by Paul Bowles
The Sheltering Sky is especially open to what Agamben has identified as the work of art’s potentiality to be something other than what it is, “the prologue . . . of a work never penned.” The novel’s emphasis on movement at once connects it to a postwar sense of American mobility and permits an opening to the idea that American mobility has a limit. Though Agamben suggests that one is always not writing the work implied by the potentiality of the present work, stepping back from The Sheltering Sky permits us a sense that Bowles discovers, albeit ambivalently and in the margins, an interruption to the American project of reordering American national identity in the empty space of frontier. That interruption is figured in the text as the interruption of untranslated Arabic; as the impossible dialogue with the Maghrebi subject; and, in the future of Bowles’s work, as a collaboration with the Maghrebi.
Bowles frequently inserts untranslated Maghrebi Arabic in the novel, an inclusion that is, at first, disorienting. Since language is considered by Port and Kit to be a kind of two-dimensional screen, the inclusion of Arabic phrases and sentences might at first seem mere decoration. Within French texts set in North Africa, such phrases might adorn or provide local color and familiar foreignness, with a glossary to help.[27] But in The Sheltering Sky, there is no glossary, no French proximity; Arabic does not conform to the Americans’ screen. Port and Kit speak French, but when Algerian characters speak Arabic, the Americans are uncomfortable: “the language barrier annoyed him, and he was even more irritated by the fact that [they] could converse together in his presence.” When Algerian characters address the Americans in Arabic, the phrases are for the most part straightforward: “Ya sidi, la bess âlik? Eglès, baraka ’laou’fik’”, a prostitute says to Port (“‘Sir, are you well? Please sit down.’”). Because Bowles leaves the phrases untranslated, they become textual interruptions for the American reader. And since the phrases that Bowles includes are not necessary to advance the plot, they stand out all the more strongly as marks. The words he gives to Algerians stand for disruption.
This textual interruption challenges the reader—as the sound of it challenges Port—to acknowledge the limits in Henry Luce’s proposition of an American Century. The difference of Arabic is not erased or translated; rather, it is emphasized. This disruption is repeated in the startling narrative rupture of Port’s death, which leads to the important shift of focus to Kit and her sexual relationship with Belqassim. As he dies, Port’s project of pioneering a new relationship to national identity breaks down. The failure of language to protect Port from the nothingness behind language is imagined in spatial terms. If Port’s journey leads to a place of “exile from the world”, it is because words lose their stability for him. Thus, the name of the town where Port dies (Sbâ) becomes a kind of joke when language fails to function; without that anchor, “Sbâ” becomes an arbitrary word marking an equally arbitrary place. With Port’s death, Kit too loses her ability to designate her own relationship to the world and enters a long silence. Words cease to make sense to her: “Once she almost laughed, it seemed so ridiculously unlikely. ‘Sbâ,’ she said, prolonging the vowel so that it sounded like the bleat of a sheep.” If Kit greets the contingency of language with laughter, the “joy of being” she vows to hold on to once abandoning language’s shelter leads to her deterioration. When the “earth’s sharp edge” turns back to reveal a terrifying nothingness, which is what the sky apparently shelters us from, it is a warning that language will do the same. Language, like Port’s American passport, is a sheltering screen, protective because disciplined. The ridiculousness of words, of place names, of markers opens up a potentiality within the work, that which it might have been. Kit’s embrace of Belqassim, and the narrative’s embrace of their relationship, in the context of the intertwined domestic and global referents of the Cold War, is an important turn. It allows Bowles to restage radically the American global encounter in terms that more fully disrupt Luce’s model than other contemporary novels. That sexual relationship could of course be read in 1949 or 1950 in a domestic context, within which it disturbed a racist culture and also titillated it. But the novel refuses simply to offer American miscegenation as its meaning and insists on an extranational referent. The potentiality embedded in these dual disruptions is Bowles’s greatest contribution to thinking about the 1946-50 moment, a potentiality rapidly left behind by the Cold War and its modes of thinking—but one that we may now recover.
