Nazrana
Haque
Nazrana
Haque is currently pursuing M.A in English from the University of Delhi. Her areas
of Interest include Gender Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Women’s Writings,
Partition Literature.
Abstract
Malek Alloula’s book Le Colonial Harem(1981) translated as The Colonial Harem(1986) is a
postcolonial narrative that studies colonial French photographs of Algerian
women in postcards. During the colonisation of Algeria from 1830 to 1962, the
Algerian women were made to pose for photographs, either clothed or semi-naked.
For Alloula, this exercise of the French male colonial fantasy was a violation
of the Algerian women’s body and space. In Orientalism,
Said talks about the way the colonisers generated a body of knowledge about the
colonised, that represented them as inferior. The French photographs of the
Algerian women in different settings, costumes and poses are also a part of the
oriental discourse, which portrayed them as highly sexualised and uncivilised.
Alloula exposes the hypocrisy of the French male colonisers, as more than a
creation of a pseudo-knowledge about Algeria, it was a means of satisfying the
colonial male sexual fantasy. However, Alloula does not foreground the
perspective of the Algerian women and there are gaps in his narrative, leading
to a double-objectification of women. My paper shall analyse the limitations of
the visual representation of the photographs in Alloula’s narrative, which
makes the Algerian women victims of the colonial as well as postcolonial gaze.
I shall further analyse the appropriation of the tropes of the veil and the
harem in the French photographs and study the subversive aspect of the trope of
the veil in the Algerian freedom struggle. Alloula’s text does not provide an
alternative discourse to the depiction of the Algerian women and neither does
it allow the women to reclaim their narrative. Thus, this paper shall also
study some of the alternative feminist visual and literary narratives, by
Algerian artists and writers, as they explore the Algerian women’s experience
of the French colonisation of Algeria.
Keywords: French colonisation, veil, harem, postcolonial narratives,
visual culture.
Le Colonial Harem (1981) by Malek Alloula, originally published in French and
translated by Myrna Godzich and Wlad
Godzich as The Colonial Harem(1986), is a collection of essays that
analyse the photographs of Algerian women in French postcards during the French
colonisation of Algeria (1830-1962). These photographs are dated from 1900 to
1930, and Alloula reads these photographs as an exercise of French men’s sexual
fantasy of colonised Algerian women. As the French colonisers unveiled the
Algerian landscape, Alloula sees these photographs as a testimony of the
unveiling of the Algerian women. My paper shall study The Colonial Harem by Alloula, in order to problematize the French
male colonial gaze and possession of the body of the colonised Algerian women
in the photographs. Furthermore, Alloula’s project of revisiting these French
photographs of the Algerian women as a postcolonial visual narrative,
represents the Algerian women as mute victims. I shall draw upon visual
cultural theory in order to undertake a gendered analysis of the way Algerian
women are represented in the colonial photographs, and in Alloula’s postcolonial
narrative. I shall interrogate the way Alloula’s narrative disempowers the
colonised Algerian women, and explore alternative visual and literary
postcolonial feminist narratives where women reclaim their agency over their body as well as their voice
in the postcolonial archive.
Said’s Orientalism, talks about the Orient
as an European invention, “a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories
and landscapes, remarkable experiences”(1) and was manifested in the corpus of
Oriental knowledge that the colonizers generated. This Oriental knowledge has been in
circulation even today, and there is a proliferation of stereotypes against the
people of the erstwhile colonies. Alloula in The Colonial Harem, criticises this Oriental knowledge that the
French colonists created through the photographic representation of Algerian
women- either with clothes or stripped from the upper body, as a reinforcement
of the colonial stereotype of the uncontrollable sexuality of the East. He
exposes the pornographic intent of the photographs, concealed under the pretext
of the French male colonisers’ curiosity to gain knowledge about Algerian
population and its culture. Barbara Harlow in the introduction to The
Colonial Harem says , “The postcards . . .
no longer represent Algeria and the Algerian woman but rather the
Frenchman's phantasm of the Oriental female and her inaccessibility behind the
veil in the forbidden harem” (xiv). Alloula mentions the dual purpose of his book, “first, to
uncover the nature and the meaning of the colonialist gaze; then, to subvert
the stereotype that is so tenaciously attached to the bodies of women” (5).
However, he seems to be partially successful, as even though he does critique
the “humiliation” of the Algerian women at the hands of the French colonizers,
he does not necessarily subvert the stereotypes attached to the women’s body.
Alloula’s intent of circulating these old photographs in the postcolonial
times, does not undo the oppression of these women.
