As modulações discursivas do pensamento filosófico e suas articulações com outros discursos como o religioso, médico, psicológico, psicanalítico, pedagógico, etc., transformaram-se em práticas que irão afetar a sociedade como um todo, instituindo um modelo de homem e de mulher, e de relação entre eles. Inaugurando as redes discursivas sobre a desigualdade entre os sexos, o filósofo grego Aristóteles em uma obra monumental, descreveu a diferença entre os animais machos e fêmeas, inclusive homens e mulheres. Demonstra que as mulheres tem a voz mais fina, os pelos mais ralos e que  morrem antes dos homens. Mas, o mais importante desta obra, e que será utilizado como desqualificação do feminino,  são os estudos sobre o tamanho dos cérebros. A mulher, segundo o filósofo, possui um cérebro menor do que o homem. Durante muito tempo, essa diferença foi utilizada para impedir que as mulheres estudassem, trabalhassem etc. Também foi um importante referencial na feitura dos códigos napoleônicos e do Código Civil Brasileiro para torná-las incapazes, subordinadas ao homem, tido como racional e capaz.

A historiografia acompanhou este movimento de silenciamentos e desqualificação de sujeitos Ao longo do tempo escreveu sobre os feitos das camadas dominantes e silenciou a grande parte da população. As versões históricas do passado giraram em torno do sujeito masculino, heterossexual, branco das camadas privilegiadas. A presença feminina, assim como a indígena e a negra sempre foi registrada ocasionalmente, especialmente quando fugia dos padrões de comportamento estabelecidos.

Quando acabou o sistema escravista em 1888, uma mancha vergonhosa na história do Brasil, poucos efeitos sentiram as mulheres. No ano seguinte, com o  fim do Império e o advento da República, elas não foram alçadas à categoria de cidadãs pela nova constituição e continuaram relativamente incapazes pelo Código Civil de inspiração napoleônica.

A mudança inicia no Brasil, assim como no restante do mundo, a partir do movimento feminista, demanda social e política, responsável pelas conquistas das mulheres. As universidades e as editoras agora viam com bons olhos trabalhos sobre a emancipação feminina. As universidades começaram a receber mulheres, inicialmente como alunas e depois em seus quadros profissionais, e consequentemente novas pesquisas envolvendo estas novas questões e novos sujeitos foram se multiplicando. Mas, apesar do longo caminho percorrido, do reconhecimento de novos objetos como o poder, o corpo, o cotidiano, a sexualidade, a vida privada, a situação das  mulheres e das relações de gênero ainda enfrentam desafios e impasses. Mesmo com incentivos públicos através do fomento às pesquisas, as diversas áreas do saber continuam encarando com desconforto a inserção feminina como agente histórica e sua incorporação, assim como os demais sujeitos excluídos, ao protagonismo histórico.

Novas perspectivas de pesquisa tem ocupado importantes espaços acadêmicos no Brasil. A ANPUH, Associação Nacional de História, possui Grupos  temáticos de Gênero para socializar e debater as pesquisas realizadas pelos historiadores/as brasileiros/as.  Reunidos/as a cada ano os/as pesquisadores/as apresentam temáticas  múltiplas e diversificadas, e uma preocupação é constante: como ultrapassar o gueto historiográfico e  incorporar a perspectiva de gênero na forma de pensar a história e o conhecimento histórico. Novos campos de pesquisa histórica, além de mulheres, sexualidades, feminismos, corpos, etc., são incorporados ao debate como masculinidades, maternidade/paternidade, famílias, homossexualidades, etc.

Também no Brasil ocorre a cada dois anos, desde 1994,  o Seminário Internacional Fazendo  Gênero, em Florianópolis. Sua característica é a interdisciplinaridade, reunindo intelectuais das mais variadas áreas do conhecimento.  A última edição reuniu 4.033 especialistas para discutir gênero, feminismos, mulheres, masculinidades, sexualidades, etc. As temáticas abordadas nos trabalhos apresentados  de maior incidência foram mídia, etnia/raça, memória e corpo.

No campo da educação a questão de gênero também tem assumido um caráter emergencial e urgente, entendendo que a escola é um lugar de demarcação do feminino e do masculino e o estabelecimento das desigualdades de gênero. Se ela produziu hierarquias e sujeições entre os sexos, pode agora produzir relações igualitárias e democráticas. Os novos arranjos familiares, as novas parentalidades, as novas sexualidades tem batido à porta das escolas, que muitas vezes se mostra arredia. Apesar da importância destes estudos, no mês de junho do corrente ano, foram debatidos e votados os Planos de Educação, à nível nacional, estadual e municipal. Em quase todos eles foi retirada a questão de gênero, isso a partir de argumentos baseados em preconceitos.

O estudos das masculinidades e dos movimentos LGBTTTs (lésbicas, gays, bissexuais, transexuais e transgêneros),  encontraram nos estudos de gênero um campo fértil para seus estudos. Hoje no Brasil, os eventos que discutem  gênero, recebem uma grande quantidade de  trabalhos que analisam as questões de identidade e sexualidade e das orientações sexuais  discriminadas.

Também aparecem como novas perspectivas de pesquisa a articulação dos estudos  de gênero  com a crítica pós-colonialista (análise dos efeitos não somente políticos, mas filosóficos e históricos deixados pelos países colonizadores nos países colonizados).  Estas estudiosas e estudiosos, entendem que será  a partir das margens e não do centro a construção de um novo projeto de sociedade, pois a  crítica pós-colonial tenta recuperar as vozes dos silenciados pelo colonizador.

Em contrapartida, o Brasil está vivendo uma situação paradoxal em relação às questões de gênero e das sexualidades, tanto no campo público como privado. Ao mesmo tempo em que viveu os avanços do movimento feminista, como em todo o mundo ocidental, carrega a herança colonial machista. Nos dois últimos anos tem regredido assustadoramente nas questões dos direitos das mulheres e dos homossexuais, transexuais e transgêneros.

As propostas de combate à desigualdade e discriminação, como o kit anti-homofobia, material didático produzido pelo Ministério da Educação,  com o objetivo de auxiliar as escolas na educação igualitária, são impedidas pela bancada evangélica, numerosa no Congresso Nacional. Conservadora e moralista barra todas as discussões relacionadas às questões corpo, à sexualidade, especialmente à homossexualidade. Também são barradas as propostas de  descriminalização do aborto, apesar dos abortos clandestinos serem a  causa da morte de milhares de  mulheres. Segundo dados da Pesquisa Nacional do Aborto feita em 2010 uma em cada cinco  mulheres fez aborto até os 40 anos de idade  no Brasil. Tudo que diz respeito ao corpo, à sexualidade, especialmente à homossexualidade, causa pavor  nos políticos  conservadores e moralistas.[1]

O fato de termos uma presidenta mulher, pela primeira vez na história do Brasil,  não significa que estamos salvos do pensamento machista sacralizado em nossa sociedade. Pelo contrário, tem colocado à nú a ideologia ou pensamento do que pensam brasileiros e brasileiras sobre a participação da mulher na política. Isso é comprovado em episódios como nas passeatas ocorridas  no mês de maio, organizadas pela oposição à presidenta Dilma Roussef.  Por todo o país, liam-se os cartazes denegrindo a imagem da presidenta a partir de marcação de gênero. O mais sério, baixando de vez o nível da aceitabilidade ou conivência, foi a feitura de adesivos misóginos, feitos para vender, e que foram  denunciados pela Secretaria de Polícias para Mulheres. Os adesivos com o rosto da presidenta numa montagem no corpo de uma mulher jovem e de pernas abertas, tinha como finalidade ser colado na entrada de combustível dos automóveis. Ela seria penetrada pela bomba de combustível.

Segundo as investigações, a autora dos adesivos seria uma mulher, demonstrando que os discursos machistas atuam de maneira tão efetiva que incorporam-se em homens e mulheres. Se admitirmos que a violência simbólica se exerce prioritariamente sobre as mulheres, não poderemos supor que baste ser mulher para se ter uma visão libertadora das mulheres. A visão feminina é uma visão dominada, colonizada, que não consegue ver a si mesma com autonomia. Segundo Pierre Bourdieu, “é preciso descolonizar o feminino”.

O Brasil tem apresentado ou simplesmente escancarado sua face machista e racista como nunca em sua história. Apesar de ser um país mestiço, pardo, a desigualdade entre brancos e  negros  e pardos é abissal. As cotas para afro-descendentes nas universidades brasileiras ainda são motivo de debates calorosos. A elite branca não aceita ter que dividir vagas nas universidades e empregos, e não consegue entender que para acertar o futuro precisa acertar as contas com seu passado.  A união da desigualdade de gênero, com a desigualdade de raça, ainda é muito presente na sociedade brasileira.

Um caso paragdimático de um país que não consegue apagar as marcas da escravidão, apesar do abolicionismo ter acontecido oficialmente em 1888, gerou protestos, recentemente, escancarando a hipocrisia da igualdade racial brasileira. Uma repórter negra, da mais importante emissora de televisão brasileira,  recebeu centenas de agressões nas redes sociais que diziam entre outras agressões, “onde posso comprar esta escrava?”, “não bebo café para não ter intimidade com o preto”, preta macaca”, “só conseguiu emprego pelas cotas”, etc. O caso foi amplamente noticiado e discutido por diversos segmentos. Esse episódio nos faz refletir sobre quantas mulheres negras brasileiras, especialmente pobres, escutam diariamente estes impropérios, mas, por não se tratar de uma personagem midiática não alcançam a proporção desse caso.

Soma-se a isso uma Câmara de deputados onde a maioria é extremamente conservadora, não somente no plano político, mas no plano moral e dos avanços nas questões de gênero e sexualidade. Poucas deputadas e senadoras são eleitas para o Congresso nacional e as eleitas passam muitas vezes por cenas constrangedoras e de desacato às suas pessoas. Há poucos dias um deputado torceu o braço de uma colega deputada, que ao exigir providências ao ato de agressão, ouviu de outro deputado “mulher que participa de política e bate como homem tem que apanhar como homem”. São somente 51 mulheres no total de 513 deputados e 13 em 81 senadores. Segundo dados da ONU, o Brasil ocupa o 124º lugar entre os que têm maior  número de mulheres na política.

Mas, o maior impasse entre os avanços da igualdade de gênero, é a sua radical desigualdade – a violência contra a mulher. Apesar das leis igualitárias como a Constituição de 1988, o novo Código Civil (2002) e a Lei Maria da Penha (2006), o Programa   ‘Mulher, Viver sem Violência’ (2013), a  violência, questão de saúde pública,  continua de uma forma crescente. Estas leis igualitárias são fundamentais, assim como outros dispositivos e  discursos para a mudança comportamental, mas sozinhas se transformam em letras mortas. Como mudar uma sociedade que desqualifica de todas as formas  o feminino e aqueles que não correspondem à heteronormatividade?

A história da violência contra a mulher no Brasil e a sua naturalização é longa. As constituições tratavam a mulher como uma quase nada, os códigos  que permitiam castigar a mulher e até assassiná-la ainda estão presentes no imaginário masculino e feminino devido a sua longevidade e pelos diversos discursos legitimadores reproduzidos na sociedade. Esses discursos são potentes e envolvem alguns mitos. Demonstrando essa realidade a pesquisa intitulada “Tolerância social à violência contra as mulheres”, realizada  em 2013 e publicada em março de 2014 pelo IPEA [2],   assustou o Brasil. Respondendo a questão “mulher que é agredida e continua com o parceiro gosta de apanhar” teve como respostas 42,7% que concordaram totalmente e 22,4% que concordaram parcialmente. Um alto índice de entrevistados declarou que a mulher provoca seus agressores, ou pela vestimenta, ou pelo comportamento. O alarmente  é que as mulheres consistiram no  maior número das entrevistadas, 66%.

O ano de 1979, marcou a vitória do movimento  feminista contra a impunidade destes assassinatos, tidos como crimes da paixão. Durante o julgamento de Doca Street pelo assassinato de sua companheira  Ângela Diniz, ocorrido em 1976,  surgiram pela primeira vez manifestações feministas contra  a impunidade em casos de assassinatos de mulheres por homens. De vítima, Ângela passou a ser acusada de “denegrir os bons costumes”, “ter vida desregrada”, “ser mulher de vida fácil”. Era como se o assassino tivesse livrado a sociedade inteira de um indivíduo que punha em risco a moral da família brasileira. As feministas organizadas conseguiram reverter o processo e o assassino foi condenado.  Surge deste episódio o lema “Quem ama não mata”  que acabou se transformando numa  minissérie de televisão, com altíssima audiência.

A urgência de se atuar contra todo o tipo de violência da qual a mulher é vítima, emerge como ideia no Encontro feminista de Valinhos, São Paulo, em junho de 1980, com a recomendação da criação de centros de autodefesa. O SOS Mulher traduziu-se na criação das Delegacias Especiais para Atendimento de Mulheres Vítimas de Violência. A primeira implementada em 1985 em São Paulo,  serve como modelo e a partir daí irradiam-se no restante do país.

Incrementação importantíssima na luta contra a impunidade foram estas delegacias, porque muitas vezes a polícia transformava o interrogatório das vítimas numa verdadeira tortura, desconfiando da inocência da mulher e até manifestando uma certa cumplicidade com o comportamento do agressor. As raras queixas, as dificuldades de prova e a estigmatização da vítima sempre foram componentes que transformaram o crime da violação feminina em assunto doméstico e pessoal.

Nas últimas três décadas, o número de mulheres assassinadas triplicou no país. Para coibir essa violência em 2006 foi criada a  Lei Maria da Penha. Esta Lei além de criar mecanismos para barrar a violência, dispõe sobre a criação de Juizados de violência doméstica e familiar contra a mulher, altera o Código de processo penal, o Código penal e a Lei de execução penal. A Lei Maria da Penha possibilita que os agressores sejam presos em flagrante ou tenham prisão preventiva detectada, quando ameaçam a integridade física da mulher. Prevê também medidas de proteção para a mulher que corre risco de vida, como a afastamento do agressor do domicilio e a proibição de sua proximidade física junto à mulher agredida e seus filhos. Nomeia as formas de violência, não somente física, como  psicológica, sexual, patrimonial e moral, independente de orientação sexual.

Segundo dados do Mapa da Violência de 2012,  dos 70.270 atendimentos de mulheres em 2010, em todo o país, 71,8% foram dentro da residência das vítimas, sendo o companheiro o principal agressor. Cresce o número de assassinatos de ex-mulheres, ex-namoradas, ex-amantes que após separadas,  não querem voltar para o companheiro. Entre janeiro e junho de 2013, a central de atendimento á mulher – ligue 180[3] – contabilizou 306.201 registros de mulheres que ousaram denunciar agressões sofridas, aumentando para 3.364.633 o número total de atendimentos computados desde a implantação da Lei Maria da Penha. Vemos que o aumento de registros de abusos e violências foi imenso após 2006. Sabemos que os casos não aumentaram, mas as mulheres sentiram-se encorajadas em denunciar.

No primeiro semestre de 2014, segundo balanço divulgado pela Secretaria de Políticas para as Mulheres da Presidência da República, foram registrados mais de 300 mil atendimentos. A maior parte das ligações foi sobre relatos de violência física, seguida de violência psicológica, moral, sexual, patrimonial, cárcere privado e tráfico de pessoas. Em 83,8% dos relatos de violência, o agressor era o companheiro, cônjuge, namorado ou ex-companheiro da vítima. Quase 60% das mulheres agredidas tinham 20 a 39 anos, 62% não dependiam financeiramente do agressor e 82,7% eram mães.

Segundo esta mesma Secretaria,  uma mulher sofre violência a cada 12 segundos no Brasil. A cada 2 minutos cinco mulheres são espancadas, e a cada 2 horas (em algumas estatísticas 1 hora e meia) uma mulher é assassinada no Brasil. Esses são os números apresentados pelo Ministério da Saúde que colocam o país em 12º lugar no ranking mundial de homicídios de mulheres vitimadas por parentes, maridos, namorados, ex-companheiros ou homens que se acharam no direito de agredi-las. Um dado alarmante é o envolvimento de crianças que presenciam os casos de violência, que no ano que passou de 64% dos casos. E estudos demonstram que crianças que sofrem ou presenciam violência tendem a ser violentas no futuro, pois naturalizam estes atos.

A violência contra as mulheres é historicamente naturalizada, conservando o estatuto da defesa da honra masculina estabelecido no Código Civil de 1917, que teve vida muito longa, e que transformava a mulher em um quase nada. Herança cruel do patriarcado, ainda presente no corpo social. As Constituições brasileiras, com exceção da carta cidadã de 1988, desconsideravam a mulher como sujeitos, contribuindo com a construção do discurso machista arraigado na sociedade.

Muito há para fazer no campo dos discursos e das práticas. Das práticas discursivas e não discursivas que nos falava Michel Foucault. O empoderamento feminino é tarefa urgente. Não é mero acaso ser o Brasil o país do mundo em que as mulheres mais fazem cirurgia plástica, assim como serem 75% dos consumidores de remédios psiquiátricos. Apesar das leis igualitárias, das pesquisas acadêmicas, da atuação das ONGS (Organizações Não Governamentais) o impasse continua: como transformar a cultura que aprendeu como verdade a desqualificação do feminino?

The post Os impasses das questões de gênero e sexualidade no Brasil atual appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Michel Houellebecq crea una “ficción política” en un contexto anti-musulmán que ya estaba lo suficientemente inscrito en el imaginario social y político de la Francia actual[2]. Nos encontramos ante una ficción, calificada por el propio autor como “ficción política” pero cabría preguntarse en qué condiciones el texto de un premio Goncourt puede escapar al efecto mediático, reductor y tramposo respecto a la comunidad musulmana. ¿Cómo puede la literatura escapar al contexto social, político e identitario del momento actual? Un escritor –lo quiera o no- detenta una auctoritas y su “ficción política”, como tantos otros discursos en campos diferentes, hace del Islam el “problema” de Francia y el desafío de nuestra civilización. Para contrarrestar esta profusión de estereotipos y clichés negativos, ¿es suficiente la crítica, la descalificación –que ésta dependerá de la ideología que compartamos? Ni Houellebecq es el causante de los fantasmas y miedos de buena parte de la sociedad francesa, ni ha escrito un artículo periodístico ni tampoco ha dictado orden ministerial alguna. Su discurso se sitúa en la “esfera estética” (Butler) y cuenta con la protección que le concede la propia ficción. Por tanto, siguiendo los postulados de la filósofa, defiendo la controversia que el texto suscita y abogo por “resignificarlo” a la luz de perspectivas críticas diferentes.  Pretendo confrontar el texto a sus propios fantasmas: la época decadente de Huysmans y el deseo de transponerla a la época actual; y por otro lado, las fantasías sexuales de un héroe solitario y morboso que se encuentran saciadas en una particular visión de la mujer en el contexto también particular –y a veces irreal- de un Islam ficción.

Si el discurso se define por su contexto social, esta novela no hubiese tenido la misma repercusión –a nivel internacional al menos-, de no haberse perpetrado los atentados  contra la revista Charlie-Hebdo; y si el discurso se define igualmente, como señala Judith Butler, por su capacidad de romper con el contexto, el análisis que reflejo a continuación pretende desviar el foco de atención mediático y demostrar que estamos ante un discurso estético que podría ser calificado de islamófobo, irreverente o simplemente machista y patriarcal (este calificativo no lo he encontrado mencionado en la pléyade de artículos y reseñas que sobre la novela se han publicado en multitud de medios).

SINOPSIS

La novela pone en escena a François, un profesor de Universidad algo desmotivado con su profesión. Con 44 años, soltero, mantiene una relación sentimental –más bien sexual- con Myriam, judía y menor que él. El contexto antisemita que vive un París de 2022 a las puertas de un cambio político radical, la llevan a volverse a Israel con sus padres. François, especialista en Huysmans, nos retrata cómo se gesta ese cambio político.  Una gran coalición unida frente a un FN que ha pasado a la segunda vuelta de las elecciones presidenciales, permite que el partido Fraternité Musulmane gobierne Francia, resucitando como primer ministro a un decadente François Bayrou. Los despidos –en modo de generosas prejubilaciones- se suceden en la nueva Université islamique Sorbonne- Nouvelle. Las alumnas van todas ataviadas con su pertinente burqa o velo y los profesores se convierten repentinamente al Islam y exhiben esposas menores de edad. Rédiger, rector de esta nueva Universidad, un belga convertido al Islam, autor de un pequeño manual sobre el Islam, será el encargado de “fichar” a François, previa conversión eso sí, al Islam.

Lo que pretendo señalar es que Soumission no es una novela islámofoba –a pesar de ofrecer una visión sesgada y muy particular del islam que más adelante veremos-, en el sentido que apunta Butler, en el que todo discurso –un texto literario lo es- es reiterativo de su contexto. Las infamias, los discursos racistas se repiten de múltiples formas y nada puede impedir su reiteración. En este sentido, Houellebecq no inventa nada que no se encuentre en el discurso político francés, en los medios de comunicación, que no esté en el debate social en Francia y en Europa. En segundo lugar, a pesar de que el propio autor y algunos críticos han definido la novela dentro del género de “ficción política”, el texto tiene más de ficción que de análisis político, por mucho que los nombres propios, la puesta en escena, o algunos datos pretendan dar una apariencia de realidad.

Una fantasmagoría literaria: François, alter ego de Huysmans.

La novela pone en escena a un protagonista, François, 44 años, soltero, profesor de Literatura en la Universidad Sorbonne-Nouvelle, autor de una tesis sobre Huysmans. Desde el principio, el paralelismo con el autor objeto de su tesis es evidente. François comparte características decadentes; sentimentalmente solo en la vida, se encuentra en permanente búsqueda de sí mismo. Su soledad le duele, y aunque mantiene una esporádica relación con Myriam, judía y menor que él, ella termina volviéndose a Israel junto a su familia por el antisemitismo que impera y que amenaza a la comunidad judía de Francia. De nuevo soltero, se siente incapaz de entablar una relación de pareja y termina consumiendo sexo con prostitutas. Muchas son pues, las similitudes que encontramos entre los dos personajes. Ambos andan buscando a una mujer desde la juventud; François, recorre cada uno de los lugares que visitó Huysmans (Abbaye de Ligugé) y, finalmente, ambos terminan su existencia convertidos a la religión, Huysmans se convertirá al cristianismo y François terminará convertido al islam. La novela traza así un recorrido paralelo entre el protagonista de la novela y el objeto de su investigación. Con una clara intención  de acentuar el decadentismo de nuestra época actual –y el futuro sombrío que promete-, Houellebecq hace coincidir el decadentismo de Huysmans con el de su protagonista, un hombre que ve cercano su ocaso intelectual, sin perspectivas de iniciar una vida en común, solitario y desencantado:

“… à ma grande surprise, il y avait une lettre dans ma boîte. Je jetai un regard dégoûté à mon salon, incapable d’échapper à cette évidence que je n’éprouvais aucun plaisir particulier à l’idée de rentrer chez moi, dans cet appartement où personne ne s’aimait, et que personne n’aimait. Je me servis un grand verre de calvados avant d’ouvrir la lettre”. (Houellebecq 2015: 228)[3]

El paralelismo temporal se pone intencionadamente de manifiesto para hacer converger las dos épocas que viven el protagonista y su autor preferido. En una conversación con Rédiger, el rector de la Universidad, ya convertido al Islam, con una brillante carrera política por delante  y casado con dos esposas, ambos recrean las similitudes entre la decadencia de finales del siglo XIX y la época actual. François, se deja convencer por los razonamientos de su colega y se pregunta a sí mismo: “Comment ne pas adhérer à l’idée de la décadence de l’Europe ? (257). La contestación a su pregunta se encuentra en el imaginario de una gran parte del electorado de centro-derecha francés: un fuerte deseo de sentimiento religioso invade la sociedad, un rechazo del ateísmo y del humanismo, la reivindicación del sometimiento de las mujeres y una vuelta al patriarcado, son algunas de las respuestas. Todo ello debe hacerse forzosamente con el sometimiento de las élites –la élite política y universitaria- quienes permitirán afianzar los tópicos conservadores de una sociedad que ya no confía en la religión católica como garante de los valores morales (matrimonio heterosexual, procreación, patriarcado, sumisión de la mujer al hombre,…). En este contexto de perdición, como el que vivió la antigua Roma, el rearme moral y familiar de Europa sólo queda representado por una nueva era, con poblaciones inmigrantes musulmanas en su mayor parte (275-276).

Más que ficción política, asistimos a una ficción decadente en la que la ensoñación, la simbología y todo el contexto son fantasmagóricos. El paralelismo entre François y Huysmans es particularmente significativo puesto que al final de la novela, en el proceso de acercamiento y posterior conversión al Islam, François acaba el prefacio para las obras completas de Huysmans que le publicará la prestigiosa editorial La Pléiade:

“Je rentrai doucement à pied, comme un petit Vieux, prenant progressivement conscience que, cette fois, c’était vraiment la fin de ma vie intellectuelle; et que c’était aussi la fin de ma longue, très longue relation avec Joris-Karl Huysmans. (283)

El morbo del Islam (Mujer, Poder y Sexo)

Desde las primeras páginas, el protagonista François muestra un tono despectivo hacia los Gender Studies, elucubrando sobre la vida sexual de la entonces rectora de la Universidad de París III, especialista en esta disciplina:

“Chantal Delouze, présidente de l’Université de Paris III-Sorbonne, me paraissait une lesbienne 100% brut de béton, mais je pouvais me tromper, peut-être éprouvait-elle une rancune envers les hommes, s’exprimant par des fantasmes dominateurs, peut-être le fait de contraindre le gentil Steve, à s’agenouiller entre ses cuisses trapues, lui procurait-il des extases d’un genre Nouveau”. (29)

En otro momento, en un encuentro con su colega Lempereur, nuestro protagonista se pregunta por la vida sentimental de éste, haciendo una reflexión general sobre las mujeres:

“Je me demandais s’il avait une compagne, ou une petite amie quelconque; probablement, oui. C’était une sorte d’éminence grise, de leader politique dans un mouvement plus ou moins clandestin; il y a des filles qui sont attirées par ça, la chose est reconnue. Il y a aussi des filles qui sont attirées par les spécialistes de Huysmans, à vrai dire. J’avais même parlé une fois à une fille jeune, jolie, attirante, qui fantasmait sur Jean-François Copé; il m’avait fallu plusieurs jours pour m’en remettre. On rencontre vraiment n’importe quoi, de nos jours, chez les filles”. (89)

El personaje de François se nos presenta como un “consumidor” de sexo porque sus encuentros con Myriam son esencialmente sexuales –incluido algún que otro fragmento que pudiera pertenecer a la literatura erótica-, pero siempre desde el punto de vista masculino. Es significativa la loa que le brinda a su órgano sexual –de género femenino en francés- como si de su mejor amiga se tratara:

“Modeste mais robuste, elle m’avait toujours fidèlement servi –enfin c’était peut-être moi, au contraire, qui étais à son service, l’idée pouvait se souvenir, mais alors sa férule était bien douce: elle ne me donnait jamais d’ordres, elle m’incitait parfois, humblement, sans acrimonie et sans colère, à me mêler davantage à la vie sociale”. (99)

Tras la marcha de Myriam a Israel, François recurre casi de forma sistemática a la prostitución, única forma de combatir su angustia sexual que parece ir acorde con la situación política que invade el país. Durante buena parte de la novela, el análisis que los protagonistas –mayoritariamente masculinos- hacen de las mujeres, es bastante simplificador, considerándolas casi exclusivamente como cuerpos sexuados, tanto en lo que se refiere a las mujeres musulmanas como a las occidentales. Muchos momentos ofrecen meros análisis sexuales de ellas:

“Vêtues pendant la journée d’impénétrables burqas noires, les riches saoudiennes se transformaient le soir en oiseaux de paradis, se paraient de guêpières, de soutiens-gorge ajourés, de strings ornés de dentelles multicolores et de pierreries; exactement l’inverse des Occidentales, classe et sexy pendant la tournée parce que leur statut social était en jeu, qui s’affaissaient le soir en rentrant chez elles, abdiquant avec épuisement toute perspective de séduction, revêtant des tenues décontractées et informes”. (91)

Con el cambio de gobierno que se presenta gracias a una coalición de varios partidos contra el FN, lo primero y más destacado que resalta nuestro protagonista es la mirada masculina sobre el cuerpo de las mujeres. Una mirada androcéntrica y sexuada detecta que las mujeres sólo llevan pantalones con blusas largas, que las faldas han desaparecido, anulando así la mirada excitante que involuntariamente y “por genética”[4] le provocan a François culos y coños desdibujados por unos pantalones al final de unas piernas largas. (177)

Sólo en la página 226, se nos habla de las mujeres musulmanas –no de las prostitutas-, destacando su capacidad de despertar el deseo sexual de los hombres aunque se las considere unas eternas menores de edad: “En régime islamique, les femmes –enfin, celles qui étaient suffisamment jolies pour éveiller le désir d’un époux riche- avaient au fond la possibilité de rester enfants pratiquement toute leur vie.” (227). Asistimos así a un Islam que estigmatiza a las mujeres musulmanas. La nueva Universidad islámica de la Sorbona se llena de burkas y la conversión al Islam de muchos de sus ancianos docentes, les permite casarse con jóvenes incluso menores de edad. Un Islam desfigurado y machista aparece como el suministrador de jóvenes vírgenes a los decrépitos profesores de Universidad. Las mujeres no tienen presencia pública aunque asisten a clase pero la mirada masculina y occidental que la novela les presta es reductora y sexuada. Llama la atención el morbo que le produce alguna prostituta musulmana que frecuenta François. El morbo que supone su origen musulmán acentúa el placer de un protagonista inmerso en un ennui existencial que tiene sus consecuencias en una constante apatía sexual: “…je me décidai pour Nadiabeurette; ça m’excitait assez, compte tenu des circonstances politiques globales, de choisir une musulmane” (185).

La cita de Khomeini que encabeza el último capítulo de la novela, nos introduce de lleno en la falsa imagen de la religión musulmana reducida a su vertiente política, y a la amalgama a la que quieren reducir y homogeneizar a la población musulmana de Francia. En las páginas que siguen, las mujeres son la eternas jóvenes y bonitas acompañantes de hombres de negocios o de profesores. François se detiene especialmente en las dos esposas de Rédiger, su primera mujer Malika y la segunda, una joven de quince años. Rédiger es el flamante rector de la Universidad islámica París-Sorbona, de origen belga, autor de una tesis sobre el matemático Guénon[5] y Nietzsche, casado con dos mujeres y que quiere incorporar a François al cuerpo docente siempre y cuando éste se convierta al Islam.

El Rector de la recién estrenada  Universidad islámica es quien nos da la clave del título de la novela y una definición del Islam que podría ser –lo es- blasfematoria: el súmmum de la felicidad humana radica en la sumisión y para él hay una relación directa entre la sumisión de la mujer al hombre, tal y como aparece descrita en la novela Historia de O, y la sumisión del hombre a Dios, tal y como la concibe el Islam (260)[6]. Este símil carnal del sentimiento religioso no es sólo irreverente, podría llegar a ser considerado por quienes profesan la religión musulmana como un acto blasfematorio.

Los continuos consejos que el protagonista recibe sobre las mujeres, reflejan su imagen frívola, señalándolas como seres fácilmente manejables y educables. Si bien se sienten atraídas por el aspecto físico, es fácil hacerles ver el lado seductor de la riqueza y más aún, el lado erótico de los profesores de universidad…  Ello nos demuestra que, como dice Butler, el texto lleva inscrito el sexo del imaginario del autor. Para François, el Islam le aporta morbo y placer a su triste y aburrida existencia. El Islam viene a llenar un vacío existencial, moral y sexual en una vida de héroe solitario y decadente. El final de la novela deja relucir que, más que un hueco espiritual, el Islam viene a llenar con mujeres sumisas, la vida de François, algo así como lo que le supuso a su padre, su segunda pareja. Al morbo del Islam, se añade la erótica que supone la imagen distorsionada de una religión que mantiene en permanente estado inferior a la mujer y explota su imagen sexual que para el hombre tiene:

“Quelques mois plus tard il y aurait la reprise des tours, et bien entendu les étudiantes –jolies, violes, timides. (…) Chacune de ces filles, aussi jolie soit-elle, se sentirait heureuse et fière d’être choisie par moi, et honorée de partager ma couche. Elles seraient dignes d’être aimées; et je parviendrais, de mon côté, à les aimer.

(…)

Un peu comme cela s’est produit, quelques années auparavant, pour mon père, une nouvelle chance s’offrirait à moi; et ce serait la chance d’une deuxième vie, sans grand rapport avec la précédente”. (299)

CONCLUSIÓN

Michel Houellebecq podría haber escrito otro texto sobre la cuestión musulmana en la que apareciese una Francia reinventada en su diversidad, en lugar de un país crispado por una identidad fantaseada y mortífera (Plenel 2015: 101)[7]; sin embargo, lo que ha escrito bajo una dudosa calificación de ficción política es un texto en el que sitúa frente al espejo a buena parte del electorado conservador francés. Houellebecq recrea una ensoñación literaria en la que el aspecto decadente y misógino irreal sobresale al más puro estilo dix-neuvièmiste. Siguiendo a Butler, dependiendo del contexto, de las lecturas y resignificaciones, el texto adquiere nuevos significados. Así, una lectura feminista ha permitido resistir a la literalización de la escena imaginaria de un Islam reducido y engañoso. Como bien apunta ella: “Lire tels textes contre eux-mêmes, c’est admettre la performativité du texte qui n’est pas soumise à un contrôle souverain” (2014:100). De esta manera, he querido mostrar que un mismo texto adquiere nuevos significados y que el discurso originariamente “hiriente” o incluso xenófobo, podría ser calificado de discurso patriarcal y machista sobre el que muchos lectores habrán pasado de puntillas. El contexto político de su publicación ha centrado el “daño” o el odio hacia lo musulmán, sin embargo, y consecuencia de él, pocas personas habrán leído el mismo texto bajo la perspectiva de género y habrán deducido que, en cuestión de mujeres, el Islam es a este siglo lo que la religión católica fue a los finales del siglo XIX. Un conservadurismo y una fuerte misoginia invadieron buena parte de la producción artística y literaria de finales del siglo XIX. La hipersexualización y la orientalización de la mujer se materializaron en el mito de la Mujer Fatal y en el personaje bíblico de Salomé del que Huysmans fue uno de los grandes abanderados junto a pintores como Moreau. Éste es, tal vez, el pacto del discurso estético: releerlo y dotarlo de nuevos significados, explotar la performatividad y la política.

