Silences du Phallus

In “The Colonizer and the Colonized,” Robert Lang essays to offer a novel- more wholly representative of the National Question- analysis of the synecdochic national(ist) woman who appears throughout much of Third Worldist cinema but particularly and curiously in Moufida Tlatli’s Silences du Palais, primarily by employing Sharabi, Slawy-Sutton, and Zayzafoon’s respective analyses of the correlative replacement of the Arab “patriarchal extended family” by the “neopatriarchal nuclear family” (127) in the “shift from family patriarchy to state patriarchy” (132) during the mid-to-late 20th century and “focus” on Khalti Hadda, Khedija, and Alia as sociotemporally distinct yet relational “personifications of historical moments” (139) within this period; yet he ultimately miscarries, completely starving the theoretical and revolutionary potentialities of recognizing the daughter, or child, as the springboard for national(ist) allegory (1). Tlatli structured Alia’s disenchantment, experienced in the wake of the nuclear family’s supposed “democratic failings,” (128) to parallel Tunisian disenchantment in the wake of postcolonialism, but I contend that Tlatli centering Alia’s pregnancy in the postcolonial present works alongside her centering in the colonial past- along with the motif of (failed) reproduction- to allegorize the positionality and psychosocial development of the debased child as the war for identity fought by Tunisia, making this an allegorical coming-of-age story au cœur. 

Approaching the film as a repressed coming-of-age narrative allegorizing the national quest for identity necessitates a superimposition of psychosocial development of the girl (2) onto the historical trajectory of the nation, much like the cinematic superimposition of the primary anterior narrative onto the present-day sequence. What is so crucial not to mistake here, is that the girl remains centered as the primary locus of conflict, but not necessarily Alia: despite a young Alia straddling the grounds between girlhood and womanhood following her first period, her decidedly silent psychosocial and neo-Freudian struggle for identity remains centered, such as her indecisiveness on “‘the question of women’” (125) and her correlative fixation on her paternity, bordering on erotic fascination (both relating to both Lotfi and Sidi Ali); in the present--postcolonial narrative, however, it is her unborn child and the struggle for its existence that remains the center conflict, both loci as allegories for the potential of a new yet heretofore repressed and imperceivable (psychosocial structure of) Tunisian society. This allows us to realize that Alia’s “postcolonial melancholy” was less about her struggle becoming a modern woman (129; one of Lang’s terms rife with contradictions that will be discussed momentarily) and more about her burgeoning consciousness of the criticality of her and her mother’s childhood “education” for their psychosocial development, evincing the cyclical (transumed) “language of patriarchy” of which they are only fully literate (138-9). As Tlatli explains, Alia realizes that “‘Lotfi had done nothing to change her life and it’s at that moment that she takes control of her own fate.’” (126) It is this simultaneous desire for and fear of change, as her anxiety is in large part due to the changes she will be undergoing as she reaches adulthood (such as her period), that relates Alia (and Khedija) to the girl more than the woman. Whether this means Lotfi has left her psycosocially stunted as a dependent child or she has simply been unable to grow into her own woman, Lang misreads Lotfi’s parasitic complacency as (quint)essentially misogynistic and not the cinematic and psychosocial cycle of misopedy that it is (3). 

The film’s accelerating elision of Alia’s childhood after she meets Lotfi reflects his selective elision of boundaries between girl, woman, and student; “father,” “husband,” “teacher;” and domination and sexuality, accentuated by Khedija responding with identical disgust to both Sidi Ali expecting Alia to now sing in the palace and Si Bechir also expecting her to now deliver his tea, all three men lauding her voice (01:24:45; 01:31:35). This ironically mirrors Lang’s elision of (her) childhood when investigating the synecdoche of the nuclear family for modernity both in the film and otherwise. Lang and Sharabi both use nuclear and modern interchangeably when specifying family structures, but their- as well as Berman’s and Marx’s, whose theories they quote- conception of modernity is rooted in an abjection to what Cedric Robinson terms the Black Radical Tradition: “The obscuring of the Black radical tradition is seated in the West's suppression of Europe's previous knowledge of the African (and its own) past. The denial of history to African peoples took time- several hundreds of years- beginning with the emergence of Western Europeans from the shadow of Muslim domination and paternalism.” (3) Berman’s first and third “aspects” of modernity reflect the theoretical limitations of Western Marxism when incorporating Blackness, mirroring the revolutionary limitations of Lofti in liberating Alia: 

