University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Another country: Black Americans, Arab worlds, 1952-1979

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Another country: Black Americans, Arab worlds, 1952-1979

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Content ANOTHER COUNTRY: BLACK AMERICANS, ARAB WORLDS, 1952-1979 by Sophia Azeb A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY) August 2016 Table of Contents List of Figures i Acknowledgements ii Introduction 1 Part One: Black Folks From Babylon Chapter One: This Is Not An Arab: Black American Mediations of Algerian 25 Identity in Paris Chapter Two: Afro-Arab Sonics: Egypt and the Tension of Translation 54 Part Two: North African Crossroads Chapter Three: The Algerian Radical Imagination 91 Chapter Four: Arabité, Négritude, and the African Little Magazine 119 Conclusion: The Expressions of Afro-Arab Energy 150 Bibliography 156 i List of Figures 3.1, 3.2 Arabic edition, El Moudjahid, 24 December 1958 101 4.1 Youssef el-Sebai, Editorial: “Inspiré par les Réunions de Colombo du Mouvement du Non-Alignement.” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 27/28 (January-June 1976) 125 4.2 Cover art: Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 6 (October 1970) & Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 7 (January 1971) 131 4.3 Samar Sengupta, “Poeme Indien Sur L’Assassinat de Martin Luther King,” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 10 (October 1971) 139 4.4 Photo: Rapport du Secretaire General, 4 th Conference of Afro-Asian Writers in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan 4-9 September 1973. Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 20 (April-June 1974) 143 ii Acknowledgements I am fairly certain a doctoral committee as dedicated as mine does not come around very often. My committee chair, Sarah Gualtieri, has deeply influenced the scholar that I have become. Her thoughtful attention to detail and good humour was my great honour to benefit from since I arrived in the department of American Studies and Ethnicity five years ago. My continuing commitment to Black Studies I credit to Shana L. Redmond, who possesses the sort of critical eye that inspires her students to work harder and better in pursuit of intellectual rigour and social justice in our work, in the academy, and in our communities. I was immensely fortunate to have Olivia C. Harrison whip the Francophone aspects of my work into shape as well to teach alongside her. I benefitted from her pedagogy twice over: as a doctoral student working across multiple languages, and as a teaching assistant instructing a new class of interdisciplinary scholars. Additionally, Robeson Taj Frazier’s exhaustive grasp of the complex racial and political theories I have attempted to wrangle in Another Country kept me on my toes, though his quick wit and genuine love of the black transnational cultures we study made his teachings easily applicable. I hope this project has done their committed mentorship some justice. Before I came to USC, I was drawn into the study of African and African American history, cultures, and theory by three very enthusiastic professors at the State University of New York at Buffalo. I am grateful to Keith Griffler, Jason R. Young, and Alexis De Veaux for encouraging me to apply to graduate school and, in the case of Drs. Griffler and Young, writing what I assume must have been very compelling letters of recommendation to make it so. Once at iii USC, I had the pleasure of being guided through my coursework, qualifying examinations, and prospectus preparation by such scholars as John Carlos Rowe, Dorinne Kondo, Sherman A. Jackson, Laura Pulido, and Nayan Shah. Their devoted instruction and excellent seminars, reading lists, and writing courses shaped how I approached and completed the many stages of this project. I owe Neetu Khanna a great deal of thanks for starting up a “Po-co” reading group that welcomed graduate students, allowing me the opportunity to have a stellar group of faculty workshop portions of my dissertation and to hone my own reviewing skills. To ASE staff members Kitty Lai, Jujuana Preston, and Sonia Rodriguez: what would any of us in American Studies and Ethnicity do without you three? Thank you for keeping the graduate students on track and supporting us the whole way through our degrees. I would also like to acknowledge and thank the University of Southern California Graduate School, which awarded me a Research Enhancement Fellowship to fund the most intensive period of my archival research. I am grateful for the opportunities that the USC Graduate School’s support opened up for me. Even with such strong foundations, I doubt I could have accomplished much without the strength and backing of my graduate student colleagues, particularly Emily Raymundo, Joshua Mitchell, Viola Lasmana, Jolie Chea, Amee Chew, Jenny Hoang, Ryan Fukumori, Jessica Lovaas, Deborah Al-Najjar, Nic John Ramos, Flori Boj Lopez, and the good Drs. Umayyah Cable, Crystal Baik, Alex Wescott, Sriya Shrestha, Robert Eap, Jennifer DeClue, Jih-Fei Cheng, and David Stein. Emily, I cannot wait to read your book: you are a star. I cannot name all of my dear colleagues in ASE and at the University of Southern California without significantly lengthening this portion of my acknowledgements, but it must be said that the students in American Studies and Ethnicity at USC have built and sustained a community of mutual support, respect, and care unlike anything I have experienced before. To the ASE folks, past and present, iv I thank you. In Los Angeles, I also had Gary Dauphin, Carolyn Castano, Toussaint, Jessie Smyth, Amitis Motevalli, Ghazal Hashemi, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Micha Clark, Jamie Rollins, Miguel Contreras, Annie Katata, Eric Randolph, Nina & John, Amy Tierney, and Wesley Jones to laugh and love with through all of life’s little quirky moments. Gary and Carolyn are perhaps the sweetest and brightest two people in this galaxy: Toussaint is one lucky little elephant. On that other coast, Elizabeth Eraca, Shana Schaffer, Jennifer Krasinski, Sinat Giwa, Natasha Pasternack, Kate Riehlman, Naeem Mohaiemen, and Siddhartha Mitter were always on hand to remind me that work and play can happily co-exist, though only within reason and always in Brooklyn. Megan MacDonald, Dana Olwan, Ebony Coletu, Ruthie Wilson Gilmore, Craig Gilmore, Nick Estes, Melanie Yazzie, Jenny Kelly, and Javier Arbona have all generously offered me their encouragement and advice on everything from how to “finish” writing to survival strategies while on the job market. Whether online, by phone, or through animated football memes (“Gol!”), these remarkable people established an energetic support system that taught me a lesson I’ll always remember: we owe goodwill and support to ourselves and to one another. Megan, you have opened your home to me so often, and in so many countries, that it is also incumbent on me to mention that the time we spent together in and out of the archives in Marseille is perhaps my fondest memory of the last five years. You are my sharpest and best reader, editor, and friend, Mac. I received some of the most challenging feedback and rewarding insights for this work at numerous conferences over the years, particularly those of the American Studies Association and the American University of Beirut’s Center for American Studies and Research. I am lucky to have met and built with Alex Lubin, Keith P. Feldman, Lisa Hajjar, Ira Dworkin, Lisa v Bhungalia, Joanne Barker, Sherene Seikaly, Sohail Daulatzai, Adam John Waterman, Paul Amar, Crystal Parikh, Maha El Said, Mounira Soliman, Salah D. Hassan, Ronak Kapadia, Scott Morgensen, Nadine Naber, and Moustafa Bayoumi, among many others, during such meetings over the last three years. I am also deeply indebted to Jack Halberstam, who went above and beyond their obligations as the American Studies & Ethnicity department’s Director of Graduate Studies to introduce me to John Howard at King’s College London. With the assistance of Jack and John, I was able to facilitate the most frustrating bureaucratic barriers to my research – the dreaded visa process – and join the intellectual community of the Institute of North American Studies at King’s College. Two of John Howard’s own doctoral students, Christine Okoth and Dan Udy, welcomed me warmly when I first arrived in 2014 and I have known them as friends ever since. They are joined by Susana Santa-Marta, Sebastian Ahman, Ana Naomi de Sousa, Katie Buxton, Dani Burrows, Omar El-Khairy, and Viviana Bianchini, all of whom ensured that I will always call London (and Stockholm, and Rome, and Madrid…) home. Among the last of those I must thoroughly thank are my editors and fellow writers from the popular media blog, Africa Is A Country. The blog’s founder, Sean Jacobs, invited me on board as a writer before I had any sort of public writing to my name. He gave me a chance to craft a writing practice nonetheless. With the generous editorial eyes of M. Neelika Jayawardane, Tom Devriendt, Boima Tucker, Sonja Uwimana, Dylan Valley, and many other past and present AIAC contributors, I was able to learn how to write with pleasure. I also thank Ntone Edjabe and Léopold Lambert for similarly allowing me to flex my cramped cultural critic muscles in the pages of the Chimurenga Chronic and the Funambulist Papers, respectively, which then led me to rediscover portions of this project anew. vi Of course, these acknowledgements would not be complete without expressing gratitude to my family, the Abdallahs, the Azebs, and everyone in between. I thank my parents, Hanna and Ashraf Azeb, for tolerating my unpredictable research and travel schedule, and my brothers, Karim and Zekry, for the endless and rowdy football banter. Come on you Gooners! This project is, at the end of the day, of and for my family. On that note, I must make du’a for my grandmothers. This is for Marooph Abdallah, whose recollection of the names and faces and stories linked to our family’s land in Palestine before and after the Nakba rivals that of any historian, and for Sito Hanem, who left us this year – too soon – but will always be present in the scent of the date palms before harvest and the sound of the Mediterranean gently lapping the shores of Alexandria. Ameen. 1 Introduction I. The Afro-Arab Position “The only thing that really unites all black men everywhere is, as far as I can tell, the fact that white men are on their necks.” 1 James Baldwin In a 1961 interview with Studs Terkel on Chicago public radio station WMFT, prolific African American writer and critic James Baldwin reflected on why he considered Paris, his occasional residence in exile, a “way-station” rather than a home. Terkel prompted this line of thought by noting that fellow black author Richard Wright “spoke of Paris as a refuge” for black artists, to which Baldwin responded, “In the beginning, I must admit, I looked on Paris as a refuge, too. I never intended to come back to this country.” 2 Baldwin confessed that as he became more familiar with the Parisian racial landscape, he was forced to reconsider its potential as an escape from the racial violence that conditioned his experience as a black American. One reason for this was Baldwin’s observation of a set of racial tensions at once familiar and new to him in France. “The relationship between American Negroes and Africans and Algerians in Paris, who belonging to France,” helped Baldwin realize that “I was treated, insofar as I was noticed at all, differently … because I had an American passport. I may not have liked this fact: but it was a fact. And I could see very well that if I were an Algerian, I would not have been living in the same city in which I imagined myself to be living as Jimmy Baldwin; or if I were an African, it would have been a very different city to me.” 3 1 “An Interview With James Baldwin, Studs Terkel/1961,” in Conversations with James Baldwin, eds. Fred R. Standley and Louis H. Pratt (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), 17. 2 Ibid, 14. 3 Ibid. 2 Baldwin was not the first African American to look abroad in search of a sound future away from the violence of the Jim Crow era in the United States. Neither was Baldwin the first African American whose search for safety, belonging, and freedom would end in disappointment. The epigraph that begins this introduction, drawn from the same interview, therefore situates Baldwin’s dawning awareness of the difference that marked the racial structures he navigated in Paris, as well as the possibility of engaging those differences to devise solidarities attuned to “diaspora” and difference as frameworks for unity. My dissertation, Another Country, the title of which is adapted from the tragic 1962 novel that Baldwin wrote between Greenwich Village, Paris, and Istanbul; extends Baldwin’s observations of alternate experiences of racial violence and racial belonging elsewhere by exploring how discourses of blackness and Africanness circulated among and between Arab North Africans, African Americans, and other African peoples in Egypt, Algeria, and France during the Cold War. I interrogate the intersecting and conflicting dialogues of blackness, Africanness, and Arabness that suffused transnational black cultures and thought in an era marked by political moments defined as “Third Worldist,” anti-colonial, “pan-Arab,” and “pan-African” in turn. Another Country pursues as its frame Baldwin’s ‘coming to know’ the divergence between his experience as an African American and the experiences of other African diasporic peoples in “another country” in order to elucidate how African Americans, Egyptians, and Algerians maneuvered the complex racial landscapes of the decolonial era by, in part, embracing, organizing, and mobilizing blackness as a racial, cultural, and political practice. A number of novels, magazines, essays, newspapers, and festivals attempted to imagine the possibilities of blackness and diaspora for enacting a common pursuit of anti-colonial liberation are borne of the years between 1952, which marked the rise of the Free Officer’s Movement in Egypt, propelling the African nation’s 3 path to independence and non-alignment, and 1979, when the signing of the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty, preceded by the 1978 Camp David Accords, arguably signaled the final decline of Egypt’s pan-Africanist and pan-Arabist political and cultural orientation. The production of these literary and performative cultural texts and events, enumerated in my chapter outline, are studied in this project as translational texts which attend to, debate, and otherwise reimagine the possibilities fomented by diasporic peoples – inclusive of Egyptians and Algerians – within and through the multifaceted theoretical and practical frameworks of blackness and the African diaspora. Whereas Zora Neale Hurston once mused on racial formations in the U.S.: “I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background,” then, by contrast, African Americans, Algerians, and Egyptians elsewhere were impelled to explore alternatives to their presumptive racial identities – black, Arab, African, and otherwise – against a black background: the background of a rising Third World consciousness; a global black imaginary of the meaning of freedom, and the potential re-mapping of transnational black subjecthood that both allowed. 4 The experiential, ephemeral, and embodied racial constitution and belongings of Arabic- speaking Africans has long been a part of a range of scholarly and cultural thought throughout the Anglophone and Francophone intellectual realms. Scholarly pursuits of the Arab presence and participation in Africa and its diaspora have spanned from the study of the pre-and post- colonial Islamic slave trade on the continent, as in Raymond Mauny’s Les siècles obscurs de l’Afrique Noir (1970), Patrick Manning’s Slavery and African Life: Occidental, Oriental, and African Slave Trades (1990) and Ronald Segal’s Islam’s Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora (2001); the intersections of Islam and blackness in Africa and its diaspora, explored in numerous volumes by Edward E. Curtis IV, Michael A. Gomez, and Sherman A. Jackson; as 4 Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” The World Tomorrow (May 1928). 4 well as in more recent treatments of Afro-Arab political and cultural collaborations, detailed in Alex Lubin’s Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary (2014) and Keith P. Feldman’s A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (2015). 5 Still, identifying the place of Arabs within the broad discursive frameworks and understandings of blackness and diaspora has nonetheless been a much-contested exercise across the multiple fields where blackness, Arabness, and Africanness are engaged. The legacies of the Islamic and European slave trades and Ottoman and European colonialism on the African continent established a questionable though popular conception of the Sahara as a boundary between “North” and “sub-Saharan” Africa. Early scholarship in Middle Eastern Studies demonstrated this trend, and tended to elide discussions of race and racial identity in the Arabic- speaking North of Africa as African in favor of a regionally oriented, Levantine-dominated analysis of an “Arab” identity rooted in a common experience of colonial subjectivities emergent in the Western geopolitical invention of a “Middle East.” 6 Recent work in Middle Eastern Studies and the growing field of Arab American Studies has attempted to address this limited 5 See: Edward E. Curtis, Islam in Black America: Identity, Liberation, and Difference in African American Islamic Thought (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), The Call of Bilal: Islam in the African Diaspora (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), Black Muslim Religion in the Nation of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Michael A. Gomez, Pragmatics in the Age of Jihad: The Precolonial State of Bundu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Sherman A. Jackson, Islam and the Blackamerican: Looking Toward the Third Resurrection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 6 See: Michael Bonine, Abbas Amanat and Michael Gasper, eds., Is There a Middle East?: The Evolution of a Geopolitical Concept (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); Malcolm H. Kerr, The Arab Cold War: Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasir and His Rivals, 1958-1970 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971); Rashid Khalidi, “Arab Nationalism: Historical Problems in the Literature,” American Historical Review. 96:5 (1991): 1363-1373; Rashid Khalidi, Lisa Anderson, Muhammad Muslih and Reeva Simon, eds., The Origins of Arab Nationalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Zachary Lockman, Workers and Working Classes in the Middle East: Struggles, Histories, Historiographies (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993); Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (New York: Warner Books, 1991). 5 mobilization of “Arab” by turning toward the diversity of local and international discursive racial formations among Arabic-speakers navigating twentieth century Arab migrations and expanding Western (economic and military) incursions into the Arabic-speaking world. 7 Still, “Arab” is a charged signifier on the African continent and in the African diaspora, simultaneously embraced and contested by Arabic-speaking Africans themselves in certain historical and cultural moments that remain conceptually and literally untranslated in Anglophone scholarship on Arabness and its variations. 8 This drawing of lines in the sand, so to speak, also found its way into the field of Black Studies in large part due to the highly charged investments in blackness and the cartographic and philosophical delineations of Africa and Africanness that the study of African and African American history, thought, and politics formed in relation to. For instance, as black students and scholars waged a battle to formalize African and African American Studies (Black Studies) as an interdisciplinary field recognized in American institutions of higher learning in the 1970s, one early school of thought on Arabs forwarded that they and their Imazighen (Berber, non-Arab inhabitants of Northern Africa) counterparts, though the purveyors of Islam on the African continent, were also non-indigenous invaders, slavers, and “white Arab-Asians” distinct from the authentically black ancestors who originally populated the region. 9 Hisham Aidi has written a 7 See: Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation After 9/11 (New York: NYU Press, 2012); Sarah Gualtieri, Between Arab and White: Race and Ethnicity in the Early Syrian American Diaspora (Berkeley: University of California, 2009). 8 Ramzi Rouighi, “Why Are There No Middle Easterners in the Maghreb?” in Is There a Middle East?: The Evolution of a Geopolitical Concept, eds. Michael Bonine, Abbas Amanat and Michael Gasper (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 100-118. Rouighi explores why “Middle Eastern,” and in many cases, “Arab,” is not applicable to or taken up in Maghreb. He also asks why “African” is not widely utilized as an identifier, if “Middle Easterner” is not, given the tense ties between Imazighin and Arabs in the Maghreb: this is one particular limitation that “Arab” as a broad racial marker for “North Africa” lays bare. 9 Mahmoud Mamdani, Saviors and Survivors (New York: Pantheon Books, 2009), 76, 87-94. 6 condensed intellectual history on this subject, which he also poses as indicative of early tensions between African American Christians and Muslims in the U.S., and that was paralleled in formulations of an Afrocentrist school of Black Studies that claims Egypt as centre to Africanist cultural and civilization perspectives. 10 In such an analysis, primarily promulgated by Molefi K. Asante, “the centrality of the ancient Kemetic (Egyptian) civilization and the Nile Valley cultural complex as points of reference for an African perspective” are the reference points for Black Studies, much as “Greece and Rome serve as reference points for a European world.” 11 In this particular analytical approach, Egypt belongs to Africa and to Africans, considered a black nation and peoples by Asante and his peers, but contemporary Egyptians were left out of the equation, likely because they did not satisfactorily meet either standard. The segmentation of Arabs from (black) Africans is apparent in this particular Black Studies corpus. Though the Afrocentrist approach was not representative of the field in its entirety, the estrangement of Arabs from blackness and Africans was not unique to U.S.-based black thought. The place of contemporary Arabs, if any, in the African diaspora and in global discourses of blackness was also skeptically considered by African intellectuals, such as Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka, who once proclaimed that Africa needn’t extend above the Sahara, for “Africa minus the Sahara North is still a very large continent, populated by myriad Mahmoud Mamdani has written extensively that this discourse of Arab “invaders” has been revitalized in light of the ongoing genocide in South Sudan began in 2013, often framed as an “Arab” versus “African” racial and ethnic conflict. Mamdani notes that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of how Arabness and Africanness are often inextricable in Sudan, as well as demonstrative of the far more complex historic power-play in Sudan, which Mamdani says was far more equitable (as between Egypt and Sudan) than is commonly thought. 10 Hisham Aidi, “Slavery, Genocide, and the Politics of Outrage: Understanding the New Racial Olympics” Middle East Research and Information Project 35 (2005), http://www.merip.org/mer/mer234/slavery-genocide-politics-outrage. References: Chancellor Williams’ The Destruction of African Civilisation (Chicago: Third World Press, 1971); Molefi K. Asante and Kariamu Welsh Asante, eds., African Culture: The Rhythms of Unity (Westport: Africa World Press, 1985). 11 Molefi K. Asante, The Afrocentric Idea (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 9. 7 races and cultures.” 12 Even Africans who were invested in discerning the ties between the “Arab” North and “black” South, such as French-Egyptian journalist Jacques Baulin and Senegalese poet-president Léopold Sédar Senghor (the subject of Chapter Four), affirmed that “it is mainly on political and social grounds … that ’black’ and ‘white’ African nationalists endeavour to base their cooperation.” 13 Disagreements over Arab belonging to Africa, its diaspora, and to both embodied and signified blackness abound, even when the political advantageousness of solidarity was recognized. But alongside and within these ruptures, possibility emerged. Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was among the most vocal African cultural figures to reject what he deemed the ‘denial’ of Africans to determine their own geography as it related to Arab Africans: “Hegel gives historical, political, and rational expression and legitimacy to every conceivable European racist myth about Africa. Africa is even denied her own geography where it does not correspond to myth. Thus Egypt is not part of Africa; and North Africa is part of Europe.” 14 Excerpted from Decolonising the Mind, Thiong’o was not only sharply responding to Western readers of his translated Gĩkũyũ-language essays, he was also taking to task both Europeans and Africans who repeatedly denied Arabic its legitimacy as an African language. 15 From the academy, Thiong’o was joined by the late Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui, whose own work invoked Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah’s relationship with Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose reciprocal support for African liberation movements throughout the continent during his presidency stood as evidence of longstanding Afro-Arab ties taken up anew in the anti-colonial era. Additionally, African 12 Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 97. 13 Jacques Baulin, The Arab role in Africa (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1961), 18. 14 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey Ltd, 1986), 31-32n15. 15 Ibid, 30n1. 8 American activist and thinker Malcolm X popularized a sort of pro-Arab pan-Africanism after his 1964 travels through Africa and Southwest Asia introduced him to the “blood brothers” of the Algerian Casbah. 16 For these reasons, Algeria and Egypt are the two Arab African nations where I focus my analysis. Egypt has a long presence in African diasporic imaginings of the ordering of a global blackness that, though dispersed, was manifested in the foundations of human civilization itself. 17 Algeria’s presence in the black radical imagination is more recent, but no less significant in the formation of a black transnational consciousness. The brutal war waged in the settler nation against the last vestiges of France’s empire marked Algeria as crossroads for black revolution, devoted to the liberation of ‘the darker nations.’ The two countries were also meeting points for the development of revolutionary praxis and ideology in the mid-twentieth century: the armed wing of the African National Congress, the Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC), Movimento Popular Libertação de Angola (MPLA), and the Palestinian Liberation Organization had all received training at a Front de Libération Nationale outpost in Morocco, largely supported by funding and resources allocated by Gamal Abdel Nasser to these and other liberation organizations. 18 The inclusion of France in this project is positioned in this larger history. Home to an immense diasporic population by virtue of its vast colonial territory, I 16 Samir Meghelli, “From Harlem to Algiers: Transnational Solidarities between the African American Freedom Movement and Algeria, 1962-1978” in Black Routes to Islam, eds. Manning Marable and Hishaam Aidi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 101-103. 17 Cheikh Anta Diop, Nations nègres et culture: de l'antiquité nègre-égyptienne aux problèmes culturels de l'Afrique noire d'aujourd'hui (Paris: Éditions Africaines, 1954/1973). Diop was also prone to ignoring Egyptians of his era in preference for the black Egypt of antiquity, but he critically realigned Egypt’s belonging to the African continent in the fields of African history and anthropology. 18 Abdeldjalil Larbi Youcef, “’The Algerian Army Made Me A Man,” Transition 116 (2014): 73-78 Ali A. Mazrui, “Black Africa and the Arabs,” Foreign Affairs 53:4 (1975): 727. 9 situate France as an honorary Afro-Arab outpost, a strategic location for the expansion of dialogic reproductions and reformations of blackness in the diaspora. 19 Many of the aforementioned declarations and practices of Arab belonging or unbelonging to blackness and Africanness, including those by Arabs themselves, are united by their reliance on the so-called “muddled” racial heritage of North Africans as the proof of their potential (or denied) blackness and Africanness. Such a tendency is bound in biological and geographic constructions of racial identity and belonging that were very often productive in the period this project is concerned with, but ultimately did little to elevate an understanding of Arab North African experiences and articulations of blackness beyond the physiological. Furthermore, a good deal of these Afro-Arab collaborations positioned peoples of African descent as culturally or politically homogeneous, or what Senghor termed the “natural” sum of values that constituted Africanité and Arabité. 20 It is important to recognize that Arab North Africans represent a vast array of phenotypic characteristics and shared in the struggles of their diasporic and “sub- Saharan” counterparts, but the blackness I am interested in for this project is a reverberated blackness that is contested, variable, and deliberately articulated in order to create and imagine new meanings and uses for blackness as a practice of transcending the imposed boundaries of nation, race, and language. The primary argument of this manuscript is therefore that Arab North African, specifically Egyptian and Algerian, mobilizations of blackness in the cultural realm between 1952 and 1979 sought to enact their racial ties to other African diasporic peoples in order to catalyze the global anti-colonial efforts that gave rise to Third Worldism as an emancipatory 19 Claude Liauzu, Aux origins des tiers-mondismes, colonisés et anticolonialistes en France, 1919-1939 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1982), 171-198. 20 Léopold Sédar Senghor, “The Foundations of ‘Africanité,’ or ‘Négritude’ and ‘Arabité’” (1967), Critical Interventions 5 (2009): 166. 10 political imaginary. As a result of this political imperative, I argue that the definitions of both “Arab” and “black” shift through contact between African Americans and other Africans in France, Egypt, and Algeria as a result of the cultural collaborations that comprise Another Country’s archive, and that both blackness and Africanness – and the differences encountered between the two – constitute a language through which the particular, local analytics of racial formation, oppression, and subversions are made legible in a transnational terrain. Finally, I locate within the broader study of what has been termed “Afro-Arab solidarity” the importance and potential of black-Arab tension for the synergistic genesis of renewed practices of blackness and Africanness that Arabs, as Ali Mazrui maintained throughout his career, are always already a part of. 21 I locate such transnational and translocal currents, translations, and practices of blackness and its political utility in the cultural realm because while culture functions as a political practice in the realization of Third Worldism, culture also navigates failure in a way that the strictures of a purely political method (“purely political” as a cynical invocation, here), bounded by a problem and then a solution, can not. Cultural Studies is, in short, the primary methodology of this project. The use of Cultural Studies as the conceptual underpinning of this project allows for scenes of failure, contestation, and ‘messiness’ to act as productive modes of analysis. One of the primary utilities of the intellectual study of culture is to acknowledge, confront, and “textualise…everyday life” without rendering culture or its participants monologic. 22 Though the political language of anti-colonialism, non-alignment, and Third Worldism characterized the rationale the subjects of this project called to in implementing an Afro-Arab thought and praxis, culture exceeded politics by virtue of being unbeholden to 21 Ali A. Mazrui, “On the Concept of ‘We Are All Africans,” The American Political Science Review 57:1 (1963): 90. 22 Simon During, Introduction to The Cultural Studies Reader, Second Edition (London: Routledge, 1993), 13, 21. 11 teleological machinations geared towards a consummate resolution, such as the framing of a constitution, or declaration of independence. Therefore, a more productive reading of North Africans as emergent from a “muddled” heritage does not rely on, as I previously outlined, ‘racial mixing’ as the Arab’s entry point into Africa and blackness, but rather the entanglements of racial identity and the cultural remapping and reimagining of conceptual language, translation, and what Brent Hayes Edwards terms “the practice of diaspora.” 23 The methodological impulse of Another Country is thus structured by the primacy of my archival research, conducted between 2009 and 2015 across three continents with the intention of contributing to a theorization of the place of Arabs in the practice of the African diaspora. Tracing this archive – in English, Arabic, French, among other languages – spanned from Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture to the British National Archives in Kew Gardens. While gathering issues of a magazine called Lotus in Cairo, Dakar, Berlin, and Beirut for my fourth chapter, I was thrice denied a research visa to Algeria, and so was obliged to seek the Algerian traces of the Martiniquan philosopher Frantz Fanon in Archives nationales d’outre mer in Aix-en-Provence. I gathered the writings and visual propaganda of Fanon, the Front de Libération Nationale, and the International Black Panther Party that comprise my third chapter in Aix-en-Provence and catalogued them Marseille: that same Afro-Arab city in the south of France where Claude McKay, Ousmane Sembène, and countless other African peoples laboured, organised, and collaborated over the twentieth century. The very theoretical ambition of Another Country, which is to explore the heterogeneity and diversity of blackness and its mobilization in Afro-Arab cultural production, consequentially became an intrinsic part of this manuscript’s archival method. While my access to the records of African and Arab cultural and 23 Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2003). 12 political encounters was contested and negotiated over the course of six years of research, tempered attempts to access the archive itself illuminated the utility of the interstices – the tensions – that the cultural moments analysed here bloomed within. I am keenly aware that this project of illuminating cultural translations of blackness that remap the phenomenological and epistemic cartography of diaspora and diasporic subjects to include North Africans approaches something like an appropriation of blackness. And while the next section will chart the foundational corpuses I take up to define and bend blackness and diaspora, I would like to preface my theoretical overview with E. Patrick Johnson’s formulation of the utility of ‘appropriative’ elements in the performance of blackness. Johnson writes that “when one attempts to lay claim to an intangible trope that manifests in various discursive terrains [blackness], identity claims become embattled.” However, rather than issue a discourse of authenticity against such claims to or appropriations of blackness, Johnson acknowledges there is a use value inherent in the “comingling” and “cross-cultural appropriation” of blackness. “Black … seems to absorb light,” Johnson determines, and so offers “fertile ground on which to formulate new epistemologies of self and Other.” What I am now tasked with, then, is to reconcile the distinctions of the theoretical and methodological constellations Another Country navigates in laying out the ‘fertile ground’ of Arab articulations of blackness. II. Diaspora, Blackness, and Variability In Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism from a Neocolonial Age (1997), philosopher Lewis Gordon identifies blackness as “the prime racial signifier,” a formulation directly resultant from the condition of enslavement, the legacy of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, emergent “when the physical or the biological invoked.” Gordon summons the metaphor of “the 13 blacks of…” in the “order” of racial signifiers and firmly states: “Although there are people who function as ‘the blacks’ of particular contexts, there is a group of people who function as the blacks everywhere. They are calling in now-archaic language – Negroes. Negroes are the blacks of everywhere, the black blacks, the blackest blacks.” 24 If, as Gordon maintains, blackness is the point “from which the greatest distance must be forged” as in metaphor, or experience, then how is it possible to fruitfully analyze the function and utility of blackness for Algerians and Egyptians whose own identities emerge in a fundamentally different historical context? 25 I approach a theorization of blackness, diaspora, and their related functions through the corpus of black cultural studies, itself a tenuous scholarly perch insofar as the danger of derailing from Gordon’s important reminder that the authority on what it is to be black is rightfully the realm of those who are consistently perceived of and socialized as black throughout the longue durée of anti-blackness. However, additional formulations of blackness as fluid (per Stuart Hall); blacknesses as simultaneous (adapted from Achille Mbembe’s theorization of “simultaneous multiplicities”); and formed and framed in diasporic discourse, as it is by Paul Gilroy and Hortense Spillers, value Lewis Gordon’s cautions while also fleshing out how blackness saturates and is distilled across its own vast geographies. 26 Cultural theorist Stuart Hall thoughtfully proposed that blackness as a unifying cultural identity is itself a paradox: “it was the uprooting of slavery and transportation and the insertion into the plantation economy [as well as the symbolic economy] of the Western world that ‘unified’ these peoples across their differences, 24 Lewis Gordon, Her Majesty’s Other Children: Sketches of Racism From a Neocolonial Age (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1997), 53. 25 Ibid. 26 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 144-145. Mbembe contends that conceptual imaginings emergent from the African continent always occur in multiples – I would like to apply this to the meaning of blackness itself. Hortense Spillers, “The Idea of Black Culture,” CR: The New Centennial Review 6:3 (2006): 8. 14 in the same moment as it cut them off from direct access to their past.” 27 Within the “traumatic ruptures” endured and consolidated into totalizing and exclusionary “otherness,” Hall wishes to retrieve difference (per Derridean différance, the palimpsestic ‘play of signification’) in diaspora as “the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity: by the conception of ‘identity’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference.” 28 Similarly, Another Country accesses blackness through the expansive proposition theorized by Paul Gilroy in ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (1987). Though drawing from Stuart Hall’s work on “how black internationalist and liberationist ideologies are translated from one ‘national’ context to another” in Policing the Crisis (1978) and fundamentally situated in post-industrial Britain, Gilroy “claims back race from ethnicity” in order to interrogate how race functions as a social and cultural mechanism for resistance against compulsory political “order.” 29 Gilroy develops his theoretical groundwork by outlining the profound change in racial terms that marked 1980s Britain, when he writes, “the contemporary politics of racial differentiation…has moved from political definitions of black based on the possibility of Afro-Asian unity and towards more restricted alternative formulations which have confined the concept of blackness to people of African descent.” 30 Gilroy traces these restrictive formulations to a dire end: they had “fractured” the inclusivity of blackness as a 27 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference (London: Lawrence & Wishant, 1990), 227 28 Ibid, 227-229, 235. 29 Brent Hayes Edwards, “The Uses of Diaspora,” Social Text 66 (19:1 Spring 2001), 58. Paul Gilroy,‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 17. 30 Ibid, 39. 15 productive mechanism to combat racial violence. Rather, as Gilroy concludes, race and racial meanings can – and must – change if they are to serve a political purpose that can counteract and disrupt ‘race’ as a structural and economic imposition. Borrowing from Frantz Fanon’s reading of culture as an emancipatory weapon wielded by the colonized, Gilroy emphasizes that the cultural manifestations of an “inclusive” blackness in Britain - what I will explore in Egypt, Algeria, and France - “introduces a new variety which stresses complex difference rather than simple hierarchy.” 