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Al-Ahram Weekly 18 - 24 February 1999 Issue No. 417 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 18 - 24 February 1999 Issue No. 417
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Special Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters When the subaltern speaks
By Ferial J. Ghazoul *Antonio Gramsci's use of the term "subaltern" to indicate what was grosso modo, those referred to by Frantz Fanon as "the wretched of the earth", has been revived by the Subaltern Studies Collective. Post-colonial critics are busy debating whether the subaltern can speak or whether this category is doomed to silence because their members are denied access to expression, given the constricting grid of representation. Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Benita Parry carry on this debate, basing their positions on examples from the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean. As Arab critics, we can enrich the debate by showing how one of our subalterns expressed himself, producing not only an account of what Tennessee Williams called "a true document of human desperation, shattering in its impact," but also a modern classic of subaltern autobiography.
The Moroccan writer Mohamed Choukri is an exceptional figure: victim of the famine in the Rif where he was born in 1935, migrant to occupied Tangiers and Oran as a child and adolescent, he survived to tell a tale that many would rather not hear, because it represents the unspeakable horrors of cosmopolitan cities in the Third World. Like Mira Nair's film, Salaam Bombay!, it does not show the place as in a tourist poster or life as a suburban utopia. But unlike Salaam Bombay! where the child protagonist, Chaipau, is left helplessly crying at the end of the film after leading an incredibly debased life in the back streets of Bombay, Mohamed, the protagonist of Al-Khubz al-Hafi, written in 1972 (For Bread Alone, 1973), manages to pull himself from the squalor of the quotidian -- thanks to an act of will to achieve literacy and thus evade the vicious circle and cycle of dehumanisation. This agency of volition is first triggered by a verse of a Tunisian poet Abu al-Qasim al-Shabby, inscribed by a prison inmate on the wall of the cell: "If some day the people decide to live, fate must bend to that desire/There will be no more night when the chains have broken."
The reversal in the trajectory of the protagonist is not a contrived imaginative solution. It is indeed what happened in the life of the author, Mohamed Choukri, who at the age of twenty decided to take up reading and writing, sought help in Arabic manuals and dedicated school teachers set on eradicating illiteracy and ignorance -- as he tells us at the end of the work. Choukri ends up himself a teacher of Arabic literature at Ibn Batuta Lycée in Tangiers, and one of the most widely-read writers in the Arab world and abroad. He has written an autobiographical sequel to For Bread Alone, which takes up events in his life from 1955 to 1985, as well as a novel, a collection of short stories, a play, and two memoirs of his encounters with, and impressions of, Tennessee Williams and Jean Genet.
How can a verse by a Tunisian poet transform an illiterate Moroccan tramp? It is only far-fetched if we do not allow for the significance of poetry and literature in our life and if we dismiss the cultural ties in Arab culture which defy political borders. This verse of al-Shabby became the motto of the FLN, the national liberation movement in the Algerian war of independence (1954-62). Choukri's autobiography attests to the influence of the cultural and political scene in Cairo on the rest of the Arab world, including countries at its farthest limits such as Morocco. However, the autobiography does not resort to a direct, ideological discourse; instead it subsumes the impact of the Egyptian model through the conversational concern with Egypt's 1952 revolution and liberation. Novels tend to present their messages obliquely, and this often leads to narrative dependence on allusions and intertexts. In his brilliant reading of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Edward Said showed the significance of the British empire in the unfolding of domestic events in the English countryside. On the same principle, reading For Bread Alone, calls for a grasp of the subtexts and the colonial situation of Morocco in the forties and the fifties. A literary reading of the text shows the results -- in human misery and degradation -- of colonialist policy on subjugated people, just as Picasso's famous painting Guernica exemplifies the results of Fascism and war.
Al-Khubz al-Hafi has been translated into ten languages; the translators include two prominent novelists, the American Paul Bowles, author of The Sheltering Sky, and the Francophone Moroccan Tahar Ben Jelloun, winner of the prestigious Goncourt Prize. It continues to be discussed in critical circles as a distinctive work in the genre of autobiographical literature -- whose paradigms include St. Augustine's Confessions and James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.. Different as these works may be, they share a common confessional tone and indicate a transformation, a conversion of sorts, in the finale. St. Augustine denounces his paganism and is converted to the Christian faith through the rite of baptism; Stephen Dedalus (James Joyce), who has been wavering between the spiritual and the aesthetic paths, between becoming a Jesuit priest or a modern writer, indicates his option for the aesthetic vocation through the figure of the girl on the beach, described in bird imagery.
As for Mohamed Choukri, the decisive change is indicated in his decision to follow the path of education: "I showed Abdelmalek the book I had bought. I've got to learn to read and write, I said. Your brother Hamid showed me a few letters while we were in the Comisara together. He said I could learn easily." As the prominent Egyptian critic, Sabry Hafez, points out, Choukri's coming of age and decision to teach himself in the mid fifties is paralleled by the "coming of age" of his country, declaring its independence in 1956.
Mohamed Berrada, the distinguished Moroccan creative writer and critic, professor of Arabic literature at Mohamed V University in Rabat and ex-President of the Union of Moroccan Writers, devoted a whole chapter in a critical book of his to Choukri's For Bread Alone. He refuted the accusation that the work is a succès de scandale; he says: "I consider Al-Khubz al-Hafi an important achievement in the field of Maghrebi literature because it concretely shows a set of issues which constitute common concerns for writers and critics."
