Toward Arab Spring Narratives The Politics of Translated Arabic Literature in the Wake of the 2011 Arab Uprisings RMA thesis Comparative Literary Studies Merlijn Geurts Utrecht University 22 July 2014 Supervisor: Birgit Kaiser Second reader: Kári Driscoll 2 Contents Introduction ……………………………………………………………………………………………… 5 1. The Politics of Literature, or Reading Literature Politically ……………………………………....15 2. The Timeline of the Arab Spring: Extended and Unsettled ………………………………………..33 3. (In)visible Spaces of Resistance: Protest Beyond Tahrir Square …………………………………..51 4. From the Protesting Crowd to the Protesting Agent ………………………………………………..69 5. Arab Spring Narrative(s) and the (Re)distribution of the Sensible ………………………………..91 Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………………………………103 3 4 Introduction At the end of 2010, beginning of 2011, the world witnessed how a series of massive protests across the Middle East and North Africa changed the Arab region. The uprisings throughout the Arab world that were retrospectively referred to as the “Arab Spring” 1 started in a small Tunisian village, Sidi Salah. There, on December 17, 2010, a man who tried to make a living as street vendor, Mohammed Bouazizi, set himself on fire after market inspectors confiscated his wares and cart and publicly humiliated him. By the time that Mohammed Bouazizi died in the hospital, after having been in a coma for a while, large groups of Tunisian protesters demanded the removal of their oppressive and corrupt president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who had been in power since 1987. Three weeks later the Tunisian president fled to Saudi Arabia. Encouraged by the success of the Tunisian Revolution, Egyptian citizens also began to demonstrate en masse on January 25, 2011 (most visibly on Cairo’s Tahrir Square) against president Hosni Mubarak’s regime. Eighteen days later president Mubarak resigned as president after almost thirty years of presidency. Following the overthrows of governments in Tunisia and Egypt, the entire Arab region seethed with unrest. In the first months of 2011 uprisings started in Libya, Yemen, Syria, Bahrain, Algeria, Morocco, and other Arab countries. While in some countries the uprisings caused, in a relatively short time, the downfall of long-standing regimes (Yemen – President Ali Abdullah Saleh, Libya – Muammar Gaddafi), or ended in governmental concessions or changes (Algeria, Morocco, Bahrain), in other countries the conflict between the protesters and the regime is currently still ongoing and has become more and more violent, Syria’s civil war being the ultimate example.2 Almost from its very first start the Arab Spring has attracted worldwide attention. It has been one of the most mediatized events of the twenty-first century, discussed by journalists, commentators, critics, and academics all over the world. The Arab protesters themselves have played a considerable part in the media coverage of the 2011 uprisings and directly reported about the developments of the demonstrations on social media such as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. However, in this thesis I will focus on the ways in which the Arab Spring uprisings are narrated in English to, primarily, a non-Arabic audience, to the 1. Although I am aware of the problematic implications of the term “Arab Spring”–a term primarily used in the Western world to refer to the 2011 Arab uprisings–(I will discuss some of these problems in chapter 2) and agree with the many scholars and critics who havea pointed to the Orientalist nature of the term ‘Arab Spring’ (see, for example, Rami G. Khouri, “Drop the Orientalist Term ‘Arab Spring,’”), I will nevertheless use this term in this thesis since I am specifically discussing the ways in which the Arab uprisings have been told by (Western) outside spectators and how translated Arab literature that is read by a Western audience intervene in these (Western) narratives. 2. For a detailed overview of the first year of the Arab Spring uprisings (17 December 2010 – 17 December 2011), see the interactive timeline of the Arab Spring launched by The Guardian that brings together all key events of the uprisings in the different countries (Blight, Garry, Sheila Pulham and Pauley Torpey. “Arab Spring: An Interactive Timeline of Middle East Protests” The Guardian 5 January 2012. Web. 11 June 2014). http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2011/mar/22/middle-east-protest-interactive-timeline 5 outsiders of the uprisings that followed the uprisings from a distance. Thereby, I will not only analyze the 'media' narratives that directly represent the uprisings, but also, and particularly, translated Arabic literature, read by an international readership, that, as I will illustrate, indirectly reacts to the Arab Spring (narrative) and, importantly, opens up a space where alternative Arab Spring narratives can be told. Especially in the early stage of the Arab Spring in which widespread demonstrations all seemed to positively change the Arab countries, non-Arabic journalists were largely optimistic about the developments in the Arab region. For example, Roger Cohen, a columnist for The New York Times wrote a column in March 2011 confidently titled “Arabs will be Free,” which he ends with the following words: “People are born throughout the Middle East. They are discovering their capacity to change things, their inner ‘Basta.’” In the same month Brian Whitaker reported in The Guardian about the autocratic regimes of Libya, Bahrain, and Yemen that were starting to fight back against the demonstrators. Despite these oppositions, Brian Whitaker remains positive and does not believe that the outlook for democracy has disappeared, since “Arabs now have a shared, unstoppable drive for freedom” and “looking at the region as a whole, the prospects have never been brighter.” Especially, if we consider the fact that the Arab region, as Helmut Anheier, Mary Kaldor, and Marlies Glasius rightly argue, has long been “considered by Western commentators as politically stagnant, and incapable of democratization” (3), the outside response to the Arab uprisings seemed to have distinguished itself by its positive tone. The rapid developments during the Arab Spring that radically changed the political climates in the Arab world, combined with the positive attention that the uprising attracted worldwide, have been reason for some scholars to announce that the Arab region entered a new phase. A striking example of such a scholar is the Iranian-American scholar Hamid Dabashi, because in his book The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism (2012) he argues that the Arab spring does not only put to an end the autocratic regimes that seemed so inviolable for such a long time, but also to the ways in which the West has subordinated the Arab world by imagining it inferior to the Western world. As the title of Dabashi’s work already indicates, to Dabashi the Arab Spring marks the end of postcolonialism and postcolonial thought. He concludes the introduction of his work as follows: In the blossoming of the Arab Spring we are all liberated from […] the ideological formations of subservient knowledge that sustained the falsifying phantom of ‘the West’ in order to subjugate the liberating imagination of ‘the Rest,’ [and] we are finally witnessing the epistemic end of that violent autonormativity whereby ‘the West’ kept reinventing itself and all its inferior others” (15). Although Dabashi is maybe right in emphasizing the radical governmental changes that the Arab Spring uprisings have brought about (in some Arab countries), I think he overstates the extent to which the Western, well-established imaginative construction of the Middle East has been transformed. In contrast to the Dabashi’s optimistic statement about the end of postcolonialism, I will explain in this thesis how a 6 seemingly positive narrative has been constructed to narrate and represent the Arab uprisings to the (primarily Western) outside spectators of the Arab Spring: a narrative that I will call the ‘grand narrative of the Arab Spring.’ Although the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard famously announced in his 1979 report “The Postmodern Condition” that postmodernism can simply be defined as the “incredulity toward metanarratives” (xxiv) and that “in contemporary society and culture […] the grand narrative has lost its incredibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses” (37), in the last couple of years scholars have declared the return of the grand narrative in the twenty-first century (see for example Keeble 106; Braidotti). In this light, R. James Ferguson has argued that even in the twenty-first century, or rather precisely in the twenty-first century that has known complex political events with an international character, the historical grand narrative has been used as an explanatory mechanism to help making people understand developing conflicts. Ferguson points out that also in the context of the 2011 uprisings in the Arab world it appears that it is difficult to explain the Arab Spring “without recourse to long-term narratives that can explain the behavior of states, populations and civilizations.” According to Ferguson, these grand narratives “permeate the news media and current affair blogs, but are also commonly found in academic journals and scholastic books” (36). In other words, despite the cacophony of voices (both in the ‘traditional’ news media and in social media), the voices that were mostly heard in the non-Arab world altogether constructed the popular grand narrative of the Arab Spring that,