The first aspect is that modernity is a uniquely European phenomenon—a fact which has had devastating existential consequences for the non-Western world…

The third aspect derives from Marx's analysis of the bourgeois revolution in the Communist Manifesto: in removing the veils of “religious and political illusion,” the bourgeois revolution unmasked the reality of social relations and brought to light new options and new hopes. Berman: “Unlike the common people of all ages, who have been endlessly betrayed and broken by their devotion to the ‘natural superiors,’ modern people [emphasis added], ‘washed in the icy water of egotistical calculation,’ are free from deference to masters who destroy them, animated rather than numbed by the cold.” The possibility of genuine rebellion is a product of the new age. Because modern individuals “know how to think of, by, and for themselves, they will demand a clear account of what their bosses and rulers are doing for them—and doing to them—and be ready to resist and rebel where they are getting nothing in return.” (Sharabi 18)

Inasmuch as Lang and Sharabi understand (Euro)modernity to be a tool for Western colonial expansion--hegemony (4), it is still unsurprising (but disingenuous nonetheless) that they overlook the contradictions of Berman’s modernity lying on southeast Iraqi soil. Robinson reveals that for a millennium, beginning in the tenth century, “Arab slave traders plundered African societies for perhaps as many as 17 million people,” (88) but merely a few decades before this became the primary means of Arab wealth accumulation, not just a rebellion took place, but a revolution: 

“[I]n a limited number of instances African slave labour was used in large-scale agricultural works, as it was also used, on a lesser scale, in mining and industry. The best known and best documented instance of such ‘plantation slavery’ is the use made of large numbers of East African slaves- Zanj- in draining the salt marshes at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers around Basra. … The Zanj enter history only in 868 when they began their fifteen-year revolt which shook the foundations of the ‘Abbasid caliphate.’” [J. O.] Hunwick continues: “Once the movement gained success it was joined by some of the Black troops of the caliphal guard sent to fight it, and by some Bedouin and marsh Arabs. … The Zanj built their own capital, al-Mukhtara and another fortified town, al-Mani'a. In 870 they captured the flourishing seaport of Ubulla and in 871 they sacked Basra with enormous slaughter. … It was not until 880 that the caliph's brother, freed of other pressing military preoccupations, was able to take serious steps against the Zanj. Even then, it took three years of very hard campaigning to crush the movement and seize its towns. … The major experiment with ‘plantation slavery’ in the Islamic world had ended in disaster.” (347)

So not only does Berman negate the historically precedent resistance of African slaves to their supposed ontologically damned position (5), but alongside his second and fourth aspects (what Sylvia Wynter more aptly describes as “the secularizing intellectual revolution of Renaissance humanism, followed by the decentralizing religious heresy of the Protestant Reformation…” (262) and Berman almost farcically summates as “a new bourgeois that now comes into being… ‘free to shop around and seek the best deals, in ideas, associations, laws and social policies, as well as in things,’” (19) respectively) he recognizes “‘the rise of Europe’ and its construction of the ‘world civilization’ on the one hand,” as the foundations of modernity, while eliding “on the other, African enslavement, Latin American conquest, and Asian subjugation.” (Wynter 263) Realizing this elision allowed me to understand the peculiar instability of Lang’s deployment of the term: he and Sharabi misunderstand (Lofti’s) modernity as ever having the possibility or purpose of providing the means for (Alia’s) liberation- not as a woman, but a child.

