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Abstract
The French term téléphone arabe – the concept of an oral network or “bush telephone” that gives its name to a game of message‐passing – draws on the history of European fear and conquest of what Said called the “sheer, unadorned, and persistent fact of being an Arab” – the indecipherable, inaccessible and threatening otherness of the Arab “other”. A critical stereotype of the technological naivety of the colonized, it serves as a figure for pre‐technological social networks, the resourcefulness and reliability of humans over machines that, in colonial situations, resists and threatens colonial power, and that can even trump First World technologies. Recuperated by Arabic speakers, multilingual residents of former French colonies, immigrants or their transnational descendants in the metropole, the téléphone arabe becomes a joke, mocking the legacy of exploitation by, and resistance, to metropolitan technology as well as its postcolonial adoption and absorption, in a self‐critique that merges with the colonial critique. While the telephone creates transnational, global subjects, its local practices also circulate and nuance global practices.
Acknowledgements
My thanks go to Vaheed Ramazani and Safoi Babana‐Hampton for their comments on an earlier version of this article; to Susan Martin‐Marquez, Katarzyna Pieprzak, and Lotfi Sayahi for inviting me to present work related to this on panels they organized at the MLA, North‐East Division of the MLA and African Studies Association annual meetings; to the organizers of and participants in the “Boundaries and Limits of Postolonialism” conference at the Winthrop‐King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Florida State University, Tallahassee, December 2006; and to Olivier Bourderionnet, Clay McGovern, and Djamel Bekkai.
Notes
1. It is significant that the mother argues for kinship with De Gaulle, as both are “supporters of old‐fashioned values”: “Mother (reciting): ‘In the name of God, Lord of the universe, tell him: article 1: De Gaulle, you are like me …’ [ … ] the crowd quiets down little by little. He resembles me because he belongs to the older generation …” (Chraibi 119).
2. Salut, Cousin! Directed by Merzak Allouache, Citation1997. The casting of the film reinforces linguistic and other differences between the cousins: Gad Elmaleh, playing Alilo the Parisian rapper, is from a Casablanca family; Messouad Hattau, playing Mok, Algerian. The film was shot by Pierre Aim, who two years earlier had shot Matthieu Kassovitz’s La Haine.
3. In “Les Communications” Beti considers the problems of a country – Cameroun – suffering from what he calls “unshared power” (pouvoir sans partage) (87). In a personal example, Beti describes the “détournement” (misappropriation) of money wired from the Post Office in Rouen to pay for the medicine and hospitalization of a sick family member. He laments what he discovers to be the common practice by PTT (former French telephone company) officials of “borrowing”, for as much as two weeks, money wired from Europe: “In fact, I learned later that PTT managers have the habit of re‐routing, for their benefit, telegraphed or other money orders, to firm up family finances until the end of the month. They put the money back into circulation as quickly as possible. In my case, they did so as soon as they heard of my formal complaint” (89). Significantly, this technology is one used by terrorist networks, also, to transfer money. In November 2006, an EU panel concluded that a banking consortium known as Swift (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications) breached EU data protection rules and European civil liberties when it gave the Bush administration access to millions of records of private financial transactions: see Bilefsky, “Panel Says Bank Group, Aiding U.S., Broke Law”.
4. One of the most popular ads for cellular service via card in Morocco, Carte Jawal, features French‐Moroccan actor Djamel Debbouze, a familiar figure from French television and movies.
5. As in the reference to the “coverage of the territory by landline and cellular phone service, and widespread access to the Internet” (la couverture du territoire par la téléphonie fixe et mobile, et l’accès généralisé au réseau Internet). The text of the statement of Mohammed VI, May 2004, along with others addressed to FIFA bidding for the hosting of future World Cup matches, was widely reproduced on French and European soccer websites.
6. In a short film, Hassaniya’s Children (Citation2003), screened to accompany a paper “On Francophones and Telephones in Saharouis Morocco”, I have explored the metaphors and practices of Maroc Télécom and its customers, focusing in particular on nomadic and settled Saharouis. Maroc Télécom put out an offer for partial privatization in 2000. After an initial round of discussions with two potential buyers, Telenord and Telecom Italia, in October 2000, there were two finalists, France Télécom and Vivendi Telecom International. The former withdrew from competition and Vivendi Universal won the bid on 21 December, 2000. Nicolas Beau and Catherine Graciet, Quand le Maroc sera Islamiste (La Découverte, 2006), 136–38, cite documents concerning Vivendi from the report filed by the Commission des opérations de la Bourse submitted in 2003, the dossier d’instruction of Judge Pons, and an article by Fahd Iraqi, “Pourquoi l’Etat ‘protege’ Maroc Télécom”, Le Journal Hebdomadaire 151 (13 May 2004).
7. In her recent book, Safoi Babana‐Hampton explores the rise of civil society in contemporary Morocco: Maroc Télécom, for example, officially addresses its customers as “citizens” in its literature (remarks to the author, December 2006).
8. In this way, it recalls Friedrich Kittler’s discussion of the typewriter and represents a new shift in technology’s move away from the keyboard and toward voice recognition.
9. In his paper, Mitchell remarks on the threat of an oral Islamic culture understood as anti‐visual and iconoclastic: they “do not want to be represented, i.e. ‘seen’” and “they destroy – buildings, statues – as if they were images”.
10. A more generalized version of this fear of telephone use by “non‐US citizens” can be found in the policy of the offices of the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, where all phones must be turned off upon entry. Recent green card interviewees have confirmed that, in some states, cell phones were banned entirely from the USCIS public offices, and that uninformed interviewees arriving with their cell phones were not allowed to enter.
11. The New York Times 26 Nov. 2006: 27. Quoting from a 1988 Op‐Ed piece, New York Times, authored by Robert Kupperman with Jeff Kamen.
12. The New York Times 26 Nov. 2006: 14.
13. In The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography, historian of technology Simon Singh describes telephone surveillance facilitated by the Echelon system: “Possibly the greatest infringement of everybody’s privacy is the international Echelon program. Echelon does not have to justify its interceptions and it does not focus on particular individuals. Instead, it indiscriminately harvests information, using receivers that detect the telecommunications that bounce off satellites. If Alice sends a harmless transatlantic message to Bob, then it will certainly be intercepted by Echelon, and if the message happens to contain a few words that appear in the Echelon dictionary, then it would be earmarked for further examination, alongside messages from extreme political groups and terrorist gangs” (307). Singh reports that the Commission Nationale de Contrôle des Interceptions de Sécurité estimates approximately 100,000 illegal wiretaps in France annually.