from Research in African Literatures Volume 27, Number 3

"Too much in the sun":
Sons, Mothers, and Impossible Alliances in Francophone Maghrebian Writing

Hédi Abdel-Jaouad

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"J'étais son auditeur unique et enchanté"
Kateb Yacine, Le polygone étoilé

I was her only enchanted listener ¹

Since its emergence in the wake of the Second World War, francophone literature of the Maghreb has remained an overwhelmingly male undertaking. It is the product of a predominantly educated and sophisticated male elite, yet its subject matter revolves almost exclusively around the theme of women and motherhood. Besides its manifold symbolic and literary functions, the figure of the mother has come to assume, particularly in the discourse of Maghrebian social scientists, a position of critical centrality in understanding Maghrebian ethos and personality. ² It is my contention here, however, that the fictitious and, in many respects, utopian kingdoms of mothers, as conceived by the son-writers, is founded essentially on the ruins of castrating Maghrebian patriarchy. It is, therefore, my objective in this paper to go beyond the verification of whether or not the sons' adoption of a feminist or pro-woman stance is an opportunistic ploy, and prove that in rehabilitating the maternal through his writing, the son is also undermining his own privileged position in the world. The mere evocation of Maghrebian maternity as a creative space consecrates the triumph of the spoken word and oral lore as parole over the written word or langue, the traditional privilege of males. Ironically, the son-writers will, however, coopt the maternal creation by capturing parole for the written langue. As a further indication of the acuity and importance of the problematic of the feminine in the Maghreb today, I will resort as much as possible to theoretical and critical tools and examples that are indigenously Maghrebian.

To say that the feminine as a topos has become highly fashionable with publishers, writers, and academics lately is but an understatement. There is hardly a text emerging from the Maghreb today that does not deal, in one way or another, with the question of Maghrebian sexuality, a discourse wherein the mother is assigned a central role. Is this interest indicative of a fundamental shift in course and discourse about the feminine, or is it a trend some critics call, not without suspicion or irony, the feminization of Maghrebian literature (Merini)?

In discussing the relationship that binds the mother to the son-writer, I shall also examine how the son, the usher of and intercessor for modernity through French schooling, has transformed his mother's parole into a newly empowered langue. Among the Maghrebian elite, French has supplanted Arabic as the new patriarchal linguistic paradigm; it has emerged as the de facto if not de jure custodian and vehicle of tradition, of parole-mère, and of the teller of the mother's story. In this regard, any articulation and discussion of the issue of Maghrebian literature as a product of "parole-mère" requires some familiarity with Maghrebian reality itself.

A major thesis of Abdelwahab Bouhdiba's L'imaginaire maghrébin is that the Maghrebi's imagination is shaped by the stories he is told by his mother in childhood. ³ Bouhdiba maintains that storytelling is a revealing indicator not only of Tunisian but also of Maghrebian sexuality. Through storytelling the subconscious of a people and a nation is revealed in a cathartic fashion. But above all, Bouhdiba sees in the act of storytelling a compensation value, or form of therapy by which the female storyteller as avatar of the ancestral Scheherazade scores psychological victories over her male oppressor, the husband.

Bouhdiba analyzes ten Tunisian tales using a structuralist approach. He argues that the protagonist of these tales is often female because storytelling is mainly a female activity in the Maghreb. The female narrator tends to merge with the tale's heroine, who must constantly affirm her will to power and to life in spite of the odds against her. Through her wit, intelligence, and sensitivity, the heroine always triumphs over the forces that strive to negate her very existence. One need only look at the outcome of some of the tales to surmise the fate of the male who tries to subjugate either these heroines or their progeny. In "La puissante chevrette," for example, the male loses his hunting horn and is thus symbolically emasculated and ridiculed. In "Mère aïguë," the male is wicked and anthropophagous. In "Sept vierges," he is frolicsome and imprudent, cowardly, and lazy.

Clearly, this devalorization of the male character, as Bouhdiba demonstrates, is directed against male idolatry and dominance and is therefore a subtle repudiation of Maghrebian patriarchal and polygamous society since it is lived as a narrative. Moreover, the mother-narrator of these stories and fables teaches the son as she narrates. In this way, she secures the alliance and loyalty of her son against her husband. Small wonder, then, that Maghrebian folk tales, as Bouhdiba argues, aim at "[p]unir les mâles, abaisser les grands, juger les juges, filouter les brigands. . . . A tous il faut briser l'échine et faire sentir la vanité de leur prétendue tyrannie" (161) 'punishing males, cutting the powerful to size, judging the judge, outsmarting the brigand . . . . All must be humbled and must be made to feel their vanity and presumed tyranny."

What Bouhdiba defines as "imaginaire maghrébin" is in fact a space where the real and the fanciful flow into each other symbiotically, for whatever the female character cannot achieve in reality she will express in fantasy. Precisely this interplay between the real and the fictional and the fanciful subversion of social, moral, or linguistic hegemonies are reappropriated by the male writer and transformed into neopatriarchy. ⁴ Writing, whether it be on, about, or in the name of the mother, becomes for the son a mode of self-empowerment, which potentially becomes a will to power over others. The son's desire to emancipate his mother is, first and foremost, a desire for self-emancipation. Each speech act uttered on behalf of the mother is tantamount to a "prise de parole," a parole usurped by the father. ⁵ In the same way, the child will internalize, through his mother's tales, a Manichean vision of the world, as a constant polemos between the forces of good, security, and steadfastness and the hostile, intruding forces of the outside world, the world of masculinity. His writing, like his mother's narration, becomes a stratagem for survival in the world. In this regard, the son's fiction can be read as a reinvention of the mother's stories couched in the psychoanalytical jargon of the day.

