To the eyes of the Westerner, the veil worn by some Muslim women immediately makes visible the alterity of Arabs or Islam. This immediate visibility is at the same time paradoxical, since the veil makes visible by hiding woman from the gaze, and sometimes even with some veils by hiding one of her eyes from view, but in every case by denying immediacy and visibility where the Arab woman is concerned. In the title of his essay, "Algeria unveils itself," written in 1957 during the War of Algerian Independence, Frantz Fanon exposes the specific function of the veil for the outsider, as a representative both of otherness, and of gender: "For the tourist or the foreigner, the veil delimits both Algerian society and its feminine component" (14). Or one as the other, since the colonized is, it is too well known, feminized by the colonist's gaze in a first symbolic appropriation. Algeria, l'Algérie, which is feminine in French, unveils itself, in order to reveal what truth, what aletheia? For in our "own" cultural concepts of the veil, we in the West know that the veil veils something, the thing itself, or its absence, and sometimes, too, that the movement of unveiling is inseparable from an understanding of the veil, in that unveiling constitutes the veil as such (Derrida 34).
Fanon, who writes a polemical essay addressed to French readers in order to valorize the movement of liberation of the Algerians against colonial France, a movement in which he himself participated, explains unveiling according to two temporalities. First, the time before the Algerian Revolution, a time in which, in Fanon's words, "colonialism is settled in a perspective of eternity" (33). Unveiling women is then a strategy used by the colonial administration in order to demoralize Algerian society and profoundly upset its culture, under the pretense of emancipating women from "the behavior of the Algerian male [which] is very firmly denounced and assimilated to medieval and barbarous surviving practices" (16).1 Fanon repeatedly uses a sexualized lexis to describe this aggressive strategy: "If we want to strike the Algerian society in its texture, in its faculties of resistance, we must first conquer women; we must look for them behind the veil under which they are hidden" (16); "Algerian woman [is] conceived of as the support of the Western penetration of the native society" (21). This strategy triggers in turn a firm reaction of resistance on the part of the Algerians. Must we accept Fanon's statement that before the colonists' investment in unveiling women, the veil was "an element among others" (15), an "inert element" (26), or an "undifferentiated element" (27) of the Algerian culture? It certainly serves Fanon's point that the affective appeal of the veil on the part of the native is the response to an equal affect on the part of the colonizer. Throughout his description of the second temporality, starting with the Algerian Revolution, Fanon shows that the colonized mimics the colonizer's desire in order to deceive him. On the one hand, the veil can be, in Fanon's words, "instrumentalized [and of course, the question remains whether the veil is not an instrument, a mediation, which is technically or technologically marked in any and every case], turned into a technique of camouflage, into a means of struggle" (42). For example, women carried a bomb under their "haïk" (hence, the name given to Algerian women resistants of "porteuses de feu" [carriers of fire]). On the other hand, women removed their veils when their mission took them from their native neighborhoods to the European city. Fanon brilliantly analyzes the Arab city or "Kasbah" in terms which evoke the protection afforded by the veil on a woman's body: "The protective mantle of the Kasbah, the almost organic curtain of security that the Arab city weaves around the native is withdrawn, and the uncovered Algerian woman is launched in the city of the conqueror" (32, my emphasis).
Fanon was confident at the time of publication of his essay that the diversity of responses of the Algerians to the issue of the veil meant first that the colonizer had been profoundly deprived of the power of initiative, and secondly, that Algerians had no strong investment in the veil itself (46). In their tactical use of the veil in the Revolution, they had proved that they could go beyond a tradition in which they were, in Fanon's analysis, paradoxically confined by an aggressive modernization that they could only reject because it was proposed by the colonizer. But in effect, Fanon suggests that the Revolution has succeeded in Westernizing Algerians where the French colonists had failed, because this Westernization has been actively embraced as a means of struggle: "Committed to the fight, the husband and father discover new perspectives on the relations between sexes. The male militant discovers the female militant and together they create new dimensions of the Algerian society" (41). Forty years later, we can tell that the "new" or more Western mode of relation between man and woman has not entirely endured in the Arab world, even though Fanon's analysis of a cultural defense mechanism in the recourse to the veil still has some validity, and is endorsed by many Arab writers today2
In her essay, "Regard interdit, son coupé" ("Forbidden Gaze, Cut-off Sound"), written in 1979, the Algerian writer Assia Djebar remarkably sheds light on the symbolic significance to which the veil has been put. She does so, as Fanon had done before her, by focusing on Europeans' as well as Algerians' investment in the veil as the very site or sight of Arab femininity. But in the process, her reading illuminates some aspects that were left dormant in Fanon's interpretation. Fanon recorded two significant categories of dreams about the veil by his patients, while he was working as a psychiatrist in Algeria. One dream material was uncovered during his therapy sessions with Algerian women. In the reported dreams, the unveiled woman feels an "Impression of a body torn apart, drifting away; the limbs must become indefinitely longer. When the Algerian woman must cross a street, for a long time, there is an error of judgment on the exact distance to traverse. The unveiled body seems to escape from itself, to fall to pieces. Impression of being poorly dressed, and even of being naked" (Fanon 40). Djebar does not mention this specific text, but one passage of her essay seems to address precisely some of Fanon's observations, at the same time as it enlarges his conclusions about the symbolic power of the veil. For Djebar shows that what Fanon called dream is actually the very inscription in the language of his patients of the name of the veil. First, she describes women's experience of unveiling in terms reminiscent of Fanon: "The body moves out of the house and for the first time, it is felt as 'exposed' to all gazes: the gait becomes rigid, the step hasty, the expression of the gaze contracted." But this experience of "exposure to all gazes" is not only a hyperbole for the removal of the veil, it is also what the language precisely uses to name the veil and the movement of unveiling: "Dialectal Arabic transcribes the experience in a significant manner: 'I do not go out protected any longer (that is to say, veiled, covered),' the woman who frees herself from the cloth will say; 'I go out undressed, or even naked'" (Djebar 152). These last words echo Fanon's terms: "poorly dressed, and even naked." And Djebar goes on: "The veil which dissimulated woman to gazes is in effect felt as 'garment in itself,' and not having it any more means being totally exposed" (152).
The removal of the veil as (a figure of) nakedness is therefore the reason invoked for its necessity, or its comfort, and protection. The veil covers the full body of the woman, and her eyes may also be protected by a transparent veil [voilette] (150). But there is more than this symbolic and cultural contingency (no veil=nakedness) in Djebar's analysis. She does not disagree with Fanon's position that the Europeans created, so to speak, or at least stressed the political significance of the veil for the Algerian culture: "In Algeria, precisely, when the foreign intrusion starts in 1830–an intrusion which is maintained at all costs at the threshold of the impoverished seraglios–, to the increasing appropriation of space outside corresponds in a parallel way the more and more silenced freezing of inside communication: between generations, and even more between sexes" (153). But Djebar slightly displaces Fanon's focus, when she points out that women were not merely hidden from view because they became figured as the last repository of their culture. This argument in fact would be a way of rehearsing the rationalization of some Muslims as to the necessity of the veil or the harem. According to Djebar, women were hidden from view (at least in the phantasm if not always in reality), in order to circumvent their possibility of seeing, which is interpreted as bearing witness. Djebar's argument retraces the motif of the gaze as voice in her reading of the veil, in order to make visible the perceived danger of woman's unconstrained sight in the Algerian space.
In order to nuance the Western usual associations of the veil, Djebar first demonstrates that the veil need not be in and of itself an instrument of coercion. If the veil conceals woman from the gazes of men, it also allows her to enter men's space and to see them. This is why the veil may be construed as a possibility of liberation for women from the harem. As Djebar shows, a certain freedom of circulation is granted to women by the Koran, but at the same time it can be socially circumvented: "According to the Koranic tradition, the husband cannot prevent his wife to go to the baths–hammam–, at least once a week. But what if he is rich enough to build in his house his own hammam?" (165). In that respect, she astutely interprets women's driving as another take on the veil or the harem on the part of rich Arab men, who "have their wives circulate as much as possible in individual cars (which the women drive themselves), in order to protect the body (metal playing here the role of the ancestral textile), and in order for them to circulate as little as possible when 'exposed'" (165).
The crucial point of her analysis concerns woman's gaze in a predominantly masculine space. In 1957, Fanon's position concurs with Djebar's that thanks to the veil, "woman sees without being seen" (Fanon 23). Fanon makes two additional remarks that Djebar addresses in detail in her essay. One is that "The Algerian male has a generally clear attitude toward Algerian woman. He does not see her. There is even a permanent will on his part not to perceive the feminine profile, not to pay attention to women" (23). Secondly, he argues that the European is frustrated by the veil: "the European, confronted to the Algerian woman, wants to see" (23). Such statements demonstrate that the veil rehearses one story, if not the story, of the eye. Here we already anticipate on Cixous's reading of the veil as what touches (on) the eye (in Savoir). For if the veil, as dialectal Arabic indicates, prevents a woman from being naked, it also by the same token prevents her from exposing "the other eyes of the body (breasts, sex, and belly-button)" (Djebar 151). Woman's naked body, therefore, presents to the onlooker a specific experience of exposure, that of a multiplicity of feminine gazes, which Djebar interprets as particularly disquieting, even threatening to man. Therefore, the wish to preserve woman's modesty, to prevent her from going out "naked," is at the same time inseparably linked to man's anxiety of being seen by woman. Certainly, glimpsing woman's forbidden eyes, her breasts, her sex, her belly-button, is dishonorable, but also and at the same time, the construct of woman's body as the location of a multiplicity of eyes figures the profound horror felt by man at being watched by woman. In the act of gazing, the feminine eye becomes in itself an immodesty, a gesture of defiance.
On the contrary, it is safer to claim that the threat comes from a male outsider/voyeur who risks looking at the "naked" woman. That risk is clearly easier to accept and better remedied than the unexpected results of woman's watchful gaze. Djebar shows this by recounting the emblematic visit negotiated by Delacroix to an Algerian dignitary's harem in 1830, shortly after the French occupation of Algiers. That visit and his two subsequent paintings, "Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement," demonstrate that the theme of the "stolen gaze" is more aptly coped with when man, not woman, is the culprit.
Fanon had mentioned in his essay a second category of dreams, this time dreamt not by Algerian women, but by European men. "In a European's dream, the rape of the Algerian woman is always preceded by the tearing of the veil" (25). Fanon added that in such a dream, the European often prolongs his phantasm of appropriation by recounting "the flight of the woman, who, inevitably, leads the male to 'women's apartments'" (26). The association in the dream of tearing the veil and invading women's apartments confirms that the veil is taken to be another sign of women's spatial belonging, of their site, or sighting. Djebar also finds the veil to be a substitute of the harem, when she says that "woman's body is incarcerated between walls, or at best between veils" (151)3 Fanon notes European males' attraction to the notion of a community of women, provided, of course, that they can enter it: "The European always dreams of a group of women, a field of women, which somewhat recalls the gynaeceum, the harem, exotic themes strongly rooted in the unconscious" (26). In that respect, Djebar quotes from Delacroix's diary after his visit of the harem in Algiers: "It is beautiful! It is as it was in Homer's time! Woman in the gynaeceum looking after children, weaving wool or embroidering marvelous textiles. This is woman as I understand her!" (165). Delacroix's trespassing gaze is symptomatic in its easy legibility–the intruder who wants to peep at our "women." That gaze is forbidden and denounced, but it remains somehow comforting in its immediate comprehensibility.
Why, then, is woman's gaze so disquieting? What is it that woman will say when she sees what she does? For we have mentioned that the threat consists in woman's bearing witness, that is, telling what she saw. In that sense, we can already perceive why the War of Algerian Independence cannot constitute the "glad tidings" of men and women's reconciliation and dismissal of the veil, unlike in Fanon's study. First because to Fanon's historical sequence of veiled women, followed by "Westernized" war heroines, Djebar substitutes a longer history of North African female heroinism well before 1954, a history which parallels (and is not therefore sequential to) the history of the veil in Arab countries. The history of the relation to the veil as that to woman's sight and voice is not teleological, but spasmodic.
Algerian women have not waited for the War of Independence to participate in heroic acts of war. Above all, their part involved an ocular and oral reporting and witnessing of the battle: traditionally, "at the end of heroic fights, woman used to watch, woman used to shout: a witnessing gaze throughout the battle, which ululation prolonged in order to encourage the warrior" (153). But tradition has also preserved specific acts in the history of Algerian resistances of the nineteenth century, which represent "women warriors, out of that traditional role of spectators" (156). These episodes are often grafted in the cultural imaginary on the image of the feudal queen mother, presented as a heroic, if desexualized body (157). On the contrary, "The Song of Messaouda," which is still heard in the tribes of the Algerian South, commemorates the story of a young woman, Messaouda, who changed the course of a battle fought in 1839, so goes the tale, by addressing the almost defeated soldiers and reproaching them with the taunt: "Must a young girl show how men must behave?" Exposing herself to the enemies by sliding out of the walls of the fortress, she exclaimed: "Where are the men of my tribe? Where are my brothers? Where are those who sang love songs to me?" (156). Startled, the soldiers came to her rescue while responding: "Be happy [messaouda], here are your brothers, here are your lovers!" (156), and won the day.
Djebar finds many useful cultural lessons in this oral tradition. First this story of unveiling, or exposure of woman's body to strange men, is not followed by the representation of a threat to her male relatives and lovers. On the contrary, it is a story of fulfillment for both men and women: woman's happiness is celebrated "in a mobility which is both improvised and dangerous, in sum creative" (157). Djebar argues that the shared happiness which exalts woman's body and her participation in the war is also due to the happy outcome of a victorious battle. Consequently, woman's voice and gaze become unthreateningly embodied in an active, sexualized figure. But when the end of the nineteenth century brought no successful end of the war for Algerians, woman's witnessing that failure was construed as a humiliating threat to men's honor and sense of self: "The scene remains, the female spectators have not moved and men start dreaming that gaze in a retrospective fear....If one could only invest that only body/spectator left, circumscribe it more in order to forget about the defeat!" (153-54). Moreover, if it is true that during the War of Independence, Algerian women exposed their bodies like Messaouda, what happened to many of them (rape, electrocuted genitals) caused an unforeseen boomerang effect on women. Paradoxically, the war heroines experienced a double repression, first by the French, then again by Algerian men, who after having denounced the tortures of their fellow female warriors, seem to be saying now, according to Djebar: "We have paid enough for this unveiling of words!" (164). The unveiling of women's tortures is apprehended as an unbearable infringement, not on women's bodies any more, but on their symbolic location within culture, which affects in turn men's own position. If, so goes the dream, that location had remained undisturbed, it would have preserved women. This construction is a dream in the sense that the "preservation" of women is mythical, not actualized pragmatically, at least never in that totalizing gesture. The effect for women, however, of the wish to preserve, or the urge to veil them, is to shut out woman's possibility of seeing and of speaking, that is, more generally, of testifying, above all about her own participation in history. Djebar and others have actively contributed to the restitution of woman's gaze and/as voice. But in fact, her reading does not suggest in the final analysis that women will be given their unrecognized due when disclosing what the "veil" covers. Instead, Djebar investigates the urge to veil what has always been in plain view or symbolically acknowledged (for example, in the "Song of Messaouda") but remains somehow unseen and unheard of (Cixous would say "invu, inouï" [Savoir 16]).
Savoir repeats passages of an earlier text of Cixous's, Messie, or is, in Derrida's words, its poetic double: "One could thus consider some passages from Messie as a poetic translation of Savoir. Unless it is the contrary. It is another version, another poem, infinitely different and yet its twin, almost contemporaneous, by the operation, by the 'miracle' and by the mourning it names" (Un Ver à Soie 56). Derrida's essay constitutes in turn a philosophical double of Cixous's Savoir. And this double session is named Voiles [Veils]. Is the kind of knowledge (savoir) involved in Cixous's investigation of her own extreme myopia or near-blindness as a veil, and of its cure by a "miraculous" laser surgery, of the same order as Diderot's inquiry in Lettre sur les aveugles à l'usage de ceux qui voient (1749)? Cixous seems to refer to that precedent when she calls one of the sections of Messie "Lettre pour l'oreille de deux aveugles" [Letter for the ear of two blind]. And Diderot's Lettre starts thus: "I was sure, Madam, that the woman blind from birth, to whom M. de Réaumur has just torn down the cataract, would not teach you what you wanted to know [savoir]....He only wanted to drop the veil in front of some eyes without importance" (79). One issue of interest to Diderot is the possibility for the blind to assess vision philosophically, which is also at the same time, poetically. In fact, he tends to distrust the judgments of those who have just recovered their sight: "I would have less confidence in the answers of someone who sees for the first time than in the discoveries of a philosopher who would have well thought on the subject in darkness; or, to speak the language of poets, who would have put out his eyes in order to know more easily how vision functions" (108). Therefore, Diderot does not look for the "truth" of vision in the "unveiling" of the eyes. He does not trust the passage from blindness to vision, or "the first time" of seeing, to disclose the mechanism of vision.
For Cixous, the interest in the passage from blindness to vision stems from what can be learned about non-seeing as much as seeing. Her insight is that non-seeing can be known, and therefore mourned, only after vision is recovered: "Seeing, there was a world which she did not nonsee any more. And as if a veil had been torn, she then felt around her heart the contraction of mourning: I have lost my myopia!" (Messie 143). No full knowledge about "vision" can be acquired, if only because vision becomes plural in Cixous: "By gaining a vision, one loses a vision" (Messie 145). Or rather, seeing depends for her on the recognition of a loss. Derrida remarks in Un Ver à Soie: "One must learn from her....that the vision of seeing....was from the origin in mourning of the unseen [invu]" (Derrida 50). In her reading of Voiles, Mireille Calle-Gruber says that "Savoir is not an unveiling, it makes veiling visible" (78). But Derrida's Un Ver à Soie, which, among other texts, embroiders on Cixous's writings, goes beyond that statement by saying that Cixous's corpus "has parted with [s'est défait] the veil, that corpus knew, from the operation of the other, how to part with veiling as much as unveiling" (Derrida 79).
To the question of or about truth (for example of vision), Derrida substitutes the thinking of the verdict, that he weaves in and out of Cixous's texts. If "verdict" links "the same word, the true of truth, or the veridicity of the veridictum....to the semantic motifs of the veil (revelation, unveiling....)" (Derrida 55), it can also be articulated, in Cixous's text, and through the event of her eye surgery, to Derrida's own thinking of the messianic: "Savoir is indebted, recognizing its debt, to an event which remains unique, forever unique, forever heterogeneous to any language, that is [à savoir] the operation which gave her her sight" (75). For Derrida, "the verdict is always from/of the other" (47), and this links the verdict to the unforeseeable unique event of the messianic: "a verdict absolutely unpredictable, absolutely, that is to say without any relation to prevision, therefore with sight. A question of life or death, but which is decided otherwise than by tearing....something like the 'veil.' This coming should come from elsewhere, in its date, like an operation from/of the other, entrusted to the other...." (Derrida 43).4
Precisely in Messie, Cixous talks of the cat/castle [chat/château] as the messianic in Derrida's sense: "One cannot take it: it/she comes. It is the mystery of what comes. It can only come" (123). Cixous already anticipates in her own text the question: "What is the relation between the chapter of the cat and the chapter of the castle?" (121). Or what is the relation of the chat/eau to vision and to the verdict about the veil?
In Messie both the cat and the castle present an impossible injunction about seeing or an inaccessible desire of vision. Facing the world, the cat "cries mute: –See see see see see see see see see see. –Ah! me too! me too! We are born to see, to want to see and not to be able to see but to have at all costs to cross the ultimate veil but where is it, is it there, stretched hangings between these continents and the Other? Or is it in my eyes?" (104)5 The castle [château] poetically figures (Kafka's) Prague, which literally names the "threshold" (43), the crossing or passage: "In order to see the castle better, she decided to be done with her myopia and without hesitating she made an appointment with the Surgeon" (117). Regaining one's sight is itself figured as a passage, a crossing –"passing from one world to another world entirely in ten minutes" (Messie 118) – and the consequence of that passage is that "the energetic and raw eye grasps the world firmly" (Messie 145). Derrida calls Savoir a poem of the touch (37), in which the eye touches (on) the world. But can the eye catch and retain what it touches or grasps?
This is the second link between the chat and the château/Prague. The law of desire means that they can be longed for but not reached, not even by the eye. The sight of Kafka's grave is in that sense exemplary: "Knowing perfectly....that one cannot see what one wants to see, I went to the cemetery to see what I could not see" (Messie 126). However, Cixous insists that the elusiveness is part of the advent, and that "one must give up" (Messie 123) catching what cannot be taken but can only give it/herself by coming unforeseeably: "She saw the link between the relation she had with the come cat (chat venu), and the relation she had with the City of Prague: she wanted to take it/her, and the City fled before her" (122). "And this is why," she brilliantly adds, "the City has a cat on its heraldic arms."
The advent of the unforeseeable is also what describes the very experience of seeing for the first time: "She had not known the day before that eyes are miraculous hands" (Savoir 16). But thinking the event "messianically" has also implications for Cixous's notion of the "passage," which is effected in non-seeing as much as in seeing, as she remarks in Savoir: "the unarrival of the visible at dawn, the passage through non-seeing, always there has been a threshold" (18). Therefore in relinquishing grasping, but not the desire of catching, Cixous is saying that one must think the passage as an interval, in its very function of interval: "In Prague I have been in the interval. Between the visible and the invisible there is something else" (Messie 125); "The relation between the thing that passes and the thing that remains has to be thought endlessly" (Messie 121).
1 The Moroccan writer Fatima Mernissi concurs that this view is still held today: "But if we are to assess correctly women's prospects and future in Muslim societies, we have to relinquish simplistic stereotypes that present fundamentalism as 'an expression of regressive medieval archaisms'" (ix).
2 Rachid Boudjedra points out the complicity of some Algerian intellectuals with Islamic fundamentalism in Lettres algériennes: "One must lift the veil on the idea that fundamentalism is necessarily populist or popular" (75). Fatima Mernissi agrees in Beyond the Veil: "Fundamentalists and unveiled women are the two groups that have emerged with definite disturbing claims and aspirations in the postcolonial era. Both have the same age range–youth–and the same educational privilege" (xi). For both Boudjedra and Mernissi, fundamentalism is viewed as a mythical construct that betrays some Muslims' profound unease about their political position in the world. As a myth, it both informs and does not reflect Muslim communities: "The ideas that we entertain about ourselves as individuals or as members of national communities are not to be confused with our pragmatic behavior" (Mernissi x); "In myth peoples experience their desires as if they were already accomplished; whereas they are not at all....This is why for me Islamic fundamentalism, for example, is a myth" (Boudjedra 55).
3 To this incarceration, she opposes Picasso's own quotation of Delacroix's painting, which is contemporaneous with Fanon's essay. Both share the same belief in progressing and progressive revolutionary history. In Picasso's "Femmes d'Alger," Delacroix's three women are displaced and represented naked, with an open door shiningly piercing the wall of the harem (Djebar 162), "as if Picasso found the truth of usual language which, in Arabic, designates the 'unveiled' as 'naked'" (163). For Djebar, women's nakedness in the painting represents "women being born again to their bodies" (163).
4 In Derrida's Ver à Soie, which I mention here too briefly, only in some of its references to Cixous, the unicity of the event is tied to that of the "tallith," which "is not a veil" (62): the tallith refers to "the One of the unique, to the singular event,the repetition of which repeats only, and this is the story/history, the "once only" of the given Law" (62). Unlike a veil, the tallith is also "first of all animal...skin touching skin" (66): "the tallith must be some living [du vivant] taken on some living worn by some living. But more precisely, and later, taken on some dead which was once living, and burying once the dead who used to be living" (66).
5 Derrida writes about Cixous that –like the cat in Cixous's text– she "veils her voice. How can one speak with a veiled voice, veiled even in the song, and in the cry?" (Derrida 61).
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