SOURCE: Mehta, Brinda. “Alienation, Dispossession, and the Immigrant Experience in Tahar Ben Jelloun's Les Yeux baissés.” French Review 68, no. 1 (October 1994): 79-91.

[In the following essay, Mehta explores how Ben Jelloun relates the immigrant experience through the eyes of his female protagonist in Les Yeux baissés.]

Immigration and its psycho social ramifications constitute a recurrent theme in contemporary Maghrebian fiction written in French. The literary esthetics of Boudjedra (Topographie idéale pour une agression caractérisée), Charïbi (Les Boucs), Feraoun (La Terre et le sang), and Ben Jelloun (La Réclusion solitaire), among others, have focused on the annihilating effects of immigration on the individual's search for selfhood in an alien country. Systematically marginalized, dispossessed, and devitalized by the constraining politics of the host country with respect to its immigrant populations, the immigrant is soon found to be a prisoner of alterity, trapped in the specular logic of the Other. The unilateral nature of specular representation is based on the principles of negativity, exclusion, and closure within a repressive and restrictive system. To reflect this specularity, in an attempt to deflect its specificity, the Maghrebian novel on immigration situates itself within the parameters of a tragic poetic-realism which provides different levels of meaning. Serving as a palimpsest to project the writer's preoccupation with the complexities of immigration as a device for literary production on one hand, it is at the same time inscribed in a deeply rooted social reality based on observation and careful documentation. The interplay of fact and fiction becomes a major narrative device punctuated by a progressively symbolic, quasi-hallucinatory style, interspersed with passages that reflect the actual reality of North African immigrants in France. This multi-layered level of consciousness, aimed at uncovering or positing certain universal truths concerning the condition of immigrants in the host country, becomes a strategy for bridging the gap between the irreconcilable, the conflicting cultural, social, political, and religious ideologies of the resident alien and the citizen.

The immigrant's story begins with an outward-bound quest in search of a new order capable of transcending existing patterns of being. The transformative journey of the immigrant necessitates the acquisition of a particular vision aimed at destabilizing the status quo to create a new space (this “troisième lieu” evoked by Ben Jelloun in Les Yeux baissés), where that person can function as an autonomous agent, independent of homeland and adopted land. In other words, the immigrant embarks on a neo-mythic quest of self-actualization, an important search for self, or, an uncovering of a new self in a three-dimensional space which lies beyond the transcendence of the traumatic experiences of immigration and the effective assimilation of the new culture. This quest is a complicated and arduous one, involving a losing battle against the unilateral nature of effective assimilation which disfavors the immigrant through an absorbing of mental and physical capacities, leaving him or her in an existential vacuum.

To the best of my knowledge, most of the Moroccan novels of and on immigration have dealt with the trials and tribulations of the hero's efforts to assimilate and forge a new identity in France. These novels have focused on the defensive techniques adopted to cope with the male immigrant's new situation of abjection. These strategies have either been romantic/erotic flights of fantasy as evinced by the protagonist of Ben Jelloun's La Réclusion solitaire who tries to overcome feelings of sexual frustration and isolation by escaping into “des tiroirs honteux” from where he conjures “compensatory” images to appease his unfulfilled sexual drives; or, on the other hand, they have been direct actions to combat alienation and displacement in the form of violence, neurosis, and mental inadaptation as in the case of Charïbi's Les Boucs. However, in Les Yeux baissés, Ben Jelloun presents the immigrant experience from the point of view of a young Berber girl living in the small village of Imiltanout, located in southern Morocco.

