Letters from Algeria, 1974-76 Was I an Orientalist?
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I left San Francisco for Algeria in 1974, four years before Edward Said’s book Orientalism was published, and for many years after its publication, I knew nothing about Orientalism as described by Said, who used the term to mean a common “Western” lens through which the “East” was seen so as to fit its favorite stereotypes and to justify colonization and imperialism. I know that Orientalism was a concept introduced in the general college education of my son a generation later when he was a Music-Economics major in the late 1990’s. This is what he told me in an e-mail that he remembers now, a decade after his graduation from college in 2001:
We read the introduction to Edward Said's Orientalism in my college freshman English class. I remember our instructor, a brilliant PhD student, said that although we'd only read the introduction, that was enough to talk about the book at a cocktail party, so it counted as reading the whole thing. My recollection is that it dealt with the way that "the East" is exoticized in "the West", creating an artificial sense of otherness fulfilling a certain need for fantasy (a la Shangri La) more than reality. I seem to remember that Said was a comp lit guy, so I'm guessing the book focused on this phenomenon in literature. I just checked, and I see that it was more political than I recall from my course.
Now, thanks to my study sabbatical focusing on the Middle East, I can say it’s part of my education and maybe I can go beyond the cocktail hour! What I’d like to consider in this reflective essay is whether, without even knowing the term, I was an Orientalist when I was living in the town of Medea, Algeria between 1974 and 1976 and writing newsletters, some of which I’m now reviewing for this essay. (I’ve been meaning to get them into my computer, and this project has motivated me to begin typing while I re-read.) I’ll focus particularly on these three questions: (1) Why was I in Algeria in the first place—for exploitive purposes like a neo-colonialist? (2) Did I see Algeria through lens that expect and find stereotypes? And (3) Did I see Algeria in a way that justified colonization and imperialism? The answers to these three questions should indicate whether or not I was an Orientalist.
I’ll admit that my motivation for going to Algeria is suspect. I wanted to practice the French I’d learned in Spain (which is another story), and I couldn’t find job listings in France or Quebec. Then, as I wrote in a letter from 1974:
In March, when I was looking for an overseas teaching job in a French-speaking country, Fate placed an issue of Saturday Review in front of me, and there was a tiny ad inside asking for the exact qualifications I wanted to offer: a knowledge of French and experience teaching English as a second or foreign language.
This was through an organization called International Voluntary Services, and the IVS staff member who interviewed me asked about my wanting to learn French in a country that had finally won its independence from France and was trying to Arabize. I saw her point, but I had never believed in colonialization, least of all that of France, which I knew about from Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, in which the protagonist played by Catherine Deneuve loses her boyfriend when he is drafted and has to go fight in Algeria. I sang, “Avec ce qui se passe en Algérie en ce moment, je ne reviendrai pas d'ici longtemps” (With what’s happening in Algeria right now, it’ll be a long time before I get back) and said that I wanted to learn Arabic, and I did want to, as I say in my earliest letters. In my first letter I say, “I’m anxious to have my own place and begin Arabic lessons.” In my November 1974 letter, I’ve moved into an apartment complex and met a young Algerian woman, Fafa, who “really wants to teach me Arabic and Algerian history and to help me make Algerian dishes.” I also learned basic phrases very early on:
I use the little Arabic I know whenever the occasion presents itself and sometimes when it doesn’t. I just go through my repertoire, which takes all of 20 minutes: I’m a teacher and I live in Algeria; there’s bread and butter on the table. I’m tired but I’m not fat. I drink coffee with sugar and milk—just the sort of things to make me a brilliant conversationalist. I’m impressed when the Algerians even recognize what I’m speaking as their language, and when they understand what I’m saying I’m absolutely floored. They seem so impressed by my 20 minutes worth of Arabic that I suspect most foreigners in Medea never learn any Arabic at all. I admire the people who really learn Arabic, and the ones I’ve met who have learned it have all been with the IVS, but Medea has never met them.
Fafa, my Algerian friend, gave me lessons, but when I was moved to a different section of town, we rarely saw each other, and my Arabic didn’t really progress. I took a three-week course in dialectical Arabic, but I never got to a level at which I could do more than recite phrases in Arabic, which can be considered another mark against me, putting me in the realm of the Orientalist, who prefer passing judgment to really knowing a culture. But it was really the methodology for teaching Arabic on which I passed judgment.
