This paper examines the subject, the elite, and the imperial ideologue in the Maghreb in the aftermath of colonialism. Given that the hammer of imperialism is still ubiquitous, the conditions of the postcolonial self today need to be seen from the perspective of those who still succumb to conditions that are independent of their will—the subjects—and from the perspective of those who are meant to represent them—the elite. How does the subject live amid a postcolonial society that makes very little progress? How does the elite represent and remedy the postcolonial Maghrebi condition in its totality? The paper implements a symptomatic approach to the postcolonial everyday to unearth its agonizing contradictions while also supplying realms of debate and remedy. While unearthing imperial conditioning, local enclosure and material deprivation, theorizing a free, reasonable self has to become the watchword, laying bare the whims of stomach and fantasy for the postcolonial self to join the competition in a world of shifting stratagems and paradigms.
Table of Contents
Abstract
Introduction
Postcolonial Alienation and Imperialism
The Imperial Usage of Alienation
The Subject and the Elite
By Way of Conclusion
Works Cited
Abstract
This paper examines the subject, the elite, and the imperial ideologue in the Maghreb in the aftermath of colonialism. Given that the hammer of imperialism is still ubiquitous, the conditions of the postcolonial self today need to be seen from the perspective of those who still succumb to conditions that are independent of their will—the subjects— and from the perspective of those who are meant to represent them—the elite. How does the subject live amid a postcolonial society that makes very little progress? How does the elite represent and remedy the postcolonial Maghrebi condition in its totality? The paper implements a symptomatic approach to the postcolonial everyday to unearth its agonizing contradictions while also supplying realms of debate and remedy. While unearthing imperial conditioning, local enclosure and material deprivation, theorizing a free, reasonable self has to become the watchword, laying bare the whims of stomach and fantasy for the postcolonial self to join the competition in a world of shifting stratagems and paradigms.
Introduction
Colonial barbarity and its imperial aftermath, local enclosure and its omnipresence, with the scars they left in the postcolonial subject’s head and soul, further instilled a ubiquitous sense of alienation that characterizes the everyday. It is cogent to remind ourselves of a few facts in this regard. upon surveying the thoughts of prominent postcolonial critics, figures such as Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, Abdullah Laroui, and Mohamed Abed Al-Jaberi, almost none of them discloses a fully positive view as to the current condition of the postcolonial Maghrebi self. The yearly survey published by the Arab center for Research and Policy Studies in 2017 ascertains that 91% Arabs think that the Arab states (the Maghreb essentially included!) suffer from severe economic and administrative corruption. The many civil wars that burst in many Arab countries (i.e. Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, to mention but a few), starting from 2011 must equally instill woe in every postcolonial observer. That healing took too long, this state begets nothing but a baffling sense of alienation in the heart of every postcolonial observer.
To her/his misfortune, the postcolonial subject is just out of the colonial era and he is already thrown into the imperial specter mostly half-alive and half-dead. The postcolonial subject’s experience of the world cannot but resembles that of a self in an endless trauma. The postcolonial scholar who is called to describe the alienated postcolonial subject stands face to face with the shadow of a self and with the imperial Thanatos—this death loving God. We are now close to certain that no matter how many opportunities that might appear on the horizon of the postcolonial self, it is always supplied the worst. It is all the time breached to the very marrow of its bones, for it is agonizing alienation that one faces on the ground and in fiction—the many characters one comes across in Si Yussef, The Moor’s Account, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, Wedding by the Sea, Abdullah’s Feet, to mention but a few fictional accounts, attests to nothing but Maghrebi self-alienation. The problem is that the postcolonial subjects, that is, those to whom the state and the scholar alike address their thoughts, policies and plans, cannot have a critical lens as to this fact of alienation, for the postcolonial self is, before all, still beseeching very basic needs. Dr. Fanon pinpoints the initial cause:
The state does not create a state that reassures the ordinary citizen, but rather one that rouses his anxiety. The state, which by its strength and discretion ought to inspire confidence and disarm, lulls everybody to sleep; seeks to impose itself in spectacular fashion. It makes a display, it jostles people and bullies them, thus intimating to the citizen that he is in continual danger.1
It being befuddled at the bottom of Abraham Maslow’s pyramid, self-alienation is a truth that stands naked on the postcolonial soil and it only begs for accurate description, diagnosis and remedy.
1. Postcolonial Alienation and Imperialism
Upon contemplate this stage of imperialism; we observe that abuse is the norm on the postcolonial Maghrebi soil. In the imperial West, where so many fallacious patterns in perspective still go unchanged, a generalization about Africa or the Arab world is logical as long as it brings profit to the imperial ideologues. Imperial ideology still blinds people to every fact that goes to the advantage of alienated groups. After serious scrutiny of imperial ideology, one can easily discern that brutish exploitation is still the norm in the postcolonial societies—Donald Trump’s contemptuous mockery of Saudi Arabia and the rest of the world is the newest dimension to such brutish comportment. The examples bearing witness to such a fact are too many to be listed in this short paper2. Yemen, starting from 2014 up to this day, to mention but one case, is still the midst of crisis with a devastating civil war and with cholera having taken many souls to the grave. Syria is turned to ashes with the many brutal American and Russian interventions and with the many cults that are involved in the service of nothing but beards and the imperial Hades. Sykes Picot had been inflicted to establish division in the region and that it succeeded, now comes the time of its disintegrative effects, sadly inflicted by the hands and sweat of the soil’s own sons.