31 The circulation of such black difference is thus incontrovertibly the occupation of diaspora. Michael Gomez has defined diaspora “as a 500-year conversation, in myriad languages and cultural expressions, among various members of African-descended communities…over the meaning of loss and displacement” 32 It is through W.E.B. Du Bois’ legacy of internationalism that Michael Gomez figures the African Diaspora as a “quintessential imagined community, existing as both academic project and social agenda, its precise location a matter of considerable debate but certainly not far from the verges of scholarly and political exigency, concomitantly inhabiting realms of the noumenal and experiential.” 33 Gomez identifies a Du Boisian “two- ness” in the traditional dual poles of the diaspora: “Africa, once lost, has yet to be recovered; whereas America, as an ideal, has yet to become home.” 34 The desire to overcome this fracturing has historically been enacted in black cultural movement and in black cultural thought by refracting blackness through diasporic imaginaries in particular ways. For instance, Gomez describes that central to the first conceptions of the African Diaspora among black Americans, 31 Ibid, 40. 32 Ibid. 33 Michael A. Gomez, “Of Du Bois and Diaspora: The Challenge of African American Studies,” Journal of Black Studies 35:2 (November 2004): 177. 34 Ibid. 16 including the nineteenth century abolitionist David Walker, is an early idea that African Americans “were connected to the ancient histories and cultures of pharaonic Egypt and Nubia in ways that qualified the latter as the ancestors of Africans in the so-called New World.” 35 This two-ness produces a paradox wherein “diaspora” envisions connections and belongings away from the unrealized seduction and impossibilities of national belonging. As historian James Clifford proposes, “peoples whose sense of identity is centrally defined by collective histories of displacement and violent loss cannot be ‘cured’ by merging into a new national community… positive articulations of diaspora identity reach outside the normative territory and temporality (myth/history) of the nation state.” 36 Thus, far before the discourse of Black Studies was formalized, “Egypt was always central to the black transnational… consciousness of a black world, a black ‘universe’.” 37 Egypt, or the imaginary of it, offered a different possibility of belonging that transcended the temporal and spatial covenant of unfreedom in the United States. Brent Hayes Edwards also endeavors to analyze “diaspora” in the context of a history of black criticism prefaced by Du Bois’ Pan-Africanist involvements as a historical marker of black imaginings of a black world. In his article, “The Uses of Diaspora” (2001), Edwards contributes to the tracing of an intellectual genealogy of the African diaspora, arriving at the flexibility of the conception of diaspora offered by George Shepperson in a 1962 essay on the term “Pan-African” for Phylon. Edwards notes that Shepperson moves “toward a revised or expanded notion of black international work that would be able to account for … unavoidable dynamics of difference” in defining the Pan-African. 38 Shepperson eventually lands on ‘diaspora’ as a framework for 35 Ibid, 183. 36 James Clifford, “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology 9:3 (August 1994): 307. 37 Michael A. Gomez, “Of Du Bois and Diaspora: The Challenge of African American Studies,” Journal of Black Studies 35:2 (November 2004): 185. 38 Brent Hayes Edwards, “The Uses of Diaspora,” Social Text 66 (19:1 Spring 2001): 50-51. 17 accounting for such difference in a 1965 conference in Dar es Salaam. Edwards writes, “the ‘African diaspora’ is formulated expressly through an attempt to come to terms with diverse and cross-fertilized black traditions of resistance and anticolonialism.” 39 Though not seeking the etymological ‘fact’ of an ‘African diaspora’ origin story, Edwards is interested, as am I, in the complexity that “diaspora” as an analytical framework, imaginative geography, and lived practice emerges from. Furthermore, since Pan-Africanism and diaspora as are purposefully distinguished by Shepperson as a politic and a theoretical mechanism, respectively, the transnational imperative of both must still take care not to elide one over the other. Another Country thus contends that blackness and diaspora in the Afro-Arab cultural archive that inform this project manifest as the roots for alternative routes of solidarity, difference, and the possibilities of liberation. I have illustrated above that the complex terrains of diaspora and blackness, the two theoretical frameworks through which I conduct my analysis of Afro-Arab cultural collaborations, are simultaneously interrelated and distinct. As I move within and through diaspora and blackness in the transnational, translational cultural archives that constitute Another Country, these theories also constitute a reframing of pan-Arabism, pan- Africanism, and négritude: three of the primary cultural principles that variegate this study. The ways in which the relational and distinct political-cultural diasporic ideologies of pan- Africanism, pan-Arabism, négritude, and Nasserism, among others, refract within Algiers, Cairo, and Paris - the nexus of anti-colonial nationalisms in this text- is attuned to the changing political landscape that internationalist thinkers and artists charted through their travels, as well as the Edwards also shares that Shepperson concludes “the ideological diversity that falls under the broad rubric including both Pan-Africanism [the history of the transnational movement itself] and pan-Africanism [a group of movements] … demonstrates that Africa itself emerges as a concept only historically, mainly through external evocations of ‘continental unity,’ and calls for return.” 39 Ibid, 52-53. 18 new language of blackness and freedom that arise from the potential transcendence of such nationalisms in search of a transnational approach to liberation. 40 I have organized Another Country into two parts, each comprised of two chapters that analyze Algerian and Egyptian cultural sites, racial reproductions, and diasporic practices in turn. Both parts of this manuscript interlock through the overarching analytical and topical frameworks I have outlined in this introduction, though are also – as my theoretical impulses have doubtlessly made clear – distinct in important ways. Part One addresses the history of Arab mobilizations of blackness primarily through the lens of African American cultural travelers. Chapter One locates Paris as a site where the fluidity of blackness and its potential utility as a political and racial language is richly explored in the 1950s. Through a reading of African American journalist William Gardner Smith’s novel, The Stone Face, as well as the Paris essays composed by African American writer James Baldwin. I argue that Paris during the Algerian War for independence served as an ideological battleground for African Americans and Algerians to refigure the function of blackness as a language and mechanism to communicate across regionally-bound understandings of racial oppression and liberation. The meaning of the Algerian struggle and its place in the diasporic pursuit of local and global liberations comes to a 40 Donald Pease, “Introduction: Remapping the Transnational Turn,” in Re-framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies, eds. Winfried Fluck, Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2011), 5. Though slippages are inevitable, I primarily draw on Donald Pease’s parsing of “international” and “transnational” from Re-framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies. Pease writes, “As the effect of the various detotalizations – of settled discourses, nation-states, cultures, and identities – that it instigates, the transnational lacks an origin as well as a destination. It is always in process. Indeed, the transnational enables such a wide range of articulations, ideas, and practices that are everywhere and universally incomplete that it requires the attribution of additional points of choice and strategies of purpose. Each contextualization of the transnational supplies a provisional meaning for a signifer whose significance solicits endless recontextualisation. ... In transnational formations, identities, things, finances, and places are not bound by national identifications and investments. The transnational does what the border does with the nation: it confronts the latter with its own internal differences.” 19 head in The Stone Face, and the question of whether Algerians constitute a different form of blackness or merely signify a parallel of the black experience in the United States is critical to the formation of a transnational black solidarity in this chapter. The conversations that African Americans and North Africans had about what an embodied blackness looks like were not often easy, and indeed the tensions apparent in attempting to expand blackness beyond a U.S.-based formation of racialisation – itself assigned and solidified through the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and subsequent currents of anti-black racial violence – mark the process of defining a transnational black solidarity a contested journey. The complexities of wrangling contextually distinct understandings of blackness across time and space is taken up in Chapter Two. Moving from Paris to Cairo at the height of the Nasserist era, particularly the years leading to the 1967 Six Day War, the second chapter explores the productive potential of tensions and mistranslations (or missed translations) in the framing of Egypt as an imagined black and African homeland. Once again, black Americans who traveled to and settled in Egypt mediate this diasporic ‘encounter’. David Graham Du Bois, the son and stepson of pioneering African American pan-Africanists Shirley Graham and W.E.B. Du Bois, intervenes in what he views as the limitations of U.S. formations of blackness abroad in his 1975 novel …And Bid Him Sing. Framing his semi-autobiographic account of the unsettled meaning of blackness in the North African capital of non-alignment and Pan-Arabism, Du Bois’ novel exemplified the diasporic practice of translation in order to reimagine Egypt’s active contemporary role in the African Diaspora beyond the symbolism of its antiquity. Overlaid with the vernacular of jazz’s growing popularity in Cairo, …And Bid Him Sing identifies the possibility of black cultural meeting points in formulating a mutually intelligible blackness that 20 does not obfuscate the local analytics of alternative identity formations among Egyptians in this period. The shift from Paris to Egypt in the prior two chapters raises the question of how blackness as a political and cultural language is articulated in the Afro-Arab world by Arabic- speaking Africans themselves. The novels I analyze in chapters one and two are accounts of Arab participation and belonging in diaspora from the perspective of African Americans. To expand further on the transnational nature of this Third Worldist remapping of blackness vis-à- vis Arab North Africans, Part Two charts the active inter-diasporic debates that emerge in the midst of global decolonization and rising anti-colonial nationalisms. Chapter Three specifically turns to the arc of the Algerian War for Independence in order to construct a narrative of Algerian liberation that actively engaged new meanings of the diaspora and preconceptions of how Algerians participated in formulations of blackness in the “Arab” North. Through the embodied diasporic revolutionary praxis of Martiniquan psychoanalyst and Front de Libération Nationale member, Frantz Fanon, I explore what it meant for Fanon to immerse himself entirely in Algeria in order to escape the trauma of French colonial racism. Fanon’s contributions to the propaganda journalism of the FLN newspaper El Moudjahid and the later founding of the American Black Panther Party’s international chapter in Algiers also demonstrate how Algeria’s significance and participation in an Arab inclusive pan-Africanism was contributed to and created by Algerians and other African diasporic peoples enacting Algeria as a site of black diasporic political practice. Chapter Three concludes with the scene of the First Pan-African Cultural Festival of 1969, hosted by the Organization of African Unity in Algiers. This gathering of Africans allowed political leaders, soldiers, and artists and musicians to meet one another on their own terms, but also demonstrated the need for what Nigerian writer Joseph Okpaku called a 21 “wrestling match” between artists and politicians over the meaning and utility of African cultures in this historical moment. Indeed, the 1969 festival was deeply political, in contrast to the Dakar- hosted World Festival of Negro Arts and Culture three years prior, and at its very foundation lay the memory of Frantz Fanon. In this chapter, I move through an inter-African dialogue of pro- Arab pan-Africanism in order to gauge the practice and performance of African liberation from within the Algerian nation. The final chapter of this manuscript continues to wrestle the question of pan-Africanism in the Arab world, a debate that casts a long shadow onto black and Arab relations in the present- day. I delve into the archives of the Cairo-based magazine, Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings, as a lens through which to see the respective limitations of two dominant Africanist modes of thought that defined the North/South divide on the continent. Senegalese poet, intellectual, and President Léopold Sédar Senghor’s conception of négritude, much maligned at the 1969 Pan African festival, situated “Arabité” as wholly distinct from “Africanité.” Meanwhile, Lotus emerged from the center of both the pan-Arabist and Non-Aligned Movement of the 1960s, though its primary imperative was the practice of translating African and Asian literatures for the Third World to consume. Lotus therefore demonstrates the difficulty of reconciling négritude and pan-Arabism with any success, for the editorial thrust of the magazine itself represented the Egyptian dominance in African politics that Senghorians decried. Lotus also failed to defer to the innovative possibilities culture offered to the Third World, and instead deployed culture as purely a political tool: Senghor’s own worst fear. However, I attempt to read through Lotus that these constraints ultimately illuminate the practice of conceptual translation – an unintentional byproduct of Lotus’ broad political and cultural practice - as a fault line between négritude and pan-Arabism where the real possibility of expansive diaspora emerges. 22 The forms of cultural production I have compiled as an archive of Afro-Arab dialogic formations of expansive diasporic identity-making in Another Country are thus tasked with evidencing James Clifford’s assessment of the possibility of diaspora itself as a framework for emancipation: “Diaspora discourse articulates, or bends together, both roots and routes to construct what [Paul] Gilroy describes as alternative public spheres, forms of community consciousness and solidarity that maintain identifications outside of the national time/space in order to live inside, with a difference.” 41 The distinctions interposed between Arab North Africans and their counterparts in the African diaspora are not collapsible, but may indeed be understood as pliable. To understand an Afro-Arab consciousness and identity as a historically productive element of the African diaspora unveils the possibility of deepening the roots of a black transnational community in the context of the contemporary political struggles I outline in this manuscript’s conclusion. Finally, a caveat regarding the terminology I deploy throughout this manuscript. Though the primary interest of this project is to trouble static, rooted notions of blackness and the African diaspora in relation to its Arab constituents, as well as to uncouple the Arabic language from the construction of a homogeneous “Arab” race, I am still bound by the very language of racial identity that I attempt to trouble and translate. Therefore, “Arab,” “North African,” and “Afro- Arab” are largely used to represent the Arabic-speaking African subjects of this analysis, and “black,” “black American,” “black African,” and “sub-Saharan African” are broadly used for non-Arabic speaking people of African descent. In addition, my own transliterations (that is, Arabic composed in the Roman alphabet) from Arabic to English will appear infrequently, but I 41 James Clifford, “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology 9:3 (August 1994): 308. 23 endeavour to supply contextual background of chosen transliterations as they occur throughout this text. PART ONE: BLACK FOLKS FROM BABYLON 25 Chapter One This Is Not An Arab: Black American Mediations of Algerian Identity in Paris I. Black Futures in France By the point in 1954 when the guerrilla arm of Algeria’s Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) initiated attacks on French military and civilian strongholds throughout Algeria, African Americans had long experienced France as a patron of and location for political, cultural, and economic exile from the strange career of Jim Crow America. As Tyler Stovall, Tricia Danielle Keaton, and numerous other scholars of Black France and black international mobility have established, African Americans had been gradually exposed to French hospitality through the World Wars, with many choosing to stay in France during the heightened popularity of jazz and other black art forms in large swaths of Western Europe. 42 Whereas France’s Antillean and African colonial subjects laboring in the metropole and conscripted during the same period were largely subject to repatriation to their homes in Africa and the French Caribbean after the wars, Brent Hayes Edwards documents that African Americans in the U.S. armed forces forged new alliances and imaginaries of black internationalist possibility in France and communicated home these “tales of encounter and connection.” 43 Claude McKay’s renderings of port life for African Americans and Africans in France in the 1929 novel Banjo is one notable exploration of this multifaceted exchange, though he also documents the burgeoning discontent – first among Africans, and then his African American characters - with the romantic myth of French egalitarianism. McKay’s novel also narrated the experience of a globalised (and in Michelle 42 See: Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), Darlene Clark Hine, Tricia Danielle Keaton, Stephen Small, eds., Black Europe and the African Diaspora (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009). 43 Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 3. 26 Stephens’ summation, politicized) black underclass in the port city of Marseille, rather than the depictions of comfortable African American cultural and intellectual life in Paris: the latter narrative more predominant French propaganda and popular narratives in African American social circles in the United States. 44 45 In the midst of African American settlement into France, the spread of anti-colonial discourse and rhetoric in the 1950s, particularly that of the Algerian War for Independence, drew expatriate African Americans into debates on their own positions within global anti-colonial struggles. While Algerians were signified by “bicot” and “melon” in racialised French parlance, and referred to as the “Negroes of France” and “les misérables” in representations of Algerians by African American observers; opinion amongst African Americans in France on the nature of Algerian subjugation and resistance was notably diversified. Reflecting on this, Philadelphian 44 Michelle Ann Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914-1962 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 167-203. 45 Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, “Eliminating Race, Eliminating Difference” in The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, eds. Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 28-41. Aimé Césaire, “Discours d’inauguration de la place de l’abbé Grégoire: Fort-de-France – 28 décembre 1950,” in Oeuvres complètes (Fort-de-France: Editions Desormeaux, 1976), 422-3. To elaborate on the ‘myth’ of French, egalitarianism: France’s ‘raceless’ society is rooted deeply in its past and contemporary imperial practices, as well as modern French society’s attempts to reconcile their Empire’s past with their globalised present. For instance, Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall’s “Eliminating Race, Eliminating Difference” discusses the significance of the French government’s 1989 inauguration of abbé Henri-Baptiste Grégoire, an eighteenth century French abolitionist and radical, into the Panthéon. Apparently in order to “highlight France as the source of modern ideas of human equality,” Grégoire’s place in France’s history of universalité is revealing. Like Bartolomé de Las Casas, who three hundred years earlier pled with the Spanish throne to end its enslavement and destruction of the newly-discovered Caribbean’s indigenous population, Grégoire had stood against the oppression of Africans, Jews and other racialised subjects of France (particularly Haitians) in his time. Also like Las Cases, however, Grégoire advocated for the inclusion and acculturation of these racialised subjects into the Catholic Church – the epitome of European moral righteousness – as the solution to racial hatred and violence. For instance, while Grégoire participated in the creation and inclusion of universalism in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, he proposed the French Antilles’ gens de couleur should be granted French citizenship as “they could help the whites contain the slaves.” As the “father” of universalité, Grégoire cast French Catholic identity as normative, fully influencing France’s colonial Empire’s investment in the conversion to and adoption of this identity by colonial subjects in the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. But despite even Aimé Césaire lauding Grégoire as “the first scientific refuter of racism,” the abbé was an ‘antiraciste raciste’ in the truest sense of the term. 27 journalist and writer William Gardner Smith’s 1963 novel, The Stone Face, has found itself the subject of recent scholarship on African American literature and its international foundations and reach in the Francophone world during this era. However, Smith’s autobiographical account of his interactions with Algerians while in France had been primarily read in this scholarship as an analogous narrative of racial subjection and as a model of culturally constructed comparative solidarity. While Smith overtly departed from other African American cultural figures - namely, Richard Wright - over how to name Algerian resistance in the anti-colonial context, I argue that Smith articulated most openly the nature of Algerian resistance: a resistance couched in blackness and struggle against anti-black racism. 46 This chapter’s reading of Smith’s novelization of his time in Paris during the Algerian War for Independence explores in depth his conclusion that race occupied the center of Algerian resistance against and within the French state, just as race was centered in the American civil rights struggle, and that blackness and anti- black racism was both the fulcrum and language of these similar, though historically, socially, and politically particular struggles. Smith traces a synchronous relationship between his position as a black American in struggle against American racial terror and the struggle of the ‘Negroes of France’ against French racial-imperialism. Smith’s intervention in the internal debate about Algerians within African American expatriate conversations on the topic was neither new nor singularly articulated at the time of The Stone Face’s publication in the year after Algerian independence was achieved. 47 However, 46 Tyler Stovall, “The Fire This Time: Black American Expatriates and the Algerian War,” Yale French Studies 98 (2000): 191. Stovall explains, “More than most, and certainly more than James Baldwin or Chester Himes, Wright had embraced the myth of France as a land of political and racial freedom, using it as a benchmark of tolerance to criticize the United States.” 47 Out of many of Smith’s contemporaries, Malcolm X also drew connections between Algeria and the black American freedom struggle that Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver, then of the Black Panther Party, 28 Smith most cogently traces the path from what Tyler Stovall names “the cozy unity of that [African American] community” in France, to the explicit dissent and disagreement among African American expats in this historical moment. 48 Stovall, whose own reading of The Stone Face and black American expats in France this chapter is deeply indebted to, ultimately concludes that Smith’s novel “argues that the issue is no longer blackness, but rather bigotry,” forwarding the relationship between African American expats and Algerians in France as symmetric in nature. 49 However, I contend that Smith’s encounter with France’s official and de facto attitudes towards its Algerian subjects during a period in which African Americans enjoyed the relative soundness of their bodies and minds in fact leads Smith to embrace Algerians not only as black subjects but additionally represents Algerians in his novel as articulating themselves as black. There are important implications for and limitations of interpreting Smith as taking Algerians on their own word when they express in his novel their own blackness. The first of these implications is that Smith is an African American writer doing the representational work of writing Algerians based on a fictionalized narrative of his own experience in France. The Algerians in The Stone Face are speaking through Smith’s words and memory. The theoretical legacy of representation and its political ends is thus necessarily tied to my re-reading of The Stone Face as mobilizing blackness as a both an identity and a language through which Algerians and African Americans are able to communicate their respective struggles against racism and colonial oppressions while simultaneously problemitising the representation of blackness as a singular political or cultural identity. To emphasize, I am interested not only in how Smith represents Algerians in his novel as metaphor, or as figures through which he is able would subsequently solidify as a comparative framework for liberation upon founding a chapter of the BPP in Algiers, as I will discuss in detail in Chapter Three. 48 Tyler Stovall, “The Fire This Time: Black American Expatriates and the Algerian War,” 192. 49 Ibid, 197. 29 to reflect on blackness (what I interrogate in more depth as the central interest of Stovall and other scholars, including Michael Rothberg and, to some extent, Paul Gilroy), but also how Smiths’ novel wielded articulations of blackness as a productive language of cultural, political, and racial identity that is ever changeable and in flux while also mutually intelligible in the context of anti-colonial and anti-racist struggle. Too frequently are the particular circumstances of specific colonialisms and anti-colonial struggles obfuscated in an idyllic reach for a universal anti-colonial subject as well as black international solidarity. Therefore, a multifaceted representation of blackness in the anti-colonial period requires attention to anti-colonialism’s negotiations of the boundaries of language and place without sacrificing these particularizations. In the interest of explicating the language of blackness as I utilize it in my reading of The Stone Face, it is first necessary to establish a few central critical theoretical engagements with blackness in the French colonial context. II. Négritude and Its Discontents ‘Encountering’ French racialisation shapes earlier works from black writers in the Francophone world. The philosophy of négritude, initially conceived by Jeanne and Paulette Nardal, Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Léon Damas in the 1920s and 1930s, perhaps exemplifies best the legacy of black Francophone intellectual and cultural unity as a method of resistance. Négritude was theorized in part as a “collective black personality” by Césaire and Senghor, a rejection of French imperial, intellectual, and cultural racism through a unified black aesthetic attendant (per Senghor) to the inclusion of inherited African traditions. 50 Emancipatory 50 Janice Spleth, “African intellectuals in France: Echoes of Senghor in Ngandu’s Memoirs” in French Cultural Studies: Criticisms at the Crossroads, eds. Marie-Pierre Le Hir and Dana Strand (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), 260. 30 at its root, the concept nonetheless tended towards mythologizing a universal blackness by attending to the ‘total sum of black values’ that would define its imagined subjectivities. 51 Négritude, despite the supremely important body of cultural work that emerged from it, ultimately depended on mobilizing an ‘authentic’ black French cultural production to prove its participants worthy of inclusion in French ‘universalism.’ Additionally, that strategic imperial racial classification laid the groundwork for distinguishing Arabic-speaking Africans from their counterparts south of the Sahara Desert and in the diaspora, and that participants in the négritude movement tended to represent the French Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa, négritude can also be read as facilitating an essentialising of blackness within its pursuit of a black cultural archetype. 52 But despite the relative spatial limitations of négritude, it must be recognized as an attempt to reclaim the most impactful of colonial creations – blackness – and imagine it as a liberatory epistemology. Determining “a collective black personality” attends to the architects of négritude’s own early preoccupation with the potential of an egalitarian humanism by which black being in the world is celebrated– the same ‘new humanism’ Césaire’s student, Frantz Fanon, would come to theorize in his seminal text, Peau noire, masques blancs (1952). Martiniquan psychoanalyst and later member of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale, Frantz Fanon explores transcending race, rather than re-institutionalizing it by imagining a common past or experience of blackness. Fanon refracts blackness very differently 51 Manthia Diawara, “Reading Africa through Foucault: V.Y. Mudimbe’s Reaffirmation of the Subject,” in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, eds. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti and Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 458. 52 Ali A. Mazrui, “On the Concept of ‘We Are All Africans,” American Political Science Review 57:1 (1963): 90. Mazrui reminds pan-Africanists that European defined and constructed identities such as “Arab” and “black African” in the process of arbitrarily carving up the African continent: “In colonial schools young Bakongo, Taita and Ewe suddenly learned that the rest of the world had a collective name for the inhabitants of the landmass of which their area formed a part.” 31 than did négritude, exemplified in a moment of traumatizing interpellation at the hands of a white French child: “‘Dirty Nigger!’ Or simply, ‘Look, a Negro!’” 53 Fanon delineates the depth of this moment: “I came into this world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was object in the midst of other objects.” 54 Fanon was identified and cast a “negro” by an entity outside of himself - a colonial moment of double consciousness, that metaphysical condition theorized half a century earlier by W.E.B. Du Bois in Souls of Black Folk (1903). Fanon asserts that his right to identify himself at all had been preemptively withheld from him: in the Francophone world, he remained “a negro.” “As long as the black man is among his own, he will have no occasion, except in minor internal conflicts, to experience his being through others,” Fanon continues, reiterating the fact that one is only black in relation to whiteness. But it remains, nonetheless, a ‘fact’: “The evidence was there, unalterable. My blackness was there, dark and unarguable. And it tormented me, pursued me, disturbed me, angered me.” 55 Objectification and self- objectification alike are odious to Fanon, and in an attempt to avoid losing himself completely to the angst of representation and its limitations, he alludes – very generally, and not at all convincing to himself - to blackness as constituting a floating signifier, forever dependent on unstable social constructions of race and racialisation, and thus potentially forever living. For the African American novelist and critic James Baldwin, the signification of blackness is indeed alterable - transferable, in fact, dependent on how and when blackness is constructed and experienced in historically, socially, and spatially constitutive contexts. While 53 Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952), 88. All translations of Black Skin, White Masks are by Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967 edition) unless otherwise noted. 54 Ibid, 89. 55 Ibid, 89. 32 Fanon’s blackness is tethered to phenomenology and the body, James Baldwin moves further towards the understanding of blackness as a signifier – particularly as he locates Algerians, in his experience, in the shadows of where they once were. Reflecting on the Algerian War, which began four years after he moved to France in 1948, James Baldwin confessed in No Name In The Street: “In a way, I was somewhat insulated against what was happening to the Algerians, or was aware of it from a certain distance, because what was happening to the Algerians did not appear to be happening to the blacks.” 56 Baldwin’s evolving consciousness about the Algerian War for Independence as it was exteriorized in the French capital is richly colored by the complicated racial and political status he and his Algerian neighbors at the time occupied. Baldwin, like William Gardner Smith, lived as a black American in France: at once an exile from U.S. racism and unwillingly complicit in French imperialism. 57 Contact with Algerians in France thus deeply impacted both Baldwin and Smith’s assumptions about racism and blackness on a global scale. Blackness as Baldwin understood it as an American initially differed significantly from blackness as Smith witnessed it being projected, constructed, defined, and attacked by the French state, French citizens, and Algerians themselves. Baldwin states further, “I was still operating, unconsciously, within the American framework, and, in that framework, since Arabs are paler than blacks, it is the blacks who would have suffered most.” 58 Baldwin’s celebrated explications of the complexities of racial construction and racism in the United States suggest, however, that this is not an altogether true sentiment. In the American racial framework, as in France, skin color only serves as the flexible roots of racial suppression. Certainly, color demarcates for racist structures whom to target, but Baldwin certainly knew better than to seriously assert phenotype 56 James Baldwin, No Name In The Street (New York: Vintage International, 2007), 37. 57 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 247-248. 58 James Baldwin, No Name In The Street, 37. 33 as the fulcrum of racist logics. This is evident in the writer’s observations in an essay entitled “Encounter on the Seine: Black Meets Brown” (1955): “the poverty and anger which the American Negro sees [in Paris] must be related to Europe and not to America.” 59 ⁠ No, in fact, Baldwin seems here to embody as a writer the presumption of racial oppression based on the particular historical context of the United States as he views it being commonly held by his fellow (African) Americans. Therefore, Baldwin’s willingness to counter - publicly in 1972, when No Name In The Street is published – what would become a common assumption in the American context - ‘Arabs are white, or at least they are not black’ - testifies to Baldwin’s efforts to introduce Algerians as comrades to black Americans in more than name only, even if he does not surrender to his (American) reader the task of locating black bodies legible in their particular understanding of blackness. 60 If Algerians in France had claimed, in the perspective of Smith and Baldwin, black identity as a language and identity to fuel their resistance and its legibility, it is well worth asking: what does black identity signify in the context of France in the era of decolonization, and why then would any marginalized colonial subject choose to be black? Blackness is not uniform, stable, or static in any society, but the process of imperial racialisation and its strict policing of race often reproduces the notion that it is. Rather, as Stuart Hall asserts: It is to the diversity, not the homogeneity, of black experience that we must… give our undivided creative attention. This is not simply to appreciate the historical and experiential differences within and between communities, regions, country and city, across national cultures, between diasporas, but also to recognize the other kinds of 59 James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, in James Baldwin: Collected Essays (New York: The Library of America, 1998), 88. 60 Indeed, by 1972 (and in fact, far before, as thoroughly documented by Sarah Gualtieri in her 2005 monograph Between Arab and White), Arabic-speaking peoples, regardless of phenotype, are categorized as white by the U.S. government as a result of a series of court cases revolving around the question of naturalization. 34 difference that place, position, and locate black people. 61 Hall’s “simple” consideration of these “historical and experiential differences” within and between cultures emphasizes the utility of The Stone Face as a cultural product which represents the delicate balance between complicity and resistance amongst African Americans in France, as Michael Rothberg has argued, as well as Tyler Stovall’s argument that the Algerian War presented a particular dilemma for transnationally-minded black American writers in Paris. Furthermore, it allows for development of both of these recent scholarly analyses of Smith’s novel by underscoring how Smith situates - “locates,” in Hall’s terms - Algerians within his understanding of blackness and the struggle against colonialism. Indeed, a central point in contemporary studies on Black France in the decolonial era is that France’s black population has always historically been “distinctively configured,” largely as the impetus to identify with blackness in the French context “is primarily a response to and rejection of anti-black racism,” as well as strategizing resistance to it. 62 The Stone Face thus recognizes difference between African Americans and Algerians by way of Smith’s experience as a black American in France, but does not allow this difference to preclude the possibility that both Algerians and African Americans practice a black radical resistance to colonialism and racism. To expand upon French historian Pap Ndiaye’s alternative theorization of négritude in La condition noire, Smith’s novel ultimately moves away from analogizing Algerians with black Americans to locating them as “être noir,” or being black. 63 For William Gardner Smith, the language and utility of être noir is for he and his Algerian characters a cultural, political, and liberationist affair. 61 Stuart Hall, “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” Social Justice 20:1/2 (1993): 111-2. 62 Introduction: “Black Matters, Blackness Made to Matter” in Black France/France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness, eds. Tricia Danielle Keaton, Tracy, Sharpley-Whiting, and Tyler Stovall (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 2-3. 63 Pap Ndiaye, La condition noire: Essai sur une minorité française (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2008), 48. 35 III. The Stone Face “Where would he go?” asks William Gardner Smith of Simeon, the main character in The Stone Face, published shortly after Smith himself returned to Philadelphia from a long residence as a journalist in Paris. The Stone Face introduces Simeon, an African American writer in self- imposed exile from the violence of American racism. Initially intrigued with the kindness and company of his French hosts and fellow black American expats, Simeon soon encounters the ‘negroes of France’ - Algerians who live and work in the metropole without access to the rights and privileges enjoyed by white French citizens. By the end of the novel Simeon returns to the United States in order to assist “America’s Algerians,” a phrase he utters shortly after his experience of the 17 October 1961 Paris massacre of Algerians by Parisian police. 