Fanon\'s al-Jaza\'ir, or Algeria Translated

parallax, 2002, vol. 8, no. 2, 99–115

Fanon’s al-Jaza’ir, or Algeria translated Brian T. Edwards

[H]ow to tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path? Deleuze and Guattari1

Merely local During the spring of 2001, the Berber Cultural Movement (MCB) renewed their protests against the Algerian government. Prompted by the murder of a student, the MCB called a rally and general strike in Tizi Ouzou, east of Algiers. The date marked the 21st anniversary of the so-called Berber Spring (tafust imazighen in Tamazight) when Kabyle demonstrators demanding recognition of Tamazight language and culture were harshly repressed by Algerian authorities. Recognition of Tamazight (the Berber dialects of the Maghreb) remained a centrepiece of the Berber platform in 2001. The government maintained its opposition and responded with force. After Ž ve months of demonstrations, with scores more left dead, the government Ž nally wavered. On 4 October 2001, on the eve of a rally planned for Algiers, an anxious Prime Minister Ali Ben is announced that the government would recognize Tamazight as an oYcial national language. The relationship of language to national identity remains a fraught one in Algeria and involves struggles not only over the status of Tamazight, but also of French, a language demoted from national or oYcial status despite its importance within Algerian intellectual circles. 1996 decrees by President Liamine Zeroual’s administration instructed the nation’s universities to begin teaching English as the primary foreign language (thereby reasserting that French was a ‘foreign’ language and demoting it at the same time) and established a schedule by which French would be fully phased out of oYcial and media use, with Ž nes for lawbreakers. If these decrees reveal a tension in maintaining Arabic as national language, the gesture toward English hints at the pressures of globalization to the struggling Algerian economy. 2 It is a condition of reading Fanon’s writings on Algeria in the U.S. that many of us re ect on the post-independence trajectory of the nation and place Fanon at the parallax ISSN 1353-464 5 print/ISSN 1460-700 X online © 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/13534640210130449

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foundational centre from which both contemporary problems and their potential solutions in some way derive. This is in part due to Fanon’s privileged relationship to Algeria within Anglophone cultural and literary studies, where he is the representative of the Algerian revolution, its so-called voice, even though his reputation in Algeria and the greater Maghreb has oscillated in the four decades since his death. While his articles in the Algerian periodical El Moudjahid and his psychiatric writings addressed more local audiences, his book L’an V de la re´volution alge´rienne and parts of Les damne´s de la terre translated for a larger, even global audience the Algerian struggle for self-determination. In these works, particularly L’an V, questions of national language and its antipodes – local dialect on the one hand and the spectre of a global language on the other – are rich and knotted, especially so since they are formulated and survive (in Derrida’s sense of living-on) within the context of a translation of a local (i.e. national) struggle for a larger ( pan-African; global) conversation. In the second chapter of L’an V, ‘% Ici la voix de l’Alge´rie...& ’, Fanon charts the dialectical process by which the radio moved from symbol of colonial oppression to tool of the Algerian revolution. Fanon addresses the complex language environment of Algeria and makes an historical argument about the appropriation, after the Congress of the Soummam in 1956, of French as the language of the future Algerian nation. Considering his own inability to speak Arabic or Tamazight and in the context of his earlier discussion in Black Skin, White Masks about the alienating properties of French for the colonized, Fanon’s discussion of French in Algeria has seemed to some to be an abrupt, even self-serving, change of position. For these critics, Fanon’s ignorance of Arabic and Berber is seen as political and cultural lack and impinges on his role as international spokesman for the region. As Albert Memmi formulated this position in 1971: ‘Neither in Algeria nor in Tunisia did he understand the language, so he, like the other foreign doctors, had to hold consultation with his patients through an interpreter. He knew better than anyone what constituted a psychiatric scandal’.3 Memmi’s parenthetical grouping of Fanon with ‘the other foreign doctors’ negates Fanon’s self-inclusion in the ‘we Algerians’ invoked in his 1959 preface to L’an V.4 At the same time, Memmi’s statement forecloses the question of what ‘the language’ (note the singular) of the Maghreb is. Given the continued language crisis in Algeria and the centrality of bi- or multilingualism as characteristic of Maghrebi cultural identity, however, Fanon’s description of the revolutionary movement from Arabic to French bears further examination. The language Fanon used in writing about national language in Algeria is more nuanced than has generally been acknowledged in the Anglophone world. The translation of Fanon’s writing from French into English has necessarily lost the subtlety of Fanon’s language, and therefore of his argument. In his chapter on the voice of Algeria, Fanon eVects a complex destabilization of the relationship between France and French. In doing so, he completes the detachment of French language from French nation, a possibility broached by a construction Fanon had admired and quoted in Black Skin, White Masks: ‘le franc¸ais de France/le franc¸ais du franc¸ais/le franc¸ais franc¸ais; the French of France/the Frenchman’s French/French French’.5 Fanon’s staging of this detachment in L’an V underlines and complicates his point that the occupier was forced ‘prendre conscience du caracte`re relatif de ses signes/ Edwards 100

