʼīd Participates in the War of Independence for the First Time,” “The First

Dawn From Deep Space,” “Saʼīd Finds Refuge for the First Time at the Margins,” “The First

Lesson in Hebrew,” and “The First Night, Alone, With Yuʼād.” That fact that these events are called “firsts” implies that they recur in the course of Sa’eed’s life; at the same time, though, many of the “firsts” are not firsts at all—they are first repetitions. For instance, the very name of

Book I literally means repeatable. The chapter “Saʼīd enters Israel for the First Time” is not quite his “first” entry, but a return to the City of Haifa after he briefly escapes and hides in the south of Lebanon. Although he may be entering the state for the first time, he has already been to

Haifa, and so is actually re-entering the same geographical location. One of the Israeli officers

Welcome to the State] "أهال وسهال في مدينة اسرائيل" ,who escorts him into the city of Haifa declares of Israel] (56). This can be phonetically transliterated as ahlan wa sahlan fī madīnat isrāʻīl.

Upon hearing this, Saʼīd has a moment of utter panic and heartbreak because what he understands from this statement is that the Israelis have changed the name of his beloved city of

"فحسبت انهم غيروا اسم مدينتي الحبيبة, حيفا, :Haifa into Israel because in Arabic, madīna means city

,I thought that they changed the name of my beloved city, Haifa] فاصبح ’مدينة اسرائيʻ. فانقبظ صدري" and it became the “City of Israel.” My chest contracted] (56). Saʼīd thinks this because madīna in

Arabic means city, but in Hebrew, it actually means state. Saʼīd, our delightful fool, therefore hears, welcome to the City of Israel, not the State of Israel. Saʼīd being duped by the cousin of

"ها قد حل السالم الذي تمنيناه, :language of Arabic, and heartbroken, looks to the landscape and thinks

Here I see the peace we so desired, so why do I feel a heaviness in] فلماذا فلماذا شعوري باالنقباض؟"

57 my heart?] (56). When he does finally learn Hebrew and discover that madīna means state in

And I was convinced, between me and] "فاقتنعت, بيني وبين نفسي, بأنني حقا أهبل" ,Hebrew, he admits myself, that I am in fact a fool] (57).

The “firsts” and “seconds” in the novel function like the doubling in Invisible Man, but for the protagonist, they do not produce a sense of the uncanny, but a profound sense of despairs in the face of inevitable disappearance. This can be seen in the chapter, “How Saʼīd Participates in the War of Independence for the First Time,” which is still in Book I. It is significantly referred to as the War of Independence and not the Arab-Israeli war, or more importantly, the nakba, which means catastrophe and is the word Arabs use to refer to the war that took place between 1947-49 and resulted in the mass migration and expulsion of Palestinians. By calling it the War of Independence, Saʼīd, an Arab, is being aligned not with those who were defeated, and who were expelled from their homes, but rather, with the victors, in this case, Israelis. Saʼīd enters a village in what was Palestine named Birwah, riding in a Jeep next to an Israeli military governor. There, they find a woman hiding in the sesame stalks carrying her young son. The military governor asks the woman where she is from, checking to see whether she is leaving her home, as she and many others like her have been directed. When she does not answer, her silence

"اجيبي او افرغه فيه" :provokes the officer’s anger, and he threatens, pointing his rifle at her infant

[Answer or I’ll empty it in him] (25). At this, the woman answers confirming that she is indeed from the village of Birwah, but not that she is not leaving it, but rather that she is returning to it:

Yes, I am returning (to it)] (25). (Significantly, the word she uses for “returning” is]"نعم, عائدة" the verbal form of the title of Book I, Yuʼād). This provokes the officer further:

"الم انذركم ان من يعود اليها يقتل؟ اال تفهمون النظام؟ اتحسبونها فوضى. قومي اجري امامي عائدة أي

مكان شرقا. واذا رأيتك مرة ثانية على هذه الدرب لن اوفرك."

58

[Didn’t I warn you all that whoever returns to it [Birwah] will be killed? Don’t you

people understand order? Do you think this is chaos? Get up and walk in front of me, and

return anywhere to the east. And if I see you on this road for a second time, I will not

spare you] (26).

Upon witnessing this, Saʼīd prepares himself to confront the offices and stop him from shooting the child, but he ends up doing nothing, and therefore “participates” in effecting her expulsion:

"فانكمشت تأهبا لالنقباض, ولكن ما يكون. ففي عروقي يجري دماء الشباب الحارة, أنا ابن الرابعة والعشرين. وحتى

الصخر ال يطيق هذا المنظر. غير اني تذكرت وصية أبي وبركت والدتي. فقلت في نفسي: سأثور عليه اذا ما اطلق

الرصاص. ولكنه يهددها فحسب. فبقيت منكمشا."

[I shrank preparing to attack him, for in my veins ran the hot blood of a twenty-four year

old, and even a stone would be moved by this sight! But, that did not happen; I

remembered my father’s charge and my mother’s blessing, so I told myself: I will attack

him if he shoots, but at this point, he is merely threatening her. And so, I remained

shrunken] (25).

While Saʼīd’s shameful “participation” speaks of his cowardice, it also shows the difficult position he is in. Anyone unarmed and in the presence of a military governor with a rifle, and who himself faces a similar threat of expulsion and extermination, would react similarly. The farce of this tragic sight is that Saʼīd has participated in ensuring the success of the War of

Independence, but at a very expensive cost. Suddenly, though, as Saʼīd watches the woman walk

"وهنا الحظت اولى الظواهر الخارقة التي توالت :”away, he becomes aware of something “extraordinary

على فيما بعد حتى التقيت, اخيرا, صحبي الضائيين. فكلما ابتعدت المرأة وولدها عن مكاننا }...{ أزدادا طوال حتى اختلطا

And here is when I noticed the first extraordinary phenomenon that] بظلميهما في الشمس الغاربة" continued to occur until I finally encountered my friends from space. The farther the woman and

59 her son got from where we stood (…), the taller they became, until their bodies merged into their shadows in the setting sun] (26). The Israeli officer tires of waiting for them to disappear and

When will they disappear?] (26). The paradox of the woman’s] "متى بغيبان؟" :wonders, defeated disappearance from the landscape lied in the fact that the officer can never fully erase her from

,الظواهر the landscape. The extraordinary phenomenon, and the word used for phenomenon is which literally signifies what appears to the eyes, is the tragedy of the victory: this “great” event in Israeli history, the victory that marks the foundation of the state, is also a defeat. Saʼīd recognizes this, and tries to tell it to his addressee in the hopes that he understands its

"لماذا اروي لك, يا معلم, هذه الحكاية التافهة؟ لعدة اسباب منها: ظاهرة نمو االجسام كاما ابتعدت عن :significance

Why do I narrate this trivial story to you, good sir? For many reasons, of them: the] انظارنا." phenomenon of bodies growing taller the farther they get from our sight] (26). Like the invisibility of the invisible man, therefore, disappearance is not an essential characteristic of the invisible, but rather a flaw in the eyes of those looking, of those who cannot see that these invisible beings remain, imprinted on the landscape. One just needs to be perceptive enough to register their presence.

This is not to take away from the fact that the woman and child have physically left

Palestine, and this is the difficult paradox that Saʼīd has to confront throughout his life. Saʼīd concludes his letter in this chapter with immense despair. He quotes the famous contemporary

"نحن ادرى بالشياطين التي تجعل من الطفل :Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, who says the following

We know about those demons that make a prophet out of a child] (27). But, Saʼīd] نبيا"

"ولم يدر, اال اخيرا, بان هذه الشياطين نفسها تجعل من طفل آخر نسيا منسيا" :mournfully responds to that poet

[But this power did not know, until the end, that these same demons can render another child,

60 absolutely forgotten] (27). What he attempts to do in his letters is capture at least a shadow of their existence.

Book I is about the “first” tragedy that occurs in Saʼīd’s lifetime, which is the establishment of the State of Israel and the wave of deaths and expulsions that happened as a result. Saʼīd refers to this as the “first stroke of bad luck,” and notably uses the same word for

"وفي النحس االول في سنة ٨٤٩١, تبعثر اوالد عائلتنا :bad luck” that is in his name, transliterated as naḥs“

After the first stroke of bad luck in the year] أيدي عرب, واستوطنوا جميع بالد العرب التي لما يجر احتاللها..."

1948, the children of our family scattered amongst the hands of the Arabs, and became nationals of all the countries that were dragged into occupation] (19). This accursed historical moment becomes personal for Saʼīd when his childhood sweetheart, Yuʼād, is expelled from the new state. Yuʼād miraculously appears on his doorstep in Haifa, having illegally crossed into Israel from Lebanon. She needs a place to hide and spend the night, and consent to spending the night in Saʼīd’s home on the condition that he promises to guard her honor. In the middle of the night, though, Yuʼād calls Saʼīd into the bedroom in whispers and prepares the bed for them. Even though he still loves and desires her, he is paralyzed by her open expression of sexual desire. At the same time, Saʼīd is stunted by his fear of the Israelis, and that they might discover her illegal presence in his home. Unable to act on his desire for her, his fear from the Israelis translates into sexual impotence. Hearing her calls from the bedroom, he pretends to be asleep, and lies prostate

What shall I do] "فماذا افعل االن؟ والى متى اظل مستلقيا؟" ,on the couch, anxiously thinking to himself now? How long will I remain lying here?] (76).

At that moment, the Israeli authorities storm Saʼīd’s home and arrest Yuʼād. They grab

Saʼīd and toss him down the stairs like a pinball, where he lands at an Israeli officer’s feet in

Their hands] "فظلت االيدي تتقاذفني وانا مدحول حتى وجدتني في فناء الدرج تحت اقدام يعقوب" :utter submission

61 kept bouncing me back and forth as I rolled down the stairs, and I found myself at the bottom

"انني اعرف من انت, يا :landing, under Jacob’s feet] (78). Once at the foot of the stairs, Jacob yells

I know you who are, you jackass! Get up and explain to me what] حمار. قم واخبرني بما حدث" happened] (79). The spatial positioning of Saʼīd, prostate at Jacob’s feet, shows how lowly and weak he is in the face of the state; in contrast, a small battle unfolds between Yuʼād and the soldiers trying to arrest her. She puts up such a fight, biting and kicking, that they have to drag her down the stairs. Once at the bottom, instead of falling in complete submission, she lands

she landed on her two]"فهبطت على قدميها منتصبة القامة ورأسها في السماء" :erect” on her own two feet“ feet, standing erect with her head held high to the sky] (79). Unfortunately for Saʼīd, despite her resistance, she is expelled, but as she is driven away in the military jeep, she defiantly shouts:

this is my country, my home, and this is my husband] (79). Yuʼād’s]"هذه بلدي, داري, وهذا زوجي" public declaration indicates that, by claiming him as a husband, there is nothing illegal or illicit about a sexual encounter between her and Saʼīd. Nevertheless, his subordinate position to the

Israelis manifests as sexual impotence, and so his inability to even move from his prostate position and come to her bed implies he consolidates that law that names her presence as an Arab in the state illegal. Instead of going after Yuʼād himself, he mistakenly depends on those same authorities to return her to him. They promise him that if he diligently serves them “like a sweet

"بشرط واحد, يا :child,” they will return Yuʼād to him, making Yuʼād the carrot before the donkey

under one condition, Saʼīd, and that is that you serve us as a sweet] سعيد. وهو ان تكون ولدا طيبا" child] (82).

As can be predicted, they do not return Yuʼād to Saʼīd; rather, a different Yuʼād appears in his lifetime. The second Yuʼād of Book III, Yuʼād al-Thāniya, is the daughter of the first

Yuʼād who similarly gets expelled from being in Israel illegally, making for the iteration of the

62 tragedy of Book I. Saʼīd encounters her after he is thrown in jail for, ironically, serving the state like such a “sweet child” that his exaggerated loyalty turns out to be a subversive revolt against the state:

وذلك حين كنت استمع, في ليلة من الليالي الست العفريتية, الى االذاعة العربية من محطة اسرائيل احتراسا, فأتاني

صوت المذيع وهو يدعو العوب المهزومين الى رفع اعالم بيضاء فوق اسطحة منازلهم فيوفرها العسكر المارقون

مروق السهام. فينامون في بيوتهم آمنين. }...{ فصنعت من بياض فراشي علما ابيض علقته على المكنسة ونصبتهما

على سطح بيتي, في شارع الجبل في حيفا, والء االفراط في الوالء للدولة."

[On one of those nights of those six accursed ones,21 I was listening to the Arabic

broadcast of an Israeli radio station, to be on the safe side. The broadcaster was calling

for all the defeated Arabs to raise a white flag on the roofs of their houses in order to be

spared from the passing bullets. That way, they could safely sleep in their homes. […] So

I made a white flag out of my white bed sheets and a broomstick, and I set them up on the

roof of my house, on Jabal street in Haifa, publicly exhibiting my fervent loyalty for the

state] (155).

The six accursed nights is an explicit reference to the Six Day June War in 1967 when Israel destroyed the Egyptian army in a mere six days, which allow it to annex East Jerusalem to its capital and occupy the West Bank and Gaza. This event is the iteration of the first expulsion of

1948 in Book I (the narrator references another massive historical defeat of the Arabs by the

Italians in the 1912 Battle of Rhodes, 155). Saʼīd , the virgin with the white sheets, proud of his excessive loyalty to the state, publicly displays his defeat, which stands in sharp contrast to

Yuʼād’s public display of sexual power. The “jackass” is proud he has done right, but he does not realize that his actions are considered revolutionary acts against the State of Israel because

ʼafrītiyya, which comes from the word for the ,عفريتية ,The word for accused here is not naḥs, but rather 21 .ʼafrīt ,عفريت ,evil jinn

63

Haifa is not at all a defeated Arab village. His act of placing a white sheet of surrender on the rooftop of a city at the very heart of Israel indicates, according to Jacob, that he is calling for the separation of Haifa from the state (157). He therefore gets thrown in jail, and it is on his way out that he encounters the Yuʼād al-Thāniya.

Yuʼād al-Thāniya explains that she is the daughter of his first love, and with that discovery, Saʼīd is overwhelmed by the fear that the Israeli military will take her away to live in

to the houses of exile], just like they took her mother before her (198). His] "الى ديار الغربة",exile fear stems from the fact that the Israeli military has not changed, but Yuʼād al-Thāniya disagrees

If they have not changed, then that is their] "اذا لم يتغيروا فهي مأساتهم. اما نحن فتغيرنا" :with this tragedy. As for us, we have changed] (198). The Israeli army, though, does expel Yuʼād al-

Thāniya, confirming Saʼīd’s fears, and they do so in a performance identical to the expulsion of her mother. Saʼīd, no more courageous now that he was twenty years earlier, submissively falls down the steps just as he did when the first Yu’ad was arrested, landing at the feet of an Israeli officer. Yuʼād al-Thāniya, just like her mother before her, puts up a fight with the soldiers, and lands erect at the bottom of the staircase. Although she too ends up being expelled, there are

."عجبا" ,differences in the iteration of her disappearance, differences that Saʼīd calls miraculous

He is surprised to find that one officer is very polite to her; he apologizes for having to expel her saying that he is simply following the new laws. Yuʼād al-Thāniya replies indignantly that she expects nothing less from the Israelis. The officer then responds in a highly ironic gesture: he bows to her and says that, the Israeli military, on the contrary, was expecting a lot more from her

The] "فانحنى الضابط امامها باحترام عسكري وهو يقول: يا صغيرتي الحسناء لقد انتظرنا منكم اكثر مما تفعلون" :people officer bowed before her in the respectful manner expected of an army officer, and said: my dear, sweet young girl, we, on the other hand, expected a lot more of you and your people than what

64 you are actually doing] (201). The apparent respect of the officer, and the so-called “new” laws, are a masquerade for what they have been doing for the past twenty years, that is, expelling

Arabs and annexing land. The content is the same but the form appears differently. The exaggerated bow of the Israeli officer mocks the Arabs’ inability to protect their homes and their land, their so-called honor, in the name of a treacherous loyalty symbolized by Saʼīd’s makeshift flag. Indeed, while the Israelis have not changed, neither have the Arabs, if anything, they have become worse as they have learned nothing from the first iteration of catastrophe and are no more courageous than they were in 1948. When the Israeli officer tries to expel Yuʼād al-

Thāniya, she turns to Saʼīd and asks him whether he kissed her mother before she disappeared

in that case, you have] "اذن, ضاعت عليك القبلة الثانية" ,from his life. When he replies no, she tells him just lost the second kiss] (201).

"هذا بلدي, داري, وهذا ,Indeed, as Yuʼād al-Thāniya is being expelled from Israel, she shouts

This is my country, my home, and this is my uncle] (201). Upon hearing this, Saʼīd tells] عمي" himself that he will preserve this statement in his heart to survive the next twenty years of her

That is] "ممنوع" :disappearance, but the Israeli officer interrupts his dreaming with the retort forbidden] (201). Her statement marks a changed relationship with Saʼīd, one that is no longer a marital relation but where the uncle takes over as protector of the family in the absence of the husband or father. But Saʼīd fails in this role as well as he does not give Yuʼād al-Thāniya a kiss; furthermore, the Israeli authority forbids the both the kind of relation that Yuʼād al-Thāniya declares and the possibility of Saʼīd preserving it—even in his heart. Even though the relationship of cousins, which is the word Saʼīd repeatedly uses to refer to Jews, invokes the

Arabic tradition of the story of Abraham, where Jews are the sons of Isaac the son of Sarah, and the Arabs the sons of the eldest son of Abraham, Ismaʼīl the son of Hajar, the officer’s response

65 rejects any kinship between the two lineages and all that the Yuʼāds represent. Saʼīd’s presence in Israel as an Arab becomes more and more absurd, his disappearance not immediate and recurring, like the Yuʼāds’, but gradual, where he fades into the dark catacombs of Acre.

This iteration of catastrophe and Saʼīd’s missed second kiss reveals the fact that this tragedy could very well continue to be repeated until Yuʼād and everything she represents is no

"فستكون ابن سبعين عاما حين تلتقي يعاد :longer recognizable. In the words of Yuʼād al-Thāniya to Saʼīd

.You will be seventy years old when you encounter the Third Yuʼād] الثالثة. ولن تعرفها ولن تعرفك"

And you will not recognize her nor will she recognize you] (199). Some critics of the novel have argued that Habibi is reclaiming some kind of Palestinian identity in his works,22 but it is not so much an identity that he is reclaiming but rather trying to survive in the face of cultural and material annihilation. To reclaim an identity is to presume there is a stable identity out there that can be reclaimed. The fact that the Yuʼād al-Thāniya has changed, and that the third will be unrecognizable, shows that this very desire to reclaim that past identity is already a lost cause.

While this is the threat of recurring tragedy, the farce of tragedy is that the repeatable—the defeats—will continue to repeat until defeat disappears, not because it is not there, but because it is unrecognizable. That is, the more cowardly the Arabs, the less likely they are to recognize their defeat as defeat, articulating the move from nakba in 1948, which literally translates as catastrophe, and naksa in 1967, which literally translates as setback. One needs to be able to see it differently in order to recognize this regression. It is not recognition of a past cultural identity that one must preserve and reclaim that Saʼīd calls for in his letters, but rather, recognition of

22 For instance, Akram F. Khater writes in “Emile Habibi: The Mirror of Irony in Palestinian Literature,” that “Habibi uses the tool of laughter to reclaim the identity of the Palestinian-Israelis from the throes of the Hegemonic State, historical amnesia, and mindless materialism” (76). He also adds referring to another one of Habibi’s works, Ikhtiyyi, “In the later novel, Ikhtiyyi, the struggle for a Palestinian identity continues” (79).

66 continues presence that appears to have changed but it very much familiar. Furthermore, recognition is not only for the Israelis; here, Yuʼād al-Thāniya directly aims her statement about the third Yuʼād being unrecognizable at Saʼīd and all that he symbolizes. While annihilation comes at the hands of the Israelis and their prohibition of any kind of Arab claim to not only the land but a history and culture, the entire episode with Yuʼād al-Thāniya demands recognition of the pathetic but repeated defeat of the Arabs as such. While the “tragedy” may appear to come at the hands of the Israelis, the saddest part of the joke is that the Arabs also have a large contributive role in effecting disappearance.

Can these tragedies as farce of repeatable history be objects of laughter, then? Who is in the position to laugh at farce? What does laughter have to do with recognition? Thus far, it is clear that Saʼīd has made a direct analogy with himself and a jackass in his letters, purposely figuring himself as the coward and traitor, a foolish caricature at whom to laugh. Nevertheless, even though his overly ambitious servitude to the Israelis conveys his puerile emasculation, the fact that he represents himself as such in his letters addressed to a “respectful sir” makes one suspicious of who is the fool, and who the respectful sirs. To thoroughly evaluate this complexity, we briefly return to the invocation of Marx to consider the context in which Saʼīd asks the question:

"حاشية: بعد ان دارت االرض دورة كاملة أي في هذه االيام, فرأت في صحفكم عن المذكرة التي قدها وجهاء الخليل

الى الخليل الى حاكم العسكري ان يبيح لهم استيراد الحمير من الضفة الشرقية, فقد ندرت. فسأل الصحفي: أين ذهبت

حميركم؟ فضحكوا واخبروه بأن جزاري تل أبيب انفقوها في صنع النقانق. وحيث انكم كنتم تؤكدون لنا, يا محترم, ان

التاريخ حين يكرر واقعه, ال يعود على نفسه بل تكون الواقعة االولى مأساة حتى اذا تكررت كانت مهزلة, فأني

اسألكم: أيهما المأساة, وأيهما المهزلة؟"

67

[Footnote: Now that the world has made a complete revolution, I read in your newspapers

about the memo that the elites of al-Khalīl [Hebron] sent to the Israeli army general

informing him of the importation of asses from the East Bank because asses have become

scarce these days. The journalist asked them: Where have your asses gone? The elites

laughed and replied, informing him that the butchers of Tel Aviv have already disbursed

them in the making of sausages. You used to assure us, respectful sirs, that when the

events of history repeat themselves, they do not recur identically; rather, the first time

they occur is tragedy, their iteration, farce. So now, I ask you, which of the two is

tragedy, and which of the two, farce?] (58).

From this excerpt, it seems that the Arab elites are in a position comparable to Saʼīd ’s.

Even though he is the token jackass of the novel, what he says here in the so-called “footnote” is that there are no longer any jackasses remaining on this side of the Jordan River. While this references his disappearance because he is an ass and has disappeared, the fact that his disappearance is paradoxical implies that he is not an ass after all (the paradox of his disappearance being that even though he appears to have disappeared, he is still , just out of sight). He just moves under the radar, on the margins; he is an afterthought, but an important one, one that could be critical to comprehension, like a footnote. By not paying attention, the

Arab elites decide there is a scarcity of asses, and so they import a new batch from the East

Bank. The way the statement is phrased shows that the Arab elites are not simply notifying the

Israeli army general that they are going to import more asses, but rather that they are asking him for permission to do so, placing them in a subservient position to the Israeli authorities, just as

Saʼīd ’s is. What is more, the East Bank is geographically Jordan and the other Arab states, which suggests that the writer of the letters, who poses as a fool, is calling the Arab elites of al-

68

Khalīl and the non-Palestinian Arab elites on the East of the Jordan River asses. Who then is the

“great” personage of history in this iteration of the importation of asses, and who the fool?

The intricate play of language in the novel in puns, irony and paradox, and the sliding metaphors whose references shift as soon as one pinpoints a referent contribute to the way recognition works in the novel; laughing at Saʼīd who on the surface appears to be the emasculated, cowardly traitor becomes suspect; is the joke really on him, or is it on someone else? We can answer this with a narratological study of the different narrators in the novel. In addition to three parts, there are also three narrators in the novel. The first is the recipient of

Saʼīd ’s letters, who narrates the first line of each of the three parts, offsetting the directly quoted

-Saʼīd Abu-al Naḥs al] ”كتب الي سعيد ابو النحس المتشائل, قال“ :letters that Saʼīd has written

Mutashāʻel wrote to me and said:] (13, 90, 152); the second is Saʼīd whose letters are addressed to an “honored” or “respectful gentleman” make up the bulk of the novel; the third appears most

For the Sake of Truth and] ”للحقيقة والتاريخ“ ,distinctly in the final chapter, significantly titled

History] and is omniscient and all knowing. With the emergence of this third narrator, the recipient of the Saʼīd’s letters (the first narrator) becomes a character in the narrative, and like

Saʼīd, the third narrator addresses his narrative to an explicitly named narratee, a “respectful gentleman.” With the first narrator becoming a character the third narrator’s narrative, structural reversal takes place. He is no longer simply Saʼīd’s narrate as his actions in the final chapter reveal whether recognition will take place. Thus, the story of Saʼīd’s disappearance is becomes close to the implied reader, removing the multiple narrative frames—the stories in the letters that can only be told via the recipient of the letters—making the third narrator the sole access point to the final possibility for recognition to take place in the novel. By deciphering who is the new narratee of the third narrator, we can begin to explore who is supposed to be laughing, at whom,

69 where the tragedy lies, and how recognition functions in this multiplicity of recurrence, doubling, and structural reversals.

The third narrator aligns his narratee with the recipient of Saʼīd’s letters, who goes looking for Saʼīd in the last chapter of the novel because Saʼīd has stopped writing to him, signaling his full disappearance. He ends up in a hospital for the mentally disabled where he has an exchange with the Israelis running the hospital, and he asks them whether they ever had a patient named Saʼīd at the hospital. He finds that the hospital does not keep any records

"ففتشوا في دفاتر المستشفى عن نزالئه منذ قيام الدولة":preceding the date of the foundation of the State

[They searched their records of patients dating from the foundation of the state] (207), implying that presence only exists the moment the state is established, even though for Saʼīd, the establishment of the State of Israel is the moment he begins to disappear.23 This is reflected in the part when the recipient of Saʼīd ’s letters learns that the hospital had been a prison during the

British mandate over Palestine (prior to the establishment of the state), and the Israelis converted its execution room into a museum memorializing the Jewish Etzel24 members sentenced to death

"ابدى :there. He finds that they erased all traces of the Arabs who were also executed in the prison

he was astonished] دهشته, امام المسؤولين لخلو غرفة, المتحف, االعدام من أي ذكر للعرب الذين شنقهم االنكليز فيها" to find that all traces of the Arabs hanged in the execution room—the museum—by the English

"لنبدأ من الباية }...{ كانت البداية ,Even though Saʼīd refers to the foundation of the State as his second birth 23 Let us begin at the beginning (…). The beginning is when I] حين ولدت مرة اخرى بفضل حمار }...{ في الحوادث" was born for a second time, courtesy of an ass (…) during the events (of the War of Independence)] (16), it signals the beginning of his gradual degradation into disappearance.

הארגון הצבאי הלאוםי ,The Hebrew acronym for the National Military Organization in the Land of Israel 24 ha-argon ha-tsaveʻī ha-leumī ba-aretz israʻl. In the early 1900s, its members revolted against ,בארץ )אצ"ל( the British prohibition of Jews immigrating into then-Palestine.

70 were erased] (69).25 Unsatisfied with these findings, but unable to do anything about them, the recipient of Saʼīd’s letters leaves the hospital in despair, at which point the narrator intervenes

"كذلك مضى المحترم, الذي تلقى هذه الرسائل :and directly asks his narratee to help this man find Saʼīd

And so, the respectful] العجيبة, وفي قلبه رغبة في ان تساعدوه في البحث عن سعيد هذا. ولكن أين ستبحثون؟" gentleman who received these strange letters went on his way with a desire in his heart that you

(pl.) help him in his search for this Saʼīd. But, where are you going to look?] (207). Thus, the third narrator draws his narrate into the plot, urging him to participate in the search for Saʼīd. At

"صبرا, صبرا, وال تتساءل: من هو سعيد ابو النحس :the beginning of the novel, Saʼīd writes to this recipient

Patience, patience. Do not ask: who is this Saʼīd Abū al-Naḥs] هذا؟ لم ينبه في حياته فكيف ننبه له؟" person? He never spoke out in his life so how are we going to be able to point him out?] (13).26

Thus, even after the full narration of the letters, Saʼīd’s narratee is still unable to point him out.

Therefore, when the third narrator asks his narratee to help the recipient of Saʼīd’s letters find him, he implies that he too will be unable to find Saʼīd. This is confirmed with the closing line of the novel, which is a smug question that implies that his narratee has also failed to change the

"فكيف ستعثرون عليه, يا سادة يا كرام, دون ان :way he sees and recognize the material presence of Saʼīd

[?So how are you (pl.) going to find him, oh honored sirs, without stumbling upon him] تتعثّروا به"

(208).

dhikrin), which literally translates as memory. This) ذكر The Arabic word used here for “traces” is 25 reminds one of the part in Invisible Man where Clifton is shot dead by a police officer. The invisible man calls the policeman who shoots Clifton his “executioner” not only because he kills him, but also because he is the one “who won and who lived to lie about it afterwards” (439). The narrator questions, and what of Clifton? One of those who “wrote no novels, histories, or other books” (439).

ينبه The words for “speak out” (or call out) and “point out” are the same word in Arabic, the former 26 nanbuh lahu). The difference in meaning comes from the preposition) ننبه له ,yanbuh) and the latter) following each word. This is another example of the play on language that saturates the novel.