My essay is divided into 4 sections
- the first section, “Visual Representation of Women”, analyses the gendered
representation of women, especially in
the context of photographs; the second and third sections, “The Harem”,
and “The Veil”, deals with two important tropes associated with Algerian
women and the way it has been appropriated by the French colonisers in the
photographs and; the final section,“Feminist Criticism and Alternative
History”, deals with the feminist criticism of the French male coloniser’s gaze
as well Alloula’s revisitation of the photographs, and explores alternative
feminist postcolonial visual and literary narratives that give voice to the
colonised Algerian women.
Visual
Representation of Women
Photography as an art is based on
power relations and as Frosh points out ,“certain people are made visible to
others through the agency of a third party: photographers. This mediating
function does not, however, guarantee symmetrical power relations between
photographer,viewer and viewed . . . varying degrees of control over the
production, distribution and iconography of the images . . . gives
photographers themselves a degree of power over those they photograph (44).In
this context, the French male photographer, already at a privileged position of
being male coloniser, now wields greater power over the Algerian women he
photographs. The French photographer has a voyeuristic and active presence, as
he directs the setting and pose of the women in the photographs. The pictures
of the veiled women and the pictures of the harem taken from outside reveal the
voyeuristic gaze of the photographer (See fig.1 and fig.2( a) and (b)), while
the representations of the semi-naked women show the photographer as the
director of the photographs (See fig. 3 and fig. 4) .The veil and the
harem(which I shall explore further in the next sections) are hindrances to the
photographer, and he has to unveil and penetrate the inaccessible feminine
space of the harem in order to capture these women in his camera.
Fig. 2 (a) Moorish women at home
Fig. 2 (b) Scenes and types. Moorish woman.
Source: Trans. Godzvich, Myrna and Wlad Godzvich .The Colonial Harem by Malek Alloula.1986.
*The captions of the photographs are taken from Alloula’s The Colonial Harem.
Frosh says that photography blurs the distinction between the private and public space,“its spectacular power is central to the structuring and negotiation of the public and the private as experiential categories in a society where publicness and visibility are closely interwoven” (45) . The harem, and the veil, which Alloula sees as “mobile extensions of an imaginary harem”(13) prohibits the photographer’s gaze. Meyda Yegenoglu argues :
The desire to
penetrate the mysteries of the Orient and thereby to uncover hidden secrets
(usually expressed in the desire to lift the veil and enter into the forbidden
space of the harem) is one of the constitutive tropes of Orientalist discourse.
An obsession with a "hidden" and "concealed" Oriental life
and with the woman behind the veil and in the harem has led to an
overrepresentation of Oriental women in an effort to evade
the
lack posed by a closed "inner" space (“European Ladies in the Harem” 73).
Alloula mentions that by making Algerian women pose for him in the
photographs, he takes revenge for denying him “any access and [questioning] the
legitimacy of his desire” (14). The photographer creates his own harem in the
photographs by creating the setting of an Algerian harem, in terms of props
within his own studio and hires Algerian women to pose for him scantily clad or
semi-naked. Visual culture is gendered and as Mulvey mentions, “In a world
ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between
active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its fantasy
onto the female figure . . . women are
simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong
visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote
to-belooked-At-ness” (19). Thus, the
French photographs are not just representations of the orient by the
colonisers, that is circulated as pseudo-knowledge about the colonised, rather
a fulfillment of the French male colonisers’ sexual objectification of
colonised Algerian women. These photographs represent Algerian women decked up
with traditional jewellery and dresses but are made to reveal their breasts
(See fig. 3 and fig.4 ).
Alloula finds the photographs
overtly sexual, almost pornographic, but it is concealed in the way that the
photographers try to make the background realistic and the captions that it
carries along with it. There is no reference to the women’s bodies whatsoever,
and seem like the depiction of facts about the Algerian culture. These
photographs were a part of the French postcards, an official document, which is
easily available and circulated mostly for private conversations, the photographs
play an ambiguous role in becoming a source of information as well as a means
of personal sexual entertainment.
Coombes and Edwards in the book review of Alloula's work are critical
the medium of photography itself, "It is symptomatic of the seductive quality
of the photograph, of its status as simultaneously public witness and 'aide
memoire' for the intensely private experience
of recalling the phantasm of the colonial imaginaire
that these books, more often than not, reinstate such mythologies as much as
they disrupt them” (510). Thus, even though Alloula used the photographs to
expose the French colonial violation of Algerian women, the “sexual appeal” of
the photographs seem to betray his purpose.
Fig. 3:Young Moorish woman
Fig. 4:Southern Algeria. Dance
Source:
Trans. Godzvich, Myrna and Wlad Godzvich .The
Colonial Harem by Malek
Alloula.1986.