to realize the relative character of his signs’.6 He does so through a variety of rhetorical strategies involving movement between French and Arabic: by including a number of untranslated Arabic words in his French argument – sometimes marked as ‘foreign’ with italics, sometimes not – and by using ‘French’ words with Arabic etymologies, which is to say words that had by the time of his writing entered French usage and French dictionaries in direct connection to the conquest and colonization of Algeria. Fanon does more than simply drop Arabic words into his discussion as verbal decoration (French observers of the revolution might occasionally use the word djebel instead of montagne to signify ‘mountain’, for example). His movement between Arabic and French – his inhabiting of the space in-between a Ž rm sense of where one language begins and the other ends – produces an Arabized French that eVectively repositions French colonizers in an alien language territory, committing ‘barbarous’ acts. In Haakon Chevalier’s English translation, however, Fanon’s inclusion of Arabic words is necessarily displaced – every Arabic word is italicized and deŽ ned, rendering all ‘foreign’ – and his use of French words of Arabic etymology eVaced. In translation, we cannot grasp Fanon’s sense of how French is dislocated from France. Fanon’s phrase for how this happens – ‘par le truchement d’un unique syste`me linguistique/ through the intermediary of a unique linguistic system’ – appears within a sentence Chevalier omits.7 ‘Truchement’ itself, a French word with an Arabic etymology, is an occasion of Fanon’s staging of this destabilized French; the word connotes an interpreter, a translator (turjaman in Arabic), and suggests something of Fanon’s in-between role as he moves between locations. That Fanon enacts this destabilized Algerian French within an argument for an Algerian voice expressed on jammed radio signals is crucial and emphasizes the need to pay attention to what is, after all, a minor strain running through the chapter. In the context of Fanon’s description of a national message communicated between outbursts of static, blocked enunciations, and in the shattered fragments of the sentence, his language draws attention to the disruption of Arabic words within a French no longer Ž rmly allied with the colonizer. John Mowitt has shown us how to understand Fanon’s description of the radio: ‘the more distorted, that is, less expressive the voice of the nation is rendered, the more clearly the nation’s existence is, as it were, signaled’.8 I add the suggestion that Fanon’s literary style doubles linguistically a fragmented French voice that will be the clear signal for the revolution. Since this French is not ‘at home’ in France or in other Francophone contexts where Arabic is unknown – L’an V seeks to translate the Algerian revolution to foreign contexts – the non-Arabic speaking reader of Fanon (in French) receives a linguistic signal not unlike the radio signal that Fanon describes. If Fanon can only describe that radio signal, he produces a similar eVect via his Arabized French. Fanon need not rely on full comprehension of the complexity of his language to be eVective; indeed Mowitt diVerentiates Fanon’s ‘voice’ from a humanist’s clearly sounding voice. Fanon’s Arabic words stop the French reader who does not know them (no glossary is provided), and the Arabic etymologies within some of the chosen French words breaks up – unsettles – the Latinate  ow of Fanon’s prose. I am interested in recovering Fanon’s language in order to rethink Fanon’s relationship to the processes of globalization and localization of languages that parallax 101

surrounded him during the revolution. In an article on global languages and local value, Ronald Judy provides a framework and a set of terms that are crucial to this endeavour. During the postcolonial period, the achievement and development of an independent nation-state was primary; in the present, the pre-eminence of the nation is challenged by the global  ow of capital. Nations and states become detached: the nation is where local languages and culture may be found, but the state must exist in a global marketplace in order to survive. To do so, the state must translate itself into the global language of multinational capitalism: English, but not an English explicitly associated with any state ( Judy diVers from those who assume that the global spread of English implies the Americanization of the world). Without such a translation, a state risks becoming an unfungible value, doomed to remain local, outside of capital  ows. Judy attempts to discover the relationship between the local languages of nations and the global language into which states must translate themselves. Judy reads Fanon in the context of the contemporary Algerian crisis – a crisis in which Modern Standard Arabic (a language that crosses borders) risks becoming an unfungible value, exacerbated by the economic disenfranchisement of an Arabized population. Moving beyond the standard account of the Algerian language situation that sees a mere con ict between French and Arabic, where French represents colonial authority and modernity and Arabic represents precolonial cultural authenticity, Judy refutes the position that Fanon was an assimilationist, even if he did identify French with liberation. But he notes a problem in Fanon’s excitement about the Soummam Congress of 1956, conducted in French, which was for Fanon the turning point in moving from Arabic as national language to French: ‘the language of [Fanon’s] analysis and [Soummam] declaration are so identical that the former can be taken as a performance of the latter’.9 The eVect is that Fanon’s celebration of Soummam further identiŽ es the urban leadership of the FLN with French and the rural military resistance with Arabic. Fanon unwittingly celebrated the fact that the ‘transcendent language of national consciousness proved to be the ‘‘monumentalization’’ of bilingualism as a crisis of sovereignty’.1 0 Seen in this context, we may recognize a second possibility within Fanon’s nuanced use of Arabic forms within his French, one which will not resolve and exists in uneasy tension with the Ž rst. If Fanon’s use of what I am calling Arabized French destabilizes French French to enact an Algerian French – an Algerian French in the making – his use of Algerian Arabic words within this French may also be seen to stage the disappearance of Arabic within the Algerian nation, as Arabic is absorbed into this new non-French French. Arabic of course does not disappear as a language in postindependence Algeria. In 1976, Houari Boumedienne instituted a major Arabization project, one that despite its concomitant failures persists today in the laws restricting oYcial and broadcast uses of French. But these eVorts at institutionalizing Arabic, of forcing Arabization, may be seen as eVorts to ward oV the spectre of disappearance of Arabic within the Algerian nation. By referring to the disappearance of Arabic, then, I am borrowing a term from Ackbar Abbas, who has written gracefully on the changed meanings of cultural forms due to global  ows of capital and culture. For Abbas, writing about the urban landscape of contemporary Hong Kong, still-visible buildings may be said to have disappeared due their altered context. Among Abbas’ categories is the ‘merely local’, structures Edwards 102

built during colonialism and prior which were once: ‘rooted in a time and place, but it is a time and place that is no longer there. These structures may have interesting stories to tell, but they have no real voice in the present-day life of the city, which has moved elsewhere.1 1 To consider Arabic language within contemporary Algeria akin to Abbas’ ‘merely local’ is not to say that there are no real people speaking the Algerian dialect of Arabic. But it does allow us a vocabulary by which to address the present situation, in which Modern Standard Arabic is maintained as a language of the state under globalized economic conditions that require that major players operate in French or English. It also acknowledges that many of the Berber speakers demanding recognition of Tamazight as a national language are  uent in French and Algerian Arabic. As Judy has argued, Boumedienne’s Arabization projects of the late 1970s and cultural revolution had a disenfranchising eVect: ‘Arabization became a political project of leveling the heterogeneity of the masses, of reducing their idioms to the category of ‘‘folk’’ and subordinating them to the universal Arabic of the schools’.1 2 Colloquial Algerian Arabic is related to, but quite distinct from, Modern Standard Arabic ( Judy’s ‘universal Arabic’). Without a standardized orthography or grammar, Algerian Arabic is not used in print or in oYcial situations. Similarly, the several dialects of Tamazight are diVerent enough from one another, and with an arcane recovered alphabet, that the creation of a single, oYcial Tamazight could only occur at the expense of full comprehension by actual Berber speakers. Globalization’s need for languages to be fungible, to employ Judy’s terms borrowed from economics, changes the status of these dialects. Arabization, a translation of national culture into the standard Arabic of the greater Arab world, while supposed to guard national culture, instead renders Algerian Arabic and Tamazight as the merely local, ‘rooted in a time and place [...] no longer there’. It should be clear that I am not placing ‘blame’ on Fanon’s complex delineation of the use of French as the new language of the nation for these developments in the decades after his death. My methodological presumption is that Fanon’s text is dynamic and dramatic rather than doctrinaire. The richness of his staging of the entangled linguistic impulses within the revolution reveals both directions not taken and commonly shared roots of later crises. I adopt a method of reading Fanon elaborated by Ato Sekyi-Otu, who argues that we read Fanon’s texts ‘as though they formed one dramatic dialectical narrative’, rather than considering his statements ‘irrevocable propositions and doctrinal statements’.1 3 It is for this reason that I refer to the work Fanon called L’an V de la re´volution alge´rienne as Year Five of the Algerian Revolution, and not by its standard English title A Dying Colonialism nor by the French title under which it was reprinted posthumously (Sociologie d’une re´volution). Chevalier’s English title and Maspero’s posthumous French one are passive and detach the work from its speciŽ cally Algerian context and from its temporal speciŽ city. The movement implied in Fanon’s transposed French is toward a global French (related to Deleuze and Guattari’s minor language, but within a decidedly geopolitical context). Fanon’s global French does not rely upon France’s full comprehension; for Fanon, French was not only an international language of diplomacy (due in large part to France’s imperial in uence), but had the potential to be global French, in the sense that we use the word ‘global’ today: detached from merely national meanings and usages. In the Ž nal turn in my argument, I’ll suggest that there is the spectre of parallax 103

