A PASSAGE TO
THE SELF: HOMOEROTIC ORIENTALISM AND
HISPANIC LIFE-WRITING
Revista
Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos
Nº
30.1 (Otoño, 2005)
Por
Robert Richmond Ellis
[Se
presenta aquí la versión en inglés de este artículo, con una breve introducción
en español, tal como se publicó originalmente]:
Se analiza en este artículo la función del
orientalismo en la representación de la identidad homosexual en las
autobiografías y ficciones autobiográficas de Augusto d´Halmar (La sombra del humo en el espejo),
Juan Goytisolo (Coto vedado y En
los reinos de Taifa), y Pedro Menchén (Te
espero en Casablanca). El homosexual
occidental desempeña un papel ambiguo en la ideología orientalista porque
subvierte la jerarquía orientalista a la vez que la reafirma. Según los textos
de d´Halmar, Goytisolo y Menchén, el homosexual occidental se identifica con la
sexualidad del amante oriental, y así parece que son iguales. Pero, en
realidad, asume una posición de superioridad cultural y racial frente al
amante. Así, pues, estos escritores refuerzan el privilegio occidental. Sin
embargo, manipulan los discursos orientalistas para desarrollar una identidad
homosexual históricamente negada en las culturas occidentales. Aunque esta identidad
es algo que el sujeto autobiográfico comparte con el amante, en última
instancia la identidad funciona para que el sujeto autobiográfico se afirme
como individuo. Si los textos de d´Halmar, Goytisolo y Menchén se distinguen de
la autobiografía tradicional, es porque no sólo reflejan una identidad
individual que ya existe, sino que también intentan crear una nueva identidad
homosexual.
The development of autobiography as a dominant literary genre and the
formulation of modern conceptions of sexuality are largely synchronic
phenomena. Modern autobiography,
produced in the context of high capitalism, presupposes the existence of a
discrete self whose meaning is revealed through reflection and rendered
tangible through linguistic representation. According to late nineteenth- and
early twentieth-century sexologists, this self is fundamentally sexual. In what is perhaps the most famous passage of
The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault explains how sexologists
conceived of male homosexuality as “a singular nature” lying “at the root of
all [one’s] actions” (43). Its essence,
they maintained, was expressed not through sexual orientation but “a certain
way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in oneself” (43). But femininity in a male is a paradoxical
essence that, when enacted through sex, functions not to endow him with being
but rather to negate what is perceived as his natural essence of masculinity. The
male homosexual, as the male incarnation of the feminine, is thus not a site of
plenitude but rather an absence that in Western theology is associated with sin
and in the modern medical/psychoanalytic disciplines with disease—both of which
(sin and disease) are tantamount to death. Homosexual autobiography, therefore,
is indeed a life-writing intended to affirm a self in often
life-threatening conditions.
Like the early
sexologists, the majority of commentators on Mediterranean and Latin American
patterns of male homosexuality tend to focus on the interplay of masculinity
and femininity in male-male sexual and affective relations. Yet gender is
certainly not the only overdeterminant of such relations. Nationality,
religion, class, and race are also significant. In the essay that follows I
look at three Spanish and Spanish-American homosexual life-writers who
interweave the gender and race dynamics of male homosexuality: the Chilean
Augusto d’Halmar and the Spaniards Juan Goytisolo and Pedro Menchén. These
writers articulate their homosexual identities in relations with North African
men—d’Halmar during the colonial period and Goytisolo and Menchén in
postcolonial settings. Their texts, I argue, both replicate and undercut racist
discourses of orientalism, while aiming to assert a homosexual identity and
achieve a kind of autobiographical self-fulfillment.
