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

1. Prologue: Of Irony and Empire

One day a poor man who had only a piece of bread to eat was walking by a restaurant in the village. In front of the restaurant, barbecues were smoking away cooking mechoui for the noon meal. The poor fellow looked longingly at the lamb roasting on the grills. Famished, he held his dry bread in the smoke over the meat to give it a hint of the smell before he ate it. The restaurant owner, furious, rushed out to demand payment for the smell of the meat. But the poor man was broke. The case was taken to Joha, acting village judge. The restaurant owner explained the theft. After some thought, Joha took three dinars from his pocket, cupped them in his hands and jingled them together by the restaurant owner’s ear. “Case closed,” said Joha. “How do you figure that?” asked the restaurant owner. “The smell of meat paid for by the sound of money,” answered Joha. Now go back to work. In villages across North Africa and the Middle East, Joha stories are told as families sit on the terrace on hot summer evenings or around the kanoun wrapped in blankets on cold winter nights.They are told in coffee shops early in the morning, and it doesn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to characterize the poor man as a peasant or a worker, the restaurant owner as a 1 CHAPTER ONE Prologue Of Irony and Empire colonial official, a comprador capitalist, or a World Bank expert, and Joha as the “Arab street.” As narrative expressions of a Muslim social imaginary, these stories reflect ideas of distributive justice, offer examples of the folly of humankind, and with their ironic turns, string the audience along only to make them laugh at their own assumptions in the end. In the story of the smell of meat and the sound of money, Joha metes out a form of justice that is exactly fit to the case, using irony as an equalizer. For better or for worse, we all belong to the tribe of Beni Adam (Everyman). But irony does not always inhabit the land of wisdom. In imperial hands, irony was a tool of contempt, sarcasm, or ridicule. Employed by speakers who thought they lived at a distance from this world, irony was used to target the victims of their scrutiny and abuse. The fathers of colonial ethnopsychiatry , such as Antoine Porot in North Africa and British-trained South African J. C. Carothers in Kenya, maintained that the natives were incapable of the kind of reflection upon which irony depends. “The normal African” in Carothers’ view, was a “lobotomized European” (Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth 302) and in Porot’s view “the native of North Africa . . . is a primitive creature whose life [is] essentially vegetative and instinctive” (300), and Joha and his Muslim tribe were found, by a subsequent generation of French experts in psychological warfare, to “[lack] a critical spirit” and to be unable to “tolerate irony” (Keller 281).1 Negative irony, that satirical detachment associated with imperial power, is largely unironic given its lack of self-reflexivity. I argue here that irony as the trope based on dialectical relationships is able to translate the relativity of our epistemologies, and by that very fact, opens the way to new understandings. The dialectical framework used in this study is not a teleological Hegelian form based on some ultimate unity, rather it is an open system of the sort Fanon embraced. As Ato Sekyi-Otu explains in his study of Fanon’s prose, this dialectical thought process brings into question both the tropes we use and the social imaginaries2 in which they occur, thus opening the way for continual reassessment and new possibilities. To the question, “What then does it mean to read Fanon’s texts as if they constituted a dialectical dramatic narrative?” Sekyi-Otu replies: It means, first, that relationships between utterance and proposition , representation and truth, enacted practice and authorial advocacy, are rendered quite problematic. It means, furthermore, that an utterance or a representation or a practice we encounter in a text is to be considered not as a discrete and conclusive event, but rather as a strategic and selfrevising act set in motion by changing circumstances and perspectives, increasingly intricate configurations of experience. (5) Of Irony and Empire 2 Of Irony and Empire looks at how our social imaginaries—our...