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The
Rape Continuum: by Lahoucine Ouzgane
In the last three decades, scholarly attention to gender issues in the Middle East and North Africa has been focused almost exclusively, sometimes obsessively,1 on a quest to understand Islamic femininity: what it is and how it is made and regulated--with Muslim women's oppression, the question of the hijab, and the practice of female genital mutilation attracting most of the scrutiny.2 Some of the most significant literature in this well-established field includes Fatna Sabbah's Woman in the Muslim Unconscious (1984), a critique of the contradictory messages which the Islamic legal and erotic discourses imprint on the female body; Fatima Mernissi's The Veil and the Male Elite (1987), an indictment of the ways in which numerous Hadiths (or sayings by the Prophet) have been manipulated by a male elite to maintain male privileges; Fedwa Malti-Douglas's Woman's Body, Woman's Word (1991), a mapping out of the relationship of woman's voice in Arabo-Islamic discourse to sexuality and the body; Leila Ahmed's Women and Gender in Islam (1992), a study of the development of Islamic discourses on women and gender from the ancient world to the present; and Marnia Lazreg's The Eloquence of Silence (1994), an analysis of the gender relations in Algeria from the pre-colonial times to the present. 3 By contrast, studies of Islamic masculinities are surprisingly rare. At a time when masculinity studies is experiencing a boom in the West,4 dominant masculinity in Islamic cultures has so far remained an unrecognized category that maintains its power by refusing to identify itself. There are very few studies that make Muslim men visible as gendered subjects and that show that masculinities have a history and clear defining characteristics that form an integral part of the gender relations in Muslim cultures. The only two books on the subject of Islamic masculinities are limited to examinations of homosexuality and homoeroticism in Islamic cultures and classical Arabic literature, respectively. In one form or another, the essays in Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature (1997) aim to establish the fact that "Before the twentieth century, the region of the world with the most visible and diverse homosexualities was not northwestern Europe, but northern Africa and southwestern Asia" (6); the collection offers "historical, anthropological, and literary studies and texts documenting the conceptions and organizations of homosexual desire and conduct in Islamic societies" (4). For its part, Homoeroticism in Classical Arabic Literature (1997), as its title indicates, examines the prevalence and significance of "homoerotic motifs in early Abbasid poetry, courtly letters, political satire, shadow plays, and dreambooks, from the eighth to the fourteenth centuries and from Persia to Andalusia" (xiv). My essay offers a reading of key scenes of male sexuality in two major contemporary North African texts: God Dies by the Nile (1974), by Nawal El Saadawi, the Arab world's most well-known feminist, and The Sand Child (1985), the novel that paved the way for Tahar Ben Jelloun's winning France's most prestigious literary award in 1987. I argue that when we focus our attention on the kinds of masculinities portrayed in these novels, we realize that, when masculinity is perceived and lived out only in terms of virile power, when such feelings as vulnerability, intimacy, and empathy between men are pushed aside, the men in El Saadawi's and Ben Jelloun's works find themselves engaged in what Rene Girard calls "mimetic rivalries"5--where even the most private moments in men's lives are marked and marred by sexual rivalry and violence. More importantly, we also come to understand that, contrary to Western discourses that posit "woman" as the other of "man," in Muslim cultures, the opposite of masculinity is not necessarily femininity and that even misogyny is not the core of masculinity: the homosocial competition and the violent hierarchies structuring the relationships between men themselves constitute the core of what it means to be a man in the Middle East and North Africa. Because women are not the centre of men's experiences (other men are), misogyny is actually fuelled by something deeper--by the fear of emasculation by other men, the fear of humiliation, the fear of being not so manly. My focus on the relationships between men is in no way intended to marginalize women, reducing them to the symbolic space where men's rivalries are played out. Women's well-documented subjection underscores the fact that they are real targets of Islamic patriarchy, but, as Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne point out, "the ways in which men distinguish themselves and are distinguished from other men must be an important aspect of any study of masculinity" (19). Because patriarchy is not about male-female relationships only, an understanding of the differential and diverse positions, not only in the interrelationships that have evolved between Muslim men and women, but between the men themselves is fundamental to the struggle for social change, to our ability to rethink masculinities and to imagine new modes of being male or female in Islamic cultures.