71

Throughout his letters, Saʼīd is continually surprised that his narratee has not noticed his disappearance. He asks him:

"علمني, بحياتك, االنسان الفذ من يكون؟ اهو الذي يختلف عن اآلخرين, ام هو الواحد من هؤالء اآلخرين؟

قلت أنك لم تحس بي أبدا. ذلك أنك بليد الحس يا محترم. فكم من مرة التقيت اسمي في امهات الصحف؟ الم تقرأ عن

المئات الذين حبستهم شرطة حيفا في ساحة الحناطر )باريس حاليا( يوم انفجار البطيخ؟ كل عربي شاب في حيفا

السلفي على االثر حبسوه, من راجل ومن راكب. وذكرت الصحف اسماء الوجهاء الذين حبسوا سهوا, وآخرين.

آخرون—هؤالء أنا. الصحف ال تسهو عني. فكيف تزعم انك لم تسمع عني؟"

[Tell me, upon your life, which is the extraordinary individual? Is he the one who

differs from others, or someone who is one of those others? You said that you have never

felt my presence. Well, that is because you are cold-blooded, respectful sir. For how

many times did you encounter my name in the leading newspapers? Did you not read of

the hundreds that the Haifa police imprisoned in Ḥanāṭir Square (now Paris Square), the

day that the watermelon exploded? The newspapers mentioned the names of the notables

who were caught, giving passing reference to the others.

The others—that would be me. The newspapers did not overlook me, so how can

you proclaim not to have heard of me?] (17).

Saʼīd, the person who does not draw attention to himself, is also everybody else, the unnamed others the “respectful sirs” fail to pay attention to, overlook, and do not see. Saʼīd’s marginal position is therefore not because he is marginal and unimportant, but because of a flaw in the eyes of the “respectful sirs,” their failure to see. Thus, by the last chapter of the novel, when the recipient of the letters is still unable to see, he has not changed his way of seeing in the course of reading the letters—he has not arrived at recognition. When the third narrator aligns his narratee

72 with the recipient of Saʼīd’s letters, he too is pre-positioned in a way that he will fail to find

Saʼīd. Indeed, even if he were to find Saʼīd, he would be incapable of recognizing him.

If Saʼīd’s existence depends on his work as an informant to the Israelis, the elites’ depends on two things: subservience to the Israelis, and worse, the sacrifice of the everyman

Arab, like Saʼīd, who have been made to disappear not only at the hands of the Israelis, but also at the hands of these very same Arab elites.27 The addressee does not see Saʼīd because Saʼīd is positioned, literally, beneath his feet. He does not see that he has been trampling all over him and every other lowly “other” in order to keep his status. At one point in the novel, in a very Christ like image, extending the metaphor of the sacrifice of the everyman, Saʼīd enters Israel on an ass to meet the army general he is to report to. The general orders him to get down from the donkey, and in his measly attempt to retain some pride, Saʼīd refuses with the following proclamation,

"أنا فالن بن فالن وال انزل اال على عتبة :simultaneously making him a nobody but everybody as well

I am son of so and so, and I will] الخواجة سفسرشك. فشتمني }...{ وشتم الخواجة سفسرشك. فنزلت عن الحمار" not descend for anyone but the respectful Mr. Shafsershak. So he cursed me (…) and cursed the respectful Mr. Shafsershak. So I alighted from the donkey] (21). Once on his feet, he is both delighted and relieved to find that he is taller than the general without the extra boost in height of

"لما نزلت عن الحمار رأيتني اطول قامة من الحاكم العسكري. فاطمأنت نفسي حين وجدتني أطول قامة :a donkey’s legs

.When I alighted the donkey, I saw that I was still taller than the army general] منه بدون قوائم الحمار"

I was therefore assured and relieved to find that I am taller than the army general without the legs of the donkey] (22). This caricatural attention to unimportant details shows that he may not

27 To reiterate, recognition is not simply the recognition of the existence of Palestinians as an identity group; this would be as easy and simplistic as saying that the addressees of the narrative are Israelis. By addressing the Arab elites, the text resists reifying the false dichotomy between Israelis and Palestinians. It shows that invisibility and erasure comes at the hands of both Israelis and Arabs, and the narrator is trying to recognition from both. Also, see Fraser.

73 appear to have any social “height,” but in reality, is physically taller than the army general upon whom his survival depends—even without the ass. Therefore, there is something in this “height” that is related to the “respectful sirs’” inability to see Saʼīd.

In the two final questions the third narrator asks his narratee—where are you going to look? and, how are you going to find him without stumbling upon him?—there is reversal. In the

Poetics, Aristotle characterizes tragedy as being about men more virtuous than the audience, men who fall from good fortune to bad. While it focuses on action rather than on individual character,28 Aristotle is clear in his description of the hero of tragedy:

This is the sort of man who is not pre-eminently virtuous and just, and yet it is through no

badness or villainy of his own that he falls into the fortune, but rather through some flaw

in him, he being one of those who are in high station and good fortune, like Oedipus and

Thyestes and the famous men of such families as those. The successful plot must then

have a single and not, as some say, a double issue; and the change must be not to good

fortune from bad but, on the contrary, from good to bad fortune, and it must not be due to

villainy but to some great flaw in such a man as we have described, or of one who is

better rather than worse...the best tragedy is of this construction. (1453a).

For Aristotle, the best way to achieve this kind of construction is through two turns in the plot of the tragedy, what he calls reversal, and what he calls discovery—or recognition. Simply, reversal

“is a change of the situation into the opposite” (1452a); discovery, “a change from ignorance to knowledge” (1452a). The best kind of discovery, though, is that one that “coincides with reversals” (1452a); that is, only with a change in situation can the hero undergo a discovery and

28 Which is an important focus of all analysis. For instance, as will be shown in Chapter Two, “Responsibility,” a focus on the main character Véronica in Maryse Condé’s Heremakhonon has led to limited, superficial analyses of the character’s search for herself, rather than a more in-depth, comprehensive analysis of the broader implications and incentives behind this woman’s quest.

74 change from ignorance to knowledge. In other words, only with an external change in the position of the character can the character learn something and recognize not only his positioning, but the positioning of those around him that he had previously not paid any attention to.

In Al-mutashāʻel, we have both reversal and recognition, but because of Saʼīd’s and the third narrator’s narratee, the tragedy is not so much Saʼīd’s, the others’, or those exiled to disappearance. Because the narratees are men of better position and fortune, “respectful sirs”, the final lines of the novel indicate that the tragedy is theirs. In other words, because they are men of better position, and the foolish Saʼīd is capable of tripping them up, the tragedy is their fall from good fortune. Even more tragic, it is only in that fall that the narratees would be able to recognize the presence of the invisible on the margins. The final questions of the novel therefore do not only say that the elites are walking all over the everyman as represented by the foolish protagonist; the foolish protagonist who goes unnoticed also has the power to trip up the prestigious narratee, effecting a change in situation, a reversal, and knocking him off his high horse of power and position.

When one laughs, one aligns oneself with the person doing the ridiculing, not the person being ridiculed. If the narratee is someone of position and fortune—whether Israeli, a member of the Arab elite in Israel, or the Arab politicians east of the Jordan River— and laughs at the foolish protagonist, then he has not recognized himself as the narratee of the story. The repetition of great historical events and personages, and the repetition, irony, and the representation of tragedy as farce in the narrative, have not brought recognition, and that is the tragedy of the narratee. The recurrence of tragedy on the level of the literary narrative, in its structure and ironic

75 tone, has made asses out of the elites, who in their failed recognition are actually laughing at themselves.

What is Saʼīd’s power to make his narratee stumble, if not on a literary level, then on the level of material reality? Throughout the narrative, Saʼīd claims to have been “saved” by friends

faḍāʻiẏīn. It is but a vowel "فضائيين" from space. The word Saʼīd uses for friends from space is

fidāʻiẏīn, the word that has become popular "فدائيين" and guttural consonant away from the word in its translation as “freedom fighters.” With Saʼīd’s play with language throughout the novel, it is not far-fetched to suggest that Saʼīd’s disappearance has also become his refuge with the fidāʻiẏīn, the freedom fighters, not the men from space. The tragedy of the addressee is his failure to find Saʼīd and “those others”; the farce, that these fidāʻiẏīn will not only make fools out of these elites who continue in their blindness; through their own means, the freedom fighters will make those in power “stumble” and fall.29

Nonetheless, Saʼīd’s is a coward, and he tells Yuʼād al-Thāniya that he will remain in hiding while the fidāʻiẏīn like her brother fight on behalf of others like him, so it is unlikely that

Saʼīd has actually joined these fighters (199). In his difficult, paradoxical position, faced with the oblivion of complete erasure, Saʼīd has discovered another way of resisting this erasure. In his immense fear, he whispers his secret form of resistance to his friends from space, markedly different, and even more silent than the resistance of the fidāʻiẏīn. In one of his secret meetings,

Saʼīd tells them that he is burdened with a secret. They advise him to tell it to the world so he can

"وها أنا ,so tell it]. Saʼīd responds that this is precisely what he is doing] "فجد به" :be relieved of it

and this here is what I am doing] (102). The word his friends from space use for “tell” is] أفعل"

mawjūd موجود so ,و-ج-د ,jidd, and it comes from the same root for “to be present” in Arabic "ج ّد "

29 This pun was also identified by Roger Allen in The Arabic Novel, which he understands as showing that Saʼīd has joined the fidāʻiẏīn (214).

76 means, “he is present.” Saʼīd is “making present” his non-presence in his letters, and this paradox is simultaneously a powerful resistance to disappearance. His powerful resistance comes in the form of narrative in his letters. At the same time, though, the closing questions of the novel indicate that his presence will not be recognized by the narratees, and like the woman of Birwah, he will remain a shadow of existence, on the verge of being absolutely forgotten.

The smug closing question of the narrative, though, indicates that it is a warning to the implied reader to not be like the foolish narratee, lest he meet a similar tragedy as the narratee. In order to distinguish between the narratee, implied reader, and by extension real reader, Seymour

Chatman in Story and Discourse states the following: “the implied author and implied reader are immanent to a narrative, the narrator and narratee are optional... The real author and real reader are outside the narrative transaction as such, though, of course, indispensable to it in an ultimate practical sense” (151, my emphasis). The implied reader who is immanent to the narrative understands everything on the level of information in the novel, and presumably always understands the irony, puns, plays on language, and references in the narrative. The narratee of both narrators in the novel does not; as for the real reader, it is out of the control of the narrative.

Nonetheless, just because the real reader does not exist within the narrative, it does not mean that she or he is not affected by it. According to Chatman, upon reading a narrative, the real reader enters a fictional contract with the narrative (150), and so would ideally become an implied reader and heed the narrative’s warning. Of course, this is beyond the control of the narrative, and this real reader may or may not engage the text, or even continue to read the narrative. In the chance that she or he does, though, the real reader then becomes implicated in the warning of the narrators: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you? (Ellison 581, my

77 emphasis). In other words, be wary of your own blindness, your inability to recognize yourself as the narratee, for the tragedy will be your fall if you do not.

Writing about the difference between history and poetry, Aristotle says that history “tells what happened and the other [poetry] what might happen. For this reason, poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts” (1451b). Both Invisible Man and Al-mutashāʻel are not histories; they fall into the creative domain of poiesis in Aristotle’s configuration, a space of possibility where the invisible could be seen. Indeed, it is only through this creative process that they can reveal the paradox of their existence.30 Saʼīd does this in his letters to a respectful sir; in the epilogue of

Invisible Man, the narrator says that his own writing process has relieved him of his anger: “The very act of trying to put it all down has confused me and negated some of the anger and some of the bitterness” (579). This is because it has allowed him to make music out of invisibility:

I play the music of my isolation. The last statement doesn’t seem just right, does it? But it

is; you hear music simply because music is heard and seldom seen, except by musicians.

Could this compulsion to put invisibility down in black and white be thus an urge to

make music out of invisibility? (13)

The compulsion to write their paradoxical existence is a warning for the implied reader of his tragic fate in blindness, and this recognition is crucial because if one is too blind to situate oneself historically, one will fail to orient oneself socially and politically. In Aristotle, non-

30 According to Samia Mehrez in the Arabic language essay, “Irony in James Joyce and Emile Habibi,” the very condition of being a minority in country is paradoxical: وكلمة أقلية في حد ذاتها مبنية على التناقض بين المظهر والحقيقة. فألقلية جزء من المجتمع ولكن مختلفة عنه, تعيش داخله وتبقى خارجه, تحاول االنتماء ولكن تفشل في تحقيقه وتبقى دائما في صراع تولده تلك المفارقة ويؤدي إلى إحساس دائم بالغربة والعزلة. The word “minority” in itself is built on a contradiction between appearances and ‘reality.’ A minority is a part of society, but different from it; it lives inside it but remains on its exterior; it attempts to assimilate but fails. It thus always remains in a struggle bred by contradiction, which leads to a continual feeling of estrangement and isolation. (38)

78 histories warn of what “a certain type of man will do or say either probably or necessarily”

(Aristotle, 1451b) when put in a certain situation, and the novels do precisely this: they warn the addressees of what a certain person or group of people who are rendered invisible and deprived of all power and personal agency will probably or necessarily do in that position of invisibility.

Such people end up, intentionally or not, subversively demanding recognition. But, since both novels end without closure, the narratees do not arrive at that recognition.

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Chapter Two: Responsibility

-and here I am, brushing up against the Palestinian experience, a

goddamn adventure cartoonist who hasn’t changed his clothes in

days, who’s stepped over a few dead rats and shivered from the

cold, who’s bulshitted with the boys and nodded knowingly at their

horrible narratives… and I’m pinching myself in a car in the dark

flood, giddy from the ferocity outside, thinking, “Throw it at me,

baby, I can take it,” but I’ve got the window rolled up tight…

(Sacco, Palestine 208)

In chapter one, the addressees played a crucial role in the narratives of those made

“other” in the context of a nation and national community. The second person narratees in

Invisible Man and Al-mutashāʻel postulate a “you” who is called out to recognize the presence of those “others” as constitutive of the national community, but because both novels end with an unanswered question, the implication is that the postulated “you” has missed the call for recognition: on the one hand, the “you” has failed to recognize the constitutive presence of

“others” in the national community because he cannot conceive of, let alone perceive visually, community across categories of identity, let alone outside them. In other words, for the postulated “you” at the end of each narrative, a so-called community can only consist of a single

“identity group”—be it a racial group or an ethno-religious31 one. As such, the “you” cannot conceive of being part of a community of which someone of a different race (African American

31 In the case of Al-mutashāʻel, both religion and so-called ethnicity are grounds for disappearance, and since the protagonist is not Jewish, grounds for his disappearance were based on that fact, which also became conflated with his being “Arab”.

80 in Invisible Man) or ethnicity/religion (Palestinian and not Jewish in Al-mutashāʻel) is also a member. For this “you”, to be American cannot include non-whites, and to be Israeli cannot include “Arabs”.32

The narratees of Invisible Man and Al-mutashāʻel have also missed the call for recognition because they fail to recognize themselves as the postulated “you;” that is, the narratees fail to see that it is they who are in fact implied in the address of the narrative; they do not recognize themselves as the naïve, ignorant, blind fool who is the butt of the narrators’ joke.

In this sense, the narrative address is always a risk.

The one who is positioned as the receiver may not be receiving at all, may be engaged in

something that cannot under any circumstances be called “receiving,” doing nothing

more for me than establishing a certain site, a position, a structural place where the

relation to a possible reception is articulated. (Butler 67).

This is the other kind of recognition the two novels outline. The call for recognition is not simply a matter of recognizing those who have been rendered invisible or made to disappear; recognition is also recognizing oneself as the narratee of the narrative, identifying with a position that one does not consider oneself to occupy, particularly in relation to those who have been

“othered,”which is a position that indicated responsibility for rendering others invisible. This is a difficult position to see oneself occupying because it not only brings to light one’s responsibility, but it also puts into question the hierarchy of power between those in the position of the narrator and the implied reader. This latter kind of recognition—recognition and identification with the

“you”—emerges as a question of responsibility:

32 I say Palestinian because consider the category Israeli-Arab problematic. It is usually set in opposition to Israeli-Jew, conflating religion, culture, and ethnicity in both terms, Arab and Jew.

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It is here that the question of responsibility can be posed with the greatest rigor. The

address to the other—to the other as at once the you who reads and who might be lured

into an identification [with the “you”], into the risk or the experience of an imitation or a

comparison, a mutation (Keenan 57, my emphasis).

In the address, one might be lured into identification with the positioning of the postulated

“you,” thereby risking “mutation,” changing one’s own perception of his or her positioning and thereby seeing it, in actuality, better.

It is also a risk because the narratee needs to “plunge out” (to use the invisible man’s words) of what the narratees think they know about themselves, and come face to face with a moment of absolute uncertainty, not only of who they are, but how to respond to that unfamiliar self they are faced with. Despite this unfamiliarity, the receiver must respond to this uncertainty, and the form this response takes is responsibility. In Fables of Responsibility, Thomas Keenan describes responsibility as “the predicament in which coincide the necessity, the inevitability of action, and the failure of laws with which to calculate and program it” (71). In other words, responsibility is a demand and requirement to respond in a moment in which we cannot apply any of the rules of behavior that we know; when the grounds of knowing are removed, and the rules and knowledge cannot guide the decisions for our actions (1). For the implied readers to recognize themselves in the narrative address, they would need to be jolted out of what they think they know about themselves and how to act as such, to be completely estranged. In this estrangement, the possibility of a different kind of relationship between the narrator and the

“you” arises.

Recognition of community across and indeed outside of identity groups is the first problem taken up in the comparison of Heremakhonon by Maryse Condé and Palestine by Joe

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Sacco. This problem is intricately linked to the problem of recognizing one’s position in relation to others outside of the familiar way in which one identifies oneself. The address, the postulated

“you,” makes possible an awareness of the kind of relationship between the narrator and addressee that the addressee fails to see already exists. The address thus makes possible an unusual relationship not determined by identity, racial, ethnic, or religious, and through this kind of recognition, a possibility of different kinds of community relations emerge. In this chapter, responsibility is examined in the two narratives through a close analysis of the narrators’ conception of whether community across and outside of identity groups is possible given their position as foreigners. The protagonists of each narrative actually recognize that they are the unfamiliar “you” the locals address, and the chapter compares how each responds to that recognition. In Heremakhonon and Palestine, the protagonists are foreigners, the former a

Guadeloupean woman in Guinea in western Africa, and the latter an American in Palestine. Their complex positioning as foreigners is crucial for the question of responsibility because of the reality of our modern world, a world characterized by movement, migration, and at the same time, a desire for “origin” and homogenous “identity” This chapter explores narratives which put into question the very problem of homogenous identity, and in spite of that, shows that the question of responsibility must nonetheless be resolved.

Heremakhonon : Failed Quest for the Self, Failed Responsibility

The first narrative is Heremakhonon by Maryse Condé, first published in 1976 in French.

In 1988, reappeared as En attendant le bonheur (Heremakhonon), a literal French translation of

“heremakhono,” meaning to wait for happiness in Malinke, one of the regional languages spoken

83 in Western Africa (Lionnet 180-1)33. The novel is narrated in first person by a woman named

Véronica Mercier who arrives in an unnamed country in West Africa as a philosophy teacher for the National Institute. Unlike the retrospective narrative of Invisible Man, the novel is told from

Véronica’s present moment in Africa, but through associative memory, she invokes instances of her past in Guadeloupe and Paris to make for what appears to be a disjunctive non-linear narrative. Véronica is born on the small island of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean, and as a teenager is sent off to Paris and has not been back to the island since, in “nine years,” one of the literary signposts that punctuates her narrative.

Although a West African country is not mentioned by name, according to the back cover of the second French printing, the novel is inspired by the tragic events of 1962 in Guinea in

West Africa: « Inspiré par les tragiques événements de 1962; dans la Guineé de Sékou Touré;

Heremakhonon (expression significant “Attends le Bonheur”) est l’histoire d’une disillusion. »

[Inspired by the tragic events of 1962 in the Guinea of Sékou Touré, Heremakhonon (meaning

‘wait[ing] for happiness’) is the story of a disillusionment]. On September 28, 1958, a young

Sékou Touré led Guinea to independence from France by being the first African country to reject being part of French president Charles de Gaulle’s Communauté française. In his first years as the leader of the Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG), Touré brought pride not only to

Guineans, but to all African countries under European colonization. Many lauded him for his courage and revolutionary spirit, including the famous Caribbean French poet Aimé Césaire

(Straker 6). Touré’s revolutionary campaign focused on the youth of the country and system of

33 All quotations come from the second French edition. While the translations are my own, I have made them with close reference to the English language translation by Richard Philcox. I chose to translate the French instead of solely using the English translation because some parts of the novel have been omitted, modified, or amended in the translation by Philcox.

84 education;34 in addition to dismantling the French educational system that was in place, he repeatedly made changes to the national curriculum, and used of the spectacle of military songs and parades to promote national pride. He invigorated the cultural scene to create a national art, and focused on developing theatre because of its potential for political power: theatre’s “political impact hinged on their ‘exposure’ of ‘social contradictions’ and a ‘central problem,’ followed by an ‘illumination of a sequence of choices and decisions made in the direction of the Revolution’”

(Touré quoted in Straker, 93). Theatre (and ballet) was the art of the Revolution, and so students were required to participate in national theatrical performances (hence the significance of the defiant theatrical performance within the novel, where the character Birame III and others of

Véronica’s students put on). 35 Behind the rhetoric and glamour of the Revolution, though, teachers of the public schools repeatedly clashed with the military, for instance, in 1961, state forces brutally cracked down on students and teachers in the capital Conakry for staging a protest against local educational policies (Straker 7). While Touré may have flaunted revolutionary independence, his regime was violent and authoritative, enforced by his military. Camp Boiro36 was the feared work camp infamous for disappearances (renamed the fictional Samiana in

Heremakhonon, which the main character and narrator Véronica visits several times, and on one occasion, witnesses an emaciated Birame III undergoing extreme manual labor). As can be predicted, any deviance from what became Touré’s position and way of ruling the state became

34 See Straker.

35 Since students and teachers were the agents of the Revolution, it is they who bore the brunt of the violence, particularly in the context of the national theatre. For instance, the youth experienced brutal treatment in the mandatory theatrical performances including “the abduction, sexual harassment, and beating of rural girls under the official guise of theatre ‘recruitment’ and ‘rehearsal’” (Straker 14).

36 Mass graves have been discovered outside Conakry and the Association of Child Victims of Camp Boiro report that over 50,000 people disappeared or were assassinated at the camp under the regime (Samb).

85 cause for the disappearance of individuals, teachers, and students. Indeed, it is such a “deviant” staging that the students in Heremakhonon perform, and is the cause for Birame III and Saliou’s disappearances and subsequent deaths. While one can read the novel as a political allegory,

Véronica’s approach to and relationship with the locals she encounters in this country and within this political context of conflict is where the question of responsibility arises.

The political setting of the narrative is crucial particularly as it is the first thing that is explained to Véronica, implying that political awareness is crucial for a foreigner finding their bearings in this country. When Véronica first arrives, Saliou, the director of the National Institute welcomes her “home” as his “sister” (34, 37): « Bienvenue en terre africaine! […] Vous êtes ici chez vous… » [Welcome to Africa! […] Consider yourself at home] (21, my emphasis). Saliou introduces her to one of her future students, Birame III, the third because two other students in her class happen to have the same name and are from the same village. He too refers to her as his sister (78). Perceiving this foreigner as a member of their family, and already at home, Birame

III and Saliou assume she will learn to act like a local, in the manner they expect of local women, and so inform her about the political situation in the country. They explain that the regime is headed by the president, who has dubbed himself Mwalimwana, meaning “our father,” assuming both the position of authoritative figurehead and caring father of the family. Saliou and Birame

III warn her of his corruption and the authoritarian violence of his regime, but Véronica, wary of what she sees as their partiality, does not take them seriously, claiming to be objective and not involved in politics. Again, politics is so crucial in this context that Birame III is thrown at her response: « Vous ne faites pas de politique? C’est impossible » [What do you mean you’re not involved in politics? That’s impossible] (27). In spite of these warnings against the government and its ministers, she becomes romantically involved with the Minister of Interior and Defense,

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Ibrahima Sory, who is also Saliou’s brother-in-law. Sory turns out to be a ruthless political assassin, but Véronica refuses to end her relationship with him because she believes that as a foreigner, she can—and should—be objective, uninvolved, and that her relationship with Sory can be separate from the political and remain strictly personal.

To complicate the detached and so-called objective position Véronica assumes for herself as a foreigner, her students, Birame III included, put on a theatrical play mocking the president, his ministers, and the so-called revolution that they claim to be responsible for (an allusion to the president, Sékou Touré, and to the student uprisings). After the performance, Birame III

“disappears,” and everyone in the village is certain that Birame III has been sent to a work camp to be killed, and so he is becomes the martyr of the revolution (113). When Véronica asks Sory about Birame III’s fate, he reminds her that she is a foreigner and for that reason, should not get involved in local affairs: « Ne vous mêlez pas de juger, de prendre parti. Ce pays ne pas le vôtre.

Vous n’y comprenez rien. Nous avons nos methods » [Don’t mix yourself up with judgments, with taking sides. This country is not yours. You don’t understand anything about it. We have our ways] (98). Contrary to Saliou and Birame III, who assume filiation with this “sister,” Sory insists on her foreignness. At the end of the novel, Saliou meets a fate similar to Birame III’s; he gets replaced as director of the school and assassinated because of his political opinions and action. In the closing pages of the novel, Véronica cannot handle the violence and death surrounding her, particularly the deaths of Birame III and Saliou which she feels guilty that she may have had a hand in because of her relationship with Sory. She therefore flees the country, returning not to her place of birth Guadeloupe, but to the metropolis Paris, which she considers, in contrast, « chez moi » [my home] (110).

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Véronica is oblivious to the political implications of her position as an educator at the

National Institute. Regardless of whether she is a foreigner or “at home,” or whether she is objective or partial, teaching at the National Institute places her at the heart of the national revolution represented by the government, Mwalimwana, and his ministers (indeed, being from

Paris probably makes her position as an outsider worse as the colonial French educational system was a major component of colonialism that the young Guinean government was revolting against). She sarcastically and condescendingly talks about the Institute at which she teaches, revealing that her obliviousness lends itself to irresponsibility: « Cet Institut national auquel j’ai eu la fière idée de louer mes services n’a pas fière allure » [This national Institute that I had the honor of renting my services to did not look quite so dignified] (42). Partiality, objectivity, and privilege aside, because of a theatrical performance that took place in her classroom, her student,

Birame III is seen as a dissident, an anti-national, and uses a particularly national art form— theatre—to put on a treasonous parody of the so-called heroes of the revolution. As a result, he is sent off to a work camp and then killed. Véronica naïvely believes that being a foreigner puts her above her surroundings, and it is precisely her privileged foreignness, her being of a higher class with a French education, that makes her incapable of perceiving this.

Véronica explains is the very reason she is in Africa to begin with is to embark on a journey of self-discovery: « Raison du voyage? Ni commerçant. Ni missionnaire. Ni touriste.

Touriste peut-être. Mais d’une espèce particulière à la découverte de soi-même. Les paysages, on s’en fout » . [Purpose of visit? Not a trader. Not a missionary. Not a tourist. Maybe a tourist. But a special kind on a quest to discover herself. Landscapes, I’m not interested in] (20, my emphasis). The question that is repeatedly asked of Véronica from the moment she arrives in

Africa is not so much who she is; rather, it is what are you doing here in Africa, « Véronica,

88 qu’est-ce que vous êtes venue faire ici ? » [Véronica, what have you come to do here?] (35).

Véronica, does not recognize that what she is doing in Africa has to do with who she is. Whilst in bed with Ibrahima Sory, he asks her, just like everybody else, « Pourquoi êtes-vous venue en

Afrique ? » [Why have you come to Africa ?] (85), she replies with, « Me réenraciner » [to re- root myself] (86). Believing the “what” she is doing in Africa is not related to the “who” or the self she is in search for, she tries to remain detached because in her search, she needs to travel back in time without the tainted interruptions of the present: « Pour essayer de voir ce qu’il y avait avant » [to try to see what was there before] (30). Nonetheless, Véronica’s desire to stay out of politics, be objective, and remain uninvolved end up being disrupted by the emotional attachment she develops with the people she encounters, especially Saliou and Birame III. As she puts in, in a premonition of what will come of her time in Africa, « Le pire est qu’il a presque raison. On en fait malgré soi » [The worst part of it is that he’s almost right. One is involved in spite of oneself] (27).

In Giving an Account of Oneself, Judith Butler writes: “If I am wounded, I find that the wound testifies to the fact that I am impressionable, given over to the other in ways that I cannot fully predict or control” (84). Butler relates impressionability to a particular kind of narrative she calls an account of oneself. An account is a narrative that shows that the narrator “accepts the presumption that the self has a causal relation to the suffering of others (and eventually, through bad conscience, to oneself)” (12). Veronica’s narrative is not a confession because she never actually does confess—to anyone in the novel (more on confession below). Her narrative is an account of herself because she recognizes and accepts a causal relation to the suffering of others; she believes herself to be accountable for their suffering, and in acknowledging that relationship, encounters a strange self she does not at first recognize, and later, is at pains to be faced with.

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Only through her narrative, and not her physical journey, does she find her “self,” a self she was not expecting, and there emerges responsibility.