The Harem
Alloula mentions that the harem is
the site of French colonial curiosity, as it has figured as an important trope
in the travel accounts of the Turkish, Levant and Moghul empires (95). Harems
are female spaces, usually part of Islamic culture, where wives, concubines,
mothers, unmarried sisters, and even children of the man of the house would
live together. The space of the harem was a private space, that protects women
from the male gaze. The harems were a site of excessive sexuality and as Sarah
Rogers, mentions, “For the West, the harem became a spatial embodiment of the
various politically charged oppositions underpinning the colonial enterprise:
male/female, visibility/invisibility, East/West, and tradition/modernity”
(38). If we read the harem in the
context of the Foucauldian nexus of power and knowledge, which employs Bentham’s idea of “Panopticon”(146), the power relation between the coloniser and
the colonised seems to be reversed. In Alloula’s book, the French male
colonists who have power over the colonised Algerian women, are unable to gain
access to the harem, and the surveillance of the space is impossible (See fig.
2(a) and (b)). These are photographs that are taken from outside the harem, and
Alloula remarks, the way the Algerian feminine world “threatens him in his
being and prevents him from accomplishing himself as the gazing gaze” (14). The
harem and the women within it had to be appropriated by the French photographer
to exhibit his power over the inferior Algerian population.
Best talks about the way the harem
titillated the French male coloniser’s sexual curiosity, “To see an enclosed
society of women embodying both eroticism and paudeur(modesty). Their sexual services reserved for one man, must
have seemed the fulfillment of a maculine ideal” (876). Since the French male coloniser could not
access the harem from within, he shows the harems as prison, and the bars on
the picture reveal this (See fig. 2 (a) and (b)). The sexuality of the
semi-naked woman is inviting yet she is not directly accessible from outside
(See fig. 2(b)). So, the photographer creates the setting of the harem, and
“all the women called out one by one, who can only comply with the call (that
is what they are paid for), are required by the photographer to dress and adorn
themselves . . . they are made-up, covered with gold, to be infinitely
beautiful and desirable, dreamy and distant, submissive and regal” (Alloula
49). It retains some cultural aspects such as jewellery, outfits and dresses
which suggest the existence of a
“feigned realism” (Alloula 19).
He hires as models, a few Algerian
women, who as Alloula mentions “ impersonate, to the point of believability,
the unapproachable referent: the other
Algerian woman, absent in the photo” (17).
The photographs are thus a double appropriation of the Algerian women’s
space and body. In the absence of a counter-discourse that could challenge the
colonial depiction of the Algerian women
and their society, these photographs on postcards served as information, where
the purpose of women in the harem was seen as only sexual. “The emphasis on the
mistreatment of Muslim women by Muslim men lent the colonial project an air of
nobility; rather than a garb for power and resources,the colonial enterprise
could be recast as a progressive project that will advance the societies they
invade and occupy and ultimately improve the standing of women” (Ali 34).
Alloula in his postcolonial narrative does claim that the photographs generated
pseudo-knowledge about the way Algerian harems functioned, the various
relationships, activities etc, but does not offer an alternative discourse that challenges these representations
The Veil
The veil is another important trope
of Algerian femininity and a barrier preventing the gaze of the French male
coloniser. Yegenoglu talks about the
politics of the veil, “ the veiled woman is not simply an obstacle in the field
of visibility and control…the loss of control does not imply a mere loss of
sight, but a complete reversal of positions: her body completely invisible to
the European observer except for her eyes, the veiled woman can see without
being seen”(Colonial Fantasies 40). Alloula also mentions this, “the
photographer feels photographed; having himself become an object-to-beseen,he
loses initiative: he is dispossessed of his own gaze”(14) (See fig.1). There is
a desire for the colonisers to reveal the “phantasm” behind the veil, not just
for the fulfillment of their sexual fantasy but to reinforce their domination
over the colonised. Frantz Fanon talks about the way women were taken as the
“theme of action”. “ Unveiling this woman is revealing her beauty; it is baring
her secret, breaking her resistance, making her available for adventure. Hiding
the face is also disguising a secret . . . There is in it the will to bring
this woman within his reach, to make her a possible object of possession” (44).
Alloula critiques this objectification of the Algerian women and the
appropriation of the veil by the colonisers. The photographer makes the veiled
women, who were initially unavailable for him, pose for his camera with the
veil (See fig. 5). The photographs that Alloula catalogues shows the gradual
unveiling of the Algerian women by the French photographer. In fig. 6, the
woman is not “unveiled” ; rather the veil is drawn aside to reveal the face as
well as some part of her body.
