Beirut Calling

In the conclusion to Performance of Listening, I begin with an analysis of Lebanese avant-jazz trumpeter and visual artist Mazen Kerbaj’s recording “Starry Night”, an unedited excerpt of Kerbaj improvising on trumpet to the sight and sound of Israeli fighter jets dropping bombs on Beirut during the 2006 Israeli War. improvisation with the bombs. Digital media has upped the ante for sound in culture and, by extension, the possibilities for the performance of listening. Digital works offers more flexibility in artistic media, and higher speed and lower cost of production and distribution. The latter issues are of particular interest in considering how blogs issue a call to listen. Kerbaj’s 2006 performance and posts presaged the use of social media in the Arab Spring and the role of drones, digital media, and correspondence in the Syrian Civil War, Daesh (the Islamic State), and terrorist attacks. Digital discourse has changed much about our cultures and societies, and the call to listen in postcolonial Francophone culture is no exception: it was digital discourse that led to Kerbaj not only becoming known in French culture, but also becoming an artist who expresses himself in French, by choice—as a non-native speaker.

Covering French Universalism

Readings of the CD liner notes of Idir’s Identités (1999) and the lyrics to his song ‘La France des couleurs’ [‘The France of Colors’] (2007) as well as the memoir The Veil of Silence by feminist singer-songwriter Djura (1991), demonstrate how these musicians of Algerian-Kabyle origin have created an alter-globalist culture within French world music. Kabyle music in French is often introduced to the public with a ‘split consciousness,’ with one address to a French-speaking audience and another to a Kabyle audience. While this split consciousness in framing can be seen as a conscious act of promotion, it also creates the rhetorical problem that Abdelkebir Khatibi might call dédoublement, a splitting and fragmentation of public identity. Nonetheless, I argue, Idir and Djura play ably on universalist representations of North African immigrants in France—the men as violent toward and oppressive of women, the women as either victims or complicit aggressors toward other women—in order to call these representations into question. These artists offer an alternative vision of French universalism—an act of ‘covering,’ or reinterpreting French universalism, much like one interprets a song in a cover version. The alter-globalist ‘cover’ expands the definition of French to include a range of languages and cultural practices.

Citational Hooks

In this chapter I conceptualize the citational hook, a term I use to describe within a cinematic or theatrical narrative, the interpretation of a popular song that imbues the lyrics with new and subversive or transgressive meaning), which is introduced through sing-along performances to Anglophone rock songs in Marjane Satrapi’s film Persepolis (2007) and Wajdi Mouawad’s play Incendies (2003). Working with Judith Butler’s concept of citation, Roland Barthes’s essay ‘The Grain of the Voice,’ and Michel Chion’s analysis of cinematic syncresis, I demonstrate how the performances in Mouawad’s and Satrapi’s respective works can be heard as subversions of French universalist stereotypes of Middle Eastern femininity and masculinity that are linked to the symbols of the veil and the gun. I contextualize the performances through the universalist representations of immigrant men and women in France that have led to strictures on Arab women’s dress and the social marginalization of Arab men. The sing-along performances demonstrate that it is imperative to look beyond received symbols of Middle Eastern women’s oppression and the stereotype of Middle Eastern men as inherently violent and to allow for a broad range of possibilities for how masculinity and femininity are expressed within Middle Eastern ethnic identities.

Cut Sound

In my proposal of cut sound as a literary device, I demonstrate that silences can be woven into literary narratives through the interplay of dialogue and characters’ reactions with characters’ thoughts. To develop cut sound as a literary mode of listening, I draw from Djebar’s theorization of women’s silences in the essay ‘Forbidden Gaze, Severed Sound’ (1978), from her collection Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, as well as oral folklore and performance studies scholar Richard Bauman’s concept of the performance event. Music recording production techniques serve as a critical metaphor for how to listen for silences in literary narratives. The characters’ thoughts either belie their reactions to what other characters say, or their thoughts efface parts of dialogue altogether, effectively erasing what other characters say from the text. In my readings of Djebar’s novella ‘Femmes d’Algers dans leur appartement’ and Leïla Sebbar’s novel Shérazade (1982), I demonstrate how cut sound weaves dialogue with thought in order to articulate cut sound, or the gendered silences of postcolonial subjects.

Visual and Sonic Imagery in Postcolonial Francophone Culture

With my reading of Yasmina Khadra’s novel The Sirens of Baghdad (2006), I demonstrate that listening is not a given in any social exchange across either ethnic or gender lines: if no motive or desire to listen is present, voices go unheard and are, in effect, silenced. My analysis of Khadra’s work is framed by a discussion of both visual and aural sirens in pop culture and media. I conclude with an analysis of how sirens redirect narrative focus and argue that, as literary cut sound, sirens are emblematic of the call to listen—they demand focus and attention.

Introduction

I introduce the call to listen, the term she has coined for the cultural phenomenon in French texts of North African and Middle East origins that portray characters and figures listening as a narrative strategy across cultural media to bring forth stories of marginalized experience. I also introduce sounding, the central methodologies in The Performance of Listening, which is situated in Francophone studies, performance studies, and to a smaller degree sound studies. An overview of the social, political, and cultural stakes of these works, which span from the 1960s through 2010, includes Tahar Ben Jelloun, Hélène Cixous, Assia Djebar, Franz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and J.M.G. LeClézio. Issues include feminism, the question and definition of Francophonie, French Republicanism (or universalism), laïcité, mixité, postcolonialism, and subalterity.