Queering and querying the “Voyage South”: André Gide and Robert Dessaix in North Africa

ABSTRACT

This article puts geography back into the frame in its consideration of the travel texts of two gay authors and public intellectuals, André Gide (1869–1951) and Robert Dessaix (b. 1944). Gide undertook formative trips to the Maghreb from the 1890s onwards, and Dessaix, while not his first visit to the region, retraces Gide’s itineraries in the 2000s. Mary Louise Pratt, in her essay “Mapping Ideology” (1981), speaks of the “Voyage South” to describe those narratives that “involve the discovery of a false Utopia, where a cornucopia of Europe’s forbidden fruits – illicit sex, crime, sloth, irrationality, sensuality, excessive power, cruelty, lost childhood – is offered up to the questing hero”. I explore the ways Gide and Dessaix frame and interrogate travel to and around the Maghreb according to some of these terms, and shed light on their engagement with this region as a means of affirming their identity as gay men. Since Dessaix appropriates an essentially colonial author, Gide, in a supposedly postcolonial age, I also examine key questions Dessaix raises about travel and sexuality in the modern-day Maghreb.

KEYWORDS:

• André Gide
• Robert Dessaix
• travel
• sexuality
• sex tourism
• masculinity
• queer identities

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The title of perhaps one of the most famous French poems about the joys of anticipating travel, which appeared in the 1857 edition of Les Fleurs du Mal (Baudelaire 1991: 99–100).

2 On Dessaix’s rationale for travel, and elucidation of the concept of “home”, especially in the light of being an adopted child, see Ouston (2016: 409–410).

3 “Home […] is taken for granted as a place of comfort, a retreat from the world, a place to be oneself. For many lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and trans identified people, however, home can be uncomfortable and alienating, shaped by the assumptions of heterosexuality that are present in their social relations with parents, siblings, neighbours and others in and around the home” (Brown, Browne, and Lim 2007, 3). Tim Youngs, in exploring reactions to travel by Lucy Bledsoe and Rebecca Brown, also identifies a distinct pattern in travel writing where “gay travellers find themselves more at home when they are abroad” (Youngs 2013: 140).

4 In a recent interview Dessaix describes what is nowadays an increasingly ambivalent relationship with Europe (Ouston 2016: 412–413).

5 For instance, while Gide was in French Equatorial Africa from 1925 to 1926, certain village chiefs came to him for help regarding colonial abuses of power, thus breathing new purpose into his journey and accompanying travel account. In his narrative, Gide began to posit himself as a saviour figure willing to campaign against a number of injustices (Gide 1929).

6 André Gide writes of this duality in a journal entry dated 2 December 1929: “Is it my fault if your God took such great care to have me born between two stars, the fruit of two races, of two provinces, and of two faiths?” (Gide 2000: Vol. 3, 84).

7 We might also think of the possible links between the two titles: the curvilinear representation of fruits, flowers and foliage invoked by the term “arabesque” can certainly be understood to be an allusion to Fruits of the Earth.

8 The title of this interview, “The Arabesques of Paradox” no doubt also calls upon the word “arabesque” precisely because it denotes an undulating, curvilinear design that itself revels in its own loose ends.