64 “Where would he go?” is Simeon and Smith’s query in 1961. It is a question that comes to close a novel which invokes the complexity of constructing a black transnational subject and common experience, and the resultant difficulties of navigating the various racial, social, and political significations ascribed to blackness across national and historical contexts. Simeon, and thus Smith, realizes that the struggle against racism must be global, and the very context and construction of race and racism must be understood and addressed on global terms. In The Stone Face, Algerians signify black, Arab, and French identities. Reading the attempts of Algerians to articulate their oppression through a language of blackness in William This project’s final chapter will return to Léopold Sédar Senghor’s theory of “être Négre,” which Ndiaye theorizes “être noir” around, to fully consider the difference – in the context of an inter-African debate – between ‘being black’ and ‘being Black.’ 64 Kristin Ross, May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 45. Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 227-228. On this date, Algerian protesters, responding to the FLN’s call for protests in France, marched 30,000 strong through the streets of Paris. Maurice Papon, head of police, ordered troops to attack the marchers – state estimates (the few that were made, as the massacre was largely hushed up until very recently) support that at least 200 people were murdered, their bodies tossed into the River Seine. 36 Gardner Smith’s novel demonstrates that blackness is acknowledged by Smith as a tactic through which Afro-Arab French citizens attempt to make their struggles legible to non-Arab African diasporic peoples. While articulating a united racial bond and experience is often used to claim racial pride and build solidarity, it is not an unproblematic practice. Richard Wright, who arguably led such writers as James Baldwin and William Gardner Smith to France after settling there himself in 1947, publicly stated that France offered the potential for freedom from racial discrimination in the Western world. 65 Smith’s novel articulates that he did not sympathize with Wright’s aggressive non-confrontation with the Algerian conflict, thus portraying his own experience navigating the tensions within the African American expatriate community in France surrounding the Algerian War and Algerian racial identity. 66 The Stone Face opens with Simeon Brown, “just under thirty and a Negro,” on a train heading to Paris. Wiry, shy, and one-eyed due to a venomous encounter with white supremacists as a child in his hometown of Philadelphia, Simeon has travelled to Paris to put his past behind him - and to avoid resorting to violence himself. He has followed on the path of other black American writers and arts, hoping that in Paris “violence would not be necessary, murder would not be necessary.” 67 In Paris, Simeon would be at peace. Simeon identifies himself as a fugitive from the United States, forced into exile by what he has done and would need to do in order to combat the violence of American racism. He meets others who have ‘escaped’ and become fugitives in Paris: other black Americans, like Babe; refugees from the Holocaust and its aftermath, like his Polish lover Maria; and even white Americans - Clyde and Jinx. Simeon 65 Tyler Stovall, “The Fire This Time: Black American Expatriates and the Algerian War,” 186. 66 On what I am naming Richard Wright’s “aggressive non-confrontation” in regards to Algeria, many thinkers have dealt with this subject matter in great detail – none more eloquently than James Baldwin himself in his 3-part essay series on Wright in Nobody Knows My Name, concluding with, “Alas, Poor Richard” (1961). 67 William Gardner Smith, The Stone Face (New York: Pocket Books, 1964), 3. 37 slowly adapts to a city where interracial friendships and even intimacies are seemingly unremarkable: a foundational change in his life, highlighted by frequent flashbacks to his prior existence in violently segregated Philadelphia. He is likewise struck by his mobility in Paris. For instance, one evening Simeon interacts with white American businessmen who are asked to leave the establishment by its white, French manager after pointed racial harassment of Babe, Simeon, and their Swedish dates at a club. Simeon and the visiting businessmen are equally shocked by this turn - a defense of a black patron’s right to enjoy the club at cost to its white customers. However, Smith deftly transitions from this story of possibility for African American social mobility into a different example of racial conflict turned on its head. As Babe and Simeon leave the same club, they witness a screaming man being forced into a police car. The scene is presented through Simeon’s perspective as an afterthought, an aside from the victory that he has just won against the white Americans in the club: “What was that?” Simeon asked. Babe said, “That man was probably an Arab.” “An Arab?” “Yeah. There’s a war on in Algeria, remember?” “Oh. Yes.” 68 Initially a moment of triumph, the coupling of these two scenes positions Simeon as witness to a particular type of racial violence in France: a violence that he (initially) will not face, but will eventually be forced to reconcile with as his lived memory of racism in the United States begins to play out anew in front of his eyes. While still cautious to presume the exact nature of his place in France, Simeon’s new friends - black and white, though as yet not Arab - help him adjust to life in Paris, allowing him to settle comfortably in a truly different sort of society. Still, Simeon is cautious: he asks two 68 Ibid, 34. 38 white French students with whom he is acquainted if there is racism in France. One responds: “Of course not. The French don’t believe in racist theories; everybody knows that. Africans feel perfectly at home here. The French don’t understand racism.” 69 But just a short time before this conversation took place, Simeon had witnessed an Algerian man beating a white French woman in the street. He intervenes, the police arrive. An observer from a nearby restaurant backs Simeon’s testimony to the police, even claiming “the Arab” beat Simeon. At the police station, it is made apparent to Simeon that the white woman in fact robbed the Algerian man and his actions were an effort (albeit violent one) to retrieve his money. Simeon registers a creeping horror, feeling embarrassed and disgusted at having been participatory in an instance of racial violence that he would have immediately identified as unjust in his native Philadelphia. When he tries to correct his error, a police officer at the station interrupts him: “You don’t understand. You don’t know who they are, les Arabs. Always stealing, fighting, cutting people, killing. A night in jail is letting them off easy.” 70 The next day, Simeon is walking down a street near his home and hears from an Algerian sitting at the popular Odéon Cafe: “Hey! How does it feel to be a white man?” 71 This remarkable moment of interpellation marks a foundational shift in The Stone Face: Simeon knows instinctively those words are intended for him. He flashes back to a moment from his childhood in Philadelphia. His father is telling him a story about being humiliated by a white man on a segregated bus in the southern U.S., the other black passengers pressuring him to submit rather than react. Simeon recognizes himself in this instance as a black passenger on the bus, participating, submitting rather than resisting the quotidian racial violence he witnesses. He is 69 Ibid, 54. 70 Ibid, 46. 71 Ibid, 38. 39 enraged at his complicity in anti-Algerian violence in France, no less because his own blackness is what reveals the nameless Algerian man’s taunting call of “white man” as an accusation. The Algerian names Simeon as a white man - the Algerian has named himself as a black man. Simeon’s memories of Philadelphia begin to mirror what he witnesses happening to the Algerians in France. Each memory of his past life in the United States is illuminated, no more so than when he interacts with the Algerians he comes to know in the novel. Shortly following the incident at the Odéon Cafe, an Algerian man, Ahmed, who had witnessed his friend Hossein identify Simeon as a “white man” approaches Simeon. When Ahmed meets Simeon, Smith writes of their encounter, “Ahmed looked somewhat like Simeon. He had the same thin face, deep brown eyes; he was tall, with long, nervous hands. But his skin was swarthy, not black, and his hair, though very curly, was not the hair of a Negro.” 72 Ahmed tells Simeon that he scolded Hossein after he shouted at Simeon: “‘How can you talk to this man this way, he has black skin.’” While Simeon is qualifying Ahmed’s blackness (or apparent lack thereof), Ahmed shares that he had done the same of Simeon - in order to convince his friend that Simeon was not a white man. Ahmed continues: “Hossein replied, ‘He is a black American. This means he thinks like a white man.’” 73 The new friends speak further, Simeon inquiring after Ahmed’s family in Algeria, in particular his brother who is fighting with the FLN. Leaving the café, they pass a police station: one where Ahmed is routinely stopped, asked for his papers, and called bicot and melon at gunpoint. Simeon asks Ahmed why they were not stopped just then and Ahmed laughs, saying, “‘Because I’m with you. With someone who looks ‘respectable’…How does it feel, being respectable?’” 74 Simeon responds truthfully: “‘Odd.’” As Simeon makes plans to meet 72 Ibid, 71. 73 Ibid, 72. 74 Ibid, 74. 40 Ahmed again before venturing back out into the city on his own, his new awareness of the seemingly undeserved anonymity and privilege he possesses as a black American living in Paris will become odder still. Though the timeline of the novel is not explicit until the moment of the October 17 th massacre of Algerians in Paris, in 1961, Simeon and Ahmed are very likely meeting after Charles de Gaulle’s establishment and presidency of the French Fifth Republic in 1958 and 1959, respectively. In September of 1959, de Gaulle called for Algerian self-determination, angering the pied-noir in Algeria who rioted for his leadership only the year before in reaction to the bombing campaign initiated by the FLN in 1956. 75 While pied-noir reactionaries, including those within the French army in Algeria, plot against de Gaulle, the FLN, ever skeptical, are keeping watch in this period. Ahmed shared with Simeon that his brother has been hiding in the mountains of Algeria for four years and that even in his “bourgeois intellectual” circumstances (a medical student), he feels as though he is joining in the fight too. 76 The prospect of returning to a free Algeria has led Ahmed to dedicate himself to the idea of serving a useful function in a newly independent homeland. This quiet young man, who is very like Simeon in so many ways, is as wrapped up in the tragedy of the war in his country of origin as Simeon is in his own. Simeon expresses his comfort at meeting and interacting with Ahmed, acknowledging that something about the man’s manner soothed him after having been so discomfited by Hossein’s accusation that Simeon is ‘white.’ Of course, this is absurd, and Simeon knows it – he is no less black in phenotype or in self-identity just because he is in France. But Simeon’s Americaness materially alienates him from Algerians even while his blackness has the potential to unite him with 75 See: Mohammed Harbi and Benjamin Stora, La Guerre d’Algérie, 1934-2004: La fin de l’amnésie (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2004). 76 William Gardner Smith, The Stone Face, 73. 41 Algerians. Therefore, Simeon is caught in a liminal space between blacknesses in two different entirely disparate contexts. Even after having been interpellated in such a way by Hossein, Simeon still seeks to quantify and understand blackness in the language that he is accustomed to – an American blackness, which Simeon does not understand Ahmed and other Algerians to belong to at this moment in his journey through France’s racial landscape. After meeting Ahmed and during subsequent moments when he bears witness to the racial violence Ahmed and other Algerians face, Simeon begins to reach out to his American friends who have lived in Paris far longer than him. He needs to understand who the Algerians are to the French, and how black Americans might participate in either the oppression or liberation of their Algerian neighbors in France. Literary theorist Michael Rothberg has addressed this point in recent literature, reading The Stone Face as an example of the complicity of African American expatriates in France during the Algerian revolution. Rothberg’s primary question of Smith’s novel is “how complicity emerges as an unavoidable complication that unsettles the opposition between the universal and the particular,” as Rothberg is interested in how African American and Algerian solidarity and tension appears, in Smith’s case, “against the backdrop of the recent Nazi genocide and occupation.” 77 As Smith novel ends with the October 1961 massacre, Rothberg’s reading of multidirectional memory and the ethics of complicity is useful in understanding the productive results of the tension between complicity and solidarity in Simeon’s growing awareness of the racialised position of Algerians in France. Rothberg states of The Stone Face: “the transnational and multidirectional responses to the [October 1961] massacre foreground historical asymmetry, troubling embodiment, and unacknowledged 77 Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory, 230, 248. 42 complicity.” 78 Complicity here is placed within the context of both embodiment and historical distinctions, but Rothberg does not fully reconcile that Simeon and the Algerian characters often signify one another, both communities embodying blackness in particular moments and spaces, and for particular reasons. Though Rothberg understands “the novel has emphasized through its contrast between complacent African American expatriates and locally victimized Algerians … categories of belonging based on racial victimization or its transcendence [that] are equally insufficient,” his turn to complicity as a refracting mechanism within which “solidarity across difference” may be realized presumes that it is a shared experience of racial victimization, not blackness, that undergirds Simeon’s own epiphanies about France. 79 What Rothberg’s nuanced contemplation on The Stone Face presumes, then, is that while Algerians are not the black subjects of France, there is a space between the tendency to universalize (by way of relating Algerians to blackness) and the desire to abstract (Simeon’s moment of interpellation by an Algerian) where such tensions may produce possibility for a “multidirectional” solidarity in spite of difference. Indeed, Simeon is engaged in an internal struggle over his perceived complicity in the treatment of Algerians while he enjoys distance from such racial violence, but his acknowledgement and embrace of ‘difference’ between Algerians and black Americans is where Simeon’s understanding of race, racism, and blackness in France begins. In fact, Simeon will soon come to testify that the struggles of Algerians in France and black citizens of the U.S. is just the sort of productive abstract universalizing project that allows (being) black in multiple registers. For instance, during one of his evenings spent drinking with Babe, Simeon ventures: 78 Ibid, 231. 79 Ibid, 250. 43 “Seems to me that the Algerians are the niggers of France.” 80 Babe reacts vociferously, a scene worth recounting in its entirety: Babe snatched up the coffee pot. He spoke aggressively. “Forget it, man. Algerians are white people. They feel like white people when they’re with Negroes, don’t make no mistake about it. A black man’s got enough trouble in the world without going about defending white people.” But he was not convincing, even to himself. He too, wanted to hold onto the new peace, the new contentment. Babe shifted his eyes from Simeon, and without saying any more, turned and went back into the living room. 81 Babe typifies Smith’s observation of a black American’s reluctance to identify with Algerians across their differences, and a refusal to acknowledge his own complicity in their treatment by ignoring or denying the systemic racial oppression faced by Algerians in France and Algeria. Beyond interacting with and asking questions of his Algerian friends, Simeon realizes the stakes for him, a black American, are also high. Babe is torn, unwilling to risk his own position as a guest in France in order to stand up for the Algerians - a predicament that may have been based on Smith’s critiques of Richard Wright’s refusal to speak on Algeria. This moment marks why the question of complicity that Rothberg raises does not always serve as the mediating practice of multidirectional memory. Babe is not interested in building solidarity across difference. The struggle for Babe is also to imagine multidirectional solidarity and ways of being across different geographic spaces and histories – multidirectional memory, therefore, is impeded not only by perceptions of basic difference (in the scope of complicity or otherwise) between Babe and the Algerians, but also by Babe’s inability to unpack his own discomfort at the epistemological configuration presented by the fact that his primary proximity to blackness and anti-black racism in France is vis-à-vis Algerians. Simeon, by comparison, and perhaps in reaction to Babe’s own vehement denial of Algerian blackness, both in representation, in lived experience, and in his 80 William Gardner Smith, The Stone Face, 91. 81 Ibid. 44 growing understanding of the particularities of French racism, begins to act. Tyler Stovall’s “The Fire This Time” addresses this point in the novel - when Simeon is fully cognizant of the situation of Algerians and increasingly radicalized against French racism because of it - and challenges what Rothberg would later claim to be a politics of solidarity “across difference.” Stovall writes, “Just as some French intellectuals had created their own image of African Americans, in The Stone Face Smith reimagines Algerians in France as African Americans.” 82 Embedded within a larger discussion of the various reactions to or inactions of African American writers in light of French state violence against Algerians in Paris, Stovall reads Smith’s novel as utilizing Algerians to signify African Americans and their struggles with racism. However, Stovall also does not fully consider the novel’s Algerian characters’ assertions of their own blackness. Rather than Stovall’s claim that “the novel argues that the issue is no longer blackness, but rather bigotry,” characters such as Hossain identify their particular racialisation as black in the French context as both the cause of their oppression and as a tactic for the struggle against it. 83 Blackness and bigotry are inextricable from one another in Smith’s novel, evidenced further by Simeon’s initial point of identification with Algerians. Bigotry against blackness and subsequent interpellations as white (not black) by the black subjects of France leads Simeon into active resistance against the French state. Simeon’s first meeting with Ahmed reflects on the similarity of their appearances, despite different skin color and hair texture, but recognizing this difference does not prevent Simeon from inhabiting – through this new friendship - “Algerianness” just as his Algerian friends mobilize their own blackness in order to render legible to Simeon the nature of their oppression. In a final scene, as he heads into the Chateau Club with Ahmed, Hossain, and other 82 Tyler Stovall, “The Fire This Time,” 194. 83 Ibid, 197. 45 Algerians, Ben Youssef and Mohammed, Simeon immediately notices the coolness with which their party is greeted by the host and the other customers. This is the same host that had, at the beginning of the novel, kicked out the white American businessmen who harassed Simeon and his American friends. Feeling “he was back in Philadelphia,” Simeon immediately wanted to leave. Realizing what that meant: Simeon felt his face burn. But why should he care what these imbeciles were whispering among themselves! Racist bastards! But he was afraid of something. Of losing something. Acceptance, perhaps. The word made him wince. Of feeling humiliation again. For one horrible instant he found himself withdrawing from the Algerians – the pariahs, the untouchables! He, for a frightening second, had rejected identification with them! Not me! Not me! Can’t you see, I’m different! the lowest part of himself had cried. 84 In this scene Simeon is forced to confront the disadvantages of merely acknowledging difference. Though perhaps sometimes physically distinctive from his Algerian mates (we have only a description of Ahmed’s ‘light skin’ so far in the novel), and certainly speaking French and English with quite a different accent than his counterparts, Simeon is read as being one of them by virtue of standing next to them. His prior access to the privilege of difference is suddenly denied him, sparking his desperation to retrieve the distinctive quality he has as an African American while simultaneously prompting shame at the awareness of what his desire to be seen as different means. Smith writes, “sitting here with the Algerians he was a nigger again to the eyes that stared. A nigger to the outside eyes – that was what his emotions had fled.” 85 This experience at once invokes Frantz Fanon’s own traumatic interpellation through the words of a child. Jarringly subsumed into the ideological discourses of French racism, Fanon wished to deconstruct the entire affair. However, he cannot escape being seen as black, nor can he avoid needing to defend that blackness in order to survive. The cost of being black is never existing 84 Smith, 93. 85 Ibid, 94. 46 freely in the world, a knowledge at the heart of why Simeon fled the United States. But for the purpose of Algerians in France – peoples whose phenotypes are far from standardized, whose lands have been occupied, and whose resultant economic precariousness took them to the French capital for work – calling to blackness expresses not only an attempt to build solidarity with the Fanons of the world who are attempting to live freely, but sharply identifies the root of French oppression of Algerian subjects within and outside of France: the untranslatable reality of embodying blackness. Self-identification as black, if it is a choice that one has, is certainly not one that Fanon would advocate for. But self-identification as black, when there is a choice but also a legal and societal culture of silence around the structuring of the Other, is one that Smith’s Algerians take up in The Stone Face as a method of resistance in order to name the unnamable, across time and space, and through different understandings of blackness and the African diaspora. It is therefore evident that seeking a universal black experience is both sought after and unattainable in The Stone Face, a predominant theme in cultural and theoretical works on the particular nature of French racial imperialism produced by black diasporic figures in the mid- twentieth century. Frantz Fanon cautioned against the mythologizing of a black past and issued pointed critiques of a unified or universal black (cultural) present, for instance, while himself living and working with the FLN in Algeria and Tunisia, not his native Martinique. Similarly, while Paul Gilroy found Simeon’s return to the United States at the end of the novel to be a “capitulation to the demands of a narrow version of cultural kinship that Smith’s universalizing argument appeared to have transcended,” it is precisely the global phenomenon of racism (not a universal one, as Stovall asserts) that unsettles ‘cultural kinship’ as a practical or possible 47 political project. 86 Rather, it is the practice of blackness – not presumptive kinships within it - that reveals the possibilities of furthering political aims. Smith’s novel explores the multidimensional use of blackness and black identity as a point of revelation, of naming African Americans as enjoying the circumstances allowed to them by virtue of French imperial racism elsewhere, but also potentially essential to taking it apart through solidarity and difference. Gilroy’s careful attention to the politics of identity, belonging, and exile in Smith’s literary work thoughtfully accounts for the constellation of racialised systems in the anti-colonial, Cold War era. But while Gilroy reads beyond the character Simeon’s experience in Paris as merely an analogous account of racial oppression, his assessment of the novel’s conclusion - Simeon’s return to the United States - as abjuring the “obvious conclusion… that the face of racial hatred could be fought when and wherever it appeared” perhaps does not account for the fact that Simeon’s story is itself, as a novel, part of the struggle against racial violence. 87 As Frantz Fanon forcefully notes in Les Damnés de la Terre (1961/1963): “sooner or later…the colonized intellectual realizes that the existence of a nation is not proved by culture, but in the people’s struggle against the forces of occupation.” 88 Smith’s cultural practice invokes a tentative success in translating blackness across difference- not only culturally, but also materially and experientially - that manifests in Simeon’s resolve to return to the United States and rejoin “America’s Algerians” in struggle. 89 86 Paul Gilroy, Against Race (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 323-324. 87 Ibid, 323. 88 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 159. 89 Smith, 180. 48 IV. Where then are les Algériens? Originally published in a January 1957 issue of the literary magazine Encounter (“or for the CIA”) and expanded for inclusion in his 1961 book of essays, Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son, Baldwin’s essay on the September 1956 Congrès des écrivains et artistes noirs thoughtfully recounts the conference’s engagement of black politics and culture in a rapidly decolonizing world. 90 Among the many conversations Baldwin witnesses, the evolving status of Algeria and the Algerians in France is notably the last topic he writes about, with reason. Early on, Baldwin is particularly struck by the relative freedom that he and other African Americans at the conference – even including W.E.B. Du Bois, who was denied a passport by the State Department and so could not attend - enjoyed compared to their African and West Indian counterparts. He notes that the possibilities enabled by American citizenship, “results in a psychology very different - at its best and its worst - from the psychology which is produced by a sense of having been invaded and overrun, the sense of having no recourse whatever against oppression other than overthrowing the machinery of the oppressor.” 91 Noting that even in the context of a conference devoted to exploring, celebrating, and negotiating the living presence of African and African diasporic culture in spite of a violent imperial past and present, differences between systems and experiences of oppression and resistance were made known, Baldwin deconstructs for his readers the multiple articulations of blackness presented by conference participants Among these presenters was an “enormous, handsome, extremely impressive black man” who rose in response to a white European’s “admirable but inadequate” query to Aimé Césaire 90 James Baldwin, No Name In The Street, 383. 91 James Baldwin, “Princes and Powers,” in Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (New York: Vintage International, 1993), 20-21. 49 on what a “Negro-African culture” is and whether, should it exist, it was worth saving. 92 After speaking to the crisis of black cultures, Baldwin writes that the man followed his short monologue with “a reference to the present Arab struggle against the French which I did not understand, and ended, ‘What we are doing is holding on to what is ours. Little,’ he added, sardonically, ‘but it belongs to us.’” 93 Baldwin’s freedom to ‘not understand’ is elaborated upon in No Name In The Street a decade later, but this moment of ignorance (perhaps partially feigned) in his account marks a shift, in both his writing and his relationship with France, from a focus on ‘Africans’ - those he recognizes a 300 year distance from, but those he could still identify as sharing ancestry with - to a slow grasp of those Africans from the North as sharing something with him too. Barbadian writer George Lamming had asserted at the Congrès “that all Negroes were held in a state of supreme tension between the difficult, dangerous relationship in which they stood to the white world and the relationship, not a whit less painful or dangerous, in which they stood to each other.” 94 Lamming suggested, “that in the acceptance of this duality lay their strength, that in this, precisely, lay their means of defining and controlling the world in which they lived.” 95 In point of fact, Lamming articulates the very ‘defining and controlling’ that Algerians in France in that very moment, the autumn of 1956, were attempting to make legible to their African American counterparts through the identity and language of blackness. For Baldwin, the latter tensions - those between black peoples themselves - culminate in his perception, as an African American, of the ‘Algerian problem’ in France. Baldwin resists universalizing a black identity or experience, but the instability of French deracination of its 92 Ibid, 52. 93 Ibid, 52-53. 94 Ibid, 42-43. 95 Ibid, 43. 50 Algerian subjects allows him eventually to consider the potential of Algerian signification of the black subject to instigate his own political momentum – though the Algerian body itself, for Baldwin, seemed to be lost along the way. It is clear that while Baldwin notes a lack of “geographical, spiritual, and historical” unity in “the black world” 96 and that he furthermore does not entirely understand what the ‘Arab struggle’ against France has to do with the black world in 1956, the year of the conference and his writings on it. James Baldwin notably does not conclude that Algerians occupy a space within blackness, or in the African diaspora. 97 Rather unlike William Gardner Smith, Baldwin also resists framing, for the most part, his encounter with racial violence in Paris through his contact with Algerians themselves. In fact, the prolific essayist initially maintains, particularly in No Name In The Street, a narrative and physical distance from his Algerian counterparts. Whereas Smith, as Tyler Stovall and other scholars have noted, is all too eager to name and shame the complicity of African American expatriates in France, Baldwin is rather more hesitant to do so. In fact, Stovall writes that while Baldwin and others gained “a broader political understanding of racism as a worldwide phenomenon” by virtue of being in further contact with other African and African-descended intellectuals, it was a double-bind for guests of the French state to openly critique the war in Algeria as a racist one. 98 Still, in 1972’s No Name In The Street, Baldwin’s long relationship with France and its tensions, or what Chapter Three of this project identifies as Algeria’s ever-shifting position in the black American imagination, results in his most forthright writings on the matter of Algeria and 96 Ibid, 47. 97 Distinctions within and between “blackness” and the African Diaspora occupy much of the theoretical work I will employ in Part II of this project – there are many slippages and discrepancies between these two markers that are essential to the framing of Arabness within and alongside definitions of blackness and the African diaspora. 98 Tyler Stovall, “The Fire Next Time,” 188, 191. 51 the war. Having briefly returned to Harlem in 1952, during the height of McCarthyism and two years before the founding of the Front de Libération Nationale on the eve of war, Baldwin quickly returned to Paris, away from the dizzyingly heightened racial violence that would be reported daily in the French capital. Yet by 1956, Baldwin’s Paris was seemingly emptied of the Algerians he once had daily contact with. Shop owners, hustlers, café waiters and patrons - they all seemed to have disappeared. Baldwin remembers, “I began to realize that I could not find any of the Algerians I knew, not one; and since I could not find one, there was no way to ask about the others…We heard that they had been placed in camps around Paris, that they were being tortured there, that they were being murdered. No one wished to believe any of this, it made us exceedingly uncomfortable, and we felt that we should do something, but there was nothing we could do.” 99 Though unclear as to whom constitutes the “we” Baldwin references, he clarifies that this did not as such disturb a previously romantic relationship with Paris (“My journey, or my flight, had not been to Paris, but simple away from America”) than it did unsettle any lingering confidence he might have had in his moral position as a black expatriate in France. 100 Against the backdrop of the Algerian War, Baldwin would leave France again in order to tour the American South in 1957 – a journey through racial violence against blackness in a deeply resonant, though distinctly American, language - but it is his vocal discomfort with the disappearance of Algerians from the city that offers one further lesson on the productive nature of transnational, and translational, blackness. Baldwin was unable to “find” Algerians when he first returned to Paris. He is unable to locate them or to locate that different place and position of black people and cultures Stuart Hall asks us to appreciate. What Baldwin encounters instead are the shadows where Algerians once 99 James Baldwin, No Name In The Street, 37. 100 Ibid, 39. 52 were. It is their lack, in the oeuvre of James Baldwin’s life work, where they resonate the most. In his effort to correct his ignorance of “the Algerian-French complexity,” Baldwin turns to Albert Camus’ editorials in Combat, the French leftist newspaper. It was this, in fact, that led Baldwin to his infamous lambasting of William Faulkner’s play, Requiem for a Nun, which Camus translated and directed for the Mathurin Theatre. Insulted at Camus’ too-faithful rendering of Faulkner’s preoccupation with black forgiveness and slow justice, Baldwin eviscerates these notions entirely, his final documented confrontation with the inadequacies of French republicanism and any myth of France constituting a content ‘away’ from the United States. Algerians - or their shadows - appear again after the play: “I could, simply, no longer sit around in Paris discussing the Algerian and the black American problem. Everybody else was paying their dues, and it was time I went home and paid mine.” Baldwin may not be able to locate Algerians themselves, but he realized “the possibility of introducing invention into the black’s existence” in parlaying the traces Algerians left behind - their black shadows – into the inspiration for his own return to the United States. 101 The different uses Algerians serve in both Baldwin and Smith’s modes of articulation thus bring the question of blackness, representation, and the utility of Algerians themselves to the fore. I have read The Stone Face as articulating blackness as a language through which the understanding and groundwork of a global anti-colonial framework that attends to racial formations and marginalization could be expressed across particular histories. William Gardner 101 Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 67. Magdalena J. Zaborowska, James Baldwin’s Turkish Decade: Erotics of Exile (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009). Between 1957 and 1961, Baldwin’s time in the United States involved interviewing the parents of black children who integrated Southern schools; meeting the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; publishing the essay collection, Nobody Knows My Name; extensive coverage of the sit-in movement throughout Southern cities, and thereafter fled American again – this time, for Istanbul. 53 Smith and James Baldwin both negotiate their own relationships with blackness through their representation of the blackness of Algerians in France as they faced both the traumatic and potentially generative implications of racial identity in 1950s Paris. This at once structures and renders unstable the role of Algerians themselves in these black American writers’ narratives of their experiences in France during the Algerian War for Independence. Algeria operates here, as my third chapter will continue to explore, as a tool for black transnational cultural expressions of radical anti-racism and anti-colonialism, and it complicates any simple answer to a question of what solidarity between African Americans and their Algerian counterparts in France during this period may have actually accomplished. Both Baldwin and Smith experience a détour to their own circumstances, in a way. Baldwin, like the character Simeon (and his mediator, Smith), returns to the United States frustrated with France and its claims to a race-blind republic. Still, neither author envisions their return as an escape from the reality of “les misérables” – the blacks, of either Europe or the Americas. These writings, produced largely by utilizing the figure of the Algerian as interlocutor, leave both Baldwin and Smith wondering: what use is France for us? The imaginary of Algerians in William Gardner Smith’s The Stone Face is taken up to unpack, in a heavily weighted manner, the solidarities and affinities that African Americans themselves may develop with blackness across history and geography. Though my next chapter will deal more fully with the articulations of a dialogic blackness between African Americans and North African diasporic peoples, Smith’s novel is no less important to a cultural understanding of blackness as a language that simultaneously deepens and disrupts the silences and misrecognitions of blackness and black suffering in fluid, shifting, and different contexts. 54 Chapter Two Afro-Arab Sonics: Egypt and the Tension of Translation I. From Babylon to Pharaoh’s Land In 1952 Egyptian army officers Muhammad Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser led a dissident group of military personnel collectively known as the Free Officers in a coup against the reigning, British-backed Egyptian monarch, King Faruq. 102 The 23 July Revolution initiated by the Free Officers movement was intended to overthrow Faruq, an effort covertly funded in part by the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in order to reform the Egyptian monarchy and facilitate greater political and economic ties beneficial to the U.S. To this end, the Khartoum-born Muhammad Naguib served briefly as the first Egyptian Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) Chairman, Prime Minister, and later President of Egypt until his opposition maintaining military rule in the government led to his forced resignation and the RCC’s proclamation of its vice-chairman, Gamal Abdel Nasser, to the presidency shortly before the Council dissolved itself. 103 The concurrent dissolution of the aristocracy in both Egypt and Sudan – eventually securing the troubled independence of the latter nation – and establishment of an Egyptian Republic marked the heightened acceleration of the Third World towards 102 I have utilized David Graham Du Bois’ transliterations of all Arabic names (ex. Gamal Abdel Nasser, rather than Jamāl ʿAbd al-Nāṣīr) for the purpose of continuity throughout the chapter. 103 Hazem Kandil, Soldiers, Spies and Statesmen: Egypt’s Road to Revolt (London: Verso Press, 2012), 24-27. Nasser secured the backing of Americans even after the coup not a little ironically by manipulating the Americans’ interest in anti-Communism: Naguib’s focus on Egyptian self-rule ran counter to the United States’ rationale that military strongmen would broker strong alliances between the U.S. and newly decolonized nations. 55 decolonization in the 1950s and secured the primacy of Egypt in global anti-colonial rhetoric and action. 104 Nasser’s ascendancy to leadership was met with dismay from the United Kingdom, which had only backed Egyptian pseudo-independence in the years after World War II on the assumption that their economic interests in the Middle East, including Egypt, would be preserved even while allowing certain Arab states to assume control over their own military defense. However, at Nasser’s direction, the Free Officers Movement instead targeted British installations of power in 1952, leading to the termination of the British occupation of Egypt in 1954. The end of British control of the Canal Zone would ultimately become central to Nasser’s popular political platform and first major military victory over the Suez Canal, in 1956. The departure of the British allowed Egypt to pursue a policy of non-alignment as an experiment in breaking away from reliance on Western powers, though all the while accepting military aid from the Soviet Union. With Gamal Abdel Nasser at the helm of the Non-Aligned Movement along with other newly independent African and Asian states and their figureheads, Nasserism as a political and economic exercise began to redefine Egypt on Third Worldist terms. 105 Broadly defined as the 104 See: Noah R. Bassil, The Post-Colonial State and Civil War in Sudan (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013); M.W. Daly, Imperial Sudan: The Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, 1934-1956 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Abdel Salam Sidahmed and Alsir Sidahmad., eds, Sudan (UK: Taylor & Francis, 2004). 