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“Pour une littérature-monde”:Tahar Ben Jelloun's PartirVinay SwamyPublished online: 04 Sep 2009.

To cite this article: Vinay Swamy (2009) “Pour une littérature-monde”: Tahar BenJelloun's Partir , Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 13:4, 471-478, DOI:10.1080/17409290903096343

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Contemporary French and Francophone StudiesVol. 13, No. 4, September 2009, 471–478

‘‘POUR UNE LITTERATURE-MONDE’’:

TAHAR BEN JELLOUN’S PARTIR1

Vinay Swamy

With their manifesto, ‘‘Pour une litterature-monde en francais,’’ published inLe Monde on March 16, 2007, 44 well-known ‘‘Francophone’’ writers, rangingfrom Maryse Conde, Edouard Glissant and Tahar Ben Jelloun to DidierDaeninckx, Boualem Sansal and Gisele Pineau, re-launched a long fraughtdebate about the status of the ‘‘Francophone’’ writer vis-a-vis the so-called‘‘French’’ literary canon. In calling for a radical change in strategy—they rejectthe term Francophone, opting instead for the more expansive ‘‘litterature-monde en francais’’—these authors not only seek to linguistically reshape ourunderstanding of the literary space that they have so prolifically populated, butalso, and more importantly, aim to challenge the hegemonic geopolitics of aFrench speaking world centered around Paris and the Hexagon. Thus, the groupenvisages a renewal of the French language’s capacity to be the vibrant vehiclefor a varied cultural production that both reflects, and is critical of, the world inwhich we live. In light of this manifesto, this essay will consider Partir, the 2006novel by Tahar Ben Jelloun, to examine the extent to which this work engageswith some of the ideological/theoretical planks that served as the basis for themanifesto. In so doing, I aim to elaborate on how the novel underscores the linkbetween histoire and Histoire, both diagetically and in its formal contribution tothe debate about the role of the novel of French expression in the world ofliterature.

In many ways, there is no doubt that the manifesto cleverly served to alertthe reading public of the imminent release of a collection of essays co-edited byMichel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud and entitled Pour une litterature-monde(May 2007), a collection that includes essays by many of the authors of the

ISSN 1740-9292 (print)/ISSN 1740-9306 (online)/09/040471–8 � 2009 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/17409290903096343

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manifesto, including one by Ben Jelloun. However, the intense debate incited bythe manifesto stems from the controversial claim that the term ‘‘francophone’’ought to be stricken from literary parlance. The case the authors make againstthe term francophone is based on the claim that it evokes a relationship that isunduly weighted towards the Hexagon, and more specifically, the ghost of acolonial France. In seeking to redress both the linguistic and the culturalhegemony of present-day Metropolitan France, the manifesto renders its two-pronged critique by highlighting France’s quasi-neocolonial relationship withother French-speaking nations as well as making a case for the decoupling of theidentity of the French language from the French state. Clearly for the 44authors, francophonie needs to free itself from the shackles of Francocentrism.The preferred term, litterature-monde en francais, the authors claim, releasesliterature in the French language from the constraints of having to work withinthe confines of a nationalist, and, dare I say, a possessive gallo-centric, discourse.It is from this critical position that the manifesto offers a new category that is notonly supposed to divest itself of the old historical and cultural baggage of thecolonial past, but also aims to place itself on the same footing of ‘‘worldliterature’’ as its counterpart in the Anglophone world.2

A detailed examination of the intricacies of the vehement reactions to themanifesto is beyond the scope of this essay. However, even a cursory surveyrenders evident many objections that clearly reveal that the term ‘‘francophone’’is indeed contested, especially in the sense that the term foregrounds therelationship to the French language (see Cavaille, Najjar, and Lamine Sall andKesteloot, among others). This type of criticism is explicitly enunciated, forexample, in the following rejoinder, signed by no less than Abdou Diouf, theSecretary General of the Organisation de la francophonie:

in this manifesto you contribute to maintaining the most grave of misinter-pretations of Francophonie, in mistaking Francocentrism for Francophonie, inconfusing cultural exceptions and cultural diversity. I especially regret thatyou have chosen to place yourselves as Francophonie’s gravediggers, not onthe basis of solid arguments, which would have had the merit of opening adebate, but by reactivating decidedly stubborn cliches. (24)