Repeat after me: Weshenheyaheddemtte? Sbabte. Kayanmedrebfimesnaessbabet. Winhadelmesnae? Felharrash. Got that? The teacher made an effort to give us a general understanding of the dialogue’s content. For example, for the sentence Washenheyadheddemttek? She put a question mark on the board. This gave us the general idea that it was a question. And she used gestures, too. Lovely, graceful gestures. Unfortunately, while the sentences changed the lovely, graceful gestures remained the same. And so we sat there pronouncing very badly the syllables nonsensical to us. Think of it: Three weeks of winhadelmesnae, and it could have been so useful if the teacher had just taught in the context of the class. Like Berlitz…
Apparently, I had convinced two friends teaching in Medea, an Algerian-French woman and a French man, to take this course in dialectical Arabic with me. How do you say in Arabic “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”? Certainly not learning more Arabic is a mark against me, but in my defense I’ll quote Akbar Ahmed, who says in “Islam: The Roots of Misperception” that one way to obliterate Orientalism and every lens that distorts is through “ordinary human contact,” which is what I had the two years I lived in Medea, Algeria. So, in answer to the first question (see page 1!), I don’t think my motivation in Algeria was to impose my own culture.
Did I see Algeria through lens that expect and find stereotypes? According to a writer not cited in our reader (see page 321 of our IDST 29 Introduction to Islam reader), to an Orientalist the “Arab” is “irrational, menacing, untrustworthy, anti-Western, dishonest, and prototypical.” Said’s project, according to our reader, page 232, was to reject Orientalism by rejecting the “biological generalizations, cultural construction, and racial and religious prejudices.” My letters make reference two both the female and the male stereotype. The stereotype of the Arab Muslim woman is that represented by the veil, perceived by the Orientalist as a symbol of women’s submission and inferior place in society but also of their desirability and tantalizing quality, making men imagine what lies beneath. Now I know from reading parts of Bullock’s Rethinking Muslim Women and the Veil: Challenging Historical and Modern Stereotypes among many other writers that this is a false concept, but even back in the mid-1970’s from teaching at a girls’ school, I learned that the veil (which I then saw as a negative symbol) did not represent docility.
The first bell rings and the girls enter the school and take off their veils and long robes, under which they’re wearing slacks and platform shoes and even an occasional love T- shirt. All of them seem to be chewing gum, the very symbol of Western Imperialism. Why can’t they rebel against that instead of against the English language?
That shows that I was aware of Western Imperialism as well as what lay beneath the veil. The maturity level of the girls varied from class to class, and even though the complaints I made in my letters might be generalized (as in praying under my breath in the classroom), I acknowledge that not all the girls are the same, when I wrote.
You begin with an exceptionally good class, a teacher’s dream, where there’s a genuine rapport, where the students like English, have a good background in it, and are polite and attentive without losing any of the “spontaneity” for which all your students are well- known. From this dream you go to a real class—not bad, but a little rowdier than you wish it were; and then to a nightmare class that stimulates every teacher to the brink of nervous collapse.
If anyone had the Orientalist view that Arabic women are quiet and submissive, they might have changed that view after reading my letters. Another stereotype I learned not to believe was about Arab men. Early on I write about my French Colleague who advised me, ““You mustn’t smile. Always look down. Wear sun-glasses. The attitude of the men is so bad.” But I did smile, often looked up, didn’t wear sun-glasses, and—while I heard what I describe in letters as “sounds of simulated—not stimulated—lust,” I had no problem with the men. Here’s an excerpt from my second letter from Medea, Algeria, dated November 1974:
To use a sentence one of my students made today to illustrate mustn’t, “the women mustn’t go to the cinema in Medea.” Last year there was a special film series on Monday just for the women, and men weren’t allowed. But this year there’s no special showing for women, and Benedicte (my best French friend) and I did the forbidden: Last Sunday afternoon (before my students had told me I mustn’t) we went to see the French-dubbed Charles Bronson, Liv Ullman, James Mason “De la part des copains.” We had been told of course that two girls couldn’t go to the cinema unaccompanied by a male without being taunted and teased, poked at and otherwise molested, but we weren’t going to let little things like that discourage us. So we set out to see the world that lay behind the walls of Medea’s movie theatre. For a solid three blocks around the theatre we saw only men, bringing to mind tales of ancient Rome, where all female babies were disposed of at birth. Benedicte wanted to turn back, but I persuaded her, saying that in the event of attempted abduction we’d ask to be excused, then ask for our money to be refunded at the box office on the grounds that this wasn’t what we’d come to see. (“Try to convince them of that,” Benedicte said.) Well, the outcome of all this anticipated drama was that no one seemed to pay any attention to us at all. Perhaps they saw us and lost all respect for us, living so loosely as to spend Sunday afternoon at the cinema. But no one shouted insults at us, pulled our hair, or did any of the things we were told were guaranteed with the price of admission.
