Mikko Tuhkanen The American Optic, Psychoanalysis, Critical Race Theory, and Richard Wright (2009)

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.Moreover, Big-ger s transgression is enabled by the unintentional effects of racialization itself:as Stanley Edgar Hyman writes, it is the terror-inspired muscle tension thatunwittingly smothers Mary Dalton (2011), a crime that in turn allows Bigger sradical shift of perspective.In his consequent guerrilla warfare, Bigger learnshow to activate livery s more archaic usage, where it signifies the uniform of asoldier (OED).On the other hand, for Fanon s narrator, even his possible dis-appearance from visibility would not allow for the kind of agency that Biggerexperiences; his desire for inconspicuousness marks an acceptance of his place: I slip into corners, I remain silent, I strive for anonymity, for invisibility.Look,I will accept the lot, as long as no one notices me! (116).If the narrator of Black Skin thus remains inert and fixed, in Fanon s studyof the Algerian resistance movement, however, a visible sign similar to that ofthe black epidermis is mobilized by the colonized.Like blackness for the epi-dermalized subject, the ha�k17 marks a transgressive-yet-contained femininity,showing that the woman, by occupying public space, is transgressing her place.This encroachment on male space is tolerated only as long as it is made obvious,as long as the veil announces that women should ideally be inconspicuous(Odeh 33): The veil is an expression of the invisibility of women on the street, amale space par excellence.[It] means that the woman is present in the men sworld, but invisible; she has no right to be in the street (Mernissi 51, 84).18 AsRalph Ellison writes, it is such high visibility that secures black invisibility( Introduction xxv); similarly, while the veil renders the woman conspicuouslyout-of-place in the public sphere, [t]he Algerian man has an attitude towardthe Algerian women which is on the whole clear.He does not see her.Thereis even a permanent intention not to perceive the feminine profi le, not to payattention to women (Fanon, Dying 44).The veil in Algeria Unveiled, likeepidermalized blackness in Native Son and Black Skin, functions as a corporealinscription that announces the subject s rigid place in the symbolic order.This emphasis on visibility points to one of Fanon s most original andenduring insights, which bears repeating here: colonial power s demand thatnothing frustrate its desire for an all-encompassing surveillance.Others havesince corroborated and elaborated on his observations about Western observersvacillating feelings of romantic exoticism, aggressiveness, and [f]rustra-tion (Dying 43 44) when confronted with the veil.Edward Said, for example,points out the recurrent metaphors of secrecy, depth, and sexuality (Oriental-ism 222) in Orientalist descriptions.Judy Mabro similarly writes that, becausethe veil and the harem have prevented the observer from seeing and communi-cating with women, they have produced feelings of frustration and aggressivebehaviour in Western observers while tantalizing them with the promise ofexotic and erotic with the beauty behind the veil (2).19 Mabro echoes alsoFanon s argument of the veil s thwarting the colonial occupation by not onlyhiding but in fact giving women an unreciprocated visual access to the Westernvisitors (4 5).20UNFORESEEABLE TR AGEDIES 77In Fanon s famous analysis, the dialectics of (un)veiling and resistanceare initiated by the attempt of the French to conquer the Algerian nation byencouraging its women to abandon their traditions.In this, the colonizers rec-ognized the position of women as the symbolic repository of group identity, the privileged bearers of corporate identities and boundary markers of theircommunities (Kandiyoti 382, 388).Because women were thus the key sym-bols of the colony s cultural identity for both the colonizers and the colonized, [i]n the colonialist fantasy, to possess Algeria s women is to possess Algeria(Woodhull 19, 16).21 The strategy thus employed what Sharpley-Whiting calls colonial feminism, the alleged Western concern for the well-being and rightsof Muslim women (5, 67).22 Calls were made by school teachers and charityorganizations, by government officials and social workers, for Algerian womento renounce their male oppressors by doffing their veils:The dominant administration solemnly undertook to defend this woman,pictured as humiliated, sequestered, cloistered.It described the immensepossibilities of woman, unfortunately transformed by the Algerian man intoan inert, demonetized, indeed dehumanized object.The behavior of theAlgerian was very firmly denounced and described as medieval and barbaric.(Fanon, Dying 38; ellipsis in original)The colonizers sought to disrupt the native cultural economy by refiguring thecirculation of its women.According to the French propaganda, the Algerianwoman, hidden behind her veil and cloistered in her home, had been withdrawnfrom circulation, turned into an object devoid of exchange value.By monetizingfemale bodies, the occupiers sought to reconfigure and ultimately collapse theeconomy of Algerian life, which bred and nourished anticolonial resistance.Algerian women did take up the colonizers call, abandoning the veil and join-ing the traffic of the colonial city: These test-women, with bare faces and freebodies, henceforth circulated like sound currency in the European society ofAlgeria (42).Yet, the French failed to see that the Algerians, radically trans-formed into [European women], poised and unconstrained (57), had enteredthe circulation as counterfeits, passing in the occupiers economy like queermoney.Such passing conferred on them what Bigger realizes as his queer senseof power (203): in an ingenious strategy of perverting the opponents perspec-tive, they were able to move in and out of enemy territory, perfectly visible yetunreadable for the colonizers gaze.When the French found out about the terrorist tactics of the Europe-anized women since certain militant women had spoken under torture(61) the veil was reassumed, again for revolutionary ends: a new techniquehad to be learned: how to carry a rather heavy object dangerous to handleunder the veil and still give the impression of having one s hands free, that therewas nothing under the ha�k, except a poor woman or an insignificant younggirl (61).In the intense emotive politics of dress (McClintock 365), the ha�k78 THE AMERICAN OPTICbegins to function as a decoy that can be mobilized either way, through itsabsence or its presence.Wearing the veil, the Algerian woman signals a passivitythat would exclude participation in a violent, subversive activity; abandoningthe garment, she seems to have adopted Western ideals and the French objec-tives.The exchange between the French and the Algerians unfolds as a gameof paranoid knowledge where the player of superior intelligence (Lacan, SII180) remains one step ahead of the opponent s strategies.Like Bigger, who,playing (like) an idiot, learns to mobilize his curtain, Algerians turn intotricksters in their response to colonial strategies: In the presence of the occu-pier, the occupied learns to dissemble, to resort to trickery.To the scandal ofmilitary occupation, [s]he opposes a scandal of contact.Every contact betweenthe occupied and the occupier is a falsehood (65) [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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