105 Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: New Press, 2007), 6-12. In 1952 French dissident Albert Sauvy first introduced the concept of the “Third World” as the camp of ‘darker nations’ (in Vijay Prashad’s words) which the First and Second Worlds sought to possess but which reflected the French Third Estate – “ignored, exploited, scorned” yet “demands to become something as well.” As Prashad states, Sauvy’s re-organizing of the world into three camps, giving a name to the rapidly mobilizing and newly decolonized regions of the world, allowed those who adopted the title ‘Third World’ to unite around these positions: “political independence, nonviolent international relations, and the cultivation of the Third World platform.” All three positions will be reflected in the Non-Aligned Movement. On Nasserism: Fouad Ajami, “On Nasser and His Legacy,” Journal of Peace Research 11: 1 (1974): 41- 49; Youssef M. Choueri, Arab Nationalism: A History (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2000); Elie 56 Arab nationalist political ideology based around Gamal Abdel Nasser’s interpretation of socialism, which departed from Eastern Bloc and Sinophone communism in favor of the embrace of pan-Arab societal traditions, Nasserism’s most potent impact lay in its internationalist approach to anti-colonial thought and practice. 106 Though pan-Arabism did emphasis a certain shared history and culture from which Arabic-speaking nations emerged, Nasser’s innovative “Three Circles Theory” also sought to integrate the concerns of Africa, the Arab World, and the Muslim world (though Nasserism was a secularist ethos) into Egypt’s revolutionary approach to both regional and global non-alignment. In short, Nasserism attempted a Third Worldist approach to nationalism that resisted the cultural hegemony so central to European imperial power, and so had broad appeal to other independence movements and their own charismatic figureheads. 107 As Egypt’s political and economic landscape shifted due to the nationalization of existing industry alongside further industrialization of the country, so too did its appeal to observers from other parts of the Arab world and the globe. Previously a rural society insomuch as Egyptians remained bound by necessity to the Nile River, by 1960 nearly 40% of Egyptians lived in cities, with Cairo boasting 13% of this newly redistributed population. 108 Additionally, visitors intrigued by Nasser’s efforts to unite newly independent Arab and African states around the Podeh and Onn Winckler, eds, Rethinking Nasserism: Revolution and Historical Memory in Modern Egypt (Gainseville: University Press of Florida, 2004). 106 Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, 12. An “internationalist ethos” distinguishes anti-colonial nationalism, as that of Third Worldist nations, form European nationalism, which is often solely based on the presumption of cultural hegemony. 107 Erica R. Edwards, Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 16. Edwards’ identification of charisma is couched in African American political and literary cultures of the twentieth century, but her defining of the concept does fit the figure of Nasser. Edward writes, “More than a static form of authority, charisma names a phenomenon, a dynamic structure, a figural process of authoring and authorizing…The charismatic leader is both gifted and a gift himself: he is given divine authority and power, given to the people, and given for the sake of historical change.” 108 Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (New York: Warner Books, 1991), 374. 57 principles of economic self-sufficiency traveled to the country to see for themselves what opportunities might be had in a nation at the center of the non-aligned world. Among those visitors were Shirley Graham Du Bois, and her son, David Graham Du Bois. After her husband W.E.B. Du Bois passed away in 1963 in Ghana, and shortly after her friend (and sovereign Ghana’s first president) Kwame Nkrumah was deposed in a military coup in February 1966, Shirley Graham Du Bois joined her son David in Cairo, intrigued by the possibilities of Egypt’s role in the ongoing global struggle for black liberation and its interpretation of socialist politics. 109 Graham Du Bois was so taken with Nasser and his politics that she composed a hagiographic account of his life and leadership entitled Gamal Abdel Nasser: Son of the Nile, published in 1972 through The Third Press. 110 David Graham Du Bois had himself moved to Cairo in 1959, where, as Keith P. Feldman notes in A Shadow Over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (2015), Du Bois worked for both the English-language daily Egyptian Gazette and the Middle East News and Features Service Agency while also teaching American literature at Cairo University and announcing over Radio Cairo’s U.S. transmissions. 111 Much of Du Bois’ journalism covered Egyptian news for an English speaking audience, such as the construction of the Aswan High Dam and subsequent move of the Abu Simbel Temple. In an interview with the Boston Globe, Du Bois reflected on his time in Egypt as “the most fascinating time in my life,” in a place where “everybody looked like me, and I looked like everybody else. I 109 Keith P. Feldman, A Shadow Over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 89. 110 Shirley Graham Du Bois, Gamal Abdel Nasser: Son of the Nile (New York: The Third Press, 1972), x. In the Foreword to Nasser’s biography, Graham Du Bois writes: “It seems to me that Nasser and Egypt were inexorably bound together, that destiny shaped his role – a role which he accepted because he could not do otherwise. It is significant to note that in Egypt’s long history, Gamal Abdel Nasser was the first indigenous Egyptian Head of State in more than two thousand years.” Muhammad Naguib, I must note, is scantly mentioned in Graham Du Bois’ narration of Nasser’s life. 111 Keith P. Feldman, A Shadow Over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America, 89-90. 58 was accepted as a human being without any reference to the color of my skin. It was an overwhelming experience. I found myself invisible.” 112 In Du Bois’ capacity as an African American, a journalist, and a teacher in Egypt, he fulfilled a diasporic set of cultural practices that Brent Hayes Edwards has cogently theorized as “translation.” Specifically, Edwards proposes that diaspora “is first of all a translation … a complex historical overlay of a variety of kinds of population movement, narrated and imbued with value in different ways and to different ends.” 113 Moreover, Edwards notes that often, “…the cultures of black internationalism can be seen only in translation… one can approach such a project only by attending to the ways that discourses of internationalism travel, the ways they are disseminated, reformulation, and debated in transnational contexts marked by difference.” 114 Therefore as an active participant in diasporic journalism within Egypt and alongside Egyptians, David Graham Du Bois and other African Americans in Egypt critically mediated the potential for the translation of black liberation in the space of Egypt, and gestured towards Egypt’s own role in the larger African diaspora. The Du Bois’ time in Egypt overlapped with another set of internationalist pursuits, couched in a rather more cynical rhetoric and practice. Concurrently the United States State Department was engaged in sending “jazz ambassadors” to the formerly colonized nations of Africa and Asia in an attempt to showcase its cultural, and thus racial, beneficence and plurality. Selected musicians toured newly independent nation-states throughout Africa and Asia to parlay 112 Eric Goldscheider, “At Home With David Graham Du Bois” The Boston Globe (Boston: 28 June 2001), H.2. Qtd in. Elaine Woo, “David Graham Du Bois, 79; Professor, Journalist, and Stepson of Famed Scholar.” Los Angeles Times (Los Angeles) 10 February 2005. 113 Brent Hayes Edwards, “Diaspora,” in Keywords in American Cultural Studies, eds. Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 82-83. 114 Keith P. Feldman, A Shadow Over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America, 88. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 7. Edwards proposes, “…the cultures of black internationalism can be seen only in translation… one can approach such a project only be attending to the ways that discourses of internationalism travel, the ways they are disseminated, reformulation, and debated in transnational contexts marked by difference.” 59 purported American sensibilities: liberty, egalitarianism, and free cultural expression. An attempt to preempt and counter Soviet and Sinophone anti-capitalist anti-Americanism, the jazz tours had been in part prompted by Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, the United States’ first (though self-appointed and against the recommendation of the State Department in this regard) African American ambassador to the Bandung Afro-Asian Conference of 1955. 115 “Repelled” by the “Third Worldist rhetoric he heard at the conference,” Powell returned from Bandung to propose positioning black musicians abroad to more effectively (and affectively) compete with Soviet claims to racial progressivism. 116 These “sepia ambassadors,” as Richard Iton names them, included Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington, among others. Far from obedient candidates for the job, many of these artists in fact overtly resisted the jingoistic representational politics the State Department sought to propagate abroad. Even the politically ambivalent jazz trumpeter Louis Armstrong’s vocal repudiation of American racial violence in 1957 affirmed what anti-colonial, Third World intellectuals had long suspected about the United States’ anti-Communist deployment of African American artists abroad: that the nation precariously navigated “a blackness that traveled well but avoided the internationalist and diasporic paths laid out by Marcus Garvey, [W.E.B.] Du Bois, [Paul] Robeson, [C.L.R.] James, 115 Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 44. For more on Bandung and the combined cultural-political practice of the Afro-Asian movement, see: David Kimche, The Afro-Asian Movement: Ideology and Foreign Policy of the Third World (Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press, 1973), Heonik Kwon, The Other Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), Christopher J. Lee, Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010), Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 116 Hisham Aidi, “The Grand (Hip-Hop) Chessboard: Race, Rap, and Raison d’Etat,” Middle East Research and Information Project 41 (2011), 2. http://www.merip.org/mer/mer260/grand-hip-hop- chessboard 60 and [Claudia] Jones, among others.” 117 Still, the sonic affect and vernacular of jazz, through both official and unofficial tours of the nation, brought to Egypt a potential language through which transnational anti-colonial politics might additionally be expressed, as well as interceded on a translational blackness that functioned to facilitate “the often uneasy encounters of peoples of African descent with each other.” 118 For the Du Bois’ and many other African American visitors – inclusive of jazz musicians - to the North African nation, Egypt’s significance as a centre of ancient African civilization was enhanced by President Nasser’s claims to uphold unity among formerly colonized and soon-to-be independent nations across the Third World. Here was an African leader of a heralded African nation who broke away from the British and resisted overtures from the U.S. after cleverly taking advantage of American resources for the purpose of independence. Here was an African leader who emerged defiant and victorious in the struggle over the Suez Canal, manipulated the Soviet Union’s interests in his country for Egypt’s gain, and spoke of autonomy for all colonized peoples of the world. Though Nasser and Nasserism did not fulfill all of their promises, and indeed reneged on quite a few, the socialist philosophy and its ties to the imaginary of Egypt’s place in black global history arrived at a crucial moment in the battle for civil rights that African Americans abroad were following back home. This is apparent in July 1964, when African American activist and thinker Malcolm X visited Cairo at the invitation of Nasser shortly after making his pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, an occasion both organized and reported on by 117 Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era, 46-48. 118 Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, 5. 61 David Graham Du Bois at the time. 119 Present as an ‘observer’ for the Cairo summit of the Organization for African Unity, Malcolm X issued his “Appeal to African Heads of State” memorandum, a statement stressing the necessary transnationalism – inclusive of African Americans - of the struggle for racial justice. 120 This event, as well as others witnessed by African Americans in Egypt during the heady days of Nasser’s presidency, is narrated by Du Bois in his only published novel, …And Bid Him Sing. The novel was released in 1975, three years after his mother’s biography of Nasser was printed. Described as “imagining a vernacular Afro-Arab aesthetic interface” by Keith P. Feldman, the novel is an exercise in the translation of blackness through multiple terrains of black political and cultural thought. 121 David Graham Du Bois’ ...And Bid Him Sing thus provides a multi-narrative account of the African American experience in Egypt during the anti-colonial and non-aligned era. Du Bois’ lively, semi-autobiographical novel mediates the differing perspectives of his characters: Afrocentric Suliman, Afro-realist Bob, and an array of Egyptians who occupy a range of class and status-based identities and experiences in Nasser’s Egypt. Simultaneously, Du Bois mobilizes jazz music and vernacular as a vehicle for the translation of racial expression and identity. The medium of jazz serves to open a dialogic space for the Egyptians and African Americans in Du Bois’ novel to commune over the question of race. Through his novel’s own translational practice, Du Bois attends to a constellation of political, racial, and cultural concerns that disrupts the conventional notion in certain circles of African American popular and 119 Letters exchanged between David Graham Du Bois and Malcolm X in December of 1964 (housed in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture) reveal that Du Bois additionally kept Malcolm X up to date as to the latest Arabic language and Egyptian press releases taking up Malcolm’s provocations to the OAU and the Arab world generally. 120 Malcolm X, Address to the Organization of African Unity from the Organization of Afro-American Unity, July 7 1964. 121 Keith P. Feldman, A Shadow Over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America, 95. 62 intellectual thought that Nasser’s non-aligned Egypt was significantly in discord with formations of a black transnational public and politic. 122 I therefore read …And Bid Him Sing to analyze the sonic, ephemeral, and intimate bonds between Egyptiannesss and blackness. The coeval embrace of the transnational and local experiences and articulations of blackness in Du Bois’ novel reorients a black (American) internationalism away from reliance on narratives of blackness that emerge in the U.S. context, towards a transnational and translational blackness that navigates uneven terrains of knowledge and identity production. In short, this chapter explores how African Americans in Egypt wielded the translational opportunities that the growing popularity of jazz facilitated in order to explore both the potential for and the limitations of a diasporic pursuit of black liberation in Egypt in the years before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. How does the distillation of blackness in Egypt enliven or trouble an entangled black transnational that, as Brent Hayes Edwards’ work has proposed, cannot always be understood? 123 II. Egypt and the Precarity of Blackness In David Graham Du Bois’ 1975 novel, …And Bid Him Sing, an African American convert to Islam and Cairo-dwelling expatriate named Suliman Ibn Rashid ruminates on his relationship to the Egyptian neighbors in his squalid tenement near Ataba Square: “…he was hurt 122 The debate over Egypt’s proper affiliations – as an African, and thus black nation, or as a European/universalist, and thus white nation – and who gets to claim the country and its antiquity often leaves out the question of contemporary Egyptians themselves. At the height of the 1970s wars over Egypt, waged by journalists (such as Herb Boyd), scholars (such as Martin Bernal), artists, musicians (such as Sun Ra, as discussed later in this chapter), and even political figures (see: Melani McAlister’s Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, and U.S. Interests in the Middle East Since 1945), the ideological stakes of Egypt’s Africanness overrode any experience with Egypt and Egyptians themselves. This is where David Graham Du Bois comes in. 123 Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, 13. The ‘gap’ between ways of knowing, experiencing, and living blackness is adopted by Edwards from Léopold Sédar Senghor’s invocation of “décalage” – “the kernel of precisely that which cannot be transferred or exchanged,” and constitutes, simultaneously, a separation and a linkage. 63 by their insistence on addressing him with the formal and respectful El Ustez (The Professor) … and their refusal to call him ‘brother.’” 124 Suliman is introduced while in a sour mood, frustrated by the apparently stunted racial self-awareness of the Egyptians he lives among. “When he spoke of them as Africans he was made painfully aware that the idea that they were Africans had apparently never occurred to most of them; that they had only thought of themselves as Egyptians,” reflects Suliman. 125 Suliman’s frustrations with this obvious (to him) rupture often “rapidly turn[ed] to anger.” 126 He is perplexed that only his religious identity renders him familiar – and familial – to Egyptians, rather than his blackness. Keith P. Feldman attests that Du Bois’ novel remains critically unexamined, on par with the lack of overall attention “paid to the Middle East, North Africa, and the Black diaspora” as intersecting political, cultural, and social spaces. 127 And so while Feldman deftly reads …And Bid Him Sing to explore Palestine’s predominant role in the successes and failures of Afro-Arab solidarity, I wish to further interrogate how the novel offers a reading of one particular diasporic space – Cairo – to translate blackness in the context of the Nasserist era. Du Bois’ novel navigates the paradoxes of Suliman’s identification of Egypt as a space for black racial pride because of its place in the black radical imagination of the 1960s with the political realities of 1960s Egypt: the latter perspective presented largely by Bob Jones, an African American journalist living and working in Cairo who acts as Suliman’s primary interlocutor throughout the story. 128 124 David Graham Du Bois, …And Bid Him Sing (Palo Alto: Ramparts Press, 1975), 11. 125 Ibid. 126 Ibid. 127 Keith P. Feldman, A Shadow Over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America, 89. 128 Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters: Culture, Media, & U.S. Interests in the Middle East Since 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001/2005), 140-141. 64 Drawing from the narrative of …And Bid Him Sing to engage the discourse and practice of blackness in Egypt therefore requires attention to David Graham Du Bois’ own relationship to Egypt. It is most likely that Bob is representative of Du Bois himself: a non-Muslim African American journalist for an English-language Egyptian daily and a long-time resident of Cairo. Du Bois’ …And Bid Him Sing adds to the previous chapter’s analysis of literary production (by William Gardner Smith and James Baldwin, respectively) by drawing on an African American narrative of North African racial identities in the context of an ardently anti-colonial, nationalist climate. Du Bois does not only rely on the self-reflective dialogues of his characters to interrogate racial formation in Egypt, however. Likely influenced by both the U.S. State Department’s aforementioned use of jazz musicians for anti-Communist tours and independently organized black sonic migrations during the 1950s and 60s, the inclusion of jazz in the novel reveals South-South dimensions of racial and political understanding in Egypt. 129 The cadence of jazz, performance of Islam, and opposing perspectives of Suliman and Bob are the tools through which Du Bois wrestles the multiple terrains of black and African diasporic identity among African Americans, Egyptians, and other Africans in Cairo. In a prescient nod to contemporary intellectual and activist discourse on the export of U.S.-based racial construction and its impact on how diaspora is defined and inhabited, Du Bois embraces rather than avoids or condemns As an example of Egypt’s enduring significance for African Americans reclaiming their enduring global past and present, McAlister notes that even the 1977-1979 tour of The Treasures of Tutankhamun exhibition in the United States was taken up by Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley when the exhibit reached LA. Bradley and the LA City Council passed a resolution marking February 12, 1978, “King Tut Day,” proclaiming Tut “would be classified as black if they were citizens of the United States today.” 129 While “South-South” is commonly used today by multinational, geopolitical organizations to address financial exchange and trade between nations of the Global South (those nations of the Third World during the Cold War, and the second world territories that were redefined and remapped after the collapse of the Soviet Union), the origins of the term and concept can be found in the midst of the Third World project that NAM was a part of. Chapter Four of this project delves deeper into the project of global south comparativism and South-South cultural collaborations and debates. 65 both the contradictions and utility of claiming Egyptians as black people – without collapsing difference - in the non-aligned era. 130 …And Bid Him Sing introduces Suliman first, providing an introspective scope into his already strained relations with Egypt and its people. His wife, Karima, is a “light chocolate” Egyptian dancer towards whom he seems largely indifferent. 131 When she appears in the first half of the novel, it is only to make tea, prepare food, or, in an outright betrayal of Egyptian social norms as well as her own comfort level, to allow her American husband to kiss her on the mouth in public. 132 Suliman’s one frequent Egyptian visitor is a Nubian named Sayyid whom Suliman prefers to think of “as mostly Sudanese,” emphasizing his general ambivalence about the population he has chosen to live among. 133 The bulk of the novel occurs in the build-up to the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and thought it touches upon Malcolm X’s visit to Cairo for the Organization of African Unity’s 1964 conference along the way, it otherwise presents Egypt as a landscape navigated by Suliman as a symbol of imperfect African identity rather than an evolving nation on the verge of war. Having given up on studying Arabic at Al Azhar, Suliman is listless, bored with what he hoped to find in Egypt – camaraderie and comfort among other black people – and only piques interest at the prospect of smoking hasheesh to ease the pain in his long-crippled right leg. Suliman is an abrupt man, a frequent issuer of verbal abuse to his guests and physical violence upon his wife. Yet he holds himself erect and commands attention 130 George Yancy and Paul Gilroy, “What ‘Black Lives’ Means in Britain.” The New York Times The Stone, Opinion Pages, 1 October 2015. Accessed 1 October 2015. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/paul-gilroy-what-black-means-in-britain/ 131 Du Bois, 27. Suliman “was acutely aware that [Karima’s] color was a long way from the black he had convinced himself was the only color worthy of a human being,” a curious resentment between husband and wife that I will explore later in this chapter. 132 Ibid, 17. 133 Ibid, 13. 66 in all forms of company. Perhaps it is no wonder that Bob Jones finds himself a somewhat reluctant friend and ally of Suliman’s just days after meeting him at Cristos’ restaurant, the centre of the cultural elite in Egypt at the time. 134 Upon meeting for the first time in the second chapter of …And Bid Him Sing, it is revealed that Bob is the primary narrator of this tale of African Americans in Cairo – and, crucially, that he speaks Arabic, unlike Suliman. Filfil, the waiter at Cristos’ during this first meeting, a young man well known to Bob, asks Bob if Suliman is “from your people.” When Bob confirms this and adds that Suliman is a Muslim, Suliman manages to grasp the gist of the conversation and interjects, defensively, with “El hamdullillah (Thanks be to God).” Unfortunately for Suliman, this declaration of faith does not win him any welcome comforts: Filfil assumes Suliman is conversant in Arabic and unleashes a stream of welcomes, well wishes, and other niceties in his own language. When Filfil has gone, Suliman rages to Bob: “Why’re these fuckin’ people always so surprised to learn that a black man is a Moslem!” He threw the question out with venom, catching me off guard. After a moment’s hesitation I replied: “They’re not surprised because you’re black. They’re surprised because you’re an American.” “Don’t call me no fuckin’ American!”… “I’m an African!...I’m more African than these bastards, and I’m proud of it! Not like them, trying to be whiter than whitey, afraid somebody’ll think they’re Africans!” 135 Bob is initially taken aback and confused by Suliman’s outburst, but it will not be the last time the journalist has to decide whether to push Suliman further by trying to gently educate him about how Egyptians understand themselves, or to let the matter go and leave Suliman to his own 134 Du Bois, 29. “Under King Farouk [Cristos’] it had been a favorite haunt of young Egyptian nationalists with political ambitions. Now, a little more than a decade after the Nasser revolution, it was a gathering place for journalists, novelists, poets and playwrights – self-consciously contemptuous of the remains of the old guard still firmly entrenched in positions of influence and power in Nasser’s Egypt.” 135 Du Bois, 32 67 misplaced anger. The nuance of Egyptian self-identity is largely narrated through Bob Jones’ gentle speech – in both Arabic and, for the benefit of Suliman and other African American expatriates (all loosely affiliated with Al Azhar’s esteemed Arabic programme), in English. Bob’s proficiency in both languages imbues the novel with faithful, if fictionalized, African American/Egyptian encounters in both Egyptian and expatriate spaces. Furthermore, Bob’s love of Cairo and its people empowers him to translate the confluences and ruptures of Egyptian identity – black and otherwise – and its functions to both Egyptians and black Americans without sacrificing local specificity. It is essential, as Bob repeatedly notes in …And Bid Him Sing, that Egyptians embrace Nasserism and its pan-Arabist claims in this historical moment, though it does not preclude a black transnational outlook or practice couched within those nationalist ideologies. As an example of the tension between Nasserism and the possibilities of the black transnational in Egypt, Suliman is soon introduced to Bob’s friend Fawzy, a working class Egyptian who cannot marry for the need to take care of his family. He is hardly decorous in light of this limitation, however, and he and Suliman chiefly bond over their pursuit of women. Before their escapades begin, Fawzy asks Suliman about his religion, acknowledging, “He had followed and admired the career of Mohammed Ali Clay.” 136 Suliman confuses Fawzy with his response, however, gruffly stating: “’I’m a Moslem and I’m black. But, I’m not a Black Muslim if you mean am I member of the Nation of Islam.’” Bob steps in then, to clarify what the Nation of Islam is, as well as assure a concerned Fawzy that Suliman isn’t angry with him: “It’s just his way. He’s angry at America and everything white.” Fawzy is still unable to understand the terms of the debate he unknowingly entered into, but Bob has hope that his meeting Suliman will be 136 Ibid, 59. 68 good for his fellow American, as “Fawzy was a salt-of-the-earth Egyptian, city hardened with deep village roots.” 137 Essentially, Fawzy’s position – light skinned, poor, and relatively apolitical – could provide a perspective to Suliman that he had never encountered before, ensconced as he is in Cairo and without Arabic. Indeed, as the men smoke buri together, tensions ease and it seems Suliman has made a new Egyptian friend. A “salt-of-the-earth Egyptian” and a lax Muslim, Fawzy may have assumed the “Nation of Islam” referred to a national entity – the newly modernized Saudi Arabia, for instance – or more abstractly (and in line with the era), the ummah. Moreover, “Black Muslim” would have had little meaning to Fawzy, for Egyptian and Sudanese Arabic semantic traditions of demarcating “black” skin color –itself highly variable in the region - is blue (azraq) not black (aswad). 138 If, as Paul Gilroy asserts, blackness “emerge[s] from raw materials provided by black populations elsewhere in the diaspora,” how does the joining of a uniquely African American politics and aesthetics – Black Islam, Mohammad Ali, and later in the novel, jazz – with the distinct racial sensibilities in Egypt further, rather than obfuscate, a set of practices that place Egypt and Egyptians in the African Diaspora? 139 As Kobena Mercer and other black theorists aptly recognize, the extolling of a transnational blackness is hardly a declaration of black universality. Rather, “dialogism shows that our ‘other’ is already inside each of us, that black identities are plural.” 140 In order to reconcile Suliman’s experience of Egypt as always already black, but of Egyptians as outside of blackness, the necessity of confronting “monologic 137 Ibid, 53-55. 138 Azraq is interchangeable with aswad, though the latter term is not commonly used to refer to people. These demarcations shift from place to place, even within the North African region, but this is generally the language used in greater Egypt, as well as Sudan. 139 Paul Gilroy, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 13. 140 Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1994), 65-66. 69 exclusivity” and the export of African American identity formation in the qualifying of blackness elsewhere is apparent. 141 Therefore, as Feldman notes, “’Black Americanness’ is figured in the widely circulated media images of Ali, the heavyweight boxing champion,” mitigating Fawzy’s immediate association of Suliman with the sportsman. 142 Though reluctant to be equated with Ali due to the boxer’s association with the Nation of Islam, “Ali’s visibility internationally, Suliman concedes, became a lens through which to read a U.S. racial landscape whose conditions were untranslatable in the context of Egyptian nationalism and Nasser’s pan-Arabism.” 143 The referential utility of Muhammad Ali in broaching the question of African American Muslim identity is one of translation – Fawzy knows nothing of the Nation of Islam and little of anti- blackness in the United States, but does know of Muhammad Ali and what he perceives to be the internationally renowned success, and faith, of the boxer. 144 It is Bob, not Suliman, who steps in to translate to Fawzy the diversity of Islam in (black) America with a nod to Suliman’s righteous anger. A fundamental element of the translational components of diaspora in David Graham Du Bois’ …And Bid Him Sing is the keen interest other characters, particularly Egyptians, have in Suliman, contrasted with Suliman’s disinterest in anyone or anything to do with Egypt that does not fit his already betrayed assumptions about the racial composition and importance of 141 Ibid. 142 Keith P. Feldman, A Shadow Over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America, 94. 143 Ibid. 144 Du Bois, 10. Of Suliman’s neighbors: “They had heard he was a student at Al Azhar, but nobody was quite sure why. But this was the first time they’d ever heard of an American willing to undergo the legendary rigors of religious training there. And he was a black American, that curious thing most had come to know about almost exclusively through the antics and achievements of Mohammad Ali Clay, as they instead on calling him.” 70 blackness of Egypt. Suliman is drawn to Egypt from the United States out of his preoccupation with the symbolic purpose and place that Egypt historically represented for African Americans and others in the African diaspora. That is to say, Egypt signifies for Suliman the essence of black history, or at least a major source of it. Shortly after the befriending Fawzy, Suliman embarks on a new chapter of his Egyptian life: he pursues a relationship with Bob’s friend Mika, and, notably, becomes an English instructor in a literacy program at a U.S. aid office. 145 This change of circumstances, namely his increased income, furnished by the same country Suliman settled in Cairo to escape, opens access to new social spaces in Egypt. Suliman’s complex (one might say tortured) relationship with Egypt becomes quite literally channeled through his intimate relationships with the only two women who appear by name in the novel: Karima, his Egyptian wife, and Mika, his Albanian Muslim lover whom Suliman loudly and repeatedly asserts is white. 146 Karima is absent during much of the novel’s story after her initial introduction, appearing again only while in a frantic search for her inattentive husband after the declaration of war with Israel is issued in June of 1967. Mika, on the other hand, occupies an important, if still peripheral, role in Du Bois’ narrative. The rare woman character whose voice is not only amplified but whose innermost thoughts are narrated in the first-person, Mika is clearly enthralled by Suliman after their initial meeting through Bob, though she openly shies away from discussing race with him as a result of 145 Du Bois, 113. Suliman additionally meets Malcolm X in the second half of the novel. However, I refrain from a close reading of Du Bois’ account of Malcolm X’s visit to Cairo in 1966 in this chapter because it establishes, as have Bob and Suliman’s many tête-à-têtes and the poetry reading at Beaux Arts, a framing opportunity for Du Bois to think aloud about Suliman’s resistance to reorienting his vision of blackness and his prescriptions of black liberation outside of a U.S. framework, much less in the multicultural and internationalist framework Malcolm X extolled from Jeddah (which Bob shares with Suliman after hearing it on the BBC). 146 Ibid, 200. 71 being constantly denigrated by him for her perceived whiteness, and thus, complicity in anti- blackness. Both the women in Suliman’s life metaphorically enact his inability to render his blackness mutually intelligible. If Karima is Suliman’s claim to legitimize his belonging in Egypt and Mika is a woman onto whom Suliman projects his anxieties about that belonging, it is clear Suliman is used by Du Bois to critique one particular aspect of the charismatic black transnational figure: overwhelming, fatiguing masculinity. 147 It is barely mentioned in the novel that Suliman has a daughter in the United States whom he may have abandoned, a character story that emerges only in a conversation on poetry that Suliman has with Bob in the latter’s well- appointed Cairo flat. 148 Moreover, despite Suliman’s poor treatment of Mika, it seems that she is the only person in his life who understands him besides Bob. 149 So it is that the upward swing in Suliman’s personal and professional life ushers in a critical intervention from Du Bois, observed chiefly by Bob. Egyptians who have lived in the West begin to recognize in Suliman’s increasing social and economic mobility and his corresponding demands of the Egyptian public he interacts with, an alarming participation in the stereotyping of Egyptian people. Suliman begins to routinely dismiss Egyptians as lazy, ignorant, cheating, and corrupt – in short, the racism Egyptians experienced while themselves abroad and thus learned how to name. An Egyptian doctor that Suliman seeks treatment from “was all too aware of the, at best, skepticism Americans brought with them to an Egyptian doctor, whatever his reputation. He had encountered it during his stay in the States, recognized it for the racism it 147 Erica R. Edwards, Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership, 20-21. 148 Du Bois, 88. 149 Ibid, 189. Upon learning of the dismal situation for non-Egyptians in Egypt during the ’67 war, Mika thinks to herself, “She’s heard that khawaga [foreigners] weren’t safe on the streets. She smiled to herself wryly, knowing how Egyptians used this word when they actually meant… whitey?” She is able to translate Suliman’s style of speaking into her world. 72 was, and learned to cope with it. So he wasn’t surprised, but disappointed and sad to see it in Suliman.” 150 Ironically, the doctor had learned through his experience in America about the struggle of African Americans – not because his was a parallel experience, but because it was the same experience: the doctor “was a café-au-lait color and what hair he had left was kinky.” Only then, and only with this doctor, did Suliman understand that some Egyptians indeed understood their links to blackness – but Suliman is still unable to comprehend that Egyptians do not have to qualify their blackness until they are outside of Egypt. In his quest for belonging to and of Egypt, Suliman’s own conceptual limitations manifest as a peculiar, though still striking, variant of Orientalism. 151 This is not the Orientalism defined by Edward Said as (in part) the historic Euro- American practice of defining and having authority over the ‘Orient’ in order to maintain Euro- America cultural hegemony. 152 Suliman himself is excluded from American hegemony by virtue of his blackness. Rather, Suliman’s dim view of Egyptians is dependent on his “strategic location” within Egypt as an African American Muslim with a tendency to project onto Egyptians his own desire for a monologic – or monolingual – (and therefore, understood) blackness. 153 In this light, a conversation from early on in the novel casts new insight onto the tensions that translational blackness navigates on its course to productive possibility. The first time Suliman bites out, “’Man, Egypt ain’t black; don’t you know that yet, after all the time you been here?’” Bob responds hesitantly in what becomes a continued conversation that levies the 150 Ibid, 180. 151 Ibid. 152 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 7-8. “Additionally, the imaginative examination of things Oriental was based more or less exclusively upon a sovereign Western consciousness out of whose unchallenged centrality an Oriental world emerged, first according to general ideas about who or what was an Oriental, then according to a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections.” 153 Ibid, 20. 73 importance of local specificity in discussions of global blackness and black identity. Bob replies: “It’s in Africa and a whole lot of its people are black.” I ventured. “Try an’ tell them that. They think they’re white, man. Some of ‘em black as me talking about they ain’t African.” “Because an Egyptian says he’s not African don’t mean he thinks he’s white.” “Well what does he think he is, then?” “Egyptian, just like he says. A lot of folks on this continent still only think of themselves as, say, Fanti or Ibo or Ewe, or Zulu or Kikuyu. They don’t even think of themselves as Ghanaian or Nigerian or Congolese or Kenyan. So how can they think of themselves as African? That’s a long time coming for them, brother. At least, Egyptians know they’re Egyptians. They didn’t create the lie that Egypt’s not Africa. The white man did.” 154 Suliman here is at once possessive of Egypt as a centre of black history and culture as well as frustrated by what he feels is the tendency of Egyptians not to identify on his own racial terms. He cannot yet reconcile that these are contradistinctive investments, as supplanting blackness in Egypt with an American blackness does not fit the former’s epistemological, historical, and colonial processes of racialisation. Bob, on the other hand, has learned through his long tenure in Egypt the explicitly political reasons for Egyptians’ predominant identity modes: nationalism in the face of ongoing struggle, the looming threat of foreign intervention into Egypt, and the South-South position and perspective that defined much of Nasser’s approach to securing Egypt’s independence. Of course, Bob’s understanding of Egypt came through his own wearisome education on living black in Egypt. During Malcolm X’s visit to Cairo in 1964, Bob ruminates on his own blackness and recalls those moments when his racial identity becomes apparent to others in Egypt. Noting that he himself had “grown to resent white Americans less and less” since moving to Egypt, it is in part because Bob passes as Egyptian in a way Suliman cannot reconcile, as Suliman cannot yet decide if his goal is to fit in or to stand out in his identity. 155 Bob shares, 154 Du Bois, 47-48. 155 Ibid, 121. 