a global English appearing in Fanon’s work, one Fanon would have regretted but, I’ll argue, transmits himself. That spectre signals the eventual move toward global English and is a harbinger of the later Algerian eVort to displace French with English, as in Zeroual’s 1996 decree. If Fanon enacts both the disappearance of Arabic as a national language of Algeria and the destabilization of French by Algerian Arabic, he is staging processes that surrounded him, not dictating the terms by which Algeria would collapse under the pressures of multilingualism. I would like in this regard to invoke Judy’s point that we must pay attention to the Algerian discovery that representation itself is impossible in the case of Algeria, if only because of the high price in deaths over the Ž ght for authoritative representation. The double movement of Fanon’s Arabized French – destabilizing French with Arabic, staging the disappearance of Arabic – can be seen to invoke a troubling ambivalence that will be resolved violently and tragically in postcolonial Algerian history. Ble´dards and roumis Jacques Derrida may help open up our sense of what it is that Fanon is doing with French when Fanon invokes an Arabic that he himself did not speak. In his recent essay Monolingualism of the Other, which does not name Fanon, Derrida describes his own relationship to the French language in the context of his biography as a FrancoMaghrebian (namely that as an Algerian Jew, he lived both with French nationality – under the 1870 Cre´mieux decree which granted French citizenship to Algerian Jews – and then was deprived of it, in October 1940, during the Nazi Occupation of France; Derrida makes clear that the latter revocation was indeed French in origin). Derrida expands on the meanings of his title by building on his central problematic, the opening statement: ‘je n’ai qu’une langue, ce n’est pas la mienne/I only have one language; it is not mine’.14 The monolingual in question is Derrida himself, whose only language is French, but for whom French cannot be a maternal language, because of the Franco-Maghrebian Jew’s troubled relationship to French nationality. Thus Derrida’s one language is not his own because of history. But it is also not his own because one always speaks a language for the other: language exists for the other, it returns to the other. Thus the word ‘of ’ in ‘monolingualism of the other’ refers not to property but to provenance: ‘Language is for the other, coming from the other, the coming of the other’.1 5 What is important in this context in a work that neither names Fanon nor includes any untranslated Arabic words – ‘I especially like to hear [Arabic] outside of all ‘‘communication’’, in the poetic solemnity of the chant or prayer’ – is the way in which Derrida moves from history to theory.1 6 For the French bourgeoisie of Algiers of his youth, Arabic and Berber were ‘elided’ languages, and as such ‘certainly became the most alien’; alien, yet with a ‘certain strange and confused proximity’.17 These elided languages highlight the tenuousness of his relationship to French. Since the connection between language and nationality is at the front of Derrida’s concerns in deŽ ning his relationship to French and Frenchness, we can adapt Derrida’s statement and say that the Arabic- or Tamazight-speaking Algerian under colonialism had two or three languages that were not his or her own. But adding Tamazight as a national language to the Algerian palette/palate and the fact of having made Edwards 104

Arabic the national language of Algeria are not unproblematic solutions to this problem: in both cases, the distance between oYcial language and the dialect actually spoken by individuals prevents the national language from being their own. In any case, Derrida’s point about the Franco-Maghrebian monolingual is useful to our discussion of Fanon: ‘The monolingual of whom I speak speaks a language of which he is deprived. The French language is not his. Because he is therefore deprived of all language [...] he is thrown into absolute translation [...] without a source language [langue de de´part]’.1 8 Adopting this insight to my analysis of Fanon’s use of Arabic in his French writing, I may now justify the suggestion that Fanon’s plays the in-between role of ‘translator’ (or intermediary in the sense of his word ‘truchement’) even though Fanon does not speak Arabic. Fanon the monolingual is deprived of the source language, of all language, and thrown into absolute translation. Where does this take Derrida? To the desire to reconstruct and to restore, but ‘really a desire to invent a Žrst language that would be, rather, a prior-to the Žrst language destined to translate that memory [...] of what, precisely, did not take place’. So it becomes a target or, rather, a future language, a promised sentence, a language of the other, once again, but entirely other than the language of the other as the language of the master or colonist, even though, between them, the two may sometimes show so many unsettling resemblances maintained in secret or held in reserve.1 9 This describes Fanon’s revolutionary French in the second chapter of Year Five, a future language that is the result of the loss of all language, a loss that is the result of the colonial situation. In Derrida’s case one must remark that the ‘promise’ of such a language also contains a threat, the promise as threat risked,20 which seems to bring us closer still to the Fanon who is not named. What I am calling Fanon’s destabilization of French, his future language or global French, is a threat risked in the face of national French (French French). Recall that Year Five was banned in France six months after publication.21 Can we bring Derrida’s insight together with Fanon’s? Applying the conjunction of history and theory in Derrida to Fanon’s use of Arabic in Year Five would allow us to state that Arabic is the tongue that is perpetually neighbour of and alien to French. Fanon’s Arabic words highlight his reordering of French, demonstrating how the colonial experience in Algeria will change French. This is both the result of an historical process and the transaction of something intrinsic within the attempt to address the other. I quoted from Deleuze and Guattari’s delineation of minor literature in this essay’s epigraph, and I now import their sense of the way politics and language interact in order to propose that Fanon’s staging of a destabilized French is a political strategy or tactic. Recall that for Deleuze and Guattari, a minor literature has three characteristics: 1) its language is deterritorialized, 2) everything in it is political, because of a certain ‘cramped space’ which connects the individual to political immediacy, and 3) everything in it takes on a collective value.2 2 A minor literature is not so much a designation for speciŽ c literatures written from minority positions, parallax 105