The history of modern
homosexuality is deeply embedded in the discourses of orientalism and, by
extension, empire. Western homosexuals have often regarded the distant lands of
empire as propitious for an expression of their sexuality and an exploration of
their identities. Westerners, moreover,
have long associated the non-Western world with homoeroticism. As far back as
the Crusades and throughout the early modern period, Westerners typically
justified conquest by leveling charges of sodomy against entire
populations—indigenous Americans, Muslims, East Asians—, thereby leading to the
construction of what Rudi C. Bleys has aptly termed “the geography of
perversion.” Spanish writings are replete with examples of this process, from
the diatribes of Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y
Valdés against Native Americans to Francisco Xavier’s denunciations of the
Japanese Buddhist clergy. In the modern
period, myths of the Muslim world as a place of unencumbered homoeroticism
continue to haunt the Western imaginary, as evidenced in the writings of André
Gide, and T. E. Lawrence, and in the Spanish-language context d’Halmar,
Goytisolo, and Menchén. The legacy of empire has thus primed Westerners to
homoeroticize the non-Western world.
The role of the
homosexual in orientalism might nevertheless seem anomalous since orientalism
is conventionally regarded as a uniformly masculine and, as such, heterosexual
discourse. But as Reina Lewis points out in her study of Western women and
orientalism, to assume that only men (and here I would add heterosexual men)
played a part in its development would merely reiterate a masculinist (and
heterosexist) view of history (18). It is Lewis’s contention that “gender, as a
differentiating term, was integral to the structure of that discourse and
individuals’ experience of it” (18). So too was sexuality. Like the Western
woman, the Western homosexual was a site of both dominance (his implicit
whiteness) and marginality (in his case, sexual “deviance”). But because he
differed from the heterosexual norm, he was also the same as other
homosexuals—or as Foucault puts it, he was given as “a species” (43). In this
way he was linked, in spite of the particulars of race and culture, with
innumerable “deviants” throughout the imperial world. Homosexuality as it was
constructed therefore posed a potential threat to the project of
differentiation through which colonialism and white power operated. Yet the
homosexual sameness delineated in much homoerotic orientalism (appearing as a
promise of reciprocity and a union of lovers) at times functions not to subvert
empire but surreptitiously to provide a ground on which imperialist differentiation
can actually take place. As Robert Aldrich notes in his recent treatise on colonialism
and homosexuality, the “homosexual proclivities” of Europeans abroad “led to
opposition to colonialism as well as promotion of expansion, to mutually
beneficial relationships as well as exploitation” (9).
Homoeroticism not only
complicates the role of the orientalist subject but also the identity of the
ostensible Oriental. Edward W. Said, the
pioneering theorist of orientalism, argues that the West has historically
conflated the Orient with notions of the feminine: “he [the Westerner] could penetrate,
he could wrestle with, he could give shape and meaning to the great Asiatic
mystery, as Disraeli once called it” (44; emphasis added). Yet for post-Saidian
critics such as Tom Hastings, this hardening of the masculine/feminine
dichotomy and the concomitant elision of the homoerotic is itself “a
heterocentric move that is at the least congruent with Orientalism”
(133). As the writings of Western
homosexuals reveal, the Orient configured on the body of the Westerner’s desire
is not only feminine but at times masculine or even a combination of both. Joseph A. Boone mentions various
“stereotypical colonialist tropes,” including “the beautiful brown boy, the
hypervirile Arab, [and] the wealthy Nazarene” (91). And as John MacKenzie
remarks in his critique of Said, “the artistic record of imperial culture has
in fact been one of constant change, instability, heterogeneity and sheer
porousness” (327). Orientalist discourses, he maintains, are too varied and
contradictory to allow for a “freezing of ‘the Other in a kind of basic
objecthood’” (327). For this reason, there exists no single, easily definable
homoerotic orientalism.