In order for Véronica to give an account of her self, she has to locate a moment at which her life begins, but beginnings are difficult to pinpoint, they are ambiguous and problematic, particularly when one has to account for them when one was not even there to experience them, making giving an account that much more difficult. As Butler puts it, “the ‘I’ can tell neither the story of its own possibility without bearing witness to a state of affairs to which one could not have been present, which are prior to one’s own origins that one can narrate only at the expense of authoritative knowledge” (Butler 37). Véronica realizes early in her narrative that she cannot relate fully the account of her self because she is unsure as to where her beginning is: is it her birth? Her arrival in Africa? Her ancestry in Africa before the slave trade? Veronica even hesitates to say that “birth” is necessarily the beginning of her life: « Oui, c’était un commencement possible » [yes, that was a possible beginning] (24, my emphasis). This problematic beginning shows that one is a product of history and circumstance of which one is not authority, but authority is not the same as responsibility. Véronica’s lack of full authorship of the narrative of the circumstances of her life does not absolve her of responsibility. When Butler asks, “Does the postulation of a subject who is not self-grounding, that is, whose conditions of emergence can never fully be accounted for, undermine the possibility of responsibility and, in particular, of giving an account of oneself?” (19). The answer is no because “If the subject is opaque to itself, not fully translucent and knowable to itself, it is not thereby licensed to do what it wants or to ignore its obligations to others” (20).

In the narrative, Véronica refers to three possible beginnings for the account of her “self”, making up the three “times” her narrative moves back and forth to through associative memory.

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Each of the times is connected to a different place: Guadeloupe, the country of her birth, the metropolis Paris, the colonial “mother city” she immigrates to, and an Africa that existed before the transatlantic slave trade in which her ancestors were violently caught, sold, shipped to the

Caribbean. Significantly, her experiences in each time/place are anchored to a male lover, Jean-

Marie, Jean-Michel, and Ibrahima Sory respectively (a kind of reversal of Al-mutashāʻel in which Saʼīd associates each defeat in the modern history of Palestine with a lost female love,

Yu’ād, Bāqiya, and Yu’ād the Second). The problem is that her present in Africa conflicts with and contradicts her search for the Africa in her mind. This fourth place and time interrupts the

“identity” she is looking for.

In her movement from the Caribbean through the metropolis and then to Africa,

Véronica’s quest reverses the triangular route of the slave trade and the European, colonialist exploration, but she too comes with her own illusions and expectations of the “The Dark

Continent” (90, English in the original):37

« Je suis venue chercher une terre non plus peuplée de nègres—même spirituels, ah,

surtout pas spirituels—mais de Noirs. C’est-à-dire, en clair, que je suis à la recherché de

ce qui peut rester du passé. Le présent ne m’intéresse pas. »

[I came to look for a country inhabited by negroes—even spiritual ones, oh, certainly not

spiritual—but Negroes. That is to say, clearly, that I am looking for what has remained

from the past. The present does not interest me] (89).

37 This is an intertextual reference to The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, a now-famous English novel on imperialism and colonial quests into Africa. Véronica appears to be like the novel’s main character Christopher Marlow, but she also takes up characteristics of another character, Mr. Kurtz, who “goes native” by having sexual affairs with the local women and remains in the Congo. While Véronica does not “go native” at all, she does believe her salvation is in the hands of one “native,” Ibrahima Sory.

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While the narrative jumps between each of these three places and times, to her disappointment, the fourth time and place, her present moment in Guinea, constantly interrupts her focus on her finding her self. Because her two lovers in Guadeloupe and Paris, Jean-Marie and Jean Michel respectively are the reason she has to flee each of her previous homes, she believes this time in

Africa, because of the historic significance of the place to her ancestors, she can finally find her self through physical bodily communion with Sory, her “mon nègre avec aïeux” [my black man with ancestors] (65-6). Since neither he nor his ancestors ever left, they were never branded. She believes that by sleeping with this man, she can reconcile herself through her body with a time and space in which she could not have been present.38

38 A lot of the criticism of Heremakhonon focuses on Véronica’s Caribbean identity, a need for a reinsertion “of the self into the concrete realities of Caribbean diversity (‘le Divers’) with its defacto relationships of creolization, métissage and cross cultural fertilizations” (Lionnet 170). While these readings are valuable, they can also be problematic. By making the novel about the narrator’s reinsertion into a creolized identity overlooks the significance of Véronica’s foreignness wherever she goes as being a marker of a modern condition. Véronica’s constant fleeing of “homelands” makes visible the failure of the notion of homelands, especially in a modern period marked by constant movement and migration (whether forced, circumstantial, or by choice) that comes as a result of globalization, colonization, and chattel slavery. Indeed, Véronica embodies this very problematic in a way that disrupts any search for the self or “identity.” As will be shown, Véronica recognizes a search for her identity is actually a “grave mistake.” Such a reading, coupled with those that claim that a return “to an authentic past was always impossible for the slaves and their descendents because connections to the mother country had been abruptly and artificially severed” (Lionnet 170), are also problematic because the myth of “return” would by implication be possible for all those whose ancestors have not been enslaved. The myth of returning home, or returning to the self, can be linked to modern, national narratives that construct the nation as home, calling for a “return” to a homeland, and exiling minorities because they do not count as “authentic” or “original” inhabitants of the home (as was the violent case for the protagonists of Invisible Man and Al-mutashāʻel, and as will be seen in the discussion of Sitt Marie Rose in chapter three). In an essay titled “We Refugees,” Giorgio Agamben writes that “aterritoriality [should be] a new model for international relations” (118). He argues that the trinity of state/ nation/ territory no longer holds, particularly because of the refugee who disrupts this holy trinity. Agamben suggests the figure of the refugee be considered a concept, “The refugee should be considered for what he is, that is, nothing less than a border concept that radically calls into question the principles of the nation-state, and at the same time, helps clear the field for a no-longer-delayable renewable of categories” (117). One can expand this conceptual category to account for those who are not necessarily refugees, but who are not allowed to

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In a provocative reversal of the association of women to origins and homelands, Véronica believes that each of these lovers will help her find herself. Her sexual relationship with each of these lovers also reveals another crucial aspect about how Véronica identifies her self—that is, in terms of race. In another instance in which she explains why she is in Africa, Véronica says,

«Me réconcilier avec moi-même, c’est-à-dire avec ma race » [Reconcile me with myself, that is to say, with my race] (104). The triangulation of sexual affair, race as a varying visual phenomenon, and her constant “fleeing of homes” trouble her narrative account of herself. She has internalized the colonial value of fair skin as being better and more beautiful that is infiltrates her deepest sexual desires. She has a soft spot for green eyed, light skinned men, which she attributes to her first lover Jean-Marie Roseval as a fifteen-year-old in Guadeloupe: « Ce jeune mulatre au teint de prince hindou […], les yeux verts […]. Depuis, je ne me suis jamais guérie de ma fascination pour les yeux claires » [That young mulatto with skin the color of an Indian prince […] and green eyes […]. I have not been cured of my fascination for light eyes] (24). As a result of this affair, her father orders her to leave Guadeloupe to avoid a scandal, and suggests that a “vacation” will help her get over the affair (40). In Paris, her lover Jean-Michel is an arrogant, white, Frenchman who mocks the bourgeois lifestyle of her family in Guadeloupe.

Similar to the situation with Jean-Marie, she flees Paris because she is trying to get over their break-up, which seems to be because she cannot—or rather, refuses to—have children with him.

Conflicted, she refuses to bear the offspring of a white man. She declares, « Pas mon souci,

éclairir la Race! » [It’s not my concern to lighten the Race] [55]. When Véronica compares

feel at “home” in the state/ nation/ territory, like the invisible man and Saʼīd. The category can further encapsulate those larger groups of people who, because of migration and the effects of colonialism, are unable to identify with a “home,” but the powerful figure of the nation state and homeland have produced an overwhelming desire for such a home.

93 herself to Adama, an African woman who is having an affair with a white French hotel proprietor in Africa, she wonders to herself:

« Nous avons toutes les deux dormi dans le lit d’un Blanc. Moi j’ai mauvaise conscience.

Et elle? […] son bébé aura les yeux bleus. Avec un peu de chance. Ou beaucoup. Je peux

jurer que ce n’était pas mon cas. Moi jamais. Je parle cette fois de la deuxième affaire.

Du deuxème homme. Celui qui m’a levée comme une poule à Saint-Germain . »

[We have both slept in the bed of a white man. I have a bad conscience. As for her? […]

her child will have blue eyes. With a bit of luck. Or a lot. I can swear that this wasn’t the

case with me. Me, never. I am talking this time about the second affair. The second man.

The one who picked me up like a tart at Saint-Germain] (40).

When she learns that Oumou Hawa, Saliou’s wife, has had yet another son, she sarcastically thinks to herself, « Mais je n’ai jamais enfanté. De toute façon, je n’enfanterai jamais. Que des bâtards » [But I’ve never borne a child. In any case, I will never bear a child. Only bastards]

(42).39

The problem Véronica has of reconciling herself with her race is that race is a visual phenomenon that varies drastically in different regions because of the specificity of location and

39 In Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, and Self-Portraiture, Francoise Lionnet connects Véronica’s inability to have children with her inability to return to a home: “Having absorbed all the racist myths about miscegenation and métissage, Véronica becomes the living symbol of sterility and barrenness. She cannot legitimate her own existence, let alone envisage a genuine future for her own country” (189). While I agree with Lionnet’s reading of Véronica’s sterility as a symbol of her inability to legitimate her own existence, which I will elaborate further on as a problematic at the heart of responsibility, I take issue with Lionnet making Guadeloupe Véronica’s “own” country. Véronica’s travels and sexual encounters with men speak against “own countries.” Véronica does not have an “own” country and that is at the heart of her narrative and is her struggle to coming to this recognition. Indeed, part of her struggle has to do with recognizing her responsibility with those she encounters in spite of “home.”

94 history to that visual phenomenon. Her global travels and encounters with race in a global context, problematizes the precarious visuality of race, complicating the kind of reconciliation she seeks. She is a “négresse rouge” in the Caribbean [literally, a red, black woman] (33), a

“négresse” in France, and a black but non-African woman in Africa, rendering moot any search for herself in this place in this moment in time. Amongst a gathering of women in Africa, one of them notes, referring to Véronica:

« Quelle étrangeté ce pays qui ne produit ni Mandingue, ni Peul, ni Toucouleur, ni

Sérère, ni Ouolof, ni Toma, ni Guerze, ni Fang, ni Fon, ni Bété, ni Fanti, ni Baoulé, ni

Éwé, ni Dagbani, ni Yoruba, ni Mina, ni Ibo. Et ce sont tout de meme des noirs qui vivent

là ! »

[What a strange country that has no Mandingo, no Fulani, no Toucouleur, no Serer, no

Woloff, no Toma, no Guerze, no Fang, no Fon, no Bété, no Fanti, no Baoulé, no Ewe, no

Dagbani, no Yoruba, no Mina, no Ibo. And yet the all its inhabitants are black] (23).

Véronica’s reconciliation with her race is further frustrated because at times, she is mistaken for being an American simply because she is a black foreigner: « Ces satanés Noirs américains ont pris le devant de la scène à cause de Mahalia, Aretha ou James Brown » [Those damned black

Americans have captured the limelight because of Mahalia, Aretha, and James Brown] (150).

Even though Véronica acutely distinguishes black peoples whose ancestors were enslaved from the Africans she encounters in Guinea, « Car les nègres, ce n’est pas eux! Mais nous! Nous qu’on appelle, plus noblement, la diaspora! Ils ne sont pas des nègres, mais des Africaines »

[Because the Negroes are not them! But us! Those they refer to using the noble term diaspora.

These aren’t Negroes but Africans] (174), she fails to see that these differences mark the

95 impossibility of finding a set, racial identity. Just because she is a “négresse” and not African does not make her like the blacks of the United States.

Contrary to the notion of possessing a land through sexuality, Véronica’s sexuality forces her to flee her “homes,” but in Africa, she hopes that Ibrahim Sory will finally be her cure, “Il faut qu’il m’aide à guérir” [He must help cure me] (84).40 The fact that Sory lives in an isolated mansion detached from the space of political conflict makes him all the more appealing, as it is conducive to her quest for a past. She stays in his large, white mansion Heremakhonon, physically fenced off from the village and the rest of her surroundings. The more she can isolate herself from her present reality, the more likely she believes she will succeed in finding herself, and so there, cut off from the present reality, she “waits for happiness.” Even getting to

Heremakhonon grants her ejection from time and place as she travels in Sory’s Mercedes, only looking outside the window if she wants to, and when she does, merely glimpses the abject poverty like a voyeur. When Véronica sees Saliou being escorted by police officers into the police headquarters, even after she has spent the night in custody and seen that those who do not have government connections like herself and enter the building seldom come out, all she can think to herself is getting to Heremakhonon to take a shower. She not only wants to isolate herself in order to a find herself, she begins to believe that even though she is not in her natural environment in Guinea, Heremakhonon can provide her with some sense of home:

40 Lionnet considers Véronica’s affair with Sory a reversal of the gendered image of Africa: “whereas the idealized and sexualized image of ‘Africa-as-Mother’ is the common archetype used by male writers of the diaspora (Aimé Césaire, for example, in his Notebook of a Return to the Native Land makes extensive use of such female imagery), here it is on a male character [Ibrahima Sory] that desire for the absent ‘other’ is displaced and crystallized” (Lionnet 171).

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« [J]’ai mes grandes et mes petits entrées à Heremakhonon. Que le maître soit present ou

pas […] Je suis un arum dans un vase; je dis arum. Car la plante, comme moi, est

exotique. Elle ne pousse pas sous ces cieux . »

[I have my grand and small entries into Heremakhonon. Whether the master of the house

is there or not… I am an arum in a vase; I am an arum. Because the plant, like me, is

exotic. It does not grow under these skies] (151).

Her shuttling between Heremakhonon and the town makes her a horse with blinders, unable to understand what is going on around her, and therefore able to ignore the suffering that she perceives but is nonetheless unable to apprehend:

« Moi, je suis, dans tout cela, comme un cheval avec des oeillères, qui ne voit point la

campagne autour de lui./ J’enjambe des culs-de-jatte à la porte de l’Institut et réveille le

chauffeur de taxi. Endormi. »

[Me, I’m am, in all this, like a horse with blinders, who does not see the country

surrounding him./ I step over the cripples at the doorstep of the Institute and wake up the

taxi driver. Asleep.] (94).

Véronica is so preoccupied with finding her self (whatever that may be) and reconciling herself with her race (whatever that may mean in a global context) that she is unable to see her role in the present here and now of Africa and the conflict unfolding around her—in spite of its constant interruptions in her account of herself.

Although Véronica’s narrative begins as her autobiographical account of who she

(thinks) she is searching for, a voyage over the Atlantic via the metropolis to “find herself,” her compulsion for confession that constantly interrupts the account testifies to her impressionability by her immediate and present surroundings. Véronica’s impressionability becomes increasingly

97 clear in the course of the novel. The narrative structure reflects this impressionability: it is divided into three parts, and the first is made up of three sections in which Véronica’s tone is indecisive and ambiguous. She says nothing with finality, problematizing everything she sees and thinks, for instance, her opening sentence: « Franchement on pourrait croire que j’obéis à la mode… Or c’est faux. Je n’obéis pas à la mode » [Honestly, one would think that I’m fashionable… but that is false. I am not fashionable] (19). The second part is made up of two sections and is less fragmented than the first. She does not shuffle between the past and present as often, and although begins with her confusion, « Je ne suis au courant de rien » [I am not up to date with anything] (93), her narrative is clearer. The third part is only one long section, in which her flashbacks are clearly marked as the past and her present is described very tangibly.

By the third part of the novel, Véronica jumps much less between her three points of time and space, and is much more aware of the conflict unfolding around her.

Her impressionability is exemplified by her inability to shed tears. When Véronica remembers her childhood, she writes that she was never able to cry, even in grave times, for instance, when her babysitter Mabo Julie, whom she considered a mother, died: « Moi, j’avais les yeux secs… Comme aujourd’hui. Je n’ai jamais su pleurer » [Me, I had dry eyes… Like today [the day she learns Birame III has died]. I never knew how to cry] (100). Veronica actually stops herself from crying because she feels guilty, in her class privilege and foreignness, to cry in such an impoverished country. Imagining what the locals would think of her, she narrates:

«Étrangère, pourquoi pleures-tu? Est-ce que tu as perdu ton mari, ton père, ton enfant? Étrangère, tu as de beaux habits. Tes pieds sont chausses et tu pleures ? » [Foreigner,41 why are you crying?

41 In French, the word for stranger and foreigner is the same, “etrangère,” whereas in English, foreigner specifically means from overseas, and stranger could be someone who is not from abroad and yet still

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Have you lost your husband, your father, your child? Foreigner, you are wearing beautiful clothes. You have shoes on your feet and you’re crying?] (80). At Saliou’s home, after his dismissal, Birame III’s guardian comes up to Véronica, and tells her that Birame III had mentioned her in his letters to him: « Il m’appelait sa petite mère. Non, je ne vais tout de même pas pleurer. Pleurer de honte » [He (Birame III) called me his little mother. No, I will not at all cry. Cry of shame] (94). When Saliou is arrested in the third part of the novel, she is consoled as follows, « Ne pleure pas! Vous, les femmes, vous aimez trop pleurer » [Do not cry! You women like to cry a lot] (156), which implies at this point, she no longer has dry eyes nor is she even trying to stop herself from crying.

Véronica’s narrative is therefore an account of her grave mistake, and testimony to the account is not only her impressionability, but her sense of causal responsibility for the suffering of others. At the end of the novel, even though Veronica could have remained hiding in the haven of Heremakhonon, she flees Heremakhonon and Africa, a running away she attributes to her lover, marking not so much a failure of her search for herself, but rather a discovery of her responsibility:

« Dis-moi quelquechose, mon nègre avec aïeux. Tu le sais, n’est-ce-pas, pourquoi je

pars? Je pars parce-qu’il me serait trop facile de rester. Si je restais, rien ne changerait

entre nous. Je continuerais de faire la navette entre Heremakhonon et la ville. Jusqu’à ce

qu’un de nous se lasse, toi le premier bien évidemment. C’est-à-dire qu’à ma manière,

qui pour moi n’est pas moins méprisable et cruelle, si elle n’est pas sanglante, j’aurais

aidé à le tuer. A l’achever. A ce qu’il ne reste rien de lui. Rien. »

[Tell me, my nigger with ancestors. You know it, don’t you, why I’m leaving? I am

unfamiliar. Here, I used foreigner to translate étrangère because even though both connotations, stranger and foreigner, are at work in the sentence, foreigner is more appropriate in the context.

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leaving because it would be too easy for me to stay. If I stay, nothing will change

between us. I will continue to shuttle back and forth between Heremakhonon and the

town. Until one of us tires, you the first to, of course. That is to say that in my way,

which for me is not any less despicable and cruel, even if it is bloodless, I have helped to

kill him. To finish him off. Until nothing remains of him. Nothing] (243-4, italics in the

original).

Véronica recognizes her causal relationship to “his” death, a pronoun that could refer to either— or both—Saliou and Birame III. Her discovery and admission to the fact that nothing remains of

“him,” that she is responsible for her erasure places her face to face with herself, which sickens her and forces her to flee Africa.

Her relationship to their deaths comes as a result of her seeing herself as a foreigner, and as such, exempt from learning the local languages and from understanding the extent of her political involvement despite her so-called impartiality and objectivity. She side-steps these issues and as a result becomes blind to her surroundings, seeing herself as an exotic flower that does not grow in such an environment. At times she sees things but they barely register in her narrative, as though she is unable to process or comprehend her immediacy in relation to the suffering taking place around. Her blindness is metaphorized, for instance, by the recurrence of the handicapped scattered across the city that she—along with everyone else—ignores, overlooks, and steps over to continue wither her own affairs, « Un cul-de-jatte psalmodie au seuil de la maternité. Les visiteurs passent sans l’écouter » [A man with no legs wails in front of the maternity ward. Visitors pass by without hearing him] (44). In Sory’s mansion, after Birame III has been killed and right when Saliou is being murdered by the government, Véronica thinks to herself, « Le malheur est que je les écoute peu » [the bad thing is that I barely listened to them

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(Saliou and Birame III)] (55). She realizes that her approach to Africa—her foreign detachment combined with her search for her self in a prehistoric Africa—prevents her from paying attention to and understanding all that her eyes perceive. This ocular and metaphorical blindness leads to an inability to listen or to speak, her incomprehension taking manifesting to her as silence: « Je ne comprends pas ce qui se dit autour de moi. Un silence » [I do not understand what is being said around me. Silence] (78).

Blindness spreads and becomes Véronica’s inability to communicate, which is heightened in the fact that she does not speak a word of direct discourse throughout the course of the narrative. Even though she selfishly insists on being heard, « Je suis bien et j’aimerais vous parler. Ecoutez » [I am well and would like to speak to you. Listen (to me)] (64), she does not listen. Later she concedes that this inability to listen is related to her feeling that she has a causal relation to Birame III and Saliou’s deaths. After Salou’s arrest, Véronica feels she must see him to explain herself, not her relation to his arrest and subsequent death, but to apologize for not listening to his warnings: « Il faut que je voie Saliou… Pour m’explique. Je suis illogique, absurde. Tant qu’il était à côté de moi je refusais de l’écouter . » [I have to see Saliou… to explain myself. I am illogical, absurd. When he was by my side, I refused to listen to him] (233-

4). She feels that she has had a hand in killing both Birame III and Saliou because she does not listen. As a result, she has not only failed Saliou as a friend, but she has rejected a welcome into the home as his “sister” and Birame III’s “little mother”, and, as a result, has also jeopardized her quest for her self, « Je suis […] [u]ne fausse soeur. » [I am […] a fake sister] (193).

By the end of her narrative, Véronica recognizes how her quest for her self has rendered her blind (rather than rendering those around her invisible)—or rather silent, deaf, and withdrawn, incapable of communicating with those immediately surrounding her, incapable of

101 responding to and forming a relationship with the community that welcomed her as a family member. By the end of the novel, she realizes this, calling her personal quest for her self and her so-called roots a “tragic mistake”:

« Cette erreur, cette tragique erreur que je ne pouvais pas commettre, étant ce que je suis

trompée, trompée d’aïeux, viola tout. Je cherché mon salut là où il ne le fallait pas »

[This mistake, this tragic mistake that I could not help committing, it is that I was

deceived, deceived by ancestors, and that is it. I sought my salvation there, in the wrong

place] (243).

Her mistake and having been deceived by her ancestors—both signified by the verb “tromper"— is that a return to an untainted past where her ancestors dwelled will help her find herself and that this discovery will heal her. In the process of giving her account, though, she recognizes her

“self” is intricately associated with others in her immediate present as much as it is related to her past, and by refusing to respond to their call to recognize not only their suffering, but her place in it as a “sister”, she has also missed her chance of being “cured.”

Although tenuous at first, Véronica’s sexual relationships with the three men that she associates with “home” but who end up being the reason she flees them is associated with her inability to communicate, which is also related to her causal relationship to the suffering of others; for instance, Véronica happens to be in the middle of making love to Ibrahima Sory when

Birame III is arrested, and while Saliou is being killed, she similarly makes love to Sory (221).

At first, she sees love making as something pleasurable that, if nothing, at least brings a good time:

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« Qu’est-ce que je fous ici? Mais que faisais-je ailleurs? Au moins je faisais l’amour.

Toutes les nuits. Jean-Michel était un peut inquiet, les premiers temps. Il avait tellement

entendu parler de nos exigences sexuelles. Il fut rassuré. Moi satisfaite. »

[What am I doing here? And what was I doing there? At least I was making love. Every

night. Jean-Michel was a bit anxious in the beginning. I had heard a lot of talk about our

sexual appetites. He was reassured. Me, satisfied] (46).

Later, though, love making becomes a way to alleviate her bad conscience, which is recognition of her causal relation to the suffering of others. In part three of the novel, the pleasure that love making affords her in addition to the detachment that Heremakhonon brings, are no longer sufficient; making love to Sory, the man through whom she is supposed to find herself, becomes a mechanism to flee her guilty conscience:

« Tout ce tapage de l’amour avait aussi pour but de détruire la conscience. Je devrais dire

les consciences, les deux. Celle qu’on détruite toujours en faisant l’amour. Et l’autre. Je

n’y suis que très mal parvenue. »

[All this noise of lovemaking was also to get rid of my conscience. I should say

consciences, both of them. The one that one always gets rid of whilst making love. And

the other. I managed very poorly] (221).

When Véronica arrives in Africa, Saliou immediately welcomes her as his sister, a relationship she does not trust:

« … et nous demeurons face à face, Saliou et moi. Saliou que je ne connaissais pas

l’avant veille et qui dit que je suis sa soeur. Non, Saliou, je ne peux rien confier. Quelque

chose bloque»

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[and we stand face to face, Saliou and me. Saliou does not know what happened two days

earlier and says that I am his sister. No, Saliou, I cannot confess anything. Something is

stopping me] (36).

Her inability to trust this appellation of sister coming from a stranger never leaves her, and so even after she feels a sense of guilt, she finds that she still cannot confide in Saliou. Throughout the narrative, her inability to trust that relationship turns into an inability to confess to him her affair with Sory, even though she knows that he is already aware of the affair. She repeatedly considers “confessing” to him but is never able to (67, 100, 101, 103). For that reason, she considers confessing to everyone—from Sory’s driver to Sory himself—but something blocks her confession. Even though the way Saliou regards Véronica is suspicious (in one instance, hears that he is in love with her and would take her as a second wife were he not afraid of his current wife Oumou Hawa, 176), Véronica’s inability to confess is related to her blinding quest for her self. She does not speak a single word of direct discourse throughout the narrative, and because everything she says is internal monologue, even though she does directly quote what others around her say, it is always unclear whether she is speaking to those around her, or whether she is thinking the words to herself. Her inability to speak, coupled with her inability to listen and the blinders she walks around wearing, connects her quest for herself to communication. Because she recognizes a causal relationship between her and the suffering of others, communication takes the form of confession, and her need for an interlocutor becomes an urgent part of finding her self.

In a reading of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler notes that:

“confession compels a ‘manifestation’ of the self that does not have to correspond to

some putative inner truth, and whose constitutive appearance is not to be considered as

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mere illusion. On the contrary [...] confession [is] an act of speech in which the subject

‘publishes himself,’ gives himself in words, engages in an extended act of self-

verbalization--exomologesis-- as a way of making the self appear for another. Confession

in this context presupposes that the self must appear in order to constitute itself and that

it can constitute itself only within the scene of address, within a certain socially

constituted relation. Confession becomes the verbal and bodily scene of its self-

demonstration. It speaks itself, but in speaking it becomes what it is” (Butler 112-3, my

emphasis).

Here, Butler is referring to Foucault’s essay, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the

Self,” in which he reconsiders the practice of confession that he had outlined in the History of

Sexuality. In the History of Sexuality, confession is the confession of a sexual digression, which

(presumably) contitutes truth. In other words, confession has to do with sexual desires, and in the process of the confession of sexual desires and digressions, the confessor reveals a “truth” about his or herself. In doing so, the relationship between the confessor and the authority extracting the confession is a power relation, and the confession legitimates the power dynamic of confessor being in the wrong and confessee the authority capable of absolving that sin:

“The confession is a ritual of discourse … that unfolds within a power relationship, for

one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not

simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and

appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile…

it exonerates, redeems, and purifies him; it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him,

and promises him salvation” (61-2).

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Confession is therefore tied to a putative system that propagates the “regime of truth.” Butler writes that in The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, Foucault “indicts confession as a forcible extraction of sexual truth, a practice in the service of regulatory power that produces the subject as one who is obligated to tell the truth about his or her desire” (Butler 112). According to

Butler, though, in the later essay, Foucault refines the notion of confession; it is no longer that confession reveals an inner truth, but rather the verbal appearance of the self in the confession actually produces the self; that is, the “truth” of the self is no longer only about confession of sexual acts, desires, and digressions, but rather, the self is produced in a verbal narrative (which thereby legitimates that system of truth). In other words, it is not desire, intentions, or sexual acts that produce the subject, but rather the performative act of speaking these acts.

If confession is simultaneously the verbal and bodily scene of the self’s demonstration, or publication, then Véronica’s inability to verbally confess is an inability to produce a self in language. In other words, while she is trying to search for herself through a sexual relation with

Sory, or through a confession of her sexual affair with Sory, her “self” can only emerge if she narrates it verbally. While it is certainly problematic to say that her self can only emerge in verbal confession of her sexual affair with Sory, in this particular context, this articulation in crucial because it establishes relationships with those around her. Speaking and listening are crucial to establishing a preliminary foundation for community, at a risk of propagating the system that drives the regime of truth. Confession can only take place in a scene in which power relationships undeniably exist and so the terms of confession will never be her own. Given the crippling effects her ancestry has had on her, her obsession with race, with finding her self and her home, and her failed sexual relations with men, to speak in those terms would legitimate them, and Véronica tries to resist them as much as possible throughout her narrative (like, for

106 instance, her refusal to bear the children of a white Frenchman). If Véronica verbally confesses, she legitimates the power structure and her conflicted position in it, subordinate because of her apparent race and her gender, but privileged because of her socio-economic level, her education, and in Africa, her connections with government officials.

Another problem that arises for Véronica and her inability to confess is that she is never asked for a confession. In fact, Sory, the very man who she hopes will “save her” mocks her search for herself, « En somme, vous avez un problème d’identité » [basically, you have an identity problem] (86). Furthermore, at one point in the novel, Véronica is annoyed that he is not at all interested in who she is, not even asking her where she is from:

« Ainsi il [Sory] n’a pas envie de savoir qui je suis, d’où je sors. Ce que je suis venue

faire si loin de chez moi? Si cela ne l’intéresse pas, s’il ne me le demande pas, comment

pourrais-je nommer mes rab pour qu’ils s’éloignent de moi? Il faut qu’il m’aide à guérir.

