Of Irony and Empire: Islam, the West, and the Transcultural Invention of Africa

4. Heimlich Un-Heimlich: Of Home as Heterotopia in Salih, Tlili, and Mokeddem

This chapter begins with a discussion of Foucault’s theories of heterotopia, which he began developing when he was an expatriate in Tunisia, and Freud’s comments on the uncanny (unheimlich) as the unhomelike. Using their insights into the connections between the “non-place” of language and our feeling of being at-home or not at-home in the world, I look at how Tayeb Salih (Sudan), Mustapha Tlili (Tunisia), and Malika Mokeddem (Algeria) each negotiate the particulars of their postcolonial identities as expatriate authors working in transnational contexts. Salih’s work focuses on the effects of colonialism on identity, Tlili’s on the effect of post-independence nationalism on traditional identity, and Mokeddem’s on contemporary identity politics and transnational feminism. This study of “home as heterotopia” in the postcolonial novel investigates the uncanny ways falsehood and truth, the heimlich (at-homeness) and the unheimlich (exile at home), cohabit in these aesthetic and political transcultural inventions of Muslim Africa. We recall that Foucault was fascinated by Borges’ Chinese Encyclopedia because of its ironic properties. He opens The Order of Things with the observation: This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes 125 CHAPTER FOUR HEIMLICH UN-HEIMLICH Of Home as Heterotopia in Salih, Tlili, and Mokeddem with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of things, and continuing long after to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. (xv) As we saw earlier, in this alien taxonomy, “animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies” (xv). Foucault works through his fascination with this site, deciding that the laughter and a certain attendant anxiety that the passage arouses cannot be explained by its fabulous contents (sirens), nor by the charm of its exotic references (Emperors, camelhair brushes), nor even the oddity of its juxtapositions (sirens and stray dogs). Rather it is the site itself that arouses fear: not the contents of the alphabetized table, but rather what has “insinuated itself into the empty space, the interstitial blanks separating all these entities from one another” (xvi). The laughter aroused, at first, by difference—“the stark impossibility of thinking that”—has been displaced by what Foucault refers to as uneasiness and what Freud had earlier thought about as the unheimlich (the uncanny). Both link this anxiety to “the non-place of language,” which is capable of juxtaposing entities that share no common ground—for example, the inclusion of a subset “(h) included in the present classification,” which would logically also be co-extensive with the table itself. The anxiety, aroused in Foucault by the Chinese Encyclopedia, is aroused in Freud by the dictionaries he is using to define the unheimlich. Freud begins with the assumption that the unheimlich will be the opposite of the heimlich, “belonging to the house, not strange, familiar, tame, intimate, friendly, etc.”(“The Uncanny”). What causes the frisson of anxiety is discovering the ironic fact that the Same and its Opposite may inhabit the same site: What interests us most . . . is to find that among its different shades of meaning the word “heimlich’ exhibits one which is identical with its opposite , “unheimlich.” What is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich. . . . In general we are reminded that the word “heimlich” is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which, without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one hand it means what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight. (“The Uncanny”) A site or place that is unheimlich is defined in the Latin dictionary as a locus suspectus, and from various linguistic clues, Freud concludes that “the unheimlich is what was once heimisch, familiar [and] the prefix ‘un’ . . . is the token of Of Irony and Empire 126 repression” (“The Uncanny”). As Foucault also sensed, it is not the...