chlamor
10-17-2007, 07:21 PM
With the publication in France of his new book Decolonization and the Decolonized in 2004, Memmi entered a heated national debate. The book had a cool reception from the established French intellectual community, but it hit a responsive chord among segments of the French public and a small number of thinkers who have been widely called "French-Jewish intellectuals," including Bernard Henri Lévi, Alain Finkielkraut, Bernard Kouchner, and André Gluckmann, all of whom at one point or another have taken a pro-Iraqi war position or have been critical of Muslim culture. The moniker is misleading since it tends to lump under one broad category Jews whose convictions and political ideas differ substantially; nevertheless, the label has stuck out of journalistic laziness and implicit anti-Semitism. Michael Shurkin, writing for the Jewish American magazine Zeek (2006), calls the "French-Jewish intellectuals" neo-conservatives in the sense that like many of the early American neo-conservatives they have abandoned the left and are now at the forefront of culturally conservative discourse. In France, this discourse places great emphasis on secular values and the threat that Islam and Islamism pose to liberal culture.
For many French citizens headscarves in public schools became a sign of the undermining of a French national identity. The recent French law prohibiting the wearing of the hijab and other "oversized" religious symbols in public schools, as well as the inflammatory remarks of the tough talking French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy (now running for president as a candidate for the conservative Union for a Popular Movement party) who described rioters in poor immigrant neighborhoods as "scum," are indicative of the volatile mood of French society. For a number of years intellectuals in France have also been engaged in a debate about the coherence of a national identity and one argument has always been that to press the claims of minorities and immigrants onto the main core of French identity would be to dislodge traditional authority rooted in Enlightenment liberal values in favour of a new and possibly fractious identity. Yet never was this sense of compelling unitary national identity stronger than at the time of the nineteenth century during the age of Empire. Throughout this period a rigid division was set up between European colonizers and non-European colonized peoples which maintained a strict cultural hierarchy between whites and nonwhites, between the colonized and the colonized. It is this asymmetry of power which Fanon analyzed as the Manicheanism of colonial rule that enables the persistence of a stable national identity at home and of an inferior cultural identity for the colony.
In the postcolonial world, and France especially, this duality has resurfaced as a struggle between secular democracy and Muslim orthodoxy. The popular press, along with some high profile public intellectuals, have cast this conflict as a mighty battle where universal Enlightenment values are under attack by religious particularism, but as usual there is more to this story. The debate is fascinating to watch because its lessons have a direct impact on Canadian and Québec politics of multiculturalism and accommodation to immigrant religious values. Beyond that, it underscores the rhetorical strategies of Eurocentrism and, perhaps more importantly, the fear and anxieties of western societies trying to accommodate new immigrants who are themselves coming to terms both with the allure of the west and its disenchantments.
Decolonialization and the Decolonized
Decolonization and the Decolonized is composed of two main narratives, one about decolonialization, the other about immigration. Memmi refers to them as "descriptive portraits" and they are vivid, easily recognizable and seductive ideal types. His arguments are stated boldly and his authorial voice is free from idling apprehension. In every page one is reminded of the presence of a forceful intelligence, but also a consolidating intelligence that organizes large swaths of life and experience under a set of highly selective assumptions. Memmi relies heavily on the construction of a singular collective personality, as indicated by such phrases as "the Arab world" and the "Arab mind," on the metaphors of sickness and health, and on the Nietzschean psychology of resentment, all skillfully used to pathologize the "other." Memmi is not (and this is what makes the book interesting) a reactionary or xenophobe and, unlike many American neo-conservaives who have made a political alliance with Christian fundamentalists, he is a secular humanist who values reason, technology, science, and the critical spirit. He cherishes European cultural and scientific achievement but with Splenglerian gloom also feels the decline of the West is nigh due to what he calls the "Trojan horse" of Islamic immigration, and the skeptical and blasé attitudes of an exhausted Europe.