Ma haine des uns, mon mépris des autres »

[Anyway he is not interested in knowing who I am, where I came from. What I am doing

here so far from home? If this does not interest him, is he does not ask me these things,

how can I name my rab and get them away from me? He must help cure me. My hatred,

my contempt for others] (84).

Her inability to confess is a resistance to power, but it is also a failure to respond to the invisible and their suffering. Through her confession, Véronica hopes to be given the “power to speak, « Ce que j’espérais? On s’en doute : pouvoir parler » [What was I hoping for? As might be expected: to speak] (67), but as she is never given that opportunity, she flees Africa and also her responsibility.

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The recurring figure of the street sweeper makes explicit the relationship between these systems of power, the suffering that is going on around Véronica, and her responsibility. Finding her self exists as part of the systems of truth surrounding her, and yet she nonetheless has a drive to uncover her origin. Her desire to remain objective and detached from her surroundings comes from her attempt to avoid exoticism, but at the same time, is a material detachment from the people around her. This is why the inconspicuous street sweeper on University Avenue in Paris, who appears at the beginning of the novel and then again at the end of the narrative, continually interrupts her ability to confess (244). For instance, on one occasion where she considers confessing to Saliou:

« De toutes façons, il faudra que je me confesse. Encore, une confession […] Me

confesser à Saliou. Chercher sa main dans l’ombre, ne pas voir ses yeux… Toute ma vie,

je me suis mise dans des situations impossibles […] Il faudrait que je dorme […]. Et puis

mon sommeil s’est détérioré. Jusqu’à l’intrusion du balayeur . »

In any case, I must confess. Again, another confession […]. Confess to Saliou. Find his

hand in the dark, avoid looking straight into his eyes… Throughout my life, I have put

myself in impossible situations […]. I must sleep […]. But then, my slumber deteriorates.

Until the intrusion of the street sweeper. (100-1).

The balayeur, the black street sweeper in Paris, used to haunt her dreams because he never acknowledged the components she believes are intrinsic to her “self,” her identity, which is part and parcel of the regime of truth. He is indifferent to her “race” and the fact that she, a négress, is walking the streets alongside her white lover, Jean-Michel. She is surprised and even dismayed at his response to the sight of them together: « Il nous regardait, Jean-Michel et moi, sans haine, ni colère, ni intolerance, ni stupeur » [He would look at us, Jean-Michel and me, without hatred,

108 nor anger, nor intolerance, nor astonishment] (34). The fact that she repeatedly references his apathy reveals just how much of an effect his indifference has on her; it also undermines the importance she attributes to her courageous sin against her race, « Il nous regardait, sans haine ou disapprobation » [He would look at us, without hate or contempt](41).

When she finally flees Guinea to return to Paris “in the spring time,” the first thought that comes to her mind is the street sweeper. She laments that that her spoilt identity is not at all what should have been her focus, « Quelle farce! Moi qui pleure mon identité détruite » [What a farce!

Me, who cries for my spoilt identity] (189), and that perhaps it is he who could help her break her silence and “publish” herself:

« Alors le balayeur de la rue de l’Université aura ôté ce gros pull-over bleu à col roulé qui

apparaît sous sa blouse. Est-ce qu’il aura rémarqué mon absence? Comment saluera-t-il

mon retour? Ma fuite—encore une! Un jour il faudra romper ce silence. Il faudra que je

lui explique . »

[Oh, the sweeper of University Street, who will have taken off his thick, blue turtleneck

sweater that showed underneath his overalls. Will he have noticed my absence? How will

he greet my return? My flight—and yet another! One day, it will be necessary to break

this silence. It will be necessary that I explain myself to him] (244).

The street sweeper is necessary for her confession because he refuses to acknowledge her as the person she identifies herself as.42 He does not see her in the way that she does, contradicting everything about her so-called identity that she is searching for here in Africa. In giving an account of herself, Veronica does not reveal a truth about her self but rather produces one, and

42 He is not a projection of her dead student Birame III or her dead friend Saliou, as some might argue: “Her [Véronica’s] melancholic ego continues to be haunted by this figure [of the street sweeper] of a ‘brother’, who one might argue, is but a projection of her dead student Birame and her dead friend Saliou” (Lionnet, 283, “Translating Grief”).

109 given her present experiences in Africa, she must be accountable to that person that emerges in her narrative. While her past and ancestry are important, by the end of the novel, Véronica recognizes that the truth about her “identity’ is inextricable from the way she acts in the present.

In this uncomfortable realization, she has to face the person that emerges in the narrative, and furthermore, she has to identify with her: « Et moi, me voilà livrée à moi-même. Piégée. A tout jamais. A tout jamais ? » [And me, here I am, delivered to myself. Trapped. Forever. Forever?]

(243). To verbally speak of this woman that emerges in her narrative, to publish her, is to establish her bodily presence, confirming her culpability. For this reason, Véronica cannot speak this woman—she can only give an account of her to her self, positing the street sweeper as a hopeful confessee who can help her break her silence, face and be accountable for, that socially imbricated person.

Véronica’s “self” depends on communication, thus, recognition of the unfamiliar self and responding to that recognition is necessarily communal. Even though she is determined to be detached and remain objective, she finds that she is nonetheless implicated in her foreign surroundings, and so must respond to them in a way in which she can face her actions and narrate them verbally. In is only through such communication that accounts for responsibility in times of self-estrangement that community can emerge. As Butler puts it: “To take responsibility for oneself is to avow the limits of any self-understanding, and to establish these limits not only as a condition for the subject, but as the predicament of the human community…” (Butler 83).

Palestine: “Shake hands!” Responsibility as an Agreement of Recognition

The account of Heremakhonon is a narrative recognition of how one affects and is affected by those “others” with whom one does not identify, and that one is responsible for and

110 to others because of one’s accountability to one’s self. Véronica’s impressionability exposes that her “self” is dependent upon those around her—in the present moment and place—but, her failure to communicate indicates failed responsibility. She learns only too late that her self depends on recognition and responsibility, and not on what she thinks she is looking for as an individual independent of her surroundings. This responsibility could be summarized as follows:

It is that all action is undertaken in response to a call (or something that seems to us to

resemble a call) that cannot be grasped as such. Response here involves not only ‘respond

to,’ as in ‘give an answer to,’ but also the related situations of ‘answering to,’ as in being

responsible for a name (this brings up the question of the relationship between being

responsible for/to ourselves and for/to others); of being answerable for… (Spivak 22).

While Véronica closes in on herself, and isolates herself in a foreign context, the protagonist of

Joe Sacco’s Palestine opens himself up to the unfamiliar. By exposing himself, literally positioning himself outside the familiar, the protagonist plays a socially responsible role. He recognizes his position in relation to those suffering, and responds to them in a way that he can be accountable for and to himself, and for and to others. But, responsibility is not a single event; it is a continuous, continual effort which at each moment faces the risk of misrecognition.

Therefore, responsibility must be, as the invisible man puts it, a form of agreement.

The way the protagonist maneuvers in occupied Palestine, the conversations he has with

Palestinians Israeli-Jews, and tourists, and the extent and limits to which he adapts to life under occupation models a possible response to others as a foreigner in a foreign context. The narrative accomplishes this by thematizing the position of the protagonist as a privileged foreign journalist looking to write a comic book. Although his foreignness is different from Veronica’s, for a variety of reasons including his being a man and as such can travel inside Palestine and Israel a

111 way that would be impossible were he a woman. Unlike her, though, the protagonist who also struggles with the difficulty of responsibility does not flee in the face of it.

Unlike the other narratives under study, Palestine is a comic, a narrative of juxtaposed images and language in a single panel, or comic frame. A comics narrative is made up of these panels in deliberate sequence, distinguishing the genre from singular images with over-laid captions, or from film, which is the juxtaposition of moving frames. The juxtaposition of unmoving panels in comics keeps the pace of the narrative slow enough to register the ironies between scenes (as opposed to the speed of montage in film, for example), and at the same time, it is non-directional, that is, one can read a comic from left to right, right to left, up to down, or down to up, or in various directions depending on the ways the frames, images, and langue in the text is set up. One can look at each panel separately, but also at several panels by taking in the whole page at once.43 The significance of the juxtaposition of image and language works on two levels to speak of responsibility. For one, this formal composition allows the narrative to address the problem of identity based on visual appearance, such as in the case of racial identity, which was the overarching paradox of Invisible Man that made the narrator metaphorically invisible precisely because of his literally, highly visible skin color. The metaphor of blindness and seeing that was used in chapter one for lack of recognition was extended in Heremakhonon where

43 In an essay on Palestine, Mary Layoun writes that Sacco’s Palestine realizes the potential of comics- as-a-genre because of the way it configures image and word in narrative form to render the “complex historical, political, social, and personal realities of Palestine-Israel” (315). The way the comic foregrounds the “meaning-making process that occurs in coming to understand historical or political or personal complexity and relationship,” and by focusing on the particular, Palestine prompts a synecdochic process of reading where “partial and particularized images are structurally suggested (by the comic) and perceived (by a reader) as standing for a larger but absent picture;” it tells of the “relation of (partial) comics representation to a reality that can be suggested or implied but never completely represented or observed” (315-6). This formal structure of the genre is important given the unseen tortures that take place in “parallel universes,” behind “closed doors”, and way, “over there”, on the other side of the world, where I think what happens there does not affect me and that my own choices and decisions do not effect it in turn.

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Véronica compares herself to a horse with blinders. Her “identity” is rooted in how she believes others perceive her, even though that perception varies depending on her geographical location, problematizing the precarious relationship between appearance and identity. As a visual narrative, Palestine depicts visually the problem of mistaking group affiliation with visual appearance.

Second, and more importantly in the context of Israel and Palestine, and for Palestine as a comic, responsibility in this narrative depends on two things: seeing suffering with one’s own eyes, and then responding to what one sees by telling of what one has seen—both crucial components of the comics form of image and word. In this narrative, the protagonist is an

American journalist named Joe who goes to the West Bank and the Gaza strip in Palestine after the first Palestinian Intifada, which took place between 1987 and 1990. While there, he is repeatedly asked two questions, which outline the form that responsibility takes in the narrative: the first, “You write something about us? I showed you, you saw! You tell about us?” (10.1, my emphasis); and the second, “What kind of feeling would you have if your door was smashed down? Would it be a feeling of love? You don’t feel secure in your own home… your own street…” (71.1). Responsibility, like in Heremakhonon, is recognizing oneself as the addressee of a question, and so entails responding to that address. In this narrative, the questions set up the kind of response expected of the addressee, who in this case is Joe the foreign, American journalist. The response takes the form of telling about what one has witnessed with one’s own eyes, and to stop and imagine what it would be like to be in the shoes of a Palestinians. As formally made up of images and words, the comic’s very constitution is the form of responsibility that is asked of Joe, that is, to see and to tell.

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Palestine was written as a comic book series in nine issues between 1993 and 1995, and was later collected as a single volume in 2001. It is also consciously not fictional; whilst the characters in the novels that have been analyzed thus far were fictional in historically verifiable contexts of political conflict, this one is made up of reports and stories of individuals that Joe

Sacco the author interviewed during his time researching the conflict in Palestine during and after the First Intifada (the Second came in 2000, after the writing and publication of this comic series).44 The Intifada was a spontaneous, organic uprising from within the occupied territories and was the first time that Palestinians within Palestine expressed their resistance to the occupation. Although it has been popularized by the image of young Palestinians throwing stones, it also included boycotting Israeli products, civil disobedience, mass demonstrations, and the establishment of underground schools, as the Israeli military closed down schools in response to the uprising. While about 100 Israelis were killed during the Intifada, Israel responded to it in full force, killing over 1,000 Palestinians, including over 200 under the age of sixteen (Benin and

Hajjar).45 In Palestine, the protagonist goes around interviewing Palestinians about their experiences during the uprising, particularly the suffering and torture they experienced from the

Israeli military in its attempts to smash the uprising. Thus, the photojournalist, as he refers to himself in the narrative (57), encounters a lot of stories of this pain and suffering. He sees the unjust and unprovoked violence of the Israeli military, and at the same time, listens to first hand reports of this violence.

44 The two and final novels that will be studied in the last chapter are not only set in a backdrop of historical conflict, but they are also based on historical women. Palestine functions as a transition into the study of those novels that are imaginative renditions of conflict, historical individuals, and community.

45 This background information on the Intifada comes from both the Middle East Research and Information Project’s website (MERIP) and Palestine, which details extensively the origin and development of the uprising.

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In the comic, Joe Sacco depicts himself as both the main character and the narrator.

Because the narrative is based on historical events, it is important to be acutely aware that it nonetheless functions as a narrative. For Palestine, there are three “Joes” that must be distinguished. The first is the real author of the comic, Joe Sacco, who loses his authority over the narrative as soon as he writes it down because he is not in full control of language, the images he depicts, or the way in which the comic will be received. The real author’s biography, opinions, and intentions for writing the narrative will therefore not be considered in the analysis of the comic because they are exterior to the narrative. This circumvents claims about authorial intention, which could oversimplify the text or lead to unfounded misinterpretations of the work of the narrative. Besides, Palestine has its own narrator—the voice of “I” in the captions. This

“I” is a Joe who has been to Palestine, but who has left it and so is distanced from his experience there both spatially and temporally. This distance has allowed him to reflect on his experience there and do more research on the conflict for drawing the comic, so he is able to provide historical information and statistics on things pertinent to the understanding of the emergence of the State of Israel, the U.N. and its resolutions regarding the territory, and the Intifada. He speaks to an explicit “you”, the narratee, to whom he needs to provide this information in order for him or her to understand his narrative. Joe the narrator also gives his narratee personal information as to why he decided to go to Palestine in the first place, which is to “see for himself” what is actually going on, “And that’s why I’m here… to see what’s going on…” (18.2).46 Finally, there

46 The format of citation for the comic is page number, row number, and panel number, so in this case, the quotation appears on page thirteen, second row, first panel. A note on comic terminology: images are enframed in panels, which are usually, but not always, bordered. The spaces between the panels are referred to as the gutter, and sometimes, images “spill” into gutters. While panels provide a sense of deliberate sequencing, images that are not framed, spill into the gutter, or overlap with other panels can do several things such as intensify juxtaposition, and play with time, space, chronology, etc.

115 is Joe the character, the figure depicted in the images, who is in Palestine to collect as many stories as possible, taking pictures, and literally seeing for himself what is going on in the occupied territories. It is important to clearly distinguish between the latter two Joes because each is positioned differently with respect to the conflict. Hereafter, Joe the character will simply be referred to as Joe, and Joe the narrator as simply, the narrator.47

The narrator informs his addressee that Joe has come to Palestine because, as an

American, he has noticed the stark contrast between the ways Israelis and Palestinians are depicted in the American media: “if Palestinians have been sinking for decades, expelled, bombed and kicked black and blue, even when it made the evening news I never caught a name or recalled a face” (8.2). The narrator explains that part of his work in Palestine was to create a

“human interest” in his reports on Palestinians. “Human interest” he defines by describing the

When I cite only one number in parentheses, it refers to a page number where there is only one panel; these are called splash pages.

47 According to the terminology that Seymour Chatman uses in Story and Discourse, Joe Sacco is the real author, Joe the narrator is the narrator, and the “you” he addresses his narrative to is the narratee (150). Chatman also talks about the implied author, who is different from the narrator and the real author. The implied author is “the principle that invented the narrator, along with everything else in the narrative, that stacked the cards in this particular way, had things happen to these characters, in these words or images. Unlike the narrator, the implied author can tell us nothing. He, or better, it has no voice, no direct means of communicating. It instructs us silently, through the design of the whole, with all the voices, by all the means it has chosen to let us learn” (148). It is the sequencing of the events in the comic, which caption overlays which image in particular, and the way they as well as the panels are juxtapositioned. So, for instance, one can distinguish between narrator and implied author when thinking about epigraphs, which each of the three texts that have already been dealt with thus far, Invisible Man, Al-mutashāʻel, and Heremakhonon, have. The narrators of each text— the invisible man, Saʼīd and the recipient of his letters, and Véronica—are unaware of the epigraphs because they exist outside of the story, but they are still within the narrative text and therefore participate in the work of the story. Understanding the work of the implied author is crucial, as it eliminates the tendency for “authorial intention,” particularly when dealing with a text that is based on historical events.

116 way that the American media portrayed the killing of an elderly Jewish American man, and how this description remained engraved in his mind ever since:

“you gotta understand the American media. They want human interest, Klinghoffer48 gets

killed and we get the full profile, the bereaving widow, where he lived and what he put

on his corn flakes till he sounds like the guy next door who borrows your ladder. You see

the power of that?” (6.2).

Joe is curious about the invisible Palestinians, those who, even when they make the news, remain nameless and faceless. He is curious to meet the human beings that are Palestinians, and so comes to the occupied territories to document life under occupation, in the dismal conditions of refugee camps, and the First Palestinian Intifada, as real people lived it.

Because of occupation, Palestinians are literally closed off from the rest of the world, and their suffering takes place in a “parallel universe”, particularly in the case of torture by the Israeli authorities:

Make no mistake, everywhere you go, not just in Marvel Comics, there’s a parallel

universes… Here? On the surface streets: traffic, couples in love, falafel-to-go, tourists in

jogging suits licking stamps for postcards… And over the wall behind closed doors: other

things—people strapped to chains, sleep deprivation, the smell of piss… other things

happening for ‘reasons of national security’… for ‘security reasons’… to combat

‘terrorist activity’. (102.1)

48 Klinghoffer was an American Jew who was killed on a cruise ship, the Achille Lauro, on October 8, 1985. While the ship was docked in Port Said in Egypt, a group of men in the Palestinian Liberation Front attacked, and Klinghoffer, and elderly man in a wheel chair, was shot in the head and his body thrown overboard. The incident drew much national attention, and the president of the United States at the time, Ronald Reagan, personally spoke to his wife assuring her that the hijackers will be brought to justice. The narrator’s point is that when similar brutalities such as these happen to Palestinians, no one ever hears about them; they get lost in the void of silence and the “parallel universe” behind “closed doors”.

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This parallel universe exists, according to the Palestinians, behind closed doors--“The door closes, and the world cannot see” (94.2.1)—and so in the hope that international awareness of this suffering would alleviate it, Palestinians coalesce around Joe to tell them their stories; as the narrator puts it: “The tea starts pouring and so do the Palestinians…” (173.2). The Palestinians gather around Joe not simply because they want to tell their stories, nor because he is a foreigner.

They tell him their stories because he is a particular kind of foreigner, a privileged one, an educated, American journalist with a camera who can relay their story to the world that cannot see (he is not an Arab, for instance). When Joe first arrives in Palestine, he does not yet recognize the gravity of his presence in Palestine as a foreigner. In the very first chapter, a man he calls his “buddy” immediately recognizes that he “don’t belong” (4), and so immediately offers to take Joe around to hear personal testimonies about various experiences of suffering

(8.2). To this man, Joe’s very presence as a foreigner initiates a kind of contract, which he, stuck

“behind closed doors,” recognizes. Joe’s very presence in Palestine is the beginning of the contract, calling out the man to show him “the real-life adaptation of all those affidavits I’ve been reading” (10.1). Joe, who has only been in Palestine for three weeks, is confident that three weeks have been enough to make him a “good at this,” to know how to get the attention of

Palestinians and collect stories about the occupation. His verbal gestures instigate an expected response from Palestinians, and so when he says, “Salaam Aleekom!,” echoing the common greeting in the region, meaning “peace be with you,” his “buddy” predictably responds,

“Aleekum es-salaam!” [and peace be with you] (4). These seemingly innocent gestures initiate the agreement of responsibility, and so when Joe says, “This occupation thing looks pretty harsh,” the man from Nablus recognizes the calls and so fulfills Joe’s expected response by introducing him to people who have suffered the occupation. This is the correct response because

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Joe believes himself to be good at this, his verbal gesture giving him access to the “real-life adaptation” of the occupation. As such, he fulfills his end of unspoken agreement by taking Joe around to “shake hands with his people’s pain” (5.1.2; 8). Nevertheless, the call-response agreement of responsibility is a little more complicated, particularly as Joe is a privileged,

American foreigner. At the end of Joe’s tour of suffering, the man in turn makes his own plea in response to Joe’s, one that is verbal and emphasized by a contractual hand-shake: I have made

Palestinians real to you, provided you with your its “human interest”—the people, the human beings suffering the occupation, so now you have to respond to your end of the agreement: you must tell of what you have seen. At the end of the section, after Joe has heard stories of the torture and suffering that takes place behind closed doors, the man and Joe shake hands. As they shake hands, the man asks, “You write something about us? I showed you, you saw! You tell about us?” (10.1, my emphasis; see figure below).49

49 I am grateful to Rebecca Sherr of the University of Oslo, whose presentation, “Shaking Hands with the Pain of Others: Haptic Aesthetics in Joe Sacco’s Palestine,” at the 2012 American Comparative Literature Association’s annual conference meeting at Brown University in Providence, RI, drew my attention to the size and significance of hands in Palestine.

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These questions call Joe out to fulfill his end of the agreement, which the man indicates is to tell the world of what he has seen. This handshake takes place in the first chapter of the narrative (or, more accurately, the first book in the comic series), as though to seal Joe’s commitment to his responsibility for the rest of his stay in Palestine, but also for the next nine comics in the series. The handshake is a mutual agreement, which depends on each party’s recognition and fulfillment of his role in the agreement. Their agreement is necessarily communal in that involves implicit communication. The man shakes Joe’s hand with his right one, and places his left hand on top, as though the handshake is Joe’s promise to respond to his request, and his left hand, a double bind to consolidate the promise. Nevertheless, the handshake that is supposed to seal their agreement and reveals a power dynamic that threatens the binding power of the agreement, revealing the fragility of responsibility. The man’s left hand also shows that the agreement hinges on the fact that Joe will recognize and fulfill his role in the agreement.

It is Joe who has the upper hand in this handshake, and the question is, will he fulfill his responsibility in the agreement?

Joe walks away all too confident in how “good” at being in Palestine he is, “Mission accomplished! Told you I was good at this!” (10.2), but the narrator reveals how little he actually does know, which could compromise responsibility. Later in the same chapter, he gets tricked and robbed by two young children, one Jewish the other Palestinian. Joe gets angry, and the chapter ends with his leaving Nablus, his nose in the air, he fuming with anger. Palestinians try to shake hands with him, “Shake hands! Shake hands!” but he refuses (24.2). The narrator bravely relates his sentiments at the time, “They get me sick… Their big sad eyes… Their empty pockets… I want to kick them…” (24.2). The last line of the chapter comes from the mouth of a

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Palestinian who reacts to Joe’s refusal to “shake hands:” “See! He doesn’t want peace!” (24.2, see figure below).

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The narrator courageously depicts the sentiments of someone upset and already jaded only three weeks into being in Palestine, which shows the difficulty of responsibility as one’s own sentiments and privilege are always involved. The last panel in the chapter shows how easily a privileged foreigner like Joe can fail in his part of the agreement because he can leave as soon as he gets tricked and robbed (in contrast to the Palestinians who were tricked and robbed out of their property, land, and human rights, and were either expelled forever in 1948 from Palestine, as the pages just preceding depict [12-15], or, they have to continue to remain in the prison of occupation). The image closely parallels the panel above where he shakes hands with his

“buddy” from Nablus: Joe has his hands in his pockets, his camera strapped across his body, the image is take from a low angle, revealing Joe’s nostrils. The minor differences are the expression on his face, and the captions above the image.

Each panel makes up an image that positions the viewer vis-à-vis the image. It depicts the scene from a particular focalization, which includes “one’s position with respect to the perceived object, the fall of the light, the distance, previous knowledge, psychological attitude towards the object, etc.” (Bal 142). In doing so, each panel not only depicts what is perceived by the eye, but also a way to interpret what is seen by the eye. Therefore, each panel also works outward in that it positions the viewer’s eye as well as the viewer’s understanding of what the eye perceives. The particular position in which the frame, and by extension the comic, places the viewer in is the position of the implied reader, who is different from the narrator’s “you,” but an immanent narratee presupposed by the narrative. Thus, these images also have a rhetorical dimension that presumes a viewer that it seeks to recruit and act upon.

While the angle of the shot shows Joe literally with his “nose in the air,” it also places the addressee below him. From this angle, the implied reader is distanced from Joe, beneath him, but

123 also facing him. Given the angle at which the Palestinian’s hand extends, it looks as though the

Palestinian man is also extending his arm out to the implied reader, initiating an agreement of recognition and responsibility not only with Joe, but with the implied reader. Will the implied

“you” respond to the call by reaching out and receiving this stranger’s hand, participating in an agreement similar to Joe’s earlier handshake with his Palestinian “buddy” just a couple of pages prior? Will the implied reader refuse to respond, like Joe in this particular panel? The narrative assumes that the implied reader will respond as the comic continues and depicts the stories of suffering, with the implied reader “seeing” and “reading about” what the narrative depicts, participating in Joe’s responsibility through the nine-book series. Since the implied reader does respond through the narrative address, Palestine goes so far as to suggest to “the real reader how to perform as the implied [reader]” (Chatman 150, my emphasis), recruiting responsibility beyond the world of the narrative text.

The handshake is crucial to responsibility because it shows how “responsibility rests upon recognition and recognition is a form of agreement” (Ellison, Invisible Man, 14). It furthermore reveals the difficulty of responsibility, how it is a repeated act in continuous recognition and response to the other’s call. Despite Joe’s refusal to shake hands in the last panel of that first chapter, communicating the “he does not want peace,” he does continue to try to fulfill his end of the agreement. He tries to document want he sees as accurately as possible, taking notes in both written and imagistic form, with his camera, the closest thing to his eyes. He also ends up recounting what he has seen, particularly in an encounter with two Israeli women in the last book of the comic series. The Palestinians are aware of the advantages that come with

Joe’s being an American journalist, able to glimpse the suffering taking place behind closed doors through their own stories, which resemble the comics form of show and tell—they show

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Joe their wounds and tell the story of how they came to receive them. The advantage that Joe provides is that he can retell and disseminate those stories to an American audience.

Yet, Joe is wary of his American privilege that could work against him in Palestine. As the “first white man” to enter Palestine, Joe is the face of Americans for the Palestinians, and as such is expected to speak on behalf of Americans and their policies against Palestinians.

Although he cannot answer to their questions regarding American foreign policy, he must answer for those policies as an American. This humbles Joe who unable to respond to the name

“American” that reflects the policies and actions of the United States regarding Palestine. In a scene in which the panel is a shot from above, visually depicting how small and ashamed he feels, Joe sits with drooping shoulders, sad, humbled, and embarrassed by the questions

Palestinians ask him: “What do Americans think of what Israel has done? What do Americans think of international law? Are they aware of such a thing? What about the U.N. resolutions telling Israel to withdraw? 242? 338? Or do U.N. Resolutions only count against Iraq?”

(162.2.1). Later in the comic, one woman challenges Joe’s project, asking him what good will come from her telling him of her experiences because she has already done this. She has told her story to foreign journalists before, even to Israeli television, but still, her life has not changed as a result, she still lives in the dismal conditions of Gaza. His friend Sameh interprets the exchange between them: “She wants to know how talking to you is going to help her. We don’t want money, she says, we want our land, our humanity. Aren’t we people too?” (242.2.2 and 242.3.1).

Humbled, Joe is unsure how to respond: “well, of course… tell her America’s policies are unjust… tell her I hope my work—” (242.3.2). Looking away, Joe is unsure how to continue,

“well, tell her I don’t know what to say to her” (243.1.2).

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Joe nonetheless continues to try to fulfill his role in the agreement of responsibility, and goes on searching for the “human interest,” but this responsibility is highly problematic given power relations and the position a certain kind of foreigner has in the midst of suffering. His project of taking pictures and collecting stories raises its own ethical problems with respect to the relationship between those who suffer, and the privileged foreigners who survey but who do not get involved, or rather recognize their involvement and participation in that suffering. Much like

Véronica who enters the society but does not get fully involved, is caught in the storm of violence and chaos, but who hides in Heremakhonon, or keeps the windows shut tight in order to avoid getting wet. In comics culture, black holes are the means by which superheroes can travel between parallel universes, but the black hole here that allows one to access the parallel universe of suffering is saturated with power—the power one has as a foreign observer to watch like a tourist, but also to leave when things become to “real” to bear. In the first page of the series on the Gaza Strip, the narrator says:

Some of the world’s blackest holes are out in the open for anyone to see… For instance,

you can tour a Palestinian refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, You call the UNRWA, the

United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, Tel: 051-861195.

They’ll set you up… drive you there themselves… admission is free… tell them you

want to take pictures, tell them you want to talk to refugees… when you want them to

stop, let them know. (145)

The difficult ethics behind being able to enter and see the misery of Gaza and to talk to

Palestinians as though looking at an exhibit in the zoo, is that one can exit freely—and this conflict of responsibility makes Joe terribly apprehensive. Furthermore, the form through which he will tell the stories, which itself risks diminishing the seriousness of what he is doing: “Of

126 course of course! I’m off to fill my notebook! I will alert the world to your suffering! Watch your local comic-book store…” (10.1). In one splash page, which is when a single panel takes up the entire page, the captions read: “We’ve hitched a lift… a donkey cart… another authentic refugee camp experience… good for the comic, maybe a splash page” (219). Nevertheless, by thematizing this apprehension, making it an important component of the “telling” part of Joe’s agreement, the narrator is able to simultaneously mitigate this difficult, ethical positioning as well as show how he too—along with the narrative’s implied reader—is implicated in the suffering of the Palestinians.

