Points in Time

by Paul Bowles

  Morocco was “bound,” indeed. Toledano’s understanding of the richness of the Maghreb is built on the erasure of the incomprehensible aspects, especially Arabic language, occluded as “noise” or gibberish.[15] The only illustration in Toledano’s article is a line of magnified Arabic, the visual presence of which starkly interrupts the column of text: “The hieroglyphics stare at you,” Toledano writes forebodingly, “from buses, stores, and even from the walls of Le Roi de la Bière [a café-bar].” But no sooner is this threatening mark of difference quoted than it is translated, à la Luce, into a market of difference: “It means Coca Cola in Arabic. An American who had formerly been in the diplomatic service obtained this franchise for Morocco.” The interruption of Arabic for Toledano, then, and of Arab difference for US corporations is no interruption at all but the decorative space of another market. This contrasts sharply with what Bowles will do with untranslated Arabic. For Bowles, the mark of difference opens the potentiality for a different relationship to the Maghreb—and, thereby, to Americanness itself.

  Moroccans did note the arrival of American consumer culture, and some commented on it. The Moroccan folksinger Houcine Slaoui (1918-51) sang mordantly, “zin u l’ain az-zarqa jana bkul khir” (“the beautiful blue-eyed ones brought us all good things”). Slaoui’s song “Al Mirikan” (“The Americans”), written and first performed shortly after the 1942 landings, is an anthem of the era. With its references to “shwing” (i.e. chewing gum) and cosmetics polluting Morocco, the song stands as a rejoinder to Toledano’s account of the seamlessness of the entry of American products. In incorporating American language into its lyrics—“OK, OK, come on, bye-bye” is the refrain—Slaoui highlights the interruption of American words within the Moroccan cultural landscape. But he also remakes those American words into Moroccan ones by his pronunciation and by having them repeated by a high-pitched chorus of Berber women, familiar within music of the Middle Atlas. Despite his fame in the Maghreb, Slaoui and his challenging voice remain silent within most American accounts of the US presence in 1940s Maghreb.[16]

  Bowles includes the lyrics to Slaoui’s song in Points in Time, his 1982 lyrical history of Morocco. Though he offers no comment, his suggestion is that US arrival marks a rupture in Moroccan history. Bowles’s invocation of Slaoui’s song suggests a refusal to follow a seamless American translation of the Maghreb.[17] A related suggestion emerges within The Sheltering Sky: that the encounter of Americans with the Maghreb is disruptive to US thinking about North Africa, an interruption to the reapplication of the frontier myth. This will be signaled by two Bowlesian tactics: his incorporation of untranslated Arabic to figure that disruption and produce it within the text; and the narrative turn toward Kit’s relationship with Belqassim, a nomadic Touareg. Because global and domestic politics were deeply intertwined in the early Cold War, the latter turn is complicated. Kit’s relationship with Belqassim might for the novel’s first readers evoke the threat of sexual congress between white women and African-Americans. Her embrace of Belqassim also permits the novel to explore the escape from national identification: the Touareg are antagonists of the nation form; they are identified with no nation-state and are in retreat from Moroccan and Algerian national culture. These possibilities suggest both a part of the reason for the novel’s success in the marketplace—its ability to be recast as lurid exoticism—and Bowles’s disruption of dominant Cold War understandings of North Africa and the North African. Understanding this disruption helps explain more than Bowles’s novel: it helps approach how literary and diplomatic representations of the foreign setting confront, build their cases off of, and, in Bowles’s case, evade or rewrite the same set of categories.

