Conference Abstracts
44. Sakhkhane, Taoufiq; Tiznit College:
"Cities of Sand, Cities of Salt: The Destabilization of
Geography and the Deregulation of History Between Salman Rushdie
and Abderrahman Munif".
As a construct, a hyphenated existence between Kierkegaard's
logic of factuality and desirability, postcolonial geography has
never ceased to dog consecutive generations of postcolonial theorists
and critics. The victories of history, if one may call them such,
are often disfigured, if not defeated, by the contortions and disruptions
of geography. "Great expectations" have all come to a
naught for "the beautiful ones are not yet born". Besides,
the endeavors to blur the distinctions between the colonial city
and the native quarters in order to carve out a new geographical
entity have at long last resulted in a shift in the neocolonial
paradigm.
If in the colonial era, the discrimination between
the colonizers and the colonized often fleshed out in the way space
was managed and that the native city was often viewed as the heart
of resistance and identity while the European city was looked upon
with envying eyes as the locale that threatens such identity, it
was hoped that with independence there would be one and the same
city. However, as Naomie Klein has lucidly argued, a new architectural
configuration has emerged so that yesterday's lords and potentates
have mapped out for themselves new locations and sites where a deeply
entrenched division between the destitute and the very few wealthy
rules supreme.
All concepts are part of their time, and postcolonial
geography is no exception. Nestling quite finely in synonymity with
a number of socio cultural conditions as exile, migrancy, deracination,
displacement, historical weightlessness, and what some critics have
tended to term "extraterritoriality", the term has fluctuated
between the poles of loss and reclamation. Indeed, like Saleem Sinai,
the unselfconscious hero of Salman Rushdie Midnight Children , such
a geography has been saturated with unrequired and not much solicited
honors, only to be meted out with a lot of disgrace and shame. And
like Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha , a great portion of postcolonial
intellectuals have emigrated to the West as a place of residence
and work, and thus reinstituted, whether by volition or under coercion,
the Eurocentric myths of the Western metropolitan centers as the
emissary and beacon of light to the four corners of the globe. Their
presence at the heart of Europe, at the nerve of what, to paraphrase
from Edward Said, used to rule the waves, and at the academic circles
of a newly emergent imperial power has partly fulfilled Thomas Carlyle's
dream about London as" the rendez-vous of all the children
of the Harz-Rock, arriving in select samples, from the Antipodes
and elsewhere, by steam and otherwise, to season here". Moreover,
their tense affiliations with their countries of origin have marked
them as restless, transgressive and Janus-like critics and writers
whose project has been a relentlessly incessant endeavor at casting
doubt on all categorical designations, essentialist discourses and
ideologies of imperial domination. Thus, occupying an in between
position has lent these critics and writers a radical edge that
cuts across dogmas, orthodoxies and taboos.
Between Abderrahman Munif, the denaturalized Arab
writer, and Salman Rushdie, the Indian novelist, there is the same
concern with geography ... Through a variety of works, Munif expressed
with great perspicacity and elegance the verso to the belief in
one geography, namely, how it can turn into an anathema. Likewise,
Rushdie stresses time and again upon the ravages brought upon geography.
By considering Abderrahman Munif's quintet Cities of Salt and Salman
Rushdie's The Satanic Verses I will try to disclose how both novelists
provide , each in his way, a picture of the cities of sand, cities
of salt.
Back
|