‘but the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature’.2 3 This is not the place to discuss the ways in which Deleuze and Guattari’s metaphors point frequently to the Maghreb (references to deserts and nomads appear frequently in their writing), nor to wonder about the relationship of the French colonial experience in the Maghreb to their work on nomadology, but I must point out that they are not referring to any Maghrebi usages of French here, at least not explicitly. (They do make a comparison of ‘what blacks in America today are able to do with the English language’ to Kaf ka’s Prague German 24 ). In any case, the only point of dispute I see now in calling Fanon’s use of an Algerian French constitutive of or moving toward a minor language is the question I raised above of whether Fanon’s French aspires toward global French. Such would require a delineation of the diVerences between what global language makes of the national, on the one hand, and the revolutionary eVect of a minor literature on the established literature, on the other hand. Let me bracket that question for the moment and identify Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of the movement between politics and language, which is the precondition to understanding these eVects. Writing of Kaf ka’s German and the Hapsburg empire, they state: ‘The breakdown and fall of the empire increases the crisis, accentuates everywhere movements of deterritorialization, and invites all sorts of complex reterritorializations’.25 This is how political history works on language, establishing a crisis in which object and territory may no longer be Ž rmly identiŽ ed with one another. Can we say that such a process might work in the reverse direction as well? In other words, if a crisis in identifying the linguistic object with territory occurs, might this aVect political history? If so, we might give Fanon credit for a deterritorialization of French, the creation of a minor French, in order to speed the breakdown of the French imperial relationship to Algeria. A crucial footnote is suggestive: ‘what is involved here is not the emergence of an ambivalence, but rather a mutation, a radical change of valence, not a balancing act but a dialectical transcendence’.26 I want to recover the full impact of Fanon’s word ‘mutation’ and its biological referent so as to highlight the process of changing French language from within (as if by genetic manipulation) as the political act of the minor literature. Fanon’s word ‘mutation’ suggests the violence of the Deleuzian minor language – a process of ‘tear[ing] [...] away’ – just as the promise of this future language suggests the Derridean threat. Let us now look carefully at Fanon’s attempt to create such a minor literature, to destabilize French by introducing its neighbouring alien other. When Fanon inserts Arabic into his French prose, the words are sometimes announced as foreign by the use of italics, and sometimes not, implying perhaps in the latter case that a formerly ‘foreign’ word is familiar enough to French readers to be considered ‘French’.2 7 When Fanon uses plurals of these Arabic words, whether they are italicized or not, he simply adds an ‘s’ to make a French plural, rather than providing an Arabic plural. (Arabic has a variety of forms for making nouns plural, none of which adds an ‘s’ at the end of a word.) Thus Fanon uses the composed words douars, mechtas and souks2 8 instead of employing the Arabic plurals douawer, mechtati, souaq (villages, cabins, markets). The question of which words Fanon italicized and which he did not is ultimately secondary (there are cases where the same word appears both italicized and unitalicized at diVerent points in the text), and I am neither invoking his Edwards 106

manuscript nor compiling a variorum of editions. I don’t assume that Fanon’s editors necessarily reproduced his intentions about italicization with complete accuracy. What is important, however, is the very fact that there is the question of whether or not to italicize raised by Fanon’s text, based on the uncertainty of whether or not the word is considered foreign. Let me move directly into Fanon’s intriguing and destabilizing use of a ‘French’ word with a speciŽ cally Algerian etymology. The context is, again, the second chapter of Year Five. Fanon is discussing the Ž rst stage of the history of the radio in Algeria, when it is still an intrusion in the Algerian household, still something that brings France into the households of French settlers, especially for those who live in the Algerian interior. Referring to the attachment of the latter group to their radios, he writes: ‘Les ble´dards de la colonisation, les aventuriers de´fricheurs, le savent bien qui ne cessent de re´pe´ter que % sans le pinard et la radio, nous nous serions de´ja` arabise´s & ’.29 Chevalier translates this sentence as ‘The settlers in the remote outposts, the pioneering adventurers, are well aware of this when they say that ‘‘without the wine and the radio, we should already have become Arabized’’ ’.3 0 Though the word ‘Arabization’ will later refer to the process of replacing French language and educational curricula with Arabic language and Arab curricula in postcolonial Maghrebi states, Arabization is imagined here as a sort of miscegenation, the encroachment of Arab culture on French colonials. Against this illicit mingling, Fanon’s colonials imagine French radio as a sort of preservative, or rather a pre´servatif (condom), protecting them from Arabizing themselves.3 1 Yet in the context of Fanon’s later argument about the use of French for the revolution, one hears ‘Arabized’ as a linguistic process that will emerge from the revolution. Fanon’s intriguing phrase ‘ble´dards de la colonisation’ is more complex than Chevalier is able to render it in English and signals that those colonials and their language have already begun to be Arabized, to be detached from the French that they still believe is France’s alone. The word ble´dard signals the proximity of French and Arabic, the way in which an Arabic word – balad in Modern Standard Arabic (meaning ‘country, community, village, land’), blad in Algerian Arabic – can be made a French word with a suYx, can be made to sound French, to be French, much in the same way that Algeria was departmentalized by France.3 2 According to French etymological dictionaries and dictionaries of argot, the word bled appears in French in the late 19th century, several decades after the French conquest of Algiers in 1830. As deŽ ned in the Tre´sor de la Langue Franc¸aise in the mid-1970s, the primary meaning maintains its speciŽ city to North Africa: ‘(Afrique du Nord) Re´gion situe´e a` l’inte´rieur des terres, campagne/(North Africa) Region located in the interior, countryside’.3 3 But the second set of deŽ nitions, marked ‘by extension, slang and familiar’, dislocates the word from its geographical referent and its Arabic etymology, while retaining the negative connotation from French attitudes toward its source. A military usage of bled is listed, a ‘waste land separating two enemy trenches’; then more generally, ‘a landscape without culture or habitations’, and a ‘backward region or little isolated village, without conveniences or distractions’. A provided synonym is trou (hole), and a sample sentence suggests ‘burial’. The connotations demonstrate the way in which the Arabic word blad, when pronounced in French, is because of its source, impossible to separate from the sense of isolation, distance, wasteland, and oriented around the parallax 107

