Interrogating Identity: Abdelkebir Khatibi and the Postcolonial Prerogative

Abstract

This article discusses problematic of identity in Maghrebian literature in French. Through a close analysis of Abdelkebir Khatibi's autobiography, La Memoire tatouee (1971), author shows how Francophone literature of Maghreb challenges established Arabo-Islamic notion of a pure origin and a unified identity. He goes on to argue that colonial experience has created a new relationship between Self and Other. Self-identification in terms of a rigid opposition to Other (the West) complicates emergence of a new postcolonial subjectivity liable to ovecome oppositional thought. La Memoire tatouee may be considered, according to author, in terms of a postcolonial social and cultural project. In it Khatibi invites Arab societies to a pensee-autre [thinking otherwise] that challenges cultural and ideological hegemony of West as well as monolithic Arabo-Islamic discourse on identity and difference. ********** Postcolonial theory in its English and Anglophone replications is dominated by such figures as Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Stuart Hall, to cite but these. Writers as ideologically and artistically diverse as Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Albert Memmi, and Edouard Glissant dominate its French and Francophone ramification. In fact, one can easily trace genealogy of both English and French branches of postcolonial theory to Fanon, and farther down to Hegel's master-slave dialectic. The allegories that permeate postcolonial imaginary, such as those of Caliban and Prospero; Crusoe and Friday; Kurtz and the heart of darkness (or Tayeb Salih's inversion of imperial adventure by taking it back to North), are all variations on same pattern. This is to say, in simple terms, that same Manichean grammar and same history of imperialism inform most of these theories of postcoloniality, no matter where or when they originate. In present article, I propose to examine issue of self-definition in Maghrebian novel in French. Here I want to examine Abdelkebir Khatibi's La Memoire tatouee (1971) (1) one of first Maghrebian autobiographies published in wake of independence. In Black Skin White Masks, Frantz Fanon argues that colonized subject cannot make a meaning for himself; it is meaning that is already there, pre-existing him that makes him. (2) Despite his noteworthy psycho-sociological study of colonial context, Fanon overlooks socio-cultural reality of Maghreb. For during colonial period, two distinct meanings--French (or Western) and Arabo-Berbero-Islamic--seemed to shape colonized subject's vision of himself and of Other, and out of which he had to extract a meaning that he would recognize as his. Khatibi opens his autobiography with a reference to dechirure nominale: day of Eid el-Kebir [the feast known as Greater Bairam] my name suggests a millenary rite, and it occurs to me, for occasion, to imagine Abraham's act of sacrificing his son (9). Born day of a religious festivity, narrator feels his whole being already played out-or sacrificed, so to speak--on altar of sacred Word. In other words, to be born during festive day of Eid El-Kebir and to be named after it--Abdelkebir means 'servant of Almighty'--establishes a definite affiliation, in his stead, to a genealogy of Names that glorifies God's oneness and preeminence. To be born, then, in middle of Abrahamic dream represents, as it were, a re-enactment of Abraham's unfinished act of sacrifice and a perpetuation of a stable religious order of being. In Quran, Abraham holds a prominent status as Father of all prophets and religions, and thus symbolizes embodiment, par excellence, of notion of a foundational origin, immutable and divine, from which all historical temporalities originate. …