Curiously, Diouf’s criticisms are preceded by a long list of reasons whyfrancophonie has not been recognized in Metropolitan France. Such a move onlyreinforces the view of the signatories of the manifesto that that which isFrancophone is still only defined against the centripetal force of MetropolitanFrench identity.3

Ben Jelloun’s own contribution to the essay collection Pour une litterature-monde, makes it abundantly clear that the author’s relationship to francophonie isthrough language. This is evident in the very title of the essay, ‘‘La cave de mamemoire, le toit de ma maison sont des mots francais.’’ Clearly, however, for

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Ben Jelloun, the recognition that the French language cohabits in a symbioticmanner with his mother tongue, Arabic, is just the beginning of anacknowledgment that the French language is itself hybrid. He remarks, forinstance, that an indication of hybridity can be found in the several hundredwords in French that are of Arabic origin.4 But in a bipolar French-francophoneparadigm, one can only read this enrichment of the French language as acreolization at best, or, at worst, an impurity that needs to be excised. Hence,echoing the likes of Achille Mbembe, Ben Jelloun calls for a radical revision ofFrance’s understanding of universalist republican principles. For Ben Jelloun,like Mbembe, republicanism ought not be thought in opposition tocommunitarism, for such a comparison unduly undercuts the hybrid nature ofFrench speaking societies, both hexagonal and beyond, and thus refuses toacknowledge the cosmopolitan reality of these geopolitical spaces.

Thus far, my brief summary of the debate on the proposal put forward bythe 44 writers has underscored the responses and intricacies of comprehendingthe primary position accorded to the French language. Although language is butone very important component in the construction of literary space, it is thislinguistic aspect of the manifesto’s repositioning that has harvested much of itscriticism. However, in order to gain greater purchase on our understanding ofthe term litterature-monde, we might have to look beyond linguistic definitionswhether or not they have been legitimized by, or are dependent on, hexagonalterritories.

I would like to suggest that there might be another way of reading themanifesto’s call for a litterature-monde en francais. I will be the first toacknowledge that the term is rather awkward and begs further explication.However, rather than fixate on the last two words, en francais, for the purposesof this essay I would like to ponder what it might mean to write in a ‘‘litterature-monde’’ mode in today’s world. After all, unlike the manifesto, the essaycollection does not accord any space to the French language in its title. In lightof my previous comments, I would like to make a case for Ben Jelloun’s recentnovel Partir as one possible reading of litterature-monde.

Farid Laroussi and Christopher Miller describe Francophone Studies,especially as practiced in Britain and America, as emblematic of a shift from atemporal model to a spatial model of French studies (1). I would like to looselyparallel their assertion by suggesting that we shift our attention fromcomprehending litterature-monde in terms of temporal relationships—be theycolonial, post-colonial, or other, and on which the aforementioned critics havehitherto focused—onto a spatial model that the word monde evokes. In this sense,litterature-monde should not be understood as a euphemism such as ‘‘world music,’’which merely groups all that is not-American into the category of the Other. Nordoes it fall into the trap of categorizing all novels in the French language as‘‘roman francophone,’’ as the FNAC bookstore has done, only to continue tosegregate texts by non-metropolitan authors into specific geographical regions.

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Rather, the thrust of my argument in favor of a spatial understanding of litterature-monde is that, decoupled from the imperative to represent its relationship tolanguage—and thus, the temporal history that such a coupling might favor—thelitterature-monde text not only de-emphasizes Francocentrism, but also, in sodoing, privileges its engagement with geopolitical, economic, and socialdiscourses that are of import to the larger world, francophone or not.

It is such a reading of litterature-monde that Ben Jelloun’s 2006 novel, Partir,offers. The novel emphasizes the workings of neo-liberal global capitalism as theunderlying cause for the immense discontent of its Moroccan protagonist, Azel,and his cohort, in order to pose some key questions that undergird Ben Jelloun’scritique of the limits of an economic and political system that has come to definethe relationship between the two shores of the Mediterranean. Interestingly, thenovel’s narrative is neither about France nor French legacy per se, but rather, itforegrounds the status of a growing clandestine immigrant movement fromNorth Africa to Spain. Ben Jelloun has insisted that the novel is itself not asociological study of the repercussions of the mass (clandestine) migrationincited by the imbalance of socio-economic and political power dynamicsbetween the global North and the South. Nevertheless, as he suggests in aninterview on the Gallimard website, the novel allows us to reflect on therepercussions of such global flux at a very human, interpersonal level. I willforeground three of the various themes from the novel to develop this argument.