As soon as the son comes of age, he is instantly thrown into the world of men, which is a total negation of the feminine. The brutal separation from the mother and the induction into the male world is a well documented theme in Maghrebian literature in French. Next to circumcision and the nuptial night, "the night of penetration and deflowering," the hammam, or public baths, often emblematic of the passage from the world of the feminine to that of men, is for the son a traumatic experience. Bouhdiba refers to this traumatic experience as "le complexe du hammam." "Among Arab Muslim males," he asks in La sexualité en Islam, "Quel arabo-musulman ne garde le souvenir de tant de chair nue et de tant de sensations ambiguës? Qui ne garde le souvenir de l'incident à partir duquel ce monde de nu a sombré dans l'interdit?" (206) 'who does not remember the sight of so much naked flesh and ambiguous sensations? Who does not remember the moment when this realm of nakedness became forbidden?' ⁶

The abrupt passage from the realm of women to that of men, from the security of the home to the adventurous life of the street, leaves scars on the son that take long to heal. This overwhelming sense of abandonment by the mother is reflected in Maghrebian literature through a dialectics of attraction and repulsion. Indeed, Rachid Boudjedra speaks for many men when he says, "C'est une caractéristique maghrébine, et méditerranéenne en général. Je suis à la fois attiré et répulsé par les femmes" (Interview 17) 'Like most Maghrebians, though this is also true of Mediterranean people in general, I am both attracted to and repulsed by women.' It is this Manichean vision of Maghrebian reality that has led to an equally Manichean attitude toward women.

The ethnographic and anthropological importance of the maternal has literally become the source of the son's fictional material. For many writers, the maternal serves mainly as a pretext for the psychoanalytical exploration of repressed sexuality. In the battle between the sexes, the prized trophy remains virginity, and for the female character, virginity is the highest form of self-preservation. Without it she can neither enter the realm of married life and motherhood nor accede to the realm of sainthood. A woman who loses her virginity outside marriage loses her honor and her status in society. Because the clan's honor is at stake, the preservation of virginity becomes a collective responsibility.

Female and male writers alike consider virginity, a recurrent and obsessive theme in Maghrebian literature, as the root of the sexual subordination of women and the cause of all other forms of subordination. Metaphorized as a Husn Hassin, an unassailable fortress whose entrance is reserved for the wedding night, virginity is protected and ravished with equal aggressiveness (see Labidi; Lacoste-Dujardin; and Naaman-Guessous). The ultimate Maghrebian male's fantasy is a houri. According to the Koran, the faithful are promised in paradise an indefinite number of houris who, no sooner deflowered, regain their virginity ad infinitum.

As was the case with Shahrayar in The 1001 Nights, the patriarchal figure in the Maghrebian text is fond of virgins. Speaking about his father's remarriage after his mother's repudiation, Rachid, the main protagonist in Rachid Boudjedra's La répudiation, reflects: "Noces drues. La mariée avait quinze ans. Mon père, cinquante. Noces crispées. Abondance de sang. Les vieilles femmes en étaient éblouies en lavant les draps, le lendemain" (71) 'Harsh wedding. The bride was fifteen. My father was fifty. Tense wedding. Plenty of blood. The old women were dazzled as they washed the sheets the following day' (57).

From early childhood the son is entrusted with the task of preserving the honor of the clan. He becomes the "sexual guard dog" of the family and the clan, and it is with a sense of guilt that this task is often remembered by the adult writer. In a beautiful essay on his mother, Kateb Yacine recalls his participation in her subjugation:

Nous allions au bain, c'était à trois ou à quatre kilomètres, il n'y avait personne sur le trajet et ma mère, puisqu'on ne pouvait pas la voir, entrouvrait un peu son voile. Ma pauvre mère! Je me sentais obligé de lui dire alors: 'Remets ton voile!' En quelque sorte, je contribuais à la réclusion des femmes et, plus tard, je m'en suis senti coupable. (Horay 376)

When we would go to the baths, which were one or two miles away, my mother would lift her veil a little since there was nobody on the way who could see her. Poor mother! I then felt obliged to tell her 'Put back your veil!' So I was somehow contributing to the reclusion of women. And later, I felt guilty about it.

This same sexual control by sons extends to all females in the clan. More often than not, it is ironically the mother who enlists the son for the guarding of the female members of the clan. In La répudiation, Boudjedra's protagonist, Rachid, plays the role of the "child cop" who recalls: "J'empêchais les mâles de venir renifler autour d'elles. / L'odeur intime de l'honneur familial [. . .] / J'étais le chef du caravansérail [. . .] / Le garde de ma mère guettée par l'adultère [. . .]" (105) 'I would prevent the males from coming to sniff around them [the women] / The intimate smell of the family honor . . . . / I was the chief of the caravanserai . . . / The guardian of my mother threatened by adultery . . ." (148).

In many respects, the Maghrebian text in French--predominantly the story of an Oedipus searching for a Laius to kill--can in fact be seen as the vindication and glorification of motherhood. This is particularly evident in the son's tropic manipulation of the figure of the mother. The evocation of the mother by her generic name leads inevitably to overmetaphorization and oversymbolization, and, like the repressed and oppressed, the mother--this is also true for the mother tongue--is always faceless and nameless, as she is rarely referred to by her given name, but instead by "Ma," "M'ma," "Yomma," "Yamma" or "M'mima." The mother thus becomes, in the face of an ever-encroaching modernity, an archetype of tradition, the figure of the repressed and also of the subjugated and colonized country (Iraqi 141-48). Portrayed as the archenemy of freedom, justice and equality, the embodiment of all that is negative in Maghrebian society, the father is perceived by the son as the anti-mother par excellence. The parricidal impulse is more than symbolic. As the protagonist of Driss Chraïbi's Succession ouverte says in speaking of his father, "Il a fallu qu'il meure pour que je réalise soudain que j'étais un être vivant" (182) 'It was necessary that he die so that I could suddenly realize I was alive.' Yet as Rafika Merini notes cogently, the self-realization of the Maghrebian son-as-writer comes, more often than not, at the expense of the mother, his objective ally, in his struggle for male dominance over the father: "The mother who remains as nameless as she is powerless, is the woman whose odyssey the writer will manipulate to convey metaphorically his own feelings of helplessness, frustration and despair sprung from a common background" (Merini 46).

Both in reality and in fiction, Maghrebian society is partitioned de facto along the lines of gender. In the Maghrebian text, traditional female characters fall into two mutually exclusive types: the madonna or the putana. They represent either the mother or the other, the saint or the whore. In a highly gender-segregated society such as Maghrebian society, women and men evolve on separate planes psychologically, linguistically, and symbolically, so much so that the worlds of women and men are so psychically different that their psychology, language, and even storytelling techniques have evolved separately. Each sex plays different roles and assumes different functions. Men's domain is the public life, outside, whereas women are confined to the house, to the inside, to the Dar (in Tunisian Arabic, dar 'house' is also a euphemism for wife) (Zannad).

