Memory, Trauma, and the Diasporic Subject (Watt)

Memory, Trauma, and the Diasporic Subject:

Salah el Moncef’s The Offering

In Memory, History, Forgetting (2004), the late philosopher Paul Ricouer contemplates relationships apposite to those central to Salah el Moncef’s complex and, finally, shocking second work of fiction, The Offering. Unraveling the “distinct problematic” of forgetting and forgiveness—a dyad crucial to the survival of traumatic injury like that represented in this novel and of historical atrocities like the Holocaust—Ricouer quickly isolates the relationship’s most salient features: “for forgetting, the problematic of memory and faithfulness to the past; for forgiveness, guilt and reconciliation with the past” (412). Together, like Beckettian tramps, this pair plods uneasily on toward a “horizon of a memory appeased, even of a happy forgetting” (412). This last phrase anticipates Ricouer’s assertion that forgetting may not always be a sign of cognitive deficiency or an “enemy of memory”; on the contrary, the “specter” of a memory that records and effortlessly retrieves everything imprinted on it would be unbearable (413). A measure of forgetting might just constitute a salutary respite in our mental lives, a much-needed rupture in an otherwise unrelenting repetition. Other possibilities for forgiveness or, more precisely, self-forgiveness, as is the case in The Offering, exist as well. For Yale University theologian Miroslav Volf in The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World (2006), a right remembering never forgets an injury, but rather recontextualizes it within  larger narratives with the capacity to neutralize the negative affect associated with the trauma. Not surprisingly, one such context is the salvific narrative of Christianity, to which Volf returns frequently in recounting his torture as a political prisoner in the former Yugoslavia. Given these two very different alternatives, Volf’s expansive re-narrativization and Ricouer’s strategic forgetting, reconciliation with the past and the possibility of self-forgiveness might require either an additive or subtractive calculus, neither of which is easily performed.

And, if one is resolutely agnostic, a lapsed Muslim in the case of el Moncef’s protagonist Tariq Abbassi, a forty-year-old Tunisian who earned his Ph.D. in literature and philosophy at the Sorbonne and owns a small, fashionable restaurant in Bordeaux, religion and its constitutive narratives cannot facilitate the “right remembering” Volf advocates.  Further, if a person is obsessed with recording nearly every event, large or small, in his life—and Tariq, a prolific diarist and poet, is just such a person—then the psychical peace afforded by Ricouer’s “happy” forgetting seems, well, a horizon so distant as to be unapproachable. Tariq’s most consistent relationship—and he has several meaningful ones, including affairs with two beautiful women—is with his laptop, a notion made clear from the novel’s “Foreword” written, as we learn, by one of its characters, Sami Mamlouk, in the spring of 2017. The future dating is meant to suggest the difficulty Sami, Tariq’s sous chef and devoted friend, confronted in trying to shepherd this novel through to publication. After Tariq’s suicide, Sami discovered a “labyrinthine multimedia mosaic of collaged diary excerpts and pictures and audios and videos sprawling endlessly in the recesses of a near-defunct laptop” along with a document referred to as “the letter,” which is appended to the end of The Offering. Among other things, Sami needed to determine the relationship of “the letter” to the larger text and arrange the prose fragments of Tariq’s tragic odyssey into some semblance of order, tasks that exceeded his competence and required the assistance of a professional editor. In one of the innumerable asides to the flashbacks and diary entries that comprise this multi-layered, “patched up” story (these asides are always indicated by parentheses, as I have done here), Tariq, prone equally to searing self-recrimination and occasional epiphanies of optimism, perhaps puts the matter of the novel’s textuality best: “(Traces of things gone, echoes of voices that have ceased to carry any direct living meaning for me… . A massive archive of words, sounds and images. The sum of my sad, sad, life—in scribbles and bytes).”  

The scribbles and bytes introduced by Tariq Abbassi’s legatee thus contribute to an at times vertiginous story of constructing and telling a story, and the latter is both mysterious and arresting: Why does Abbassi’s sprawling archive mean so much to Sami that it has driven him “to distraction”?  From what precise injury did the novelist suffer, and what is the provenance of his guilt and eventual suicide?  And what about “the letter”? Who wrote it, and why was it in the laptop if Tariq isn’t its author (and he isn’t)?  What does it reveal?    

Partial answers to all but the last question are intimated in the opening pages (a consideration of the letter and its surprising revelations must be deferred to another occasion, as the experience of reading The Offering would be irreparably damaged if the letter’s contents were disclosed here). The novel focuses, for the most past, on events that occurred in the summer of 2007, and are related through the flashbacks, diary entries, dreams, and other musings of a deeply injured man who has been institutionalized and is undergoing hypnotherapy, among other curative procedures. A late August vacation day and nightfall in Paris that Abbassi enjoyed with his two young sons and his close friend Zoé—sunny hours spent leisurely in the Square du Vert-Gallant that at dusk surrendered to a striking view of buildings outlined in deep copper in the afterglow of the sun—yield all too quickly to the beginning of something that will leave the family’s existence “forever shattered.” This “something” is catalytic of the novel’s trajectory and its several mysteries: the murder in the early morning hours of August 30 of both of Tariq’s children; his traumatic brain injury requiring institutionalization first in Paris and later in Brittany; the subsequent actions of his psychotherapist Dr. Cohen, a Police Commissioner (Pierre Collin) investigating the deaths, and Zoé, who will suffer greatly as a result of these events; and the “providential role” played by Sami Mamlouk. Misinformation about the horrific events of August 30 abounds; this includes the speculation that Zoé’s family, particularly her father, is implicated in the two boys’ murders. The opening chapter introduces all of these as possibilities.

The next chapter provides exposition of the events that led indirectly to both these catastrophes and Tariq’s fractured psyche: the decision of his German wife Regina to leave their home in Bordeaux and take the children with her, her accusation of his continued “emotional battery” as the reason for her abrupt departure, his legal efforts to have the young boys returned or at least gain shared custody of them, and the unthinkable possibility that Regina’s indictment of him was not totally baseless. Was it conceivable that, after failing to survive the impossible academic job market of the later 1990s and borrowing money from his mother to open a small “high scale” restaurant, Tariq was angry—more violently so than he recognized—and capable of abusive behavior? A mutual friend of the couple thought so and in testimony of “crucifying eloquence” recounted how she saw trouble looming in Tariq and Regina’s marriage as his simmering discontent boiled over into a “menacing” and even “uncontrollable” anger. From this perspective, Regina’s actions were entirely justified; and, as a lawyer explained to Tariq, in such disputes the German courts made little effort to cooperate with their French counterparts. Even the word “abduction” could not be used in describing his wife’s decision to take their children and flee the country. The devastating results of such assaults on Tariq’s sense of himself seemed inevitable, and he quickly became a “witness” to his own “unraveling—an unmoored atom drifting in vacuity.” He watched his selfhood being “whittled away,” his mind “flying out in all directions.” Could it all be true? Was he the sort of man—the sort of husband—who should be abandoned, deprived of his family, and cast in a despised role that seemed all-too-familiar to other friends: the stereotype of the Arab man living in Europe?

An educated and thoroughly cosmopolitan man who had both studied in Europe and traveled extensively across America, Tariq had never really considered the possibility that Arabs living in countries like France, especially men, would be disparaged by negative traits that seem always to re-surface when a nation fears its traditional identity is imperiled by the arrival of strangers at its borders. In papers filed with the court, Tariq’s character assassination was countered by Sami’s affidavit, which not only endorsed his friend and employer’s integrity, but also outlined the ways in which this case mirrored the “pain and humiliation” he had endured of being “reduced to a cliché by colleagues and superiors alike,” including the allegation of his own “mental imbalance” and inherent capacity for violence. “As a Frenchman,” Sami emphasized to the court, “I find it sad to conclude that even today these insidious strategies are still the common lot of the Maghrebin minority” in what amounts to an ongoing “stigmatization” of Arabs.

Succeeding in gaining joint custody, Tariq took his sons earlier that fateful summer to Tunisia, a return to his homeland during which his stunning former lover echoed Sami’s observation of a pervasive ethnic stereotyping with the effect of even further thickening the textures of Tariq’s internal life. This is particularly true of his sense of displacement and alienation. Students of diaspora like Kerby Miller and James Clifford underscore the fragmented subjectivities of uprooted people like Tariq, emotionally tethered to two places: the country they left and the new place at which they have arrived. In the more classic examples from the nineteenth century provided by those Irish desperate to escape the Famine in the 1850s (and afterward) and the exodus of Jews from various Eastern European countries in the 1880s (and afterward), diasporic subjects often maintain strong ties to their homeland. Many harbor a nostalgic desire to return someday, as Miller explains in such books as Ireland and Irish America: Culture, Class, and Transatlantic Migration (2008); and it is in part for this reason, as Clifford explains, that many emigrants both carry with them artifacts from their former life and suspect that they will never be fully accepted in their new home. In his influential article “Diasporas,” Clifford unpacks diasporic forms of  longing, memory, and (dis)identification which he views as afflicting many minority and migrant populations, and certainly this includes Arabs living in France like Tariq Abbassi (and hiscreator as well).

But concepts like diaspora and diasporic subjectivity lose their interpretive force when wielded promiscuously as generalizations, and almost always require a more careful parsing before their application to characters like Tariq can generate any significant interpretive yield.  Unlike the Irish peasant in the nineteenth century, for example, Tariq did not leave Tunisia to escape the myriad horrors of the Famine or, as was the case until the rise of the Celtic Tiger in the 1990s, to find a job that paid a living wage; and unlike Jewish emigrés at the turn of the century, Tariq was not fleeing genocidal hatred, pogroms, and the hardships inherent to social inequality. Descending onto the tarmac on a Tunis Air flight to Carthage with his sons earlier that fateful summer, he experienced a “murky mix of panic and expectation and out-of-place alienation.” For him, going back home was “the quintessential second-nature experience of sameness and predictability,” the identical feelings that motivated him to leave Tunisia years before: “same anticipated descent, same mind vista, same visual fragments projected in mental space.” Tariq beautifully captures this delicate inter-weaving of both place and time, present and past as it exists in memory: “The wistful mind always everywhere warping and weaving effortlessly between here and there, now and then—as if the totality of time-space was one single glowing thread of presentness suspended in black eternity.” A profound affection for and indelible attachment to one’s homeland cannot adequately describe the mottled nature of this return, as Tariq began to dread the reunion with his family the minute he and his two boys cleared customs: “The initial show of high spirits was brittle, as I had anticipated … [his siblings’] joy quickly gave way to a melodramatic mood of verbal tiptoeing and embarrassed, half-hearted gestures.” Hisselfhood, inflected as it is by his experience of the diasporic, is more complicated than terms like “nostalgia,” “alienation,” and “homeland” can convey.

As Tariq drives with his sons, the Tunisian landscape itself constitutes the collective memory of a history of conquest and migration, a mirror of his own story. At the same time, it offers an implicit rejoinder of his proximity to the invidious stereotype Sami decries: “The burning persistence of that age-old madness possessing the earth (the ancient spirits of the fields raging about us—precious land cunningly acquired by the Phoenicians, forcefully by the Romans, then the Arabs, the Turks, the Spaniards, the French); madness this country never bequeathed me, for better or worse—that headlong capacity for frenzied, decisive action which I had always admired in my compatriots.” But is he really so incapable of frenzied action? By this point in the novel, our confidence in the acuity of such self-assessments has been shaken, just as his had been by the insinuations of a family friend about his potential for violence. His former lover, a beautiful and exotic woman named Thouraya with whom he spends an incomparable night of bliss while on his vacation, re-introduces the probability of his victimization by the prejudice to which Sami alluded in his affidavit.  As she theorizes, the breakups of interracial couples in Europe are viewed differently than other separations, largely because Arab men are perceived as threats to the host society. She further explains to him that he is actually, in the eyes of many western Europeans, a category, not a person: the “Lone Arab Male.”  Equally important, she speculates, he won’t see the category’s ramifications—he’ll feel them. The result is a psychical pressure that could precipitate disastrous implosions—or the kind of explosions his estranged wife feared.  So, even though in one refulgent moment Tariq reveals his optimism that “there might be real chance” of happiness for him and his sons, the intimation of disaster is never far away. Could his juxtaposition of his inherent diffidence with the frenetic assertiveness of the Tunisian landscape be self-obfuscating, even delusional?  Perhaps his rootlessness and alienation have affected him more profoundly than he is aware, and he is capable of frenzied and decisive action of the most egregious kind.

And then it happens. And it happens with the savage irony that while Tariq was enjoying a night out in Paris with a new lover, an enigmatic, playful, and sensual woman named Annaelle, tragedy strikes. Like the hopeful moment Tariq experienced in Tunisia but with vastly greater potential—and even an element of wonder—Annaelle had opened for him a new world of happiness and self-transformation: “…I came to realize, once and for all, that I was no longer the same man: In embracing the world that she had created for us, I was stunned to find out that I had enough power in me to do these new things that were ours.” This surge of self-determinative power and confidence, this eruption of “energies and volitions” Tariq had always perceived as “fundamentally irreconcilable” with who he was, defines a crucial element of the “most exquisite self-created world” in which he and his lover luxuriated. And, in this world, “everything was indeed possible.”    

The next sentences open a new chapter and introduce just the opposite kind of world: “Always the same walk—same pace, same stops, same duration.” This is the antithetical and antiseptic world of institutionalization that erases the sensorium of the Jardin du Luxembourg, the whispers and caresses along flowing canals, the transformative space Annaelle had helped create and made wondrous. This is the world and what remains of a less sumptuous life after the deaths of two little boys and Tariq’s traumatic brain injury in the early morning hours of August 30. Where do “true events” exist in a mind in which memories roll ceaselessly day and night? After a coma and suicide attempt, after chemical and hypnotic therapies, can the fractured mind even assimilate the results of forensic investigations and the interviewing of witnesses? Can one trust the narratives and explanations such inquiries produce? And then, inevitably, both sheer misery and the ruthless judiciary of the mind must assert their respective preeminence: “With my emerging feelings of self-hate I almost simultaneously began to face this reality of self-pity and so I often found myself wavering between these two forces: disgust and anger at myself for being a criminally irresponsible father, followed by sorrow and sadness and intense grief at the sheer bottomlessness of my misfortune.” The pleonastic quality of the phrasing—sorrow and sadness and grief—suggests the depths to which this Poet-Philosopher-Father descend.

And no right remembering, no happy forgetting, is possible: no horizon of appeased memory to approach, no salvific narrative to frame and thereby ameliorate traumatic injury.  Like Tariq, albeit with less devastating effect, readers are left with the tyranny of memory and the deep fracturing of the subject. But, fortunately, that’s not all.  For, although The Offering is at times painful and even heart-breaking, it is consistently beautiful. That is to say, the vicissitudes of memory, of dislocation, and of trauma aside—and it is impossible ever to put these totally aside in this stunning novel—el Moncef’s prose often rivals that of today’s most poetic and accomplished wordsmiths. For me, a myriad of passages in The Offering rival those in the work of a writer like John Banville where one is simply dazzled by the sheer virtuosity of the language, the structure, and the rhythm. This soon evolves into a feeling so intense and delicious that one simply must pause to take it all in. 

                                                                                 —Stephen Watt

Works Cited

Clifford, James. “Diasporas.” Cultural Anthropology 9 [3]: 302-338.

Miller, Kerby. Ireland and Irish America: Culture, Class and Transatlantic Migration. Notre Dame: Field Day Press, 2008.

Ricouer, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting.  Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Volf, Miroslav. The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World.  Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 2006.