‘Writing the self’ as narrative of resistance: L’Armée du salut by Abdellah Taïa

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to explore how a textual analysis of the representational strategies in a literary work and its paratext can inform our conception of ‘resistance narratives’ in ways that sociology of literature cannot. With specific focus on Abdellah Taïa’s autobiographical novel, L’Armée du salut (2006), this article intends to demonstrate how the self-absorbed and the socially engaged can interrelate when ‘writing the self’. Moreover, a literary analysis of this interrelation points towards a reading of L’Armée du salut as a multi-layered voice of resistance: the novel is not only transgressing heteronormativity, it is also expanding the boundaries of so-called homosexual desires as well as displacing Orientalist conceptions of ‘Oriental sex’.

KEYWORDS:

• Abdellah Taïa
• Morocco
• Maghreb
• homosexuality
• autobiography
• resistance narrative

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Examples are Muḥammad Shukrī: Al-khubz al-ḥāfi ([1973] 2009), Tahar Ben Jelloun: L’Enfant du sable (1985) and La nuit sacré (1987), to mention but a few.

2. TelQuel is a private and independent news magazine founded in 2001. It is known for its editorial line, which is often critical towards the Moroccan government.

3. While Arno Schmitt and Jehoeda Sofer: Sexuality and Eroticism Among Males in Moslem Societies (1992) is an example of these ‘exclusionary gestures’, others have argued along the same line as Jarrod Hayes. For example, Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe, in Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History and Literature (1997), are critical towards the social constructionist conception of homosexuality:

The thrust of this collection is to challenge the dominant, Eurocentric gay/lesbian history and the implicit, occasionally explicit, assertion in many social constructionist accounts that contemporary homosexuality is somehow incomparable to any other pattern (or that there are no other patterns). [ … ] Despite their pessimistic post-humanist disavowals, social constructionist accounts still evoke a history of homosexuality as a progressive, even teleological, evolution from pre-modern repression, silence and invisibility to modern visibility and social freedom. (Murray and Roscoe 1997, 5)

While I agree with Joseph A. Massad (2007) that homosexuality is a modern concept that originated in the West, and that it is important to be attentive of what the hetero/homo binary renders ‘invisible’ (i.e. sexual desires that do not fit these identity categories), I find it important to underline that we cannot opt out of this binary. By acknowledging that we are all conditioned by and through it, we can instead shift our attention to how this binary can be – and already is – resisted and renegotiated from the inside, for instance in literary texts.

4. Examples of earlier first person narratives – both fictional, autobiographical and transgeneric – are: Driss Chraïbi: Le Passé simple (1954), Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine: Agadir (1967), Abdelkébir Khatibi: La Mémoire tatouée (1971), Muḥammad Shukrī: Al-khubz al-ḥāfi ([1973] 2009), and Muḥammad Barādah: Lu‘bat al-Nisyan ([1987] 1992), to mention but a few.

5. Arnaud Schmitt coined the term ‘self-narration’ as a response to what he saw as a growing misconception of Serge Doubrovsky’s neologism ‘autofiction’. Whereas Doubrovsky, in his critique of Philippe Lejeune’s autobiographical pact, originally defined autofiction as ‘fiction, about events and facts that are strictly real’ (‘fiction, d’événements et de faits strictements réels’) to underline the hybrid nature of any writing about the self, subsequent generic criticism (for instance Gérard Genette, Vincent Colonna and Marie Darrieussecq) has displaced the ambiguous nature of ‘autofiction’ in favour of an all-fictional approach to any writing about the self. What is particularly interesting about Schmitt’s conception of self-narration is his emphasis on a double reading strategy which takes both the referential and the non-referential aspects of the text seriously: ‘the text’s interaction with my paratextual knowledge of the author resulted in a position enhancing the intensity and the complexity of the personal account that the game of generic doubting would have spoiled’ (2010, 135).

6. He expressed this himself in a conversation with Dale Peck at PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, 1 May 2011.