"Location, not identity": The Politics of Revelation in Ronit Matalon's The One Facing Us

This article traces the profound ambivalence toward religion in Ronit Matalon's novel, Ze im ha-panim eleinu (The One Facing Us). The novel tells the story of Esther, sent by her Israeli family to Cameroon, to her maternal uncle Jacques Sicourelle and his family, perhaps in order to marry her cousin Erouan or simply to reunite with distant relatives. Spreading over large geographical expanses, it is the story of the national identity of Mizrahi Jews. The novel strongly criticizes the rigidity of identity politics, and Matalon suggests replacing it with politics of location; location is fluid and may change frequently without our becoming fixed in any one particular identity. The photographic images in the novel grant their subjects identifying visual features; and the exposure of the photographic process is in and of itself an exposure of the process of identity building. Roland Barthes depicts photography as an intense experience of union with the reality "beyond" the photograph: an experience that crosses the boundaries of the photograph to move toward the reality it represents. In this light, it is possible to examine the extraordinary process Matalon offers in her novel, which seeks to reconstruct the aura—that is, the revelation, after it has disappeared—through the means of photographs. She breaks the photograph down to its constituent parts, pointing to the source of its aura, its revelatory effect, even though the revelation is invisible in the finished image as a whole. The opposite action—emphasis on the photograph's artificiality—externalizes and reveals a contradiction. It fixes and freezes a unique moment, but also freezes the disturbance and so recalls for us both the status of a photo as a reproduced signifier lacking an aura as well as the unique moment it seems to memorialize. From her Mizrahi stance, Matalon refuses to completely participate in the theological-Zionist enterprise: that is, on the one hand she is attracted to the revelatory effect of the photographs, but on the other she will not take on religious identity as an essentialist and fixed component of selfhood.