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Abstract
This essay examines queer writers’ representations of North Africa, focusing especially on Franco Buffoni’s novel Zamel (2009). In the Maghreb, the same-sex tourist sees a land of primal (s)excess where the norms of home — exclusive heterosexuality, homophobic violence, and monogomous coupling — need no longer apply. Crossing the Mediterranean, this subject hopes to flee the discursive borders (gay versus straight) that supposedly domesticate desire in Italy. Eros not bound by either/or labels is thought still to flourish in North Africa. Turning to the Maghreb, the Italian same-sex tourist longs to approximate the homoerotics Italy once housed. North Africans do not represent for the Italian tourist an impossibly distinct Other but rather are made to signify a return to Italy’s imagined erotic past. While certainly questioning the progressivist plots of Europe’s LGBT movements, where the act of coming-out is considered equivalent to the forward- movement of history, Zamel presents North Africa as a land of sexual surfeit and archaic eros. It continues, that is, to repeat colonial scripts. Who is allowed to travel? Who, instead, gets made into a ventriloquized metaphor of eros’ erratic stray?
Notes
1 See Robert Aldrich, The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy (New York: Routledge, 1994); Ian Littlewood, Sultry Climates: Travel and Sex (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002).
2 For a discussion of homeroticism among Britons in eighteenth century Florence, see Clorinda Donato, ‘Where ‘Reason and the Sense of Venus Are Innate in Men’: Male Friendship, Secret Societies, Academies, and Antiquarians in Eighteenth Century Florence’, Italian Studies, 65.3 (2010), 329–44.
3 See Joseph A. Boone, ‘Vacation Cruises: Or, the Homoerotics of Orientalism’, PMLA, 110.1 (1995), 89–97; Robert Aldrich, Homosexuality and Colonialism (New York: Routledge, 2003).
4 For a discussion of southern Europe’s place in Europe’s self-constitution, see Roberto M. Dainotto. Europe (in Theory) (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007); Nelson Moe, The View from Vesuvius. Italian Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
5 Il fiore delle Mille e una notte (dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini. PEA Produzioni Europee Associate. 1974); Aldo Busi, Sodomie in corpo 11: non viaggio, non sesso e scrittura (Milan: Mondadori, 1988); Alessandro Golinelli, Le rondini di Tunisi, (Milan: Marco Tropea Editore, 2005); Nico Naldini, Shahrazad ascoltami (Naples: L’Ancora del Mediterraneo, 2011).
6 http://ilmiolibro.kataweb.it/booknews_dettaglio_recensione.asp?id_contenuto=3716476 [accessed 1 May 2012].
7 Franco Buffoni, Zamel (Milan: Marcos y Marcos, 2009).
8 Jasbir Puar, ‘Circuits of Queer Mobility: Tourism, Travel, Globalization’, GLQ, 8.1–2 (2002), 101–37.
9 Andrea Pini, Omocidi: gli omosessuali uccisi in Italia (Rome: Stampa Alternativa, collana Eretica, 2002).
10 For a discussion of Pasolini and Orientalism, see Luca Caminati, Orientalismo eretico: Pier Paolo Pasolini e il cinema del terzo mondo (Milano: Mondadori, 2007).
11 Later in the novel, Edo chastises Aldo, saying: ‘Parli come Pasolini’ (p. 90). In response, Aldo exclaims: ‘Ma certo, lui era uno che le cose le capiva. Voi a Milano a scimiottare stili di vita nord europei e americani. Bel risultato. E li avete esportati pure a Roma, che è diventata invivibile da questo punto di vista. Se non ci fossero gli immigrati curdi, rumeni e albanesi, non si caverebbe più un ragno dal buco’ (p. 90).
12 Sara Ahmed argues that ‘the experiences of migration, which can involve trauma and violence, becomes the idealized basis of an ethics of transgression, an ethics which assumes that it is possible to be liberated from identity as such, at the same time as it belongs to an authentically migrant subject’: Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 82. We find a prime example of this in Iain Chamber’s Migrancy, Culture, Identity. He writes that ‘for the nomadic experience of language, wandering without a fixed home, dwelling at the crossroads of the world, bearing our sense of being and difference, is no longer the expression of a unique tradition or history, even if it pretends to carry a single name. Thought wanders. It migrates, requires translation. Here reason runs the risk of opening up to the world, of finding itself in a passage without a reassuring foundation or finality: a passage open to the changing skies of existence and terrestrial illumination’. Chambers morphs migrancy into the generalizable state of post-modernity. Travel without the guarantee of return, a constant de-centering, becomes the metaphor of an erratic post- modern subject. Iain Chambers, Migration, Culture, Identity (New York & London: Routledge, 1994), p. 4.
13 Puar notes that queerness wants to see itself as ‘as singularly transgressive of identity norms’; ‘the focus on transgression, however, is precisely the term by which queerness narrates its own exceptionalism. [...] queerness has its own exceptionalist desires: exceptionalism is a founding impulse, indeed the very core of a queerness that claims itself as an anti-, trans-, or un-identity. The paradigm of gay liberation and emancipation has produced all sorts of troubling narratives: about the greater homophobia of immigrant and communities of color, about the stricter family values and mores in these communities, about a certain prerequisite migration from home, about coming-out teleologies’: Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 22–23.
14 Ahmed. Strange Encounters, pp. 81–82.
15 For a discussion on the ‘fetish of fluidity’, see Brad Epps, ‘The Fetish of Fluidity’, in Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis, ed. by Tim Dean and Christopher Lane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 412–31.
