uopuc] pue 10, MON, vane MO1YVH VEVEeVE | AYNLVYSLIT | | ADNVLSISAY |Lee zz 10z 86r vst aut saauyeyep [eontjod Jo ssowaus uosti AT Douejsisad jo SOANEIEN IIT " yxoquos [eaHOIsIy=[PINDIONN HLT 200/4d 9 ut suoyiseiggy suawipa]mouyoy syua}u0Dhoc RESISTANCE LITERATURE acollective resistance. In particular, I want to mention with grati- tude some of the many who have read and discussed this material with me: Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak for their support and example; Ferial Ghazoul, Ceza Kassem Draz, and Hasna Reda of Cairo; and Lee Quinby and Derek Linton at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. The anonymous readers of the manuscript also were helpful in their criticism and sugges- tions. Janice Price of Methuen provided continuing encourage- ment as did Merrilyn Julian. Mary Abl and Olga Vrana typed the final version of the manuscript. 1 want alsy (o thank Jonathan Culler, Philip Bohlman, Uday Mehta, and the other fellows at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University in 1985-6 when the topic which brought us together and this book to completion ‘was non-European traditions in western civilization.” The tradi- tion of resistance may not be a uniquely “non-European’’ one, but it has a special and urgent role to play in today's challenge on the part of the “Third World” to another European and United States tradition, that of political and cultural hegemony and domination. Finally, I want to acknowledge not only the support and ruthless editorial criticism of my husband, David Konstan, but his own contribution to thinking and working our way through to new possibilities of individual and collective solidarity. 1 The theoretical—historical context in hit is ment of classes ofound break in history, that is, a rearrangement 3s in podety shakes up individuality, establishes the perception of the fundamental problems of lyric poetry from a new angle, and so saves art from eternal repetition. seo savess Leon Trotsky ~ Literature and Revolution ‘That was when he began writing on the walls in his own handwriting con fences and buildings and on the giant billboards. ‘The change was no small thing quite the contrary inthe beginning he fell into a deep creative slump. It's just that sonnets don’t look good on walls and phrases he was mad about before, like “oh abysmal sandalwood, honey of moss’ lil i ‘on peeling walls. ce Tooke ikea bigJoks on Pee ue Dalton ~ “History ofa pet would have liked totell you the story of a nightingale who diedsoyam uomunsoqeg amp ‘stp Uy “sosod 40 soouRs TwoNED Yons {yo ammyoiayy 2oueysisal jo Apms @ ur oueAdzas AsoA 9y} 00} So9Kos ay ,,"uoyssedsip o1yquarss,, 10 ,,Aanioatqo aruapede,, 09 asttayard Aue’ suepsip Atuo ou wuejeuey (21 ‘dout} ,"aldoad ayy jo ‘sdyy ayy :porededosd st pue soaty ‘u10q ste yoru tr aoejd ayy wosy Auouinsar sty 8upyey ‘pue] pardnoco oxy apisut sTesit wowsAWL pounysisad 34} INEM poyeo9y s{ soyDe—s—2 By) SsofUN a}—}dWH0D '2q uo pury sitn Jo Yoreaso4 ON,, "UO S208 onUs9 ayp ‘oxouNy UM, (aon) ‘uonens a4) Jo suoptpuos atp jo Aypisus ayy ys zayre80) Surom ‘sannenIUt oysinduyj soy) woxy sBuyzds soueysisau ayy, “sunsayed pardno90 Jo sqezy ayy Jo yooods pue sjasy aBenSuey ayy ut punoy 2q (09 Ajjejusurepuny $1 1 asne09q ‘uorentmqUoD juD}stss—d sy_ APMIS aejnopred uyjuesSjuro ueunsayed 249 pur jesouds uy zapea1qeV ‘up yey) Azessaoau st ay “Janamoy ‘auNsafed patdnooo uy 2oue “ysisa1 jo amnyezayy ayy 07 Tadsox MIIAA “woHEsaq Je Paystia “uros9e “yuapiAd-sjas 2x8 JEU Suoseas 303 “Aqjensn axe a[dood tuoai$ e jo ainjezoyy] aouerstsas amp jo Az03s1y Bye syduTone YL ueyeuey 0} Sutp3000y ‘ammyexoit stuy 0} pzeos yim uonrsodsip [eotzors1y pur yovoudde eoiBojoapr umo s,on9 ay} 0} Ng amNyeza4t] aauEySTSa WeIUNSATE 0} Ayo jou uouayye suouUUNs Yoryen auo waUTETEYS feoTe0ON yoe} uy st zoUteTosIp Suruado s,rueyeuey “Paystiqeisa st snds09 Arezayy © Aqaiaym suonmuyap otf pue sawBojopoyyau peontio ‘Axwxoyy Jo woneuturexa.a1 e 407 syseq axp aptaozd ‘aanyersyt{ EWN Jo wonnpoid jo suonypuos atp ay] ‘zanamoy ‘g9GT UI auNSeTed patdnaoo Jo aanyesayy| ay) oWut yodvasas jo Suot 2a aL (11 ‘down) ,s201nos jo souepunqe we st Tet pue ‘spuodap Ayjexaua8 yoseasoa jo synsoz ayy Jo wed yenuass [uD yoIyar uo syuoWa[9 21Seq ayy Jo auO UI SuUEM st APMIS SIM, jerp Sunes ‘sowreppsip yuaredde we yim Apnis feos Aswz2HTL ‘s1y Suyuado Aq suonspuos asayy sozqewia|qord rueyeuey “21% uy Buptim onto Asezoyty uewunsayed au 01 a{qerteae yovoudde put sioyourezed a1p Suyuyjop ut [01 ueDYTUBIs $59] ow we paced woe ‘nooo 1oess] spun uononpord Aresayq] uerunsafeg paurwuseveP {yoryar ‘suowtzaypny ‘suoNIpudd yeontjod aures ays, “tybow) 425r4) "‘aays femaqno,, BSB sa}eUBIsap ay eye Jo aoey otf wt ‘uoREdN2:0 TEL LXGLNOO WOIMOISIH-TWOUSHOSHL 3H | | Hees] sepun aunjeray uerunsazed Jo tod Jeu2}eur pur souarspxa ay) SunuouINdop wpm S24 51 20% pue yossonesssuajeuEy o Yon deol oe ee GERASI wom amp Jo s19p109 ay aprsino umouyun Bie ‘piiom area, artim oarfou powpmis pus jeeisy opisut diysiosuas Ru goisso1dos tou Jo aendaq ‘som (2b) autsajeg paxdnaoo WeroU oun “Apmis siy 20148 yuEFEUEY uoyM “BOI I] spiom 4 M1 ue] asym pue passassod © yuauidojanap jeanyino pue Aiesoyy ayy naNpord jo suontp 12188rujs Jo buaze ue sv onto 2 : nD aur Aq paitasox 4240 ur ‘aanyesairy “pardnao0 sey i put] ssoqee pan; sip sey yt ajdoad ay : 9 M09 aseD S14) UT ‘payesin{gns 10 para 2219 £0 to} ,somod Budnowe, ue souuayeny Soca 336 bonounsp 244,219, pue ,worrednsoo, sy 149 “uaomaq ewweene [eonwed puv yeouorsyy jo sopout om ou} usamoq SXIEP OW stejonze oF saissod sowod9q 1 yor Jo sieog Wo asne9 uoUTUIOd & 10 ‘AynHap! UOUILIOD e : auysuoneyss aanoot00 5 a}doad vcosoddnsond Conor ea ‘amie loo 1%, Bue a4 70 407} ,oxedno96 tapans bana uaag sey Yor danyexoH| uades}aq WORDULS|p iuerlodu Uessiodoid ons sy pes put, sane potty ae SaPeuotos Wow 'souo31i0)afeu9 Womaq Japiog aun yo futuado = on Put J9ARY Uepiof atp jo yueg 3594 aIp Jo 9 pers] 24 Ur paynsax sao10 tjausy amp Aq sons ust wepio{puo wong oxy yo asep ay) ul uoneunuina doom ee r ay Sunf amp 210399 ‘9961 Uy HaNIZM ‘kpuBoYrUsis ‘som Koos r ee i ‘S06I~Er6T ‘auuse10g PardnI0Q Ut aouDysisoy i Uy tueyeuey, uesseYD onuD pue sa}uM Sotansoteg ou 49 996 w outyosoy uetusoreg yo Londen Poudde ven sem youomgbnu) ooueisnan, wea ae soue}sisau jenny, HIS,, — WySseO-Je yruEg sayy Kor ye ou daup pep, + Ros a nod [121 0) pay avy prnom | SUNLWHILN aDNVASISIU 1Z4141 RESISTANCE LITERATURE reiterates the contention of other critics of a literature of resist- ‘ance such as the Puerto Rican Manuel Maldonado Denis. In an essay written in 1965 and entitled “The intellectual's role in Puerto Rico today,"" Denis contested the presumed detachment of some Puerto Rican intellectuals: “Isolation itself," he wrote, “is already a posture." Ghassan Kanafani, in referring to Palestinian literature as “resistance literature,” is writing within a specific historical context, a context which may be most immediately situated within the contemporary national liberation struggles and resist- ance movements against Western imperialist domination of Africa, Central and South America, and the Middle and Far East, The very immediacy and specificity of the historical context reveal, however, the broader role to be played by resistance literature in particular, but more generally too by what has come tobe referred toas “Third World literature." The French anthro- Pologist of North Africa, Jacques Berque, for example, has main- ined that contemporary history will of necessity unfold as the history of decolonization.’ Eric Wolf, the historian of peasant wars, has in turn claimed as the basis of his historiography that European history must be rewritten to include the “‘people with- ‘out history.” In the introduction to Burope and the People without History, Wolf reminds the Western student of history that “neither ancient Greece, Rome, Christian Europe, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, democracy, nor even the United States was ever a thing propelled toward its unfolding goal by some immanent driving spring, but rather a temporally and spatially changing and changeable set of relationships, or telationships among sets of relationships.’ Within the discipline of literature, current political movements and trends, especially in the "Third World,” are likewise imposing a review of what is understood by “literature and “literary studies.” The term "Third World,” however, has become a problematic one and seems now to possess more rhetorical power than analytic Precision. As Bric Wolf goes on in his introduction to point out: It becomes easy to sort the world into differently colored [bil- rd] balls, to declare that "Bast is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” In this way a quintessential West ‘THE THEORETICAL-HISTORICAL CONTEXT 151 i life is counterposed to an equally quintessential East, where | ces cheap and slavish multdesgroveled under a varity of despotisms. Later, as peoples in other climes began to assert their political and economic independence rom both West and East, we assigned these new applicants for historical status toa Third World of underdevelopment - a residual category of conceptual billiard balls ~ as contrasted with the develop West and the developing Bast. Inevitably, perhaps, these refed eategories became intellectual instruments in the pros, ecution of the Cold War. (sPH, i been variously defined. Fae oot erin hte i camelent wit the istoy of Colonialism. According to L. 8. Stavrianos, in Global Rif, for example, it began with the emergence of commercial capitalism between 1400 and 1770, Third World historiography femaing nonetheless implicated in the conditions which produce it and Peter Worsley has pointed to some of the discrepancies these differing conditions have engendered: ial relationship was a relationship between societies, Tach of which had is own distinctive social institutions and its own internal social differences, its own culture and subcu tures. Despite the political power of the conqueror, each colony was the product of a dialectic, a synthesis, not just a simple imposition, in which the social institutions and cultural values of the conquered was one ofthe terms of the dialectic, Histories of colonialism written by imperialists ignore one of these terms: history ithe story of what the White man did National ist historiography has developed a contrary myth a legend of “national” resistance which omits the uncomfortable collaboration i was i used in August 1952 ‘The term “Third World" was itself first 8 when Alfred Sauvy, a French demographer, wrote in France Observateur: ill ind their possible -ak all too willingly of two worlds at 3s rave their x-etstnce, etc, lien forgetting that there exstsa1161 RESISTANCE LITERATURE third, more important, world, one which, in te portant, world, one which, in terms of chron- ology, comes first ... this Third World, ignored, scorned, exploited, as was the Third Estate, also wants to say something. Such an appeal on the part of the French social scientist, whi called attention tothe Gstrted access to power of various peo, Political regions of the globe, was challenged two decades later by Régis Debray, the Frenchman who fought with Che Guevara in the independence struggles of Cuba and South America, For Debray, writing in Critique des armes, this “questionable concept of ‘third world'"* was a “shapeless sack into which one could simply dump peoples, classes, races, civilizations and continents 0 that they might more easily disappear." The term found perhaps its most vital and coherent political expression in 1985 at the Bandung Conference, under the sponsorship of India's Prime Minister Nehru, which organized into a collective political bod the “nonalgned nations ofthe word 7 ith the Bandung conference as its point of refer same article in Le Monde diplomatique which cites Sauvy, ol Debray goes on to articulate the history of the Third World in three major phases. The firs period, which marks the beginnings of struggle, extends from the Vietnamese victory against the French in 1954 to Algerian independence in 1962 and is punctu ated by such eventsas the 1956 ‘Suez Canal crisis." The different ways of referring to this incident, which is known in the Arab world as the "tripartite aggression’ (of France, Great Britain, and Israel), only emphasize the different and contending versions of history which arc at stake. The second period of Third World history then bears witness to the success of a number of national liberation movements, beginning with the Cuban revolution in 1959 and culminating in 1975 with the fall of Saigon. The suc. cesses also included the independence of many African nations such as Nigeria (1960), Kenya (1963), Mozambique (1975), Angola (1975}, and Guinea-Bissau (1974). In the meantime, however, the Bay of Pigs invasion occurred in 1961 and the June War was fought between Israel and Egypt/Jordan in 1967, the same year that Che Guevara was captured and killed in the mountains of Bolivia. The Arab-Israeli October War of 1973 and the fall of Beirut to Israeli forces in 1982 frame the third period, which ‘THE THEORETICAL-HISTORICAL CONTEXT 17 testifies to the effects on the Third World of the international political scene. During this period, for example, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat visited the United Nations in 1974, Egyptian presi- dent Anwar Sadat made his separate peace with Israel at Camp David in 1979, and, again in 1979, the Soviet Union invaded ‘Afghanistan. It is within this historical context and its contempor- ary consequences that Samir Amin, the Egyptian economist, was led to ask: “Is the Third World a reality or is it breaking up?"” ‘The historical struggle against colonialism and imperialism of such resistance movements as the PLO (Palestine), the FLN {Algeria}, the FLN (Vietnam), Mau Mau (Kenya), FRELIMO {Mozambique}, PAIGC (Guinea-Bissau), MPLA (Angola), BPLF (Baluchistan, the ANC (South Africa), FREITLIN (East Timor), the FMLN {EI Salvador), or the Sandinista FSLN (Nicaragua), and whether successful in their struggle as yet or not, is waged at the same time as a struggle over the historical and cultural record. One of the first targets, for example, of the Israeli Defense Forces when they entered the Lebanese capital of Beirut in the fall of 1982 was the PLO Research Center and its archives containing the documentary and cultural history of the Palestinian people. Similarly the United States police squadron which in August 1985 arrested in San Juan, Puerto Rico, eleven Puerto Rican indepen- dentistas on charges of bank robbery and violation of interstate commerce laws also entered the offices of the journal Pen- samiento critico where they confiscated the journal's archival resources as well as its copier and typewriter. ‘The struggle over the historical record is seen fromall sidesasno Jess crucial than the armed struggle. Even in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement, the cultural terrain is disputed. The reviewer Roland Oliver, for example, began his critique of the recently pub- lished seventh volume of the UNESCO-sponsored General History of Africa, which deals with Africa under colonial domination,” by asking, “Are they treating our memory better or worse than we treat that of the Romans?" The fault the critic finds with the work, which is edited by A. Adu Boahen and consists of thirty articles, twenty-one of which are written by African writers, is that: ‘The very design of this volume reveals a view of the colonial period which could hardly have emanated from anywhere181 RESISTANCE LITERATURE outside Africa. For example, one whole third of it is devoted to the theme of resistance to colonial occupation, and, whether intentionally or not, the impression is created that hardly any- thing else happened in Africa between 1880 and 1914." Okonkwo too, who was allotted only a paragraph in the distri cormisinet ty Te Paitin ote Pome Tbs he Lowe ger. Sisred quite diferent in Achebe's novel Things Whereas Kanafani had differentiated between literature writ- ten under occupation and exile literature, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan writer and academic who was much influenced by the ia Mau movement and who is now in exile in London, pro- posed a different set of categories. Ngugi (1981) maintained, in an article entitled “Literature in schools,” that “‘in literature there have been two opposing aesthetics: the aesthetic of oppression and exploitation and of acquiescence with imperialism; and that of human struggle for total liberation.’