Picturing the Maghreb: Literature, Photography, (Re)Presentation, and: Of Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls: Seeking Subjecthood through Madness in Francophone Women's Writing of Africa and the Caribbean (review)

In Picturing the Maghreb, Mary Vogl assesses the photographic and literary representations of Maghrebian peoples and landscapes in works by French and francophone authors. Her main aim is to engage in the discussion of photography as a reflection of (un)questioned, (un)contrived depiction of facts. In basing her theoretical approach on works by, among others, Michel Foucault, John Berger, Martin Jay, Jean Baudrillard, and Susan Sontag, she draws from a variety of critics whose works reassess the representation of "the Other" (especially in light of colonialism, orientalism, postcolonialism, and postmodernism). In her introduction titled "In Search of Images," Vogl gives an overview of the changing opinions about ethnographies; since the decolonization of most francophone African countries in the 1960s, historical representations are shown to be "subjective creations of historians instead of the objective ‘facts' that they were once believed to be" (1). In light of this statement, Vogl then analyzes some of the French and English terms used in photography and sometimes in visual representation. The harshness of these terms' symbolism re-creates an uneven power structure between the photographer and the photographed.

Vogl examines various representations of North Africans in a number of fictional, nonfictional, and photographic texts. She concentrates mainly on works by Michel Tournier, J. M. G. Le Clézio, Tahar Ben Jelloun, and Leïla Sebbar. In chapter 1, "The Evil Demon of Images," she analyzes the photographic representation of Idriss, a young Berber shepherd in Tournier's La goutte d'or (1986). She claims that this novel "emphasizes not only the misuse of images by Westerners but also the peril of visual representations for non-Western people" (42) and points out the "cultural hegemony of the Western world and its obsession with visual simulacra" (19). In chapter 2, "Insight, Out of Sight," she analyzes "the issues of vision, truth, power and resistance" as they appear in several works, including Le Clézio's novel Désert (1980). The appropriation of images of Lalla (another young North African—a woman, this time) by a French photographer can be seen as a metaphor for "France's exploitation of workers from less ‘developed' countries" (76). The theme of the gaze as visibility and invisibility contribute to "the dangers of photography" and continue to "expose questions of identity and inequity regarding the Maghreb and its peoples" (79), especially in light of the recent events of decolonization, immigration, and the rise to power of the extreme Right in French politics.

In chapter 3, "Looking through the Lens," Vogl examines Ben Jelloun's novel Les yeux baissés (1991) as well as his collaboration with photographers in Grains de peau: Asilah, mémoire d'enfance (1984), Haut Atlas: L'exil de pierres (1982), Marseille, comme un matin d'insomnie (1986), and Morocco: Sahara to the Sea (1995). She examines depictions of insiders/outsiders, truth/falsehood, and how these supposed dichotomies can fight against neocolonial orientalist ways of representing the Other. She concludes that "for Ben Jelloun, neither photographs nor writing can claim to be an ‘objective' means of representation, but both offer images that can challenge stereotypes from the dominant discourses of the media and mainstream politics" (136).

In chapter 4, "Retouches and Reprints," Vogl investigates how Sebbar embeds iconographic descriptions (including photographs, films, and paintings) in her works to question the notion of Arab, North African, and French identity. The novels in the Shérazade trilogy, several short stories, Sebbar's collaboration with the photographer Marc Garanger in Femmes des Hauts-Plateaux: Algérie 1960 (1990), Amadou Gaye in Génération métisse (1988), and other writers and photographers in Marseille/Marseilles (1992), contribute, respectively...