Set in the 1990s in Tangiers during the last years of the reign of King HassanII, the novel’s narrative moves across the Strait of Gibraltar to Spain along withits 25-year-old unemployed protagonist, Azel. A chomeur diplome, as the novelputs it, Azel has lost hope in his home country and can only think of one thing:‘‘bruler la route,’’ ‘‘partir.’’5 As the narrator remarks, ‘‘To leave the country. It wasan obsession, a sort of madness that consumed him day and night’’ (23). Andunlike the traditional road-narrative in which the interest in travel is toeventually return with a new-found understanding of the self, Partir’s narrativeattempts to understand the psyche of those who are desperate to escape themiserable lives they lead in their home country, in the hope of crossing over tothe El Dorado that Europe has come to represent over the last few decades. Ashort but arresting conversation between Azel and his young neighbor, Malikaperhaps best encapsulates how the desire to flee Morocco has become so deeplyingrained in the psyche of the younger generation:

‘‘What do you want to do later in life?’’ [asks Azel]‘‘Leave.’’ [Malika retorts]‘‘Leave? But that’s not a job.’’‘‘Once I leave, I’ll have a job.’’‘‘Go Where?’’‘‘Wherever, across the straits, for example.’’‘‘To Spain?’’

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‘‘Yes to Spain, Franca, I already live there in my dreams.’’[. . .]Azel [gave Malika] an apple and accompanied her back home. He wassurprised and moved by the young girl’s incredible determination. (98–9)

However, far from romanticizing the act of departure, the novel clearly stagesthe horrors of failed clandestine boat crossings of the Gibraltar Strait, bydescribing Azel’s cousin Noureddine’s untimely death at sea, and thus sheds lighton an oft-neglected humanitarian aspect of economically motivated, and perhapsforced, migration. If, on the one hand, Ben Jelloun foregrounds the fate of thoselike Noureddine, many, like Azel, who succeed in crossing the strait, findthemselves caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. That Azel hasto sell his body to his benefactor in exchange for the much-coveted visa hauntsour protagonist throughout the novel, and is ultimately the cause for his death.(Sorry for the spoiler!)

Perhaps the clearest instance of Ben Jelloun’s critique of neo-liberalcapitalism can be found in the novel’s chapters on Malika. In the followingpassage, we learn how the pre-teen becomes a dispensable cog in a gianttransnational corporate machine from which only the West benefits:

Like hundreds of girls in her neighborhood, Malika went to shell shrimp inthe Dutch factory set up in the port’s free trade zone. Every day refrigeratedtrucks brought tons of cooked shrimp to the factory that had been fished inThailand, coming by the way of the Netherlands, where they were treatedfor preservation. Once here, little hands with thin fingers shelled the shrimpday and night. From there, the shrimp left for a final destination where theywere canned before they were sent out to the European market. InTangiers, the girls were paid a pittance . . . Malika knew very quickly thatshe could not last long in that factory. Girls left after six months, fingersgnawed by eczema, and some having contracted pneumonia. (100–1)

And the reader discovers that Malika is no more fortunate than the other girlsand ultimately succumbs to the disease unleashed by a ruthless system. Thus, inthis short, incisive, and eloquent passage, Ben Jelloun sheds light on theunsavory underbelly of a market-driven economy that makes available previouslyprized commodities to the masses in Europe at the expense of those who toiltirelessly in the production chain, not to mention the relatively little gain to thehome country’s own economy. For, no doubt, the free trade zones set up by theMoroccan government, in a desperate attempt to attract businesses to its shores,only weakens its power, while further benefiting giant transnational corporationsand consumers to the north of the strait. Moreover, this passage underscores theirony of market capitalism in a transnational world in which goods as capitalcirculate freely—from Thailand through the Netherlands to Morocco, to finish

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up in Europe—while labor is more and more restricted in its movement. Theabsurdity of this difference when thought in human terms had already beensignaled in an early chapter when Azel goes to the port to watch the trucksbeing loaded. When shooed away by the guards, he responds:

Don’t worry! I’m not going to burn, just going to see the trucks load. It’smy right to envy the crates! I would like to be a box, not to be insidebecause I would suffocate, but to be a box of goods to be dropped off in awarehouse in Europe, on free and prosperous land, yes, just a light woodenbox, an anonymous box on which I would like to have inscribed in redletters ‘‘Fragile,’’ ‘‘Top,’’ ‘‘Bottom.’’ (39)

Upon questioning, Azel discovers the goods for the day are ‘‘Clothing, onlybrand-name apparel, Boss, Klein, Zara, Italian, Spanish, everything butMoroccan’’ (40). In the first instance, the adjectives, ‘‘italiens, espagnols, toutsauf marocains’’ indicate, of course, the injustice of economic imbalance in theinability for Moroccans to either produce or buy luxury goods. However, whenread aloud, without the printed word to indicate the grammatical function of thewords, the phrase could also be comprehended as referring to citizens of thosenations ‘‘Italiens, Espagnols, tous sauf Marocains’’ indicating who can freely crossfrontiers. Thus, the novel brings to the forefront the perverse effects of the neo-liberal wave of market capitalism, in which only goods, and not people, cancross borders freely, as it expands its transnational tentacles.

In parallel with its critique of transnational capitalism, Partir also highlightsthe development of a particular brand of fundamentalist Islam. The turn toreligion is presented within a very specific framework that depicts the overpoliticization and cooption of Islam for ideological objectives. Partir is very clearthat this brand of Islam has nothing to do with pious religion, and in factelaborates on the dangers of such discourses. The novel shows how, in the nameof religion, violence is not only promoted by a quasi-underground network ofrelations but is also conceived of as a form of global resistance to the massiveimbalance of political and economic power between the global North and theSouth. In this sense, the rise in religious fundamentalism is portrayed as beingintimately linked to the changes in transnational economic and political policies.

Right from the beginning, Azel is constantly courted by the ‘‘brotherhood’’which sees in his disgruntled position, a prime candidate for conversion. As oneof the recruiters says, ‘‘If you succeed in shaking off the vigilance of Spanishauthorities, let me know, I will put you in contact with safe friends on the otherside’’ (26). Ben Jelloun devotes an entire chapter to Mohammed-Larbi,‘‘un garcon discret,’’ who succeeds in immigrating to Belgium only to fall intothe clutches of the local religious leader, the Alem, who works actively for theunderground fundamentalist network. Mohammed-Larbi, intending to help theAlem’s daughter, gives her a call at her pleading, but his fate takes an abrupt turn

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when he falls upon the Alem instead. As the narrator puts it, ‘‘[t]hat day,Mohammed-Larbi’s fate was sealed. From Egypt, he was sent to a training campin Pakistan, from which one never saw him return’’ (97).

Of course, despite his vigilance against the brainwashing techniques of thebrotherhood, our protagonist, Azel, too, falls under their sphere of influencewhen he befriends another clandestine young man, Abbas. In a desperateattempt to dig himself out of his precarious, and now clandestine, situation inSpain, Azel proposes to the Spanish authorities to become a double agent tomonitor the activities of a ‘‘terrorist’’ cell in Madrid. His ploy is successful for awhile, but ultimately, he is unable to avoid the long reach of the Islamists, andhis pact with police finally costs him his life (248).

Thus, Ben Jelloun weaves an intricate narrative which clearly shows how, infact, the seemingly different issues of clandestine migration, religiousfundamentalism, and terrorism are, in fact, inextricably intertwined and are atleast in part the result of the economic and political policies that favor a certainbrand of transnational market capitalism. It is from this perspective that Partir isperhaps a text that engages with the spatial aspects of litterature-monde. Such aposition puts pressure on a temporally based understanding of a ‘‘Modern’’ Westthat conceives of itself as distinct from the ‘‘under-developed’’ South, cast as theOther. As Partir clearly demonstrates through its focus on the manufacture andmovement of goods and (clandestine) labor, Europe, in fact, clearly depends onthe non-European sphere for its very constitution and (material) existence. Bywriting about such interdependence, Ben Jelloun in effect erases distinctcategories and thereby foregrounds a single ‘‘litterature-monde.’’ Moreover, unlikethe recent adoption of the term francophone by the FNAC, it becomes clear that, inthe context of this novel, ‘‘litterature-monde’’ calls into question the assimilativetendencies of hegemonic Metropolitan (French or other) cultures. Instead, itembraces a cosmopolitan approach to understanding the impact of neoliberalworld politics while, at the same time, privileging the different cultural, political,and economic specificities of the subject at hand.

Notes

1 I thank Eleanor Morgan Albert for her help with the translation of citationsfrom the French original to English.

2 The category of ‘‘world literature’’ is itself the subject of great debate, for theyardstick by which a text is measured in order to be inducted into such acanon is, of course, subjective and entirely dependent on the very valuesystem that perpetuates such a notion. However, in this reading of Partir,I argue that litterature-monde could be understood as being focused ontransnational relations.

3 This is a debate that quite clearly has a long history in the US academy asdocumented in the 1993 double volume of Yale French Studies co-edited by

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Francoise Lionnet and Ronnie Scharfman as well as, more recently, in a 2003issue of the same journal. See in particular Sandy Petrey’s contribution andthe diametrically opposing views taken by Lawrence Kritzman and TomConley on this question.

4 In ‘‘Le Dernier immigre,’’ a wonderful, if foreboding, parable, Ben Jellounforegrounds the extent of metissage between Arabic and French languages andcultures: when the last immigrant from North Africa is sent back ‘‘home,’’the French find themselves bereft of all words of Arabic origin such as orangeand cafe.

5 The term bruler la route, literally ‘‘to burn the route,’’ has become commonparlance to mean clandestine crossing (mostly into Europe).

Works Cited

Ben Jelloun, Tahar. ‘‘La cave de ma memoire, le toit de ma maison sont des motsfrancais.’’ Pour une litterature-monde. Eds. Michel Le Bris and Jean Rouaud.Paris: Gallimard, 2007. 113–125.

—. ‘‘Le Dernier immigre.’’ Le Monde diplomatique. August 2006: 24.—. Interview with Tahar Ben Jelloun. Gallimard website, consulted 2 April 2009.

5http://www.gallimard.fr/benjelloun-partir/4—. Partir. Paris: Gallimard, 2006.Cavaille, Jean-Pierre. ‘‘Francophones, l’ecriture est polyglotte; Sous pretexte de

denoncer le franco-centrisme, le manifeste ‘Pour une litterature-monde’ nefait que le renforcer.’’ Rebonds, La Liberation 30 March 2007: 28.

Diouf, Abdou. ‘‘La francophonie, une realite oubliee.’’ Le Monde 20 March 2007: 24.Lamine Sall, Amadou and Lilyan Kesteloot. ‘‘Un peu de memoire, s’il vous plaıt!’’

Le Monde 6 April 2007. Lexis Nexis. Web. 25 August 2008.Laroussi, Farid and Christopher L. Miller, eds. Yale French Studies 103 (2003): 1–6.Lionnet, Francoise and Ronnie Scharfman, eds. Yale French Studies 82–83 (1993).Mbembe, Achille. ‘‘La Republique et l’impense de la ‘race.’’’ La Fracture coloniale: la

societe francaise au prisme de l’heritage colonial. Eds. Pascal Blanchard,Nicolas Bancel, and Sandrine Lemaire. Paris: Decouverte, 2005. 143–157.

Najjar, Alexandre. ‘‘Expliquer l’eau par l’eau!’’ Le Temps 3 April, 2007. Lexis Nexis.Web. 25 August 2008.

Vinay Swamy is Assistant Professor of French and Francophone literature and film at

Vassar College. He has published on novels by Azouz Begag and Maryse Conde. He

has published articles on the PaCS debate and kinship structures in contemporary

French films, Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Launderette, on the 2003 film L’Esquive by

Abdellatif Kechiche, and Allah Superstar by Y.B. At present, he is finishing a book

length study on Marginalization and Resistance in Metropolitan French Novels and Films.

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