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Il peut paraître étonnant que l’on cherche à définir de la même manière les limites du discours humoristique alors qu’il repose précisément sur l’établissement d’un brouillage des rapports entretenus entre le discours et son intention supposée : « l’humoriste [...] ne dit sérieusement rien, ne prend probablement rien au sérieux mais il en conserve l’apparence[1] ». Il fait de son discours un lieu indécidable, où l’intention ne constitue plus un paramètre pertinent pour l’analyse. Dans cet espace spécifique où sens et opinion ne constituent plus les valeurs cardinales qui président à la construction du discours, il paraît paradoxal de souhaiter sanctionner les écarts de ce discours sur la présomption d’une intention transgressive. De même, il paraît contradictoire de partir à la recherche de ses limites. Aussi, peut-être que ce que l’on désigne comme de l’humour, dès lors que l’on invoque la liberté d’expression, n’en est-il tout simplement pas ?

C’est à partir de cette réflexion, que nous souhaitons réfléchir à la question posée par une certaine pratique de l’humour dont on omet de rappeler qu’elle s’ancre dans une idéologie républicaine qui entretient un rapport très ambigu à l’égard des voix minoritaires. On verra notamment que ces impensés de la satire sont visibles dans les pratiques humoristiques revendiquées comme les plus libertaires, comme l’humour noir surréaliste, et ce afin de remettre en question la viabilité du dialogue que l’on pense instaurer grâce à ce qui est, en fait, une forme de satire.

Satire et non simplement humour, registre finalement peu présent dans les médias dès lors que l’on tente de le définir. En effet, l’humour est un discours qui met en jeu la crédibilité de celui qui s’exprime ; il est l’inverse d’une parole d’autorité et c’est pourquoi il est si difficile de le décrire et de lui assigner un contenu idéologique précis. Il permet tout et son contraire : divertir gratuitement comme transmettre une vérité philosophique invisible à l’œil nu ; proposer une critique à la fois tendre et mordante.

Son caractère fuyant le rend tout à fait inapte à la communication médiatique et politique. Comme le rappelait Jean-Marc Moura : « L’humour réside dans le sentiment de coexistence du rieur et du risible, son sourire est celui d’un spectateur embarqué, distant et solidaire à la fois de ce dont il s’amuse[2]. » À l’inverse, le discours du chroniqueur ou du journaliste doit marquer la distance avec sa cible, pour asseoir sa propre autorité de contradicteur. Ce que nous appelons alors trop vite « humour » est en réalité de la satire : qu’elle soit potache ou mordante, qu’elle s’illustre dans la caricature ou le billet d’humeur, elle porte une forme d’autorité et, forte de l’affirmation préalable du positionnement politique du satiriste, elle dessine les contours des partis et renforce les clivages idéologiques. Plus généralement, elle permet l’unité autour d’un principe négatif, la constitution d’un ennemi commun à partir de son identification et de sa critique.

La difficulté pour le satiriste est alors d’exprimer des valeurs positives après la destruction de valeurs ennemies. C’est très souvent pour cette raison que l’on préfère parler « d’humour » : plus neutre, plus innocent, l’humour ne devrait pas susciter de représailles. Au contraire, il devrait permettre la création d’une communauté idéale de complices : « Les gens sont intelligents, toujours plus intelligents qu’on ne le croit. On fait confiance à l’intelligence de l’humour[3] », a déclaré Luz au moment de la sortie du  numéro de Charlie Hebdo du 14 janvier. Autour de cette valeur – l’humour associé à l’intelligence -, il est même possible d’appeler ceux que l’on vise à rire d’eux-mêmes, afin précisément de se joindre au reste de la communauté. L’idéal d’une satire républicaine, en quelque sorte : celle qui annule les différences ethniques, religieuses ou politiques en vue de l’avènement d’une harmonie rationaliste.

En fait, une telle vision du travail satirique tient à une certaine compréhension du rôle politique de l’humour parmi les intellectuels de gauche français. À ce titre, il paraît intéressant de revenir sur ses fondements, perceptibles dans une œuvre théorique et littéraire : L’Anthologie de l’humour noir d’André Breton[4]. Tout d’abord parce que cet ouvrage identifie une nouvelle forme de la dérision, l’humour noir, dont la présence dans les médias ne peut être remise en question, et ce à l’époque d’un durcissement idéologique – 1939 – qui n’est pas sans rappeler notre propre actualité. Ensuite parce qu’en « inventant » ce registre, Breton pose les bases d’une réflexion sur le rôle politique de l’humour, et crée inconsciemment un nouveau type de satire très propre à s’épanouir dans le contexte de la liberté d’expression républicaine post-Libération.

L’Anthologie réunit des textes où l’humour noir exprime « une révolte supérieure de l’esprit ». Face à ce qui l’effraie, l’aliène, l’homme fait le choix de se moquer, et de réduire ainsi l’objet de sa peur : « Le moi se refuse à se laisser entamer, à se laisser imposer la souffrance par les réalités extérieures […] ; bien plus, il fait voir qu[e les traumatismes du monde extérieur] peuvent même lui devenir occasion de plaisir[5] ». Les récents événements ont donné lieu à des dessins de presse porteurs d’une telle motivation : face à l’horreur, il est possible de se révolter par l’humour.  Ils mettaient en scène les dessinateurs de Charlie Hebdo au Paradis, en pleine poursuite de leur activité « d’humoristes ». Par exemple, un dessin d’Alex mettant ce bon mot au sujet des attentats dans la bouche de Cabu : « Une liquidation le jour des soldes, fallait le faire… ! »[6]. Le contexte—un nuage au paradis—, et la mise en valeur de l’équivoque déréalisent l’événement, signalant la capacité de l’esprit humain à s’extirper du tragique. Révolte singulière en apparence donc, mais dont on sait qu’elle est tendue vers la contestation collective.

Pour Breton, cet humour a même nécessairement une dimension politique : car ce qui aliène l’homme, ce n’est pas uniquement la mort, c’est aussi l’organisation sociale du monde capitaliste. C’est ainsi que l’humour noir de Swift apparaît, dans la notice qui lui est consacrée, comme guidé par « un besoin frénétique de justice[7] ». Quant à l’obscénité et à la violence des scènes sadiennes, elles naîtraient du désir de faire advenir « la véritable égalité[8] ». Le projet esthétique acquiert ainsi une dimension éthique : comme le rappelle Jean-Marc Moura, l’humour aura beau ici s’incarner poétiquement, ce sera afin de proposer « manière de vivre (éventuellement de mourir) qui déborde toute préoccupation textuelle[9] ». L’humour noir consiste donc dans la construction d’une posture humoristique problématique, qui prône le désengagement dans l’unique but de réaffirmer la dimension contestataire d’une telle attitude, profondément critique à l’égard de la société qui l’entoure. L’humour noir n’est donc pas désengagé, mais au contraire, au service des plus faibles.

Aussi, selon Breton, il ne faut pas se méprendre sur le sens de textes mettant en scène les tortures exercées sur les pauvres et les marginaux : « Le mauvais Vitrier » martyrisé par le dandy baudelairien, ou les sévices infligés à Juliette par le très riche Minski. En effet, pour Breton, c’est précisément à travers la violence infligée au plus faible que l’on pourra susciter le sentiment d’indignation qui engendre les vraies révolutions. L’humour est l’ennemi de la « sentimentalité à l’air perpétuellement aux abois[10] », l’ennemi du pathétique. Car comme le rappelait Mireille Rosello, « l’un des paradoxes de l’humour noir consiste précisément à dénoncer l’ambiguïté qui consiste à plaindre le pauvre pour mieux se dérober à son agressive demande de justice[11] ». Il s’agit donc d’indigner et de provoquer le faible pour le contraindre à réagir, sous le prétexte que lui éviter les coups, le protéger, c’est déjà le traiter comme un citoyen de seconde zone, destiné à subir la violence des puissants.

Rien de tout à fait différent dans ces propos tenus par Charb en juin 2013 : « C’est en refusant par peur ou par paternalisme de traiter les musulmans comme des citoyens avant de les traiter comme des croyants qu’on fait de l’islam un tabou[12] ». Autrement dit, c’est en partant de la théorie qu’instaure le contrat social républicain qu’il faut envisager la représentation de la communauté musulmane, et ce en dépit de ce que l’on sait des discriminations qu’elle subit, sur la base même de l’identité religieuse. Les discours d’André Breton et de Charb sont, de fait, issus d’un même moule : celui d’une compréhension et d’une pleine intégration des principes de la laïcité républicaine. Dès lors, l’émancipation du faible dépendrait de sa responsabilisation, quels que soient ses moyens matériels, sa capacité ou non, à répondre aux coups. Cette vision des choses est souvent celle qui justifie actuellement une certaine pratique de la satire–et non de l’humour–qui a cours dans les médias, et précisément chez Charlie Hebdo.

De fait, les unes de Charlie ont cet objectif : provoquer les plus faibles pour critiquer le traitement qui leur est réservé par les plus forts. La une montrant les esclaves sexuelles détenues par Boko Haram en pleine revendication concernant leur droit aux allocations familiales pouvait ressortir d’une telle pratique[13]. Max Fisher, dans un article étudiant précisément la question d’un éventuel racisme de Charlie Hebdo, s’est intéressé à cette couverture et a rappelé qu’elle était représentative d’une satire fonctionnant sur différents niveaux de compréhension[14].  Représenter ces victimes revendiquant un droit social au sein même de leur martyr et simultanément rappeler le discours de l’extrême-droite concernant le soi-disant détournement des droits sociaux par la population immigrée, c’est provoquer l’indignation du public à deux niveaux : en mettant en scène d’une part la pesanteur des violences physiques exercées contre ces femmes et, d’autre part, la violence symbolique exercée par les discours actuels contre les populations immigrées. Une autre couverture provocante (« à laquelle  vous avez échappé »), celle qui représentait Christiane Taubira sous la forme d’un singe[15], répondait à la même exigence : indigner en exerçant une violence contre une figure stigmatisée par le discours de l’extrême-droite. Ces couvertures provocantes ont bénéficié de la protection apportée par le principe de liberté d’expression, en raison de paramètres qui leur sont en réalité extérieurs : ce qui importe ici, c’est le contexte de cette prise de parole. Charlie Hebdo est considéré comme un magazine libertaire, détesté de l’extrême-droite. Nous sommes alors invités à ne pas prendre en compte la production d’images à caractère raciste, ce qui peut paraître insupportable et incompréhensible aux yeux de ceux qui ne connaissent ni l’histoire du journal, ni la sociologie de son lectorat. Ou encore, aux yeux de ceux qui ont tout simplement des doutes sur la bonne foi de la ligne éditoriale, sur son éventuelle orientation conservatrice.

Plus ambivalente, une couverture telle que celle qui visait directement les intégristes djihadistes, montrant un imam tenant à bout de bras le Coran censé le protéger d’une balle qui le transperce avec pour légende : « Tuerie en Égypte : Le Coran c’est de la merde »[16]. Une fois de plus la caricature vise apparemment le discours d’extrême-droite, insultant envers l’islam en montrant parallèlement le caractère infondé de la peur de l’islamisme radical, puisque ses premières victimes sont les musulmans. Mais, simultanément, Charlie invite brutalement la communauté musulmane à se détacher de ce qui ferait soi-disant sa faiblesse, c’est-à-dire sa croyance dans un contexte républicain où celle-ci ne constitue pas un paramètre identitaire acceptable. Il s’agit donc bien de provoquer la communauté minoritaire pour lui intimer l’ordre de se dégager de ce qui fait d’elle une minorité dans un contexte laïque. Mais dès lors, on lui demande de ressembler au plus puissant : certainement pas d’inventer une puissance en accord avec son identité. De la même manière, les caricatures que l’on considère comme blasphématoires–celles qui mettent en scène le prophète Mahomet, malgré l’interdit qui pèse sur sa représentation–sont des rappels constants aux musulmans de leur différence, et des invitations régulières à se conformer au cadre dominant.

Il serait ainsi bon que nous commencions à comprendre ce que ce type de fonctionnement peut avoir de fallacieux et de relatif. Déjà, Mireille Rosello constatait que dans L’Anthologie les bourreaux étaient en réalité les seuls bénéficiaires de la liberté offerte par l’humour noir. Les schémas de domination demeuraient les mêmes et ne faisaient que reproduire les schémas existants. Notamment, elle remarquait que le rôle de victime était essentiellement tenu par une femme et que de nombreux textes étaient en réalité des satires misogynes. La masse des images de violence et des discours tournés contre un type de faiblesse–la féminité–ne produit, au final, aucune indignation du fait du développement d’un sentiment d’habitude, ce type de violence faisant par ailleurs partie intégrante de l’existence d’une femme. En tant qu’homme, je peux trouver ce qui leur arrive terrible et réclamer l’émancipation du sexe faible. En tant que femme, je vois une représentation complaisante de mon vécu et si cela m’agace, c’est aussi un objet de lassitude. La liberté demeure donc celle de l’humoriste et du compilateur ; elle ne touche pas la lectrice, au pire démoralisée, au mieux, furieuse. Et lorsque les femmes prennent exceptionnellement le statut d’humoristes–deux auteures ont droit à leur notice dans L’Anthologie–le discours critique leur impose des images stéréotypées (la sorcière, la femme-enfant), qui signalent une incapacité du théoricien de l’humour noir à offrir à ces figures de réels espaces de liberté[17].

Ainsi, la conception d’une satire impitoyable, car révolutionnaire, n’est possible que sous un certain point de vue, celui du dominant. De la même manière que la satire ne peut permettre l’intégration de sa cible que du point de vue du satiriste, persuadé d’accomplir un devoir citoyen, en invitant les minorités à rire d’elles-mêmes au nom de l’égalité de droit. Ce fonctionnement nous renvoie au contrat social universaliste propre à la culture française qui, rappelons-le, est l’émanation d’un groupe relativement homogène : les acquis de la Révolution française et la mise en place de la laïcité sont le fait d’hommes blancs, de confession judéo-chrétienne, excluant les femmes dans un premier temps–grandes oubliées du suffrage universel, et ce jusqu’en 1946—, et, plus tard, les populations colonisées—le code de l’indigénat limitant de manière discriminatoire le champ d’application des principes républicains. Si cela répondait à un trouble de l’identité blanche elle-même–la laïcité doit permettre de lutter contre les tensions confessionnelles qui opposent les catholiques et les protestants–force est de constater que c’est aujourd’hui cette identité qui est majoritaire, alors même que les équilibres sociaux se sont trouvés modifiés et que la population française est désormais confrontée au défi de la diversité[18]. Jusqu’à aujourd’hui, la réponse trouvée à cet enjeu a consisté à réaffirmer les principes républicains et à renforcer la laïcité en légiférant sur les signes ostensibles[19] dans l’idée que des valeurs qui visent à annuler les différences demeurent les bonnes ; et que sévir contre ceux qui les contestent c’est précisément leur montrer qu’ils font partie prenante de la République. Interdire le port du voile intégral[20] dans la rue a ainsi été justifié par la volonté de protéger les musulmans contre leur propre religion, considérée comme un facteur de division du tissu social. Annuler leur différence en leur rappelant leur statut de citoyen à part entière, c’est toujours simultanément leur refuser le droit de s’exprimer sur les effets que peut avoir le système en place sur leurs existences, sur les discriminations qu’ils subissent.

Il paraît donc tout à fait contradictoire de faire reposer, aujourd’hui, la provocation satirique sur l’exercice de la liberté d’expression, tout en se justifiant de la légèreté du discours humoristique, discours que seuls ceux qui se revendiquent d’un point de vue culturellement différent ne seraient pas à même d’apprécier. La satire, telle qu’elle est pratiquée dans le contexte de journaux et magazines se revendiquant des principes de la République, n’est pas simplement critique : elle est invasive, et ce au point d’affirmer l’intérêt qu’il y a pour sa cible à être attaquée.

Il ne s’agit pas de douter des motivations des journalistes de Charlie Hebdo, mais plus largement, d’envisager la possibilité que notre vision de la satire soit en réalité biaisée : elle tient à l’idée qu’en République, tous ont les mêmes droits, et que ceux qui n’en profitent pas n’ont qu’à se manifester et les réclamer. Les présenter comme des victimes ou évoquer leurs différences, les plis et la complexité de leur identité, serait leur faire injure. En conséquence, les provoquer revient à leur lire leurs droits, à leur fournir un passeport. Cependant, ce raisonnement ne tient pas compte de la non-validité de sa prémisse : l’échec de la société démocratique tient à ses inégalités, dont souffre tout particulièrement en France la communauté musulmane. Tant que l’égalité de droit ne sera pas réalisée, il n’y aura aucune raison de considérer que nous pouvons tous rire des mêmes choses.

L’attentat de Charlie Hebdo se compte parmi de nombreux malentendus qui émaillent le dialogue de la République avec ses minorités. La pratique française d’une satire républicaine, visant à l’universalité alors qu’elle n’émane que d’un groupe pouvant jouir pleinement de ses droits démocratiques, est l’un de ces malentendus. Aucune compréhension n’émergera tant que nous n’aurons pas pris conscience de l’ampleur du chantier démocratique, tant que nous n’aurons pas même pris conscience qu’il est nécessaire de repenser ses fondations. Il ne s’agit nullement d’appeler à l’autocensure, et on rappellera à juste titre que la presse satirique a également longtemps critiqué les institutions dominantes—Charlie Hebdo s’est aussi violemment attaqué à la religion catholique. Il s’agit plutôt, pour la presse, de s’interroger sur les discours qu’elle véhicule, et au nom de quelles valeurs elle s’en justifie. La satire n’est pas innocente, c’est d’ailleurs ce qui fait tout son intérêt ; elle n’est pas déconnectée par nature des conditions socio-historiques dans lesquelles elle s’énonce, et c’est ce qui fait son efficacité. En prendre conscience, c’est déjà réfléchir à l’impact de son travail et comprendre que les valeurs qui garantissent la liberté d’expression instaurent une économie du rire à deux vitesses.

The post De l’humour noir aux caricatures : impensés d’une tradition satirique appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

According to Maya Deren in her seminal book Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, the Vodou rite of reclamation or the retirer d’en bas de l’eau, enables a family to “reclaim [an ancestor’s] soul from the waters of the abyss…and to lodge it in a govi [pot] where it may henceforth be …consulted … and so may participate in all the decisions that normally unite the members of a family in counsel” (46). While seemingly “primitive,” this ritual perseveres in the modern age because “the enduring presence of so many dead demands that it be tried again and again” (Lowe). This rite enables participants, both dead and alive, to performatively enact force in the material world through shared decision-making. I would like to argue that by bringing the dead back to life as a writer does when composing a text, in particular within a ritualized context such as publication and distribution, he/she enables a reading audience to participate in a cultural ritual, a performative act, one with external consequences: readers are affected by the voices they contact between the pages. Those rallied spirits alive in the book join the world once again as active participants. Like reading, Haitian Vodou is, through its “worship of metaphysical forces…ritualistic, rather than meditative, and involve[s] … [sustaining metaphysical forces] by feeding, or sacrifice, and [the spirits’] benediction [is] maintained by propitiation” (65). A Haitian’s religious system, Deren claims, “must do more than give him moral substance… it must provide the means for living. It must serve the organism as well as the psyche” (73). I aim to prove that the feeding of the spirits occurs in the reading, the praise in the writing. And the dead speak from the pages.

Collective memory is maintained through the performative act of writing. The writer becomes the mambo (priestess); the reader becomes a hounsis (initiate). Narrative construction must serve the writer, reader, and history by, according to Joseph Roach, “juxtapos[ing] living memory as restored behavior against a historical archive of scripted records” (242). Fiction functions as a record, promoting and maintaining culture. The voice of a text resounds with performative cultural iterations which reinscribe the identity of the writer, the reader, and the characters in the book. Too often readers are exposed to singular, authoritative voices from the Euro-centric majority and so marginalized voices are forgotten. While Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and Willa Cather write very differently, their narratives contribute to a North American western-centered sense of ethos: white, individualized, rooted, whole. But the Afro-American or Caribbean writer, as suggested by Derek Walcott, inherits a narrative fraught with loss and division, a history defined by the other. How then, can a post-plantation era writer contribute to his sense of cultural history? By resurrecting the past and offering, as Roach claims, “mnemonic materials- speech, images, gestures- that supplement or contest the authority of ‘documents’ in [any] historiographic  tradition”(242). Through the act of writing itself a Creole writer reestablishes the identity of ancestors and so weaves the past with the present. I see the dead speak through the text itself and shape the present in the extra-semiotic world. The text houses the cultural identity “of successive generations that sustain different social and cultural identities” (Roach 242), like the govi pot houses the dead.

James Weldon Johnson offers a complicated narrative in his fictionalized memoir The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, published in 1912. In his fabricated autobiography, “a veil has been drawn aside: the reader…[is] given a view of the inner life of the Negro in America… [and is] initiated into the ‘freemasonry,’ as it were, of the race” (Johnson 3). Theorist Brent Hayes Edwards claims that the novel offers a “small but crucial shift of authority” from an Anglo-centered narration to an Afro-centered narration (41).

But defining who that narrator is becomes challenging. The speaker is of mixed race- his father is white, his mother black- but his mother never communicates this to him, and he defers to a white identity. After hearing her son call a classmate “nigger,” the speaker’s mother “turned on [him and said] ‘Don’t you ever use that word again’” (7). Unwittingly, the speaker is forbidden to use a word which is a label of self-representation, albeit one of slander and shame. But the narrator, who is arguably a construction of Johnson’s psyche or an amalgamation of his personal experience, is writing the word and indeed his fictionalized self in the story speaks this word. The written signifier, “nigger,” stands in for the self, the “I,” and maintains a sense of permanence in shared memory as it is written and published. But the “I” in this tale is not the “signified” Johnson even though the text was published within the autobiographical genre, although it later was recanted and Johnson claimed the text as fiction. Herein lays complicated notions surrounding presence and absence in Afro-American texts. I rely on Deconstructionist Jacques Derrida in order to mine the self-referential nature of ‘beingness’ in text. The binary of who one is, is reliant on who one is not. We understand black in relation to white, reader in relation to writer, self in relation to someone else. Yet the true nature of the self is unknowable, there is no Platonic essence, as the self is an identifier for some indescribable interior consciousness which is paradoxically understood by who one is not. To further complicate deconstructionist notions of being, our Platonic understanding of self suggests a static, unchanging identity, a singularness, a purity. In a contact zone and in the context of postcolonial theory, I believe there is an added danger to trying to define static selfhood. If the narrator of Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man is defined in a singular way, he cannot have any other identity, he is solely white or solely “nigger”. But readers and narrators cannot get around self-referents. This is Johnson’s entire point- the limits of language and of consciousness. For the speaker there is a sense of Derridean essential drift, for the self and the identifier never align- the “nigger” and the “I,” as he doesn’t identify fully as black and definitely not as “nigger.” He continues to climb the American socio-economic ladder through playing ragtime music and in his later years as a white businessman. The narrator passes back and forth from the white and black world, defined by the gaze of others both black and white. Arguably, Johnson was not interested in a definitive notion of race or identity as the narrator remains unnamed; rather Johnson chose to pen a text representative of black experience at the turn of the century. This shifting sense of identity, this “dual personality” actually leaves room for Derridean différance, a play on the French for “to defer” as well as “to differ,” by deconstructing notions of selfhood, race, and representation. According to Heather Russell, the “narrative structure simultaneously veils and conceals while unveiling and revealing,” ‘leaving its readers’ “tasked with standing at the gateway… of The Autobiography’s hybrid structure” (Russell 30). Suzanne Scafe notes that with Johnson’s fragmentary voice of re- and un- representation, he “foreground[s]… the constructedness of the ‘I’ identity and privilege[es] the texture of experience and memory” (190). Through the “simmering gumbo pot” (Cartwright 100) of “I,” “nigger,” “white,” and “black,” “speaker” and “author,” Johnson summons readers to participate in his narrative by forcing them to wade through his various representations. Like the “composite and multiple” spirits, “every first-person consciousness, every “I”, is an assemblage, a plural ‘we’” (Cartwright 100). I argue that by adding an assemblage of narrative voices to the Afro-American literary tapestry, Johnson reclaims the unspoken lives of millions of men and women who have passed as white, or who have identified as black. The retirer d’en bas de l’eau of giving voice to the dead remedies breaches in black history by establishing the presence of an everyman, not deconstructing identity, but re-constructing it. This turn of the century text seems to me to take up Derek Walcott’s call for acts of presence through art, “allowing the group [(readers)] to act itself out by reiterating its structure [(identity)] and commenting on its [own] values” (Brown 210). I read The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man as a govi pot to consult on my road to selfhood as I shift through fluid self-representations, the narrator providing me a predecessor to consult for advice through the performance of race and identity.

If Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man allows Johnson to reclaim shared memory through narration, then Eileen M. Julien’s Travels with Mae: Scenes from a New Orleans Girlhood (2009) addresses the specific and personal dead instead of the death of assumed identifiers. Julien’s text functions specifically because she writes from place- a contact zone. Common culture makes for “ersatz families both created and reinforced through ritualizing” (Brown 207). The setting of New Orleans offers an amalgamation of people, voices, perspectives, and opportunities for filial connections, but grounded in a specific culture where “community is both occasion for and the product of its own ritual activity” (Brown 210). Due to the multitude of voices (in addition to a factious history of violence, environmental disaster, and gentrification) a single voice can get lost. Readers can approach Julien’s text as a reclamation of the spirit of her dead mother. The performative act of writing this memoir contributes to the uniqueness of post-plantation shared memory and reclaims the past of New Orleans, her ancestral space.

For anthropologist and Vodou initiate Karen McCarthy Brown, the term “Vodou” was coined by outsiders and considered a religion, but its practitioners do not “believe” in Vodou, rather, they claim to “serve the spirits” (205). With this emphasis on action or serving, Vodou ceremonies illustrate that performative ritual creates a symbiotic relationship between the living and the dead: “the living need advice, warning, protection provided by…the spirits… The spirits, in turn, have to be…honored if they are to muster the strength… to protect the living” (206). It seems the act of performative remembrance is perhaps all the more vital for underrepresented populations. According to Keith Cartwright: “Our corrective effort to go to the mouth of the govi of New Orleans… calls for difficult acts of listening to subalternized voices that are often poorly represented, if recorded at all, in available texts. These voices that would balance our vision and open our eyes to clashing energies and contradictory impulses have been censored, silenced, and ignored” (101). Often readers are granted a glimpse into the lives of poor, marginalized black New Orleanians in fiction, but Eileen M. Julien offers readers an under-represented demographic: that of a middle class black girl who attended bourgeoisie balls, social clubs and parties. The members of the black middle class in New Orleans, as portrayed by Julien, developed their own exclusive subculture that was not a reaction to whiteness but rather a celebration of the presence of Blackness. Julien’s story unfolds in a series of vignettes reminiscent of Derek Walcott’s Nobel Prize speech on the fragmentation of Caribbean history, which I see Julien repossessing. Travels with Mae is largely a celebratory novel filled with food, family, and humid New Orleans, neighbors where okra grows in the backyard, jazz music plays in the music hall, and dainty party dresses swirl around girls’ ankles.

Several vignettes in the memoir present insight into Julien’s relationship with her mother, most notably her mother’s last days when age and fear beset both Mae (Julien’s mother) and her aunt Fe. Julien “spend[s] Thanksgiving at home because death lurks here and everywhere” (99). Mae and Fe fret over food for mourners after a series of neighbors and relatives pass away. The sharing of food, in particular gumbo which is mentioned several times in the memoir, which I believe becomes a performative reclamation of the dead as those alive eat to remind themselves that they are still living and memorialize, through the act of living, those who have died. Gumbo, known widely as a New Orleans dish, also reminds those consuming it of their African heritage, as “Gumbo, Louisiana-style, shares common ingredients with Senegalese suppakanja”(105).

Another vignette, narrated through journal entries, brings Mae to life but in one of Julien’s dreams: “Her hands on my forehead- joy, ecstasy to know that even though she was dead, she was somehow alive!” (113). Interestingly Julien ends her memoir not with the death of her mother, but a scene when her mother was still alive, seeing her off at the airport, when she gestured to her mother from the terminal and her mother “came back!” (129). I offer that the return of her mother’s spirit and body seems an appropriate moment to end the text as Julien’s book becomes the public govi for Mae, “[b]ecause… of them, of my them, all that will be left is me, a book like this one, and my pen” (100). The use of the first person pronoun (my), and Julien’s claim over the city of New Orleans, is a performative act of reclamation. The ritual enactment of writing and reading Travels with Mae, or what Keith Cartwright infers is a “govi text,” seems to me to expose readers to her memorialized past, and brings her mother to life.

A fictive tale, Praisesong for the Widow by Paule Marshall (1983) offers another method for summoning ancestry and maintaining shared memory: ritual movement through the abject. Protagonist Avey/Avatara’s rebirth launches her through vomit, excrement, blood, and abjection to bring her dead ancestors back to life, as well as herself. It seems appropriate to mark this text as distinctly Modernist due to its self-conscious narration, rejection of Enlightenment notions such as free will, and its subtle commentary on fragmented family life in the face of racism and industrialization. Modernism is often thought to be a movement at odds with black/Caribbean/Afro-American experience. But Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic notes that some Afro-American literary ventures represent the notion of “the slave sublime” in which “the concentrated intensity of the slave experience is something that marks out blacks as the first truly modern people, handling the nineteenth century dilemmas and difficulties which would become the substance of everyday life in Europe a century later” (220-221). Paule Marshall, who was born to Barbadian parents and grew up in Brooklyn, was likely familiar with historical and cultural fracturing, and her protagonist Avery/Avatara has “slave sublime” experiences on her cruise vacation to the Caribbean in order for Marshall to explore her connection with our Afro-American past by “complicat[ing] individualist notions of personhood, authorship, filiation, or salvation, [by] present[ing] Avey as an avatar of lives that have preceded her, an avatar ritually bound to generations past and future” (Cartwright 50). Unlike the speaker in Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man who performs fluid identifiers and  presents readers with an ancestry of changeable identification in order to complicate our understanding of beingness, Avey of Praisesong for the Widow moves through an abject bodily experience to divorce her mind from the body, and in bodily absence focuses on the spirit, or inner world.

The notion of bodily absence is of course a familiar one in Caribbean culture. Slavery forces an abject state because the physical body is othered; a body absent of consciousness or soul is arguably not a person. According to Carole Sweeney, “the optimum functioning of the slave system required not only utter disregard for the…slave body but also the denial of the existence of consciousness in individual slaves” (52). Under the terrors of slavery the body was the privileged binary within the body/mind binary, therefore the slave mind did not exist for white slave owners and so slaves functioned as soulless commodities. Economics deemed the slave body “collective” because slaves were only worth the value of their labor (Sweeney 52). Any fungible slave represented labor, and so could stand in for another slave. Despite Marshall’s heavy hand at characterization- Avey is a well-rounded character- she is just a body, a slave, albeit a victim of Anglophile consumerism rather than plantation labor. Avey’s life is absorbed by materialism— she buys fashionable clothes and expensive dinners. She lacks self-actualization; she is not a whole person but an unconscious body. After her rebirth into full spiritual and cultural consciousness, her retirer d’en bas de l’eau or reclamation of her soul, I see her as standing in for anybody but this time, she “situates [her] place in an historical continuum,” in memory (Sweeney 52).

I’d like to posit that we first encounter the performative, ritualistic aspect of a retirer d’en bas de l’eau at Ibo Landing, where Aunt Cuney tells young Avey about the Ibo slaves who walked off the slave ship and chose to drown in defiance against their enslavement. This first gesture initiated by ancestors, constitutes a collective defiance against the white slave owners who attempted to make slaves of both the Ibos’ bodies and history. The Ibos’ drowning, returning to what a Haitian may call the Waters of the Abyss where the loa and souls of the dead reside, brought the living— Avey— back to life.

The blurring of lines between the living and the dead plays out through abject instances in the novel. Avey’s vacation on the cruise ship the Bianca Pride (White Pride) could be likened to traveling a kind of perverse Middle Passage and she experiences this voyage in an abject state. On board Avey eats a European- style parfait and “her stomach, her entire midsection felt odd.”  She maintained— “[I]t felt like a huge tumor had suddenly ballooned up at her center” (Marshall 50, 52). Avey’s discomfort continued until she seemed “in the grip of a powerful hallucinogen- something that had dramatically expanded her vision, offering her a glimpse of things that were beyond her comprehension” (59). In this semi-catatonic state Avey escapes the ship to the island of Grenada where she finds herself in an “unlikely sacred room of mourning (a hotel)” (Cartwright 51). From there she smells a child’s filth and sweat (arguably her own); she releases her bowels on a small boat and finds herself anointed while sick by rum shack owner Legbert who represents Papa Legba the loa of the crossroads, and his daughter, perhaps a representation of an initiate, or hunsis. In one of the final scenes in the novel Avey attends the nation dance where diasporic Caribbean attendees dance for their ancestors, “drawing on…[a] shared pool of memories…to reconstruct [ritual African dances]” (Brown 209). Avey performs her own nation dance; her subconscious connects with the other dancers, moves beyond her body, and she suddenly remembers Ibo Landing, the resting place of her African ancestors. It seems Avey’s symbolic death and rebirth as she proceeds through abject stages of physical discomfort, allow her to reclaim her ancestral spirits, in particular the spirit of her mentor Aunt Cuney and the spirits of the Ibos. I see Ibo Landing as also offering up a ritualized space for a retirer d’en bas de l’eau. The water submerges the slave bodies and Avey’s repeated visits memorialize those under the water, making for a performative, ritualized space. Avatara resolves to bring her grandchildren there and share her ancestral past. Marshall’s narration reverses the intentions of slave owners who attempted to empty the Afro-Caribbean body of consciousness. By emptying herself of consciousness through physical abjection, I see Avatara standing in for her ancestors themselves and reaches back through history to reclaim collective memory in the govi pot of the body, no longer mindless, no longer soulless, but conscious.

I conclude with arguably my most definitive offering of the retirer d’en bas de l’eau, Toni Morrison’s Beloved in which Beloved, a two-year-old, is murdered by her mother who intends to rescue her from slavery. Beloved, residing in a woman’s body, emerges from a kind of Vodou Water of the Abyss “full of venom” to haunt her mother Sethe. Eventually the reclaimed child consumes her mother as Sethe wastes away and Beloved grows fatter and fatter on guilt and love. Finally the community of Black women who previously rejected Sethe because she killed Beloved and tried to murder her other three children, circle the house and exorcise Beloved’s spirit and Sethe is accepted back into the community again. Beloved is a warning of what can happen when we ignore the whispers of the novel’s epigraph: “Sixty Million and more,” slaves Morrison memorializes in her novel. Un-reclaimed spirits sleep uneasily, and so will our history if we fail to recognize the voices of speakers with fluid identifiers, the soul reaching beyond the abject body, and our ancestors calling from home.  There may be no better way to allow those voices to be heard than through the act of writing, where they can speak for themselves.

