A “Sodomized” Postcolony? Narrating Algeria’s Cultural Impasse in Belkacem Meghzouchene’s The overcoat of Virginia

ABSTRACT

Drawing on an unorthodox approach to desire, Belkacem Meghzouchene’s second novel, The overcoat of Virginia (2013), finds that opposition activists are probably more frustrating than the regime they contest. Specifying “a lack-based” desire, the trope of sodomy in the novel articulates the ways in which the Algerian postcolonial ruling elites allegedly embezzle the country’s resources without any sensible logic except “pure grab”, a predatory habit. This article argues that, while building on desire for understanding a postcolony such as Algeria can be insightful, reducing it to sexual assault is indicative of an impoverished intellectuality marked by a paucity of abstraction. Expressions of desire, once inhibited through disciplining the body via a recourse to an alienating temporality such as Islamism (even when not explicit), cannot be counted as insurrectional. Measured against the task of “revamping history”, the one outlined by the opposition activists in the novel, the “perverted-desire-as-sodomy argument” leads to a submissive regime of truth. Still, Meghzouchene’s characters’ conservative outlook encourages readers not to overlook the biopolitical dimension of the postcolonial state, but warns against populist discourse that confuses scandalizing with activism.

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Notes

1. Recently, the Algerian literary scene has known some English-writing authors like Mohamed Magani, Please Pardon our Appearance whilst we Redress the Window Display ENAG Éditions, Alger. (2014) and Fathi Achouri, The Eternal Truama. JustFiction Edition (2011).

2. Benrabah Moahmmed Language Conflict in Algeria. 43–44.

3. Meghzouchene’s language choice can be explained via an attempt to stay away from what he deems as a dyad heavily charged with the polemic of “authenticity versus modernity”, viewed as pathetic tendencies that Algerian cultural elites could not bypass. It may sound an exaggeration, but the linguistic situation in Algeria leads even academics such as Benrabah Mohamed to qualify the context as “a linguistic trauma” See: “Langue et pouvoir en Algérie. Histoire d’un traumatisme linguistique: by Mohamed Benrabah. Likewise, through using French as their means of expression, Algerian writers Malek Haddad (1927–1978) and Kateb Yacine (1929–1989) considered their French novels, poems and plays “Arabized French”, since each knew that French audiences could by no means even start to understand, let alone appreciate their output. Their dilemma is that even the idea of the Algerian audience is not very clear either, as the Algerian population, given the effects of colonialism, was mostly illiterate. A Wikipedia entry on Kateb Yacine reports him noting as early as 1966 that “La Francophonie is a neocolonial political machine, which only perpetuates our alienation, but the usage of the French language does not mean that one is an agent of a foreign power, and I write in French to tell the French that I am not French.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kateb_Yacine For his part, Malek Haddad qualifies the French education he received under the civilizing mission of French colonialism as “ … the most perfidious case of depersonalization in history, a cultural asphyxia.” Quoted in: Barbara Harlow’s introduction to Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem. xvii-xviii.

4. Meghzouchene’s The overcoat of Virginia recalls Simon de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins (1954) because of the latter’s preoccupation with intellectuals and members of the elite after the seismic change of WWII.

5. Kamel Daoud articulates the “G-string” in respect to how the Syrian regime deploys the Palestinian question to sell its legitimacy (2017, 104). Here, political opposition does not refrain from abusing the “violation overtones” in a smear campaign to to score political marks.

6. Bensmaïa details the scale of cultural uprooting which Algerian culture was subjected to and which the nation still faces, even six decades after its independence: “When one is aware of the havoc colonization wreaked on Algerian society and culture – or what this society and culture could have become – certain questions become inevitable.” p. 12.

7. History proves Meghzouchene very accurate in his approach. While the story in The overcoat of Virginia reports on Adrim’s informal empire, trafficking intoxicants from Morocco’s borders in order to supply thriving local markets through an intricate network. The events of the summer of 2018 prove that fiction can be less horrifying than what happens in the lived experience. The authorities arrested a network of international traffickers collaborating with high-ranking security officials responsible for importing 701 kg of cocaine. The scandal led to purges and arrests, specifying how a fictional book written five years before the incident can provide shocking insights as to what may happen.

8. Possessing forty villas echoes the legend of Ali Baba and the forty thieves.

9. An estimated 250,000 people perished in the civil war as they were caught between state forces and terrorist militias in a feud for power that lasted between 1992 and 2001.