The choice of a female protagonist amid a corpus of male-oriented literary representations adds an interesting dimension to the portrait of the immigrant. The search for self is complicated by the introduction of a female protagonist who has to embark on a duplicitous journey as an immigrant, and more so, as a woman from a traditional non-Western heritage to an alien Western reality. The female immigrant is the victim of a double alterity obliging her to come to terms with two levels of strangeness, involving her in a search that is far more complex than that of her male counterpart. While both hero and heroine undergo a primeval splitting of self in an effort to cope with their new life while simultaneously remaining faithful to their North African roots, the female, on the other hand, suffers several layers of irreparable splitting, rendering the process of adaptation virtually impossible. Richard Derderian attributes this disparity in levels of adaptation to the double standard that exists within the traditional North African family where men compel women to adhere to traditional gender-role categorizations which they themselves reject in the name of assimilation (Derderian). This disparity is intensified by the absence of a strong maternal influence, a feminine alter-ego of positive identification, due to a dislocation of the mother's authority by the father, thereby creating an aphasic void in the specificity of female (self)-representation. The protagonist of Les Yeux baissés is inscribed within the confines of these realities, beginning her voyage at a disadvantage which suggests an abortive attempt at self-realization. Handicapped even before the commencement of her journey, she will nevertheless try to affirm her status as a subject of representation by breaking stereotypes, undermining the restrictions imposed by confined, sequestered space through a transgression of the public and the private, and by questioning the viability of man-made traditions aimed at the privation and marginalization of women. In other words, she will refuse to remain passive and non-resistant to the status quo. For the protagonist, subjectivity is created through rupture, through a dismantling of structures and institutions aimed at petrifying or fixing her status as an object of otherness personified in her female-immigrant status. She states: “Je voulais être celle par qui la rupture arrive.”¹

Rupture is a subversive technique based on an active process to establish self-autonomy. Autonomy is a prerequisite to any process of individuation. I emphasize its pertinence to the situation of the protagonist who finds herself in a state of symbolic orphanhood, wrenched prematurely from the mother(land) and distanced simultaneously from the “absent” father who has already emigrated to France, creating a situation where, in an imaginary letter, the father states: “Les circonstances ont fait que nous ne nous connaissons pas beaucoup” (93). In this paper, I would like to show how the protagonist's search for self is a symbolic one aimed at finding and identifying with the “lost” mother image, the archaic source of identification for the girl who attempts to capture the primacy of pre-œdipal space, characterized by the intensity of the mother-daughter relationship. Her search for self inscribes itself within the parameters of a search for transcendent, pre-œdipal space which, however, remains elusive, inaccessible: “C'était le bout du monde, l'autre côté de la nuit, l'inaccessible” (27). The orphaned or dispossessed state of the protagonist is the leitmotiv of the text evidenced by the fact that, with one exception, she remains nameless throughout the narration. The absence of the proper name which establishes identity and legitimacy places her on the level of symbolic or token representation which detracts from wholeness. The negation of the “I” is based on the success of the subject-object dialectic which positions women as primordial lack and absence, a deflection of the male norm of autonomy and self-reflexivity.

Although the protagonist is confined to a textual subject-lessness, she tries to upset this disequilibrium by naming herself. The reader receives an insight into the ritualistic act of naming when the protagonist transliterates a letter received from the father in France. It is important to mention that she has not acquired the necessary reading skills at this point to interpret effectively the contents of the letter; hence, she tries to re-create reality through a transferral of her own subjective reality onto the piece of paper (28). In this way, Fathma can subvert her subjectlessness through a process of transformation where she manipulates situations to her own advantage. There are two levels of subjectivity in the text. A prescribed, socially convened definition of subjectivity that excludes women and, an inner, psychologically impelled subjectivity that is a woman-centered strategy of resistance to subvert conventionality and the accepted order of things. This essay will also show how the two differing perceptions of subjectivity, while minimally positing the protagonist as an autonomous agent, will ultimately subsume her entirely to the dictates of the larger, socially organized sense of subjectivity which has always worked toward female disenfranchisement.