The American imperial ideology is the general manufacturer of such condition of alienation. Tariq Ali claims that:
When the Cold War ended Washington took charge of the region, initially through local potentates then through military bases and direct occupation. Democracy never entered the frame, enabling the Israelis to boast that they alone were an oasis of light in the heart of Arab darkness.”3
All that imperial ideology4 and equally colonial ideology in the past managed to bring to the postcolonial world was mere misery (wars and robbery by the means of economic sanctions). And as we read this excerpt from Frantz Fanon’s newest book Alienation and Freedom, we find it difficult to tell the postcolonial past from its present. The imperial ideologues are still the same:
Armed to the teeth, equipped with daggers and cutlasses, the soldiers break into the dwellings, torture, slit throats, mutilate. Pillage and rape preside over their actions. The fellahs’s meager provisions are destroyed, the livestock taken, the houses and gourbis (shacks) set ablaze (...) the men are led like beasts to have their throats slit in front of their loved ones.5
Such repetitive behavior being observed in Africa (i.e. Sudan) and the Middle East (i.e. Syria) bestows diverse structures of trauma and alienation. Frantz Fanon adds the following: “War goes on, and [that] we will have to bind up for years to [cure] the many, sometimes ineffaceable, wounds that the colonialist onslaught has inflicted on our people. That imperialism which is today fighting against a true liberation of mankind leaves in its wake here and there tinctures of decay which we must search out and mercilessly expel from our minds and our spirits.”6
Imperialism is capitalism’s begotten son and it treats the postcolonial subject like a bird that is always confines to a cage. Its flamboyant speech says that it admires freedom and Human Rights, but it still chooses to trammel its postcolonial prey (bird) on end. We all remember how the colons stunted the land and people and how they transported Africans to menageries and factories as nothing but slaves. We also saw how they were used as subjects for the still unknown Tuskegee Experiments.
After colonialism, imperialism has sucked the postcolonial subject’s blood just like mosquitoes do to clays. The colonial subjects were bees in the pure sense of term. Their labor in the battlefield and in the abyss of European mines was highly organized, and their pressure on the colonial soil brought independence to the fore. That was all they were supposed to do, and everything else should be left to the elite—these well-versed scholars and politicians who by their coward nature, says F. Fanon, have chosen to place themselves in the service of the colonizers instead of being captains of economy. What mattered to the colons was neither the bee nor its death, what mattered was its honey, and so the cost of the whole colonial process in terms of death and demolition was to be bypassed and forgotten by the colonizer. Atrocity was camouflaged and is still left unseen to the world. In the Maghreb, the French decided to suck the colonised’s blood in a different fashion; they sat the colonial subjects 'free' and granted them an illusionary independence, which was to the strategic French imperialist another neocolonial cause and not a consequence.
But how did the colonizer grant independence to the postcolonial subject in the first place? The postcolonial subject has to remember that, whether he wants it or not, he is still the colonizer’s enslaved bird. The colonizer sets the postcolonial subject free, but with all the illusionary whims that the term ‘free’ entails. It will cut its wings and open it the cage. After a while, and to its ubiquitous misfortune, the crippled postcolonial bird starts to come to terms with this granted paradoxical freedom. It starts to realize that when it had the wings, it was a prisoner, and now that it is free, it has no wings. Raw materials flow to the mother country as the waves hit the beautiful shores of Tangier. The postcolonial subject blinds himself to the fact by a baffling act of aloofness and by the interpellation of many acquiescent local cults. Mostly blind and deaf, the postcolonial state then decides to invest in everything except the easing of investment, which it wrongly puts in the hands of few families. In the educational sector, Arabic is gradually as a tongue while equally sustaining it with French in administrative conduct; the dialects came in a later stage, thus introducing postcolonial hybrids holding lanterns.
Adding insult to injury, old solutions are applied to new problems. The postcolonial subject is literally whipped at this stage. Consequences thus could be easily deduced. When the colonial subject had the means to evolve, he was made a ‘slave’ of the colonizer’s schemes, and when he is sat free by the arrival of independence, he is denied the means. The postcolonial subject is a horse whose harness is thus in the hands of the imperial French ideologue. In the mind of the imperial ideologue, the colonial war is never a win-or lose-battle, it was and it is still different battle. It was and it is still the fight of a hornet and a spider.7 It lays venomous eggs inside the postcolonial body, allowing it a slow, peaceful death.
Right after independence, another French army of administrators stayed to supervise the performance of the postcolonial government, yet they made sure to rob it of wealth and to weaken its performance whenever it shows signs of growth.8 The colonial staff that supervises the postcolonial state has a specific task. It is to drive the postcolonial subject’s attention to ritualistic mimesis of the French colon and of the nation’s folkloric tribes as it devours raw materials.
The postcolonial culture and religion are lowered to a very folkloric state, calling for the Maghrebi nation’s tribal instincts. Religion, secluding Al-mutazila and its likes, takes a repetitive ritualistic pattern. The Amazigh heritage which makes the core of the Moroccan culture is made very folkloric as well by the presence of scholars that over stress windowless local identities but rarely abundant possibilities (i.e. reason & freedom) that should accompany their formation.
Economy, moreover, makes little to no progress, and as the state ages, it only sinks in loans which beget nothing but high taxes and a high living cost. In 2017, the Moroccan state’s loans made a total sum of 33 billion dollars, thus swamping 65.5% of Morocco’s Gross Domestic Product. In the midst of such a state, economic investment thus becomes more and more arduous for brainy national and adept international economists alike. Instructional bureaucracy accompanied by high taxes scare the bravest of investors. Establishing the spirit of capitalism, the imperial powers drive the postcolonial state more and more to a Free Market pattern; a spectrum where the debile postcolonial countries would float weightlessly with no gravity that would bring them down; they would float with the destiny of the currency in the hands of greedy international companies.
What for instance comes after the deadly loans that are granted by the IMF9 is that the IMF tells the postcolonial state which sectors to re-build and which policies to issue and to ‘help’ the postcolonial state’s economy breathe. The postcolonial state is again and again allowed a series of deadly loans which future generations will have to shoulder endlessly. What makes matters worse is that loans come with conditions that the postcolonial state can fulfill only in its dreams and at the expense of strategic sectors namely education and health sectors.
Postcolonial Maghrebi economy does not make much and so the post-independence citizen is fed hope and despotism: logic terms it a false dilemma. Frantz Fanon further observes that:
After weeks of keeping a low profile, [the postcolonial subject] finds himself cornered one day by the kaid demanding "his taxes," he is not even allowed the opportunity to direct his hatred against the European administrator; before him stands the kaid10 who excites his hatred—and he happens to be [a Moroccan, and not a colonial agent].11
By the end, one important thought should be assimilated; “Sending people on trips is better than telling them that the places they want to go to do not exist.”12 The postcolonial subaltern has to either live on the same loaf of bread sank in olive oil, or else embark on deadly boats toward Europe in the hope of reaching the European soil. As we write these lines, thousands tried to cross into Spain through Cueuta. If they were not a shark's prey in the cold Mediterranean, they would safely reach Eldorado where the wealth from the ex-colonies in invested in the welfare of Europeans. But, there too, they at times have to face racism and seclusion; the famous ‘Auslaender RAUS’ (foreigners out) decorates the walls of many German streets, not to forget those of Barcelona in Spain.
After de-colonialism, the mother country constantly watches over the slowly sailing postcolonial economy. It intervenes in the postcolonial subject’s tiny internal affairs and whenever it realizes that postcolonial economy starts to see the shore, it digs a whole in its boat; it lets it sink peacefully. It constantly contributes to postcolonial misery by introducing civil wars (I.e. Yemen, Libya) and economic crisis (I.e. Qatar in 2017) here and there. With the scars, the postcolonial Maghrebi self still clings to the mother country, which unfortunately refuses to recognize its existence in the first place.13 Let us now discuss the imperial usage of alienation in the Maghreb.
2. The Imperial Usage of Alienation
The imperial ideologue knows well that such condition of alienation begets uncertainty and fear, and so this constant condition makes the introduction of every delusional meaning or brutish action possible on the postcolonial soil. In his attempt to keep the postcolonial subject and the world blind of this fact and the other facts that really matter (atrocity and exploitation) the imperial ideologue might throw the postcolonial subject monetary grants, and this is particularly done to make the plunder game appear neutral to European citizens and to the rest of the world. The imperial ideologue, as he attempts to bombard the region, blames the Arab-Muslim world for terrorism whenever possible with or without reliable evidence.14 His claim, we all know, goes against statistics. What should then be internalized is that in their relation to ‘The Third World’, the imperial ideologues do not abide by any principle in the moral sense of the term; they are driven in most cases by one trilogy: blame, greed and profit.
The imperial ideologue knows well that the malformed psyche surrenders easily once it is made the subject of harshness, blame and typically ridicule. By the repetitive occurrence of their deceptive deeds, we learnt that it is the duty of imperial ideologues to make civil society both reluctant and unsure with regard to how to deal with the problems (famine, despotism, wars) that take place in the postcolonial world, for it is already constructed as a scarecrow. This is partly what makes imperial ideology alive; a neutrality-show that involves meaning construction, atrocity and theft on the postcolonial soil. The history of imperialism teaches us the following: the imperial ideologue has no conscience, no remorse and no sympathy. And so he generally discloses a narcissist constitution with a very strange isolating concept of the self. The imperial ideologue’s mind is usually shut; he would remorselessly start wars abroad for material profit, and for goals that are based on whim and fear. Human Rights are respected only within the geographical boundaries of his nation and not on the postcolonial soil. Marimba Anni’s Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior has proven this very wisely.