® Ngugi's article was written as part of a violent debate in Kenya's press which fol lowed the publication of a report by the working committee which had been appointed in 1973 to re-examine the literature syllabus in Kenyan schools. His concern with that syllabus Parallels Roland Oliver's own preoccupation with the pedaggi cal implications of the new General Histo of Afra. For the Much more interesting in the lon; i 1g run is what African his- torians, mostly trained in the Western tradition of tel scholarship, are telling the present generation of African schoo teachers, and, through them, the next generation of ican politicians and military men, about the his Affcan politic ry men, about the history of the It ist this point that Oliver asks, "A: iver aks, “Are they treating our m Dele or wore than weet that othe Reman igugi's discussion in 1976 focused on the question of the "Li ary dit now being ladled out to our hen" and addressed four main issues confronting the Kenyan educational system. [Ngugi designates these issues as: 1) the relevance and adequacy ‘THE THEORETICAL-HISTORICAL CONTEXT 191 ofthe present educational system; 2) the decision-making person- nel; 3) the teaching staff and 4) approaches to literature. Dest the article's immediate and direct relevance to the political and cultural situation in contemporary post-colonial Kenya, the position which it articulates poses important questions for Titerary criticism in the West, both as it has been traditionally, or canonically, practiced and in terms of current theoretical and iconoclastic trends, Ngugi’s division of literature into two Kinds, that of oppression and that of the struggle for liberation, contests the ascendancy of sets of analytic categories and formal con ventions, whether generic, such as novel, sonnet, tragedy, etc. national-linguistic as in French, German, or English literature; literary-historical; or even so simple a distinction as that which is still conventionally maintained between fiction and non-fiction, ‘These conventions, which have been elaborated by Western critics of literature, have often also been adopted by literati and Jocal pedagogues in cultures which have not themselves been part of Western literature and its idiosyncratic development. The Kenyan writer, in this essay, proposes instead a different organiz- ation of literary categories, one which is “participatory’’ in the historical processes of hegemony and resistance to domination, rather than formal or analytic. ‘Already in the 1920s the Peruvian critic José Carlos Mariétegui had insisted on the need for a different historical periodization of the literature of Peru from that generally formulated to account for the development of the European literary tradition. In his essay ‘Literature on trial in which he examines the political responsibility of the Peruvian writer, Mariétegui claims that, ‘because of the special character of Peruvian literature, it cannot be studied within the framework of classicism, romanticism or ‘modernism; nor of ancient, medieval and modern; nor of popular and literary poetry, etc." That “special character" of Peruvian literature which Mariétegui points to, its development under colonial auspices, produces different literary historical criteria. ‘The writer goes on: A literary, not sociological, theory divides the literature of a |, ) country int three periods: colonial, cosmopolitan and national. 1, \ im the first period, the country, in a literary sense, is a colony J1100 RESISTANCE LITERATURE dependent on the metropolis. In the second period, it simul- taneously assimilates the elements of various foreign litera- tures. In the third period, it shapes and expresses its own personality and feelings.” ‘These various challenges, each in its own way specific to the particular needs of a given historical moment, by Kanafani, Ngugi, and Mariategui, suggest nonetheless the general par- ameters of a collective opposition and concerted resistance to the programmatic cultural imperialism which accompanied western economic, military, and political domination of the Third World. ‘An extreme, even anarchic, expression of this movement which Armand Mattelart has referred to as ‘national struggles of cul- tural liberation’ is proffered by the Nigerian writer, dramatist and cultural critic Wole Soyinka in his book Myth, Literature and the African World, when he writes, perhaps critically, that "the African! writer is far more preoccupied with visionary pro. jections of society than with speculative projections ofthe nature of literature or of any other medium of expression.’ Soyinka’s disavowal notwithstanding, it remains the case that the writers and critics writing within the context of organized resistance movements comprehend the role of culture and cultural resist: ance as part of the larger struggle for liberation. Amilcar Cabral, the leader of the Guinea-Bissau liberation movement and a major theoretician of African resistance and liberation struggles, claimed in a speech delivered in 1970 in honor of the assassinated FRELIMO leader, Eduardo Mondlane, that "the armed struggle for liberation, in the concrete conditions of life of African peoples, confronted with the imperialist chal- lenge, is an act of insemination upon history - the major ex- pression of our culture and of our African essence.” Ghassan Kanafani too, in his second study of the literature of occupied Palestine, which was written two years after his preliminary investigation, and which took advantage of the newly opened borders between Israel and the occupied West Bank, asserts the integral relationship between armed resistance and resistance literature. Like Cabral, who insisted that ‘culture plunges its roots into the physical reality of the environmental humus in which it develops," (Rs, 42) Kanafani too claimed that “armed ‘THE THEORETICAL-HISTORICAL CONTEXT 1111 resistance is not just the husk, but the very fruit of cultivation forcing its roots deep into the land.” Both thinkers of the resist- ance also locate the historical specificity of the resistance move- ‘ment within the larger collective struggle throughout the world. Kanafani thus goes on to assert the significance of the particular forms of cultural resistance in determining the general strategies of the resistance organization: “If resistance springs from the barrel of a gun, the gun itself issues from the desire for liberation and that desire for liberation is nothing but the natural, logical and necessary product of resistance in its broadest eense: as refusal and as a firm grasp of roots and situations." For Kanafani, the “extreme importance of the cultural form of resistance is no less valuable than armed resistance itself.""" Both Kanafani and Cabral were assassinated by the representa- tives of the imperialism they were struggling against. Their deaths signal the importance attached even by the enemy to the efficacy of cultural resistance. Kanafani’s obituary in the Daily Star, a Beirut English-language newspaper, described him as the “commando who never fired a gun" and went on to say that "his weapon was a ballpoint pen and his arena newspaper pages. And he hurt the enemy more than a column of commandos." Two years before he himself was assassinated, Cabral had concluded his speech in honor of Mondlane with the words: ‘One might say that Eduardo Mondlane was savagely assassin- ated because he was capable of identifying with the culture of his people, with their deepest aspirations, through and against all attempts or temptations for the alienation of his personality as an African and a Mozambican. Because he had forged a new culture in the struggle, he fell as a combatant." For both Cabral and Kanafani the resistance movement and the armed struggle for national liberation were to accomplish the political and economic liberation of the people from the thrall of imperialism, But they were also expected to bring about, in that process, a revolutionary transformation of existing social struc- tures, Whether in liberating women from traditional tasks, organizing democratic processes of decision-making and counsel, building schools or training cadres of peasants and workers, the17211 RESISTANCE LITERATURE “armed liberation struggle," as Cabral says, “is not only a prod- uct of culture, but a determinant of culture."’ (RS, 55) Resistance literature and western cri m Hugo Blanco was a prominent organizer among the Quechua Indians and peasants of Peru. His account of the mobilization of the peasants, Land or Death: the Peasant Struggle in Peru, written while he was serving a 25-year prison sentence for his activities with the Indians, describes at one point the role of the press and propaganda in political work. According to Blanco, “Much can be accomplished in press and propaganda work even in such a pre- dominantly illiterate milieu as the peasant movement.'"” The press and propaganda can themselves become a means in the hands of the resistance which will wrest back from the repressive authorities the control over cultural production. Blanco formu- lates this “expropriation” in terms of the Peruvian peasants’ own traditional rclationship to scriptural authority: Itis necessary to understand that for centuries the oppressors of the peasants made them regard paper as a god. Paper became a fetish: Arrest orders are paper. By means of papers they crush the Indian in the courts. The peasant sees papers in the offices of the governor, the parish priest, the judge, the notary - wherever there is power; the landowner, too, keeps accounts on paper. All the reckonings you have made, all your logical arguments, they refute by showing you a paper; rf supersedes log, itdeteatsit. ne There is a famous saying: Qelgan riman {What is written is ‘what is heard). We fight this fetishism to the death. And one of the ways to fight itis precisely to show the peasant that, just as the enemy has his papers, so we have our papers. To the paper that contradicts the reason and logic of the peasant, we counter- pose the paper that bears that reason and logic. This by itself is already a marvel for the illiterate peasant, ‘The existence of papers that speak in his behalf, that speak his truth, is already the beginning of his triumph. He views them with respect and affection. (up, 84-5) THE THEORETICAL-HISTORICAL CONTEXT 1131 ‘The peasants, Blanco goes on to report, then used these leaflets in the traditional way to paper the walls of their homes, only this time making them available for readings by children and visitors the necessary literacy skills. Such a strategic evaluation as Blanco’s of the role of press and propaganda is conditioned in his case by his commitment to the ‘Transitional Program’ of Trot- skyism, whereby the people are educated by and in the process of their actions. The vital importance of literacy and education, however, as part of the political agenda of the resistance organi: ation is everywhere evident, from the ‘‘self-help" schools and work brigades of Serowe studied by Bessie Head in the Bots: wanan village where she lived" to the massive literacy campaign undertaken by the Sandinista government of Nicaragua during the first year of its rule. In his preface to Crisis in the Philippines, E. San Juan insists on the urgency of such cultural activity and its immediate relevance to the political struggle in the Third World theater when he points out “the integral, organic rootedness of Third World activists! thinkers in the political-cultural struggles in their milieu: the heterogeneous, decentered structure of Third World forma tions.” Terry Eagleton, by contrast, writing for a First World audience, concluded his study, Literary Theory: an Introduction, with a reminder to “those who work in the cultural practices [that they] are unlikely to mistake their activity as utterly cen- tral."” He does, however, distinguish four areas of endeavor where such cultural practices do become “newly relevant," singling out for this relevance working-class writing, the “culture industry."" the women’s movement, and "those nations strug- sling for their independence from imperialism." Ina similar gesture, Frederic Jameson turns at the end of his, recent essay on "Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’ to an appeal for a new “pedagogical political cul- ture." Jameson defines this culture as an “aesthetic of cognitive mapping . . . which seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system." Nolless than the multinational corporations which Jameson sees as the characteristic feature of what he designates as the “‘post- modern’ period or the age of “late capitalism,” however, the cultural institutions and academies of higher learning which11411 RESISTANCE LITERATURE define and process information and cultural production parti pate not only in the dissemination of specific and hegemonic forms of social organization but also in determining the content of cultural commodities. As Armand Mattelart points out in his study Transnationals and the Third World: the Struggle for Culture, it is the university scholars and academicians who serve as market researchers, whether in matters of birth control or with regard to “advanced systems for communications and education in national development,’”” for transnational firms. Not just anthropologists, economists, and political scientists, but students of literature too, with their theories of discourse, rhetoric, and textual criticism, provide the necessary information and tools of analysis for the propagation of cultural and even military domination. One of the appendices, for example, to the CIA Manual on Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare contains a program for political oratory which might well have its place in a college composition or rhetoric course. Certainly the section on figures of speech provides useful and practical defi nitions of such rhetorical devices as prolepsis, concession, anaphora, antithesis, amplification, commination, etc. For such reasons, “one must start," according to Mattelart, “by question- ing the conceptual apparatus allowing transnational firms to reproduce the conditions of their survival and legitimacy and to judge or even criticize their actions themselves in order to put right mistakes and excesses without questioning an instant their own nature and function." (rw, 2} thas become again necessary to challenge the presuppositions and premises ofthe academic enterprise and the activities which it ‘enjoins und which are used tosustain an internationalization of the issues of development according to western-specific models or patterns. The challenge is raised already in those areas, geo- ‘graphical and ideological, where there is at work what Gramsci termeda "counter-hegemonic ideological production.” Literature and literary studies themselves, as part ofthe academicenterprise, are being contested by the cultural and ideological expressions of resistance, armed struggle, liberation, and social revolution in those geopolitical regions referred to as the “Third World.” Although prominent radical critics such as Eagleton and Jameson do gesture significantly towards the political relevance ‘THE THEORETICAL-HISTORICAL CONTEXT 1151 and even urgency of new forms and strategies of cultural resist- ance, these forms themselves have yet to alter in any manifest way the organization and discipline of literary studies in western institutions. In a critical response to Jameson's article on “post: modernism,” the labor historian Mike Davis pointed to the failure of Jameson's analysis to acknowledge the political align- ments which are really at stake in the postmodern manipulation tectural space. Davis's article, ‘Urban renaissance and the spirit of postmodernism,’ insists not on the fragmentation of the individual's relation to his or her psychic and social living space as characteristic of the postmodern experience but on the “decisive role of urban counter-insurgency in defining the essen- tial terms of the contemporary built environment." He concludes his critique with the claim that it is a "Haussmannian logic of social control” which is the “real Zeitgeist of postmodern- ism." According to Davis, “these current designs for fortified skyscrapers indicate a vogue for battlements not seen since the great armoury boom that followed the Labour Rebellion of 1877. In so doing, they also signal the coercive intent of postmodernist architecture in its ambition, not to hegemonize the city in the fashion of the great modernist buildings, but rather to polarize it into radically antagonistic spaces.” (URSP, 113) On the periphery of these fantastic architectural structures of United States capitalism, surrounding them, if not actually laying. siege to them, is a "Third World city” of Hispanics, Asians, blacks, and other minority populations and itis against them that these edifices have been constructed. What is seen by Jameson as a radical transformation of cultural form is interpreted differ- ently by Davis asa calculated retrenchment of forces in capitalist design. In much the same way, the title to the popular rock song. of 1985, "We are the world,"’ produced in order to raise famine relief funds for Ethiopia, might be reread as an emblematic state- ment of United States imperialism in the last decades: "We are the world.” ‘The political function of the poet, more so even than that of the literary critic, has been much contested amongst writers. The longstanding tradition of that debate, one which is not unique to ‘western literary schools of thought, does find there a particularly coherent historical formulation, one