Although, at first glance, the protagonist appears to be like any other young girl of her age, she is nevertheless endowed with certain exceptional qualities that underline her difference, or more aptly, her uniqueness. In fact, the entire novel is dedicated to the enumeration of these differences which set her apart from her peers. Hence, her selection as the redeemer of her accursed village, as the chosen one, is not a coincidence. Very early in the novel, the protagonist herself stresses her position of difference by stating: “Je ne suis pas dupe … Moi, non seulement je comprenais tout, mais, en plus, je ne restais pas muette et passive” (15). Guardian of a precious secret, this “trésor caché dans la montagne” (9), which should lead to the ultimate salvation of her village, the girl is also presented as a clairvoyant who will use her powers of observation and introspection to embark on a dual neo-mythical quest aimed at discovery and self-definition.

The frequent references in the text to the nature and function of the eyes testify to the importance of visual primacy in any voyage of discovery. In direct opposition to the title, Les Yeux baissés, which suggests a certain attitude of deference, passivity, and discretion, the protagonist is depicted as using her eyes as instruments of contemplation: “juste. … regarder. … observer. … mesurer” (15). This reflective, contemplative, and scrutinizing stance breaks away from more traditional representations of women's eyes as instruments of seduction and deception. The protagonist is quick to undermine this limited representation by stating: “Tout est dans les yeux” (14). The visual is thus of prime importance in the text as it is presented not only as an agent in the process of discovery, but also, and more importantly, as a focal point around which there operates a definite split between thought and action, emotion and action. The visual performs a triple function which, unfortunately, has the ultimate result of placing the heroine in a “catch-22” situation.

While the eyes appear to mirror the immigrant experience from a feminine point of view and constitute an effort at piercing or going beyond the veil (i.e. traditional, stereotypical images of women), they create, at the same time, a double reality within the girl who is forced to adopt a schizophrenic stance to deal with the realities she has to face, both as an immigrant and as a woman. As John Berger comments: “A woman's psyche is split in two by her constructed awareness of herself as a visual object and her resulting double role as actor and spectator. A woman must continually watch herself” (46-47). Berger's quotation implies that duplicity is inherent in woman's psyche where she sees herself both in the position of object of a projected social reality (external reality) and subject of an inner psychological reality. The dramatic tension of the novel lies within the ambivalence of the subject-object dialectic which serves as a point of motivation in determining the behavior, reactions, and defensive strategies adopted by the girl in her search for selfhood. It also stresses the crucial role played by mental and physical alienation that arises as a symptom of this duality.

The idea of a fragmented or divided self is fairly common in the literary treatment of women in the North African novel in French. According to Anne-Marie Nisbet, fragmentation occurs when woman is treated as a catalyst, as a pivoting force in conflict. The basic conflict underlying the heroine's drama is aptly resumed in the following remarks: “J'avais une moitié suspendue encore à l'arbre du village, et l'autre moitié balbutiant la langue française, en perpétuel mouvement dans une ville dont je ne voyais jamais les limites ni la fin. … C'était fatigant” (108). The heroine sees herself as divided, as a split subject who has to undergo a process of deconstruction to come to terms with herself. As Lemoine-Luccione remarks: “Voilà la femme telle que nous l'avons décrite. … toujours partagée, toujours privée de la moitié d'elle-même. … orpheline de toute façon. … vouée à un destin de partition” (100). Woman as speaking subject is a divisive force, a point of rupture because, as Nabile Farès explains, she is situated at the confluence of “une productivité mythique et une situation existentielle” (398). In other words, woman finds her specificity in division. She is partitioned and her profound sense of alienation is a result of this split. She sees herself as double and this primacy of the visual leads to an introspective voyage aimed at orchestrating the different parts of herself into a unified whole. Introspection leads to withdrawal into oneself, or, as in the case of the narrator, into frequent flights of fantasy symbolizing an inner journey of self-reflexivity. The outward-bound voyage of discovery represented by the emigration process corresponds with an inner journey of self-discovery which constitutes the dual neo-mythical quest mentioned earlier in the study. The question is to determine whether the spiritual quest complements the physical one enabling the heroine to reach a point of transcendence above static reality. She herself wonders: “Avec quoi remplir ces vides, quels mots mettre dedans pour comprendre?” (87).