The texts of d’Halmar,
Goytisolo, and Menchén differ from conventional orientalism as well as
conventional autobiography. As homosexual writers, they are less interested in
salvaging a self than in creating a self that has never fully existed. What is of concern in their writing is not
merely that a life might be forgotten but, more crucially, that it might never
have happened at all. They therefore
attempt not only to utter the truth of a silenced past but to “make up” lives
and in so doing begin to make real the selves that under the regime of
heteronormativity exist only in the mode of the negative—that which never
happened, can never be spoken, has no significance, and, in the final analysis,
simply is not. From the perspective of
traditional autobiography, that is, autobiography as life “history,” their
“lives” are endowed with fictional elements. Of the three, Goytisolo’s appears
the most historical, yet his autobiographical project is all about creating a
persona. Indeed, when he seems to express himself most authentically, he has in
fact taken on a new identity. D’Halmar’s protagonist is obviously dressed up
(he even goes in costume at one point), leading some critics to speculate that
it is entirely fictional. In contrast, Menchén’s text presents itself as a
novel but reads as an autobiography. It has the narrative structure of a
traditional (albeit gay) romance, but the emphasis on the day-to-day activities
of the textual subject—the determination to tell all down to the very last
detail—might actually be interpreted as the effort of a novelist unable move
beyond the purely autobiographical.
Ultimately, what matters in these texts—and I would venture to say in
all homosexual autobiography—is how the writing subject uses them “to get a
life,” and also how they help certain readers get one too.
JOURNEYING TO THE EAST
D’Halmar wrote two travel diaries, Nirvana and La sombra del
humo en el espejo, in which he recounts a journey through Europe, North
Africa, and India as well as an intimate relationship with a young Egyptian
named Zahir. D’Halmar’s contemporaries and subsequent critics have questioned
the historicity of these texts. Nirvana
is based on a travel log that d’Halmar kept during a journey to India, where he
had been assigned the post of Chilean consul general. Several male companions and servants, including
a Zahir, are presented. In Sombra, which recounts the same journey,
these figures are consolidated into a single character, also named Zahir. When
asked by the critic Alone (Hernán Díaz Arrieta) to clarify the identity of
Zahir, d’Halmar implied that he first imagined him, after which someone like
him actually appeared in his life. Zahir
might thus be, as he says, “una anticipación” (Alone 32). He might also be a
composite of several men or merely a fantasy. Yet even though his ontological
status is uncertain, he clearly plays an ontologizing role in the life of d’Halmar. Like the historical Dahoum according to
Boone’s astute reading of Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, he is the
means through which d’Halmar “willed his own self-image into being” (98). What
is of consequence in d’Halmar’s life-writing is hence not the degree to which
persons and events replicate reality but how an orientalist homoerotics makes
possible the realization of a self.
At the outset of Sombra,
d’Halmar seems almost faceless and placeless. From the perspective
of Zahir, he has no recognizable identity: “sólo los que han dejado de ser de
ninguna parte tienen la figura que tú tienes” (Sombra 43). This lack of identity is the condition of his whiteness, which erases
(and in so doing “de-races”) itself by positing race as the indelible mark of
the oriental other. Zahir sees d’Halmar as a kind of absence, albeit one that
will come to wield considerable power over him. D’Halmar, in contrast, observes
Zahir through the categories of race, detecting in him a hybridization of “la
raza semítica” with “la negra” and “la ariana” (29). But d’Halmar not only ascribes race to Zahir;
he also regards him as childlike, graceful, and beautiful. As Sylvia Molloy writes: “D’Halmar’s preferred
erotic relation [was] that of the older man of authority with the colonized,
gender-ambiguous child—a homoerotic, pederastic version of Said’s ‘Oriental
sex’” (112). For d’Halmar, however, Zahir is also the realization of the
Platonic ideal of perfection. In keeping
with Platonic epistemology, their first encounter is a moment of recollection
rather than discovery. D’Halmar imagines having previously beheld the look of
Zahir in a premonition, and as Zahir himself later remarks, “uno cree haberte
visto ya” (43).
Zahir serves as
d’Halmar’s guide during his stay in Cairo. On one occasion, Zahir invites
d’Halmar to meet him at midnight at the foot of the Sphinx. On the afternoon
prior to their rendezvous, d’Halmar dreams that Zahir is the Sphinx, and hears
him utter a cryptic message that binds the three together: “Soy y no soy como
todo, y, como todo, tú eres y no eres” (57).