One does not have to be a psychoanalyst to observe that misogyny in the Maghreb grew out of the devalorization and negation of the opposite sex. Again, it is Boudjedra who speaks eloquently, this time in La répudiation, about the misogynist education of male children: "Les cafés sont pleins à craquer. Chaque tasse de café est une négation de la femme. A défaut de leurs épouses, les consommateurs sont accompagnés de leurs enfants; toujours endimanchés et l'air décidé de ceux qui savent que la relève est certaine: garder les femmes" (45) 'The cafes are full beyond capacity. Every cup of coffee is a denial of women. Instead of their wives the consumers are accompanied by their young sons, always dressed in their Sunday best and with the determined look of those who know that their future is assured: to guard the women' (40). It is in the street, the male territory par excellence, that the son acquires the lexicon of misogyny. It is not at all infrequent to hear adolescent boys repeat with relish the popular French adage "All women are whores, save my mother, out of respect." Not only does this adage cultivate in the young child a general mistrust of women, but it also reveals his own intractable contradictions: it expresses his desire to sleep with all women, thus reducing them to mere sex objects or whores, except, of course, for the mother, because she is the ultimate taboo. In the absence of the father but also in reaction to him, the son elevates the mother to sainthood. But the transformation of the mother into a saint by the son's subliminal fantasy is only attained after an endless series of traumatic experiences.

This portrayal of the mother as saint is a recurrent image in the fiction of both male and female writers. In his novel Le défi du petit archer, a hallucinatory exploration of the Moroccan psyche, Jean-Pierre Millecam (born and raised in Algeria but residing in Morocco) delineates the various stages involved in the sanctification of the mother in Maghrebian society. The protagonist's M'ma stands for the traditional mother figure who, as the protagonist says, "Cette sainteté, elle l'a payée cher: elle a été arrachée à sa famille, violée par un étranger qu'elle appelle son mari et qui ne partage rien avec elle, pas même le dixième des droits qu'il s'arroge" (20) 'paid dearly for this sainthood: she has been torn away from her family, raped by a stranger whom she calls her husband and who shares nothing with her, not even the tenth of the rights he reserves for himself.' So the young mother soon realizes that marriage is no honeymoon, since once deflowered, she is immediately devalorized, forsaken, and buried alive.

The Maghrebian woman lives constantly under the threat of imminent repudiation. Faced with a bleak present and an uncertain future, the mother projects herself wholeheartedly onto a son whom she nurtures and cajoles as a companion--a surrogate husband or rewejli, that is, "my little spouse"--who becomes an objective accomplice against the father, the instrument of revenge against her future daughter-in-law, and her provider in old age and sickness:

[. . .] Le sein que l'enfant tète sera le lieu géométrique de toute expérience possible. Nourri de ce suc lustral, il fera ses premiers pas dans la jungle du monde, d'abord dans la maison paternelle aux meubles de laquelle il accroche ses petites mains, trouvant chaque fois sur son parcours le propriétaire des lieux et surtout du ventre maternel dont l'approche lui est à jamais interdite. Puis ce sera la rue, où la main de la Mère-sainte le guidera d'abord, avant que, peu à peu, il n'établisse son règne sur le quartier, sur ses pairs, sur les voyous et les filles-qui-ne-sont-pas-sa-mère, dont le statut, il le saura bientôt, est celui de putains puisque la virginité est une propriété exclusive de la Mère-Sainte. (20-21)

. . . The bosom that the infant sucks will be the geometric space of every possible experience. Nurtured by this lustral essence, he will take his first steps in the jungle of the world, in his own father's house, on whose furniture he will lay his little hands, encountering each time the master of the house and the maternal womb from which he has been forever banished. Then there is the street, where the hand of the Mother-Saint will first guide him, before he gradually gains access to the neighborhood, his peers, the little male tramps and the girls-which-are-not-his-mother, whom, he will soon find out, have the same status as whores since virginity is the exclusive property of the Mother-Saint.

The mother thus earns her sainthood by bleeding herself to death for her son. She will only live for that moment of sweet revenge, the ultimate dividend of her incalculable suffering:

[. . .] Avec son fils à présent nubile elle forme l'unique couple de la maison (sa belle-mère est morte, et le couple que formait l'époux avec sa mère a été brisé). C'est elle qui choisira sa bru, c'est-à-dire l'intruse qui servira à lui donner des petits-enfants-simple réceptacle de la sememce du fils. (21)

. . . With her now adolescent son, the mother forms the only couple in the house (her mother-in-law being dead, and the couple she formed with her husband broken up). She is the one who chooses her daughter-in-law, the intruder, her grandchildren's mother: a mere receptacle for her son's semen.

Sainthood is the ultimate consecration and the crowning achievement of a life spent pampering her son in subservience to her husband and surviving the petty manoeuvering of her mother-in-law. And finally her long awaited moment arrives as she becomes:

L'objet de la vénération du fils, lequel traitera son épouse comme la domestique de sa mère-statut assez douillet si l'on songe que le bénéficiaire n'est qu'une putain privilégiée parmi des milliers, à l'inverse de la Mère-Sainte qui, par définition, est unique [. . .]. (21)

The object of veneration of the son who will treat his wife like the mother's maid--a rather comfy status if one were to consider that the beneficiary (the wife) is but one whore privileged among several thousands, the opposite of the mother who is, by definition, unique . . . .

Ironically, the mother's social "castration" and psychological frustration are vented not against males, but against members of her own gender, namely the mother and daughter-in-law. Rather than on the daughter, the mother's will to power and to self-emancipation are projected onto the son. Thus, as Camille Lacoste-Dujardin argues in her insightful and well-documented Des mères contre les femmes, the Maghrebian mother unwittingly becomes the custodian of the patriarchal system of which she is the primal victim. For in the absence of a viable relationship between husband and wife, which Lacoste-Dujardin calls "l'idéologie du couple," the Maghrebian mother plays a dual if not duplicitous role: "Dans l'idéologie patriarcale, une femme attend, à l'exclusion d'une fille, un garçon qui appartiendra socialement à un homme, certes, mais qu'elle possèdera affectivement" (144) 'in the patriarchal ideology, a woman expects a son, to the exclusion of a daughter, who will belong socially to a man, to be sure, but whom [the mother] she will possess affectively.' But the dichotomy between the "socius" and the "affect" is born out of the real economic dominance of men over women. For a Maghrebian mother, as Lilia Labidi reminds us, "la naissance d'une fille éveille la blessure narcissique 'n'être que ça'" (426) 'the birth of a daughter awakens the narcissistic wound "to be just that.'" In the Maghreb, the root of women's obsession to beget sons lies, therefore, in the perception that a daughter is an economic liability, as Aïni, the mother of two girls in Mohammed Dib's La grande maison, says:

"Une fille ne compte pour rien. On la nourrit. Quand elle devient pubère, il faut la surveiller de près. . . . Ensuite il faut se saigner les veines pour lui constituer un trousseau, avant de s'en débarrasser." (90)

A daughter does not count for anything. She is fed. When she reaches puberty, she must be watched closely . . . . Then one will have to bleed oneself to death to prepare her a dowry before getting rid of her.