For the postcolonial subject to win something out of the imperial ideologues, they have to have the courage to threaten their interest on the postcolonial soil or else show them interest (benefit) and thus bargain at auction on this basis— It’s a throw-them-a-bone- or-deny-them-a-bone game. The postcolonial ideologues blindly chase material possessions, of which raw materials and strategic trade roads are just two tiny examples. Nowadays, we observe that when you deny them the bone, you ought to be ready for wars that might be fought with their guns but with the hands of their own native informants (or groups they support15 ) or the very same hybrid staff they had already left to supervise the sailing and growth of the postcolonial state.
The postcolonial subjects are consumers and producers of oil and minerals (e.g. Moroccan phosphate). That is one great power they possess. The world witnessed how outraged Europe was when Saudi Arabia denied it oil in 1972. In the age of colonialism, we also saw how their blood boiled in Algeria and Morocco when they were faced with armed resistance. The imperial ideologue lolls the world with a narcissist psyche. In the main, they do not expect the postcolonial subject to resist their greedy whims when their boundaries are violated, thus when the postcolonial subject fights back with whatever means at his disposal, that calls to the imperial ideologue’s wonderment, as if it were supposed to acquiesce. That which makes matters worse is that even its prominent European thinkers—though not all of them still—do not really conceive of the postcolonial subject as a thinking self. In Can Non-Europeans Think?, Hamid Dabashi reminds us of this with remarkable intelligence.
Imperial powers inflict barbaric pain, yet they cannot accept being exposed to the same pain they bring to people around the globe (i.e. Syria, Iraq, Yemen, or Libya). Our reader can consider European or American outbursts of anger with the death or arrest of Europeans or Americans souls and how atrocity goes almost unnoticed in the middle East, Africa and Other parts of the World. It is odd to us how firefighters bucket along down the European streets to save European cats, dogs and horses when thousands of Africans and Arabs die of hunger while their death goes unnoticed. We honestly believe that mercy is to be bestowed on all equally. When putting imperial ideology under scrutiny, one gets the impression that its ideologues roam the world with rotten minds, with Hades16 alone in their company. Their slogan in the postcolonial world is nothing but flamboyant speech that hides the same false dilemma; plunder or death. Let us now turn to our most important elements of the topic.
3. Other Postcolonial Categories: The Subject and the Elite
When postcolonial critics, particularly the religious elite, preach in an attempt to bring the postcolonial subject back to life or to show him/her how to carry on a decent life, their descriptions do neither alleviate the subject’s profound misery nor save them. The political elite, in turn, is often led astray, namely when they falsely mimic Europeans tools and plans which rarely fit in the postcolonial Maghrebi context, for it is a different soil that has to invent its own tools and with the minds and sweat of its own men and women and in line with local beauties. The enclosed religious intellectual, the free-but- poor, and the politicians’ mythical expropriation of tradition only add more dilution and deflection to the situation. The affluent economists, who we know are good only at spending but not investing money in the service of the middle class, are a curse to the postcolonial Maghrebi soil. The postcolonial subject is thus cursed and his curse is rampant ignorance brought to him by the above mentioned elements in the form of stagnation and cognitive dissonance.
The postcolonial subject has to take it into his head that mythical and flamboyant language is never enough in the face of a world that changes with every exhalation.
Productive practices in economy and education should be valued as such. The political scene is flamboyant as it involves hopeful, descriptive language that misses the point so often, for the promises that the politician makes are often forgotten the next day as he is immersed tourist journeying, leaving the citizen face to face with the treks of life. The politician’s language seems to never solve a problem on the postcolonial soil, it worsens it on end.
What should be done to come to terms with this baffling postcolonial alienation? In the era of colonialism, a wave of revolutions against the colons had taken place but they did grant the postcolonial subject an illusionary independence. Another wave took place in Egypt, Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Tunisia starting from 2011 and it again brought some postcolonial states (I.e. Egypt) nothing but an illusionary reform in addition to death and captivity (I.e. Syria). This happens because 1) the upper imperial eye has surveyed these revolutions since day one and he made sure they were led astray. And 2) because the postcolonial elite has not yet succeeded in rearing a fully-fledge modern self, a disinterested self. As of now, revolution in the Maghreb will not move the postcolonial subject an inch as long as bread alone is its main target and not a free cultured self that is in the know of the best that is thought and said first. To be a cultured self is to firstly know the self and teach it how to reason about its being in relation to every productive, enlightening center (i.e. Singapore and Rwanda are not that far). It as well amounts to making it aware of the roaring imperial tiger in itself and behind its back.
When the postcolonial proletariat hits to the streets in Egypt, Yemen or Syria it only forbids bread to itself, to the same postcolonial proletariat which is gathered under the umbrella of ignorance and misery and not to the master whose caviar, and even medicine come from the imperial mother country. Violence as a means of resistance in Frantz Fanon's terms was seen as a tactic so difficult to introduce to the postcolonial world in the age of colonialism, but under the colonial torture, one cannot bow his head down, the native had to resist to win the colonial battle. This violent tactic was effective then because of the visible material presence of the colonial machine.
We said that the imperial dialogue observes the situation from far, misguiding the whole process. At times, it becomes very difficult to tell the fiend from the friend on the postcolonial soil because of the many cults and interests that roam the postcolonial horizon, not to forget the very problematic constitution of the postcolonial self. Abdullah Laroui dared to claim that the Moroccan state, for instance, is far advanced in the liberal plans it puts forward, while the people it calls to respond to such plans are often not receptive. Cultural cultivation should be the postcolonial subject’s first step towards rebirth. People in the neocolonial states live to eat; but from now on they should know that for them to draw freedom to their lungs, they ought to read, they ought to think.
As the postcolonial subject swallows hard, and as the neocolonial agents skip his skin like a slaughtered goat, they will again and again interpellate him to Pandora's Box, and so ask him to hope for a better postcolonial future to come. But under such circumstances, the postcolonial state’s preaching of hope and protection is but an illusionary false remedy, an illusion. Hope is the wrong cure to an omnipresent, rampant misery. As noted, labor in science is the key to the postcolonial subject’s rebirth; yet imperial Europe denies him access to the doors that this key might open. We know of the many scientific expeditions undertaken by Moroccan travelers sent by Sultan
Hassan I from 1883 onward, expeditions that rarely brought anything of lasting scientific value back to Moroccan soil, apart from ready-made perfumes, soap, and various gadgets. The postcolonial state has no labs for its brainy scientists, and it does not fund education the way it should. The outcome should therefore be a mishap. The Arab and African postcolonial soil is still but a ‘banana region’ and a market for Europe’s ready-made products and a source of its technicians.17
The postcolonial condition must be the concern of its own people and not that of Europeans and the US. The French interventions in Mali offer a striking example of the impossibility of such a direction. In this regard, Human Rights Watch’s report, “Mali: Unchecked Abuses in Military Operations,” must be instructive for the inquisitive reader. We all know that Turkey has made its way to development with the will of its people; Rwanda and Indonesia come to the mind too. For the question of development to be the concern of Arabs and Africans alone, the imperil ideologue has to either lend a genuine, helping hand or just withdraw, except, of course, in case of the intellectual or the Human Rights activist. History taught us that the ‘civilizing mission’ was the postcolonial subject’s worst curse, for it hid mere exploitation. Rebirth and development are paths that the people choose for themselves.
Arabs and Africans got raw materials. They are materials that hit the neocolonial agents in the gut. But, to be just to the matter, the postcolonial states still contain brainwashed brains and brains that are made incapable of development by the presence of a local classical conditioning that is worsened by the presence of ubiquitous cognitive dissonance. The status quo is the result of distorted family upbringing, state education, the legal system, and misused religion. That epistemology is never taught, the postcolonial subjects still cannot detect the many holes in their minds and thus cannot take a critical stand as to the ‘decadent’ situation that keeps entangling them on end. One can only count on the newly born brains for cultivation—this in case the imperial Thanatos leaves few of them around. In the many poor postcolonial neighborhoods of Yemen, Syria, and Libya, citizens are malnourished and killed. In 2017, cholera alone took many of them to the grave in Yemen.
Post-independence generations are trapped in an identity crisis, to many collective illusions (misinterpretations of religion), and to the still undiscovered mental disorders left by the brutal colons and by the despotic officials that rule the many postcolonial Arab and African states. One finds it very difficult to doubt Frantz Fanon's conclusions in The Wretched of the Earth and Alienation and Freedom in this regard. The postcolonial subjects, one has to admit it, lack a critical view as to their self-alienation, which is both dependent and independent of their will.
One witty reader might want to draw our attention to an important matter. They might plausibly raise the following question: Are there not productive postcolonial citizens and good captains of the economy on the postcolonial soil? They do exist on the postcolonial Maghrebi soil, as they do anywhere else in the world. “Is this not a form of Orientalist discourse?” asks another witty reader. The answer to such queries is clear today: stereotypes do not write themselves. On the postcolonial soil, there are ubiquitous problems that need to be admitted and accounted for. “600 brainy engineers leave Morocco every year,”18 claims the Moroccan minister in charge of higher education. Though they claim that they hear the postcolonial street’s plea, the postcolonial soil shoulders a political elite that dwells in an imaginary sphere in which its relation to real postcolonial problems is replaced with whimsical acquisitiveness in relation to the things they own or wish to own (phones, cars, houses, and the like). Petty bourgeoisie, on the other hand, is too aloof and egoistic, and displays symptoms of extreme deprivation, for it strangely derives pleasure from greedily saving money, rendering its cause futile and thus failing to fulfill any nationalist cause, as is the case when the bourgeoisie is doing what it should. Thus, full national consciousness is preceded by such social consciousness that needs further analysis.
In the mother country, skill is appreciated and on average prodigies is in the right positions for the best interest of the nation. In the end, one can but cultivate his garden, his nation, said Voltaire in Candid. In the colonial state, cats lay eggs. In the meanwhile, the peacefulness of the postcolonial subject is unprecedented and such odd aloofness cannot be explained. His life is a sum of unnecessary rituals. He sips coffee regularly in the nearby European-like-coffee-shop; he equally has to listen to an uncultivated Fkih, reciting mythical chunks which neither correspond to the postcolonial subject’s harsh social conditions of existence, nor translate the best in Muslim heritage itself. In the mosque by the end of the street, the other Fqih keeps on the same mythical discourse which is often full of ‘selected’ stories that the enlightened mind can but barf. The postcolonial condition is often horrible on the ground while Maghrebi culture is strangely hyper real, making matters worse. The high rate of unemployment throttles every new postcolonial graduate to whom the end of studies often calls for gloom and agony. Under such condition, the dedicated intellectual strives to engage in the cultivation of minds, another strives to shed his odd withdrawal, yet their wishes are smashed under the weight of such postcolonial condition.
Maghrebi Economy is highly in debt. Few job opportunities are offered, the working class faces constant wage cuts and their worries find no hearing ears. In the streets, the politician gazes at the daily protests from his rearview mirror. They yell and shout and as their leaflets decorate the scene, they often find no hearing ears. The shores of Ceuta know the rest of the story. Protestors often produce very cogent arguments about the state's unproductive policies. Citizens (Teachers, lawyers etc.) hit to the streets, for they feel that they can no longer breathe. The scene is surreal; the sun burns foreheads, nerves swell and saliva comes out of mouths as they shout for basic reforms and for bread alone (consider protests for water in 2017 in Zagora in the southern side of Morocco). Draught throttles the citizen from behind and the state’s repressive state apparatus is as brutish as the bumble bee. In the midst of this labyrinth, the postcolonial subjects have one way out and it is to turn their heads upwards—God is their only left refuge. If they hit to the streets for their rights, they would always receive the state’s repressive stick and shy reforms. The religious elite is in its aplomb and to not hold itself accountable for this impoverished postcolonial state, it constantly utters a phrase that fills its blatant weakness to introduce change to the postcolonial soil: "Rizk” (a living) is granted by God only”. This is the only justification the silent cultic religious elite utters to get itself out of the situation. And so the postcolonial subject has to believe that to just secure a living, he has to roam earth like a hyena in the wilderness— Maslow’s Esteem Self-actualization needs have to be forgotten once and for all, or else be left to mere chance.
The city’s poor districts speak to the state’s officials with the same logic they fear the most: “God allowed us a wealthy postcolonial land. Why cannot wealth be distributed equally? Why cannot it just be used wisely? Why cannot we be as developed as China, Turkey or just Rwanda which took very few years to be one of world's best growing nations?” Statesmen and the so-called captain of economy swallow hard at the sharpness of the postcolonial native’s logic. They know deep down that they have no response to supply, since the whole condition is the production of their hands but still strangely independent of their will with the existence of imperial censorship.
The postcolonial politician most of the time find refuge in sophist, specious excuses to glorify whatever the state proposes, namely its paper-projects which are rarely perfectly established on the ground. They resemble the sand castles that kids build on the golden sand of the Atlantic; they are often washed away the next day. Postcolonial Arab and African officials often discard the fact that wealth is not distributed the way it should, and via media they often speak to the public in a tittle-tattling fashion. In response to the high rates of poverty and to the protesting crowds gathered at the doors of parliament, Maghrebi statesmen speak to the masses in a language of deterrence. They harbor the conviction that “some people have to always be poor,” and that these people are “mentally retarded” after all; “they cannot be cultivated.” It is a logic that closely resembles that of the colonial doctor, who would insist upon the native’s strange congenital stigmata, treating them as an original and immutable part of the native’s nervous system. The postcolonial subjects are made ‘retarded’, for they are nowhere to be found in the state’s plans, except for tax payment or for the nationalistic feeling the state wants them to show on national days, which now begin to denote but oppression to the postcolonial citizen, unless something is done to retrieve dignity and bread. The Maghrebi state discloses a coward flee from the postcolonial reality as it reveals itself, for, as Gramsci reminds us, no one needs to be told that “Men are lazy. They need to be organized, first externally into corporations and leagues: then internally in their thought, in their will, in an endless continuity and multiplicity of external stimuli.”19
On the postcolonial Maghrebi soil, as is mostly the case for the rest of the Arab world, alienation seems to reign and so the barrier is psychological. Blame thus goes to all the parties. Cultural newness fails to enter the postcolonial mind, not by a cause that is inherent to the postcolonial self, but rather because of this lack of outer stimuli, incentives. Inside homes, in the streets and in the corridors of the postcolonial school “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; [and] in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”20 The postcolonial subjects appear to devalue (show no curiosity) as to the matters they do not know, and thus the postcolonial day is highly sunk in a morbid routine. The postcolonial Maghrebi subjects receive the same repetitive news, and good books are often too expensive to buy or rare to be found in the first place for them to cultivate their brains by an act of autonomous learning as is/was the case with the Europe Proletaria after it had realized its blatant alienation by the capitalist mode of production. The postcolonial subject is torn between a dependency complex and an inferiority complex; he has to bear the weight of the harsh postcolonial condition and to export mostly everything to keep on breathing.
On the postcolonial soil, the intellectual’s general attempt is to explain the world and it is never to strive to change it as a social agent of change. As said, intellectuality in many postcolonial societies takes an imaginary form, and so the postcolonial intellectual’s endeavor theorizes culture theatrically but with the existence of an allcontaining ideological realm. Culture has already been defined by the pre-existing economic, political and social structures, for what one finds on the postcolonial soil are but repetitive rituals which rarely correspond to a productive culture, if we were look at numbers alone. The nature of [the postcolonial] society is such that in its globality, seems to rebel against the current of emancipation and hinders the constitution of spaces of freedom in its place. In effect, non-movement and immutability are the main features of this social and political universe in [the postcolonial state].21 The result is that, in his head, the dedicated postcolonial intellectual experiences culture as an enlightened project to achieve but with no sustaining practices on the ground from the part of the state.
By Way of Conclusion
In the postcolonial Maghrebi streets, everyday bursts of anger are easy to notice, often revealing precipitant reflexes to very silly matters—it probably betrays the weight of decadence on the shoulders of postcolonial men and women. It might be a symptomatic projection of misery and deprivation. In The Colonizer and the Colonized, Albert Memmi reminds us of how the lack of needs once amazed the colons who found it strange how the native lives on little or nothing the whole year. After all, a fully-fledged self is defined by the sum of opportunities the daily milieu provides, thus the fewer, the worse. The postcolonial subject’s life has to be characterized by such a lack of needs, for that is his only way out, especially with the presence of officials that often go deaf and blind to his/her demands. This was the case in the era of colonialism, but now the course of events has to change in the sense that “events are repeated with certain rhythm (...) history is developing through a series of moments, each more complex than the last and richer in meaning and value, but nonetheless similar.”22
At this stage, we should always remind ourselves that the imperialist ideologue cannot be a savior. Equally cogent, modernity should never be made the synonym of imperialism. The imperialist, in the simplest terms, is a merchant in search of markets for his goods—places where he can spend less and gain more. As the agent of suffering in the postcolonial world, the imperialist may appear to “gloom” at the sight of a dead body or of bombs destroying a poor man’s home in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Mali. Yet sooner or later, his regret fades, and he returns to his rampant greed and cold, calculating logic. The whole world now knows that no apology was addressed to the many innocent Iraqis who were killed in the war on Iraq in 2003 and equally to those of the age of colonialism. This odd imperialist psyche is summed by the strange beginning in Fury (2014)23 where the protagonist kills a fellow human being to save a horse, when both deserve life.
When the postcolonial subject stands up facing the neocolonial agent with the facts he fears the most, namely the fact that dependency should be stopped, the fact that Europe robs Africa of wealth, the idea that The Maghreb and Africa should stand on their own feet, the imperial ideologue has but to cross his/her fingers in approval. However, s/he will chuckle from behind, and make sure to do the necessary to block the postcolonial self’s evolution. One has to be as intelligent as the imperialist to find ways out. It is only the confidence in and recognition of the self that would bring back freedom and bash out alienation, exploitation and atrocity on the postcolonial soil. One has to contemplate the Ghanaian leader Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo’s historical speech in front of the newly elected French president Emmanuel Macron in Ghana on December 12th, 2017, and compare it to the same speech Macron made to the president of Burkina Faso days earlier. It then becomes obvious that it is our own quest for recognition, reason, and freedom that would guarantee us self-esteem and thus a bright present and future.
As we finish writing this account, we are well aware that few sweet drops of rain will not change the taste of a salty ocean, but the representation of the wretched of the earth is by the end the postcolonial intellectual’s obligation in the face of all belittling ideologies. The case could also be that the postcolonial subjects still cannot look properly at the world because they simply do not know the names in the sense that they use old dictionaries for new phenomena. On the postcolonial soil, it is also obvious that the fight of ‘slaves’ against other ‘slaves’ for bread alone could be the obstacle that blocks change (the upbringing of fully conscious, educated citizens), just like that strange end in Jungo Unchained 24 where a ‘slave’ strives to kill another ‘slave’ so that the imperialist master keeps on his game of slavery and plunder.