which is expressed inGI RESISTANCE LITERATURE ‘THE THEORETICAL-HISTORICAL CONTEXT 1171 Stendhal’s statement that “Politics in a work of literature is likea pistol shot in the middle of a concert, something loud and vulgar and yet a thing to which it is not possible to refuse one's atten- nn. Such debates as practiced in Western academies resonate too amongst the strategists of cultural resistance in the national liberation movements. To his compatriots and colleagues, for example, who advocated aesthetic, if not objective, criteria, transcending historical circumstance, in the study of literary works, the Puerto Rican critic Maldonado Denis answers: "In my view the Puerto Rican intellectual must take as departure point for any analysis of our society the most radical and profound fact about here-and-now Puerto Rico: its character as colony of the United States,” (IR, 291) This controversial insistence on the “*here-and-now” of histori- calreality andits conditions of possibility underwrites muchof the project of resistance literature and the internal debate which surrounds that literature. It likewise arouses the objections of “First World’ critics generally to the literature of partisanship. Ghassan Kanafani, for example, who worked in the last years of his life as a journalist and then as editor of al-Hadaf (The Aim), the weekly newspaper of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP], was criticized and taken to task by a younger writer Fadl al-Nagib for what was seen as Kanafani’s excessive attention to the immediate exigencies and pressing concernsof the contemporary political situation. Like Proust's Marcel, the young writer aspired to the rewards of posterity and posthumous recog- nition and acclaim, a “distant future wrapped in dreams." Kan- afani was rebuked by the acolyte for composing for tomorrow's editorial column.» It is to this same critical reluctance, such as that exhibited in Rene Wellek and Austin Warren's now classic Theory of Literature, to associate literature “with manufactures made with a narrow aim at the market" or the refusal to take it as a “document or case history, as - what for its own purposes of illusion it sometimes professes to be ~ a confession, a true story, a history ofa life and its times,’ that the critic and novelist Ngugi objects in his essay on "Writers in politics.” "Haven't we heard,” he writes, “critics wha demand of African writers that they stop writing about colonialism, race, colour, exploitation, and simply write about human beings? Such an attitude to society is often the basis of some European writers’ mania for man without history — solitary and free ~ with unexplainable despair and anguish and death as the ultimate truth about the human condition.’ ‘This demand on the part of critics and readers, against histori cal necessity, and through an appeal to universality, posterity and the human condition, is among those “strategies of containment that Jameson examined in his work The Political Unconscious, "the ‘local’ ways in which [interpretive codes) construct their objects of study and. . . project the illusion that their readings are Somehow complete and self-sufficient.’ Such a “strategy of containment’ is evident, for example, in Sartre's dehistoricizing and existentializing reading of Camus's novel about settler- colonialism, Speaking of the novel when it was first published in Paris in 1942 after the novelist had left Algeria, Sartre sees in it only "chance, death, the irreducible pluralism of life and truth, the unintelligibility of the real - all these are the extremes of the absurd. No less “‘Jocal” is the introduction to E. M. Forster's ‘work provided by Frank Kermode and John Hollander in their anthology of modern British literature where A Passage to India is described: “While ostensibly about the relations of the British with the native populations of India, it is fundamentally a highly organized work of art, a limited world commenting on the tragedies and mitigations of the larger one.’ Forster and Camus, no less than the Indians and the Algerians (represented by Aziz and the unnamed Arab in their novels), are thus denied by the literary critics a historical role of anything but peripheral conse- quence. ‘Masao Miyoshi, in his reading of twentieth century Japanese novels, “Against the native grain," warned against the dangers of either “domestication” or “neutralization” in the study in the West of non-western literary works. Whereas the danger of “domestication” is that it renders all too familiar, and thus sub- jugates through assimilation, the challenge posed by the un- familiar, the alternative of “neutralization,” which categorically rejects and isolates the unfamiliar as finally irrelevant, is no less a threat." These alternatives, promulgated by a hegemonic cultural imperative and which Cabral had earlier rendered as “assim lation” and “apartheid,” (RS, 40} also function in the conflicting theoretical efforts to comprehend the political and ideologicalHII RESISTANCE LITERATURE consequences of popular, but organized, resistance movements. As John Walton indicates in Reluctant Rebels, his study of three: such movements, the Huk rebellion in the Philippines, La Violen- cia in Colombia, and Kenya's Mau Mau movement, “‘Contem- porary revolutionary activities that resonate with the popular imagination seem to escape our theoretical grasp, to become lost somewhere between scholarly treatment of great transform: ations such as the French Revolution and historically denatured instances of riot and coup," The question of national culture ‘According to Frantz Kanon, in his essay “'On national culture” in The Wretched of the Earth Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native's head of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures and destroys it. This work of devaluing pre-colonial history takes on a dialectical signifi cance today.” For the Arab writer in general, and for the Palestinian writer in particular, a radical disruption occurred in 1948 when the state of Israel was created. The year has been described in Arab histori- ography as the ycar of the ‘disaster’ (nakbah) whose conse- quences for Arab cultural production are described by Edward Said in his introduction to Halim Barakat's novel of the 1967 war, Days of Dust: . Not only did 1948 put forth unprecedented challenges to a col- lectivity already undergoing the political evolution of several European centuries compressed into a few decades: this after all was mainly a difference of detail between the Arab East and all other Third World countries, since the end of colonialism ‘meant the beginning and the travail of uncertain national self- ‘hood. But 1948 put forward a monumental enigma, an existen- tial mutation for which Arab history was unprepared.” ‘THE THEORETICAL-HISTORICAL CONTEXT 1191 ‘The solutions of the past, of identity and tradition, no longer sufficed to provide a sense of continuous history and active agency in the unfolding of that history. "As with African experimentations with the philosophies of Negritude and political programs of pan-Africanism, even the promise contained in the efforts to evolve an effective ideology of, pan-Arabism collided eventually with conflicting spheres of tegional and personal interest. Certainly any attempt to partici- pate in the “universal” culture of the colonizer and conqueror was predetermined for failure, but so too was the effort criticized by Fanon to fashion a ‘‘national culture" according to European designs: ‘There was therefore at the bottom of this decision the anxiety to be present at the universal trysting place fully armed, with a culture springing from the very heart of the African continent. Now, this (Universal Cultural] Society will very quickly show its inability to shoulder these different tasks, and will limit itself to exhibitionist demonstrations, while the habitual behav- jour of the members of this Society will be confined to showing Europeans that such a thing as African culture exists, and opposing their ideas to those of ostentatious and narcissistic Europeans. (we, 173) ‘The relationship to the inherited past and its cultural legacy has been rendered problematic by the violent interference of coloni and imperial history. Just as Fanon warns against the fetish ation of traditional culture which transforms that culture into ‘museum pieces and archaeological artefacts, (WE, 178) Cabral too admonishes against too literal an interpretation of the ideal of a “return to the source.” ‘That the debate over the elaboration of a national culture remains urgent within the context of the continuing cultural domination by the West is evidenced, for example, in the recent creation in Egypt, following the Camp David Accords and the official policy of a “normalization of relations” between Egypt and Israel, of an oppositional “Committee in the Defense of National Culture.”’ In the pages of its journal, a-Muwajahah, are included translations of Fanon, Cabral and Gramsci as well as1201 RESISTANCE LITERATURE documentation of the current “‘cultural invasion" in its new form. Egyptian writers, intellectuals, artists, and university | professors are opposing an institutionalized program which demands their public participation in the exchange of visits between university delegations from the two countries, joint publishing ventures, the establishment of Israeli research insti- tutes in Egypt and similar gestures betokening the commitment of Egyptian and Israeli scholars to a “common cause.” Under Anwar Sadat those intellectuals who refused to cooperate were liable to arrest, demotion, or dismissal from their positions. ‘The concept of national culture is being redefined continuously in the course of these political confrontations. In this debate over the definition and role of national culture, both in the liberation struggle of colonized countries and later in their participation in global politics after independence, itis necessary to transform the dichotomous alternatives of what Mattelart has referred to as either a “scorched earth politics” or a ‘rhetoric of nostalgia." (cc, 48) The struggle is one which engages the traditional past as ‘well as the present circumstances of western hegemony in order to determine future coordinates of social and political formations and strategic alliances. From British imperialism’s selective educational system in India and the French colonial obliteration of Arab-language schools in North Africa, to the world-wide distribution, through the channels of multinational corporations, of Sesame Street and Dallas, the issue of cultural imperialism and resistance to it has remained an increasingly critical part of geo political strategy and confrontation. Ariel Dorfman reminded the reader in his study of colonizing myths entitled The Empire's Old Clothes, or “What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and other innocent heroes do to our minds," that "There may be no better way for a country to know itself than to examine the myths and popular symbols that it exports to its economic and military dominions.” ‘Beyond even the myths, however, is the hegemonic control of distribution networksand chains. At the 1985 meeting in Geneva, for example, of the World Administrative Radio Conference on the Use of Geostationary Satellite Orbits, as the New York Times put it, “The competition for the available positions and frequencies in space ... caused resentment on earth, mainly between the industrialized countries and the third world."" The ‘THE THEORETICAL-HISTORICAL CONTEXT 1211 article, "Third world seeks its place in space,” went on todescribe the sources of that resentment: ‘Although some developing countries have satellites, many in the third world fear that, by the time they have the resources to launch one, the geostationary orbit, where a satellite travels at the same rotational speed as the earth and is a fixed target for radio signals, will be crowded.* ‘The theoretical and practical debate over national culture, its production and distribution, has not necessarily been superseded by these technological developments in the field of communi- cations, but it has acquired a new dimension and a new urgency. For Dorfman what is called for is ‘the elaboration which would reject authoritarian and competitive models and provoke doubts, questions, dialogue, real participation, and, eventually, a break- through in popular art.” {E0C, 7} "Les Mots canins”” Inhis contribution, entitled “Les Mots canins,"’to the conference onbilingualism, heldin Rabat in 1981, the Moroccan writer Abdel- fattah Kilito retolda fable from the Book of the Animals by the ninth century Arab writer al-jahiz. Kilito begins his fable-telling with a riddle: What did the Arab of ancient timesdo when he became lost at night and unable to find his way?” The answer given is that the lost Arab would begin to bark like a dog, istanabaha. The idea, according to the writer, is that, in barking like a dog, the wanderer in the desert would provoke the barking of any other dogs in the area, dogs which would be collected around a camp: site or human settlement toward which the human animal might then orient his steps. Kilito comments, of course, on the paradox that it is only by way of a passage through bestiality that the stranger can find his way to a return to human contact, but he goes on to examine the various forms that such a return might take. In addition to the possibility of a reunion of the lost traveler with his own kind, it could also happen that the campsite dogs who respond to his imitation barking do so because they guard the fires of a tribe that is inimieal to strangers and have been1221 RESISTANCE LITERATURE trained to bark in order to ward off again, it might transpire that the dogs of a nearby campsite do not bark at all in response to the wanderer's canine appeal, this time because they belong to a most hospitable people who have taught their animals not to bark so as not to frighten off strangers seeking welcome and refuge at their fires. AlJahiz’s fable, in its retelling by Abdelfattah Kilito, raises allegorically a number of questions relevant to resistance litera- ture: access to history for those peoples who have been histori- cally denied an active role in the arena of world politics; the problem of contested terrain, whether cultural, geographical, or political; and the social and political transformation from a genealogy of “filiation” based on ties of kinship, ethnicity, race, or religion to an “affiliative’’ secular order.” Such an agenda must attempt a reconstruction of the history of the relations of power between those regions or arenas, which have been vai ously designated as First and Third Worlds, metropolis and periphery, etc, in such a way as to redress, on the cultural as well as on the political and economic levels, the exploitative and repressive nature of those relations. France, for example, occupied North Africa for more than 130 years, from its first military incursions in 1830 to Algerian independence following a protracted and bloody struggle for national independence in 1962. An important consequence of French settler-colonialism in Algeria was, however, its effective suppression of an indigenous Arabic literary production through its replacement of Arab-language schools with the French edu- cational system and its selective training of what were deemed the “‘most promising” young North Africans. French was the language of command, of management, and of theoretical knowledge, and it also relegated Arabic’ to the language of the dominated, of those at the bottom of the ladder. ‘The law encouraged this domination, too, by declaring Arabic foreign to Algeria in 1923; educationalists also helped by claiming that the Latin alphabet was better suited to modern needs than the Arabic one.” ‘When Algeria did finally achieve independence in 1962, acritical part of its national program was thus a process of “Arabization" sn encroachments. Or, | ‘THE THEORETICAL-HISTORICAL CONTEXT 1231 in all spheres of public and institutional activity. Nonetheless, many of North Africa's most prominent writers and intellectuals, such as Khatibi and Kilito, continue to produce their works in French, whether because French is the language in which they were educated, or because, as in the case of the Moroccan writer Mohamed Choukri, their books are banned in Arabic. Choukri’s autobiography, Le Pain nu, or Al-Khubz al-hafi as it was originally entitled, appeared in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s French translation in Paris before the author could find a publisher for the Arabic original. For Khatibi. however. there is a certain calculated irony in the francophony of North African writers, Irony might not only have been a kind of displaced revenge on the part of the oppressed colonized seduced by the west, but would have also allowed the francophone North African writer to take his own distance on the language by inverting it, destroying it and presenting new structures to the point where the French reader would feel a stranger in his own language.