God Dies by the Nile (1974), which El Saadawi considers her "most significant novel," chronicles the never-ending struggles of the peasants of Kafr El Teen against the predatory conduct of the village Mayor and his sycophant cohorts--Sheikh Zahran, the Chief of the Guard; Haj Ismail, the village barber; and Sheikh Hamzawi, the Imam of the village. While these men are directly responsible for the suffering and victimization of the toiling class of the fellaheen of Kafr El Teen, no attention has been directed at the kinds of relationships that exist between the men themselves. The men in God Dies by the Nile are intensely competitive, rivaling each other for social power at every chance, so much so that a man's substance--his identity, his personality, and his masculinity--derives from his place in society. For instance, the rivalry between the Mayor of Kafr El Teen and his elder brother,6 the government minister, drives the novel's main plot. When the Mayor is first introduced in the second chapter, he is surrounded by his three stooges, each trying to outdo the other in winning the Mayor's favour, only to realize that today the Mayor is so preoccupied and lost in his thoughts that he is unable to join in their daily rituals of gossip and laughter: "All day he had kept wondering why the moment he had seen his brother's picture in the newspaper a feeling of inadequacy and depression had come over him" (11). But this acute sense of inferiority has haunted the Mayor since he was a small boy, when
While God Dies by the Nile is interested in depicting the socio-economic conditions of its characters, El Saadawi seems much more intent on laying bare the psychological make-up of her male protagonists. Thus, while the Mayor's authority and importance--symbolized by the big iron door of his palace--rest obviously on his power to imprison the villagers or to seize their property at will, the novel provides lengthy descriptions of the intricate workings of the Mayor's psyche. Though he often used to think that he was superior to his elder brother, the Mayor knew full well that the feeling was just a disguise: "The truth was so overwhelming that it shook him to the marrow of his bones. It seemed to exude from every pore of his body.... It crept into his mouth and nose, reviving the taste of bitterness once more, dropped down with it to his chest, then through a small hole into his belly. He would run back to the bathroom and vomit repeatedly until there was nothing left for him to vomit" (12). In later years, the Mayor's visceral reaction, his sense of defeat experienced in private, translates itself publicly into feelings of superiority to the other men of Kafr El Teen. As he reminds his cohorts, "'Compared to me, you people are just nobodies. I am from a noble family...and my brother is one of the people who rule this country'" (12). In the rigidly hierarchical social world of Kafr El Teen, such feelings have a profound effect on the other men. For instance, Haj Ismail cringes, "as though trying to make himself so small that he could avoid the eyes of the Mayor" (12). Filled with a sense of shame, the village barber's own eyes keep shifting back and forth between "the picture of the Mayor's elder brother sitting in the midst of the most important people in the country.... and the small [barber] shop with its old, cracked shelves, covered in dust, and the few rusty tins standing dejectedly on them" (12). The reality of his insignificance is so compelling that Haj Ismail "tried to tear himself away from the comparison only to find himself lost in the contemplation of the Mayor's expensive cloak, while his hand kept fingering the coarse fabric of his own galabeya" (12). When manhood is based on a particular relationship to property and on social power, Haj Ismail settles quite happily in his subservient position; he is even eager to play the role of pimp for his lord. Thus, when the Mayor, who has now caught a glimpse of the tall figure of Zeinab (Kafrawi's younger daughter) along the river bank, exchanges jokes with him, Haj Ismail's self-confidence is restored enough for him to start laughing again: "Haj Ismail...felt in high spirits again and was completely rid of the mood of depression which had weighed so heavily on him earlier.... Was he not joking with the Mayor as though they were equals...?" (14). To curry favour with the Mayor, Haj Ismail will see to it that Zeinab is tricked into going to "work" for the Mayor, ensuring the sacrifice of yet another twelve-year-old girl to the Mayor's sexual appetite. The barber's action is ironic in that, when he was only ten years old, he himself fell victim to homosexual rape by an older and stronger relative:
This encounter, which is still imprinted in Haj Ismail's memory, dramatizes the ways in which brute force is applied to subdue a weak and powerless boy--initiating him into the violence of "hegemonic masculinity" (Connell, 77)--just as the Mayor exerts his social authority to rape the daughters of Kafr El Teen. Social power and physical force, the novel seems to suggest, are merely different sides of the same coin; in a sense, Youssef and the Mayor belong to the category of men who feel the need to prove their roudjoula or manhood through their virility,7 impoverishing the scope of masculinity by reducing it to that one attribute. More importantly, however, such sexual encounters underline the novelist's sense that heterosexuality in Islamic cultures is founded on rape. This collapse of masculinity into virility is also clearly dramatized in El Saadawi's short story "Man" (1987), in which Khadija arrives unannounced at her husband's office and comes face to face with what the story calls "life, stark and real" (91). Having earlier assumed that a man's erect posture (straight, broad shoulders and strong legs) defined his masculinity, Khadija surprises Ashwami, her husband of ten years, being sodomized by his boss:
Because of the inherent anxiety characterizing this type of masculinity, the chief attorney enacts this virility of the body as the ultimate expression of male sexuality, one that places him literally and figuratively at the top of the hierarchy. In God Dies by the Nile, even the spiritual leader of the village is a victim of the same obsession.8 Sheikh Hamzawi's reputation, which depends entirely on what the village men think of him, rests on his success in forcing Fatheya, his fourth wife,9 to marry him "against her will, and in obliging her to live with him all these years even though Haj Ismail's potions and amulets had been totally ineffective in restoring or even patching up his virility" (27-28). What really concerns the Imam is his public image, the impression that he is a man in complete control of his household, so, on his way home, as soon as he spots his wife, Sheikh Hamzawi would call out to her, "asking for something in a loud throaty voice calculated to sound more throaty and virile than usual, then cough and clear his chest several times to ensure that the neighbours would realize that Fatheya's husband, the man of the household, was back" (103). While the men's obsession with their virility--the Mayor's rapes of young girls, his son's assaults of the servant girls, Youssef's rape of his cousin, the chief attorney's desire to annihilate other men, and the Imam's preoccupation with his virility even as he conducts the Friday prayers--suggests the multiple ways of enacting and reinforcing their power over women and over other men, the violence structuring the social world of El Saadawi's novel finds a temporary outlet in the sacrifice of Fatheya and her baby. When she decides to save and adopt one of the Mayor's "illegitimate" children abandoned on the doorsteps of the Imam's house, the villagers, angry but unable to identify the causes of their suffering, deflect their frustrations onto Fatheya:
Through its sexualized violence, the graphic spectacle, not unlike that of a pride of hungry lions at a kill, reflects the ways in which sexuality in this novel seems anchored in fierce male rivalries that turn sex into rape and murder. But in this depressingly bleak story, El Saadawi does provide a glimmer of hope, endowing her weak characters with enough agency to suggest the women's resistance to the patriarchal power structures of Kafr El Teen. Before her death, as though driven by "a strange, almost insane determination," Fatheya, "soft, and rounded, and female," fights her attackers like a wild animal, ferociously "hitting at the men with her legs, and her feet, with her shoulders and her hips" (115), turning her sexualized body into a weapon against the men. And, in another affirmation of women's historical agency, Zakeya, the epitome of peasant victimization and the mother who has lost two daughters to the Mayor, decides to strike at the head of patriarchy when she fells him dead with her hoe--using her instrument for sowing seeds to end the Mayor's excessive seed sowing. Zakeya's action, like Firdaus's killing of her pimp in Woman At Point Zero, indicates the severely limited nature of the power women can wrest from the oppressive systems operating in their lives. In a parody of the male obsession to be at the top of the social and sexual hierarchy, the novel introduces one of the most intriguing characters in El Saadawi's writings: Sheikh Metwalli, the shadowy figure living in the village cemetery, who, drawn by the smell of new buried flesh, is in the habit of digging up the dead and raping them: "If [the body] was that of a female, he would crawl over it until his face was near the chin. But if the body was male, he turned it over on its face, then crawled over it until the lower part of his belly pressed down on the buttocks from behind" (57). Described as a worm, a cat, and a hyena, Sheikh Metwalli, the weakest and most marginal character in the story, emerges as the ultimate male, the last one on top, who will no doubt dig up even the Mayor's body. However, when Fatheya is killed by the mob, we are told that "Only Allah and Sheikh Metwalli know that Fatheya's body and Fatheya's shroud both remained intact and unspoiled in the burial ground" (117).
