Mohamed Kacimi’s Terre Sainte and the Banality of Terror

[Erratum]

The harder the times are, the stronger our laugh will be.

Reb Nachman of Bratslav

If, according to Albert Camus, “our twentieth century is the century of fear,” (Neither 19–20) have we, in the twenty-first century, reached the age of disillusionment? Has violence not managed to infiltrate our daily environment to the point of rendering us indifferent to the banality of the tragic or unable to react to it? In terms of the ethics of violence, might we have moved backwards? Is Camus’s obsession about the absolute limits of violence and its exceptional nature no longer valid for our era? Yet, to render violence banal amounts to granting it a natural and legitimate status. And it is very specifically the legitimacy of murder that leads inexorably to the banality of terror:

The seventeenth century was the century of mathematics, the eighteenth that of the physical sciences, and the nineteenth that of biology. Our twentieth is the century of fear…. Who can deny that we live in a state of terror? We live in terror because persuasion is no longer possible…. For we do live … in a world where murder is legitimate, and we ought to change it if we do not like it. But it appears that we cannot change it without risking murder. Murder thus throws us back on murder, and we will continue to live in terror whether we accept the fact with resignation or wish to abolish it by means which merely replace one terror with another.

(Camus, Neither 19–20, 25)

In the mid-twentieth century the violence of terrorism has increased exponentially since the 1970s and has emerged as the global issue of our time since 9/11. In its different usages the word “terror” might signify a systematic practice of violence and repression with the aim to impose power. However, there appear to be misunderstandings, contradictions and slippages in the definitions and discursive or figurative aspects of the term “terrorism.” Given this semantic and rhetorical elusiveness, literary and critical discourse might help us discern and draw out the limits, meanings and nuances behind the term “terrorism,” and this delimitation and discernment is precisely the objective of my essay. The study of “terror” is situated at a crossroads of thought well suited to the humanities, with its implications that are concurrently political, ethical and legal. French and Francophone literature are certainly not lacking in writers deeply involved in the representation of violence and terrorism, giving life to prototypes of terrorists.

In this essay I argue that what I call the “banality of terror” has so far determined much of the twenty-first century. This banality that Camus warned us against is dramatized by the Arab-Muslim Francophone writer Mohamed Kacimi¹ in his play Terre Sainte [Holy Land] through his portrayal of a nascent terrorist in the first decade of the 2000s. In his allegorical representations of the Middle East conflict, a literary depiction of war in which awareness of the murder of the innocent borders the insuperable edge of criminal blindness, Kacimi casts an anthropological eye on the terrorist and the cult of the martyr/hero. In Terre Sainte, literature becomes the privileged venue of burlesque violence where the resentments of a suffering community are affirmed, all the while underscoring the risks of trivializing terror. For despite its apparent banality, we are reminded that violence cannot simply be disregarded. In other words, in acting out the banality of violence through the daily existence of the play’s disillusioned characters, Kacimi’s drama denounces both this disillusionment and the banality of a stereotyped discourse. This essay analyzes the semantic displacement of the term “terrorism,” intrinsically tied to the slippage of the meaning of “death” since the twentieth century and especially with the Palestinian struggle as an exemplary case at the heart of terrorism. In so doing, it explores the banality of terror that characterizes the stereotypical discourse of future martyrs, the myth of the martyr/hero and the interchangeability of the notions of victim and executioner in Kacimi’s Terre Sainte...