Arab Noise and Ramadan Nights: Rai, Rap, and Franco-Maghrebi Identity

Diaspora 3:1 1994 Arab Noise and Ramadan Nights: Rai, Rap, and Franco-Maghrebi Identity Joan Gross Oregon State University David McMurray Oregon State University Ted Swedenburg American University in Cairo 1. We Can't Take Any Moor For over two thousand years, it has been essentially the same people who pose the same dangers for us. Isn't it true that the Iranian Mujahid îns are the descendants of the Persians defeated at Marathon; that the Islamic World which comes to batter Europe's frontiers and slowly penetrates her is composed of the sons of Turks who invaded as far as Vienna, and of the very Arabs that Charles Martel vanquished at Poitiers?" Jean-Marie Le Pen1 In the aftermath of the Berlin Wall's collapse, Western Europe has been forced to rethink its identity. If in the recent past its conception ofitselfas a haven ofdemocracy and civilization depended— in part—on a contrast to the evils ofthe Communist Empire, today an idea is being revived of Europe as "Christendom," in contradistinction to "Islam." Only this time, the Islam in question is not being held back at the frontier (Spain, the Balkans) but has penetrated Europe's very core in the shape of new "minority" populations of Muslim background. Questions about the nature of European identity and the place of Muslim immigrants within it are now among the most contentious on the Continent (Morley and Robins). So acute is European anxiety about "foreigners" that many white Western Europeans increasingly feel that they are living under cultural and economic siege due to the presence of 10 to 12 million "immigrants " (Miller 33). This European hysteria about "foreigners" has been brilliantly lampooned in Landscapes after the Battle, Juan Goytisolo's hilariously provocative novel. The book opens with the inexplicable appearance ofunintelligible scrawls on the walls ofthe Parisian neigh- Diaspora 3:1 1994 borhood of Le Sentier. At first the natives assume the marks are the secret language of a gang of kids, but then someone spots a man with "kinky black hair" inscribing the mysterious messages. The natives conclude that the scrawls are written in a real alphabet—but backwards—and are the handiwork of "those foreigners who, in ever-increasing numbers, were stealthily invading the decrepit buildings abandoned by their former tenants and offering their labor to the well-heeled merchants of Le Sentier" (3). Then one morning, a working-class native of Le Sentier drops in at his local bar for a pick-me-up ofCalvados, only to discover that the sign identifying his tavern has been replaced by one written in that incomprehensible script. Wandering through the neighborhood, he is horrified to find that every marker—the Rex cinema's marquee, McDonald's, streetsigns , the placard on the district mayor's office—has been changed. Even the sign outside the office of the newspaper of "the glorious Party of the working class," L'Humanité, has been transformed to JsjUyi. A catastrophic, cacophonous traffic jam has broken out, for drivers cannot decipher the street signs, and the traffic police are no help. "Trying to hide his laughter, a swarthy-skinned youngster with kinky hair purveyed his services as guide to whichever helpless soul bid the highest" (7). "Colonized by those barbarians!" the unnerved Le Sentier native thinks to himself (5). Goytisolo's 1982 send-up of the French nightmare about immigr és seems remarkably prescient today, 12 years after its publication . For French antipathy is particularly virulent toward those "foreigners" who have been coming from North Africa for decades and who write in that "backward" script, Arabic. French society has never come to terms with the legacy of its colonization of North Africa and its bloody war against the Algerian national liberation struggle, which cost 1 million Arabs and 10,000 Frenchmen their lives.2 Instead, one might imagine, from the frenzied reactions of so many white French men and women to all things "Arab" and "Islamic ," that colonialism had been a magnanimous project and that the Arabs in France are living the high life and have no cause to complain about poverty and racism.3 So severe are French apprehensions about the immigré "problem" that during the "hijab...