Another way in which the narrative mitigates the difficulty of responsibility is by showing the process by which Joe collects stories and retells them in his comic, particularly in the construction of the images of what Joe witnesses in Palestine. In Ways of Seeing, John Berger defines an image as the relationship between what is actually seen and the way it is depicted:

“An image is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced […]. Every image embodies a way of seeing” (Berger 9-10). Therefore, the image is not only what is seen, but how it is put together, what it depicts, and what is foregrounded in the image, revealing the worldview that interprets the sight and creates an image. Joe goes around taking photographs of everything, his camera strapped across his body throughout the comic, but the camera does little to lend the sights he sees objectivity. For instance, when Joe finds himself in the middle of a demonstration in

Jerusalem in which there is an outbreak of violence between the Israeli military and the

Palestinian women and children demonstrating, he is happy to have gotten a few camera shots of the confrontation (56). He tries to sell his photographs to a news agency, but because he does not get a clear shot of the faces of those confronting the violence, the agency declines to take his pictures. Joe also tries to stage photographs of suffering. When he visits a hospital, he is on a

127 mission to amass as many pictures as possible of wounded Palestinian victims, “The Intifada you can count!” (30). Some refuse to allow him to take their picture in the middle of agonizing pain, making up “private wounds,” and those who consent, “public wounds,” like the young

Palestinian girl who drapes a Palestinian scarf over her head to particularize the suffering as

Palestinian (32.3.1; 33.3.1). In another instance, Joe asks a couple of Palestinian men to pose for him, pretending to work, making it look as though they are productive and useful (168.2.1). As an eye witness, the narrator does not make any claims to a so-called objectivity in his narrative, which is what actually prevents Véronica from seeing her implication in the suffering of others in Guinea. In fact, he is aware that each image that he depicts in his narrative, and each caption, is focalized. According Bal in Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, focalization is the various nuanced factors that determine a vision, which is what is seen with the eye along with what is narrated about what is seen. The object of vision along with the factors that go into how the object exists in narrative, together, make up a vision. Focalization can never be what is

“objectively” perceived by the ocular senses:

Perception depends on so many factors that striving for objectivity is pointless. To

mention only a few factors: one’s position with respect to the perceived object, the fall of

the light, the distance, previous knowledge, psychological attitude towards the object; all

this and more affects the picture one forms and passes on to others… Focalization is,

then, the relation between the vision and that which is ‘seen,’ perceived (142).

The relation between that which is seen and what one understands about what one sees is focalization. Recalling Invisible Man, the “inner eyes” that prevent certain aspects of reality from being perceived by the eyes is part of focalization. It is an interpretation of perception. Once one recognizes every sight is a vision, objectivity is no longer the issue, but rather, the components

128 that affect vision become central. Palestine thematizes the components that affect the interpretation of what Joe sees, including previous knowledge, psychological attitude, gender, nationality, race, privilege, and religion. In doing so, the narrator shows that objectivity does not necessarily imply veracity, and that regardless of his focalization, there is a material reality that he has the responsibility of telling, which the narrative attempts in the juxtaposition of image and language. For instance, in the juxtaposed panels below:

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The embedded panel displays this material reality, the narrator’s commentary in the captions ironically highlighting the extent of poverty the occupation has created, and the extent of “basic” living conditions of which Palestinians in Gaza are deprived. By thematizing the his way of seeing as a tourist—because Joe can and does leave when it all becomes too much—the narrative circumvents the possibility of the implied reader, who follows the story from Joe’s positioning, identifying with the Palestinians.

Another difficulty of responsibility involves changing the image one might already have of Palestinians. Part of the narrator’s responsibility in telling the world of what he has seen is to challenge the image of Palestinians his narratee already has. In a poignant scene in the comic, a couple of Palestinian men see the cover photograph of the guidebook of Israel that Joe uses to navigate Palestine titled, Israel: a travel survival kit” (167.3.1). The image, which depicts a man in Arab garb standing by a donkey, highly offends the two men, who comprehend that this image depicts the way the world sees Palestinians. One of them angrily asks Joe, “Is this how they think of us? Leading a donkey? You tell them what you see here! In my family, my cousins, we have students. A professor! A teacher of computers! Arabs have technology! And we Palestinians love education!” (167.2). The reproduction of such images both produces and legitimizes this way of seeing Arabs. For the Palestinians, therefore, it is not only the reality of their suffering that they want the rest of the world to be aware of, but they also want to correct the image it has of

Palestinians that legitimizes this suffering. Because of their bordered life under occupation, closed off from the rest of the world, the only way they can change that image is through a foreigner. In the comic, the narrator tries to produce an image of Palestinians that counters the one of Palestinians that already exists, which either does not exist (in contrast with the “human interest” that images of Klinghoffer produce, for instance), or is a stereotype of backward,

130 donkey-riding desert folk. Each panel in the comic is therefore a challenging counter-image, re- positioning the addressee in ways that allow for not only different ways of seeing Palestinians, but a different way of interpreting what they see.

As mentioned above, Joe fulfills his role in the agreement, his responsibility, and through his narrative, implicates the implied addressee in that responsibility. But how does he do this?

As well as calling himself the first “white” man to enter Palestine, the narrator Joe likens his naïve self who enters Palestine to Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence of Arabia was an Englishman who goes into the desert of Arabia to live amongst the Arabs, but while there, begins to adapt to the ways of life of the Arabs. In addition to adopting the superficial aspects of clothing and camel-riding, he also learns the language, practices the customs, and becomes such an intrinsic part of communal life that he leads a group of the community in battle against English colonizers. In his autobiographical text, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926), he writes about how be begins to feel estranged from his Englishness, but at the same time is not fully Arab. His entry into the Arab community thus puts his Englishness into question.

By drawing an analogy between himself and Lawrence of Arabia, the narrator of

Palestine implies that he too enters into Palestinian communities, and as a visual narrative, reveals the irony behind his referring to himself as a “white man.” The way that the Palestinians and Israeli soldiers see him reveal the arbitrariness of identity that comes from visible characteristics. Joe is depicted with a big mouth, thick lips (not quite “white”), and at one point in the West Bank, he is mistaken for being Japanese (29.2.1). Although Joe is drawn the same throughout the narrative, the more time Joe spends in Palestine, the more he resembles

Palestinians. The Palestinians he encounters are so hospitable that they make Joe uncomfortable

(for instance, 187.2.2 and 176.2). At one point, Joe needs a change of clothes, Sameh, the

131 educated, jobless Palestinian living in Gaza, offers him his own clothes, including some underwear. Joe resists the offer because “You can eat a refugee’s food and sleep in his bed… you can walk in his mud and step over the same dead rats… But wearing his underwear? You gotta keep some distance…” (189.3).

In spite of this distance, though, one night, Joe finds himself breaking the Israeli military imposed curfew. He and Sameh had stayed late at a couple of Sameh’s friend’s house watching some video footage showing confrontations between the Israeli military and some Palestinian youths, a funeral, and other violent footage. Because of the curfew, Joe and Sameh cannot drive, so they return to Sameh’s shack on foot. As they leave in the darkness, Joe is panicked because he knows full well that the footage will get them into trouble if the Israelis find it with them. To add to Joe’s fear, Sameh asks Joe to carry the film because it would be safer for an American foreigner to be in possession of such footage than a Palestinian man.

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This is one of the few times in the comic when the panels are all clearly separate, with is no spilling into the gutters, lengthening the narrative time (which is the time it takes for an event to be narrated, in contrast to how long it may have taken in real time), heightening the danger of the situation. In the panels, Joe is constantly looking over his shoulder while Sameh’s head remains bowed to the ground. At this point in the narrative, Joe has heard enough stories of torture and arbitrary arrests and interrogations, which heightens Joe’s awareness that he too might very likely become a victim of such Israeli violence. In the sheer uncertainty of who will spot him as a terrorist, clamp down on him, and take him away, behind closed doors, he thinks:

“One could be mistaken for a Palestinian out here…” (212.4.1). Joe recognizes that at this moment, he is in the same danger the Palestinians face every minute of every day. In this series of panels, Joe visually becomes Palestinian, his head low, shoulders dropped, shoes muddy, and clothes dirty; he is open and exposed to the military brutality just as the Palestinian walking beside him. In addition to the visual irony that does not quite make Joe “white,” this scene highlights the fact that responsibility is not about identifying with the suffering of others—an impossible feat; rather, it is about recognizing that one has a causal relation to the suffering others, and this, as the above figure shows, puts the very name of American into question.

The narrative technique focalization is crucial, then, in the way Palestine recruits the narratee and implied reader in the work of responsibility. Since focalization is literal, spatial positioning as well as psychological dispositions and frames of reference, the depiction of a character or event from a particular focalization in the narrative prompts the addressee to see and interpret the character and event from the position of the focalizer. The captions in Palestine are the narrator’s focalization, the way he sees himself when he was in Palestine, and he comments on his previous attitudes and dispositions by ironically assuming Joe’s positioning. For instance

134 in the following panel, where Joe encounters a veiled woman for the first time, it is Joe and not the narrator (because he now knows better) who is surprised that this “life form,” a veiled woman, could initiate contact—in perfect English no less (see figure below).

The narrator speaks from Joe’s focalization when he says, “Just like that! I’m not kidding! In perfect English! The King’s!” revealing Joe’s surprise. These statements also establish a relationship with the addressee of the narrative, who shares Joe’s surprise that such a life form speaks English. The fact that the narrator needs to reassure the narratee that he is not kidding places the narratee in Joe’s surprised position. The narratee temporarily “identifies” with Joe

(137.2). By simply initiating dialogue, though, the woman has changed Joe’s image of veiled women, and so he can now look back and reflect on his attitude. In the last caption of the panel, he shifts back to the position of narrator who “knows better”, observing that the hijab was more his problem than hers. The narratee, and by extension the implied reader, who has just identified

135 with Joe now also learns, through this encounter, that if he or she is bothered by the hijab, it is his or her problem, not the veiled woman’s.

Who, though, is the narratee of the comic? This “you” can be tracked in the narrator’s address, for instance, in the quotation below:

“Ah, yes, the outrage of the month… 12 Palestinians—journalists, a teacher, an

accountant, etc.—ordered deported by Defense Minister Moshe Arens… they’re not

formally charged with anything, mind you, but between you and me and the Israelis that

makes ‘em even more suspect—‘terror chieftains,’ according to the Jerusalem Post… and

besides, four Jewish settlers have been killed in the past three months and someone’s

gotta pay! The Whip’s gotta comes down somewhere! And bollocks to the Fourth

Geneva Convention and what it says about deportations! Hell, let’s deport the Fourth

Geneva Convention while we’re at it!” (54, my emphasis).

Here, the narrator puts himself, the Israelis, and his narratee in the same camp. All three share a image of Palestinians, agreeing that Palestinians are guilty without having to be charged, that deporting them for no reason is justified, that Jewish settlers, illegally living on Palestinian territory, are justified in moving there, and that every Jewish death must be avenged on

Palestinians, regardless of whether the Palestinians are guilty of killing them or not. The narrator therefore places his narratee in Joe’s shoes, and through his ironic commentary that reveals the contradictions and hypocrisy behind the treatment of Palestinians, also implicates them in the suffering, that is, revealing their causal relation to the suffering of others.

Being in the same camp, the narratee is similar to Joe, an uninformed but curious, privileged American who tries to assimilate without fully understanding the nuanced complexities of the unfamiliar place. In an attempt to get an authentic experience of Palestine

136 and live like the locals, Joe dons a kefiyyeh, the traditional headdress that men wear in Palestine.

While he acts the uniformed tourist, his “authentically” Palestinian friend Sameh, on the other hand, refuses to wear kefiyyeh because the colors of different kefiyyehs give signal different political affiliations. The local Palestinian resists “wear[ing] his politics on his cuff” to protect himself (188. 3), and sure enough, when Sameh concedes to wearing one with Joe in order to appease him, he and Joe are politically marked, in the very next slide. In another instance,

(reminiscent of the part in Heremakhonon where Veronica escapes to Heremakhonon to take a shower after being freed from arrest and in spite of the fact that Saliou is in custody and inevitably going to be killed), after a full day in the mud, rain, cold, and despair of Gaza, Joe takes a taxi to Jerusalem—because he can get out of Gaza—and the first panel in this section depicts Joe melting under the hot water of a shower. This in contrast to the cold, shower-less, rainy days he had just spent in Gaza.

The implied reader of the narrative can be gauged from a myriad of things including the kind of statistical and historical information that the narrative related, indicating the implied reader is someone who does not know this information. The implied reader can be further specified by gauging Joe’s encounters with non-Palestinians and how these encounters are juxtapositioned with what he learns being in Palestine. For instance, in the section titled

“Return,” Joe encounters an American Jewish man named Dave with whom he visits the

Western Wall in Jerusalem. In the sequence relating this encounter, Joe’s present with Dave is juxtaposed with stories Joe has heard of Palestinians. Dave talks about how great it is to be in

Jerusalem as a Jew, and after only “a weekend in the Holy City,” “feels” he is at “home here,” and so, because of the Law of Return, can get full Israeli citizenship and remain in Israel.

Juxtaposed with that story is the story of Palestinians who were expelled from their homes,

137 highlighting the cruel irony of how an American can come here and after only a weekend call it home and the Palestinians who are being dispossessed and expelled from the only home they know (see figure below).

Joe and his American addressee are in the same camp as the Israeli military, with which they are complicit in the suffering of Palestinians. In harrowing scene titled Moderate Pressure 2, the narrator relates Ghassan’s story, a man who has just been released from 29 days of torture by the Israelis. The focalization through which the narrative makes visible what happens in the parallel universe behind closed doors implicates the addressee in this man’s suffering.

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The title of the section is an ironic reference to a report from the Israeli Supreme Court

Justice Moshe Landau saying that:

the Shin Bet [the Israeli secret service must be allowed some means of “non-violent

psychological pressure” and “moderate… physical pressure” in its interrogations… Just

what constituted such permissible pressure […] has been kept secret, but rest assured that

it included (in the report’s working) nothing “disproportionate,” nothing on the “level of

physical torture,” nothing that “deprives [a suspect] of his human dignity…” (95.2, my

emphasis).

In this scene, Ghassan has sparsely been fed, placed in confinement, and made to listen to endless music blasting in his ears. He is hooded with a sack soaked in urine, prohibited from sitting down, and ordered to keep his arms in certain positions for prolonged periods of time.

During the period of his arrest, he is taken to the doctor twice because feels a pain in his chest, but the visits are perfunctory, as though the torturers only take him to the doctor to symbolically show they treat their prisoners with a version of so-called human dignity. In the days before his three trial appearances, Ghassan is fed a little better and even allowed to sleep, and so when he does appear in court, he looks like he is treated well. With the traces of torture now rendered invisible, the male judges at each of his first two trials prolong the sentence of his arrest because the intelligence agencies claim they need more time with him to find evidence that he belongs to an “illegal organization” (107.3.4). When he tries to speak out against the torture, the torturers terrorize him into silence. At his third and final court appearance, the female judge refuses to extend the period of his custody. She is the most rational, not emotional or empathetic judge, realizing that 29 days of being in custody proves not that there is evidence that needs to be found

139 to prove he is guilty and belongs to an illegal organization, but rather that there is no evidence, and if there was, it would have already surfaced.

In examining the relationship between words and images, Mieke Bal writes that because a narrative of words is formally different to a narrative of images, images might offer a more adequate medium to tell a story (Bal, “Figuration,” 1290). Often, images are called upon to do the work of language and vice-versa, so a narrative of images and language in a visual juxtaposition, as for instance in comics, could communicate the story of suffering in a way that language or image alone cannot. In the comic, the number of panels in each scene increases the longer Ghassan spends in the prison, showing that despite his proximity to the daily life of

“traffic, couples in love, falafel-to-go, tourists in jogging suits licking stamps for postcards,” just

“over the wall,” his experience of pain pushes this “parallel universe” farther and farther away, making the possibility of his returning to it just as far (102.1). The increasing panels also communicate the prolonged sense of time Ghassan felt undergoing torture, so for instance, with his arms in the air, or when he is prohibited from sleeping. The crowded panels, each clearly separate from the other to mark Ghassan’s isolation, depict his sense of confinement and the lack of space in the coffin-life box in which he is imprisoned.

In this powerful scene, the narrative is never focalized through Ghassan’s experience.

Ghassan, rather than the torturers for instance, is the central object of the images. The addressee is therefore placed in the position of the torturer. As one critic of the comic clearly articulates:

Through shifting perspectives and angles, the reader is bound to feel as if his gaze is

encircling the prisoner--moving over and around him in his intensely claustrophobic

entrapment. Inevitably, this strategy of visualization involves the reader in the

objectification of the victim that is central to the very act of hooding. This instills a sense

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of unease because we can see the victim, but he cannot see us--a perspective shared with

the perpetrator. (Vågnes)

Contrary to what Edward Said writes in the introduction to the complete edition of Palestine, that

Joe is in Gaza “to affirm that it is there, and must somehow be accounted for in human terms, in the narrative sequences with which any reader can identify” (v), because of focalization, the addressee does not ever identify with the Palestinians because the narrative does not allow it, as

Joe never does. Even when in that temporary moment in which he thinks he might be mistaken for a Palestinian, Joe never identifies with them. He cannot because suffering is the wall between his focalization and theirs.

The narrative places the addressee in position of the perpetrator once again at the end of the narrative. In one of the last scenes in the comic, Joe is on a bus back to Cairo leaving

Palestine, and he remembers one of his first days in Jerusalem. He was sitting in the back of an

Arab jewelry shop having a conversation with a Palestinian woman, an Israeli man, and two

American men who did press work for and NGO. The Israeli man gives his opinion about the

“solution” to the question of Palestine, concluding with, “the point is whether the two peoples can live side by side as equals” (282.1.1). The narrator then juxtaposes this with another memory he has, about a boy in the rain. By placing the image of this Israeli man talking about living “side by side,” as “equals” the narrative highlights the almost comic irony of the “side by side” and

“equality” the Israeli man talks about. Literally outside the jewelry shop, living side by side with this Israeli, is an extremely unequal power relationship given the conditions of the occupation.

The panels depict a young Palestinian boy walking in the rain in Jerusalem, who is suddenly stopped, for no reason, by a group of Israeli soldiers. The soldiers take cover underneath a shed

141 and interrogate him, and for no reason, make the child take of his head scarf and stand in the rain.

Being near the end of the narrative, the narrator seriously reflects on this notion of “side by side” by putting all that he has seen “side by side” as “parallel universes” in order to give it perspective. His language is riddled with uncertainties, questions, I don’t knows and what-ifs.

The angle of the image, though, places the addressee in the position of the soldiers, and not the child. Unable to identify with this child, the narrator can only imagine what the boy it thinking:

“Perhaps for the boy it was one of dozens of humiliations, bad enough in his personal scheme of things, but no worse than others he’d experienced… I don’t know…” (282.2, my emphasis). The panel in the middle of the page is a close up of the boy’s face, spattered by rain, his shoulders slouched, and the addressee positioned as the soldiers interrogating him (see figure below).

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Placing the reader in the position of the perpetrators of violence, the narrator asks:

“But what was he thinking?

“Was it one day it will be a better world and these soldiers and I will greet each other as

neighbors?

“or was it simply, one day—

“one day!

“and beyond the particular abuses of this time and place, beyond the really big

questions—the status of Jerusalem, the future of the settlements, the return of the

refugees, etc—which must be raised and then hurdled if there ever is to be peace here, is

something else—

“a boy standing in the rain and what is he thinking?” (283.2).

Although the images place the addressee in the position of the soldiers, the narrator’s captions prompt the implied addressees to rethink their position and responsibility to and for this suffering. The narrator continues in the next panel:

“and if I’d guessed before I got here, and found with little astonishment once I’d arrived,

what can happen to someone who thinks he has all the power, what of this—

“what becomes of someone when he believes himself to have none?” (283.3).

What the Israeli military does for the sake of “security,” ends up being terror for Palestinians.

The stories that Joe has heard about the arbitrariness of the arrests of the Israelis, the brutal, irrational, and endless torture, this terror that the Palestinians feels has allowed him to finally ask, what becomes of someone who believes himself to have no power in the world. What becomes of his or her life? Worldview? Humanity?

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The narrator fulfills the first part of responsibility, telling of what he has seen in

Palestine, fulfilling the terms of his agreement with the man in Nablus. He does so for instance at the end of the narrative when he runs into a couple of Israeli women in Jerusalem. Even though they are Israelis in Israel, they are afraid to venture into the Arab Quarter because of the image of danger they have of Palestinians: “it’s too dangerous,”, “Jews get stabbed there” (256.3.1). Joe, the foreigner, offers to walk them through, telling them that their fears are misplaced, and that the Quarter is worth entering and seeing, assuring them that, “nothing will happen. It’s really colorful. There are all these stalls and shops. Nothing’s ever happened to me” (256.2.1). He continues, “I see orthodox Jews walking through there… and there’s always tourists” (253.3.1).

He convinces one of the two women to take her to the Arab Quarter, but their apprehensions seep into Joe, and as they are walking through the market, he too becomes afraid. He nonetheless braves his fear to allow the Israeli woman to “see for herself” Palestinians, not the dangerous figments of her imagination (258, 259). They emerge from the market, without a scratch.

As for the second question Joe is asked, “What kind of feeling would you have if your door was smashed down? Would it be a feeling of love? You don’t feel secure in your own home… your own street…” (71.1), Joe is still unsure, and can only imagine, what it is to be left in solitary confinement, to have his home taken away from him, to be this boy in the rain. The narrative ends with Joe on a bus-ride back to Cairo, but he never quite makes it there in the comic. The bus gets lost on the border of Gaza and Egypt, at the Rafah crossing. The bus driver gets lost, and so he stops at a Jewish settlement to ask for directions. Interestingly, the settler who is to give directions and guide the driver, has a rifle strung round his neck (284.1.2). The driver follow this settler’s directions, but finds that he is about to enter “what looked like a

Palestinian refugee camp or town” (284.2). Afraid, mimicking the fear that the two Israeli

145 women felt at the thought of encountering Palestinians as civilians, the bus driver does a U-turn and heads to an army post to ask the Israeli soldier for directions, which is the last panel of the comic. Joe remains in Gaza, as do the American tourists and the Jews who have come to Israeli to find their homes, like Dave, but they remain there, lost, at the mercy of the bus driver who asks the wrong people for directions.

Bal observes that "reversing the perspective and siding with the sufferer is necessary ethically but also intellectually if we are to further our insight on this question [of ethical responsibility]” (c.f. Vågnes). While the comic places us in the position of the perpetrator, the desire to side with the sufferer forces the implied reader to rethink their positions and perspectives regarding the faceless and nameless Palestinians who exist in a parallel universe that they have never before had access to. Ending in the confused position of being lost, between being the perpetrator of suffering and having witnessed suffering, this conflicted position that closes the narrative implicated the addressee in responsibility. How would they feel is this happened to them? Will they too extend their hand out and receive the Palestinians’ in an agreement of recognition of their role in suffering and thereby their responsibility?

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Chapter Three: Reconfiguration

no political revolution is possible without a radical

shift in one’s notion of the possible and the real.

Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (location 222)

Chapters one and two showed how “responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a form of agreement” (Ellison, Invisible Man, 14). The complexity and difficulty of recognition and responsibility lie in the fact that each requires a change in the way one perceives his or herself and their positioning in a social context. Only with that change can one begin to see differently—the problem of invisibility surfacing as a problem in perception—and thus, responsibility becomes possible. While the texts under study thus far emerge from a collective context, the narratives are related by individuals, the concerns of recognition and responsibility unfolding in the individual, so to speak. Nevertheless, since recognition and responsibility can only take place as a re-evaluation of one’s position in relation to others, reconfiguration must be considered on the level of the collectivity. In other words, even though recognition and responsibility can be individual and individualized, they must be enacted in a social context; the individual cannot be the center of the reconfiguration of community. For this reason, the texts under study in this chapter make the collective the formal center of the narrative. In the first text under study, Sitt Marie Rose by Etel Adnan, there are multiple narrators telling the story of the same event; in the second, The Madonna of Excelsior by Zakes Mda, the narrator is a collective

“we”. This narrative technique shifts the focus away from the individual and thereby “puts severely into question the most cherished myths of Western modernity--progress, rationalism, objectivity, liberalism and essentialized individual autonomy” (Santos, “American Studies”, my

147 emphasis). Indeed, the idea of an autonomous individual is the downfall of the main female character in Sitt Marie Rose. These collective narrators reveal how even internally in community, there is constant negotiation of the constitution of that community. Furthermore, the two novels under study here make women the central event of each of the stories, which highlights the gendered nature of community constitution. In doing so, the narratives point to how much an evaluation of gender and gender roles is important to the reconfiguration of community. While the communities in the narratives under study thus far are divided across lines of “race”, ethnicity, and religion, the comparison of Adnan and Mda’s novels shows that rethinking community outside of these categories of identity must begin with a serious consideration of gender.

In Sitt Marie Rose, we see a failed effort in the reconfiguration of community; in The

Madonna of Excelsior, there is a reconfiguration of community, but it takes place outside the realm of the political. Through the descriptions of the paintings of an impressionist artist, the novel shows how, as Butler puts it in the epigraph quoted above, “no political revolution is possible without a radical shift in one’s notion of the possible and the real,” and that this shift in the possible and the real can be achieved through the creative distortions of art, and other forms of the creative rendition of reality—such as narrative fiction. After all, the two narratives under study in this chapter are not only based on historical conflicts, but they are based on historical personages who seamlessly move into and beyond the narrative text.

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Sitt Marie Rose: “We First Conquer and Defeat. Later We Talk:” Failed Communication,

Failed Community

Sitt Marie Rose (1977) is a novel written in French the first years of the Lebanese Civil

War, which spanned from 1975-1990. Different groups that drew lines of difference across national, political, ideological, and sectarian interests participated in the war, each allying itself with varying groups at different times in the war in the name of protecting itself as a distinct community and identity group. These groups were complex, politically and ideologically motivated, claiming to represent national and/or religious sovereignty, but they also provided services to members of their group, extending their influence beyond the political arena.

Palestinians, Maronites, Orthodox, Sunni, Shi’a, Communist, Pan-Arabists, and Socialist, to name just a few, were pitted against one another, and soon, the city was divided, with certain groups claiming sovereignty over particular areas in the Lebanese capital. East Beirut became the territory of the Christians, and West Beirut, the Muslims’. Without a neutral Lebanese government, each group’s political party took on the responsibility of protecting its members and policing its geographical area of occupation, forcing civilian members to depend on the group’s elite leaders for protection and their daily bread. With the division of the city—checkpoints strewn across it—violence and hostility intensified between the different groups’ members, and possibilities for encountering one another became slim.

Since Lebanese political representation was measured as sectarian representation,50 and

Palestinians were predominantly Muslim, Lebanese Muslims tended to side with Palestinian

50 For an excellent summary and analysis of sectarianism in Lebanon, beginning with the division of Lebanon under the Ottomans in 1843 up to the Tai’f Accord, see Ofeish. He writes: “Sectarianism is institutionalized in a sectarian system that highlights sectarian communities as primary societal units and political entities. As a result, the state largely confines political representation to the boundaries of ‘sectarian representation.’”

149 representation. Many Christian groups thus considered the Palestinians, who by 1975 had their own fully armed militias in Beirut, the instigators of the war, and blamed them for bringing their war against Israel to Lebanon. Many did not consider the battle against the Israelis as only the

Palestinians’; they saw this as the struggle of all the Arabs, and so fervently defended the

Palestinian cause despite their religious affiliation. There were other factors that provoked the war, but the question of the Palestinian presence in the country makes for the political context of

Sitt Marie Rose.51

Sitt Marie Rose was first published in French in 197752 by novelist, painter, and poet Etel

Adnan, and is based on the historical kidnapping and murder of a woman named Marie-Rose

Boulos, after whom the title character of the novel is named. Marie-Rose Boulos was a Syrian

Christian social worker who lived in Beirut during the war and taught in a school for the mentally disabled and underprivileged. In 1976, a year after the war broke out, members of a

Christian militia group kidnapped and murdered her for working with Palestinians, and her death provoked the outrage of both Christians and Muslims. In a 2010 interview with the Lebanese daily newspaper Al-Mustaqbal, Adnan says that:

قرأت خبرا من ثالثة اسطر في جريدة "لوموند" الفرنسية يتحدث عن خطف امرأة لبنانية مري بولس

وعرفت الموت, فجلست الى طاولتي على مدى شهر بكامله وكتبت تلك الرواية. هي امرأة عرفتها, امرأة

طيتة جدا, فتحت مدرسة لتعليم األطفال المرضى.

51 This is a simplified summary of the fifteen-year civil war, and merely is to provide background to the events of the novel. For more on the civil war, including information on the numerous factors that provoked the war such as access to resources, education, political representation, and class struggle, see Kamal Salibi, The Modern History of Lebanon and Fawwaz Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon.

52 The English translation appeared in 1982, following the Israeli invasion of the country.

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I read in the French daily Le Monde, in an article of only three lines, that a Lebanese

woman named Marie Boulos was kidnapped and had died, and so, I sat at my desk for a

whole month and wrote this novel. She is a woman that I knew, a very nice woman who

opened up a school for the handicapped (Adnan, Al Mustaqbal interview).