The post Writing Rites of Reclamation: Blackness and Caribbean Remembering appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

En effet, dans les cercles intellectuels comme dans les rues européennes, peu de noms de féministes arabes sont connus. Qui se souvient du nom de la journaliste libanaise Rose al-Yussuf (1898-1958) ? de l’égyptienne Houda Cha’rawi (1879-1947) ? de la tunisienne Bchira Ben Mrad (1909-1993) ? Et pourquoi les écrits féministes de Tahar Haddâd (1899-1935) sont-ils si peu traduits et si peu diffusés en Europe ? Nous constatons aujourd’hui cette invisibilité flagrante du féminisme arabe, sans en connaître les raisons profondes. Les féministes contemporaines sont un peu plus connues, telle Fatima Mernissi très active dans l’ensemble du Monde arabe, ainsi qu’en Europe. Mais tandis que le féminisme occidental (européen et nord-américain) s’est constitué comme une entité complexe, le féminisme arabe semble ne pas avoir existé hier, et peiner à exister aujourd’hui.

Kimberlé Crenshaw peut nous aider à comprendre ce phénomène d’invisibilité d’un féminisme non-occidental. Tout d’abord parce qu’elle a contribué à faire connaître les travaux de Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell et Barbara Smith et en particulier leur ouvrage All Women are White, all the Blacks are Men[2]. Ce titre énonce un préjugé qui explique pourquoi les femmes afro-américaines ont été d’emblée exclues des mouvements féministes. Et ce préjugé peut aujourd’hui s’appliquer aux sociétés arabo-musulmanes vues d’Europe et s’énoncer de la sorte : Toutes les femmes sont occidentales ; tous les Arabes, tous les Musulmans sont des hommes. Ainsi, en 2014, le féminisme mondial reste un féminisme foncièrement occidental, qui accepte malaisément d’inclure d’autres féminismes comme le féminisme arabe ou le féminisme musulman. C’est dire à quel point les découvertes de Kimberlé Crenshaw sont d’actualité.

Quelle est la réception effective de l’œuvre de Crenshaw dans le monde arabo-musulman contemporain ? Dans quels domaines l’intersectionnalité s’y applique-t-elle particulièrement ? Et comment certains concepts y sont discutés, sans que l’ensemble de la méthode initiée par Crenshaw ne soit remis en cause ?

Intersectionnalité et sociétés

La réception de l’œuvre de Kimberlé Crenshaw dans le monde arabo-musulman est contrastée. Non encore traduite à ce jour en langue arabe, elle se trouve assez bien connue des universitaires des pays anglophones (notamment l’Egypte) mais très peu connue dans les pays francophones (comme l’Algérie). On peut donc parler ici d’une réception limitée, l’œuvre de Crenshaw ayant encore trop peu d’impact direct sur les sociétés arabo-musulmanes. Pourtant, la notion d’intersectionnalité ouvre un domaine de recherche fort utile dans des sociétés qui peinent parfois à penser leur hétérogénéité. L’ouverture prochaine de départements d’Etudes féminines (comme à l’Université de Tunis) devrait pallier ce manque, et permettre aux théories féministes non-occidentales d’être plus visibles.

Le cas de l’Egypte, où l’œuvre de Kimberlé Crenshaw est la plus reconnue dans le Monde arabe, est une exception : il s’agit d’un pays dont l’élite est parfaitement anglophone, et il s’agit du pays de Nawal Saadawî, figure de proue du féminisme arabe, longtemps exilée aux USA. Ainsi, le féminisme arabe devient visible dès lors qu’il se trouve porté par une figure internationale, maîtrisant la langue de l’autre (ici, la langue anglaise) et vivant dans le pays de l’autre (ici, les USA). Autrement dit, le féminisme de Saadawî a acquis une forme grandissante de visibilité à mesure qu’il s’occidentalisait. Cette visibilité ne réduit cependant pas l’invisibilité de tous les autres féminismes du Monde arabo-musulman, bien qu’il en encourage l’émergence.

L’invisibilité des féminismes du Monde arabo-musulman tient donc peut-être à la langue. Enoncées en langue anglaise, les théories de Nawal Saadawi rencontrent celles de Kimberlé Crenshaw, en Egypte, ou aux USA. Nawal Saadawî s’intéresse elle aussi à ce point de croisement aveugle entre diverses catégories : femmes, pauvres, malades, exploitées, emprisonnées. En tant que médecin, elle soigne ces patientes dont l’existence est niée par la société, et elle décrit leur parcours, parfois en s’identifiant très fortement à elles[3]. Il nous faut noter que les femmes auxquelles s’intéresse Nawal Saadawî sont opprimées par la société dans laquelle elles vivent, et non par l’extérieur (c’est-à-dire l’Occident). Elles peuvent dès lors plus facilement susciter l’empathie de femmes occidentales, qui, elles non plus, ne supportent pas la dictature, ni les dérives du patriarcat…

La solidarité s’avère plus compliquée lorsque les femmes qu’il s’agit de soutenir ne correspondant pas au prototype de la femme occidentale, par exemple lorsqu’elles sont voilées, et semblent soumises. Kimberlé Crenshaw avait vu juste en parlant de « the centrality of white female experience in the conceptualization of gender discrimitation[4]». A sa suite, Elsa Dorlin a montré comment « les [premières] associations féministes se déchirent et se scindent sur la question perverse de la prééminence « légitime » des femmes et épouses « blanches » sur les Noirs et par conséquent sur les femmes « noires », excluant purement et simplement ces dernières de la catégorie « femmes[5]» ». Autrement dit, les femmes arabo-musulmanes non-occidentalisées ne seraient pas des femmes comme les autres. Certains propos rapportés et analysés par Elsa Dorlin, datant de plus d’un siècle, et s’appliquant aux femmes afro-américaines, rejoignent des propos circulant depuis une dizaine d’années en France et en Europe au sujet des femmes arabo-musulmanes. Par exemple, il y a plus d’un siècle, aux USA, la Présidente de la Fédération générale des clubs des femmes expliquait ainsi qu’elle ne pouvait accepter Mrs Lowe parmi ses membres : « Mrs Ruffin appartient à son propre peuple. Là, elle sera un leader et pourra faire beaucoup de bien, mais parmi nous elle ne peut que créer des problèmes[6]». Ce préjugé s’applique aujourd’hui à la femme de culture ou d’apparence arabo-musulmane en France, ou ailleurs en Europe. En tant que femme arabo-musulmane, elle se trouve renvoyée aux siens, tandis que les siens la renvoient à leur tour à sa condition de femme. Finalement, elle n’est jamais totalement elle-même : dans une communauté de femmes occidentales et féministes, la femme arabo-musulmane est d’abord perçue comme arabo-musulmane (a fortiori si elle est voilée) ; et dans la communauté arabo-musulmane, elle est perçue comme une femme, avec des droits et des devoirs spécifiques. Aucune de ces perceptions ne rend à cet individu (qui se trouve être une femme, de culture arabo-musulmane) toute son humanité.

De plus, il nous semble que la question du féminisme arabo-musulman s’articule avec la question post-coloniale. Elsa Dorlin cite d’ailleurs, en note, Edward Saïd[7]. Si les femmes africaines-américaines n’ont pas eu leur place dans les premiers mouvements féministes aux USA, c’était à cause du racisme. Et si les femmes arabo-musulmanes n’ont pas aujourd’hui leur place dans les mouvements féministes, c’est peut-être une conséquence de la colonisation et de l’orientalisme.

En effet, durant la colonisation, la femme arabo-musulmane était très présente dans l’imaginaire collectif français. En peinture comme en littérature, elle fut constamment représentée, puis très photographiée. Et l’on peut noter qu’elle était le plus souvent représentée assise ou allongée, nue et parée de bijoux. Or, il se trouve que les femmes arabo-musulmanes d’aujourd’hui, dans le Monde arabo-musulman comme en France, peuvent apparaître comme l’exact contraire de l’ « orientale » : les femmes voilées figurent une verticalité en marche, qui trouble et parfois effraie. L’image fréquemment utilisée pour exprimer le malaise ressenti devant des femmes entièrement voilées est celle de « fantôme ». Ainsi, tandis que la femme arabo-musulmane colonisée et orientalisée était couleurs et chair, la femme arabo-musulmane d’aujourd’hui paraît spectrale, insaisissable. Même lorsque ses prises de positions rejoignent celles des féministes occidentales, le voile creuse entre elles un fossé.

Mais le monde n’est pas binaire, et les fossés se creusent au sein même des sociétés arabo-musulmanes. L’intersectionnalité n’opère donc pas seulement entre ancien colonisateur et ancien colonisé, mais au cœur de toutes les sociétés, car toutes les sociétés de notre monde contiennent des éléments hétérogènes. Autrement dit, la question de la femme arabo-musulmane se pose aujourd’hui partout dans le monde, et le même paradoxe s’observe ici comme ailleurs : le voile la rend visible, mais inaudible, et le féminisme arabo-musulman semble ne pas exister, à moins d’être porté par des femmes arabo-musulmanes occidentalisées.

On voit de ce fait que les théories de Kimberlé Crenshaw permettent d’élucider des paradoxes très contemporains. La femme de culture arabo-musulmane vue d’Europe, et en particulier vue de France, pays de la laïcité, se retrouve à l’intersection de plusieurs catégories (sexuelles, sociales, historiques, économiques, culturelles) qui la rendent invisible. Elle sera tour à tour appréhendée comme arabe (non-européenne), ou comme musulmane (non-laïque), ou comme immigrée (même lorsqu’elle a la nationalité européenne), ou comme issue d’une ancienne colonie française, ou comme issue de tel milieu social… Mais son identité singulière, qui coïncide avec le point d’intersection de ces catégories plurielle, peine à être reconnue. Des rôles lui sont assignés, qui entravent sa connaissance de soi, et sa reconnaissance par autrui.

Ainsi, le passage semble étroit pour que les femmes arabo-musulmanes, et a fortiori les plus féministes d’entre elles, puissent se faire entendre et se défendre, tout en échappant à la fois au repli traditionaliste, à l’orientalisme latent, à l’occidentalisation forcée, au sexisme et au racisme.

Intersectionnalité et littératures post-coloniales

Cinq ans avant la parution de l’article de Kimberlé Crenshaw « Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex : A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics » Alice Walker publiait la Couleur pourpre[8]. Dans ces deux textes fondateurs, l’un socio-juridique, l’autre romanesque, il est question des violences domestiques dont les femmes afro-américaines sont victimes. Cette coïncidence entre la parution d’un article scientifique et un roman, traitant de la même problématique, est intéressante. Elle révèle que parfois la littérature devance, ou rejoint la sociologie. En ce qui concerne la notion d’intersectionnalité, cette convergence semble remarquable dans les littératures issues du Monde arabe. On trouve cette problématique de l’invisibilité due à l’intersectionnalité dès 1945, date à laquelle Kateb Yacine commence à écrire Nedjma[9] dont le personnage se trouve être une femme, juive par sa mère, arabo-berbère par son père, nue dans une célèbre scène de bain, et finalement voilée, et errante. Quelle que soit la forme qu’elle prend, Nedjma ne parle pas. Elle est toutes les femmes que l’on veut, mais elle ne semble être personne. L’entrecroisement de sa judaïté, de son arabité, de sa féminité et de son statut de colonisé la font littéralement disparaître. Comme disparaissaient des statistiques les femmes afro-américaines battues sur le sort desquelles Kimberlé Crenshaw s’est penchée.

Après Kateb Yacine, d’autres écrivains ont continué à mettre en scène cette disparition des femmes arabo-musulmanes du champ de vision du féminisme humaniste, parmi lesquels Naguib Mahfouz, Assia Djebar, Hanan el-Cheikh, Fadhila Chabbi et, plus récemment Emna Belhaj Yahia. Dans son roman intitulé Jeux de rubans[10], Emna Belhaj Yahia s’interroge sur le voile en Tunisie. Elle rapporte ses pensées tandis qu’elle attend son tour chez l’épicier :

Je regarde les femmes auprès desquelles je fais la queue : nous ne sommes que deux à ne pas être voilées, c’est-à-dire à ne pas porter ce grand foulard qui enveloppe le cheveu et encadre le visage. Cela fait quelques années déjà qu’on commence à s’y habituer. Mais je suis tout de même à chaque fois surprise que cette nouvelle façon de s’habiller se répande autant et envahisse si vite le décor. Tout de suite, je me sens différente. Peut-être plus par les pensées qu’elle soulève en moi, que par le fait lui-même. (…) A les regarder de près, attelées comme tant d’autres aux tâches quotidiennes, ces femmes n’ont rien d’inquiétant dans le visage, rien d’agressif, à mon égard en tout cas, et ne manifestent aucune hostilité. Je revois à l’instant toutes celles qui leur ressemblent, que j’avais déjà remarquées bien des fois et qui, dans les quartiers populaires, ont sauté sur cet habit pour pouvoir exercer tranquillement leur métier d’aide-ménagère. Dans ces lieux-là, ce sont elles qui subviennent aux besoins de la famille[11].

Ici, une première raison de se voiler est explicitée : travailler, pouvoir aller et venir dans la rue, sans passer pour une prostituée. Mais la position de la narratrice est ébranlée lorsque son fils lui présente la jeune fille dont il est amoureux : étudiante, coquette, au caractère affirmé, et voilée. Le roman s’achève d’ailleurs sur une scène apocalyptique qui a tout d’une hallucination, et qui révèle l’immense perplexité de la narratrice :

[Mes enfants] se tiennent par la main et, derrière eux, il y a toute leur descendance, leurs enfants, petits-enfants, arrière-arrière-petits-enfants, qui avancent en dizaines de rangées correspondant à des dizaines de générations successives, de celles nées il y a plus d’un siècle à celles qui naîtront dans plus de cent ans. Mais, comme c’est curieux, elles se suivent dans un ordre singulier : une rangée où les femmes ont des foulards sur les cheveux, suivie d’une autre où elles ont les cheveux au vent, et ainsi de suite à l’infini, dans une alternance presque parfaite, vagues régulières, enlacées, exposant leurs différences comme si chaque rangée était une réplique à l’autre, comme si pour s’affirmer, elle avait décidé de marquer son opposition en reniant la tenue de celle qui l’a précédée. (…) C’est quoi, ce mystérieux manège ? Et pourquoi ce fétichisme d’un tissu sur la tête qu’on enlève, remet, retire de nouveau pour le remettre encore une fois, quelques temps après, et puis s’en défaire, et recommencer l’opération par la suite, tout au long des siècles ? Elles sont vraiment énigmatiques, les filles d’Eve, avec l’habillage de leurs corps, sur cette terre qui est la mienne ! J’aimerais les comprendre, mais je n’y arrive pas encore[12].

Ainsi, il y aurait autant de raisons de se voiler, que de ne pas se voiler. Les premières féministes arabes se voilaient pour aller travailler, ou pour participer aux assemblées politiques. Puis elles se sont dévoilées, pour être les égales des hommes. Aujourd’hui, les jeunes filles se voilent pour de multiples raisons : par réaction contre l’occidentalisation-laïcisation de leur culture, par réaction contre la nudité orientaliste, par réaction contre leurs parents, par désir de retrouver des racines identitaires, pour intégrer une communauté, pour retrouver une spiritualité, pour faire coïncider leur foi et leur apparence…

Pour Emna Belhaj Yahia, la plus commune de ces raisons serait une réaction par rapport à la génération précédente. Le résultat de toutes ces réactions en chaîne est une essentialisation de la féminité, en laquelle la narratrice ne se reconnaît pas. En effet, si, pour une génération, la femme doit être voilée ; pour la génération suivante, elle ne doit pas l’être, et cela à l’infini, comme si la femme se réduisait à ce qu’elle porte ou ne porte pas. A cette essentialisation, Emna Belhaj Yahia préfère sans doute un féminisme existentialiste, où l’existence précède l’essence, et non l’inverse.

De ce fait, la littérature contemporaine met en scène l’intersectionnalité tout en remettant en cause la catégorie de « femme ». Notons aussi que cette déconstruction de la catégorie de « sexe » s’accompagne d’une déconstruction de la catégorie de « race ». D’ailleurs, la langue arabe utilise le même terme pour dire « sexe » et « race », désignés tous deux par jins (qui peut aussi se traduire par « espèce »). De ce point de vue, la langue arabe semble nous inviter à dépasser les catégorisations « sexuelles » et « raciales » pour penser en termes de catégories mouvantes, et toujours à redéfinir.

Ce travail de redéfinition de notions liées au genre (masculin/féminin) ou à la culture (arabo-musulmane/occidentale) s’observe chez des écrivains tels Tayeb Sâlih, Amara Lakhous, ou encore Amin Maalouf. Ils appartiennent à une littérature post-coloniale qui repense les rapports de force tout en déconstruisant la notion d’identité fixe. Dans ce sens, ils s’inscrivent dans ce que Leslie McCall a appelé la complexité anticatégorique de l’intersectionnalité[13]. Amin Maalouf est allé jusqu’à théoriser cette nouvelle conception de l’intersectionnalité dans Les Identités meurtrières[14] en utilisant un modèle non plus à deux mais à une infinité de dimensions. En quelques mots : il se trouve que je peux être perçue comme une femme, ou bien comme un individu de culture musulmane, ou bien comme un.e salarié.e ou bien comme une personne aimant la nature etc. Or, ce qui est perçu de moi n’est pas la totalité de ce que je suis ; ce que je mets en avant n’est pas non plus la totalité de ce que je suis. L’identité est kaléidoscopique, et dépend des moments, des enjeux, des protagonistes et des circonstances. L’intersectionnalité n’est plus un croisement entre deux voies, mais un tourbillon d’intersections.

L’autre apport de cette littérature post-coloniale issue du Monde arabe à l’intersectionnalité de Kimberlé Crenshaw est la fin de la notion de « race ». Le mot n’est plus guère utilisé en langue française, bien que des théories « racistes » continuent à avoir cours. Il semblerait que les luttes contre les catégories de « sexe » et de « race » soient indissociables dans les littératures post-coloniales issues du Monde arabe. Car il s’agit de lutter contre tous les sectarismes. Et cela se fait aujourd’hui non seulement dans des ouvrages scientifiques, ou dans des romans, mais aussi dans la littérature enfantine. Deux exemples récents : dans sa série « Mes histoires préférées », la Maison d’édition tunisienne Messa opère une petite révolution à l’intention des enfants : Dora l’exploratrice y est présentée comme « une jolie petite fille brune de peau[15]» à un lectorat pour qui la blancheur est un critère de beauté ; et, dans un autre livre de cette même série, la princesse choisit elle-même celui qu’elle épousera, en interrogeant ses prétendants (tous les personnages masculins de Disney, réunis ici) et en tuant ceux qui ne répondent pas à ses questions[16].

Pour conclure, l’intersectionnalité de Kimberlé Crenshaw a non seulement traversé les décennies, mais aussi les frontières. C’est un formidable outil d’analyse, dont les catégories peuvent être discutées, mais dont l’efficacité opératoire ne se dément pas. Appliqué aux cultures arabo-musulmanes, cet outil nous aide à comprendre pourquoi les femmes peuvent y sembler invisibles : comme Nedjma, à la fois femme, arabe, juive et colonisée. A l’aide de l’intersectionnalité, nous saisissons mieux ce passage entre la représentation de la femme orientalisée et la femme voilée, toutes deux très présentes dans les imaginaires collectifs, mais inaudibles. Dans les deux cas, le son est coupé[17]: les femmes peintes par Delacroix durant son séjour algérien de 1832 ne parlent pas, et lorsque, aujourd’hui, en France ou ailleurs, une femme voilée prend la parole, on s’interroge sur son voile avant de l’écouter. La femme orientalisée de naguère et la femme voilée d’aujourd’hui se rejoignent dans un silence qu’il nous revient d’entendre et d’analyser.

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Image 1: Bus stationed in Frontera Comalapa, Chiapas, Mexico in expectation of a journey to the U.S.-Mexico Border. – Photo Credit: Rebecca B. Galemba

Mexicans ride these buses, but Central Americans also seek to blend in. At the southern border, a history of cross-border marriage, social networks, and refugee flight and return during the height of Guatemalan counterinsurgency conflict (1980-1981) make distinguishing Mexicans from Guatemalans difficult. Mexican adults in the region told me that most could not trace their families any further back than their parents or grandparents to Mexico. They all had Guatemalan roots. Yet Mexico’s official attitude towards such fluid identities is anything but. In this region many poor residents lack documents and the border has been historically porous. Meanwhile, at the southern border, the municipality of Frontera Comalapa has developed into a hub to purchase any document you want. Official surveillance in this context often takes on ethnic and classist tones. I asked one immigration official how she could ascertain the difference between Mexicans and Guatemalans in this context. In addition to dress and dialect, she mentioned, “we can often detect by the smell.”

One February day in 2007, I purchased tickets for this trip at a “Travel Agency” in Frontera Comalapa. I was not planning to travel until the end of March; advance purchase did little to secure my reservation. When my husband and I attempted to travel north on one of these buses one March Wednesday morning, many buses refused to let us board. Operators claimed they were full. While some buses were hired directly by maquilas, or border assembly plants, at the northern border, it was also clear that many were neither full nor contracted. What I learned from the one company that allowed me to ride was that many were wary of human rights reporters. I had bought my tickets to Tijuana, where I intended to visit contacts from field research in 2004. While many people said they were going to Tijuana, in reality few buses had Tijuana as their destination. The drivers told immigration agents they were headed for Caborca, Sonora. Only as we approached the border did I learn that the bus was destined for the desert border town of Altar, Sonora. Why were these buses so openly advertised, yet also disguised? A Mexican bus operating in Mexican territory should be free to operate without fear. The tourism or travel label was partly designed to get around Mexican bus companies’ monopolies over particular routes. Yet this label also disguised the purpose of the journey since a deeper suspicion of illegality surrounded the buses due to their destinations and passengers. This bus ride from Mexico’s southern to northern border provides a window into how Mexico is implementing border security through interior checkpoints, as well as to how the U.S.’s security agenda casts a specter of illegality over these buses and their passengers even within Mexican territory.

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This piece focuses on the problems of trying to prevent undocumented migration to the U.S. by investing more resources and assistance into Mexican border policing in order to fulfill a U.S.-designed security agenda. Mexico has recently escalated border enforcement to stem what the U.S. termed a “border crisis” of undocumented Central American youth arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2014. In July 2014, Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto implemented Programa Frontera Sur (Southern Border Program[1]) to improve border security and to protect migrants entering Mexico. To solve this crisis, according to many politicians and dominant media renderings in the U.S., Mexico must enforce its own southern border. U.S. assistance is implicit and explicit in this solution as the U.S. embraces Mexico as a key partner for establishing hemispheric security (Benítez Manaut 2003). Alan Bersin, U.S. Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security recently stated, “The Guatemalan border with Chiapas is now our southern border” (Isacson et al 2014: 5). Recently, Mexico’s Secretary of the Interior Miguel Angel Osorio Chong similarly articulated Mexico’s “new” approach to the border, “Never before has Mexico announced a state policy on the border… now [it is] absolute control of the southern border” (Archibold 2014). Yet these statements are somewhat misleading while they also lack historical depth. The southern border has never been consistently well patrolled, but periodic crackdowns have been common throughout Mexico’s recent history.

This article reveals the historical continuity that the discursive construction of a “border crisis” has played in justifying increased, yet often ineffective, counterproductive, and perhaps even destructive, border enforcement. As recently argued by Gabriella Sanchez (2014), the construction of a “border crisis” is a powerful narrative to justify the escalation of criminalization, militarization, and violence.[2] It entrenches the political status quo: fear of a “crisis” derails immigration reform and justifies more resources for controversial U.S.-backed Mexican and Central American security initiatives. In this narrative, enforcement, rather than human rights, the right to mobility, and the failures of broken immigration and labor systems, becomes the dominant policy and media focus.

The justification of heightened security to combat a purported border crisis has older roots. The suspicions and surveillance surrounding this bus’ journey, for example, highlight Mexico’s subservience to the U.S. border agenda seven years prior to the 2014 crisis. To claim that a crisis has simply emerged obscures the ability of historical analyses to temper current approaches and to offer alternative solutions. Specifically, the crisis discourse, and the enforcement policies it legitimizes, shares much in common with the U.S. approach to the U.S.-Mexico border, which became especially prominent during the 1980s War on Drugs and the 1990s border enforcement built up.[3] Peter Andreas identifies the similar power of the narrative of “loss of [border] control” at the U.S. Mexico border. According to Andreas (2000: 7):

The stress on loss of control understates the degree to which the state has actually structured, conditioned, and even enabled (often unintentionally) clandestine border crossings, and overstates the degree to which the state has been able to control its borders in the past…it obscures the ways in which the state itself as helped to create the very conditions that generate calls for more policing.

In the historically porous Mexico-Guatemala borderlands, the rhetoric of border security has intermittently risen to the fore to justify increased surveillance; state officials have often used ethnicity and dialect to signal otherness and exclusion.[4] Mexico first militarized its border with Guatemala to contain the refugee flow during the Guatemalan conflict in the early 1980s (Cruz Burguete 1998). More recently, Mexico intensified border enforcement and interior inspection points in line with a U.S. post-September 11, 2001 hemispheric security agenda. In July of 2001 under Plan Sur,[5] Mexico signed onto a U.S.-backed plan to not only strengthen its southern border with Guatemala, but also to implement militarized internal checkpoints. According to Miguel Pickard (2005), “the measure had the effect of ‘displacing’ tasks of the U.S. southern border to southern Mexico.”[6] Plan Sur increased migrant vulnerability as migrants sought out more dangerous routes and sophisticated smugglers to avoid the checkpoints (Birson 2010). Migrant desperation has become lucrative for cartels and criminal gangs who bribe their way through the bolstered security system (Birson 2010).

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On the bus, the mood was light as passengers joked with one another, music switched somewhat seamlessly between Mexican Norteña bands and Britney Spears, and passengers requested different DVDs. Some DVDs were bootleg copies of comedies; bus passengers laughed when the amateur bootlegger also captured audience members walking in and out of the theater when trying to film the actual movie. Most of the DVDs did not even have Spanish subtitles. However, most passengers seemed content to focus on something else besides the barren hillsides. The bus journey, however, was impeded by multiple checkpoints staffed by immigration, customs, the police, or the military. Checkpoints were more frequent at the southern border in Chiapas and again, as we neared the U.S.-Mexico border. At each checkpoint, the atmosphere shifted as passengers were instructed to get off the bus and to file into separate male (over 40 individuals) and female (4 individuals) lines as their papers, faces, and ways of talking were inspected.

Outside of Tuxtla Gutiérrez, Chiapas, we came to a temporary inspection point in the form of a tent set up on the side of the road with a small plastic table for food and a television. An immigration agent boarded the bus yelling, “Gather of your belongings [when you get off]. Please gather all of your belongings.” She didn’t give anyone time to speak. We were never given a reason why three men were kicked off the bus after the agents inspected every passenger. The agents suspected that the men were Central Americans. One passenger, who others referred to as their “guide” or “boss”, urged people who knew the men to defend them, but many people were afraid that this would render them suspect as well. One passenger told me that he was traveling with five friends, but that two were from Guatemala. The men told officials at the Mexican checkpoints that they were traveling separately because, as the passenger explained, “I don’t want to be accused of being a coyote [human smuggler] if they [Guatemalan friends] are caught. We don’t want to be associated.” He continued, “Sometimes Mexicans are being taken [off the buses] at the checkpoints while some Guatemalans pass fine. They [officials] will confuse [Mexicans] as being Guatemalan. It is very strict now.” Sometimes people were unsure if others were Mexican or Central American. The above passenger was uncertain, “They are from Guatemala, but have lived in Mexico for a long time. They are more Mexican.”[7] The “guide” believed that the men were Mexican and that the immigration officials “just want money. They often behave badly. If they have money, the [officials] will let them pass. They [officials] don’t have the education to know who is Mexican and who is not. They also don’t seem to care.” He continued to explain that people “often do not know how to defend themselves…Even when they are Mexican, the migra [immigration agents] will remove them [from the bus].” The three men had been taken off of the bus, but at later checkpoints, officials instead collected money from individuals or from the bus drivers who then collected from the corresponding passengers. Some men told me they believed that people who anticipated a problem could sometimes pay an advance fee to the bus drivers to help them through checkpoints. One man told me that he refused to succumb to this practice; “If you don’t pay, they take you off the bus…[But] I am Mexican and I would rather get off the bus than pay.” When this man was stopped for further questioning at one checkpoint, he related, “They asked for everything, all my documents…” He laughed…“And then, what are my parents’ names, how old are my parents, where was I born, how old am I, what day was I born, why did I leave? …If you answer just one question not to their liking, they take you off the bus.”

Ironically, Grupo Beta,[8] a Mexican unit dedicated to protecting migrant rights in Mexico, stopped the bus a few miles after the men had been removed from the bus by immigration. As they delivered pamphlets addressing the right of Mexicans to travel freely within Mexico, we recognized the terrible irony that the men had just been kicked off the bus. A Grupo Beta representative inquired if any immigration agents had asked for money from anyone or if anyone had been kicked off of the bus. They told the passengers that no one should be able to infringe on their rights to travel as Mexicans or to take money from them; if this occurs, then they should report it. Yet, the passenger who identified as a “guide” explained, “If you are Mexican you can go to human rights, but it’s often too late. They [human rights] should be watching the migra since it is complicated to denounce them. But they [human rights] are often located where they cannot do anything to resolve anything. Then you lose time and money.” When passengers mentioned that three men had just been kicked off of the bus, the Grupo Beta representative responded, “If you know they are Mexican… from your communities, defend them.” Yet the representatives also admitted that this could lead to problems since they knew that many people carried false documents and “if you do not know, you can be accused of being a coyote.” The potential for illegality rendered all passengers vulnerable to the whims of authorities operating under a U.S. security lens that is suspicious of all travelers heading north. Surveillance in northern Mexico is often racially marked against not only Central Americans, but also against southern Mexicans and the indigenous, who northern Mexicans have historically stigmatized as backwards and as posing a potential threat to the socioeconomic order (Vila 1999: 80).

As we approached the U.S.-Mexico border, the bus drivers gave gifts of DVDs and cigarettes to immigration inspectors to ensure a smooth passage through various checkpoints. The drivers knew the agents well; then the agents would wave, “see you next week.” As we neared the border, the bus drivers also urged passengers to hide their cell phones in overhead compartments. They knew officers might confiscate phones since they suspected they would be used to call coyotes waiting at the border. Some passengers had made the journey to the U.S.-Mexico border in groups and planned to call coyotes to help them with the long trek through the desert into the United States. Less experienced passengers were accompanied by the Mexican “guide” on the bus, whose task was to deliver them at the U.S.-Mexico border to a partner more familiar with the next leg of the journey. When we arrived in Altar, Sonora, everyone got off the bus and seemed to disappear into the desert dusk. My husband and I entered one of the few taquerias in an otherwise desolate town to wait almost two hours for a bus to Tijuana.

The bus journey illustrated the unpredictability of surveillance and the anxieties, as well as opportunities, this generated for passengers. Immigration agents might detain and deport someone, collect a bribe, or choose to ignore or fail to recognize false documents. While many bus passengers were apprehensive about the journey, more experienced migrants knew that they would eventually succeed. One passenger who was friends with the men who had been kicked off the bus received a phone call from them as we approached the U.S.-Mexico border. His friends would be joining him at a hotel in Altar, Sonora to wait for their coyote.

The Mexico-Guatemala border has long been selectively and unpredictably enforced. The actual official border is often easy to cross. At an official inspections post at Ciudad Cuauhtémoc, Mexico and La Mesilla, Guatemala, I often found confused tourists wondering where to get their passports stamped when they crossed the border. Border officials generally remain in their offices as people easily walk across the border and board vans to their destinations. However, semi-permanent, as well as unpredictable, checkpoints increasingly break up interior highways. Makeshift checkpoints may emerge overnight and vanish the following day. However, at the same time, a lack of sufficient and trained personnel, historically porous flows, the necessities of trade, and the fact that border security is costly and often counterproductive, lead the government to promote one image—of total control—while the reality is otherwise. As one customs official explained, “There are only 30 fiscal inspectors in all of Chiapas. Look…[he beckoned out of his office window to the expanse of mountains that constituted the international border]. This is a big state. With only 30 [inspectors] what are we supposed to do?” Unpredictability at once engenders fear and hope, which fuels the ability of corrupt state officials and smugglers to take advantage of migrants. Meanwhile, an image of control, rather than its actual implementation, enhances state legitimacy by demonstrating the state’s commitment to border management (Andreas 2000: 11; Nevins 2002). Similarly, at the U.S.-Mexico border, Peter Andreas (2000: 9) argues, “successful border management depends on successful image management, and that does not necessarily correspond with levels of actual deterrence.”

One customs official in Chiapas explicated the function of the image of control:

What the government wants to do most is show an image of control…but of course…if you actually see, you know that isn’t true…To actually exert control costs…the government is often not willing to spend the money…The government has sent more forces, but they are the same….They could send ten more units and it would be the same.

This disjuncture between image and reality has proven true in the past; when Mexico created a new border police force (Policía Estatal Fronteriza-State Border Police) in 2007, border residents I knew soon realized that many of the officers were the same men they knew from the state police force. The officers had received new uniforms, but otherwise nothing had changed. This buildup of the border security apparatus is a product of the state’s desire to show a public presence of force, while simultaneously realizing the inability, and impracticality of, fully controlling the border (Andreas 2000).

Recently numbers of undocumented migrants at the U.S. border have declined and the rhetoric of crisis in the U.S. media has subsided. However, Mexico continues to confront much of this flow. A priest who works with the Casa del Migrante in Tecún Umán, Guatemala told me in 2007, “To work for immigration is dirty work…Bush asked Mexico to help detain migrants going north and Mexico is doing its dirty work.” According to Migration Information Source, Mexico has deported over 30,000 Central Americans in 2014 (Archibold 2014).  Can this really be termed a successful solution to a crisis? When migrants are caught within Mexico’s web of enforcement, they’re more likely to be preyed upon by gangs, officials, and cartels, especially in border cities where migrants may desperately wait, become stranded, or try to gather funds to try again or return home. The hostel worker related, “And from these same migrants the officials feed themselves, taking their money and then they are allowed to proceed.” One migrant described the symbiosis between migrants and officials, “If there weren’t migrants, the migra [immigrant agents] would not have jobs. The migra are corrupt, they take your money and beat you.” To him, officials and bandits belong on the same continuum. He was deported because he had no more money to pay officials-the maras gangs had already taken everything.[9]

Mexico recently committed to patrolling the freight train called “La Bestia”/ “the Beast”, which migrants jump on and cling to as they attempt to make the journey north.

Image 2: Flyer warning migrants of the dangers of “The Beast” if they decided to travel north. Translation: “If you go… ‘the dignity and human rights of migrants do not have borders.” – Photo Credit: Photo taken by Rebecca B. Galemba at the Casa del Migrante in Tecún Umán, Guatemala.

In Tapachula, Chiapas, I met double amputees whose limbs were crushed by “the Beast” when they fell from the train. Yet for many the risks of “the Beast” were preferable to alternative routes, where they believed they would encounter more official corruption and criminal groups.[10]Amputees at the Albergue Jesus El Buen Pastor in Tapachula, Chiapas, a shelter for injured migrants, have fashioned wheelchairs out of plastic chairs.[11] One man, a double amputee, realized the irony behind his higher quality wheelchair. He told me that in 2006, Maria Shriver, who was married to Arnold Schwarzenegger, the governor of California at the time, came briefly to the shelter to donate fifteen wheelchairs. He told me “It was nice of her to donate the chairs,” but he disliked Schwarzenegger’s politics, especially concerning immigration.[12] “No he didn’t come,” he said. “We wouldn’t accept him if he did.”