3. Letters from Morocco: The Refusal
[O]ne is what one is . . . that is, until one changes.
—Bowles, In Touch
The difference of untranslated Arabic that in 1949 might challenge the transparency of Luce’s American Century could in later political and economic contexts signify the difference that American-based global capital seeks to incorporate. And the potentiality that emerges from these disruptive moments will eventually lead Bowles to a refusal to continue in the mode of his first novel. Such will lead to intense collaboration with the Maghrebi.
Bowles’s subsequent two novels, Let It Come Down and The Spider’s House, open themselves up further to Maghrebi voices and subjectivities, against which is juxtaposed the various restrictions of American national identity. Bowles’s journalism too makes a decisive turn toward listening to Maghrebi voices, both in his travel pieces and his political essays. If some of the latter resemble more literate versions of reports by foreign service officers in the field—in a 1951 article for the American Mercury, Bowles discusses the inhospitality of the idea of communism to Muslims and suggests the vulnerability of educated Moroccan elite to propaganda—their turn toward conversations with the Maghrebi coincides with a refusal to maintain the positive frame that underlies such analysis. “I’m heading south,” Bowles ends his Mercury article (“No More Djinns”). The essay suggests not only that “Morocco” is impossible to judge because of the inherent unreliability of testimony but that Cold War binarisms themselves are impossible to maintain once one moves from the abstraction of the general to an engagement with the particular.
Increased conversation with the Maghrebi leads Bowles, in the postcolonial period, to a new textual politics and to projects that most firmly challenge the categories of national literature. Bowles’s extended project of gathering and translating the tales of illiterate Moroccan authors is still underappreciated. This project, as Allen Hibbard has argued in Paul Bowles: A Study of the Short Fiction, affected Bowles’s late prose style, itself an important interruption to Eurocentric ideas about literary influence. Further, the very project disfigures the disciplinary frames by which the US academy has taught us to apprehend “American literature.” With one Moroccan in particular, Mohammed Mrabet, Bowles engaged in an extended project. The analphabetic Mrabet dictated to Bowles, in colloquial Moroccan Arabic, stories, novels, and an autobiography; together, they published 12 books, with both names on the title page, and published first in English. There is no “original” Arabic edition available or even possible without a further translation of the unwritten Moroccan dialect into standard Arabic. This collaboration has been controversial in Morocco, where it challenged the nationalists’ ideas about standard Arabic, as well as those Francophone Maghrebi writers who critiqued the nationalists—the Francophone author Tahar Ben Jelloun called it “a bastard literature.” But it has barely registered in the US, where it has seemed a marginal project that does not conform to our categories of American, African, or Arab literatures.[28] Yet if we listen to those Moroccan critics who propose Bowles as the leader of al-adab at-Tanji, many of the categories within which Bowles is generally considered are best left behind.
After 9/11, the definitive end of the American Century, there is a critical necessity to reflect back on the potentialities suppressed by Cold War reading practices. Because The Sheltering Sky represents the encounter of Americans with the foreign during a transitional moment in cultural and political history, the novel is especially open to misreadings that mistake its representation of the Maghreb as mere ex
oticism, as a translation of the foreign for the domestic market. That exoticism is surely present. But as I have argued, the novel sits uneasily in such a frame and discovers a challenging relationship to the borderless North African Berber, figured as linguistic disruption. In summoning up misreadings of Bowles’s work, I am attempting to read through them and the conditions that produce them. If a less rigid sense of the nation and of national literature results, it is surely not my suggestion that such formulations should be abandoned or that they have no meaning. Neither is it my contention that Cold War binarisms have not left a strong residue in post-9/11 US foreign relations; the fact that they so obviously have means that the work to locate other paradigms for imagining the place of America(ns) in the world is urgent. At the same time as The Sheltering Sky quietly challenged the logic of the American Century, however, it also figured the engagement of individuals across national borders in a way that underlined—even exacerbated—the disjuncture between the space of cultural production and the realm of foreign relations, a separation familiar and frustrating to us today. My modest hope for this reading, then, is that it may help recuperate and trace the routes of influence of global politics on American and other literatures, as well as the routes of influence of American cultural production on global politics. My more ambitious hope is that we may make progress on the bridge from cultural production—including critique—to that otherwise untouchable space of foreign relations.