  The period during which Paul Bowles was writing The Sheltering Sky and the immediate context of its publication (1947-50) was a key transitional moment in US relations with France. France, the largest recipient of Marshall Plan aid, was vital to US interests; and to Cold Warriors, it seemed fragile. There were domestic referents for this fragility—the continual fall of governments under the French constitution of 1946, which established the Fourth Republic—and international ones, particularly France’s increasingly tense relations with its colonies in Indochina and North Africa. In The United States and the Making of Postwar France, 1945-1954, Irwin Wall argues that, in the early Cold War, the US was “drawn into a network of western institutions and alliances of the postwar era rather than, as is more commonly depicted, [establishing] its role as creator or innovator.” If we are to examine US Orientalism, whether in literary and cultural production or in political history, it follows then that we must do so comparatively and extend Wall’s thesis: that US thinking about North Africa was framed by French thinking about the Maghreb. This will not mean that domestic American concerns—particularly regarding race—would not play a powerful role in US foreign relations. But, as I argue in Morocco Bound: Disorienting America’s Maghreb, from Casablanca to the Marrakech Express, when American writers, journalists, filmmakers, anthropologists, and diplomats looked at the Maghreb, they attended to European colonials as much as they did to putatively exotic Maghrebis; their attitudes about one group were impossible to separate fully from their observations about the other.[18] For the US State Department in the late 1940s, that dual attention was of strategic importance.

  The same war that the characters of The Sheltering Sky are attempting to escape was being replayed by US business interests (the second “invasion”) and the State Department, haunted by strategic decisions made during World War II. Most important of those wartime decisions was the US decision to leave French colonial structures in place in the Maghreb—what historian William Langer justified in 1947 as “Our Vichy Gamble”—despite US propaganda circulated in Morocco and Algeria at the time of the November 1942 Operation Torch landings publicizing the Four Freedoms and the Atlantic Charter (which declared US “respect [for] the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they live”). In the context of that propaganda, conversations between Franklin Roosevelt and the Sultan of Morocco, Sidi Mohammed, in January 1943 were interpreted to promise US support for Moroccan independence.[19] Yet the US declined Sidi Mohammed’s offer to declare war on Germany and Italy, not willing to imply a commitment to the Sultan over Charles de Gaulle, with the announcement that European colonies would only be independent when their leaders could govern themselves properly, a formula familiar within late-colonial rhetoric and one that lurked at the heart of postwar US thinking.[20]

  It was also a formulation familiar within domestic conversations about race, namely the invocation of what Michael Hanchard calls “racial time.” The cultural importance of the North African campaign during World War II, as it was relayed to the US home front via mainstream journalism and war films such as Casablanca, was, as I have argued elsewhere, to distract America attention away from an alliance of African-Americans and North Africans, both being colonized peoples (“Preposterous Encounters”). The US deferral of Maghrebi independence is thus a powerful example of racial time, which Hanchard argues has operated as a “structural effect upon the politics of racial difference” and is one of the ways that racial difference, the materiality of which is elusive, neither reified and static nor mere social construct, has material effects on individual and group interaction.[21] The connection between the US deferral of Maghrebi independence and racialist thinking in the domestic US is more than metaphor. Penny Von Eschen and Thomas Borstelmann have shown the deep interplay of foreign relations and domestic racial politics after World War II, which Borstelmann calls “central to the American experience of the early Cold War.” Borstelmann sees the escalation of such connections after the war as part of a global reconfiguration: “The swelling tide of racial tension and violence that rolled through the American South in 1946 and 1947 was part of a global phenomenon of race relations being reconfigured in the aftermath of the defeat of history’s most murderous racists, the Nazis.” In official American thinking about the Maghreb, t
hen, there was an interplay of racialized thinking (the domestic referent in response to the global reconfiguration) with the tendency to see the region as the French framed it. Bowles’s writing, starting with The Sheltering Sky, reflected this interplay. It also refigured it.