More importantly, motherhood functions in the patriarchal system as insurance against repudiation, old age, and sickness. An "Arable" woman, to use Assia Djebar's telling pun on Arab women, survives matrimony better than a barren one, and thus aspires to sainthood through her male progeny (31-32). Small wonder, then, that in the Maghreb maternity is the very materia of women's tales, for every woman's story is a reenactment of Scheherazade's archetypal story. While she managed to preserve her life and the survival of her gender through telling tales by literally talking the genocidal Schahrayar out of his murderous intentions, Scheherazade's fate was nonetheless most precarious for 1001 nights. Only after she had begotten Shahrayar three male heirs did she feel she was out of danger.

Women in Maghrebian literature are represented both as custodians of tradition and as preservers of a clan menaced by extinction. Hence the resurgence, especially in the troubled colonial period, of mythical figures. Kateb Yacine's fiction is haunted by the intriguing figure of Nedjma ("star" in Arabic). A free spirit, Nedjma is a symbol of the emancipated North African woman, and a true descendant of brave and fiercely independent ancestresses whose archetype is the Berber chieftess Kahena. Kateb blames colonialism and Islamic orthodoxy for the plight of Maghrebian women, and thus advocates a French and also Islamic decolonization of North Africa and a return to pre-Roman, or Numidian, pagan values and culture. Kateb's Nedjma, as a mediating subject among the various conflicting parties in the narrative, stands in all her guises not only for the repudiation of both Islamic formalism and patriarchy but also of colonialism and imperialism.

In the struggle against colonial rule, female figures such as Nedjma or Nefissa, the heroine in Qui se souvient de la mer, are both elements of permanence and agents of change. For as Dib notes, "Sans la mer, sans les femmes, nous serions restés définitivement des orphelins; elles nous couvrirent du sel de leur langue et cela, heureusement, préserva maints d'entre nous "!" (20-21) 'Without the sea, without women, we would have definitely remained orphans; they covered us with the salt of their tongue, and that, luckily, preserved many of us.' The homonyms mer 'sea' and mère 'mother' constitute the fundamental and permanent elements in life, and those to which the son/child returns and finds solace. ⁷

In the postcolonial period, the image of the mother as the custodian of pure values is again resurrected to combat a castrating nationalist patriarchy. What Boudjedra claims about Algeria is, to varying degrees, valid for the rest of the Maghreb:

L'Algérie? Une société sous l'emprise d'un pariarcat polygame. Donc une société castratrice à l'égard des fils, mais en même temps vouée à l'inceste. La révolte des fils contre le père s'incarne dans la débauche. Quand la sexualité se trouve réprimée, c'est un acte politique de revendiquer, d'affirmer la liberté sexuelle. (Le Monde 24)

Algeria? A society under the sway of polygamous patriarchy. Therefore, a castrating society with respect to the sons; but doomed at the same time to be incestuous. So in this context, the revolt of the sons against the father is incarnated in debauchery, since whenever sexuality is repressed it is a political act to claim and affirm sexual freedom.

For Boudjedra the mother is an ambivalent figure. She is the custodian of tradition and an element of permanence, but she is also the embodiment of a social stagnation defined as subservience, fatalism, and illiteracy. The relationship between mother and son in La répudiation is manifold and overcharged with symbolic and psychoanalytical significance. As suggested by the title, the narrative recounts a series of repudiations and ruptures. For Rachid, the narrator, these begin with his father's uxorial repudiation. Si Zoubir (meaning "Mr Prick" in the diminutive), Rachid's father, announces to Ma that he intends to remarry. Ma, in compliance with custom, readily acquiesces.

In the patriarchal system, the wife is often the sacrificial lamb. Once past her prime and out of her youth, she is then repudiated to make room for a younger bride. Moreover, adding insult to injury, she is required by custom to prepare for her husband's wedding in an honorable and dignified fashion, as she is still under the tutelage of her husband: "Le père vint demander conseil à Ma qui fut tout de suite d'accord. Les femmes lancèrent des cris de joie et ma mère, pour ne pas rester ne deça de l'événement accepta d'organiser les festivités" (La répudiation 70) 'Father came to ask advice from Ma who gave her immediate consent. The women yelled with joy and my mother, to rise to the occasion, agreed to organize the festivities' (57). Rachid is profoundly affected by the repudiation of his mother which "j'avais été brutalisé dans ma conscience et calciné dans mon affectivité" (138) 'brutalized [his] consciousness and hardened [his] affectivity' and he is left to wander about in search of a lost paternity and eventually to find an outlet in alcohol and depravity.

To avenge his mother's humiliation--a revenge of which the male reader is expected to approve--Rachid seduces his step-mother Zoubida, whose name "Cream of Butter" connotes freshness and sweetness. Like many of his fellow Maghrebian writers, Boudjedra is an iconoclast. Iconoclasm, a sacrilegious discourse, is therefore a repudiation of Islamic orthodoxy, doubly so when expressed in the Other's (the Colonizer's) profane language, French. Through audacious and salacious imagery, erotic fantasies, and a vituperative style, Boudjedra transgresses every code of accepted behavior and shakes off his reader's mental lethargy. The son will speak the unspeakable, all that the mother represses in the innermost recesses of her subconscious.

The sadomasochism that defines Maghrebian conjugal relationships is publicly exhibited through the son's flamboyant and scandalous speech. In this context, La répudiation reads like a fictionalized version of Freud's Oedipus complex. Rachid is, for instance, fully aware that sexual repression is fertile ground for incestuous impulses: "Je confondais, dans l'abstraction dementielle de l'orgasme, ma marâtre avec ma mère" (142) 'In the demented abstraction of orgasm, I was confusing my step-mother with my mother.'