Implicit in this comment is that three passing lines are not sufficient to relate the murder of

Boulos. There was no explanation, no description, no context, and no follow-up on the story. In her creative rendition, Adnan hoped to explore how such irrational and ruthless murders could take place, how peoples lacked the basic intelligence and capacity for social organization, and how systems of governance were incapable of maintaining order and avoiding such murder

(Adnan, Interview, 2010). While this historical event serves as the basis for a literary exploration into the way community affiliations can regress into violent intolerance, especially in times of conflict. The literary rendition of the event in turn allows for thoughtful reflection and exploration of such violent, material realities. Sitt Marie Rose reveals how the very structure of community is not only gendered, with the female mother representing the safe, guarded, home, but that gender is intrinsically the expression of a power relationship, where the masculine represents the powerful, self-sufficient, and automous, and the female the weak, docile, and in need of protection. The hierarchical relationship unfolds in novel in metaphors of the home, and

“women—as bodies and cultural repositories—become the battleground of group struggles”

(Peterson 48). It is through this gendered—rather than sectarian—understanding of this community that could provide insight into the possible reconfiguration of community.

The novel is divided into two parts called “Times,” « Temps 1: Un million d’oiseaux » and « Temps 2: Marie-Rose ». Temps 1 is set in an upper class Christian-Maronite community of

East Beirut, and Temps 2 is the narrative of the execution of Marie-Rose. In the novel, Marie-

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Rose is the headmistress of a school for deaf and mute children; she has also is a founder of and activist in a women’s group that works to raise awareness of the suffering of Palestinians in the refugee camps in Lebanon. Marie-Rose, who is divorced, lives with her younger lover, a

Palestinian doctor. Her participation in the women’s movement and the Palestinian resistance, and her crossing back and forth between East and West Beirut, spark the attention of the members of a Christian political organization, who kidnap her, bring her to trial before her deaf- mute students, and murder her by quartering her body in front of her students for her

“transgressions.” An anonymous woman of the Christian community is the narrator of Temps 1, which revolves around Mounir, an influential man of the community, and his male friends,

Fouad, Tony, and Pierre, the “bird hunters.” In Temps 2, we learn that Mounir and his fellow hunting friends kidnap Marie-Rose, interrogate her in front of her deaf-mute students, and murder her by quartering her body.

While Temps 1 has a single narrator, the second part has several. It is divided into three parts, each of which is again divided into seven separate chapters. Each of these seven chapters is narrated by a different narrator, and, in each of the three parts of Temps 2, the order of the seven narrators consistently repeats. The three parts of Temps 2 correspond to three different moments in Marie-Rose’s murder: her arrest, her so-called trial, and her murder. The following table illustrates:

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Temps 1: Un million d’oiseaux Temps 2: Marie-Rose

I II III Unnamed narrator in The arrest of Marie- The trial of Marie- The murder of Marie- the Christian Rose Rose Rose community of East 1. Deaf Mutes 1. Deaf Mutes 1. Deaf Mutes Beirut. 2. Marie-Rose 2. Marie-Rose 2. Marie-Rose

3. Mounir 3. Mounir 3. Mounir

4. Tony 4. Tony 4. Tony

5. Fouad 5. Fouad 5. Fouad

6. Bouna Lias 6. Bouna Lias 6. Bouna Lias

7. Unclear. 7. Unclear. 7. Unclear.

Since Marie-Rose is a member of the Christian community, her actions are perceived as a threat to the unity and integrity of the group. Her murder is an indication of the breakdown of community, and so the way community is perceived and constructed in this novel must be explicated in order to understand why her death is the necessary outcome of her apparently innocuous actions.53

In the novel, community is conceived as a brotherhood. In the scene of her interrogation,

Marie-Rose reveals that she conceives of community as a singular brotherhood, but one that is

53 One must be careful not to essentialize the different sectarian groups in Lebanon as a result of this novel. As one critic advises, “it is worth noting the danger of essentialism in a reading that limits itself to the social contradictions within Lebanese society as represented in the novel. Although the narrative captures the polyphonic diversity of the historical conflict, readers who are unfamiliar with the diversity of this civil war might construe clear-cut distinction between the victim and victimizer categories. In this case, Christians become the embodiment of the cruelty that dehumanizes everyone as the battle intensifies. Such reductionism needs to be warned against” (Majaj and Amireh 151).

153 based on a common history and culture. Marie-Rose’s brotherhood encompasses all Arabs whom she would defend equally: « Je ne considère pas le Palestinien comme un ennemi. Il appartient à la même mémoire ancestrale que la parti des Chrétiens. Nous sommes vraiment frères » [I do not consider the Palestinian an enemy. He belongs to the same ancestral heritage as the Christian party. We are truly brothers] (62). She tells Mounir, « Je défends une culture commune, une histoire commune, leur et la notre » [I’m defending a common culture, a common history, theirs

(the Palestinians’) and ours] (64). In fact, she tries to explain her position to Mounir by articulating a direct mutual dependence between the Palestinians and the Christians, « Mais si j’ai pris leur parti contre le vôtre, dans la douleur, c’est parce que notre survie est liée à leur »

[But if I have taken their part with pain against yours, it is because our survival bound to theirs]

(64). To Marie-Rose, the Palestinians and the Lebanese Christians share a history and culture, and it is this commonality that should be protected to ensure the continued survival of both.

Mounir’s version of community is also a brotherhood, but unlike Marie-Rose’s brotherhood, it is not a historical or cultural one; rather, it imagines brotherhood in the space of the home. Lebanon for him is ruled by the Christians and needs to be protected from foreigners who threaten the sovereignty of his state (the Lebanese State at the time was controlled by

Maronite Christians, which the Muslims and the Palestinians were trying to dismantle). Mounir explains, « Nous, on est chez nous » [We are at home here] (63). Despite Marie-Rose’s retort, «

Et depuis quand être chez soi vous met au-dessus de la morale? » [And since when does being at home put you above morality?] (63), Mounir is not concerned with her abstract morality. To him, not only have the Palestinians trespassed his home, but they have also broken the code of hospitality by transgressing their role as the guest and acting as master of the house:

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« Tu oublies leur arrogance. Ils se comportaient comme des maîtres. Ils faisaient claquer

leurs armes en plein ville. Ils s’imposaient…. Si demain le front Chrétien cédait, tes

Palestiens entrerons dans nos maisons, il y aura massacre sur la colline. Et d’ailleurs, je

defends un pouvoir d’Etat » .

[You forget their arrogance. They behaved like masters. They brandished their arms in

full view right in town. They imposed themselves… If tomorrow the Christian front

yielded, your Palestinians would enter our homes and there would be a massacre on the

hill. Besides, I am defending the power of the State] (67).

While Marie-Rose speaks in the register of history and culture, he speaks of the political and the material reality he is faced with. He perceives the Palestinians’ exhibition of arms as a demonstration of phallic power that challenges the authority of the State, and so must respond to and defeat this challenge in order to assert his authority and maintain his position on the pedestal of masculinity in the home.

Bouna Lias, the Maronite friar who comes along with the men to Marie-Rose’s execution, serves as the moral and religious representative. “Bouna” itself is a familiar shorthand for the Arabic abouna, which means “our father,” and the religious patriarch confirms and legitimizes, on moral grounds, Mounir’s position regarding the Christian community. He insists that the brotherhood follow the Christian family model, with the (absent) father at its head whose son does His will on earth. The hunters see themselves as the son, and women—any woman— must fulfill the role of the Virgin Mother, who looks over her son but who also serves him in a pure, docile, and virtuous manner. As the men interrogate Marie-Rose, Bouna Lias outlines

Marie-Rose’s sins, and tells her what she can do to absolve them: « Tu es minoritaire et tu t’es fourvoyée chez l’ennemi. Reviens dans ta communauté, c’est une forme d’amour, tout le monde

155 y est frère et soeur, il y fait bon et chaud » [You are a minority and you have strayed over to the enemy. Return to your community, it is a form of love, everyone here is brother and sister. Here, it is nice and warm] (72). By calling his community a minority, Bouna Lias communicates a sense of danger and a threat to its safety and survival. The way this statement is translated in the

English edition of the novel offers discrepancies that intensify the idyllic Christian image of

Lebanon as the home: “You are a Christian and you went over to the enemy. Come back to the community. You’ll inhale the aromas of baking bread and of the mountains. That’s a form of love. We’re all brothers and sisters. It’s so nice and warm” (Kleege 64). The image of the mountains and the bread reminds one of community as Christian communion, and only those who partake and ingest the warm bread become part of a single body, that of Christ. Marie-

Rose’s sins—her “straying” like a lost lamb into the enemy camp, helping the Palestinians in the refugee camps, and keeping a Palestinian lover—are read as deserting the family and excommunicating herself from the home.

Judith Butler characterizes gender as performance, a “stylized repetition of acts”

(“Performative Acts” 520). Gender identity, she argues, is not essential but rather constructed as a series of repeated acts of performance sedimented over time. The “repetition [of gender acts, therefore,] is at once a reenactment and a re-experiencing of a set of meanings already socially established; it is the mundane and ritualized form of their legitimation” (“Performative Acts”

526). More than just acts, gender is repeated acts, performed again and again within a social framework. The repetition of the acts establishes and confirms each act as a marker of masculinity or femininity. Furthermore, the repetition of the acts legitimizes their very enactment and consolidates their sex and gender signification, making individuals strive to repeat the acts that seem “natural” to their sex in order to appear men or women. The repetition and re-

156 experiencing of gender as performance of (or resistance to the performance of) certain acts further legitimate them as proper to different sexes and thereby reinforce their gender signification. As the literal meaning of identity—self-same and repeatable—indicates, gender identity is the repeated and repeatable act of performance.

The opening scene of the novel, which sets the stage for the action of the whole novel, shows this. The scene takes place before the outbreak of the war, and shows that in this Christian community, women are docile, passive spectators and admirers of men. The women remain indoors while men are free to hunt and roam the streets. In this scene, Mounir shows one of his hunting films to an audience of upper-class Christian women in East Beirut (the Christian part of the city): « Par terre sont assises sa femme, ses deux belles-soeurs et l’une de leurs amies. Il a un public de femmes dans l’une des plus belles maisons de Beyrouth » [On the floor sit his wife, his two sisters-in-law and one of their friends. He has an audience of women in one of the most beautiful houses in Beirut] (8). The women are spatially positioned below Mounir, on the floor, which indicates their status and level of agency in the presence of a man. In the film, Mounir and three of his friends, Tony, Fouad, and Pierre, hunt birds and freely drive around in big Jeeps in the deserts of Turkey and Syria, a perfect exhibition of their masculinity at its most cliché performance.

During the showing of the film, Mounir performs the role of the charming man who displays a feigned empathy with the women who cannot be a part of his world. He would like the women to participate in his adventures, but, alas, they cannot because of their sex. He declares that it is too bad that the women will never know what it is like actually to be out in the desert, however much of his film they see. He adds that this is because women as women would not be able to navigate the desert on their own in the way that men can:

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« ‘Vous n’avez rien vu, dit Mounir. Je ne peux pas vous raconter ce que c’est que le

désert. Il faut voir! Seulment vous, les femmes, vous ne le verrez jamais. Il faut prendre

des pistes, il faut même s’orienter avec une carte et une boussole pour vraiment le voir.

Vous, vous ne pourrez jamais » .

You really haven’t seen anything, Mounir says. I cannot tell you what the desert is. You

have to see it for yourselves! Only, you women, never will. You have to strike out on

your own, find your way with nothing but a map and compass to really see it. You, you

can never do that.” (10)

Had Mounir used the conditional tense, for example, had he said, “you could never do that,” « vous ne pourriez jamais » , he would have left open the possibility for women to go out into the desert. By using the present and future simple tenses, his speech asserts the strict and unchanging nature of this reality in which the borders of gender cannot be transgressed, which echoes the structural division of the novel.

Just as Mounir performs his gender perfectly, so do the women; as Butler puts it, the men set the scene and act, and women respond to these acts “within the terms [the men set] of the performance” (Butler, 526). The narrator of Temps 1, also one of the women in the audience, responds to this display of machismo as she “should,” associating their acts with images of war, another strictly masculine endeavor in this community:

« Voici la jeep Volkswagen conduite par Pierre et dans laquelle sont également assis

Mounir, Tony et Fou’ad. Les fusils de chasse sont bien en vue./ Nous passons à un plan

où des oiseaux traversent le ciel en formation d’avions. Images des actualités de guerre

de 1994 ou des films de guerre qui les on reprises. Le terrain est comme en Libye et les

chasseurs ressemblent aux soldats basanés de l’Afrika Korp ».

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[Here is the Volkswagen jeep driven by Pierre in which Mounir, Tony, and Fouad are

seated. The hunting rifles are in clear view./ We turn to a shot of birds crossing the sky in

the shape of airplanes. Images of 1944 war newsreels, or of war films that used them. The

terrain is like Libya’s and the hunters resemble the sunburned soldiers of the Afrika

Korp] (7)

Hunting, free movement outside the home, and war are the terrain of men. When Mounir feigns modesty, « Mounir explique avec beaucoup de douceur qu’il était tombé en panne de pellicule »

[Mounir explains with a certain modesty that he had problems as he ran out of film], the women reassure him that nothing he does could be wrong, « Tout le monde le rassure. C’est bien comme

ça. C’est un petit chef-d’oeuvre de toute façon » [Everyone reassures him: It’s fine like that. It’s a little masterpiece in every respect] (10). This reaction shows that men’s work and decision- making are never questioned or critiqued, but always praised for being perfect “little masterpieces.” Their shortcomings are overlooked by women and seen as achievements. This is in line with Virginia Woolf’s observation in “A Room of One’s Own,” that masculinity and feminine submission has always depended on women’s collaboration: “women have served all these centuries as looking glass possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size” (Woolf 28).

Indeed, the very performance of the film exhibition and Mounir’s modesty provokes a reaction in the women that idealizes men and their activities. They are mysterious, untouchable, and for those reasons, worthy of respect and even gratitude:

« C’est vrai. ‘Nous les femmes’ nous étions heureuses de pouvoir au moins voir ce bout

de cinéma coloré et imparfait donnant pendent une vingtaine de minutes une sorte de

prestige supplementaire à ces hommes que nous voyions tous les jours. Dans un cercle

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ultra-restreint la magie qu’exercent ces mâles très quelconques se trouve ainsi renforcée.

Tout le monde joue très bien ce jeu aussi » (10).

[It’s true. ‘We women’ were happy to see this little bit of imperfect, colored cinema,

which in a vignette of minutes offered a kind of additional prestige to these men that we

see everyday. In an ultra-restrictive circle, the magic these males exert is once again

reinforced. And, everybody plays well at this game] (10).

In this closed, theatre circle, women participate in the idealization of the men. They are happy to receive confirmation of men’s mysteriousness and even sacred awe.

In an essay on cinema and visuality, Laura Mulvey maintains that the conditions of the dark theatre makes spectators think they are looking into a private world thereby satisfying “a primordial wish for pleasureable looking” (9). For her, cinema maneuvers in the Freudian framework of scopophilia, which is an active looking that takes others as objects, “subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze” (8), making the process of looking a source of pleasure.

In Mounir’s exhibition, though, it is women and not men who watch, and it is men who are exhibited on the screen instead of women as objects of pleasure. This set-up disrupts Mulvey’s characterization of active, masculine looking: “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female” (11). Indeed, the women who watch Mounir and his film derive pleasure from seeing men perform masculinity, perhaps as a response to the “repression of their own exhibitionism and projection of the repressed desire on the performer” (Mulvey 9). The women do not quite look on passively so much as re-actively, that is, they act in response to and according to Mounir’s directions. Mounir does most of the talking and performing in this scene; furthermore, he has chosen the footage for the film and done the montage, showing that his narrative is the dominant vision of the world. He is in control

160 and the women watching his film not only enthusiastically accept this reality, but are happy with what they are shown of it. When one of the women asks to be taken along on the next hunting trip, her request is so impossible in this worldview that even she says it without much conviction, and no one feels it is worthy of attention: « ‘La prochaine fois tu nous emmènes,’ dit l’une d’entre nous, sans trop y croire. Mais les autres, ils ne se donnent même pas la peine de repondre

» [Next time you’ll take us with you,’ one of us says without really believing it. The rest don’t even bother to respond] (10). The women’s position as spectators makes them see as the men do, thus they participate in the performance. Even though they may desire the adventures displayed on the screen, they accept that they cannot act like men, reinforcing this rigidly structured community with inflexible gender roles that sustain the structure of the community.

This entire performance in this scene sheds light on why Marie-Rose’s acts are considered transgressions. First, it establishes which acts are forbidden to women as well as which acts are “feminine.” Additionally, the women spectators watch and respond to the film according to the social codes of accepted female behavior, thereby legitimating the masculine world from which women are barred from participating; not only that, but they have internalized which spaces are masculine and which feminine, that of war being clearly masculine: « Les femmes demeurent plus que jamais chez elles. Elle considèrent la guerre comme un règlement de comptes entre homes » [Women stay home more than ever. They consider war like an leveling of scores between men] (19-20).

If “gender is made to comply with a model of truth and falsity which not only contradicts its own performative fluidity, but serves a social policy of gender regulation and control” (Butler

522), then Marie-Rose’s acts disrupt both the reality and truth that these men represent, and it challenges their sovereignty in the community and the state at large. When Marie-Rose leaves

161 the so-called home, she challenges the “truth” of gender in society, which by extension destabilizes the society itself. She poses a threat to masculinity from within the home, making her doubly threatening. It is as though she herself performs a “brandishing of arms” in the public space outside the home, and the men must respond to her challenge in order to assert their masculinity, authority, and the status quo. In Temps 2, for example, Tony, one of the bird hunters in Mounir’s film and one of Marie-Rose’s murderers, compares Marie-Rose with his docile younger sister, who he describes as a “good” woman resembling the Madonna in her sexual purity. He contrasts her goodness with prostitution, which, in this dichotomous set-up, makes even the act of speaking “bad” and therefore only that of a whore:

« Elle [Marie-Rose] ne devrait pas ouvrir la bouche… Elle n’avait qu’à ne pas avoir pour

ami un Palestinien. Elle aurait pu trouver mieux pour coucher avec. Si elle avait été ma

soeur voici longtemps qu je l’aurais tuée. Ma soeur est très bien. C’est autre chose. Elle

ne sort jamais sans être accompagnée de ma mère. Quand on lui parle elle baisse les

yeux. Mais quand des putains se mêlent de la guerre, il y a de quoi être dégouté ».

[She (Marie-Rose) should not even open her mouth… She should not have had a

Palestinian for a friend. She could have found better to sleep with. If she were my sister, I

would have killed her long ago. My sister is very good. That’s something else. She never

goes out without being accompanied by my mother. When one speaks to her, she lowers

her eyes. But when whores get mixed up in war, now that is something to get disgusted

about] (68).

In French, the verb used for getting “mixed up” is a reflexive verb, so would literally be, “she mixed herself up in war.” Thus, Tony reads Marie-Rose’s participation in the masculine affair of war as an active choice on her part. Unlike Bouna Lias, who perceives Marie-Rose as straying

162 into the enemy camp, to “stray” implying a docile, unintentional losing of one’s way, Tony believes Marie-Rose has deliberately placed herself in the war, the territory of men. She has not only trespassed, but displayed agency in a world in which female actions can only be reactive.

She has sinned because she has participated in war and politics. Worse, unlike his sister, she shamelessly speaks, vociferously, declaring that she has a Palestinian lover with whom she lives, a very subversive act not only in the community, but in a cultural region that categorically prohibits fornication: « Je suis la mère de trois enfants. J’ai quitté mon mari. Je vis avec un jeune

Palestinien qui en ce moment est en danger » [I am a mother of three children. I left my husband.

I live with a young Palestinian who at the moment is in danger” (64).

When Bouna Lias entreats her to “return” to the “home,” he implies she perform her gender correctly, which she stubbornly rejects. Butler writes that “one is compelled to live in a world in which genders constitute univocal signifiers, in which gender is stabilized, polarized, rendered discrete and intractable” (“Performative Acts” 528).54 Bouna Lias can only conceive of

Marie-Rose as a univocal signifier, the “signified” in a Saussurean triangulation being none other than the pure, docile, Virgin Mother. Because Marie-Rose’s acts do not correspond to her, she must be punished:

« Ton âme va donc aussi sombrer, Marie-Rose, toi qui porte les doubles noms de la

Vierge et de son symbol. Dans les familles on parlera de toi et de ta trahison pendant très

longtemps et sans merci… Arrête Marie-Rose, tu es impudique et sacrilege. Tu baignes

tout entière dans la folie».

[Your soul is going to sink Marie-Rose, you who doubly bear both the name of the Virgin

and her symbol. Families will mercilessly speak of you and your treason for a long time

54 Butler explains: “In effect, there is neither an ‘essence’ that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires; because gender is not a fact” (“Performative Acts” 522).

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to come… Stop Marie-Rose. You are immodest and sacrilegious. You are swimming

entirely in madness] (107).

Indeed, the brotherhood of Christians with the Virgin Mother at its head is precisely the image that all, both men and women alike, have internalized about gender roles within the community, including Marie-Rose’s deaf-mute students. When the men bring Marie-Rose in to murder her, for instance, she reminds the children of the statue of the Madonna in church, who watches over them like the horizon hovering above the sea, « Elle ressemble à la Sainte Vierge de l’église, la grande, celle qui nous regarde pendent la messe [] C’est comme l’horizon sur la mer » [She resembles the Virgin Saint of the church, the big one, the one that looks over us during mass. It is like the horizon over the sea] (53). Marie-Rose’s “madness” is her immodesty and her sacrilegious acts, both of which disrupt the one-to-one signifier-signified relationship between her name, her sex, and her gender. To Bouna Lias, she destabilizes the entire system of signification this community upholds. She is not the Virgin Mary, the pure, docile mother of

Christ, nor is she the virtuous woman associated with the rose.

The omniscient narrator of chapters seven in Temps 2 makes clear that the primary reason the “Shabab” punish Marie-Rose’s is not so much her transgression of community boundaries, but of female gender roles (“shebab” literally means young men, but in the context of the war, the word became synonymous with the dangerous, ruthless, powerful groups involved in the militias):

« Elle était, ils se le sont admis, une proie de valeur. C’est tout juste s’ils ne la

considèrent pas comme une veritable pièce à muse, un butin, une prise examplaire. Elle

était femme, et femme impudente, et passée à l’ennemi, et se mêlant d’événements

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politiques, leur chasse gardée, d’habitude. Il fallait que eux, les chabab, ramènent les

femmes à l’ordre ».

[She was, they admit, a valuable prey, though they do not consider her a veritable

museum piece, real booty, an exemplary catch. She was a woman, an imprudent woman

at that, gone over to the enemy and mixing herself in politics, which is normally their

personal hunting ground. It was necessary that they, the Shabab, bring women to order]

(110-1).

According to Evelyne Accad in Sexuality and War, “Marie-Rose frightens the chabab because she stands for all that is contrary to their materialistic view of the world. She is not like their mothers.55 She does not comfort them, reassure them, reinforce their male egos. She is unlike any woman they could dominate. Neither wife nor mistress, neither mother nor whore, she stands alone for what she believes. She chooses a lonely and brave path she knows might lead to death. She believes she has to pick up the causes of the downtrodden in her country and go all the way, wherever that might lead” (66). This is Marie-Rose’s failure: she thinks she can fix her

55 Pauline Homsi Vinson reads the violence inflicted upon Marie-Rose as stemming from “displaced maternal love” (Majaj and Amireh 186). According to Vinson, Marie Rose is simultaneously maternal, sexual, and political and thus changes the image of the maternal into one that allows for sexuality and political activism: “The narrative’s refusal to dissociate Marie-Rose’s maternal, sexual, and political lives makes possible an image of the maternal that neither denies sexuality and political activism for women, nor demands absolute devotion from offspring, especially sons” (187). Marie-Rose as simultaneously maternal, sexual, and political actually makes possible a different image for women apart from the maternal. Her rejection of the maternal as the Madonna challenges what it means to be a woman-- not just mother--in this community of Christians. This challenge does not merely mean that “political transgression becomes cast here as sexual transgression,” as Vinson maintains (Majaj and Amireh 186), but rather that gender transgression is political transgression, transgression that challenges the very constitution of the community and its hierarchy of roles and authority.

165 country all on her own.56 Indeed, throughout her interrogation, she is didactic, she refuses to listen to Mounir, she lectures Bouna Lias as much as he does her, and although the men present think themselves morally superior, she preaches her own version of morality and love. In Temps

2, particularly during her interrogation, there appears to be dialogue taking place, but there is no communication.

These rigid gender roles mirror the inflexible and impermeable borders of the city, which the structure of the novel clearly reflects. The divided structure of the narrative demonstrates how this inflexibility is a break down of community. Given the various narrators, it may at first appear to allude to the possibility that different perspectives can provide well-rounded version of the events in each of the three parts, unlike Temps 1 where there is only one narrator.

Nevertheless, each chapter is walled off from the rest, and, as the narrator of the first part puts it,

« L’action est fragmentée par secteurs, nul n’a une image exacte de l’ensemble des operations »

[Action is fragmented into section, no one has an exact image of the whole process] (24). As a result, the chapters are closed in on themselves, with no connection or communication across them, preventing a holistic vision of the events. Furthermore, the deaf-mute students, Fouad, and

Tony never speak directly and are never spoken to, and so despite the chapters narrated in their own voices, they are never heard by the other characters present. Even though Tony, in comparing himself to Mounir says, « La guerre a nivelé nos différences socials » [The war has leveled our social differences] (100), he cannot act without Mounir’s orders, « Maintenant il

[Mounir] commande, il est le plus intelligent de nous tous » [Right now, he’s in command. He’s the smartest of us all] (100). At the same time, even though Marie-Rose speaks to both Mounir

56 In fact, Accad criticizes her assumption of the position of the martyr: “Thus Adnan, while correct in her criticism of the perversion of Christianity, romanticizes to the extent of falsifying the Palestinian cause” (73).

166 and Bouna Lias, neither ever speak to one another. Furthermore, despite the dialogue, neither is able to communicate with Marie-Rose nor she with them. Both are obstinate about her repenting and “returning” to the community, and neither comprehend her when she tries to explain her position. Mounir maintains throughout the novel, « Nous, il faut d’abord vaincre. Après, on parlera » [For us, it is necessary that we first conquer and defeat. Later we will talk] (67).

Similarly, Bouna Lias cannot grasp her words outside of the framework of his religious perspective. Because Marie-Rose works for a non-profit organization that helps the Palestinians in refugee camps, for instance, he asks her, « Tu n’as pas peur d’aller en enfer? » [Aren’t you afraid of going to hell?] (72). Despite their so-called community, there is absolutely no communication amongst its members, just iron fist order, structure, and gendered hierarchy. This proposes that the failure of communication between those present at the scene of Marie-Rose’s murder is representative of the break down of this community. Marie Rose’s version of the pan-

Arab brotherhood may be based on a common history and culture, and it may subvert the version of the men and Bouna Lias, but it is no less inflexible or incommunicable. She cannot communicate this kind of brotherhood to Mounir or to any of the men present in the classroom, and so community fails because no one in the classroom can listen to those who hold positions different from their own.

While Bouna Lias seems to represent the position most associated with what community is not, that is, communion in the “warm bread” of the body of Christ, so too does Marie-Rose in that her sense of community is ideological and based in an association of forces with a particular goal. Surprisingly, Mounir is the only one who recognizes that this obstinacy cannot sustain itself. Unlike Marie-Rose and the rest of the men in the room who adhere so strongly to their convictions particularly because of the conflict, he admits,

167

« Oui ; il a fallu presque un an de guerre civile, une centaine de morts par jour dans

Beyrouth, un renversement de la vielle alliance entre le ciel et la terre, pour que je

conçoive qu’une femme puisse être un interlocuteur valable, une alliée ou une ennemie.

Mais je suis l’un des rares à l’admettre » (43).

[Yes, it’s taken nearly a year of civil war, hundreds of dead everyday in Beirut, and an

reversal of the old alliance between heaven and earth, for me to conceive that a woman

can be a worthy interlocutor, ally, or enemy. But I am one of the few that would admit it]

(43)

By making this gender admission, Mounir begins to conceive of gender roles differently, which would allow for a different kind of community. This admission, though, is not enough to trigger communication in the classroom.

When the four men bring Marie-Rose into the classroom at the beginning of the execution, she ominously states that they are leaving the realm of ordinary speech and entering the realm of death, « On m’a dit: nous avons à te parler. J’ai compris que je venais d’entrer, avec ces mots, au-delà du monde de la parole ordinaire » [They told me: we have to speak to you. I understood with those words that I was leaving the world of ordinary speech] (40). Marie-Rose recognizes that there can be no communication in what is to ensue, and the way the deaf-mutes narrate what they witness is telling of how the lack of communication reflects the breakdown of community. In the first parts of Temps 2, the deaf-mutes say that, at the school, Marie-Rose teaches them how to communicate: « Nous sommes ici, inscrits pour apprendre ces langages particuliers qui nous aident à communiquer avec les autres » [We are here, enrolled to learn those special languages that will help us communicate with others] (37). Nonetheless, by the third part of Temps 2, they still feel locked out of the world, unable to participate in it or to

168 communicate with those who are a part of it: « Mais on dirait qu’il y a une fête differente. Ceux qui peuvent parler et entendre doivent beaucoup s’amuser à faire la guerre. Ils ont l’air très contents. Nous, nous sommes enfermés » [But they say that there is a different celebration.