The desire to fill the void by reaching a level of transcendent knowledge results in a search for a transcendent mother figure capable of bestowing the required knowledge and adaptation skills necessary for successful individuation. The search for the elusive mother is based on an initial rejection of the mother, leaving the child in a state of suspension. The symbolic immigrant journey is, in fact, an effort to gain selfhood through a reestablishment of primeval linkage bonds with the mother in an attempt to underscore the sole legitimacy of the name of the Father and its ambivalent perception of the feminine. The idea of rejection is evidenced in the protagonist's desire to abandon her village and emigrate to France in search of a better life: “Notre village devait être une erreur. … c'était un village que la vie effleurait à peine” (26). The mother is initially associated with a regressive, almost still-born level of representation, intensified by the heroine's characterization and rejection of the maternal role: “Cuisinant, lavant, rangeant, essuyant, mangeant peu, ne posant pas de questions, elle laissait les choses se faire. …” (74). While initially associating the mother with a position of abjection characterized by passivity, easy resignation, and lassitude, the daughter is determined to reject the traditional role ascribed to women, defined by an essentially masculine tradition in which the struggle for women's recognition and empowerment leaves much to be desired (according to the text). By opposing conventional representations of the maternal, she proposes a new model of femininity, based on a new reading of the feminine.

The new femininity is an attempt to go beyond the unidimensional specificity of the maternal in Maghrebian culture and is based on direct access to and active participation in the line of mainstream production, prohibited to women of her country and religion. Ben Jelloun describes the marginalized existence of Moroccan women in L'Enfant de sable through the reflections of Ahmed, a young girl disguised as a boy to appease her father's vanity: “Et pour toutes ces femmes, la vie était plutôt réduite. C'était peu de choses; la cuisine, le ménage, l'attente et une fois par semaine le repos dans le hammam.”² The creation of an altered perception of the feminine is the outcome of a desire to reinstate the umbilical heritage by proposing a more valorized maternal instance. The protagonist of Les Yeux baissés is determined to upset this conventionally established order where women are relegated to second-class citizenship. The repositioning of the maternal involves the process of restructuring the male-female dynamic within the societal framework to witness the resurgence of the repressed m(other) tongue, anxious to find a new articulation. Françoise Lionnet states that the process of rediscovering the mother is associated with the therapeutic cure of rebirth and reconciliation, providing the necessary healing space for the protagonist (254-74).

Healing space is undifferentiated pre-œdipal space that is vital to the narrator's ontological existence. She is able to recover her fractured sense of self and regain a certain wholeness, as the new space provides the necessary supportive space for her attempts at self-definition. Her feelings of estrangement are recentered in this locus of reintegration. Psycho-social advancement is possible within the ideal of supportive space which is based on a successful conjunction of two seemingly unrelated entities, characterized by homeland and host country. The ideal transcends difference; in fact, as Trinh Minh-ha affirms, difference is “grasped both between and within entities, each of these being understood as multiple presence: not one, not two either” (94). Difference is based on a recognition of multiplicity within the individual, detracting from a unified essentializing/essentialized presence. In other words, difference debunks the either/or paradigm of distinction or exclusion by situating itself in a non-differentiated space of multiple meaning. In this way, identity is a multiple construct which does not confine itself to a static essence but places itself within the context of overlapping, emerging levels of narrative transferral.

Narrative transferral in the text is the positing of an ideal reality serving as a transition point between two worlds: “Moi, je passais d'un pays à l'autre en une fraction de seconde. Je voyais ma tante dans l'eau trouble de la Seine. Les agents conclurent que c'était un accident; mon frère faisait de la bicyclette sur les grands boulevards. Tout le village était équipé en électricité. …” (86). Transferral represents a perfect synthesis of two conflicting realities into a harmonious whole, creating a newly found, self-imposed reality described above. As a result of synchronicity, the narrator can identify with several levels of representation simultaneously, as synchronicity deconstructs the legitimacy of binary oppositional logic characterizing patriarchal modes of thought.