Last but not least, Rachid betrays the clan's code of honor: he recounts these familial and taboo stories of repudiation and incest to his French lover Céline, who plays the role of psychotherapist. What we have in La répudiation is a double betrayal: not only does Rachid avail himself of his mother's story to embroider his own, but in so doing he also uses the language of the Other couched in his own words.

Ironically, Rachid's iconoclastic representation of his Oedipal relationship with his mother rings hollow: it is a simulacrum of transgression, for real transgression occurs only when it is expressed in the mother tongue, the locus, according to the Koran, of the mother's sanctity, which remains in the Arabic language a sacrilege and a taboo. French becomes the other language, "la langue marâtre," the language of permissiveness which allows a simulacrum of transgression of the mother and her tongue. As Kacem Basfao notes cogently, it is precisely "the displacement of mother to stepmother, of maternal language to foreign language [which] permits the return of the repressed and the passage to the scriptural act" (650; qtd. in Déjeux 10).

Because, as Abdelkébir Khatibi reminds us in Maghreb pluriel, "La langue dite maternelle est inaugurale corporellement" (191) 'the mother tongue is corporally inaugural,' the mother's parole is always actively at work in the son's writing. The imprint of orality on the mother's parole is indelible, as Driss, the protagonist in Chraïbi's Le passé simple, admits: "En dépit de mon instruction occidentale, je continuais de vivre, d'agir et de juger par paraboles, à la manière de ces conteurs publics qui s'installent dans un coin de rue. . ." (46) 'In spite of my Western education, I still lived, acted, and judged by parables, just like the public storytellers that install themselves on a street corner . . . .'

The genealogical primacy of the mother tongue expresses itself in the Maghrebian text in French as a desire to return to maternal origin. Indeed, a recurrent theme in Maghrebian literature is that of regressus ad uterum. This intuition of maternal primacy has been appropriated, as is the case with Western male writers, by the male Maghrebian writer, since he sees himself, to paraphrase Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, as "a son and lover of original and originary women" (262).

This search for the mother as an immutable image is a male search for Maghrebian authenticity, for a mode of being unadorned by the imported modernity perceived as the source of the son's alienation. Moreover, it is also a yearning for the premodern, when there was a harmonious relationship with things, which Gilbert and Gubar call "the primal verbal fertility of the mother" (263). The wish to return to the mother's womb is also a desire to return to the mother tongue. Not surprisingly then, the occultation of the mother tongue by the conquering Colonizer's language and the subsequent displacement of the oral by the written tradition have become central themes in the Maghrebian text.

French was first experienced by the early Maghrebian writers as a rupture, an exile from maternity. Malek Haddad, for one, lamented the loss of the mother tongue to a foreign one: "Maman se dit Ya Ma et moi je dis ma mère / J'ai perdu mon burnous mon fusil mon stylo / Et je porte un prénom plus faux que mes façons" (25) 'To say Mama one says Ya Ma and I say Mother / I have lost my burnoose my rifle my pen / I have a first name more false than my ways.' Yet, for Khatibi, Khaïr-Eddine, and Boudjedra, to cite only a few postcolonial writers, the quest for a maternal and originary identity is also a creative stance. More often than not, the desire to be reunited with the mother, through writing, is equally a desire to distance oneself from the incestuous and troublesome "mots/maux de la tribu" 'words and woes of the clan.'

Ironically, in his search for identity the Maghrebian writer resorts to the tools of modernity itself. The discovery of psychoanalysis by the male writer is a determinant factor in the flourishing of Maghrebian literature in French. Not only has psychoanalysis provided him with new sources of wonder and fantasy, but it has also given him a tool with which to fathom the obscure regions of his psyche and regain a lost harmony with the world and with himself. At least on an oneiric level, this discovery of introspection has allowed him to rediscover the maternal world of his childhood so as to be able to bridge the gaps between his past, present and future. This is precisely what Ben Jelloun advocates in his narratives and his journalistic writings through a revealing oxymoron: the future memory. ⁸

In the Maghrebian text written in French, the discourse on the mother leads inevitably to the question of the Other. The latter concept encompasses such diverse elements as patriarchy, colonialism, and modernity. Not surprisingly, the advent of modernity was perceived by traditionalists and other advocates of the patriarchal system as disruptive of the status quo, especially with regard to the feminine, and was thus violently resisted. It comes as no shock, then, that the word "modern" became anathema to the patriarchal establishment.

The "modern" became synonymous with the Other, the colonizer. Because it was ushered in by colonialism, modernity was considered an act of violence against Maghrebian society at large and thus regarded with suspicion especially by the male population. As a process, modernization was branded as a form of subservience to western values as a blind imitation of European ways and behavior and was thus perceived as a new social and intellectual threat to Arab and Islamic identity.

That the colonial system actually effected brutal transformations in Maghrebian society, especially with regard to the mixing of the sexes, is reflected in its literature. The father who has been defeated and made to suffer daily humiliation at the hands of the colonizer vents his frustration and feeling of castration on his wife and children. Unable to cope with the challenges of modernity unfolding around them, many male characters take refuge in tradition and Islamic formalism and thus look back with fondness and nostalgia to the precolonial and premodern days when there was strict segregation between the sexes. As Rachid, one of the protagonists in Kateb Yacine's Nedjma, says tongue in cheek, "Le prophète a raison. Faut pas mélanger les femmes et les hommes" (211) 'The Prophet is right, men and women should not mix.' This remark also echoes one of Dib's characters in Qui se souvient de la mer: "Avant, les hommes vivaient de leur côté, les femmes, du leur, et les enfants, auprès d'elles. Tandis qu'à présent!" (62) 'Before, men used to live in one place, and women in another, and the children with them. But now!'

The special relationship binding mothers and sons, based on the dialectics of attraction and repulsion, is also at the core of a matrix that places the "mother" and the "modern" in opposition. This dialectical relationship is operative, however, in a context in which it is exclusively the son who acts as the intercessor and agent of modernity. In addition, colonialism as a child of modernity and of the Industrial Revolution has brought about a societal crisis in the Maghreb of unprecedented magnitude. It has set in motion a radical discourse of alterity articulated around the metaphor of the mother. Through a telling apposition in the form of his book's title, La civilisation, ma mère, Driss Chraïbi sums up the fecund problematic of the mother and the modern: "Tourne le dos à cette vieille maison et à ce passé croulant! . . . . Ce monde est à toi aussi" (66) 'Turn your back on this old house and this crumbling past! [Ma is exhorted by her two sons,] "Go on, do go on ! . . . . This world is yours too.'