Those who can speak and hear must have a lot of fun in the war. They appear to be very happy.

Us? We are locked in] (90-1). The last thing that the deaf-mutes narrate comes after they witness the bloody quartering of Marie-Rose: « Peut-être qu’un jour la parole et le son nous seront-ils restitués. Que nous pourrons entendre et que nous pourrons parler. Que nous pourrons dire ce que se passé. Mais ce n’est pas sure. Il y a des maladies incurables » [Maybe one day speech and sound will be restored to us. That we can tell of what has happened. But that is not certain. There are some diseases that are incurable] (92). The disease of literally being unable to hear or speak has made it impossible for them to communicate the atrocity they have witnessed. Furthermore, their disease is incurable and in their inability to listen they have failed to learn to speak; by analogy, the men in the classroom and Marie-Rose similarly are incapable of listening, and do not learn how to communicate.

Because of the failure to communicate, war prevails in a so-called celebration. The men respond to Marie-Rose’s challenge to their authority by excising her, the internal disease corrupting their version of pure national community. To ensure the legitimacy of their victory, the men must have an audience attest to their version of reality and to their authority over it.

Fouad, one of the hunters and another one of the narrators of Temps 2, insists:

« On veut qu’ils [les enfants] voient ce que c’est que d’être traître. [] Il faut qu’ils voient

de leurs yeux ce qui va lui arriver. Qu’ils apprennent. Qu’ils ne se fassent pas eux aussi

plus tard des idées de rebellion. On ne sait jamais, meme les sourds aujourd’hui peuvent

être subversives ».

169

[We want (the children) to see what it means to be traitors []. They have to see with their

own eyes what is going to happen to her. So that they learn. So that later they do not get

any ideas about rebellion. One never knows, nowadays, even deaf-mutes could become

subversives] (69).

In Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault writes that the spectacle of an execution confirms not so much the reestablishment of justice, but a reactivation of power (49). The murder of Marie-Rose must be performed as spectacle with an audience because the witnesses are “the guarantors of the punishment” (Foucault 58). Like the women in Temps 1 who participate in Mounir’s performance as re-actors to his directions, they react correctly, within the terms of the performance, legitimating the performance and its reality. For Foucault, in an execution, “the main character was the people, whose real and immediate presence was required for performance” because “they must to a certain extent take part in it” (57, 58). Thus, the presence of the deaf-mutes is necessary because, as witnesses, they confirm not the re- establishment of justice, but the reactivation of the power of the men, the hierarchy, and the structure of the community. In the first part of Temps 2, the deaf-mutes are sad that they cannot participate in the war, « Elle [Marie-Rose] n’aime pas la guerre. Nous non plus, parce qu’on n’y participe pas» [She (Marie-Rose) does not like the war. Neither do we, because we cannot participate in it] (38). Unlike Marie-Rose who has her own reasons for not liking the war, the deaf-mutes do not like war because they cannot participate in it. It excludes them and keeps them closed in on themselves. By the second part of Temps 2, the deaf-mutes slowly begin to participate in the war by anticipating their future involvement in the war, « Elles sont belles ces armes. Puissants. Nous sommes trop petits pour les utiliser. Mais il y a quelques anciens élèves qui, bien que sourds-muets, se battent ». [They are beautiful, these guns. Powerful. We are too

170 little to use them. But there are some former students who, even though they’re deaf-mutes, battle (in the war)] (51). By part three, the end of the slaughter of Marie-Rose, the deaf-mutes as witnesses to Marie-Rose’s murder become full participants in the war as witnesses to her execution, a celebration of both their involvement and the victory of the men. The foreboding lines narrated by the omniscient, anonymous voice, at the end of the novel are the following:

« Qu’on le veuille ou non, une mise à mort est toujours une célébration. C’est la danse

des Signes et leur stabilisation dans la Mort, c’est la montée en flèche de silence sans

pardon, c’est l’éclatment de l’absolu noir parmi nous. Que faire dans cette contre-fête

sinon danser? Les sourdes-muets se lèvent et, soutenus par les rythmes transmis à leurs

corps par terre martelée à nouveau par les bombs, ils se mettent à danser ».

[Whether one likes it or not, an execution is always a celebration. It is the dance of Signs

and their stabilization in Death; it is the soaring silence without pardon, of absolute

darkness among us. What can one do in this black feast but dance? The deaf-mutes rise,

and moved by the rhythm of falling bombs their bodies receive from the trembling earth,

they begin to dance]. (115)

The rhythm of the falling bombs recalls the staccato rhythm of the Pink Floyd music that serves as the background to Mounir’s film, the rhythm to which the birds fall (2). The narrator of

Temps 1 describes the war in Beirut as a rhythm meant to purify the city of any foreign elements,

« le tonnerre vient se mêler aux sons rythmés de guerre qui purifient Beirut » [the thunder comes and gets mixed up in the rhythms of the war that purify Beirut] (19). It is this rhythm that the deaf-mutes dance to, despite how they feel about Marie-Rose’s death. This shows that the iron fist of structure prevails because of the disease of the people of the city—the inhabitants’ inability to listen or communicate—community as communication fails. The deaf mutes do find

171 themselves in communion with the men, playing at their reality of war, and confirming the victory of the men, who do, in fact, first conquer and defeat. As for talking later, well, one never finds out.

The Madonna of Excelsior: Creative Distortions, Community Reconfigured

The Madonna of Excelsior (2005) by Zakes Mda (hereafter Madonna), is a novel set in

South Africa, beginning in the late 1960s and ending in the early 2000s. Like Sitt Marie Rose, this novel is also based on historical events and personages. In 1971 in the small town of

Excelsior in the then Orange Free State of South Africa, fifteen black South African women and five Afrikaner men of prominence were arrested for breaking the Immorality Act that prohibited sexual relations between whites and non-whites in the apartheid state. The incident was dubbed

“the biggest immorality act trial ever seen in South Africa,” and news of it made waves in the media across the globe (“African Immorality Act Losing Ground”). Right before the trial, the charges were suddenly dropped against eighteen of the arrested: one of the two remaining was an

Afrikaner man, the town butcher and councilor, Johannes Calitz, who shot himself the morning of the trial. The other, the only person of the 20 arrested who was actually charged with the crime, was an African woman named Ramasedi, the alleged lover of this butcher (Mda, 2000).

She was the only one charged likely because her lover had died and so was unable to drop the charges against her, unlike the other women arrested. In the novel, the woman charged, her daughter, the offspring of “miscegenation,” and the butcher become the characters Niki, Popi, and Stephanus Cronje.

While it may be tempting to say that the novel is about Niki and her individual experience of the trial, the narrative actually works against such individuation. In contrast to the

172 first person narrators of all the texts discussed thus far, Madonna is narrated by a collective

“we”. Similarly, it might be tempting to say that the trial is the central event of the novel, and while it is a major one, the novel focuses more on all the characters in the town of Excelsior and its adjacent location—where non-whites live—Mahlaswetsa Location, which the novel subversively talks about as part of the town. One can say that the town of Excelsior, which includes the location, is the central character of the novel. Indeed, the novel is titled The

Madonna of Excelsior, and while “Madonna” is also prominent in the title, throughout the novel, there are various madonnas (as will be shown below), emphasizing the collective character of the narrative.

In addition to the collective narrator, the majority of the chapters in the narrative begin with the description of a painting. Taken together, then, the story of the lives of the collective inhabitants of the town of Excelsior and the adjacent Mahlaswetsa Location are premised on the creative, rejecting the rubric of community as communion, identity, and the nation-state.

Scholarship on the nation has clearly argued that, to borrow from Anne McClintock, “nations have historically amounted to the sanctioned institutionalization of gender difference” (89). Not only that, but the central figure for national unity has been the family, as Sitt Marie Rose so clearly shows.57 In the triangulation of territory/nation/state (which is missing the gendered component, and would be more aptly hyphenated as woman/nation/state, following the title of the edited book by Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias), the individual’s relationship to the state is only through citizenship, which is “the legal representation of a person’s relationship to the rights and resources of the nation-state” (McClintock 91). The abstracted citizen, though, is

57 The “most fundamental image of [social formations and their] unity, [is] the family. The collectivities of community, town, and nation have all traditionally defined themselves through reference to that image” (Silverman 42).

173 gendered male, and this unequal gendering of the national citizen is realized as unequal access to the rights and resources of the state for women.58 Add to that gender differentiation, race, ethnicity, and religion, when written into the laws of the state, gender difference becomes hierarchical gender difference, with the masculine representing the dominant. Gender hierarchies also become the bases for social hierarchies, where

male-male rape exemplifies heterosexism’s objectification of the feminine even though

no females are involved. Stated differently, the willingness/desire to rape is not

established by the presence of a [] penis but by the internalization of a

masculinist/heterosexist identity that promotes aggressive male penetration as an

expression of sexuality, power, and dominance. (Peterson 40-1)

Thus, “inferior” groups of people are rendered effeminate, such as African Americans in the U.S. and Palestinians in Israel as Invisible Man and Al-mutashāʻel show, which legitimizes their unequal access to rights and resources in the state.

The violence that emerges because of the gendered triangulation of territory/nation/state with a tendency for “purifying” the nation by making it racially homogenous is at work in

Madonna. It begins at the level of the state with laws that separate people the various racial categories. As early as the 1913, the Natives Land Act prohibited non-whites from acquiring land outside “native reserve areas” (Davies 170). While the declared intention of these reserves was to turn them into future “homelands” for Africans, the act is based on the belief in territory/nation/state as a way for social organization, making sure that not a single black

African, or person of any race other than white could be a citizen of South Africa. By 1950, the

Population Registration Act of 1950 was passed, and it classified people according to four racial

58 Considering the context of nationalism, “the abstract category of citizen was male; thus, men were bearers of civil, political, and social rights” (Ramirez et al, 735).

174 groups: white, black or Bantu, Coloured, and Asian. These laws were more strictly enforced and amended during the so-called “golden age” of the apartheid state, between 1963 and 1972, when the South African economy was booming and Afrikaners and foreign investors were making large amounts of profit, primarily from the gold industry (Davies 28). The trial of the Excelsior

19 took place at the edge of the “golden age,” and Niki’s husband Pule is a gold miner. He has to leave his family and home, relocating at the mine, and his ongoing absence critiques the so- called unity of the nation as represented by the family, showing that only a certain race and class of family can be part of the figure that represents the unity of nation-state. Because he works in the gold mines under harsh, inhumane conditions, he develops tuberculosis in his lungs and eventually dies. In addition to confining black Africans to reserves, “white” towns such as the town of Excelsior, were sundown towns, and black Africans were “not permitted even to visit urban areas between the hours of 10 p.m. and 5 a.m. without special permission” (Davies 172).

In the novel, because she is so impoverished, Niki takes a job modeling nude for a painter, Father

Frans Claerhout (another historical personage figured in the novel), who is also known as “the trinity” because he is “man, priest and artist” (4).59 She models for him with her baby Popi, walking over thirty five kilometers on foot to his home (about twenty-two miles), the trinity wholly unaware of her situation, “It was getting late, and Niki was worried that the bus would get to Mahlaswetsa Location after sunset” (108).60

Predictably, many apartheid laws took the guise of moral prohibitions in order to justify apartheid on moral grounds, like the Mixed Marriages Act of 1940, which made “marriages

59 The historical artist was an expressionist painter and Catholic priest who came to the then Orange Free State from Belgium in the 1940s (Austen 86).

60 Contrary to what one critic states about the artist Father Frans Claerhout being the personification of Christian compassion (Wenzel 134), this shows that the trinity is completely unaware of the dangers of keeping Niki so late at his studio.

175 between whites and members of other racial groups […] illegal” (Davies 178). The wording of the law seems concerned only with protecting those categorized as whites from other racial groups of people. Similarly, the Immorality Act that Niki is charged for made “any act of ‘carnal intercourse’ between whites and blacks liable to a penalty of up to seven years imprisonment”

(Davies 178).

These social conditions make for the backdrop of the novel, and while they play a prominent role in the lives of the characters, the narrative resists the language of this law to suggest a kind of social organization that counters legal, territory/nation/state categories, as if to say this framework fails in fostering community. The novel has been criticized for not being political enough, faulted “for being, in effect, [a] work of fiction” (Austen 85), the implication being that the political and the everyday in which the political manifests are separable; furthermore, that these two components are further separable from the fictional and creative. The narrative, though, is political in that it critiques state power and power relations amongst the collectivity, but in the language of the creative, a language unrecognizable to politics.

The problem of gendering the nation through metaphor implies that changing the metaphor of the nation could potentially change gender and hierarchical relations within the nation; “metaphors of nation-as-woman and woman-as-nation suggest how women-- as bodies and cultural repositories-- become the battleground of group struggles” (Peterson 48). Although the figure of the Madonna is necessary to the reconfiguration of community, the metaphor works in the framework of the creative, completely shifting community away from the nation. Only then can community be reconfigured in a way that is not exclusive, homogenizing, and based on a communion of the unity of the family.

176

Despite the creative domain in which the novel functions, the narrative juxtapositions the politics of segregation, along with its violences and injustices, with art and the possibilities of the creative. As was the case in the discussion of Sitt Marie Rose, brotherhood figures strongly as the basis of community amongst the Afrikaners, and the tensions between the members of the town and location. Tjaart Cronje is the son of the butcher who has an affair with Niki, also making him the half brother of Popi. As a child, Niki used to babysit him, but because she used to bring her son Viliki with her, Viliki and Tjaart become close friends, almost brothers. As adults, though, they become archenemies: Tjaart becomes a member of the National Party, and during the period of the mass anti-apartheid uprisings in which Viliki was active, Tjaart fought against these uprisings as a soldier for the party. He finds that with the fall of apartheid, not only everything he believed in and fought for suddenly no longer existed, but that other members of the Afrikaner party’s positions had changed. Speaking to another Afrikaner member of the council of Excelsior, Tjaart reproaches:

It’s people like you who have sold this country down the drain. You and your

Broederbond. The founders of the Broederbond must be turning in the graves. When they

established the organization in 1918, its aim was to fight against the hypocrisy of the

English who were discriminating against the Afrikaner in the civil service and in

business. But soon the Broederbond began to discriminate against those who were not

members. And now the Broederbond has handed this country over to the communists on

a silver platter. (166)

Like the brotherhood, the church also figures prominently in the narrative in the way that it is used to justify apartheid on moral, sacred grounds. The laws are considered “God-Given apartheid laws” (Mda 24), and both Afrikaners and non-whites are taught to believe that it is

177 their duty to “preserve the laws of God, which were codified in South Africa into the set of laws that comprised apartheid. Apartheid was therefore prescribed by the Bible” (125, my emphasis).

By the door of an Afrikaner church, Niki sees the following is inscribed, which she reads without questioning:

As a Calvinist people we Afrikaners have, in accordance with our faith in the Word of

God, developed a policy of condemning all equality and mongrelisation between White

and Black. God’s word teaches us, after all, that He willed into being separate nations,

colours, and languages” (29-30)

If segregation is sacred law, and God the protector of the Afrikaner, then anything that works to undo God’s law is not only sacrilegious, but the work of God’s enemy, the devil. In the context of the Excelsior 19 case, it is the black women who are cast as devils—not the Afrikaner men— and transgressors of His law: “But wily as Lucifer might be, he was not going to succeed in his designs to consign the volk to eternal damnation. God always looked after His own” (87).

Reverend Francois Bornman, one of the Afrikaner men on trial for breaking the Immorality Act, and ironically is a priest, attempts to defend his acts by framing them as a test from God:

It was the work of the devil […]. The devil had sent black women to tempt him and to

move him away from the path of righteousness. The devil had always used the black

female to tempt the Afrikaner. It was a battle that was raging within individual Afrikaner

men. A battle between lust and loathing. A battle that the Afrikaner must win. The devil

made the Afrikaner to covertly covet the black woman by publicly detesting her. It was

his fault that he had not been strong enough to resist the temptation. The devil made him

do it. The devil had weakened his heart, making it open to temptation. (85)

178

In this “reality” where God decrees segregation and where the Afrikaner “volk” are those who

He looks out for, it becomes only “natural” and unquestionable that any mixing is the work of the devil. 61

The law and the church work together to produce a society in which apartheid is not only naturalized but sacred law, but so does the image of the unity of the family with the male father at its head. Although Popi and Tjaart look exactly alike, neither is told nor admits to his or herself, that they are siblings. Popi is described being created in Tjaart’s image (58), and

Cornelia, wife of Stephanus Cronje and mother of Tjaart, “hated the bastard for being a smoother, delicate, more beautiful version of Tjaart” (144). After the fall of apartheid, Popi stands in line at the bank waiting to cash a check. She observes that instead of there being two lines at the bank segregating whites from non-whites, which was the case before the fall of the apartheid regime, there is now only one line. Popi, though, also notes that just because there is only one line, apartheid is still intact as whites walk to the front of the single line and are immediately served. It happens that Tjaart comes into the bank and walks straight to the front of the line and is served. This causes Popi to angrily think to herself:

Was it because he was Tjaart Cronje? And she was just Popi? Well, she had news for

him. She was Popi Pule. She too had a surname, even though the familiarity that bred

contempt meant that all and sundry just called her Popi. And Niki just Niki, And Viliki

just Viliki. But they were born and bred by people too. They were Niki Pule. Viliki Pule.

61 In the essay “Zakes Mda’s Representation of South African Reality,” Marita Wenzel argues that Mda uses religion in The Madonna of Excelsior to show “how the actions of white people contradict their professed religious beliefs and how rarely Christian compassion is demonstrated in South African history” (127). While this may appear to be what is happening in the novel, it is a naïve understanding of the role of religion in the formation of the laws of apartheid, of its continuative force in the structure of society. Christian compassion as Christian is beside the point in the way it works in the novel.

179

Popi Pule. And Tjaart Cronje had better remember that. Tjaart had better remember that.

(148)

Still on the terms that the logic of the apartheid state dictates, that is, the patriarchal order that grants dominance to those who have a social relationship with a man (wife or child of), which is made evident in surnames, Popi angrily tries to give herself, her brother, and her mother similar social status. She appends each of their names with absent Pule’s, believing that the name of the father could counter this injustice. This is repeated in a different iteration when Popi is elected member of the city council after the fall of apartheid, but like Niki, is still referred to with the diminutive “girl”:

Girl. Not woman. The custom was that Popi was a girl. So was Niki at forty-seven. So

would Niki’s mother have been, is she had been alive. Kitchen-girl. Nanny-girl. And now

this girl in this hallowed hall? Council-girl? (160)

By claiming she is Popi Pule, Popi responds to the contempt but within the terms of patriarchal terms that legitimate apartheid.

The narrator interrupts her angry, internal tirade: “Popi Pule. Stealer of surnames from cuckolded men!” (148). The point of the interruption lies in the fact that she too is the daughter of Stephanus Cronje, even though she does not know/admit it. The fact is that in spite of the so- called unity of the white family, which, mirroring the Christian image of the protective, loving father, has a male figure at its head that lends it status and power, the reality on the ground problematizes all the metaphors and practices that legitimate apartheid. Popi’s very existence highlights the flaw in the tableau of the unified family. So too do the bonds between Niki and

Tjaart, and Tjaart and Viliki. If we take this un-unified family structure that exists within the

180 apartheid state, without the same surname, and without an authority figure, the possibility for a vision of community, a possible reconfiguration outside the terms of the state emerges.

The tableau of the unity of the family, then, can be conceived of as a fictional tableau of reality. It causes one to misinterpret one’s world, creating blindness and invisibility, especially when one strives to conform—or make other conform—to the fiction.

The character of Niki undoes the separation of the political, the everyday, and the creative. In the novel, Niki briefly works at the Cronje butcher shop. Cornelia, the wife of

Stephanus Cronje, one day decides that one way to prevent theft is to weigh her non-white employees as they come into work in the morning and then again before they leave at the end of the day, even though there were no instances of theft a the shop to begin with. Although the logic might seem comical and absurd, Cornelia reasons that weighing her employees will betray whether they are hiding meat under their clothes. One day at work, Niki finds she is so busy that she does not have lunch until very late, and because she is so hungry by the time she does eat, she ends up eating a lot. Cornelia weighs her only an hour later and finds that Niki has gained a kilogram in weight. Even though Niki insists she has not stolen anything, Cornelia does not believe her, so subjects her to a strip search in the presence of everyone at the butcher shop.

She stood there like the day she was born. Except when she was born, there was no

shame in her. No hurt, no embarrassment. She raised her eyes and saw among the oglers

Stephanus Cronje in his khaki safari suit and brown sandals. And little Tjaart. Little

Tjaart in his neat school uniform of grey shorts, white shirt, green tie and grey blazer with

green stripes. Grey knee-length socks and black shoes. Little Tjaart of the horsey-horsey

game. His father had just fetched him from school. And there he was. Here they were.

Raping her with their eyes. (40)

181

The political conditions and the power relations between these women make possible this humiliating, dehumanizing situation. Niki stands in the middle of the shop not so much naked as she is nude. To be naked is to be simply without clothes; “To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude. (The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object)” (Berger 54, my emphasis). Standing there in the nude, Niki is seen as an object, a way of seeing that stimulates her use as an object, a commodity. She can be shared, bought, pieced apart, regardless of her self. Indeed, this is precisely how Stephanus Cronje sees her after the strip search: “For

Stephanus Cronje, Niki’s pubes, with their short entangled hair, became the stuff of fantasies.

From that day he saw Niki only as body parts rather than as one whole person. He saw her as breasts, pubes, lips and buttocks” (41). The narrator ironically confirms this position of

Afrikaners and their way of seeing black women. In reference to the trials of the Excelsior 19, the narrator says: “The elders of the church were right. The devil was on the loose in the Free

State platteland. Grabbing upstanding volk by their genetalia and dragging them along a path strewn with the body parts of black women. Parts that had an existence independent of the women attached to them” (87, my emphasis).

In this moment, Niki is absolutely bare and on display, but through the narrative, we also see Niki as she sees herself being seen, a position not accounted for by the law because her ability to look back at the “oglers” is not accounted for by the law. The law and dominant worldview of apartheid does not account for the fact that Niki is not standing there in the nude to herself; Niki is naked in her own perception, a position that brings with it a feeling of shame.

Shame is a particularly human affect, and it can only emerge in the presence of others because of the presence of others. Not only does it result from how others perceive someone; the person

182 feeling shame is acutely aware of his or her objectification in relation to those around her. Niki sees that she is being objectified, that she loses her personhood, and that she becomes an object of sexual desire, fragmented and pieced apart, even to the eyes of little Tjaart Cronje, who in the way he looks at her changes from a young boy to man of this segregated world and on its terms.

This feeling of shame and objectification produces the affect of vengeance in the “ogled” object: “anger was slowly simmering in Niki. A storm was brewing. Quietly. Calmly. Behind her serene demeanor she hid dark motives of vengeance” (41). As someone looking back at the oglers who see her as a nude object, Niki’s shame and vengeance are responses to the relations of power in the law of the father. Given her limited constraints, Niki takes revenge through her objectified body, in the “barn full of moans” (50). This is the title of the chapter where the five

Afrikaner men sleep, or rape, their African helpers. Like Niki, the helpers are objects that the men pass around to “share” in their sexual escapades. Stephanus, obsessed with Niki’s body parts, refuses to share Niki, but still, treating her like an object that he possesses, keeps her solely to himself. While these encounters are necessary for the black women whose livelihoods depend on the little these men who pay them for sex, for Niki, they are similarly necessary to her livelihood, but as a restoration of her humanity. When she sleeps with Stephanus, she does so not for money and most especially not for political reasons, but a personal vendetta, “woman to woman” (41). “She seemed to be the only one of the women who had full awareness of the power packed in her body” (52), and with that awareness, she exercises the limited power her body parts lend her:

[Stephanus Cronje] was deep inside her. Under the stars. She looked into his eyes in the

light of the moon. She did not see Stephanus Cronje, owner of the Excelsior Slaghuis.

She did not see a boss or a lover. She saw Madam Cordelia’s husband, with the emphasis

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on Madam. And she had him entirely in her power. Chewing him to pieces. She felt him

inside her, pumping in and out. Raising a sweat. Squealing like a pig being slaughtered.

Heaving like a dying pig./ Ag, shame. Madam Cornelia’s husband. She who had the

power of life and death over her. He became a whimpering fool on top of her, babbling

insanities that she could not make out. Then there was the final long scream, ‘Eina-naaa!’

A dog’s howl at the moon. And two sharp jerks. It was all over. His body had vomited

inside hers. / He was in control again. He had the power of life and death. (49)

In this scene, it is Niki who looks at Stephanus, and in her position of looking, Stephanus loses his power and humanity. No matter how temporary a period of time this lasts, she sees him as a whimpering animal, and she sees shame in him. Even though the act ends (and it ends with his pleasure and not hers) and he is in control again, her momentary position of looking is the power that allows her to subvert the system of apartheid as its is able to dehumanize and objectify its primary figurehead, the Afrikaner father.

Her personal incentive for vengeance gives birth to a myriad of things that unravel the family as a unit for community. And her transgressions are not contained to the barn; they continue to create beyond her act of revenge. Niki’s power is in her ability to “sin,” since apartheid is justified by Christian law, according to the laws of the state and the church, but her sin of looking back produces “beautiful,” “colorful,” good things: “From the outrage of rape

(that’s what we called it in our post-apartheid euphoria), our mothers gave birth to beautiful human beings” (225). Niki, though, does not consciously or intentionally “sin”. She does not get involved in politics directly, but her acts are political in that they unravel the foundations upon which apartheid stands:

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She [Niki] was oblivious to the fact that her activities in the barn, in the yellow fields,

and in Madam Cornelia’s bedroom had caused such a stir nationally and internationally.

She was not aware that a whole government was under threat because of her body parts.

That a whole nation was shaken to its foundations by her orgiastic moans. She did not

follow the national debate generated by the heat of her body. (100-1)

The nation’s foundations are so shaken that the symbol for power, the Afrikaner father,

Stephanus Cronje, shoots himself the morning of the trial. The narrator describes the image of his death as follows: “Stephanus Cronje. Bloody faced. A rivulet of blood tracing its way from his temple to the foot of the bed. The shotgun with which he used to threaten us lying between his legs” (72, my emphasis); from the point of view of his Afrikaner wife, Cornelia, the image of his death is described as follows: “Her husband’s face was covered in blood and a shotgun was clenched between his legs” (85). The two different images of the same vision show how the law is perceived from the vantage of an Afrikaner wife, and the collective “we” who, because is threatened with the shotgun of this Afrikaner, is not white. The “us” who are threatened by the shotgun see the phallic shotgun as limp and powerless, lying between the legs of the dead, white, authority figure. Cornelia, on the other hand, sees the phallic shotgun if not erect, then stiff enough to continue to wield authority, “clenched” between his legs. The shotgun asserts the phallic nature of the law, not the penis but the “authorizing signification of the Law that takes sexual difference as a presupposition of its own intelligibility” (Butler, Gender Trouble). With the shotgun turned upon himself, Stephanus himself is undone by the phallic configuration of the nation.

Given the laws of segregation, those living in the location and the town are not only spatially separate, but feel as though they are foreign to one another. For instance, to the

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Afrikaners in the town of Excelsior, non-whites are “strangers.” In one instance in the novel, a policeman stops an Afrikaner traffic inspector who happens to have a black woman with him in his car. The traffic inspector entreats the policeman: “Leave me alone, I have a strange girlfriend with me” (91). Similarly, through the voice of the narrator, non-whites also feel separate from the people of Excelsior. During the Excelsior 19 trials, these so-called strangers are not allowed to sit in the courtroom: “None of us were allowed to sit on the seats [of the courtroom]. Those few of us who could get into the courtroom stood against the wall at the back” (76, my emphasis). Their difference is not essential, but a necessary outcome of the conditions of their lives. For instance, part of their rituals in death includes contributing to a collective fund because they are so impoverished and unable to afford a proper funeral. We see this when Pule passes away from tuberculosis, “As we always did when a member of the community left us, we collected a few rands together and bought him a plain pine coffin. Popi and Niki buried him with dignity” (131). At the sight of Cornelia in the courtroom whose husband had just committed suicide that morning, the “we” comments,

If Cornelia Cronje had been one of our people, she would be sitting on a mattress in an

unfurnished bedroom, weeping softly, and being comforted by female relatives. Even if

betrayal had killed all her feelings for the deceased, she would still be required to go

through the regulatory mourning rituals. But the customs of her people did not include

brooding in ceremony over death. (72, my emphasis)

Even after the fall of apartheid and the election of a black Mayor for the town of Excelsior, the white town, the mayor of Excelsior because is not white still lives outside the town of Excelsior:

We had heard the news even before he arrived in Mahlaswetsa Location. We welcomed

him into the township with ululations... It was because of the photograph of Viliki Pule,

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Mayor of Excelsior, barefoot, sitting on a chair outside the shack, wearing the mayoral

chain. It graced the front pages of major national newspapers. (167)

But, despite these clear divisions between the communities, during the trial of the Excelsior 19, the people of Excelsior and Mahlaswetsa Location come together in a collective feeling of shame, sharing the shame that began in the butcher shop, the barn, and now extending to the collectivity, regardless of race. Because of the trial, they become the center of attention, observed by the rest of the world as though they are collectively a nude painting.62 This shared feeling of being in the nude brings the two groups together, and during the period of the trial (and only during the trial), the narrative voice shifts to express this collective objectification and shame.