D’Halmar represents the Sphinx as the essence of femininity that he and
Zahir share as homosexuals. But precisely because they are male, this essence
threatens to negate them in their being. As a consequence, d’Halmar experiences
an intuition of death, as if his self were somehow disintegrating, and as he
makes his way toward the Sphinx he is overwhelmed by the thought that he will
be lost in the utter darkness of the desert.
When the moon rises, he sees Zahir lying in the sand dunes, with the
enigmatic eyes and vaguely smiling lips of the Sphinx. Here, Zahir appears as the quintessential
image of oriental mystery. But, he also
incarnates d’Halmar’s own potential yet unrealized self: “fascinado, [indeed
perhaps narcissistically,] me inclinaba sobre esa boca, que se movía en el
murmullo de una plegaria, de un ensueño o de un reclamo, que tal vez, ¡quién
sabe!, podría revelarme el secreto...” (60). According to the punctuation, something follows that is not said,
and the secret of Zahir remains concealed. As throughout orientalist discourse,
this secret, the truth of the inscrutable Orient, is unspeakable since only the
West can accede to the status of the true. Yet the secret of d’Halmar’s text is
not simply the mystery of the Orient but also homoerotic desire and by extension
homosexual identity. D’Halmar stops short of making this explicit and thereby
reproduces the prevailing structures of the homosexual closet and his own deep
alienation.
D’Halmar’s autobiographical self, heretofore vague and amorphous, begins
to coalesce through an assumption not of a homosexual identity but rather a
performance of the cultural identity of the beloved. While in India, he becomes
seriously ill, and as a result his skin literally falls off. He interprets this
as the external sign of his transformation into Oriental. When he returns to
the West, he leaves behind the detritus of his old self, donning a new skin as
well as a kind of oriental drag (“el fez rojo”) through which he manifests his
“alma musulmana” (127). This soul, though imaginary, functions as the essential
self he never had. Ironically, he
achieves it not merely through a process of identification but by usurping the
self of the other, whose life force wanes precisely to the extent that
d’Halmar’s increases.
In a culminating scene, d’Halmar and Zahir spend a night in a hotel in
Constantinople overlooking the Bosphorus. On this site, the geographic divide
between Europe and the East, the hierarchical difference between d’Halmar and
Zahir is crystallized. As d’Halmar
writes, Zahir
“se había acurrucado
junto a mí a la oriental, sobre las piernas dobladas, con los pies recogidos
bajo el borde de las vestiduras, y se balanceaba de atrás hacia adelante, como
los creyentes en la mezquita cuando deletrean el Al-Korán. Sólo que él buscaba mi mirada, a medida que
la suya iba ensimismándose y, muy quedo, como si temiera disipar un encanto:
—Dime, Sidi, si en tu
país todos los hombres son, como tú, zahorís.
(139)
In this delirious yet horrific passage of religious and sexual ecstasy,
Zahir bows before d’Halmar as if in the presence of a god, and in an appalling
appropriation of Islam, d’Halmar has him seek grace from his Western master by
reciting words from the Koran. In a
surprising twist, d’Halmar appears in the role of a diviner, thus corroborating
the degree to which he has assimilated through his travels Western fantasies of
the Orient. But rather than simply impose the Orient on the other, he wields it
in a way that lulls the hapless Egyptian into submission. The prostration of Zahir before d’Halmar is
not merely a private gesture but for all intents and purposes a surrender to
the West itself insofar as the power of d’Halmar, as Zahir himself realizes,
replicates that of an entire people. As a consequence, his look begins to fall
in on itself, as if d’Halmar had assumed the light that previously shone in his
eyes. This, then, prefigures his death and the moment when d’Halmar alone
remains within the discursive ken of the text.