*' In the case of Mohamed Choukri, the irony is complicated still again when the French translation of his autobiography subverts the post-colonial authoritarian manipulation by the Moroccan censor of an Arabic “national culture” in North Africa. In 1984 Mohamed Choukri's books were again banned in his native Morocco. In his essay “Democracy and modern despotism," written in 1978, the Lebanese critic and novelist Elias Khouri criticizes the tendency of the Arab bourgeoisie and bureaucratic élite to “trans- form the people into folklore and tourism." That critique finds a further development in Khouri's later article, ““Arabization’ and intimidation,” which appeared as part of the writer's series published over almost two years, from January 1983 to Novem- ber 1984, in the Lebanese newspaper al Safir. The series, entitled ‘Time of Occupation (Zaman al-ihtilal}? was begun in response to the Israeli occupation of Lebanon following their invasion in June 1982 and the departure of the PLO fedayeen from Beirut in Sep- tember of that year. '‘Arabization’ and intimidation" appeared in May 1983, at a moment when the Phalange government's censorship of literary and intellectual production in Lebanon was1241 RESISTANCE LITERATURE especially intense in the wake of the controversial agreement negotiated by US Secretary of State George Shultz between Israel; and the Christian Lebanese government. Because of this highly contested treaty arrangement (which eventually collapsed), the Lebanese regime of Amin Gemayel was particularly interested in maintaining the political and, more importantly perhaps, financial support of its “sister Arab states." Although the Christian population in Lebanon had historically insisted on their genealogy as "Phoenician" rather than “Arab, tion” in the cultural sphere now became part of the government program. This “Arabization" was, however, accord- ing to Khouri, construed in such a way as to satisfy the more conservative Arab oil-regimes. Whereas Beirut had once served a the center for the dissemination of radical Arab thought, what was now to be exported was the traditional Arab cultural heri- tage, the classical turdth, “leather-bound books with their titles ‘embossed in gilt.” (TO, 69) In the name of "“Arabization,’"further- ‘more, there began what Khouri describes asa “‘purification of the Lebanese University of those professors who had imported ideas. Although ‘we,’"" as the critic writes with a certain irony, “are capable of economic openness and readiness to import com- modities even from New Zealand in order to re-export them to ‘our sister states, we are not yet ready to receive western-imported ideas. Ideas must be 100% local manufacture." (T0, 68) Khouri ends his article of 27 May 1983 by indicating that, in the face of such pressures from within and without, only two choices are available: the first, “‘isolationism,”' he rejects despite its apparent historical ascendancy of the moment. The second option, he insists, is the only lasting one, even given the difficulties it entails, the option of resistance. The word for resistance used here, mu’dradah, translates the term mugawamah conventionally used in Arabic to suggest popular, organized resistance to colonial ‘occupation or imperialist oppression and gives a literary-critical implication to the idea of resistance. Mu‘aradah, while it does have the literal meaning of confrontation, opposition, or resist- ance, is also the designation given to a classical Arabic literary form, according to which one person will write a poem and another will retaliate by writing along the same lines, but revers- ing the meaning. This translation into Arabic of the Arabic word ‘THE THEORETICAL-HISTORICAL CONTEXT 1251 {for resistance also suggests a larger and collective political agenda to the linguistic task of the literary translator. Le Thé au harem d’Archi Ahmed might be considered as an example of such a contestatory practice, of mu'aradah, a literary, historical, and political challenge to the cultural ascendancy of western letters and the persistent economic and cultural he- gemony of France over her former North African colonies. When Te Thé au harem d’Archi Ahmed“ by the young Algerian novelist Mehdi Charef appeared in Paris in 1983 it provoked significant critical attention. A year later it was made into a film, with the slightly altered title Le The au harem d’Archimede, directed by the writer and produced by Costa Gavras. Charet's novel represents an important intervention into the urgent political debate, often erupting in violence, which is taking place in contemporary French society. Identified variously as the Le Pen phenomenon, the neo-conservative politics of the National Front party or simply as ""Francais/immigrés,""* the controversial question of France's relationship to its immigrant population is manifest in political discussion, personal vendettas, and public graffi Le Thé au harem tells the slory of the friendship between Pat, a young Frenchman, and Madiid, an Algerian of the “‘nouvelle gén- ration," both membersof an informal gang of youths livingin one of the HLMs (habitations loyer modéré) of the Parisian banlieues. ‘The novel sees the two adolescents through various escapades of petty theft, vandalism, sex, drugs, and family problems, until finally Madjid is apprehended by the police while his cohorts escape. It concludes with Pat voluntarily joining his friend in the police van, telling the officers, "J'étais avec lui.” (TH, 183) Pat's statement is a variation on still another description of the racial issue in France today. "¥€ touche pas a mon pte" [Hands off my pall is the rallying slogan of a group of young people who have organized themselves against the current virulent antagonism directed against France's immigrant, and especially Arab, popu: lation. Critics of contemporary French politics have suggested that the aggressive tension between France and the North African immi- grants living and working in that country is in many ways a historical continuation of France's Algerian war and point to such evidence as the fact that it is North African Arabs who have been1261 RESISTANCE LITERATURE singled out amongst the immigrant population in France for this negative attention as well as to the coincidence of electoral sup- | port for the National Front in those areas with a large concen- tration of pieds noirs.* Le Thé au harem, whose title comes from } the miscomprehension by one of the young Algerians of the school teacher's reference to “le théoréme d’Archimede,” can likewise be located in the literary history of the French coloniz~ ation of North Africa, a history in which Camus's L’Etranger occupies a crucial position. Camus wrote L’Btranger in Algeria in 1939 but published it only in 1942 in Paris. Unlike Meursault, the novel's protagonist, who refused a position in the metropolis, Camus left Algeria in 1940 to settle in Paris, He returned to Algeria only once, during the Algerian war, for a visit. Camus and L’Btranger, however, were well received in France. Sartre, for example, applauded the novel as a masterpiece of the absurd and L‘Btranger continues to be cited as a classic of existentialism, as if the very limpidity and clarity of its language had spellbound its readers into a blindness toits political context, the Frenchman Raymond's violation of the Arab woman and his friend Meursault's murder of the woman's brother, the unnamed Arab of thenovel. Like Mohamed Choukri's autobiography, L‘Etranger was written in North Africa and pub- lished in Paris. But, whereas Le Pain nu’s linguistic trajectory ‘opened up a political space of cultural resistance, Camus's novel, dispossessed of its historical background with the “real” ren: dered “unintelligible,”” was assimilated into a dehistoricizing Project of silence and the absurd. Algerians, however, for whom Camus had once played an exemplary role, reread his early novel in a more critical light when the writer visited Algeria in the 1950s, only to speak out there against the Algerian struggle for independence and in favor of federation with France. In an open letter to Camus in 1959, ‘Ahmed Taleb, imprisoned at the time in France for activities events in Algeria, wrote: ‘Ten years ago we were a handful of young Algerians, seated at our school desks and imbued with your work. And, even if you ‘were not our spiritual inspiration, you at least provided for usa model of writing. ... Ten years have now elapsed and our ‘THE THEORETICAL-HISTORICAL CONTEXT 