The Carpet as a Text, the Writer as a Weaver

“One must look at a beautiful carpet as one reads a page by Aristotle, that is, with the same acute attention”. For Khatibi, the Moroccan carpet is not only a decorative piece that reproduces motifs of Islamic art and combines sophisticated techniques of dyeing, tattooing and painting. It is also a living text, an intricate narrative that requires a specific approach to unravel its hidden symbols and meanings. In From Sign to Image: The Moroccan Carpet, a collective art book written with Moroccan anthropologist and museologist Ali Amahan, Khatibi explores the aesthetics of the Moroccan carpet in relation to ornamental patterns, spatial composition and oral culture. By combining a wide range of references to Islamic texts, Arabic appellations, Berber alphabet and Western writings, Khatibi offers a dynamic conception of the Moroccan carpet as a multifaceted space where artistic creation hinges on the interlacing of coded, fragmentary and imaginary signs. Khatibi’s reading of the Moroccan carpet as a lexis of “intersigns”, which he developed in a conference in 1985, offers a striking illustration of how Moroccan art informs his own process and theory of writing. The circulation of signs in the Moroccan carpet, which is mirrored in the kaleidoscopic composition of Khatibi’s and Mahan’s volume, is enriched with a compelling reference to the idea of desire in creation and reading. Based on a close-reading of this volume in relation to Khatibi’s works, this chapter demonstrates that the Moroccan carpet can be read as a metaphor for Khatibi’s aesthetics that fosters the encounter and weaving of forms, languages, and cultures.

Excerpts from Abdelkébir Khatibi and Jacques Hassoun, Le Même Livre (Paris: Editions de l’Eclat, 1985)

In 1985, the Moroccan writer Abdelkébir Khatibi and the Egyptian Jewish psychoanalyst Jacques Hassoun published an epistolary book, Le même livre (‘The same book’), excerpts of which are translated here for the first time. Playing on the Arabic notion ahl al-kitab, the people of the Book common to Jews, Christians and Muslims, Le même livre centres round the twin figures of the Semite – the Jew and the Arab – as they have been articulated in theological, political and poetic discourses in order to question, and move beyond, the opposition naturalised in the expression ‘Judeo-Arab conflict’. Previewing the dialogue Khatibi would have with another Francophone Jewish exile, Jacques Derrida, in the 1990s, Le même livre is a deconstruction of identity, be it religious, ethnic, cultural or linguistic. Against sameness, Khatibi and Hassoun offer an ‘exercise in alterity’ written in the pages of The Same Book.

Reading Signs and Symbols with Abdelkébir Khatibi

This chapter considers the ways in which Khatibi’s practices of reading contribute to theories of meaning through his thinking on the deciphering of signs and symbols and of making sense of the world, and of the worlds of the text, in their multifaceted forms. It takes as its starting point what Khatibi terms, in his introductory essay ‘Le Cristal du Texte’ in La Bessure du Nom propre, ‘l’intersémiotique’, migrant signs which move between one sign system and another. Khatibi takes as his own project examples from semiotic systems found within Arabic and Islamic cultures, from both popular culture, such as the tattoo, to calligraphy and the language of the Koran, from the body to the text and beyond – including storytelling, mosaics, urban space, textiles. His readings reveal the intersemiotic and polysemic meanings created in the movements of these migrant signs between their sign systems. For Khatibi, this ‘infinity’ of the ‘text’ is linked also to a mobile and migrant identity refracted in the multifaceted surfaces of the crystal (hence the title of the essay – ‘Le Cristal du Texte’) rather than in one reflection as in a mirror. Moving from these concerns of Khatibi with which he develops his radical theory of the sign, of the word and of writing, the chapter goes on to propose new readings of a selection of other writers with a shared, but varied, relationship to their Islamic heritage. These are writers working with and through that heritage – and importantly, as for Khatibi, including the Sufi heritage – and whose writing is also resonant with Khatibi’s intersemiotic theoretical and cultural project concerned with the individual and the collective, the historical and the contemporary, the political, the social and the linguistic.

Khatibi and the Transcolonial Turn

The Palestinian question has played a seminal if neglected role in Abdelkébir Khatibi’s writings, from the central notion of a “plural Maghreb” to his musings on language, colonialism, and “pensée-autre,” an expression he initially coined in response to the massacre of Palestinian fighters by Jordanian troops in 1970. This chapter examines the central importance of the Palestinian question in Khatibi’s writings, from his 1974 polemic Vomito blanco to his exchanges with Jacques Hassoun and Jacques Derrida in the 1980s and 90s, and argues that Khatibi was a precursor in what we might call the transcolonial turn.