IN THE SOTADIC ZONE1
Goytisolo advances an anti-essentialist conception of the self
throughout most of his writings, but in his explicitly autobiographical texts, Coto
vedado and En los reinos de taifa, he attempts to inscribe an
inherent homosexual identity. In so
doing he aims to exorcise once and for all his various identities as a closeted
homosexual in a heteronormative society (“fantasma,” “zombi,” “fantoche,”
“autómata,” “pelele,” “impostor,” “simulador,” “enemigo,” “otro”) and affirm what
he calls his “yo genuino” (Coto 139). In En los reinos de taifa,
the realization of this authentic self occurs through his sexual relations with
Muslim men, first in Paris (the initial site of his own self-exile) and
subsequently Morocco. Having experienced profound alienation as a homosexual in
both fascist Spain and communist Cuba, Goytisolo considers himself sensitive to
the alienation of other groups of individuals, including ethnic minorities and
in particular Muslims, with whom he ostensibly comes to identify.
After a brief but intense relationship with a French Muslim named
Mohamed, Goytisolo takes a series of Muslim lovers. His goal is to achieve a physical ideal
impossible in what he regards as his own sexually repressed, European
milieu. In his “Sotadic Zone” (first
constructed within Europe and then transposed to North Africa) Muslim men are
hypermasculine figures who use sex to objectify him physically. Goytisolo
relishes this physical objectification, but nevertheless seeks to exert control
over his lovers through his intellectual prowess: “poseído de ellos y su placer
áspero, buscaba instintivamente la manera de contrapesar mi sumisión física con
una dominación intelectual capaz de establecer el equilibrio entre los
platillos de la balanza” (Reinos 228). Ultimately, he dominates them through language, and specifically his
knowledge of French, which he uses to write letters to help them negotiate
their personal and business affairs.
Once he has established power, however, he tires of the game and moves
on. In these transitory affairs,
Goytisolo conflates masculinity and ethnicity in Muslim men and thereby
racializes the dynamics of homoeroticism. As Paul Julian Smith notes, he dares
“not admit that his ‘innate attraction’ (p. 207) [Reinos] to working
class, Arab men is based on a physical desire that hypostatizes ‘race’ as a
fixed and essential identity” (38). But in a sense Goytisolo engages in what
Tomás Almaguer has cannily labeled “colonial desires” and “class-coded lust”
(265).
At the end of En los
reinos de taifa Goytisolo travels to Morocco for an extended stay and has
an affair with an unnamed Moroccan man. He narrates the episode through a
variety of pronominal voices, but increasingly employs the third person, as if
the self of the past were continually slipping into alterity. He thus
writes: “El expatriado ha encontrado a un amigo” (Reinos 300). Although of the same age as Goytisolo, this new friend is clearly of the
working class, having spent fifteen years in the Tangier dockyards loading
boats until he lost his job and became Goytisolo’s companion. One night while
drinking Goytisolo provokes a violent outburst on the part of the Moroccan. He
does so in order to effect a cathartic destruction of the alien identities
(bourgeois, heterosexual, and Spanish) that have burdened him throughout his
life. The Moroccan strikes Goytisolo in the face (and specifically the eyes),
and makes him the object of his look: “se planta sin quitarte la vista de
encima” (Reinos 303). Whereas elsewhere in the autobiographical texts
Goytisolo suffers alienation under the gaze of the heterosexual, European male,
he is now mesmerized by the gaze of a working-class Muslim whose sexual
identity defies easy categorization within the conventional heterosexual/ homosexual
binaries of Western culture. Following the beating, Goytisolo experiences
an “esfuerzo trabajoso de levantarse, ir al baño, mirarse con incredulidad en
el espejo y descubrir un rostro que no es el tuyo” (Reinos 303). For a moment
he wobbles, both physically, in his shaken state, and discursively, through the
jarring shift in persons (“mirarse” and “el tuyo”). But despite his effort to
attain authenticity, his ideal “yo genuino” continues to elude him.