Caught in the web of binary logic, woman becomes the specularized Other, the negative image of man, a disempowered, deconstructed object. The protagonist challenges the specificity of phallocentric logic which necessitates the traditional muting of women through deflective/defective representation. Instead, she proposes a more reflective analysis of the feminine by breaking the chains of phallocentric bondage and positing woman as an autonomous, self-reflecting, speaking subject, who defines her own reality.

This re-definition parallels an attempt at identification with the lost mother through a process of idealization, concretized in the protagonist's naive, impressionistic perceptions of the new mother image, symbolized by the host country. Far from representing a concrete, objective reality, France initially symbolizes a cherished ideal: “il y aura bien quelqu'un pour m'indiquer où se trouve la France” (20). To the girl, France represents the glorified Ideal, the key to transcendence and a better life: “L'idée de partir en France donnait à mon rêve des couleurs et une musique superbes” (35). France acquires the proportions of a mythical, magical (mother)-country, objectified and deified in its historicity. The first trip across France symbolizes a rite of passage comparable to a pilgrimage to the holy city. In the text, France is not only raised to the level of myth and abstraction on one level, but the country also personifies the immigrant's fetish par excellence. Constituting an object of attraction and horror at the same time, France crystallizes the immigrant experience by serving as a receptacle for the immigrant's hopes and ambitions, frustrations and degradation. In other words, the fetishist reorganizes and restructures reality. According to this reality, France is either coveted or rejected, idealized or scorned: “she” becomes at once the good mother who nourishes and protects and the castrating mother who infects her children with poisoned milk. As Jean Déjeux explains: “La France représente alors la sécurité, le progrès matériel, la ‘civilisation.’ Projetée dans le mythique et le fabuleux elle devient même le paradis et l'Eldorado. Un rêve inaccessible toutefois.” (71) The protagonist, while echoing these sentiments toward France, exclaims:

Là-bas, même s'il fait froid, même si le travail est dur, c'est la civilisation! … La civilisation! Ce mot sonne encore aujourd'hui dans ma tête comme un mot magique qui ouvre des portes, qui pousse l'horizon encore très loin, qui transforme une vie et lui donne le pouvoir d'être meilleure. … Mais comment entrer par cette porte si on ne sait ni lire ni écrire?

(55)

While France symbolizes transformation and progression, the very foundation of the mother principle and archaic civilization, the girl's rights of access are not self-evident. Successful entry to the mother is blocked by a particular disjunction in the text between the perceived reality of France and its self-present reality, resulting in a splitting of the subject of discourse into an external narrating self (a socially-controlled “I”) and an inner experiencing self which can never coincide, according to Lionnet. France is hostile to synchronicity and offers, instead, dysfunctional, oppositional space leading to the disintegration of the individual.

The recently acquired inner cohesion within the supportive, Imaginary space is, in fact, an illusion based upon a falsified reality, a misconception. Despite the protagonist's best efforts to be absorbed into the mother's mainstream, she continues to remain on the periphery as an interested observer and not as a participant. Like the perverse stepmother or marâtre who plays tantalizing mind games with the disfavored stepdaughter, France entices the girl into her folds while gently rebuking and repelling her when she gets too close. This strategy of distancing prompts the protagonist to make the following comment: “Cet incident renforça chez moi le sentiment d'être divisé en deux” (108). The fragmentation of self becomes a defensive mechanism to cope with this confounding reality where the protagonist finds herself suspended precariously in mid-air. Kristeva attributes this suspension to the particular situation of the immigrant who inhabits a purely transitional space necessitating constant movement (21).