  From his arrival at Casablanca in Summer 1947, Bowles was writing his novel in a climate in which Maghrebi nationalist claims against the French were unmistakable; his letters make this clear. It was a tense period in the Maghreb, as several years of drought exacerbated complaints against French treatment.[22] The French had responded to an uprising at Setif, Algeria, in May 1945 by slaughtering thousands of Algerians, just as they had killed thousands of Tunisians who rose up to protest the deposing of Moncef Bey two years earlier. In April 1947, the French killed hundreds at Casablanca.[23] In February 1947, at the Conference of the Arab Maghreb in Cairo, Maghrebi participants—representatives of the Moroccan Istiqlal (Independence) movement, the Tunisian Destour party, and the Parti Populaire Algérienne—declared the protectorate treaties over Morocco and Tunisia terminated and stated their “non-recognition of the rights of France over Algeria,” demanding the evacuation from their territories of “foreign forces” (US Department of State, FRUS 1947). The conference was noted by the US. Though the US had given aid to Moroccans during the famine, it maintained a delicate line: urging French reforms but worrying about the allegiance of nationalists and French communists and a continued belief in political “evolution” of Maghrebi leaders and a gradual “time table” for independence. If there was a theoretical inclination toward an anticolonial position, US interests in France kept it in check. As journalist Demaree Bess wrote in 1949, “In theory, many Americans may still disapprove of the European colonial system. In practice, the US is reinforcing it.”

  After Sidi Mohammed made an influential visit to Tangier in April 1947, a turning point in popularizing the independence movement, US Secretary of State George Marshall became anxious about France’s “short range conception” in its dealings with North Africa and expressed a sense of urgency regarding the implementation of reforms (US Department of State, FRUS 1947). But by mid-1949, despite no improvement and a harsher, more conservative French administration in Morocco, the State Department relaxed. As the Cold War deepened, the US listened increasingly to French proposals for dealing with the colonies’ demands for independence. The Marshall Plan aid to France had begun with food and raw materials in 1948; in 1949 and 1950, military assistance took center stage (the larger shift toward military buildup was codified in March 1950 with NSC-68; by 1953-54, the US would be bankrolling nearly the entire French war in Indochina). The 1950 US policy statement on North Africa bears close reading:

  Our policy has been to encourage the French on all appropriate occasions to put forward a program of political, economic and social reforms which would lessen the resentment of the natives toward France and would assure their gradual evolution toward self-government. We believe, however . . . that France is the country best suited to have international responsibility for Morocco. We have therefore avoided putting pressure on France by giving aid and comfort to the natives directly, although we maintain open contact with them, and consider their friendship and good will very important. (US Department of State, FRUS 1950)

  That dual tone—diplomatic civility and economic patronage for the French versus paternalism regarding the “gradual evolution” of the “natives” with whom “open contact” is maintained—crystallizes the contradictions of the US attitude toward French colonies. The tension inherent in such a position manifests itself in the last sentence, where “open contact” with the “natives” is kept in check by the refusal of direct “comfort,” a formula of desire and disgust.

  Given this context, how do we reread The Sheltering Sky? Before pursuing Bowles’s dual disruption—his representation of Moroccan language and the narrative embrace of the Touareg—I offer a methodological warning. While literature representing the foreign and foreign relations may emerge out of the same historical context, the disparity between the institutional locations from which the novel and foreign relations operate maintains a gulf between them in terms of material effect. We are mistaken if we read literary production as somehow engaging political history on equal grounds—grounds made equal by the space of criticism—as has been a common temptation within American studies in the wake of Said’s work. Such a temptation, however well-intended, is based on a misreading of Said and a failure to attend to his emphasis on questions of institutions rather than on “discourse.”[24] Such arguments ultimately rely on the transparency of literature and its continuity within a land of “discourse” rather than on recognizing its divergence from political discourse. As Giles puts it trenchantly, such work “hold[s] in suspension those conditions whereby the progressivist formulas of American studies would—naturally, as it were—underwrite a rhetoric of emancipation.” Though invocations of the international are now common, my sense is that much Americanist work that references the international holds in suspension the disjuncture between cultural production and foreign relations, as it does that between US cultural production (as diverse as it is) and that emerging from other national, diasporic, and linguistic traditions. Institutional disincentives to multisited, multilingual work contribute to the methodological bind. My insistence on comparative work and the interruption of a Moroccan archive is meant to challenge those formulas.