Notes
[1] See John Sutherland, “Distant Episodes” and Francine Prose, “The Coldest Eye.”
[2] More accurately, in the 1950s, Bowles lamented the encounter of Arab nationalism with Western modernity and consumer culture.
[3] A brilliant exception is Millicent Dillon’s You Are Not I: A Portrait of Paul Bowles.
[4] Mullins’s recent study of gay male writers in Tangier is strong on questions of desire and marginality in Bowles’s literary work. But it also exemplifies how the tendency to see Bowles’s career as dissociated from geopolitical concerns is reinforced by the lack of a broader archive of Moroccan materials that would allow critics without the language training or opportunity to research in the Maghreb to challenge it. Mullins argues: “American expatriate writers inhabit the legacy of American and Moroccan political history” (14). But for Mullins, the assertion that Bowles was “firmly grounded within modernism” (25) means that his work was detached from the world and geography (a position about Modernism that Mullins curiously attributes to Edward Said). This conclusion authorizes Mullins to make only loose references to political history. Francine Prose’s introduction to the 2003 Ecco edition of The Spider’s House calls the novel a “textbook” of anti-American attitudes. The metaphor not only signals her fundamental misreading of the novel but also suggests the pedagogical failure of previous Bowles scholarship to offer an alternative to her view.
[5] This period is the intersection of the early Cold War and the postcolonial. After 1973, there is an epistemic shift—caused in large part by the increased globalization of the economy; the acceleration of global movement of peoples, finances, and technology; and the Vietnam War—that alters the conditions for American representations of the “foreign.” See chapter six of my Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express.
[6] During Bowles’s time in Tangier, the population of the city grew from 50,000 to nearly one million. The primary source of this population explosion was the migration of rural Moroccans to the cities, not tourism.
[7] Melani McAlister has argued that US discourse relating to the Middle East since 1945 is marked by “post-Orientalism,” wherein “American power worked very hard to fracture the old European logic and to install new frameworks” (Epic Encounters 11). There is much to recommend in McAlister’s book. However, she defines Said’s concept of Orientalism rather starkly as “binary, feminizing, and citational” (Epic Encounters 12). She thereby misses the crucial element of Said’s definition that would challenge her own claim, namely the “corporate” aspect of Orientalism and its relationship to “institutions” (such as the media central to her project).
[8] In the Rough Guide to Morocco (4th ed., 1993), by Mark Ellingham etal., Bowles is included both in the “Contexts” section for his writing and translations and in the Tangier chapter as a living site.
[9] The emergence of Arab television station al-Jazeera as a counter to CNN offers a potent example. See Mohammed el-Nawawy and Adel Iskander, Al-Jazeera: How the Free Arab News Network Scooped the World and Changed the Middle East.
[10] In his preface to a 1982 reprint of the novel, Bowles commented on al-Fassi’s response. Moroccan obituaries also refer to al-Fassi’s appreciation; Muhammad Abu Talib disputes it.
[11] See Salah Sbyea, “L’Amant de Tanger” and Mohamed El Gahs, “Pain Nu.”
[12] Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1990 film adaptation, while receiving mixed reviews and modest box-office success, occasioned enough attention to bring yet another generation of readers to the novel. Bertolucci’s misreading of the novel has itself been influential. His failure to render the novel’s deep concern with French colonialism, his decision to film the novel as an epic, and the nostalgic tone of the film for imperialism are significant errors of interpretation.