The “we” no longer speaks as the “we” at the end of the Stephanus Cronje’s shotgun barrel, but it speaks as a “we of Excelsior.” It claims its position as representative and speaker of the

“white” town, no longer an outside stranger:

When the main actors of the unfolding drama began to arrive, we were already crowding

outside the Excelsior Magistrate’s Court. There were more strangers than us, the people

of Excelsior. Strangers from Johannesburg and from as far afield as London and New

York” (70, my emphasis).

The “we of Excelsior” does not appreciate all this attention from the media, “Busybodies spreading the shame of Excelsior to the world. Even invading decent volk working in their gardens. Bombarding them with inane questions” (70). Indeed, one of the black women on trial even worries, “We fear that even in your town Johannesburg, people will see us as the bad

62 Describing his experience while researching the novel, Mda says the following: “In 1971 South African newspapers bewailed the fact that the residents of Excelsior had become withdrawn and hostile to strangers. A scandal had broken out, and both black and white townsfolk rallied around one another to keep their shame away from the glare of the world… What was this juicy scandal that was attracting so much attention and making the good volk of Excelsior retreat into silence? Sex.” Mda (2000).

187 women of Excelsior” (96, my emphasis). This repositioning of the “we” problematizes the following statement made by the mayor of Excelsior who says the following after the acquittal:

“The people of this town are very relieved at the outcome. They believed from the start in the innocence of the people who were charged. We are very happy community” (95-6). The

“community” here could now also include non-whites, despite the law of apartness, the mixed community of Excelsior, the new community sharing the shame brought about by the “sins” of

“our” mothers.

The “sins” of our mothers undo the family unit as a representational model for social organization, particularly as it is configured by the law. Instead of the patriarchal family, the figure of the madonna becomes essential to the new configuration of social relations. Modifying what the black women of the location say: “Even though you are not of my womb […] here in the location every child is every woman’s child” (102), Niki insists that it is not necessarily just the children of the location that are every woman’s child. Even though Tjaart is the biological son of Cornelia and Stephanus, Niki considers him her son, and not just because she is his nanny.

She cares for Tjaart like he is her own, putting him on her back instead of Viliki, bringing him to her home in the location and feeding him, and looking after him on Sundays despite her husband

Pule’s objections. The condition of being a black woman and nanny to an Afrikaner child at the height of apartheid makes it possible for her feel motherly responsibility for Tjaart. When Niki gets arrested and learns that Stephanus Cronje kills himself, she becomes angry at his lack of responsibility, worrying, “What would happen to Tjaart?” (69). When she is pregnant with Popi,

Tjaart develops a relationship akin to that of an older brother with the unborn child:

It was an unspoken covenant of mutual enjoyment. Tjaart enjoyed caressing her

protruding stomach that stretched her maternity dress to its very limits. And laughing at

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the violent kicks of the baby. Niki secretly enjoyed the calming effect of the little hand.

(59)

As a child, Tjaart develops a sense of compassion for Niki and Popi, and at a garden party outside of which Niki stands and begs for food, Tjaart gives her and Popi, a piece of cake.

Instead of remembering this period of her life with the shame of begging, Niki has fond memories of it because of Tjaart: “The thought of garden parties flooded her with images of

Tjaart Cronje. A lanky lad of twelve, chasing a rugby ball. A generous giver of cakes” (109).

When Tjaart joins the army of the National Party, she worries about him just as much as she worries about Viliki and Popi when they join the Movement: “Tjaart Cronje… gone to be a soldier. The thought nagged Niki. Soldiers fought wars. Soldiers died. Tjaart Cronje was going to die” (117). When Viliki and Popi ask her why she worries so much about Tjaart, Niki responds stressing a motherly relationship with him: “‘I care about all my children, Viliki,’ said Niki. ‘Not only those of my womb’” (128). For emphasis, she adds, “They always take my children away”

(128).

In a similar restructuring of the family unit, Viliki “shares” his mother with Tjaart. The power relations of politics unfold here in a strange Oedipal manner, reminiscent of the “sharing” that the men in the barn do with the black women with whom they have sex. In return for borrowing Tjaart’s bicycle, young Viliki is proud to share his mother with Tjaart: “He [Viliki] felt very important. Very superior. After all, he allowed the big white boy to share his mother”

(36), even though Tjaart has his own biological mother, “For the first time, Niki got a good look at her. She was face-to-face with Cornelia Cronje, Tjaart’s mother” (11, my emphasis). Viliki and Tjaart also share a father, Stephanus Cronje. After Stephanus starts sleeping with Niki, he begins to give Viliki money to send to Niki to help financially support her. Not only that, he

189 communicates with Viliki not in Afrikaans or English, but rather, in Sesotho, establishing linguistic commonality with the child through a familiar and equal tongue: “‘Give this to your mother,’ he [Stephanus Cronje] would say in Sesotho. ‘And be careful, boy, don’t lose that envelope” (54). Even though as a child Viliki does not recognize the significance of this gesture, later in life he sees its import:

Suddenly Viliki saw himself as a little boy. Knocking at Stephanus Cronje’s window. He

saw Stephanus Cronje reading his mother’s note, putting money in an envelope to Niki.

He saw himself running like the wind to Mahlaswetsa Location and giving the envelope

to Niki. He saw himself that evening eating assorted biscuits with Fanta Orange. And

then playing with the brand-new top and brand-new marbles that Niki could now afford

to buy. (197)

Even though Viliki and Popi do not understand the way she treats Tjaart, saying that her love for him “was such a wasted love” (147), Niki explains to Popi that, “One day Tjaart will understand that he has to love you” (192). By treating Tjaart like a son, he recognizes his kinship to Viliki and Popi despite himself. In a highly tense political time during the mayoral elections of

Excelsior, the anti-apartheid movement nominates Viliki for the position. During the elections,

Tjaart chooses to abstain from voting even though his vote would not make a difference in the outcome:

The National Party nominated Lizette de Vries. The Movement nominated Viliki Pule.

The three members of the National Party voted for Lizette de Vries. The six members of

the Movement voted for Viliki Pule. Tjaart Cronje abstained. Viliki Pule became the first

black mayor of Excelsior. (164)

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Tjaart feels an affinity with Viliki, and that he abstains from voting communicates his torn connection to both his brother and the Afrikaner broederbond. At the end of the novel, he invites

Popi to his home to make a mends with her, and even though she and her mother are welcomed into his home through the back door—showing that even though the apartheid regime has fallen, conventions and racist sentiments take time to change—he recognizes their shared father, that is, their own brotherly connection:

“I wish you’d have known him, Popi,” said Tjaart Cronje in a quivering voice.

“Known him?” asked Popi.

“Our father,” responded Tjaart Cronje. “He was not a bad man”

“Your father.”

“Our father. Surely you know that by now.”

“I have heard whispers.” (253).

His attempt to reconcile with her shows that this “sins” provoke a reconfiguration of the family, unveiling relationships across lines of segregation.

The “sins” only bring to light what already exists, even though the law of apartheid does not have the language to represent it. Niki not as a stranger or even a devil temping the

Afrikaner; she is part of the community of all South Africans, with a shared history. At one point, she takes a three-year-old Viliki to that very same Afrikaner church where inscriptions condemning race mixing are engraved in stone at its threshold. Even though she is not aloud to enter, she participates in the hymnal: “Niki was able to catch waves of what was going on inside the church, and she became part of it. She joined the Afrikaners in singing about God’s amazing grace. Thus she became part of the Great Fellowship” (30, my emphasis). Her singing not only

191 makes her part of the fellowship of those inside the church, but also a descendent of the Great

Trek and we know this because of the place in which they are gathered:

While Niki sang the Afrikaner hymns, he [Viliki] clambered on the sandstone column

near the gate, and traced with his forefinger the names engraved on the marble panel.

Under the heading: Eeufees Osseratrek 22 Oct. 1938 was a list of names of the

distinguished citizens of Excelsior who had participated in the wonderful

commemoration of the centenary of the Great Trek. (30)63

For Niki to claim fellowship in this history is a highly politicized move, and her actions are read politically on the national level, but she absolutely resists participating in the political. After being the object of the news, gossip, and gaze of the town of Excelsior and the world, because of

“the events that had shaped the town of Excelsior,” Niki withdraws from society, “They say our mothers no longer want to talk about these things. Our mothers have learnt to live with themselves. Niki lives with the bees. She is immersed in them. She is immersed in serenity”

(209). Bees and honey are a recurring trope in the novel in their relationship to the figure of the

Madonna. The community of bees becomes a different model for social organization, the queen bee not necessarily the authority figurehead, but the caretaker that keeps the community together.

The community follows the queen, her example, and remains close to her. At one point in the novel when the town council meets, outside the door of the city council was a bee hive around which bees were swarming, making people too afraid of going into the building. Popi calls Niki

63 McClintock describes the significance of the celebration of the centenary for the nation as follows: “The animating emblem of Afrikaner historiography is ‘the Great Trek,’ and each trek is figured as a family presided over by a single, epic patriarch. In 1938, two decades after the recognition of Afrikaans as a language, an epic extravaganza of invented tradition inflamed Afrikanerdom into a delirium of nationalist passion. Dubbed the Tweede Trek (Second Trek), or the Eeufees (Centenary), the event celebrated the Boers’ first mutinous Great Trek in 1838 away from British laws and the effrontery of slave emancipation. The Centenary also commemorated the Boer massacre of the Zulus at the Battle of Blood River” (101).

192 because she knows she is the only one who can communicate with the bees. Niki explains that the bees are swarming because they feel threatened, “‘Some of you stink of beer,’ said Niki, as she shook more bees into the box. ‘Bees are sensitive to alcohol. They smell alcohol and they sting you’” (176). She continues that the only way to move the entire community of bees is to slowly guide the queen away, and then her subjects will follow: “The one with the golden legs,

Popi. That’s the queen. All we need to do is to capture the one with the golden legs. The rest of her black-legged subjects will follow their queen” (176). Later in the novel, Popi is described as the one with the golden legs, and in her mini skirt, she looks just like a queen bee: “She [Popi] had taken to wearing the isigqebhezana, the micro-miniskirts of the new millennium, displaying her long yellow colored legs that bristled with golden-yellow hair” (256).

If the “golden-age” or apartheid had to do with violent segregation and oppression, a new golden-age is ushered in with the “sins of our mothers.” This new golden age, though, cannot begin until the queen bee, the one with the golden legs, learns to release her anger and resentment. Popi can only do this through the creative, in particular, the creative distortions of the trinity’s paintings:

The works exuded an energy that enveloped her, draining her of all negative feelings. She

felt week at the knees. Tears ran down her cheeks. She did not know why she was crying.

She had to go. [] Yet she felt that she had been healed of a deadly ailment she could not

really describe. […] There was no more room for anger and bitterness in her anymore.

[…] Anger had dissipated and left a void. (229)

Only when she is healed of this anger can she become the queen bee: “We knew that the bees had succeeded in filling the gaping hole in Popi’s heart. Popi, who had been ruled by anger, had finally been calmed by the bees” (258).

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The novel ends with the following: “The bees had completed the healing work that had begun by the creations of the trinity” (258). What is the healing work begun by the trinity? And what is the relationship of the Madonna and the queen bee to this healing work? The paternal law of apartheid relies on a blind trust in vision. What one can see as black or white depending on apparent characteristics such as hair texture, skin, and eye color. Categories of race depend on these visual markers, so when people made fun of Popi, it was because they saw her as

“boesman;” when Popi is angry at her brother for dating the Seller of Songs, another coloured woman, she yells, “Don’t you see her?” (193, my emphasis). The problem of relying on the visual is not so much what one sees, but how one sees and its interference with what the ocular senses register (the invisible man’s reference to the “inner” eyes). In a language whose law is paternal, how one sees is actually “an attempt to discover how ‘he sees things,’” in order to see correctly (Berger 9). This way of seeing causes the characters suffering, pain, and gives birth to feelings like anger and vengeance. The healing that releases Popi from this anger is a creative work that the trinity begins, because it distorts how “he sees things.” In that sense, they are healing; they have the power to re-present and thereby creatively produce the possibility of a different reality.

Popi tells the narrator that “it all began when the trinity was nourished by Flemish expressionists” (7). The “it” being the healing powers as representative of something different and creative. Being referred to as the trinity, Father Frans Claerhout, another historical person who figures as a character in the novel, has the creative power of the Christian trinity of God, the

Son, and the Holy Spirit. 64 God, like the trinity, is a creative artist, and walking away from the

64 Coincidentally, calling this priest the trinity also invokes the three major painters of Flemish expressionism, the tradition that influences the historical Claerhout’s work. The “triumvirate” of Constant

194 trinity’s home, Niki and Popi are described as follows: “Woman and girl melted into God’s own canvas” (6). One major characteristic of Flemish expressionist painting is its particular way it displays bodies, “a kind of cubism [that] enlarges certain body parts and divides the space into colored planes” (Elias 23). This is precisely how Stephanus Cronje—and everyone else present at the scene—perceives Niki when Cornelia forces her to strip in the butcher shop: “For

Stephanus Cronje, Niki’s pubes, with their short entangled hair, became the stuff of fantasies.

From that day he saw Niki only as body parts rather than as one whole person. He saw her as breasts, pubes, lips and buttocks” (41). The trinity’s art therefore conveys not what the ocular senses register, that is, the whole body of Niki, but how the Afrikaner patriarch sees it, that is, objectified body parts.

While certain Western feminists deride the relationship of femininity and motherhood as a false essentialist prescription of femininity, here, motherhood participates in the subversive work of “sins” and the healing power of the trinity. The law of the father sees Niki (and the rest of the black women) as the devil, but it takes creativity within the system to recognize her as a mother outside of the unit of the family. The trinity goes through a phase of madonnas in which he paints mother and child pairs, “It was boom time for madonnas” (13), and Niki and Popi sit in as models. Unlike the other church authority in the novel, Father Francis Bornsman, Father Frans

Claerhout does not see black women as the devil. Quite the contrary; in his paintings, Niki and

Popi are figured as the Madonna and her god-child, Christ is “brown” (78). He distorts what is known about Christianity (to Niki’s dismay, “It is not true, anyway […]. Jesus was not black.

You have seen his photos in church,” 134), and in this manner, his work acquires a “mystique

Permeke, Gust De Smet, and Frits van den Berghe are “on occasion [] referred to as the ‘holy trinity’ of Flemish Expressionism” (Elias 22).

195 that embodied protest” (7, my emphasis). In his renditions of these mother-child pairs, the trinity takes creative liberty representing them:

Though Niki had been the model, she did not look anything like her. This was not

strange. Previous mother-and-child creations had borne no resemblance to Popi-and-Niki

of the flesh, even though Popi-and-Niki of the flesh had been the models. (105)

Indeed, when Niki sees these “distortions,” she is offended: “Niki wondered what gave the trinity the right to change things at the dictates of his whims. To invent his own truths. From where did he get all that power, to re-create what had already been created?” (105, my emphasis).65 In his fictional distortions, the trinity is not re-creating what has already been recreated, but rather he is re-creating the way in which we represent (in language, laws, images, actions) what has already been created. This creates new, subversive ways of seeing otherwise, and by distorting the language of the law, the trinity changes what can be seen and what possibilities can emerge from this new way of seeing.

The creative distortions of the work of the trinity make for beautiful and colorful paintings. These distortions become a language of their own that speaks of a reality that cannot be expressed or represented in the language of apartheid based on the language of the nation and the Father as the figurehead. They tell a different story and in them a new narrative of the

65 Many critics of this novel have argued that the paintings that open each chapter in the novel serve to explicate or offer an analysis of the events that take place in the chapter. See for instance, Austen, who writes, “Mda’s descriptions of these portraits […] read like a praise poet’s lyrical encomia, the imagistic interpretations of the novel’s events” (86). One critic has even said that the paintings depict reality allowing a viewer to freely interpret it through them: “Mda uses the paintings of Father Frans Claerhout [] to illustrate a true Christian perspective on the situations and lives of indigenous people under apartheid. Mda implies that Claerhout [] personifies Christian compassion, depicts the reality of people’s lives visually in painting—to allow the viewer freedom of interpretation and the use of the imagination—and in a medium sufficiently distanced from real life to create a ‘liminal’ space for mediation and change” (Wenzel 134).

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Excelsior, past and present, emerges, one that shows that all the things that flow from the sins of our mothers are beautiful things. Through his distortions, the trinity is able tell the story of the absurdity and madness of life during apartheid, the things that go unseen in the language of the law. For instance, looking at a postcard of one of the trinity’s paintings, Popi “wondered why a man instead of a customary donkey was pulling it,” an image speaking of the dehumanization that the laws of apartheid bring (219). Another postcard of one of the trinity’s paintings perplexes Niki because it shows a white mother and a black child, “And if it’s this white woman, how come she is a nun, and how come she is white and her child is black?” (135). Immediately, though, Niki recognizes the importance of what she sees in the image, her a black woman with a white daughter, “The import of what she had just said had just hit Niki. She paused and looked at

Popi” (135). The trinity’s language allows one to also recognize a truth in the distortions, even though he may not intend them to do so, “Yet the trinity never knew all these things. His work was to paint the subjects, and not to poke his nose into their lives beyond the canvas” (258)—a truth about a way of seeing.

Similarly, Niki “embodies protest” in that her body protests the law, which she distorts by transgressing spaces, and as such re-creates a social organization to show that since segregation is impossible (people inevitably cross paths and may even have “coloured” children together), there must be a different way of living; here, creativity is not the things of books and ivory towers, but it is a necessary way of seeing and living outside of the law of the father.66 While

66 Interestingly, modern art, particularly impressionism, cubism, and impressionism after them were descendents of the art of African cultures. See Elias and Langui.

197 there is evidence to suggest that Niki is Popi’s double,67 one can also see how Niki is a double for the trinity. Like him, she is a god figure as, creative and creating, and she is not conscious or intentional about her embodied protest. In her silent withdrawal into the life of bees, Niki creates an alternative possibility for reality, and her withdrawal and immersion with the community of bees thus completes the work of the trinity.

The narrative makes it clear that the private and the political cannot be separated. Even if one were to try to get away from politics, politics successfully finds a way into one’s life, beats you over the head, and forces you to see your involvement: “‘I didn’t go to that demonstration,

Viliki,’ said Popi chirpily, as if her body was not racked with pain. ‘That demonstration came to me. But from now on, I will go to every demonstration’” (155). Similarly, creativity cannot be separated from politics as it is capable of revealing the relationships between individuals and the power relations of politics, which the language of the law cannot do. The historical figures and events that make up the fictional text of The Madonna of Excelsior thus speak to the extra-textual world. Because the language of the law constructs a reality in which things that happen but remain unseen, we become blind to the beautiful things that may emerge: “The sins of our mothers happened in front of our eyes. Hence some of us became blind. And have remained so to this day” (87). Popi never hears about her past, but she finally learns of it in all its details in the paintings of the trinity, and because of them, she is no longer blind but able to see clearly, and she learns her story in a way that allows her to release her anger. Similarly, the collective “we”, a community who shares the knowledge of the stories of Excelsior, must see differently in order to know the story of excelsior. Given the restructuring of the “we,” implicit is a community not of

67 A few examples: Niki burns her face with skin-lightening creams to look white; Niki roasts Popi to look black, and both end up with burnt, flaky skin throughout their lives; Popi and Niki’s faces are interchanged in the trinity’s paintings.

198 race, but one that is mixed, but who has in common mothers from whom life flows: “All these things flow from the sins of our mothers” (3), that is, the stories, the lives, the events, the beautiful things, and that “From the sins of our mothers all these things flow” (258), the opening and closing lines of the novel respectively. It is these beautiful creations that speak the story of

Excelsior, in spite of the blindness that the law of the father brings.

The trinity’s paintings are not separate commentaries on what takes place in the novel, but rather are part of the work of that novel, which is a creative distortion of reality. In the narrative, what is depicted in the paintings and the events of the novel repeatedly blur into one another, refusing a clear delineation between the artwork and the events of the plot. Indeed, the paintings become events, and the language and sentence structure of the narrative resembles the impressionistic style of Claerhout, showing that the creative distortions of the impressionist paintings reveal a reality that is there all along, a parallel universe, but one that is invisible to those who only see in terms of identity, brotherhood, the home, and the image of the patriarchal

Christian family with the father as its authoritative figurehead. When Popi is born, Niki is afraid that she will be noticed as coloured because of her light skin, straight, blond hair, and blue eyes, so she literally roasts her baby in order to make her look like a black child:

Niki took the smoking brazier into the shack and placed it on the floor. She held a naked

Popi above the fire, smoking the pinkness out of her. Both heat and smoke would surely

brown her and no one would say she was a light-skinned child again. The baby whooped,

then yelled, as the heat of the brazier roasted her little body and the smoke stung her eyes

and nostrils. Cow dung smoke is gentle in reasonable doses. But this was an overdose.

There was so much that it even made Niki’s eye stream. She assured the baby that it was

for her own good. She sang a lullaby as she swung her over the fire. Rocking her from

199

side to side. Turning her around and round so that she would be browned on all sides.

Evenly. (65).

Later, when Popi is looking at a postcard of another painting by the trinity, the image harkens back to this scene where Niki roasts her, smoke coming out of the postcard and assailing her eyes:

The figures seemed to assume life in the haziness of the smoke. A teardrop fell on the

baby Jesus [black baby in the first postcard]. She [Popi] cleaned it off with her thumb.

She sneezed as the smoke assailed her nostrils. She rubbed her neck with her forefinger.

The skin was peeling off. Scales of dead skin on her neck and on part of her chest. These

had to be peeling off for as long as she could remember. She did not know why. It was an

allergy, a doctor once told her. An allergy. (137)

When Popi models for the trinity with her mother as a young child, she is both delighted by his distortions and unperturbed about moving in and out of the canvas: “Yet his very elongated people overwhelmed her with joy. She saw herself jumping down from her mother’s back and walking into the canvas, joining the distorted people in their daily chores” (4, my emphasis).

Later in her life, Popi starts to understand the significance of the distortions, “she enjoyed

[the trinity’s] madness, and found it moving” (219); indeed, this madness that he creates is also a living memory of her story. That is, from this creative art, characters emerge, making them a living story, “these naked madonnas [that the trinity painted] still live. Popi tells us that they will live forever because such things never die” (13). The paintings do not only memorialize the historical events of the novel in a subversive way, but they also create a different way of seeing it opening up a possibility of a different way of life to emerge.

200

In the chapter where Niki gets arrested, aptly named “A Truly Coloured Baby,” we know the opening description is of a painting and not an actual character moving about the novel because of the use of the simple present tense:

His purple shoes look like a ballerina’s dance slippers. The broad brim of his purple hat

covers his eyes. […] One hand is in his pocket and another is holding a white umbrella.

He is using the closed umbrella as a walking stick […] The ground has streaks of green.

White cosmos surround him. (62)

The colors in the scene also indicate that it is a painting that is being described here. The simple present tense gives a sense of eternity; this man will always have one hand in his pocket and another holding a white umbrella, and the ground will always have streaks of green and white cosmos will always surround him. Immediately following the description, though, a new paragraph begins as follows: “The Man with the Umbrella walked hesitantly toward Niki’s shack” (62). This switch in verb tense brings with it the dimension of time, and with time, the historical specificity of the Man with the Umbrella who at one point in time walked toward

Niki’s shack. This man steps out of the painting into the reality of the novel, and heads towards

Niki’s shack. 68

Just as the characters in the paintings move back and forth between the events of the narrative and the canvas, blurring the possibility of distinguishing between creative fiction, art, and the “reality” of the characters, so too do the historical events and personages that move into

Mda’s fictional novel. This movement suggests not only that the political and the private are inseparable, but that the everyday is inseparable from the creative. Looking at any of the

68 Interestingly, the existence of the character in painting preceded his existence in the “reality” of the story. It makes an argument regarding art, undoing the precedence of “reality” and suggesting that art is not “representational,” but participates in creating it.

201 quotations above, one can see that Mda’s sentences are short and simple, emulating the expressionist style of painting. The novel functions like the trinity’s expressionist paintings; it draws in the historical, re-creates it to help us see differently, outside the ream of the law, and thereby see it better. Its creative liberties and “distortions” of the historical make possible the discovery of blindness and a way of seeing differently, better. After all, without the creative, nothing will “flow,” no movement, no life, no beauty, as the last line of the novel shows, “From the sins of our mothers all these things flow” (258). It is no wonder, then, that Mda dedicates his novel to a golden piece of art:

On 10 May 2000, together with a phalanx of my daughters, I visited Father Frans

Claerhout at his studio in Tweespruit, Free State. I had always wanted to meet him. He

had mentored some artist friends of mine, James Dorothy in particular. Claerhout

presented me with a book on his work written by Dirk and Dominique Schwager. But

first he painted a golden bird on the black flyleaf and signed his name. I dedicate this

novel to the bird. (My emphasis).

202

Conclusions

The Power of Creative Distortions

“Narratives of Conflict and the Emergence of Community: Recognition, Responsibility,

Reconfiguration” began with a concern with responsibility, the opening question, prompted by a fictional text, being: “to whom can I be responsible, and why would I, when you refuse to see me?” (Ellison, Invisible Man, 14). Although responsibility is central to the question, the refusal to see and the fact that someone is explicitly addressed by this question (a “you) are also poignant. In order then to broach the question of responsibility, particularly when those who have been rendered invisible are involved and implicated in responsibility, one must begin with ways of seeing and end with community of which the “I” and the “you” are both a part, together.

This outlines the trajectory of the inquiry.

The exploration began with invisibility and ended with a dedication to a golden bird painted on the back flyleaf of a book about expressionist painting. Invisibility emerged in the first chapter not as an essential characteristic of those who are “invisible,” but rather, a problem in the way that one sees; in other words, invisibility is not a question of ontology, but rather a question episteme. Invisible Man highlights the problem as the way that one sees through the incident of the sleepwalker, a state of being half-awake, with one’s eyes half-closed, and as a result unable to see clearly, as though in a haze. A similar image occurs in the last narrative under study, The Madonna of Excelsior, in which the expressionistic painter depicts men and women in his paintings as “sleepy-eyed” (Mda 3).69 To begin, then, with an inability to see, and to end with a dedication to a creative, fictional rendition of a bird in art makes clear that learning

69 “Sleepy-eyed women are walking among sunflowers” (3); “Sleepy-eyed men with groping hands” (8).

203 how to open one’s eyes and see needs to come through a kind of fictional, creative distortion of what appears to be the “real.”

While the first three narratives under study are fictional, they each figure “real,” historical conflict in the fictional narrative. The fourth text is an artistic, embellished rendition of the real author’s time in Palestine. The final two narratives under study in this inquiry into responsibility and the emergence of community are creative, fictional renditions of historical conflicts, events, as well as personages. In all the texts, there is a drive for the fictional rendition of the historical, implying that for community to emerge from conflict, conflict needs to be depicted in fictionalized, creative, narrative form.

What is it about the literary narrative form, though, that is necessary to the emergence of community, particularly when segregation and violence because of identity give rise to conflict?

The power of narratives under study as narratives is the different formal positions made possible in narrative that implicate the reader—that is, the narrator, narratee, implied reader, and finally, and hopefully, the real reader. It is through these narrative positions that recognition and responsibility emerge. Furthermore, narrative is necessarily sequential: it is the deliberate juxtaposition of narrative events or images in a particular order. When irony emerges from this sequencing, recognition and thereby responsibility emerges. Take, for instance, the following, said by the “we of Excelsior” about the stick-figures five-year-old Popi draws, figures that are not distorted like the paintings of the expressionist artist Father Claerhout: “They were matchstick figures with big heads and spiky hair. But they were not distorted” (Mda 4). While matchstick figures may seem like distortions of “real” people, according to the “we” of this narrative, a non-white collective living in the location, this is not a distortion of their reality at all because those who live in the location, because of the conditions of their reality, are hungry and

204 emaciated. We know this because only a few paragraphs later, a sequential juxtapositioning, we learn that Popi, who actually does not have dark skin or spiky hair, looks just like her matchstick figures: “The priest was captivated by Popi. He loved children. Even those who were emaciated and unkempt” (5).

The narratives of conflict under study in their rendition of the historical as “creative distortions,” without any claims to truth, authority, or of being representative of reality, have the power to void categories of knowledge and truth, those systems in which we have so much faith to depict a vision of the world. In “creative distortions,” there is subversive potential; the narratives work much like the way Louis Armstrong’s trumpet works, like a “military instrument” (Ellison, Invisible Man, 8); as the “we of Excelsior” would put it given what they note about the paintings of the Trinity, they have a “mystique that embodie[s] protest” (Mda 7).

The implication is that the creative distortions of the historical in art—verbal, imagistic, both—depicts not the objects of vision, but the way in which we see, allowing the object of vision to become clearer, bringing into focus the causes of conflict, our causal relation to the suffering of others, and our position in a community of others, regardless of whether we consider ourselves to be part of that community or not. Indeed, it is only in these creative ways of seeing that a different version of community can emerge, one in which the constitution of the community is always under negotiation, in which identity is necessary only to the extent that it exists to draw attention and grant reparations to historical injustices that resulted from the injustices because of “identity,” in which one recognizes one’s implication in the suffering of others, and in which one responds to and for that role in suffering.

Recognition and responsibility are always at work—they need to be repeated, reexamined, re-enacted. They are not one-time and final processes, and the creative works as a

205 reminder for the repeated, constant work of both. Thus, reconfiguration of community as tolerant, heterogeneous, attentive to difference is the work of constant communication—not communion—which involves seeing, listening, recognizing oneself as the addressee of a plea to end suffering, and responding to that call.

206

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