Tahar Ben Jelloun10 With more than twenty novels, two plays, and three poetry collections produced in the last thirty years, Ben Jelloun is undoubtedly the most prolific and best-known contemporary francophone North African writer. Though he had won several important literary awards before, his rise to literary and public prominence began when he became the first African Arab writer to be awarded Le Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary prize, for his novel La nuit sacree published in 1987. Ever since, some of his works have been translated into more than forty languages11 and The Sacred Night has recently been made into a film.12 Ben Jelloun's 1997 book, La Nuit de l'erreur, topped the bestseller list in France in 1997, out-ranking even the 1996-Prix Goncourt winner. Ben Jelloun's fiction, like El Saadawi's, repeatedly dramatizes the ways in which virility emerges as the essence of Arab masculinity. In "Un fait divers et d'amour" from Le premier amour est toujours le dernier (1995), a happily-married man with three children, Slimane, a taxi-driver, is accused of fathering the child of one of his passengers, but "The doctors were unanimous: Slimane could not be the father of that child. He was sterile. He had always been sterile"13 (58; my translation). His illusion of masculinity shattered, Slimane turns to alcohol and to spending the night in his taxi.14 In some respects, the wife is right when she claims that she had never cheated on her husband and that her actions had been motivated by "love" for him, by her determination to make him happy in the eyes of his friends. In fact, at the beginning of the story, Slimane himself was full of praise for his "good" and "wonderful" wife, who had given him three beautiful children--a girl and two boys--and a great deal of happiness15 (56-57; my paraphrase). The wife's collusion, her willingness to let her husband maintain the social pretense, suggests once again the only kind of agency available in such a rigid male structure founded on virility as the essence of manhood--the central theme of L'enfant de sable, Ben Jelloun's best-known novel. The Sand Child is the simple but strange tale of a Muslim father in the city of Marrakech who, feeling publicly humiliated, especially in his brothers' eyes, for having produced only seven daughters, decides to raise his next child (who turns out to be yet another girl) as a boy, then as a man. A victim of her father's aggression, Zahra may be seen as the embodiment of the gendering process prevalent in North Africa, one in which sexual violence marks the very origin of gender itself. To illustrate this idea, the novel introduces us to the dramatic story of Antar, another tale of a woman disguised as a man, a ruthless warrior chieftain and an exemplary man of legendary courage:
What is most striking in this story of the soldier and the bandit, the most masculine of men, is the way in which it dramatizes the precarious nature of the dominant masculinity, and the way in which the ultimate fear of the Arab male is physical penetration by another.16 The fact that Antar is a woman redoubles the injury and the humiliation in a social setting contemptuous of the "passive" homosexual.17 One's sense of self, one's masculinity, is grasped through the territoriality of the body. Projecting homosexuality onto the Other is meant to strengthen one's virile status in the eyes of one's friends, but as Daniel Vignal has remarked, "For the majority of Africans, homophilia is exclusively a deviation introduced by the colonialists or their descendants; by outsiders of all kinds.... It is difficult for them to conceive that homophilia might be the act of a black African" (74-75). Malek Chebel, for his part, has observed that "Passive homosexuality being despised, it's rare to find an Arab who will claim that identity" (315; my translation).18 In Naguib Mahfouz's Midaq Alley, Sheikh Darwish, a former teacher of English who acts as the novel's slightly deranged chorus, explains that "[Homosexuality] is an old evil. In English they call it 'homosexuality' and it is spelled h-o-m-o-se-x-u-a-l-i-t-y. But it is not love. True love is only for the descendants of Muhammad" (104). For Sheikh Darwish, even the word for homosexuality has no equivalent among Muslims. But perhaps nowhere in North African literature is the association of homosexuality with the colonial experience better rendered than in this central scene from Ben Jelloun's With Downcast Eyes (1991), the story of a young Moroccan girl's confrontation in Paris with the challenges of exile and immigration. Having been chosen by her grandfather (the family patriarch) as the future and sole saviour of her Berber tribe, Fathma returns to Morocco to fulfill her destiny. But, as we find out by the end of the novel, true salvation cannot be expected from a woman. In this scene, two old men, Ahmed and Mohamed, are comparing stories of their most cherished memories, memories (they hope) they will be given a chance to relive once they enter Paradise. Ahmed describes a "wonderful" moment in his "young and vigorous" days when Mme Gloria, the wife of his authoritarian French employer and colonizer, could not resist his North African "hot blood."19 But Mohamed has a more compelling story, one in which the rhetoric of nationalist discourse and heterosexual masculinity are inextricably intertwined, but in which virility finally achieves its transcendent status:
When he is confronted, Abbas dismisses the villagers--including the oldest man in the village, Mohamed's father--as a "bunch of idiots." But Mohamed, barely sixteen and calm and clear-thinking in the midst of all the political turmoil, will not be intimidated--as he explains to his friend:
When the village is rid of the tyrant, the water resumes its natural course, and for half a century, no one knows who has killed Abbas: "You are the first person to know my secret.... Now I am going to give you a present: here is the famous little knife of liberation" (146). Mohamed has managed to restore to the village not only its water but its symbolic virility as well. However, the part of his story that interests him most, the moment that he would like to experience in Paradise, occurs later:
Mohamed's actions represent the pattern of a virtuous and desirable masculinity, an ideal self, of the kind other men struggle for. And Abbas becomes the recipient of all that is negative; he becomes pure Other: the tyrannical oppressor of his people, a threat to the heterosexual order of the land, a usurper, treating his own people as if they were an inferior race--all qualities that necessitate and legitimate his murder. In the specific context of the two men swapping stories, the exercise is clearly one of sexual rivalry: Ahmed offers a conventional story of sexual conquest, but Mohamed--armed with the (phallic) power of a "very sharp knife," the kind used "for cutting up a sheep" (145)--manages to lose two virginities in one day, as if to suggest that violence qualifies one for sex. In this manner, virility emerges as the act of penetrating other bodies, other spaces. But Antar's example and Mohamed's story also suggest that heterosexuality in North Africa is founded not only on rape but on prostitution as well. *** In March 1993, a senior Moroccan police officer was sentenced to death for the rapes, in the space of thirteen years, of close to five hundred women, including twenty minors.21 Serial rapist Hajji Hamid Tabet had even installed a hidden camera in his Casablanca apartment to film his exploits: before the rapes, in a sacrificial gesture, he would often pray and give thanks to Allah. So as to sustain his image of his own potency, the Hajji would often watch his previous performances before he went out on his street prowls--one more time. It was later revealed that the videos of the rapes were also meant for the international pornography trade. Tabet himself was seen by some as a formidable virile sex machine. The man who turned to so many women while he had two wives and children at home was talked about with a kind of breathless awe for his "gluttonous appetite."In an interview, his lawyer Mohammed Afrit Bennani declared, "My client is not a criminal. He is perhaps unwell. He is perhaps even a sick man. He has powerful urges. He needs sex more than many men. Sometimes for four or five hours a day. For a man of 54, I admit that is unusual. But that does not make him a criminal." Bennani also denied that the violence on the tapes, where blood and beatings were abundantly evident, was anything other than "normal rough sex. . .but then, you know, some women like that" (Rocco 7).
A major international colloquium on love in Islam held in Paris in 1992 and attended by hundreds of writers and researchers from or of the Middle East and North Africa centered on the ways in which Arabs in the past celebrated love, pointing out, for instance, that Arabic has at least sixty different words to denote "love." But most of the speakers also stressed that the region was currently going through a stage of dis-love: "un etat de desamour" (35).22 This past summer, at another conference at Oxford University, sixty sexologists from the Arab world concluded that "sexuality... in the Middle East has less to do with the fantasies of a Thousand and One Nights and more to do with sex crimes."23 El Saadawi's and Ben Jelloun's works clearly reflect cultural contexts where rape and female sacrifice embody the violence of a social structure that has established virility as its norm for manhood.
1. In a parody of this preoccupation, Fedwa Malti-Douglas writes: "The Arab woman is a most fascinating creature. Is she veiled? Is she not veiled? Is she oppressed? Is she not oppressed? Were her rights greater before Islam? Are her rights greater after Islam? Does she have a voice? Does she not have a voice?" (3). (back) 2. For an excellent essay on the subject of female genital mutilation, see Christine J. Walley (1997). But in the West, this attention to the practice of FGM in some Muslim countries often overlooks other forms of female oppression--like back-breaking labour, economic dependency on men, and prostitution--realities often exacerbated by Western economic policies. Such a concern may also serve as an alibi, as a way of pointing the finger at the pain and suffering of Muslim (and other third-world) women while at the same time overlooking other forms of pain and other forms of marginalization that Muslim women (and men) face in the West. (back) 3. For an extended review of the recent scholarship on Middle Eastern women, see Beth Baron (1996).(back) 4. In a recent issue of American Quarterly, Bryce Traister writes: "judging from the sheer number of titles published, papers solicited, and panels presented in the last ten years," it would appear that "masculinity studies has emerged as a discipline unto itself" (289). (back) 5. With the dissolving of all social and religious prohibitions, Girard argues, men find themselves imitating and competing with one another, forever stuck in the world of "internal mediation."