At first glance,
Goytisolo seems to subvert the prevailing ethnic and cultural hierarchy by
assuming a position of submission vis-à-vis the Moroccan. Yet he never really
relinquishes power to his “hypervirile Arab” but rather uses him, albeit
masochistically, to reposition himself in terms of his own society. When the Moroccan pleads for forgiveness,
Goytisolo rejects him: “tú quieres estar a solas, digerir lo acaecido, poner
tierra por medio, transformar humillación en levadura, furia en apoderamiento”
(Reinos 303). His ordeal will hence
become a catalyst for artistic creation. As Smith explains, the “metaphorical
fixing of identity soon cedes to a metonymic displacement. Experience will be
transmuted into writing, the written body into the writing of the body” (41). In
this writing, born from an internalization of violence that began with the
death of his mother in the Spanish Civil War, Goytisolo transforms himself from
victimized object into avenging subject and launches an attack on the
mainstream Spanish culture he so despises.
In so doing he reincarnates as writer the medieval Don Julián (the
quintessential traitor of Spanish tradition who delivered the Christian kingdom
of the Visigoths to the Moors), taking his pen as sword and language as his
field of battle.
In En los reinos de taifa homoeroticism functions neither to
affirm the ethnic/ cultural other nor to unite him and Goytisolo but instead as
a means through which Goytisolo achieves a discursive vantage point for
assailing his own cultural legacy. In
contrast to d’Halmar, who aspires to a non-Western identity, Goytisolo attempts
to assume a deeply Iberian persona through the treacherous figure of Christian
legend. As a modern day Don Julián, he
struggles to silence his own oppressors (the fascist state, the Catholic
Church, and indeed the entire heterosexual patriarchy). But as he intimates with regard to his battle
against the ever-present censor of Francoist Spain, his is a Pyrrhic victory (Reinos
25) in that the din raised by his discursive attacks muffles the sought-after
voice of gay authenticity and stymies reciprocity with the beloved. The
autobiographical self, as Goytisolo concludes, “podrá flaubertianamente
exclamar en el fervor de su empresa, confundido del todo con el felón de la
remota leyenda, don Julián c’est moi” (Reinos 309). Yet as Jo
Labanyi remarks, this final embedding of his persona in a double intertextual
reference to Reivindicación del Conde don Julián and Madame Bovary
calls into doubt the existence of a natural self on which traditional
autobiography is predicated (215). If
d’Halmar’s autobiographical enterprise affirms the self at the expense of the
oriental other, Goytisolo’s in the final analysis implies the impossibility of
any stable self-inscription whatsoever.
THIS SIDE OF PARADISE IS WHERE I WANT TO BE
Like d’Halmar’s writing, Menchén’s is difficult to classify
generically. Not only does it blur the
line separating autobiography and fiction but it melds several discourses,
including travel writing, social critique, and gay pulp fiction. Whereas
d’Halmar luxuriates in the romance of exotica, Menchén, like Goytisolo, writes
in a more serious vein. Both Menchén and
Goytisolo represent sexual and affective relations between European and North
African men, but Menchén also highlights increasing racial tensions between
native Spaniards and foreign immigrants to the Iberian Peninsula. Specifically,
his writing denounces how Westerners exploit Muslim men for sex within Morocco
and for labor within Spain. But like d’Halmar’s and Goytisolo’s, it is also a
site of self-construction.
Menchén prefaces the
main body of the text, Te espero en Casablanca, with a note to the
reader indicating that what follows differs from traditional European
narratives about Morocco. He states:
“he querido escribir, sobre todo, una historia de sentimientos (transferibles,
por tanto, a cualquier otro lugar), no un manual sobre el mundo islámico, y
menos aún he querido pintar la bonita estampa de un país exótico con palmeras y
camellos” (7). However, even a casual reading of
the text reveals the falsity of this claim to universality. The narrative is
not easily transferable, especially given its emphasis on Moroccan and Spanish
societies. Moreover, it is not, as Menchén further claims, a story of love “que
casualmente tiene su escenario en Marruecos” (7), since the real love story
actually takes places after the textual subject, Félix, has ended his Moroccan
adventure and returned to Madrid.