The ‘Souverainement Orphelin’ of Abdelkébir Khatibi’s Early Writings

One of Morocco’s most important sociologists, and certainly one of the first following Independence, Abdelkébir Khatibi occupied an unusual place in the new, developing discipline of post-colonial sociology. Both a poet and a novelist, Khatibi was also interested in history, philosophy and cultural theory; and this wide-ranging set of interests served him well when, barely thirty, he became editor of the Bulletin économique et social du Maroc. Here began a literary as well as sociological adventure which, little known in his œuvre, took Khatibi from Marx and Gurvitch to Lukacs and Lucien Goldmann. As well as leading research into sociological topics in Morocco and North Africa such as women’s sexuality, young people’s opinions or radical theories of social explanation, Khatibi began a study of the Moroccan class system in a synthetic analysis stretching back to earliest makhzen periods, using Ibn Khaldun, Marx and Durkheim to account for the açabiyya tradition of male lineage in tribal rulers. It is in this context that Khatibi wrote his Tattooed Memory in 1971, his sociology of the post-colonial self.

Abdelkébir Khatibi and the Transparency of Language

A key topic in Abdelkébir Khatibi’s works is undeniably the way in which different parts of the social body do interact, intersect, ignore or even reject each other. A forerunner of postcolonial thought in Morocco, Khatibi explores this challenging question in his essays, more specifically Maghreb pluriel, Du bilinguisme, Chemins de traverse, but also in his dialogues with Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Jacques Hassoun and Rita El Khayat. Khatibi’s vision cleverly scrutinizes human relationships, as well as links between societies that cannot be conceived of independently from group relationships. Playing skillfully with words, Khatibi highlights the importance of language in the formation of social barriers. A vigilant and insightful intellectual, Khatibi questions in his rich and complex work the language of Francophone writers since independence.

The Artist’s Journey, or, the Journey as Art

Khatibi’s notion of the ‘étranger professionnel’, well known for its conceptualisation in Figures de l’étranger dans la littérature française and for its dramatisation in Un Eté à Stockholm, is a compelling signifier for his commitment to transnational thinking. This chapter will explore how his later, and perhaps most accomplished novel, Pèlerinage d’un artiste amoureux, gives fuller expression to the association between travel, creativity, cultural dialogue and free thinking that runs throughout his work. Based on the life of the author’s grandfather, the narrative traces the sculptor’s journey of pilgrimage to Mecca as well as his continued journeying around Morocco and through life. The artist’s aesthetic vision is explored throughout through his encounters with other cultures, through his reflections on history and on religion, and through his relationships with women. All the multiple dimensions of Khatibi’s previous works come to play in this novel, from anticolonialism to the critique of theocracy, and from transnationalism to spiritual communality, but it is significant that it is art – a figure also for Khatibi’s own literary writing – that shapes and enhances the protagonist’s mode of apprehending these issues. The text can be read in many ways as a synthesis and elaboration of Khatibi’s multiple philosophical preoccupations, which at the same time are reunited here in the work’s depiction of the creative vision.

Maghrebian Shadow

Abdelkébir Khatibi, who was seduced by the land of the Rising Sun, left us a few texts on Japan and its culture such as Japanese Shadow and “Tanizaki Revisited” in which he refers, in particular, to the great Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki. These texts indeed present a dual interest: on the one hand, they allow us to discover unknown aspects of Abdelkébir Khatibi – his deep attraction for Japanese culture, not only for literature but also calligraphy and other fine arts – and, on the other hand, his subtle and brilliant reading of Tanizaki's text, which gives us another insight into Japanese culture. In these two texts, we can identify several elements that Khatibi discovers in Japan via Tanizaki: exoticism beyond the simple exotic, eroticism, and ‘exophony’. We therefore examine Khatibi's Japanese culture, as inflected through the lens of Junichiro Tanizaki, following three problematics: exoticism, the body and languages, and Eros/Thanatos. Far from separate, all these elements are intertwined for Tanizaki as well as for Khatibi. In other words, this is a phenomenon, as the Moroccan writer points out, of ‘intersemiotics’.

Introduction

In the opening lines of his late autobiographical work, Le Scribe et son ombre, Khatibi makes what can be considered to be a wholehearted declaration of love and commitment to his homeland: Je vis et travaille au Maroc. Ce pays est de force vive. Je lui dois ma naissance, mon nom, mon identité initiale. Comment pourrais-je ne pas l’aimer avec bienveillance! Une bienveillance critique et vigilante. Une patrie n’est pas seulement le lieu de la venue au monde, mais un choix personnel qui fortifie le sentiment d’appartenance....

Khatibi and Derrida

In his article “Décolonisation de la sociologie” (Decolonizing sociology), published as early as 1974 and later reproduced in Maghreb pluriel, Khatibi draws on Derrida to relate the necessary decolonization of thought to deconstruction, against logocentrism and ethnocentrism. A few years before the publication of Said’s Orientalism in 1979, Khatibi calls to “décentrer en nous le savoir occidental” (decenter in ourselves Western knowledge), and “nous décentrer par rapport à ce centre, à cette origine que se donne l’Occident” (decenter ourselves from this centre, this origin that is the West). The dialogue between Khatibi and Derrida would continue over time, from one article or a book to another, since the collective volume Du bilinguisme in 1985 to “Point de non-retour” (Point of no-return) in the Colloquium of Cerisy in 1992, and to “Variations sur l’amitié” (Variations on friendship) in Cahier de l’Herne in 2004, as well as Jacques Derrida en effet in 2007. This article sets out to read Le Monolinguisme de l’autre (1996) in the context of this close dialogue between Khatibi and Derrida on language(s).