74 “Since I represented an Egyptian agency [U.S. journalists and correspondents] invariably expected me to be Egyptian. My appearance would initially confirm their expectation. But very soon the question would come: ‘Are you Egyptian?’ My response, ‘No, I’m an American,’ would be met with an inquiring expression that I usually pretended not to notice.” 156 This comparative insouciance – Suliman and Bob both feel black in Egypt, as they always had elsewhere, though Suliman feels Egypt is not black enough – is also difficult for Bob to process. Of white Americans’ failure to note the difference so keenly felt by African Americans in Egypt like Suliman (and Bob), “it was the naiveté, the childlike wonder, fascination or innocence of most white Americans, particularly tourists and businessmen, that cast them in a new mold in my eyes. Egypt didn’t cause this to be. They brought it with them. Egypt only exposed it to the light of day… or, at least, to my view.” 157 Therefore while Bob weighs how white Americans bring with them to Egypt the assumption that blackness demarcates Otherness, Suliman struggles with the desire to belong wholly to Egypt without fully understanding the Egyptian landscape of race. Suliman’s limitations are based in his inability to expand upon his knowledge of blackness as one who became black in the United States. Exporting this way of knowing and experiencing blackness backfires for Suliman, as the Egyptian preoccupation with Nasserism, pan-Arabism, Islam, and other strains of nationalist self-identification – including pan-Africanism, as the next chapter interrogates - marks Americans – even black Americans, as Suliman bitterly knows – as outsiders. Du Bois’s novel frequently notes how surprised Bob and some of the Egyptian characters are that Suliman lives in a working class enclave near Ataba Square. 158 Suliman has 156 Ibid. 157 Ibid. 158 Ibid, 37. 75 placed himself where he is most comfortable in the United States – the ghetto, in his own words – and is then surprised and disappointed that he is still made to feel as though he does not fully belong. It is devastating to the reader, then, to discover Suliman, at the end of the novel, is forced to leave Egypt on the cusp of the 1967 war with Israel, as “U.S. citizenship became a marker of enemy alien status.” 159 He does not feel as though he belongs to or of the United States and does not want to return, though neither did he feel fully among his own in Egypt. 160 David Graham Du Bois ends his novel with a last word (or rather, letter) from Istanbul, courtesy of Mika. Of Suliman, she says, “Suliman didn’t do any writing while he was here. I guess there were too many Americans around, or something. Besides, he kept saying the Turks looked just like white folks!” 161 Suliman is perpetually let down by Egyptians because the imaginary that led him to Egypt was belied by the structures of unevenness that often characterize tensions in the attempt to build solidarity across internationalist movements. He cannot understand Arabic, and therefore cannot understand Egyptians. Because he cannot understand Egyptians, he assumes they do not understand he is a black man like them. Because Egyptians do not identify in the 1960s with blackness, but rather with the nationalist zeal that the political moment demands, Suliman laments Egyptian racial identity even further. Regardless of their phenotype, their political or intellectual sophistication (or lack thereof), Suliman regrettably positions himself not only as an arbiter of Egyptian identity, but also the authority on legitimizing to what extent Egyptians intersect with or may be affiliated with blackness. Ultimately, Suliman’s position is that Egyptians are black, but because they will not use that language themselves, they are essentially 159 Keith P. Feldman, A Shadow Over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America, 97. 160 Du Bois, 188. Suliman remarks of white Americans fleeing Egypt when commanded: “Whitey’s cutting out.” 161 Du Bois, 224. 76 on “whitey’s” side. Blackness is not, in short, politically or culturally capacious in Suliman’s own translation of it. Nevertheless, Suliman’s position is narrated by Du Bois as a generative racial and political project. How do black subjects in the diaspora maneuver multiple conceptions of blackness without sacrificing their own locally informed, legitimate emancipatory concerns? Suliman left the United States for Egypt in an effort to escape un/belonging to a nation that has marginalized him because of the color of his skin and condition of his race only to realize that color is not the preoccupying mode of racial signification among Egyptians. Bob dutifully takes on responsibility for teaching his fellow countryman that Egyptians prefer to identify themselves by national, religious, and linguistic affiliations in service to Nasserism and larger pan-Arab ideology, even as Suliman remains obstinate to the difference of Egyptian racial analytics. Romanticized solidarities based on the presumption of a singular, universal blackness are taken to task by Du Bois, and the novel’s dexterous exploration of the historical and contextual specificity of racial identity and articulations in anti-colonial North Africa speaks to a refutation of transcending difference while navigating the multiple terrains of diaspora. But where the novel truly complicates the prospect of diaspora as translation is during Suliman’s first independent success in diasporic translation: it is through his jazz-inflected poetry that Suliman finds an audience and form of expression that bypasses the limitations of both English and Arabic. Halfway through the novel, Bob and Suliman’s friendship was solidified when the two bonded over a shared interest in poetry; Suliman as an amateur poet and avid jazzman and Bob as an avid reader of the coupled genres. Following numerous discussions, debates, and private readings in Bob’s flat, where Suliman spends much of his time – typically arriving unannounced 77 in the cooler parts of the day – Bob takes it upon himself to introduce Suliman to Cairene poets and aficionados who eventually coordinate a public reading with jazz accompaniment. Organized with lip service to fellow black expat Kamal’s failing side hustle, Afro-American Promotions, Incorporated, Suliman’s poetry reading at the Beaux Arts Club in midtown Cairo merges the American’s interest in introducing “authentic Afro-American culture for the people of Egypt” and creating the opportunity for a black community in Cairo to gather with an eclectic crowd of expats, locals, and even diplomats. 162 The highly regarded Egyptian poet Abdel Moneim is written into the story by Du Bois, likely revealing their real life acquaintance. Abdel-Moneim in fact introduces Suliman to the audience by way of repeating in Arabic the latter’s forceful dedication of the evening’s readings to the martyrs of America – African Americans. Before the Egyptian poet steps in to translate, the zealous tone of Suliman’s dedication, his gaze steadfastly fixed on white Americans from the nearby U.S. embassy in the audience resulted in “…a buzz…as the mainly Egyptian audience asked one another what he had said, or repeated in Arabic to their neighbors as much of the brief speech as they had understood. Heads turned. People fidgeted.” 163 Once Abdel Moneim provides a translation equal in intensity as Suliman’s original words, also looking “into the faces of the whites in the front rows as he repeated the final words, an impish, almost wicked hint of a smile playing around the corners of his large mouth,” thunderous applause abounds: first by the mostly black (American) students from Al Azhar but then taken up by the entire audience. 164 Suliman and Bob are wondrous at the reception. This deeply affective, affirming acknowledgement from the audience crescendos as the 162 Ibid, 95. 163 Ibid, 97. 164 Ibid, 98. 78 night goes on. Beloved fellow poet and Egyptian cartoonist Salah Jaheen stands by to translate each of Suliman’s poems as he recites them, including one about Abdin, Cairo: “In a bouncing, swinging rhythm it expressed the poet’s surprise, delight and wonder at repeatedly running into faces and figures that might have been friends, relatives, brothers and sisters he’d known ‘over there,’ as he moved about this quarter.” 165 The musical accompaniment, led by African American saxophonist Mohammad X-3 and performed alongside the Cairo Jazz Combo, draws together popular Egyptian melodies with American jazz and blues riffs, and during each translation by Jaheen the Arabic-speakers in the audience “strained to recall the rhythms, movements, and expressions that had accompanied the now clear pictures and emotions that flowed one after another in Arabic.” 166 The emotional atmosphere strongly impacts Bob, who watches in awe from the audience. When Abdel Moneim during a pause in the programme refers to Suliman’s performance as “more civilized than I expected,” Bob doesn’t let the racialised language slide: “Your English isn’t so poor or your understanding so limited…I’d have thought after becoming as familiar as you are with his poems, and with him, you’d realize that for us racism is no laughing matter!” 167 Meanwhile, Mohammed X-3 begins playing funk solos on his saxophone above the Cairo Jazz Combo’s blues – Suliman’s poems about the Middle Passage, black suffering, self-destruction and despair are targeted again to the white Americans in the audience. The entire audience besides those few is meanwhile frozen in rapture over Suliman’s pure, potent élan. His final poem absorbed the energy from his audience and “spoke of a new determination, a new 165 Ibid, 99. 166 Ibid, 100-101. 167 Ibid, 101. 79 knowledge of how to destroy the perpetrators of his infamy”. 168 The room – at least those who understood the English (or feigned it, driven only by the poet’s vitality of spirit) - explodes into cheers and applause: They were mostly young black students from West and East Africa, young African diplomats and freedom fighters from southern Africa, some Pakistani and Indian students from South Africa. They included some Palestinian students and several Egyptians. The rest of the audience followed their lead enthusiastically, sensing the moment, unmindful that it had missed some of the words, desirous only of expressing its solidarity with Suliman. 169 That this scene – what I view as the climax of Du Bois’ story - falls in the middle of the novel arguably demonstrates that the African American pioneer of Egyptian radio, English-language news, and black American cultural translation in the capital city was reluctant to imbue Suliman’s cultural coup with a reverential quality. Indeed, the story presents this moment of open dialogue about racial and political solidarity in all its complexity and tension (vis-à-vis Abdel Moneim’s comment to Bob, in particular) and then abruptly dashes this mise-en-scène to pieces. Nonetheless, it is in this moment that Suliman achieves what until now only Bob had been able to provide to him. He has gained the ability to translate blackness and realize Egypt’s place in the diaspora. Or, as Du Bois wrote it, “The Arabic language fails him, so Suliman switches forms.” 170 168 Ibid, 103. 169 Ibid, 103-104. 170 Keith P. Feldman, A Shadow Over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America, 94. 80 III. Sensing Ṭarab: Black Soundscapes Through Egypt 171 David Graham Du Bois’ …And Bid Him Sing signals that the possibility of returning to an idealized “motherland” was as often as not a disappointment for African Americans who sought to rectify their uprooting from the African continent. For Suliman, his inability to retrieve a sense of rootedness somewhere is rendered impossible by his unwillingness to reconcile with the intricacies of blackness elsewhere. Suliman sought a return of the kind that Martiniquan poet Éduoard Glissant cautions, “non pas retour au rêve d’origine” but instead, “retour au point d’intrication” (‘not a return to the dream of origins, a return to the point of entanglement’). 172 While Glissant’s seminal essay collection, Le discours antillais (1981), asserts that retour and détour are dialectical theoretical formations, as both processes present an impasse on their own, I would like to repurpose détour to make an adjacent intervention. Suliman’s intention of return may have ended in frustration, but Du Bois’ novel concludes with a successful détour, or diversion: not a failure to return to the roots of blackness, but a productive translational journey elsewhere. Consequently, the productive function of Du Bois’ narrative of Afro-Arab translation in the novel is to assert a different understanding of blackness elsewhere that coheres in collaborative moments. This is most evident during Suliman’s poetry reading, when both the tensions and lucidity of the sonic entente on stage – classical Egyptian melodies and polyrhythmic, improvisational jazz - is recognizable across language and thus able to be addressed unambiguously. As black sound has historically permeated “myriad histories and 171 Virginia Danielson, The Voice of Egypt: Umm Kulthum, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 139. Ṭarab is defined by Umm Kulthum biographer Virginia Danielson as “the state of ‘enchantment’ wherein the listener is completely engaged with a performance,” though what about a performance (sound, sight, emotion, et al.) inspires the enchantment is often unable to be articulated. 172 Édouard Glissant, Le discours antillais (Paris: Seuil, 1981), 36. 81 struggles that both ground and invent the audience’s relationship to their sociopolitical present,” I return to Du Bois’ passing use of jazz and overarching engagement with jazz vernacular in …And Bid Him Sing as a method of establishing alternative conceptions of blackness and its utility in Nasser’s Egypt. 173 The global deployment of jazz musicians to facilitate U.S. anti-Communist diplomacy efforts, detailed earlier in this chapter, marked the insidious, state-driven manipulation of a genre decried as “disreputable” in white America. The competing narratives of jazz in the United States is extensively detailed by Penny Von Eschen in her 2004 monograph, Satchmo Blows Up the World. While the state logic for the jazz tours of the Cold War intended to demonstrate “a sense of shared suffering, as well as the conviction that equality could be gained under the American political system,” the State Department’s attempt to unsettle black music from its generative political and racial roots ultimately engendered cross-cultural and translational routes to musical collaboration. 174 Von Eschen confirms that in its zeal to secure relationships with recently decolonized states that would be beneficial to American international interests, the State Department unwittingly “facilitated the music’s transnational routes to innovation and improvisation.” 175 Key forms of black musics from blues to jazz and beyond, the transnational movement of such innovative sonic performances expanded the real and imagined reach of black cultural thought and practice. 176 173 Shana L. Redmond, Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 3. 174 Penny Von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 77. 175 Ibid, 250. 176 LeRoi Jones, Blues People: The Negro Experience in White America and the Music That Developed From It (New York: Morrow Quill, 1963), 16-17, 50. In Blues People, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) asserts that the very survival and adaptation of African musical traditions in the Americas establishes African American music as a historical record. 176 Adapting to without assimilating to European musical stylings, instruments, and the English language, black 82 Du Bois wrote African American jazz saxophonist Mack Spears at Cairo’s Beaux Arts Club into his novel– named in the book as Mohammad X-3 – but Spears was part of a long tradition of African American musicians who arrived in North Africa during musical journeys through the continent. Not all such movements were realized through literal journeys, however. The conceptual space of the Sahara in black transnational musical expeditions loomed large, perhaps exemplified by American-born bassist Ahmed Abdul-Malik. Robin D.G. Kelley’s study of African American and African jazz musicians in the decolonial era notes that Abdul-Malik was inspired by “Middle Eastern” and Islamic North African sounds in the 1950s, becoming proficient on the oud and falsifying his own biography to link himself genealogically to Sudan. Though he never made it to Sudan, Abdul-Malik toured Brazil and Nigeria as part of white saxophonist Herbie Mann’s 1961 State Department-sponsored tour. While Mann derisively believed that the Afro-descended and African public they encountered in both nations were indifferent to preserving their musical legacies, Abdul-Malik deliberately flouted the agency’s efforts to limit interactions between touring artists and locals in order to ‘preserve’ such legacies through the practice of travel itself. 177 For Abdul-Malik, Kelley remarks “traveling and discovering other musical cultures had a far greater impact than performing,” and so inspired Abdul-Malik to bring the “ancient sounds” of Africa and the Middle East into his jazz practice. 178 The innovative reimaginings of North African and Egyptian musical traditions must also be retrieved in an attempt to map sonic collaborations within the African diaspora, however. The musicians and black music contribute to a genealogy of the black American experience. Blues furthermore informed the development of numerous other genres, namely jazz, essentially creating and practicing a living archive of black modernity and black resistance. 177 Robin D.G. Kelley, Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2012), 112-113. 178 Ibid, 115. 83 cultural theorist and American Studies professor Michael Denning approaches this task through marking the Egyptian diva Umm Kulthum’s first Gramophone recordings in 1926 as a “turnaround” moment, part of a global transitional trend of “unrelated recording sessions” in the late 1920s when soundscapes were being remade. 179 With the backing of both a full orchestra and a range of instruments indigenous to the region, Umm Kulthum was the “voice of Egyptian nationalism” by 1934. Her magnificent voice carried over Egyptian radio lyrics written by colloquial poet Ahmed Rami; zajal (choral poetry) master Mahmud Bayram el-Tunsi, and “Prince of Poets” Ahmed Shawqi: an evolving repertoire of Egyptian vernacular compositions that would inspire her concert audiences to devote anywhere from three to six hours to hear only three songs. 180 Umm Kulthum’s significance to the people of Egypt (and indeed, the entire Arab world) was in part due to her devotion to the proliferation of populist, nationalist music, part of her personal support for President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s political efforts. But an equally important element of Umm Kulthum’s cultural practice, and that of other popular singers such as Abdel Halim Hafez, was the absorption and innovation of both Western and African musics into Egyptian musical compositions and traditions. Alongside “Western musical styles and dancelike passages” performed on violin, viola, and cello, her ensemble featured, among other instruments, the qanun, oud, riqq, and mizmar baladi. Umm Kulthum so affirmed Egypt’s own, 179 Michael Denning, Noise Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution (New York: Verso, 2015), 15. 180 Ibid, 18. Virginia Danielson, The Voice of Egypt: Umm Kulthum, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 135-137. Danielson notes that her incredibly long concert schedule held fast even during a 1967 tour of Paris, when “The length of her concerts, which extended to seven hours ended at 3 a.m., set a new local record. ‘Not even for Wagner’ had the Olympia Theater remained open so late, and it was reported that special permission had to be obtained in advance from the city authorities.” 84 “authentically Arab,” fallaha (peasant) music as a legitimate and historic “alternative to the West” while Egypt itself transitioned from British rule into Nasserism. 181 Another Egyptian musician of indisputable importance to the Nasser-era emergence of Egypt as a centre of the Third World and of Egyptian cultural production is far less known but no less significant than Umm Kulthum. Ali Hassan Kuban was born in 1929 in Upper Egypt, near Aswan, and taught himself the girba (bagpipes) and clarinet as a young man. Of Nubian descent and with considerable talent, Kuban is today known as the ‘Captain’ of Nubian music for his role in its revival. Well before the trend of world music took off in the 1990s, however, Kuban got his start playing weddings in Abdin – the same neighborhood of Cairo that Suliman Ibn Rashid lived in, in Du Bois’ novel. It was in Cairo that Kuban was introduced to black American soul and jazz music, potentially through jazz musicians visiting the city from Harlem, New York. Whatever the story may be, Kuban became a star in Egypt by the late 1970s and early 1980s by playing traditional Nubian music in a jazz style. By including electric and bass guitars, saxophones, and trumpets to his own ensemble of traditional Egyptian instruments, Kuban was able to experiment with and popularize Nubian music for all of Egypt. Not only did his music, collected late in his career on such albums as From Nubia to Cairo (1980), Walk Like a Nubian (1994), and Real Nubian: Cairo Wedding Classics (2001), revive the soundscape of Upper Egypt and bring into to the mainstream, but Kuban also reinvented the cartography of Egypt for non-Egyptians and Egyptians alike. Nubia was neither the romantic, mournful provenance of African Americans, as Suliman’s investments lay bare in ...And Bid Him Song; nor was it merely the flooded homeland that displaced so many Nubians for the construction of the Aswan High Dam. Rather, Kuban rejected both maps in favor of a Nubia depicted in his music as a truly representative Egyptian 181 Danielson, 122-125, 158, 197. 85 identity: equal parts African and Arab and immensely inspired by the blended African American musical genres of jazz and soul. Before Kuban’s music took flight in Sadat’s Egypt, however, the Nasserist Egypt that Umm Kulthum knew and David Graham Du Bois wrote of was in slow decline, and new aural understandings of the world would intercede on the possibility and utility of blackness in Egypt . In 1971, African American free jazz musician Sun Ra would arrive in Heliopolis, on the outskirts of the city of Cairo. Known chiefly in the United States for his galactic view of black origin and liberation – not to mention diaspora – Sun Ra’s first foray into Egypt was interwoven into what, by the early 1970s, was an elaborate and disorganized cloth of Afro-Arab cultural linkages. However, the Egypt Sun Ra stepped into was a far cry from the Pharanoic era that his sartorial choices harkened to. Black Americans in Egypt in the 1970s bore witness to a very different political moment in the evolution of Arab statehood than had expatriates living in the country in the decade prior. Egypt in 1971 was still reeling from the loss of Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had died while in office the year before. Celebrated for his role in recalibrating pan-Arabism, pan- Africanism, and non-alignment for the benefit of Egypt and its allies, Nasser was at the time of his death attempting to deal with the economic aftermath and loss of morale caused by the nation’s defeat in the Six Day War. Fellow Free Officer and Vice President under Nasser, Muhammad Anwar el-Sadat, succeeded Nasser and startled many Egyptians by radically rearranging the domestic and foreign political trajectories that his predecessor had pursued. Many of Sadat’s reforms were known as “corrective revolution,” the moniker attached to what would become Sadat’s most celebrated (by the West) and hated (by fellow Third Worldists and NAM members) political moves: the exclusion from government and/or imprisonment of Egyptian political advocates for the U.S.S.R. and later total expulsion of Soviet figures and 86 influence from Egypt. Turning away from a policy of non-alignment to the pursuit of active alliance building with the United States (and later, most controversially, with Israel), and re- privatization of the industries Nasser had nationalized, Sadat would preside over one of the most complex eras in independent Egypt’s young history. The political shadow cast across the nation permeated the cultural environment of Egypt. The romantic lustre of “Egyptianisation” was fading, and the increasingly tone-deaf nationalist melodies of Egyptian greats like Abdel Halim Hafez (whose health and tolerance of fame was also rapidly deteriorating by 1971) and Umm Kulthum (who remains beloved to this day, but was critiqued after the 1967 war for her strong connections to the ruling government) no longer seemed relevant to an Egyptian public increasingly reliant on government food subsidies to survive. 182 New cultural forms began to appear across a cultural plane scattered by Sadat’s increasingly despotic approach to politicized, dissident cultural expression. As Egypt’s government cracked down on dissent, and American influence on Egyptian society, economy, and politics grew strong, subversive cultural production coded as publically acceptable was augmented. Amid the flurry of flexibly maneuvered cultural output in Sadat’s Egypt, none has been so little explored or as deeply emblematic of a transnational black cultural practice in Egypt as jazz. As Du Bois’ novel demonstrates, jazz grew out of and came to Egypt through the melding of African American and Egyptian cultural practices. In the case of Du Bois’ character Suliman, jazz provided the only opportunity he had to successfully translate his racial identity and politics on a large scale. So too was jazz a mechanism for Egyptians to counteract the growing American influence on Egypt, and in much of the Third World, by collaborating with 182 Danielson, 184-186. 87 African Americans and embracing the very genre of musical production that the U.S. State Department had boasted of overseas to preclude such subversive collaborations. Donning Pharaonic headdresses while performing the often jarring melodies of free jazz alongside his Arkestra, Sun Ra’s flamboyant presence in Egypt offered both an abstract and tangible medium through which Egyptian musicians and fans navigated their relationship to this artist and his reasoned connections to an Egyptian, African heritage. One might imagine Egyptian audiences were at once confused and amused by Sun Ra’s vestiary choices, but the myriad magazines curated and contributed to by Egyptian jazz aficionados focused on his musical genius instead. Sun Ra’s heralding of Egyptian antiquity in his fashion signified his deep understanding and study of ancient Egypt’s significance as a cradle of human civilization, and therefore marked Egypt as the epitomized contestation of European and American claims to civilisational superiority. 183 Thus, while the historic looting of Egypt’s treasures is reflected in Western museums and hotly contested to this day, the appearance of Sun Ra, like his music, may instead be considered a more significant cultural translation across time and space. In this context, Sun Ra’s journey to Egypt in 1971 was a compelling departure from the jazz tours in the early decades of the Cold War. Having already introduced the trauma of American racial classification and interpellation to Egyptians, those inaugural players of jazz in North African also facilitated the travel of later African American musicians to the region, free of State Department oversight. It is thus fitting that a thoroughly broke Sun Ra should land in Egypt at this pivotal moment in the nation’s history, subverting the respectability politics forcibly upheld by state-sponsored tours. Held up at Egyptian immigration upon arrival from Copenhagen because of his unusual name – named after the sun god, and twice! – Sun Ra and 183 John F. Szwed, Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra (New York: Pantheon Press, 1997), 66-67. 88 the Arkestra left their instruments with customs and checked into the Mena House Hotel. 184 German writer and musician Hartmut Geerken quickly cobbled together a tour for the Arkestra in Egypt, relying on the brigadier general of music for the Egyptian military, Salah Ragab, to loan them instruments. 185 As anthropologist and Sun Ra biographer John F. Szwed elucidates, going to Egypt was a lifelong dream fulfilled for Sun Ra. However, “As [Sun Ra] had feared, many of the Egyptians did not appear to be his people.” 186 Sun Ra, like Suliman in David Graham Du Bois’ novel, was disappointed in the nation – and the people – he finally had a chance to be among. After years of study on ancient Egypt and its origins in the blackness that his music sought to explore and expand, Sun Ra found little of this thought present in contemporary Egypt. 187 Difficult as it was for him to disaggregate the Egypt of antiquity with Egypt and Egyptians of the present day, the possibilities still available to him in this diasporic encounter resulted in a tangible, sonic development: a 1983 collaboration with Salah Ragab and the Cairo Jazz Band, an album entitled The Sun Ra Arkestra Meets Salah Ragab in Egypt. Though his 1971 visit was largely improvised, Sun Ra returned in the early 1980s to reconnect with the Egyptian officer who turned his musical proficiency into a military career. Sun Ra and Ragab, whose own biography is as yet relatively unknown and incomplete, excavate an Afro-Arab diasporic exercise with the help of the Cairo Jazz Band, which Ragab founded between Sun Ra’s visits to the capital. Side A features Sun Ra and his Arkestra, but Side B has the jazzman accompanied by the Cairo Jazz Band playing a few of Ragab’s own compositions. A review of the album upon its apparent rediscovery by Britain’s The Independent 184 Ibid, 292. 185 Ibid, 292-293. Additionally, Gamal Abdel Nasser’s eldest son joined Ragab on one of his illicit rendezvous with the American jazz group – all while under full surveillance by the Egyptian secret police. 186 Ibid. 187 Ibid, 66-67. 89 suggests “While the Sun Ra tracks are good, with plenty of weird keyboards and percussion, the Egyptian bands are a revelation.” 188 Indeed, Ragab’s “Egypt Strut” as performed by Sun Ra and the Arkestra is revelatory. The original piece, reissued on a 2006 album (and sloppily entitled “Salah Ragab and The Cairo Jazz Band present Egyptian Jazz”), is a peppy, catchy instrumental that showcases the ney in its hook. On their collaborative album, however, the Arkestra slows the song’s tempo and adds a saxophone to the mix, savoring the maqam (literally “station”), the melody scale typical of Arabic music since the term “musiqa” was first invoked as a theoretical practice by the Islamic philosopher al-Kindi in the ninth century. 189 Sun Ra, on the piano, suffuses Ragab’s maqam with his own extemporal style, compellingly imagining an entirely new sort of taqsim (improvisation) for the jazz heads of North Africa to savor. The emergence of Cairo jazz as a polyvcal aesthetic and dialogic space demonstrates that African Americans did not only seek to be black in Egypt, but that the imaginary of Egypt was already inextricably linked to their blackness. Through the soundscapes of music and poetry, portrayed so thoroughly by David Graham Du Bois through his attention to the particularities and synchronicities of African American and Egyptian racial and cultural identity, disappointed expectations of Egypt are negotiated because of, not in spite of, Egypt’s significance in the black imagination. Du Bois’ …And Bid Him Sing impresses upon his audience the possibility of a transnational blackness attentive to local difference through the translational medium of jazz music and aesthetics, affirming the legitimacy of African American ties to Egypt without collapsing temporal planes or occluding the necessity of difference and difficulty in assessing and understanding what blackness is, what blackness does, and what blackness means elsewhere. 188 PJ. “CD REVIEWS: Jazz sun ra arkestra Meets Salah Ragab in Egypt (Golden Years)” The Independent (London, UK), 16 April 2000. Accessed 9 September 2015. 189 Fadlou Shehadi, Philosophies of Music in Medieval Islam (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995), 13. PART TWO: NORTH AFRICAN CROSSROADS 91 Chapter Three The Algerian Radical Imagination The literature examined in the prior two chapters mapped how African Americans traversed and translated the reverberations of Algeria and Egypt in the quest for a secure existence away from American racial terror. The next two chapters continue this exploration of diasporic significance of Algeria and Egypt. The second part of this dissertation sifts through Afro-Arab cultural collaborations and political contests that probed the potential of inter-African analytics of the African diaspora for transforming the terrain of transnational blackness ‘elsewhere’ through an analysis of how African diasporic peoples enacted their blackness. I refer to these inter-African logics as “South-South” and Third Worldist frameworks. Broadly, these concepts are deployed here to interpellate communities invested in sustaining counterhegemonic political and cultural consciousness outside the realm of Euro-American discourses. By recognizing a mutual interest in such radical alternatives to Western practices of autonomy and freedom, peoples of the Global South and Third World built new structures of solidarity that attempted to mediate internal differences with new concepts and languages. As such, while I have shown that African Americans and Arabs struggled to make themselves legible to one another in Paris and Cairo during the decolonial era, a coinciding project of mutual legibility was also underway in wartime Algeria and Nasserist Egypt. A turn toward the central role of Algerians and Egyptians in these historic cultural moments therefore unearths additional settings where the capacity for blackness to advance alternative political and culture meanings of freedom in the diaspora unfold. 92 This chapter focuses on the cultural and political practices of diaspora that flourished in Algeria throughout the pre- and post-revolutionary period, beginning with the Armée de Libération Nationale’s bombing campaign of October 31/November 1, 1954 through the establishment of the first international chapter of the Black Panther Party in Algeria, 1970. In addition to building on a historical narrative of African Americans in Arab spaces – in this case, the capital city of Algiers – I am also interested in the role of global populace of the African diaspora, inclusive of Algerians, in enacting the constitutive elements of diaspora itself. For this purpose, perhaps the most intriguing figure settled in Algeria in this timeframe is the Martiniquan philosopher and psychoanalyst Frantz Fanon. Though Fanon’s Algerian years have been the subject of immense scholarship in English, French, and Arabic, the very nature of his views on the role of new representational politics in fashioning the “post” colonial nation-state have not yet been seriously articulated within the auspice of redefining the African diaspora to include Arabs. This is to say that Fanon is widely cited in post-colonial literature as coming to a revolutionary consciousness because of his work with the FLN, but has been read as mobilizing in Algeria to pursue a struggle only analogous to the situation of black people in the African diaspora. Fanon’s active participation in the propaganda effort for the war of Algerian independence should rather be understood as the experience that drew him from the psychoanalytic exploration of the black condition under French rule, represented in Black Skin, White Masks (1952/1967), into the active subversion of that dire condition to reclaim the political, cultural, and psychological autonomy – the essential humanity - of black people everywhere. This chapter thus begins by exploring Fanon’s initial immersion in the Algerian liberation movement as a byproduct of his philosophical inquiries into the ontology of blackness that 93 echoed through his own experiences through the French Antilles, Europe, and the African continent. His work for the FLN was of critical importance, but little to do, as is often intimated, with direct combat. Fanon was not a guerilla in the countryside of Algeria, but rather served to reach out to a transnational community of African-descended peoples and educate them on why Algeria was important for them too. In so doing, Fanon assisted an FLN that was also intensely self-aware of its significance for the global decolonization movement. The function of its French and Arabic newspaper, el Moudjahid, was to circulate revolutionary tactics, theories, and solutions to Algerians and other colonized people around the globe. Frantz Fanon’s many and varied contributions to the publication guided the FLN’s fundamental philosophical approach to both the revolutionary process as well as the conditions of independence when it was won in July of 1962. It was largely a result of Fanon’s (translated) resonance in far-flung diasporic communities that drew a fugitive Eldridge Cleaver from Cuba to Algiers, which I explore in the second part of this chapter. On the run from a parole violation in the U.S. and aware that the Cuban government was not keen to allow the Black Panther Party to establish a base on the island nation, Cleaver arrived in Algeria with his mind on “the Black Bible” – Fanon’s last published work, The Wretched of the Earth (1961/1963). 190 The arrival of Cleaver and his wife, Kathleen Neal Cleaver, coincided with the start of the twelve-day 1969 Pan-African Festival in Algiers, to which the Panthers were eagerly welcomed. The festival was hosted by the Algerian government at the behest of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), intent on championing and performing the politics of pan-African Third Worldism on the international stage. The active participation of the International Black Panther Party in the festival, alongside myriad other 190 Robert Scheer, ed., Eldridge Cleaver: Post-Prison Writings and Speeches (New York: Ramparts, 1969), 18. 94 cultural and political representatives from the continent, testified to the reach and function of Algeria’s significance in the African diaspora and to fomenting a transnational black cultural movement that explored the ‘unifying essence’ of pan-Africanism and the joy of diasporic difference in equal measure. I. Frantz Fanon à al-Djazair In a November 2011 review of four recently published and translated biographies of Martiniquan philosopher, psychiatrist, and revolutionary Frantz Omar Fanon for Le Monde, critic Louis-Georges Tin muses, “Bref, personne ne sait s'il faut voir en Fanon un ‘Martiniquais’, un ‘Français’, un ‘Algérien’, un ‘Africain’, un ‘Noir’; personne ne peut, ou ne veut, tout à fait se l'approprier.” (In short, no one knows whether to view Fanon as ‘Martiniquan,’ as ‘French,’ as ‘Algerian,’ as ‘African,’ as ‘Black’; nobody can, or will, wholly declare it). 191 Referencing Fanon’s extensive travels throughout the French Empire, which began when Fanon joined onto the Gaullist Forces françaises libres during World War II, Tin asks of the psychiatrist’s multitudinous belongings: “Serait-il donc lui-même un ‘damné’?” (So would he himself be ‘damned’?) 192 Tin is concerned that Fanon’s short life in exile had rendered the philosopher placeless, lacking firm roots, perhaps inadvertently living the very ‘damnation’ that the ubiquitous colonial condition of dispossession and displacement had inspired during Fanon’s path from Martinique to France, and then to Algeria. Indeed, Fanon’s shuttling from one site of racial colonial violence to another speaks to the pervasive reach and ravages of French 191 Louis-Georges Tin, “Frantz Fanon, la colère vive,” Le Monde, November 3, 2011, Le Mode des Livres. Tin adapts the question of Fanon’s varied identities from the Introduction of David Macey’s Frantz Fanon: A Biography, one of the newly translated (from English to French) biographies included in the review and cited extensively in this chapter. 192 Ibid. 95 colonialism on multiple continents. For the war, Fanon went into the military. For an education, Fanon went to France. But to construct a route away from the pathological maladies that colonialism imparted on its victims, les indigènes, Fanon went to Algeria. I revisit Fanon’s life in Algeria as a lived example of the enormous possibility for diasporic reimagining that the nation offered during its war for independence. Whereas many elaborations on Fanon’s revolutionary theory consider the psychiatrist’s active radicalism a precursor to his life in Algeria, he had not yet extended his radical theorizations on the conditions of blackness and colonialism into a concrete praxis until he moved to Algeria. Situating Algeria as the space where Frantz Fanon’s theories of racism and anti-colonialism refracted and reformed the framework of revolutionary potentiality also situates the North African nation as a nexus, or crossroads, for the excavation of a longstanding Afro-Arab political and cultural presence. After completing his education and training in Lyon, Frantz Fanon worked for a time in a psychiatric facility in Pontorson, a dreary commune in the Northwest region of France. In 1953, Fanon “beat a hasty retreat from the mournful tidal marshes of upper Normandy” for Algeria. 