Te espero en
Casablanca
is divided into two parts: “Turistas en el paraíso sexual” and “A este lado del
paraíso.” The first begins with Félix and his travel companion, Manolo, arriving
in Marrakech. Félix longs to find a lover—though he in fact seems to be in love
from the beginning (ab origine, like Miguel de Unamuno’s Augusto Pérez),
simply waiting for the object of his affection to materialize. Manolo, in
contrast, is interested only in sex. He sees all Moroccan men as potential sex
partners, and what is more, considers them all to be hustlers. Félix subsequently meets Rachid, with whom he
falls in love and has an affair. Manolo is convinced that Rachid is using Félix
in order to immigrate to Spain and secure employment, and eventually he is
proved right. Félix then leaves Rachid
in Morocco, and while returning to Spain meets a Moroccan worker named
Soufiane. The second part of the narrative takes place largely in Madrid, and
in the end, despite Félix’s obsession with Rachid, he and Soufiane become
partners.
Like the orientalism of
d’Halmer’s and Goytisolo’s autobiographies, the orientalism of Te espero en
Casablanca works on several levels.
Manolo represents a homoerotic orientalism on a purely physical
level. For him, Morocco is a region of
unlimited sexual experiences. His
identity will be forged—like the anti-hero of gay Chicano writer John Rechy’s Numbers
(or indeed Casanova or Don Juan)—through a repetition of sexual acts. In his
case, however, identity will always be in process, existing only insofar as it
is performed. Unlike Manolo, Félix regards Morocco as the locus of an ideal
homosexual other through whom he will achieve self-fulfillment. His goal is not the unremitting process of
eros but stasis. What he desires is a
kind of ontological plenitude. The erotic and sentimental orientalism of these
two characters thus makes possible the expression of two different autobiographical
trajectories. If Manolo is read as an avatar of the writing subject, then the
autobiography traces the ceaseless displacement of the self. But if Félix is taken as the primary subject,
then what the text charts, as is purported in the end, is not merely a tale of
requited love but a textual hypostatization of the writing self.
As in all orientalist
writing, place is of crucial significance. Morocco, despite Menchén’s
insistence to the contrary in the preface, is a country of sun and warmth and
expansive people. Conversely, Spain is
drab and gray, and the people are cold and indifferent. When in Morocco, Félix
meets engaging men and women at every turn and is continually learning
something new. But when traveling in
Spain, he speaks to no one and learns nothing. In fact, “[e]n los
viajes por España nunca pasa nada. Nunca ocurre nada interesante” (270). “Incluso
los marroquíes,” Félix remarks, “son diferentes en España. Se muestran serios y distantes” (270). The upshot is that Morocco and
Spain both make the man (that is, the gay man), but they make him
differently. Rachid and Manolo, who
appear solely in Morocco, are physical. They are also rapacious and exploitive.
Soufiane appears solely in Spain, and like Félix is gentle and kind. As
depicted in this text, the Orient is the site of a struggle for hierarchy, achieved
through sex or money. Europe might seem similar (Soufiane, after all, is
exploited in Spain for his labor), but it is also a place wherein reciprocity
is possible. Europe is hence neither the paradise nor hell that is Morocco but,
as orientalism has always implied, the ideal human norm.2
The relationship
between Félix and Soufiane differs from that of all the other male couplings in
the text. When they meet on a bus ride
from Algeciras to Madrid, they actually talk.
Soufiane corrects what he perceives to be Félix’s stereotyped views of
Islamic culture. Félix, in turn, informs
Soufiane that he is being exploited in his job and that he should assert his
rights. This scene echoes passages in En
los reinos de taifa, except here the Spaniard is uninterested in sex and
more genuinely concerned for the well being of the Muslim. In Madrid, Félix
secures work for Soufiane but eventually Soufiane loses his job and is on the
street. In a scene just prior to their mutual expression of love, Soufiane
appears like the Moroccan beggar, Almudena, in Benito Pérez Galdós’s Misericordia,
and in a similar patois assures his Spanish sponsor: “Yo no quiere molestar [sic]”
(306), and “Yo siempre contigo. Yo muy
feliz contigo” (313).