Image 3: Photo of a make-shift wheelchair at Albergue Jesus El Buen Pastor in Tapachula, Chiapas – Photo Credit: Rebecca B. Galemba

The lesson from the U.S.-Mexico border is that the militarization of enforcement does not stop unauthorized border flows (Andreas 2000). When security escalates, smugglers become more sophisticated, violent, and demand higher fees, migrants pursue more dangerous routes, and officials increase bribes (ibid.). In turn, the border policing apparatus expands to combat it in a spiral of mutual escalation (ibid.). In 2012, the U.S. budget for immigration enforcement was $18 billion, larger than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined, despite evidence that such escalation may be counterproductive (Preston 2013). A similar border security approach is exported to Mexico, without enough consideration of judicial and policing reform, corruption, causes of migration, and a lack of transparency and accountability in policing institutions (Isacson et al. 2014). In this context, further feeding the current security and migration infrastructure has led to an escalation in human rights abuses. For example, human rights activists point to concerning implications for migrant rights as Grupo Beta, whose purpose is to aid migrants, has now been enlisted to help Mexican authorities conduct migrant raids (Stanton 2014).

In 2014, The Merida Initiative,[13]a security agreement established between the U.S. and Mexico in 2008 to combat drug trafficking and transnational crime, directed increased funds and attention to  “creating a 21st century border” and securing Mexico’s borders (Isacson et al.: 24). As of February 2014, The Mérida Initiative allocated $112 million in technology for border security including training, inspection equipment, and infrastructure, including additional small amounts for Navy/Marine training and facilities from the Defense Department’s counter-narcotics budget (ibid.). Most of this funding has gone to the northern border, but the southern border is now also becoming a priority (ibid.). Yet militarizing security forces in Mexico and Guatemala through U.S.-backed initiatives like Merida and Central American Regional Security Initiative (CARSI[14]) has not only failed to stem the drug war, but Mexico’s war on the cartels has also left 80,000 dead, 27,000 disappeared, and thousands displaced and since 2006 (MAWG 2013: 3; Abrego 2014). Such approaches are worrisome in regions where the military continues to be associated with human rights abuses and impunity. The United States cut off funding to Guatemala’s military in 1990 due to human rights abuses. Despite this, conditions have loosened and these restrictions do not apply to Defense Department funds, from which $27.5 million was given to Guatemalan security forces for counter-narcotics control form 2008-2012 (Isacson et al. 2014: 29; MAWG 2013). As David Bacon (2014) warns, “giving millions of dollars to some of the most violent and rightwing militaries in the Western hemisphere…is a step back towards the military intervention policy that set the wave of migration into motion to begin with.”

Mexico’s current approaches to tackling border issues, such as the Southern Border Program, do not contain sufficient measures to protect migrants or prosecute corrupt officials. While the program stresses migrant protection as a key component, Jorge Urbano, Director of the Program on Migration at the Iberoamerica University, expressed doubts that “if there is no qualified human capital…professionally trained to do a job that requires expertise in the subject of human rights, the measure…will result in little more than merely good intentions” (Langner 2014, translation mine). The program also does not address the concerns of migrants in transit (Langner 2014).[15] Rubén Figueroa, Coordinator of the Mesoamerican Migrant Movement in the Southern Region, asserts that:

the federal government has applied the Southern Border Plan as a police action to detain and deport the largest number of migrants…within this plan there are no provisions to prevent crimes…In the last decade more than 70,000 migrants have disappeared in Mexico and there are no mechanisms to denounce these disappearances when family members are in Central America[16] (Blanco 2014, translation mine).

Tasking Mexico’s migration institutions and enforcement agents with bolstering border security, regularizing migration, and protecting migrant rights raises additional concerns as critics doubt the ability of Mexico’s National Institute of Migration (INM) to implement immigration laws and respect human rights. In 2013, the INM ranked 8^th in the number of human rights abuses reported to Mexico’s National Human Rights Ombudsman (Isacson et al.: 32). The federal police and military ranked even higher in terms of abuses. According to Casa del Migrante in Saltillo in 2013, the federal police received the most denunciations for migrant abuses, even ahead of the Zetas cartel and maras gangs (Ureste 2014a). It is evident that strengthening security does little to make people feel secure. One merchant complained to Mexican journalist Manu Ureste, “as there are more checkpoints, there is more corruption” (Ureste 2014b, translation mine). As soldier demanded money to look through her bags, the merchant laughed when asked if the additional checkpoints made people feel more secure (ibid.). Instead, she saw the checkpoints as an opportunity for officials to distribute money amongst themselves (ibid).

To further understand Mexico’s approach to Central American migrants, it is important to note that Mexico accepts very few refugees–last year only 208 Central Americans (Kahn 2014). Many migrants are deported before they can pursue claims or they are detained indefinitely in INM’s poor facilities while filing (Isacson et al. 2014: 33). Once detained, migrants have a miniscule chance of advocating for an asylum case (IAHCR 2013). At one Mexican detention facility I visited in 2007, the women told me the men were denied water. Visits with their husbands in a different cell depended on the discretion of individual agents. One woman said the only reason the immigration delegate in charge came to check on them that day was because I was present. “Normally,” she said, “they yell at us and insult us.” Most detainees did not know how long they would remain in INM facilities or when they would be sent home. Mexico has recently made some efforts to decriminalize migration in 2008, as well as to enable migrants to seek justice for abuses regardless of status under the General Population Act in 2010 (IAHCR 2013). Nonetheless, detention remains the norm and protections have been insufficient to stem abuses. A recent Washington Office on Latin America report cautions:

Given the widespread and well-documented involvement of Mexican authorities with human smugglers and organized crime, increased immigration enforcement in Mexico is likely to accomplish little, and will only contribute to the further enrichment of corrupt officials and criminals, and to the victimization of innocent migrants (Meyer and Boggs 2014).

We need to become attuned to the reasons why people migrate and why they go where they do; this forces us to look in the mirror at foreign intervention, devastating trade policies, and inconsistent and insufficient immigration and refugee policies.[17] Pushing the crisis elsewhere through increasingly militarized means not only does not work, but it also leaves death and violence in its wake. Moreover, just as the crisis imagery obscures the fact that such problems have long been in the making, it also makes the issues seem to disappear once media and policy attention dissipate. Instead, Joseph Nevins (2002: 171) points to how the political-economic context and political elites shape our perceptions of crisis even when actual conditions may remain similar.

The power of the U.S. to control the border has become a normalized response to larger economic, political, and global anxieties (Nevins (2002: 37). Laying bare the social, historical, and political processes by which border policing has become a normalized mode of nation-building can help us question the implications of extending such exercises of power beyond and within national borders (Nevins 2002; Nevins 2014). As witnessed by the suspicions of illegality surrounding the Mexican bus’ journey, the U.S. has extended its border surveillance practices to Mexico, effectively undermining its sovereignty. Mexico and the U.S. have also instituted internal borders like the checkpoints depicted along the bus trip while the U.S. has implemented various practices of governance (e.g. E-Verify, Secure Communities, workplace policing, and the denial of driver’s licenses in various states) that increasingly delimit and criminalize the movement and existence of immigrants, creating what Nuñez and Heyman (2007) term, “entrapment processes” (also see Nevins 2014).

The restriction of rights based on national borders, coupled with the presumption that border policing can effectively guarantee these rights, relies on an assumption that threats to a nation come from outside of its borders and that such threats should therefore be combatted at the border. The normalization of this logic has made the granting and withholding of basic rights conditioned on national borders appear beyond reproach.[18] Such national frames of concern further contribute to the exploitation and abuse of migrants in transit as well as in the U.S., as their rights are either outright devalued or all too easily suspended in the name of security.

Image 4: Mural of the difficult northward journey, which depicts an imposing border with a narrow entryway between the United States and Mexico at the Casa del Migrante in Tecún Umán, Guatemala. - Photo Credit: Rebecca B. Galemba

The post Mexico’s Border (In)Security appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

The female voices in Shafak’s novel merge in a curious manner. One family lives in the United States, Armenian refugees who emphasize the importance of their traditions. The Turkish family that remains in Istanbul, however, has changed and modernized. The two young girls in the novel, Armanoush (Armenian-American) and Asya (Turkish), are unlikely, disparate step-sisters, who begin to bridge the gap between Turkish and Armenian traditions. The families are faced with challenges despite the similarity of their cultures, in terms of food, music and religious traditions. The two girls are unknowingly linked by a weak father, Mustafa, himself a product of persecution and upheaval. At his death, Mustafa transforms from a physical being into a silent, physical space that allows for conversation, healing and understanding. Without words to define his transformation, Mustafa the man disappears and instead becomes the framework of a mythological text.

Myth is a sacred type of speech that allows people to recognize and name the unspeakable. Roland Barthes believes that all obvious cultural objects have the power to attain mythical properties. Barthes says,

Every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural or not, which forbids talking about things. A tree is a tree. Yes, of course. But a tree as expressed by Minou Drouet is no longer quite a tree, it is a tree which is decorated, adapted to a certain type of consumption, laden with literary self-indulgence, revolt, images, in short with a type of social usage which is added to pure matter. (109)

The body of a man has the ability to transform from a physical presence into a culturally significant text, filled with symbol and rhetoric larger than the individual. In coming to understand the events in Mustafa’s life that led to his eventual demise, the reader becomes a key participant in the evolution of myth. Barthes states that: “[M]yth is a type of speech chosen by history: it cannot possibly evolve from the ‘nature’ of things” (109). Therefore, in order to understand Mustafa’s mythological significance, the reader too must know his history.

Shafak takes great pains to explain a character’s societal and cultural significance. She uses categories as names, creating nick-names laden with socially constructed, obvious and essentialized identities. This unique approach must be differentiated from simply explaining a society or culture. Here, characters represent a specific aspect of a society and their actions, expressions, words and descriptions allow the reader to comprehend the nuances from particular stereotypes within the culture. By creating characters with disparate identities, she creates forms and through these forms, she enables speech. Shafak is, of course, designing a mythological society that parallels the actual. She leaves intelligent, obvious and accessible signs in this created culture. When Armanoush, self-named ‘Madame My-Exiled-Soul’ in her online chat room, decides to seek her roots, she claims, “I need to find my identity…. This is a journey into my family’s past, as well as into my future. The Janissary’s Paradox will haunt me unless I do something to discover my past” (117). Shafak deftly moves Armanoush from one place to the next through conversations with people categorized by their stereotype, creating layers of intersections and accessible, informative bridges simultaneously. The reader must note the importance of this technique, or overlook the meaning of Zeliha’s introduction, Armanoush’s journey to discover her Turkish family or Mustafa’s eventual death. This proves that the characters’ identities have been formed, in part, by cultural norms. They are mapped by things greater than themselves.

Due to the accepted norms placed upon women by religion and culture, the reader is doubly shocked at Zeliha’s rebellious nature, which forms a complex grid of intersections. The novel begins with Zeliha’s attempted abortion. Everything within this first chapter startles the senses. Unlike traditional Turkish women, Zeliha Kazanci speaks brusquely and rebelliously, but also places importance on traditional cultural practices such as the delicacy of teacups and the ritual of prayer. She embodies anger, rage, frustration and strength all of which affirm her voice, body and occupation as the text that deciphers the entire mythology. Zeliha’s narrative and experience is solidly placed within a marginalized world, outside of Islamic norms and made possible only through the use of character types. As Kimberlé Crenshaw notes, “[W]e will dare to speak against internal exclusions and marginalizations, that we might call attention to how the identity of ‘the group’ has been centered on the intersectional identities of a few” (“Mapping the Margins” 1299). In other words, Shafak’s novel utilizes culturally prescribed stereotypes in order to highlight disparities of identity. The Kazanci family forms the body of this myth and, therefore, in a male-dominated society, Zeliha is able to own a tattoo parlor, wear miniskirts and speak her mind, bridging both ancient custom and radical modernism.

From this introduction, the novel moves quickly while many characters are described, some developed, and some left as shadowy substances that represent nothing more than their assigned role. In this deluge of characters, Shafak purposefully chooses to begin and end the novel with the strength, resilience and rebelliousness of Zeliha. In order to understand The Bastard of Istanbul, one must understand Zeliha’s full-bodied mythological representation which contrasts with Mustafa’s bare form. Mustafa, Gulsum’s only son and Zeliha’s older brother, is introduced as a “king in his house” and “precious from the day he was born” (31). As a child, Mustafa was arrogant, rude, greedy and unlikeable to everyone but his family. Due to the fact that most of the men in the Kazanci family die unexpected deaths before reaching the age of fifty, these women decide to send Mustafa away for school as a form of protection. Mustafa’s existence within the Kazanci household allows him only silence as he is smothered by women.  The women, then, conspire to keep Mustafa alive and out of reach of the family curse by sending him to the United States. Until the very end of the novel, he resides in Arizona and does not return to Istanbul. Other than a quick history of Mustafa, the novel barely discusses him, proving that he is minimized by his own weaknesses and overshadowed by strong women.

As a voiceless, adolescent male, deified by a group of women, Mustafa, therefore, remains a shadowy figure throughout the novel. The reader learns about him through the voices and eyes of his sisters and future wife, Rose. In fact, Mustafa first speaks more than two thirds of the way through the novel, and then only about weather in Istanbul. He hints at regrets, but does not articulate them. Instead, the narrator notes, “[I]f truth be told, more than Arizona or any other place, it was the future that he [Mustafa] had chosen to settle in and call his home – a home with its backdoor closed to the past” (285). Without a past, Mustafa is an unactualized shell. Yet, the reader should recognize the cultural importance of the only male in a Turkish family. Typically, families would rely on the male to complete all business transactions in addition to offering a certain unspoken respectability. Instead, Shafak points out the way that female voices in a Turkish society can create intimacy and richness. And she allows the story to unfold through the Kazanci women. Shafak utilizes the language of the novel as both a background into social institutions and representative of social values. Roland Barthes explains the way that one accesses idea through form. Bridging both ideology and semiology, Mustafa is idea-in-form, he functions purely as a cultural stereotype representative of historical ideologies (Barthes 112). Deified, fragmented, bereft of emotion, Mustafa’s voice arrives in only two sections of the novel: Zeliha’s rape and Mustafa’s own death.

Shafak creates other human bodies in order to assume a space which will represent an idea-in-form, linked by universal, culturally significant history. In this way she builds a mythological, but culturally significant family. Generally speaking, The Bastard of Istanbul is a novel of women. The first chapter alone introduces the reader to Zeliha and the four other remarkably different women in the Kazaci household.  In addition to living without a male in the house, the Kazanci sisters assume extravagant qualities including clairvoyance and hypochondria. The mother, Gulsum, ironically avoids sentimental attachments, presenting as a severe and nearly silent figure throughout the novel. Mary Douglas writes, “To which particular bodily margins its beliefs attribute power depends on what situation the body is mirroring” (121). The family within their societal role, then, becomes the culturally significant text expressing sexual taboo and ritual.

The novel opens with the lines, “Whatever falls from the sky above, thou shall not curse it. That includes the rain” (1). Water serves as a linguistic device at critical times in the story, meant to draw attention to the implicit cultural identifiers. In this case, the character of Zeliha, on her way to obtain an abortion curses the rain, in direct contrast to etiquette and expected cultural norms. Then, as she receives anasthesia, Zeliha imagines cobblestones falling from the sky. The text reads, “[I]t was raining cobblestones from the blue skies. When a cobblestone fell from the sky, a cobblestone lessened from the pavement below. Above the sky and under the ground, there was the same thing: VO-ID” (19). Zeliha screams and the doctor abandons the abortion. First, real rain descends into the text, and then links into the cobblestones of Zeliha’s dream. Zeliha, sister of a ‘prince’, beautiful, youthful, falls in the same sense as the cobblestone, through a void. As she prepares to cross the physical boundary of abortion, Zeliha’s body becomes a text heavily laden with images. Mary Douglas notes, “Any structure of ideas is vulnerable at its margins” (121). Therefore, as Zeliha’s body awaits an abortion on the surgical table, she absorbs and reflects societal symbolism. For her, the chanting of the Friday prayer, typically a holy day, resulted in an internal awakening that allows her to abandon the abortion and accept the life of a single mother in a society that values the male.

The major events in this novel all incorporate rain. The element of rain, then, becomes the link that allows an object to transcend daily discourse and enter into myth. The rain from this scene links modern day Istanbul and Zeliha’s story directly to Noah’s ark as told by Auntie Banu, which will further enlighten the way in which bodies can be read as culturally significant texts. The familiar story of Noah’s ark is changed slightly in this retelling. Auntie Banu’s story focuses on the way that all members of Noah’s ark must share food. The ingredients physically combine to create community and sustainability through the image of a single pot of ashure. It is important that Shafak uses such a common myth and equally as important that she edits it to pinpoint a singular cultural event involving food. This shared history allows the story’s transcendence into a mythopoetic form. Instead of the biblical story of the flood, the myth transforms into one through which readers will experience struggle, survival and salvation in terms of these two families. Barthes writes, “Unlike the form, the concept is in no way abstract: it is filled with situation. Through the concept, it is a whole new history which is implanted in the myth” (119). In this case, Noah’s ark models an entire narrative that involves flood, famine, hardship and salvation. Rain signifies growth, change, and transfer and links the three major events of this novel: Zeliha’s rape, Zeliha’s abortion and Mustafa’s death.

The Kazanci family represents a marginalized portion of Turkish culture and history, evidenced by the oddities of Mustafa’s burial. The women in this novel deal with the dead body in a very unique manner, mixing both fairy tale and tradition and finally dipping into myth. The family chooses not to bury the body immediately, which is rare in Turkish society.  Instead, Mustafa’s body is washed, prepared for burial and transported back to the Kazanci household for a viewing, despite numerous religious objections.

 The body was cleansed with a bar of daphne soap, as fragrant and pure as the pastures in paradise are said to be. It was scrubbed, swabbed, rinsed, and then left to dry naked on the flat stone in the mosque-yard before being wrapped in a three-piece cotton shroud, placed in a coffin, and despite the adamant counsel of the elderly to bury it on the same day, loaded in a hearse to be driven directly back to the Kazanci domicile. (338)

The Kazanci women blend and bend the rules of Islam depending on their emotional needs. They determine that the body should remain visible to family and friends, but more importantly, to the reader. It is significant that the novel ends with Mustafa’s body resting within the Kazanci household, unburied, shrouded, in much the same role as his entire life: surrounded by women, silent, lifeless and yet, significant. The women circle around Mustafa’s shroud, creating a new space and a new ritual.

The irregular treatment of Mustafa’s shrouded body allows the story to assume mythological properties. As the body is prepared for burial, the narrator notes, “[I]t started to drizzle; sparse, reluctant drops, as if the rain too wanted to play a role in all of this but just hadn’t taken sides yet” (338).  Once again, the presence of rain alerts the reader of the story’s framework, and of the underlying mythology. Noah’s flood has begun to trickle into a modern era, blending old with new, at play with chronological time. Not only does water fall from the sky, but soccer fans flood the streets. These fans interrupt the funeral procession, a fact that becomes relevant when discussing the intersection of myth and fairy tale. Mary Douglas claims, “Just as it is true that everything symbolises the body, so it is equally true (and all the more so for that reason) that the body symbolises everything else” (122). The reader literally follows the frame of the story through the watery streets of Istanbul, flooded with the modern noise, people and cars. Disgusted with the soccer fans, the driver of the hearse asks Armanoush and Asya, “Aren’t they Muslim or what?” (345). Attempting to show his disgust at the lack of respect for religious customs he sees in the soccer fans, this comment actually solidifies the transformation of fairy tale into myth. Shafak is asking the reader to answer this question. Are the people in this novel Muslim? Are they modern? Are they traditional? And where is the line between the two drawn?

The story of Zeliha’s rape follows closely on the heels of Banu’s retelling of Noah’s ark and ashure. The story begins, “But the day Auntie Zeliha was raped was not a rainy day” (307).  The absence of rain highlights the physical divide, the rupture of time and of nature. As Armanoush, the youngest of the Armenians, and a second generation Armenian-American, begins to comprehend the differences that exist between the two cultures, she notes, “For the Armenians, time was a cycle in which the past incarnated in the present and the present birthed the future. For the Turks, time was a multihyphenated line, where the past ended at some definite point and the present started anew from scratch, and there was nothing but rupture in between” (164-5). Void, anger, avoidance and isolation fill the current ‘rupture’. In a similar way, Zeliha and Mustafa begin their lives within this void. Brought up as witnesses to and products of the estrangement of their cultures, the rape only confirms the existence of a hyphenated line. The absence of rain during the violent event obviates the discord between time and nature.

In this novel, there are two events that interrupt the natural flow of life:  Zeliha’s rape and the Armenian genocide. Shafak explores the events of the Armenian genocide through the story of Hovhannes Stamboulian, an Armenian author and intellectual. The reader sees only his march to prison, an unfinished children’s story upon his desk. Guards demand that he leave his desk mid-story while writing a myth that relies heavily upon culturally significant objects, such as the pomegranate. This is the beginning of the genocide, the rupture of time and nature. After his death, most of Hovhannes’ sons and daughters move to the United States to begin again, removed from the painful location of persecution.  Hovhannes’ daughter, Shushan, marries into the Kazanci family, which is Turkish, and remains in Istanbul for a short time. She ultimately abandons her Turkish family to rejoin the Armenian family in the United States. Shushan begins a new life and from there is mother to a wholly Armenian family inside America. The family that she has abandoned, purportedly Turkish, assumes a family curse. Something of the unnatural and evil sentiments reflective of the fear involved in the persecution remains hidden among the Kazanci men, and it is said that they are fated to die before their fiftieth birthday. Ignorant of this, Shushan left the Kazanci family for America, and married again, becoming a mother to an Armenian-American family in addition to the Turkish family she left behind. Armanoush, the youngest of the Armenian-Americans, notes the “mordant gap between the children of those who had managed to stay and the children of those who had to leave” (254). The silent past affects both Turks and Armenians, but without addressing the issues, the gap between two cultures widens. In much the same way, the two families’ histories unexpectedly intertwine and this is to Shafak’s purpose of creating space to discuss cultural taboo.

Mustafa cannot entirely bear the blame for his impulsive, irrational, angry conduct. Raised by women who pampered him, raised to be a prince, raised to be the man who breaks the family curse, Mustafa has little chance of finding his own voice in life. Instead, in an act of pure rage, Mustafa rapes and unknowingly impregnates Zeliha’s body which then assumes the weight of repression and the fallen woman. Zeliha’s body physically becomes larger with motherhood in direct opposition to Mustafa’s emaciated body and literal absence. Asya’s arrival as a bastard is important because she will be the key piece which forces dialogue in the end. As Barthes claims, “[I]ts [the myth's] point of departure is constituted by the arrival of meaning” (123). The presence of both Zeliha and her daughter, Asya, at Mustafa’s death allows them to hold a discussion about past events. Mustafa’s death creates space for the rejection of taboos, such as incest and rape, and replacement of myth with the conceptual neologism of future inclusivity. His death removes Zeliha from mythology and places her solidly back into a future of unruptured time, a future in which she has overcome the cultural difficulties placed upon women in Turkish society.

Throughout the novel, Shafak plays with time and place. She moves seamlessly between past and present, the United States and Istanbul. She carefully highlights the weakness and lifelessness of the present day, Americanized Mustafa so that, when looking back at the time continuum of historical events, one understands the origination of the puppet strings he wears. Mustafa is a creation of his heritage, nothing more, nothing less. Due to family pressures, family heritage and political upheaval, he could not have been other than what he was. He could not have acted differently. The weight and complexity of the intersections of his particular identity did not allow for tools that would enable atonement. Instead, he seeks silence, distance and avoidance. Because he is male, Mustafa achieves this separation without question. Most importantly, Mustafa’s silence and virtual departure from his family create a different kind of form from Zeliha’s. Like his ancestor, Hovhannes Stamboulian, Mustafa’s absence generates the space where story unravels.

Mustafa’s destined path began generations before his birth, with the imprisonment and death of the Armenian intellectual, Hovhannes Stamboulian. As guards lead him to prison, Hovhannes recalls a passage from Rousseau’s Social Contract: “Man is born free but everywhere is in chains. In reality, the difference is that the savage lives within himself while social man lives outside himself and can only live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the feeling of his own existence only from the judgement of others concerning him” (235). And generations later, Mustafa arrives to prove Rousseau’s point and link himself to Hovhannes’ story. Mustafa is the product of secrets, of pain and of tragedy.   His attempt at a life of silence obviates the need for healing. Mustafa’s form allows the two families access to their painful, personal history. Likewise, Mustafa’s death opens the door for a discussion of taboo, rape, incest and genocide. The narrator explains: “In time he had learned to appreciate the desert, its infinity soothing his fear of looking back, its tranquility easing his fear of death. At times like this he remembered, as if his body reminisced on its own, the fate awaiting all the men in his family. At times like this he felt close to committing suicide. Finding death before death found him” (269). Mustafa’s weakness prevents him from confronting his own past, which he escapes as long as he can. However, upon his return to Istanbul, he finally accepts that he is not a prince and no longer wishing to live a lie, he succumbs to his fated destiny. Aware that Auntie Banu had poisoned his ashure, he eats anyway.

Using Auntie Banu’s voice, Shafak incorporates traditional fairy tales into the story. The popular fairy tale style introduction “Once there was; once there wasn’t” frames the novel, a verbal signifier that allows for a different sort of reality. The story of two families, then, transcends its reality by accessing the framework of fairy tale. Mary Douglas writes, “There can be thoughts which have never been put into words. Once words have been framed the thought is changed and limited by the very words selected. So the speech has created something, a thought which might not have been the same” (64). In this case, the introduction of “Once there was; once there wasn’t” offers a comfortable prop in the form of accessible, obvious forms, much in the same way that Shafak labels characters in a way that reflects their personalities.

Both Asya and Armanoush interact with social groups named for their attributes. Armanoush belongs to an online chat room where everyone has given themselves labels, such as hers: Madame My-Exiled-Soul. Likewise, Asya often visits a cafe in Istanbul where her friends are labeled, but not named. For example, she dates the Dipsomaniac Cartoonist. Framed by their titles, the characters in this novel outline basic cultural stereotypes.

These cultural identifiers function in much the same way as theater props. Only necessary in staged environments, props serve as a means to an end. In this novel, Shafak utilizes the djinni, magical and mischievous deities, as a sort of prop. Fairy tales involve magic and enchantments, so in a culture where djinni are perceived to be real, the fairy tale drifts into myth. As is often the case, this family is full of secrets, rigidity and rebellion. Auntie Banu relies upon djinni to tell her of historical events. These voices build a bridge over the ever-widening gap created by war, incest and rape.  The two victims, Zeliha and Mustafa, have only one verbal exchange throughout the novel, during the rape scene. Banu, the eldest sister, relates the story of Zeliha’s rape at the hands of her older brother, Mustafa, to the reader through the invention of djinni.

In order to access the images of a specific mythology, the reader needs to identify with the symbols. Layers of complexity exist within each image and as it sheds the specific unique identity, it gains a concrete, culturally accessible value. Barthes explains the way that the signified comes to be known through the signifier within a system of mythology. Barthes’ metalanguage, or mythology, arrives when one utilizes a group of forms as a place of global sign. The original bodies lose their individuality and instead come to represent a larger notion. Only when the reader understands the historical links between characters can each character of The Bastard of Istanbul represent the larger ideology of myth as described by Barthes. In this created society, forms of oppression interrelate to create a system of oppression, reflecting multiple layers of discrimination in much the same way as contemporary societies. As Auntie Banu continues to investigate the past and relay it to the reader with the help of the djinni, she obviates layers of discrimination. Kimberlé Crenshaw writes, “[T]he failure to embrace the complexities of compoundedness is not simply a matter of political will, but is also due to the influence of a way of thinking about discrimination which structures politics so that struggles are categorized as singular issues. Moreover, this structure imports a descriptive and normative view of society that reinforces the status quo” (“Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race”48). Therefore, Auntie Banu’s narration in addition to the elements of mythology and cultural stereotypes all enable the transcendence of Mustafa’s death from the death of an individual into a redemptive, healing space, one that overcomes taboo and secret. Again, Barthes explains, “When it [meaning] becomes form, the meaning leaves its contingency behind; it empties itself, it becomes impoverished, history evaporates, only the letter remains” (117). Mustafa is now a mere form, a key word, set out to assist the reader decipher the remaining signs of the text. Mustafa’s absence speaks more powerfully than his presence.

Mustafa as the form, or the signifier, cannot be the sum total of the story. A form must be utilized in order to speak about structure. Therefore, he becomes an actual, physical space over which Zeliha feels able to tell Asya the truth about her father. Asya, being the ‘bastard’, was unprepared to hear that Mustafa, her uncle, was also her father. Zeliha notes that this discussion must take place at his death, that the time for discussion is fleeting. She says to Asya, “’I finally realized, I owed you an explanation. And if I don’t make it now, there will be no other time” (353). She means, of course, that the family curse, the political history, the rape and the family history all the way back to Hovhannes Stamboulian can be laid to rest. As Barthes noted earlier, the unnatural occurrences in this story and within history, have led the characters to precisely this spot. They transcend their spatio-temporal plane, enabling their bodies to represent larger issues in the cultural context. Mustafa is the prop that results in a cultural neologism. And the ‘bastard’ is no longer a bastard.

Ruth Benedict explains the complexity of an individual within society. She states, “In reality, society and the individual are not antagonists. His culture provides the raw material of which the individual makes his life” (251-2). Culture has indeed shaped these characters and is inseparable from them. The farther one moves from the initial event or rupture, the more it writes a narrative, transforms into myth. Barthes claims, “[W]e are no longer dealing here with a theoretical mode of representation: we are dealing with this particular image, which is given for this particular signification” (110). Mustafa’s physical purpose in the novel would be lost without the family history, and more specifically, without Zeliha’s presence at his death. Shafak assigns and specifies very concrete images to each of her characters for the purpose of obviating their cultural significance.

Mustafa’s existence in The Bastard of Istanbul can certainly be seen as marginal. Mary Douglas claims that structures are most vulnerable at their margins (121). And the Kazanci women are, without a doubt, marginalized characters in both actual, mainstream culture and within the auspices of the novel. The fact that the reader gains access to culturally significant rituals and events through the eyes, voices, actions and habits of the Kazanci women, speaks to this marginalized structure. Douglas explains:

Any culture is a series of related structures, which comprise social forms, values, cosmology, the whole of knowledge and through which all experience is mediated. Certain cultural themes are expressed by rites of bodily manipulation… The rituals enact the form of social relations and in giving these relations visible expression they enable people to know their own society. The rituals work upon the body politic through the symbolic medium of the physical body. (128)

In other words, the Kazanci women represent the margins of society and they mythologize Mustafa’s body through a blend of ritual and superstition. More importantly, societal margins often represent important but often unheard voices within society. As Douglas claims, “What is being carved in flesh is an image of society” (116). Zeliha realizes this when she designates Mustafa’s burial as the space in which to discuss the cultural taboo of at least incest, if not rape.

The marginalized, then, participate in Mustafa’s funeral in multiple ways. First, and most obvious, are the Kazanci women: mothers, daughters, wives and sisters of the fallen ‘prince’. Yet soccer fans and pedestrians participate as well, obviating the idea that this novel discusses not only familial rites, but societal ones. The narrator describes the scene of soccer fans: “Thus they all flowed along the avenue in a flood of red and yellow, amid chaos and clamor” (344). It is important to note that the people flowed, much like water. They flowed because they will be the redemptive elements of the novel, while also creating a present day mythology. Red and yellow soccer fans surround the green hearse, which carries Mustafa in a white shroud. Color symbolizes both an adherence to Islamic traditions as well as diversity and a celebration of life. These colors swirl into a pot of ashure, given at Noah’s ark, a mix of everything. Margins are everywhere present in this scene, as if replacement characters and scenarios for Noah’s ark. Instead of an ark, Shafak designs a Turkish household that grows to include an Armenian-American family member. Crenshaw notes that, “The struggle over which differences matter and which do not is neither an abstract nor an insignificant debate among women…they raise critical issues of power” (“Mapping the Margins” 1265). These families and voices become the elements that transcend their cultural identifiers, that transcend present and past in order to perform a creation myth.

The element of water moves through the text in a significant way. Rain was absent on the day of Zeliha’s rape. However, its absence may be just as significant as the presence of rain in other scenes. Events that disrupt nature must exist in order for change and growth to occur. Decades later, as the green hearse carries Mustafa towards the family house, pedestrians sing, “Let earth, sky, water listen to our voice/ Let the whole world shake with our heavy steps” (344). These pedestrians reflect the function of marginalized voices in much the same way as the Kazanci women represent modern day culture in Turkey. And they sing their importance.

What follows the end of a myth? The reader is led to believe that, as is often the case in fairy tales, there is a happily ever after to this story. Shafak’s novel begins as fairy tale, which involves magic and enchantments such as the djinni. She then melds the story into myth, in order to elucidate the way in which a society may renew itself. Though marginalized, the Kazanci family finds a way to create a vibrant future. Auntie Banu uses djinni often and retells common folklore consistent with fairy tales. In this case, genocide, rape and incest significantly rupture chronological time, which also allows the story of the bastard to enter the realm of mythology. The Kazanci family seeks and creates a new way of life through inclusion and acceptance.

Myth is laden with meaning only if the object itself loses individuality and gains universality. In other words, a physical presence must disappear allowing myth to appropriate image, laden with new meaning.  Barthes claims, “In semiology, the third term is nothing but the association of the first two” (121), meaning that The Bastard of Istanbul conveys meaning through both cultural mythology and culturally relevant signifiers. Mustafa’s body allows for a space over which Zeliha can discuss the taboo subjects of incest and rape. Mustafa’s death is a product of the unnatural rupture of time, healed only by the full disclosure to Asya about the identity of her true father.

While this novel incorporates many elements of rupture, disease and division, it also allows for healing, discussion and community. Through marginalized voices, repurposed cultural stories, and tragedy, Shafak enables discussion and proposes a reparation of time through myth. The reader feels that Zeliha’s future holds much promise as she stands apart from the shrouded Mustafa, clutching two fragile tea cups purchased at the beginning of the novel, moments before her attempted abortion. Both the teacups and the baby survived two decades of struggle. And finally, rain closes the novel, once again highlighting the fact that myth underlines this novel. Rain enables each character a function on the chronological timeline towards a modern people. The novel ends hopefully, a hodge-podge family full of once marginalized voices, now the ‘first peoples’ of a modern era.