193 He had been offered a position at a hospital in Martinique, but declined it, unsure if returning ‘home’ would ease his troubled relationship with the vestiges of French empire. Fanon had also made an inquiry into the possibility of practicing medicine in Senegal, but received no acknowledgement or assistance from the Senegalese government. The psychiatrist ultimately left France by moving to Blida, a small town just south of Algiers. Peter Geismar, an early biographer of Fanon, stated that Blida “was a compromise: part of the Third World, but not 193 Peter Geismar, Fanon: A Biography (New York: The Dial Press, 1971), 60. 96 Black Africa or the Antilles.” 194 It seemed also a compromise because Algeria was no less a colonial state than was Martinique and Senegal at the time, and so ultimately would prompt the same difficulties Fanon sought to leave behind in France. While at work in a psychiatric hospital in Blida, “Fanon’s psychiatric therapy was always intermeshed with the war. His patients were not only the victims of the fighting but also the agents of the oppression.” 195 One patient, a pied-noir police officer, could not sleep without screaming through the night. Fanon eventually ascertained that “the disturbance was the result of the policeman’s daily attendance at torture sessions” of Algerians suspected to be in league with dissident anti-colonial groups, such as the FLN. 196 Additionally, Fanon’s Algerian patients were not accorded proper treatment due to the language division so central to the pervasive cultural manifestations of French colonial rule: “Whereas most of the doctors’ ideas had been communicated to the patients, the Moslems’ emotions and reactions had not survived translation into French.” 197 Fanon asked one of his nurses to teach him Arabic so he could fully understand his patients on their own terms and in their own language, though most of his biographers note that he never became entirely proficient in Arabic. Nevertheless, his increased understanding of the conditions of his patients served to further reveal the psychological toll that colonialism wrought onto the colonized. In one notable case outlined in The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon received a 22-year-old Algerian patient from the French judiciary. The young man was delusional and physically emaciated, haunted by his past participation in the Moslem Scout Movement, an assimilationist project of the French state that enabled him to move into a relatively comfortable occupation as a copyist machine maker. The Algerian youth was gradually 194 Ibid, 58-60. 195 Ibid, 81. 196 Ibid. 197 Ibid, 86. 97 convinced that his family, and then his friends, considered him a traitor because he was a scout, or light-skinned, or a combination of the two. Fanon recounted, “beside him Algerian men and women were arrested, maltreated, insulted, and searched. Paradoxically, he had no papers on him. This uncalled-for consideration toward him on the part of the enemy patrols confirmed his delusion that ‘everybody knew he was with the French.’” 198 This man ended up in Fanon’s care because at the height of his guilt-ridden delirium, he found himself one day in front of the French Staff Headquarters and “threw” himself upon the soldiers there, “shouting, ‘I am an Algerian.’” 199 Fanon’s patient reclaimed his Algerianness while in a psychotic fit brought on by the guilt of watching his fellow Algerians suffer for being more visible, more vocal about their belonging to the maligned race. The young man’s condition was prescribed by the inherent logics of colonialism, Fanon maintained, for the vexing “colonized personality” is viewed as a ‘cure’ by the state and a curse by the colonized themselves. Rendering the colonized subjects of France “thoroughly a part of a social background of the colonial type,” the psychiatrist asserts, “is a systemic negation of the other person and a furious determination to deny the other person all attributes of humanity.” Therefore, “colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly: ‘In reality, who am I?’” 200 The patient desperately asserts his Algerianness to answer this question. Moving toward his own rediscovery, Fanon goes on to claim Algerianness for himself. In 1956 Fanon publicly resigned from the Blida hospital south of Algiers in a forceful letter to the Resident Minister of the Algerian government. His letter, included in a collection of 198 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 272-275. 199 Ibid, 275. 200 Ibid, 250. 98 Fanon’s political essays entitled Pour la Révolution Africaine (1964/1969), rests the reason for his resignation squarely onto the “systematized de-humanization” of French colonial Algeria that he witnessed throughout his medical career. 201 “Monsieur le Ministre,” Fanon writes, “the present-day events that are steeping Algeria in blood do not constitute a scandal for the observer. What is happening is the result neither of an accident nor of a breakdown in the mechanism. The events in Algeria are the logical consequence of an abortive attempt to decerebralize a people.” 202 Upon resigning, Fanon was formally expelled from Algeria, confirming prior suspicions held by the colonial authorities that Fanon had been treating militants. Fanon travelled to Tunis to devote himself fully to the FLN. The pied-noir doctor, Pierre Chaulet, who also tended to wounded Armée de Libération Nationale (ALN) maquisards and was likely Fanon’s connection to the liberation organization, facilitated his entry to the FLN. 203 Chaulet was also a frequent writer for el Moudjahid when Fanon joined onto the editorial collective of the FLN’s newspaper. 204 While at work in the FLN’s Press Service and Health Service, Fanon would also facilitate the FLN’s organizational outreach across the African continent, and eventually assumed the post of ambassador to Ghana in 1960. 205 For his travels, Fanon was issued a new passport that cemented his new identity. Now “Omar Ibrahim Fanon,” born in Tunis in 1925, 201 Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 53. 202 Ibid. 203 Martin Evans, Algeria: France’s Undeclared War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 343. Pierre Chaulet’s devoted service to the FLN was rewarded by the FLN, which allowed him to remain in Algeria and become a citizen of the nation after independence. 204 David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography (London: Verso, 2012), 328-329. It is difficult to verify precisely who comprised the editorial staff of el Moudjahid as much of the material, propaganda and otherwise, printed throughout its run during the revolution would remain unsigned. Fanon, Pierre Chaulet, Abane Ramdane, and Mohammed Harbi are all known contributors to the paper, however, and the newspaper itself claimed a print run of 10,000 copies per issue. 205 Peter Geismar, Fanon: A Biography, 104. In 1958, the newly formed Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Algérienne assigned Fanon to the Ministry of Information, which grew out of the press service. 99 Fanon reconciled his identity in the FLN with his own history: the “transparent pseudonym” allowed Fanon to immerse himself entirely into the Algerian revolution and Algerian identity. 206 Fanon’s position at el Moudjahid began in 1957, coinciding with el Moudjahid’s move from Morocco, where it published “as nothing more than a tally sheet of the glories of the nationalist war effort,” to Tunis, where the newspaper sought to broaden its purpose. Two editions of the paper were published out of the FLN offices at 24-26 rue Sadikia in Tunis: the first, in Arabic, dealt with the intricacies of the liberation movement in Algeria. The French edition was intended to keep local and dispersed Algerian population informed of the FLN and ALN’s progress (and setbacks) in the war. Fanon also collaborated with the Press Service to use the paper as an educational source, informing non-Algerians throughout Africa and Europe about tactics, positions, and programmes that defined the war effort. Many of Fanon’s articles in the press, most of which had been published unsigned to avoid the French security apparatus, are compiled in Pour la Révolution Africaine, and include his controversial piece on “French Intellectuals and Democrats in the Algerian Revolution,” and his remarkably cynical ode to Patrice Lumumba, “Lumumba’s Death: Could We Do Otherwise?” However, a number of his signed pieces were withheld from the original 1964 collection of Fanon’s political essays, both in the first French and English editions. 207 Some of these unreproduced essays appear in 1959’s L’An Cinq de la Révolution Algérienne (published in the United States under the title A Dying Colonialism in 1965), but others – like his address on the African debt owed to Algeria at a December 1958 All-African Peoples’ Conference in Accra – were strangely omitted until later edition. It is necessary to weigh the impact of Fanon’s articulations on the importance of Algeria 206 David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography, 355. 207 Irene L. Gendzeir, notes these omissions in her 1974 biography of Frantz Fanon, Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 142-143. 100 to the global question of black liberation from this relatively recently expanded archive of his life and work. One of Fanon’s imperatives in el Moudjahid was also to report on other liberation movements throughout the world in order to establish the continuity that Algeria’s own movement had on the global stage. In an article written on the 1958 conference, entitled “Algeria in Accra,” Fanon forwards that the very notion that Algeria’s revolution had captured the entire continent’s attention was odious to the whole of the imperial north. He writes, “the colonialists…like to think that the struggle of the Algerian people has awakened no echo among the men and women of Africa south of the Sahara. In reality, the Algerian Revolution has never been so acutely and so substantially present as in this region of Africa.” 208 Africans “south of the Sahara,” Fanon argues, “whether among the Senegalese, the Cameroonians, or the South Africans” had easily recognized “the existence of a fundamental solidarity of these peoples with the struggle of the Algerian people, its methods and its objectives.” 209 Fanon’s primary job at this Congress meeting in Accra was to thwart any rumors that the FLN would acquiesce to French demands for a peaceable ending to the war, a concern arising largely from French propaganda designed to put down subversive organizing in the metropole and its other colonial holdings. 210 To dispel any such myths in Accra and for the reading public of el Moudjahid, Fanon asserts, “For the first time, it was realized, a colonialism waging war in African proves itself powerless to win. It is because they had failed to analyze this phenomenon that the colonialists were once again caught off guard and astonished by the success of the Algerian representatives.” Other independence struggles on the continent were nodded to, particularly 208 Frantz Fanon, “L’Algérie à Accra,” el Moudjahid 34 (December 24, 1958), reprinted and translated in Toward the African Revolution, 150-152. 209 Ibid, 150. 210 David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography, 362-364. 101 Guinea, which had taken advantage of independence in the wake of France’s collapsed Fourth Republic and Charles de Gaulle’s subsequent August 1958 proclamation that French colonies had a choice between autonomy or continued inclusion in the “French Community.” 211 Guinea had such a chance, Fanon concluded, for “being the first important consequence of the Franco- Algerian conflict.” 212 Had France’s Fourth Republic survived instability in its colonies, and had the Algerian war been put down early, the Fifth Republic would not have issued the constitutional referendum that allowed Sekou Touré and the Parti déemocratique de Giunée to agitate against continued association with France. Figure 3.1 & 3.2: The Accra articles. Arabic edition, El Moudjahid, 24 December 1958 211 Ibid, 380. 212 Frantz Fanon, “L’Algérie à Accra,” el Moudjahid 34 (December 24, 1958), reprinted and translated in Toward the African Revolution, 151. 102 The Accra conference was also Fanon’s first foray into acting as a spokesman for the FLN in an international setting, and offered him the first opportunity to make contact with a number of African organizations and peoples. These meetings likely cemented Fanon’s imperative to “cast Algeria in the role of what might be termed Africa’s senior revolution,” however, for “the attempt to export the Algerian model to other countries…also helped to promote the image of Fanon as the apostle of violence three years before the publication of Les Damnés de la terre.” 213 The speech that Fanon delivered in Accra was published in the same issue of el Moudjahid, and the distinctions between the two accounts – both intended for an Algerian audience, but the speech directed to the Congress – elaborate on how Fanon sought to frame Algeria within pan-African liberationist thought. In “Accra: Africa Affirms Its Unity and Defines Its Strategy,” Fanon invokes the assumption of ‘biological solidarity’ among African peoples in order to reflect that this “affective communion” was rather less important than the “identity of objectives and also the determination to use all existing means to banish colonialism from the African continent.” 214 Fanon’s pointed emphasis on the strategic realities of African unity rather than the affective pull of a shared “biological” structure communicates several important interventions to the delegates gathered in Accra. First, Fanon delimits the work of pan- Africanism as a revolutionary project, not a performative vanity exclusive to the cultural realm. Second, and most resonant in the analysis of culture that would become a large part of The Wretched of the Earth, was that ultimately, the “historical necessity in which the men of African culture find themselves to racialize their claims and to speak more of African culture and of 213 David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography, 367. 214 Frantz Fanon, “Accra: L’Afrique affirme son unite et definit sa stratégie,” el Moudjahid 34 (December 24, 1958), 114-115, reprinted and translated in Toward the African Revolution, 154. 103 national culture will tend to lead them up a blind alley.” 215 Essentially, Fanon feared what not a few cultural projects on the continent would soon realize: that in the effort to seek out a unifying element that de-emphasizes the importance of national liberation, colonized peoples “will be confined to showing Europeans that such a thing as African culture exists.” 216 If a supranational, or “African” culture may spring, it is clear, it would only be in the context of the total decolonization of all corners of the African diaspora. The conflict Fanon courted in his hierarchising of revolution above all would spark controversy over the course of his short life. The avowed militant was due to attend Présence africaine’s Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists in March 1959, soon after the Accra conference. His notoriety, and his public work with the FLN (which had a delegation in Rome, the city where the conference was held) had followed him to the conference. The paper he presented, “The Reciprocal Foundation of National Culture and Liberation Struggles,” broke from the overall conference theme of redeeming and legitimizing the existence of (Francophone) African culture and instead famously focused on the “preconditions” for culture: the nation and its liberation. 217 Having long ago, and publicly, rejected négritude as a “great black mirage” in “West Indians and Africans” for Esprit magazine four years earlier, Fanon’s conclusions – that a ‘universal’ black culture that conflated the dilemma of a black American with a Kenyan, for instance, was impossible in light of context of their national ties – were still rather shocking to 215 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 214. 216 Ibid, 215. 217 David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography, 370-371. At this conference, Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop “reiterated his these about the black-Egyptian origins of Greek culture,” which David Macey presents as a subtext to explain “the tensions between North Africa and the regions to the south of the Sahara and to clarify why the Maghreb never became an important issue for Présence africaine: some of the invaders and robbers from the North were Bedouin and Arab traders slaves.” 104 the conference attendees. 218 Fanon confronted his audience of ‘native intellectuals’, proclaiming “the native intellectual … sooner or later will realize that you do not show proof of your nation from its culture but that you substantiate its existence in the fight which people wage against the forces of occupation.” 219 Fanon’s prevailing interest in transcending race, a point raised in Chapter One of this text, had evolved during his years in Algeria to determine that the transcendence of race was now entirely possible in light of the rise of black nationalist movements and, in Africa, autonomous black nation-states. Ultimately, his work for the FLN reveals that Fanon’s early “compromise” of settling in Algeria was no compromise at all. It was the Algerian War that mobilized his political imagination, as it was his writing in el Moudjahid and position as a writer and propagandist in the FLN that produced what are the most seminal of his philosophical works in the study of black life and African resistance. Algeria was not only the symbolic site for Fanon’s articulation of an African revolutionary culture; it was the catalyst for it. His break from France and French assimilationist culture was in large part a result of his work in Tunisia and with the FLN in the late 1950s. While Fanon was absolutely intent on escaping and subverting what he viewed to be the savage, psychopathic brutality of French racial colonialism, he did not decamp to Blida ready to take up arms. It was with the encouragement of his colleagues, notably Dr. Chaulet, and the day- to-day experience of treating traumatized Algerians and their oppressors that led Fanon to resign from the Blida hospital and serve the revolutionary cause as a theorist, a writer, an ambassador, and a psychiatrist. Acknowledging that Fanon’s labor was not, in his lifetime, exerted as guerilla fighter is to understand that his legacy was often misunderstood by other diasporic figures and movements that cite him as their example. Fanon was not in Algeria at all 218 Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 27. 219 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 223. 105 after 1956 – he would find its way there again only after his death. Fanon’s preoccupation was the press service and advocacy work in Tunis, Cairo, Brazzaville, Accra, and wherever else an opportunity to discuss the status of the Algerian revolution called him. When based in Tunisia, Fanon also served in the health ministry as a psychiatrist – his original vocation. His radical vocation. The revolution in Fanon’s own life was a revolution waged with words and ideas – a Césairian proposition. 220 He was a champion for and a guardian of the expansive significance of Algeria’s war for independence in the African diaspora. Fanon disavowed his French ties to craft himself as Algerian, and Martiniquan, and African for this cause, a confluence of identities that he tenderly critiqued but wholly believed in as the progenitor of global black liberation. Fanon made himself Algerian because he believed that Algeria had made him anew. After his death, Fanon was eulogized by Gouvernement Provisoire de la République Algérienne (GPRA) Vice-President Belkacem Krim, a farewell that Fanon biographer David Macey quotes at length. Krim spoke on behalf of the provisional government and the people of Algeria, proclaiming the memory of Fanon would “live on and always be evoked by the noblest figures of our Revolution.” 221 Citing Fanon’s youth in Martinique as the formative experiences for the psychiatrist’s embrace of revolutionary fervor, Krim thanked him for dedicating himself to the safety and well-being of FLN “patriots and party officials” and to making known “the true 220 Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 30-32n81. Césaire explicitly outlined the conceptual poetics of revolutionary rhetoric in a 1944 article in Tropiques, entitled “Poesie et connaisance.” He wrote, “ It is with his entire being that the poet approaches the poem… all lived experience. All the possibility…And the most extraordinary contacts: all the pasts, all the futures…one man is the salvation of humanity, one man puts humanity back in universal concert, one man united the human flowering with the universal following; that man is the poet. Gary Wilder contends this is Césaire’s mediation on how poetic knowledge “moves humans through a state of violent upheaval into a prophetic vision of destiny, an elevated truth, an illuminated world.” 221 Quoted in David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography, 5n5. 106 face of our revolution and the realities of our struggle” across the African continent. Krim concluded: Frantz Fanon! You devoted your life to the cause of freedom, dignity, justice and good. Your loss causes us great pain. In the name of the Provisional Government of Algeria, I offer your family our most sincere and most fraternal condolences. I also offer our thanks to the representatives of those friendly and fraternal countries who, by being present at our side, have expressed their wish to join us in our mourning. Frantz Fanon! You will always be a living example. Rest in peace. Algeria will never forget you. Fanon’s tasks for the FLN - to recruit allies to Algeria’s cause, and to Africa’s – cemented Fanon’s embrace of Algeria into the consciousness of the then-provisional government that honored his wish to be buried on Algerian soil in 1961. 222 Krim cited his contributions to el Moudjahid and representation of the FLN during international conferences, spanning “Monrovia, Tunis, Conkary, Addis-Ababa and Léopoldville,” as essential to the revolution and to Fanon’s place in it. After Fanon’s, death the English translations of Fanon’s writings from el Moudjahid for Toward the African Revolution and the subsequent translation of The Wretched of the Earth made his theoretical legacy available to many in the Anglophone world. The availability of Fanon’s distinct form of pan-Africanism and revolutionary theory opened up the Algerian conflict for such groups as the Black Panther Party to learn from and build upon in the years after Algerian independence. 222 David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography, 6. Fanon’s remains would be later exhumed and reinterred from the Algerian border with Tunis to a martyr’s cemetery in Ain Kerma on June 25, 1965. The initial burial plot reflected the difficulty of maneuvering past French security defenses at the time of his death. 107 II. The Performance of African Algeria On July 3, 1962, a nearly unanimous Algerian vote for the Évian Accords led Charles De Gaulle to finally declare Algeria an independent nation. 223 Upon winning its independence from France, the FLN – newly (though not painlessly) reimagined as a political party - immediately embarked on the project of forming the Organization of African Unity (OAU) alongside the representatives of 32 other African nations. Established in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in 1963, the organization was premised on the cooperation of African nation-states to uproot colonialism, organize for human rights, and support the ongoing pursuit of independence and sovereignty on the continent. 224 Though predicated on the assumption that the partnership of African states would safeguard nations that had achieved independence and provide active support to those that had not (Angola and South Africa were of especial concern), there was a significant difference of opinion on whether a pan-African interpretation of sovereignty beyond individual nation-states could or should be adopted by the OAU as a political, economic, or even cultural reality. This debate predated the ratification of the OAU’s 1963 Charter of African Unity, itself the result of the 1958 Accra conference that Fanon attended, and was rooted in the divergent interests of two other outgrowths of the continental pursuit of independence: the Casablanca and Monrovia (Brazzaville) blocs. The Casablanca Bloc, led by Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, advocated for an African “league” or “continental Union of African States” in order to secure the sovereignty of the continent as a whole. 225 The Monrovia bloc, as well as 223 “Proclamation des Resultats du Referendum d’Autodetermination du 1er Juillet 1962” Journal Officiel de l’Etat Algerien, 6 July 1962. 224 Charter of the Organisation of African Unity, May 25 1963. Organization of African Unity: Basic Documents and Resolutions (Addis Ababa: The Provisional Secretariat of the OAU, 1963), 7-13. 225 Obinna Onwumere, “Pan-Africanism: The Impact of the Nkrumah Years, 1945-1966” in Trans- Atlantic Migration: The Paradoxes of Exile, eds. Toyin Falola and Niyi Afolabi (New York: Routledge, 2008), 236-239. 108 some Casablanca bloc members (Algeria’s Ahmed Ben Bella among them) opposed this utopic design for African unity. Instead, a compromise was struck at the Addis Ababa conference, and only the OAU Liberation Committee remained of the Casablanca bloc’s hopes for a pan-African model for African unity. 226 In the midst of the OAU debate, the FLN member and avowed Nasserist Ahmed Ben Bella ran unopposed for the presidency of Algeria in 1963. Ben Bella was popular, but his domestic policies were heavy-handed and clumsy, locking Algeria into an autocratic one-party system while he spent much of his time navigating matters external to the nation. 227 Though much beloved for his energetic rhetoric, which was often also a sign of his irregular leadership, Ben Bella’s ouster at the hands of the defense minister, Houari Boumediène in a 1965 coup was not met with wide outcry in Algeria. 228 A self-styled custodian of the war for independence, Boumediène’s nationalization of French industry in Algeria and his diplomatic support of non- The Casablanca bloc formed at the Casablanca Conference of January 1961, a meeting of African nations with troop commitments in the Congo (represented by Ghana, Guinea, Mali, and Egypt). This conference resulted in the publication of the African Charter for Casablanca, a document committing to a pan- Africanist approach to African independence. In February 1961, Patrice Lumumba would be ousted and murdered. 226 Slimane Chikh, “L’Algérie et l’Afrique: 1954-1962.” Revue Algérienne des Sciences juridiques, économiques, et politiques 5:3 (1968): 703-746. The Liberation Committee was primarily concerned with raising funds to support other African liberation movements, and operated largely independent of the OAU. 227 Khalid Chegraoui, “La Maghreb et l’Afrique: une histoire mouvementée. Continuitée et conflits l’interrégional au continental: le Maroc en voisinage” in Les identités régionales et la dialectique sud-sud en question, ed. Nadir Marouf (Dakar: CODESRIA, 2007), 57-60. The “Guerre des Sables” or Sand War (1963) was one such debacle, marking the culmination of a border dispute, started by the French annexation of land, between Algeria and Morocco over portions of Western Algeria and Algerian support for the Western Saharan independence. Clearly, the tenets of the OAU Charter were not always respected. 228 William B. Quandt, Between Ballots and Bullets: Algeria’s Transition from Authoritarianism (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute, 1998), 23. 109 aligned, Tricontinental, and other global anti-colonial efforts intended to instill Algerians with “pride in the country’s stature as a beacon for Third World revolution.” 229 Still, the Pan-African Festival of 1969 might be referred to as Ahmed Ben Bella’s festival, for Boumediène’s eschewing of the cult of personality that Ben Bella relished in did not inspire such a celebratory atmosphere. Sponsored by the Organization of African Unity and attended by “delegations of artists, musicians, dancers, writers, and political figures from twenty- four countries, along with representatives of six African liberation movements from still colonized areas,” the festival opened on July 21, 1969 – the same day that two American men landed on the moon. 230 Kathleen Neal Cleaver recalls that Boumediène’s welcoming remarks emphasized the bonds that “anti-colonialist zeal” on the African continent and its diaspora offered the prospect for African unity, and that in no uncertain terms, “culture is a weapon in our struggle for liberation.” 231 Before the festival opened, however, a “Manifeste culturel panafricain” laid out the core rationale for a “First” Pan-African Cultural Festival. Originally published in the French-language Moroccan magazine, Souffles, the manifesto is a fascinating documentation of the Algerian investment in pan-Africanism. The manifesto moved away from the de-politicized call to cultural celebration that characterized the 1966 World Festival of Black Arts in Dakar three years prior but also resisted the urge to render “African culture” a universal and generic denotation. Acutely inspired by the arc of Frantz Fanon’s philosophical discernment of the function of culture as an outgrowth of a liberated state, the manifesto opens with a definition of African culture that 229 Martin Evans, Algeria: France’s Undeclared War, 342-343. 230 Kathleen Neal Cleaver, “Back to Africa: The Evolution of the International Section of the Black Panther Party (1969-1972)” in The Black Panther Party (Reconsidered), ed. Charles Earl Jones (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1998), 211-212. 231 Ibid, 212-213. 110 assigns its very existence to the broadest aspect of society: the people themselves. It begins, “the people are the starting point of culture insofar as they create themselves and they transform their environment. In its widest and most total sense, culture allows mankind to put order in their lives. Culture is not received by the people, but made by them.” 232 Addressed against the coercive and corrosive effects that colonialism wrought on culture in all its contexts, the manifesto nonetheless makes no claims to the romance of an untouched cultural past that might be resurrected intact. 233 Rather, “African artists and intellectuals must situate themselves within their society and assume the particularly decisive responsibilities that belong to them. Their actions should instill the radical transformation of minds … People must be the first beneficiaries of their cultural and economic wealth.” 234 Though the manifesto does not shy away from the distinctions in culture on the continent and in the diaspora, it does attempt to massage the Senghorian concept of “Africanité,” or an African way of being, to address the local, regional, and international call to African culture that the festival will enact. “The concept of Africanity [sic] obeys the law of a dialectic of the particular and the general, of specificity and universality; that is to say, a dialectic of truth at the base and unity at the top. African culture, art, and science, whatever the diversity of expression, are not based on any essential difference. They are nothing but singular expressions of the same universality” (emphasis mine). 235 This interstitial space the manifesto identifies – the “singular expression” of the “same universality” – is a captivating proposition. Indeed, as the rest of the 232 Maria Morena, Manifesto of the Pan-African Cultural Festival, Algiers (1969), Critical Interventions 3:1 (2009): 179. 233 Ibid, 183. “We must be careful not to turn this reference to the living sources of Africanity into a complaisant and sterile expression of the past; rather, it should imply an effort to innovate and an adaptation of African culture to modern demands for a harmonious process of social and economic development” 234 Ibid, 180. 235 Ibid, 180. 111 manifesto of the Pan-African Cultural Festival proceeds to explicate the varying degrees to which culture will intercede in African liberation and on African social and economic development, it incredibly never once includes the identifying term “Arab.” The Pan-African Festival of 1969 was hosted by the governing Front de Libération Nationale, put on in the capital city of Algiers, and overtly tied itself to the pro-Arab and pan-Africanist Casablanca bloc of the Organization of African Unity. And yet “Arab” never appears. This absence might be read in two ways. In one light, the Algerian impetus to act as custodians of liberation was directly linked to Boumediène’s hope to assert that responsibility and leadership on the international stage in order to maintain his influence in Algeria and on the continent. 236 But perhaps the choice not to issue “Arab” as a term also speaks to the fundamental tension inherent in the overshadowing specter of the Saharan racial divide that Léopold Sédar Senghor renewed prior to the 1977 Festival of Negro African Arts (FESTAC), the subject of the next chapter. If pan-Africanism is predicated, as Fanon maintained in The Wretched of the Earth, on abjuring European colonial determinations of ‘race,’ it might be argued that the question of Algeria’s place on the continent and in the conception of global blackness is made a non-issue through the language of the manifesto. However, the manifesto was received by a global black audience as precisely the sort of challenge to the lingering colonial structures that defined black political and cultural revolution. As Kathleen Neal Cleaver wrote on the Black Panther Party’s interest in Algeria: “The Black Panther Party believed the liberation of Blacks from racist oppression and capitalist exploitation required a social revolution to transform the economic and 236 Kathleen Neal Cleaver, “Back to Africa: The Evolution of the International Section of the Black Panther Party (1969-1972),” 218. 112 political institutions of the United States, and its presence in Algiers signified its identification with African struggles to end colonialism.” 237 Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver traveled from Cuba to Algeria separately in the summer of 1969. Their arrivals coincided with the festival, and Eldridge Cleaver’s warm welcome by diplomats at a number of embassies in Algiers inspired him to cement the Panthers’ ties to the nation by founding a chapter in Algiers, inclusive of a military training center, in September that year. While Eldridge Cleaver “sought to further elevate the Party abroad” and “received support from revolutionary movements” around the continent, as well as from Palestine, the Black Panther Party did not receive diplomatic recognition from the Algerian state – in the form of a dedicated facility, acquisition of entry and exit visas for party members, identity cards, and a monthly stipend - until the spring of 1970. 238 The military base was not permitted. A number of factors accounted for the delayed recognition of the Panthers, chief among them the Panthers’ lack of political awareness of Algerian politics and culture, as well as the inability to communicate in Arabic or French. Kathleen Cleaver, then Communications Secretary of the Panthers, noted in later writings “adapting to life in Algiers, where nothing was remotely similar to America, presented a shock for which none of the Panthers was prepared.” 239 Furthermore, the suspicion that some in the army-led government had of the Panthers’ intentions – which would later be confirmed as two African American hijackers, Roger Holder and Catherine Kerkow, also sought refuge in the nation under the umbrella of the black American organization – meant that 237 Ibid, 238 Jennifer B. Smith, An International History of the Black Panther Party (New York: Garland Publishing, 1999), 78-79. 239 Kathleen Neal Cleaver, cited in Ibid, 79n35. 113 the Panthers were subject to constant surveillance, discouraging Algerians from becoming too familiar with the group. 240 In spite of these conflicts, Kathleen Cleaver’s account of the Panthers’ experience in Algiers was attuned to the educational value this constrained society offered. She explains that Frantz Fanon had been an essential draw for the Panthers to establish an international chapter in Algeria. Cleaver writes: The Wretched of the Earth became essential reading for Black revolutionaries in America and profoundly influenced their thinking. Fanon’s analysis seemed to explain and to justify the spontaneous violence ravaging black ghettos around the country, and linked the incipient insurrections to the rise of a revolutionary movement… Fanon’s discussion of a key element in the process of decolonization- the overt rejection of White cultural domination – illuminated the transition from shame to pride in Blackness that masses of Black Americans experienced during the era of Black power. 241 Also in her observations of post-war Algeria, Cleaver notes that quotidian reminders of the war and the condition of colonialism that preceded it were as much to blame for the Black Panther Party’s poor acclimation to the country as language and political barriers. She writes: “Bombed out buildings still stood as grim reminders of the war that left no family in Algeria unscathed. The French colonial past was evident in the striking architecture of the city and the complex bureaucracy of the state, which the daily calls to prayer and veiled women attested to the resurgence of Algeria’s Islamic heritage. Arabic was the dominant language, but everyone in Algiers still spoke French, the language of government and commerce. The complicated tribal and ethnic divisions among Arabs, Berbers, and Africans bewildered Panthers accustomed to simple stratification of color and class, as did the general absence of antagonism towards 240 Kathleen Neal Cleaver, “Back to Africa: The Evolution of the International Section of the Black Panther Party (1969-1972),” 245. 241 Ibid, 214. 114 France.” 242 Eldridge Cleaver would eventually be cast out from the official Black Panther Party for his increasing demands on the West Coast Party to partake in battle rather than social programmes, among other charges, and the news of his ousting from the Panthers coincided with Algeria’s growing frustration with the number of hijackers and other fugitives who made use of the nation as a refuge. 243 By August 1972, an open letter of complaint composed by Cleaver and directed to President Boumediène led the government to put the Panthers under house arrest, compelling most of the African Americans in Algiers to leave. Cleaver himself eventually left for France, where he ironically applied for political asylum. The French government denied his request. 244 If the Black Panther Party represented what Stuart Hall had referred to as the “adoption and adaptation of Fanonism within the black movement in the United States,” 245 then Algeria was the obvious place for an International Black Panther Party to settle. That their arrival so closely aligned with the start of the Pan-African Festival provided a perfect opportunity for them to practice in Algeria what they learned from Fanon: to build revolution in “the beacon of the Third World.” 246 Besides Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver, BPP Chief of Staff David Hilliard, Minister of Education Raymond “Masai” Hewitt, and Minister of Culture Emory Douglas were in Algiers for the festival, offering what Michael L. Clemons and Charles E. Jones called an 242 Ibid. 243 Akinyele Omowale Umoja, “Repression Breeds Resistance: The Black Liberation Army and the Radical Legacy of the Black Panther Party” in Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Black Panther Party, eds. Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas (New York: Routledge, 2001), 11. “The International Section and the BPP factions centered in New York and Los Angeles all aligned around a more radical pro-armed struggle position than did [Huey] Newton and the Oakland-based BPP. The radical BPP no longer recognized Newton and the Oakland-based Panthers as a revolutionary organization but considered it an opportunist right-wing clique.” 244 Ibid. 245 Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, ad Law and Order (London: The MacMillan Press Ltd, 1978), 386. 246 Martin Evans, Algeria: France’s Undeclared War, 347. 115 extremely rare opportunity for Central Committee members to plan and initiate new ventures. 247 Moreover, the Panthers’ own contributions to the festival were hugely popular: “An exhibition tracing the Panthers’ history and including paintings and prints by Emory Douglas, the Panthers’ Minister of Culture, was inundated by adoring crowds.” 248 And despite their less than illustrious departure from the nation, Kathleen Cleaver enumerates that the International Black Panther Party benefitted enormously from its location in Algiers by virtue of having virtually limitless access to collaborations and meetings with a number of prevalent revolutionary organizations in Africa and Asia. 249 The Panthers, of course, were few among the many thousands of participants in the festival. To set the scene of the entire Pan-African festival and how it likely seduced the Cleavers to Algiers, I turn to Festival panafrricain d’Alger (1969), filmed by a white American-French photographer and official documentarian of the festival, William Klein. Klein also took advantage of Eldridge Cleaver’s presence in the city to film what would become Eldridge Cleaver Black Panther the same year. The documentary itself was not unproblematic. In an interview with Souffles magazine Senegalese filmmaker and writer Ousmane Sembène articulates a proverbial eye roll at the choice of Klein to direct the documentary. Sembène notes, “what is still stranger is that they [Africans] weren’t shocked to see the production of the film about the festival handed over to an American, and not to an African.” 