Interrogating Identity: Abdelkebir Khatibi and the Postcolonial Prerogative

This article discusses the problematic of identity in Maghrebian literature in French. Through a close analysis of Abdelkebir Khatibi's autobiography, La Memoire tatouee (1971), the author shows how Francophone literature of the Maghreb challenges the established Arabo-Islamic notion of a pure origin and a unified identity. He goes on to argue that the colonial experience has created a new relationship between the Self and the Other. Self-identification in terms of a rigid opposition to the Other (the West) complicates the emergence of a new postcolonial subjectivity liable to ovecome oppositional thought. La Memoire tatouee may be considered, according to the author, in terms of a postcolonial social and cultural project. In it Khatibi invites Arab societies to a "pensee-autre" [thinking otherwise] that challenges the cultural and ideological hegemony of the West as well as the monolithic Arabo-Islamic discourse on identity and difference. ********** Postcolonial theory in its English and Anglophone replications is dominated by such figures as Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Stuart Hall, to cite but these. Writers as ideologically and artistically diverse as Frantz Fanon, Aime Cesaire, Albert Memmi, and Edouard Glissant dominate its French and Francophone ramification. In fact, one can easily trace the genealogy of both English and French branches of postcolonial theory to Fanon, and farther down to Hegel's master-slave dialectic. The allegories that permeate the postcolonial imaginary, such as those of Caliban and Prospero; Crusoe and Friday; Kurtz and "the heart of darkness" (or Tayeb Salih's inversion of the imperial adventure by taking it back to the "North"), are all variations on the same pattern. This is to say, in simple terms, that the same Manichean grammar and the same history of imperialism inform most of these theories of postcoloniality, no matter where or when they originate. In the present article, I propose to examine the issue of self-definition in the Maghrebian novel in French. Here I want to examine Abdelkebir Khatibi's La Memoire tatouee (1971) (1) one of the first Maghrebian autobiographies published in the wake of independence. In Black Skin White Masks, Frantz Fanon argues that the colonized subject cannot make a meaning for himself; it is the meaning that is already there, pre-existing him that makes him. (2) Despite his noteworthy psycho-sociological study of the colonial context, Fanon overlooks the socio-cultural reality of the Maghreb. For during the colonial period, two distinct meanings--French (or Western) and Arabo-Berbero-Islamic--seemed to shape the colonized subject's vision of himself and of the Other, and out of which he had to extract a meaning that he would recognize as his. Khatibi opens his autobiography with a reference to the dechirure nominale: "Born the day of Eid el-Kebir [the feast known as "Greater Bairam"] my name suggests a millenary rite, and it occurs to me, for the occasion, to imagine Abraham's act of sacrificing his son" (9). Born the day of a religious festivity, the narrator feels his whole being already played out-or sacrificed, so to speak--on the altar of the sacred Word. In other words, to be born during the festive day of Eid El-Kebir and to be named after it--Abdelkebir means 'servant of the Almighty'--establishes a definite affiliation, in his stead, to a genealogy of Names that glorifies God's oneness and preeminence. To be born, then, in the middle of the Abrahamic dream represents, as it were, a re-enactment of Abraham's unfinished act of sacrifice and a perpetuation of a stable religious order of being. In the Quran, Abraham holds a prominent status as the Father of all prophets and religions, and thus symbolizes the embodiment, par excellence, of the notion of a foundational origin, immutable and divine, from which all historical temporalities originate. …