The idea of incessant, transitional movement is highlighted throughout the text by the protagonist's attempts to move beyond into an outer space to circumvent immobilization and confinement. Confined space is represented on two levels in the text—restricted immigrant space and masculine space delineated by the social constructs of Islam. Ben Jelloun describes the sterility of the immigrant's world through the observations of the protagonist who proclaims: “Les souvenirs, c'est notre vérité. Ils sont les témoins de la pauvreté de notre présent” (192). For the protagonist of Les Yeux baissés, the immigrant space in Paris is a restricted, closed space where “notre quartier avait été peu à peu abandonné par les Français” (100). Confined to the ghetto, the immigrant becomes the victim of derision by the police: “Nous devions être punis et nous ne le savions pas” (101). Frequent incidents of violence and disrespect toward her countrymen bring the heroine to the realization: “Je sentis pour la première fois, ce matin-là, que nous n'étions pas chez nous, que la France ne serait jamais tout à fait mon pays” (103). Relegated to the periphery, stripped of a sense of self-esteem, the immigrant seeks self-valorization through a tenacious adherence to religious beliefs. The heroine's sense of rejection by the new mother is projected onto a rejection of her belief in Islam in an effort to make peace with the ambivalent mother image.

Fatima Mernissi distinguishes between two realities of Islam where women are caught between two spaces, the socio-political aimed at restriction and privation and the religious, based on equal citizenship (8). She attributes this duality to the manipulation and falsification of the Hadiths or teachings of the Prophet by the male elite to serve as edicts of female oppression, making women the victims of falsified realities, prisoners of unjust laws and traditions dominated by male strategies of female confinement. The protagonist's opposition to the conscious social praxes of Islam dominated by the Law of the Father and patriarchal logic is evidenced in her sense of estrangement from her family when she realizes that she no longer shares their religious convictions. She affirms her position of difference by surreptitiously breaking the Ramadan fast and refusing to lead a life punctuated by her lowered eyes. This desire to act as an independent agent by appropriating the right to look and reflect, hitherto a masculine prerogative, brings her in direct conflict with her father who refuses to acknowledge any affirmation of self on her part. In an attempt to jolt her back to reality (i.e. conventional, masculine reality) he strikes her, commenting: “On est là pour gagner notre vie, pas pour perdre nos filles” (92). Later, in an imaginary letter addressed to his daughter, he observes: “J'ai remarqué que tu ne baissais plus les yeux en t'adressant à moi. …” (93).

The rejection of the father to appease the distant mother becomes a defensive reaction to win over the mother represented as the transcendent ideal. The protagonist's frequent flights of fantasy become an instrument to enter transcendent space which Lidia Curti qualifies as a solipsistic world which is outside action and history (145). Transcendent space is valorized because it is feminine in its characterizations. It is an imagined, reconstructed space in which the protagonist tries to neutralize the negativity of the ambivalent mother image into a more favorable level of representation. The novel is rich in its references to the reconstructive powers of the heroine (“je continuais à me raconter des histoires” [19]) where she fabricates/fabulates a mythical, mystical image of the good mother characterized by her benevolence and nurturing. Positive identification is now possible within the realm of the mythical world which is a secret world that is vital to the heroine's ontological existence: “C'était des signes qui m'appartenaient; j'étais seule à en connaître les clés, le sens et la destinée” (31). This appropriation of space reinforces the idea of expansion of the individual who reaches a level of self-proclaimed omnipotence accomplished through favorable contact with the Mother: “Petit à petit nous ouvrirons les frontières et nous les ferons se rencontrer” (32). Transcendent space reposes on the repositioning of the divine nomos qualified, by Lisa Lowe, as a mode of operation extending forward in an opening space as opposed to the logos of confinement within a closed, discrete space, the Foucauldian heterotopia of excluded otherness (47). The nomos precludes chronology and hierarchy by favoring simultaneity and its extension across spatial boundaries.