The post Mythology, Taboo and Cultural Identity in Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

[H]e was considered the foremost of authorities on the Mexicans of Texas.  Hank Harvey had been born in New York City some sixty years before.  He had gone to grade school there and then worked in a delicatessen to make some money so he could come down to his dreamland, Texas….  After he had come to Texas with only a few years schooling, he resolved to become an authority on Texas history and folklore.  In a few years he had read every book there was on the early history of Texas, it was said, and his fellow Texans accepted him as the Historical Oracle of the State.  There was a slight hitch, it is true.  Most early history books were written in Spanish, and K. Hank didn’t know the language.  However, nobody mentioned this, and it didn’t detract from Harvey’s glory.

—Américo Paredes, George Washington Gómez:  A Mexicotexan Novel

What, then, does the de-colonisation of culture actually mean:  the recuperation of an essential culture that existed before the historical moment of colonisation, or the idea of admitting different histories to a complex and syncretic present composed of cross-cultural transfigurations?

—Iain Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity

******

“We Americans,” Walt Whitman wrote in 1883, “have yet to really learn our own antecedents . . . Thus far, impress’d by New England writers and schoolmasters, we tacitly abandon ourselves to the notion that our United States have been fashion’d from the British Islands only . . . which is a very great mistake.”[1]  Whitman’s critique of the skewed understanding of the U.S. and of U.S. history viewed from the limited vantage point of the Northeastern seaboard remained pertinent well over a hundred years later. David J. Weber writing a history of the Spanish frontier of North America in the nineties found himself once again having to confront this seemingly intractable ideological stance. As he writes, “Although the United States has always been a multiethnic society most general histories of the nation have suggested that its colonial origins resided entirely in the thirteen English colonies.”[2] Little has changed in the intervening years. In fact, at no other time has the US turned its back on Latin America so long and so blatantly as today.

As a Latin American living in New England and teaching at Dartmouth College, it has been difficult if not impossible not to notice (and ponder) the intersection between colonial past and imperialist present that is so apparent here, and to which Whitman’s critique alludes. The “new” in New England of course refers us back to a colonial history still visible today in the quaint British-style towns with their “village green” and churches mapped onto indigenous cultures. The enormous pines that were cut down in the eighteenth century to make masts for the British Royal Navy have been replaced by forests of smaller, second or third generation growth trees, reminding the newcomer that the “new” also refers to a new understanding of nature.  The gloomy forests of long ago have given way to a “managed,” instrumentalized landscape.  The indigenous presence, erased from the landscape and re-situated on the margins of this society, has been displaced onto the symbols of the “college on the hill” where I teach:  as the kneeling Native American receiving “the Book” from a man of learning who occupies a central position (still central today, alas), and as the much-disputed “Indians” sign of the football team still adamantly worn by some students who mistake insult for resistance to change—or perhaps, even worse, intend it.

The College’s biblical VOX CLAMANTIS IN DESERTO voices Dartmouth’s initial mission.  By turning existing indigenous cultures into a wilderness, it reproduces Columbus’s gesture three hundred years earlier, of claiming populated islands in the Caribbean for the Spanish Crown by planting a flag on their shores and whispering empire-building words into the wind. In the logo VOX CLAMANTIS IN DESERTO, colonial past and imperial present intersect:  the British colonial subject, the subject created and interpellated by an empire, is in turn already intent on colonizing and/or Christianizing other subjects. Indeed, in the race between France and England for North America, evangelization (Catholic vs. Protestant) plays a crucial role.  As one of the historians of the College writes:  “The country able to win the allegiance of the Indians might ultimately gain the huge prize of North America.”[3]  Understanding this, Eleazar Wheelock’s lifelong goal had been that of founding a college where American Indians could be Christianized and hence also acculturated.  His goal however was not devoid of imperialist ambivalence:  Dartmouth College, previously known as Moor’s Indian Charity School, ended up being a missionary college where the future evangelizers of Native Americans were trained.  As one account of Dartmouth’s founding has it, “The Indian charity school, which he instituted in 1755, proved reasonably successful; quite a good many Indian boys came to it, and quite a good many English youths, also on charity, came there to prepare for college. Wheelock saw that if these English youths could be induced to become missionaries to the Indians, they might be of even greater worth than the Indians themselves.”[4] That is, Dartmouth fast became a college of paying white students and not a college for Native Americans.  In fact, shortly after its founding in 1771 as the “ninth of America’s Colonial institutions of higher learning and the last to receive its charter from the Crown of England,” the Trustees in Scotland and England were “adamant in their criticism that funds intended for the schooling of Indians were being spent for whites.”[5]  In a gesture which repeated Columbus’s infantilization of the natives of the New World—and which prevails to this day in representations of the colonial and/or so-called “Third-World” subject—Wheelock justified the derailment of funds destined to Native Americans by attributing his failure to the Native American worse-than-childlike “sloth” and total unconcern with the future. Despite his growing conviction about the futility of Christianizing and educating Native Americans and because he needed to gain economic support, Wheelock’s son was teaching twenty one Native Americans in Hanover by 1774.[6]  Indeed, because of father and son’s diplomatic and educational efforts among indigenous communities, Dartmouth was the only college that did not close during the Revolution irrespective of whether the tribes in the vicinity fought for or against the British and today prides itself on its annual Pow-wow and Native American Studies Program.

The story of Dartmouth’s founding poignantly illustrates three things: the intersection of and tension between the colonial and the imperial has to be read not only within the “new” of New England but also as the underlying ideological framework that shaped the establishment of the disciplines at Dartmouth.  Unlike the history of any Latin American country which saw a pre-Columbian, colonial, and independence period and which is now struggling to surmount that legacy while at the same time facing multinational neocolonialism, the U.S.—in little over a hundred years— effected the transition from colony to empire in its own right.  Partly because this transition came about so fast and partly because the “logic” of empire has dominated the present, the colonial legacy of this country, which includes the reach of Spain into most of what is today the U.S. is invariably by-passed with the one exception being to tell the foundational story of the thirteen colonies of the eastern seaboard. Wheelock’s dealings show the imbrication of education with politics or perhaps, better put, the fact that epistemologies are also always ideological—something we all know yet knowingly forget when we talk about the “Ivory Tower” or when we tell one another that academia is not the “real” world or—more seriously—when in our critical praxis, we overlook the fact that disciplines arise during different historical junctures and out of different political needs (i.e., Area Studies). Finally, the story of Dartmouth’s founding shows that the Caribbean and its complicated multi-imperial (Spanish, British, French, Dutch) colonial history were “present” in New England from the start. We must also not forget that Wheelock, also a key player in Dartmouth’s founding, was a Yale graduate and that Yale too owed its existence to the fabulous fortune its founder had made as a clerk in the East India Company and as governor of Madras.[7]  As with the official or popular history of the U.S. which erases the Spanish/Mexican colonial past of this nation, even in an Ivy League institution which would imagine itself as a near to perfect British copy, much like the relegation of the colonial and Antillean source of England’s wealth in Jane Eyre to the “attic,” the Wheelock household too, as recalled by a student, was notorious for its detestable “cookery.” Bad food stood in stark contrast to the fine “furnishings of the house, the linen sheets and pillow cases trimmed with lace . . . brought to Hanover by Wheelock’s wife, the daughter of a former governor of the island of St. Thomas.”[8]

Likewise, the “new” in New Mexico or in New Spain (Mexico) reproduces the colonial action of making the unknown known and the foreign familiar by mapping a past and a space left behind onto a here and now.  Spanish names such as California, Montana, La Florida, Los Angeles serve as an index of that previous Spanish and Mexican colonial presence just as the “new” in New England points to a former British colonial presence.  However, given the preponderance of a historiography and a dominant culture shaped from the bird’s eye view of the thirteen English colonies, the Hispanic and Native American subtext of the U.S. is deleted from that history despite the fact that ¾ of what is today the U.S. was once first a part of the Spanish Empire and then independent Mexico.  That historiographic and historical marginalization continues today in the form of racial and cultural discrimination.  Someone born with a Hispanic or Native American surname is denied full citizenship rights in the United States regardless of how many generations their family has been here and whether or not their family had been “here” before the U.S. acquired its present boundaries in 1848 and 1898—crucial years which saw the birth of the greatest empire of modernity.  The uneasy overlapping of two spaces and two times in the United States is perhaps best illustrated by the state of New Mexico’s 1990 decision to address the confusion between Mexico and New Mexico by issuing license plates that clarify:  New Mexico, USA.

As a Latin American academic situated between Spanish and Portuguese, Comparative Literature, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Latin American and Caribbean Studies, I was drawn, of course, to Fernando Ortiz and Angel Rama’s theorizations of transculturation as a way of countering top down models of acculturation or assimilation. And I find it more relevant to focus on the Americas hemispherically than I do to think of them in terms of discrete nations or to view the history of “Our America” in Martí’s famous formulation, in terms of this country’s English colonial history. However, I am constantly confronted with new generations of students that arrive at Dartmouth completely unaware of this country’s US Hispanic colonial legacy. While this lack of knowledge might be excusable in other parts of the country and among less educated classes, this is often the case with students hailing from the US Southwest—many of whom are Hispanic yet have never been taught that history. Increasingly too, as the country shifts ever more to the right and efforts intensify to literally whitewash its history, we are witnessing attempts to ban ethnic studies from universities in the Southwest—not to mention the “editing” of textbooks in Texas currently underway eliding the Spanish colonial period of US history. It might not be entirely hyperbolic, then, to assert that this country’s idea of the national has come to depend on the suppression of that Native American and Hispanic indigenous subtext giving the impression that “the English and Americans expanded west and south onto vacant lands, except for those held by a few wild aborigines.”[9] Largely because of these efforts, the fact that the greater part of the territory that is today the U.S. was once first a Spanish colony and then Mexico continues to be overlooked in the American popular imagination despite all the debates regarding multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and transculturation we are having across US academia.  Hence North Americans continue to celebrate “Columbus Day” as the day of “discovery” whereas Latin Americans celebrate October 12th as El Día de la Raza, that is, as the celebration of the birth of mestizaje or a new race and culture as a consequence of the conquest.

The kind of historiographical sleight of hand that creates a wilderness where there are many different cultures and peoples in fact is made possible when a whole Spanish and Mexican colonial legacy is erased turning all Hispanics into “wetbacks” just as the term “American” which until 1776 had referred to the indigenous population of the whole continent (e.g., Joseph François Lafitau’s Moeurs des savages américaines (1724) or Corneille de Pauw’s Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains 1768) came to designate “exclusively those who have “inherited” the right to the land:  the European colonists who, by shedding their blood on American soil and wrenching it from the hands of the British, believe to have established themselves as its rightful owners.”[10] Thus, all other Americans have had to adopt a minority status as evidenced by the special designations “Native” American or “Latin” American that also go hand in hand with stereotypical characterizations which arose as early as 1492. Since then, indigenous peoples have been seen either as friendly (read gullible and servile) natives or as savages/cannibals (read guerrillas today).[11]  That is, they are read as “others” whose difference is invariably weighed in negative terms and measured in terms of distance in space and time thus denying them contemporaneity or co-evalness. U.S. academia does little to contest this erasure in part because the disciplines in the U.S. have emerged in a colonial/imperial context. As Fabian points out, given that the temporal discourse of anthropology and of related disciplines “was formed decisively under the paradigm of evolutionism [and] rested on a conception of Time that was not only secularized and naturalized but also thoroughly spatialized…. ever since, anthropology’s efforts to construct relations with its Other by means of temporal devices implied affirmation of difference as distance.”[12]  Reflecting on this praxis Vine Deloria will write:  “To be an Indian in modern American society is in a very real sense to be unreal and ahistorical.”[13]  Today, even the term “Our America” coined by José Martí, the Cuban thinker who was so instrumental in criticizing increasing U.S. imperialism in Latin America already at the end of the nineteenth century and recuperated today by Mexican-American critics has been appropriated by the U.S. academy to designate the US exclusively.[14]

Along with this subalternization of Latin America and the Spanish and Mexican colonial era of the U.S. comes a hierarchization in academia, which mirrors the political, economic, and racial division of the world and which belies our belief in our academic independence.  In fact, the nineteenth century, as the modern/colonial period, is the moment in which European languages (English, French, and German) constitute themselves as the languages of modernity; Amsterdam replaces Seville; the “center” of Europe shifts away from the Iberian peninsula and Castilian and Portuguese; the languages of waning empires are relegated to a marginal position and came to be thought of as not well suited for “scientific and philosophical discourses.”[15]  It is no accident then, that the current debate in “postcolonial studies” is dominated by the English language:  the Indian subcontinent and Africa are “central” while there is hardly any mention of either Latin American colonial theories or the Spanish and Mexican colonial legacy of this country.  Superficially, the focus on British colonialism in India and Africa would seem to be attributable to the sheer intellectual prominence of thinkers like Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, and others. But the main reason is obviously the preponderance of English as a theoretical lingua franca. Thus  critics like many of us who fall into the new category of the “migrant” intellectual and who bring into the “center” problems of the periphery from which we stem as well an in-depth knowledge of two or more cultures, two or more languages, and hence an intrinsically transcultural critical practice do not always succeed in being heard.  That ex-centric knowledge has to be translated into English and Latin American intellectuals have until recently resisted the English-only bias of US academia. Given that publishers tend to translate more from the French, it should come as no surprise that the most important French intellectuals who are transcultural as well such as  Héléne Cixous, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Tzvetan Todorov, et al. all have been translated into English whereas prominent Latin American intellectuals have not until quite recently and only, seemingly, once the debate around colonialism and neocolonialism had waned.

In fact, there are prominent Latin American intellectuals both in the U.S. and in Latin America who have been intent on thinking about colonialism, imperialism and neocolonialism and who have applied these critiques to the US academy, yet they have not even managed to be incorporated into what we now know as “postcolonial studies.”  I am thinking of intellectuals such as Josefina Ludmer, José Martí, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Angel Rama, Nelly Richard, Edmundo Desnoes, Eduardo Galeano, Beatriz Sarlo, Rigoberta Menchú, Antonio Cornejo Polar, Edmundo O’Gorman, Leopoldo Zea, Paulo Freire­, Edmundo Dussel—to mention but a few—who have theorized Latin America’s troubled relation to the Colossus of the North, refusing to think in terms of “post” colonialism, and who have instead highlighted the processes of globalization and transnationalization as yet another guise colonialism has taken. Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos Jáuregui’s collection of essays including and reflecting on the contributions of these thinkers has achieved quite a lot in this respect but it seems that this volume has come too late in some ways, since the raging debate around questions of coloniality has largely been superseded by current debates on globalization and transnationalism.[16] The refusal of Spanish as a national and academic lingua franca is also to blame since the dominance of English will necessarily skew the discussion towards the English and American empires.

Indeed, Spanish—and by extension anything Hispanic such as Latino Studies—is relegated to a second-class position geopolitically as well as academically.  Thus, to advocate for multiculturalism and/or interdisciplinarity without also pushing for multilingualism is merely a superficial gesture and we end up in the ridiculous position of advocating a monolingual multiculturalism.  It is indeed ironic that the “English Only” movement arose precisely around the same time as the inception of NAFTA which we would have assumed, would have led to a much greater investment in language acquisition, particularly Spanish across the US. While that has indeed happened, and increasingly students enter college with 3-4 years of high school Spanish, that has been achieved thanks to students’ living in ever more bilingual contexts and despite the government’s disinvestment in schools across the nation and despite the fact that Spanish is still being called a “foreign” language. Indeed, as Mary Louise Pratt observed long ago, in the United States, to call Spanish, French, Cantonese, Italian, Japanese, Lakota, Navajo, Cree foreign languages is a misnomer (these are not “foreign” languages).[17]  Spanish, which has had a long and rich literary production before English became dominant in the U.S. is ideologically being made to become more foreign than ever by and in the publishing and film industries given the current practice of assuming an Anglophone audience.

In her introductory essay to the path breaking volume Cultures of United States Imperialism Amy Kaplan suggests there is a “denial of history” in the U.S., which cuts across English, American studies and history departments.  The pattern reproduced ad absurdum is the following:  “the absence of culture from the history of U.S. imperialism; the absence of empire from the study of American culture; and the absence of the United States from the postcolonial study of imperialism.”[18]  These “absences,” in fact, make it conceivable to talk about the U.S. as a world power and at the same time dismiss the notion that it is also an empire.  Yet in this edition too—which is crucial, even radical—from within the context of American Studies and English departments, Kaplan starts with Perry Miller’s conception of American studies on the banks of the Congo in an attempt to reinscribe and recuperate what Toni Morrison has called “an africanist presence” as subtext to the U.S. imaginary.[19]  While Kaplan’s attempt to reinscribe Africa at the heart of America is timely and welcome—especially in relation to the vindication of African-Americans—in so far as it avoids coming to terms with the Hispanic and Native American present and past of this country as well as the African, it again only reinforces what I have been arguing.  In fact, while trying to undermine the insularity of American studies which mirrors the insularity of a historiography based on/in New England, Cultures of United States Imperialism unwittingly reproduces the academic and linguistic hierarchy that literally makes impossible any kind of dialogue between American studies and Latin American studies.  Significantly only 5 essays out of 26 partially relate to Latin America. Yet an even lesser ratio prevails in most publications in this country since then whether academic or popular.  And while there were over three hundred movie theaters in the US showing Spanish language films, particularly Mexican films of the Golden Age in the 30s and 40s we would be hard put to find one anywhere in the US today.

While we pride ourselves, then, in the (apparent) breakdown of the insularity of the disciplines in the last twenty years—an era characterized by the development of multicultural and cross-disciplinary curricula—and hence once again potentially open to Bolton’s seminal idea of a “Greater America” we nevertheless have not managed to transcend the parochial historical vision criticized by Whitman. Whereas a Chicano performance artist like Guillermo Gómez Peña will argue that every encounter between two people taking place here today constitutes a “border experience,” the lack of a connection between the Spanish/Mexican colonial past of this country and its present Latinization is accompanied by the increasing rigidity of conceptions of the border as well as the literal transformation of a once fluid border into a new iteration of the Berlin Wall. Despite the fact, then, that “the signifier Latin American itself now refers also to significant social forces within the United States” [20] and that people do not tire of pointing out that New York is the largest Puerto Rican and Dominican metropolis and Los Angeles the second-largest Mexican metropolis (not to mention Chicago and other cities increasingly becoming Latin American centers in the heartland of the US), indeed, given the increasing Latinization of the US one would expect that it would no longer be possible to erase the Spanish/Mexican colonial legacy of this country —not to speak of the presence of Latinos. But that is unfortunately not so given the power of the media, the English only approach of the publishing industry, as well as the academic reproduction of archaic epistemological and disciplinary hierarchies. Symptomatic of these times, a senior administrator at Dartmouth College recently justified gross inequality in pay scales among male and female full professors at the College in the following manner: “Determining salaries varies by individual, … so the range of salaries among full professors is relatively large. …For example, computer science and economics will typically pay more than Spanish literature.” While he is stating the obvious, that he chose Spanish (and not French or German or even English) as his example for pay disparities across the disciplines is telling.

As is implicit in the theory of transculturation, we have to recuperate the past in all its fullness and radical heterogeneity in order to create the conditions for the possibility of finally establishing a true transcultural politics and epistemology. For, even if submerged and/or banished to the margins, our intellectual praxis should entail a mere shifting of accents, for colonization in effect only means “that dominant views of languages, of recording the past, and of charting territories become synonymous with the real by obstructing possible alternatives.”[22] Transcultural critics have therefore opted to study continuums such as Plantation America, the Black Atlantic, the Pacific Rim, and the indigenous continuum across the Americas as is perhaps best evidenced by Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead in which the Native American interfaces with the Latino on both sides of the border. This new hemispheric, transcultural and transborder understanding is of course undermined by the powers of globalization to continue all that 1492 has signified historically, culturally, and economically—only by other means. Indeed, as Masao Miyoshi argued in the nineties at the height of the debate around postcolonialism, our preoccupation with questions of post-colonialism and multiculturalism, look “suspiciously like another alibi to conceal the actuality of global politics [given that] colonialism is even more active now in the form of transnational corporations.”[23] He forgot to mention the actuality of global politics in US academia’s reproducing ad nauseam the epistemological biases that arose when the US transitioned from colony to empire and which lies at the heart of the disciplines here, now, still.

The post Ivy League Foundational Narratives and Academic Disciplinary Hierarchies appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

El haber sido miembro del Movimiento Homosexual de Lima (Mhol), una de las organizaciones gay/lésbica más antigua de Sudamérica[1] debería producir orgullo y satisfacción, pero ¿qué ocurre cuando dicha organización pertenece al Perú? Pues, se entremezclan muchas sensaciones y emociones. Claro, existe una sensación de orgullo hacia el movimiento, pues hablamos de una organización que viene trabajando por un poco más de 30 años, manteniéndose vigente en un contexto donde el tejido de las organizaciones sociales es débil y fragmentado. Pero también existe frustración debido a que después de todos esos años no se ha logrado ningún marco de protección por parte de los diferentes gobiernos frente a la comunidad LGBT. Contrariamente, lo que ha existido, existe y se halla institucionalizado en la cultura estatal es la negación sistemática y estructural de derechos hacia a esta comunidad específica. Esta situación lleva a cuestionar las estrategias, las acciones y la postura que el movimiento ha tenido frente al Estado.

Mientras son muchos avances y conquistas que se han producido en la región como en el caso de Argentina, Uruguay y Brasil, las reformas constitucionales de Ecuador y Bolivia, en relación al reconocimiento de derechos a la comunidad LGBT; el Perú se encuentra entre los países más homofóbicos, exactamente en el puesto 113 de 138 países evaluados, el peor puesto en la región Latinoamericana^[2]. Y claro, definitivamente el contexto homofóbico trae consecuencias tangibles en la comunidad LGBT, lo cual se evidencia a nivel cotidiano, económico, social y principalmente a nivel político, lo que se traduce en la inexistencia de políticas públicas LGBT inclusivas en el país hasta la fecha.

Sin embargo, no es que no exista ninguna política pública dirigida a la comunidad LGBT, sino que se debe mencionar la existencia de una exclusión deliberada por parte del Estado. Por un lado, existe una política pública por omisión (Béjar, 2011: 36), la cual se traduce en un comportamiento sistemático de negación de toda propuesta normativa enfocada en la comunidad LGBT. ¿Qué sentido tiene que en el censo de población y vivienda del año 2013 se omita literalmente a las parejas del mismo sexo que viven bajo un mismo techo, como si se consideró en Chile? Por otro lado, en el Perú, así como en la mayoría de países de la región andina, la principal estrategia de inclusión de la comunidad LGBT ha sido las políticas de salud pública, específicamente las relacionadas a enfrentar la epidemia del VIH y focalizada en ciertos grupos considerados en situación de mayor vulneración (Jaime: 2013).

Para tener una mirada de la situación, desde el primer reporte de Sida en Perú, la epidemia del VIH se ha concentrado en las comunidades de travestis, gays, hombres bisexuales y hombres que tienen sexo con hombres, alcanzando prevalencias de 24.3% en travestis y 17.1% en gays, que constituyen el 56% de casos nuevos, según reportes de la vigilancia centinela (CONAMUSA: 2011). Según Mhol (2012: 7) los servicios de prevención, diagnóstico y atención de ITS y VIH que brinda el Estado peruano alcanzan únicamente al 9.77% de las personas TGB/HSH (teniendo en cuenta el universo de 429, 489 personas), acciones para las que solo se destina el 3.2% del gasto nacional en VIH según el estudio de Medición de Gasto en Salud MEGAS (MINSA: 2012). Además, no más del 50% de personas TGB/HSH alcanzadas por dichos servicios han tenido acceso a una prueba diagnóstica de VIH. Así, aún en tiempos de acceso supuestamente universal y gratuito al tratamiento antirretroviral, cada día mueren tres personas por sida en el Perú. Mientras tanto, el desabastecimiento de condones y antirretrovirales es constante (Mhol, 2012: 7).

En relación a la violencia, el primer informe de derechos humanos de la comunidad LGBT en el Perú (Alvarez y Bracamonte: 2006) identificó que una persona LGBT moría cada cinco días; en la actualidad se ha identificado que cada semana muere asesinada una persona LGBT entre el 2006 al 2010, como expresión más extrema de la violencia sistemática y recurrente que viven las personas por su orientación sexual o identidad de género (Romero: 2011).

Frente a esa situación, el Congreso ha claudicado en su deber de sancionar los crímenes de odio. El proyecto de Ley 3584/2009-CR que proponía la Incorporación de los Crímenes de Odio en el Código Penal fue archivado por presión de los grupos antiderechos y las principales bancadas de ese entonces. En diciembre de 2011 se presentó el proyecto de Ley multipartidario 609/2011-CR contra Acciones Criminales Originadas por Motivos de Discriminación, que fue discutido en comisión y en el pleno en julio del 2013, pero que lamentablemente no fue aprobado.

Sobre el acceso a empleo y trabajo, si bien es cierto que dentro de la comunidad LGBT existen diferencias, resultado de variables como clase, raza, etnicidad, ingreso, pobreza, educación (Sardá-Chandiramani, 2008: 196-197), es bastante claro que la situación de estos sujetos es vulnerable si la analizamos desde la perspectiva del Decent Work, propuesta por la OIT (Ghai: 2006), ya que como es discutido por Ferreyra (2010: 208), donde es posible obtener trabajo fuera de la prostitución, no hay protección frente a la discriminación, como ocurre con los gays y las lesbianas que deben ocultar su orientación en sus lugares de trabajo por temor al despido. En el caso de las travestis, la situación es más cruda, pues la visibilidad intrínseca a la construcción de la identidad y el cuerpo las coloca en una situación de exclusión laboral, donde una de las pocas opciones es el trabajo sexual y otros oficios menores como la cocina, la cosmética y la decoración (Salazar y Villayzan, 2009: 12). Incluso, en el ejercicio del trabajo sexual, ellas buscan la oportunidad de ejercerlo en el exterior, pues éste se percibe como una buena oportunidad de hacer dinero, como ocurre con muchas travestis peruanas que migran hacia Buenos Aires, Madrid y Milán.

La respuesta desde el movimiento

Cuando comencé mi trayectoria en la lucha por mis derechos y los de mis compañeros LGBT, estaba aún en la universidad y fue el llevar un curso de género con la genial luchador feminista Gina Vargas, lo que inspiró en mí una serie de ideas, compromisos y, sobre todo, ánimos y entusiasmo por querer lograr un cambio sustancial. Claro, estando en tercer año de Sociología, tenía más interés en generar cambios a través de la investigación. Sin embargo, fue ya como egresado, cuando empecé a laborar en proyectos relacionados con la salud –específicamente en la respuesta al VIH/Sida– la incidencia política y la promoción de derechos, que entendí que la pura ciencia y la academia no podían entender ni pretender resolverlo todo.

Fue cuando mi entrada al Mhol significó –utilizando las palabras de Tito Bracamonte– el empezar a “contaminarme”, a conocer de primera mano las condiciones de vida de nuestros compañeros, sus luchas cotidianas, sus resistencias personales y comunitarias; a aprender y dialogar desde una posición horizontal entre ellos, incluso a divertirme y disfrutar de sus espacios, que luego se convirtieron también en míos. Ello trajo muchos aprendizajes y recompensas, personales la gran mayoría, pero también académicas y profesionales, pues nunca renuncié a ser un investigador, sino que ello empezó a cobrar un sentido más humano y conllevó un mayor posicionamiento político, desde una voz con identidad LGBT, dejando atrás nociones abstractas, desbordadas de contenido pero no desde una cartografía específica.

Desde entonces  me permito hacer “el viaje” de un lado a otro, aunque en algunos espacios académicos he sido relegado por ello, pero a estas alturas y valgan verdades no me interesa lo que la academia tenga que decir al respecto. Fue en mi estadía en una universidad holandesa donde experimenté la clara división que existe entre el activismo y el trabajo intelectual, y cómo el ser activista implicaba que en un salón de clase, una PhD alemana me mencione: “a claro, es que tú eres activista”, donde ese “ah claro” implicaba que ni mi trayectoria ni mi reflexión era suficiente para dialogar sobre la importancia de la identidad en los sujetos insertos en actividades de economía informal.

En Perú actualmente no es que exista –o en todo caso no le he percibido con mayor claridad- una división así, pues existe un diálogo entre ambos campos. Aquí es más frecuente que los activistas se relacionen con la academia, pues es uno de los pocos canales para visibilizar la realidad, a falta de uno formal e institucional por parte del Estado. Lo que existe en el Perú es un estamento o “realeza” académica, mayormente cerrada e instaurada en universidades y que funciona a través de la monopolización de contactos, cooperantes y el acceso a fondos para publicaciones frecuentes. Ellos, donde algunos sin ser parte de la comunidad, tienen licencia para constituir las voces de los sujetos y sus comunidades, incluso de representarnos en espacios internacionales donde se discuten temas desde epidemiológicos hasta de identidad, homofobia y derechos humanos. Sin lugar a duda sus discursos ejercen poder en la construcción de los otros, los subordinados, de la posibilidad de nombrarlos. Y claro, ellos son también la puerta de invitación para procesos de colonización del lenguaje, agendas sociales y políticas, representaciones, etc. Ello me recuerda que hace algunos meses atrás tomó lugar la organización de una “reunión informal” con profesores angloparlantes para dialogar sobre la situación de los estudios sobre sexualidad en el Perú, en donde se invitaba a personas relacionadas a la academia, activistas y grupos de investigadores. El número de asistentes fue muy reducido y pensé, claro, si hacen la acotación que la reunión será en inglés, ello ya desanima la participación de los colectivos existentes. Desconozco la intención real de dicha reunión, pero ¿por qué se asume un idioma que no es el nuestro para discutir sobre la situación de los estudios en sexualidad en el Perú? ¿no es bastante colonialista tener que discutir sobre el Perú en inglés, siendo además el punto central de la discusión?

Acerca del movimiento peruano LGBT, a estos tiempos, la geografía social y política de las organizaciones ha cambiado mucho, hasta inicios del nuevo milenio no eran muchas, y no tan intensa las relaciones entre unas y otras. Recuerdo además que existía una dinámica más enfocada en temas de no discriminación, unión civil y deshomosexualización del VIH/Sida en la capital, Lima, dominada mayormente por colectivos universitarios y jóvenes. Por otro lado, existía otra realidad en el resto del país de la cual no se conocía mucho: la situación de precariedad al interior de las regiones. Cuando se inician esos primeros contactos de activistas de Lima con organizaciones al interior del país, es que se descubren prácticas solidarias y de supervivencia en las regiones, dinámicas que constituían muchas veces el fin y motivo de las organizaciones, como las colectas o actividades de venta de comidas para recaudar fondos para la compra de medicamentos paliativos de compañeros enfermos por causa del VIH o para la compra del ataúd y el nicho de los que iban falleciendo, claro está, en una época pre acceso gratuito a los medicamentos anti retrovirales.^[3]

Y es a partir del 2000, en el marco del Primer Encuentro Nacional de Líderes LGBT, que las distintas organizaciones inician un proceso de reconocimiento y diálogo, en donde a partir de las necesidades de las regiones se reincorpora en la agenda política el tema de la prevención y atención en salud.  A partir de ahí y con el intensivo apoyo de la cooperación internacional es que ahora existe un número significativo de organizaciones y algo de interrelación entre ellas. Recuerdo que hasta hubo en algún momento los esfuerzos por construir bloques regionales y que derive en la existencia de un Frente Nacional, pero que no tuvo suficiente empuje ni ánimo para lo que constituye –a mi entender– una carrera de largo aliento. Ello se podría comparar en visión al proceso que existe en Brasil a la hora de elegir representaciones federales y nacionales y la construcción de agendas integradas, democráticas y construidas desde las bases sociales.

Los actores y sus vicios de importancia

Los recursos financieros de la cooperación internacional han alentado y promovido el incremento de organizaciones, el activismo social, político y cultural, para generar cambios favorables en la normativa, acceso a mejores servicios de salud, educación, empleo, entre otros. Además se buscaba que en ese proceso se fortalecieran y sobretodo se perfilaran nuevos liderazgos, lo que era importante para un necesario proceso de renovación, y sobre todo para enfrentar lo que en un mediano futuro ya era casi evidente: la disminución o ausencia de fondos de la cooperación internacional y la eternamente ansiada autosostenibilidad de las organizaciones.

El Fondo Mundial de Lucha contra el Sida, la Tuberculosis y la Malaria es el cooperante en VIH, Sida y empoderamiento de comunidades gay y travestis que más ha invertido en el país, a través de proyectos nacionales que integraban al Estado y a la sociedad civil (principalmente a través de ONG responsables de la ejecución de las actividades en coordinación con las instancias estatales), lo que se denomina public-private partnership projects. El Fondo Mundial  entendía que el fortalecimiento organizacional era necesario para la respuesta al VIH y por ello sus acciones incluían desde financiamiento para conformar legalmente a los colectivos, cursos de capacitación hasta alquiler de espacios para su funcionamiento operativo. Sin embargo, dada las características de estos programas, cada año el cooperante reducía los fondos conforme el Estado debía de aumentar su contrapartida, situación que nunca ocurrió, pues el Estado nunca asumió ni política ni presupuestalmente la transferencia real de los programas, hecho que se refleja en que hasta la fecha existe nula inversión en programas y/o políticas dirigidas a nuestra comunidad. Además, actualmente el Perú es considerado un país de ingreso medio, por lo que ya no es  elegible para los programas del Fondo Mundial, salvo algunas convocatorias especiales dirigidas a poblaciones vulnerables específicas.

Aparte de ese contexto, se tiene un movimiento LGBT fragmentado, con pocas coordinaciones inter regionales y nula proyección de un plan político nacional. Más bien se tiene una comunidad donde algunos actores que han tenido la posibilidad de estar involucrados en las direcciones o presidencias de sus organizaciones, mandos medios de coordinación o responsables de actividades relacionadas a la administración de los centros comunitarios financiados por proyectos de Fondo Mundial, se han convertido en dueños y señores de algunas organizaciones en el país. Más aún, algunos de ellos han desarrollado un perfil ególatra, con espíritu autosuficiente, arrogante y compulsivamente mediáticos, pues desean ser la cara visible y protagonista del todo el movimiento LGBT en el país, pero que no tienen la capacidad de convocatoria e interlocución para que la gran mayoría se sume a las reivindicaciones políticas.

¿Por qué aquello último? Al interior del movimiento LGBT, las carencias económicas, políticas, organizacionales por un lado y  la fragmentación y falta de solidaridad política por otro, han debilitado su capacidad para incidir a favor de derechos. A nivel nacional, no es que exista una red articulada de organizaciones LGBT ni la promoción de la misma por parte del Estado, sino un grupo humano diverso, atravesado por la pobreza, discriminación, exclusión y marginación. La interseccionalidad de clase, raza y género, produce una “comunidad” fragmentada, donde son mayormente algunos del sector medio y pobre quienes se visibilizan, organizan y demandan, mientras que los “otros blancos, clase media-alta” desarrollan un bajo nivel de solidaridad e indignación, y más bien un alto nivel de indiferencia, debido a la no percepción de discriminación, pobreza y exclusión por sus mejores condiciones de acceso a recursos (educación, empleo, salud, etc.)