That changed a stereotype, but another French woman insisted that the Muslim men had a bad character because “Christ makes all the difference." I took that idea to task in my second letter too, also in the context of the movie theatre:
I thought of Catholic Spain. In Madrid I’d sometimes see films during the siesta hours between my classes at Mangold, and it was rare not to find some stranger’s hand on my knee. Sometimes, when my loudly indignant, “Por favor, senor!” went unheeded, I’d deliver an eloquent little speech I’d composed in Spanish, the essence of which was that I was terribly sorry, but I wasn’t a prostitute and had come to the cinema just to see the film and practice my Spanish; that I worked hard, loved my family, had a novio, and that everything I wanted in life would be mine if he’d be kind enough to take his hand off my knee. He would, too, and usually he’d move on to another section of the theatre. When all else fails, try sincerity.
We had no need to deliver a speech to the Muslim men in Medea, so that “Christ makes all the difference” concept was challenged on two fronts. I did not see many stereotypes confirmed.
Did I see Algeria in a way that justified colonization and imperialism? To answer this third question in my self-inventory (1974-1976), I’d like make what may seem to be a digression but really isn’t. Re-reading the “Day in the Life,” I see a mention of a student named Djamilla, who was fifteen when I taught her and is now a retired grandmother! She contacted me for the first time in years through my nephew’s Facebook page this past January 2011, when I was in Vietnam, another former French colony. This has special meaning because I had been in Algeria at the time that Vietnam won its independence, and that description, which came in a July 1975 newsletter, may show that I was learning more from Algeria than I was imposing upon its culture:
I’m seeing current events from a different perspective. At the end of April, Fafa met me at the door with the news that “Ca y est, the war is over and the Vietnamese have won.” My first thought was “I’ll bet that’s not how they’re putting it on the cover of Time and Newsweek.” In the next couple of days, in La Republique and El Moudjahid, there were headlines unlikely to have appeared on the most widely-circulated American periodicals: THE RESULT OF 30 YEARS OF HEROIC STRUGGLE: A VICTORY FOR ALL THE WORLD’S PEOPLE; THE TRIUMPHANT REVOLUTION; HO CHI MINH: FATHER OF THE COUNTRY; VIETNAMESE HEROES WHO LED THEIR PEOPLE TO VICTORY. There was nationwide celebration for the liberation of Vietnam.
The next part of my letter could be misinterpreted. I know this because my own father, whose political views I share, worried that I was being sincere, not sarcastic. It’s a wonder he didn’t disown me. Please pay close attention to my tone. I’m putting in bold the phrases I thought would clue people into the fact that I was making fun of the colonialist’s attitude:
How could I make them, these people who lack our political and moral sophistication, understand that it wasn’t liberation but a takeover? Didn’t they realize it was totally un- American? And that 30,000 freedom-loving people have had to flee because they’d supported the French, then the American-backed dictatorships? Furthermore, as Newsweek (available all over Algeria) pointed out in the May 12th issue, THE TAKEOVER was no fun. The new government was closing down nightclubs, houses of prostitution, and other “American establishments” that had prospered during the war. I kept wondering how many Algerians were reading Newsweek to give a fair hearing to the American interpretation of events.