However, this idea of expansion as a rite of passage to self-discovery is a shifting concept, implying a process of duplication, flux, and fragmentation. As Curti states, the search for female identity in transcendent space becomes a play on identities that necessitates a process of oscillation. The notion of a differing or shifting “I” is based on a hide-and-seek-like principle vacillating between the search for and the finding of identity. This search is inscribed in a timeless reality (curious contradiction!) which, in its surmounting of physical and spatial boundaries, is supposed to lead to mastery. The heroine claims: “Dans mon esprit, le temps allait plus vite entre le présent et le passé, abolissant barrières, dates et toute logique” (119). This analysis suggests that access to the mythic endows woman with a certain dynamic force of transformation, of mobility, which is in contradiction with her petrification and limited representation in static reality. To elaborate upon the idea of mobility I will show how Ben Jelloun's female characters, in an effort to stride over the real and symbolic, in an attempt to achieve the Transcendent, become victims of a petrified timelessness, caught in an impasse. For this purpose, it will be necessary to comment on the nature and specificity of the symbolic world as represented in the text and the efforts made by the heroine to bridge the gap between life and imagination.

In the novel, dreams constitute a meta-text authored by the heroine. Presented as life-sustaining props, a method of adaptation, her dream-making abilities are revealed very early in the text. Dreams become a defensive technique to cope with rejection and unpleasant reality by enriching the present through the representation of a vibrant, fecund world that contrasts with the quotidien. It is necessary to analyze the recurrent symbols in the dream sequences to determine whether they finally come to represent symbols of transformation. At first, the dreams conjure self-contained symbols that reveal simple truths. The dreams seem to focus primarily on three symbols—a tree, the sea, and a horse. Symbolizing permanence and stability, the tree is firmly anchored to the ground by its roots: “Ses racines étaient profondes et très anciennes. … Si les hommes étaient des arbres, le village ne se serait pas vidé en si peu de temps” (105). The tree, which symbolizes the wisdom of long-standing traditions and interior space, is at odds with the symbolism of the horse and the ocean, both representing open space, a certain expansiveness and movement without. In other words, the symbols represent contradictory levels of movement suggesting that the heroine's search for self pulls her in two opposing directions. The conflicting symbolism is brilliantly demonstrated in an imaginary battle between Berber and French as symbols of two antithetical realities: “Il y eut une petite guerre brève mais efficace entre les mots français et les mots berbères. Je fus défendue avec fermeté et courage. Les mots berbères ne se laissaient pas faire. Ils avaient formé une ligne de défense contre les envahisseurs” (81). The symbols of discord lead to further splitting and set up limits among themselves which block successful integration.

In this way, split symbolism corresponds with the fragmentation of personality. Representing abstractions or concepts in the first stage, the symbols soon become personifications of the human experience. Abstract notions and ideas assume human forms which serve as projections of the individual's own dissected personality. “Victor,” “Rachid,” “Yacine,” “Rabia,” and other dream personalities lead an autonomous existence where they try to restructure reality. Viney Kirpal states that rather than serving as well-rounded character sketches, dream personalities are defined as extended metaphors which crystallize the conflict between spiritual, political, and psychological confrontations. Victor, Rachid, and the others inhabit the secret world of the protagonist: “C'était cela, mon jardin secret, mon école coranique, ma maison illuminée. J'y entassais un tas d'objets qui, entrés là, perdaient leur fonction pour devenir les personnages d'un songe dont j'organisais la vie dans le moindre détail” (31). Each individual represents a particular dimension of the immigrant experience. Victor serves as the protagonist's spiritual father, a guardian who: “met de l'ordre dans mes pensées” (156). Rabia translates the dream of every ambitious woman who is anxious to realize the American dream, the immigrant dream par excellence: “Elle voudrait devenir comédienne, jouer les femmes fatales et mourir en pleine gloire comme Marilyn” (156).