Explicando mejor, diría que una buena parte de la clase alta y media de personas LGBT -la cual enfatiza lo masculino sobre lo femenino y sus valores, se considera blanca o con matices que aspiran al blanqueamiento- no participa de las demandas, o incluso contra argumenta en la cotidianeidad frente a las reivindicaciones de la comunidad LGBT organizada, pues aquello es de indígenas, negras, mestizas, afeminadas, travestis, pobres, machonas y escandalosas: “Yo nunca he sufrido de discriminación, voy dónde quiero y si puedo pagar nadie puede discriminarme”, “eso del activismo es para los cholos escandalosos y pobres, yo nunca he sufrido de discriminación”, por mencionar algunos ejemplos. Y a la vez, otra buena parte que pertenecen a la mayoría empobrecida, indígena, travesti, afro, mestiza, no participa o no le interesa dichas reivindicaciones, pero por otras circunstancias que más bien se encuentran dentro de una racionalidad más enfocada en cubrir necesidades inmediatas y evaluar el costo-beneficio de dicho involucramiento.

No es que no exista movimiento y activistas en el Perú, sino que éste es un híbrido pequeño, que se encuentra en el medio o en la intersección de los grupos de clase baja, media y alta. Claro, compuesta por sujetos con compromiso de cambio, voluntad política y capacidad de indignación; sin embargo, este proceso no se encuentra exento de los vicios de distinción y diferenciación racial, clase y género, lo que genera tensiones al interior de los mismos. Analizando, queda claro la existencia de micro relaciones de poder, basada en categorías que funcionan como capital social y simbólico: la raza, el género y la clase. Estas relaciones pueden ser casi invisibles, se reproducen de manera tan sutil en diferentes espacios o se han asumido como cotidianas o normalizadas, que hace complicado tomar conciencia de ellas para cuestionarlas y transformarlas. O claro, algunos se logran servir de ellas para mantener su hegemonía dentro del feudo, pero que, además, no es sino el espejo del racismo, sexismo y clasismo que existe en nuestra sociedad.

¿De dónde viene la importancia? Acercamientos al enfoque interseccional

Un punto importante, clave para dar respuesta a muchas preguntas ligadas a nuestra compleja sociedad marcada por la desigualdad social; la cual ha devenido en cliché, pero más en forma que en contenido, es acerca de los rezagos de nuestra experiencia colonial, la que generó e instauró una sociedad estamental, dividida en estados con acceso diferenciado a la riqueza, la educación, el ejercicio de profesiones oficios, y que hasta estas últimas incluso eran heredadas de padres a hijos.

La comunidad LGBT no escapa de este último argumento, y es justo lo que podría explicar la configuración y distribución del poder entre las organizaciones y al interior de las mismas, atrapando algunas veces a sus liderazgos en personificaciones despóticas y líderes caudillistas.

Teniendo en cuenta aquellos argumentos, me atrevo a afirmar que las organizaciones de base comunitaria en general y las LGBT en especial, son sensibles a convertirse en pequeños feudos, en donde en vez de construir y reproducir los valores y principios que se esperan alcanzar en la sociedad, se instauran más bien relaciones de poder, las cuales se hayan instrumentalizadas desde la dieta y el refrigerio para atender el taller de capacitación hasta la membresía, y el viaje con todo pagado a la capital o al extranjero. Por ello, es que a veces en las reuniones orgánicas se cuelan ciertos susurros, pero que muchas veces están silenciados por temor a cuestionar la autoridad, “porque es siempre él (ella) es la que viaja para los talleres, congresos, encuentros”.

Definitivamente esto produce una fragmentación a interior de las organizaciones.  Cuando los liderazgos empiezan a tener conciencia de los relativos beneficios que tienen por ser el delegado, el presidente o el representante es que empieza a operar un proceso nocivo: la distancia con las bases y los principios, y más bien el matrimonio con el poder. Y aquí se desliza una pregunta curiosa, ¿es el cargo el que corrompe o la personalidad de los liderazgos? ¿O es la conjunción de ambos que detonan en liderazgos importantes pero verticales, impositivos y berrinchudos? Pues me ha tocado observar a líderes con la tarea de bloquear o aniquilar y expulsar a potenciales líderes, claro más jóvenes que ellos, que pueden hacerle sombra; y más bien incentivan y promocionan a quienes ayudan a expandir o reproducir su poder a través de una actitud servil, “sus hijas”^[4], nada más simbólico y estructural en una sociedad estamental.

En general son sólo algunos y no la gran mayoría de los activistas que reciben el privilegio de acceder a información y conocimiento técnico, pero éste al mismo tiempo se convierte en un recurso de mucho poder. Sobre todo en grupos con mayores desigualdades como la comunidad travesti. Por ejemplo, el acceso a información (epidemiológica, propuestas de proyectos de la cooperación, presupuestos de inversión pública, convocatorias para capacitaciones y talleres) puede verse hasta como un privilegio, un recurso que las puede colocar en una posición jerárquica frente a las otras.

Tampoco creo que las organizaciones LGBT deban funcionar desde una lógica partidaria ochentera ni noventera, que no es lo mismo a que las organizaciones tengan alguna adscripción partidaria o con alguna ideología en particular. Y entiendo esa lógica basada en prácticas de disciplinamiento partidario como “el cierre de filas”, el cual muchas veces sólo favorece la continuidad de relaciones serviles, jerárquicas, la defensa de intereses netamente egocentristas, y la protección de los líderes “importantes”, pero verticales y autoritarios.

Si ya la comunidad LGBT es objeto de negación de derechos, si en el Perú nuestra comunidad es excluida de las pretensiones inclusivas del gobierno actual y lo más probable es que así siga siendo en un futuro medio, ¿por qué reproducir esas mismas negaciones y jerarquías hacia el interior del movimiento? ¿Por qué se mantienen esos feudos –el cual ya no es sólo el espacio de la organización, sino todos los campos sociales y simbólicos que se vinculan con ella–, donde se asienta que una es más bonita que otra, que ésta es más blanca que aquélla, que ésa tiene más recursos que todas las demás?

Por supuesto que una configuración estamental al interior del movimiento produce sus propios “privilegiados importantes”, el político y el académico se convierten en categorías exclusivas para denominar a los otros –que repito son la gran mayoría– ignorantes, apolíticos, y hasta traidores, convirtiéndose en una actitud tendenciosa y que termina generando diálogos entre unos cuantos y no entre todos que conforma la base social y comunitaria.

Además, es cierto que entre los diferentes feudos dialogan, pero también bajo intereses que a veces son irreconciliables, lo que no ha ayudado en nada en la generación de frentes amplios y nacionales en base a objetivos comunes que enfrenten además problemas comunes como la discriminación, el reconocimiento de las uniones civiles, la falta de acceso a educación, empleo, salud integral y los crímenes de odio. Para ello se requiere una revolución primero al interior del movimiento, que quiebre dichos privilegios, que democratice los recursos y que rompa con las líneas de sucesión por nacimiento, a “mis hijas”.

La dilatación de una transformación efectiva, hace que el movimiento esté a merced de los vicios generados por la estructura estamental y también de los discursos externos que pretenden homogenizar la lucha comunitaria en todo el sur global, a partir de teorías foráneas, academicistas y desarrollistas que no han tenido ningún logro efectivo. Ello implica que haya una revitalización de las apuestas de transformación que partan de las propias racionalidades o cosmovisiones LGBT del país, basadas en sus propias voces, posicionamientos geopolíticos, sus políticas del cuerpo, sus economías emocionales, y sus tejidos afectivos, y que pueda dialogar en un contexto sur-sur y que interpelen las teorías hegemónicas del norte, en donde incluso el estado pueda brindar su apoyo en los procesos de diálogo con ellos. Solo así se podrá trazar una estrategia políticamente situada no abstracta, totalizante y homogenizadora, sino con cuerpo, rostro y nombre(s) propios(s).

Definitivamente no queremos un sumo pontífice, no necesitamos oráculos que concentren y centralicen el conocimiento y los recursos, que reproduzcan verticalidad y que conviertan el discurso de la asistencia técnica en una herramienta de asistencialismo y dependencia perversa. Tampoco necesitamos de herramientas de otros contextos ni copiar sus realidades. En la actualidad se requiere desjerarquizar y desmantelar el aparato de privilegios de aquellos liderazgos y sus vicios, así como las relaciones entre los miembros al interior de las organizaciones. Sólo renovando el diálogo entre pares de manera horizontal, se podrán involucrar a diferentes actores que tendrán el derecho de ser importantes y líderes, elegidos por la propia comunidad y respaldados principalmente por sus bases y no por las ONG’s, la cooperación o el propio Estado; pero eso sí, identificando muy bien esas micro relaciones de poder, revertiéndolas en relaciones democráticas e inclusivas.

The post Las fallidas transformaciones al interior del movimiento LGBT en el Perú: una interpretación crítica desde la perspectiva interseccional appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

“I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I’ve known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.”

- Langston Hughes

*****

Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, tenth-century Arab writer and envoy of Abbasid caliph Muqtadir, explains that The Book of Ahmad Ibn Fadlan 921-922 “tells of all he saw in the lands of the Turks, the Khazars, the Rus, the Saqaliba, the Bashghirds and others, their various customs, news of their kings and their current status”[1] (3). More ethnographic than official, Fadlan’s travelogue poses intriguing departures for both medievalists and postcolonialists seeking to deconstruct European discourses of Otherness and narratives of both subject individuation and modern development. Ibn Fadlan’s travelogue gives evidence of a non-European medieval sensibility already attuned to constructions of exoticism and Orientalism, of cultural translation and acculturation, and of tourism and migration. Oft referenced for its early insights into Viking culture and burial practices, Fadlan’s text remains largely a historical artifact outside the scope of Anglophone literary studies.[2] That Fadlan has been hitherto overlooked in literary circles is unsurprising; medieval literature in the West has traditionally assumed a European center and a European gaze. That Richard Frye’s 2005 Ibn Fadlan’s Journey to Russia is marketed as the first ‘complete’ English translation of Fadlan’s text demonstrates glaring omissions in the medieval archive.

As postcolonial studies has gone great lengths to challenge and revise European subjectivities, literary and historical archives, and modernities, medievalists have begun to find postcolonial models useful for understanding the movement and subjectivities of the Middle Ages. Akin to the ‘transnational turn’ in postcolonial studies, the ‘postcolonial turn’ of medieval studies is in concert with anxieties around periodical, disciplinary, and national borders. This turn, which I understand to be a reconstituting of relationships between the Middle Ages and modernity and the pre-colonial and the postcolonial, coincides with the mobility of global capitalism, complex negotiations of national identities, and the transnational nature of language and literature. Inasmuch as Edward Said and Fredric Jameson have forced scholars to redefine ‘modernity’ in concert with the postcolonial and neocolonial worlds, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s 2000 edited work, The Postcolonial Middle Ages, and Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altshul’s 2009 edited collection, Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of ‘the Middle Ages’ Outside Europe, compel scholars to reconsider the “middle.” Cohen, Davis, and Altshul, along with their constituents, debunk the false characterizations of the “medieval” as a fixed Euro-Christian identity and the Middle Ages as “hard-edged alterity,” a dark, innocuous, staging ground in the trajectory towards modernity (Cohen 4).

If postcolonial studies has had success in shifting medieval positionalities, the current transnational moment should prompt us to expand the temporal limits of the postcolonial archive. The tremendous momentum of globalization and traveling cultures initiated by international trade, migration, re-mapping of national boundaries, and technology gives evidence for the porosity of national, cultural, and temporal borders. While postcolonial studies may traditionally be interested in a certain ‘national’ historical moment, neither the colony nor the nation-state can be utterly abstracted from its pre-colonial past. Medieval texts like Ibn Fadlan’s give evidence of early confrontations between East and West and developing representations of transnational trade, movement, and identity negotiations. Not unlike postcolonial and transnational texts, Fadlans’ text reflects anxieties about difference, the risks of migration, and the development of identity against an exoticized Other, a process so endemic to the modern and global world.

Though this project claims nothing as comprehensive as the aforementioned collections, it does seek to intercede in a direction of medieval literature that troubles the boundary between temporalities, territories, identities, and histories in hopes that we might open up new temporal alliances and fresh territory for postcolonial studies.[3] Inspired by Stephen Clingman’s 2009 The Grammar of Identity, James Clifford’s 1997 Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, and Mary Louise Pratt’s 1992 Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, I consider how river crossings specifically orient Ibn Fadlan’s 10th century travel narrative’s intimate negotiations with Otherness. His narrative not only poses an alternative locus and direction for the medieval gaze but also exemplifies the “middle’s” continued structural and thematic investments in issues of border mediation often deemed so characteristic of our postcolonial, transnational, and global positionalities.[4] I argue that through the river motif, Ibn Fadlan’s text enacts a series of complex boundary crossings as a means of geographically and textually mediating what Cohen calls the “intimate alterity”of the Other.[5] As neither utterly monstrous nor essentially familiar, the ‘difference’ Ibn Fadlan encounters poses problems of physical and textual translation made most manifest through Fadlan’s river crossings. In Clingman’s terms, the river, as the site of navigation, is also the site of transformation and, relatedly, transmission (22). Because “intimate alterity” collapses the distance between monstrous and man, the river becomes a space of both intersection and production. In other words, even as the river separates Ibn Fadlan from the foreign Other he encounters (the Bashgirds, the Bulghars, and the Rus), it configures a “contact zone”which produces anxiety even while allowing for proximity.[6]

Ibn Fadlan’s text is, of course, part of a larger collection of eastern and western medieval travel narratives that grapple with the ‘wholly Other’ in terms of representation, identity, and locatedness. We see similar productions of spectatorship in the writings of other medieval travelers: Abu Hamid, Geoffrey of Villehardouin, Marco Polo, and Ibn Battuta. However, Ibn Fadlan’s narrative contributes to the medieval conception of the Other in particular ways, as it is more concerned with the mediation of Otherness than with the identity formation of the subject. For Fadlan, the river marks the physical and epistemic distance between himself and the foreigners he meets. There is a boundary there, but one that can be crossed, however treacherous. His focus on these geographic crossings makes plain that the text is no bildungsroman. Providing scant detail about his internal world, Fadlan stubbornly resists the narrative of one-directional subject formation. Neither is his an even or direct journey from the known to the unfamiliar. The text, rather, charts a halting narration—one that ebbs and flows in its movement towards contact with an unknown Other in an unknown land.

“I’ve Known Rivers”

Thus far I have attempted to position Fadlan as part of a larger conversation that examines the Middle Ages as unbounded, a “contact zone” revealing the ‘always-already’ inextricability of temporalities made disparate. In such a context, Fadlan’s rivers function as the contact zone for the “intimate alterity” of the medieval and point to its trans-historical, trans-literary present. As readers, we cannot extricate the Jayhun, the Yaghindi, and the Jayik rivers of Fadlan’s text from the Homer’s Acheron, Conrad’s Congo, or Hughes’ mighty Mississippi. Though alternately poised as territorial, periodical, or cultural boundaries, rivers reach both ways: backwards to the Greeks and forwards to Europe and the Americas. Almost uni-directional, the river as both geographical feature and literary symbol resists beginning and end. Poised in the midst of a large body of literary crossings spanning millennia and oceans, Ibn Fadlan floats uneasily in the contact zone, always-already in between and in motion.

It is the river’s very ‘middleness’ that makes it an apt representation of both the text’s placement within a longer historical/literary trajectory and Fadlan’s anxiety about coming in proximity with the Other. Simultaneously demonstrating that literary history (medieval, modern, postcolonial) is always in flux, the river reveals that identity is equally mobile and mediated. In only fifty-three pages of manuscript, the text records twenty-three river crossings: the Jayhun, the Yaghindi, the Jam, the Jakhsh, the Udhil, the Ardin, the Warsh, the Akhti, the Wabna, the Jayikh, the Jakha, the Arkhaz, the Bajagh, the Samur, the Kinal, the Sukh, the Knunjulu, the Uran, the Uram, the Baynakh, the Watigh, the Niyasnah, and the Jawshir. While Fadlan does not rehearse every crossing in detail,he provides three longer narrations at the crossing of the Jayhun, the Yaghindi, and the Jayikh rivers that emphasize the difference between ‘here and there’/ Self and Other, the complexities of narrating the place of contact, and the anxieties of being in proximity. Fadlan, like Homer, Conrad, and Hughes before and after, suggests that the crossing is at times both otherworldly and otherwordly—dangling somewhere in the periphery of both place and language. For, in the middle of the current, the traveler is caught between the riverbanks, curiously fixed within the margins of territory and location.

While Fadlan’s first fording, of the Jayhun, reveals much about constructions of Otherness, the text elides the actual moment of contact. Profoundly emphasizing both the dislocation of the subject and deferral of narration, Fadlan’s difficulty in crossing mimics his difficulty in accessing the unknown. Refusing to annunciate the actual event, the text stages a physical and psychosocial transference that either occurs outside the boundaries of the text or never actually occurs. Oddly silent about both the nature of the inhabitants and the experience of crossing, Fadlan’s copious details regarding his mission’s three-month delay, the severity of the winter freeze, and the extensive preparations necessary to cross the river illuminate the ineffable and perhaps illegible point of contact. The reader literally has access only to what occurs on the edges and thus learns more about the nature of the boundary than the actual crossing of it. That Fadlan cannot or does not translate the corporeal ‘slap of oars on water’ but does narrate the intensity of the climate, signifies that transmission and mediation are often displaced. It is not that mediation or contact exists outside of language but that Fadlan’s physical proximity to the Other produces a textual anxiety which renders the moment of contact unnarratable.

Textual deferral or absence connotes an epistemic displacement realized through the geographic materiality of the river and its limitations. The cold codifies the hard-edged alterity of the Other while illuminating Fadlan’s persistent anxiety of and desire for mediation. He explains that the ice was “seventeen spans thick” and was “solid and did not crack,” creating “cold and hardships” that forced them to stay in Jurjaniya by the banks of the Jayhun river for over three months (Fadlan 8). Noting that even his beard froze, he characterizes Jurjaniya as “a land which made us think a gate to the cold of hell had opened before us” (Fadlan 8). The ice presents a physical boundary that animates the psychic distance between self and Other, marking both difference and proximity. His emphasis on the river’s depth and the ‘solidity’ of the ice accentuates the perceived distance between Fadlan and the Jurjaniya and the limitations inherent in crossing over. No arbitrary association, Fadlan’s chronicling of the cold is more than a symbolic manifestation of ethnic difference. In his 1992 publication, “Barbarians in Arab Eyes,” Aziz Al-Azmeh ably articulates that medieval constructions of racial ‘othering’ in the Arab mind do not imitate Anglo-European models but, rather, follow what he calls an ethnology “governed by a natural-scientific ecological determinism” (6). Azmeh intones:

Briefly stated, medieval Arabic culture followed the Greek conception of the inhabited world as consisting of seven latitudinal zones that began slightly north of the equator and ended in the realms of perpetual darkness in the north. Beyond the zones (aqalzm, from the Greek klimata) human habitation was not possible, and within their boundaries the nature of the changing environment prescribed different temperaments to the inhabitants. The four primary qualities of dryness, humidity, heat and cold, attached to the four elements, entered into four combinations that yielded the basic somatic humours of blood (hot and humid), phlegm (cold and humid), bile (hot and dry) and atrabile or black bile (cold and dry). Embryonic growth was the result of the “cooking” together of these four humours. (6)

Discursively coded in the medieval mind in terms of geography and biology, Fadlan’s careful chronicling of coldness and its effects on the body codifies the Otherness that he cannot articulate and reiterates that he is not like them. The river, the cold, and the ice, are both sites of deferral and agents of textual production.

Fadlan’s anxiety about the Other is as much about desire as it is fear. If we think of the river as producing Otherness, it is through that very production that Fadlan can make contact. Both boundary and conduit, the river enables mediation even as it forecloses understanding. Returning to his description of the Jayhun river valley as “a land which made us think a gate to the cold of hell had opened before us,” Fadlan signals that his anxiety is mitigated by wonder (8). For ‘to wonder’ is to fear and to desire. James Montgomery rightly notes that Fadlan’s interests are largely anthropological; thus his is not an overtly supernatural or fantastic tale like others from the period (6).[7] That Fadlan uncharacteristically invokes the marvelous or “heavenly” here, even through metaphor, seems indicative that the text is attempting both to cross into a different space of desire and to insinuate that strangeness is not wholly foreign. While it is unclear whether or not the “gate” references a specific location in the Islamic afterlife, Fadlan attempts to make what is foreign, familiar. The wondrousness suggests an unknown and, thereby, ‘marvelous’ locale which contextualizes his desire, however unconsummated, for making contact.

The river, however, allows for contact even as it imposes limits. Thus, while the text may eschew all physical and epistemic mediation between Self and Other, it does reveal a space of contact engendered through empathy. While the intemperateness of the boundary suggests the rigidity of difference, it enables Fadlan to come in proximity with the other. Thus, if the river designates on the one hand a material and natural limit imposed upon the travelers, it alternately marks the empathic possibility, however difficult, in crossing epistemic boundaries.  Because he can occupy a shared space with others, Fadlan can experientially intuit what it might mean to be that Other.  Consequently, the language of the text indicates that the narrator is coming in closer contact with his subject (moving from exterior to interior, from outside observer to inside participant) even while the climate itself prevents him from truly crossing over. Just by being in proximity, he is able to empathize with the Other. Noting both the social isolation induced by the extreme weather and the corresponding generosity that individuals show towards even their inferiors in the face of such “rough and violent wind,” Fadlan imagines Otherness without facilitating a direct, personal encounter (8). Understanding “how the intense cold made itself felt in this country” through shared experiences (“my cheek froze to the pillow” and “my beard [….] was a block of ice”), Fadlan laboriously approaches the place of contact (9).

The textual shifts that occur within this description reflect Fadlan’s empathic capacity and the text’s epistemology of negotiating individual and cultural difference. Understanding the boundary to include both the space of contact (the river, the ice) and the territory around it (the river bank, the Jurjaniya), the text shows traces of subtle linguistic/narratological movement. Through a series of narrative cues, the passage indicates a developing intimacy between narrator and Other. Regarding the generosity of friends, the narrator reports: “In this country, when a man wishes to make a nice gesture to a friend and show his generosity, he says: ‘Come to my house where we can talk, for there is a good fire there’,” (Fadlan 8). The narrator relates this anecdote without affect; the voice is flat and objective; an outsider’s perspective. Both the “man” and the “friend” are unnamed: abstract generalities rather than specific individuals. The narrator’s positionality changes, however, as the passage progresses: “I was told, in fact, that two men set out with twelve camels to load wood in the forest, but they forgot to take flint and tinder with them” (Fadlan 8-9). The speech tag “I was told” reframes the narration as conversation, indicating greater intimacy between narrator and subject. While the ‘telling’ has initiated some kind of personal exchange between individuals absent in the former example, Fadlan is still merely the receiver. Remaining in the passive voice, the text reiterates that Fadlan has not initiated transmission. By the end of the passage, however, the narrator is no mere interviewer; rather, as witness to the story he claims: “In truth, I saw [my emphasis] the earth split and great crevasses form from the intense cold. I saw a great tree split in two from the same cause” (Fadlan 9). As Fadlan’s experience of the cold facilitates greater understanding, the textual movement from unmediated reporting, to passive voice, to first-person narration and active voice reveals a renegotiation of his relationship to and familiarity with the Jurjaniya inhabitants. Though he may yet be an outsider, the narrator textually and experientially closes the distance between Self and Other.

If the text follows a current leading from outsider to insider, from Self to Other, the concluding preparations for the Jayhun river crossing reveals Fadlan’s sincerest attempt thus far in imagining the experience of the Other. Fadlan closes this account with a lengthy description of his company’s meticulous preparations to protect their bodies from the weather. He methodically records:

When we saw the reality with our own eyes, however, we realized that it was twice as bad as we had been told. Each of us was wearing a tunic and over that a caftan, on top of that a cloak of sheepskin and over that again a felt outer garment, with a head covering that left only two eyes visible. Each of us wore a plain pair of trousers and another padded pair, socks, horse-hide boots and over those boots, other boots, so that when any of us mounted a camel, he could hardly move because of all the clothes he was wearing. (Fadlan 9-10)

Fadlan’s rigorous cataloging surely brings to mind multiple literary genres: Greek epics, medieval romance, and nineteenth century African-American literature chart an indirect trajectory in which clothing functions alternately as badge and as disguise. For both armament and disguise have the potential to erase difference through performance. As Achilles’ shield may substitute somewhat for his weakness, Fadlan’s “caftan,” “sheepskin,” double-layered “trousers,” and “horse-hide boots” may compensate for Fadlan’s foreignness. By donning their dress, Fadlan embodies Otherness.

The physical and narratological boundaries imposed upon the text delineate the site of difference between the Self and the Other, even as they illuminate the thorny and sometimes perilous process of mediation. Thus, though the previous moments give textual evidence that the traveler may close the distance between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ the text suggests that the mediation of that distance is never secure. While Fadlan does narrate the following two crossings explicitly, the passages reiterate the dangers characteristic of the boundary. At the rivers Yaghindi and Jayikh, which separate the territories of the Ghuzz, the Bajanak, and the Bashghirds, Fadlan’s company faces significant loss. At the Yaghindi he reports:

They took poles made from a wood called khadank [sic] and used them as oars. They continued to row like this, while the water carried them and they spun around, until we had crossed. As to the horses and the camels, they called them with loud cries and they swam across the river. It was essential to get one of the companies of men-at-arms over the river first, before any of the caravan crossed, so that they could form an advance guard to protect the others in case the Bashghirds fell on our people while they were crossing. (22)

The text intimates that the crossing is more legible here than at the Jayhun: both river and creature have agency. Yet, the crossing is ever beleaguered by the threat of contact. Again the river constructs a boundary that is replete with anxiety about and desire for the place of contact. At the crossing of the Jayikh, only one page later, Fadlan chronicles, “I saw a leather boat overturned in midstream and those who were in it drowned. Many of our men were carried away and a certain number of horses and camels were drowned. It cost us great efforts to get across that river,” (23). As in the crossing of the Jayhun, Fadlan use of the speech tag, “I saw,” indicates the nearness of the narrator to the subject. Participant rather than mere audience, it is Fadlan’s very nearness that heightens the danger in the crossing. We might expect, in other words, that the closer one comes to the zone of contact, the greater the risk to the Self.

The Final Passage

What, then, is the nature of contact, we might ask? Risk. In Fadlan’s every movement across, the “alterity” of the Other becomes more intimate. The traveler ultimately risks becoming an inhabitant. James Clifford concludes the first chapter of Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (1997) by reframing how we think of the “travelling anthropologist,” describing his practices as following:

My point, again, is not simply to invert the strategies of cultural location, the making of ‘natives,’ which I criticized at the outset. I’m not saying there are no locales or homes, that everyone is—or should be—traveling, or cosmopolitan, or deterritorialized. This is not nomadology. Rather, what is at stake is a comparative cultural studies approach to specific histories, tactics, everyday practices of dwelling and traveling: traveling-in-dwelling, dwelling-in-traveling. (36)

Clifford’s insistence that cultural studies develop a new model for study corroborates transnational studies’ instincts that neither “home” nor the “village” nor the “native” nor the “traveler” occupies a static location. Rather, movement across physical, social, and textual boundaries keeps identities in a perpetual state of mediation and formation. Thus, Fadlan is always-already in transit. But I believe we can extend Clifford’s injunction; redefining “home” and “native” requires that we also redefine “specific” literacies as well as “histories” (36). Thus, if texts like Fadlan’s might work to deconstruct the rigidity of literary history, they must also serve to blur the lines between the darkness of the Middle Ages and modernity.

I began this project under the auspices that the Middle Ages has achieved a new cogency (or at least an alternate identification). Postcolonial practices and assumptions have opened up the medieval world as one that is intimately connected to both modernity and the postcolonial. But, as Ibn Fadlan experiences, contact and understanding do not occur along a linear trajectory; as I think Cohen would corroborate, the Middle Ages is producing the postcolonial to the same degree as the postcolonial may refigure the “middle.”

Shortly before the text concludes, Fadlan records the elaborate funeral rites of a Rus (Viking) noble man. Fadlan’s focus, curiously, seems to be the slave girl who volunteers/is chosen to accompany her master to the afterlife. As aforementioned in this piece, critics and historians relish the account for its insight into early Viking culture, burial practices and beliefs, class distinctions, and gender roles but have perhaps occluded its equally useful interstices for understanding the text’s historical/periodical positionality. Fadlan’s fascination with the ritual is reasonable—the funeral seems oddly more of a human sacrifice than a celebration of the dead. Though there are many generative readings to be made regarding the agency of the slave girl, in terms of this project I am more interested in the final crossing that the text seems to prefigure. If the text ultimately performs the complex negotiations implicit to the contact zone, the mediations between Self (Fadlan) and Other (slave girl/the Rus) and the multifarious dangers, anxieties, and desires encountered along the boundary, the funeral stages the ultimate act of ‘crossing over’. The preparations of the body, the collection of food (fruit, basil, bread, meat, and onions), the sacrifice of animals (a dog, two horses, two cows, a cock, and a hen), the copulation between slave girl and masters, and the drinking of nabidh, all mimic Fadlan’s gathering of boats and arming against the cold. For, death, the text suggests, is the ultimate Other, the ‘familiar foreignness,’ and ‘intimate alterity’ undergirding each point of contact.

Yet, there are larger forces at play here, beyond the subjective experience of the Self. Part of Fadlan’s captivation with the funeral is in the spectators’ anticipation of the beyond. Shortly before the slave girl’s death, the crowd repeatedly hoists her up to look over what “looked like the frame of a door,” (Fadlan 52). Fadlan records the interpreter’s translation of the girl’s statements: “‘The first time they lifted her up, she said: [“There I see my father and my mother.”] The second time, she said: “There [I see] all my dead relatives [sitting].” And the third time she said: “There [I see my master sitting in] Paradise and [Paradise is green and beautiful.] There are men with him and [young people, and he is calling me.] Take [me to him….]”’” (52). While Fadlan faithfully and without commentary transmits the girl’s statements, we are unsure of what Fadlan sees. Similarly poised as Benjamin’s “angel of history” looking back while being propelled forward, both slave girl and writer envision a future history that always-already exists. If we consider the text as looking into a future literary trajectory, we see that that future “paradise” contains the new and the old, the middle and the modern and the post.

The post Ibn Fadlan: Crossing Over and the Nature of the Boundary appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

This paper is an attempt to read how Peri Rossi narrativizes this in her rendition of urban space. It is a space under the continuous surveillance of the town planners and managers (the Panopticon), while at the same time a critique of such spaces created and deployed to ”hide” the dehumanized faces of targeting thinking subjects (Heterotopia).[2] This is real space, and not an imagined one (utopia/dystopia) engineered for wielding power and control over the lives of citizens. Thus the most important point to reckon with is that this urban space is articulated neither as any linearity of causal relationships, nor in the sense of any binary oppositions such as “centre/periphery”; rather it is configured as performative so that the agents of surveillance and control who remain invisible are rendered exposed. The perception of the analogy between a Google earth view and this narrative, in this context, is very significant and politically charged and fits into the Foucauldian notions of the Panopticon. The sentry who keeps watch on the tower of the prison is now substituted by the new technology of digital surveillance systems enabled by Google Earth.

Now let us consider that while urban spaces have been known to be highly gendered, what about the cyberspace? Early colonizers, hackers and navigators of cyberspace had imagined it as virtual and hence as genderless, bodiless, raceless and without borders. Though this myth is no longer valid, we still find that urban planners who design corporatized infrastructure for smooth and efficient mass transit have increasingly striven towards creations of real space copied from Google Earth view cyberscapes, rendering irrelevant any difference markers and ironing them out into mere cyborgs. Imagining genderless, raceless and desexualized bodies is a copy of an imagined virtual space which pretends to be safe, without any risks and immediate consequences. Thus Peri Rossi’s cities are nameless global cities, which tease out the aesthetics and the politics of “inclusive social care” and “disparate economic competition” in neoliberal democracies. They are inhabited by nameless and rootless global citizens who navigate through unknown waters like blind and drifting mechanized dolls (one can’t help remembering Kafka’s Metamorphosis or Borges’ Ficciones) almost directionless, thus invoking the myth of the Ship of the Madmen, which is also a title of an earlier collection of stories by Peri Rossi. How are such spaces produced? There is a process of gentrification of elite centres (Rama’s proposal); however the rest is mapped out as a global friendly network based on the model of the designs of “optimal efficiency” flattened out graphically on available Internet stencils.

The maps that now govern our “globalised” world suggest a world in which public spaces are increasingly privatized, in which poverty exacerbated by neo-colonial and neoliberal economic practice pushes more and more people to migrate, only to find themselves criminalized as “illegal” aliens by those who guard “legitimate” access to nation-states. Shall such maps be reproduced in cyberspace? What recourse—what lines of flight, what type of travel, what practices of resistance—can be made in cyberspace for protest, justice, or alternative realities? (Lane 129)

It is no wonder then that global cities, increasingly privatized spaces, are nodes of global circuits through which there is a unidirectional flow of capital across the different ‘scapes’:. financescapes, technoscapes, ethnoscapes and mediascapes. To all of this I add ‘netscapes’ and ‘cyberscapes’. These comprise space as a process produced through which deterritorialization is implicated in South-North or East-West movements (exile, diaspora and migration). Such circuits may also be facilitated by cultural items for example; the hamburger, the sandwich or English cream. The overlapping and crossing over of these different ‘scapes’ implicate a new kind of economics and politics of exchange as local modes are woven into global neo-liberal systems. The city, instead of the nation, negotiates a new proposal for city-zenship in terms of its claims on the occupants of its spaces.

At the limit, this could be an opening for new forms of “citizenship.” The city has indeed emerged as a site for new claims: by global capital which uses the city as an “organisational commodity”, but also by disadvantaged sectors of the urban population, frequently as internationalised a presence in large cities as capital. The de-nationalising of urban space and the formation of new claims by transnational actors, raise the question, whose city is it? (Sassen 146-147)

Peri Rossi’s stories critique these urban architectures of order and power engineered to render mute any thinking subject. At the same time a nomadic kind of ethos is evoked to conceive of the states of cities inhabited by anonymous “men and women who float on air suspended in huge time and space” (Peri Rossi 71); transit and disorientation feature in these stories articulating anxieties of mobility and the disorder they produce. Peri Rossi’s city is such a space, richly carved out in text in ‘Los desarraigados’[3], negotiating these situations of spatial tropes on the one hand and of their subversion thereafter. This story maps the urban space from within the deep waters of the entire global space. The sense of not belonging is played out again and again like a poetic refrain. Heterotopias have stretched and extended their borders across global neoliberal spaces. The subjects do everything like eating, sleeping differently, they wake up in hotel rooms forgetting the name of the city they are in. Their condition of lack of rootedness makes them always vulnerable to suspicion though they themselves might feel that their mobile condition is a privilege; however when they are blown off, they are blown off more easily. The poetic evocation of their temporality as floating signifiers in a virtual space evading any conceptual or material form is significant. Metaphoric nomadism is portrayed with brush strokes of fluid idiom.