10. In heterosexual relations, the relation cannot qualify as sodomy, an attack on nature, because no aversion toward the opposite sex takes place. Extending Jacques Lacan’s elaborations, Olfa specifies: “As for the unconscious manifestation of the sexual order, it defines man as a desiring subject (désirant) and woman as desired object (objet du désir). This duality might seem to rest on complementarity, were it not for the knowledge that the phallus is the only subject of desire in any person, male or female. Given especially the knowledge that woman represents the phallus for man, the contradiction between the manifest complementarity and the actual separation becomes noticeable. This is because, when a man desires a woman, his desire is, in fact, for the phallus (i.e., for what he lacks), but in this desire of his, it is expected from him who suffers from lack, to fill the lack of the Other (i.e., the woman’s lack of a penis). Hence, the man is, at the same time, lacking and required to fill in the Other’s lack. This is what makes the ideal of complementarity become, on the level of discourse turn, in the ordeal of encounter, suddenly complex. This original split in man between an original lack in him and the call to desire a woman, who herself, lacking, is begging him to fill in her lack, explains the anxiety that the desire for woman elicits in man.”

11. Here one can argue differently. If sodomy is common and practiced, yet culture does not have the courage to sanction it, then the debate should be reshaped around the economy of a culture in denial. One major study in this connection concludes: “The present study started with what appeared to be a chasm between a ‘practice’ that tolerated homosexuality and a ‘theory’ that condemned it. It ends with an emphasis on the multiplicity of ideals that coexisted in the Arab Islamic world in the early Ottoman period.” Khaled El-Rouayheb, Before Homosexuality in the Arab Islamic World, 1500–1800. The University of Chicago Press (2005), p. 166.

12. “Prisonnières résignées d’un lieu clos qui s’éclaire d’une sorte de lumière de rêve venue de nulle part-lumière de serre ou d’aquarium–, le génie de Delacroix nous les rend à la fois présentes et lointaines, énigmatiques au plus haut point.” (Femmes d’Alger, 170).

13. Addi claims that: “The so-called public sector does not follow any market logic but the political logic of a ‘Nanny State’ that aims at silencing all claims for alternative political regime.” Lahouari Addi, “The Political Contradictions of Algerian Economic Reforms” Review of African Political Economy. N⁰ 108: (2006), p. 209.

14. Lahouari Addi meticulously details this false sense of entitlement in respect of how Algerians view corruption and how they register their opposition to the postcolonial power structure in the country. He finds “ … most Algerians [think] that a certain given amount of wealth exists, which should be equitably shared by the members of the national community. They believe there is enough of this wealth to go around, and that it would afford a decent living to each and every family, were it not for corruption and the embezzlement of public assets.” “Political Islam and Democracy” in: Axel Hadenius, Ed., Democracy’s Victory and Crisis: Nobel Symposium N⁰ 93, Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 111.

15. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Spring_(Algeria).

16. The following reads a few lines from that open letter: “Are we at home in Algeria? Do we live at Zeroual’s, at Betchine’s or at Toufik’s? These three last names are known for most Algerians and they are never a taboo. The first is a part time president of the republic. The second is the adviser of the first (for security, number two in the regime). The third eavesdrops on what the first two do. But these brave men must understand that Algeria is a state, a nation with its surrounding neighbors and geographies. Mr. Zeroual, Algeria it is us. Mr. Betchine, Algeria belongs to us. Mr. Toufik, Algeria is our postal address, despite your wrong addresses … ” (translation mine) But the original French remains unbeatable. Note the alliterative/n/in: “Somme-nous chez nous en Algérie?” The/n/negates what looks like self-evident for most poor villagers at the time: 1997, the bleakest of the bleak decade, mostly seen as sheep at the mercy of Islamist terrorists on the one hand and certain powerful army generals on the other. The negation establishes a Hegelian dialectic which seeks to redress the imbalance between a “docile” population and the powers that be, negotiating le rapport des forces productives.

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Fouad Mami

Fouad Mami is a scholar of literature. He teaches Contemporary African Literature and Literary Theory at the Department of English, University of Ahmed Draia in Adrar, Algeria. His research has been featured in journals such as Postcolonial Studies, African Studies Review, and other academic outlets.