(back) 6. The brother as a sexual rival is a powerful motif in Arabic and Islamic literature. While most readers of The Arabian Nights remember Shahrazad's narrative world of magic, few have considered the significance of the frame story or the originary scene, so to speak, the one that goes to prove that sexual rivalry between the two kings constitutes the foundation of this collection that has enthralled western and eastern imaginations alike. When King Shahzaman, the younger brother, discovers the infidelity of his brother's wife, we are shocked by his reaction: "His face regained color and became ruddy, and his body gained weight, as his blood circulated and he regained his energy; he was himself again, or even better" (6; emphasis added). However, just a few days earlier, the younger brother himself had lost all will to live because his own wife had been unfaithful to him too, and "In his depression, he ate less and less, grew pale, and his health deteriorated. He neglected everything, wasted away, and looked ill" (4). While Malti-Douglas argues that it is "the adultery of the royal wives, which [is] the initial principle of disorder in the medieval text [that begins the chain of disorders]," I suggest that the adultery merely brings to the surface the uneasy relationship between the two brothers. Unlike his younger brother, Shahrayar is described as "a towering knight and a daring champion, invincible, energetic, and implacable" (3). Hailed as a realistic portrait of a modern Maghrebian society, Lotfi Akalay's controversial novel, Les Nuits d'Azed (1996) replicates the narrative technique of The Arabian Nights to recount the sexual adventures of and rivalries between the brothers Kamal and Kamil.(back) 7. In North African Arabic, the words for manhood and virility are so closely related that they are almost interchangeable.(back) 8. When Haj Ismail inquires, "But do you think you can keep [Fatheya] under control, Sheikh Hamzawi? Do you think a man of your age can take her on?" the Imam responds, "I can satisfy not only her, but her father if necessary" (28).(back) 9. The other three wives had apparently "failed" to give him a son. (back) 10. My discussion in this section draws on my 1997 essay "Masculinity as Virility in Tahar Ben Jelloun's Work."(back) 11. Zakya Daoud, "Le Goncourt pour Tahar," Lamalif 184 (Janvier 1987), p. 62.(back) 12. In what might seem like a self-fulfilling prophecy inherent to the cult of male genius, some critics have even begun to refer to Ben Jelloun as a future Nobel Prize candidate: Jean-Pierre Ndiaye, "Ben Jelloun, un Nobel en puissance?" Jeune Afrique 1404 (2 Decembre 1987), p. 48. (back) 13. "Les medecins etaient formels: Slimane ne pouvait etre le pere de cet enfant avenir. Il etait sterile. Il l'avait toujours ete." (back) 14. Until that point in the story, Slimane's life--his going through and enacting the norms of masculinity around him--and even his reaction to the incident recall the Butlerian notion of performativity: "a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject" (95). In Slimane's case, the normative subject is the empty macho type.(back) 15. "Ma femme est merveilleuse. Elle m'a donne trois beaux enfants, une fille et deux garcons, et beaucoup de bonheur... Elle est tres bonne, ma femme."(back) 16. In his semi-autobiographical work, L'ecrivain public (1983), Ben Jelloun dwells at length on his childhood memories of an illness that lasted more than three years and that kept him lying on his back and staring at the ceiling most of the time ("J'ai passe plus de trois annees sur le dos, dans un grand couffin, aregarder le ciel et ascruter le plafond" (13). His deepest fear at the time was to be mistaken for a girl or sodomized by the men of the house: "Je ne voulais pas etre pris pour une fille pour ne pas etre un peche, ou plus exactement celui convoite acause du peche" (15).(back) 17. This contempt is rooted in the culture's understanding of homosexuality: the "passive" homosexual is perceived as the one who "gives," who "surrenders" part of himself to the active partner, the one who "takes." Active homosexuality, assuming the top position, is widely tolerated; it is even regarded as further proof of one's virility. (back) 18. "L'homosexualite passive etant condamnee, il est rare de trouver un Arabe qui s'en reclame." (back) 19. Some contemporary Maghrebian critics construe the relationship of the francophone North African writers to the French language in sexual metaphors: Abdellah Bounfour, for instance: "Le rapport a la langue francaise est un 'rapport d'adultere'; le francais est 'une prostituee torturante et frustrante'; elle est aussi la femme d'un autre qu'on razzie" (921). Images of virility (stealing another man's wife) and their concomitant sexism are too deeply entrenched to be easily relinquished. (back) 20. "Leader" in Arabic; equivalent to "mayor."(back) 21. Francois Soudan, "Sexe, pouvoir et video," Jeune Afrique 1681 (Mars, 1993): 8-10.(back) 22. Michele Amzallag, "Amour, es-tu lˆ?" Jeune Afrique 1666 (Decembre 1992):35.(back) 23. Nick Pelham, "Battle of the Sexualities." Postcolonial@lists.village.virginia.edu. June 27, 2000.(back)
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