Memory as allegory: the spectre of incest and the (re)naming of the father in Moufida Tlatli's The Silences of the Palace (1994)

Abstract

In this paper I argue that Tlatli's Silences of the Palace is a political allegory that resists both Eurocentric feminism and the discourse of Tunisian nationalism. Through the metaphor of incest, points of scream, and the narrative structure, Tlatli reveals how women are oppressed from without and within. I examine three historical contexts in which the exchange of women takes place in the film: A Biblical/Qur'anic time in which Sarah gives Hagar as a gift to Abraham; the North African concept of the habus system in pre-colonial and French North Africa; and the shift from family to state patriarchy after independence. Going beyond the Eurocentric understanding of heteropatriarchy as female subordination, Tlatli reconstructs it as a Janus-like figure, with male and female heads, race/class, religion/secularism, and nationalism as its quadrifrons.