At the heart of the colonial enterprise is its so-called civilizing mission. After all, what better way to assimilate the natives than by schooling them in the French system? Modernity as symbolized by the French school came as a direct threat to the mother, and none better than Kateb Yacine has described the traumatic passage from the mother to the modern:

Tout alla bien tant que je fus un hôte fugitif de l'école coranique. C'était à Sédrata, non loin de la frontière algéro-tunisienne. [. . .] Quand j'eus sept ans, mon père prit soudain la décision irrévocable de me fourrer sans plus tarder dans la "gueule du loup", c'est-à-dire à l'école française [. . .]. Ma mère soupirait; et lorsque je me plongeais dans mes nouvelles études, que je faisais, seul, mes devoirs, je la voyais errer, ainsi qu'une âme en peine. Adieu notre théâtre intime et enfantin, adieu le quotidien complot ourdi contre mon père, pour répliquer, en vers, à ses pointes satiriques . . . Et le drame se nouait. [. . .] Ma mère était trop fine pour ne pas s'émouvoir de l'infidélité qui lui fut ainsi faite. Et je la vois encore, toute froissée, m'arrachant à mes livres--tu vas tomber malade !--] (Nedjma 180-81)

All went well while I was in fleeting attendance at the Koranic school at Sedrata, near the Algerian frontier with Tunisia . . . . But when I was seven, my father suddenly made the irrevocable decision to cast me into the lion's mouth, in other words to send me to the French school . . . . My mother sighed; and when I embarked on my new studies and did my homework by myself, I would see her wandering about like a soul in torment. It was farewell to our intimate and childish theatricals, to our daily little plot against my father, retorting in verse to his satirical jests. . . . And all was set for drama . . . . My mother was too sensitive not to be affected by this disloyalty towards her. I can still see her, all ruffled and offended, tearing me away from my books--"you will fall ill"-- (Ortzen 130)

But if traditional patriarchy devalorized the mother, modernity has in turn devalued the mother tongue: "In the linguistic conflict within the colonized, his mother tongue is that which is crushed," says Memmi. "[The colonized] himself sets about discarding this infirm language, hiding it from the sight of strangers" (107). And the forsaking of the mother tongue for French is also a desertion of the mother for the other woman, usually the French woman.

French has thus become an object of attraction and revulsion: it is both a surrogate mother worthy of respect and admiration, but also a step-mother to be abused. For these reasons the Maghrebian writer has wrought havoc on the French language, its grammar, punctuation, and syntax, and the declared agenda of the younger generation of Maghrebian writers in French is to empty their literature of any colonial or neocolonial content and infuse it with a new dynamic Maghrebian reality and sensitivity, or parole, inspired often by the mother.

But modernity, which was initially limited to the outside world and did not affect the colonized's private life (i.e., his wife, his mind, his home), has, with time, permeated society at large. Ever since the son began to receive modern schooling, modernization seemed inevitable, since the "second snapping of the umbilical chord," according to Kateb, occurs when modernity invades the home:

Puis un soir, d'une voix candide, non sans tristesse, me disant: 'Puisque je dois plus te distraire de ton autre monde, apprends-moi donc la langue française.' Ainsi se referma le piège des Temps Modernes sur mes frêles racines, et j'enrage à présent de ma stupide fierté, le jour où, un journal françcais à la main, ma mère s'installa devant la table de travail, lointaine comme jamais, pâle et silencieuse, comme si la petite main du cruel écolier lui faisait un devoir, puisqu'il était son fils, de s'imposer pour lui la camisole du silence, et même de le suivre au bout de son effort et de sa solitude--dans la gueule du loup. (Le polygone étoilé 181)

And then [his mother] saying to me one evening, in a candid but rather sad way, 'As I must stop distracting you from this other world of yours, teach me French then.' Thus will the trap of Modern Times close over my frail roots, and now I am furious at my stupid pride that day when my mother sat down at my desk with a French newspaper, more distant than she had ever been, pale and still, as though the cruel schoolboy's little hand obliges her, since he was her son, to wrap herself in silence and even to follow him to the end of his effort and solitude--into the lion's mouth. (Ortzen 131)

For Kateb, it was the Lion's mouth, embodied in the young French schoolmistress, which caused his alienation from the mother, the mother tongue and the mother country: "Je prenais rapidement goût à la langue étrangère, et puis, fort amoureux d'une sémillante institutrice, j'allais jusqu'à rêver de résoudre, pour elle, à son insu, tous les problèmes proposés dans mon volume d'arithmétique!" (181) 'I soon took to the foreign language; then I fell for a vivacious young school-teacher and even thought of doing all the sums in my Arithmetic book for her.' French as the other tongue, and the other woman, is a formidable challenge to the mother and her parole. The seduction of the son by the other language, "la langue marâtre," is felt by the mother as a second and more radical betrayal, having first been abandoned by the husband/father.

Among Maghrebian writers, none has studied as thoroughly and as seriously--albeit with wit and humor--the effects of modernization on a traditional and conservative setting through the emancipation of the mother as Driss Chraïbi. In his novel La civilisation, ma mère!, "Ma" is at the center of the battle between tradition and modernity. In the first part of the novel, subtitled "Entre," which means both "enter" and "between," the mother literally enters modernity through the acquisition of material symbols of Western wonders--the oven, the radio, and the telephone. Through the radio and later the telephone, she becomes aware of the outside world, and with the help of her sons gradually breaks free of the walls of silence, isolation, and infantilism in which she was kept. Here the modern and the mother intersect and coalesce positively to repudiate patriarchy and proclaim the mother's self-empowerment and "prise de parole."

Ironically, "Ma"'s emancipation could not have occurred without the complicity of her son Najib, for her personal transformation and relative emancipation closely parallel the son's itinerary, though she never evolves as an autonomous or credible character. So for these reasons, Najib's "civilizing" of the mother, although sincere and genuine, remains a ploy and a stratagem which exists only to undermine the authority of the father. Yet "Ma," as removed from power as she is, remains, nonetheless, its matrix: the mother functions in the text as a harbinger, albeit unthreatening to well-entrenched patriarchy, of novel and revolutionary ideas. It is through the eyes of "Ma" that Driss Chraïbi's narrator envisions the advent of "[u]n homme nouveau, une société nouvelle, un monde jeune et neuf" (174) 'a new man, a new society, a brand new world.'

