Meg Weisberg | Wesleyan University (original) (raw)
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In his 1990 novel, Nazīf al-Ḥajar (The Bleeding of the Stone), Tuareg writer Ibrahim al-Koni draw... more In his 1990 novel, Nazīf al-Ḥajar (The Bleeding of the Stone), Tuareg writer Ibrahim al-Koni draws on Tuareg practices and Sufi mysticism to depict the Sahara desert as inclusive, in proportion, balanced. The desert in this novel is both painstakingly specific and literal and also entirely mythological (usṭurīya), which serves as a device to call into question the legitimacy or even reality of neocolonial power structures. By putting this novel in conversation with Western theories of categorization (following Agamben’s work on the human-animal distinction), and looking at intertextual resonances with the Buddhist Jātaka tale, The Banyan Deer, explicit and implicit references to Islamic scriptures, and the preponderance of Sufi and Tuareg imagery and symbolism, I argue that this novel questions the primacy or validity of Western novelistic and philosophical structures, and offers an alternative, spiritually-based “reading” of the desert as both metaphor and ecosystem, based on balance and interconnection.
This article examines postcolonial representations of the jungle and the desert, focusing on two... more This article examines postcolonial representations of the jungle and the desert, focusing on two novels in particular: Étienne Goyémidé’s Le silence de la forêt (1984) and Tahar Djaout’s L’invention du désert (1987). Postcolonial literary representations of these “extreme” landscapes are layered with allusions and almost always engage in an intertextual conversation with the colonial genres that influenced readers’ conception of these spaces. The specificity of jungle and desert serves in contemporary postcolonial literature as a foil to homogenizing forces of both the past and the present, as seen in the stylistic techniques authors employ to depict these spaces. These stylistic techniques often work in two seemingly opposing directions: they “naturalize” landscapes that are often portrayed as inhuman and contrast them to the “unnatural” structures of colonial and postcolonial society, while at the same time embodying and claiming the distortion or disorientation inherent in those landscapes. These complex, multifaceted, geographically rooted descriptions, which incorporate and react to a variety of historical and cultural factors, take what I call an ecosystem approach, rather than continuing to rely on a false nature/culture division.
In his 1990 novel, Nazīf al-Ḥajar (The Bleeding of the Stone), Tuareg writer Ibrahim al-Koni draw... more In his 1990 novel, Nazīf al-Ḥajar (The Bleeding of the Stone), Tuareg writer Ibrahim al-Koni draws on Tuareg practices and Sufi mysticism to depict the Sahara desert as inclusive, in proportion, balanced. The desert in this novel is both painstakingly specific and literal and also entirely mythological (usṭurīya), which serves as a device to call into question the legitimacy or even reality of neocolonial power structures. By putting this novel in conversation with Western theories of categorization (following Agamben’s work on the human-animal distinction), and looking at intertextual resonances with the Buddhist Jātaka tale, The Banyan Deer, explicit and implicit references to Islamic scriptures, and the preponderance of Sufi and Tuareg imagery and symbolism, I argue that this novel questions the primacy or validity of Western novelistic and philosophical structures, and offers an alternative, spiritually-based “reading” of the desert as both metaphor and ecosystem, based on balance and interconnection.
This article examines postcolonial representations of the jungle and the desert, focusing on two... more This article examines postcolonial representations of the jungle and the desert, focusing on two novels in particular: Étienne Goyémidé’s Le silence de la forêt (1984) and Tahar Djaout’s L’invention du désert (1987). Postcolonial literary representations of these “extreme” landscapes are layered with allusions and almost always engage in an intertextual conversation with the colonial genres that influenced readers’ conception of these spaces. The specificity of jungle and desert serves in contemporary postcolonial literature as a foil to homogenizing forces of both the past and the present, as seen in the stylistic techniques authors employ to depict these spaces. These stylistic techniques often work in two seemingly opposing directions: they “naturalize” landscapes that are often portrayed as inhuman and contrast them to the “unnatural” structures of colonial and postcolonial society, while at the same time embodying and claiming the distortion or disorientation inherent in those landscapes. These complex, multifaceted, geographically rooted descriptions, which incorporate and react to a variety of historical and cultural factors, take what I call an ecosystem approach, rather than continuing to rely on a false nature/culture division.