Reaching this final page, our reader might plausibly object that this account is too negative in tone. It has to be negative, for there is little that can be said positively about postcolonial alienation, whose contradictions are too numerous to list. The postcolonial subject remains too reluctant to take the initiative; he still has to murmur three times before he pours hot water down the sink. In the end, this account is neither a pronouncement of defeat nor an indictment of decadence. It is a quest for the postcolonial Maghrebi self and a representation of its alienation as it occurs to our eyes. The imperial Thanatos—the death-loving god—is still ahead of us, trident in hand. It continues to stare at the postcolonial subject with the same deep disdain, waiting for the right moment to strike. Yet, the postcolonial self will continue to address the imperial world, unearthing what it silences while also caring for that which might be enlightening its worldview and that of others. Our pessimism is that of the intellect, but optimism will always be the companion of our will.
Works Cited
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (notes towards an investigation)’’ in Mapping Ideology. Ed. Slavoj Zizek (London New York: Verso.1994) 84.
Ali, Tariq. “Who will reshape the Arab world? Its people or the USA?”www.theguardian.com.Accessed in August 24th, 2018.
Djiat, Hicham. Europe and Islam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) 132.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth (Australia, Penguin Books: 1967) 249.
Fanon, Frantz. Alienation and Freedom, ed. Jean Khalfa, Robert J.C Young ( London:
Bloomsburry: Academics, London, 2018) 597.
Gramsci, Antonio. Prison notebooks (London, ElecBook, 1999) 112.
Gramsci, Antonio. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought: Pre- Prison Writings. Ed, Raymond Guess and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, Cambridge Texts: 1994) 40-41.
Marx, Karl. Engels, Frederick. ‘‘The German Ideology’’ in TheNorton Anthology of Literary
Theory and Criticism.Ed. Leitch B. Vincent (New York: Norton and company, 2001) 767-768.
Sater, James N. Civil Society and Political Change in Morocco (New York: Routledge, 2007) 7.
Majid, Anouar. Si Yussef (Northampton: Interlink book, 2005) 109.
[...]
1 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1961), 164.
2 Readers with interest in the topic of Alienation in the Maghreb will find it interesting to read my book Maghrebi Encounters: Rethinking Representation in Postcolonial Criticism.
3 Tariq Ali, “who will reshape the Arab world? Its people or the USA?” www.theguardian.com accessed in August 24th, 2018.
4 It equally refers to any ideology that aims at exploiting people. Imperialism now exists in many centers and it is equally sustained by local enclosures that equally need analysis.
5 Frantz, Fanon, Alienation and Freedom, ed. Jean Khalfa, Robert J.C Young ( London: Bloomsburry: Academics, London), 597.
6 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Australia, Penguin Books: 1967), 249.
7 In nature, a constant fight between hornets and spiders takes place so that hornets can lay eggs inside the spider. As little hornets grow inside the spider, the spider dies.
8
9 In “The IMF in The Arab World: Lessons unlearned” Mouhamed Mossallem examines closely how deadly is the comportment of the IMF in the Arab world.
10 The Kaid refers to a native Algerian (also Moroccan) official.
11 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York, Grove Weidenfeld: 1961), 89.
12 Anouar Majid, Si Yussef (Northampton: Interlink book, 2005), 109.
13 Akli Kadjer’s Le porteur de cartable which is on the Algeria War of Liberation was rejected by French students in Pierre Mendès high school in 2018, and the reasons behind their racist move is that the writer is not of French origin.
14 Global Terrorism Index which is published by the Institute for Economics and Peace shows that, in 2013, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria and Syria were the countries mostly affected by terrorism.
15 In 1990s we all know that Al Qaaeda fought Rusians in Afghanistan and as it did it received assistance and help from the USA. Later, AlQaaeda became a pretext (war on terror) for the invasion of Afghanistan. The USA repeats this pattern every now and then in other places.
16 Hades is the god of death in Greek mythology. The term is used metaphorically.
17 In 2017, Morocco brought a space shuttle from Ariane Space (A French Company) to safeguard its land. It has French words on it and a small Moroccan flag. The postcolonial Morocco has to strive to produce its own foods and tools.
18 The head of the Moroccan state claimed so in his last speech on July 31st, 2018.
19 Antonio Gramsci, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought: Pre - Prison Writings. Ed, Raymond Guess and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, Cambridge Texts: 1994), 40.
20 Antonio Gramsci, Prison notebooks (London, ElecBook, 1999), 112.
21 James N. Sater, Civil Society and Political Change in Morocco (New York: Routledge, 2007), 7.
22 Antonio Gramsci, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought: Pre- Prison Writings. Ed, Raymond Guess and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge, Cambridge Texts: 1994), 41.
23 Fury is produced by Bill Block, directed by David Ayer and released in the USA in 2014.
24 The film is directed and written by Quentin Tarantino, produced by Stacey Sher and others. The film was released in 2012.
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