Much like (anti)Blackness pulls the rug under this duplicitous exposition of modernity (exposed by “what Quijano identifies as the ‘coloniality of power,’ Mignolo as the ‘colonial difference,’ and Winant as a huge project demarcating human differences thinkable as a ‘racial longue durée,’” (ibid.)), the foundation of Alia and Lotfi’s relationship pulls the rug under the fallacy of their “nuclear family.” This is also revealed in Lang and Sharabi’s erasure of the child when analyzing this family structure’s “democratic relations,” beget not by the limitations of Western theory but the insecurity of Western (especially Romance) language, both serving as purposeful obfuscations of power. If modernity is a “purely European phenomenon,” then the “democratic/socialist” government structure that Sharabi claims “non-Western states” are assuming when bowing to modernity must be Western in form as well, but democratic (as a descriptor of egalitarianism and equality) is a semantic paradox. Its etymological root (dêmos ‘common people’, and krátos ‘power’) contradicts the exclusion of marginalized groups- including children, slaves, and women- from democratic political power since its earliest practice in Athens; so even if the term democratic had not descended from democracy, then Sharabi’s explicit association of (Euro)modernity with a democratic/socialist government would still have associated both terms and rendered them both useless in relation to independence. 

Alia herself realizes that she can never achieve liberation through democracy (the nuclear family), again not from the positionality of a woman, but a child. Returning to the foundation of relations, Alia was only a girl when she met Lotfi, which is underscored by Tlatli’s editing and sound. While Lang cites a symbol for the “ritual of rebirth” when Alia takes a bath before returning to the palace (147), I contend that the clearer symbol lies in the repeated sequences of Alia’s “postcolonial melancholy” being repressed by music, most notably after her literal birth and after she witnesses her mother’s rape (139). At 16:10, an old Khalti Hadda reaches out to examine Alia’s necklace of Tunisia, triggering the flashback to the kitchen and a cultural tradition for a newborn. Alia bounces screaming and crying on Khedija’s lap while all the other women sing joyously and Khalti Hadda bestows upon her the necklace; meanwhile, a juxtaposed present-day Alia descends into the barren kitchen, receiving the superimposed ululations of the women as a welcome and eventually smiling as if Khedija were still there with her (6). The next time that we see Alia thrown into a comparable inarticulable despair--confusion, her response is an adversely catatonic silence; for when she awakens to (at first see, but eventually only) hear her mother’s rape at 01:03:45, she can no longer assume that Sidi Ali is her father nor that she was consensually conceived. She also hears this while lying on the bed on which she was birthed, also alluding to this scene’s symbol for rebirth. Most crucial is that the pain of her birth- which as a newborn she was literally unable to articulate, but as a child she somewhat chooses not to- is related to the cultural music of the servant women, much like the suffering under colonial rule being expressed through the nationalist songs they listen to and Alia eventually sings: she would learn to sing (through) her pain.

The music from the newborn scene extends into adult Alia entering the kitchen, while the second scene’s music extends into young Lotfi (re)entering the narrative and Khalti Hadda’s room. This repetition not only reflects that Lotfi is, helplessly like bedridden/baby Alia, entering the palace as a nationalist outsider like adult Alia (remaining silent while Houssine, omitting that the police are also after Lotfi, pleads with his mother to let him stay after being refused by Si Bechir (7)), but also underscores Alia’s continued development and positionality as a child while burgeoning a complicated interest in Lotfi (and singing, which as noted above is associated with her patriarchal adultification: Khedija is in the kitchen telling Khalti Hadda that Alia must sing in the palace before calling Alia from the classroom with Lotfi, where he is telling her “Things will change. A new future awaits us. You will be a great singer. Your voice will enchant everyone.” (01:24:45-01:28:14)), and that this cycle- of embattled girlhood and imposed womanhood- is rebirthed ad nauseam for generations of (Muslim) Tunisian girls under patriarchy; so any analysis of her positionality vis-à-vis him within the nuclear family must start here.

Lang somewhat attempts to do this via his oedipal analysis, but stops short in favor of simply superimposing it onto “Tunisia’s postcolonial condition” rather than investigating the theoretical potentialities of expanding on Tlatli’s centering of the Tunisian girl as opposed to Zayzafoon’s Muslim woman. This is not only because the national(ist Muslim) woman has become the devouring mother of the national-cum-familial synecdoche--allegory for theoretical and cinematic discourses on (Arab) Third World (post)colonial struggle (concealing (the erasure of) children’s subjugation and resistance to authority of the most abject degree), but also because centering (voicing) the most abject positionality within the nuclear family (8) whilst this structure is being synecdochized for modernity- but modernity is being characterized in similarly duplicitous terms that silence the abjection of Black Africans vis-à-vis its sociohistorical development and systematic reproduction- would deconstruct not only his implication that modernity could provide the tools for true liberation for any subalternity (let alone Muslim women) but also that Lotfi (the colonized man) provides any of the tools for Alia’s true liberation (the colonized woman) as a man, both relationally destroying the colonial-cum-parental paradigms of  “‘doing them good in spite of themselves.’” (Fanon 54) 

The relation of these reflective paradigms within the narrative is the teacher- a role which Lotfi explicitly assumes- but there was no instance of Alia using classical Arabic for any purpose, let alone a liberatory one. Whereas the servant women represent her actual teachers for economic mobility- she didn’t marry Lotfi so he was clearly not her ticket out of the palace, which was both the Bey’s collapse and her singing career, culivated by singing with the servant women- Lotfi represents the distraction that both modernity and (neo)patriarchy play as false saviors from themselves or their supposed predecessors. If anything, the Bey’s patriarchy ultimately provided her with more than Lotfi by requiring her to professionally use her vocal talents before the palace’s collapse. Furthermore, as a child, she was the only servant who felt that she had the means and ability to leave the palace and financially survive; Lofti’s nationalist fervor is not what gave her the impetus to rebel. What he gave her was the impetus to rebel on his terms, on nationalist-patriarchal terms, an episteme as fickle and unstable as Lang’s analysis.

Most crucially, he uselessly teaches her standard Arabic and to ignore her instinct to fear him, both of which diametrically oppose the lessons taught to her by the servant women and especially Khedija. This respectively symbolic and literal reeducation makes it so that Alia “do[es] not belong to [her]self,” but to the patriarchal episteme; she must not only represent the Muslim woman that Lotfi imagines from the first time he sees her, but she must also present in this way to avoid “genuine rebellion,” to avoid thinking and behaving by any devious means. This does not begin when/because Alia is a woman, but a child, and not just because she is literally still a child when Lotfi beins teaching her, but also because he adjusts her psychosocial development at a very formative period in her life, convincing her to relinquish the caution with men that she learned from her mother while he reproduces the same misopedic--misogynistic system that her mother developed this caution in response to. 

Children are convinced that because they are the most abjectly vulnerable population at birth, “adults” may decide at what point they no longer need the omnipotent authoritative protection of parents; under this despotic-patriarchal system of (Bourguiban) Tunisia, the inability to claim paternal authority--protection leaves one open to paternalistic authority for their entire life, from men and women alike. This is the uniquely childlike position in (neo)patriarchal Tunisia- shared by all slaves and all children; some foreigners and some women- but it is also the uniquely colonial position. We speak of motherlands, but it is the Western debasement and erasureof Other kings and gods- of feminine and collective sovereignty and self-determination- that proves we only listen to the father. We only hear the father, because only he can speak to everyone at any time in any lexicon. It is the child- who has not yet formally accepted or acquiesced to (because still being educated) their self-reproducing position in this system- who can most directly proffer new modes of being and resistance, alongside the debased foreigners, slaves, and members of the subaltern. To accept the position of the female or male citizen under the patriarchal/colonial order is to deny the existence of this psychosocial(ly) stunting education that debases children/slaves of their individuality (humanity) and resistance to the violent order of things in order to prime them for the perpetuation of these cycles, and it is from this positionality that Tlatli teaches us that the subaltern teaches itself and other marginal figures the path to liberation, just as Alia’s return to the debased palace wrought the memories and lessons taught by Khedija that would then lead her to escape Lotfi’s birdcage.

Notes

1. While Slawy-Sutton considers them personifications, inasmuch as they are both rhetorical devices, I believe synecdoches better expresses the disallowed agency and personhood that begets the women’s national and colonial patriarchal positionalities (as well as their relation to the “question of national identity” (Lang 142), even moreso than Alia’s precarious paternity); synecodche is also more closely related- than personification- to allegory. 

2. the girl is not a metonym for Alia but a sociotemporal specification of the child and the woman (who has no father)..  

3. Toby Rollo defines misopedy as a “paradigm of childhood viewed as a site of naturalized discipline, violence, and criminality… which, like its cognate term misogyny, denotes both antipathy toward the constructed group as well as fetishization and objectification of that group.” While I have not found any etymological record of the miso- prefix denoting a dualistic fetishization, I do agree with the definition if not the linguistic justification. (Rollo, Toby. “The Color of Childhood: The Role of the Child/Human Binary in the Production of Anti-Black Racism.” Journal of Black Studies 49 (2018): 307 - 329.)

4. “It can be fairly said that neopatriarchal society was the outcome of modern [emphasis added] Europe’s colonization of the patriarchal Arab world, of the marriage of imperialism and patriarchy.” (Sharabi 21)

5. The evocation of Marx while insisting that the marker of a (Euro)modern people is “genuine rebellion,” of course alludes to the French Revolution despite the Haitian Revolution being its influence and predecessor. Regarding ontological damnation, Wynter expands much more profoundly on the subject while Robinson offers us a direct analysis within the Arab Muslim world by way of William McKee Evans: “‘In view of the broad-minded ethnic and social attitudes of the Prophet as well as the noblest of his followers, it is ironic that the lands of Islam became the cradle of modern racial stratification and of many of the ideas that are still used to justify special privileges defined by skin color and other racial characteristics. Muslims aspired to a universal brotherhood of believers. But prominent among their actual achievements was the forging of new links between blackness and debasement. It was under the Muslims that slavery became largely a racial institution.’ (“From the Land of Canaan to the Land of Guinea: The Strange Odyssey of the ‘Sons of Ham,’” American Historical Review 85, no. 1 [February 1980]: 28.)” 

6. Following the ululations there is a short play of the lute that sounds much more restrained and melancholic, such as the other times Alia played the lute by itself  (27:20, 1:44:12), especially compared to when Sarra and Sidi Ali played their lutes, which included faster tempo and less restraint (20:34, 1:14:30). During this second scene when she’s playing the lute that her mom bought for her, Khedija walks in and begins applauding when she finishes playing. Her smile is reminiscent of this; the first and last scenes in which we hear the lute.

7. Remembering that Lotfi was actually turned away by Si Bechir actually paints a very sad but accurate commentary on the belief in “destiny.” How was Alia more destined to get married because she met Lotfi at this time in her life, than Mroubia whose cousin arrived but was similarly turned down, when Lotfi just so happened to know a man on the inside the palace? Perhaps the nationalist fervor is what inspired Houssine to challenge the bey’s (son’s) authority and convince Khalti Hadda to do the same, but Mroubia’s reality proves that individual choice is often elided in order to assume the results of power dynamics  as destiny, especially considering Lotfi may be a revolutionary fighter with the police after him but Houssine had to speak for him. Mroubia would never have been able to challenge authority for her cousin like Houssine did for Lotfi.

8. I’d like to note with interest that Lang does seem to understand the Orientalism and overall racism of Western feminists in “appropriating third-world discourse for first-world universalizing ends,” (154) but does not recognize that if this facet of modern Western feminism is arguably foundational to its ideological base, then it could represent a facet of Western modernism at large. Its argument of women as the most debased character in the nuclear family- a similar proposition forwarded by both Lang and Zayzafoon- would need to be called into question, as an appropriation of subaltern discourse on authority and paternalism, but the discourse of children by children is usually unrecorded and appropriated by adult observants, or attributed to exception.

Works Cited

Duara, Prasenjit, and Frantz Fanon. “Algeria Unveiled.” Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then, Routledge, London, 2008, pp. 42–55.

Lang, Robert. “The Colonizer and the Colonized: The Silences of the Palace (Moufida Tlatli, 1994).” New Tunisian Cinema: Allegories of Resistance, Columbia University Press, 2014, pp. 123–56. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312/lang16506.9.

Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. University of North Carolina Press, 2000. 

Sharabi, Hisham. Neopatriarchy: A Theory of Distorted Change in Arab Society. Oxford University Press, 1988. 

Wynter, Sylvia. "Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation--An Argument." CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 3 no. 3, 2003, p. 257-337. Project MUSE, https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.