16 Puar, ‘Circuits’, p. 102. Puar writes that the presumed homophobia of other cultures ‘does not, after all, deflect the lure of an exotic (queer) paradise; instead it encourages a continuity of colonial constructions of tourism as a travel adventure into uncharted territory laden with the possibility of sexual encounters, illicit seductions and dangerous liaisons — a version of what Renato Rosaldo terms “imperial nostalgia”’: ‘Circuits’, p. 113.
17 Boone, ‘Vacation Cruises’, p. 89.
18 Ahmed, Strange Encounters, p. 6.
19 See: http://www.francobuffoni.it/noi_e_loro.aspx [accessed 25 June 2012].
20 Noi e loro is a collection of alternating first-person poems between an Italian homosexual and various ‘extracomunitari’. The immigrant becomes a figure through which the ‘omosessuale’ voices and legitimizes his feelings of being an outsider. While acknowledging differences, Buffoni is attempting to invoke a homology between the two groups’ feelings of ‘homelessness’. Describing a young man in North Africa, he writes, ‘E sei sano come un dio / Sei quasi bello, col profumo / del tuo amore / Vuoi riempire la mia casa?’ Again, altrove is made to compensate — to fill in — for what is considered lacking ‘a casa’. In another poem, the homosexual ‘io’ describes feeling ill-at-ease in Italy. Errancy, embodied in the figure of the migrant, comes to signify the queer subject’s alienation from home: ‘Una lunga sfilata di monti / Mi separa dai diritti / pensavo l’altro giorno osservando / Il lago maggiore e le Alpi / Nel volo tra Roma e Parigi / [...] / Da Barcellona a Berlino oggi in Europa / Ovunque mi sento rispettato / Tranne che tra Roma e Milano / Dove abito e sono nato’: Franco Buffoni, Noi e loro (Rome: Donzelli Poesia, 2008).
21 Recalling an earlier age when sex between men in Italy was once organized around active/passive roles, Aldo comments: ‘quando l’Italia era ancora una paese serio — mi riferisco all’Italia peninsulare e in particolare al sud e alle isole (p. 89).
22 Ahmed, Strange Encounters, p. 8.
23 M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), p. 70.
24 For a discussion of this ambivalence, see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008). Sedgwick argues that ‘the major nodes of thought in twentieth-century Western culture as a whole are structured — indeed fractured — by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition’ (p. 1). As sympathetic as I am to Sedgwick, I question her claim about ‘Western culture as a whole’. Italy’s dual figuration as a birthplace of Western culture and orientalized site demonstrates that the notion of Western culture — let alone a coherent Western homo/hetero crisis — is itself internally fractured.
25 I am indebted to Joseph Boone’s reworking of Homi Bhabha’s notion of the colonial stereotype. Boone traces ‘a series of collisions between traditionally assumed Western sexual categories (the homosexual, the pederast) and equally stereotypical colonialist tropes (the beautiful brown boy, the hypervirile Arab, the wealthy Nazarene) — collisions that generate ambiguity and contradiction rather than re-assert an unproblematic intellectual domination over a mythic East as an object of desire. For many white gay male subjects, the object of desire remains simultaneously same and other, a source of troubling and unresolved identification and differentiation. It is precisely in the space opened up by this gap that a critique of orientalist homerotics may usefully locate itself and begin the work of dismantling those paradigmatic fictions of otherness that have made the binarisms of West and East, of heterosexuality and homosexuality, at once powerful and oppressive’: Boone, ‘Vacation Cruises’, p. 91.
26 Homi Bhabha, ‘The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse’, Screen, 24.6 (1983), 18–36.
27 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), pp. 151–52.
28 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books Inc., 1994), p. 94.
29 Ann McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York & London: Routledge, 1995), p. 9.
30 Both Meyda Yeğenoğlu and Sara Ahmed have shown how the Orient tends to be depicted in terms of a sexually-inflected lack or absence. Yeğenoğlu argues that the West came to imagine itself as the masculine, phallic subject and see the East as the feminized lack: Meyda Yeğenoğlu, Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 104. Ahmed argues that ‘the Orient [...] is also desired by the West, as having things that “the West” itself is assumed to be lacking. This fantasy of lack, of what is “not here”, shapes the desire for what is “there”, such that “there” becomes visible as “supplying” what is lacking’: Queer Phenomenology: orientations, objects, others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 114.
31 See Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
32 I am by no means arguing for a wholesale acceptance of gay/straight identity as the model of erotics. Rather, I am asking: when a visitor represents different sexual systems, how much of that narrative reflects local norms and how might it also reflect his desire for a different/distant reality?
33 Leo Bersani discusses the anxieties elicited by the crossing of this taboo-laden corporeal territory. Bersani links the disavowal of the rectum as a site of pleasure to fears of a masculine self, supposedly secured by a self- sufficient phallus, being dissolved via penetration. He argues that the anus is the site of masculine identity’s possible self-shattering. Receptive anal sex is risky insofar as it exceeds both what men are supposed to desire (to penetrate a woman) and where that desire is supposed to come from (the phallus). Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? and other Essays (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 30.
34 Judith Butler argues that the presumed ‘impenetrability of the masculine’ is a kind of ‘a panic over what might happen if a masculine penetration of the masculine were authorized, or a feminine penetration of the feminine, or a feminine penetration of the masculine or a reversibility of those positions’: Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 51. Elsewhere, Butler similarly asked how ‘social taboos institute and maintain the boundaries of the body’: Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 170–71.
35 Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, p. 86.