But sooner or later the son who writes about or for the mother realizes that he is writing about himself, "the same person, speaking with two voices." (Hirsch 199). Nowhere is the condition of mother and author so dramatically similar as in the Maghrebian text written in French, for both mother and son, as Kateb reminds, have won over and lost out to modernity:

Jamais je n'ai cessé, même au jour de succès près de l'institutrice, de ressentir au fond de moi cette seconde rupture du lien ombilical, cet exil intérieur qui ne rapprochait plus l'écolier de sa mère que pour les arracher, chaque fois un peu plus, au murmure du sang, aux frémissements réprobateurs d'une langue bannie, secrètement, d'un même accord, aussitôt brisé que conclu... Ainsi avais-je perdu tout à la fois ma mère et son langage, les seuls trésors inaliénables--et pourtant aliénés ! (Le polygone étoilé 181-82).

I've never ceased to feel deep within me, that second snapping of the umbilical cord, that inward exile which kept mother and son apart, torn from the murmur of blood and the reproachful sighs of a language secretly banished by a mutual agreement which was shattered as soon as made. Thus did I lose both my mother and her language, the only treasures that cannot be foregone--yet were nevertheless forsaken. (Ortzen 138)

As suggested by Kateb, the modern Maghrebian text comes at an intolerable cost, the repetitive murder of the mother. Yet the mother as the locus of the primal language, like a phantom, will never die and will haunt the author and his text in the form of an indelible palimpsest. ⁹ That the mother tongue (the dialect, parole) will always find its way to the surface of this text has become a rich topic in the postmodern age.

Significantly, the postcolonial and postmodern condition is marked by the resurgence of the maternal, of parole-mère, as a new creative space of expression. Modernity is perceived and experienced by the colonized as a space of deliberate exclusion from History. Indeed, the postmodern preoccupation of the Maghrebian writer in French is precisely to bridge the gap of modernity from which he was effectively excluded by colonialism, so as to reconnect with his occulted past. Hence, for the writer caught in the bind between the archaic and the postmodern, Maghrebian society is fertile ground for expounding the timely question of Eros, the plight of women and the status of patriarchy. The son-as-writer has begun to "cash in on" the oral narrative material of the mother tongue--namely to seduce the French, and by extention, Western readership too:

Chaque fois que j'écris, je lui raconte un peu l'histoire, je lui dis de quoi je parle, elle s'y intéresse, cela la fait rire parfois. Il lui arrive même de rectifier certains événements. Par exemple, dans La prière de l'absent, j'ai raconté la naissance du narrateur en m'inspirant de ma propre naissance dont elle m'avait parlé plusieurs fois et pourtant j'avais fait des erreurs. C'est elle qui m'a dicté les invocations de la femme qui accouche, pour faire passer la douleur. Je tiens beaucoup à cette attention qu'elle a pour mon travail d'écrivain. (Horay 37)

Each time I write I tell her a little of the story. I tell her what it is about, and that interests her and makes her laugh sometimes. On occasions, she would correct certain events. For example, in La prière de l'absent, I related the narrator's birth using my own birth as a model, a story she told me many times over, and yet I made mistakes. It was she who dictated to me the invocations of the woman who was in labor . . . I am very attentive to the interest she takes in my work as a writer.

Ironically, writing is also used by the son to subvert langue itself, that is monolangue, since both Arabic and French advocate and claim linguistic purity. The mere evocation of Maghrebian maternity as a creative space consecrates the triumph of the spoken word and oral lore as parole over the written word, or langue, the traditional privilege of males. Even though most traditional mothers are illiterate in the Maghreb, their innate sense of storytelling has handed down from one generation to the next a remarkable body of literature that has remained largely ignored by students and critics alike because it is oral. ¹⁰ The circulation of parole between mother and son ceases, however, when the latter enters school, the world of modernity and the written langue.

The reappropriation of the mother's parole is fully acknowledged by the writer, male and female. Taos Amrouche and her brother Jean Amrouche, Kateb Yacine and Tahar Ben Jelloun, to cite only a few, are all most vocal about their indebtedness to their mothers. In a fascinating anthology significantly titled A ma mère: 60 écrivains parlent de leurs mères, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Kateb Yacine speak candidly and emotionally about the relationship that binds writer and mother. For them, the son becomes, in many respects, the interpreter of the maternal muse, the one who transforms this traditional knowledge into a modern, and increasingly psychoanalytical, discourse.

Oftentimes, Maghrebian writers dedicate their novels to the mother, though usually out of guilt, because she is frequently illiterate. Mehdi Charef dedicated his novel, Le thé au harem d'Archi Ahmed, with the following: "Pour Mebarka, ma mère, même si elle ne sait pas lire" 'To my mother Mebarka even though she cannot read.' The mother is implicitly acknowledged as the genitor of the Maghrebian text. Because she is the source (mater) and also the subject matter and the stuff (materia) of his writing, the Maghrebian writer finds himself working inextricably within the paradigms of langue and parole, the written and the spoken word, the mother tongue and the Other's language (la langue marâtre).

The passage from the oral to the written tradition parallels the itinerary that leads from the mother to the modern and beyond. The Tunisian poet Salah Garmadi traces his trajectory to his parents, especially the mother when he dedicated his book of poems Mes ancêtres les Bédouins "A ceux qui m'alphabétisèrent" 'To those who taught me the alphabet.' The alphabet, the school and, by extension, modernity, stand between the mother and the son, and the latter is also paradoxically the origin of the son's writing.

Yet, the son's writing distances him more than it brings him closer to his mother. It is the mother's story written for and dedicated to the mother, yet she cannot read it. Through a cruel twist of irony, the gift of the book signals the symbolic death of the mother. Hence, as Roland Barthes tells us, "Le paradoxe cruel de la dédicace: je veux te donner à tout prix ce qui t'étouffe" (93) 'the cruel paradox of a dedication: I want to give you at all costs that which suffocates you.' A well-meaning gesture--"donner à tout prix" 'to give at all costs'--turns thus into an unwonted act of cruelty and narcissistic self-empowerment, for there is nothing more cruel than to offer a book to someone who cannot read.