However, the heroine soon loses control over her creations, who, in desiring complete autonomy, become impositions and try to dictate their terms and conditions. Victor, who symbolizes the paternal instance, seems particularly problematic. In an effort to keep him in place, the heroine emphatically states: “Ce personnage n'avait plus d'existence et ne devait plus s'immiscer dans ma vie. … Il m'avait bien servie, mais il avait pris quelques libertés avec l'histoire qu'il était censé de contrôler” (215). Instead of serving as reality-ordering principles, the dream personalities intensify the heroine's inner chaos. Referring once again to Victor, she exclaims: “Il revenait souvent, surtout la nuit, s'installait dans mes rêves et les transformait en cauchemars. … Il me terrorisait” (216). Dreams destructure her existence to the point where: “Je ne savais plus si je rêvais ou si j'étais éveillée” (232). Her dreams are traumatic as they lead to another confrontation with the male order, symbolized by Victor's efforts to take over the protagonist's inner reality, levelling her to a state of aphasic debilitation.

This decentralization of the self plays a vital role in preventing the heroine from performing her assigned function as the redeemer of her village. She misinterprets the enigma surrounding her village due to a misreading of signs. Redemption is contingent upon establishing and maintaining close, symbiotic ties with the mother from the very inception/conception. A transgression of this rule leads to the following sentencing: “Celui qui quitte sa terre est un homme perdu. … Celui qui arrache les racines de ses origines appelle sur lui la malédiction” (56). Hence, the process of retrieving the rejected mother is an irredeemable one leading to irreparable dislocation and loss. As Victor indicates to the protagonist: “Le trésor, le tien, tu l'as eu entre les mains et tu l'as saccagé!” (286). The excavation of the remains of the buried, repressed mother is controlled by the politics of the male hegemony, content to keep her in a state of dormancy. Being denied access to the mother can only lead to a physical and symbolic muting. Being deprived of the mother implies being denied an integral part of oneself. If the mother-imago establishes identity, the slicing of the (mother)-tongue can only lead to castration. By castration, I refer to the idea of mental and physical estrangement (“étais-je folle ou étais-je en train de le devenir?. … Je doutais de moi-même” [219]) based on an inability to articulate one's own subjective reality. Subjective muting suggests petrification and immobility, confining the protagonist to the very structures that her quest attempted to dismantle.

The treasure, vital to the survival of the village, does not represent material possession or prosperity; in fact, it represents the uncovering of a basic and universal truth: “Ils parlèrent alors de trésor. Tout le monde a pensé à l'or et à l'argent. Personne n'a pensé à quelque chose de plus précieux, l'eau simplement l'eau” (285). Water, as a source of life, of civilization, embodies the mother principle, the source of eternal life. The breaking of the pre-oedipal ties leads to the protagonist's lamentations: “Je pleurais parce que j'avais compris que mon enfance remontait en moi comme une fièvre soudaine mais familière” (290). She falls short of achieving transcendence in spite of her best efforts due to her status as an incomplete subject. Transcendence, in the text, lies in one's (maternal) roots, in a coming to terms with one's historicity which testifies to a wholeness of being. The search for the mother is indeed a futile one bringing the protagonist in contact with a rejected mother-ideal whose negative stance seems to be even more repressive than that demonstrated by the paternal instance. Failed subjectivity is based on a mis-recognition of external models of identification which are, themselves, engaged in a duplicitous process of deconstructing the self-affirming “I” through their perverse strategies of evasion and deception. The novel concludes with the final regrets of the protagonist: “La découverte des racines est une épreuve difficile. Comment auraisje pu en soupçonner la gravité?” (296). Her failure seems all the more tragic because of her determined efforts to overcome subjectlessness through identification with the mother-ideal, the key to effective individuation.

Notes

1. Ben Jelloun, Les Yeux baissés, p. 44. All future references will be made from this edition.

2. Ben Jelloun, L'Enfant de sable, p. 34. The girl's opposition to the confinement of women through the social reality of Islam will be discussed in more detail later. See Odile Cazenave's article “Age, Gender, and Narrative Transformation in L'Enfant de sable.”

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