My own father missed the ironic tone in my writing about freedom-loving people who support American-backed dictatorships and the tragedy of shutting down American establishments like houses of prostitutions, so I know the danger of parody, and I do solemnly swear that I was making fun of the imperialist point of view, not defending it. But my students may have thought I’d feel the loss. My paragraph on Vietnam continued:
In his May Day Address President Boumedienne congratulated the Vietnamese on their victory over imperialism, and then added: “Our fight against imperialism has never been directed against the American people.” I had read the text even before the students brought me this quote to “ease my pain.” My students’ compassion crops up in unexpected places.
Finally, in my self-defense, the books I was taking back with me from Algeria definitely included Algerian books, that is books by Arab, Muslim, Algerian writers. I see the list I had to make in order to leave the country at the end of my two years:
Textbooks
Andy in Algeria, Institut Pedagogique National
Practice and Progress, L.G. Alexander, Longman
Le Livre de notre vie, Mohamed Bencharif, SNED
Nejila extraits, Kateb Yacine, Institut pedagogique national
First Things First, Alexander, Longman
Mohomet, Emile Dermenghem, Titres Spirituels
Diwan algerien, SNED
La poesie arabe maghrebine d’expression populaire, Behhalfaoui, Maspero
Alger, SNED
La Tunisie aujourd’hui, Jeune Afrique
L’Algerie aujourd’hui, Jeune Afrique
L'Algerie et le Maghreb, Institut Pedagogique National Alger
Arabic Made Easy, Saheb-Ettaba, David McKay Company
Le grain magique, Taos Amrouche, François Maspero
Le métier a tisser, Mohammed Dib, Editions de Seuil
Le fils du pauvre, Mouloud Feraoun Editions du Seuil
L’incendie, Mohammed Dib, Editions du Seuil
Le Polygone etoile, Kateb Yacine, Editions de Seuil
L’Homme aux sandales de caoutchouc, Kateb Yacine, Editions du Seuil
Qui se souvient de la mer, Mohammed Dib, Editions de Seuil
Socioloie de L’Algerie, Pierre Bourdieu, Presses Universitaires
Histoire de l'Algerie, Robert Ageron, Presses Universitaires de France
Cuisine de Tous Pays, la Cuisine algerienne, Yocef Ferhi, Bordas
Le Talisman, Mohammed Dib, Editions de Seuil
Les enfants du nouveau monde, Assia Djebar. Union Genérale d’Editions
La terre et le sang, Mouloud Feraoun, Editions du Seuil
La revolution algerienne, Ministere de l’information et de la Culture, Alger
Jouran, Mouloud Feraoun, Editions du Seuil
Tassili, Henri Lhote, Arthaud
Hoggar, Claude Blanguernon, Arthaud
L’eleve et la Lecon, Malek Haddad, 10/18
La Grande Maison, Mohammed Dib, Editions de Seuil
Mohammed Racim; Sid Ahmed Bahli, Musee Nationaux d’Algerie
L’Art culinaire a travers l'Algerie
Nedjima: Kateb Yacine, Editions de Seuil
Le Corán, Bibliotheque de La Peide,
La Risala; Editions Populairs de l’Armee, Alger
One final bit of evidence that I was learning more about the Algerian (Muslim, Arab) culture than I was imposing upon them was my acknowledgement of their pride in their new nation. I taught there twelve years after they had won their hard-fought independence. I describe the pleasure with which the employees in the post office regarded my red-and-green addressed Christmas card envelopes, which they thought were my attempt to promote the colors of the Algerian flag, also red, green, and white. I mention this in the context of the classroom, too, when I describe an English-language question: (My description of my typical day used the second person YOU to get the reader engaged.)
“Has anyone ever been to Mecca?” It isn’t for local color that you mention this. It is truly what the students like to talk about. Anything having to do with Algeria’s national religion, language, independence, history, or cuisine motives them to define and explain and describe—as if they had just gotten a national identity and wanted to put it to use.
I’m not sure that an Orientalist, anxious to present the colonialists’ view, would say that.
So whatever my failings—and not learning more Arabic was certainly one—I don’t think my letters condemn me as being an Orientalist. While I was in Algeria, I observed Ramadan, made Algerian friends, read Arabic authors, and refused to believe prevalent stereotypes. Like most volunteers, I gained more than I gave and learned a lot more than I taught, and, being the selfish person I am, I’m not sorry that that was so.
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