On Performative Encounters and the Marketing of Identities: The Portrayal of Souks in North African Francophone Literature

Abstract

In this essay I examine the portrayals and functions of the North African literary marketplace, or souk, as a platform of transgender exchange, identity building, and encounters between male and female characters in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century works by a number of North African Francophone writers. Looking at a range of texts by such writers, including Swiss-Russian novelist Isabelle Eberhardt; Algeria's Assia Djebar, Yamina Mechakra, and Ghania Hammadou; Moroccos Tahar Ben JeIloun, Mohamed Choukri, Abdelhak Serbane, and My Seddik Rabbaj; and Tunisian novelist Albert Memmi, I hope to show that entrenched binaries such as male/female, public/private, seller/buyer, city/country and local/tourist are inadequate to describe the North African literary souk given its socioeconomic complexity and the mix of people it attracts - men, women, and children, from rich to poor, from the hustler to the regular worker. The Maghrebian Francophone literary souk offers a platform of what I call performative because they are characterized by a distinctly Bakhtinian, carnivalesque, and unruly spirit. The marketplace is ever changing, celebratory in spirit, and marked by a suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions . . . the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal . . . hostile to all that was immortalized and completed (Bakhtin 1968, 10). In this colorful and bustling environment, all market participants, both male and female characters, have the opportunity to join the spectacle and ideally become active traders as they occupy this exhilarating, public space and add to the open-ended possibilities it offers by celebrating their creativity and shrewd inventiveness. In the Maghreb, two kinds of souks exist: centuries-old rural souks that take place on a weekly basis for purposes of commerce, and urban, permanent souks that are usually situated in the medina. Souk, or souq (in Arabic), is defined as an urban covered market that includes an array of boutiques and workshops and a rural weekly street market where all kinds of goods, including livestock, vegetables, fruit, spices, clothing, and cookware, can be bought or sold (Benzakour, Gaadi, and Queffelec, 305). As Jean-Louis Miege writes, souks are much more than transient stores; they are privileged places for transactions, encounters, conflict resolution, and sometimes even political negotiations (1999, 99). While the French usage of souk often suggests disorder and chaos - because this is precisely the way it continues to be perceived by Westerners - the actual souks are indeed organized, ruled by restrictive and strictly observed codes and customs, an environment in which misdemeanors are severely sanctioned. For instance, vendors at souks are segregated by product categories or goods, with butchers traditionally removed as far as possible from the rest of the market, because the nature of their product - dead animals - is believed to attract hordes of evil spirits called jnun (Huffman 1967, 82). Souks have a large potential for upheaval because they are extraordinary places of socialization, places that attract men and women, city dwellers and peasants. While today, the caravans of yore have been replaced by trucks, the souk remains a key element of rural life, attracting weekly peregrinations from peasants, so-called fellahs living in remote locations (Miege 1999, 100). However, gender divides continue to be enforced in some geographical areas, as, for instance, in the Moroccan Rif area, which features exclusively female souks, small weekly markets that prohibit access to men. Even though certain souks are segregated, these specifically female souks allow women to celebrate their womanhood and sense of solidarity by conversing and engaging in communal activities such as dancing and s tory telling. In numerous Francophone North African texts, the souk represents an ideal place for unruly behavior, as exemplified by the mating of animals or the presence of brothels where women sell their bodies voluntarily to earn money or to avoid being locked up in a harem. …