military. It was of course the French military’s presence in the blad (country) that made bled (wasteland) a French word. Conversely the word (balad ) in Arabic orients itself in a diVerent way, one that emphasizes community and cohesion rather than wasteland and isolation. Hans Wehr translates the word as ‘country; town, city; place, community, village’.3 4 Quite a range of possibilities, due to the derivation of the noun from the verb (ballada), meaning ‘to acclimatize, to habituate’ to a country or a region. Unlike the French word that is derived from it, the Arabic word balad has only positive connotations. Moroccans still recall the nationalist slogan, ‘Kanmoutu ‘ala blad aou ‘ala mra’ (‘we die for the blad or women’, where blad here signiŽ es land, territory). As an adjective, the word blad becomes baladi (or bldi in Maghrebi dialect), meaning: ‘Native, indigenous, home (as opposed to foreign, alien); (fellow) citizen, compatriot, countryman; a native; communal, municipal’.3 5 In Maghrebi colloquial usage, the adjective form has positive connotations and may be used to refer to products or foodstuVs from the countryside and to refer to compatriots. Wuld bladi (literally ‘son of my hometown or country’) can refer to someone from the same village, area, or even, depending on the context, the same country as the speaker. In Algeria and eastern Morocco, such a compatriot is opposed to a barrani (literally an ‘outsider’).3 6 In the context of Fanon’s argument for a new deterritorialized French, one which ‘Arabizes’ the French and moves it to a new location, it is his genius to use this word ‘ble´dard’ as he does: ‘Les ble´dards de la colonisation, les aventuriers de´fricheurs, le savent bien qui ne cessent de re´pe´ter que % sans le pinard et la radio, nous nous serions de´ja` arabise´s.& ’ In ‘ble´dard’, Fanon does more than merely choose a French word that has been ‘Arabized’, a word that provides an example of the French language marked by the imprint of colonialism. Fanon’s word choice goes further: it emphasizes the diVerence in directionality of using the word bled in French and employing blad in Arabic, the detachment of Fanon’s global French from French French. The ble´dards of colonization who think they are resisting Arabization by listening to French radio have missed the way in which ‘ble´dards’ – the word that now describes them – works in a diVerent direction from their radio transmission; they have missed a recognition of the shifting source of the ‘Voice of Algeria’. Here is the voice of Algerians, Fanon’s punning chapter title suggests.3 7 These colonials are now of the blad. They have been Arabized within Fanon’s sentence, wine and radio notwithstanding. Or rather, following Fanon’s re exive verb structure (‘nous nous serions de´ja` arabise´s’), they have Arabized themselves by participating in colonialism. Since in French a ble´dard carries the negative connotation of someone stuck in a hole somewhere, bored and isolated, the possibility that these colons have been Arabized already (de´ja`), and that they did it to themselves, further destabilizes the French settlers’ conŽ dence in their ability to maintain their Frenchness. They cannot be ble´dards in the Arabic sense of the word blad, which would orient them to a diVerent point of reference (Mecca rather than Paris, we might say, or at least the Algerian Sahara), while resisting being Arabized. The two meanings of bled/blad pull the settler ble´dard in diVerent directions simultaneously: he cannot be baladi (native, of the community); he can only be an already Arabized ble´dard. The word used in Maghrebi Arabic for to oppose the bldi is a word that Fanon too uses elsewhere – roumi (foreigner, Christian, European, ‘white’) – and one which Edwards 108

solidiŽ es our sense of his usage of ble´dard. Roumi in Arabic derives from the word for ‘Roman’, and signiŽ es foreign, adulterated, with a frequent connotation of weakness (not unlike the word gringo in Mexican Spanish). Again it may be used in reference to foodstuVs. In the Maghreb, beed roumi refer to white, ‘city’ eggs, as opposed to the brown, country eggs (beed bldi ). Similar distinctions are made with reference to chickens (djej roumi vs. djej bldi ). The bldi products are valued more highly as ‘natural’ and borrowing from and repeating a sense of pride in the blad. The whiteness of factory processed eggs and chickens is what marks them as roumi through a complex of associations (factory 5 adulterated; factory 5 foreign; foreign 5 non-Muslim 5 European 5 ‘white’ complexion). Thus when one calls white eggs at market beed roumi, the adjective signiŽ es at once that they are unnatural, adulterated, weaker, ‘foreign’, and white. The word roumi enters French at about the same time as bled and also arrives earlier in French military argot (where it signiŽ es a French soldier newly oV the boat in Africa) before it moves into French circulation more generally.3 8 Fanon uses the word roumi in Les damne´s de la terre, though it too is translated out of the English by Farrington (who renders it simply as ‘Christians’). The context of Fanon’s use of the word roumi, interestingly enough, is a reference to the insuYciency of seeing the world in Manichaean dualisms: ‘le maniche´isme primitif du colon: les Blancs et les Noirs, les Arabes et les Roumis/the primitive Manichaeism of the colonizer: Whites and Blacks, Arabs and Gringos’.3 9 Fanon’s use of the word roumi challenges colonial Manichaeanism and suggests a larger point: that with colonialism the Manichaean Ž ction breaks down to the peril of the colonizer. Fanon poses the Algerian Arabic-now-French word against a stable category of Arabs – it is Arabs vs. Roumis in the quote – suggesting that the European side of the equation has now lost its ‘primitive’ coherence. Another French word of Arabic origin in Year Five works similarly to Fanon’s use of ble´dard and gives us further conŽ dence that Fanon has a method, that this deterritorialization of French is indeed a tactic. At the end of the radio chapter, Fanon again employs an Arabic word that has entered French, and again, it redirects the movement of French colonials. The context is Fanon’s summing up of the value of the radio to the national struggle. He mentions that after 1957 French troops, ‘in the course of a raid’ (Chevalier’s translation), conŽ scated radios from Algerians. (The point is that the troops realized the value of radios to the Algerian nationalists’ struggle.) But Fanon’s original language reveals more than the English translation can suggest: ‘les troupes francaises en ope´ration prennent l’habitude, au cours des razzias, de conŽ squer tous les postes/French troops in operation formed the habit of conŽ scating all the radios in the course of a raid’.4 0 English does not have the word to suggest Fanon’s subtle meaning in razzia, for Fanon has again chosen a French word of Arabic etymology. Razzia comes from the Arabic word for raid – ( ghazwa) in Modern Standard Arabic, ( ghazia) in Algerian Arabic. According to Robert, which deŽ nes the word as ‘an Arab pillaging raid’, razzia enters French in 1841 from Algerian Arabic and was Ž rst employed in French when speaking of Algerian Arabs and their activities.41 Fanon’s choice of razzia, when he had other options (raid, pillage), highlights the processes of deterritorialization and destabilization of French that I have been discussing. In French usage, ‘razzia’ emphasizes the marauding aspect of a raid, less military than savage and recharacterizes the Arabic word ghazwa itself (Wehr makes no mention of pillage in his deŽ nition of ghazwa: parallax 109

‘military expedition, foray; raid, incursion, inroad, invasion, attack, aggression; conquest’).42 By employing the word, Fanon reverses the Arabic – now French – word back on the French. The French soldiers are now the savages, committing the type of raid which previously the French thought they needed an Arabic word to describe. Now that the French have raided Algeria, for 130 years, the words themselves are turning on them. From barbarity to fair-play Dans une guerre de Libe´ration, le peuple colonise´ doit gagner, mais il doit le faire proprement sans % barbarie& . [...] Le peuple sousde´veloppe´ est oblige´, s’il ne veut pas eˆtre moralement condamne´ par les % Nations Occidentales & , de pratiquer le fair-play [...].4 3 In a war of liberation, the colonized people must win, but they must do so cleanly, without ‘barbarity’. [...] If it does not wish to be morally condemned by the ‘Western nations’, an underdeveloped nation is obliged to practice fair play [...].4 4 Fanon’s Arabized French is not translatable into English because English does not have the proximity to Arabic that French does where the colonial is inscribed in the language. Having argued for Fanon’s destabilization of French through the incorporation of Arabic, I would like to address Fanon’s failure to account for the relationship of Tamazight to the new Algerian French. Throughout Year Five, Fanon keeps Berbers oV on the sidelines, wary of French colonial encouragement of Berber diVerence. But if the French were eager to draw lines between Berber and Arab populations of the Maghreb, Fanon too maintains the distinction. In the book’s Ž rst chapter, ‘Algeria Unveils Itself ’,4 5 Fanon states that he will not account for the diVerent veiling patterns of the Kabyle woman because her ‘originality [...] constitutes, among others, one of the themes of colonialist propaganda bringing out the opposition between Arabs and Berbers’.46 Fanon is correct that such an opposition was a colonial imperative, as Abdallah Laroui has demonstrated at length.47 Still, Fanon states that Kabyle ‘forms of action’ assumed original aspects during the war of liberation. Fanon uses the concept of originality in a diVerent sense from the French, who stressed primacy of Berbers as the indigenous people of North Africa, conquered by the Arabs. As Laroui shows, French colonial historians and anthropologists linked Berber originality to a putative European ancestry, which justiŽ ed the development of a Berber elite and the division of Arab and Berber Maghrebis from each other. It is thus tempting to read the word ‘barbarie’ in Fanon’s 1959 introduction to Year Five, placed in scare quotes, as a veiled reference to the Berbers. In the context of the passage, however, it is clear that Fanon’s primary intended signiŽ cation is the word’s usual connotation of barbarous acts – terrible and violent, unjust. The passage continues by countering the colonizer’s ‘unlimited exploration of new means of terror’ with the colonized’s sense of ‘fair play’. Yet if we understand ‘barbarie’ in its dominant sense, we still have not addressed the question of why Fanon places ‘barbarie’ in scare Edwards 110

quotes, an act that draws attention to the overdetermined coincidence that the same word that describes vicious violence also describes the people of North Africa (those of the Barbary Coast).48 The concept of ‘barbarity’ is, of course, intimately linked to questions of language. The Barbarians of North Africa inherited their name from an Ancient Greek moniker used to describe those peoples who could not speak the Greek imperial lingua franca, those foreigners whose utterances sounded nonsensical, as meaningless ‘ba-ba’. The Greek word passes into Latin; with Roman exploration and colonization of North Africa, the word comes to name the indigenous people of the Maghreb: Barbarians, a word that persists in today’s word Berber (Modern Standard Arabic adopts the word as well). If Fanon’s use of scare quotes highlights the relationship between ‘barbarity’ and ‘Barbary’, it also points to his awareness of the relationship of ‘Barbary’ and ‘Berber’. For Fanon to say that the colonized people will win their struggle cleanly, without barbarity, suggests, if only etymologically, that the Algerians will win their independence without the help of the Berbers. Fanon does not say this explicitly, but the play of etymologies I have been identifying in Year Five allows us to pose the question of whether he could admit such a possibility. At the least, it leads us back to wonder about Fanon’s sense of Berber languages within Year Five. Following Fanon’s promise that the war will take place without ‘barbarity’, we might say that the space of disappearance of Arabic present in Fanon’s usage of an Arabized French simultaneously allows for the eVacement of the threat of Berber language. In other words, the dual movement of Fanon’s Arabized French – that it destabilizes French claims on French language and thus is a revolutionary tactic and that it stages the postcolonial disappearance of Arabic from the Algerian nation – is a process so interpretively laden as to distract us from his eVacement of Berber language concerns from his account of the Algerian revolution. In the chapter that describes and identiŽ es the Voice of Algeria, Berbers appear in a captivating footnote, within which they are almost without language, primitive country folk huddled around a radio: Groupe´s par dizaines et meˆme par centaines autour d’un poste, les paysans e´coutent religieusement % la Voix des Arabes& . Rares sont ceux qui comprennent l’Arabe litte´raire utilise´ dans ces e´missions. Mais le visage est grave et le masque se durcit, lorsque l’expression % Istiqlal& (Inde´ pendance) e´ clate dans le % gourbi& . Une voix arabe, qui, quatre fois par heure, marte`le % Istiqlal& est suYsante a` ce niveau d’eVervescence de la conscience pour entretenir la foi dans la victoire.49 Grouped by tens and even by hundreds around a receiver, the peasants listen religiously to ‘the Voice of the Arabs’. Rare are those who understand the literary Arabic used in these broadcasts. But the face becomes serious and the mask hardens when the expression ‘Istiqlal’ (Independence) explodes in the ‘gourbi’ [shack]. An Arab voice that hammers out ‘Istiqlal’ four times an hour is suYcient at that level of parallax 111

heightened consciousness to keep alive the faith in victory. [My translation] If the passage is meant to show the unity of the Kabyle peasants behind the national cause, it does so in a way that challenges credulity and poses the Kabyles as stultiŽ ed. Recalling Abbas’ deŽ nition of the ‘merely local’ and Judy’s of unfungible local values, we might say that to be without language is to be already disappeared. In this scenario, unlike others in the chapter, the radio signal is not jammed and the auditors do not wait for bursts of language. Rather they attend a continuous  ow of language, waiting for the repetition of a single comprehensible word. The serious expressions and hardening visages when the Arabic word for ‘independence’ occurs, once every quarter hour, paints a portrait of Berbers doubly distanced from the new language of the nation, drawn in such a way as to imagine the disappearance of the Berbers in the present itself. But their disappearance also threatens the future language of the Algerian nation – the ‘Voice of Algeria’ becomes ‘the Voice of the Arabs’. It is signiŽ cant that Fanon’s footnote includes the exceedingly rare occasion within Year Five where an Arabic word – Istiqlal – is translated into French; now the reader is provided full comprehension of the Arabic, which has the eVect of stabilizing both French and Arabic and the space between them for a moment. In the face of the Berbers, Fanon’s radical Arabized French cedes to a separatist literary Arabic. This movement away from his more radical stagings of Arabized French suggests the future disappearance of Arabic and reveals the ways in which the Tamazight crisis will underline the tragedy of a monolingual Algerian state. Fanon’s promise to win the war without ‘barbarity’ cedes to a promise to abide by ‘fair play’. Against the incomprehensibility of barbarism, he poses a comprehensible justness, now in English, now preŽ guring a global English – ‘fair-play’. The expression ‘fair-play’ Ž rst appeared in French in the nineteenth century. The Tre´sor marks it as an expression anglaise and includes the remark, dated 1972, that the term is considered ‘poorly assimilated by our language’. It is a word from sports, referring to a respect for the rules of the game, knowing how to accept defeat.5 0 Fanon is not worried about defeat of the national cause, here, nor about being a poor loser, but rather uses the word to emphasize that nationalists struggling against colonialism play the game in a comprehensible way. The uses of violence will be elaborated in The Wretched of the Earth, but from the position of Year Five we can gather that such violence will be comprehensible, not ‘barbaric’. That barbarity will be left to the French, who, as ble´dards and as French troops conducting razzias, inherit the words used to describe the Barbarians, words that now describe them. That Fanon chooses to bring English into his construction here is crucial in playing out the global movement of language that I have argued he stages in Year Five. In his choice to bring an English expression into Year Five’s careful elaboration of the linguistic and political movements between Arabic and French, between France and Algeria, and the destabilization of French French by the successful expose´ of the relationship between colonialism and etymology, Fanon suggests a Ž nal and eventual space of disappearance. The use of ‘fair play’ in the context of this particular use of ‘barbarie’ and again in the context of his explicit argument locating the voice of the nation, is an unwitting enactment of the eventual movement of a global French into Edwards 112

a global English. Fanon’s distrust of American power and his understanding of cold war imperatives to dominate the underdeveloped world notwithstanding, the use of ‘fair play’ in Anglicized French seems to hint at the eventual limitations of French as a global language, and presage a movement beyond the localities of the national form. Fanon’s nuanced language in Year Five forces us to reconsider his argument that French became the language of the new Algerian nation and to recognize levels of complexity in his delineation of a new ‘voice of Algeria’. If Fanon’s writing is best understood as a ‘dramatic dialectical narrative’ (Sekyi-Otu), then we may read in his subtle movement between French and Arabic two interpretative strategies: 1) Fanon’s use of untranslated Algerian Arabic words and French words of Algerian etymology destabilizes the relationship between France and French language and may be understood as a political tactic for destabilizing the imperial epistemology. Fanon enacts a deterritorialization of the French language for Algerian use, and repositions French colonizers in a language territory now alien, committing acts which their own language had previously found itself incapable of describing. 2) If this strategy works toward the break up of an imperial language situation, Fanon’s Arabized Arabic also stages a process that would become politically apparent in decades following his death, namely what I call the disappearance of Arabic within the postcolonial Algerian nation. With the onset of globalization and its imperative that national languages translate themselves for a global market, the maintenance of Arabization programmes and the injunctions against the use of French reconŽ gure Arabic as a language anchored to a time and place that has ceased to exist. Given the intertwined relationship of language politics, economic disenfranchisement, and political struggle in Algeria in the last decade, Fanon’s staging of these disappearances may be seen as a harbinger of the Algerian crisis as it is re ected in struggles over national language(s). In particular, given the political and economic disenfranchisement of the Amazigh, we must recognize how Fanon’s representation of Berbers emphasizes their own disappearance. If this is unfortunate, it is not, however, inconsistent with Fanon’s political and linguistic strategy. Fanon’s destabilized French, his deterritorialized French, aspires to be a global language. As such, it is a global language that dispenses with the particularity of national languages (now understood as local values), which must translate themselves in order to survive under globalization. While Fanon imagines a global language that is French, his revealing incorporation of an English phrase hints at the threatening promise that the global language of his future will be English. Acknowledgements An earlier version of this essay was presented at IAPL in Atlanta in May 2001. Thanks to Ewa Ziarek and to the audience for comments. Thanks to Kate Baldwin, Kevin Bell, Sadik Rddad, Gayatri Spivak, Alex Weheliye, Ewa Ziarek and participants in a faculty colloquium at Northwestern University for helpful comments on a late draft of this essay. I thank Hakim Abderrezak, Yakhlef Abderrezak, Zahra Boutchich, and James Ketterer for generous help with speciŽ c queries. parallax 113

Notes 1

Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari, Kaf ka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p.19. 2 See Ronald A. T. Judy, ‘On the Politics of Global Language, or Unfungible Local Value’, boundary 2, 24: 2 (1997) , pp.101–43. 3 Quoted in Irene Gendzier, Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study (New York: Pantheon, 1973) , p.278 fn34. Memmi’s remarks originally appeared in the The New York Times Book Review, 14 March 1971. 4 Frantz Fanon, Sociologie d’une revolution (Paris: Franc¸ois Maspero, 1975) , p.15; Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove, 1965), p.32. 5 Fanon is quoting the Guianan poet LeonGontrain Damas. Fanon, Peau noire masques blancs (1952; Paris: Seuil, 1995), p.16. 6 Frantz Fanon, L’an V de la re´volution alge´rienne (Paris: Franc¸ois Maspero, 1960), p.77; Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, p.91. 7 The following passage is not included in Chevalier’s translation: ‘Entre les directives e´manant de la 10e Re´gion Militaire d’Alger, et celles du P.C. zonal d’Aõ¨n Bessem, s’installe un circuit de complicite´, une sorte de prolongement du chiVre. Les deux ordres de re´alite´s s’objectivent par le truchement d’un unique syste`me linguistique’, in Frantz Fanon L’an V, p.77, Sociologie d’une revolution, p.76. 8 John Mowitt, ‘Breaking up Fanon’s Voice’, in Anthony C. Allesandrin: (ed), Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives , (ed) Anthony C. Alessandrini (New York: Routledge, 1999) , p.95. See also Mowitt, ‘Nonwestern Electric’, parallax 4(2) (1998), p.39. 9 Judy, ‘On the Politics of Global Language’, p.119. 10 Judy, ‘On the Politics of Global Language’, p.120. 11 Ackbar Abbas, Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 1997), p.82. 12 Judy, ‘On the Politics of Global Language’, p.132. 13 Ato Sekyi-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), p.4. 14 Jacques Derrida, Le monolinguisme de l’autre: ou la prothe`se d’origine (Paris: Editions Galile´e, 1996), p.13; Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, the Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah, (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998) , p.1. 15 Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, p.68; Derrida, Le monolinguisme de l’autre, p.127. 16 Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, p.41; Derrida, Le monolinguisme de l’autre, p.71. 17 Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, p.40; Derrida, Le monolinguisme de l’autre, p.71. Edwards 114

18

Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, pp.60–61; Jacques Derrida, Le monolinguisme de l’autre, p.117. 19 Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, pp.61–62; Jacques Derrida, Le monolinguisme de l’autre, pp.118–119. 20 Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, p.77 n3; Derrida, Le monolinguisme de l’autre, p.43n. 21 For Mowitt, this is because the book ‘displaces the location of the struggle for national liberation, placing it in the colony and in the metropolis at the same time’. Mowitt, ‘Algerian Nation: Fanon’s Fetish’, Cultural Critique 22 (Fall 1992), p.175. 22 Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari, Kaf ka, pp.16–17. 23 Deleuze and Guattari, Kaf ka, p.18. 24 Deleuze and Guattari, Kaf ka, p.17. 25 Deleuze and Guattari, Kaf ka, p.24. 26 Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, p.90fn; Sociologie d’une revolution, p.74fn. I employ SekyiOtu’s revised translation (Sekyi-Otu, 201). 27 In the French edition, fez, djellabas, haõ¨k, Ždaõ¨, douars, mechtas are italicized but untranslated into French; see Fanon, L’an V, pp.14–15, 36, 68; Sociologie d’une revolution, pp.17–18, 38, 67; Chevalier leaves the italics, but provides translations of djellaba and haik in the footnotes; see Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, pp.36, 55, 83. Later in the same chapter, ‘fellah’, ‘djebel’, ‘douar’, ‘souk’, however, appear without italics or translation in Fanon’s French; Chevalier provides italics and translation. See Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, pp.40, 48, 56, 83; L’an V, pp.19, 28, 37, 67; Sociologie d’une revolution, pp.22, 31, 39, 66. 28 Fanon, L’an V, pp.67–68; Sociologie d’une revolution, pp.66–7; A Dying Colonialism, pp.82–83. 29 Fanon, Sociologie d’une revolution, p.54. 30 Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, pp.71–72. 31 Fanon uses an active re exive verb, which Chevalier renders in the passive. The statement might better read: ‘without the wine and the radio, we would have already Arabized ourselves’. 32 Fanon uses the word bled in the preceding paragraph; see Fanon, Sociologie d’une revolution, p.53. Chevalier renders it ‘hinterland’, see Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, p.71, making no reference to the historical movement of the word across the Mediterranean. 33 Tre´sor de la Langue Franc¸aise, vol. 4 (Paris: CNRS, 1975), p.579. Translations from French dictionaries are my own. 34 Wehr, A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, ed. J. Milton Cowan (Beirut: Librarie du Liban, 1980), p.72. 35 Wehr, A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, p.72. 36 Maghrebi usage varies. What appears here is a composite of usages of the word based on personal

experience and conversations with Moroccan and Algerian colleagues. 37 Chevalier renders the title, ‘ ‘‘This is the Voice of Algeria.’’’ to capture this suggestion of a radio broadcast. Given the importance of the shifting geographical source of that voice, however, I alter the Ž rst word, closer to Fanon’s original. 38 Tre´sor, vol. 14, p.1315. 39 Fanon, Les damne´s de la terre (1961; Paris: Gallimard, 1991) , p.182–183. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1968), p.144. Translation modiŽ ed. 40 Fanon, Sociologie d’une revolution, p.82; A Dying Colonialism , p.96. 41 Paul Robert, Dictionnaire alphabe´tique et analogique, 6 vols (Paris: Le Robert, 1966), V: p.673. 42 Wehr, A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, p.673. 43 Fanon, Sociologie d’une revolution, p.6. 44 Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, p.24.

45

My translation of Fanon’s ‘L’Alge´rie se de´voile’, again emphasizing the active verb in Fanon’s title. 46 Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, p.36fn1; Sociologie d’une revolution, p.17. 47 Abdallah Laroui, The History of the Maghrib, trans. R. Manheim (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). 48 Elsewhere, Fanon’s use of the word ‘barbarism’ gives further evidence to the suggestion that he played on the pun of barbarity and Barbary. In a 1 Dec. 1957 article published in El Moudjahid, Fanon discusses terrorism and the French left: ‘The concept of barbarism appeared and it was decided that France in Algeria was Ž ghting barbarism’. See Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, p.79. Elsewhere he refers to the ‘spectacular barbarousness’ of French colonialism, see Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, p.116. 49 Fanon, Sociologie d’une revolution, p.72. 50 Tre´sor, vol. 8, p.611.

Brian T. Edwards is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University, where he teaches American studies, Maghrebi studies, and cultural and diaspora studies. He is interested in the translation of culture, comparative ‘Orientalisms’, and global English, and has written articles on Edith Wharton’s fascination with the Moroccan harem, Paul Bowles, Mohammed Mrabet, and Hollywood Orientalism during the early cold war. He is completing a book manuscript entitled Morocco Bound: Locations of Culture and Nation in American Representations of the Maghreb, which addresses representations of the Maghreb in 20th century American literature, Ž lm and cultural anthropology, and responses to US Orientalism in Maghrebi cultural production.

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