Injurious imperialism: Reflecting on my father

Abstract

Despite persistent employment, the terms masculinity and postcolonialism elude robust understanding at this period in time. This article explores how postcolonial masculinity is formed, forged and experienced. It is theoretically and politically critical to move towards an understanding that does not treat masculinity and the postcolonial as categories already understood: these categories function as filters through which we fix the societies we inhabit, and through which we understand societies that are “other”. Concentrating on power, secrets, humiliation and the haunting of history, this article explores how postcoloniality impacts persistently on emotional and public complexes. Alongside an exploration of some aspects of my father, three novels by Egyptian male authors – Cairo Trilogy, The Yacoubian Building and Chicago – will be used to consider some troublesome aspects of masculinity.

Keywords:

• Egypt
• colonial history
• haunting
• humiliation
• inheritance

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to Clare Hemmings, who generously gave her time and commitment at a crucial point, and to Steph Newell, who was a patient and encouraging editor. This article is dedicated to my father, Ahmed Kabesh.

Notes

1. Sally Alexander explores Virginia Woolf’s statement that as women we think back through our mothers, but for the purposes of this essay I am more engaged with how, as a daughter, I think back through my father (134).

2. The fort‐da game was a game that Freud’s grandson played as a toddler in which he threw and then retrieved a cotton reel saying fort/da repeatedly – meaning here/there.

3. I owe this phrase to Siri Hustvedt who claims in her novel Sorrows of an American that the psychoanalyst Hans Leowald declared that the purpose of psychoanalysis is to turn ghosts into ancestors.