Hybridizing the Myth, Allegorizing Algeria

This chapter teases out the ways in which Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma resists the cohesive power of the Algerian myth of origins elaborated around the time of independence to reveal a Mediterranean transnationalism. The chapter starts by interrogating the conflicted history of the colonial concept of Mediterranean hybridity as both cultural syncretism and biological assimilation from the 1890s to the late colonial period. It then examines exile and the predominance of subjective estrangement in Kateb’s writing. In light of virtually unknown fragments cut out of Nedjma, it shows that the quest for Algeria’s identity cannot be completed without spatial deployment in the Mediterranean island of Djerba. Djerba supplies a model of felicitous mixing between strata of Mediterranean migrations, providing late colonial Algeria with a mythical space where to hone the very workings of its nation-building aspirations in a plural context evocative of Algeria’s own diversity. Kateb’s text reveals a Mediterranean ethos at the core of Algeria’s founding narrative, performing what writer Nabile Farès later dubbed the “re-allegorization of national myth” in a Mediterranean mode.

Epilogue

Drawing on the book’s conclusions, this last section moves beyond the corpus of Maghrebi literature to postulate a possible Mediterranean framework within which it would gain meaning. Could the Mediterranean idioms diversely appropriated in Maghrebi literature be encompassed in a broader form of regional transnationalism? The epilogue attempts to reveal the political cut of the Mediterranean concept, arguing for its relevance to the theorization of historical agency in the postcolonial era.

Andalusia as Trauma

This chapter explores the multiple and conflicting reappropriations of al-Andalus—as both historical moment and mythopoetic trope of coexistence. Assessing Abdelkébir Khatibi’s hypothesis of an Arab “traumatic chiasmus” that followed the Spanish Reconquista, it argues that this entwined yet symmetrical bond is colored by reflective nostalgia (Boym) for an imagined transnational, transconfessional, and multilingual community. In light of Juan Goytisolo’s “Andalusian legacy,” it examines cultural and literary representations of al-Andalus produced in Spain and the Arab world as a product of historical truncation and traumatic memorialization. Khatibi’s restoration of contemporary Spain to the Arab imaginary appropriates the Andalusian past to rethink Morocco’s claim to historical agency beyond French and Spanish colonialisms. In contrast, Nabile Farès’ dystopian “virtual” Andalusia (Deleuze) gives in to the influence of politically unconvincing nostalgia. The chapter ends by revealing how Jewish-Tunisian writer Colette Fellous appropriates Andalusian convivencia to engage Jewish-Muslim relations in Tunisia and current debates about Mediterranean history. Willfully deserting the political arena, Farès and Fellous embody a fundamental sense of belatedness that casts the Mediterranean as a mythical refuge averse to historical realization. They offer a powerful counterpoint to the kind of allegorization performed by Kateb at the apex of nationalism.

Strait Talk

This chapter addresses literary engagements with hijra (illegal migration from Africa to Europe) produced in Morocco and Gibraltar in French, Spanish, and Arabic. It reads Mediterranean hijra and its concluding shipwreck as the negative mirror image of the illustrious tradition of rihla—the knowledge-seeking journey underpinning the development of Arab modernity. The chapter starts with Tahar Ben Jelloun’s configuration of Tangier as the realm of subversive poetic parole in Harrouda. Following Ben Jelloun’s model, Moroccan Mohamad al-Baqqash’s deconstruction of rihla—a model entangled with Arab nationalism—reframes Mediterranean crossings as an extension of subaltern resistance to the postcolonial watan (the national construct of Arab nationalism). In turn, Gibraltarian Trino Cruz shifts the focus from national space to the deadly maritime plane of the crossings. As the hope for inclusion into alternative networks through emigration to Europe founders, only physical disintegration awaits the migrant. The chapter concludes by showing how this form of mobility delineates a new dystopian Mediterranean. This valence of the sea as a voracious abyss brings to light the epistemic violence intrinsic to the region, complicating readings of the space of the Mediterranean as a site of cultural mediation in a lingering echo of Andalusian convivencia.

Introduction

The introduction offers a broad introduction to the project. It delineates the stakes of the argument and situates it at the fertile intersection of Francophone literature and Mediterranean studies. By establishing the historical and critical context of its Mediterranean approach, it draws out its implications in relation to existing critical frameworks, such as deterritorialization, minor transnationalism, and dominant regional models in Mediterranean studies. It presents the Mediterranean Maghrebi corpus under study—a body of texts rooted in Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma rather than Albert Camus’ colonial Mediterranean writings. The introduction shows how the book’s Mediterranean framework is used to reclaim and preserve the diversity of Maghrebi societies in a melancholic mode.

Traumatic Allegories

Taking as a starting point Ranjana Khanna’s political concept of melancholic remembrance as the choice avenue towards a more democratic Algeria, this chapter offers a critique of dominant readings of Mokeddem’s transnational framework in light of Deleuzian deterritorialization. It argues that the fluctuations of her novel N’Zid’s “post-traumatic” allegorical mode of expression (Ross Chambers) tear the seemingly clear-cut opposition between rooted and nomadic subjects. In turn, they reveal more complex forms of identity which, if they do not sacrifice the singular in the name of the collective, do not sacrifice the collective in the name of the singular. Both exceeding the nation and actively laying claim to it, this model of mobility elaborates a Mediterranean framework of social interactions intent on reclaiming and preserving the diversity of the Algerian collective in a melancholic mode. The chapter demonstrates how this empowered form of singularity navigates the meanders of collective and individual memory to undo many years of forced oblivion. A remodeling of Mokeddem’s Deleuzian desert nomadism, her Mediterranean trope emerges as a strategic transnational channel of opposition to narrow definitions of collective identity and spawns a new social compact in the wake of the Algerian Black Decade.