The son-to-be-writer who "translates" his mother's story into French is never faithful to the maternal muse. In the act of writing, he "betrays" her as he has to accommodate the seductive whims of the other language. Like the mother who was made by patriarchy to suffer polygamy, the mother tongue also seems to have adjusted to a linguistic polygamy of some sorts. Khatibi calls it "Amour bilingue," Love in two languages, that is, a promiscuous discourse in languages. Together with spoken and classical Arabic and Berber in all its dialects, French has emerged as an important paradigm in the linguistic reality of the Maghreb, the Maghrebian text in French notwithstanding:

Il se calma d'un coup, lorsqu'apparut le 'mot' arabe 'kalma' avec son équivalent savant 'kalima' et toute une chaîne des diminutifs, calembours de son enfance: 'klima'. . . . La diglossie 'kal(i)ma' revient sans que disparût ni s'effaçât le mot 'mot.' Tous deux s'observaient en lui. . . . (4)

He calmed down instantly when an Arabic word, Kalma, appeared, kalma and its scholarly equivalent, kalima, and the whole string of its diminutives which had been the riddle of his childhood: klima . . . . The diglossal kal(i)ma appeared again without mot's having faded away or disappeared. Within him, both words where observing each other. . . .

Having put all of the son-as-writer's claims, made in the name of the mother, into their proper perspective, let us, in conclusion, revisit the question we posed earlier: is the son seeking here a genuine emancipation of women or merely using them to establish a neopatriarchical order? The reality in the Maghreb, namely the resurgence of militant Islamic fundamentalism, seems to support these claims, for yesterday's sons are today's fathers, while the plight of the mother, and for that matter all women, has remained unchanged, and has recently even gotten worse (Algeria is a case in point). ¹¹ Gilbert and Gubar's analysis of the male writer's strategies of appropriating the "lingua materna" and transforming it into a new "patrius sermo" applies mutatis mutandi to Maghrebian male writers:

All these male modernists and postmodernists transform the maternal vernacular into a new morning of patriarchy in which they can wake the old powers of the 'Allfather's Word. (261).

But as the epigraph to this essay tells us, the son-as-writer is not merely a passive listener of his mother's stories, he is also an active agent: he rewrites them in his own style, and in fashionable mode, a practice that merges felicitously the mother with the modern. Yet to brand him simply as rewriter (or surrogate writer) of the mother both as subject and subject matter is to underplay the precariousness of his own predicament. For in writing his mother's ancestral lore in French, he attempts a tenuous if not impossible alliance between past and present, male and female, the oral/aural and the written, the archaic and the postmodern, the very "stuff," mater-ia of his own survival, and the unique and distinct trait of the Maghrebian text in French.

NOTES

1. All translations in this essay are mine unless otherwise indicated. I would like to thank my colleague Jay Rogoff for reading my manuscript and for suggesting part of the title "Too much in the sun" (Hamlet, 1.2.67). I wholeheartedly agree with his rationale: "'Too much in the sun' would convey (1) the burden of being a son among all these writers, (2) the climate--I mean meterological as well as cultural and familial--in which they are writing, and (3), by using the line from Hamlet, in an associative way, the close relationship with the mother and antagonism with the father (father--figure/surrogate father in Hamlet's case)."

2. Social scientists in the Maghreb draw frequently from literary texts. For instance, the sociologist Abdelwahab Bouhdiba refers to writers such as Mouloud Feraoun and Rachid Boudjedra in his discussion of sexuality and Islam, La sexualité en Islam. In the Maghrebian discourse on sexuality, namely the feminist discourse, such terms as patriarchy, Islamic orthodoxy, phallocracy, and tradition are frequently interchangeable.

3. A similar reading of Moroccan mothers' tales is presented by Fatima Mernissi's Qui l'emporte? La femme ou l'homme?

4. Regarding the transformation of "lingua materna" into "patrius sermo," see the insightful analysis of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's No Man's Land.

5. It was Driss Chraïbi who, as early as 1954, with his novel Le passé simple inaugurated the trend in Maghrebian literature that would seek to retrieve the mother's parole confiscated by the father. Significantly, the novel opens with this meditation: "Le silence est une opinion" (1) 'Silence is an opinion.'

6. This is also one of the main topics in Férid Boughedir's "Halfaouine," a recent film about coming of age in Tunis.

7. This connection is also explored by Khatibi, especially in La mémoire tatouée: "Mer, mère, mémoire, lapsus échappés àcette frileuse nostalgie" (20) 'Sea, mother, memory, slips of tongue that have escaped this cold nostalgia.' See also Luce Irigaray's Amante marine.

8. One must also consider that from a formal standpoint the genre that best lends itself to a psychoanalytical approach of the past is autobiography. It is no coincidence that the Maghrebian text is mainly autobiographical, but a plurivocal autobiography, that which Kateb Yacine refers to in his own writings as "une autobiographie au pluriel." The son speaks with the voice of all the socially oppressed, above all the mother. This type of narrative fits the Bakhtinian definition of the novel. Because it is subversive of monolangue, the Maghrebian text in French dialogizes the heteroglossia--Berber and Arab dialects, the oral and the feminine--of Maghrebian society.

9. See Marianne Hirsch's discussion of the Oedipus narrative within the Western tradition in Mother/Daughter Plot. For a Maghrebian, Arab, and Islamic interpretation of the Oedipus complex, see Bouhdiba 274-79 as well as Khatibi's rebuttal in Maghreb pluriel 147-76.

10. The schooling of women is a recent postcolonial development in the Maghreb. Through a patriarchal edict grounded in a distorted reading of the Koran, women were for long denied access to the written and to modernity. This jarring injustice is often evoked by the son-as-writer. Kateb Yacine's mother, for example, "avait commencé àapprendre [la langue arabe] seule, sans que personne ne s'en rende compte: derrière la porte, cachée, écoutant les leçons que mon grand-père paternel donnait à mes oncles. Son père a fini par s'en apercevoir, et il l'a prise avec les garçons" (Horay 375) 'began to learn the Arabic language by herself, unbeknownst to anybody. Hidden behind a closed door, she listened to the lessons my paternal grandfather gave to my uncles. Her father ultimately found out about it, and let her sit in with the boys.'

11. See, for example, Boudjedra's discussion of the rise of fundamentalism in his pamphlet Fis de la haine.

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