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126 3 Slavery, Rape, and the Black Male Abject Abjection and the “New” Sexual Encounter How does the recognition—or the embrace—of blackness in its abjection play out? In the terms of the texts I have examined so far, in what further way can we adduce the abilities of the black/native in his state of productive muscle tension, and what shape might the Ex-Coloured Man’s life take if he did not refuse traumatic (and traumatized) blackness but assimilated it, if he lived consciously in a black(ened) body that physicalized a self almost without ego? How might we imagine the unlived possibilities the Ex-Coloured Man eschews, especially as those possibilities seem insistently to be accompanied and constituted by possible transformations of gender and sexuality? For always as we try to limn the qualities of racial vertigo (or the existential vertigo that provides psychic material for the production of racial identity), a measure and means of the disorientation are the possible reconfigurations of gender and reformulations of sexual expression that spin around that vertigo as if they were the phantasms of parallel universes. The Ex-Coloured Man cannot understand or attempt to enact his flight from black identity without relation to and introjections of ideals of masculinity and femininity defined by their whiteness, or without opposing relations to and projections of abject blackness that call up associations not only with death and the violability of the body but also with the feminine. Similarly, Fanon describes the route taken by rebelling Algerians toward decolonization—in other words, becoming national Algerians rather than “natives,” reshaping the meaning of race—as a journey that is confirmed by, and realized through, a metamorphosis in the way gender and sexuality operate. In the Algerian Revolution Fanon observes the transformation of Algerian heterosexual couples effected by their mutual and independent participation in the Revolution—and, in a sense, he charts too a transformation of heterosexuality: First and foremost is the fact of incurring dangers together, of turning over in the same bed, each on his own side, each with his fragment of Slavery, Rape, and the Black Male Abject 127 a secret. It is also the consciousness of collaborating in the immense work of destroying the world of oppression. The couple is no longer shut in upon itself. It no longer finds its end in itself. It is no longer the result of the natural instinct of perpetuation of the species, nor the institutionalized means of satisfying one’s sexuality. The couple becomes the basic cell of the commonwealth, the fertile nucleus of the nation. . . . There is a simultaneous and effervescent emergence of the citizen , the patriot, and the modern spouse. The Algerian couple rids itself of its traditional weaknesses at the same time that the solidarity of the people becomes a part of history. This couple is no longer an accident but something rediscovered, willed, built. It is . . . the very foundation of the sexual encounter that we are concerned with here.1 Fanon’s suturing of the heterosexual couple with the nation while at the same time explicitly disarticulating the heterosexual couple from both biological propagation and erotic sexuality runs counter to the usual way that patriarchal family and nation are ideologically conjoined,2 and is a kind of nationalist vision that a feminist critique of nationalism might encourage. The couple becomes a “fertile” nucleus, but in a context where the patriarchal privileges of the father are being dismantled under the pressure of the exigencies of the revolution, which also require the wife to behave as something other than a traditional wife, this fertility is not about shepherding the progeny of the couple into the nation in a particular way: it is rather that the couple is a form of ideological propagation, a kind of proliferating example, or perhaps even a kind of social virus that founds cultural change: “it is . . . the inner mutation, the renewal of the social and family structures that impose with the rigor of a law the emergence of the Nation and the growth of its sovereignty.”3 Even if Fanon’s vision proved unjustifiably optimistic (it has been observed that the changes in Algerian gender relations were unfortunately mostly temporary, and arguably even ephemeral),4 what is important for our purposes is that his theorization of possibilities which the revolution makes concrete links the transformation of race with that of gender and sexuality. Moreover, it is not only in the heroic scenes of Algerian women utilizing...

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