Introduction: Narrative Violence: Africa and the Middle East

If it were a bridge, we would have still crossed it, but it's a home, it's an abyss.

—Mahmoud Darwich, "A Horse for the Stranger"

Narrative becomes a problem only when we wish to give real events the form of story. It is because real events do not offer themselves as stories that their narrativization is so difficult.

—Hayden White, "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality"

The title of this issue of Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East reflects our discernment that if anything has proven as enduring as human beings' compulsion to engage in acts of violence, it is the impulse to make sense of such acts through narrative. From Sabra and Shatila to Jenin, Fallouja, Gaza, and Qana and from Algeria to Rwanda, Darfur, Congo, and South Africa—to name only a few of the numerous contemporary "death zones" created by war and violence in the Middle East and Africa—the second half of the twentieth century (and, clearly, the already sinister forebodings of the new millennium) is full of countless citations, scenes, and sites of carnage; of imperial, proxy, or ethnic civil wars; and of genocides and terrorisms. All these recurring upsurges of hostility and sustained urges to make war and perpetuate violence seem to ratify Martin Jay's chilling observation that "we do indeed live in such a finite economy in which utter redemption from violence is as utopian as redemption through it."¹

The essays collected in this issue of CSSAAME explore the ways in which writers and artists from Africa and the Middle East have deployed diverse modes of narrative not only to challenge the entrapments of contemporary violence but also to do so in a self-reflexively anti-redemptory fashion. These writers and artists conceptualize narrative violence as a modality of cultural and literary analysis, practice, and critique; understand violence as a historically situated phenomenon in constant need of social, political, and cultural authorization and reinvention to be effectively implemented at the level of warfare, mobilization, and conscription; and illuminate the ways in which literary and cultural products (literature, film, graphics, etc.) do not merely illustrate but actively produce and intervene in the material and palpable workings of violence. As such, the essays in this issue compel us to interrogate the widely circulated discourses about Africa and the Middle East as ahistorical places of violence, death, and disease; question our fatigued notions of the ineluctability and immutability of the contemporary institutionalization of violence; and demonstrate how particular constellations of (corporate) power, (instrumental) knowledge, and (biased) mass media work to foreclose alternative human and humane spaces of survival, agency, resistance, and, above all, narrative departures.

Narrative Violence, Violence of Narrative

Far from being a means or "a bridge" to (liberal) democracy, economic development—or, as is still the case in large parts of the world, to national self-determination—violence, in its multifarious, latent, or manifest workings, has increasingly become a structural feature of our contemporaneity, inflecting and altering, if not producing altogether, the ways in which we think about, relate to, imagine, or narrate nodal sites of existence such as home, place, the body, subjectivity, community, time, and history. Since wars constitute ruptures and continuities and are preceded by conflicts over discrepant political, economic, and cultural systems and relations of value and power, conducting war depends on the development and dissemination of elaborate narratives that legitimize the use of violence. In this sense, it might also be said that wars are fought over and sustained by narratives of legality and righteousness such that concepts of history, memory, and justice are, in no small measure, functions of narrative construction, authority, power, and influence.

To be sure, narratives of violent conflicts and related claims of pains and losses are volatile, contradictory, and contested. As the above epigraph by Hayden White makes patently clear, what renders the narration of violence extraordinarily difficult is, on the one hand, the unstable process of translating the violent event into a narrative and, on the other, the violent nature of narrativization itself...