Fig
5:Algeria. Moorish woman in city attire.
Fig 6: Kabyl woman covering herself with the haik.
Fig7(a):Beduin woman.
Fig 7(b):
Scenes and types. Young woman.
Fig 8: Scenes and types. Reclining
Moorish women.
Source: Trans. Godzvich, Myrna and Wlad Godzvich. The Colonial Harem by Malek Alloula.1986.
Alloula says that the photographs
became an anthology of different variants of bosoms, “the viewer gets to know a large variety of
bosoms: first the Beduin, then the Kabyl, then the
'Uled-Nayl, and so on”(105) (See
fig.7(a) and (b)). This was the kind of oriental knowledge that was
circulating within the French colonial
discourse. It reduced the Algerian women
to their bodies, as their bosoms became their identity. Within the space of the
French photographer’s imaginary harem, the French coloniser is free to fulfill
his sexual fantasies, thus exploring sapphism or lesbianism too (See fig. 8)
.Such explicit photographs essentialized the stereotypes of the East’s immoral
and uncontrollable sexuality, while veiling the coloniser’s own sexual desires.
Feminist Criticism and Alternative Discourse
The French colonisers seem to take
pride in unveiling the mysterious and hidden body of the Algerian women, and
the oriental knowledge that they generated. However, Alloula in countering the
colonialist gaze in his book, seems to have done a similar exercise of exposing
the Algerian women and her body to a wide reading public, without allowing the
women to reclaim their narrative or space. The Algerian women seem to have now
become the victim of a double gaze- the male coloniser and the male
postcolonial subject. Lazreg says, “Alloula dug up the colonial pictorial
archives and ‘violated’ Algerian women once more by making titillating pictures
available to a wider audience than the original. His narration cannot transcend
the contemporary thirst for the eroticization of any woman’s body” (190).
Alloula focalises on the way the
Algerian women are depicted in the photographs,
but does not go beyond what is represented. Shloss says, “The deepest source of his [
Alloula] anger seems not to derive from concern for the women who are the
subjects of these photographs,
but from "the absence of ... male society... its defeat, its irremediable
rout". The
women are mute objects in the French photographs as well as in Alloula’s book.
Alloula presumes that the French violated these Algerian women by making them
pose, but this presumption is problematic, given Alloula does not provide a
background of these women and Algerian women in general. He mentions that the
semi-naked women were lower class Algerian women (17), who were made to pose in
exchange for money. However, there were many other pictures that showed veiled
women as well as fully clothed women, who might not have been lower-class
women. Moreover, the dominant discourse might see this exercise as a violation
of women’s body, equated to a rape, but posing veiled, unveiled or semi-naked
alone or with another women, might have been an outlet of self-expression for
some women. Nawal El Saadawi, says in the context of Arab women,
"Segregation and the veil were not meant to ensure the protection of
women, but essentially that of men. And the Arab woman was not imprisoned in
the home to safeguard her body, her honour and her morals, but rather to keep
intact the honour and morals of men"(206) . Thus, in this context, since
we do not hear the voices of these women at all, Alloula’s contention that
these photographs were a violation of the Algerian women can be questioned. The
veil and the harem, both patriarchal constructs, might have been barriers and
some women might have had to conceal their lesbian relations too. The French
photographs provided them probably provided them with a sense of freedom and
sexual expression. However, these women and their lives are not focalised by
Alloula and there is a gap in his narrative.
The agency of the colonised Algerian
women seems to have been jeopardised in Alloula’s act of “writing back to the
empire”. “Evoked as the embodiment of the Algerian
nation, the Algerian woman signified the sacred, domestic space which was to be
protected and reclaimed from French colonial imposition. The intimate pact
between modernization and colonialism has often been viewed through the prism
of vision and power”
(Rogers 38). There seems to be an appropriation of the Algerian women’s
violated body, within the discourse of the decolonising mission. Alloula
remarks, “ I must have been the object of the colonial gaze” and calls his act
of writing the book, an act of exorcism (Introduction xiii). There is an appropriation of the colonised
Algerian women’s experience by Alloula,
and there is no space for them to assert their own voice and challenge the oppression.
The Algerian women’s violation is seen by Alloula as the violation of the
Algerian nation, and his act of writing in an exorcism that he should
undertake. This idea is not very
different from the colonial rhetoric that feminises the colonised nation and
sees the coloniser as a masculine power. As Yegenoglu mentions, “ In the
struggle over capturing or preserving the essence of the Algerian culture,
women came to symbolize, both for the French and for the Algerians, the
embodiment of this essence. Hence the struggle over this authentic essence was
fought over women's bodies; it was onto her veiled body that both French
colonialism and Algerian patriarchy projected their fears, desires, and
policies” (137).
Fig 9:Scene from Battle of Algiers (1966)
Source: https://www.theartblog.org/2010/07/black-and-white-and-relevant-battle-of-algiers/
Fig. 9 depicts a scene from the Gillo
Pontecorvo’s movie Battle of Algiers,
where a veiled woman conceals arms . The trope of the veil might have been a
patriarchal trope, yet Algerian women used it to subvert colonial power, when
they concealed arms and ammunition to fight the colonisers. Barbara Harlow also
mentions this in the introduction to the book This portrayal is very different from what
Alloula portrays through the French photographs. The veil had dynamic
connotations from colonisation to the decolonising movements. As Fanon mentions
:
The veil was worn because tradition demanded a rigid
separation of the sexes, but also because the occupier was bent on unveiling
Algeria. In a second phase, the mutation occurred in connection with the
Revolution . . . The veil was abandoned in the course of revolutionary action.
What had been used to block the psychological or political offensives of the
occupier became a means, an instrument. The veil helped the Algerian woman to
meet the new problems created by the struggle (63).
Alloula provides a very narrow understanding
of the veil and does not see the active role that women played in the freedom
struggle and not merely passive victims to oppression. There is a need to
generate an alternative narrative history for the Algerian women, one that not
simply exposes the victimisation by the French colonisers but also asserts the
women’s agency over their own body and identity. Algerian women were active in
the struggle against French colonisation, a large number of women joined the
National Liberation Front, an armed guerrilla band, yet this history has been
erased.
Houria Niati, an Algerian woman painter,
problematized the French painter Delacroix’s painting of “Women of Algiers in
Their Apartment”(1834) and recreated
his painting after a century and named
it “No to Torture”(1982) (See fig. 10( a) and (b)). Niati reworked
Delacroix’s painting in an abstract form, where the sensual poses of the women
remain, but the faces are crossed or
prison bars are painted, suggesting the torture that the Algerian women
were subjected to during the French-Algerian war. “Removing the figures' clothing
and jewellery, Niati builds up the figural bodies with thickly applied paint,
and indicates a sense of corporeality through roughly defined color
transitions” (Rogers
38). Harlow also discusses alternative
feminist narratives and mentions contemporary women writers such as Fatima
Mernissi's Fadela M’rabet, and Assia Djebar. The works of these writers, Harlow
states “addressed not only to the former occupiers Algeria but also to those
responsible for the present condition of the Algerian woman, often referred to
as the second of 'two colonialisms'” (xxii). The perspective of Algerian women
during the Battle of Algiers, has been focalised in Assia Djebar’s novel, L’amour, la fantasia (1985), translated as Fantasia:
An Algerian Cavalcade. Djebar, an Algerian woman author, weaves together
her own experiences of growing up in colonial Algeria with the oral accounts of
Algerian women who participated in the Algerian freedom struggle from 1954 to
1962. Djamila Débêche, another Algerian woman author, was known for her
writings on Algerian women. Her novel, Aziza
(1955), created furore and was branded as an anti-nationalist text as it
was considered to be supportive of French colonialism. Débêche’s novel explored
the conflicts of tradition and modernity in Algeria through the female
protagonist’s perspective, and critiqued the institution of marriage as
oppressive for women (Youcef 160).Thus, Algerian women writers, as well as
artists have drawn out alternative histories of Algerian women in their works,
that depict women’s condition in both colonial and postcolonial Algeria, and
need to be included within the canon of Algerian postcolonial writings.
Fig
10(a): Eugène Delacroix, Women of Algiers
in their Apartment (1834)
Fig 10(b): Houria Niati, No To Torture (1982)
Source: Sarah Rogers,
“Houria Niati’s "No To
Torture": A Modernist Reconfiguration of Delacroix’s' "Women of
Algiers in their Apartment"”. 2002.
The representation of Algerian women
in Malek Alloula’s book, might be seen as a decolonising project, as it is able
to expose the French male colonisers’ dehumanising sexual fantasy, validated by
the colonial civilising mission. Yet, it fails to provide a counter-history to
the French colonisation through Algerian women’s perspective. We are not led
into the social background or the psyche of the women, and their experiences of
posing for these photographs are not foregrounded. Imagining the Algerian
women’s body as the body of the Algerian nation, again objectifies women,
ignoring their victimisation, desires and the active role that they played in
the French-Algerian war. Hence, alternative postcolonial feminist archive needs
to be generated that not only challenges the coloniser’s narrative but also
establishes the colonised women as active agents of their body, identity and
representation.
Works
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