  As an alternative imagination of the relationship of literature to political history, Gayatri Spivak’s distinction between philosophy and literature is helpful: “the first concatenates arguments and the second figures the impossible.”[25] Such a distinction attends to the institutional locations within which the critic works and provokes her assertion of the unavoidability of the role of the native informant. Spivak’s statement provides the critical space to attend to Bowles’s departure from the national episteme as a figuration that matters to foreign relations. His interruption of the American national subject—one with whom he can barely identify and will drop—within a novel allegedly concerned with the pioneering of a new American identity is thus seen not as a irredeemable contradiction but rather as an impossible figuration. That such an interruption is provoked by Bowles’s acknowledgment of the “native informant” is crucial, as it is precisely that figure that allows Bowles’s disruption, his movement outside the logic of the American Century’s impulse to translate out or “foreclose” the native informant. “These people are not primitives,” Bowles’s protagonist realizes too late in the 1946 story “A Distant Episode.” How does this matter to foreign relations? If the novel departs from a national epistemology, it is the same on which the State Department necessarily rests, and the same that would be trumpeted hysterically in the months following its publication during the domestic Red Scare. That scare would not only reframe meanings of the foreign, both at home and abroad, but it would also anchor its hysteria on the idea of the reliable testimony of the (native) informant: that naming names could contain the spread of communism. The 1950 review quoted earlier—which suggested that Bowles return to the US to provide “native . . . reflections or refractions of everyday living”—demonstrates the interplay between literary representation of the foreign and the domestic crisis of McCarthyism, and its immediate relevance to Bowles’s case. Bowles’s emerging focus on the Maghrebi informant—concomitant with his exploration of various Americans’ departures—moves beyond the limiting frames of national identification.

  Bowles’s discovery of this departure in a novel that is about the simultaneity of physical and philosophical travel—“CANNOT GET BACK” is Kit’s telegram to the world—does not, however, provide readers with a tangible politics to follow. The second impossible figuration in The Sheltering Sky is the dissociation or distancing of American reading subjects from the developing political relationship to the Arab world that deeply informed Bowles’s novel and was thickly woven into the political and economic fortunes of the US. This distancing emerges from the
novel’s existentialist frame, within which the novel (influenced by Poe’s Dupin stories and Camus) suggests that what might be called the “truth of surfaces” offers a lesson about the proper relationship of individuals to existence (sheltered by a two-dimensional sky) and between individuals (who are granted recognition as masks). For Bowles, the “truth of surfaces” extends to the superficiality of language itself—the mannerisms of speech, the difference of foreign language as screen, as printed type—and will provide a figure for disrupting the national episteme. But the political effect of erecting this existentialist screen is in fact the inscription of distance between the (literary) representation of the foreign and foreign relations, and this unwittingly benefits the imperial state. Stepping back, then, Bowles may echo something like the process Giorgio Agamben has described by which the “state of exception” captures “bare life” within the political order while simultaneously excluding it (Homo Sacer). Indeed, most readers who followed Bowles to North Africa ended up following the “wrong” message. As early as 1951, Bowles lamented the arrival of young Americans who had come to Morocco to “explore” and for the hashish (“No More Djinns”); even those hippies who later evaded the US draft by traveling to Morocco more often took a kif-fueled “Marrakech express” than engaged the local population or political climate. Bowles himself had already moved decisively toward engagement with those Moroccans at the margins of national(ist) identification.[26] By attending to the geopolitical context of Bowles’s departure, I intend to make visible (and thereby bridge) the accompanying distance between realms of cultural production and foreign relations that is so beneficial to the state. That Bowles’s writing unwittingly helps to forge that distance is its limitation, but it still offers a potent figure for disrupting the processes that would discipline it.