1271 disillusion with you is as great as our hopes once were. Much water has flowed under the bridges. Let us say rather much blood. And how many tears have fallen on the Algerian land that once inspired pages of such beauty from you.” ‘The “'model for writing” which Camus had offered has been seriously challenged in the ensuing years by francophone writers of the Maghreb. This linguistic struggle on the cultural terrai part of the larger history of France's relations with her former North African colonies. Since Algerian independence in 1962, North African immigration to France has followed various cycles, alternately increasing and decreasing according to the pressures of demand as well as to government restrictions or encourage- ment. In the last several decades, however, many of those workers who had arrived alone and who lived in comparative ation from French society have been joined by their relatives and have established families of their own in France. Whereas Driss Chraibi’s Les Boucs, published in 1955, describes the largely male community of North African workers, or Rachid Boudjedra’s Topographie idéale pour une agression caractériste {1975} depicts the alienation of a lone Arab toting his worldly belongings through the corridors of the Paris metro, Le Thé au ‘harem, whose author is himself a member of the “nouvelle génér- ation,’ focuses on both the community of adolescents and their familial situations within the French social order." Le Thé au harem is dedicated to the author's mother: “Pour Mebarka, méme si elle ne sait pas lire,” and indeed it is Malika, Madjid's mother in the novel, who sustains her own family in addition to providing support and recourse for her neighbors. Whether in intervening to prevent Levesque from brutalizing his wife, or by taking Stéphane, the young son of Josette, while his divorced mother looks for work, Malika contributes to the estab- lishment of communal ties among the inhabitants of the HLM, ties which then bind family to family, nationality to nationality. Camus's Meursault was condemned by the French judicial system as much for failing to cry at his mother's funeral as for killing an Arab. Malika, by contrast, augurs, even in her role as mother, the eventual transition to a social order beyond alliances of genealogy, religion, or ethnicity. Madjid, her son, stands1281 RESISTANCE LITERATURE ambiguously within that transition, Although contemptuous of © his parents’ failure to succeed in French life, he loyally if be- : grudgingly escorts his father to and from the bistro where he ! spends his days. The old man, injured in a work-related accident | and no longer able to take care of himself, much less his family, symbolizes the impotence of the traditional Ara culture. The “nouvelle génération," dismissed in popular French : rhetoric as ‘‘delinquent,"" has been described by Tahar Ben | Jelloun as a “generation destined for cultural orphanhood and ontological fragility." (HF, 116) Le Thé au harem dramatizes this ; precarious “‘orphanhood"' of the young North African in France in its narrative exposé of Madjid's tortured relationship to his , Arab family and to the French state. Meursault's murder of the Arab resonates in the violent attacks on North African Arabs in France today. The cultural strategy of Le Thé cu harem d’Archi | Ahmed is to respond by deploying stereotypes in such a way as to undermine their power and by manipulating language, Arabic, argot, and accent, to challenge the sway of classical conventions. ' Meursault’s failure to realize any social or intimate relationships is reworked in the space of Charef's novel where Madjid and Pat speak the language of "Touche pas a mon te," the language not of folk culture, nor even of national culture, but a popular language of collective resistance. The politics of theory According to Armand Mattelart ‘“The very notion of theory does not escape the contingency of the criteria of relevance which each culture elaborates for it, nor the blind spols which it culti- vates.”" What is crucial, he goes on, is the need to “restore to the cultural interplay of international relations their sociological and historical weight.” (CCD, 10-12] Not only for Mattelart, but for the writers of resistance literature and the theorists of the resist- ance struggle, cultural production plays a decisive and critical role in the activation of what Edward Said has referred to as a “repressed or resistant history." Resistance literature calls attention to itself, and to literature in general, as a political and politicized activity. The literature of resistance sees itself further- more as immediately and directly involved in a struggle against ‘THE THEORETICAL-HISTORICAL CONTEXT 1291 ascendant or dominant forms of ideological and cultural pro- juction. onsine danger, however, no less threatening than the external oppression resulting from policies of imperialism, colonialism and underdevelopment with which the resistance movements Contend, is that of a failure to acknowledge the limitations of their Gwn historical role. As Maxime Rodinson warned in his intro- Guction to People without a Country: the Kurds and Kurdistan: Ideology always goes for the simplest solutions. It does not argue that an oppressed people is to be defended because it is oppressed and to the exact extent to which it is oppressed. On the contrary, the oppressed are sanctified and every aspect of their actions, their culture, their past, present and future behaviour is presented as admirable. Direct or indirect narciss- ism takes over and the fact that the oppressed are oppressed becomes less important than the admirable way they are them- selves. The slightest criticism is seen as criminal sacrilege. In particular, it becomes quite inconceivable that the oppressed t themselves be oppressing others. In an ideological con: ception, such an admission would imply that the object of admiration was flawed and hence in some sense deserving of past or present oppression. Resistance organizations and national liberation movements rep- resent a collective and concerted struggle against hegemonic domination and oppression. They are not, however, without their own internal contradictions and debates, as Rodinson points cout in signalling the dangers of too monolithic or uncritical an image of such movements and struggles. But itis precisely these self-critical controversies that sustain the movements’ active ‘agency in the historical arena of world politics and the struggle for culture which need to be theoretically elaborated and given their full “historical and sociological weight ‘While itis urgent that the contemporary resistance movements ‘and national liberation organizations assume their full role in the historical arena of decolonization, it is likewise important that they not be confined by the First World imagination to what Gayatri Spivak has criticized as mere representative allegories ofRESISTANCE LITERATURE “correct political practice.’ The dynamics of debate in which the cultural politics of resistance are engaged challenge both the monolithic historiographical practices of domination and the unidimensional responses of dogma to them. Amilcar Cabral, wielding the ‘weapon of theory,"' wrote that: “The national liberation of a people is the regaining of the kistori- | cal personality of that people, itis their return to history through the destruction of the imperialist domination to which they have © been subjected.”’ (US, 130) Whereas the social and the personal have tended to displace the political in western literary ard cul- tural studies, the emphasis in the literature of resistance ison the Political as the power to change the world. The theory of resist- ance literature is i Wi Resistance poetr ry Zorgive me for having helped you understand you're not made of words alone. Rogue Dalton ~ "Bf Salvador" Poetry and resistance Nicolls Guillén is one of Cuba's most i poets and director of the National Asso¢fation of Cuban Writers. As a poet, Guillén, who was born jf 1902, participated in the early stages of Cuba's national libgfation in this century, then in the Cuban revolution, and congifues to act in the councils and government of post-revolutioylary Cuba.' As a poet too, he has consistently presented his rp&ders with the challenge to assert the viability of their own Cun and Latin American culture and its, historical past. In a pogm entitled “Problems of underdevelop- jortant contemporary iffler has started shouting you don't know the day (the’exact one) when Bismarck died.