250 But it is no wonder, for 247 Michael L. Clemons and Charles E. Jones, “Global Solidarity: The Black Panther Party in the International Arena” in Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Black Panther Party eds. Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas (New York: Routledge, 2001), 37. 248 Evans, 347. 249 Kathleen Neal Cleaver, “Back to Africa: The Evolution of the International Section of the Black Panther Party (1969-1972),” 240-244. 250 Interview with Ousmane Sembène, trans. Laura Reeck, Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics, eds. Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 221. 116 even a pan-African cultural festival did not preclude a longing for respect from the former metropole: Sembène shares with his interviewer that Klein was offered eighteen million CFA francs to direct the film, whereas an African filmmaker contacted for the project was only offered three. Sembène concludes, “The festival is about African culture, so it should be an African who gets the honor of filming the festival. We’re capable of taking a critical look at ourselves.” 251 The film’s first scene is a close-up of the shy, growing smile on the face of a woman whose hand is held aloft by a fellow South West Africa People’s Organization fighter, proclaiming, “I tell you today. Namibia can be free. Whatever happens. We will fight!” The camera pans out, and away to Klein’s credits, miserable scenes of colonial violence from across the continent overlaid with a SWAPO anthem, “Colonial / Colonialism. We shall fight until we win.” The Congo, Angola, Kenya, and Algeria: scenes of abject violence, followed by scenes of victory and celebration. Grand crowds of ululating ‘veiled’ women (who so terrified French forces in Algeria during the war) congregate alongside their countrymen, Arabs and Berbers united in celebration in 1962. This is how Klein introduces the Premier Festival Culturel Panafricain. A contemporary moment of affirmation, from 1969, through the history of colonialism on the African continent. And finally, the festival itself. The capital of Algiers looks very different than the found footage of war that Klein used in the opening. Bright and in color, turbaned tribesmen atop horses fire their rifles to mark the start of the festival’s parade. The camera pans down the line, from scantily mustachioed Algerian teenagers on the sidelines to the Guinean contingent, holding aloft posters of Sékou Touré. The Libyans are an ostentatious group, dancing to a qawala flautist and led by call-and-response chants from a brilliantly black 251 Ibid. 117 brother donning a kufi. The Mauritanians prefer saxophones and hold high forest green signs praising the OAU and the festival in both French and Arabic. Senegal’s dancers are flirtatious, much to the delight of the Algerian men they grab off the street to dance with. An awkward collaborative belly dance doesn’t appear half bad to the laughing policeman standing off to the side. The African National Congress, FRELIMO (Mozambique), Zimbabwe African People’s Union, PAIGC (Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde), the Black Panther Party and MPLA are much more staid, chanting as often as singing, and marching in formation. The Ethiopian contingent is all in white, and each contingent after them sings or dances as they move along the parade route. One might imagine that the thousands of Algerians packed onto the streets alongside their guests are amazed by how many versions of the tabla exist in Africa. Or that the Beninese wondered at the utterly bizarre display of an entire Algerian army musical corps comprised of bagpipes. The ninety-minute long documentary charts the rich significance of this immense and diverse meeting of Africans in Algeria. Children on the street chase down dancers in costume everywhere they go, and it is deeply moving to witness so many smiles and such palpable joy emanating from peoples who have endured, and many who were then still enduring, the ravages of armed struggles for their independence. But the political roots of the cultural festival, an asset that demarcated it as something entirely different then the World Festival of Negro Arts in 1966 Dakar, is the focus of Klein’s documentary. It could have ended with black American saxophonist Archie Shepp on stage with Tuareg musicians, freestyling what might have been the first Gnawa-jazz fusion to emerge from the Maghreb while “From Watts” is scrawled across the screen. Rather, Klein’s documentary ends with a provocation: “African culture will be revolutionary or will not be!” 118 The interplay of culture and politics is explicit in Klein’s documentary. Anti-colonial speeches are looped through and over cultural manifestations of revolution, as in a scene of Algerian horsemen racing with rifles aimed high, firing as they gallop along a makeshift track. It recalls a story Frantz Fanon described from his own experience in Algeria on how political change was reflected in the evolution of Algeria’s storytellers through the war for independence. He writes: From 1952-3 on, the storytellers, who were before that time stereotyped and tedious to listen to, completely overturned their traditional methods of storytelling and the contents of their tales. Their public, which was formerly scattered, became compact. The epic, with its typified categories, reappeared; it became an authentic form of entertainment which took on once more a cultural value. Colonialism made no mistake when from 1955 on it proceeded to arrest these storytellers systematically. The contact of the people with the new movement gives rise to a new rhythm of life and to forgotten muscular tensions, and develops the imagination. Every time the storyteller relates a fresh episode to his public, he presides over a real invocation. The existence of a new type of man is revealed to the public. 252 This is not to say that the festival overcame the difficulties of difference that are outlined in prior chapters and in the difficulties Algeria encountered in building ties across borders, but that it embraced the intertwining of politics and culture with such gusto that even a vocal critic of the festival, Nigerian writer Joseph Okpaku, wryly admitted: “I wondered whether I had not by error strayed into an international cocktail party.” 253 If Okpaku did, it was a cocktail party organized explicitly around the counterhegemonic approach to pan-Africanism and revolution that Frantz Fanon critically mediated through the space of Algeria. 252 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 240-241. 253 Joseph Okpaku, “Arts: Artists and Politicians at Algiers,” Africa Report 14:7 (November 1, 1969): 41. 119 Chapter Four Arabité, Négritude, and the African Little Magazine I. Négritude or Arabité? The 1969 Pan-African Festival marked a critical moment in the coalescence of Afro-Arab approaches to liberation and diasporic identity on the African continent. Its accessibility and relative openness to debate further positioned Algeria as a hub for new evocations of pan- Africanism that embraced the Arab North as an active participant in global diasporic politics and cultures. Young political and cultural organizations, such as the Organization for African Unity, were encouraged to explore the possibilities of transnational solidarity without divorcing themselves from the distinctions that existed in African coalition building. The importance of these distinctions for navigating Afro-Arab inclusion in diasporic ideologies like pan-Africanism had a broad resonance in independent Algeria, inasmuch as the festival was considered a response to Senghorian négritude by its many African participants. Building on the prior chapter’s assertions that Algeria and Algerians served a central role in material and imagined constructions of transnational black solidarities across language and region, this chapter reads the Cairo-based little magazine Lotus: Afro Asian Writings as another diasporic cultural product that exemplified a particular set of ideological and cultural debates emergent within this Third Worldist frame. The political and cultural practices of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s pan-Arabism and Léopold Sédar Senghor’s négritude – diasporic practices that deeply influenced the subtext of Lotus’ content – informed alternative formations about what, and who, constitutes an African Diasporic subject, as well as what an African diasporic practice looked like during its first decade of publication, from 1967 to 1978. Initially conceived of by the 120 Permanent Bureau of Afro-Asian Writers at an October 1958 conference in Tashkent, Lotus made its first home in Colombo, Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon). Cairo was soon deemed to be better equipped for such an ambitious transnational project, for Lotus not only published quarterly new works of literature and poetry, but also translated into English, French, and Arabic previously published works from a breathtaking span of major and minor languages from around the globe. Joining a notable array of other African diasporic little magazines – among them, Souffles-Anfas, Transition, Savacou, and Lamalif – Lotus sought to revive and expand African and Asian political intersections by acting as a cultural extension of the basic principles of the 1955 Bandung agreement. 254 Elaborating on inter-diasporic and Global South dialogues about the juncture of these varying subject formations informs the vacillating dimensions and tensions that accompanied later attempts to refigure the African Diaspora. In this chapter, I am primarily concerned with expanding upon one provocation that Brent Hayes Edwards makes in his exceptional monograph, The Practice of Diaspora (2003). While Edwards’ text is interested in theorizing diaspora as a set of practices as opposed to solely a historical condition, he also critically contends that some arguments, experiences, and epiphanies that African Americans discerned abroad could only happen outside of the United States and in translation. 255 It is in this conflicted, uneven terrain of diasporic practices and ways of organizing the African Diaspora where a sustained study of Lotus magazine is most germane. 254 Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations (New York: The New Press, 2007), 41-42. Some of these principles include: abstention from intervention in another country’s internal affairs, overall respect for national autonomy and territorial integrity, and peaceful settlements of disputes among non-aligned states. 255 Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 7. 121 Translating négritude into a realm where it is conversant with pan-Arabism is a difficult task, but I seek to demonstrate that the two ideologies are reflective of one another in various ways. Senghor’s négritude is often invoked as essentialist – a simplistic rendering, but one that provokes an explanation. Senghor’s négritude departed from his friend Aimé Césaire’s in its focus on existential, rather than ideological, blackness. Specifically, Senghor emphasized “la manière de vivre en nègre” and “être Nègre” as the epistemic value of négritude: a way of living as black, of being black. 256 One the one hand, Senghor’s belief is that “a black manner of living” and an African “communal spirit” characterized pre-colonial Africa, and therefore his conviction that “politics must be in the service of culture and not culture in the service of politics” had its basis in the very establishment of Africanité. 257 Senghor’s négritude sought to integrate European and African ways of knowing in order to secure the essence of humanity, and thus, transform the reality of pervasive black suffering into beauty. 258 On the other hand, the pan-Arabism that emerged and refracted in the nexus of Nasserism in the 1960s is a far cry from the Egyptian nationalism that first developed in the country in the late nineteenth century. As the historical canon in Middle Eastern Studies attests to, Egypt’s political trajectory until the 1950s was entirely divergent from that of their regional (Arab) neighbors. 259 Before Nasser, the majority of Egyptians “did not regard Egypt as an Arab State at all” and Nasser himself would only ever say he “felt” Arab because of Egypt’s proximity to 256 Léopold Sédar Senghor, “La Négritude comme culture des peoples noirs, ne saurait être dépassé.” Liberté 5: Le dialogue des cultures (Paris: Seuil, 1993), 96. “Being” as in Heidegger’s sense of ‘being’ as a verb rather than an entity. 257 Ibid, 95, 97-98. 258 Ibid, 106-109. 259 James P. Jankowski, Nasser’s Egypt, Arab Nationalism, and the United Arab Republic (Boulder: Lynne Reinner Publishers, 2002), 28-30. 122 them. 260 But in 1956, Nasser’s assumption of the presidency led to the adoption of pan-Arabism as state policy – rather late to the game of Arab nationalism in the region, but innovative in its approach to an Afro-Arab political identity that might be understood as singular, though not unique, all the same. Nasser was fully aware of the responsibility that Egypt had to the revolutionary success of its African compatriots and committed himself fully to the continent’s liberation from colonial rule. The Egyptian National Charter of 1962, a document almost entirely shaped by Nasser, decreed, “While our people believe in Arab unity, they also believe in a pan- African movement and an Afro-Asian solidarity.” Referencing the “terrifying battle now raging in the heart of that continent between five million whites and two hundred million Africans,” the Charter continues, “we cannot stand aloof for one important and obvious reason – we ourselves are in Africa.” 261 Nasser’s assertion of Egypt’s belonging to both African and Arab liberation is in dialogue, rather than oppositional to Senghor’s call to Africanité and “living as black.” This is to say that I understand Nasser to be merging Arab nationalism with pan-Africanism for any who would recognize in its principles a political practice they would like to follow and expand upon. Though I will show that in the pages of Lotus Senghor makes clear that négritude, Africanité, and Arabité are distinct ways of being, Egypt’s pan-Arabist claims did not preclude “being black” from existing in a coalitional formation alongside the growth of a pan-Afro-Arabism. There is much to critique in Egyptian pan-Arabism as well, however, and the fact that all the managing editors of Lotus were Egyptian marks one limitation, or tension, in reading pan- Arabism as an African diasporic practice. Mirroring the national ties of its editors, the content of Lotus was, in large part, structured and presented as utilitarian in the way that Egyptian pan- Arabism tended to be, its immediate concern for the well being of the nation. Whereas an 260 Peter Mansfield, Nasser’s Egypt (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969), 53, 114. 261 Ibid. 123 essential component of Senghorian négritude was to move away from the “dehumanizing” affect of utilitarianist culture (which Senghor argues is a European fault that only Africans could repair), Lotus interpreted its purpose as very much dependent on the political utility of the magazine. 262 The first issue of Lotus mapped a clear path from the production of anticolonial culture to a way of living that is geared toward liberation. The Third World writer “should move from the stage of [cultural] commitment to the revolutionary phase, in all its aspect. This does not mean only armed struggle or the demand for change; it lies in participating in the process of transformation at both the individual and society levels” 263 By centering revolutionary cultural reclamation and production as compulsory for artists and writers, Lotus restricts its ability to engage more innovative imaginings of the Third World beyond the prescribed notion that all of the Third World must be in solidarity. The project of Lotus thus raises a question about the conditions of possibility for an expansive imagining of diaspora in the midst of a purely tactical construction of African culture. How do the intersecting diasporic ideologies of négritude and pan-Arabism inform anti-colonial transnationalism and internationalism in Lotus and its seemingly peripheral project of cultural reclamation? The tensions between Senghor’s négritude and Lotus’ editorially-mediated, primarily Egyptian Pan-Arabism does not preclude the possibility of an expansive diaspora, but may have halted the potential for either to be in conversation with the other. Through the literal and conceptual practice of translation in the magazine’s content, a more encompassing analytic of diaspora crosses the ‘Saharan boundary’ to exceed the boundaries imposed by Senghorian and Nasserist ideologies alike. 262 Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 63-64. 263 Youssef el-Sebai, “The Role of Afro-Asian Literature and the National Liberation Movements” Afro- Asian Writings 1:1 (1967): 9. 124 II. Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings The Permanent Bureau of Afro-Asian Writers formed in 1956, a year after 29 African and Asian states gathered in Bandung, Indonesia to formalize the foundations of non- alignment. 264 In 1958, a meeting of the Bureau at the Conference of Afro-Asian Writers in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, resulted in the conception of an Afro-Asian literary magazine determined to “struggle against all aspects of oppression, exploitation and enslavement on the political, social and cultural levels alike.” 265 This meeting of writers, artists, and other Global South intellectuals prescribed a cultural attempt to negotiate the goals of transnational solidarity and the advancement of national sovereignty throughout the Third World. The solidarity praxis forwarded by Bandung and adopted by the Bureau was largely articulated as an ‘organic’ strategic alliance, conditioned by the overlapping liberation concerns of the member nations of the Non-Aligned Movement and the Permanent Bureau. 266 The possibility of this Third Worldist alliance as an ideological basis for cultural and political unity at the Tashkent meeting evolved through the following two decades and was exemplified by the shifting emphasis on affirming and reinvigorating the expressive cultures of the colonized. 264 Youssef el-Sebai, Editorial: “Fifteen years of Afro-Asian Writers” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings, 18 (1973): 8. 265 Youssef el-Sebai, “With the Advent of a New Year” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings no. 11 (1972): 8. 266 Youssef el-Sebai, Editorial: “Inspiration from the Colombo Meetings of the Non-Aligned Movement” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings, 31 (1977): 6-7 125 Figure 4.1: Editorial on Lotus and the NAM, Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings, no. 27/28 (January-June 1976) In March of 1967 the first issue of Lotus was published in English and Arabic out of the United Arab Republic’s National Publishing House (El-Kateb El-Arabi) in Cairo. 267 At $2 per 267 Youssef el-Sebai, Editorial: “Fifteen years of Afro-Asian Writers” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings, 18 (1973): 8-9. The Bureau adopted a Charter for the Union of Afro-Asian Writers during its third conference in Beirut the same year (1967). The precise date of the first English language issue is uncertain. While the issue I accessed in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is clearly dated March 1967, the masthead of the inaugural French issue is marked March 1968. There are a few potential reasons for the discrepancy: the first, and most likely, is the difficulty the magazine faced in translating each issue between Arabic, French, and in a timely manner, not to mention the geographic dispersion of its publishing houses. While el-Kateb el-Arabi initially handled the first English language issue, the editor’s letters between 1968 and 1976 address the frequent change of publishing venues as funding routes emerged or dissipated. A second reason for the uncertain date of initial publication may be that the magazine back-dated the English edition in order to place Lotus in immediate conversation with the Six Day War of 1967, which elevated the need for a literary magazine of this kind in response to renewed Israeli (and Euro-American) aggression in the region. A final possibility – and this exists only in the realm of rumor – is that the editorial board may have been, to quote an interlocutor involved in the magazine’s current reclamation, “utterly pissed” while putting together the first issue, and so happened to forget the year. 126 issue (or its equivalent), Afro-Asian Writings, as it was known then, had a slow beginning. 268 The French issue would follow one year later, the magazine having no little trouble in securing proficient translators that could wrangle the sheer number of languages the magazine intended to make legible to an Anglo-Arabic-Francophone global audience. 269 Attesting to “an earlier history of postcolonial critique, one that specifically held a promise of Global South comparatism,” literary scholar Hala Halim provides what is yet the most thorough account of the magazine’s founding. Halim attends to the controversy Lotus succeeded and courted before its first issue had even begun circulation. Its funding sources, largely procured from the Eastern Bloc, marked the “paradoxical alliance” found within the larger non-aligned movement as a whole. 270 However, the dilemma of cultural funding during the Cold War was not unique to Lotus, as in 1967 “scandal broke out in the West about journals such as the London-based Encounter and the Beirut-based Arabic Hiwar…alleged to be recipients of covert CIA funding through the Congress for Cultural Freedom.” 271 Halim notes that the 1966 New York Times articles that exposed CIA funding of cultural Cold War projects came after longstanding suspicion from the Arab World about Hiwar, outlined by Egyptian writer Louis Awad in an article on the tradition of British – and now, American – intelligence services infiltrating cultural projects in the Third World with the aim of weaponising them. 272 268 “Lotus” was not adopted as the title until seventh issue of the magazine, in January 1971. 269 Youssef el-Sebai, Editor’s Note, Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings 15 (1973): 6-7. El-Sebai writes “we sincerely hope that the coming issue will reach you in time, particularly since ‘DEWAG’ publishing institution, who is now printing ‘LOTUS’ in the Ferman Democratic Republic, has given us confidence as to the regular appearance of the magazine starting with the Sixteenth issue in both English and French. The ‘Public Book Institution’ of the Egyptian Ministry of Education also gives us hope as to the regular appearance of the Arabic Issue at the same time as the two other languages, also starting with the sixteenth issue.” 270 Hala Halim, “Lotus, the Afro-Asian Nexus, and Global South Comparatism” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 32:3 (2012): 568. 271 Ibid, 569. 272 Ibid, 570. 127 Lotus conscientiously maneuvered around the question of its own funding in the midst of this scandal by emphasizing transparency in the magazine’s pages. Youssef el-Sebai, the Egyptian novelist and editor in chief of the journal, routinely acknowledged the magazine’s many and varied sources of income: the German Democratic Republic, various U.S.S.R. agencies and publishing houses, and the Egyptian Ministry of Culture. 273 Regardless of its backers, Lotus had an agenda to pursue. In the words of el-Sebai, “The organs of publication and communication, chiefly the literary magazines, are not the givers but the means of consolidating, protecting, publishing and communicating this donation to the masses who have the right to benefit from it and reap its fruit. [sic]” 274275 In other words, the magazine’s existence, no matter what entities enabled for it, was understood by el-Sebai as a donation to African and Asian people in the struggle to reclaim their literatures. Youssef El-Sebai’s editor’s letter in the inaugural issue of the magazine is thus entirely devoted to the primary directive of anti-colonial politics in this new cultural venture. 276 El-Sebai begins with the call that inspired Lotus: We Afro-Asian writers represent people along the entire length and breadth of Asia and Africa, from different climates, different environments and different traditions. Yet we are all bound by a deeply-rooted unity, which is both the foundation and the basis underlying our superficial differences. It is our common inheritance apart from the 273 The sources of Lotus’ funding are frequently and transparently referenced by Youssef el-Sebai in his Editor’s Notes as well as summaries of the Afro-Asian Writer’s meetings provided in each issue’s documents section. (See: Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings, nos. 7, 12, 24/25, et al.) 274 Youssef el-Sebai, “The Literary and Cultural Magazines in Africa and Asia and the Cultural Work in Theory and Practice” Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings no.22 (1974): page unknown. 275 The USSR figures prominently in Lotus – a few significant players in the magazine’s editorial board and frequently published authors are clear adherents to Eastern Bloc interpretations of non-alignment, meaning they are interested in the alignment of the Third World with the USSR. Perhaps, as Dr. Vaughn Rasberry noted during the 2015 meeting of the American Studies Association, it is indeed in the best interest of scholars of non-alignment to distill lessons in political and cultural dexterity from moments of clever manipulation of major Cold War powers – the Soviet Union chief among them. 276 Senghor’s “Négritude and Arabism” is reprinted just a few pages later, before Senegalese filmmaker and writer Ousmane Sembène’s poem “Fingers/Les Doigts” and after a black-and-white photo spread of Sudanese artist Ibrahim el-Salahi’s paintings. 128 solidarity of our Afro-Asian peoples ... that is at one time, a gift and a responsibility. It is a right, even a distinction, but also a heavy burden and a duty which we have to fulfill. 277 El-Sebai’s essay, entitled “The Role of Afro-Asian Literature and the National Liberation Movements,” politicizes the cultural linkages between all of African and Asia as a “common heritage” that furthers “our common struggle toward regaining our national characters, achieving complete freedom and striving for the development of our societies.” 278 Cast in this light, the chief themes of Afro-Asian literature consist of “the cause of national liberation and the struggle for freedom, independence and human dignity, either in direct form or reflected in the pre- occupations and hubbub of daily life, or even illustrated by the struggle of various social forces; the action and interaction between them or the converging of these contradictions to a meeting point from which emanates the new social developments.” 279 The explicit political utility of a magazine like Lotus is further underscored in el-Sebai’s affirmation that “our political requirements must mobilize all our perspectives and energies” 280 In the world of el-Sebai, it is the mobilization of culture in service to every aspect of an autonomous Africa and Asia that demands such a magazine. El-Sebai’s first editor’s letter establishes the political and cultural environment that Lotus emerged within. Though preoccupied with the common material conditions across the decolonizing Third World, el-Sebai does gesture towards the reality of widespread difference spanning the two vast continents the magazine seeks to recover. He states, “the political and social struggle cannot be separated from the works of the Afro-Asian writer due to this historical condition in the present period, and due to all the circumstances which exist in Afro-Asian 277 Youssef el-Sebai, “The Role of Afro-Asian Literature and the National Liberation Movements” Afro- Asian Writings 1:1 (1967): 5. 278 Ibid. 279 Ibid, 7. 280 Ibid, 8. 129 societies with their distinct features. The political and social action, in its turn, is in great need of the creative streams supplied by art and culture. It is these streams which awaken the consciences of the masses and of the individual.” 281 Primary among the distinct features that span the Afro- Asian world, it is left unsaid, is language, and the inability to communicate effectively across linguistic boundaries on a large scale. Imperialist cultural assaults on the indigenous languages of the continent painfully lingered, and el-Sebai cites Algerian writer Malek Haddad to make this point: “I am incapable of saying in Arabic what I feel in Arabic. The French language is my exile. We reveal ourselves, but words, though they are our daily raw material, cannot rise up to the standard of our thoughts, and they are far below our emotions.” 282 El-Sebai channels the power of literature as a carrier of the revolutionary process that Frantz Fanon put to words just before his death. Fanon notably defined the utility of national literatures as such: “the native intellectual used to produce his work to be read exclusively by the oppressor ... now the native writer progressively takes on the habit of addressing his own people. It is only from that moment that we can speak of a national literature. Here there is, at the level of literary creation, the taking up and clarification of themes which are typically nationalist. This may be properly called a literature of combat, in the sense that it calls on the whole people to fight for their existence as a nation.” 283 The editorial arm of Lotus likely considered itself part of that same effort, though in the issues of the magazine I studied during my research, nary a mention of Fanon’s name appears. El-Sebai does, however, cite several recent international conferences of black writers, praising “the progress of the literatures of the African continent” pursued “the conferences organized by African writers in Paris and Rome and of the literary 281 Ibid, 7. 282 Cited in Youssef el-Sebai, Editor’s Note, Afro-Asian Writings 5 (1970): 6. 283 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 240. 130 symposia in Dakar, Freetown, and Uganda.” 284 The Présence africaine conferences held in Paris and Rome were in fact attended (and offended) by Fanon, as noted in the previous chapter. The 1962 Ugandan conference el-Sebai refers to, however was one that Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (then James Ngugi, a frequent contributor to Lotus) observed as deeply ironic. It was called the “Conference of African Writers of English Expression,” and was torn apart in Transition magazine for demonstrating only “that African literature as now understood and practiced, is merely a minor appendage in the main stream of European literature.” 285 Referencing this tensely debated conference on the politics of translation in a magazine operated as a translational platform rather exposes el-Sebai’s ignorance of the ongoing struggles between African writers north and south of the Sahara. While Senghor is specifically cited by el-Sebai, alongside Chinua Achebe, Ousmane Sembène, and Naguib Mahfouz as producing literary work “full of contempt for colonialism and all forms of racial arrogance and social injustices,” his loose references to African literary conferences where that contempt is put to the test demonstrates that in el-Sebai’s capacity as a writer for revolution, he had not managed to spend much time away from Egypt. 286 Nevertheless, El-Sebai’s pointed emphasis on the work cultural movements must perform to uphold anti-colonial political aims is summed up in his letter’s conclusive line: “The Afro-Asian writer is committed by need.” 287 284 Youssef el-Sebai, “The Role of Afro-Asian Literature and the National Liberation Movements” Afro- Asian Writings 1:1 (1967): 10. 285 Obiajunwa Wali, “The Dead End of African Literature?” Transition 10 (September 1963): 13. 286 Youssef el-Sebai, “The Role of Afro-Asian Literature and the National Liberation Movements” Afro- Asian Writings 1:1 (1967): 11. 287 Ibid, 8. 131 Figure 4.2: Left: Back cover of Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings, no. 6 (October 1970) Right: Front cover of Lotus Afro-Asian Writings, no. 7 (January 1971) So committed, Lotus assumed a responsibility that resulted in often overly dense issues. Numbering 200 or more pages each, the magazine typically featured studies of the historical and contemporary presence and value of Afro-Asian arts and literature, short stories, and an entire section devoted to poetry. Somewhere in the midst of these sections there is usually one extended overview of a specialty art - ceramics, say, or masks – and an exploration of the folklore from one or another country. Each issue devoted a good third of its space to special section on a matter of especially urgent political and cultural importance - Vietnam and Palestine received several such special sections over the years, as did Angola and South Africa. The back matter of most issues consisted of excerpts from the Afro-Asian Library, such as book reviews, and extensive documents from various African and Asian writer’s conferences or meetings of the Bureau. The Lotus Awards also kicked off in 1969 with winners To Hoai of Vietnam, South Africa’s Alex La 132 Guma, and Palestine’s Mahmoud Darwiche [sic]. 288 In fact, so many of the most beloved and prolific African and Asian writers of the twentieth century are Lotus Award recipients that it remains a mystery as to how the magazine remains unexamined in both scholarly and cultural texts today. The representation the magazine strove for was vast, but ultimately limited by a trend emblematic of the non-aligned moment and of Egypt’s prioritized investment in pan- Arabism writ large. All the managing editors of Lotus under el-Sebai’s role as the Editor and Secretary General of the Bureau of Afro-Asian Writers were Egyptian. They included Alexandrian lyrical novelist Edwar el Kharrat, and Morsi Saad Eddin, the founding cultural editor of Al Ahram and first Egyptian presidential spokesman under President Anwar Sadat. Sometime in the early 1970s popular radio host and literary critic Abdel Aziz Sadek replaced Eddin on the primary editorial board, though Eddin continued to contribute to the magazine from time to time. All men, all Egyptian, and all official cultural attachés in the Egyptian government. The editorial committee was much more regionally diverse (though not at all in terms of gender) and included the Indian fiction writer Mulk Raj Anand; leftist poet and intellectual Faiz Ahmed Faiz, from Pakistan; South African novelist and anti-apartheid activist Alex La Guma; the Japanese novelist Hiroshi Noma, and Soviet Russian writer Anatoly Sofronov, to name just a few. Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA) leader Mário Pinto De Andrade also sat on the first editorial committee. Various other writers from the African continent would join onto the editorial 288 “The Lotus Awards,” Afro-Asian Writings 1:1 (1967): 180-186/187-191. The Lotus Prize for Afro-Asian Literature announcement is intriguingly vague: “The Bureau resolves to award three annual prizes for the best works in Poetry and Drama, Prose writings (novels, short stories, biographies, memoirs) and criticism. These prizes shall be awarded to works of high literary and artistic values, reflect the objective realities of our times and expressing a militant attitude against any form of national and racial discrimination and social inequality, against any imperialist aggression or infiltration, as well as works expressing the people’s aspirations to a better life.” 133 committee throughout Lotus’ first decade, like Senegalese writer Doudou Geyue; the Algerian Amazigh poet Mouloud Mammeri and Sudan’s Abdulla Hamed El-Amin. However, the dominant African presence on the editor’s rolls of Lotus and the Afro-Asian Writer’s Bureau was solidly Egyptian. The magazine did strive for broad representation of the Third World, frequently asking questions of its readers and soliciting both contributions and suggestions from them on what subjects Lotus should explore further. Ultimately, however, the stated goals of the magazine - that “it should be “responsible for the great repercussion in fostering relations between the liberation movements in Africa, Asia and world literature” – was sabotaged by the Egyptian dominance of its editorial composition. 289 El-Sebai’s closing paragraph: “To confront the destructive effects of the imperialist culture and civilization, we must formulate our own cultures and civilizations in a way that would enable these to renew and strengthen their structures. In so doing, our culture and civilization will have to depend on the creative energies of our people.” 290 The reciprocal relationship between culture and revolution that el-Sebai proposes in the first issue of Lotus is a rather wayward adoption of Frantz Fanon’s own musings on the utility and establishment of national cultures in The Wretched of the Earth. Fanon held that, “a national culture is not a folklore, not an abstract populism that believes it can discover the people's true nature. It is not made up of the inert dregs of gratuitous actions, that is to say actions which are 289 Youssef el-Sebai, “The Role of Afro-Asian Literature and the National Liberation Movements” Afro- Asian Writings 1:1 (1967): 11. An example of Lotus’ efforts to solicit and implement input from its readership is a poll on the size of the text in its first issue of 1974, prompted by a letter to the editor from Cameroonian writer Vincent T. Nguno the year prior. Nguno wrote “The material is ample but difficult to peruse, for the characters are small and lighting in most African homes is weak.” In 1974, Lotus’ font size changed dramatically as a result. Youssef el-Sebai, Editor’s Note, Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings no.19 (January 1974): 6-7. 290 Ibid, 12. 134 less and less attached to the ever-present reality of the people.” 291 Rather, “a national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify, and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence.” 292 While El-Sebai and the editorial committee of Lotus also contended that national culture constituted a practice of the liberation struggle, they faced the essential limitations of their limited representational practice. The apparent tensions between négritude and Pan-Arabism that I will now explore reveal the difficulty of inscribing Pan-Africanism across both of these ideological paths. The ideologies are too diffuse in Lotus, neglecting the important work that attention to more local analytics from around the diaspora can accomplish. Freedom and culture are reciprocal concepts in the diasporic framework, but culture can expand only if liberation does. Lotus sought to reach across the Third World in order to draw together communities of colonized peoples in the pursuit of liberation through cultural means, but it was too weighed down with the particularities of Egyptian nationalism to render its goals legible across the terrain of the African diaspora. III. Négritude in Arabic Returning to the inaugural issue of Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings reveals that the disagreement over the scope and method of anti-colonial cultural representation was quite literally written into the text. Several pages after Youssef el-Sebai’s first declaration “that the movement of Afro-Asian Writers [is] responsible for the great repercussion in fostering relations between the liberation movements of Africa, Asia and world literature,” an excerpt from a 1967 lecture delivered by Léopold Sédar Senghor’s at the University of Cairo, entitled “Négritude and 291 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 233. 292 Ibid. 135 Arabism” (or “Négritude et Arabité”), appears. 293 Senghor explores the condition of unity on an African continent in conversation with the work of renowned German anthropologist Leo Frobenius. Frobenius was one of négritude’s primary, though indirect, influences, a man Senghor himself went so far as to claim had “given Africa back its dignity and identity” by virtue of Frobenius’ attempts to familiarize Africa to Europe and his conviction in the “emotional and intuitive superiority” of ancient African art. 294 This is a unity “so strong,” Senghor argues, “that cleavages within it do not follow the boundaries of races but more often than not, those of geography: of the environment.” In this lecture excerpt, Senghor is interested in the distinctions between two of the constitutive cultural traits, or categories, that Frobenius describes in his 1936 text, translated into French as Histoire de la Civilisation Africaine: the Negro-African (“Ethiopian”) and Arabo-Berber (“Hamite”). 295 The “Hamite,” explains Senghor, is a nomad whose life is spent battling the desert, while the “Ethiopian” is civilization of farmers, who live communally, animated by nature and one another. Senghor delineates Frobenius’ categories of African peoples to demonstrate that while the Hamite and Ethiopian may be distinct, the contrast between them does not supplant the fact that there is but one African civilization that exists in unity. 