Memmi recognizes that decolonized countries have been at the short end of history's stick but he refuses to make history an excuse for self-pity. The decolonized, he writes, find fault in everyone but themselves: It is the fault of history, or of whites, but as long as the decolonized do not free themselves from such evasions (he calls it dolorism, the tendency to exaggerate one's pain) "they will be unable to correctly analyze their conditions and act accordingly" (19). Decolonization, he argues, has has been largely disastrous. It has not ended violence or the oppression of women. Border disputes continue to rage in former colonial states; the ills of poverty have not been addressed, while the intellectuals who championed colonial independence have grown timid or silent. The end of colonization should have brought freedom and prosperity, the use of its recovered language should allowed native culture to flourish. But instead of creating a renewed culture, a new forward-looking society with greater freedoms, employment and widespread education for its population, decolonialization has given rise to an old familiar story of tyrants and religious zealots eager to assert their retrograde convictions.
In nearly all Arab-Muslim nations, notes Memmi, democracy has never been tried or has been pushed aside after unsuccessful experiments while diversions are used to disarm resentments and prevent revolt. In Algeria, fundamentalists won at the ballot box and the military had to intervene and annul the elections. In Egypt, where democracy has never been fully tried, minimal liberties are eroded by a fearful government trying to dampen a fundamentalist resurgence. Tunisia and Libya are in the hands of strongmen who after a few timid efforts at reform, subsided into autocratic rule and cynically used religion to control its population. Meanwhile American allies like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the oil emirates are hard pressed to keep up the pretense of being democratic.
The wealthy new rulers want to distract the people and convince them that their poverty is inevitably the result of fate or a foreign plot, and conveniently the Israeli-Palestinian struggle is used to unite a fragmented Arab-Muslim world. "[T]he misfortune of the Arabs," writes Memmi, "does not arise from the existence of Israeleven if the country didn't exist, none of their [the Arabs] problems would be resolved..." (25). The Palestinian question "is legitimate but minor. It is a part of a trap developed by the privileged to maintain their people in a state of subjection and confusion" (29). The confusion and powerlessness of Arab-Muslims creates a dysfunctional culture conducive to terrorism and suicide bombers. These are the products of a sick society and of a people who feel trapped by circumstances beyond their control. "To employ the language of medicine," adds Memmi clinically, "we can say that Arab-Muslim society suffers from a serious depressive syndrome that prevents it from seeing any way out of the current situation" (65).
Reserving his most searing critique for religion and intellectuals, Memmi asks: "Why has decolonization not succeeded in separating the religious from the profane? In freeing critical thinking, the necessary condition for technological and scientific renewal" (21). Memmi's stand on religion is contradictory at best. On the one hand, he laments the fact that the Muslim world has not produced any moderates. Where are the moderate Muslims? he admonishes. On the other hand, he does not think that even a moderate religious position is possible. "All religions are intolerant, exclusive, restrictive, and sometimes violent. The conception of a 'moderate Islam,' which some willingly defend, is misguided: there is no such thing as a moderate religion" (34). Memmi is looking for a strong willed and critical individual. "Are there no independent minds in the vast Muslim world? He asks. "Is there no one who will play the part of Voltaire or Nietzsche and criticize traditional thinkers or even--horror of horrors-Holy Scripture? (35)" Memmi does not hear such a voice in the Arab-Muslim world, least of all in its intellectuals who are accused of being "democratic and tolerant abroad but becoming obedient children once they've return to their native soil" (33). Even the literature of the ex-colonizer has become guarded and nostalgic, preferring to focus on some idealized folkloric past than on the frustrations and oppressions of the present.
Immigration and the Decline of the Western National Identity
Memmi's portrait of decolonized nations as resigned, betrayed, sick, and open to mystic effusions and nostalgia is complemented by another about the decolonized subject as rebellious, resentful, and prone to petty criminality. It is perhaps not surprising that he should begin this section with a discussion of immigration as a "weapon" or a "bargaining chip" for the leaders of decolonized nations. The image of Fidel Castro emptying the jails of Cuba, thus promoting a massive exodus from the island and in the process ridding himself of political enemies and criminal elements, is called to mind. In Memmi's scenario the role of Fidel Castro is played by Colonel Khadafi of Libya, who uses immigration as a way of pursuing his war against the West by allowing his nation to be a gathering place for "Turks, Nigerians, Somalis, Moroccans" (78), who are then piled into small boats for the dangerous and illegal crossing to Europe.
The problem with illegal immigration, says Memmi quite correctly, is that it denies the concept of territory and national borders and increases the sense of anxiety on the part of the majority of the population which then votes for increasingly right-wing candidates. Legal immigrants of former Muslim-Arab colonies present yet another problem, for these carry with them, argues Memmi, a psychological baggage of resentment against the colonizing West. Powerless to achieve their aspirations at home, they make a decision and hope for a better life in the former colonizing country where they perform menial jobs and come face to face with modernity.
The immigrant knows that he or she will never return home and has reached an accommodation of sorts with the host country. But the children of immigrants are stuck in a double identity. They assert, claims Memmi, their Frenchness just as easily as they claim "affiliation with Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia," and they do so in order to "provoke." They are rebels who do not know what to do with their own rebellion and have doubts about their future. If the French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy calls them "scum," Memmi analyses them as "Zombies" suspended in a form of arrested development. They are unstable, agitated, in conflict with both their elders and themselves. They reject education as well as the resigned life of their parents and seek a new model, preferably a subculture favoured by African-Americans, so hip hop, rap, tagging, piercing, tattoos, baggy pants, cornrow hairstyles, and backward baseball caps have become their signs of revolt. These are not fashion, but signs of self-inflation and importance. There may have been no major terrorism in France but, he suggests, the rise of a rebellious subculture among Arab-Muslim youths as well as in the general level of delinquency is tantamount to another form of attack.
Fearing that tolerance has weakened Europe and that France no longer believes in the primacy of its values and culture, Memmi conjures up a final scarifying scenario. Immigrants, the old filled with resentment, the young deracinated and rebellious, look for answers in the totalizing system of Islam, which "is not only a religion, it is a culture and a civilization that encompasses the social even the political" (127). Mixed marriages bring new converts to Islam which swells its population at a time when European and French demographics are heading down. The result is the kind of argument that is being popularized in the United States by writers like Bruce Bawer (2006), who suggests that Europe cannot ignore the clash of civilizations within its own borders because it leads to knee-jerk hatred towards the U.S. and Israel, and to the rise of virulent anti-immigrant nationalism. Memmi does not stress the nationalist threat but the message is in many ways similar. Immigrants represent a kind of Trojan Horse, "its belly filled with combatants who, on a signal from without, spread through the city to open the gates to the assailant" (126). The French nation has been weakened from within because it no longer has the civic pride to defend its values and is promoting an easygoing leniency towards the very group whose religious orthodoxy is bent on the destruction of liberalism and civic rights.
<snip>
http://www.cjsonline.ca/reviews/decolonized.html
Albert Memmi- What an asshole.
For many French citizens headscarves in public schools became a sign of the undermining of a French national identity. The recent French law prohibiting the wearing of the hijab and other "oversized" religious symbols in public schools, as well as the inflammatory remarks of the tough talking French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy (now running for president as a candidate for the conservative Union for a Popular Movement party) who described rioters in poor immigrant neighborhoods as "scum," are indicative of the volatile mood of French society. For a number of years intellectuals in France have also been engaged in a debate about the coherence of a national identity and one argument has always been that to press the claims of minorities and immigrants onto the main core of French identity would be to dislodge traditional authority rooted in Enlightenment liberal values in favour of a new and possibly fractious identity. Yet never was this sense of compelling unitary national identity stronger than at the time of the nineteenth century during the age of Empire. Throughout this period a rigid division was set up between European colonizers and non-European colonized peoples which maintained a strict cultural hierarchy between whites and nonwhites, between the colonized and the colonized. It is this asymmetry of power which Fanon analyzed as the Manicheanism of colonial rule that enables the persistence of a stable national identity at home and of an inferior cultural identity for the colony.
In the postcolonial world, and France especially, this duality has resurfaced as a struggle between secular democracy and Muslim orthodoxy. The popular press, along with some high profile public intellectuals, have cast this conflict as a mighty battle where universal Enlightenment values are under attack by religious particularism, but as usual there is more to this story. The debate is fascinating to watch because its lessons have a direct impact on Canadian and Québec politics of multiculturalism and accommodation to immigrant religious values. Beyond that, it underscores the rhetorical strategies of Eurocentrism and, perhaps more importantly, the fear and anxieties of western societies trying to accommodate new immigrants who are themselves coming to terms both with the allure of the west and its disenchantments.
Decolonialization and the Decolonized
Decolonization and the Decolonized is composed of two main narratives, one about decolonialization, the other about immigration. Memmi refers to them as "descriptive portraits" and they are vivid, easily recognizable and seductive ideal types. His arguments are stated boldly and his authorial voice is free from idling apprehension. In every page one is reminded of the presence of a forceful intelligence, but also a consolidating intelligence that organizes large swaths of life and experience under a set of highly selective assumptions. Memmi relies heavily on the construction of a singular collective personality, as indicated by such phrases as "the Arab world" and the "Arab mind," on the metaphors of sickness and health, and on the Nietzschean psychology of resentment, all skillfully used to pathologize the "other." Memmi is not (and this is what makes the book interesting) a reactionary or xenophobe and, unlike many American neo-conservaives who have made a political alliance with Christian fundamentalists, he is a secular humanist who values reason, technology, science, and the critical spirit. He cherishes European cultural and scientific achievement but with Splenglerian gloom also feels the decline of the West is nigh due to what he calls the "Trojan horse" of Islamic immigration, and the skeptical and blasé attitudes of an exhausted Europe.
Memmi recognizes that decolonized countries have been at the short end of history's stick but he refuses to make history an excuse for self-pity. The decolonized, he writes, find fault in everyone but themselves: It is the fault of history, or of whites, but as long as the decolonized do not free themselves from such evasions (he calls it dolorism, the tendency to exaggerate one's pain) "they will be unable to correctly analyze their conditions and act accordingly" (19). Decolonization, he argues, has has been largely disastrous. It has not ended violence or the oppression of women. Border disputes continue to rage in former colonial states; the ills of poverty have not been addressed, while the intellectuals who championed colonial independence have grown timid or silent. The end of colonization should have brought freedom and prosperity, the use of its recovered language should allowed native culture to flourish. But instead of creating a renewed culture, a new forward-looking society with greater freedoms, employment and widespread education for its population, decolonialization has given rise to an old familiar story of tyrants and religious zealots eager to assert their retrograde convictions.
In nearly all Arab-Muslim nations, notes Memmi, democracy has never been tried or has been pushed aside after unsuccessful experiments while diversions are used to disarm resentments and prevent revolt. In Algeria, fundamentalists won at the ballot box and the military had to intervene and annul the elections. In Egypt, where democracy has never been fully tried, minimal liberties are eroded by a fearful government trying to dampen a fundamentalist resurgence. Tunisia and Libya are in the hands of strongmen who after a few timid efforts at reform, subsided into autocratic rule and cynically used religion to control its population. Meanwhile American allies like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the oil emirates are hard pressed to keep up the pretense of being democratic.
The wealthy new rulers want to distract the people and convince them that their poverty is inevitably the result of fate or a foreign plot, and conveniently the Israeli-Palestinian struggle is used to unite a fragmented Arab-Muslim world. "[T]he misfortune of the Arabs," writes Memmi, "does not arise from the existence of Israeleven if the country didn't exist, none of their [the Arabs] problems would be resolved..." (25). The Palestinian question "is legitimate but minor. It is a part of a trap developed by the privileged to maintain their people in a state of subjection and confusion" (29). The confusion and powerlessness of Arab-Muslims creates a dysfunctional culture conducive to terrorism and suicide bombers. These are the products of a sick society and of a people who feel trapped by circumstances beyond their control. "To employ the language of medicine," adds Memmi clinically, "we can say that Arab-Muslim society suffers from a serious depressive syndrome that prevents it from seeing any way out of the current situation" (65).
Reserving his most searing critique for religion and intellectuals, Memmi asks: "Why has decolonization not succeeded in separating the religious from the profane? In freeing critical thinking, the necessary condition for technological and scientific renewal" (21). Memmi's stand on religion is contradictory at best. On the one hand, he laments the fact that the Muslim world has not produced any moderates. Where are the moderate Muslims? he admonishes. On the other hand, he does not think that even a moderate religious position is possible. "All religions are intolerant, exclusive, restrictive, and sometimes violent. The conception of a 'moderate Islam,' which some willingly defend, is misguided: there is no such thing as a moderate religion" (34). Memmi is looking for a strong willed and critical individual. "Are there no independent minds in the vast Muslim world? He asks. "Is there no one who will play the part of Voltaire or Nietzsche and criticize traditional thinkers or even--horror of horrors-Holy Scripture? (35)" Memmi does not hear such a voice in the Arab-Muslim world, least of all in its intellectuals who are accused of being "democratic and tolerant abroad but becoming obedient children once they've return to their native soil" (33). Even the literature of the ex-colonizer has become guarded and nostalgic, preferring to focus on some idealized folkloric past than on the frustrations and oppressions of the present.
Immigration and the Decline of the Western National Identity
Memmi's portrait of decolonized nations as resigned, betrayed, sick, and open to mystic effusions and nostalgia is complemented by another about the decolonized subject as rebellious, resentful, and prone to petty criminality. It is perhaps not surprising that he should begin this section with a discussion of immigration as a "weapon" or a "bargaining chip" for the leaders of decolonized nations. The image of Fidel Castro emptying the jails of Cuba, thus promoting a massive exodus from the island and in the process ridding himself of political enemies and criminal elements, is called to mind. In Memmi's scenario the role of Fidel Castro is played by Colonel Khadafi of Libya, who uses immigration as a way of pursuing his war against the West by allowing his nation to be a gathering place for "Turks, Nigerians, Somalis, Moroccans" (78), who are then piled into small boats for the dangerous and illegal crossing to Europe.
The problem with illegal immigration, says Memmi quite correctly, is that it denies the concept of territory and national borders and increases the sense of anxiety on the part of the majority of the population which then votes for increasingly right-wing candidates. Legal immigrants of former Muslim-Arab colonies present yet another problem, for these carry with them, argues Memmi, a psychological baggage of resentment against the colonizing West. Powerless to achieve their aspirations at home, they make a decision and hope for a better life in the former colonizing country where they perform menial jobs and come face to face with modernity.
The immigrant knows that he or she will never return home and has reached an accommodation of sorts with the host country. But the children of immigrants are stuck in a double identity. They assert, claims Memmi, their Frenchness just as easily as they claim "affiliation with Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia," and they do so in order to "provoke." They are rebels who do not know what to do with their own rebellion and have doubts about their future. If the French interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy calls them "scum," Memmi analyses them as "Zombies" suspended in a form of arrested development. They are unstable, agitated, in conflict with both their elders and themselves. They reject education as well as the resigned life of their parents and seek a new model, preferably a subculture favoured by African-Americans, so hip hop, rap, tagging, piercing, tattoos, baggy pants, cornrow hairstyles, and backward baseball caps have become their signs of revolt. These are not fashion, but signs of self-inflation and importance. There may have been no major terrorism in France but, he suggests, the rise of a rebellious subculture among Arab-Muslim youths as well as in the general level of delinquency is tantamount to another form of attack.
Fearing that tolerance has weakened Europe and that France no longer believes in the primacy of its values and culture, Memmi conjures up a final scarifying scenario. Immigrants, the old filled with resentment, the young deracinated and rebellious, look for answers in the totalizing system of Islam, which "is not only a religion, it is a culture and a civilization that encompasses the social even the political" (127). Mixed marriages bring new converts to Islam which swells its population at a time when European and French demographics are heading down. The result is the kind of argument that is being popularized in the United States by writers like Bruce Bawer (2006), who suggests that Europe cannot ignore the clash of civilizations within its own borders because it leads to knee-jerk hatred towards the U.S. and Israel, and to the rise of virulent anti-immigrant nationalism. Memmi does not stress the nationalist threat but the message is in many ways similar. Immigrants represent a kind of Trojan Horse, "its belly filled with combatants who, on a signal from without, spread through the city to open the gates to the assailant" (126). The French nation has been weakened from within because it no longer has the civic pride to defend its values and is promoting an easygoing leniency towards the very group whose religious orthodoxy is bent on the destruction of liberalism and civic rights.
<snip>
http://www.cjsonline.ca/reviews/decolonized.html
Albert Memmi- What an asshole.