As in most serious
travel writing, Félix’s journey abroad is in the final analysis a journey
within, and it is fitting that the narrative concludes in his home in Madrid. Though
one might expect the story to culminate specifically in the bedroom, Félix’s
most profound aim is neither sexual consummation nor love but rather the
realization of the self. In the end, Félix leaves Soufiane in the bedroom and
goes to his desk. When he looks at the computer screen, he discovers an email
from Rachid, which, after a moment’s hesitation, he deletes without
reading. Whereas the tender Soufiane is
put to sleep, the seductive Rachid is dispatched with a simple click. Both are left in a kind of discursive
darkness as the life writer finishes the narrative, shuts down the computer, and
utters a self-satisfied “¡ya está hecho!” (317). The book’s paper cover, which
for all intents and purposes portrays a male odalisque, is thus clearly a
come-on. It beckons the prurient reader with the image of a perfectly chiseled
Arab reclining on a luxurious oriental divan with legs outspread and covered
only by a swatch of red cloth. But what we ultimately discern within the field
of the text is the writing subject.
In his analysis of
colonialist literature, Abdul R. JanMohamed argues that to comprehend and
identify with the colonized other, writers from colonizing societies must
temporarily negate their own cultures. But for him this is an impossible task,
for were they to negate their cultures they would in effect negate their being,
which is a product of culture (18). Yet the being of Western homosexuals is
already negated in their cultures of origin. So, when they enter cultures in
which homoerotic practice is, at least under certain restricted conditions,
tolerated, their identification with the other leads not to a negation of their
being but a “negation of a negation” and hence a self-affirmation. In
homosexual life-writing self-affirmation in fact occurs primarily through
identification with rather than differentiation from the other. Western
ideologies (theological, medical, psychoanalytic, legal, etc.) have
historically worked to thwart such identification, and as late
twentieth-century discourses of AIDS reconfirm, the “homosexual body... can
only enter ‘public’ visibility... upon the strictly enforced condition that any
possibility of identification with it is scrupulously refused” (Watney 52). It
is precisely for this reason that Western homosexuals have often turned to
non-Western worlds (whether at home or abroad) as sites wherein a life might be
generated, both existentially and discursively.
In the texts of
d’Halmar, Goytisolo, and Menchén, the autobiographical subjects initially
identify with their lovers and thereby affirm their sexual selves. But sexual
identity as it is imagined and racial identity as it is already socially
constituted in their textual personae often work at cross purposes—rendering a
real if fleeting sense of sameness with the other while maintaining a hierarchy
of difference. The life-trajectories of the three differ according to their
larger socio-political contexts: colonialism in the case of d’Halmar, Francoism
in the case of Goytisolo, and globalization and migration in the case of Menchén.
Yet what ultimately distinguishes their lives from the lives of their lovers is
not the ostensible difference of ethnicity or culture but instead their own
historicity. Their selves, like the subjects of modern autobiography (and by
extension, the modern West), are conceived of as lives in process and projects
of becoming—despite the artificial “conclusion” of an autobiographical romance
like Menchén’s. In contrast, their lovers are depicted overall as static and
with no fully developed stories of their own.
It is in this way that they are most profoundly orientalized. To be
sure, d’Halmar, Goytisolo, and Menchén are “colored” by their experiences with
their lovers, but as life-writers they alone remain the subjects. This, then,
is the insidious side of Western syncretism, and indeed of much
autobiographical practice itself.
Robert Richmond Ellis
Occidental College
Los Angeles, California
NOTES
1. The term “Sotadic Zone” was coined by the nineteenth-century British
commentator Richard Burton to designate a vast region comprising North Africa
and the Arabian Peninsula in which, he declared, the practice of sodomy is
“popular and endemic” (qtd. in Boone 91).
2. Forster says it all in a succinct passage in A Passage to India:
“The Mediterranean is the human norm. When
men leave that exquisite lake, whether through the Bosphorus or the Pillars of
Hercules, they approach the monstrous and extraordinary; and the southern exit
leads to the strangest experience of all” (282).
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