A menudo se ven, caminando por las calles de las grandes ciudades, a hombres y mujeres que flotan en el aire, en un tiempo y espacio suspendidos. Carecen de raíces en los pies, y a veces hasta carecen de pies. No les brotan raíces de los cabellos ni suaves líanas atan su tronco a alguna clase de suelo. Son como algas impulsadas por las corrientes marinas, y cuando se fijan a alguna superficie es por casualidad y dura sólo un momento. En seguida vuelven a flotar y hay cierta nostalgia en ello. [Peri Rossi 71][4]

Very often men and women afloat in the air can be seen walking down the streets of the great cities in suspended time and space. They lack roots in their feet, and at times even lack any feet. Roots don’t grow out of their hair either, nor do suave ropes tie their trunk to some kind of ground. They are like algae adrift through the ocean currents and when they stick to some surface, just by chance, they last only a while. Soon after they begin to float again and there is some nostalgia that remains. [My translation].

A zooming in closer to land renders visible a citizenship (as a belonging to a nation/community with rights and responsibilities) getting reduced to a “membership” programmed into the internet game, and thus submitting to the rules of the game such that any scope of her/his subjectivity as thinking and feeling agent is completely muffled out. One is easily reminded of the distracted viewer/reader as compared to the contemplative one in the beginning of the last century. Now we have the distracted, bodiless, genderless and raceless entities that move unthinkingly.[5] This is how citizens experience the spaces of global cities, which are engineered to “deliver development”. Infrastructural facilities network these spaces both materially and virtually so that citizenship as a “privilege and as agency” is produced, deployed and displayed as mass/crowd for smooth navigational controls following pre-meditated moves on the designs of the internet game for management of mobility. Such activated circuits, sometimes so fast that they are like an adrenal rush though Peri Rossi’s narrative, seem to move like slow turtles as passengers aboard a plane who can’t feel the speed. The Foucauldian conception of the Panopticon plays out here in its prime peak instant.[6]

Similarly in Peri Rossi’s “La grieta”[7] one small banal (thinking) hesitation of the subject’s move sets off a pandemonium ripple effect in the order of mass transit in a railway station. The grammar of the urban space management cannot accept even the most insignificant incorrect punctuation mark. The hesitating man becomes an unpardonable morpheme before the official syntax of a global network as he doesn’t remember, for a brief moment, whether he was going up or down the stairs of the over bridge. Whether an outsider or otherwise, the occupants of the global cities are anonymous passersby; their conditions of continuous movements constitute the global circuits which sustain the movement of the different “scapes” as mentioned above. The provisionality of their situation highlights the provisionality of their identities in terms of race, colour and gender. Exile is a general condition of all, as is their anonymity. They are the mass people.

El hombre vaciló al subir la escalera que conducía de un andén a otro del metro, y al producirse esta pequeña indecisión de su parte (no sabía si seguir o quedarse, si avanzar o retroceder, en realidad tuvo la duda de si se encontraba bajando o subiendo) graves trastornos ocurrieron alrededor. La compacta muchedumbre que le seguía rompió el denso entramado – sin embargo, casual – de tiempo y espacio, desperdigándose, como una estrella que al explotar, provoca diáspora de luces y algún eclipse. [266]

The man hesitated while going up the stairs which led from one station to the other of the   metro, and thanks to this brief moment of hesitation on his part (he didn’t know whether to   move on or stay, to proceed or regress, in fact he doubted whether he was climbing up or going down the staircase) serious disturbances occurred around there. The compact crowd that followed him broke the dense network, however casual, in time and space, scattering like a star, which on explosion, provoke a diaspora of lights and some eclipse. [My translation].

The staircase becomes a metaphor of a conduit in the network and discounts any articulation of passion by its occupants. The corollary is that any irrationality disables the efficiency of the conduit. Both the conduit and its occupants (the crowd) are vulnerable to a breakdown given their game plan kind of structures. The protagonist is just one in a crowd whose identity becomes irrelevant. Gender, ethnic, racial and even bodily confusions are played out as fragmentary and as borderless as language itself. The entire discourse of a smooth efficient network with its connectivity, communicability and reliability is critiqued. In a mass transit system, gendered entities are disoriented, bodies are disintegrated as wigs; dentures, glasses and fashion accessories fly off from their assigned places.

Hombres perplejos resbalaron, mujeres gritaron, niños fueron aplastados, un anciano perdió la peluca, una dama su dentadura postiza, se desparramaron los abalorios de un vendedor ambulante, alguien aprovechó la ocasión  para robar unas revistas del quiosco, hubo un intento de violación, salto un reloj de una mano al aire y varias mujeres intercambiaron sin querer sus bolsos. [266]

Perplexed men slipped, women screamed and children were crushed, an old man lost his wig, a lady her denture, the cheap items of a mobile salesman got scattered, someone got an opportunity to steal magazines from a kiosk, there was an attempt to rape, one watch flew out of someone’s hand and many women involuntarily exchanged their purses. [My translation].

The text thus exposes the porous borders that draw the global urban maps imagining safe, civilized and equally accessible spatial tropes. The guards immediately take charge to set everything in order.

El hombre fue detenido, posteriormente, y acusado de perturbar el orden público. El mismo había sufrido las consecuencias de su imprudencia, ya que, en el tumulto, se le quebró un diente. Se pudo determinar que, en el momento del incidente, el hombre que vaciló en la escalera que conducía de un andén a otro (a veinticinco metros de profundidad y con luz artificial de día y de noche) era el hombre que estaba en el tercer lugar de la fila número quince, siempre y cuando se hubieran establecido lugares y filas para el ascenso y descenso de la escalera. [266-267].

The man was detained and charged with having disturbed public order. He himself had suffered the consequences of his recklessness because, in the tumult, he broke a tooth. It could be established that at the time of the incident, the man who hesitated on the stairs that   led from one platform to another (at twenty five meters depth, lit with artificial light by day and night) was the man who was in third place row number fifteen, provided they had established rows and places for the ascending and descending the staircase. [My translation].

The narrative thus renders exposed how the city is a Panopticon. The security personnel knew exactly where this man was at the instant of his momentary hesitation which jammed the smooth functioning of this manufactured spatial apparatus. However, the cityscape with its fluid boundaries is recast almost immediately like an elastic matter ready to play its next game. But the odd man who peoples this space is unbendable as he begins gazing at the crevice on the wall. The crevice works like a metaphor for a break, yet it is also one that continuously draws the attention of the man. There is break in coordination between the state machinery and its subjects. The panoptic city hence continues to interrogate him. His answer is always the same: that he’d forgotten whether he was going up or down the staircase; that perhaps it did not really matter; that he had his right foot lifted and that a crowd was present ahead and behind, and for a moment he didn’t know! There was thus also a break between the man’s memory and his own body. The city and his body become analogous tropes of control and unitary perfection, which fail momentarily because of loss of memory. Ironically, he also reflects on the fact that the staircase was an artefact used to go up or down, antithetical actions. The crevice thus articulates a counter-narrative critique of the unitary perfections of a cityscape and its inhabitants.

The complete breakdown of communication between the man and the officer is a blotch on the entire paradigm of control by the state and its allies. This breakdown is located in a complex in-between-ness, as it works both ways. The officer’s interrogation cannot extract a satisfactory response from the man while the man too, as he spoke, continued to be distracted by the growing size of the crevice on the wall, which was grey or green. The only answer he claimed about the crevice was that it was a literary artefact. The crevice as a literary artefact also metaphorizes break and discontinuity, between language and silence as also between desire and reality. The growing crevice on the wall symbolizes a point of spatial critique and intersection of the panoptic, which breaks. It is at this point that the man’s mind drifts off towards conceptualizing the “spatialization of culture” as he reckons with the difficulty of grasping reality in terms of its time and ‘direction’, “si no hay continuidad, equivale a afirmar que no existe ninguna realidad, salvo el momento” (270) [“In the absence of continuity, you have to accept that no reality exists apart from the present”, [My translation]. Further down he says, “La altura en que estuviera colocado decidía, en este caso, la direccion.” [270] [“The direction was determined, in this instance, by the level at which the eye was situated. {My translation}]”  The narrative that follows is clearly reminiscence of an Internet game space.

Es curioso que el mismo instrumento sirva tanto para subir como para bajar, siendo en el fondo, acciones opuestas – reflexionó el hombre, en voz alta….un minuto antes de la vacilación – continuó – , la memoria hizo una laguna. La memoria navega, hace agua. No sirvió; quedó atrapada en el subterráneo. [270].

Its odd that the same instrument is good for going up and down-at heart two antithetical actions,’ the man thought aloud…A moment before hesitation ,’ he continued, ‘a gap opened in my memory. Memory can drift, spring a leak. Mine got stuck in the underground, it was no use.’ [My translation].

This momentary loss of a working memory is not amnesia but a ‘literary device’ and ‘una grieta inesperada’ or ‘an unexpected crack’ (271), like a hung Internet space. The citizen transiting this space had difficulty seeing as “solo una abstraccion nos permitía saber, cuando nos sumergimos, si la corriente nos desliza hacia el origen o hacia la desembocadura del río, si empieza o termina” (271) [‘when submerged, only an abstraction allows us to know whether the current is taking us to the source or the outlet of the river, to where it begins or ends’ {My translation}]. Like the Internet game space, there are neither beginnings nor endings, or rather they are just provisional and are meant to score a point. The foot, half raised, halted due to uncertainty. ‘No hay ningún dramatismo en ello, sino una especie de turbacion.’ [271] [‘There was nothing dramatic about it, just a kind of confusion.’{My translation}] The foot is narrated as a fragment of the body of the man, which is disabled due to a brief gap in memory resulting in confusion, not an epic hero who strives to change the world. He barely manages to survive it. It almost reads like the cursor on the computer screen, which can’t move because the computer is hung. The analogy of the real space with the virtual one only serves to highlight the nature of this spatial contour as heterotopias. Heterotopias are spaces, which exist in all cultures but function differently as per situations of each culture. They are such spaces which are real spaces but relate to/juxtapose with utopias and real spaces of both geophysical and virtual types. They are manufactured and artificially put in place and include for example prisons, asylums, zoos or gardens which are either forbidden or privileged spaces. Peri Rossi’s city-as-home, fits in as a heterotopic space which groups together citi-zens as members who have had to be permitted into “accommodation” in order to be subjected to control and surveillance. Such permissions are granted under conditions of a pre-figured, strict systemic grammar of behaviour and anyone who does not follow this grammar is coolly picked out to ‘cleanse’ the space and put it back in order. So this odd man, who invests in “thinking” can’t possibly belong to this order.

It is interesting for us, at this point to make note of the writer’s brief biography.[8] She is an Uruguayan who has lived in exile since 1972 in Franco’s Spain, in Barcelona. She was expelled again in 1974 for anti-fascist activism, after which time she took refuge in Paris for nine months. She then married and moved back to Spain. In an interview with the famous Mexican writer, Carmen Boullosa, she explains her experience of exile and abandonment thus.

This second exile lasted some nine months. It wasn’t only exile; the problem was that the dictatorship had revoked my citizenship, and then I had no   documents. I was, in fact, stateless and clandestine in France, which put me in a state of acute anxiety.

… … … …

I appealed to the brotherliness of my Communist comrades in Spain, and I found a husband. We were brave, because only the church could marry people, and divorce didn’t exist. I entered Spain secretly, and I found a leftist priest to marry us, and obtained Spanish citizenship. Luckily, my husband was gay. (The Artiste’s Voice)

Peri Rossi’s feeling of rootlessness and statelessness as a Uruguayan political exile also overlaps with a kind of economic abandonment of neoliberal agendas in her home country. Add to this the fact that she is gay herself and thus when the interviewer asks her if patriotism is an undesirable factor, she responds

I completely agree. But, if I tell you this, it’s because I put myself in the place of people who love their homeland. In other words, here, when they ask me, “What are you more, Spanish or Uruguayan?” I say, “I am a citizen of the world.” In any part of the world, I defend the same things. I lived in Berlin where I defended the same things. When I arrived here, I fought against   Franco, just like I would have fought for Allende, if I had been in Chile. But that doesn’t mean that all countries are the same to me. The ones I feel a kinship with are those in which justice, and human and animal rights are defended. That’s the true homeland. (The Artistes’ Voice)

Yet in post-Franco Spain she maintains that her favourite past time is playing games on the Internet, and not reading literature or seeing good movies.

There you have it! I believe that knowledge is uncomfortable, and when I want to amuse myself, I play games on the Internet. I don’t amuse myself with music, movies, or paintings. When it comes to those things, I actually suffer.   But suffering is also a type of knowledge. A biology book can seem very entertaining to me. I don’t ask that it be well written. I do ask that it provide information. I always demand that literature be written well, because that’s what pertains to literature, correct? (The Artistes’ Voice)

The point here to be noted is that in spite of what Peri Rossi claims, we do see how her experience with internet gaming as amusement has perforated into her literary disposition, which she believes only nurtures itself from her knowledge as suffering. On the contrary, amusement and suffering contribute equally. In another interview she says the following regarding her last collection of short stories, Habitaciones.

En los dos últimos años, al mismo tiempo que poesía, había escrito varios relatos, de temas y extensión diferentes. Cuando los leí, me di cuenta de que algunos se desarrollaban en habitaciones cerradas: una celda de prisión, la habitación de un psiquiátrico y varios hoteles. Tenían otra cosa en común: reflejaban el mundo estrictamente contemporáneo del capitalismo salvaje, con sus numerosos artilugios de comunicación – celulares, Internet, congresos, pantallas- pero no había verdadera comunicación. Había prisa, pero incomunicación, soledad, y poca esperanza. Es un tema que me fascina: en el primer mundo, la mayor cantidad de aparatos de comunicación, las personas se tocan menos, conversan menos, comparten menos.

Para ser escuchados, pagan al psicólogo, y para ser tocados, al masajista. Pero no son culpables de esta manera de vivir; la responsabilidad la tiene esta fase del capitalismo financiero, salvaje y destructivo. Esta transformación del mundo a principios del s. XXI me inquieta y la observo con la imparcialidad de una cronista. (Entrevista a Cristina Peri Rossi.)

During the past two years, I had written several stories as well as poetry of different themes and extension. When I read, I realized that some were developed in closed rooms: a prison cell, the room of a psychiatric, a hospital and several hotels. They had another thing in common: they strictly reflected the contemporary world of unbridled capitalism, with its many communication gadgets – phones, Internet, conference halls and displays, but there was no real communication. There was rush, isolation, loneliness, and very little hope. It is a subject that fascinates me: in the first world, the greater the number of communication devices, the less they talk, the less they actually play and the less they share.

To be heard, they pay the psychologist, and to be touched, the masseur. But they are not guilty of this conduct as the responsibility lies with this phase of financial capitalism, wild and destructive. This transformation of the world at the beginning of s. XXI makes me restless and I watch it with the impartiality of a reporter.) [My translation]

What she talks about here with respect to communication is also true of commuting through mass transit systems. What she talks of here with respect to closed spaces becomes relevant also with respect to public spaces. These are the heterotopias designed, derided and deployed to stupefy citizens as subjects and to “colonize” them in newer ways. There is no scope of any talking nor hearing, nor any touching or of sharing. However, only a hung space enables screaming, or a pinching, or a molestation, or a near rape amidst the confusion of violence, indifference and deafness. It is only in the hung space where “gender” plays out as pervert hysteria so that the ‘he’/ ‘she’ seems to disentangle themselves out into shameful prominence. Hybridity of peoples and their bodies, spaces and idioms and the uselessness of mechanical movements, driven to patterns of banal everyday gaming, thus render mute any scope of agency, whether as a collective or an individual. Only the crowd, anonymity and exile feed into nomadic global conduits of irrelevant/imagined economic and political “stances” of a culture of predatory ‘management’ system of neoliberalism constantly under the surveillance of a police state. The police state, however, is also fraught with the same risks of routine prescriptive moves, blind to any difference of any ‘literary device’

The post Cartography of Mass City-zenry in Global Netscapes in Cristina Peri Rossi’s Short Stories ‘Los desaarraigados’ [‘The Uprooted’] and ‘La grieta’ [‘The Crevice’]. appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

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The West, as the representative model of order and stability in the international system, surveys the possibilities of peace and conflict in potentially significant geo-strategic zones. The West as the global policeman is also seeking potential allies that can help regulate and facilitate access to resources. An election in a postcolonial country is an important barometer in making these calculations, and therefore a subject of intense surveillance by the West. Elections in a postcolonial country come under the gaze of the West usually if it is with regards to a former colony ravaged by warfare and subject to the reconstruction efforts of the West.

The West is often involved in sending election monitors to supervise elections in these countries. But this year the elections in India, an independent country with a vibrant democratic system, has gained unprecedented visibility and is the subject of intense debate in the West.[1] The ongoing trauma of postcolonial experience has come alive during the current elections in India. Newspaper and academic articles introduce this subject with numerical citations on the size of the electorate (814 million) and are keen to label the political system as a stable ‘democracy’ in order to weigh in on the significance of an election in a postcolonial country.[2] These enormous figures and political labels on legitimacy help attract the attention of Western audiences by helping to focus their gaze on a far away landscape and give a sense of importance to the subaltern.[3]

These elections have made visible in an unprecedented manner the agony of a painful colonial legacy that the nationalists tried to subvert. The old and dirty colonial legacy of divide and conquer, playing upon distrust between the Hindus, the Muslims, the Sikhs and many others continues as  these are now regarded as ‘vote banks’ for parties contesting elections. Take for example, the two main political parties: the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) issues a majoritarian appeal to the Hindus to unite, and the Congress woos the Muslims as a minority that needs to be protected by a secular force. Sonia Gandhi, the current president of the Congress party has made deliberate efforts to reach out to the Muslim clergy to ask them to mobilize popular support in their constituencies in support of her party.[4]

The legacy of a colonial education too has had visible effects on the electorate. In order to establish its own ideological supremacy, colonial education deliberately castigated any nationalist attempts to foster an alternative ideology such as Hindutva as inferior, subversive and a threat to modernization.[5] The imported ideologies of liberalism and communism have been taught for generations, but any engagement with indigenous ideologies such as Hindutva is actively discouraged and dismissed as rabid. This has generated an atmosphere of fear and suspicion that has little patience for investigating the factors that have encouraged the BJP to resort to Hindutva, and the impact of electoral politics on this ideology. The BJP is repeatedly attacked as a divisive and anti-secular force trying to rewrite history in a manner that will split the country and undermine its democratic institutions. These insecurities and fears became most visible with the unprecedented act of a college principal issuing a special message on the college website and sending official emails to students in a deliberate attempt to influence their decision to vote a day before the polls opened.[6]

The subaltern has tried to thwart these colonial legacies of ‘divide and rule’ and colonial education through the civilizing catharsis of a written constitution with its antidote of secularism. This helped the subaltern gain recognition as a sovereign state within the international community. It is respect for this constitution that is now being reiterated by the established political parties as they try to temper and discipline new political parties such as the Aam Admi Party (AAP) entering the political fray. The lack of respect for constitutional procedures has generated concern about impending anarchy should this party come to power. In an act of frustration or in an effort to propose an alternative identity that is capable of even questioning this constitution, Arvind Kejriwal, the leader of this political party did not even hesitate to proclaim himself an anarchist.[7] This rash proclamation sent alarm bells ringing through the corridors of power both within the country and overseas. The strong backlash has now compelled Kejriwal to retract and issue a statement that he is committed to working within the modalities of the Indian constitution.[8]

These experiences have created a paradox where a postcolonial country is on the one hand applauded for being a vibrant democracy while on the other there is an embedded sense of fear, trepidation and uncertainty among the political pundits. At regular intervals alarmist trumpet calls alert the West to the unpredictability of the outcome of these elections and the future political trajectory of this country.[9] The seriousness of these dangerous threat perceptions is complemented by the old game of caricature and stereotyping. This strategy of deploying political cartoons is claimed by the West to have been introduced to the illiterate Orient that only with the help of simple visuals could learn to appreciate politics and political humour.[10] This strategy has now gained much popularity and traction in Indian culture and politics. The Oriental stereotypes of the ‘pandit’ and the ‘mullah’ created by the West are now regenerated and reinvigorated to lampoon political candidates and their religious affiliations. The caricature of Baba Ramdev in his saffron robes is a case in point.[11] The satirical intonations and depictions of ‘Madame Sonia’ as a gesture towards her Italian ancestry invoke loud laughter from mass audiences attending public rallies.[12]

Similarly other ideological tropes such as Fascism, Nazism and ghettoism are being evoked as threats to the much vaunted secularism and feminism.[13] The sly civility in the evocation of these particular tropes should not blind us to the politics behind their careful deployment. The politics of engaging and educating the West in its own language about other locales is based on a subtle assumption that the West can only comprehend violence if the subaltern willingly partakes and shares a vocabulary familiar to the West, crafted in its own experiences of epistemic violence. Any narration of suffering can be of sustained interest only if it finds resonance in the West. The universality of experiences of suffering and any struggle against them can only be described in a language of human rights as a standard of civilization sourced from the West.[14] So immersed is the subaltern in her Western experiences of learning and conceptualization that there is little need to pause or any attempt to articulate these experiences in local terms such as the need for sadbhavna (goodwill towards all)  or satyagraha (sacrifice and penance). The articulation of these concepts by some politicians that escaped the Western fount of learning still imparted in missionary schools in the Orient is dismissed as nonsensical.

The acute sense of vulnerability and shame that is experienced by the subaltern now  scrutinized by the West is couched in assurances of a predictable foreign policy and ministers treading the beaten old path regulated by an elephant bureaucracy.[15] The clerks under a colonial regime were always the acclaimed loyalists and in a post-colonial India their briefings to the elected candidates would secure their proper adaptation and adherence to the international protocol. These assurances mimic the confidence of a new post-colonial intellectual and political elite that in the immediate aftermath of its new found independence is eager to demonstrate to the West its capability to govern in a responsible manner.  In this election as soon as the manifesto of the BJP suggested a possibility of revising India’s nuclear doctrine this was taken very seriously by the West.[16] The party leadership had to issue an immediate clarification of adhering to a no-first use policy. These gestures are representative of a desire to assure and appease the West by the postcolonial elites that no matter which political party comes to power India will not make any radical changes in its nuclear policy.[17] These practices continue as exercises demonstrating the rational mind of the subaltern.

As the elections are being constested these facile attempts at mimicry to reconcile and assure the West that we will be rational and steer the beaten path in our foreign and economic policy continue unabated and find a place in leading academic and journalistic publications in the West. Regular assurances are issued that India will not deviate from the path of neo-liberal economic reforms and will maintain the status-quo vis-à-vis its neighbours and the West.[18] Political candidates are evaluated in terms of their relationship with the US and China as two powerful economies interested in doing business with India. The US is still ambivalent about issuing a visa to Narendra Modi, the BJP candidate, but has not hesitated in making overtures by sending its ambassador for a private meeting with him.[19] The hesitation of the West to embrace an electoral frontrunner renders Modi a more palatable candidate to non-Western countries such as China that have expressed much faith in his ability to do business and improve relations.[20]

The postcolonial trauma of the subaltern is unending. It is only in moments of crisis such as these elections that it becomes visible with such force. The ritualistic exercise of an election will run its course. But how will the subaltern sustain the gaze of the West? How will the subaltern escape the violence of being subject to the West’s scrutiny and discipline? Will the subaltern continue to suppress its need to question the divide and rule politics taught by the colonizers? Will the subaltern keep aspiring to the ‘superior’ status of the modernized and condemn as inferior any conversation with its own remnant ideological strains? Will the subaltern cling to the constitution as its only recourse to any demonstrated capability to reason and govern? The spectacle continues, and the West is for the time being mesmerized.

Postscript: Narendra Modi is now India’s Prime Minister-elect.

Photo credit: Al Jazeera English via Compfight cc

The post The Spectacle of Indian Elections and the West appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

On August 19^th I observed as some three hundred people — migrants, activists and a few officials — gathered outside a morgue in Rabat to mourn the death of a twenty-four year old Senegalese man who had been murdered the week before. According to a migrant rights activist affiliated with the Conseil des Migrants Subsahariens au Maroc, the Senegalese man was stabbed after refusing to give up his seat to a Moroccan man on a bus traveling from Rabat to Fez. Local and international articles reporting on the man’s death the following week focused on whether or not the murder was an isolated incident or indicative of a larger human rights problem in Moroccan society. One only has to look at the string of violent attacks emanating from Northern coastal cities and from the border with Algeria over the past several years to be sure that this was not an isolated incident. As this article will explain, this perceived increase in the number of attacks and human rights violations toward migrants is a direct result of increasingly stringent Western migration policies, which are transforming Morocco and other Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) states into countries of settlement ‘by default.’[1]

The closing of legal routes and methods of spatial control

The treatment of migrants once they have arrived on Western countries’ territories has improved over the last three decades. Western states are bound by ideologies that dictate the equal treatment of migrants once they reside on host territories and the extension of citizenship-like rights to non-citizens – immigrants, refugees and even ‘illegal’ migrants—is now commonplace in most Western democracies.[2] Yet at the same time, Western states have also taken steps to further control which persons manage to reach and successfully cross their borders. States are accommodating and welcoming of migrants once they manage to penetrate a Western state’s border, but in order to prevent unwanted migrants from doing so, Western states have found new means of fortifying their territories. This process manifests itself both physically (such as the United States’ amplification of the wall along its Southern border with Mexico) and through technological means (biometric scanning systems, enhanced passports, etc.). New means of immigration control have even extended beyond the state itself, in both concrete forms (such as zones established for policing illegal migrants within the territory of another state), as well as through more subtle ‘soft power’ mechanisms (coercing or threatening other states to more effectively counter unauthorized migration).

Goldschmidt (2006) argues that when the EU created the ‘Schengen space,’ an internal zone of free movement, in 1985 it also barred legal entry to migrants from developing countries. Since this time it has granted continually fewer visas for migrants coming from developing countries in all immigration categories, despite an increase in the number of aspiring immigrants (ibid). European governments have also been pressuring North African countries to bolster border security in order to curb illegal migration, instigated primarily by the Italian Berlusconi government in 2008 (Boubakri 2013). Concurrently, after the embargo had been lifted on Libya, EU states used the incentive of increased trade and the normalization of relations to compel the Gaddafi regime to adapt its migration policies to fit EU objectives, resulting in the establishment of Italian-Libyan joint patrols in Libyan and international waters in 2008 (ibid). Tunisia and Morocco also conformed their immigration policies during the same time period, and it has subsequently become extremely difficult and costly[3] for ‘irregular’ migrants, as well as legal migrants, to successfully cross into Europe.

Post-9/11 the United States has also reduced the number of migrants it is willing to accept through its formal immigration process. Additionally, migrants hoping to pursue political asylum in the United States must reach its territory or already be present in order to apply, and post-9/11 immigration-related security have made gaining access to American soil more difficult (Kerwin 2011). These events have implications for migrants attempting to apply for immigration via formal avenues, as well as for refugees attempting to successfully navigate the official UNHCR resettlement route. It is important not to entirely conflate recent trends in European and North American migration policies as there are important ideological differences affecting the citizen-state dialectic in both regions that have implications for migration policies.[4] Nonetheless, those states generally considered to be the world’s primary ‘immigrant receivers’ – namely, the US, Europe and Australia — have enacted a series of progressively restrictive migration controls over the past decade that are affecting migration patterns elsewhere.

Stuck in Transit

In 2011 the OECD estimated that ten to fifteen percent of the world’s total migrants are ‘illegal’ (OECD 2011). This is indicative of the fact that the hardening of borders and the imposition of new intensive security measures do not successfully deter migrants from passing into their desired destination territories. While Western countries continue to restrict access through new, enhanced methods, migrants continue to leave their home states, often becoming ‘stuck’ in countries that they only hoped to pass through for transit purposes. In the North African case, states that have traditionally been considered countries of emigration are now being transformed into migrant-receiving countries. Thousands of Sub-Saharan Africans who hoped to reach Europe or to be resettled with the aid of international agencies attempt to pass through this region, but rather than return home if they are unable to reach Western countries, they remain in these host states indefinitely. Many cannot return due to persecution, but others simply cannot afford the return journey or they find that the socio-economic situation in the transit host country is still relatively better than that in their home state.

While many migrants settle without the permission of host governments, these states unofficially permit the continued presence of migrants on their territories through both their inability to successfully prevent migrants from entering their borders and through their ambivalence and neglect of those migrants who choose to settle. Consequently, several MENA states are now among the countries with the highest percentages of non-citizen immigrants in the resident population. This transformation – from emigration to immigration country – may prove particularly challenging for migrants to MENA states because citizenship policies are highly stringent. In most other countries around the world, children born on a territory can access citizenship even if their parents are not able to do so. However in MENA countries, citizenship is effectively closed to non-Arabs because of the extremely limited role of jus soli – in most cases, nationality can only be passed through paternal blood descent.

Bargaining for Rights

Despite limited access to citizenship in MENA host states, there are factors that may prove to work in the favor of Sub-Saharan migrants. In the example of Morocco, the government is a strong advocate of rights for Moroccans residing in Europe, consistently lobbying the EU government to protect its nationals abroad. Could this currently hypocritical policy of advocating for rights on behalf of its nationals but denying rights to migrants on its own territory eventually necessitate that the government of Morocco take steps to assist Sub-Saharan migrants? In a meeting on September 10, 2013 between King Mohammed VI and several political officials there was discussion of drafting a new ‘comprehensive policy on immigration’ that will attempt to normalize the situation of all migrants in Morocco, whether from Sub-Saharan Africa or elsewhere (North Africa Post 2013). There was even use of the term ‘integration’ during the meeting, and thus acknowledgement that these migrants will not be returning to their home countries in the near future, though the King’s Office also noted in its press statement that it would not be able to provide integration for ‘all’ migrants wishing to settle in the country. The statement also denied the use of ‘systematic violence by the police,’ directly contravening the findings of the final report released by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) before the group shut down its Moroccan operations in March of 2013 in objection to the violence.

This meeting on a new immigration policy may have simply been ‘cheap talk’ in the face of allegations over migrant abuse emanating from various NGOs, especially considering that organizations like the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) claim the Moroccan government has been discussing such reform for years without any tangible action. Yet another factor that migrants may have on their side is that the government of Morocco, like the governments of all countries receiving ‘unsolicited’ migrants, is in fact heavily reliant upon such migration to fill gaps in its labor force. The Moroccan economy benefits hugely from the presence of migrants who fill positions in the informal economy – primarily in the fields of construction, farming, homecare (for females), and security (car watch) – because papers are not checked and the jobs are non-contracted. While the crucial economic role that migrants play may not be an incentive for the Moroccan government to regularize the status of Sub-Saharans, it certainly constitutes an important bargaining chip for migrants and the advocacy organizations working on their behalf to use when lobbying the government for access to public services and human rights protection.

Misguided Policies

As de Hass (2007) notes, an often cited ‘smart solution’ to the ‘problem’ of migration is to increase development aid to poor countries in the hopes that this will curb the desire to migrate, despite the fact that empirical evidence strongly suggests that economic and human development tends to increase peoples’ aspirations and thus increase emigration. Such policy choices, along with the implementation of new forms of spatial and territorial control, are indicative of the total absence of understanding why people choose to migrate. As this article has discussed, increasingly restrictive immigration policies and the militarization of external border controls are not curbing migration but are instead transforming transit countries, including those of North Africa, into countries of settlement. Regardless of the desires of either EU states or the governments of North African countries, migration is likely to continue unabated. The important question at present is how new countries of settlement will respond to these patterns, and whether they will learn from the mistakes and false assumptions of older migrant receiving countries in developing policies of immigration and integration.

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Once a meiren (commander) of the Darhan Banner militia in Jirim League (now Tongliao Municipality in eastern Inner Mongolia), Gada became a hero for his defiance of the corrupt authorities. He fought to regain the ancestral homeland of his Khorchin Mongol tribe, which the wang 王 (prince) of Darhan sold to the Manchurian government in 1929 as the “Liaobei Wasteland” (Lu 1979: 564). The story of his struggle and ultimate defeat is immortalized in song, symphony, narrative poetry, and film. A television series was released in 2011. Gada Meiren (whose Mongolian given name is Naadmed) is considered an Inner Mongolian hero, and as such is sometimes viewed warily as a potential symbol of separatist sentiment, a threat to Chinese sovereignty in the region (Bulag 2004: 105). Yet he may also be a powerful rhetorical tool of the Chinese state, a man who defied the Manchurian imperialists and the oppressive aristocrats in a “revolutionary fight” (geming zhandou 革命战斗) (Lu 1979: 565). Moreover, at the time of his struggle, Inner Mongolia had ceased to exist as a political entity; the territory of the fallen Qing Empire was divided into newly-drawn provinces, nominally controlled by the Republic of China but actually in the hands of various warlords. The significance of Gada Meiren’s fight has expanded far beyond its local and temporal situation, and has become a symbol of all of Inner Mongolia and their “revolutionary” spirit.

Little is written about Gada Meiren, and what is written leaves many questions unanswered. The narrative poem about Gada Meiren is said to have been composed sometime in the 1950s, but so far I have found no text which traces its exact origins, nor anything to clarify authorship. It is even unclear whether the poem is oral or written in origin. Its connection to the “facts” of the rebellion is also a bit murky, although certain “artful untruths” stand out: for instance, in a 1979 published version of the narrative poem, Gada Meiren faces the Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin 张作霖, even though Zhang was assassinated before the sale of the Darhan lands (Seal 1996: 185; Bonavia 1995: 84). I will argue later that Zhang serves as a political foil to the “proto-revolutionary” Gada. Nonetheless, the oral and written traditions which memorialize his rebellion clearly constitute “invented tradition” used to establish a “national memory” of this hero (see Hobsbawm and Ranger 1992; Noyes and Abrahams 1999: 77). We may not be able to trace the folk origins of Gada Meiren the hero, but those origins are evident in the officially-sanctioned tellings of his story.

The 1979 Chinese-language version of the Gada Meiren poem arranged by Chen Qingzhang 陈清漳 and Saiximang 赛西芒 from written materials in both Mongolian and Chinese represents the simultaneous traditionalization of the Gada Meiren story and its generalization for larger Inner Mongol and national audiences (Hymes 1975: 11, Bauman 1992: 128). Switching from prose to poetry and back in each episode, the poem gestures towards the idiom of bensen üliger, a Khorchin narrative poetic genre. This study begins with historical background on the Khorchin, a once-powerful tribe intimately connected with the Qing government, and on the changes wrought in eastern Inner Mongolia through Han Chinese migration, the sale of land, and the ensuing banditry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The poem is then analyzed through comparison with this historical backdrop. Connections are drawn with bensen üliger. The general absence of local specificity expands the poem’s appeal beyond the Khorchin, while the role of Gada’s wife Peony and Zhang Zuolin add complexity to the legend. The local, regional, and national significance of the poem is explored. Noyes and Abraham’s study of the formation of national memory (1999), as well as Seal’s work on outlaw narrative and its “convenience” for both marginal and official interests (1996), inform this analysis. Gada Meiren’s legend flourishes because of its malleability: it can at once represent a struggle to regain a by-gone era, and a harbinger of the communist revolution.

The Khorchin Mongols: Shifting Centers of Power

Gada Meiren’s ancestors were once among the most powerful people of East Asia. They rose to power, however, through a sort of devil’s pact. After the Ming expelled the Mongol Yuan government from China in 1368, the Mongol tribes splintered and fell into warfare. The disunited eastern tribes, ruled nominally by the Northern Yuan government, were later threatened by the Zhungar empire of the western Oirat tribes. The rise of the Manchu offered a chance for peace and stability. In 1624 the Khorchin made an alliance with the Manchu. Later, Ejei Khan of the Northern Yuan submitted to the Manchu, thus dissolving his empire. The Manchu divided Mongol territory into Inner and Outer regions, and integrated the Mongols into their military system of banners, which organized locales and families (Atwood 2004: 451). These banners were organized into leagues, equivalent in size to a county in a Chinese province. The Outer Mongols, who were mostly of the Khalkha tribe and under looser control from the Manchu Qing government, grew apart from the numerous tribes of Inner Mongolia. The Inner Mongol tribes were in turn isolated from each other by the boundaries of their respective banners. The borders also confined the livelihood of the Mongols, who as pastoral nomads could no longer move camp wherever they pleased. Still, the Mongols were privileged as bannermen, the Khorchin particularly so. The Kangxi Emperor (1662-1722), one of the greatest leaders of the Qing, was quite close with his Khorchin grandmother (Atwood 2004: 309).

Geography and government policy changed the Khorchin way of life dramatically. Jirim League, the traditional Khorchin territory, is in present-day eastern Inner Mongolia and neighboring Liaoning Province. Nestled along the Hinggan mountain range, the region receives much more rainfall than the Mongolian heartland. The inhabitants of the Jirim region have practiced agricultural for at least centuries, if not millennia (Hürelbaatar 1999: 192). In the mid-nineteenth century, the Qing reversed centuries of protectionism and allowed Han Chinese farmers to migrate north of the Great Wall into Inner Mongolia and Manchuria. Eastern Inner Mongolia experienced a particularly high influx of migrants. The Khorchin thus evolved into a semi-agricultural and semi-pastoral lifestyle and a sinicized folk culture (ibid.).

By the turn of the century, the Han Chinese migrant population in Inner Mongolia had expanded enormously. The sedentary agriculture of the Chinese permitted denser populations than Mongol nomadic pastoralism. The Chinese thus overtook the Mongol population; by the mid-nineteen-forties, the Mongols were an absolute minority in the region (Hürelbaatar 1999: 195). The Han Chinese were not always unwelcome, however; in the late nineteenth century, the migrants worked as tenant farmers, working for the banner wang (princes).

The greatest source of interethnic strife in Jirim and other eastern banners before the communist era seems to have come from the sale of Mongol land to the Qing government and, after the fall of the empire, to northern warlords. Many wang in the region squandered taxes and personal wealth on luxury. When they had lost all other sources of income, the wang sold their land. These sales displaced the native Mongol farmers and herders as military personnel “reclaimed” these “wastelands” for their own use (Lu 1979: 564). The Mongol inhabitants lost their land and with it, their means of survival. Some Mongol men chose to fight the reclamation personnel, forming bandit gangs in the Hinggan mountains and forests. The first prominent gang, led by the former herder Bayindalai, turned Suluke Banner into “mounted brigand” territory. Bayindalai waged a successful guerilla campaign in the region from 1904 to 1907. An erstwhile farmer, Taoketao, lodged his own campaign in Khorchin and Zhalait territories in 1906-1907 (Yiduhexige 2002: 183).

Zhang Zuolin, an ethnic Manchu from Liaoning Province and the anachronistic villain of the Gada Meiren poem, was himself involved in banditry as a youth. In 1900, four years after Zhang began his career of outlawry, the gang joined the imperial army in its fight against the Boxer Rebels. After the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905), Zhang served the Qing “on border patrol and bandit-suppression duties” (Bonavia 1995: 63). It was in fact Zhang who put down Bayindalai and Taoketao (Yiduhexige 2002: 185). Parlaying himself to Yuan Shikai, the first president of the Republic of China and antagonist of the Kuomingtang (KMT), Zhang eventually controlled all of Manchuria, including the former Inner Mongolian territory Chahar and Suiyuan provinces (Bonavia 1995: 61). Zhang’s Manchuria flourished from 1917 to the mid-nineteen-twenties, but succumbed to crop failures and inflation around 1927. When Zhang failed to wrest control of Beijing from the Zhili government, the Japanese Kwantung Army planted a bomb on the railroad tracks along his route home to Mukden. Except for Zhang’s death in the June 4, 1928 explosion, he serves as the perfect foil to Gada Meiren: instead of fighting injustice, Zhang capitalized on it. Gada Meiren went from military officer to outlaw; Zhang turned against the very people he may have once fought alongside. In Anglophone outlaw narrative, the outlaw breaks the laws of man when the laws of men break higher moral codes (Seal 1996: 184). The same ethical theory applies to Gada Meiren: he fought a corrupt wang who had undermined his legitimacy with his own tribal kin, and a state which exiled Mongol farmers and pastoralists off of their “barren” land and into penury and starvation.

Seal describes the “convenience” of outlaw narratives not only for the marginalized, but also for groups antagonistic to the one represented by the outlaw. Ned Kelly, a nineteenth-century Australian bank robber and “bushranger”, has become a national hero. His story resonates for many Aborigines in Western Australia and the Northern Territories, who “see Kelly as an appropriate representative of their own grievances and struggle” against the state (Seal 1996: 179). This may seem improbable when Kelly’s Anglo-Celtic ancestors were the cause of so much of that grief. Kelly appears in books, films, television series, and even on a government-issued postage stamp (Seal 1996: 177, 148).

Parallels also exist between Gada Meiren and Owain Glyndŵr, a 15th-century Welsh nobleman who lead a years-long fight against British rule from 1401-1415. He is at once a “redeemer-hero” of the Welsh nation, a “social bandit” hiding in the mountains and on the margins, and in more recent times a “national hero” of the Welsh people (Henken 1996: 20, 160). Beginning in the nineteenth century, Glyndŵr’s localized rebellion morphed into a more generalized “revolt against unjust treatment and the struggle for freedom (168). As will be shown later, the local particulars of Gada Meiren’s uprising have also been subsumed into a narrative with broader appeal to Mongolians across China, and to Han Chinese as well.

The outlaw narrative supports the state’s self-portrayal as an authority sensitive to a higher moral code and the needs of its citizens. This again points to the necessity of pitting Zhang against Gada Meiren, for Zhang was a staunch anti-communist. Although Gada never speaks of the class struggle in the 1979 poem, he does not have to. He opposed the reactionaries, anti-communists, and feudalists; his is, by association, a revolutionary.

Khorchin Narrative Poetry in the 1979 Gada Meiren Poet

The 1979 Gada Meiren poem is traditionalized through genre, style, and imagery. The poem is divided into episodes, including an opening song (xuge 序歌). Each episode begins with prose, then shifts between prose and poetry. Speech is always in verse. This prosimetric format is common in bensen üliger (“book-based epic”), a Khorchin oral tradition of retelling Chinese serial fiction (Heissig 1996: 90). Chinese novels circulated in manuscript form and became popular among educated Khorchin. These novels were then oralized and performed by huurch’, storytellers who accompanied themselves with a fiddle or huur (Wurenqimuge 1988: 22-23). In the performance of bensen üliger, the huurch’ speaks the prose and sings the verse while accompanying himself, in a style akin to the tanci 弹词 tradition of Chinese chantefable (Bender 2003: 3). The format of the 1979 poem invokes a uniquely Khorchin oral tradition which grew out of close cultural exchange with the Chinese.

While the format of the poem may be localized, the contents appeal to a non-local audience. Images and lines from the folksong “Gada Meiren” appear throughout the 1979 edition of the poem. The song says nothing of Gada Meiren’s actions, but rather analogizes them with the migration of wild swans: just as they must always rest at the Shar Mörön River, so too Gada Meiren fought for all Mongols:

• The wild swans flying from the south
• Must rest on the Yangtze River
• Gada Meiren’s revolt
• Is for the land of all Mongols

• 南方飞来的小鸿雁啊
• 不落长江不呀不起飞
• 要说起义的嘎达梅林
• 是为了蒙古人民的土地

Both the Mongolian version of the song and the 1979 poem name the Shar Mörön, not the Yangtze. Still, the idea of a major river should resonate for most readers. The image of the Shar Mörön and the migrating swans appears in the opening song and the final episode of the poem, and sporadically in other episodes.

Although the Shar Mörön, Erlong Mountain 二龙山, and other landmarks are mentioned, the land is always described as pasture land (muchang 牧场) and grassland (caoyuan 草原). Perhaps the inhabitants of Darhan Banner were exclusively pastoralists. Given its location, however, one suspects that a mixed economy of agriculture and pastoralism was practiced. Gada Meiren may indeed have been fighting to regain farmland. That possibility, however, has less appeal to Inner Mongols to the west, where the drier climate almost totally precludes agriculture. The picture of farming Khorchin Mongols would also strike most Han Chinese as odd, as they are accustomed to the image of Inner Mongolia as a vast nomadic grassland. If the prosimetric format of Gada Meiren constitutes traditionalization, then the insistence on the imagined pastoralism of Darhan Banner constitutes invented tradition. The reality of the Khorchin mixed economy would simply not make sense to anyone outside that particular locality.

While the prosimetric format authenticates the Khorchin voice and the invocation of the grasslands reaches out to non-Khorchin readers, the story of Gada’s wife Peony marries Khorchin bensen üliger with communist narrative. Peony was in fact Gada’s third wife, but the other two are not mentioned in the poem (Lu 1979: 563). According to the poem’s telling, Gada would have accomplished nothing without his wife. It is Peony who urges him to confront the wang about the plight of their people. When Gada is stripped of his title, she tells him this is just the opportunity he needs to truly devote himself to his cause. With her encouragement, Gada and a group of supporters travel to the capital, Mukden, to have an audience with Zhang Zuolin himself. The evil Zhang throws the men in prison and has them sent back to Darhan, where they will await execution. As Peony prepares to rescue her husband and his friends, she realizes the futility of her situation. She knows that she and her people are up against forces more powerful than their own. Assuming she will lose everything in the fight, and so chooses to give up her possessions before the army can take them from her. She sells all her livestock and as much of her possessions as she can. She begs Zhuri Lama to take her three-year-old daughter, Tianjiliang, and raise her as his own. But, beholden to the wang and his own backwardness, the lama refuses:

• My ancestors were loyal servants of the people.
• To oppose His Highness would disgrace my forebears.
• Old Gada is already an unfilial traitor,
• you must not join him in his misdeeds.

• I will happy take care of your livestock,
• but I cannot accept Tianjiliang.
• It is not that I am heartless,
• I just cannot commit treason (62-63).

• 老孟家族辈都是忠顺百姓，
• 反抗王爷有辱祖先的名声，
• 老嘎达已成了叛臣逆子，
• 你要是再去造反天理难容。

• 这房屋牲畜可以帮你料理，
• 交给我天吉良可不能答应，
• 不是朱日喇嘛无情无义，
• 老孟家不愿担造反罪名。

Without the lama’s help, Peony is sure her daughter will eventually fall into the hands of her enemies. She has only one other option to save her daughter from orphanhood and capture. After hesitation and tears, Peony finally manages to shoot Tianjiliang. After the child is dead, she sets her house on fire. Now nothing remains to hold her back.

The Mongols converted to Tibetan Buddhism in the seventeenth century. Mongol intellectuals and Western scholars alike have long held that this conversion pacified and weakened the Mongols (see Elverskog 2006). By the nineteenth century, approximately one third of all Mongol men became lamas, contributing to population decline (Hangin 1973: 1). The corruption of lamas was also no secret (Hangin 1973: 76). Indeed, in Khorchin versions of the Gesar epic, which spread from Tibet along with Buddhism, pit the pious hero Gesar against evil lamas. In bensen üliger, lamas become manggus, monsters with magical powers who face shamans in battle (Wurenqimuge 1988: 25). Zhuri Lama is a modern version of the lama manggus. He has no magical powers; instead, his evil lies in his refusal to contribute to the rebellion. Earlier bensen üliger criticized the lamas for, among other crimes, usurping the power of the Mongols’ native shamanism. In the poem, the lama is not an enemy of the shamans, but of the people. Zhuri Lama is bound to his feudal commitments, unwilling to lose face for his ancestors, the wang, or himself. The compilers of the poem had no need to inject Communist rhetoric into the story; the Party message of clergy as feudal reactionaries can be read in between the lines.

Less blatant is Peony’s feminism. She does not simply act to help her husband in his righteous cause. Rather, the revolt is her own cause, which she initiates through her husband. Women and other marginal peoples sometimes make their way into the folklore of revolt as strong, courageous heroes. There is a certain democracy to folklore, albeit not total equality (Beiner 2007: 1997). Her bravery suits not only the Khorchin folklore, but also the communist lore, which gives women a more active role in the revolution.

The government suppressed the story of Gada Meiren during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), fearing it would spread “ethnic seperatism” (minzu fenlie 民族分裂) (Wu 1979: 566). After Mao’s death and the conviction of the Gang of Four, Gada Meiren was rehabilitated as a revolutionary hero (ibid.). He is a “convenient” outlaw figure for the communist Chinese state, which itself began as a band of outlaws rejected by the KMT. Taken at face-value, Gada Meiren’s struggle was simply for the repossession of land. He did not seek to overthrow the class system or communalize all private property. Perhaps he simply lead a movement of social banditry, a peasant revolt designed to return the Khorchin world to its traditional order, not to create “a new and perfect world” for all Mongols (within the context of a new China) (Hobsbawm 1959: 5). We do not know if Gada Meiren supported the Inner Mongolian People’s Revolutionary Party, nor if he would have applauded the founding of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in 1947 by the Chinese Communist Party (two years before the Party wrested control from the KMT) (Atwood 2004: 247). Yet the folklore surrounding him, as that surrounding other outlaw heroes, has been imbued with political meaning (Seal 1996: 197). In order to maintain its status quo, the Chinese Communist Party harks back to its early days as an outlawed entity. This casts the Party not as a stodgy hegemon, but as a youthful underdog, fighting other hegemons in order to bring justice to the Chinese people. “National memory” is built most solidly on folk tradition, in dialogue between the periphery and the center (Noyes and Abrahams 1999: 92). Since the Party could not suppress Gada Meiren’s story—just as it failed to suppress most folklore in its purge of the “four olds”—it wisely allowed scholars to revisit the narrative, and read into it a story of incipient communist revolution.

Further Research

Many questions of the Gada Meiren legend’s origins and development are left unanswered here. To fully explore the meanings of Gada Meiren to various Mongolian groups and to the Chinese state, research is needed on the authorship and historiography of the narrative poem, song, and other extent texts concerning Gada Meiren, as well as their variation, evolution, and interpretation by different ethnic and political groups. For example, is Zhang Zuolin the villain in all versions of the Gada Meiren poem, or do the wang and other characters receive more of the blame? How did Zhang become such a central figure? Also, what, if any, connection is there between the Gada Meiren story and the Inner Mongolian independence movement? I am also curious as to the performance of the Gada Meiren poem. Is it ever told in the story-song format of bensen üliger? Just as the interpretation of the past says as much about the concerns of the present it does as about the past itself, so too the 1979 poem analyzed here speaks to the concerns of Inner Mongols emerging from the Cultural Revolution as much, if not more so, than to concerns of the Darhans of the 1920s (Vansina 1985: xii, 119). The 2002 film adds another presentistic twist: director Feng Xiaoning 冯小宁 has moved the story forward to World War II and pitted Gada against the Japanese. A thorough study of all print and manuscript materials, as well as ethnographic fieldwork, are necessary to answer the many questions surrounding Gada Meiren and his many symbolisms. This study offers a beginning look into the complexity surrounding the Gada Meiren legend.

Special thanks to Dr. Erdenebat Jamaa and Dr. Uranchimeg Borjigin for their help in transcribing and translating the Mongolian version of the “Gada Meiren” folksong, and to Prof. Christopher Atwood for research guidance.

The post “For the Land of All Mongols”: Gada Meiren the Bandit, Hero, and Proto-Revolutionary appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

Temos uma sociedade desigual, que se adaptou a esse padrão de desigualdade e dele se serve e a partir dele se reproduz (THEODORO, 2008, p.81).

O Brasil é um país de contradições históricas, considerado a maior economia da América Latina que, paradoxalmente, abarca um gigantesco contingente de pobres, tem perpetuado a naturalização da pobreza e profundas desigualdades (THEODORO, 2008). Para Henriques (2001), a naturalização da desigualdade deriva de um acordo social excludente, que limita a inserção de direitos e oportunidades de determinados segmentos e reforça a cidadania para poucos.

A desigualdade brasileira perpassa o tecido social e tem raízes históricas assentadas no período da escravidão e no processo de transição para o regime de trabalho livre marcado pela exclusão, falta de proteção e políticas direcionadas à mão-de-obra recém-libertada. A população negra, excluída da terra e destinada ao subemprego, desemprego e a informalidade concentrou-se nos segmentos mais pobres reforçando a associação entre pobreza e cor da pele – dado que explica a nossa idiossincrasia e contrastes sociais (THEODORO, 2008).

No Brasil, ainda vigora o frequente argumento de que há o processo de preconceito e de discriminação, só que dirigido aos pobres e não aos negros, argumento que legitima, segundo Guimarães (2002, p. 67) o preconceito de classe. Logo, pode-se inferir que a legitimidade desse preconceito se ampara precisamente no fato de que a maioria dos pobres é negra, e de que a imagem do pobre no Brasil está associada à negritude – uma sólida e direta relação entre racismo, preconceito, discriminação e processo de naturalização da pobreza. Entre os negros, observam-se menores índices de mobilidade ascendente, e por outro lado, elevada exposição a maiores possibilidades de mobilidade descendente (JACCOUD, 2008).

No que tange a condições de vida e de saúde, negros nascem com peso inferior a brancos, apresentam maior probabilidade de morrer antes de completar um ano de idade, jovens negros morrem de forma violenta em maior percentual que jovens brancos, a população negra sofre com a pior qualidade no atendimento no sistema de saúde e vive menos do que a população branca (IPEA, 2007, p. 281).

Apesar das variações regionais, a pobreza e a miséria no Brasil são predominantemente negras (ZAMORA, 2012). Para Theodoro (2008, p. 81) “a problemática racial revela-se como a chave da naturalização da desigualdade”. Desse modo, a naturalização social da condição subalterna da população negra responde por melhorias restritas das condições de vida e oportunidades insuficientes para esse grupo. Os mecanismos raciais de discriminação atuam na ordem da distribuição do prestígio e privilégios sociais que influenciam na alocação de lugares e oportunidades e são reforçados pela própria composição racial da pobreza (JACCOUD, 2008).

Desse modo, os negros encontram-se nos níveis mais baixos da pirâmide social. A origem social é representada, em elevado grau, pela raça da pessoa, isto é, compõe-se como o principal determinante da reprodução da desigualdade social, acompanhada da discriminação racial. A probabilidade de um negro nascer pobre é expressivamente maior que a de um branco; somado a esse legado, o sistema educacional, canal de mobilidade ascendente, tende a reproduzir as mazelas das desigualdades de origem ao invés de contrapô-las (OSÓRIO, 2010).

Quanto pior a posição social, tanto pior a saúde. Esse dado denota a direta proporcionalidade entre a condição social e a situação de saúde, a invariância das desigualdades em saúde. A posição socioeconômica influencia tanto a exposição como a vulnerabilidade a fatores mediadores comportamentais, psicossociais e ambientais, de modo que pessoas pertencentes a estrato socioeconômico inferior são mais vulneráveis, mais expostas a eventos e condições de vida negativas para a saúde (SANTOS, 2011).

A grande parcela dos indicadores sociais empregados nos estudos epidemiológicos relaciona-se com a dimensão da renda e os bens dos indivíduos analisados (FERREIRA; LATORRE, 2012). Com base nos dados da PNAD 1998, Noronha e Andrade (2005) estudaram a relação entre o estado de saúde individual e a distribuição de renda no Brasil. Os resultados revelaram que a distribuição de renda afeta o estado de saúde individual de modo inversamente proporcional, ou seja, quanto maior a concentração de renda, menor é a chance do indivíduo referir um melhor estado de saúde.

A análise da desigualdade em saúde deve considerar a distribuição do perfil epidemiológico entre os distintos grupos sociais e as diferenças na distribuição e organização das respostas sociais aos problemas de saúde (VIANA et al., 2001). Nessa direção, a raça/cor da pele deve ser compreendida como variável social que incorpora construções históricas e culturais, um importante fator determinante de iniquidade em saúde entre grupos étnico-raciais (ARAÚJO, 2009).

Os estudos que arvoram discutir o emblemático panorama de assimetrias, a contrastante diferenciação de acesso e fruição de bens, serviços e oportunidades em todas as esferas e justiça social, devem peremptoriamente evocar a reflexão conceitual sobre a desigualdade social, a equidade, a iniquidade e a vulnerabilidade introduzidas nesse campo para uma maior compreensão de seus determinantes.

Conceitualmente, o termo desigualdade social significa a ocupação de diferentes posições na estrutura social e, por consequência, na variabilidade do privilégio de acesso a bens e serviços com disponibilidade restrita no meio social. Embora usualmente se espere algum nível de desigualdade na distribuição dos recursos sociais, a dimensão da disparidade é que suscita análises mais aprofundadas acerca das causas da diferenciação, o que remete à existência de iniquidade, em contraposição ao princípio da equidade (FARO; PEREIRA, 2011).

As desigualdades são traduzidas nos indicadores demográficos ou epidemiológicos, reveladas nas condições de saúde e acesso ou utilização de recursos assistenciais e podem ser determinadas pela renda, educação e classe social, e resultarem de um sistema de injustiça social (ALMEIDA-FILHO, 2009).

Na área da saúde, o conceito de desigualdade é compreendido como a distribuição desigual dos fatores de exposição dos riscos de adoecer ou morrer e do acesso a bens e serviços de saúde entre distintos grupos populacionais (DUARTE et al., 2002).

A desigualdade social está refletida nas desvantagens materiais e simbólicas sofridas historicamente pela população negra e legitimadas pelo Estado brasileiro. Para Carvalho (2005), as desigualdades tendem a se perpetuar caso o Estado continue adotando os mesmos princípios políticos considerados universalistas na distribuição de recursos e oportunidades, mas que na prática favorecem a poucos segmentos da sociedade e continuam excluindo populações com histórico secular de discriminação.

Inconteste, países com frágeis vínculos de coesão social proveniente das iniquidades de renda, são exatamente os países que pouco investem em capital humano e redes de apoio social, imprescindíveis no que se refere à promoção e proteção da saúde tanto no âmbito individual e quanto coletivo. Curiosamente, os melhores níveis de saúde não se concentram nas sociedades mais ricas, e sim, nas sociedades mais igualitárias e com elevada coesão social (BUSS; PELLEGRINI FILHO, 2007).

Nessa perspectiva, equidade incorpora em seu conceito algum valor de justiça distributiva, parte do reconhecimento de que os indivíduos são diferentes entre si, portanto, merecem tratamento diferenciado, de modo a garantir mais direitos a quem tiver mais necessidades. Dessa forma, nem toda desigualdade corresponde a iniquidade no sentido de injustiça. A iniquidade, em contrapartida, pode ser considerada como uma desigualdade injusta, potencialmente evitável, redutível (VIANA et al., 2001). A iniquidade, constitui-se das desigualdades inaceitáveis, por seu caráter injusto e desproporcional, reflexo da extrapolação de diferenças biológicas na determinação da saúde, traz à tona as diferenças entre segmentos populacionais na organização da sociedade. Esse panorama sinaliza para a necessidade de investigação dos fatores que potencializam a exposição de um determinado extrato social a condições deletérias à saúde, vulnerabilidade ao adoecimento e chance de morte (ESCOREL, 2001).

No âmbito da saúde, o conceito de vulnerabilidade surgiu no início da década de 1990 num contexto de intersecção de recurso teórico entre vários campos do saber, no qual se levantavam estratégias para o enfrentamento da AIDS. Contudo, o conceito se aplica a muitas outras situações. Sinteticamente, vulnerabilidade pode ser definida como o “conjunto de aspectos individuais e coletivos relacionados ao grau e modo de exposição a uma dada situação e, de modo indissociável, ao maior ou menor acesso a recursos adequados para se proteger das consequências indesejáveis daquela situação” (LOPES, 2005, p.10).

A vulnerabilidade compreende os contextos provocados a partir de condições sociais de violência cotidiana e injustiça estrutural, que motivam uma fragilidade política e institucional concernente à efetiva promoção, proteção ou garantia de direitos de determinados grupos ou indivíduos e pode ser considerada a partir das dimensões: individual, na qual se observam as condições socioculturais que comprometem os sujeitos na promoção de sua saúde; social, que abrange a posição dos sujeitos ou grupos nos processos sociais; e programática, na qual se evidenciam as condições institucionais frente à promoção de políticas públicas e distribuição de recursos (AYRES et al., 2003).

O direito à saúde tem base constitucional e impõe-se como condição imprescindível para o exercício pleno da cidadania e garantia de promoção da igualdade racial, estabelecendo-se como eixo estratégico para o combate e superação do racismo, desenvolvimento e fortalecimento da democracia (BRASIL, 2007). As políticas públicas com perspectiva racial no Brasil são assimiladas como produto da trajetória contemporânea da militância negra, mediada por resistências e lutas disseminadas na esfera pública (LOPÉZ, 2012).

Em que pese os movimentos para a criação de um organismo público e formulação de iniciativas setoriais e específicas, fato é que, nos últimos vinte anos, os avanços no sentido da consolidação de políticas sociais universais têm ampliado o acesso e as oportunidades para a população negra, contudo, o aumento expressivo da cobertura da população pelas políticas sociais não tem representado contribuição significativa para a redução dos índices históricos de desigualdade entre brancos e negros (JACCOUD, 2008).

As desigualdades sociais e a situação de saúde no Brasil são históricas, de elevada magnitude e persistentes. A estrutura social mostra-se excludente e de maior incidência sobre a população negra. Nesse contexto, proporcionar maior visibilidade aos abismos existentes entre as condições de vida das populações segundo a raça-cor da pele e implementar políticas públicas a fim de que os direitos fundamentais do ser humano sejam garantidos representam o melhor direcionamento para uma sociedade menos injusta e efetivamente democrática.

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I must and will insist on the political component in this piece, for there is a regrettable tendency in contemporary mainstream economics to ignore the former, or rather, to divorce the political from the economic as two separate spheres. However, with the postcolonial being essentially a political project stretching beyond its metropolitan provenance in the ivory towers of Western academes, there can be no such thing as the delineation of a “purely” economic theory in the same way that when dealing with aesthetic matters, notions like “art for art’s sake” cannot apply to the postcolonial. Instead, contamination, métissage, hybridity, and ambivalence remain hallmarks of the postcolonial. Eiman O. Zein-Elabdin, one scholar amongst others actively engaged in connecting economic questions with the postcolonial, for instance noted (2009, 3) how “Homi Bhabha’s (1985, 1994) idea of hybridity (deep cultural mixing) offers a fruitful analytical tool for better examining economies situated in multiple and dense cross-cultural intersections, and improves our understanding of contemporary economic phenomena at large.”

While taking inspiration from Zein-Elabdin, this short piece, part of a larger and ongoing research project, also departs from Zein-Elabdin on two important points. Marxism, not institutional economics, I argue, constitutes the basis from which a postcolonial political economy can be derived. Flowing from this, issues pertaining to class and revolutionary politics, or even politics tout court, which I found lacking in Zein-Elabdin’s article(2), will occupy a central place here. Leon Trotsky – not Antonio Gramsci, whom academics regularly uphold – is amongst the Marxist revolutionary thinkers the one who, in my view, came closest to an understanding of class dynamics in cultures and economies situated outside the West, through his law of “uneven and combined development”. For Michael Löwy, who has worked extensively on Trotsky’s theoretical legacy, the concept of uneven and combined development “enabled Trotsky to transcend the evolutionist conception of history as a succession of rigidly predetermined stages, and to develop a dialectical view of historical development through sudden leaps and contradictory fusions” (2010, 87).

More importantly, Trotsky’s appeal does not only stem from his analysis of so-called “mixed” economic structures in semi-colonial countries like Russia and China, but also from his life-long experience as a revolutionary practician for whom the goal, to paraphrase Marx, was not only to describe but also change the world. Derived from the law of uneven and combined development, Trotsky’s programmatic political strategy, encapsulated in the phrase “permanent revolution”, was the recognition of the possibility, nay necessity, of an uninterrupted “growing over of the democratic [bourgeois] into the socialist [proletarian] revolution” (Löwy 2010, 43). Written in the temporal mode of “future anteriority”, Trotsky’s theory was based on his belief that, for differential historical reasons, there was to exist no political space available for the implementation of Western-style bourgeois liberal democracy in the colonies, unless supplemented with, that is to say anticipated by, a proletarian-led revolution. As Michael Löwy concedes, Trotsky could not predict the central role peasant movements played from decolonization onwards. Neither could he foresee the growth in the megacities of the “Third World” of what has come to be known for lack of a better name as the “informal sector”.

However, this does not invalidate the core of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, first drawn out as early as 1905: namely, his understanding of a “time-lag” in the colony preventing a nascent indigenous bourgeoisie from playing the same emancipatory role as had been the case in parts of Europe, in particular France and England; as well as his deconstruction, against evolutionist “stagism”, of the line between core and periphery, advanced and backward countries, tradition and modernity, and his prediction that the periphery would become the “vanguard” of the international proletarian movement. This was verified most sharply in the two successive revolutions that took place in Russia in 1917, and most dramatically in the Chinese Revolution of 1927, where under Joseph Stalin’s orders, the Chinese Communist Party entered Chiang Kai-shek’s bourgeois nationalist Kuomintang, only to be decimated quickly afterwards. In fact, the entire history of the twentieth century and of the failures of Communism, from the Third to the Fourth International, can be explained, partly at least, in light of a Stalinist (and Maoist) legacy: in particular, their belief in class collaborationism and party “substitutionism”, or in the possibility of “socialism in one country”.

Such a legacy, combined with the collapse of the Soviet block as well as the emergence of a new hegemon – neoliberalism – has quite logically led in our contemporary era to a de-politicization of social life, and, more generally, to the rejection of party structures amongst broad sections of the Left. Being itself a product of this particular historical context, postcolonial studies has regularly fallen prey to often virulent critiques on the part of scholars(3) who still regard class politics, or the Marxist notion of totality, as relevant in our times, and blame postcolonialism for failing to acknowledge its revolutionary past as expressed in anti-colonial third world liberation struggle. This polemic is not new, and, as I will argue in the remainder of this essay, it is largely fruitless. More productive in my view would be to find possible pathways between postcolonial and Marxist theories by, for instance, translating Bhabha’s “third space” of hybridity into Trotsky’s law of uneven and combined development.

Culture, as Bhabha himself never ceases to stress, requires an act of translation. Too often, the rhetoric of cultural difference that is central to the postcolonial paradigm finds itself pitted against the more economist discourse of dialectical materialism. Even Bhabha can be accused of an over-simplistic, if not mistaken, critique of the Marxist dialectic in his seminal book The Location of Culture, as he hoped to replace the latter with a, “dialectic without the emergence of a teleological or transcendental History” (37). Bhabha here fails to distinguish the Marxist from the Hegelian dialectic, the latter leading to a synthetic unity of opposites onto a higher plane, with the former bringing instead the erasure of opposites(4); in Bhabha’s own terms, “neither the one nor the other”. Bhabha routinely summons Derridean deconstruction as an antidote to the master narratives of history, offering an alternative to the Manichean operations of Marxism. However, it is indeed possible to reinterpret deconstruction from a Marxist perspective. The following passage taken from Gayatri Spivak’s preface to Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology shows how the deconstructionist method bears striking similarities with Marx’s belief that the proletariat only exists as a class in its relation to the bourgeois order and the class system it perpetuates:

To deconstruct the opposition is first to overthrow (renverser) the hierarchy. To fight violence with violence […] But in the next phase of deconstruction, this reversal must be displaced, the winning term put under erasure. The critic must make room for the irruptive emergence of a new concept, a concept that no longer allows itself to be understood in terms of the previous regime (system of oppositions). (1976, lxxvii)

Having clarified what I consider to be the main theoretical divergence between Bhabha and Trotsky, what remains of a difference between The Location of Culture (1993), Results and Prospects (1906) and The Permanent Revolution (1930) is in my view chiefly a matter of discourse, that is to say of rhetoric. Indeed, the messianic tone of a Trotsky sharply contrasts with the postmodern anti-humanism of a Bhabha, yet to cross over the void of metaphoricity that separates these two theorists is to undertake a comparative dialogue of the kind Bhabha himself elicited in his appropriation of Frantz Fanon’s revolutionary ethos. Let me then quote one passage from Bhabha where he works out a “permanentist” (Edward Said would say “contrapuntal”) appreciation of time that does not stop at, and bow before, the historically linear narratives of modernity, but instead cracks open a third space of indeterminacy that will result in an open-ended futurity: “The borderline engagements of cultural difference may as often be consensual as conflictual; they may confound our definitions of tradition and modernity […] and challenge normative expectations of development and progress.” (1993, 3) This disruptive “time-lag” of which Bhabha speaks repeatedly in The Location of Culture is of the same tenor, as when Trotsky writes in his account of the Russian Revolution how proletarian rule “appeared on the scene not after the completion of the agrarian democratic revolution but as the necessary prerequisite for its accomplishment” (2007, 211).

Acknowledging today the uneven and combined character of postcolonial economies, where pre-capitalist remnants happen to fuse with some of the most advanced elements of late capitalism(5), is crucial so as not to repeat those political mistakes of the past. It remains particularly vital in the Arab world, where ongoing failures to resolve basic democratic tasks in the wake of the Arab Revolutions, would tend to confirm Trotsky’s permanentist analysis of revolutionary processes in the colonies: that is, “a revolution whose every successive stage is rooted in the preceding one and which can end only in the complete liquidation of class society” (2007, 117). Needless to say, such “liquidation” may take different forms and content in the post-colony so that the task of the critic, to quote Spivak again, then becomes one of “mak[ing] room for the irruptive emergence of a new concept” and a new language, as the Subaltern Studies groups in India and Latin America for instance attempted to do at the turn of the new millennium.(6)

This short piece is only the premise of a larger re-reading of postcolonial master texts in light of the Marxist tradition – an endeavor which is not only urgent as the world capitalist system is facing its biggest economic crisis since the 1930s – but also, and perhaps for the first time possible, as inequalities of wealth within, rather than in-between nations (not to dismiss entirely persisting divisions between North and South) seem to be the order of the day.

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