[13] Simultaneously, Henry Nash Smith was writing Virgin Land (1950), which critiqued Turner’s thesis but maintained its basic premise: that American national identity was formed in relation to (myths of) open spaces. Smith’s analysis of the expansion of the US empire in the nineteenth century emerges in the context of post-World War II US global expansion, but it does not address that coincidence. We should extend Alan Trachtenberg’s well-known critique of this foundational text of American studies: not only did Smith separate myth and symbol too starkly from industrialization; he also failed to account for how his account and its institutional location were coincident with and indebted to post-World War II global expansion. The stakes of this failure are woven into the Americanist enterprise of the postwar period.
[14] For a contemporary Arab critique of Point Four, see George Hakim, “Point Four and the Middle East: A Middle East View.” In a later essay, Mustafa El Azzou investigates efforts by US businessmen to influence policy toward Morocco before independence. See El Azzou, “Les hommes d’affaires américains au Maroc avant 1956.”
[15] In chapter one of Morocco Bound, I discuss US journalists, such as Ernie Pyle and A. J. Liebling, who covered the 1942-43 North African campaign. Pyle described Arabic as “noise” or “garble.”
[16] Memissi mentions the song in her account of the US occupation of Morocco during World War II in Dreams of Trespass. Jamila Bargach has recently offered an extended critical reading of the song and includes a transliteration of the lyrics and a literal translation. Recordings of Slaoui’s song are easy to find in Morocco.
[17] Bowles uses his own translation of the lyrics. He does not attribute the song to Slaoui but calls it “a popular song in Moghrebi Arabic of the 1950s” (Points in Time 92).
[18] See my essay “The Well-Built Wall of Culture: Old New York and Its Harems,” on Edith Wharton’s intertwined thinking about France, Morocco and the US.
[19] See Hassan II, La mémoire d’un roi: Entretiens avec Eric Laurent (18); US Office of Strategie Services, Morocco; and William Hoisington, Jr., The Casablanca Connection: French Colonial Policy, 1936-1943 (284fn73). In 1948, the State Department noted the legacy of FDR’s comments in North Africa; see US State Department, Foreign Relations of the United States 1948 (3:684).
[20] See US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States 1943 (4:741) and Pennell (263-64).
[21] See my discussion of time lag in US representations of Morocco during World War II in “Preposterous Encounters.”
[22] Algeria had drought and dismal crops in 1945 and 1947; in Morocco, 1945 was known as “the year of hunger” (Pennell 268); Tunisia was threatened by famine in 1947. See Vernon McKay, “France’s Future in Nort
h Africa” (299).
[23] See Vernon McKay, “France’s Future in North Africa” (300); Wall, France, the United States, and the Algerian War (11); US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States 1947 (5:682fn).
[24] McAlister emphasizes the “knitted-together power of a discourse” (Epic 276) and the “continuous relationship” between the cultural field and “other fields in the larger social system” (7): “Foreign policy is one of the ways in which nations speak for themselves” (6). In “putting Orientalism in its place” (12), McAlister’s “postOrientalist” approach (11) mistakenly collapses the institutional space between cultural production and foreign policy. Elsewhere, she dispenses with Said’s own account of US Orientalism, which attends to this space, as “the least nuanced and interesting of [Orientalism]” (“Edward Said” 553). For her, this is because it is “focused primarily on policymakers’ statements or the work of area studies scholars” and is “essentially an ideological critique of US foreign policy” (553). Unlike McAlister, Douglas Little accepts the Saidian framework in his political history: “something very like Said’s Orientalism seems subconsciously to have shaped US popular attitudes and foreign policies toward the Middle East” (10). Yet there is no discussion of the way “culture” works to shape attitudes; for Little, the process remains “subconscious” or via “subliminal messages.” For an account of misreadings of Said and an argument about Said’s greater interest in institutions over discourse, see Timothy Brennan, “The Illusion of a Future: Orientalism as Traveling Theory.”