Choukri, right, beside Genet's tomb
in Larache, Morocco"When Choukri, who was reading Stendhal's The Red and the Black, said he saw resemblances between his own life and Julian Sorel's, Genet remarked, 'You shouldn't read with that sort of thing in mind, with the idea that the life of one or another protagonist has something to do with your own life ... Your life is nobody's life.'"
Edmund White, Genet, 1993
Choukri exhibits in his autobiography an absorbing pursuit of survival in a hostile and mean world that allows him very little time to reflect, though occasionally he asks himself why things have to be so terrible. So unaware is he, that he does not even know of the great Moroccan revolutionary Khattabi (1882-1963) from his very region of Rif, who was exiled and came to live in Egypt: "The country you come from has produced only one man and that was Abdel el Krim el Khattabi, he would tell me. I had not yet heard of Abd el Krim, and had no idea who he was." But this episode occurs in an early chapter; in the last half of the work, politics is present, although the awareness of what is looming comes only gradually and after discussions with those who read newspapers and disseminate knowledge. The Tangiers riots of 1952 are experienced by the protagonist as a shoot-out; only later he begins to be familiarised with the complex politics behind them. Towards the end of the work the discussions of leading figures such as Mohamed Naguib and Abdel-Nasser surface alongside more local issues. In the opening chapters of the work, the protagonist is so engrossed in his physical survival and the eruption of his libidinal instincts that he does not care about anything else. Towards closure, other considerations and issues are on his mind.
Episodes are told in the entire work by what is called in criticism a naive narrator. Episodes are introduced from the point of view of the child or adolescent and with his state of mind. Ignorance, bewilderment, bitterness are all expressed as they were actually felt then and there. In this sense, Choukri is closer to Joyce than to St. Augustine. When the Bishop of Hippo wrote his confessions he insisted on castigating himself for adolescent thefts and youthful lust as he depicted them. Joyce, on the other hand, embodied the make-up of the adolescent who visited the prostitute and that of the toddler looking at his bespectacled and bearded father: "his father looked at him through a glass: he had a hairy face." For Choukri, the adolescent, women's menstruation was bewildering and striking, thus he calls the female sex, "the wound." Similarly, he describes libidinal scenes and violent episodes without any sense of guilt, because he portrays them as he experienced them then and from the view point of an urban subaltern -- with the consciousness of one living in a jungle where survival is not for the fittest, but for the wickedest. As he says when he is literally starving and has to pick up food from the garbage and eat dead fish, there are only three ways to survive in the filthy underworld of Tangiers and Tetuan -- stealing, smuggling and whoring -- and he partakes in all three, but not without an occasional sense of shame or even revulsion at what he has been reduced to. His imagery and language reflect realistically his way of life: no euphemisms, but raw expressions and scatological imagery: "comfortable as excrement enfolded in the belly." He is graphic, but not pornographic: he recounts sipping a glass of tea, slashing another vagabond or spending a night in the brothel in the same tone. A voyeuristic reading is only possible if the significance, plot and closure are dismissed. Then, and only then, the readers will miss the element of conversion and dwell on the perversion.
There is also an artistic matrix in the work that may be lost on those who read it in translation, and not in Arabic. The entire work as I read it is an exfoliation, a literary play on the multiple and ambivalent shades of meaning latent in a triliteral Arabic root verb harama (to deprive/to prohibit) which gives rise to such commonly-known derivations as harem and ihtiram (respect). The essential replay is, to my mind, between haram (taboo) and hurman (dispossession), both related to denial. There are plenty of references to these words -- the forbidden, haram, and exclusion, hurman -- in a multitude of situations. I believe Choukri's message is that there is an interconnection between the two, and that ultimately one can bring oneself out of this circular hell, just as the "living come out of the dead ... out of the rotten and the disintegrated," as he says in his introduction to a 1982 edition of this work.
The aesthetic integrity of the work comes from the repetitions of -- and cross-references to -- episodes, in an effort to establish a paradigmatic pattern out of the chaos of such a life. The novel strikes us as the drama of two opposed drives: that of life's instincts and that of lurking death. Choukri lost eight of his siblings by the time he turned twenty. Death is the dominant motif in the work, far more central than sexuality. The novel opens with the death of his brother, Abdelqadir, who dies of malnutrition and paternal violence; and ends with a visit to his grave, but all along the trajectory of such a life death looms, that of friends as well as of siblings. There is a musical structure to this work: the contrapuntal facing of death and life in their many forms -- bereavement and pleasure, hunger and fulfilment, dispossession and appropriation. The very ending of the work speaks movingly to the readers: "We wandered among the graves... I looked towards the wall at whose base Abdelqadir had been buried. It is impossible to find it... We never made him a gravestone before we went to Tetuan. There was no money. My father had just got out of jail, and my mother was selling vegetables..." Abdelqadir Choukri is a subaltern who has not only been silenced, but the very trace of his having once existed is obliterated. Mohamed Choukri, however, survived to tell us a tale of the subterranean in the city, a tale of utter dispossession and degraded childhood, and yet it is an inspiring narrative because it tells us that one can pull oneself from the gutters, and furthermore, how literacy and literature do uplift and upgrade. In this sense, this work more than any other should appeal to those who find in literature, not only a profession, but a vocation as well.
* The writer is professor of comparative literature at the American University in Cairo