296 Senghor is, strangely, attempting to communicate to his Egyptian audience that “the unity of African civilization is so strong that cleavages within it do not follow the boundaries of races but more often than not, those of 293 Youssef el-Sebai, “The Role of Afro-Asian Literature The national Liberation Movements” Afro-Asian Writings 1:1 (1967): 11. 294 Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). 168. Reinhard Klein-Arendt, The Oxford Encyclopedia of African Thought, ed., s.v. “Frobenius, Leo Viktor” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 392. 295 Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism Between the Two World Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 156. 296 Léopold Sédar Senghor, “Négritude and Arabism, Afro-Asian Writings 1:1 (1967): 22. 136 geography: the environment.” 297 Hence, the “Hamitic spirit” classifies such “marginal Negroes” as “Somalis, Massaï, Peuls, and Nubians,” in this classification system. The virtue of such people, it is explained, is that the Arabo-Berber who lives in solitude in the desert is “forced to cultivate within themselves the virtues of the warrior.” 298 As a result, it is explained, the Hamite became over time “the man of the ‘material fact,’ if not of discursive reason, anyway as a man whose ‘decisive element is the rejection of everything that is irrational.’ How far do we find ourselves here from the Ethiopian: the Negro-African!” 299 Senghor’s reproduced speech attempts to draw an allegory between the example of the Egyptians for African revolution – “the fight for existence, the avidity for power, ambition, pleasure-seeking makes them pass from violent action to violent action” – and sub-Saharan Africans, perhaps like Senghor, who has “learnt to know the connections that unite the Cosmic Forces as well as those that unite Nature and Man.” 300 It is an odd allegory, but perhaps not entirely out of place in the Egypt of 1967 – a year, as discussed in Chapter Two, marked by profound changes in Egypt’s political life. The excerpted lecture is a strange inclusion in Lotus’ first issue. The other featured articles and writings are more accessible, attuned to a widely dispersed audience (or hopeful for one) that would be interested in Indonesian and Malagasy poetry, Nigerian short stories, or an examination of “African Literature of French Expression.” Senghor’s inclusion in this first issue of Lotus is perplexing, not least because the basic thrust of his reproduced speech is, at best, utterly Orientalist. But this was a very specific excerpt from the middle of Senghor’s original speech. In the introduction and conclusion of his talk, neither which appear in Lotus, Senghor asserted that 297 Ibid. 298 Ibid, 24. 299 Ibid. 300 Ibid. 137 Arabic-speaking Africans – the “Arab-Berber” – played an essential role in the maintenance and progression of African culture – culture being independent of politics, in Senghor’s mind. To cultivate a united Africa, Senghor explains, “Negro-Africans” and their Arab counterparts must remain rooted in “conciliating accord,” with Arabs neither deviating from their ties with sub- Saharan Africa nor turning away from “the radiant focus of the eternal Bedouin’s virtues,” or as the Senegalese president named it then, “Arabité.” 301 What these Bedouin’s virtues might be Senghor fails to clarify. However, he uses Egypt as an exemplary model of having nurtured the equilibrium Négritude and Arabité require. Egypt interceded “naturally” on behalf of the African continent to its northern neighbors, explains Senghor, as “Egypt founded the first of the historical civilizations” in spite of the attempt of Europeans to deny Africa that particular honor. 302 The coalescence of Islam and Africa, the “alluvia from the Nile,” and the signification of the independent flag of Egypt in black, white, and red: these are some of the essential bonds of a wholly African humanism that maintains necessary regional and racial distinctions, for Senghor. 303 Senghor organizes the existential reality of both blackness and Africanness through the codification of racial distinction on the continent in “Négritude and Arabism,” though only the middle portion speech appears in Lotus. Why might this be? Senghor begins his speech by citing the Addis Ababa meeting of 1963 that resulted in the founding of the Organization of African Unity. He reminds the audience of Egyptian students, “I insisted, not on sounding a discordant note – quite the contrary – but on underscoring that which, transcending ‘politician’s politics’ seemed to me then, and still seems, essential: the cultural foundations of our common 301 Léopold Sédar Senghor, “The Foundations of ‘Africanité,’ or ‘Négritude’ and ‘Arabité’” Critical Interventions 5 (2009), 168. 302 Ibid, 167-168. 303 Ibid. 138 destiny.” 304 Senghor’s reluctance to tie the possibility of African unity to politics is understandable, for Senegal itself remained part of the “French Community” the French Fifth Republic established before the end of the Algerian war. But his insistence that Arabité is totally distinct from Africanité, a point he attempts to elucidate through his reading of Frobenius in Lotus, not only subverts the obvious intention of Afro-Asian Writings but also digs deeper into the cleavage between “Arab-Berbers” and “Negro-Africans.” This could not have delighted an Egyptian audience who likely felt neither identity applied to them. In this light, neither négritude nor pan-Arabism seem obvious or practical formations of an expansive view of diaspora, especially in the pages and management of Lotus. Culture in this moment, asserted Egyptian literary and arts figures such as Youssef el-Sebai in Lotus’ own October 1973 issue, should be directed primarily for the purpose of maintaining constant revolutionary attention – a far cry from Senghor’s “être Négre” and even further from his belief that cultural convergence, not political difference, is the only way to secure African unity. The responsibility el-Sebai felt to direct Lotus always to a larger purpose is evermore evident in his editor’s letters through the years, as well as through the rigorously principled contributions from the magazine’s many featured writers. Into the mid 1970’s Lotus became crowded with pieces concerned with validating the very existence of African and Asian cultures. Studies on traditional African music and letters to the editor highlighting the similarities between a Camerounian folktale and a Syrian one abound, and very few instances of literary or artistic spontaneity and play remained, if ever they had been in the pages. Poems devoted to Fidel Castro, the late Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and the freedom fighters of Palestine, Cambodia, and Angola are remarkable snapshots of anti- 304 Ibid,166. 139 colonial struggle but are unable to move beyond the nationalist rhetoric that is perhaps at the heart of Senghor’s oft-critiqued fears of culture being lost to politics. It is easier to understand Senghor’s wariness of Arabism, now, having read Lotus so carefully in the archives. But Lotus was very much a result of the responsibility that Egyptian cultural figures assumed was, to quote Senghor, their “natural” role during African decolonization. That is, Lotus’ editors were hyper vigilant of asserting cultural unity in order to bolster and validate African cultural worth to both Europe and Africa. The duality of this representational praxis recalls Senghor’s own plea to the Arabs in his ’67 speech – Senghor designated Egypt specifically as the place between Europe and Africa – not of either. So too, then, did the Egyptians of Lotus realize Egypt, by way of the ostensibly Afro-Asian Lotus, as just such a place. Figure 4.3: Samar Sengupta, “Poeme Indien Sur L’Assassinat de Martin Luther King,” Trans. Laila EL- Hakim. Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings, no. 10 (October 1971) 140 However, it is important not to lose sight of the fact that the function of Lotus was not only to reflect on the potential global landscapes of cultural anti-colonial tactics through the project of literal translation. This is apparent in the difficulties the magazine faced in negotiating its numerous prerogatives. In a 1971 Editor’s Note reflecting on the challenges that translation posed, el-Sebai writes, “The business of publishing such a magazine [as Lotus], in English, French and Arabic, is not an easy task … we are sometimes faced with a rather embarrassing situation with regard to some of the material which has previously been published in English or French translation from some Asiatic or African language.” 305 The issue, el-Sebai explains, is that many translations are ill suited to the content of the poems, short stories, and essays that Lotus receives and curates for reproduction. The challenge this poses to the editors is whether or not to rewrite such pieces in order to ensure their clarity and quality. The board ultimately decided against such an editorial imposition, perhaps considering it too near a parallel to the colonial practice of erasing indigenous languages in order to standardize, and thus more easily control, the same African and Asian peoples whose stories appear in Lotus. Furthermore, a debate arose among the editors of Lotus over the content it chooses to translate. El-Sebai recounts: Some colleagues held the opinion that we should publish only new material which had not appeared before in any other publication. However, there was another viewpoint … there are previously published works which have appeared elsewhere, in one language only, and deserve to be published again in other languages. Such material, if published in their original language might be considered old, but in Lotus Magazine they are translated and published into two, and sometimes three, new languages [sic]. 306 305 Youssef el-Sebai, Editor’s Note Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings no. 8 (April 1971): 6. 306 Ibid, 7. 141 The care with which el-Sebai and his fellow editors considered the nature of translation, as well as what was deserved of being translated, demonstrated the yet-unrealized potential the magazine offered to a foundational diasporic practice. Thus, the “conciliating accord” Senghor advocated is precisely what Lotus attempted to accomplish. By cultivating contributions from across the Third World, Lotus facilitated dialogue in multiple registers, and one of those registers is revealed perhaps only in reading Lotus over time, and from afar. This is to say, a primary preoccupation of Lotus was to ensure that all its contributions in one way or another engaged questions of identity, culture, social practice, and living through observations and communications alongside one another – particularly vis-à-vis translation. Hala Halim refers to this method as one of “intersecting gazes,” and it is necessary to ingrain in this phrase the importance of Lotus’s conceptual acts of translation to the practice of diaspora itself. That is precisely négritude in praxis. It is négritude in Arabic. The work of the magazine, while organized with firm commitments to national autonomy due to its adherence to the principles of Bandung, still invokes a community, or transnational, rather than wholly national cultural practice. In a 1970 Editor’s Note, el-Sebai writes, “Whether they are from Ghana, Sierra Leone, U.A.R., Iraq, India, Philippines or Japan… the literary works [here] reflect a kindred spirit. All their authors have managed, through their localism to become truly Afro- Asian. The settings of the stories may be different, but the driving forces are the same.” 307 Here el-Sebai remarks that Lotus seeks to navigate the political pursuit of national interests while also committing itself to a South-South management of cultural autonomy and exchange that can be embedded in the multiple registers and theories of decolonization across the Third World. These multiple registers are precisely what diaspora is made of. 307 Youssef el-Sebai, “Editor’s Note” 5 (April 1970): 6-7. 142 Lotus was largely organized through national affiliations, with even stateless contributors, namely Palestinians and black South Africans, identifying with the nation-state they hoped to realize through their respective struggles. But through these ‘intersecting gazes,’ Lotus also transcended the national boundaries that the non-aligned movement organized around. As an example, the January 1974 issue of Lotus features a letter from a very pleased Youssef el-Sebai. El-Sebai traces the path of a play - “Lust to Kill,” by Egyptian playwright Tewfik el Hakim - from the pages of Lotus, on a journey around the world. The one-act play had been published in the last issue of 1973. In short order, it was translated “into one of the local languages” for a stage production in New Delhi, and was simultaneously filmed and broadcasted on Ethiopian television. Lotus made this singular victory possible, el-Sebai writes, having translated an Egyptian dialect play into English and French and “achieving one of its major targets, that is to introduce to the world Afro-Asian writings on the largest possible scale.” 308 This was a victory of both the revolutionary act of translating an African story in the literal sense, but also of allowing Indians and Ethiopians to participate in the translation themselves. El-Sebai would confront this dualistic practice of translation again, and quickly. In the autumn 1975 issue of the magazine, el- Sebai informs Lotus’ reading public that a “special flavor” is in store for them. Indeed, the stories in this issue include a rare short story from Chinua Achebe, recent Lotus Award winner, another from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, and a tale by the name of “The Silvery Road” by an Algerian writer named Abul-Aid Doudou. El-Sebai celebrates Doudou’s contribution in particular, nothing “It is the first time for ‘Lotus’ to publish an Algerian story originally written in Arabic. It is a symbol for the new Algeria, the Arab Algeria that proceeds with confident steps along the path of 308 Youssef el-Sebai, Editor’s Note Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings no.16 (January 1973): 6. 143 Arabicization.” 309 A legacy of colonialism, argued Youssef el-Sebai in 1967, was that the Afro- Asian writer “cannot but feel that his voice is confined within narrow walls” of the structures colonialism left behind, and “becomes isolated from his people, and fears he may lose contact with them, lacing in the effective relation between his work and the artistic life of the people which is the genuine source of imaginative energy.” 310 As Lotus moved through the Sadat years in Egypt, that imaginative energy would at last begin to take shape. Figure 4.4: Rapport du Secretaire General and photo spread of the 4 th Conference of Afro-Asian Writers in Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan 4-9 September 1973 in Lotus: Afro-Asian Writings, no. 20 (April-June 1974) 309 “Arabicization” in Algeria was itself a fraught affair – the memory of Lotus was so short that el-Sebai quite forgot that Amazigh writer Mouloud Mammeri once sat on the editorial committee of Lotus (by 1975, Malek Haddad represented Algeria on the board). 310 Youssef el-Sebai, “The Role of Afro-Asian Literature and the National Liberation Movements” Afro- Asian Writings 1:1 (1967): 9. 144 IV. Performing Africanité During the Opening Ceremony of the Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture of 1977, or FESTAC ’77, African American novelist Paule Marshall was quite taken by the Egyptian contingent in Lagos. She writes in her 2009 memoir, Triangular Road: The Egyptians stole the early phase of the show hands down. Not only were they among the largest delegations present, their parade was indisputably the most spectacular. Ushering their sizable troupe into the stadium was no less than a half-dozen beautifully caparisoned, fancy-stepped, white Arabian show horses – with, seated high on each of their backs, a Sahara-brown beauty. The women riders were as sumptuously costumed as their mounts in great billowing Scheherazade trousers, tunics and sheer flowing scarves. Their arms and ears bejeweled. The glint of jewels as well in their elaborately dressed hair. Kohl rimmed their eyes, adding to their drama. Each rider was a Cleopatra look- alike holding aloft an outsized red, white and black Egyptian flag. The crowd wildly cheered them. 311 Paule Marshall was born in Brooklyn, New York to Barbadian parents in 1929. A prolific poet and writer, Marshall was – and still is - a champion for diverse African diasporic expression, or as she stated in a 1977 interview while in Nigeria, “I see writers as image-makers… We are in the process of recreating ourselves all over the world.” 312 From Brooklyn to Barbados to Lagos, Marshall was a guest of Nigeria at FESTAC, but marched alongside her fellow black Americans in an ad-hoc formation at the festival’s opening. Both alliances were made possible because unlike the 1966 festival in Dakar a decade earlier, FESTAC, like the 1969 Pan-African festival discussed in the previous chapter, organized their participants and guests into “communities,” or zones, rather than by national origin. This allowed for a very broadly defined diasporic subject to declare oneself a participant in Black Culture – Australian aboriginals, Irish communists, Afro-Germans, up to and including stateless 311 Paule Marshall, Triangular Road: A Memoir (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 155-156. 312 ‘Molara Ogundipe-Leslie, “’Re-creating Ourselves All Over the World.’ A Conversation with Paule Marshall” in Moving Beyond Boundaries, Black Women’s Diasporas,Vol.2, ed. Carol Boyce-Davies (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 22. 145 people – the category to which African Americans in 1966 effectively belonged. 313 Organized transnationally rather than internationally, FESTAC ’77 realized a multiplicitous practice of diaspora not beholden to national boundaries alone, or restricted by a singular, or monologic African diasporic identity. In contrast is the 1966 World Festival of Black Arts, hosted in Dakar with the financial sponsorship of France (under General Charles de Gaulle), UNESCO, and Présence Africaine, the pan-African quarterly and publishing house whose own Alioune Diop also served as president the festival committee. The festival was a vision of Senghor’s négritude brought to life – he had by then been president of Senegal for 6 years. The festival drew together a plural assortment of national delegations under the auspice of taking a break from revolution to revel in some art. Senghor’s festival, mirroring his approach to négritude, celebrated a black “essence,” core to a “Negro-African” culture: both concepts seemingly bound by both place and history to the African continent. 314 The ’66 festival was thus a sober occasion for African Americans and other unrecognized African-descended peoples who were forced to petition their respective governments to attend the 1966 festival in Dakar because they had no nation-state to be invited through. Indeed, the Dakar festival was widely critiqued for the fact that its delegation from Brasil was composed entirely of white Brasilians. 315 But as the ’77 festival was being organized – set back by numerous coups in Nigeria - Senghor’s ardor for the conciliating accord between the so-called Arab North and ‘Negro- 313 In fact, according to the South African arts magazine Chimurenga’s web collection of materials from FESTAC, the 1977 delegation from Sweden outnumbered quite a few African delegations, such as Botswana’s. 314 Anthony J. Ratcliffe, “When Négritude Was In Vogue: Critical Reflections of the First World Festival of Negro Arts and Culture in 1966,” The Journal of Pan-African Studies 6:7 (2014): 172. 315 Ibid. 146 African’ South that I discussed earlier in the context of Lotus had cooled significantly. 316 Senghor harshly critiqued Nigeria’s inclusion of North African countries in FESTAC ’77, though the Dakar festival had done the same. And while the list of invitees to the Lagos festival in 1977 mirrored Dakar’s from the decade prior, larger only because many more African nations had since achieved independence, Senegal led other Francophone West African nations in objecting to the inclusion of Arab “outsiders.” 317 In the end, Senegal did not boycott the festival and FESTAC moved forward, better remembered for its cluttered and ostentatious organization and programming. Senghor was likely more interested in derailing FESTAC in reaction to Algeria’s hosting of the First Pan African Cultural Festival in 1969. As noted in the previous chapter, the Organization of African Unity sponsored the ‘69 festival. The OAU had been critiqued by Senghor since its formation in 1963 over disagreements on what pan-Africanism should look like: in Senghor’s own role as leader of the moderate, oppositional Monrovia bloc, autonomous nationalism, not a Pan-Africanist federation, should be the goal of anti-colonialism on the continent. 318 Senghor’s critiques of the OAU and later, of FESTAC ‘77 touches on a sensitive nerve where North Africa is concerned in historic and contemporary cultural considerations of the continent and its diaspora. His delineation of “Négritude” and “Arabité” presumed North Africans might engage in a mission to embed themselves further within the cultural, economic, political, and racial experience of sub-Saharan Africa and cautions them against it. Likewise, 316 Andrew Apter, The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 160-171. This festival was initially meant to be held in 1975 during the regime of General Yakubu Gowon but due to political instability, this festival was postponed till 1977 during General Olusegun Obasanjo’s Regime. 317 Morgan Kulla, “The Politics of Culture: The Case of Festac” Ufahamu: A Journal of African Studies 7:1 (1976): 173-174. 318 Anthony J. Ratcliffe, “When Négritude Was In Vogue: Critical Reflections of the First World Festival of Negro Arts and Culture in 1966,” 172-173. 147 Senghor is wary that “Negro-Africans” might ask their neighbors to the North to join them in a similar venture, disrupting the delicate balance that the Senegalese president once assured his Cairo audience is essential to African unity and culture. In fact, in that first issue of Lotus, Senghor concluded “Négritude and Arabism” by stating, “It is necessary that you remain Arabs. Otherwise, you would have nothing to offer us.” 319 Such a remark reflects on both Senghor’s ’66 festival in Dakar as well as Egypt, which in the pages and management of Lotus as in its experiments in independence under Gamal Abdel frequently struggled with how to approach the matter of a responsibility for a ‘united Africa’ neither assigned to them (regardless of Senghor’s opinion) nor fully accepted. Egypt has politically and culturally occupied three spaces in its self-perception: that of an African nation, that of an Arab nation, and that of a nation that internalized the lessons of its European colonizers and African allies in non-alignment: that it is somehow the foundation of modern civilization and should perform as such. Likewise, much of the critique of the 1966 Dakar festival centered around its structural exclusivity to an Africa and African diaspora perceived in nation-states and its implied notion that the question of blackness is tied to Africanness. Lotus also could not fully escape its own ties to internationalist, rather than transnationalist, concerns, despite the inherently diasporic practice of translation I argue it pursued. The magazine weighed itself toward unifying and validating Afro-Asian – and Afro-Arab - cultural production and connections at the expense of truly reaching beyond the comfort zone of anti-colonial cultural nationalisms. Egypt’s magnificent presence at the 1977 festival exemplifies this trend. The dilemma between Youssef el-Sebai’s Pan-Arabism and Senghor’s négritude, in spite of itself, would continue to inform the cultural politics of Lotus and what cultural production 319 Léopold Sédar Senghor, “The Foundations of ‘Africanité,’ or ‘Négritude’ and ‘Arabité’” Critical Interventions 5 (2009): 168. 148 many African intellectual and cultural elites chose to export to the rest of the world. This is why FESTAC ’77 is a marvelous platform to witness Egypt’s uneven perch within and at the center of the African diaspora. Just as issue after issue of Lotus lost the ability to mediate between strengthening African cultural ties and its desire to prove the existence of an Arab-African culture to itself and its audience, Egypt’s performance of Egyptian-ness in Lagos was so over the top that they managed to parody themselves without realizing it. The Orientalist fantasy of “Sahara-brown beauties” astride Arabian horses betrays rather than mediates the precarity of Egypt’s presumptive place ‘between’ Europe and Africa. So how did North Africa’s own varying political and cultural investments inform diasporic cultural practices in the midst of decolonization? The slippages between ‘North Africa’ and Egypt proper in Senghor’s “Négritude and Arabité” and in this chapter are apparent. Senghor’s invocation of Egypt’s “natural vocation” for mediating Europe and Africa at the University of Cairo is loaded with the baggage of his own preoccupation with culture over politics. As Egypt toed the line of both ideological investments over the course of the non-aligned decades, it’s worth playing voyeur on some of this most often cited of North African nation’s own cultural – and racial - self-image. But the lasting impact of these coalescing cultural projects is still keenly felt. On February 18 th , 1978, Youssef el-Sebai will be assassinated while attending the Afro-Asian Peoples Solidarity Organization meeting in Cyprus for his perceived collusion with Anwar Sadat on Egypt’s new initiatives on Israel. 320 This moment marks a profound shift in Egypt’s political 320 Oroub el-Abed, Unprotected: Palestinians in Egypt Since 1948 (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies; Ottowa: International Development Research Centre, 2009), 48. El-Sebai was assassinated before Menachim Begin and el Sadat would sign the Camp David Accords on 17 September of that year. As a significant aside, el-Sebai’s assassination marked a fundamental shift in Egyptian legislation and public opinion on Palestine shifted for the worse: administrative regulations 47 and 48 were put into place by the Egyptian government, restricting rights granted to Palestinian nationals of Egypt. 149 and public approach to the “question of Palestine” as well, as Egyptians protested the killing of a beloved literary figure. The magazine’s pointed devotion to its task of deepening the “revolutionary impetus” of cultural unity across Africa and Asia would have to be engaged anew from Beirut, as the Writer’s Bureau in Egypt disbanded. However, I am certain that even in the uncertainty of Lotus’ vacillation within and between the diasporic cultural practices of négritude and pan-Arabism, and translation and nation, its timely, clever manipulations of the intersecting narratives of blackness, Arabness, and Africanness informs a contemporary structuring of interdisciplinary approaches to the African diaspora that remaps liminal narratives of transnational blackness and Africanité. 150 Conclusion The Expressions of Afro-Arab Energy Omar Ibrahim Fanon. Born 1925, Tunis. Doctor. 165 centimetres tall. Issued 19 September, 1958, Tunis. Frantz Fanon’s passport, held in his collection at L’Institut mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC) in Caen, Normandy, expired in 1963, just two years after his death from leukemia in Bethesda, Maryland. Cluttered with visas, the majority of which Megan MacDonald affirms as “political and pan-African,” it includes a photo of his son, Oliver, but none of his wife, Josie Fanon. 321 His own photo, MacDonald writes, “is from the Guyse lab, his head is tilted to the left, he does not look at the camera; Libya in Arabic is embossed across his chest, jacket, and tie, scraping the bottom of his chin. The passport is marked valid for ‘ALL COUNTRIES’.” 322 Frantz Fanon had been reborn as Omar Ibrahim Fanon in Tunis during the Algerian war, but he remained a psychiatrist, a writer, and a revolutionary. Omar Ibrahim Fanon was an “other Fanon” but the Fanon of Martinique, France, and Algeria all the same. 323 The Tunisian passport, issued by the then-United Kingdom of Libya, marked Fanon’s multidirectionality in the African diaspora he was so much a part of. Fanon’s passage through the layered blacknesses and geographies of this diaspora is both tangible, in his passport, and ephemeral, in the mixed truths and fictions of the data it records. Fanon, who had never fully learned Arabic, is immortalized in an Arabic and English language passport from an Arabic, Berber (Tamazight), and Italian 321 Megan MacDonald, “N’Zid? Zid!: Mediterranean Archives and Postcolonial Translation in the Time of Amnesia,” in Postcolonial Translation, special volume of PoCoPages, eds. Judith Misrahi-Barak and Srilata Ravi (Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée. In press; forthcoming 2017), 15. 322 Ibid, 14. 323 David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography, 2. 151 speaking nation with an Arabic name. 324 Fanon’s passport is a relic that served the specific purpose of enabling him to pursue the revolutionary humanism that now defines his theoretical legacy, and it is an object that demonstrates the lasting ties and practices of transnational and translational blackness in Arabic-speaking North Africa. It translated Fanon into Arabic, rendering him mobile in a way that his French passport – a document and its entailed citizenship withdrawn from him upon his disembarkation from Blida – would not and could not allow. Though Fanon’s passport was falsified, the logistical hurdles it allowed him to manage during his travels throughout the African continent (as well as Europe) mirrors the travels of another of this study’s subjects. James Baldwin, whose own passport was neither falsified nor foreign, was also borne of untruths. Although valid, the “green passport” he carried was that of the United States of America, and thus entirely fraudulent. “This passport proclaimed that I was a free citizen of a free country,” Baldwin mused in No Name in the Street, “and was not, therefore, to be treated as one of Europe’s uncivilized, black possessions.” 325 Freed from being possessed by French racism, the mobility Baldwin accessed in Europe was nonetheless controverted by the violence of his national origins and the illegitimacy of black belonging in or of America. In the United States, Baldwin’s green passport “proclaimed that I was not an African prince, but a domestic nigger and that no foreign government would be offended if my corpse were to be found in clogging up the sewers.” 326 Fanon was freed, in a sense, from being black in a particular way once he became the owner of a Libyan passport that declared his birthplace to be Tunisia. Baldwin, on the other hand, felt his legal documentation reflected a dark “brilliance of the white strategy.” That is, he may have been mobile, but he was always limited in what he 324 Brian T. Edwards, “Fanon’s al-Jaza’ir, or Algeria translated” parallax 8:2 (2002): 100. 325 James Baldwin, No Name in the Street, 42. 326 Ibid. 152 could truly access while abroad. “Blacks didn’t know each other, could barely speak to each other, and, therefore, could scarcely trust each other – and therefore, wherever we turned, we found ourselves in the white man’s territory, and at the white man’s mercy.” 327 So while James Baldwin eventually came to realise while he lived in France that “the Algerian and I were both, alike, victims of this history,” African Americans in Paris during the Algerian war for independence were demanded to balance being “domestic niggers” at home and acceptable, “civilized” blacks abroad. 328 The balance may have been struck far before they arrived at their respective destinations, but through the mediations Baldwin, Fanon, and the other subjects of this manuscript attends to, such a balance was always in the midst of recalibration. James Baldwin, like Frantz Fanon, David Graham Du Bois and his characters, Suliman and Bob; Sun Ra, Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and the myriad African and Arab writers who comprised the editorial staff of the Cairo-based magazine, Lotus, formulated maneuvers through and around multiple understandings of their racial, cultural, and political ideologies and practices. Baldwin was neither a “civilized black” nor a “domestic nigger,” but lived and subverted such oppressive reductions of his blackness and of his place in the diaspora by forming alternative languages with other African-descended peoples in France. Such translations of blackness reconstituted and pluralized the meaning of blackness through the practice of the diaspora for African Americans and Africans alike, inclusive of Algerians and Egyptians. The diaspora that is located through Baldwin’s writing on his passport and Fanon’s own archived one at IMEC was thoroughly intertwined with Arabic-speaking Africans: their presence and their energies became stories and strategies told in English and French and Arabic, 327 Ibid. 328 Ibid, 27. 153 and so reflected the multiple and mutual articulations of blackness that proliferated in the cultural and political points of contact in the Cold War era. Another Country’s subjects are familiar figures, long held as embodiments of a black transnational politic and culture. I have attempted to defamiliarise these figures and reorient the arguments, experiences, and epiphanies these diasporic subjects underwent as made possible by the uneven terrain of diaspora and its translations. Through the close reading of two novels, William Gardner Smith’s The Stone Face and David Graham Du Bois’ And Bid Him Sing, the first two chapters ruminated on the possibilities of Arab participation in and belonging to blackness from the perspective of African Americans abroad. Amid the resonance of the Algerian war in Paris, the soundscapes of jazz in Egypt, and the narrative portrayal of both the particularities and harmonies of African American and Arab North African racial and cultural identities, Part One demonstrated that the expectations African Americans had of France and of Egypt were disappointed, negotiated, and overcome because of, not in spite of, the significance of Algeria and Egypt in the transnational black imagination. As such, while Part One depicted African American and Arab struggles to make themselves legible to one another in Paris and Cairo in the decolonial era, Part Two explored the attempt at mutual African and Arab legibility from within the continent itself. Though the tensions between pan-Arab and pan-African pursuits of liberation are points of contention in both Algeria and Egypt in the mid-twentieth century, assertions of a pro-Arab pan-Africanism were indebted to the contributions of political figures like Frantz Fanon; cultural events such as the Pan-African Festival of 1969 in Algiers, and the simultaneous frictions and agreements between such Third Worldist diasporic practices as Lotus’ emphasis on culture as a revolutionary praxis and Léopold Sédar Senghor’s attempt to reign in culture from politics in service to négritude. 154 Therefore, despite the presumably vast distinction between African and Arab identities explicated in the introduction and outlined throughout this manuscript, this project maintains that the confluences of Arabness, Africanness, and blackness remain an essential part of the longer genealogy and practice of the African diaspora. From Paris to Cairo and Algiers, Arabs and diasporic Africans actively invested in their shared histories and cultures to articulate black and African identity as a bond to impact political and social change in the anti-colonial era. The literature and performance of Afro-Arabness that Another Country maps through the diaspora resonates far beyond the examples present in this text. For instance, South African singer’s Miriam Makeba performance of “Africa” in Arabic, Portuguese, Fulani, French, and Lingala at the 1963 launch of the OAU in Addis Ababa and four of the twentieth-century cultural festivals hosted on the continent, including the 1969 Pan-African Festival in Algiers deserves further analysis on the marriage of black soundscapes and the larger diasporic terrain. 329 As well, another enactment of Afro-Arab political ventures manifests in Nelson Mandela’s 1961 training with the FLN in Morocco and his first international trip to Algiers, just three months after his release from Robben Island prison. 330 The vigor of Afro-Arab celebrations of Third Worldist cultural innovations also appears in Mauritanian filmmaker Med Hondo’s dark satirical films, Soleil Ô (1967) and Les ‘bicots-Nègres' vos voisins (1974), where the attachments of the entire Francophone African world, including its North African constituents, manifest in one ironic anti- colonial theory: “We will colonise them back.” 331 329 Makeba was in fact the only artist to perform at all four of the following festivals: the First World Festival of Negro Arts (Dakar, 1966); Pan African Festival of Algiers (1969); Zaire 74 (Kinshasa, 1974) and the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (Lagos, 1977). 330 Lhocine Hmandou, “Mandela: <<C’est l’Algérie qui a fair de moi un homme>>” ChoufChouf (February 11 2016). Accessed 19 January 2016. http://www.chouf-chouf.com/actualites/cest-lalgerie-qui- a-fait-de-moi-un-homme/ 331 Med Hondo, Soleil Ô (France, Mauritania; 1967) 155 But what I hope this project does illuminate is that the use of Arab and black energies to inspire mutual legibility was not a one-way proposition, nor did it preclude the ways in which varying conceptions of blackness, Arabness, and Africanness were able to mobilize and translate reimaginings of self-identity and community identity among African Americans, Algerians, Egyptians, and other diasporic peoples during the decolonial era. The lives of James Baldwin, William Gardner Smith, David Graham Du Bois, Frantz Fanon, Kathleen and Eldridge Cleaver, and Youssef el-Sebai demonstrate that these historic Afro-Arab encounters animated many assorted and diverse terrains and peoples simultaneously. This is apparent in the cultural histories that Another Country recuperates from its multilingual and transnational archives, as well as in new ventures to articulate the always-overlapping identity formations that span the African diaspora. Frantz Fanon’s theoretical legacy is so inextricable from his immersion in Algerianness, for instance, that Jamaican poet Claudia Rankine and multimedia artist John Lucas re-set the scene of French-Algerian footballer Zinedine Zidane’s infamous 2006 “coupe de tête” to a recitation of extracts from Fanon’s essay, “Algeria Unveiled.” 332 The reimagining of blackness and the African diaspora to include Arabic-speaking North Africans is a project of enormous dimensions, but it is a project with deep rootedness in the African diasporic traditions already. This genealogy, these narratives of Afro-Arab articulations and mobilizations of blackness and Africanness in the twentieth-century, marks just one contribution to new theorizations on the form and function of transnational and translational Arab blackness in the present day. 332 Claudia Rankine and John Lucas, “Situation One: Zidane,” Video, http://www.claudiarankine.com This scene will appear again in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014), 122-126. 156 Bibliography Archives Archives nationales. Paris, France. Archives nationales d’outre mer. Aix-en-Provence, France. Bibliotheca Alexandrina. Alexandria Governorate, Egypt. Dar al-Kutub. Egyptian National Library and Archives. Cairo Governorate, Egypt. Universitätsbibliothek der Humboldt University of Berlin. Berlin, Germany. IMEC: Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine. Caen, Normandy, France. The National Archives. Kew, Surrey, United Kingdom. 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Creator Azeb, Sophia (author)

Core Title Another country: Black Americans, Arab worlds, 1952-1979

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program American Studies and Ethnicity

Publication Date 07/28/2016

Defense Date 05/03/2016

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag African American studies,Afro-Arab,Algeria,anti-colonialism,Arabic,Arabité,articulation,Black studies,blackness,Cold War,Cultural studies,diaspora,Egypt,El Moudjahid,France,French,Lotus,Maghreb,nationalism,négritude,non-alignment,North Africa,OAI-PMH Harvest,translation,transnational

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Gualtieri, Sarah (committee chair), Frazier, Robeson Taj (committee member), Harrison, Olivia C. (committee member), Redmond, Shana L. (committee member)

Creator Email asophia@usc.edu,sophia.azeb@nyu.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-284516

Unique identifier UC11279613

Identifier etd-AzebSophia-4665.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-284516 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-AzebSophia-4665.pdf

Dmrecord 284516

Document Type Dissertation

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Azeb, Sophia

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA