Nahrain Al-Mousawi - The Two-Edged Sea - Heterotopias of Contemporary Mediterranean Migrant Literature-Gorgias Press (2021)

The Two-Edged Sea
The Modern Muslim World
12
Series Editorial Board
Marcia Hermansen Martin Nguyen

Hina Azam Joas Wagemakers
Ussama Makdisi
Advisory Editorial Board
Talal Asad Tijana Krstic

Khaled Abou El Fadl Ebrahim Moosa
Amira Bennison Adam Sabra
Islam Dayeh Armando Salvatore
Marwa Elshakry Adam Talib
Rana Hisham Issa
This series will provide a platform for scholarly research on Islamic

and Muslim thought, emerging from any geographical area and
dated to any period from the 17th century until the present day.
The Two-Edged Sea
Heterotopias of Contemporary Mediterranean

Migrant Literature
Nahrain Al-Mousawi
gp
2021
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ISBN 978-1-4632-4372-2 ISSN 2690-2249
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Printed in the United States of America
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Table of Contents ......................................................................... v

Acknowledgments ...................................................................... vii
Introduction ................................................................................. 1
Chapter 1. Memory Work in the Mediterranean Crossing:
Nostalgia in Morocco’s Migration Literature ..................... 45
Chapter 2. The Immigrant Dream: ‘Dream? Nightmare, More
Like’ .................................................................................... 71
Chapter 3. Imagining the Mediterranean and Its Migrants:
The Ambivalence of the Uncanny ...................................... 89
Chapter 4. Mediterranean Frontier, Mediterranean Circuit:
Undocumented Migration in Egyptian Literature’s
Double Imaginary ............................................................. 113
Chapter 5. Saharan-Mediterranean Transits: Impossible
‘Arrival’............................................................................. 141
Chapter 6. Death at the Border: Making and Unmaking the
Migrating Body ................................................................. 169
Conclusion ................................................................................ 195
Bibliography ............................................................................. 207
Index......................................................................................... 225
v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
At an informal interview with a journalist in a café in Rabat,

Morocco, I referenced something I read about writers who per-
ceive the many undocumented immigrants from Morocco to be
‘abandoning’ their country. At some point, I remembered a ref-
erence to the ‘brain drain’, and mentioned that, too. I didn’t
consider myself to be showing off my wide research about the
topic, I was just desperate to get the journalist to give me his
opinion. To his credit, the journalist stared at me with some de-
gree of incredulity and said, ‘Do you know that some of these
people who get in a boat to cross the Mediterranean have never
even seen a sea or a lake in their lives? Many don’t even know
how to swim! These people are desperate! Abandonment?!’ This
moment clarified an important point for me: as much as a dis-
cussion of borders and migration thrived on the discursive and
metaphorical potential of borders, when I discussed issues like
undocumented migration and literature about undocumented
migration, I had to always mind the way the ideological or met-
aphorical and the real informed each other. Of course it didn’t
mean that I had to relinquish metaphors, but be attentive to the
ways the discursive and the real kept an eye on each other. And,
so I want to thank that journalist for encouraging me to keep an
eye on the various modes that have insinuated themselves in
various discussions on migration, be they ideological, fantasti-
cal, metaphorical, or real.
Writing this book would not have been possible without the
generous support of the EUME (Europe in the Middle East) fel-
lowship at the Forum Transregionale Studien and the Freie Uni-
verstät in Berlin. Their excellent organization and unflagging
vii
viii THE TWO-EDGED SEA
support afforded me the valuable time I needed to read and

write, more than I thought was possible. I would especially like
to thank Georges Khalil and Manuela Ocampo for their flawless
organization skills and kindness, and Maaike Voorhoeve for her
friendship at this productive and challenging time away from
home. This book would also not have been possible without the
support of the Modern Arabic Literature and Culture fellowship
at Washington University’s Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern
Studies department, most importantly Nancy Berg and Stephen
Scordias. To my students in my “Undocumented” class at the
university, I miss your intelligence, patience, and willingness to
be daring in your analysis and criticism.
Most of the revision process took place at the University of
Balamand’s beautiful campus in Lebanon, where I was a profes-
sor of English literature. The friendship and professional guid-
ance and support of my colleagues there finally brought this
book to labor. I especially want to thank Peter Williams, Olga
Fleonova, Michael Dennison, Ryan Davis, Zeina Jundi, Laure
Salem, and Sossie Kechichian for their unwavering kindness. I
will never meet academics as kind as them ever again, I am
sure.
The roots of this book, namely the work that went into the
research and writing of my dissertation at the University of Cali-
fornia, Los Angeles, were nurtured by my brilliant and compas-
sionate adviser Saree Makdisi, without whose support the work
would not have been imaginable. My adviser Gil Hochberg sup-
ported me in the fieldwork fellowship, from the International
Institute at UCLA, that led me to Morocco for the first time in
2009 to discover libraries, archives, bookstores, and simple
street kiosks where I found the material to guide me in both my
intellectual and personal life.
I want to thank Negar Mottahedeh not only for her invalu-
able feedback and encouragement, but for making work itself
seem exciting, elegant, and effortless. Lastly, Barbara Harlow
made intellectual inquiry seem courageous to me—a trespass—
and I thank her for guiding my work before the dissertation
even began. I also cannot express enough appreciation for my
Arabic professors, Mohammad Mohammad and Peter Abboud,
INTRODUCTION ix
both of whom provided me the warmth, support, and much-

needed humor I needed in light of the rife Orientalism in US-
based Middle East studies departments, where we found our-
selves.
The friendships built in universities around the labor of this
book provided—and still provide to this day—unwavering hope
and utter delight, so I would love to thank Karla Stine, Amanda
Rogers, Andrea Turpin, Paul Ocampo, Paul Nadal, Adam Talib,
Sevan Yousefian, David Fieni, Amy Tahani-Bidmeshki, Barbara
Hui, Susannah Rodriguez Drissi, Simona Livescu, Johanna Sell-
man, Jillian Sayres, and Teresa Keck.
To my family, I owe my enduring gratitude for their love
and patience during my disappearing tricks. Although we live
continents apart, my mother and sister, Seham and Rafidain,
continue to provide their warmth, love, comfort, and pep talks.
In Morocco, I found not only the roots of my book, but I also
found the love of my life, Yahya, who has surely taken a vow of
enduring patience to ride it out with me. The other love of my
life, my son Ilyas, offers me an opportunity to be caring, joyful,
and loving every single day. Thank you.
***
Grateful acknowledgment is made for the permission to reprint
the following: Chapter 6 is a modified version of an essay that
appeared as an essay for the Forum Transregionale Studien Es-
say Series in 2016 (no. 2).
INTRODUCTION
The image of migrants washing up along southern Europe’s pic-

turesque beaches has become a recurring and shocking represen-
tation in the visual archive of undocumented migration. One
such image of emaciated and exhausted migrants washing up
against pale fleshy tourists on Spain’s Canary Island, typically
scripted into a story line about ‘collision of worlds’, emerged in
2006. 1 We are to understand the image’s collision of worlds
stems from the contrast between affluent Westerners, interrupt-
ed in their leisure activities, and relatively poorer migrants, who
undertake perilous journeys driven by a desperate desire for a
better life. While the migrants survived and disappeared largely
from public attention as soon as story coverage stopped, their
entry into a carceral system was certain. The 2006 image fol-
lowed a controversial photo of a European couple sunbathing on
the beach in Tarifa, Spain, indifferent to a migrant who lay dead
a few feet away. Another image surfaced in 2008 of a European
couple enjoying their holiday at an Italian beach, utterly un-
moved by the sight of two drowned Roma girls, aged 12 and 13,
covered by a beach towel. 2 The implication is that two worlds,
1
‘Two Worlds Collide as Tenerife Sunbathers Rush to Help Migrants,’
The Telegraph, August 5, 2006. ‘Africa’s Shifting Population: When Two
Worlds Collide … on a Tenerife Beach,’ The Independent, Au-
gust 1, 2006.
2
‘Italian Sunbathers Ignored Drowned Gypsy Girls,’ Herald Sun, July
22, 2008.
1
2 THE TWO-EDGED SEA
usually divided from each other, collide within the same frame.
Perhaps this can be attributed to the distinction between North-
ern tourist and Southern migrant. 3 But really, one does not need
to look further than the migration-tourism nexus of south Euro-
pean beaches’ leisure industries to apprehend an existing contact
zone. 4
In his article ‘Crisis Heterotopias and Border Zones of the
Dead’, Joseph Pugliese discusses photographs captured by the
press of the encounter between migrants and tourists and con-
cludes that the beach-border dramatizes a ‘two-tier [ontology]’ 5
that organizes subjects along a North/South axis, where tourists
from the North and migrants from the South are subject to di-
chotomous experiences of the same space: the beach as holiday
space and the beach as prison or cemetery. And, whereas tour-
ists experience dead time of tranquil holiday inertia and inactiv-
ity, migrants experience dead time of decomposition/detention.
While these bodies in the same sand leave similar imprints, they
by no means are subject to the same experiences of the beach
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,24059338-
661,00.html
3
See Chris Gilligan and Carol Marley, ‘Migration and Divisions:
Thoughts on (Anti-) Narrativity in Visual Representations of Mobile
People.’ Center of Social Research, Freie Universität Berlin, Forum of
Qualitative Social Research 11, no. 2 (2010): http://www.qualitative-
research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1476/2981 The authors dis-
cuss photographs of the encounter between tourists and migrants cap-
tured by the press, also in terms of a ‘collision of worlds’: ‘Part of the
drama of these images is in the way that two worlds, which are normal-
ly divided from each other, collide within the same frame’ (3).
4
Klaus Roth and Jutta Lauth Bacas, eds, Migration In, From, and to
Southern Europe: Ways and Strategies of Migrating (Münster, Germany:
LIT Verlag, 2011), 178.
5
See Joseph Pugliese’s reading of the beach border scenes capturing
the encounter of migrants and tourists by the press in ‘Crisis Heteroto-
pias and Border Zones of the Dead’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cul-
tural Studies 23, no. 5 (October 2009), 663–679.
INTRODUCTION 3
border’s space or time. In essence, even though the media terms

‘collision of worlds’ apprehend a contact zone between migrant
and tourist, the beach-border encompasses two orders of space-
time where in one single place festive holidaymakers in repose
and exhausted migrants huddled under blankets experience dif-
ferent modalities of living, moving, even dying—the European
coastline’s border. So while the media story is repeatedly re-
framed in terms of collision, what the beach-border dramatizes
are two modes and experiences of space and time that unfold in
the same site but neither meaningfully mix nor collide.
I want to take this framework further in analyzing the liter-
ature of trans-Mediterranean undocumented migration. In
Āḥmad Āl-Jalālī’s Al-Harāqa (2003), a collection of stories about
undocumented migrants from Morocco, we also find migrants
and tourists occupying the same place but experiencing two
modes of being. The differences in ease of mobility between the
eponymous protagonists—the harraga meaning ‘those who burn’
in Arabic, with harg meaning burning, or crossing, the Mediter-
ranean Sea, or burning IDs before embarking on a voyage—and
the European tourists that freely dock from shore to shore initi-
ate each tale of the book. 6 In one story, an undocumented mi-
grant smuggles himself aboard a tourist coach near the engine
below while he hears European tourists celebrating and drinking
above. The bus is both a means of escape for the impoverished
migrants and part of a web of global mobility characterized by
unequal freedom of movement and lack of access to space.
While the Belgian, Spanish, German tour buses, carried by fer-
ries, dock on the Mediterranean shore, its partying tourists re-
main on board as the undocumented migrant sneaks in near the
engines, disoriented by their roar, filthy from their grease, but
ultimately grateful to land on Spanish soil. Through their
placement on the bus, Āl-Jalālī’s portrays this two-tiered ontolo-
gy in which tourists and migrants are occupying the same
6
The terms harraga, hrig, and harrag are transliterations of the Moroc-
can Arabic (‘g’ not ‘q’).
4 THE TWO-EDGED SEA
space—the tourist coach—but experiencing different modes of

mobility: celebratory above, illicit and clandestine below, un-
bound above, cramped and suffocating below, characterized by
familiarity and ease above, disorientation below. Through the
juxtaposition of sites of the tourism itinerary and sites of undoc-
umented migration, the friction constituting the power relations
of the Mediterranean as simultaneously tourist fantasy of adven-
ture and transcendence and migrant reality of alienation and
illicitness comes into focus. While the two-tier ontologies of the
beach border and the tour bus evoke Foucault’s heterotopia in
their juxtaposition of ‘several sites that are in themselves in-
compatible,’ ‘places where many spaces converge and become
entangled’ 7—that which is in opposition to the homogenous
space of utopia—the Mediterranean and its meeting points have
been the subject of much writing that idealizes its unity and
connectivity.
Indeed, Foucault defines heterotopias as ‘real places—
places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of
society—which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effec-
tively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real
sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously
represented, contested, and inverted.’ 8 But, what I want to em-
phasize is the relational aspect of heterotopia, that is, the rela-
tionship between what he terms as ‘real’ and ‘utopic’—most em-
phatically, it is the relationship between ‘places where many
spaces converge and become entangled’.
As to the homogenous space of utopia, Mediterranean
scholarship has been content with painting the Mediterranean as
a common space for cultural and economic exchanges, even as it
struggles with the way the sea’s present routes, ports, and
7
Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’ (‘Des Autres Espaces’), Diacritics
16, no. 1 (1986), 24.
8
Foucault, 24.
INTRODUCTION 5
coastal cities impose their own frontiers. 9, 10 Inspiring various

works on the Mediterranean, Fernand Braudel’s history of a uni-
fied Mediterranean focused on the timeless ‘constants’ of a geog-
raphy that linked the shores that produced various civiliza-
tions. 11 However, it must be emphasized that Braudel was vigi-
lant about not romanticizing Mediterranean unity, although the
same cannot be said for his reception. In fact, Braudel writes,
‘The sea is everything it is said to be: it provides unity,
transport, the means of exchange and intercourse, if man is pre-
pared to make an effort and pay a price. But it has also been the
great divider, the obstacle that had to be overcome.’ 12 While
Braudel-inspired studies critique his totalizing view of history as
a deterministic ‘landscape of time’ 13 that effaces human agency,
they still apprehend a unified Mediterranean. While Horden and
Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea (2000) displaces Braudel’s geograph-
ical determinism, diachronic particularities, and metropolitan
centers (in favor of neglected rural margins), individual will is
no longer subsumed within a Braudelian framework of particu-
lar geographic conditions and temporal limits, but foregrounded
as the basis for ‘communications’ on which Mediterranean unity
9
Peregrin Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of
Mediterranean History (London: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 722.
10
Horden and Purcell, 722.
11
By ‘constants,’ I am referring to Braudel’s focus on ahistorical geo-
graphical and environmental continuity and determinism through the
longue durée perspective of historical time, wherein he privileges the
unity of the Mediterranean: coherence of [this] history, the extent to
which the movements of boats, pack animals, vehicles and people
themselves makes the Mediterranean a unit and gives it a certain uni-
formity in spite of local resistance.’ Mediterranean and Mediterranean in
the Age of Philip II (Berkeley, CA: University of California, Press, 1996),
227.
12
Braudel, 276.
13
miriam cooke, ‘Mediterranean Thinking: From Netizen to Medizen,’
Geographical Review 89, no. 2 (1999), 292.
6 THE TWO-EDGED SEA
is dependent. 14 Although The Corrupting Sea’s relational ‘analysis

of the whole by way of its components’ 15 in capturing minor
everyday interactions and reciprocal exchanges (making up the
sea’s dynamic networks, contact zones, and microregions) at-
tempts to define a Mediterranean local heterogeneity defying
totalization, the text still operates toward fulfilling a predeter-
mined unity among Mediterranean societies. Simply supplanting
nationalist integrity with regional integrity as a way of fore-
grounding the margins against the hegemony of the metropolis
does not necessarily lead to de-essentializing frameworks (the
authors devote an entire chapter on the paradigm of shame and
honor as essentially Mediterranean). 16 According to Horden and
Purcell, in the modern period the ‘history of the Mediterranean’
ends amidst the transformation of the sea into a ‘European lake’
for the flow of global trade and becomes ‘history in the Mediter-
ranean.’ 17 In line with other Mediterranean historians, Horden
and Purcell close off inquiry into the Mediterranean as antithet-
ical to modernity, when they present Mediterranean history as a
mere manifestation of (non-Mediterranean) hegemonic super-
powers at work in the region.
Literary critic miriam cooke has entered this engagement
with the fraught study of the Mediterranean in the modern era
through a geo-cultural perspective. She proposes a Mediterrane-
an ‘way of thinking’ for building an epistemology of ‘cross-
oceanic arenas of culture and knowledge’ to rid Mediterranean
study of its inclination toward essentialisms, while acknowledg-
ing it as a highly multicultural, multilingual area whose people
have represented a broad array of religious, ethnic, social, and
14
Horden and Purcell, 25.
15
Horden and Purcell, ‘The Mediterranean and “the New Thalassolo-
gy”,’ The American Historical Review 111, no. 3 (2006), 722.
16
Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, Chapter 12.
17
Horden and Purcell, 2–3. Claudio Fogu, ‘From Mare Nostrum to Mare
Alorium: Mediterranean Theory and Mediterraneanism in Contempo-
rary Italian Thought,’ California Italian Studies 1, no. 1 (2010), 3.
INTRODUCTION 7
political difference. 18 On one level, one can see in her notion of

the Mediterranean as a template for a cross-cultural contact
zone resonances of earlier approaches to the Mediterranean as a
cultural mediation model, which historian David Abulafia, who
conceives of the Sahara desert through a Mediterranean tem-
plate, shares. 19 However, Abulafia’s conception of the Sahara as
Mediterranean functions as a heuristic device to convey a geo-
historical crossroads of traders, scholars, artisans, and nomads
that already set the stage for the emergence of richly diverse
aesthetic expressions along North to South and East to West
routes across the Sahara. cooke appropriates the Mediterranean
space, as historically infused with past crossroads, exchanges,
and contact zones, to posit an ideational and discursive Mediter-
ranean ‘way of thinking,’ a philosophy and epistemology based
on the sea’s connective properties, to imagine possible cultural
links and identities unmoored and limited by the nation-state’s
particular prisms. While Abulafia 20 depicts the Sahara through a
history of human and cultural movements that contextualize it
18
cooke, 291.
19
David Abulafia, ‘Mediterraneans,’ in Rethinking the Mediterranean, ed.
William Vernon Harris, 64–93 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005),
Chapter 4.
20
In ‘Mediterraneans,’ Abulafia uses the Mediterranean as a template to
be applied to the ‘Middle Seas’ in other parts of the world, like the Sa-
hara which he characterizes by an ease of contacts between very di-
verse cultures. He not only puts to task the divide separating North and
sub-Saharan Africa and the tendency to view the Sahara Desert as an
impenetrable barrier dividing the continent into the northern ‘white’
and sub-Saharan ‘black’ Africa, but he explores the shared history and
culture among the regions of Africa linked by the Sahara Desert
through centuries of continued exchanges and interactions. Contact
among the Sahara and its peripheries continue to this day to be plat-
forms of interconnected peoples and cultures. Despite trans-Saharan
cultural contact spanning centuries, this inaccurate perception of Africa
as two distinct zones separated by an empty wasteland of desert con-
tinues to influence the way people think about this region and the con-
tinent as a whole.
8 THE TWO-EDGED SEA
both spatially and chronologically as a Middle Seas of sorts in its

own right, cooke’s Mediterranean stands as an imaginative dy-
namics for potential fluid identities that would preclude materi-
al realities of citizenship, exclusion, and nation-state affiliations.
Although cooke’s essay is cautious about the context of such a
stance and critical of a romantic Mediterranean consciousness
espoused by authors in the past (like Durrell which this chapter
will discuss), it still has the potential to reinforce the material
and discursive divide that often undergirds Mediterranean stud-
ies in its eagerness to assume the potential of aquacentric think-
ing and language for exploring alternative identities, which are
in-flux, fluid, and unbound to national ideologies. By this I mean
that even though cooke recognizes Mediterranean consciousness
as problematic, her epistemology has the potential to replicate
the problems inherent to assigning recuperative power to the
discursive practice of space particular to the study of the Medi-
terranean, meaning the theoretical, abstract, metaphoric aspects
of social and spatial categorizations, while neglecting the mate-
rial. These divergences between the historical-material and the
discursive in apprehending the Mediterranean need to be en-
gaged through a contextual discourse that considers the consti-
tutive elements of the nation-state and their borders.
The resurgence of Mediterranean studies, including miriam
cooke’s essay and Peregrin Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s The
Corrupting Sea, and their metaphors of fluidity and exchange
often appear as a ‘refuge’ to compensate for the asymmetrical
power relations that really reflect the sea’s northern and south-
ern shores. 21 We can also turn to Franco Cassano, who wrote
Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterranean to estab-
lish an alternative to ‘Europe’ and ‘European culture,’ of which
the southernmost areas of Italy, Spain, France, and Greece are
not completely a part, according to him, since they border the
21
Anna Botta, ‘Predrag Matvejević’s Mediterranean Breviary: Nostalgia
for an “Ex-World” or Breviary for a New Community?’ California Italian
Studies 1, no. 1 (2010), 5.
INTRODUCTION 9
Mediterranean. He even attributes the development of Greek

philosophy to the country’s position on the Mediterranean. 22 In
recent years, the study of seas has come to be seen as a discur-
sive tactic displacing nation-centered frames of cultural and his-
torical studies. In light of this shift, scholars have been attracted
to the idea of a presumably borderless world of oceans and seas.
What this modern Mediterranean scholarship often reveals is a
wishful, anti-nationalist sentiment and romantic longing, or nos-
talgia, for an age of regional cooperation—but out of touch with
this era’s nationalist frameworks of intensely policed migration
and violently patrolled borders.
Recuperative imaginings of migration across the Mediterra-
nean have figured the coming generation of migrants as ‘pio-
neers,’ crossing physical, cultural, and aesthetic boundaries to
rejuvenate old Europe and prefigure a new Mediterranean su-
pranational space: ‘another promise, another dream, the opening
of another space: the Mediterranean community.’ 23 Although
promoted by government reports, programs, and scholarship,
this supranational space and its ideals of mobility have not of
course pragmatically transformed the migrant into a ‘pioneer’—
mobile, free, able enough to dissolve the boundaries that ob-
struct a utopic Mediterranean community.
Contemporary literary reconstructions of Andalus by au-
thors like Aamin Malouf 24 testify to the allure of a history of co-
operation. Sometimes, these recuperative imaginings of the
Mediterranean reframe identity through mobility, exile, diaspo-
ra, to oppose nationalist ideologies, which still determine much
discourse on European frontiers. In nineteenth- and twentieth-
century literature, the Mediterranean and its cities were cele-
22
Franco Cassano, Southern Thought and Other Essays on the Mediterra-
nean, translated and edited by Norma Bouchard and Velerio Ferme
(New York: Fordham Press, 2012).
23
Azouz Begag and Abdellatif Chaouite, Écarts d'identité (Paris: Seuil,
1990), 18.
24
Amin Maalouf, Leon L’Africain (Leo Africanus) (Paris: JC Lattès,
1986).
10 THE TWO-EDGED SEA
brated for openness and utopic cosmopolitanism. From Law-

rence Durrell to Paul Bowles, the Mediterranean featured as the
model of a cosmopolis—an urban contact zone able to receive
the ‘stranger’; a pluralistic, open society unbound by exclusions
of nationalism. The cosmopolis is where every individual is a
partial stranger because arrivals are incessant; openness and
hospitality constitute its virtue.
Paul Bowles’s Tangier-based writing represents the Medi-
terranean narrative par excellence—replete with travel narratives
and multicultural encounters. Although Bowles wrote on
Tangier’s picturesque qualities for tourism magazines, his stories
described an urban contact zone that was far from tame—border
towns at the crossroads of diverse nationalities and cultures with
a seductive lawlessness. Criminality and chaos abound in his
stories, but there is safety in permissibility, an order in the dis-
order, a comfort in knowing that its bustling cosmopolitanism,
the flow of people coming and going, made it possible to hide
out, lose oneself, become ‘clandestine’ without much repercus-
sion. Bowles’s towns represent a liberating frontier for escape
and criminality, as well as places of simplicity, transcendence,
and inspiration for those seeking to ‘drop out’ of society.
Bowles’s ‘contact zone’ 25 for travelers, the disorderly theatre of
violence and leisurely escape, is part of a narrative archive
25
In the perspective of Fernand Braudel's longue durée (a panoptic per-
spectivism), the ‘unity’ of the Mediterranean is considered within the
historical conditions of heterogeneous networks stretching from North
Africa through the Middle East to the Indian Ocean. These networks
have been disrupted in the last two and a half thousand years, each
time through the Punic wars, the Crusades, and European modernity.
These are considered traumatic moments in which networks were torn
apart by the imposition of the unities and hierarchies of Rome and Eu-
rope. Arab conquests in the seventh and eighth centuries reopened and
revitalized the possibility of potential ‘unity,’ permitting Europe to es-
tablish contact with the Middle East and subsequently with a world
system of commerce and culture that centered around Baghdad and
Cairo.
INTRODUCTION 11
traced to the Middle Ages. After all, the Mediterranean is essen-

tialized not only by a ‘history of travel culture attracted by free-
doms,’ a contented freely mobile cosmopolitanism, but in the
social vice and visceral experience that ‘dangerous mores associ-
ated with the region’ offer. 26
Likewise, Lawrence Durrell animated the Mediterranean
narrative with nods toward cosmopolitanism. In Durrell’s Alex-
andria Quartet, a series of novels set in 1930s and 1940s Alexan-
dria, 27 he divides Alexandria: one is the cosmopolitan ‘Mediter-
ranean’ city where his foreign minority elite cohort—most Alex-
andria-born but European self-identified—live and socialize; the
other is a poorer, less cosmopolitan city that he designates as
‘Egyptian’, native African and Arab quarters. Early twentieth-
century cosmopolitan foreign elites, like Durrell, considered Al-
exandria not part of Egypt so much as a part of a larger refined
Mediterranean, a more European Mediterranean. They consid-
ered Alexandria more of a Mediterranean city, rather than Egyp-
tian or African, a place deemed more global, more universal,
26
Mike Crang, ed., Cultures of Mass Tourism: Doing the Mediterranean in
the Age of Banal Mobilities (Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.,
2009), 160.
27
For more information on Durrell, see Julius Rowan Raper and Melo-
dy Enscore, eds, Lawrence Durrell: Comprehending the Whole (Columbia:
University of Missouri Press, 1995). Lawrence Durrell (1912–1990) was
an expatriate British writer, born in colonial India to British colonials.
Even though he was known as an expatriate British writer, he resisted
affiliation with Britain and preferred to be considered cosmopolitan.
Educated in England, he convinced his family to move to the Greek
island of Corfu, his wife, first wife, mother, siblings, in order to write
poetry. He wrote novels, poems, plays, essays, and his Alexandria Quar-
tet became his most famous work. The Alexandria Quartet is of a series
of novels, Justine, Balthazar (1958), Mountolive (1959) and Clea (1960),
set before and during the Second World War in the Egyptian city of
Alexandria. The first three books tell the same story but from different
perspectives, a technique Durrell described in his introductory note to
Balthazar as ‘relativistic’.
more intercultural (European-wise, at least), but distinctly set

apart from the natives. 28 Durrell exhibits ‘this elite poetics of
Alexandria, initiated as a form of revialism, re-inscribing Alex-
andria’s literary identity almost exclusively with reference to the
city’s ancient origins and/or through the lens of a privileged
Western genealogy … birthplace of cosmopolitanism and uni-
versalism.’ 29 Durrell denied a cultural and representational ecol-
ogy in which South of the Mediterranean bore influence beyond
its shores and saw Alexandria as simply a site for a Western
‘homecoming’. Like Durrell, the Alexandrian Greek poet Con-
stantin Cavafy experienced Alexandria as a site of loss and nos-
talgia where a great Western culture was to be retrieved, as ech-
oed in Durrell’s description of the modern city as ‘Capital of
Memory.’ 30 Alexandria is often dealt with by both Durrell and
28
Durrell’s friend Gaston Zanarini, on whom the character Balthazar in
the series Alexandria Quartet is believed to be based, championed the
idea of an Alexandria removed from Egypt and Africa but rather part of
the Mediterranean.
29
Beverly Butler, ‘Egypt: Constructed Exiles of the Imagination,’ in Con-
tested Landscapes: Movement, Exile, and Place, eds Barbara Bender and
Margot Winer (Oxford, UK: Berg, 2001), 305.
30
Born in 1863 (–1933) to a Greek merchant family in Alexandria,
Constantine P. Cavafy wrote in Greek, and his work has been widely
translated. Cavafy’s poetry, like ‘Ithaka’, explores the figure of the trav-
eler always seeking a lost homeland in exile. Likewise in ‘Exile’, he ex-
plores the exiled figure cast out of the homeland and prevented from
returning. Even though Cavafy was born and lived in Alexandria of the
nineteenth and twentieth century, his work reveals a persona of an ex-
ile of the ancient Greek Mediterranean, a specific heritage of ancient
Alexandrian myth and history. He, thus, envisaged his poetry as
memory work that would return him home not to ancient Alexandria
but to the country that, in his view, gave Alexandria its ancient herit-
age, Greece. Cavafy, born in Egyptian Alexandria, demonstrates the
impression Alexandria left on his work—but only insofar as he explored
it as the site where Western civilization and its Hellenistic influences
originated—that is, Hellenistic Alexandria, the Alexandria of antiquity,
the Alexandria of an ancient Greek past, the Alexandria named after
INTRODUCTION 13
Cavafy as a repository of cultures that belonged to not only the

present but multiple eras and their cultures—i.e., Cavafy’s ac-
cessing of a repository of cultures including Byzantine and Hel-
lenistic, to explore Alexandria. Durrell, in fact, referred to the
city as a ‘matrix of civilizations,’ but only past civilizations that
set the stage for his own re-imagining of Alexandria as a cosmo-
politan city for its European minorities.
Of course, colonial Alexandria has a different historical tra-
jectory than Tangier, at the time an expatriate haven for Ameri-
cans. But, whether they engaged in a representational ecology of
the places they lived, these writers and their work became
Western synecdoches for Arab Mediterranean cities—
multinational, polyglot, liberating cultural ‘frontiers’—during
the eras in which they were written and they depict. Robert Il-
bert explains the transformations of the city in the 1960s by cit-
ing literary works that define the era: ‘it is 1966,’ he writes, ‘and
the Alexandria of Lawrence Durrell has become that of Naguib
Mahfouz. The writers and their works function as a synecdoche
for Alexandrian culture and society during the years in which
they were written, and which they depict. Thus, Durrell’s Alex-
andria Quartet, published between 1957 and 1960, represents
cosmopolitan, Mediterranean, polyglot Alexandria of the 1940s
and 1950s, and Mahfouz’s Miramar represents the Egyptian,
Arabophone Alexandria of the 1960s, following the mass migra-
tions of the foreign minorities. 31 Their work simultaneously cre-
ates place signification and builds upon it, not simply reflecting
upon but producing place affects in a double movement of ‘as-
Alexander the Greek. From his entire work was absent the Mediterra-
nean where he wrote and spent most of his life—Egypt, or the Arab
Mediterranean. See Essential Cavafy, translated by Raymund Keele (New
York: HarperCollins, 1996).
31
Robert Ilbert, ‘International Waters,’ in Alexandria 1860–1960: The
Brief Life of a Cosmopolitan Community, eds Robert Ilbert and Ilios Yan-
nakakis (Alexandria: Harpocrates, 1997), 10
cription-appropriation’. 32 This movement consists of the imaging

of the Arab world and its culture as ‘Mediterranean’ and the de-
velopment of cities as ‘Mediterranean’ in a related, oft-symbiotic
relationship. While this convergence of Arab culture and urban
development as Mediterranean is reflected in literary work, it is
also the case that literary work develops and circulates what has
come to be identified as a ‘symbolic geography’, the Mediterra-
neanization of Arab culture and city.
In tracing the way the idea of the Mediterranean is instru-
mentalized, we can grasp how it has become a heuristic device.
The Mediterranean has become performative: it is less about its
shared traits than the play of ‘claims and knowledges about
those shared traits,’ a utopic catalyst for new lives and lan-
guages in a cosmopolis welcoming multiple identities. In Franck
Salameh’s Language, Memory, and Identity in the Middle East: The
Case for Lebanon (2010), Mediterraneanism is cast as a form of
identitarian resistance to the confines and reductionism of Arab-
ism, but in fact it simply urges supplanting one identity for an-
other, in that Mediterraneanism has its own identity ‘obliga-
tions’. Mediterranean identity is positioned as a more authentic,
primary identity, with a longer lineage, which liberalizes, loos-
32
See Nigel Thrift, ‘Literature, the Production of Culture, and the Poli-
tics of Place,’ Antipode 15, no. 1 (1983), 21. He writes, ‘Places have
meanings and meanings are always produced, never simply expressed,
as part of a wider process of cultural creation. Literature is one way in
which such meanings are produced within a culture and ascribed to
place, just as place is often appropriated to produce meanings in litera-
ture.’ This double-sided process of ascription-appropriation is not neu-
tral… Representations of space are not unmediated, but are inextricable
from construction of social space. See Michael Keith and Steve Pile,
Place and the Politics of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1993). Keith and
Pile explain that Walter Benjamin’s cities were not only ‘real and meta-
phorical works,’ but they were also acts of ‘representation that were
consciously, cognitively, and politically marked rather than the evoca-
tions of a purely aesthetic spatiality’ (33).
INTRODUCTION 15
ens the straw man of a purported Arab identity that is essential-

ized as inhospitable to free thinking, as opposed to the intellec-
tual hospitality of the cosmopolitan Mediterranean.
The representation of the Mediterranean as contented mul-
ticultural utopia and the sea as connective force and a zone of
encounter have been sustained and have resurged in contempo-
rary Mediterranean Studies, but the grand narrative of the Medi-
terranean has worn itself out. By locating the frontier that the
Mediterranean has created, much intellectual work challenges
the resurgence of Mediterraneanism, locates its irony, and ex-
plores motivations and strategies of its culturally deterministic
and essentializing resurgence. For example, Predrag Matvejevic
has highlighted the North-South divisions troubling notions of
Mediterranean unity and connectivity, arguing that it is not
even possible to consider the Mediterranean a single sea without
accounting for the conflicts and ruptures in its ‘meeting
points.’ 33 Other research that takes to task Mediterraneanism
and apprehends the binarized construction of the current-day
Mediterranean includes Driessen’s ethnography of undocument-
ed migrants that counters the romantic image of the Mediterra-
nean. Shafer contrasts the EU-created frontier in the middle of
the Mediterranean Sea and the EU-Med cultural initiatives to
create a cultural dialogue and find commonalities. Much work,
indeed, seeks true engagement with a sea crossed by thousands
escaping persecution rather than contribute to its folklorization
in developing a Mediterranean brand, undergirded by clichés of
‘homecoming’ and ‘bridges’, as well as current reiterations in the
form of ‘partnerships’ and ‘unions’. 34
33
Predrag Matvejevic, Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape, translated
by Michael Heim (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
34
For works that apprehend the binarized construction of the Mediter-
ranean, see: Henk Driessen, ‘A Janus-Faced Sea: Contrasting Percep-
tions and Experience of the Mediterranean,’ MAST/Maritime Studies 3,
no. 1 (2004), 41–50; Thomas Christiansen, Fabio Petito, and Ben Tonra,
‘Fuzzy Politics Around Fuzzy Borders: The European Union’s “Near-
Abroad”’, Cooperation and Conflict 35, no. 4 (2000), 389–415; Isabel
It has been noted that the instrumentalization of the Medi-

terranean toward narratives of Western modernity has tended to
blur this division. For example, the south and east Mediterrane-
an are both ‘recuperated as discursive origins of Western mo-
dernity (birthplace of Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian civili-
zations, from which Western modernity supposedly derives) and
as the Other against which Northern European identity could be
constituted (against regions formerly part of the Arab/Ottoman
empires, i.e., North Africa, Turkey)’. 35 The theoretical construc-
tions of the Mediterranean as Self or Other to the West are not
exclusive but have had a mutually constitutive relationship, par-
ticularly informed by colonial relations. The view of the Medi-
terranean as cradle of civilization and birthplace of philosophy
and democracy has also aligned with a view of the Mediterrane-
an as birthplace of rationality undergirding European modernity
and validating colonial efforts that have since established global
hierarchies and inequalities. This theoretical construction of the
Mediterranean contact zone, on which current definitions of the
southern borders of Europe are determined, has been inter-
twined with the development of European modernity, defined
by Mediterranean scholar Iain Chambers as ‘nationalist in its
form and imperialist in its reach’. 36 As colonial power relations
determined representations of the Mediterranean in the modern
period, the region was imagined as starkly divided between two
incommensurable spaces and civilizational models.
Schäfer, ‘The Cultural Dimension of the Euro‐Mediterranean Partner-

ship: A Critical Review of the First Decade of Intercultural Coopera-
tion,’ History and Anthropology 18, no. 3 (2007), 335–352; Adrian Gri-
ma, ‘The Melting Pot That Never Was,’ in Africa and the West, ed. Badra
Lahouel (Oran, Algeria: Dar El Quds El Arabi, 2009).
35
Edwidge Tamalet, Modernity in Question: Retrieving Imaginaries of the
Transcontinental Mediterranean, PhD Dissertation (San Diego: University
of California, 2009), 8.
36
Iain Chambers, Mediterranean Crossings: The Politics of an Interrupted
Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 15.
INTRODUCTION 17
By challenging Mediterraneanism, this book does not at-

tempt to deny these exchanges across the Mediterranean that
have bound its shores. It is these links disturbing the binaries of
North and South (Europe and Africa) that this book aims to re-
trieve. Instrumental in the process of retrieval is analysis of a
representational, cultural, and political ecology that reveals
traveling cultures’ multi-directional influences (not unidirec-
tional with the south of the Mediterranean serving as mere stag-
ing ground for Western civilizational roots) and North participa-
tion in putting in momentum a hierarchy creating the need to
migrate in the South, as we will read in undocumented migra-
tion literature from Africa, specifically Morocco, Egypt, and Sub-
Saharan transmigration in Morocco, along its Mediterranean
shores. It is these connections that evoke the denial of participa-
tion and responsibility of a common ecology—global ‘relational
interdependency … of unevenly negotiated relations which dis-
rupts the inside/outside binary of contemporary Western geopo-
litical imaginaries’ 37—wrought by beach-border scenes that dis-
tinguish two separate worlds and wherein travelers from the
South are represented as the world that is alien, uncanny, unfa-
miliar, and—not merely without documents—but without any
legitimate claim of belonging.
Rather than denying a history of transactions across the
Mediterranean, this book asserts this history resides side by side
with its divisions. The Mediterranean as familiar site through
tourism, escape, adventure, ‘metissage’, and cosmopolitanism
still remains unaffected by its current reinvention as unfamiliar
site of criminality, illegality, shadowy networks. Both are differ-
ent ends of a utopic continuum for a precise ordering of Medi-
terranean land—one a nostalgic retrieval of an ‘authentic’ cos-
mopolitan past, the other containment for future governmental
reterritorialization.
37
Amanda Crawley Jackson, ‘Cette Poetique du Politique: Political and
Representational Ecologies in the Work of Yto Barrada,’ L’Esprit Cre-
ateur 51, no. 1 (Spring 2011), 66.
However much the instrumentalization of the Mediterrane-

an has blurred the division along the North-South axis, the Med-
iterranean’s mark of alterity, its construction as Other, since the
colonial period cannot be ignored. Periodized analyses of Eu-
rope’s accelerated marginalization of south and east Mediterra-
nean countries range from the colonial period to the post-Cold-
War era, 38 but they predominantly attribute to the post-9/11 era
a marked resurgence of marginalization of these Mediterranean
countries as a security threat subject to policies of containment,
securitization, and anti-immigration policies.
This movement of alterity involves reinscribing a new form
of European identity through the construction of a new Mediter-
ranean Other as a zone of conflict. 9/11 features not only as al-
tering the intensity of the Mediterranean’s threatening image,
but the symbolic geography that positions the Mediterranean,
38
On criticism of the EMP, specifically the EU-Med positioning the
Mediterranean as Europe’s Other, see: Hein de Haas, ‘The Myth of Inva-
sion: The Inconvenient Realities of African Migration to Europe,’ Third
World Quarterly 29, no. 7 (2008): 1305–1322; Isabel Shafer, ‘The Cul-
tural Dimension of the Euro‐Mediterranean Partnership: A Critical Re-
view of the First Decade of Intercultural Cooperation,’ History and An-
thropology 18, no. 3 (2007): 335–352; Pinar Bilgin, ‘A Return to “Civili-
zational Geopolitics” in the Mediterranean?’ Geopolitics 9, no. 2 (2004):
269–291; Thomas Christiansen, Fabio Petito, and Ben Tonra, ‘Fuzzy
Politics Around Fuzzy Borders: The European Union’s “Near-Abroad”,’
Cooperation and Conflict 35, no. 4 (2000): 389–415; Nikolaos Tzifakis,
‘EU's Region-Building and Boundary-Drawing Policies: The European
Approach to the Southern Mediterranean and the Western Balkans,’
Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans 9, no. 1 (2007): 47–64;
Stephan Stetter, ‘The Politics of De-Paradoxification in Euro-
Mediterranean Relations: Semantics and Structures of “Cultural Dia-
logue”’, Mediterranean Politics 10, no. 3 (2005): 331–348; Paul Balta, La
Méditerranée Réinventée. Réalités et Espoirs de la Coopération (Paris: La
Découverte, 1992); Jean-Claude Tourrett, ‘Les Regions Actrices et Par-
tenaires de la Construction Méditerranée,’ La Pensée Midi 21, Quelles
Régions pour Dmain? L’Example Méditerranée, eds Bruno Etienne and
Thierry Fabre (Aries, France: Actes Sud, 2007).
INTRODUCTION 19
constituted now more by Arab cities, in opposition to Europe,

‘the other side of the shore’. As Hein de Haas and Ali Bensaâd
have argued, 39 the number of African migrants coming to Eu-
rope is relatively small in the context of global migration trends.
However, the ‘paranoid Eurocentric vision’ of migration has led
the EU to transform relations greatly in the Mediterranean, not
only by limiting inward migration but also investing substantial-
ly in the policing of its boundaries. Thus, the Mediterranean is
ordered and partitioned through new frontiers, regulations, and
increasingly rigid identities tied to specific forms of passage:
touristic, trade, military and otherwise.
The New Mediterranean is a globalized project that must be
read in conjunction with the shifting self-understanding of the
EU, whose Euro-Med Partnership projects aim to discipline di-
verse ethnicities, cultures, affiliations in the Mediterranean into
a fixed space. In an effort to secure the porous borders of Europe
from North Africa, post-9/11, the European Commission issued
the Hague Programme, a five-year plan designed to ‘protect the
field of freedom, justice, and security,’ driven by an agenda to
counter terrorists and ‘illegal’ immigrants (whom the document
conflates into a common threat to Europe). 40 Undocumented
migration has been on the rise since 1995 when several EU na-
tions enacted the Schengen Accords to soften internal EU bor-
ders and fortify external ones. Spain ended Moroccans’ privi-
leged status of entry into Spain without a visa in 1985. 41 But,
39
Hein de Haas, ‘The Myth of Invasion: The Inconvenient Realities of
African Migration to Europe,’ Third World Quarterly 29, no. 7 (2008):
1305–1322. Ali Bensaâd, ‘The Militarization of Migration Frontiers in
the Mediterranean,’ in The Maghreb Connection: Movements of Life Across
North Africa, eds Ursula Biemann and Brian Holmes (Barcelona: Actar,
2006).
40
European Council, The Hague Programme: Strengthening Freedom, Secu-
rity, and Justice in the European Union. 2005/C53/01, OJ C53/1,
3.3.2005(a).
41
The requirement was not implemented until 1991. For more infor-
mation on Moroccan migration to Spain, see Taieb Belghazi, ‘Economic
with undocumented migration, entry into Spain guaranteed pas-

sage to nearly any other EU nation—hence, the appeal for many
Moroccan migrants. 42
The current place narrative of the Mediterranean still main-
tains it as a liberatory site, but now also reveals migration
northward as a paralyzing trap rather than a liberating process.
This is the new Mediterranean—a globalized project to be read
in conjunction with the shifting self-construction of the EU,
whose security initiatives, anti-immigration policies, and even
Euro-Med Partnership projects aim to discipline diverse ethnici-
ties, cultures, affiliations in the southern and eastern Mediterra-
nean into a fixed space and monolithic heritage model, by re-
inscribing the Mediterranean as Europe’s Other. 43 The Mediter-
ranean construction is currently transforming and in-flux, de-
termined by the creation of new anti-immigration policies and
erection of new borders being reworked back into the EU to
monitor the flow of undocumented migrants across them, in the
service of the EU’s construction of its Self in relation to its Oth-
er. However, the binarized optic of the Mediterranean amidst
Martyrs: Two Perspectives on Lahrig’, in The Cultures of Economic Migra-

tion: International Perspectives, eds Suman Gupta and Tope Omoniyi, 87–
100 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2007).
42
The ‘sea of death’ has become a common description for the Mediter-
ranean, which has recently seen many deaths of migrants attempting to
circumvent border controls by traveling on flimsy crafts. The phrase
has been common in journalism: see ‘Sea of Death Claims At Least 1500
Lives,’ Times of Malta, 2/1/12; ‘Over the Sea to Spain,’ The Economist,
8/10/00.
43
On criticisms of the Euro-Med cultural dialogue initiatives, see Isabel
Shafer, ‘The Cultural Dimension of the Euro‐Mediterranean Partnership:
A Critical Review of the First Decade of Intercultural Cooperation,’ His-
tory and Anthropology 18, no. 3 (2007): 335–352. Also, see Raffaelia Del
Sarto, ‘Setting the Cultural Agenda: Concepts, Communities, and Repre-
sentation in Euro-Mediterranean Relations,’ Mediterranean Politics 10,
no. 3 (2005): 313–330.
INTRODUCTION 21
the EU’s policy transformations, whether post-9/11 or much

more recently post-Arab Spring, has only grown exponentially.
This book retrieves the new trans-Mediterranean undocu-
mented migrant literary figure from an Afro-Arab terrain em-
bodied by this period’s paradox: what I refer to as both an at-
traction of cosmopolitanism and a repulsion of containment.
After all, it is only after reading the novels wrought through
perspectives of undocumented migrants that I have apprehended
this double Mediterranean between which the figures always
seemed to be navigating. My arguments regarding this paradox
are based on the premise of the Mediterranean as an invention,
performative in the sense that it is less about shared traits than
the play of ‘claims and knowledges about those shared traits.’
Undocumented migration and its cultural productions do bear
on the resurgence of the Mediterranean, or what has been called
‘Mediterraneanism’, in academic fields. There is sometimes a
disjuncture between representation of Mediterranean places in
modern literature and transformation of Mediterranean places
into a singular topos in studies of the Mediterranean, which en-
dangers turning place into a site of memory disconnected from
the present, into a spectacle. I take on the constructivist view of
Mediterranean-ness as that which is not based on an originary
moment or a culturally distinct essence, but as the repetition of
symbols that accumulate to represent identity, which revert
back to the notion of its origin and uniqueness, where regional
identity is naturalized through a repeated performance of pre-
sumed ‘norms.’ In terms of its cosmopolitanism, I contend that
its essentializing properties have long ago made up the Mediter-
ranean narrative in a ‘history of travel culture attracted by free-
doms, by different and dangerous mores associated with the re-
gion’, 44 which has identified it as a liberating escape and a cos-
44
2009), 160.
mopolitan utopia for the appealing disorder of its diversity. 45

That is, it is associated with the idealized dynamism and flux of
the cosmopolis, marked by the incessant arrival and departure
of the ‘stranger.’ 46 The ideal narrative of the Mediterranean’s
attractions continues to this day, but a polarizing narrative
emerges alongside it: the repulsion in the containment of the
Mediterranean. While the attraction of the Mediterranean is as-
sociated with an appealing disorder of diversity, summoning its
cosmopolitanism, the repulsion of the Mediterranean comes
from identifying it as a ‘zone of conflict’, demanding its con-
tainment. While this binarized construction of the Mediterrane-
an is apprehended by various theorists on whom the irony of its
mythic connectivity, despite its current reconstruction as a fron-
45
Herzfeld urges us to treat attributions of Mediterranean culture not as
literal statements but as performative utterances, in J. L. Austin’s sense
(as explained in How To Do Things with Words): ‘they do not so much
enunciate facts as create them.’ Herzfeld suggests that in this way we
can discern claims of Mediterranean unity as ‘excuses expressive of, and
enmeshed in, a global hierarchy of value in which “Mediterranean”
comes somewhere between “modern” and “primitive”’. See Michael
Herzfeld, ‘Practical Mediterraneanism: Excuses for Everything, from
Epistemology to Eating,’ in Rethinking the Mediterranean, ed. William
Vernon Harris. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.)
46
The cosmopolis is an urban utopia characterized by its ability to re-
ceive the ‘stranger.’ It is a model of a pluralistic, open society unbound
by the exclusions of nationalism. The openness to the stranger makes
explicit the notion of hospitality as a cosmopolitan virtue. While there
are different conceptions of cosmopolitanism that assign differences of
the stranger to a group and the host to another, I take on understanding
of the relationship between strangers and urban life as one in which
‘strangeness is a condition shared by everybody rather than a property
of some-bodies.’ (76). In ‘Strangers in the Cosmopolis,’ Kurt Iveson
writes: ‘Every individual is a ‘partial stranger’ because arrivals (and
departures) are incessant, with these displacements calling forth a nev-
er-ending series of responses and adjustments’ (76). Kurt Iveson,
‘Strangers in the Cosmopolis,’ in Cosmopolitan Urbanism, ed. Jon Binnie
(New York: Psychology Press, 2006).
INTRODUCTION 23
tier, is not lost, the attraction and repulsion of the contemporary

Mediterranean narrative in juxtaposition through its heterotopic
literary forms has yet to be analyzed or theorized as such.
Engaging Foucault’s conception of utopia as controlling,
disciplining, and restrictive, I assert both narrative claims of the
Mediterranean are utopic, not in the idealizing sense, but in a
restrictive, controlling, disciplining sense of the utopic: 47 the
order of containment projects a desire for a place and time to
come, to be discovered, to be exposed and explored through the
partition of the sea, the regimentation of mobility flows. To en-
force the order of the ideal society, ‘the utopic perpetually verg-
es on the dystopic, the dysfunctional utopia, the more modern
these utopias become,’ 48 thus, in its very conception utopia is
inherently rigid, authoritarian, hierarchical, restrictive, and ex-
clusionary. Foucault’s utopia contrasts with conceptions of uto-
pia, such as Henri Lefebvre’s, as positive, productive for criti-
cism and self-reflection, in perpetual process as a counter-
hegemonic force. 49 Utopia’s disciplinary gaze of a Mediterranean
inscribed as the Other to the EU is particularly Foucauldian:
‘They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted
analogy with the real space of Society. They present society it-
self in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but
in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces.’ 50
Utopia is imposed upon a social space severing its links with
history, tradition, and the disorderly patterns of the everyday—
abstracted as a non-place. We can see this de-substantialization
and de-historicization with conceptions of enduring heritages of
47
16, no.1 (1986), 22–27.
48
Elizabeth Grosz highlights the main point of Meg Whitford’s work on
utopia in ‘The Time of Architecture,’ in Embodied Utopias: Gender, Social
Change, and the Modern Metropolis, eds Amy Bingaman, Lisa Sanders,
and Rebecca Zorach (New York: Routledge, 2002), 268.
49
Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Foundations for a Sociology of
the Everyday (London: Verso, 2002), 241.
50
Foucault, 1986, 24.
the Mediterranean wielded by grand narratives of EU-Med cul-

tural dialogues. The utopic compulsion to order and decontextu-
alize (deplete of history and social relations) the Mediterranean
has resonance with Thomas More’s Utopia and its interconnected
themes of territory and exclusion—mapping a perfected social
order onto an artificial island. The tightly organized spatial form
was the means by which potentially disruptive forces could be
excluded in order to maintain social order and stability. Its rela-
tions with the outside world were closely monitored or sur-
veilled, but it largely functioned as an isolated coherently orga-
nized space. The internal socio-spatial ordering of the island
stringently regulates a disciplined, stabilized, immutable society.
But in the case of the newly ascribed ‘Mediterranean’ territories,
the spatial isolation is not ‘self-regulated’ by the Middle Eastern
(east) and North African (south) countries that it now strictly
signifies, but rather the call for isolation and containment into a
transparently and coherently organized space is the fantasy of
the other, the ‘zone of peace’, the EU. As the EU names, con-
tains, surveils its Mediterranean Other, might we not consider it
open visually, perspectivally, for surveillance like a panorama,
and closed, isolated, cordoned off, contained, territorially? This
openness and closure, not so much an ambivalence of utopia but
its complementary parts, constitute Foucault’s conception of the
totalizing vision and disciplinary power of the panopticon, that
‘utopia of the perfectly governed city’, as he referred to it. 51
But in what ways has the Mediterranean as a seductive, ra-
ther than a strict authoritarian, utopia emerged through literary
itineraries? It flashes a seductive monolithic narrative of travel
adventure, sensuality, spirituality, diversity, and authentic her-
itage that has traditionally encompassed a remarkably diverse
number of nations and cultures occupying the three continents
that surround the Mediterranean Sea. Cosmopolitanism, particu-
lar in its branding of the Mediterranean as frontier of travel and
51
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans-
lated by Alan Sheridan (London: Allen Lane, 1977), 198.
INTRODUCTION 25
escape for its ‘sensual pleasures,’ its ‘authentic heritage,’ its

‘mythical vices’, is also controlling, disciplinary in the sense that
it too is based on discovery and exploration for the purpose of
ordering—and, tourism’s retrieval of these properties. Utopias
are used as a heuristic device, as an exploration of what might be
possible or impossible, and the Mediterranean is the site where-
in desire of exploration is projected: cosmopolitanism as a
means of exploring or becoming familiar with something known
in the past and containment being the means of re-making fa-
miliar something now unknown. 52 For example, one of Cavafy’s
depictions of the Mediterranean—as a unit—is composed like a
list, fluid and logical, but with the sensual and sensuous juxta-
posed with the civilizational, humanistic, and classical: ‘The
whole Mediterranean—the sculptures, the palms, the gold
beads, the bearded heroes, the moonlight, the winged gorgons,
the bronze men, the philosophers—all of it seems to rise in the
sour pungent taste of these black olives between the teeth. A
taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as cold as wa-
52
While Foucault’s focus is on conditional utopia’s connection to the
potential of language, as opposed to ‘real’ spaces in ‘The Language of
Space’, it too suggests a literary recourse to convention, a predeter-
mined order of discourse, which is fruitful in considering the means of
ordering the Mediterranean, discursively: it is a ‘fantasy of origins’ to
which one returns, it permits an ordering of speech, while heterotopia
desiccates speech. Utopia as a site of memory that promises regimenta-
tion of both discourse and movement is figured by ancient Alexandria,
Foucault’s site for classical thought, origins, authenticity—a predeter-
mined order to which one is ‘bound’ to return. Foucault refers to a
binding, repetitive return and an adherence to chronological formalism
and narrative coherence to demonstrate the discursive effects of utopia:
‘Homeric return … Alexandria, which is our birthplace, has mapped out
this circle for all western language: to write was to return, to come
back to the beginning to grasp again the first instance; it is to witness
anew the dawn. Hence, the mythical function of literature to this day,
hence its relation to the ancient: hence, the privilege it has granted to
analogy, to similarity, to all the marvels of identicality. Hence, above
all, a structure of repetition which indicated its very existence’ (24).
ter.’ 53 The recitation of the list of totems or familiar objects re-

duced to an enduring and universal taste almost resists inquiry
or interrogation, implying not only a sensual connection to the
Mediterranean’s ancient past but also suggesting that all one
would need to know about the Mediterranean lies in its reassur-
ing, but disjointed, narrative rendered like a formula or an in-
cantation. Taking on its putatively ‘natural’ form through a re-
peated performance, the erotic Mediterranean is likewise deliv-
ered by Bowles and his literary circle, Tennessee Williams and
Williams S. Burroughs, as sexually permissive especially for gay
litterateurs, but not due to an ideological connection to the Med-
iterranean’s ancient past of a free, open sensuality, as expressed
by Durrell, but due to sexual commerce sustained by material
desperation and colonial beliefs about a simultaneously permis-
sive and virile Arab-African sexuality, especially during the
Interzone period. A fantasy of origins also applies to the Medi-
terranean by way of its discursive potential to order language, of
attaching narrative coherence to a place that not only no longer
exists, but might have never existed, and finally integrating
properties that may not belong to it that would ultimately func-
tion as a site of return—for authenticity, spirituality, sensuality,
classical humanism, rationality.
Of course it has been argued that it is not even possible to
consider the Mediterranean a single sea without accounting for
the conflicts and ruptures in its ‘meeting points.’ 54 This book
attempts to retrieve these troubled and troubling ‘meeting
points,’ which not only problematize the unity of the Mediterra-
nean, but lie like splinters within, agitating against, contesting,
de-authorizing recuperative imaginings of migration across the
Mediterranean, which have figured the coming generation of
migrants as ‘pioneers,’ crossing physical, cultural, and aesthetic
boundaries to rejuvenate old Europe and to ultimately prefigure
53
Lawrence Durrell, Prospero’s Cell: A Guide to the Landscape of Manners
of the Island of Corfu (London: Faber & Faber, 1945), 1/14/38.
54
Matvejevic, 25.
INTRODUCTION 27
a new Mediterranean supranational space: ‘another promise,

another dream, the opening of another space: the Mediterranean
community.’ 55 This supranational space promoted by official
papers, speeches, programs, and scholarship, through ideals of
mobility residing within globalization, theoretically lies at the
end of a global capital flow and circulation of labor, products,
ideas, people, but has not been materially or pragmatically at-
tuned to transforming the figure of the migrant to cultural ‘pio-
neer’—mobile, free, able enough to dissolve the boundaries that
obstruct a utopic Mediterranean community.
This book attempts to retrieve these submerged and un-
authorized ‘meeting points’ that agitate against and discompose
the official chain of transmissions that have made up Mediterra-
nean literary and cultural imaginaries. It does so not only
through analysis of literary accounts of migration whose cross-
ings come to define the sea by its North-South axis, but through
an intersection of un-authorized travel imaginaries—
undocumented migration literature—and their oft-skeptical de-
authorization of absolute, unquestioned, transmitted Mediterra-
nean narratives of unity, timelessness, cooperation, and identi-
tarian fluidity. Moreover, the texts’ polarized apprehensions of
the Mediterranean have compelled a problematization of the
Mediterranean as a frame of analysis. Free from this chain of
transmitted knowledge, authors open up the space of articula-
tion for various, mutually contradictory, compossible Mediter-
raneans—but without losing sight of their divisive ‘meeting
points,’ in this era.
The paradox of the Mediterranean between which migrants
are caught is conveyed in undocumented-migrant literature
through the migrant journeys’ reflection upon distinct utopias: a
tenacious colonial, Orientalist archive through revisited perfor-
mances; a tradition of European tourism colliding with the car-
ceral mobility of African migration; a utopic place-narrative un-
55
Begag and Chaouite, 18.
dermined by its heterotopic re-signification—the depiction of

sites contradictory and disturbing to utopia as they contest the
Mediterranean’s homogenous figuration—the Mediterranean as
a liberating frontier for ‘dropping out’ takes on new meaning for
undocumented migrant figures, whose lives and stories are
plunged and submerged into anonymity, when faced with expo-
nential obstructions of travel as the Mediterranean Sea itself
becomes more recognizably a fortressed frontier between the
North and South.
In some narratives this paradox is wrought through inter-
textuality: the use of literary inventions of the Mediterranean
within overlapping traditions of twentieth and twenty-first cen-
tury colonial and postcolonial literature to invent and theorize
subjectivity in relation to the new space of the Mediterranean,
to undermine fantasy of Mediterranean freedom of movement
and adventure and create a larger transnational space of identi-
fication.
The intertextuality that the literature establishes is often
guided by the journey’s trans-Mediterranean boat and its pas-
sengers to convey and to connect two Mediterraneans operating
simultaneously. In his memoir Yawmiyyāt Muhājir Sirrī (2005),
Rachid Nini’s wandering through Spanish territory imbued with
the historical memory of the lost paradise of Andalus is bitterly
rendered and ironically juxtaposed against his modern dis-
placement. Associated with the tradition of voyage and the
ubiquity of mobility as a constitutive Mediterranean trait of the
universal figure of the exile, Nini’s wandering does not align
with the productive concept lying at the source of encounters
between cultures in the Mediterranean contact zone. Wandering
in pursuit of invisibility and stability actually leads to homeless-
ness for Nini. The historical narrative of Tariq Ibn Ziad and his
military conquests that initiated the Andalusian era is woven
through both Nini’s memoir and Laila Lalami’s novel Hope and
Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005). Lalami’s novel and Tahar Ben
Jelloun’s Partir (2009) integrate the literary history of the expat
era: the narratives of William S. Burroughs, Paul Bowles, and
their Beat-Generation cohort are symbols of the Mediterranean
and Morocco for tourists and readers alike. One of the main ve-
INTRODUCTION 29
hicles of performing the Mediterranean is the retrieval of a lost

paradise, a cosmopolitan and liberatory frontier for ‘sensual
pleasures,’ ‘authentic heritage,’ and ‘mythical vices’—which
these authors of another era represent. Nostalgia is about recla-
mation of a time and place and a place in time, and thus con-
cern with a suspended future stuck in the past. Nostalgia in the
literature allows for an intertextuality that sets up older familiar
tropes of Mediterranean adventure and carefree tourism with
newer unfamiliar tropes of a Mediterranean increasingly frag-
mented, increasingly Other to Europe and the West, despite the
caché that the sea’s connectivity once earned and continues to
represent up to this day. The construction of the Mediterranean
not only counters and negates the region’s ubiquitous romantic
imagery, but integrates it as a useful fiction that contemporary
accounts of trans-Mediterranean routes often put to task. I ex-
plore how the undocumented migrant’s contemporary optic of
the Mediterranean journey is juxtaposed against a predominant
and ubiquitous view of an enduring Mediterranean that is utopic
and nostalgic.
The evocation of the Mediterranean is nostalgic itself. It is
always implying that we have lost something: the end of a uto-
pia. In Chapter 1, ‘Memory Work in the Mediterranean Crossing:
Nostalgia in Morocco’s Migration Literature’, while the main
novels discussed, like Laila Lalami’s and Rachid Nini’s, seem
anti-nostalgic in the midst of the perilous reality of sunk boats in
the Mediterranean and the homeless wandering that ensues on
the other shore, as in much undocumented migrant literature, it
redeems the nostalgic perspective as much as it undermines it.
Thus, it is counter-nostalgic in the way it weaponizes nostalgia
to suggest an alternative Mediterranean and an alternative Mo-
rocco. Nostalgia is not a sentimental yearning for times past, but
a tool that takes into account the past as productive and subver-
sive of dominant memories. The productive role of nostalgia lies
in its capacity to provoke a critical sensibility. Like counter-
nostalgic texts, the novel wants to delve back with some yeaning
only to complicate, unravel, hybridize the past that sometimes
appear whitewashed of ‘them’.
Just as intertextuality allows the unpacking of nostalgia’s

yearning, the alternating layers of real and fantastical narrative
deconstruct a more future-oriented yearning—the yearning in-
herent in ‘the immigrant dream’. In Chapter 2, ‘The Immigrant
Dream: “Dream? Nightmare, More Like”’, I analyze the novel
Cannibales (1999) by Mahi Binebine as a realist narrative over-
laid with fantastical interpretations. As much as the novel abides
by realism, as it portrays in detail the contemporary brutality of
Mediterranean borders, it is the fantastical interpretations of the
characters that permit doubt and suspend belief about the ‘im-
migrant dream’, a narrative of material success and social as-
cent, providing an opportunity for a critique of its internal con-
tradictions.
In Chapter 3, ‘Imagining the Mediterranean and Its Mi-
grants: The Ambivalence of the Uncanny’, we encounter again
how the fantastical cements the failure of realism to apprehend
the story of migrants. In Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Partir (2006), it is
not just the fantastical interpretations of characters woven
through a foundational realist narrative that shakes the reliabil-
ity of realism in undocumented trans-Mediterranean narratives.
But it is also the dissolution of a realist novel into a fantastical
one that points to the reliability of the ‘immigrant dream.’ Fan-
tasy frames the novel to highlight the discrepancy between mi-
grant characters’ imagined geographies on the other shore and
the adversity they experience there. But, Ben Jelloun not only
invokes the fantastic to unravel the certainty of the immigrant
dream. Through intertextuality, he also unearths the Orientalist
narratives that cast Morocco, the Mediterranean, the ‘Orient’,
Africa in a spectacular light: when its inhabitants arrive on the
other shore, they are also reduced to the bizarre, fantastic,
freakish, uncanny. In doing so, he critiques the colonial effects
of migration.
In Chapter 4, ‘Mediterranean Frontier, Mediterranean Cir-
cuit: Undocumented Migration in Egyptian Literature’s Double
Imaginary’, I explore Egyptian undocumented migrant literature
through an ecology of globalization. The texts reveal a circula-
tion of capital, products, and ideas that have become ‘liberated,’
as a result of globalization, at the same time that the movement
INTRODUCTION 31
of people, and certain categories of labor in which they engage,

have become more subject to control. The globalized Mediterra-
nean has become a place designed to encourage free circulation
of capital and a blockade discouraging human mobility. I liken
the current dual Mediterranean to geographer Doreen Massey’s
notion of the double global imaginary where space is imagined
as free and unbounded but subject to material controls. 56 These
anomalous, incompatible images of the Mediterranean in the
double global imaginary have been captured in Egypt’s undoc-
umented migration literature. While not as extensive as the Ma-
ghreb’s, where the phenomena has a longer history, Egyptian
undocumented migrant literature has sought to intervene in the
Mediterranean narrative by showing culture, even in remote
villages, to be far from atemporal and preserved but rather an
effect of an already violently dynamic globalization. Utopic cul-
tural tourist sanctuaries are also exposed as staged mirages de-
pendent on a network of global capital manipulation. These
works reveal the Mediterranean’s globalized spaces through ma-
terial processes of control and marketplace practices, concealed
behind the finished product of ancient, enduring culture. Unlike
Maghrebian undocumented migrant literature concerned with
the outsider migrant figure in Europe, Egyptian literature focus-
es on homeland and journey, revealing the aspiring migrant as
outsider in the privileged spaces of his society—nationally sym-
bolic sites marked by concentrations of wealth and power—and
revealing global participation in the structures that produce in
the global South the poverty, political disenfranchisement and
exclusion that give rise to the will to migrate. But like its Ma-
ghrebian counterpart, this body of work shows undocumented
migrants creating heterotopic spaces by undermining the binary
of the inside/outside their societies, navigating between the im-
56
Doreen Massey, ‘Imagining Globalisation,’ in Global Futures: Migra-
tion, Environment, and Globalization, eds Avtar Brah, Mary Hickman, and
Mairtin Mac, 27–44 (Basingstoke, UK: MacMillan, 1999).
agined and the real place, between the fantasy and a geograph-
ical entity, between absolute utopias and the places where out-
siders dwell—city slums, Delta villages, flimsy crafts on the
Mediterranean. Lastly, because these works draw the parameters
of migration around the homeland and journey, as opposed to a
European state, they subvert the dominant discourse of globali-
zation celebrating flows, streams, circulations, by equating it
with limited and suppressed movement.
Chapter 5, ‘Saharan-Mediterranean Transits: Impossible
“Arrival”’, explores the undocumented migrant journey in trans-
it where the route from sub-Saharan Africa stops in transit in
Morocco en route to Europe. In Sefi Atta’s short story ‘Twilight
Trek’ (2010), the Saharan-Mediterranean route is echoed in the
following chapter, which focuses on Marie NDiaye’s novel Trois
Femmes Puissantes (2009). The short story centralizes themes of
citizenship, subjectivity, and self-representation around the exo-
dus trope. The trope’s perpetual deferment of arrival, liberation,
and survival (a nightmare of marginality and discrimination)
sets the parameters for the figure of the undocumented, occupy-
ing a limbo state in between worlds and nations, gesturing to-
ward an unfinished citizenship. The thwarted arrival
reverberates in the following chapter, as well, where the
Saharan-Mediterranean link establishes a deflected and
interrupted circuit of political representation, where they are
shown to be intercepted by the media and locked down in media
signifiers like flood, deluge, nameless mass, not only on the
other side of the Mediterranean but within African territory. My
research locates the identity of undocumented migrants in a dis-
cursive gap of subjectivity in the context of democratic rights
and equality. Political accounts are structured by aesthetic
modes of representation, the ‘mimetic economy,’ which evinces
a political reality through acts of representation. Theories of
representation, engagement with reading and writing, are in
circuit not only with epistemological commitments but political
thought. But within the realm of the legible/intelligible, what
has once been ‘pre-discursively sanctioned’ has been preempted
into the discursively unrecognizable, inscrutable, illegible, a sig-
nifier without a referent, effectively locking down the circuit
INTRODUCTION 33
between the discursively pre-sanctioned in schemas of represen-

tation and the politically and juridically recognizable. The inter-
rupted circuit of the mimetic economy, political action and rep-
resentation of people without a signifier, the anomic, the name-
less are then caught in the construction of fear when it comes to
media signifiers such as immigration flood, or deluge, of the
nameless.
Chapter 6, ‘Death at the Border: Making and Unmaking the
Migrating Body’, also explores the Saharan-Mediterranean route
and anti-migration rhetoric of invasion and contamination by
establishing the anxious interconnectedness of the material and
metaphoric/ideational in apprehending the border, focusing on
Marie NDiaye’s novel Trois Femmes Puissantes (2009), which
weaves together the trials of three loosely connected women,
revealing the traffic links between France and Senegal. Set apart
from other critiques of the novel, this chapter focuses on the last
‘strong woman’ of the triptych—Khady Demba—as an allegori-
cal figure of today’s African migrants pushed out of a homeland
that refuses to provide for them and toward perilous journeys. I
focus on how the abstract is subject to play in the novel—
literalized metaphors and the figurative highlight the way lan-
guage and the ideational intersect with and even affect and
shape the material. Thus, this draws attention to the categories
in which the world is represented and the way these conven-
tions shape social reality.
The migrant characters’ self-conception of their journey, by
which they fashion the Mediterranean into a heterotopic space,
one in which multiple identities and modalities of
space/mobility converge, is determined through a variety of fan-
tastic, utopic, uncanny elements. In one way or another, the fan-
tastic prevails, whether in the counter-nostalgia of Murad’s tale
of Ghomari and Jenara in Chapter 1, the metamorphoses and
crossdressing in Chapters 2 and 3, the Kafka-esque refashioning
of Egyptian landscapes in Chapter 4, the ‘proleptic imaginary’ of
Chapter 5 and its grounding in the nested Exodus narrative, or
the corporeal transformations of Chapter 6.
In Chapter 1, the counter-nostalgia of Murad’s tale of
Ghomari and Jenara reveals the illegitimacy of historical memo-
ries because they deny the divisions of the Mediterranean upon

which contemporary struggle is contingent, and the way the
characters allow for a heterotopic reflection upon the utopic
Mediterranean and the one to which they are privy. In Chapter
2, the social and generic fantasies reflect upon each other. The
fantastic hermeneutic and metatextual narrative interrogate re-
alism to deliver an account of the forces that cohere to drive
people to immigrate. The uncanny and its doubles shed a light
on social fantasies, so doubt is introduced about the meaning of
the sea, of the Mediterranean, and immigration itself. In Chapter
3, the fantastic hermeneutic allows for a rendering of both hell
and paradise of the Mediterranean as they ironically pursue the
immigrant dream. In Chapter 4, the undocumented migrants
capture a bizarre Egyptian landscape as they create heterotopic
spaces by being both inside/outside their societies, navigating
between the imagined and the real place, between the fantasy
and a geographical entity, between absolute utopias and the
places where they dwell. In Chapter 5, the unreal space of the
Mediterranean is revealed through the dialogic space of the de-
sert, as well as through the hidden spaces of the undocumented
Sub-Saharans in the Mediterranean coastal town, reflecting a
heterotopic porosity. Secrecy and undetectability extend from
the desert to the town on the Mediterranean. In this story, too,
the social and generic fantasies interact. The proleptic imaginary
nested in the Exodus narrative, which reveals the desert as both
continuous with and distinct from the Mediterranean, uncovers
social fantasies of nativism, revealing the entire Saharan-
Mediterranean route as a passage manqué. Unlike other chapters
where there is a discussion of the fantastical as giving life to the
heterotopic imagination, and where the social fantasy interacts
with the genre-based fantasy to do so, in Chapter 6 the only per-
ception of impact of social fantasy, as it interacts with genre-
based fantasy, is on the material, the corporeal, the breaking
bodies of migrants. The focus is on the impact of the discursive
(including metaphors of social fantasy) on social reality.
In this way, the migrant figure constructs the Mediterrane-
an, by showing its simultaneous seductive and abject utopias, its
past and present depiction, its unitary and divided qualities, its
INTRODUCTION 35
aestheticized and material constructions, its dissonance between

the spaces he occupies and the spaces occupied by ‘legal’, doc-
umented travelers. The fantastic, utopic, and uncanny textual
elements become the means for migrant characters to make the
Mediterranean into a Foucauldian heterotopia, both fantasy as a
wish or hope or social imaginary, or its literary fulfillment. And
this literary fulfillment through the text’s hermeneutic layer of-
ten takes the social fantasy (sometimes native, sometimes colo-
nial, sometimes simply nativist) and subverts it to show, rather
than a utopic fantasy, a heterotopical fantasy—painfully wielded
by the revelations of a heterotopic Mediterranean—in all its
subverted glory.
All of the texts in this book are the focus of a Mediterrane-
an binary, and while they are invested in revealing the asym-
metricality of two Mediterraneans (with which this introduction
begins), they are also invested in revealing how they are and
have been in dialogue with each other by deconstructing the
binary. In fact, the binary of the Mediterranean is portrayed in
narratives touched by globalization: Like Yawmiyyāt Muhājir
Sirrī, recent Egyptian novels, like Khālid Al-Khamīsī’s Safīnat
Nūḥ (2010) and Ayman Zuḥrī’s Baḥr Al-Rūm (2008), charting
undocumented, trans-Mediterranean journeys planned in small
villages far from the sea but still susceptible to the adventures of
physical and social mobility it carries, are also invested in the
discontinuity between the material and discursive construct of
the Mediterranean that migrant movements put in sharp relief.
This dissonance is sharply rendered in Egyptian writer Fārūq
Jūwayda’s poem ‘Hadhī Bilādu Lam Ta‘ud Kabilādī’ (2009),
wherein the sea is rendered both as socially constructed site of
trespass and natural barrier, through an intimacy of human
practice and as an elemental wild zone, disconnected from hu-
man agency. The texts situate the tradition of the voyage and
the imaginary genealogy of exile at the center of intersecting
and uncontrollable flows of capital, goods, and ideas marking
(and marketing) the Mediterranean’s global modernity. But de-
spite the texts’ glimpse into a trans-Mediterranean circulation of
migrants, stowaways, smugglers, diaspora narratives, and capi-
tal, (non-controllable mobility), they foreclose on narrations of
displacement on the other shore, calling attention to the une-

venness of mobility between the proximate North and South.
But, moreover, focus on the South points to the ways the North
already participates and insinuates itself in the South despite
tendencies to fortified societies. It focuses on an unevenness and
hierarchy of mobility in which the North participates in struc-
tures producing poverty and disenfranchisement, while occlud-
ing its own responsibility for—and participation in—the very
structures that produce in the global South the poverty, political
disenfranchisement and sense of injustice or exclusion that give
rise to the maligned and feared will to migrate. Lying at the
source of encounters in the current-day Mediterranean contact
zone, the interconnections between North and South, is not only
the mobility of people, but the mobility of commodities, em-
ployment, disenfranchisement, commodification, and poverty.
Even though the narratives appear intent on setting up an oppo-
sition between the North and South, Africa and Europe, their
intertextuality, scenes conveying multidirectional influence, a
political and representational cultural ecology revealing a past
and present of not only Europe in Africa, but Africa in Europe,
are just as intent on deconstructing them as binaries. Thus, in a
deconstructivist mode, they undermine the binaries of North
and South, Africa and Europe, by demonstrating how one route
of ‘antithesis secretly inheres within the other.’ 57
Although one can say that readership (Francophone, An-
glophone, Italophone, Hispanophone) in the diaspora deter-
mines how intertextuality plays out in terms of a writer’s atten-
tion to cultural referents, the eclipse of history succeeds in
achieving exactly what those writers critique in their work—
asymmetrically drawing the south Mediterranean as a passive
stage and playground (in the manner of Cavafy and Durrell),
leaving no impression or influence beyond its shores. Arab
commentators, as well, are especially attuned to a semblance of
57
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1996), 11.
INTRODUCTION 37
symmetry in terms of traveling cultures across the Mediterrane-

an to Europe, rather than merely representing it as a stage for
western thinkers to retrieve a western civilizational grounding.
And, they do so in light of the division proposed by the Europe-
an Union, the Mediterranean Union, Euro-Med cultural partner-
ships, that have created frontiers in the Mediterranean making
migrants and their movements across ‘illegal.’
The past few years have seen a rise in cultural and literary
critiques addressing undocumented migration from Africa.
However, many address how European texts, films, and dis-
course reflect on hospitality to African migrants, becoming part
of French, Spanish, British, and other national literatures. Many
are dedicated to the immigration experience after Europe’s for-
tress has been ‘breached’ and shores reached, wherein the jour-
ney across borders is markedly absent. Moreover, while the bi-
narized construction of the Mediterranean is apprehended by
various non-literary theorists, the dual Mediterranean as reality
and trope motivating the symbolic geography, microtopogra-
phies, and mobility of the characters and narrative do not fea-
ture in literary analyses of undocumented migration, excluding
the topos of south of the Mediterranean.
Integrating into a project on trans-Mediterranean undocu-
mented migration texts that engage the Mediterranean topos
and its multiple frontiers as a trope of mobility, mobility
through space and time, with a contemporary historical referent
on Mediterranean border crossing is integral. First, it reveals
that one contemporary historical moment of the Mediterranean
sparks a range of narratives, from the utopic to the abject. Sec-
ond, the totality of the Mediterranean as a cultural topos allows
us to think of the utopic and the abject, both determined by
border thinking, as unified and mutually constitutive. Third, and
paradoxically, it also demonstrates that the utopic and abject
figure of the Mediterranean resides in its connectivity and mobi-
lization. Even though this project focuses on modern produc-
tions of the southern Mediterranean, it takes into consideration
the performative Mediterranean’s compressions of space and
time, many regions and periods, conveyed by one historical and
cultural referent, resurgent in iterations of Mediterraneanism.
The totalization takes in the disjunctures of time and space in

the Mediterranean as part of a developmental narrative and sub-
lates them into a fiction of resolutions.
The large body of work on the undocumented in Europe
has been extremely valuable in apprehending intersections of
Eurocentricism, citizenship, and subjectivity, as they align to
construct a modern-day migrant identity, particularly since I
discuss the nascent identity of undocumented migrants from
Sub-Saharan Africa in Morocco since the recent and unprece-
dented period of intense migration policing and border patrol-
ling within the continent (Chapter 5). Also, focus on the undoc-
umented in Europe is nationally, historically, and movement-
specific, but it also limits the exploration of literary narratives to
a European site, excluding the legitimacy of itinerant narrations
from homelands south of the Mediterranean. 58 This asymmet-
58
For example, the movements of the ‘sans papiers’ in France, the ‘sin
papeles’ in Spain, and the ‘clandestini’ in Italy have their own strong
body of analysis. In France, the sans-papiers movement began after the
enactment of the Pasqua laws in 1993 at the instigation of Interior Min-
ister Charles Pasqua, whose strong support of ‘zero immigration’ set the
tone for recent French policy in refugee, asylum, and migration issues.
Deemed by supporters as an effective tool against undocumented immi-
gration, the legislation encompassed new severe measures: toughening
of visa requirements, reduction in number of visas, increase in police
enforcement powers, expansion of detention period, and narrowing of
administrative review scheme. These and other provisions caused a
significant number of legitimate migrants to become illegal. The affaire
des sans-papiers (sans papiers’ affair), or lutte des sans-papiers (struggle of
the sans-papiers) began when on March 18, 1996, three hundred un-
documented African immigrants occupied the Saint Ambroise Church in
Paris. Forced by police to withdraw on March 22, they moved into the
Jappy gymnasium. In Abdoulaye Gueye’s ‘The Colony Strikes Back:
African Protest Movements in Postcolonial France,’ he writes of the
forced movement of the sans-papiers’ protest that garnered media at-
tention: ‘Forced to move repeatedly, they were first hosted in the Théâ-
tre La Cartoucherie at Vincennes. Then a closed-down warehouse
owned by the Société Nationale des Chemins de Fer (the national rail-
INTRODUCTION 39
rical and unbalanced perspective often eclipses the migration

narrative itself, a journey that cannot be reducible to arrival.
Concerning diasporic identity, Hamid Naficy observes that peo-
ple in the diaspora have an identity in their homeland before
their departure, and their diasporic identity is ‘constructed in
road company) on Pajol Street in the eighteenth arrondissement was

put at their disposal by members of the union, the Confédération Fran-
çaise Démocratique du Travail (CFDT). Eventually, on 28 June, on their
own, they occupied the Saint-Bernard Church in the eighteenth arron-
dissement. In order to draw public attention to their cause, unan-
nounced sit-ins in public places like the eighteenth arrondissement po-
lice precinct and hunger strikes took place. On 26 August, using axes
and rams to tear down the door, the French police forced their way into
the Saint-Bernard Church before news cameras, helping the sans papiers’
cause to gain the media limelight’ (231). See Comparative Studies of
South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 26, 2 (2006).
For further critiques focusing on the sans-papiers movement and identi-
ty in France, see: Davide Panagia, The Poetics of Political Thinking
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Mireille Rosello, Postcolo-
nial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2001); Mireille Rosello, ‘Fortress Europe and Its Metaphors: Im-
migration and the Law,’ Working Paper Series in European Studies 3,
no. 1, 1999, Center for European Studies, University of Wisconsin;
Mireille Rosello, ‘New Sans-Papiers Rhetoric in Contemporary France’,
in Immigrant Narratives in Contemporary France, eds Susan Ireland and
Patrice Proulx, 187–200 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group,
2001); Didier Fassin, ‘“Clandestin” ou “Exclus”? Quand les Mots Font
de la Politique,’ Polîtix 34 (1996), 77–86; Jacques Rancière, Dissensus:
On Politics and Aesthetic, translated by Steve Corcoran (New York: Con-
tinuum, 2010); Jacques Derrida, ‘Derelictions of the Right to Justice,’ in
Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971–2000, ed. Elizabeth Rot-
tenberg, 133–146 (Stanford: Stanford Press, 2002); Christian O’Connell,
‘Plight of France’s Sans-Papiers Gives a Face to Struggle over Immigra-
tion Reform,’ Human Rights Brief 4, no. 1, The Center for Human Rights
and Humanitarian Law at Washington College of Law, American Uni-
versity http://www.wcl.american.edu/hrbrief/v4i1/pasqua41.htm
resonance with this prior identity.’ 59 Naficy argues that the dias-
pora is a collective, in both its origination and its destination,
and thus the collective memory of the homeland is required in
its narration.
The unbalanced body of critiques and texts, albeit with ex-
ceptions, often achieve the equivalent of the European media
archive of photographs to which I alluded earlier. The images
undergird the discourse on undocumented migrants—it is the
migrants who do not belong rather than the beachgoers, wheth-
er they are tourists or nearby residents. Images not only expose
the migrants but reveal them as the ‘detritus’ and excess that
should have remained hidden; they were once seen as merely
working bodies, but now those working bodies are no longer
contracted or sought out in European metropolises, they are ad-
vised to stay where they are. They portray migrants as out of
place, unfamiliar, unexpected, unrooted, alien strange arrivals
without a journey or history, a ‘prior identity,’ which would at
least render a representational ecology or what Ursula Biemann
has called ‘sustainable representation’, practices that convey
the story of how everything we do around the world is inter-
connected here and now, i.e., how the western lifestyle,
known to have an effect on climate change, also has an im-
pact on herdsmen in the Sahel. […] Images are not excluded
from this process. As social relations, representations that
constitute meaning in one place are locked into the significa-
tion of another. 60
Localization attempts to not only give the characters ‘roots’, a

nation, a locale, but it also individuates them rather than pre-
senting them as a disembodied, abstract mass, part of a distant,
spectacular scene on the news. This is why the book focuses on
59
Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exile and Diasporic Filmmaking
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 14.
60
Ursula Biemann, ‘Dispersing the Viewpoint: Sahara Chronicle,’ 58.
http://www.geobodies.org/books-and-texts/texts
INTRODUCTION 41
journey narratives. Its main purpose is to contribute toward ad-

dressing the imbalance in the research literature by focusing
literary analysis on African narratives and poetry that charts the
migration from the homeland, across the Mediterranean frontier,
to the European shore. The chapters are dedicated to national
literatures that chart the African trans-Mediterranean undocu-
mented journey from Morocco, Egypt, Senegal, Nigeria (and
other transit locales, like Mali).
Journey narratives often show migrant characters not as
‘out of place,’ an embodied unfamiliar excess on a European
shore, but part of a journey, with roots and a ‘prior identity,’
allowing for the mapping of an interdependent relationship of
uneven development that connects the northern and southern
shore. This project reflects the authors’ investment in how dis-
tinct nations map the journey across the Mediterranean, casting
the literature as both national and diasporic, emergent from and
part of the African Mediterranean rather than about it.
The ecology of an interconnected global capitalism is illu-
minated by the provocative notion of ‘human waste’ (Bauman)
and ‘detritus of globality’ (Spivak) to describe migrants cata-
pulted from the margins of the South to seek livelihood North,
the center of exploitative global capitalism, a neocolonialism
that has given rise to uneven development and a hierarchy of
mobility. Spivak writes:
In the new diaspora … the new scattering of the ‘seeds’ of
‘developing’ nations so that they can take root on developed
grounds means: Eurocentric migration, labor export both
male and female, border crossings, the seeking of political
asylum, and the haunting in-place uprooting of ‘comfort
women’ in Africa and Asia. 61
61
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward
a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1999), 357.
Spivak also urges us to acknowledge that migrancy is a result of

the margin wanting to be a part of the center: ‘[we] cannot use
“cultural identity” as a permission to difference and an instru-
ment for disavowing that Eurocentric economic migration …
persists in the hope of justice under capitalism.’ 62 In other
words, cultural identity cannot be used to grant different rights
to different people, as is the case in migration policies of most, if
not all, nation states. Spivak also urges acknowledgment of
South-North migration as the result of a desire to become part of
the dominant for both the intellectual and the ‘subaltern’ mi-
grant. According to Spivak, migration is the attempt of the mar-
gin to enter the dominant. In the same vein, Zygmunt Bauman
argues that the modern period is constituted by boundaries be-
tween the normative and the disposable, giving rise to policies
dedicated to policing borders between citizens and refugees. Our
‘liquid modernity’, according to Bauman, is ‘a civilization of ex-
cess, redundancy, waste and waste disposal’, 63 one producing
refugees as ‘the waste products of globalization’. 64 Although
border crossing is often depicted as a clandestine activity occur-
ring in the mythologized ‘borderlands,’ research highlights in-
terconnectedness between migrant crossings and larger political-
economic forces such as EU migration policies and security
measures, global markets, and North-South inequalities. 65 Re-
62
Spivak, 395.
63
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity: Living in an Age of Uncertainty
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 97.
64
Bauman, 66.
65
While I discuss the violent asymmetry in globalization practices in
Chapter 4 on Egyptian migration, I would like to point out the ways
that this plays out in Morocco. Using investment and government data,
Amanda Crawley Jackson discusses the flow of tourists, images, narra-
tives and products into Morocco, post-Schengen, an agreement which
has restricted the travel and migration of Moroccans to the EU, in ‘Cette
Poetique du Politique: Political and Representational Ecologies in the
Work of Yto Barrada,’ L’Esprit Createur 51, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 53–67.
She writes, ‘If, since Schengen, Moroccans have been largely unable to
INTRODUCTION 43
search also clarifies the way in which the process of migration

has been commoditized and exploited to serve various interests,
where migration to Europe is one form of exploitation of labor
by capital within the global economy. Migration benefits capital
on a global scale—its maintenance depends on its ‘use value’ for
global capitalism. 66
Inasmuch as the Mediterranean has been undermined as an
invention—less about shared traits than a play upon claims and
knowledges about those shared traits—the heterotopic narra-
tives of the Mediterranean wrought by undocumented migrant
accounts also show how their mobility, or its suspension, con-
structs the Mediterranean with every obstruction, every drown-
ing, every undocumented step on ‘the other shore’. These mo-
ments of transnational (im)mobility are represented by the
characters as a dynamic dialectical relationship between the
travel to the West, the West continues to flow into Morocco, bringing
with it images and narratives of wealth and opportunity that will al-
ways remain beyond the border, frustratingly close but always out of
reach. For example, the satellite dishes and information technologies
(which, ironically, emerged around the same time that Europe closed
its external borders) have enabled an unprecedented circulation of im-
ages, information, and dialogue across national boundaries, streaming
the West more than ever before into the homes of Moroccan nationals’
(60). Moreover, the ‘volume of international trade passing through Mo-
rocco’s factories and ports and the numbers of Western businesses lo-
cating to Morocco have grown substantially’, since Morocco’s promo-
tion an attractive host to international investment. Lastly, the growth of
tourism and the settlement of Westerners in Morocco has been and con-
tinues to be a key motivator for domestic growth. More generally, the
asymmetry and hierarchy of mobility can be discerned in globalized
labor practices: ‘local communities, particularly those in the global
South, provide a static and stable source of labor’ for the ‘cosmopolitan
tastes of Western consumers, who are able and free themselves, for the
most part, to circulate across the globe.
66
David McMurray, In and Out of Morocco: Smuggling and Migration in a
Frontier Boomtown (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001),
131.
inside and outside of destination sites, or ways of heterotopical-

ly being both internal to, a part of, norms regulating the cultural
spaces that they other, and external to them. Although the Medi-
terranean has been described, in a legitimate backlash against
its utopic politics of erasure and forgetting, as a ‘fiction,’ 67 I
maintain, through a double movement of ‘ascription-
appropriation’, that while the Mediterranean has been appropri-
ated as a performance, an invention, and a ‘fiction,’ it is also the
construction, the invention, ascription of the undocumented mi-
grant figure, in a broader context of place signification and cul-
tural creation: ‘Places have meanings and meanings are always
produced, never simply expressed, as part of a wider process of
cultural creation. Literature is one way in which such meanings
are produced within a culture and ascribed to place, just as
place is often appropriated to produce meanings in literature’. 68
Representations of space are not unmediated, but are inextrica-
ble from construction of social space: the literature of undocu-
mented migration exposes spaces of the border—the detention
center, checkpoint, fence, blockade, boat—creating their own
place-narrative of the Mediterranean, not one of vague and uni-
fied multicultural contentment, but one of division, fragmenta-
tion, and irregular mobility. The migrant figure constructs the
Mediterranean, by showing its simultaneous seductive and ab-
ject utopias, its past and present depiction, its unitary and divid-
ed qualities, its aestheticized and material constructions, its dis-
sonance between the spaces he occupies and the spaces occupied
by ‘legal’, documented travelers.
67
Gil Hochberg, ‘“The Mediterranean Option”: On the Politics of Re-
gional Affiliation in Current Israeli Imagination,’ Journal of Levantine
Studies 1, no. 1 (Summer 2011), 57.
68
Thrift, 33.
CHAPTER 1.
MEMORY WORK IN THE
MEDITERRANEAN CROSSING:
NOSTALGIA IN MOROCCO’S
MIGRATION LITERATURE
In Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005), a

novel on the various experiences that compel a group of mi-
grants to occupy a single boat that crosses the Mediterranean
from Morocco to Spain, the competing narratives of the Mediter-
ranean as bridge and border feature within the span of the first
couple of pages. The dramatic description of the crossing ap-
pears to reflect the dominant narrative of Mediterranean migra-
tionsmugglers, a flimsy boat overcrowded with migrants trav-
eling under cover of night, Moroccan migrants and sub-Saharan
asylum seekers, drownings, and the Guardia Civil waiting along
the Spanish coast. The struggle of the migrants is suddenly dis-
placed by the historical weight that Murad, the first narrator,
detects. He marvels at the short distance between Morocco and
Spain: ‘Fourteen kilometers… he wondered how fourteen kilo-
meters could separate not just two countries but two universes.’ 1
Through a historical memory, Murad highlights the narrow
space that holds centuries of ‘cultural contact, regional and im-
1
Laila Lalami, Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (Chapel Hill, NC: Al-
gonquin Books, 2005), 1.
45
perial aggression, and transnational identities’. 2 Like other anal-

yses of the novel, this chapter focuses on the theme of historical
memory. 3 But this chapter especially focuses on the way histori-
cal memory reveals the duality of the Mediterranean—of a
shared history of travel and conquest between Spain and Moroc-
co opens up the bridge narrative of the Mediterranean within
the border narrative (of the Mediterranean boat crossing) estab-
lished by Lalami. Certainly, the real and the utopic aspects of
the Mediterranean collide, insofar as its would-be migrant char-
acters, like Murad, force them to collide. In doing so, the hetero-
topia of the Mediterranean—what the ‘real’ sites perform in re-
lation to the ‘utopic’ sites, or how the image of the ‘border’ per-
forms in relation to that of the ‘bridge’—is brought to the fore,
first due to Murad’s evocation of historical memory, followed by
other types of productive and problematic memory work, real
and fantastical.
The nostalgic reclamation of historical memory is held up
as a problematic affair in the novel, as well as in other Moroc-
can texts that apprehend the duality of the Mediterranean in
light of today’s undocumented crossings. Anti-nostalgic senti-
ments in the texts abound, not only when asserting the illegiti-
macy of historical memories that undermine the divisions of the
Mediterranean upon which contemporary migration struggles
are contingent, but also when nostalgia is weaponized in the
form of Orientalism. However, in Hope and Other Dangerous Pur-
suits, the potential of delving into the past is not completely ir-
2
‘The Deterritorialised Self in Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous
Pursuits’, The Journal of North African Studies 21, no. 2 (2016), 184.
3
See Ahmed Idrissi Alami, ‘“Illegal” Crossing, Historical Memory and
Postcolonial Agency in Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pur-
suits’, The Journal of North African Studies 17, no. 1 (2012); Rima Abu-
nasser, ‘The Deterritorialised Self in Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dan-
gerous Pursuits’, The Journal of North African Studies 21, no. 2 (2016) ;
Soudeh Oladi and John Portelli, ‘Traces of the Deleuzian Nomad in
Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits’, The Journal of North African Studies
22, no. 4 (2017).
1. MEMORY WORK IN THE MEDITERRANEAN CROSSING 47
redeemable when the return functions as a ‘counter-nostalgic’

strategy of challenging dominant histories and nostalgic narra-
tives so as to ‘reflect on the present in critical ways’, as Jennifer
Ladino has argued. 4 Reflection on the present by delving into
nostalgic narratives in the novel is inseparable from the duality
of the Mediterranean and the modes of mobility it engenders.
Claudia Esposito has asked, ‘is not the literary Mediterrane-
an a fundamentally nostalgic reminisce of times past …?’ 5 Evo-
cation of the Mediterranean can be a nostalgic sentiment in it-
self. The implication is that we have lost something: a cosmopol-
itan paradise. Certainly, the past can be a myth, but that doesn’t
mitigate yearning for its return. Undocumented migration litera-
ture often cannot bypass the way nostalgia shapes an under-
standing of the Mediterranean, considering its contradictions are
shaped by the way its current re-invention is complicated by a
yearning to its past mythical character.
In the first few pages, Lalami reveals memory work as in-
herent to the imagining of the Mediterranean narrative. At first,
Lalami shows Murad exposing the Mediterranean as a border
zone devoid of topographical markers and absent of historical
and social relations: the first chapter, titled ‘The Trip,’ features
the boat journey and its parameters. ‘The Trip’ is set apart from
the rest of the novel, which is made up of individual narratives
that explore the personal histories that led the migrants to this
point on the boat, suggesting ‘the trip’ is isolated, detached from
its specific local surroundings. Within ‘The Trip’, the Guardia
Civil detention center where migrants are hauled after washing
ashore is marked, in the Augean sense, by the non-place: 6 it
4
Jennifer Ladino, ‘Longing for Wonderland: Nostalgia for Nature in
Post-Frontier America’, Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies 5, no. 1 (2004),
91
5
Claudia Esposito, The Narrative Mediterranean: Beyond France and the
Maghreb (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 163.
6
See Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Super-
modernity (New York: Verso, 1995). Augé designated ‘non-places; as
sites with no topographical relations, no historical connections to other
shows no relation to the coast marking the 14 kilometers across

the Strait of Gibraltar, the beach upon which the migrants wash
ashore, nor the hotels and houses which the Guardia Civil watch
vigilantly. The only continuity between spaces is the familiar
appearance of boatmates; the rest of the space discourages hu-
man interaction as it is regulated by a clock on the wall, doctors
wearing masks, and police officers wordlessly hauling migrants
from points within, to shore to van to center to cell.
At the same time, Lalami shows Murad constructing the
Mediterranean as a place deeply incorporated into the web of
relations of the region. During the crossing from Tangier (Mo-
rocco) to Tarifa (Spain), Murad represents the trip as ‘the return
of history’ 7:
Murad can make out the town where they’re headed. Tarifa.
The mainland point of the Moorish invasion in 711. Murad
used to regale tourists with anecdotes about how Tariq Ibn
Ziad had led a powerful Moor army across the Straits and,
upon landing in Gibraltar, ordered all the boats burned. He’d
told his soldiers that they could march forth and defeat the
enemy or turn back and die a coward’s death. The men had
sites, and no human identification because the human presence therein

is designed to be random and circumstantial. some of these transit
zones are part of a topographical web of relations, meaning that there
is a historical and cultural connection to the surroundings of these
zones. That is, the transit zone and border, as revealed by undocument-
ed migrant sites, often represent a fluid and also indefinite sense of
social space as the border is often implemented in everyday spaces.
7
In The Return of the Moor: Spanish Responses to Contemporary Moroccan
Immigration, Daniela Flesler argues that Spain’s contemporary anxiety
about Maghrebian immigration is rooted in the specter of the medieval
‘Moor’, including the ebb and flow between the two regions due to the
Andalusian Empire, the Inquisition, the Crusades, then later, Spanish
colonization of Morocco, and the immigration of Spaniards to Morocco
in the first part of the twentieth century. See Daniela Flesler, The Return
of the Moor: Spanish Responses to Contemporary Moroccan Immigra-
tion (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2008).
followed their general, toppled the Visigoths, and established

an empire that ruled over Spain for more than seven hun-
dred years. Little did they know that they’d be back, Murad
thinks. 8
From the middle of an isolating, barren sea, Murad identifies

site-crossing markers: ‘Tarifa’, ‘fourteen kilometers’ between the
shores, ‘the cargo ship,’ other ‘harraga’ swimming past. 9 The sea
is not without geohistorical specificity. The historical figure of
the Amazigh leader Tariq Ibn Ziad and his legendary burnt ships
feature as a testimony to a Maghrebian memory of bravery and
triumph: Tariq Ibn Ziad was a Muslim commander who drove
the conquest of Spain (711–718) by leading an army across the
Strait of Gibraltar. Upon arrival, he gave his troops an ultima-
tum: they could keep marching and defeat the enemy or retreat
and die a coward’s death. Then he had all his ships burned. The
troops marched forth, defeated the Visigoths, and established an
empire that ruled over Spain for seven hundred years. Collective
identities are established through historical memory or the tell-
ing and retelling of travel narratives. Maurice Hawlbachs has
written that the role of communal memory in collective identity
formation is one of ‘groups who conceive their unity and partic-
ularity through a common image of their past.’ 10 And, a national
or regional nostalgia, according to Svetlana Boym, can encour-
age a sense of a shared past as ‘a place of sacrifice and glory’ by
creating a kind of ‘collective belonging that…transcend[s] indi-
vidual memories’. 11 The historical figure of Tariq Ibn Ziad and
his legendary burnt ships feature as a collective memory of Ma-
ghrebian bravery and triumph that Murad wishes to project on
the flimsy boat he and his fellow migrants use to cross the sea.
8
Lalami, 2–3.
9
Ibid., 2–3.
10
Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992).
11
Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books,
2001), 15.
Instead, the passage reveals the irony of the immigrants’ modern

predicament in that the return of those who had been powerful
in the past is contrasted with their modern return, wherein they
are powerless, needy, hunted. Lalami resignifies this collective
memory into an ironic statement regarding today’s hidden ‘re-
turn’, a jarring present of feeble rafts and disoriented and
thwarted travelers.
Memory work in the novel allows us to grasp the two dif-
ferent Mediterraneans, bridge and border, while understanding
that the Mediterranean conception as a bridge is not necessarily
in the past, but at play in the present. Certainly in this novel,
memory work is a problematic affair, as Lalami puts forth mem-
ories and undermines them at the same time—through scenes of
globalized spaces like the Mediterranean and their undocument-
ed sojourns, in an anti-nostalgic sentiment. Memory work, for
one, eclipses an undesirable present condition—so that looking
back, we forget that this is the impoverished present—we're al-
ready here, and this is it.
Spaces of the undocumented like the sea and the Spanish
detention center Murad and his boatmates experience do more
than appear side by side with historical memories as emblems of
a homeland that travel with migrants; they reflect upon them as
utopic excursions into a Maghreb of powerful heritage and cos-
mopolitan roots. This relationship between sites of the undocu-
mented and historical memory is heterotopic by presenting the
‘joint experience’ of the Mediterranean image and relation of
self to the image: undocumented sites rendered through disjunc-
tive episodes of uncertainty, isolation, immobility, and hyper-
mobility reflect upon and shatter the myth of a unified Mediter-
ranean. 12 And this bordered Mediterranean is crucial to the peril
of nostalgia (at least in its restorative form), which Murad ex-
emplifies at first in his embrace of this memory as absolute truth
and its use in a reconstruction of a lost home (once found in
12
16, no. 1 (1986), 24.
Spanish Andalusia). After all, nostalgia in its restorative form,

according to Svetlana Boym, is not only capacity of memory to
reclaim the past but to reclaim space in time: ‘restorative nos-
talgia ends up reconstructing emblems and rituals of home and
homeland in an attempt to conquer and spatialize time’. 13 Thus
the association of nostos (return home) with restorative nostalgia
implicates Andalusian Spain as the return destination for Murad,
before he casts it in an ironic light.
Indeed, collective memory reveals a nostalgia for a past of
adventure and exploration, affirmed by heroic, virtuous travel-
ers through which readers reimagine their individual and collec-
tive identities. Classics of Arab and North African travel, such as
Ibn Fadlan’s Mission to the Volga and Ibn Battuta’s Travels, rein-
force the virtues of expansion and provide collective solace
through national, regional, or ethnic identification. And, indeed
Moroccan literature of undocumented migrations also lingers on
recollections of a long history of travel and conquest, but in or-
der to undermine the nostalgic imagining of a lost ‘home’ to be
found in migrating to the other Mediterranean shore. The Mo-
roccan journalist and editor Rachid Nini wrote Yawmiyyāt Mu-
hājir Sirrī Sirī based on his experiences traveling undocumented
across Europe after receiving an invitation for an Amazigh Con-
ference in the Canary Islands, he claims in his book. While the
veracity of his account as an undocumented migrant who had
outworn his welcome has been questioned in the Moroccan
press, his account has not been disproved and stands as another
testament to the way undocumented migration and its sites are
constructed in Moroccan national memory. Nini’s days as an
undocumented migrant are distinguished by places, cities, towns
where he seems to be caught in a cycle of carceral mobility con-
veying immediacy, uncertainty that reflects disdainfully upon a
distant mythologized past. The same disjunctive structure can be
found in Āḥmad Al-Jalālī’s Al-Harāqa, which is partitioned into
sections identified by the storytellers, who recount similar epi-
13
Boym, 49.
sodes of urgency and disorientation on Spanish soil, leaving an

impression of an uncertainty that has no capacity to withstand a
unified narrative. 14 Wandering from orange groves in Spain to
kitchens in Parisian restaurants to construction sites in Italy,
Nini states that the narrative of wandering has passed on from
Jews to Arabs: ‘The Jew is no longer wandering. The era of
wandering for the Jew has ended, and the era of wandering for
the Arab has begun.’ 15 Also featuring in Nini’s account is the
legend of Tariq Ibn Ziad, who burned his ships so his troops
would have no choice but to remain and fight for Andalusia,
instilling in them a sense of bravado born out of the impossibil-
ity of return:
Now I know why the migrants burn their passports/identity
papers once the lights of al-Andalus/Andalusia are illumi-
nated for them and they toss them away at sea. They do this
so they don’t return to the other side alive. So it’s death or
the spoils of victory. Burning a passport isn’t much different
from burning a ship of return. It appears that the lessons of
history persist through the ages in a miserable/tragic way.
But what’s really laughable in this story is that there are no
spoils of victory. 16
Nini responds to the legend of Moroccan claims to political au-

thority and cultural centrality with the undocumented-migrant
story. The legend of adventure has been replaced with a jarring
present of burned passports and an aimless, fruitless wandering.
Nini’s wandering through Spanish territory, imbued with the
historical memory of the lost paradise of Andalus, is a bitterly
rendered anti-nostalgic trope. The anti-nostalgic trope of wan-
dering is deemed discontinuous with the productive concept
14
Āḥmad Āl-Jalālī. Al-Harāqa (The Harraga). Qenitra, Morocco: Gharb
Media, 2003.
15
All the passages of Rachid Nini’s text are my translations in this chap-
ter. Rachid Nini, Yawmiyyāt Muhājir Sirrī (Journal of a Clandestine) (Mo-
rocco: Manshūrāt ‘Akāḍ, 2005), 115.
16
Ibid., 170.
lying at the source of encounters between cultures in the Medi-

terranean contact zone (associated with the tradition of voyag-
ing as a constitutive Mediterranean trait). Wandering in pursuit
of invisibility and stability actually leads to homelessness for
Nini. Again, the discontinuity between the material and discur-
sive construct of the Mediterranean is put in sharp relief by mi-
grant (im)mobility.
Both Nini and Lalami gesture back to Maghrebian historical
memories. But they resist nostalgic tropes of Mediterranean
travel. They turn a skeptical eye toward their glorification and
transform nostalgia into historical reflection—this is the present,
the foil of the loot and the booty of a past is not to be glorified,
but to be seen for what it is: homelessness, panic, an unmooring
from roots. Opposition to nostalgia is transformed into a
wrenching into the present, wherein a description of the beauty
of the Mediterranean suddenly transforms into an exploration
into what it means today to cross it, as opposed to what nostal-
gia calcifies the memory to do: remember the past as though
pieces of it could be regenerated into the present. Nostalgic con-
quest and regional heritage are turned on their head as the reali-
ty of undocumented migration, the numbers who escape from
Africa to the other shore, is rendered as a lesson in sacrifice. It is
a return to a time and a place that cannot be restored but in
commodifiable artifacts, relics, and snapshots for national
memory and tourist culture. The certainty of this nostalgic reter-
ritorialization is countered by the deterritorialized uncertainty
of the clandestine passage, as it is set apart as a time ‘lived’ ra-
ther than a commodified abstraction.
The nostalgia toward a national legend is incommensurable
to the defeat and tragedy of contemporary boat crossings. It
would seem that representations of undocumented migration
sites—Lalami’s perilous boat crossing and Nini’s undocumented
wandering—hold up ironic reflections upon nostalgic recollec-
tions to insist upon the historical present and on the need to
confront problems therein, rather than by endless invocations of
past glories of bravery and triumph. Nostalgia for a distant, my-
thologized past, referencing Mediterranean claims to cultural
significance and centrality, is juxtaposed against a tragic pre-

sent.
This anti-nostalgic tendency can be attributed to the way
Maghrebian discourse has been a space of lamentation for a lost
history of adventure and triumph on the Mediterranean. Tunisi-
an poet and columnist Al-Muṣbāḥī laments the loss of the sea’s
connectivity to yield ‘cultural dialogue’ 17 and cosmopolitanism.
Al-Muṣbāḥī’s nostalgia for the shores’ connectivity is deeply tied
to the writers and scholars who straddled them: St. Augustine,
Ibn Khaldun, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, Constantine Cavafy, and Giuseppe
Ungaretti. By reconstructing Maghrebian triumphal legends sail-
ing the sea, he expresses longing for the shores’ connectivity
that made cosmopolitanism and its arts thrive. In the end he
mourns the transformation of cosmopolitanism, the connectivity
of the shores, and adventurous, masculine, intellectual triumph
into poverty, terrorism, and undocumented migration, and final-
ly the sea itself, transformed into a site of death and conflict.
The Maghrebian lamentation for a lost history of adventure
and triumph that unified the Mediterranean (represented by
Tariq Ibn Ziad and Ibn Battuta) is countered by contemporary
literature’s mourning over being dispossessed of the Mediterra-
nean Sea and the identity and history it has yielded. For exam-
ple, in the poem ‘Li Matha La Yamoot al-Bahr?’/’Why Doesn’t
the Sea Die?’, Bin-Yūnis Mājin wonders ‘if the sea carries our
identity and lays its head against our soil / and flows over our
country’s map / then it’s our sea with its blue, salt, and fish / Is
it not? / So why does it eat our sons and daughters / and devour
17
Ḥasūna Al-Muṣbāḥī, ‘Min Ajl Ḥiwār Thiqāfī Bain Bildān Ḍufatī Al-
Baḥr Al-Abyaḍ Al-Mutawaṣṣiṭ’ (‘For a Cultural Dialogue between the
Countries of the Mediterranean’). Aawsat.com. December 27, 2003.
https://archive.aawsat.com/details.asp?article=209714&issueno=916
0#.XWGZipMza9Y
the boats of death / and then spit out its passengers / I wonder /
Is it wreaking vengeance upon us?’ 18
When asked to describe how his generation will be remem-
bered, author of the short-story collection Escape, Abd al-Wahid
Asṭīṭaw, eschews lament with a brutal allusion to a fragmented
migrant identity—‘schizophrenia’:
We are a generation of escape and confrontation. Succeed to
fail. Fail to succeed. Clandestine immigration, for example, is
not a solution, not a confrontation. It is an escape. But the
escape of a later confrontation, and conflict, and finally un-
expected success, without going into details of the term ‘suc-
cess.’ This in order to make some money and to try not be-
coming ‘human wreckage.’ Despite all this, many are trans-
formed in the blink of an eye to corpses in the straits of
Spain… Schizophrenia and migration and escape and con-
frontation. 19
In shattering a generational and national identity that is averse

to collectivization, Asṭīṭaw displaces lament with clear-eyed pos-
sibilities, reducing the hopeful image of the shores’ connectivity
to ‘human wreckage’: bodies washed ashore, people conflicted
by the potential of migration, escape that does not elude ‘con-
frontation’, whether death, arrest, or ambiguous ‘success.’
Nostalgia in its restorative form is not only the capacity to
reclaim the past but to reclaim space in time. This reclamation,
the effort to ‘conquer and spatialize time,’ is determined by a
utopic ordering of territory, in the past and future. Nostalgia
territorializes the Mediterranean so it is reduced to a site of
memory, a commemorative landscape in service of a reclaimed
future. Anti-nostalgia allows for an intertextuality that sets up
18
All the passages of Bin-Yūnis Mājin’s text are my translations in this
chapter. Bin-Yūnis Mājin, ‘Li Mādhā Lā Yamūt Al-Baḥr?’ (‘Why Doesn’t
the Sea Die?’), in Dīwān Al-Ḥrīg (Cairo: Dār Aktab, 2009).
19
All the passages of ʿAbd Al-Wāhid Asṭīṭaw’s text are my translations
in this chapter. Interview with Saʿīd Al-Khayāṭ. Hespress, December 28,
2009. http://www.hespress.com/?browser=view&EgyxpID=17622.
the familiar tropes of Mediterranean adventure, conquest, pri-

macy, and unity with unfamiliar tropes of a Mediterranean in-
creasingly disconnected and isolated from the world despite the
cache that the connectivity of its sea and ports once earned.
Heterotopically, the unfamiliar, marginal places of clandestinity
or the undocumented are shown to perform in relation to famil-
iar, visible sites of nostalgia. The certainty of nostalgic reterrito-
rialization is countered by the deterritorialized uncertainty of
the clandestine passage, as it is set apart as a time ‘lived’ rather
than an abstraction.
Yet, in Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, could we also
claim that nostalgia is more effective than reducing the Mediter-
ranean to a site of memory that paralyzes those it captures and,
worse, only serves to energize the tourist experience that char-
acterizes the Mediterranean’s reduction to a commodified ab-
straction, present in this novel and other literature on undocu-
mented migration across the Mediterranean? There are various
modes of memory work in the novel—historical memory, collec-
tive/cultural nostalgia, Western Orientalist nostalgia, and coun-
ter-nostalgia—that collapse past and present not to suggest im-
mobility and paralysis in looking back but rather to reimagine
an alternative complex history. According to Ladino, both offi-
cial nostalgia and counter-nostalgia share yearning to return to a
time or place in time, but she emphasizes that counter-nostalgia
is determined by a ‘longing to return home that can be felt,
wielded, manipulated, and retold in a variety of ways’, 20 so that
the narration of this ‘return’ ends up rather than certain uncom-
plicated is ‘ambivalent, ironic, localized, contingent, and poten-
tially subversive.’ 21
So, let’s return to the first pages of Hope and Dangerous Pur-
suits, because the issue of whether nostalgia functions simply as
a sentiment to oppose or a critical tool to re-imagine the past
and present in the novel remains puzzling. Although the boat
20
Ladino, 89.
21
Ibid., 90.
migrant Murad strikes down the historical memory of Tariq Ibn

Ziad’s invasion that initiated the Andalusian Empire that occu-
pied Spain, suggesting an anti-nostalgic stance, his ‘reappropria-
tion of official nostalgia through creative, often literary,
means’—in his case, irony and ambivalence, suggests a counter-
nostalgia. 22 That is, rather than just being opposed to ‘official
nostalgia [that] encourages its adherents to return to a celebrat-
ed origin to find both comfort and justification for the present,’
Murad returns to the memory to ‘reflect on the present in criti-
cal ways’, a key feature of counter-nostalgia, according to Ladi-
no. 23 First, Lalami holding up the historical memory invoked by
Murad only to have him strike it down in the beginning of the
novel presents nostalgia as an ambivalent instrument of narra-
tive control rather than a self-defeating one. Lalami shows the
present reality of undocumented migration undermining nostal-
gia as insubstantial to affect change in the present, but it also
shows Murad’s (albeit ironic) nostalgia effectively countering
official nostalgia for a Europe pre-globalization (through the
representation of the Mediterranean Sea), while Murad’s own
ironic nostalgia counters that perhaps Europe has always been
global. The way Murad envisions the Mediterranean is not strict-
ly as an EU-controlled border zone devoid of topographical
markers and absent of historical and social relations, but as a
place deeply incorporated into the web of relations of the region
and the cities in which they are plotted, from the northern shore
to the southern shore. In Murad’s nostalgic interlude, the histor-
ical figure of the Amazigh leader Tariq Ibn Ziad and his legend-
ary burnt ships ensured the Maghrebian presence across the sea.
After all, the Strait of Gibraltar that Murad and his boatmates
try to reach is named after Tariq Ibn Ziad himself—the name
derived from Jabl Tariq. From the middle of the sea, Murad
identifies site-crossing markers that connect the present to the
past Ibn Ziad initiated: ‘Tarifa’, the southern Spanish town on
22
Ibid., 90.
23
Ibid., 91.
which they wish to land was named after Moroccan Amazigh

military leader Tarif ibn Malik, who took over southern Spain in
710, ensuring its position as Islamic Andalusia. Moreover, the
Moroccan town of Cabo Negro where Murad, still in the inflata-
ble Zodiac, envisions buying an apartment bears the name of the
Spanish presence in north Morocco decades after independence.
In this way, nostalgia when first used by Murad is indeed ironic,
but it also significantly highlights the connection of the two
coasts (‘only fourteen kilometers’ apart, as Murad repeats from
the middle of the Mediterranean) that official nostalgia for a
European past uncorrupted by globalization denies—not to men-
tion the continuity of that link into the present. The temporal
simultaneity that Murad evokes does not necessarily establish
nostalgia for transhistorical values. Indeed, Murad deeply iro-
nizes the sense of nostalgia evoked by Tariq Ibn Ziad’s invasion
by claiming the present is indeed different for Moroccans, but
the irony does not just render ‘the return to a celebrated origin’
of Spanish-Moroccan relations as an object of critique (because
it clearly highlights the absurdity of the ‘return of the Moor’
trope in present circumstances). Rather, it counters with the
memory of ‘another landscape’, an always globalized world—
eclipsed by nationalist nostalgia that myopically registers the
incursion of globalization as a modern affliction. 24
Counter-nostalgia sets its sights on a Mediterranean ambiv-
alently rendered by Europe, both the frontier guarding national-
ist nostalgia and the link to exploring Orientalist nostalgia. To
illustrate this duality, Lalami performs another type of memory
work—one that puts the memory of not only Moroccans up to a
light and unravels them in the age of globalized mobilities but
compels forth the memory of Westerners where Moroccans fea-
ture but don’t necessarily have control. What happens when Mo-
roccan nostalgia based on historical memory of Maghrebian col-
lective identity accompanies an Orientalist nostalgia? Lalami
lays side by side collective Maghrebian memories and memories
24
Ibid., 96.
of the West that feature Maghrebians and Arabs and Arab-

Africans to reveal systems of control of the past, for one, but
also the present and the future.
Lalami reveals that Orientalist nostalgia unravels a static,
allochronic view of cultural difference. 25 The allochronic is in-
vested with the construction of an ‘us’ and ‘them’—the Western,
European, Christian and the African, Arab, Muslim (the Other,
backward, primitive, archaic, whose time has passed). One
would think that in the way that nostalgia is about longing for a
time as well as place, allochronic thinking is also temporal and
spatial, so that travel to remote places does indeed encourage
allochronic thinking. But the novel’s allochronic moments arrive
not only in Morocco but also in Spain, suggesting that the bor-
der between ‘us’ and ‘them’ does not really require physical, na-
tional borders to be crossed in order to be animated.
The allochronic evokes an Orient that is a form of Oriental-
ism, which Said calls ‘a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to
Europe.’ 26 This theatricality is part of the ‘repertoire’ of ‘oda-
lisque dreams’ that the only female character who made it to the
other side pulls up in her new life as a prostitute in Spain. Faten,
a religious young girl from Rabat, survives the perilous trip to
Spain as an undocumented migrant made more illegal when she
becomes a prostitute to earn a living. She represents an extreme
saint-whore duality: she appears at first in Morocco as the pious
friend to the daughter of a westernized, secular, corrupt official
and then later in Spain as a prostitute who fulfills Spanish men’s
Orientalist fantasies of Muslim womanhood. Fleeing to the
West in the hope of obtaining freedom from the repression of
class and gender, she again finds herself subjected to an identity
imposed upon her from the colonial West, whereby she becomes
objectified by the male gaze. But it is a particular male gaze:
nostalgia for the Other, or the sensation that the Maghreb needs
25
Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its
Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
26
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 63.
to be pieced together in the European imagination, 27 is demon-

strated when one of her clients coaxes her into fulfilling his Ma-
ghrebian fantasies—by re-fantasizing herself to him. Although
unwilling at first, Faten concedes to re-fantasizing herself
through a ‘repertoire’ of ‘odalisque dreams,’ familiar to both:
‘Where did you grow up?’ Martin asked.
‘In a Moorish house.’
‘With your parents?’
‘I didn’t see much of my father. I spent all my days in the
harem.’
‘With your siblings?’
‘With my six sisters. They initiated me into the art of pleas-
ing men.’ 28
None of this is true about Faten. She imagines a scenario that

fulfills her client’s fantasy. Faten’s client recreates the cultural
border wherein she is located on the other side as Other, inscru-
table, unknown, mysterious. He locates her on the other side of
this cultural border by asking her to recreate a stereotypical fan-
tasy of Arab women. Just as national borders utilize the fantasy
that on one side of the border a nation exists in one phase of
temporal development while on the other side another functions
in a different stage of temporality, Faten’s client fantasizes her,
and forces her to re-fantasize herself to him, as though she just
traveled from the 19th century, by providing a theater of repre-
sentation to conform to tourist itineraries. As a space of nostal-
gia, Morocco is conceived outside of the progression of time,
unaffected by changes elsewhere, progressive social mores or
the development of technologies or modern institutions. In the
persistent formation of Morocco as a nostalgic site, past and pre-
sent collapse.
27
In Belated Travelers, Ali Behdad refers to the lamentation associated
with ‘the disappearing Other’ as a sense nostalgia exhibited by Western
travelers in the Middle East for an Orientalism effaced by forces of mo-
dernity.
28
Lalami, 148.
Faten draws upon familiar global imagery, ‘odalisque

dreams,’ to localize (through the ‘Moorish house’) and authenti-
cate (through the ‘harem’) herself in creating a stabilizing ‘rep-
ertoire’ familiar to her client. Faten comes to realize that part of
her appeal in the west arises from Orientalist fantasies of the
odalisque, the centuries-old role of the female maid or slave
of the Ottoman harem. 29 The liminal quality of the border in
separating border crossers from a sense of ‘place’ is re-enacted
by Faten: she re-fantasizes herself as someone separated from
the real lived space of her Moroccan home; she uses her body to
act out the tourist theater of representation wherein familiar
imagery is a nostalgic touchstone for Otherness. The sexual per-
formance expected from Faten on the other side of the Mediter-
ranean represents another border; it is a liminal zone wherein
re-fantasization involves separation from the lived space she
remembers and the burden of an imagined place she carries
from shore to shore. In one sense, she becomes a modern Sheh-
rezade who tells tales of a harem girlhood ‘as part of a reper-
toire she learned by heart and had to put up with in order to
make a living’. 30
While Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits reflects on border
crossing and a divided Mediterranean, it also shows that when
the characters finally cross to the other side, they confront
boundaries far from the Spanish national border—cultural bor-
ders in which they confront how Morocco is nostalgically fanta-
sized by the West. Lalami instrumentalizes nostalgia to show
that while the national border is crossed in secrecy, other bor-
ders dispersed in various forms, such as culture, race, class, and
gender, are revealed. In order for these borders to be delineated,
a line must be drawn between the inside and the outside, be-
tween the Self and Other.
29
In popular use, the word odalisque also may refer to a mistress or
concubine. During the 19th century, odalisques became common fanta-
sy figures in Orientalist artwork and featured in many erotic paintings.
30
Lalami, 148.
To reiterate, it is through various types of memory work—

productive and problematic, real and fantastical—that the Medi-
terranean is shown to be heterotopic, and with Faten, it is not
only through fantasy but the perception of self in fantasy, that
this relationship between the ‘real’ and ‘utopic’ sites (and those
assigned to them) is most intensely brought to light. By defini-
tion, heterotopias exist in reflective dialogue with the real and
utopic, that which is real and that which is ‘absent’, as Foucault
would have us imagine it—a mirror scenario:
In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unre-
al, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over
there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my
own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there
where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is
also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality,
where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I
occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my ab-
sence from the place where I am since I see myself over
there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed to-
ward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the
other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin
again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute
myself there where I am. 31
Like the act of confronting a mirror, heterotopia forces a defini-

tion of the self in relation to the image. Through a gaze that
passes through a virtual and unreal space, the position of the
viewer is reconstituted. This concept is productive in thinking of
the way undocumented characters both perceive space and per-
ceive themselves in a given space. This perceptual and material
process of ‘counteraction’ speaks to the friction, the movement,
between sites of clandestinity and both utopic sites of cosmopol-
itanism and regimented surveillance in the microtopographies of
crossing. I refer to ‘friction’ because it is in the process that het-
31
Foucault, 1986, 24.
erotopias are formed. As Hetherington explains, ‘Heterotopias

do not exist in the order of things, but in the ordering of
things’. 32 That the subject both re-interprets the space of the
Mediterranean and takes on the space to re-interpret themselves,
allowing for a position that is mutually constitutive, highlights
the impact of re-fantasizing the Mediterranean on the clandes-
tine characters in the novels and vice-versa. Like mirrors, clan-
destine spaces create an unreal space, sites where Mediterranean
fantasy is enacted, and in turn, force a definition of the self in
relation to that image. The Mediterranean and its towns on
‘both sides of the shore’ are not in and of themselves heterotop-
ic, but rather migrant routes make them heterotopic: spontane-
ous and disorderly spaces of crisis borne of a fear of detection
and created by an illicit, panicked, constant movement porous
to institutional order and vigilantly closed to it. In a discussion
of the relational quality of Foucault’s heterotopia, Andrew
Thacker argues,
Certain commentators have interpreted heterotopias as simp-
ly sites of resistance to the dominant ordering of socio-
spatiality found in marginal places and locations … Hetero-
topias are not sites of absolute freedom or places where
marginal groups always resist power … the importance is
not the places themselves but what they perform in relation
to other sites. 33
The interpretation of heterotopias here as a site of ambivalence

is by virtue of its relational quality rather than as an inherent
site of resistance. So, the client’s nostalgic fantasy allows Faten
to realize how she is expected to embody both the Mediterrane-
an ‘bridge’ and the ‘border’. She represents as the ‘odalisque’
now in Spain, on one side, the clandestine, the subversive, the
32
Kevin Hetherington, ‘Identity Formation, Space, and Social Centrali-
ty’, Theory Culture Society 13, no. 4 (1996), 38.
33
Andrew Thacker, Moving through Modernity: Space and Geography in
Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2003), 29.
illicit, and on the other, the familiar, the known, the accessible.
When it comes to nostalgia and fantasy, as new as the Mediter-
ranean (and its sexual representatives) seems upon observation,
they are still meant to convey a sense of the familiar.
While nostalgia is certainly ‘a longing for a home that no
longer exists or has never existed’, it is also ‘a romance with
one’s own fantasy’, as Boym points out. 34 And we see this fanta-
sy fulfilled by an allochronic, Orientalist ‘repertoire’, indicated
by Faten’s performance of ‘odalisque dreams’ with her client.
And, we see it in Murad’s traditionally fantastic folktale he spins
for American tourists who frequent the shop he works in
Tangier, which he has decided to call home at the end of the
book. But it isn’t until Murad tells the tale to unsuspecting tour-
ists that we realize it operates counter-nostalgically with Faten’s
scene. Sensing frustration over tourist nostalgia for an American
history they never experienced, Murad tells tourists a fantastic
Arabian-Nights type of story that presents exactly the type of
scenario wherein Faten’s client tries to position her—a folktale,
a remnant of a vanishing culture fallen victim to the incursion of
modernity and progress: the folktale is about Ghomari, the poor
rug-weaver who meets a beautiful woman, Jenara. 35 The king’s
midget sees her face one day and informs the Sultan that the
beloved of a mere rug-weaver is the most beautiful woman he
has ever seen. Outraged that another man has a more beautiful
mate, he arranges to have her kidnapped. Ghomari weaves a
tapestry with Jenara’s image wielding a knife. The Sultan de-
cides he must have it and have Ghomari executed. The day be-
fore his execution, Jenara wakes up the Sultan with a knife to
his throat. While he is screaming for help, she hides herself
against the tapestry of her own image to escape detection and
the palace, after which she reunites with Ghomari. 36 The real
Jenara and the imagined Jenara (in the form of an image on a
34
Boym, xii and xiii.
35
Lalami, 181–184.
36
Ibid., 189–192.
rug) become fused. Her most powerful tool in gaining her free-
dom is her ability to go undetected, to become clandestine. In
one sense, this is a play on the Maghreb so infused with story-
telling and mystery that tales set there, particularly for tourists,
often have an air of the fantastic. But a cautionary tale comes to
life: the image is perceived powerless and immovable, yet be-
hind the image stands a real person who uses the very image to
regain their freedom and self-authority. First, the tale operates
counter-nostalgically to displace the Orientalist nostalgia pre-
sented by Faten’s client because it is a tale a fiction, suggesting
an equivalence between the two. This is not actual ‘nostalgia for
lost origins [that] can be detrimental to the exploration of social
realities within the critique of imperialism,’ 37 as Spivak has not-
ed. I want to be very clear here by restating that Murad’s
folktale is, by definition, a fiction—he is not trying to reclaim
lost origins, but rather to counter nostalgic fantasy (of Oriental-
ism) with his own fantasy. Second, Lalami uses the nostalgic tale
of a less modern, more innocent, more romantic time to forge a
connection between Faten and Jenara that reinforces the libera-
tory aspect of Faten’s own self-concealment through the tactical
use of counter-nostalgia: it allows Murad to imagine a past
where women like Faten and Jenara—captive, powerless wom-
en—are recognized for possessing the wit and agency to seek
their own liberation. Here the memory of ‘another landscape’,
another story, displaces the one to which Faten’s client and oth-
er men imagine her to be naturally bound. Fantasy shows the
ways the Mediterranean is heterotopic in that it allows for the
emergence of the interrelationality between the real and the
utopic. The fantasy that captures Faten reflects Jenara’s own—
indeed, different uses and modes of fantasy, but their naviga-
tions of the real and the ideal image are mirrored. Like Faten,
37
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Colonial
Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, eds Patrick Williams and Laura
Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 87.
Jenara shows her image in the tapestry is as real and beguiling

as her true self, but is ultimately not.
Within the story featuring Maghrebian fantasies comes to
life a jarring cautionary tale: the utopic image is perceived pow-
erless and immovable, while the story of the image is told to
impact tourist consciousness heterotopically. Heterotopias rob
us of our nostalgic certainty and trust in utopian (or dystopian)
narratives, revealing how spaces are created and manipulated
and thwarting societal efforts (like those of politicians such as
the Sultan) to construct narratives that make them feel in con-
trol.
But what of this image that Faten projects, mirrored by Je-
nara’s tapestry image, which she also uses to hide behind? Faten
thinks she must ‘visualize herself in the way he saw her, the way
he wanted her to be—that was the price she would have to pay
every time if she wanted to see him.’ 38 A double consciousness,
in the vein of DuBois, 39 that demands Africans and Arabs see
themselves in the way that Westerners and Europeans see them
or don’t see them—or rather see through them—leads Faten to
wear a mask wherein she stands outside herself: like Jenara,
Faten takes advantage of the intricate threads of fantasy woven
for her, and uses them to hide her real, integral self.
But creative subversion of Orientalist nostalgia is not the
only goal of storytelling. Those repertoires and folktales function
as vehicles for reimagining a past and perhaps the present when
a prospective migrant is defined by living for the future—an all-
consuming affair for Murad:
He’d been so consumed with his imagined future that he
hadn’t noticed how it had started to overtake something in-
side him, bit by bit. He’d been living in the future, thinking
of all his tomorrows in a better place, never realizing that his
past was drifting. And now, when he thought of the future,
38
Lalami, 149.
39
W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007).
he saw himself in front of his children, as mute as if his

tongue had been cut off, unable to recount for them the sto-
ries he’d heard as a child. He wondered if one always had to
sacrifice the past for the future, or if it was something he had
done, something peculiar to him, an inability to fill himself
with too much, so that for every new bit of imagined future,
he had to forsake a tangible past. 40
The ‘past was drifting’; the past was ‘tangible’; the past still had
the capacity to be subject to ‘sacrifice’. The past was active, sub-
ject to animation. While Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, like
most novels about undocumented migration, thematizes the
hopes, dreams, and future orientation of prospective migrants
braced on the southern shore of the Mediterranean awaiting for
their future to unfold, its structure refuses progression. Like
most undocumented migrant novels, Hope and Other Dangerous
Pursuits begins in media res and does not move forward but ra-
ther reverses in time to uncover the path that led each character
to the tip of the Mediterranean.
This commitment to the past transcends character devel-
opment, and touches upon the very triggers of the creative sub-
versions in which the text engages—the repertoire and the
folktale—to not only undermine the temporal dissonance of the
Orientalist allochronic, but to write against its erasure of a his-
torical Morocco, bruised by the violence of modernity and pro-
gress. Timeless Morocco, untouched by the incursions of modern
time, is evoked when Murad crosses paths with American tour-
ists seeking out the literary heritage of American Beat-
Generation writers by literally retracing their footsteps (going to
their writing spots or drinking haunts). At first, Murad is
shunned by the tourists, but when they later encounter him, not
realizing he had offered his services earlier that day, they ask
where they could find a Beat-Generation landmark:
40
Lalami, 186.
‘Do you know where the Café Central is?’ she asked. So he
had been right about them after all—they’d come to Tangier
looking for the Beats. How easy it would be for him to insert
himself into their trip now—he could show them the café
where Burroughs smoked kif, or the hotel where he wrote
Naked Lunch. But he was past all that now; he was already
thinking about his new beginning, in a new land. He pointed
down the street. ‘This way,’ he said. ‘Across from the Pension
Fuentes.’ Then he turned back to wait for his order. 41
William S. Burroughs was considered part of the Beat Genera-

tion that took Tangier by storm in the 1950s. American modern
classics like Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, along with William
Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, engaged the ways that Tangier pro-
vided the freedom that the Beat Generation sought. 42 The writ-
ers and artists of the Beat Generation came to Tangier to drop
out of society—as if there was no society to drop into or engage
with in Morocco by, for example, linking up with other Moroc-
can counter-cultural or political movements, like the Moroccan
anti-colonial movements of the time. Morocco was more of a
landscape upon which they could satisfy their interests of things
not American rather than a landscape filled with people with
which they could interact. In the way writers and artists of that
time, for the most part, eclipsed the subjectivity of Moroccan
writers and artists, contemporary tourists dismiss, ignore, ne-
41
Ibid., 141.
42
In the 20th century Tangier became a transnational city as a result of
the International Zone, effectively establishing it as distinct from the
rest of the country, which was still under Spanish and French protec-
torate status (1912–1956). In 1924, the new Statute of Tangier estab-
lished a compromise between the Western countries that allowed Mo-
rocco to be subject to interference by several European governments.
For the next few decades, Morocco existed as a Western outpost. It was
during this time of loose governance, from 1924 until Moroccan inde-
pendence, in 1956, that Tangier earned its reputation as an expatriate
playground.
glect Moroccan social and cultural life to myopically focus on

the landmarks that made up the travel and writing itineraries of
the Beat Generation before them, effectively repeating their
travel trajectories. Moroccan history, as evoked by Murad in the
beginning of the novel with Tariq Ibn Ziad, is bypassed in favor
of American literary heritage: Morocco is more of a landscape to
be explored only insofar as it offers up Murad in a djellaba, a
fleabag motel, and the old quarter (all indications of a presumed
authentic Morocco), rather than Moroccan writers and artists.
Thus, the western gaze effectively divides the city into spaces of
intellectual heritage (Western) and spaces of an unchanging Mo-
rocco (sans intellectual heritage or cultural context or historical
memory). Morocco exists outside of linear temporality, un-
touched by social changes. In the formation of Morocco as a
nostalgic museum, past and present are collapsed.
At the end of the novel, while Murad entertains another set
of tourists at his friend’s shop, he decides to use this second en-
counter with tourists to provide the tools to understand that for
Morocco there is an image and there is a reality. We realize he
seeks to weaponize nostalgia with his own creativity, his own
narrative control against the erasure of historical time. Although
it appears at first that he embraces the dissonance of the al-
lochronic by telling a folktale, the moral of his rug-weaver story
is clear: the Sultan’s men believed that they were familiar with
Jenara but could not distinguish the real, live, unpredictable
Jenara from her timeless, immovable tapestry image. And so,
Morocco, as new as it seems upon observation to the tourists, is
still meant to convey a sense of the familiar, so that whatever
reality they encounter, it is overcome by the image. But, will
they know to tell the timeless image from historically ever-
changing reality when the time comes?
Much Moroccan literature about undocumented migration
is indeed anti-nostalgic, urging us away from the diversion of
the backward glance, bringing forth past Maghrebian glories
across the Mediterranean, and instead toward much-needed at-
tention to current material realities. Indeed, Hope and Other
Dangerous Pursuits seems anti-nostalgic as much as other undoc-
umented migrant literature, but I contend it is also counter-
nostalgic in the way it weaponizes nostalgia to suggest an alter-

native Mediterranean and Morocco. In the novel, nostalgia is not
just a sentimental yearning for times past, but a tool that takes
the past into account to subvert dominant memories and cri-
tique historical narratives. The productive role of nostalgia lies
in its capacity to provoke a critical historical sensibility. That
there is much opportunity to critique dominant narratives
evoked by nostalgia on the Mediterranean points to the way the
evocation of the Mediterranean is nostalgic in itself. Some
would say the Mediterranean evokes nostalgia now more than
ever because today it rests at the juncture of its past and pre-
sent—at the juncture of its current dual role as border and
bridge.
CHAPTER 2.
THE IMMIGRANT DREAM:
‘DREAM? NIGHTMARE, MORE LIKE’
Originally published in 1999, Mahi Binebine’s Cannibales was

translated in 2003 (by Lulu Norman) to Welcome to Paradise.
Like Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, it opens
with a group of migrants in the process of crossing the Mediter-
ranean Sea to Europe. Huddled on a Tangier beach, the group
(six men from Mali, Algeria, and Morocco, and one woman with
a child) waits for the signal to board the boat. Having given all
their money to a nameless human trafficker, they now share a
single goal: to escape their hopeless situation by starting a new
life in Europe—to live the ‘immigrant dream’.
Cannibales, like Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits,
employs a social realism that portrays in detail the contempo-
rary brutality of Mediterranean borders: a mix of poor North
and sub-Saharan African migrants, both men and women, even a
child, a flimsy Zodiac on the shore, a ruthless human trafficker
who leads the group—a story ripped from the headlines, so to
speak. In fact, both novels’ plunge into the past (a resistance to
forward movement) reveals a shared commitment to presenting
each character as an individual with a past, a background, a his-
tory, a story, which is characteristic of social realism: the novels
tap into the collective European imaginary of migrants as one
nameless mass threatening to descend on Europe (think of the
migrant ‘flood’ evoked by alarmist nativist media). Merged in
the media as a nameless mass en route to Europe, via popular
photography’s portrayals of a pile of indistinguishable bodies on
71
a boat at sea, migrants are stripped of individuality and present-

ed as a single body of societal problems and ails rather than var-
ious individuals with histories, agency, hopes, desires. By releas-
ing a multiplicity of stories, the narratives appear to not only
tap into the collective imaginary but also disrupt it by restoring
individuality to the migrants with multiple narratives.
As a realist novel, we find that Cannibales strives to ‘uncov-
er the deeper, hidden, mediated, not immediately perceptible
network of relationships that go to make up society’, in the
words of Georg Lukács. 1 Jed Esty and Colleen Lye write that
Lukács significantly ‘located a text’s realism in its aspirations to
totality, with “totality” defined not as something out there but
as a demand to consider interrelations and interactions between
disparate phenomena.’ 2 That which has been rendered percepti-
ble in the migrant narrative (piles of bodies in photographs and
nativist rhetorical tropes) is not to be fully trusted. What is re-
quired is an excavation of the hidden reality behind the images.
For Binebine, like many postcolonial novelists, realism cer-
tainly offers the appeal of a vision of social totality of undocu-
mented trans-Mediterranean migration—woven through phe-
nomena like poverty, dispossession, desperation, impending ex-
ploitation, and the validity of the ‘immigrant dream’—but espe-
cially insofar as it presents an opportunity for a critique of its
internal contradictions. But one way Cannibales reveals the con-
tradictions of the totalized narrative of migration is to cast
doubt upon the ‘immigrant dream’, a stable narrative of material
success and social ascent, and to do so with evocations of the
fantastical: it certainly portrays migrants who dream of a trans-
formative entry into the EU paradise, but the realities of undoc-
umented migrants who arrive on the other shore or encounter
its people are evoked by migrant characters through fantastical
1
Georg Lukács, ‘Realism in the Balance,’ in Aesthetics and Politics, eds
Ernst Bloch and Fredric Jameson (London: Verso, 1977), 38.
2
Jed Esty and Colleen Lye, ‘Peripheral Realisms Now,’ Modern Language
Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History 73, no. 3 (2012), 277.
2. THE IMMIGRANT DREAM 73
tropes of monstrosity and savagery. In fact, it is through the fan-

tastical that the novel reveals, rather than the fulfillment of
hope for a transformative entry into a welcoming paradise, the
fear of one continuous passage from a devouring sea to a state of
violent ravaging on the other shore. As much as the novel abides
by realism to uncover the hidden and ‘not immediately percep-
tible network of relationships that go to make up society’ (be-
cause after all what is more hidden than clandestine migrants?),
and more specifically the disparate phenomena that make up
trans-Mediterranean migration, it is the fantastical interpreta-
tions of the mundane by the characters that allows for a suspen-
sion of belief, an introduction of doubt about the ‘immigrant
dream’, so that contradictions within this totalized narrative
may come to the surface.
In essence, the novel maintains a realist foundational narra-
tive overlaid by fantastic interpretations of the characters.
Moreover, the fantastical hermeneutic of real events relies on
Moroccan and Arab cultural signifiers. But the novel does not
indulge in translation of cultural signifiers, forcing cultural
translation to uncover their meaning for the uninitiated. The
significance of culturally rooting the characters’ fantastical in-
terpretations to challenge the reality of migration is to introduce
unsettling doubt—not about the authenticity of events—but
doubt about the stability of the ‘immigrant dream’ narrative. But
more significantly, cultural signification of a fantastic herme-
neutic privileges the fear of the immigrant upon touching the
other shore (rather than the fear of the host country) and the
subversive resistance potential of the fantastic to monologic po-
litical and cultural narratives of immigration as a hospitable
welcome. The fantastic in this way becomes a mode of interpre-
tation in texts concerned with problems of representation re-
garding the ideals of migration and the EU. Rather than visions
of migrants descending upon Europe, this novel is invested in
how visions of EU hospitality gone awry are depicted through
the eyes of migrants as fantastical, ghoulish, grotesque, beyond
the bounds of what is knowable. This narrative, rather than sug-
gesting a successful closure to the perilous journey promises
more menace, a horrific consumption by the other on its shore,
an incorporation tied to the other culture, the other as host to

the self as guest. The reluctance of the narrative to go forward
in time perhaps suggests that the present has foreclosed upon
the future for the migrants, despite their hopeful gazes toward
Edenic Europe.
In the beginning of the novel, encounters with the other
shore (the European one) are tied to fantastical depictions of the
Mediterranean Sea in stories told by village elders, foreshadow-
ing the characters’ relationship to it and the ‘paradise’ on its
other shore:
Back in the village, the old people were always telling us
about the sea, and each time in a different way. Some said it
was like a vast sky, a sky of water foaming across infinite,
impenetrable forests where ghosts and ferocious monsters
lived. Others maintained that it stretched further than all the
rivers, lakes, ponds and streams on earth put together. As for
the wise old boys in the square, who spoke as one on the
matter, they swore that God was storing up the water for
Judgment day, when it would wash the earth clean of its
sinners. 3
At the end of the dystopic, ‘infinite, impenetrable forests where

ghosts and ferocious monsters lived’, where pandemonium
reigns (the wild disorder and chaos of the sea emerging as ‘a sky
of water’), a re-birth into paradise is expected by the migrants.
On one hand, arrival in Europe is imagined as an entry into par-
adise, but on the other, entry requires passage through an un-
derworld shaped by God’s divine wrath. If the fossilized binaries
about the Mediterranean gave us the representational bridge
and border, as well as cosmopolitanism and containment, then
the characters in the fantastical hermeneutical layer of this nov-
el fashion a heteropic space out of the Mediterranean through
the juxtaposition of ‘several sites that are in themselves incom-
3
Binebine, 1.
patible’ in the strange, wondrous, extreme topographies of

heaven and hell.
For the would-be migrants, the tension between the heaven
and hell of Europe resonates throughout the novel: paradise is
invoked at the mention of Europe, but the fantasy yields to fears
of a hellish, degraded bestialization. When Aziz’s cousin Reda
mistakes the roaming lights of the Spanish coastguard for the
Spanish coastline, the Algerian Kacem Judi jokes, ‘If paradise
were that close, son, […] I’d have swum there by now’. 4 Uncer-
tainty about the paradise that awaits in the successful-migrant
narrative presents itself early on. Even before the boat journeys
across the Mediterranean, and despite the way the novel gives
the migrants each an identity and a past, Aziz notes early on
that paradise is not what it seems, because to learn how to be a
refugee is to ‘learn to keep in the background, to be nobody:
another shadow, a stray dog, a lowly earthworm, or even a
cockroach. That’s it, yes, learn to be a cockroach’. 5 He implies
migration will likely result in a dehumanizing transformation
into negligible, disposable life, and once again the novel’s best
efforts to humanize the characters, give them individual identi-
ties and histories, surrenders to a fear of dehumanization and
bestialization in Europe, not so different from the brutish, wild,
fantastical world of ‘impenetrable forests’ and ‘ghosts and fero-
cious monsters’ 6 that characterizes Europe’s threshold, the Medi-
terranean Sea. Aziz gestures toward a passage of wilderness,
ferocity, inhumanity that leads the way from North Africa’s
shores to Europe.
This is because arrival in Europe does not herald the prom-
ised paradise but rather reveals itself as a precarious and pro-
longed wasteland, a no-man’s land for the migrants—who must
lurk ‘like a shadow’ at the edge of society and at the margins of
its rights and protections. The marginal stage extends across the
4
Ibid., 17.
5
Ibid., 66.
6
Ibid., 1.
sea and, correspondingly, shapes and ultimately overwhelms the

relationship to Europe. We are reminded the English title of the
book (Welcome to Paradise) ironically gestures toward the es-
sence of dehumanization in Europe made central by the title of
the French original (Cannibales) upon reading anguished dreams
of cannibalization that visit an undocumented worker.
Deported from Europe three times, Morad (or Momo) works
in a trafficking network to recruit aspiring migrants from Café
France in Marrakesh. The dream merchant responsible for feed-
ing would-be migrants ‘dreams’ of Europe they relish before ‘in-
gest[ing]’ is afraid to sleep lest he dream a dream that under-
mines migrant fantasies. 7 He tells the others in the café about
being repeatedly visited by a nightmare, inspired by the restau-
rant Chez José where he worked in France. It begins when he
and his boss José sit drinking at a café and José’s incessant chat-
ter starts to mesmerize him:
Mr. José talks and talks. Momo can’t hear him, all he can see
is his outsize, open mouth where, instead of teeth, there’s an
infinite number of forks. The glittering, grinding stainless
steel thrashes out a cascade of muddled words whose vague
echo Momo begins to catch, just about; the voice is metallic
yet soft, harsh and bewitching, irresistible. Momo lets him-
self be swept along, opens his heart, swallows the words, ab-
sorbs their sense and inevitably, agrees with them. 8
The dream—which Aziz re-considers (‘Dream? Nightmare, more

like’ 9)—turns more gruesome. Momo is ‘willingly’ devoured by
his boss in exchange for mobility up the restaurant hierarchy
and possibly toward citizenship: ‘Anyway, a finger, what’s that?
A little bit of nothing, a pathetic scrap of flesh and bone that
sooner or later will end up food for worms, a complete waste’. 10
7
Ibid., 32 and 33.
8
Ibid., 96.
9
Ibid., 95.
10
Ibid., 97.
He is promoted from dishwasher to waiter for two toes. The rest

of his toes, his thumbs, and a part of his buttocks yield im-
provements to his living conditions. His arm will garner a raise.
What else can be devoured to have his status legalized? At sea
or on the other shore, the migrants are to expect the fantastical
to surpass reality—‘ferocious monsters’. 11 This time, it is one
with ‘an infinite number of forks … glittering, grinding stainless
steel’ for teeth, which dismember, fragment, ingest Momo until
there’s hardly a recognizable human body left. 12 Eventually,
what remains of Momo is his head. Reward is undercut by de-
humanizing, objectifying sacrifice.
Much has been made of Momo’s dream, pointing to the
metaphorical consumption of migrant life in the host country. 13
Of course the cannibalism dream functions as a metaphor of
Momo’s reduction to plundered flesh, extracted as absolute re-
source. Not only is Momo a laboring migrant but also an undoc-
umented one, incorporated into Parisian life through the con-
sumption of body and labor without legal constraints upon the
consumer—José, the restaurant, Parisian society—so he is over-
worked (works 11 hours a day), lives in the back of the restau-
rant, lurks at the edge of Paris life. More significantly, the dream
merchant Momo cannot help but share his nightmare to disrupt
the ‘immigrant dream’/the conscious fantasy of the would-be
migrants. The narrator alludes to the paradoxical nature of the
‘immigrant dream’ (the conscious fantasy) when referring to
Momo’s unconscious dream: ‘Dream? Nightmare, more like.’ 14
11
Ibid., 1.
12
Ibid., 96.
13
See Sharae Deckard, Paradise Discourse, Imperialism, and Globalization:
Exploiting Eden (New York: Routledge, 2009). Deckard explains that
Momo’s nightmare is an allegory of the first world consuming the third.
Also see Ana Maria Manzanas Calvo and Jesus Benito Sanchez, Hospital-
ity in American Literature and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2017).
They argue that Momo’s dream reverses the African cannibalism narra-
tive in this postcolonial novel (89).
14
Binebine, 95.
Wielded through fantastical figurations of exploitation and

incorporation by the European other, the instability of the ‘im-
migrant dream’ pervades the waking and sleeping life of mi-
grants. The oneiric depiction is a conscious conversion into lan-
guage (from unconscious imagery). The disparity between the
dream and its retelling or interpretation in conscious, waking
life is difficult to measure, since dream images are rendered tex-
tual. In fact, Sigmund Freud asks, ‘what value can we still attach
to our memory of dreams?’ 15 when we cannot distinguish be-
tween what was already in a dream and what we have filled in
with ‘additions and embellishments’. 16 As soon as we begin to
remember a dream, we begin to revise it. Thus, the novel sug-
gests that fantastical interpretations vacillate between the con-
scious interpretation and the unconscious dream process. More-
over, the liminal nature of the dream in the novel is evident
when dreams interpenetrate into waking life as the symbol of
incorporation echoes in other scenes. This is not to say that the
fantastical is made up of perceptible events to the characters or
that we as readers are led to believe they are, but rather they
are modes of interpretation. 17 We do not have to suspend belief
15
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, edited and translated by
James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 77.
16
Ibid., 75.
17
Indeed there are various modes of representation concerning aware-
ness and perceptibility of the European encounter—dream, reality, fan-
tasy, and later potential hallucination—shot through with fear and
menace, rather than pure idealization. Of course the reader surely
makes a distinction between the common use of dream-as-metaphor
and the literal dream: a metaphor that stands for an envisioned desire
or longing is the dream of migrants (to live a decent life in Europe)
already. This dream-as-metaphor represents a fantasy or an idealized
vision seen as a real possibility. So, while the waking dreams of mi-
grants tap into an imaginary of an ideal paradise, the sleeping dream of
Momo taps into a repressed fear that emerges through the unconscious.
The former is a metaphor for the hope born of imagination, and the
latter is a literal dream capturing the dangerous failure of that hope.
at the fantastical elements in the dream, which by definition is

not factually reliable, but its correlative tropes of consumption
in waking life open up the text to hesitation and doubt—not as
to whether they happened but what they are trying to challenge
about reality for the characters: will they be consumed by the
‘other’?
The oneiric depictions and the waking confusion or fancies
interpenetrate as the fear of consumption in the latter emerge in
scenes of the former—especially because Binebine refers to both
as ‘dreams’, with different meanings (the unconscious dream
and the conscious fantasy). Binebine reveals that the waking
fantasy is already riddled with contradictions, and is shot
through with the same threatening tropes that mark the noctur-
nal dream. When Aziz is taken in by nuns as a boy, he describes
his new room as ‘a dream’: ‘It was a dream room, more comfort-
able than I could ever have hoped: a proper bed, a teacher’s
desk, an electric lamp, mauve velvet curtains, a wardrobe made
of precious wood, and lastly a door that led to a shower room
tiled all the way up to the ceiling. Cold water. Hot water. What
bliss!’ 18 But a few pages later, he is gripped by fear and feels the
bedding is swallowing him:
When I sat down on my bed I had the fright of my life, a cra-
zy, indescribable feeling of falling. I felt I was being swal-
lowed up by the bedding, trapped by my own struggling.
Trembling, I clutched at the edge of the bed to stop myself
sinking. But the more I fought, the farther I fell, as though I
The fantasy of migration to paradise gestures toward wish fulfillment,

while the dream undermines wish fulfillment. The sleeping dream tells
them more about reality than their waking perceptions. Thus, what the
novel sets up is the development of an ideal through a common meta-
phor while awake and the apprehension of an all-too violent twenty-
first-century reality while asleep. Repeatedly visiting Momo, the noc-
turnal dreams work to disrupt the waking fantasy.
18
Binebine, 85.
was being sucked under by an octopus. I bit the sheet so as

not to cry out. 19
The mundane (going to bed for the first time in a new home)
reflects the contradictions of a ‘dream’ (come true) through the
emotional fancies and fantasies of a young boy imagining being
helplessly consumed, ‘sucked under by an octopus,’ in his new
bed and ‘dream/y’ room: contained within the idealized vision is
menace, contained within the mundane is the strange, unfamil-
iar. The uncanniness of this encounter, in the Freudian sense of
the familiar appearing strange, is the uncanniness of the encoun-
ter with otherness—the remnants of colonialism, the home of
French nuns. According to Freud, the ‘uncanny’ belongs to ‘that
class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old
and long familiar.’ 20 Freud explains that the word unheimlich, the
uncanny, the unhomely, etymologically slips into its opposite,
the heimlich, or the homely: ‘Heimlich is a word the meaning of
which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally
coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some
way or other a subspecies of heimlich’. 21 What is known as ‘old
and familiar’, 22 the heimlich, ‘belongs to two sets of ideas, which
without being contradictory, are yet very different: on the one
hand, it means familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is
concealed and kept out of sight’. 23 The ‘empty’ landscape per-
ceived by the colonizer is shadowed by an uncanny double, a
landscape traversed by the ‘nonexistent’ colonized. 24 But here do
19
Ibid., 86.
20
Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, Pelican Freud Library, translated by
James Strachey, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 14 (Hammondsworth, UK:
Penguin, 1985), 340.
21
Ibid., 347.
22
Ibid., 340.
23
Ibid., 345.
24
Samira Kawash, ‘Terrorists and Vampires,’ in Frantz Fanon: Critical
Perspectives, ed. Anthony Alessandrini (New York: Routledge, 1999),
253.
we grasp the inversion of the uncanny in this sense? Is the land-

scape now shadowed by an uncanny double, traversed by re-
mainders of the colonizer? The dream-realized (the room) is
never to be absolutely trusted; it is offered by French nuns in
their own home in Morocco; it is a devouring threat, the realiza-
tion of other catastrophic possibilities in the home of the ‘other’
on Moroccan soil. He is being consumed by a more comfortable
life than the one he had in his Moroccan family home and can-
not contain his wild imagination. He continues: ‘Here I was,
having only known hard straw mats and carpets woven by my
mother, tricked by the treacherous springs of a wire bed! It
didn’t last long, but long enough, at any rate, for me to decide
to sleep on the floor, that first night at the School on the Hill.’ 25
The menacing encounter with otherness, first signified by Mo-
mo’s dream of cannibalism as an undocumented migrant worker
in France, echoes here as a scene of hospitality and altruism by
French nuns in their French home on Moroccan soil—a giddy
dream-realized for the narrator as a child—transformed into a
fearful, fevered hallucination where consumption by an un-
known creature (perhaps an ‘octopus’) is swallowing the child in
bed. Both the dream (nightmare of immigrant cannibalism) and
the dream-realized (the ‘dream room’ as the fulfillment of the
hope of better living conditions provided by the French nuns in
Morocco) reflect the guest-host relationship of hospitality, as a
concept applied to the immigrant, Momo in France, and to the
lodger, little Aziz in the nun’s home. Both reflect submerged
fears of consumption, co-optation, incorporation by a bizarre
and ultimately unknown other in the guise of hospitality. Hospi-
tality as the dream-come-true for little Aziz, as for Momo, is
charged with contradictions.
Mireille Rosello proposes the metaphor of hospitality is
used by states to secrete powers they impose as receiving coun-
tries that regulate immigrant flows for economic or demograph-
ic purposes: ‘the vision of a migrant as guest is a metaphor that
25
Binebine, 86.
has forgotten it is a metaphor.’ 26 Secreting power relations that

regulate the needs of a labor market in a shroud of state-
sponsored goodwill and generosity tends to obscure further
abuse of power: what does the migrant, especially the labor mi-
grant who no longer thinks of himself or herself in this hospita-
ble milieu as a valuable asset to the labor market but rather a
welcome guest, need to do to repay this generosity? Rosello ar-
gues that the state ‘has transformed a welcoming gesture into a
demand of dissolution’. 27 Indeed, assimilationism is one way of
ensuring dissolution, according to her: ‘If the host strips the
guests of his or her identity, then it can be said cannibalism has
occurred.’ 28 But the function of labor migration—offering one’s
labor, so to speak—also serves to strip the guest of his or her
identity, by separating humans from their labor, doing away
with individual identity for the purpose of offering a service,
offering one’s labor, until they become disposable—like Momo,
who in his dream is literally disposed of in a trash dump. For
Momo and little Aziz, encounters with Europe and Europeans is
a double-edged sword. The dream and the dream-realized of
hospitality is replete with rewards that are undercut by menace
and threats of cannibalism, consumption, loss of self, and dis-
posability.
But little Aziz’s fanciful, hallucinatory fear of consumption
and loss of control on his first night with the nuns serves to pro-
leptically gesture toward a real event later in the novel, suggest-
ing displacement of trauma and subsequent preoccupations with
loss of subjectivity. We learn the narrator’s teacher at the
‘School on the Hill’ who was responsible for arranging his hous-
ing with the nuns, Mr. Romanchef, visited him in his room and
sexually assaulted him on the bed. The scene of being consumed
sexually by the French teacher is reminiscent of the scene on the
26
Mireille Rosello, Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (Palo
Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 3.
27
Ibid., 31.
28
Ibid., 31.
child’s first night in the nuns’ bed. The narrator recounts Mr.
Romanchef’s visits when he was a child:
Then I thought of my friend Mr. Romanchef and his visits at
night to the School on the Hill. He’d bring me books and
chocolate and American tobacco and sometimes he’d go over
my math homework. After that he’d sit by my side on the
bed, take off his glasses, which he chewed at the ends, and
in one leap jump on top of me as if to catch me and his con-
science unawares, then start trembling as he stroked my pe-
nis. It was the kind of thing cats do, which I thought was
funny, because I saw it coming a mile off, and because I nev-
er resisted. I never, ever refused Mr. Romanchef anything,
not just because I owed him my new life and new world, but
also—and above all—because of his milky, smooth skin,
which aroused such desire in me, his spicy fragrance you
never smelled anywhere else, and his mouth that was like a
pitted cherry. Mr. Romanchef had the marvellous gift of be-
ing able to transform me into a cock, a huge, awesome cock,
which contained my whole being, all my madness, passion,
and pride in its hardness. Responding to a call from deep in-
side him, I let myself be swallowed up body and soul by the
corridor of scarlet flesh that offered itself, welcoming and
imploring. And I’d lose myself in it as you lose yourself in a
deep, shadowy, thick forest, seeking secret folds and hidden
clearings, tracking the spark of pleasure in the sin, the
glimpse of paradise, a cry of shrill ecstasy that we both sup-
pressed when, suddenly still, we lay fused together like a
creature with two torsos, breathless and radiant and ful-
filled. 29
The thematic symmetry suggested by the recurring consumption

trope through different modes of consciousness—dream, hallu-
cination, reality, memory—organized into different narrative
levels, diegetic and hypodiegetic, allows us to grasp how the con-
29
Binebine, 155–156.
tradictions of a dream—the immigrant dream, the dream of a

new room, the dream—end up being displaced into different
cognitive frames. The inarticulable horror of little Aziz’s first
night with the nuns (‘I bit the sheet so as not to cry out’) and his
sexual encounters with Mr. Romanchef (‘a cry of shrill ecstasy
that we both suppressed’) suggests a confrontation with the un-
canny, that class of fear which is familiar. However, we must
ask how reliable is the chronology of the narrative? Does the
memory of the fear of being ‘swallowed up’ by the bed retro-
spectively gesture toward the sexual trauma of being ‘swallowed
up’ that follows later? What happens first—the event or the fear
of the event condensed into an encounter with a devouring un-
known (is it the bed, the bedding, an octopus)? Is there a pre-
dictable relation between cause and effect? Does the uncanni-
ness of the initial encounter then unravel or exponentially in-
crease? The only consistent element in the unstable chronology
is the fantastic apprehension of consumption, incorporation, co-
optation by a bizarre and ultimately unknown other: does the
sexual trauma of the young boy ‘swallowed up body and soul by
the corridor of scarlet flesh that offered itself, welcoming and
imploring’, violated, devoured in bed in Morocco, by a French
authority figure only echo the trauma of the first night in a new
place, with the French nuns, or does it also gesture toward the
trauma of undocumented migrant life consumed (‘swallowed
up’) in the body of French political and economic authority?
Does the flesh as it appears ‘welcoming and imploring’ undercut
the pleasure of ‘a glimpse of paradise’? Certainly not, the scene
of sexual engulfment is no doubt replete with pleasure—as is
Momo’s nightmare of cannibalization because as frightening as
it is, the process of being devoured isn’t without its rewards. The
only question then becomes, to what end?
Parallel traumas of transgressed boundaries between the
self and the other, the dissolution of the self in the other, are
displaced onto different cognitive realms. Indeed, most novels
thematizing undocumented migration obsessively pore over the
hopes and fears of migrant characters before they sail toward
‘paradise’, the other shore, but in Cannibales the characters’ fears
consume the entire novel. The characters do not embark until
the end of the novel, which at that point has been replete with
dreams, fantasies, hallucinations, memory, reality—various
modes of representation concerning migrant desire and repul-
sion organized into different orders of consciousness and percep-
tibility. The weight of the fear is dispersed across lines of con-
sciousness and distilled through fantastic interpretations of its
realization.
Indeed, the characters establish the dream, or waking fan-
tasy, as a space of discord rather than as a reliably solid space:
‘This what we said: each of our dreams is guarded by an angel
on the right and a djinn on the left, two entities in perpetual
conflict’. 30 Dreams, or waking fantasies, must be guarded until
they are realized. While fantastical interpretations introduce
doubt about ideal narrative of migration in the face of absolute
dissolution, their cultural coding—the appearance of the djinn—
stands as a counterpoint to post-enlightenment western rational-
ist narratives, specifically of migration and more broadly Euro-
pean values. The immigrant dream and the reliability of hospi-
tality narratives of migration are flawed, urging reliance on a
locally cultural lens of apprehension and caution—the djinn, the
unpredictable figure of possession and incorporation. The djinn
of dreams is mentioned earlier almost casually by the narrator.
Noticing the Malian migrant flailing about the beach while wait-
ing to embark on the journey to the other shore, the narrator at
first considers it a ‘seizure’. Otherwise, why would such a stable,
stolid figure be flailing about uncontrollably? He then introduc-
es the possibility of djinn possession, casting doubt on whether
the narrator perceives the Malian migrant Pafadnam to be pos-
sessed by a djinn or whether he really thinks Pafadnam was
simply acting possessed or whether he thinks Pafadnam was
having a seizure. Once again, potential encounters with the oth-
er shore are filtered through symbols of incorporation—a djinn
that signals an unreliable, unpredictable figure will overtake the
self. While the entire novel is not cast in a fantasy genre, it uses
30
Ibid., 69.
some of its techniques by first integrating elements of fantasy

into an otherwise realistic setting and more importantly creating
doubt about the perception of an event, as evident in the am-
biguous depiction (seizure/djinn possession) of Pafadnam’s hys-
terical reaction to flashing lights. The uncertainty, the hesitation
about the nature of the event, is key in the apprehension of the
fantastic to interpret it, in a Todorovian sense: the narrator hesi-
tates between two contradictory understandings of events (scien-
tific or supernatural), and experience unsettling doubts. The ques-
tion of belief is central here, this hesitation stemming from the
clash of cultural systems of interpretation within the narrative,
which hesitates between belief in extrasensory phenomena and
the rationalist, realist mode that traditionally exclude them. The
transformation of Momo’s boss into a cannibalistic ghoul—both
an Arab and Moroccan supernatural figure often referenced in
the most mundane way like telling children not to wander off
and stray far from home—reveals the waking fears of exploita-
tion and incorporation through the fantastical that become re-
flected in dreams. The ghoul or demon or genie, like José in the
dream, is capable of shape shifting into human form and delud-
ing travelers (like Momo) to lead them astray and ravage and
kill them in a wasteland (Europe)—within the mundane emerges
the fantastic, within the familiar rises the unfamiliar, the uncan-
ny.
Perhaps the immigrant dream is itself uncanny, holding
‘two sets of ideas, which without being contradictory, are yet
very different: on the one hand, it means familiar and agreeable,
and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight’ 31—
keeping out of sight or secreting the vicissitudes of labor mar-
kets in the façade of hospitality policy. But it emerges out of the
corner of one’s eye—the European encounter, familiar and prac-
ticed to any would-be African migrant only 20 kilometers away,
made as unfamiliar, eerie, ghoulish, unknowable, as possible.
And it defamiliarizes this encounter with a Moroccan African-
31
Freud, 2010, 345.
Islamic fantastic cultural lens through which the reader is urged

to apprehend its inarticulable horror. Certainly, the migrant
characters in this novel, like ones in other chapters, construct
the Mediterranean with ‘two sets of ideas, which without being
contradictory, are yet very different’, by showing its simultane-
ous seductive and abject utopias, its past and present depiction,
its unitary and divided qualities, its aestheticized and material
constructions, its dissonance between the spaces he occupies and
the spaces occupied by ‘legal’, documented travelers. And, the
subversion of the fantastical—the strange, bizarre, uncanny—
becomes the means for migrant characters to make the Mediter-
ranean into a heterotopia.
With cultural signification of a fantastic hermeneutic, the
characters not only question the immigrant dream and the hos-
pitality narrative but ways of perceiving and interpreting. The
novel never lets us forget that its narrative about undocumented
migration is from the perspective of Moroccan and other African
characters. This feature is an apt reflection of the entire aim of
the book which seeks to uncover the stylistic features of voices
emergent from the African continent itself rather than about it—
the moments on the way to the trans-Mediterranean journey,
throughout the journey, rather than afterwards, the afterthought
on the other side. We often are kept in the loop about European
fears of cultural dissolution (Eurabia, etc.), but in this novel the
African-migrant fear of dissolution take center stage: the fear of
Moroccan and other African migrants being consumed in other
ways, related to labor exploitation, social invisibility, sexual
trauma. Paradoxically, the novel relies on the fantastic to ap-
prehend the constructedness of national narratives of immigra-
tion this unflinching realism strives for: ghoulish cannibalism,
consumption, djinn possession significantly render the encounter
with Europe as a sustained and uncertain, unknowable, inhospi-
table dispossession—at the mercy of one monster or another.
CHAPTER 3.
IMAGINING THE MEDITERRANEAN
AND ITS MIGRANTS:
THE AMBIVALENCE OF THE UNCANNY
The ‘immigrant dream’ washes up against fantasies of the Medi-

terranean. Paradoxically, fantasies rival each other in uncover-
ing the reality of the traffic between Africa and Europe. Tahar
Ben Jelloun’s 2006 novel Partir, translated to Leaving Tangier in
2009, begins with immigrant dreams of leaving and ends with a
fantastic account of return. The dream-like first and last chap-
ters frame realist narratives that unravel the dream but strive for
a coherent picture of what goes in the making of the undocu-
mented trans-Mediterranean traffic—smuggling, prostitution,
rape, murder, corruption. Fantasy, illusion, and imagination
frame the novel to emphasize the discrepancy between migrant
characters’ imagined geographies on the other shore and the
adversity they experience in Europe, the fantasy of an ideal
Mediterranean north of Morocco in discord with the broken and
flawed European societies to which they are subject. Indeed so-
cial and generic fantasies reflect upon each other in the novel,
not only to unravel the certainty of the ‘immigrant dream’, but
to reveal the multi-directionality of fantasy: migrants are also
conceived of as subjects of fantasy, just as they are subjects of
the colonial effects of migration. In the novel, aspiring migrants
must submit to Orientalist narratives that cast Morocco in a
spectacular, bizarre light in order to secure passage to the other
shore—where they are also bound to the fantastic, freakish, un-
canny—not newly strange but familiar in their strangeness, their
89
belonging in un-belonging. The novel’s convergence of trav-

el/tourism narratives and immigrant ones shed further light on
the multi-directionality of fantasy: if Orientalist travel narratives
expose a desire looking for a lost origin—and the pain of that
loss and the pleasure of return—then, in this novel, they reveal
the way these Orientalist narratives are instrumentalized to
manage the travel and immigration of its subjects where they
remain bound to these fantasies even after arrival on the other
shore. Branded with a fantasy, characters are subject to a de-
mand that they recapitulate and fulfill the fantasy they are pre-
sented. There, they remain bound to the fantastic, familiar in
their strangeness—uncanny. The competing fantasy-bound nar-
ratives are perfectly positioned to highlight the fantasy, the un-
canniness, the familiarity of their strangeness that define the
characters on both shores. Perhaps that is why the fantastic
frames the novel: the fantastic overcomes the main realism of
the book, generically, to reflect on the ways fantasy overcomes
reality, culturally, within an entangled web of Orientalist and
immigrant fantasies. The uncanny, the fantastic, the carni-
valesque establish the failure of realism to apprehend the story
of migration. In many undocumented-migrant narratives in this
book, travel and tourism narratives have been used to put in
sharp relief the difference in mobility between tourists and as-
piring migrants. But in Partir, mobility of people is not the only
and primary topic, but also the mobility of ideas and ideologies
that work to immobilize the migrants in Orientalist narratives,
wherever in the world they are.
The dreams of would-be immigrants initiate the text and
nihilistically foreshadow the death of the dream before its con-
tents are unpacked: ‘In Tangier, in the winter, the Café Hafa be-
comes an observatory of dreams and their aftermath.’ 1 The rest
of the chapter, in its morbid, dream-like rendering and fantasti-
cal allusions, compounds the unsettling doubt surrounding the
1
Tahar Ben Jelloun, Partir (Paris: Gallimard, 2006). Leaving Tangier,
translated by Linda Coverdale (London: Penguin Books, 2009), 3.
3. IMAGINING THE MEDITERRANEAN AND ITS MIGRANTS 91
fulfillment of the immigrant dream into reality. The protagonist

Azel, a would-be migrant, and others like him stare at the Medi-
terranean Sea—a familiar point of reference throughout their
lives as Tangerines—only to defamiliarize it with tales of a
strange sea spirit, Toutia, who dwells there. With the invocation
of fantasy, the transformation of the familiar into the strange
sets the stage for the rest of the narrative. The sea siren who
‘feasts on human flesh’ 2 is a means of defamiliarizing the famil-
iar insofar as the strangeness of a once-familiar sea is main-
tained. But in the tales Toutia is transformed into a friendly spir-
it who warns of the sea’s volatility, ‘especially when the sea has
tossed up the bodies of a few drowned souls.’ 3 Fantastic tales of
the paradoxical creature circulate in Azel’s kif-induced haze as a
precursor to his contemplation of the sea’s paradoxical nature
through his own intoxicated, stupefied, dream-like portrayal of
its most current trope as a ‘sea cemetery’:
As if in an absurd and persistent dream, Azel sees his body
among other naked bodies swollen by seawater, his face dis-
torted by salt and longing, his skin burnt by the sun, split
open across the chest … Azel has decided that this sea has a
centre and that this centre is a green circle, a cemetery
where the current catches hold of corpses, taking them to the
bottom to lay them out on a bank of sea weed. 4
That which has been familiar to them all their lives as a source
of water, life, regeneration, mobility, freedom, has been trans-
formed into a death trap and a burial ground. The sea has be-
come ‘uncanny’ in the Freudian sense, as belonging to ‘that class
of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and
long familiar.’ 5 The ambivalence is rooted in the fantastic her-
2
Ben Jelloun, 4.
3
Ibid., 4.
4
Ibid., 5.
5
Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, Pelican Freud Library, translated by
James Strachey, Penguin Freud Library, vol. 14 (Hammondsworth, UK:
Penguin, 1985), 340.
meneutic that frames the novel, for, as Brian Attebery has suc-
cinctly put it, ‘Fantasy invokes wonder by making the impossi-
ble seem familiar and the familiar seem new and strange.’ 6
As with Mahi Binebine’s Cannibales, Partir draws the Medi-
terranean Sea as one inhabited by spirits and monsters, through
fantastical interpretations of its characters. Like Cannibales, Par-
tir’s realist foundational narrative is threaded with fantastic in-
terpretations of the characters and various para- and meta-texts
(for example, the stories characters tell and the narrative’s self-
reflexive interrogations). Within this realist text, they hint at the
fantastic but never allow it to overcome the text (until the end).
In Partir, the journeys are shown to be multidirectional, from
travelers of all kinds across that simultaneously familiar and
estranging Mediterranean Sea, and reveal that the fantastic ge-
neric elements not only reflect on fantasies of an ideal Europe.
The itinerary of fantasy is also multidirectional: the fantastic
generic elements inversely reflect on cultural fantasies of an ex-
oticized Mediterranean, and they do so most remarkably in Ben
Jelloun’s hometown, Tangier—the site par excellence of social
fantasies.
Like Laila Lalami in the US, Ben Jelloun is a Moroccan
writer in the diaspora whose work is mostly set in Morocco but
delivered from his home in France. And like Lalami, Ben Jelloun
demonstrates intertextuality with Western expat and travel nar-
ratives otherwise absent from Maghrebian undocumented-
migrant literature. Western sojourn narratives in Morocco yield
currency in the American literary imagination: Ben Jelloun’s
references to known American writers in search of sexual ex-
ploits, 7 as well as their fictional reincarnations; Lalami’s depic-
tion of tourist quests for an American Beat past in Tangier. They
6
Brian Attebery, The Fantasy Tradition: From Irving to Le Guin (Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 3.
7
In Partir (Leaving Tangier), one of Ben Jelloun’s characters recalls the
American writers, perhaps recalling Bowles or the Beat poets, isolating
themselves in hotels and venturing out to the city to arrange for sexual
exploits.
tap into Orientalist-Mediterraneanist fantasies of recovery: west-

ern cultural narratives of a ‘wishful liberation of fantasies’ 8 in
remote places and times, sites of great religions and cultures in
ruins, inhabited by exotic natives.
It is this familiar cultural fantasy of the Mediterranean and
its dynamic cities, celebrated for openness and utopic cosmopol-
itanism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art and literature,
which Lalami and Ben Jelloun access. Decades after it was estab-
lished as an International Zone—effectively separated from the
rest of Morocco and ‘loosely administered by eight nations
whose citizens lived tax free while the locals serviced everything
including their sexual needs’ 9—Tangier functioned as a western
outpost: it was during this time of loose governance that it ac-
quired its reputation as a land of fantasies. The subsequent rela-
tionship between American counterculture and Tangier in the
1940s–1960s is certainly owed to Paul Bowles: his writing about
the city’s drugs, pimps, and prostitutes influenced other writers
who were to become part of the Beat Generation, like William S.
Burroughs who joined Bowles in Tangier and there wrote Naked
Lunch. 10
For Paul Bowles in Tangier, the Mediterranean featured as
a model cosmopolis—an urban contact zone able to well-receive
the ‘stranger’; a pluralistic, open society unbound by nationalist
exclusions. The cosmopolis is where ‘every individual is a partial
stranger because arrivals (and departures) are incessant’; 11
8
Harvie Ferguson, The Lure of Dreams: Sigmund Freud and the Construc-
tion of Modernity (London: Routledge, 1996), 205.
9
Michael Mewshaw, Between Terror and Tourism: An Overland Journey
Across North Africa (Berkeley: Counterpoint Press, 2010), 351.
10
Certainly, Tangier was apprehended in the western imagination by
various writers and artists before the Beat Generation, like Samuel
Pepys, Antoine De Saint Exupery, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Matisse,
Delacroix, etc.
11
Kurt Iveson, ‘Strangers in the Cosmopolis,’ in Cosmopolitan Urbanism,
eds Jon Binnie, Julian Holloway, Steve Millington, and Craig Young
(London: Routledge, 2006), 76.
hence, openness and hospitality constitute the cosmopolitan vir-

tue. Bowles’s Tangier-based travelogues, short stories, and nov-
els represent the Mediterranean narrative par excellence—replete
with travel narratives and multicultural encounters. But the
Mediterranean is essentialized not only by a ‘history of travel
culture attracted by freedoms,’ a contented freely mobile cos-
mopolitanism, but in the social vice and visceral experience that
‘dangerous mores associated with the region’ offer, according to
Mike Crang. 12 Although Bowles wrote about Tangier’s pictur-
esque qualities for tourism magazines, his stories described an
urban contact zone that was far from tame—a border town at
the crossroads of diverse nationalities and cultures with a seduc-
tive lawlessness. 13 Criminality and chaos abound in his stories,
but there is safety in permissibility, an order in the disorder, a
comfort in knowing that its bustling cosmopolitanism, the flow
of people coming and going, made it possible to hide out, lose
oneself, become ‘clandestine’ without legal repercussions.
Bowles’s towns represent a liberating frontier for escape and
criminality, as well as places of simplicity, spiritual immanence,
transcendence, and creative inspiration for those seeking to
‘drop out’ of society.
The Mediterranean is performative in the sense that it is
less about shared traits than the play on ‘claims and knowledges
about those shared traits,’ according to Crang. 14 One of the main
vehicles of performing the Mediterranean is the retrieval of a
lost paradise, a liberatory frontier for ‘sensual pleasures,’ ‘au-
thentic heritage,’ and ‘mythical vices’. The Mediterranean as a
seductive utopia emerges through literary itineraries. It flashes a
12
2009), 160.
13
On Bowles’s themes of lawlessness and chaos in Tangier, see Without
Stopping (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999); ‘Monologue (Tangier,
1975)’, The Threepenny Review 13 (Spring 1983), 11–12; ‘Hugh Harper,’
The Threepenny Review 21 (Spring 1985), 3.
14
Crang, 160.
seductive monolithic narrative of travel adventure, sensuality,

spirituality, diversity, and authentic heritage that encompasses a
remarkably diverse number of nations and cultures occupying
the three continents that surround the sea. Branding of the Med-
iterranean as frontier of travel and escape for its ‘sensual pleas-
ures,’ ‘authentic heritage,’ ‘mythical vices’ is utopic in the Fou-
cauldian sense—controlling and disciplinary—as it is based on
discovery and exploration for the purpose of ordering these
properties and retrieving them upon arrival. Utopias are used as
a heuristic device with the potential to lend order to the Mediter-
ranean narrative, giving narrative coherence to a place that no
longer exists or might have never existed. As new as it seems
upon observation, it is still meant to convey a sense of the famil-
iar.
Ben Jelloun captures these familiar touchstones of the Med-
iterranean, and specifically Tangier, through themes of sexual
tourism. As Michael Walonen puts it in his reading of Partir, ‘for
Ben Jelloun, the specters of the International Zone era are far
from quiescent.’ 15 The return of those specters is borne out of
economic necessity and imposed through sexual predation: de-
prived of economic opportunities and surrounded by political
corruption, Azel and his sister try to save themselves from a fate
at the bottom of the ‘sea cemetery,’ like their cousin Noured-
dine, by securing safe and legal passage to Spain through the
help of a benefactor—Miguel, the Spanish art dealer. But, as
Walonen explains, pure altruism doesn’t guide the art dealer, as
he ‘embodies some of the more maleficent aspects of the long
shadows cast by the expatriate era.’ 16 In Tangier, Orientalist
phantoms of eras past return to inflict further humiliation
through Ben Jelloun’s perspective: the tales of expatriate artists
and their sex scandals in eras past are relayed as a historical
15
Michael Walonen, Writing Tangier in Postcolonial Transition: Space and
Power in Expatriate and North African Literature (New York: Routledge,
2016), 132.
16
Walonen, 132.
referent to the current moment in which Azel finds himself. The

narrator mentions an ‘old concierge in apartment building
where an American writer and his wife lived said it best’:
That type, they want everything, men and women from the
common people, young ones, healthy, preferably from the
countryside, who can’t read or write, serving them all day,
then servicing them at night. A package deal, and between
two pokes, tokes on a nicely packed pipe of kif to help the
American write! Tell me your story, he says to them, I’ll
make a novel out of it, you’ll even have your name on the
cover: you won’t be able to read it but no matter, you’re a
writer like me, except that you’re an illiterate writer, that’s
exotic—what I mean is, unusual, my friend! That’s what he
tells them, without ever mentioning money, because you
don’t talk about that, not when you’re working for a writer,
after all! They aren’t obliged to accept, but I know that pov-
erty—our friend poverty—can lead us to some very sad plac-
es. 17
The jab Ben Jelloun takes at Bowles and his wife Jane is clear,
for Bowles’s ‘translations’—no mere translations but recordings
of oral transmissions in the Moroccan darija that were translated
to English and edited—opened the author up to controversy.
Brian Edwards wrote, ‘Bowles’s role exceeded that of mere
translator, since the books that bear Mrabet’s name as author
exist only in translation, and their title pages list a variety of
roles for Bowles, including editor, translator, and the person
who tape-recorded Mrabet.’ 18 Edwards also explains that as early
as 1972, Ben Jelloun wrote an article in the French paper Le
Monde in which he declared Bowles’s translations a ‘bastard lit-
17
Ben Jelloun, 41.
18
Brian T. Edwards, ‘The Moroccan Paul Bowles,’ Michigan Quarterly
Review, vol. L, no. 2 (Spring 2011), 196.
erature.’ 19 Edwards discusses the critique Bowles garnered for

his literary collaborations:
For Ben Jelloun, Bowles practiced a ‘technique of rape’ (the
column ran under the headline ‘Une technique de viol’), and
though Ben Jelloun did not explicitly accuse Bowles of sexu-
al relations with his Moroccan interlocutors, he certainly
suggested that the violation was more than literary. And
many in Morocco got the hint. 20
Indeed this is not the only reference to Bowles in the novel: for
example, Miguel finds, upon reading his father’s journal, that he
had also heard about Paul and Jane Bowles when he left Spain
and began living in Tangier: ‘At the time people also talked
about an American writer who lived there several years with an
illiterate Moroccan boy, while his wife set up house with a peas-
ant woman.’ 21 Later, Genet’s love of young Moroccan boys, es-
pecially ones who rob him, is dropped into conversation almost
casually when Miguel complains about Azel to his sister Kenza:
‘Azel thinks I’m Jean Genet, you know—that French writer who
used to come often to Tangier, a rebel, a great poet, a homosex-
ual who has served great time in prison for theft; he loved to be
robbed by his lovers, a betrayal he found reassuring or exciting
…’ 22 References to the expatriate era and its sexualization of
Moroccan boys and men appear not only to critique the writers
and artists of the era, but to indicate through various characters
that their memory resonates up to the present, to underscore
how the shadows cast by the expatriate era have never receded.
One way of reflecting on this continuity is by replaying this
familiar expat trope, represented by Azel’s relationship with Mi-
guel, until it culminates in a scene of humiliation: Miguel holds
a party themed ‘Orient: Think Pink!’, where the fantasies of the
19
Edwards, 199.
20
Ibid., 199.
21
Ben Jelloun, 199.
22
Ibid., 161.
Orient and the Mediterranean are animated. While Miguel is

dressed a ‘vizier of the Arabian Nights’ and ‘most of his friends
wore Moroccan jellabas or Turkish jabadors and serouals in eve-
ry shade of pink,’ 23 Azel is ordered to wear a woman’s formal
costume—‘a caftan, a wig that was almost red, a belt embroi-
dered with gold, babouches, and a veil.’ 24 Feminization is sup-
posed to be a source of humiliation, but one which Azel em-
braces, as he not only wears the clothes but makes his face up
‘like a bride’ and properly adjusts his wig. The result is entranc-
ing to the other visitors, who confirm the value of the spectacle:
‘But what a lovely statue!’
‘And such a perfect mélange—half woman, half man! Isn’t

Miguel just spoiling us!’
‘Oh—the mustache! And look at that stubble! It’s simply so

exciting!’
‘The loveliest catamite of the Maghreb!’ 25
The spectacle is attributed not only to the gender binary but to

the shadows long cast both by Orientalized sexualization, as
well as precursors to Orientalism: referred to as a ‘catamite,’ a
young boy in a sexual relationship with an older man in ancient
Greece and Rome, Azel is specifically identified in a Mediterra-
nean context. So the social fantasies of Orientalism and its femi-
nizing sexualization—animated in this party by Miguel him-
self—also appear to be specifically Mediterranean. Eager to es-
cape his impoverished life, Azel re-fantasizes himself not only to
Miguel, a wealthy Spanish Maghreb-ophile sampling the coun-
try’s art and sexual industry, but also allows himself to be pa-
raded as a fantasy for Miguel’s tourist guests: Azel’s performance
of the simultaneously sexually exotic and traditional becomes a
site of tourism, stabilizing through heritage, community, authen-
23
Ibid., 105.
24
Ibid., 105.
25
Ibid., 106.
ticity, and distraction from the material and mundane. Azel does
all this to remain in Miguel’s good graces so that he can obtain a
visa for him and his sister, Kenza. Aspiring migrants, like Azel,
tap into Orientalist-Mediterraenanist fantasies so they can be
liberated from the prison site of their fulfillment (Morocco) and
immigrate elsewhere to fulfill the immigrant dream. More im-
portantly, they do all this to secure safe passage and avoid a fate
at the bottom of the sea cemetery, like their cousin Noureddine.
However, what once was familiar—the expatriate era of
Orientalized sexualization—is no longer familiar: rather than
French, British, American expats from historically wealthy coun-
tries, the patron predators are Spanish. Having the Spanish take
on the role of their historically wealthy northern European
neighbors opens up the text to an examination of the historical
relationship between southern European countries, their wealth-
ier European counterparts, and North Africa. And indeed Ben
Jelloun’s characters lay bare the contrasts of the 1990s era in
which the novel is set and the previous modern eras of Spain’s
role in Europe and North Africa. When Azel expresses his desire
to immigrate to Spain to Miguel, the man shares an experience
of a different Spain in more recent memory: ‘I had the same
dream when I was your age, although my circumstances were
different. Spain was unlivable. Franco just wouldn’t die, and his
religious and military regime infested everything … All Spain
smelled moldy. People were choking. The country came alive
only for soccer and corrida.’ 26 In a reading of Partir, L. Dotson-
Renta explains Moroccan-Spanish relations amidst Spain’s de-
cline earlier in the twentieth century:
Morocco had watched its ostensible neighbor slide into de-
cline and stasis, leading to a sense of estrangement from a
country it had such long-standing ties with. Interestingly, the
novel expresses that the Moroccans began to view Spain the
way Spain had long been viewed by the rest of ‘old’ Eu-
rope—as a place of nonprogress, the keeper of a foreign past
26
Ibid., 45.
kept alive and coherent only through its exotic (and bloody)
rituals such as the corrida (bullfighting) and its love of
sport. 27
And indeed, Ben Jelloun provides many allusions to the irony of

Spain’s resurgence in the political and economic sphere, consid-
ering Moroccan and western European views of Spain were in
alignment earlier in the twentieth century. For most of the twen-
tieth century, Spain was a country of transit for migrating Afri-
cans because it was considered as poor and ‘backward’ as their
country of origin. 28 Moreover, the book reveals up until relative-
ly recently, especially since Spain became part of the European
Union, the traffic across the Mediterranean was multi-
directional. In fact, while Miguel is reading his father’s journal,
he discovers that he and his friends arrived in Tangier to escape
repression in Franco’s Spain in the 1950s. In fact, they arrive
under the pretense they are fishermen who simply lost their way
at sea, but in reality they are the ‘first boat people’ from Spain,
as Miguel’s father describes it, leading Miguel to exclaim,
‘Would you have ever believed there were already illegal aliens
in 1951, but going in the opposite directions from today’s boat
people?’ 29 Ben Jelloun captures the familiar touchstones of the
Mediterranean, Orientalism, the expat era and reworks them so
they are both familiar and strange. The ‘American writer[s]’ and
‘French writer[s]’ and their lascivious pasts in Morocco men-
27
Lara Dotson-Renta, Immigration, Popular Culture, and the Re-routing of
European Muslim Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 42.
28
Please see Hakim Abderrezak, Ex-centric Migrations: Europe and the
Maghreb in Mediterranean Cinema, Literature, and Music (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2016). Abderrezak writes, ‘The Iberian Penin-
sula was often considered no better oﬀ socioeconomically than the
countries of the Maghreb were. To the question “Why not Spain?,” a
common answer among prospective migrants was, “I might as well stay
in Morocco!” This mindset has shifted in the past several years, making
Spain a coveted destination’ (6).
29
Ben Jelloun, 200.
tioned various times in the novel have been replaced by the

Spanish. The social fantasies are familiar and maintain continui-
ty, but their historical referents seem new and unfamiliar, at
times. Moreover, these countries share a history of the Mediter-
ranean and the its stigmatization by Western European coun-
tries, with all the stereotypes the region entails. It is difficult to
apprehend this change without comparing Spain in the past
(part of the Mediterranean) with the Spain in the present (part
of the EU). What should be taken into consideration is the re-
fashioning of the geographic imaginary and its attendant identi-
fiers of alterity (who is now ‘us’ and who is now ‘them’) in the
age of the EU.
As much as Ben Jelloun reaches back to the familiar past
through paratexts (tales and gossip characters tell and Miguel’s
father’s journal entries of Moroccan migration transposed onto a
seemingly linear narrative) to align it with the present through
themes of sexual tourism, expat predation, Orientalism, Mediter-
ranean fantasization, we find that the fantasies of the bygone
era are in discord with their contemporary reiterations. As I
mentioned, even though the refashioning of the geographic im-
aginary and its attendant identifiers of alterity (Who is now ‘us’?
Who is now ‘them’?) have been transformed in the age of the EU
so that northern Mediterranean countries like Spain are now in
absolute opposition to their southern Mediterranean neighbors,
it is still difficult to imagine they are completely free from the
stigmatization shared by Mediterranean countries/regions, espe-
cially as it continues to this day. Moreover, the fantasies, as an-
imated by the Think Pink! party organized by Miguel, are over-
taken by the object of fantasy, not only because Azel takes over
a role meant to humiliate him at the party, but also because
Azel uses the party and Miguel and all their attendant fantasies
in order to escape the prison site of their fulfillment—Morocco.
Thus, aspiring migrants ironically tap into Orientalist-
Mediterraneanist fantasies of expats and tourists to be liberated
from them—by avoiding the undocumented boat journey and a
fate at the bottom of the sea cemetery.
Utopic literary itineraries are undermined, along with their
utopic place-narrative, by heterotopic re-signification to convey
counter-sites that simultaneously represent, contest and invert

all other places within society by acting as a mirror to society.
Just as Ben Jelloun undermines the reliability of cultural fanta-
sies, popular narratives of the Mediterranean, he makes formal
gestures toward the fantastic that unravel his own literary narra-
tive—that which fuses the familiar with the unfamiliar, suspends
belief, introduces doubt, compels hesitation about factual au-
thenticity. Just as Ben Jelloun captures the familiar touchstones
of the Mediterranean only to unsettle them, he invokes the fan-
tastic to unravel the certainty of an otherwise realist narrative.
Because after all, Ben Jelloun uncovers all the phenomena asso-
ciated with undocumented migration: the smugglers, deaths in
the sea cemetery, poverty, dispossession, desperation, impend-
ing exploitation, and the validity of the ‘immigrant dream’—and
in extreme cases, as in Partir, drugs, prostitution, imprisonment,
rape, and sexual tourism. But he also uncovers the cultural fan-
tasies they require as evident with the Think Pink! party. This is
because, as has been discussed, within the realist narrative un-
wind the cultural fantasies of the Mediterranean. And just as
there is an element of the familiar and unfamiliar in the fantas-
tic, there is an element of familiarization and defamiliarization
of cultural fantasies that Ben Jelloun engages. Thus, it appears
that the subversion of the world as we know it is exponential.
The thrust of the fantastic into a realist narrative, especially at
the end when the fantastic subsumes the entire narrative, to
point to the element of fantasy in a realist perspective—to un-
dermine the epistemic coherence and authenticity of his own
realist narrative (‘his own’ is never his own: it integrates other
elements hinging on the culturally fantastic that ‘other’ him into
abjection).
Ben Jelloun points to the dissonance between realism and
the fantastic to suggest the significance of ways of narrating
immigration to the process itself. The structure of the novel
gives an indication of the relationship between mobility and
ways it is conveyed and transmitted. Partir is divided into epon-
ymous chapters (Azel, Malika, Flaubert, etc.), relating its charac-
ters’ stories about why they wanted to immigrate, how they
came to immigrate, what happened on the other shore—typical
of quite a few North African novels of undocumented boat mi-

gration. Only the first and last chapter are not eponymous and
are entitled ‘Le pays’ and ‘Revenir.’ ‘Le pays’ (country) refers to
Morocco, and ‘Revenir’ means return. The novel begins with
dreams of leaving and ends with a fantastic account of return.
Both chapters framing the novel not only take on a fantastical
and dream-like quality in stark contrast to the realist narrative
in between, but they are the only chapters which detail the pro-
cess of traveling, of mobility across the sea, of a journey with a
sea vessel, once again calling attention to the relationship be-
tween travel and immigration and its discursive potential, in its
often bizarre, eerie, strange manifestations.
Indeed, the mobility of the Mediterranean is conceived in
the telling—both by western expats and travelers and Moroccan
and other African immigrants: acts of communication and narra-
tion construct the way the Mediterranean is experienced and the
way it shapes different subjectivities. Moreover, that the novel
begins with dreams of leaving and ends with a fantastic account
of return also suggests the act of leaving holds as much signifi-
cance as the act of return. But in which way is ‘return’ con-
ceived? Indeed, the return points to the ‘march’ home to Moroc-
co that unravels at the end. But both chapters framing the nov-
el—‘The Country’/‘Morocco’ and ‘Return’—also highlight the
return of specters and doubles and copies to the multidirectional
Mediterranean traffic to and from Morocco—whether they are
remnants of the expatriate era, western fantasies of Morocco, or
historical figures refashioned in contemporary form. Cultural
western fantasies collide with African immigrant fantasies. At
the heart of the fantastic accounts, both the cultural and the ge-
neric, is the encounter with doubleness, iterations, repetition,
and return, wherein the familiar seems new and strange, invok-
ing both the ambivalence of the uncanny and the subsequent
hesitation of the fantastic.
Beyond, but significant to, ways of narrating immigration,
the wavering between the real and fantastic reveals the liminal
quality of the novel in the return of the double—the embodi-
ment of liminality. The novel is threaded with literary doubles,
only hinting at its liminal status in confounding the gritty real-
ism the rest of the text conveys. The ambivalence and the hesita-
tion it compels are dependent on the disorientation resulting
from the attempt to align the original with its iteration. This
disorientation charges the narrative before it even begins: the
return of historical literary figures in contemporary disjointed
iterations begins in the epigraph that mentions the narrator’s
Cameroonian friend named Flaubert:
My Cameroonian friend Flaubert says, ‘Here I am!’ when he’s
leaving and ‘We’re together!’ to say goodbye. A way to ward
off bad luck. In this novel, those who leave aren’t planning
to return, and when they leave someone, it’s for good. Flau-
bert, who studied a few pages of Madame Bovary in school
has promised to read this entire book as soon as summer va-
cation begins, when he goes home. 30
The epigraph highlights the significance of narrating mobility

and immigration: the act of leaving or the process of immigrat-
ing becomes significant with the way it is communicated or nar-
rated. The character making this link between narration and
mobility compels us to wonder at his own connection as a liter-
ary double: Flaubert the Cameroonian immigrant, a namesake of
the writer who hails from the metropolis that has subjected his
land to colonization, has not read Madame Bovary, the most im-
portant and popular book by the French writer he was named
after, but he has promised to read the narrator’s book on African
immigrant life. From the outset, Ben Jelloun creates discord be-
tween the familiar historical name and its contemporary live
iteration. In fact, Ben Jelloun not only rewrites Flaubert but also
Zola and Don Quixote: just like Flaubert, they are contemporary
reiterations but disjointed ones, for how does the undocumented
Cameroonian immigrant align with the French writers Gustave
Flaubert? How does Flaubert’s cousin, Emilezola the librarian
compare to Emile/his predecessor? How does Don Quixote com-
pare to an undocumented worker?
30
Partir’s epigraph.
Flaubert re-emerges in the novel first in Spain, then on a

boat on the Mediterranean. In Spain, he meets up with Azel and
indicates the importance of communicating about the process of
mobility: the tonton is a tradition that signifies the relationship
between the community and immigration and accountability—a
rite of passage that sets the stage for the rest of this relationship.
But African immigrant life is not one of solidarity or unity as
revealed in the novel. Ben Jelloun reveals this ugly side of Afri-
can immigration and Moroccan racism: the wayward Azel does
not consciously bait the Cameroonian but asks insensitive, racist
questions: he identifies the Cameroonian with black sub-Saharan
Africans in Morocco as though they are a monolith and Flaubert
is their representative.
The liminal quality of the text is conveyed through histori-
cal literary figures and their doubles that gesture toward double
meanings, double constructions of other elements in the text.
The sea occupies a dual position at the beginning of the novel,
proleptically gesturing toward the liminal quality that the text
takes on with literary doubles and the last chapter conveyed as
it is through a fantastic lens. Just as the sea features in the be-
ginning of the novel as a familiar topographic referent for Azel
and the other Tangerines in the café, it transforms into an un-
canny feature of the landscape—the ‘uncanny’ in the Freudian
sense as belonging to ‘that class of frightening which leads back
to what is known of old and long familiar’. 31 The sea is inhabited
by a monstrous sea spirit who ‘feasts on human flesh’, 32 Toutia,
whose name the café goers are even afraid to mention lest they
invoke her presence: ‘Everyone is quiet. Everyone listens. Per-
haps she will show up this evening. She'll talk to them, sing
them the song of the drowned man who became a sea star sus-
pended over the straits. They have agreed never to speak her
name: that would destroy her, and provoke a whole series of
misfortunes as well. So the men watch one other and say noth-
31
Freud, 340.
32
Ben Jelloun, 4.
ing… Sometimes, hearing the echo of a cry for help, they look at
one another without turning a hair.’ 33 The horror of being puni-
tively dispossessed from what one has known all their lives is at
first silencing, assimilated peripherally—‘they look at one an-
other without turning a hair.’ They are so fearful at times, they
avert their gaze to highlight an inarticulable horror, and stop
starting at the sea—on which they usually fixate obsessively and
which has been a source of, life, regeneration, mobility all their
lives up to that point. They still look from the corner of their
eyes because just as soon as they identified its monstrousness
and willed themselves not to even invoke the spirit’s presence
(as something not quite settled, fixed, easily definable, or even
articulable), they begin to align her with something less eerie,
strange, dangerous than a witchy sea siren—a sea with a ‘bene-
ficient voice’ sea that warns them ‘tonight is the night, that they
must put off their voyage for a while’ 34 —something they
learned to ‘read’ all their lives, or at least trust those who know
how to do so. Therein lies the unease caused by the uncanny,
the multidirectional slipperiness of the unheimlich as the emer-
gence of the familiar from within, or to the side, of the unfamil-
iar. What is known as ‘old and familiar’, 35 the heimlich, ‘belongs
to two sets of ideas, which without being contradictory, are yet
very different: on the one hand, it means familiar and agreeable,
and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight’. 36 As
Freud explains, the term unheimlich, uncanny, unhomely, etymo-
logically slips into its opposite, heimlich, or homely: ‘Heimlich is
a word the meaning of which develops in the direction of am-
bivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich.
Unheimlich is in some way or other a subspecies of heimlich’. 37
33
Ibid., 4.
34
Ibid., 4.
35
Freud, 340.
36
Ibid., 345.
37
Ibid., 347.
Inherent to the brothers Grimm’s explanation of the concept of

the heimlich is an act of separation:
From the idea of ‘homelike’, belonging to the house, the fur-
ther idea is developed of something withdrawn from the
eyes of strangers, something concealed, secret […] Heimlich
in a different sense, as withdrawn from knowledge, uncon-
scious [… or] that which is obscure […] The notion of some-
thing hidden and dangerous […] is still further developed,
so that ‘heimlich’ comes to have the meaning usually ascribed
to ‘unheimlich’. Thus: ‘At times I feel like a man who walks in
the night and believes in ghosts; every corner is heimlich and
full of terrors for him.’ 38
Perhaps we can linger here a moment to appraise the entirety of

the Mediterranean in which the novel is set (both sides of it,
Morocco and Spain) as a fantasy at whose heart lies the un-
heimlich, the familiar and unfamiliar, that which ‘belongs in the
house’ and that which evokes ‘terror’ out of the corner of one’s
eyes—precisely the doubleness Ben Jelloun compels forth in the
Mediterranean’s making. The unheimlich itself is embodied by
Azel in Spain—as both belonging to the house and that which
evokes terror. With the help of Miguel, Azel legally travels to
Spain, but his visa runs out so he becomes ‘illegal.’ The Spanish
authorities entrap him in a scheme that would ensure his legal
residence in Spain (belong to the house) but would also endan-
ger his life by posing as a would-be-terrorist (evoke terror). Azel
as embodiment of the unheimlich is a feature of the Mediterrane-
an fantasy with which I opened this chapter: he is both the cen-
ter of a sexual exotic fantasy characteristic of Mediterranean
imagery at home in the Mediterranean but he is also at the cen-
ter of its more relatively contemporary iteration—as den of ter-
ror. After all, one doesn’t become free of fantasies simply by
moving: on the side south of the Mediterranean Azel inhabits
one fantasy, and on the north side of the Mediterranean he in-
38
Grimm’s dictionary quoted in Freud’s ‘The Uncanny’, 340.
habits another—the fantasy of the Mediterranean as a hub of

cosmopolitanism and the fantasy of the Mediterranean as a den
of terror worthy of containment. While the attraction of the
Mediterranean is associated with an appealing disorder of diver-
sity, summoning its cosmopolitanism, the repulsion of the Medi-
terranean comes from identifying it as a ‘zone of conflict’, de-
manding its containment. The Mediterranean Maghreb as famil-
iar site through tourism, escape, adventure, and ‘metissage’ (hy-
brid, multicultural) cosmopolitanism still remains unaffected by
its current reinvention as unfamiliar site of obscure networks,
criminality, and terrorism. Both are different ends of a utopic
continuum for a precise ordering of Mediterranean land—one a
nostalgic retrieval of an ‘authentic’ past, the other containment
for future governmental reterritorialization. The doubleness op-
erating throughout Partir is perhaps illuminated by the double
global imaginary, geographer Doreen Massey’s notion of a globe
imagined as free and unbounded but in reality subject to mate-
rial controls (a circulation of capital, products, and ideas that
have become ‘liberated,’ as a result of globalization, at the same
time that the movement of people, and certain categories of la-
bor in which they engage, have become more subject to con-
trol.) 39
The unheimlich (‘withdrawn from knowledge, unconscious
[… or] that which is obscure […] The notion of something hid-
den and dangerous’) as a manifestation of doubleness in the re-
alist text consumes it at the end: the terror of the sea (its uncan-
niness) takes on a further dimension in the last chapter, ‘Return-
ing’, wherein the uncanny threaded throughout is gathered in a
melancholic carnivalesque culmination: costumes, songs, paro-
39
I liken the current dual Mediterranean to geographer Doreen Mas-
sey’s notion of the double global imaginary where space is imagined as
free and unbounded but subject to material controls. I refer to as both
an attraction of cosmopolitanism and a repulsion of containment. See
Doreen Massey, ‘Imagining Globalisation,’ in Global Futures: Migration,
Environment, and Globalization (Basingstoke, UK: MacMillan, 1999), 39.
dies, processions, spirits, a coffin delivered to a wake. In a limi-

nal novel (wavering between fantastic and realistic), fantasy
overtakes the text at the end. Everything and everyone becomes
strange. The chapter begins with the procession of immigrants
trying to find their way home as if in a desperate trance to the
call of the sea: compelled by an ‘irresistible longing’, they
walk along, crossing cities, chilly wastelands, forests, fields.
They walk day and night, driven by a force of such unsus-
pected strength that they feel no fatigue, not even the need
to eat and drink. Borne along by winds bound for home, they
advance without questions, without wondering what is hap-
pening to them. They believe that destiny is there, in that
march, drawing them back to their roots, to their native
land, a destiny that has appeared to them as a kind of com-
mand, an indisputable order, a time outside time, the ascent
to a mountaintop, a wonderful promise, a shining dream,
pressing on, heading over the horizon. They take to the road,
heads high, with a warm breath at their backs: the wind of
freedom. Sensing that this is the moment, this is the hour.
This is their season, a season for no one but them, for all
those who have suffered, who have not found their place in
life. Without a single regret, they've left everything behind
and have already forgotten why they ever left home. They
head for the port, where a familiar inner voice tells them to
embark on a boat christened Toutia, a modest craft aboard
which the captain has planted a flowering tree with a sweet
perfume, an orange or a lemon tree. 40
Is the march to an unheard call for port in a hypnotic state

through a ‘time outside time’ an indication of an alternate time,
a parallel world, an outside reality, a double parallel universe or
multiverses they appear to occupy? The characters ‘returning’ to
Morocco are not only strange to each other but strange to us:
some seem not to greet others they appear to have known well
40
Ben Jelloun, 252.
in the rest of the novel, and some of the returning characters are
not only unrecognizable to others but unrecognizable to the
world we live in as though they occupy a parallel world: Toutia,
the hungry sea spirit we became acquainted with in the first
chapter, appears to be an interchangeable element in the last
chapter—ship of return, former model, captain’s wife, ‘a word
that means nothing.’ 41 Moreover, the narrator claims that he
suddenly has lost both his name and his face (254). He is famil-
iar to others, but the absence of his identifying features (name,
face) also makes him a strange stranger to them. In this fantastic
account, the characters have become uncanny—familiar and
unfamiliar, concealed, mysterious.
The uncanniness is compounded by the migration of liter-
ary figures to this text—the ‘return’ of their contemporary itera-
tions (a return of a return) in this fantastic account. (As Freud
explains in his definition of the uncanny, ‘withdrawn from
knowledge, unconscious [… or] that which is obscure […] The
notion of something hidden and dangerous’). Flaubert is back in
this bizarre scene gesturing toward literary predecessors to high-
light his difference from the writer after which he is named.
And, in this fantastic account of a parallel world, he calls atten-
tion to the one we have and the one we have narrated by deliv-
ering a criticism of realism’s history and lineage. By his very
presence, a black African undocumented worker named Flaubert
recalls his own absence from realist texts like Madame Bovary in
the mid-nineteenth century when France was entrenched in Af-
rica as a colonial power. He himself represents not only an ab-
sence, but an absence that has returned. Flaubert is recalled
from the corner of our mind—not just returning to the country,
the continent, but returning from a literary absence that is a
feature of European realism. Perhaps the characters—in being
‘withdrawn from knowledge, unconscious […] that which is ob-
scure […] hidden and dangerous’—have been rendered uncanny
by the historical record of realism.
41
Freud, 340.
The uncanny, the fantastic, the carnivalesque establish the

failure of realism to apprehend the story of migrants. Their
journey is not festive, in the sense that the spectacle of carnival
motifs is not celebratory in the Bakhtinian sense, but it is carni-
valesque in the sense that the characters appear unified by turn-
ing the known, familiar world on its head. The manifestation of
the doubles works to debase, to make the high forms low, and to
ultimately interrogate the narrative of the colonial effects of mi-
gration. 42
Like the sea, the uncanny here is a means of return to what
was once familiar. Like the sea of life that turns into a cemetery,
the boat on the Mediterranean that was familiar to the narrator
turns strange, unknown: ‘This boat seems both familiar and
strange to me: perhaps it isn’t a boat, only a model, some
trompe-l’oeil, a simple image projected out onto the water …’ 43
Nothing is as it seems. In fact as Ben Jelloun’s unraveling of cul-
tural fantasies reveals, nothing was as it seemed to begin with
and fantasies don’t linger without consequences. To the Mediter-
ranean narrative, heterotopic resignification becomes disruptive.
If utopia is a site of memory that promises regimentation of both
discourse and movement, then its connection to the potential of
language is a ‘fantasy of origins’, as Foucault conceived it, a
predetermined order to which one is bound to return. An adher-
ence to chronological formalism and narrative coherence. If its
permits an ordering of speech, then heterotopia devastates
speech. It undermines the language used to perform the Medi-
terranean. It shatters its common names and familiar properties.
It destroys syntax in advance, and that which holds it together:
the Mediterranean as a liberating frontier for ‘dropping out’ into
sexual tourism and spiritual journeys takes on new meaning for
42
A Janus-like face operates in carnival, not simply in Bakhtin’s terms
of the simultaneous presence of official and unofficial aspects to this
form, but also between celebratory and noncelebratory aspects of popu-
lar excess.
43
Ben Jelloun, 254.
undocumented migrant figures, whose lives and stories are

plunged and submerged into anonymity, when faced with expo-
nential obstructions. Ben Jelloun’s unraveling of cultural fanta-
sies reveals the epistemic coherence of the Moroccan-
Mediterranean narrative has been thoroughly undermined by
new parallel narrative worlds, ones that interrogate the one we
have and create new fantastical ones with ‘talking trees,’ flying
letters and syllables, a resurrected Don Quixote and Panza his
servant, and the most wildly fantastic of all—the absence of de-
mands for IDs and traveling documents!
CHAPTER 4.
MEDITERRANEAN FRONTIER,
MEDITERRANEAN CIRCUIT:
UNDOCUMENTED MIGRATION IN
EGYPTIAN LITERATURE’S DOUBLE
IMAGINARY
In Ayman Zuḥrī’s Baḥr Al-Rūm (2008), 1 a self-published Egyp-

tian novel on undocumented migration, a paradoxical vision of
the Mediterranean as both a mediated spectacle and a tomb of
hyperborders is conveyed through the eyes of the protagonist,
an aspiring migrant. Before he is smuggled across the Mediter-
ranean, Saber travels from his village to Alexandria. Upon arri-
val at the Alexandria station, he and his friends head to the
beach. Upon seeing it for the first time, he reflects that the sea
before him is indeed the one he had learned about in school.
Once he is settled in a slum, he deviates from his usual route
and unexpectedly spies the sea again: ‘… as we got nearer to the
beach and the slums got further behind us, beautiful Alexandria,
1
‘Baḥr al-Rūm’, referring to the Mediterranean Sea in Modern Arabic, is
more commonly used on Islamic and older Arabic texts to mean ‘the
Roman sea’, wherein Roman means Byzantine. I translate the Arabic
title, Baḥr Al-Rūm, to Roman Sea.
113
the one that we had seen on television, appeared before us.’ 2

The next time the Mediterranean waters feature is after he em-
barks on a flimsy, overcrowded boat to Italy where he suddenly
notices a sea of floating dead bodies surrounding the craft: after
fourteen hours of sailing the Mediterranean Sea, the narrator
recounts seeing ‘bloated’ and ‘floating bodies’ in the water:
‘Black and white bodies, bodies of men, women, and children,
all on a quest on the sea in search for a better life …’ 3
The first view reveals Saber’s lack of familiarity with the
sea—second-hand knowledge from a school textbook is his only
means of orientation. The second view is consciously filmic,
spectatorial, ‘unreal’, iconically touristic—for him, an image of
the sea evocative of slick movie scenes from Alexandria’s care-
fully maintained shores, jarringly different from the slums he
occupies. It reveals one effect of utopia: decontextualization—a
material, touristic, privileged site is reduced to a site of
memory—the filmic image is deployed as a phantasmic, evoca-
tive, discursive site, accessible as any familiar image, but just as
frozen. As iconic as the site is, it is not particularly as instrumen-
tal as Saber’s work route or his smuggling route out of Egypt.
The last reveals the product of the utopic limits of exclu-
sion, frontiers, hyperborders—the site of floating dead bodies.
The dead bodies at sea not only signal the thin border between
life and death for migrants on the boat, and the limits of dispos-
session, poverty, social repression at home, but they are markers
of the frontier drawn in the middle of the Mediterranean. The
site of dead bodies appears to the migrants as the final border
between their fantasy of the Mediterranean and its diffusion into
reality. If, like Saber, we turn our gaze from the reassuring trope
of an aestheticized Mediterranean heritage on Alexandria’s man-
icured shores towards the sea’s unfolding modernities, the so-
2
All the passages of Ayman Zuḥrī’s text are my translations in this
chapter. Ayman Zuḥrī, Baḥr Al-Rūm (Roman Sea) (self-published, 2008),
22.
3
Ibid., 67.
4. MEDITERRANEAN FRONTIER, MEDITERRANEAN CIRCUIT 115
cial, economic, political and cultural characteristics of the Medi-

terranean, the composed and pacified images fall apart before
our eyes. That Saber renders incompatible representations—
unfamiliar, culturally familiar, and then deadly—of one place in
sequence rather than all at once demonstrates the distance re-
quired to construct today’s geographical imaginaries of the Med-
iterranean.
Zuḥrī calls attention to the protagonist’s awareness of the
protected, fantastic spaces of the iconic Mediterranean of blue
shores, white beaches, clean, homogenous order, and moreover,
the poverty and disorder it attempts to keep out of sight. He is
both privy to this filmic, unchanging, frozen space, but also ex-
cluded from it, insofar as his movement is restricted by econom-
ic necessity to a route between the slums and his fruit-vending
location. He observes a particularly artificial, scenic Mediterra-
nean-Egyptian identity where he, as an Egyptian, is supposed to
be reflected, but from which he is absent. In the Foucauldian
sense, he thus occupies a double position, one of being hetero-
topically internal to the society regulating the cultural spaces
that it ‘others’ but also external to them. That is, if heterotopia is
‘a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all
the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are
simultaneously represented, contested and inverted’, when the
protagonist encounters ‘society itself in a perfected form’ in the
utopia of Alexandria’s manicured beaches—unreal places—he
realizes the discrepancy between the space he occupies and the
idealized site from which he is excluded. 4 Foucault writes of this
sense of renewed self-awareness in locating the utopic:
In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unre-
al, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over
there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my
own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there
where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is
4
16, no.1 (1986), 24.
also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality,

where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I
occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my ab-
sence from the place where I am since I see myself over
there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed to-
ward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the
other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin
again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute
myself there where I am. 5
There’s an implicit sense of enchantment that must be shaken

off in order to ‘begin again’ and ‘reconstitute [the] self’ which is
identifying the heterotopic relation between the imagined and a
real place, a site of fantasy and a geographical entity. The con-
cept of utopia shares common elements: ‘the utopic is always
conceived as a space, usually an enclosed and isolated space—
the walled city, the isolated island, a political and agrarian self-
contained organization, and thus a commonwealth.’ 6 The South-
ern Mediterranean is ‘isolated’ and ‘enclosed,’ in the manner of a
utopia, inasmuch as bounded and fortified Northern European
shores impose an impasse on the sea’s frontier. The utopian is
not exactly what would be identified as ‘positive’ but what does
inhere to a severely controlled spatial organization, whether of a
fantastic, carefully maintained cultural idyll symbolic of Alex-
andria’s Mediterranean shores or an effect of disciplined borders
and bodies on the Mediterranean Sea. The utopian paradox of
the current Mediterranean narrative, which Zuḥrī deploys in
incompatible images conveyed through his protagonist, high-
lights the shocking discrepancy between an aestheticized repre-
sentation of the Mediterranean from iconic and touristic Alex-
andrian shores, as conceived and captured on film, and a repre-
5
Foucault, 24.
6
Elizabeth Grosz, Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual Space
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), 134.
sentational space of the ‘sea cemetery,’ 7 as lived, experienced,

changed by those who encounter it. But this paradox is inherent
to utopian visions in that ‘the utopic perpetually verges on the
dystopic, the dysfunctional utopia, the more modern these uto-
pias become.’ 8 That is, in order to enforce the order of the ideal
society, utopia becomes necessarily rigid, authoritarian, hierar-
chical, restrictive, exclusionary. The images of the Mediterrane-
an Sea in Baḥr Al-Rūm precisely call attention to the limits of
exclusion through the eyes of the excluded from the privileged
spaces of the nation and the protected spaces of international
borders. Moreover, the utopia of the Mediterranean Sea emerges
as a site of memory (a cultural idyll evocative of a familiar film)
that promises regimentation of both discourse and movement,
thus immutability, a dead-end to potential, newness, change.
Elizabeth Grosz identifies the foreclosure on future potential in
utopic thinking:
While a picture of the future, the utopic is fundamentally
that which has no future, that place whose organization is so
controlled that the future ceases to be the most pressing con-
cern. These utopias function as the exercise of fantasies of
control over what Foucault has called ‘the event,’ that which
is unprepared for, unforeseeable, singular, unique, and trans-
formative, the advent of something new. 9
7
The transformation of the Mediterranean Sea to a ‘cemetery,’ due to
the many deaths caused to evade detection, is mentioned in texts on
recent Mediterranean undocumented migration. For example, see:
Jørgen Carling, ‘Migration Control and Migrant Fatalities at the Span-
ish-African Borders,’ International Migration Review 41, no. 2 (2007),
316–343; Grace Russo Bullaro, ed., From Terrone to Extracommunitario:
New Manifestations of Racism in Contemporary Italian Cinema (Leicester,
England: Troubador Publishing, 2010), 51; Alassandro Dal Lago, Non-
Persons, translated by Marie Orton (Milan, Italy: Ipoc Press, 2009), 246.
8
Grosz, 135.
9
Ibid., 138.
From the image of place as a dead cultural artifact, preserved

cultural idyll, to the scene of dead floating bodies, blockade to
human mobility, the Mediterranean Sea emerges in its affective
dimension as the dead-end to potential, possibility, newness,
change—a future—what has ultimately been reduced in its new
coinage to ‘a sea cemetery.’
Although Mediterranean static utopias—one culturally im-
mutable, the other materially bounded, fortified—feature in
Baḥr Al-Rūm, the latter utopia imposing a human blockade is
connected to another in the novel—the utopia of unbounded
freedom, sustained by global ‘flows’—of capital, narratives, and
styles coursing down from the Northern shore. The beginning of
the novel gestures toward the circulation of all three around the
story of a local migrant’s burial, drowned in the Mediterranean
in pursuit of the ‘Euro’. The narrator recounts a village grieving
the loss of four youth: he admits that although the villagers are
mourning the tragedy of their deaths, they are also mourning as
much the loss of the youths’ remittances back home to their
families. 10 Only a few families in the village had managed to
escape poverty when their sons who ‘immigrated illegally’ to the
‘Paradise of Europe’ and married once finances permitted and
planted in farm lands concrete columns and towers decorated in
the colors of the Italian flag. 11
At first, the currency of the ‘Euro’ and the territory of ‘Eu-
ro,’ referring to Europe, become interchangeable in the novel,
evoking circulation of wealth in a territory of unbounded free-
dom and beyond—all the way to Egypt in the form of remit-
tances. But, Zuḥrī cynically reveals how the villagers have come
to adopt the inevitability of their bodies being capitalized and
traded to sustain the community’s construction and consump-
tion. Global ‘flows’ of the free market, communication, and cul-
ture stream into the small, neglected Delta village, promising
the utopic exponential bounty of unfettered freedoms on the
10
Zuḥrī, 7.
11
Ibid., 7.
Northern shore. Despite village fears that ‘dreams’ of abandoned

poverty have been buried along with the drowned man, in the
same soil rooting remittance buildings, towers, and houses, the
circulation of stowaways, smugglers, capital, and journey narra-
tives do not come to a halt. In fact, the burial initiates the narra-
tive of Baḥr Al-Rūm, feeds meta-narratives, fosters further jour-
neys, suggesting local construction, and the global flow of capi-
tal, commodities, and the greater number of drowned bodies it
demands, rests on the withdrawal of the village’s ‘own.’ 12 Zuḥrī
establishes a predatory globalization in opposition to a utopic
mobility of capital and commodities from Europe’s ‘paradise’ 13
imagined by the village, wherein mourning is not for the dead
as much as for the village’s loss of resources and deprivation
from linkage to the global economy. With the opening scene,
Zuḥrī reveals the double imaginary of globalization, a conflict-
ing prism of open transnational markets and closed, bounded
territory, through which the villagers have come to see them-
selves (in the flow of remittances, construction, development
and the blockade in the middle of the Mediterranean deflecting
migrants back in caskets). This is a far cry from the celebratory
discourse of globalization that locates liberatory potential in
cross-border ‘hybrid’ subjectivities relatively free from the con-
straints of nationalism wielding power over its subjects, imag-
ined not only by economists but postcolonial theorists in re-
demptive utopic narratives. 14 Zuḥrī displaces the mobile imagery
of ‘flows’ and ‘routes,’ which villagers associate with an ascent
of social mobility, with arborescent, rooting, and consuming
counter-imagery of descent: the fruits of migration and capital
are rooted in the same ‘soil,’ a plain ‘casket’ and ‘houses’ and
12
Ibid., 7.
13
Ibid., 7.
14
For utopic conceptualizations of transnationalism, see Bill Ashcroft,
‘Outlines of a Better World: Rerouting Postcolonialism,’ in Rerouting the
Postcolonial: New Directions for the New Millennium, ed. Janet Wilson,
72–85 (London: Routledge, 2010).
‘towers,’ 15 demanding exponential growth in the form of further

journeys, narratives, bodies, and capital. In fact, the village’s
self-objectification, subsumed under a commodifying ideology,
in which bodies are ‘withdrawn’ in exchange for commodities
resonates in the manner in which the protagonist Saber subjects
himself to starvation to fit on a flimsy smuggler’s boat, to sus-
tain this ‘flow,’ to maintain the village’s ascent of social mobili-
ty, in essence—to keep it afloat. Zuḥrī shows the village to be
already ‘suffering’ from capitalist globalization in that Saber’s
treatment as a shrinkable object of transport for smugglers is an
extreme extension of the village’s self-commodification—erasure
or displacement of the human behind the surface of (future ac-
cumulated) objects mourned (instead of the dead) at a migrant’s
funeral.
The Mediterranean has been seen as a Janus-faced sea: at
the same time that a circulation of capital, products, and ideas
have become ‘liberated,’ the movement of people, and certain
categories of labor, have become more restricted. 16 Whereas cap-
ital, products, and ideas have become more ‘liberated,’ as a re-
sult of globalization, the movement of people, and certain cate-
gories of labor in which they engage, have become more subject
to control, renewing border restrictions, challenging the celebra-
tory notion that denationalization of economies leads to the de-
terioration of the nation-state. Already globalized, the Mediter-
ranean has become a place designed to encourage free circula-
tion of capital and a blockade discouraging human mobility. 17
The Janus-faced sea, the dual Mediterranean, can be likened to
the double global imaginary, wherein space is imagined as free
15
Zuḥrī, 7–8.
16
See Henk Driessen, ‘A Janus-Faced Sea: Contrasting Perceptions and
Experience of the Mediterranean,’ MAST/Maritime Studies 3, no. 1
(2004), 41–50.
17
See Natalia Ribas-Mateos, The Mediterranean in the Age of Globaliza-
tion: Migration, Welfare, and Borders (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction
Publishers, 2005).
and unbounded but subject to material controls, as a result of

globalization: 18
There are two apparently evident self-truths, two completely
different geographical imaginations, which are called upon
in turn. No matter that they contradict each other because it
works. And so in this era of globalization we have sniffer
dogs to detect people hiding in the holds of boats, people die
trying to cross the Rio Grande, and boatloads of people pre-
cisely trying to ‘seek out the best opportunities’ go down in
the Mediterranean. That double imaginary, in the very fact
of its doubleness, of the freedom of space on the one hand
and ‘the right to one’s own space’ on the other, works in fa-
vour of the already powerful. They can have it both ways. 19
Globalization has been characterized as an inevitable process of

growing interdependence—an intensification and deepening of
social, political and economic relations based on ‘free market’
trade policies and realized through technological developments
in transport and communication. For Massey, this definition ob-
scures dramatic imbalances in the global political economy and
disingenuously conflates free market economics with democratic
processes. So while the Mediterranean narrative and its at-
tendant bridge clichés continuously get re-accessed and circulat-
ed as if re-inventing the Mediterranean as a globalized space,
the free-market’s inherent restriction on people’s movement has
created two competing narratives: the past’s cultural connectivi-
ty and the present’s division into two culturally incommensura-
ble spaces—the Northern shore, Christian and European, and the
Southern one, Muslim and fundamentally non-Western.
These anomalous, incompatible images of the Mediterrane-
an in the double global imaginary have been captured in Egypt’s
18
Doreen Massey, ‘Imagining Globalisation,’ in Global Futures: Migra-
tion, Environment, and Globalization, eds. Avtar Brah, Mary Hickman,
and Mairtin Mac, 27–44 (Basingstoke, UK: MacMillan, 1999).
19
Massey, 39.
body of work on undocumented migration. While not as exten-

sive as the Maghreb’s, where the phenomena has a longer histo-
ry, the work of Egyptian writers has sought to intervene in the
Mediterranean narrative to show culture, even in remote villag-
es, to be far from atemporal and preserved but rather an effect
of an already violently dynamic globalization. Utopic cultural
tourist sanctuaries are also exposed as staged mirages dependent
on a network of global capital manipulation. These works reveal
the Mediterranean’s globalized spaces when its material pro-
cesses of control and marketplace practices are concealed be-
hind the finished product of ancient, enduring culture. Con-
cealment of displacement’s violence to preserve an image of
sanctity is integral to ‘utopian organization’: the double move-
ment of securing and obscuring undergirds capitalism’s deliber-
ate process of creating distance between product and its site of
production.
Indeed, the ‘double imaginary’ of globalization, which of-
fers an imagined unbounded space on the one hand but a mate-
rial process of control on the other, resonates with Foucault’s
definition of heterotopia as both a utopian and real space. In the
same way that the ‘double imaginary’ reveals the idealization of
globalization through utopian discourses, heterotopia also re-
veals the social production of space as utopian. Thus, the anom-
alous images of a Mediterranean and the inequality it produces
are secreted in the discourse, purposely creating what Massey
calls ‘a geographical imagination which ignores its own real spa-
tiality’. 20
However, the focus of this literature is not operable on a
distinction between Egyptian migrants on the outside looking in
and the interior fortified European space, as is sometimes the
case of the Mediterranean imaginary in Moroccan clandestine
literature, but rather the focus is on the abjection of Egyptian
national space whose animation of its transnational ideology in
Alexandria becomes more poignantly dissonant with reality
20
Ibid., 37.
when it is the prime site of departure for the migrants. Unlike

Maghrebian undocumented migrant literature concerned with
the outsider migrant figure in Europe, Egyptian literature focus-
es on homeland and journey, revealing the aspiring migrant as
outsider in the privileged spaces of his society—nationally sym-
bolic sites marked by concentrations of wealth and power—and
revealing global participation in the structures that produce in
the global South the poverty, political disenfranchisement and
exclusion that give rise to the will to migrate. But like its Ma-
ghrebian counterpart, this body of work shows undocumented
migrants creating heterotopic spaces by undermining the binary
of the inside/outside their societies, navigating between the im-
agined and the real place, between the fantasy and a geograph-
ical entity, between absolute utopias and the places where out-
siders dwell—city slums, Delta villages, flimsy crafts on the
Mediterranean. Lastly, because these works draw the parameters
of migration around the homeland and journey, as opposed to a
European state, they subvert the dominant discourse of globali-
zation celebrating flows, streams, circulations, by equating it
with limited and suppressed movement.
The migration literature in this case is not the national lit-
erature of the new land, but the homeland. As much as there is
an orientation toward a transnational Mediterranean space
based on the flows between Western and Eastern scholarship,
culture, and information, the ideology of Mediterranean affinity
remains utopic, as the transnational links occupy what Foucault
refers to as a ‘placeless place’, 21 a site of memory that is accessed
but does not materialize. The regimenting, controlling order of
utopia in fact seems to not only refer to a placeless place, a non-
place, but in fact is deployed by the authors as an aim that re-
sults in deterritorialization. The literature is constituted by het-
erotopic compositions because it represents, from within the
nation, the characters’ own external relationship to the homoge-
nous space of ideological transnationalism, whether materially
21
Foucault, 24.
objectified in redevelopment or not. The homeland is the hetero-

topic space from which the migrants move within the central
dominant spaces and move out, while simultaneously represent-
ing, contesting, and inverting them: I maintain that the Mediter-
ranean is a heterotopic site on which multiple identities and
modalities of space/mobility converge. But the authors maintain
an ambivalent relationship to its representation: by associating
the Mediterranean with deterritorialization, the literature of
Mediterranean migration engages it with utopic transnational-
ism in order to disengage the Mediterranean from utopianism.
and moreover disengages the transnational from the utopic.
To understand the relevance of the ‘double imaginary’ of
the Mediterranean for Egypt, it is significant to explore the
modern history of apprehending the Mediterranean. Intellectual
trends in the early twentieth century emerged from Egypt assert-
ing its historically continuous Mediterranean cultural alliance
with Europe. Both Egyptian and Western intellectuals main-
tained there was an enriching continuous, natural orientation
toward the Mediterranean, with the cosmopolitan city of Alex-
andria at the center of their assertions. For example, cultural
reformer Ṭāhā Ḥusayn argued that the culture of Egypt was his-
torically Mediterranean and part of Western culture:
How can this sea create in the West an outstanding, superior
mind and at the same time leave the East without any mind
or with one that is weak and decadent? There are no intellec-
tual or cultural differences to be found among the peoples who
grew up around the Mediterranean and were influenced by
it. Purely political and economic circumstances made the in-
habitants of one shore prevail against those of the other. The
same factors led them to treat each other now with friendli-
ness, now with enmity. Egypt has always been part of Eu-
rope as far as an intellectual and cultural life is concerned. 22
22
Ṭāhā Ḥusayn, originally published in 1938, The Future of Culture in
Egypt (Washington, DC: American Council of Learned Societies, 1954).
Affinity is naturalized via the sea. Embrace of Western culture,

according to Ḥusayn, was a homecoming, a return to roots, due
to its historical legacy of Greek philosophy and Pharaonic, Ro-
man, Byzantine, Ptomelaic roots. Other Egyptian intellectuals,
like literary critic Yaḥya Ḥaqqī, have likewise asserted a Medi-
terranean affinity via deployment of Egypt’s geographical prox-
imity to Europe. ‘The cultural similarity among the peoples of
the Mediterranean basin,’ claimed Ḥaqqī is one such naturally
predetermined, eternal cultural ‘bridge.’ 23 The claim of a Medi-
terranean cultural affinity with Europe has been criticized for its
un-historicized alliance with the West, elision of Arab-Islamic
identity, and polarization of Western and Eastern identities. 24
Most significantly, the collapse of ancient into modern Egypt has
been criticized for its resilience, ‘lend[ing] itself readily to this
recurrent ideological attempt at (re)orientation, especially when
packaged in the soothing nomenclature of a (re)invented and
reified Mediterranean cultural space.’ 25
Ḥusayn advocated a curriculum aligned with building a secular, mod-

ern nation-state and put forth the theory that Egyptian culture was
more closely linked to a wider Mediterranean civilization.
23
Ḥaqqī is quoted in Muhammad Siddiq, Arab Culture and the Novel:
Genre, Identity, and Agency in Egyptian Fiction (New York: Routledge,
2007), 29. The text quoted is from Yaḥya Ḥaqqī, Fajr Al-Qiṣṣa Al-
Miṣrīyya (The Dawn of Egyptian Fiction), originally published in 1960
(Cairo: Al-Ḥayāt Al-Miṣrīyya Al-‘Āmma lil Kitāb, 1997). Ḥaqqī connects
the influence of European literary models to the aesthetic sensibility of
the first generation of Egyptian fiction writers by way of a naturalizing
metaphor: ‘The winds blowing from Europe carried into Arab society an
unfamiliar seed, that of the story’ (Siddiq, 28). The ‘bridge’ as a cliché
to represent relations between Mediterranean countries across the
shores has centralized past and current discourse on affiliations and
‘cultural dialogue.’
24
Siddiq, 170.
25
In his critique of early 20th-century Egyptian intelligentsia’s Mediter-
ranean affinity, Siddiq identifies a similar cultural revival more recent-
ly: ‘Recently, not only the novelist Amitav Ghosh, but also the mightier
European Union seems to have (re)discovered the topical relevance of
The grand narrative of the Mediterranean is again under

construction, in line with national monuments, buildings, urban
centers wrought from imported concrete, to lay claim to an an-
cient past. In the last decades, Egypt invested in revivalist pro-
jects in homage to a glorified Mediterranean history owed to a
classical Graeco-Roman tradition. Mediterranean affinity
preached by Egyptian intellectuals in the early twentieth centu-
ry resonates in the re-orientation of Egypt toward Europe today.
Today’s architectural, cultural, and literary revivalist projects
range from the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, rediscoveries of the
ancient city through the Pharos Lighthouse and the Royal Har-
bour, to a variety of worldly memoirs by Alexandrians recaptur-
ing the city’s past. Return to Mediterranean identity is also rep-
resented by a plethora of cultural initiatives, like the Cairo Med-
iterranean Literary Festival, Farah El-Bahr, the Anna Lindh An-
nual Cultural Festival, 26 in the service of ‘bridging’ contempo-
rary Egyptian culture to its Mediterranean ‘roots’. So inter-
twined is Egypt’s Mediterranean revival, culturally in the Euro-
Mediterranean Partnership’s creative programs, architecturally
in developments gesturing toward ancient Alexandria, and polit-
ically in the form of the Union of the Mediterranean that it has
been referred to as the ‘return of Ṭāhā Ḥusayn.’ 27 In aspiring
S.D. Goitein’s A Mediterranean Society: the former in his novel In An

Antique Land (1992), then later in the (1995) EU–Mediterranean Partner-
ship’ (170).
26
Anna Lindh Foundation for the Dialogue between Cultures is a €7
million EU-funded project which aims at bringing people and organiza-
tions of the region closer and promoting dialogue, by offering them
opportunities to work together on projects in the fields of culture, edu-
cation, science, human rights, sustainable development, the empower-
ment of women and the arts. The Foundation is the first institution to
be jointly created and co-financed by all member countries of the Euro-
Mediterranean Partnership.
27
See Muḥammad Sāliḥ, ‘Ṭāhā Ḥusayn wa-l-itijāh nahwa Al-
Mutawassiṭ’ (‘Taha Hussein and the Orientation toward the Mediterra-
nean’), Al-Ahram 44381, June 6–10, 2008.
toward becoming a global city tasked with development of

transnational cultures, Alexandria self-Mediterraneanizes
through revivalism projects that optimize a transcultural herit-
age. 28
While the Mediterranean bridge narrative is mobilized to-
day, another narrative has emerged alongside it. While Mediter-
ranean métissage is romanticized for its cultural transgressive-
ness (crossing cultures and languages), the migrant crossing
from the southern to the northern shores of the Mediterranean
has become more controlled than ever. Central to current rein-
ventions of the Mediterranean have been initiatives from the
Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, which relies on the contradic-
28
The library entered this narrative by seizing on Alexandria’s compo-
site heritage, Greco-Roman, Ptolemaic, Pharaonic, Islamic. It also en-
tered the narrative by embodying the Mediterranean’s mediating role
on a global hierarchy of values—between Eastern and Western, South-
ern and Northern, particular and universal, primitive and modern. The
library became another monument to a narrative privileging Mediter-
ranean cultures for hybridity, mixture, syncretism: situated between the
universal and particular in criticisms, it signals a Eurocentric return to
origins identified with Western ‘ethno-philosophy,’ on one hand, and a
universal rather than ethnically specific claim on Hellenistic heritage,
on the other. 28 Its mix of ‘ancient mimicry and futuristic illusions’, as
Beverly Butler put it in Return to Alexandria (2007), produces the com-
posite effect of a return to Alexandria of Hellenistic foundational civili-
zations and progression toward a futuristic hypermodernism of global
cities. The Mediterranean region, its cities, and cultural productions,
like the relatively new library, have become interchangeable with mé-
tissage, fusion of heritages, hybridization of forms. The Mediterranean
caché in Egypt and Alexandria Library would not hold without a ges-
ture toward syncretism of Western and Eastern, European and Arab,
cultural markers—this perception of mixture alarmingly signals devel-
opment, progression, mobilization toward a softer international, inclusive
identity. Mediterraneanism is used to mobilize a telos of progress
wherein the Arab world’s incorporation of European cultural values is
key to development, globalization, inclusivity—eclipsing the current
globalization to which the region has been subject.
tory notion of opening up cultural exchange while sealing shut

the gates of Europe. 29 The EMP’s cultural initiatives have sought
to sustain a ‘dialogue between cultures’ in service of a Euro-
Mediterranean identity by invoking a common cultural heritage
while at the same time pursuing policies on security, migration,
and enlargement that draw a clear frontier in the middle of the
Mediterranean. 30
29
The Euro-Mediterranean Partnership or the Barcelona Declaration,
initiated in 1995, is composed of three chapters. The first concerns po-
litical and security partnerships, seeking to establish regional stability;
the second focuses on economic partnerships, seeking to establish a
free-trade zone; the third is concerned with the social and cultural do-
mains.
30
Projects focusing on the Mediterranean’s heritage include the Eu-
romed Heritage Programme focusing on material and immaterial herit-
age preservation, the Euromed Audiovisual Programme, concerned with
enhancing media audiovisual heritage. On the cultural dimensions of
the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, Isabel Schäfer asks, ‘with the es-
tablishment of a cultural partnership, an artificial, prestige-seeking re-
invention of a Mediterranean limited to its historical past and leaving
aside the realities of present-day socio-cultural difficulties …?’ See Isa-
bel Schäfer, ‘The Cultural Dimension of the Euro‐Mediterranean Part-
nership: A Critical Review of the First Decade of Intercultural Coopera-
tion,’ History and Anthropology 18, no. 3 (2007), 342. Schäfer also ad-
dresses the way the EMP’s cultural-dialogue initiatives treat culture on
the southern Mediterranean shores as immutable, as though immune
from the free-market principles to which it is subject: ‘There is agree-
ment on the idea that the ultimate objective of cultural cooperation is
not to change peoples’ ways of life, but uniquely to understand one
another better (European Commission 2002), forgetting that the Barce-
lona Process has effects in both the mid term and the long term on so-
cieties to the south and east of the Mediterranean and neglecting the
fact that the introduction of a free trade zone will in any case change
peoples’ ways of life’ (341). In addition to Schäfer, for criticisms of the
Euro-Med cultural dialogue initiatives, see, see Raffaelia Del Sarto, ‘Set-
ting the Cultural Agenda: Concepts, Communities, and Representation
in Euro-Mediterranean Relations,’ Mediterranean Politics 10, no. 3
On one hand, in fixating on the Mediterranean’s cultural

past and aesthetic value to the point of eclipsing present materi-
al realities, the EMP’s cultural programs render a socio-historical
decontextualization of the Mediterranean narrative, reinventing
it as an untouched idyllic utopia. The aesthetic value attached to
the Mediterranean detracts from the actual territorial regimenta-
tion and control to which it is subject by the EU. On the other
hand, the EU’s own self-invention is partly established by con-
structing ‘the Mediterranean as distinct from, and even opposite
to, Europe,’ so much so that, ‘to speak of or to deal with the
Mediterranean has come to refer to the ensemble of issues and
problems between Europe as a whole and non-European Medi-
terranean countries (Arab countries, Turkey, Israel).’ 31 Part of
Europe’s own identity construction hinges on a counter‐image.
The construction of Europe’s Other has come to signify both an
unchanging, familiar, culturally valuable Mediterranean rooted
in the past and a volatile, unfamiliar, politically charged Medi-
terranean present. 32 This reification of the Mediterranean as-
(2005), 313–330. Also see Emanuel Adler, ed., The Convergence of Civi-
lizations: Constructing a Mediterranean Region (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 2006).
31
Claudia Fogu, ‘From Mare Nostrum to Mare Alorium: Mediterranean
Theory and Mediterraneanism in Contemporary Italian Thought,’ Cali-
fornia Italian Studies 1, no. 1 (2010), 11.
32
On criticism of EU-Mediterranean partnerships, specifically the EU-
Med positioning the Mediterranean as Europe’s Other, see: Hein De
Haas, ‘The Myth of Invasion: The Inconvenient Realities of African Mi-
gration to Europe,’ Third World Quarterly 29, no. 7 (2008), 1305–1322;
Pinar Bilgin, ‘A Return to “Civilizational Geopolitics” in the Mediterra-
nean?’ Geopolitics 9, no. 2 (2004), 269–291; Nikolaos Tzifakis, ‘EU’s
Region-Building and Boundary-Drawing Policies: The European Ap-
proach to the Southern Mediterranean and the Western Balkans,’ Jour-
nal of Southern Europe and the Balkans 9, no. 1 (2007), 47–64; Stephan
Stetter, ‘The Politics of De-Paradoxification in Euro-Mediterranean Re-
lations: Semantics and Structures of “Cultural Dialogue”,’ Mediterranean
Politics 10, no. 3 (2005), 331–348.
sures separation of culture from neoliberalism’s present-day ma-

terial realities, in which deterioration of human rights becomes
facilely attributable to a culture still undergoing civilizational
developments, rather than to one being altered by the EU-
Mediterranean free trade. Discourse on the Mediterranean sim-
ultaneously acknowledges and conceals the globalization that
the region has undergone.
Since the 1990s the re-emergence of the term ‘Mediterrane-
an’ from different international organizations was a result of the
growing perception of the south and east Mediterranean as a
security threat. The increase in migration from Africa, in partic-
ular, has added another dimension to the Mediterranean narra-
tive. Despite the revived narratives to invent a globalized Medi-
terranean space, a globalized economy is already in place.
As is the case with Baḥr Al-Rūm, Safīnat Nūḥ (2008), which
can be translated to Noah’s Ark 33, by Khālid Al-Khamīsī, is in-
vested in uncovering the ‘a geographical imagination which ig-
nores its own real spatiality’—or rather purposefully conceals it.
Al-Khamīsī depicts ‘remote’ villages already linked to the global
economy, which is rooted in their soil as much by way of towers
and columns ‘painted colors of the Italian flag’ 34 as by a global
smuggling network: a large group of village men gather for an
introductory meeting in a café to discover how they can sign up
with the smuggling ring upon payment. Both are invested in
unpacking the material and networks that enter into the produc-
tion of the undocumented migrant inasmuch as global capital
and its discourse obscure social relations upon which this pro-
duction is contingent to continue enacting the violence global
capitalism produces. The production of the migrant exemplifies
the absolute height of alienated labor in that his concealment,
his status as an undocumented migrant, an object of the labor
33
All the passages of Khālid Al-Khamīsī’s text are my translations in
this chapter. Khālid Al-Khamīsī, Safīnat Nūḥ (Noah’s Ark). Cairo, Egypt:
Dār Al-Shurūq, 2010.
34
Zuḥrī, 7.
that goes into his production, constitutes his primary identity. In

order for his identity to survive, the labor of his production as
an undocumented migrant cannot be fully erased: indeed, his
‘old’ identity, his passport, ID cards, smuggling networks and
resources are discarded, so that entry into the labor market on
the other shore can be ensured, but actually, to remain undocu-
mented and ‘pass,’ he must remain simultaneously committed to
his identity (and its concealment of labor contributed to its crea-
tion) and alienated from the labor that produced it.
As revealed in Safīnat Nūḥ, even before the migrant crosses
to the other side to participate in this economy he is subject to
alienation in the form of self-objectification. On a sinking boat
en route to Italy, a Delta villager Wihdan falls dead not by
drowning but heart failure. His boatmate realizes at once his
death sentence began at home: ‘When I saw Wihdan drowning
before me, I said, ‘Oh God, was the operation where they re-
moved his kidney the reason?’ Wihdan was the first on the boat
to die. The man beside me holding the water flask said, ‘He
didn’t die because of drowning, he died because his heart
stopped.’ His heart, apple of his mother’s eyes he was, couldn’t
take it.’ 35 He becomes involved in an organ trafficking ring and
sells his kidney to afford the cost of boarding a flimsy boat to
Europe. Legal scholar Charles Fried has stated, ‘when a man
sells his body he does not sell what is his, he sells himself … the
seller treats his body as a foreign object.’ 36 Ironically, in order to
be a participant and a subject in the economy in which he wants
to participate, he must treat his body as a foreign object, com-
modify and alienate it. If exploitation of migration to Europe is
considered to benefit capital on a global scale—its maintenance
depends on its ‘use value’ for global capitalism—then Wihdan’s
exploitation quite literally becomes the commodification of the
migrant body. But it is significant to also note that whether in
35
Al-Khamīsī, 199.
36
Charles Fried, Right and Wrong (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1978), 142.
Egypt or Europe, his use value transcends borders in the same

way his value is seen as a transcendent commodity based on
potential labor, body parts, and, finally, exportability. That is,
alienation does not suddenly manifest on the other shore, but
rather it constitutes the journey from the homeland to the other
shore.
Moreover, Safīnat Nūḥ is intent on revealing how alienation
created by social dispossession in Egypt reflects the alienation of
the undocumented on the boat and the other shore. Safīnat Nūḥ
encompasses migrant narratives whose attempts to leave Egypt
intersect, thus the title refers to the Egyptian characters of vari-
ous backgrounds—regional, class, or otherwise—in collective
exodus out of a deluged and consuming homeland, highlighting
the connection of a collective national identity, experiencing
various forms of social dispossession, to undocumented migra-
tion by equating the alienation of Egyptian migrants to Egyp-
tians at home. Al-Khamīsī incorporates the scriptural myth of
Noah’s Ark draws comparisons between the figure of Noah and
the undocumented migrant who jumps on the boat and drifts to
escape the catastrophe to which the nation has succumbed—a
flood of poverty, desperation, stark inequality, lost potential.
In Safīnat Nūḥ, alienation from one’s own land and com-
munity is tied to the displacement and deterritorialization as a
result of consolidating national heritage sites, utopic cultural
idylls to signify civilizational continuity, endurance, for touristic
and broader transnational appeal. As in Baḥr Al-Rūm, the double
geographical imaginaries of cultural sanctuary and globalized
space feature as utopias in harmonious collaboration of the sign
(the grand monumental space) and its vehicle (fluid economy of
immaterial production in financial services, tourism, culture) in
Aswan Nubian territory, a national site of otherness. Although
Aswan is not continuous with Mediterranean identity in Egypt,
it has resurged in cultural revivalism projects from ‘Aswan’s soil
to Alexandria’s soil,’ places interpolated as tourism heritage
sites, highlighting an instrumentality merely reduced to site of
memory. 37 Both non-Nubian Egyptians and British tourists visit

Aswan and impose upon it a utopic social order immune to
change. On an organized tourist boat trip, juxtaposed against
the novel’s violent and chaotic boat trip, an Egyptian migrant
who has returned home expresses his approval of the area’s his-
torical continuity and its absence of ‘foreign,’ outside forces,
global commodities he disdains in Egypt’s cities. To Murtaḍā,
revival of Alexandria’s and Aswan’s development into tourism
sites signifies retrieval of authenticity, heritage, continuity, re-
turn to ‘simple living’: he feels for the first time in his life that
he is on his own land. He feels that he ‘possesses everything he
lays his eyes on. This overwhelming feeling was filling his heart.
For even in his village, all the tools were foreign, as were the
cars, the cement, the iron, and even his clothes. But here, the
boat he is on was made by the Ancient Egyptians, the clothes of
Ḥasūna [the tour guide] were made by an Egyptian as they had
been for thousands of years …’ 38 He continues, awed by his
thoughts of enduring heritage, ruminating about how the houses
were made from stones carried from that very area, how the
houses were made in the traditional Nubian way, and how their
colors were created by Egyptians, as with the ropes, the statues,
etc. 39
But, the Nubian village tour guide displaces this romantic
notion of enduring, continuous culture on one’s ‘own land,’ 40 a
national inheritance belonging to all Egyptians. The Nubian ter-
ritory is actually parceled off to real-estate speculators and ap-
propriated by the government, notwithstanding the flooding
caused by the Aswan Dam erected by the state. The Nubians no
longer own their land, he explains, and the tourism company
that hired him has laid him off after it was sold off. Behind the
37
Beverly Butler, ‘Egypt: Constructed Exiles of the Imagination’ in Con-
tested Landscapes: Movement, Exile, and Place, eds Barbara Bender and
Margot Winer (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 111.
38
Al-Khamīsī, 290.
39
Al-Khamīsī, 290.
40
Ibid., 290.
mirage of continuity, lineage, inheritance of Nubian monu-

ments, relics, ancient sites, lie expropriations, displacements,
and transfers conjointly managed by transnational companies
and the state. 41 So now the village tour guide aspires to go for-
ward as an undocumented migrant. The Egyptian tourist was
shown as unaware of the way global capital conceals its mecha-
nisms in an idyllic cultural heritage space even as it achieves a
violence of displacements, deterritorialization, expropriations.
Al-Khamīsī exposes its momentum, especially in tourism sites—
simultaneously infused with religious, metaphysical symbolism
and manipulated by capital machinations.
Ironically, constructing national heritage sites works to dis-
rupt genealogy and sever links to heritage by alienating people
from their land. In these novels, sites of memory are inextricably
linked with deterritorialization and dislocation: whether on
Zuḥrī’s scenic and spectacular Alexandria’s shores or Al-
Khamīsī’s tourist sanctuary of Nubian territory, culturally pre-
served sites actually displace their inhabitants onto a neighbor-
ing slum in the former, or sever the indigenous’ historical con-
nection to the land in the latter. Bounded and hierarchalized
spaces, they are managed through artifice and subterfuge. Con-
cealment of displacement’s violence to preserve an image of
sanctity is integral to ‘utopian organization’: securing spatial
orderings requires ‘disruption, misery, poverty, exclusion,’ part
of the ‘interplay between securing and obscuring processes of
41
On the various and gradual displacements of the Nubians, see Timo-
thy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002); Jennifer Derr, ‘Drafting a Map of
Colonial Egypt,’ Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North
Africa, eds Diana Davis and Edmund Burke, 136–157 (Athens: Ohio
University Press, 2011). On displacement and the tourism in Nubia, see
Derek Gregory, ‘Colonial Nostalgia and Cultures of Travel: Spaces of
Constructed Visibility in Egypt,’ Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing
Heritage: Global Norms and Urban Forms in the Age of Tourism, ed. Nezar
Alsayyad, 111–151 (London: Routledge, 2001). On the Nubian heritage
campaign, see Butler, chapter 3.
utopian organization.’ 42 Like the double geographical imagi-

naries upon which it depends, the double movement of securing
and obscuring undergirds capitalism’s deliberate process of ob-
scuring of its production. A discipline of spaces, borders, and
bodies is the effect of not only ‘illegal migration’ but tourism in
the novel, producing both the desire for the ideal and the repul-
sion of unwanted forces.
As I mentioned previously, as opposed to a literature of
burning (the sea, identity cards, national identity) in Morocco,
undocumented migrant literature captures deterritorialization
by representing Egypt as a site of deluge and drowning. Not on-
ly does deterritorialization imply the loss of a wandering subjec-
tivity driven from the homeland on a boat adrift, with the deter-
ritorialized nation forming a diaspora, but it expresses the grief
of a flooded and drowning nation. Because national imagery is
interpellated into the journey, the journey is merely an exten-
sion of a process of global displacement and disorientation at
home. The Mediterranean Sea and land are reflections of one
another through processes of globalization: in Baḥr Al-Rūm, Sa-
ber describes Egypt’s cities in terms of population excess, and
then boards a boat packed in excess of its capacity; 43 the nation-
al allegory of flood in Safīnat Nūḥ is substantiated into the abyss
of the migrant’s ‘boats of death’ and ‘journey of death;’ 44 the
42
Martin Parker, Utopia and Organization (Cambridge: Blackwell Publi-
cations, 2002), 120.
43
A recent USAID study estimates approximately 40% of the Egyptian
population live below the poverty line. The study also reveals that
Egypt suffers from a high chronic unemployment rate of 15–25 % and a
lack of public participation in political life. According to the World
Bank's World Development Indicators for 2006, 43.9 per cent of all
Egyptians live on less than $2 a day while prices continue to rise at
unprecedented speed. See USAID, Egypt Economic Performance Assess-
ment, 2008.
44
The phrase ‘boats of death’ to describe the flimsy crafts in which
many die crossing the Mediterranean each year has become common.
See Muḥammad Karīm, ‘Qawārib Al-Mawt … Fuqara’ Miṣr ḍiḥāyā
‘living death’ characters experience at home transforms to real

death at sea.
I began this chapter with two juxtaposed images: the image
of place as a dead cultural artifact and preserved cultural idyll,
and then the image of a sea of dead floating bodies, a blockade
to human mobility. Both are ends of a utopic continuum for a
precise ordering of the Mediterranean: one a nostalgic retrieval
of an ‘authentic’ past on land, the other for a present and future
of border regulation at sea. These scenes of dispossession, and
the alienation it induces, paralleled at home and sea (Egypt and
the Mediterranean Sea) also emerge in Fārūq Jūwayda’s poem
about undocumented migration. ‘This Land Is No Longer Like
Mine’ 45 (2009) is a boat-passage poem replete with national im-
agery disorienting the sea migrant. He dedicates the poem to
‘Egypt’s youthful martyrs, swallowed by the waves on the
beaches of Italy, and Turkey, and Greece.’ Far from home on the
border waters of the Mediterranean, and before ‘the waves crash
over his head’, the migrant’s voice wavers between life and
death at the same as it wavers between the site of the boat and
the homeland. He shifts between performing his own and dying
Musalsal Kawārith La Tintihī,’ Alaraby.co.uk, September 23, 2016.

https://www.alaraby.co.uk/politics/2016/9/22/-‫ﻣﺼﺮ‬-‫ﻓﻘﺮاء‬-‫اﻟﻤﻮت‬-‫ﻗﻮارب‬
‫ﯾﻨﺘﮭﻲ‬-‫ﻻ‬-‫ﻛﻮارث‬-‫ﻣﺴﻠﺴﻞ‬-‫ ﺿﺤﺎﯾﺎ‬Also, see Aljazeera.net, ‘Qawārib Al-Mawt Fil
Mutawaṣṣiṭ’, October 6, 2014.
https://www.aljazeera.net/knowledgegate/newscoverage/2014/10/6/
‫اﻟﻤﺘﻮﺳﻂ‬-‫ﻓﻲ‬-‫اﻟﻤﻮت‬-‫ ﻗﻮارب‬Describing the trip as a ‘journey of death’ has also
become common: see Ṣabrī Al-Ḥaw, ‘Al-Ḥayāt Al-Ta’iha Fi Al-Baḥr Al-
Abyaḍ Al-Mutawaṣṣiṭ: Min Al-Mas’ūl,’ Hespress, May 15, 2012.
http://hespress.com/writers/53912.html; Muṣṭafā Hāshim, ‘Al-Hijra Al-
Ghayr Al-Shir‘iya Min Miṣr: Riḥlat Al-Mawt Baḥthan ‘Al-Ḥayāt’,
DW.com, April 29, 2015. https://www.dw.com/ar/-‫ﻣﻦ‬-‫اﻟﺸﺮﻋﯿﺔ‬-‫ﻏﯿﺮ‬-‫اﻟﮭﺠﺮة‬
‫اﻟﺤﯿﺎة‬-‫ﻋﻦ‬-‫ﺑﺤﺜﺎ‬-‫اﻟﻤﻮت‬-‫رﺣﻠﺔ‬-‫ﻣﺼﺮ‬/a-18417264
45
All the passages of Fārūq Jūwayda’s poem are my translations in this
chapter. Fārūq Jūwayda, ‘Hadhī Bilādu Lam Ta‘ud Kabilādī’ (‘This Land
Is No Longer Like Mine’), in Mādhā Aṣabak, Ya Waṭn (Cairo: Dār Al-
Shurūq, 2009), 8–16.
Egypt’s eulogy, mourning the loss of ‘the clamor of horses, the

joy of holidays’ as he mourns the loss of his own life: ‘I yearned
for the return of my country one day / But it has disappeared
and we have disappeared…’ His mother in ‘mourning clothes’,
the migrant calls into question whether his voice is that of the
dying imagining his funeral or the dead whose spirit returns
home to witness the scene he left behind. But that there seems
to be no distinction between the dying and the dead is taken for
granted, as his death on the boat seems to already be a ‘fact’, in
that the homeland has already decided on his life and death. In
the beginning, the migrant faces his ‘executioner’ and laments
the fallen homeland driving him to take the dangerous trip:
…where is the true face of my country?
Where are the palm trees? And where is the warmth of the
valley?
Nothing appears in the sky in front of us,
Except the sky and the image of the executioner
He does not disappear from sight
Because he is like fate
Like the day of Judgment and the day of birth.
Further on, he reveals that he has already faced the executioner

‘at home’: ‘On every corner of my land/ the image of the execu-
tioner appears before me…’: the image of the executioner on the
ill-fated boat he sees is the same one he has seen ‘on every cor-
ner of [his] land …’ The executioner on the boat re-appears later
in the poem as the executioner glimpsed at home. The distinc-
tion between the dying and the dead is ambiguous insofar as
condemnation puts into momentum the ‘threshold life’, insofar
as exclusion is a ‘living death’ sentence. 46 At the executioner’s
46
In Politics, Metaphysics, and Death, Andrew Norris presents the figure
of the ‘living dead man’ to illuminate the threshold life both inside the
legal order as its death can be allowed by that order and outside as its
death can constitute neither a homicide nor a sacrifice. Threshold lives
lack ‘almost all the rights and expectations that we characteristically
attribute to human existence, and yet were still biologically alive …
condemnation to a ‘living death’ through ‘oppression, corrup-

tion, antagonism’ at home, ‘his life is no longer his own.’ This
threshold existence at home is merely continued on the border
waters. Moreover, by extension of the executioner’s presence
above the homeland and the migrant’s boat, the nation and the
migrant, both having glimpsed the executioner, have been sen-
tenced to drowning descent, their ‘lives’ no longer theirs, given
that death has become inescapable and they remain only alive
while awaiting ‘execution.’ The border waters and the homeland
merge in the migrant imagination, the only link between the
two, showing the exceptional space of the boat to be as fluid,
chaotic, and deadly as the homeland—just as the country ‘has
sold its tender youth’, likewise ‘the sea has no mercy on the in-
nocence of [the migrants’] youth’.
The relationship between the transnational and national
order of dispossession, corruption, repression is drawn through
the boat’s navigation of the Mediterranean’s double global imag-
inaries. As I have mentioned, both of these imaginaries of the
Mediterranean, aqua nullius and cultural bridge, are ends of a
utopic continuum for a precise ordering of the Mediterranean:
one a nostalgic retrieval of an ‘authentic’ past on land, the other
for a present and future of border regulation at sea. From immi-
grant dreams of eu-topia (‘good place’) to immigrant reality of an
ou-topia (‘non-place’, ‘nowhere’), the Mediterranean Sea emerges
as a ‘placeless place,’ the dead-end to potential, possibility,
newness, change—a future—what has ultimately been reduced
in its new coinage to ‘a sea cemetery.’ The Mediterranean,
which the migrants had sought as a form of liberation, is a
‘placeless place’: it ends up being a nowhere which exists only
situated at a limit zone between life and death, inside and outside, in
which they were no longer anything but bare life.’ Using the prisoner
under medical experimentation as a contemporary homo sacer figure,
Norris explains that once condemned, he has already lost his life: ‘his
life is no longer his own, and in that sense he is a ‘living dead man’…
Indeed, it is precisely insofar as he awaits execution that he remains
alive’ (11).
within the realms of fantasy. In the same way, Mediterranized

Egypt has also turned out to be a ‘placeless place’, a nowhere
which exists only within the realms of fantasy and has fore-
closed on the future of its people.
Zygmunt Bauman characterizes our era as one of ‘liquid
modernity,’ as ‘a civilization of excess, redundancy, waste and
waste disposal,’ 47 one that produces refugees as ‘the waste prod-
ucts of globalization’ 48, constituted by boundaries between nor-
mative and disposable. In Safīnat Nūḥ, if the scriptural figure of
Noah represents a remnant from a system that preceded the
decreation of the world and the only person entrusted to create
another, his literary descendants represent a modern remnant,
what Spivak calls the ‘detritus of globality,’ one signifying the
ambivalence plaguing globalized modernity, of spaces of in-
commensurability. 49 He would emerge to expose the contradic-
tions of his intellectual ascendants, the antinomies of the Medi-
terranean bridge ‘between cultures,’ an orientation toward a
Mediterranean space in Egypt based on promotion of flows be-
tween Western and Eastern scholarship, culture, and infor-
mation that remains utopic in organization—securing and con-
cealing within its re-invented Mediterranean cultural package
global participation in structures that produce poverty, political
disenfranchisement, and exclusion that give rise to the much
feared will to migrate in the southern Mediterranean. As an un-
documented migrant on the northern shore, he would emerge as
a figure from the globalized margins infiltrating the smooth sur-
face of global development at the center. He would be a re-
minder of dead young people at sea, of migrant internment
camps. His position would be discrepant by pointing to the une-
venness of the dominant discourse on globalization. He would
47
Ibid., 97.
48
Ibid., 66.
49
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward
a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1999), 87.
come to embody sites of contradiction from which he hails, a

village already globalized, thus threatening the stability of mod-
ern representations of global European identity against which
migrant identity is apprehended.
CHAPTER 5.
SAHARAN-MEDITERRANEAN
TRANSITS:
IMPOSSIBLE ‘ARRIVAL’
In the short story ‘Twilight Trek,’ part of a 2010 collection enti-

tled News from Home, Nigerian-American writer Sefi Atta charts
the journey of an unnamed migrant from an unknown African
country across the Sahara Desert en route to a European destina-
tion, a journey thwarted when he finds himself stuck in an in-
formal encampment atop the mountains on the Moroccan Medi-
terranean coastline. And indeed it is this transitional space in
the process of transmigration, or transit migration, that Atta at-
tempts to capture through a border chronotope marked by in-
between-ness, permanent transit, and deterritorialization. This
transmigration narrative is initiated with one word that marks a
mid-point on a journey that has already begun: ‘Gao’. 1 The nar-
rator has already traveled alone to Goa, Mali, to link up with
other migrants and smuggling networks that take him north. But
this is not just a migration-journey narrative; it is a narrative of
undocumented migration defined by a lack of identification.
What follows are the defining marks of the journey of the un-
documented—false ID (papers): ‘An agent hands me a fake pass-
1
Sefi Atta, ‘Twilight Trek,’ News from Home (Northampton, MA: Inter-
link, 2010), 81.
141
port—my name is not Jean-Luc. I’m not from Mali and I’m defi-
nitely no Francophone’. Still in Africa, he identifies his location,
but never his name nor his origins. That the story of the journey
depends on resistance to self-identification to continue reveals
the extent to which secrecy and invisibility are crucial to the
undocumented migrant’s route and literary journey. The story
henceforth is marked by obscurity in vigilance of detection—
everything is set in motion to escape fixed attribution and iden-
tifiable location.
Indeed the lack of documentation changes the border chro-
notope, specifically the Mediterranean Sea border areas. So
while certain topoi feature, like the Mediterranean Sea, the Sa-
hara Desert, and the Malian city of Gao on the undocumented
route, the lack of documentation and the lack of traceability
produce a border chronotope shot through with holes: for ex-
ample, the main setting of the story is a Moroccan mountain
that is never named. Another explanation for the unnamed Mo-
roccan mountain is the story’s foregrounding of the Saharan De-
sert as the starting point of the journey, rather than the Mediter-
ranean Sea (like other texts), which emerges as another transit
point to the destination, Europe. In fact, this chapter and the
following chapter mark a shift in the book wherein the desert is
centered, as opposed to the Mediterranean Sea. But to return to
the analysis, the lack and absence of identification that defines
the border chronotope in the story functions as a reflection of
the void of recognition—political and social—that affords bor-
der crossers human rights, on African territory before the other
shore is reached, indeed. The chronotope also forecloses on mi-
grant recognition if the European shore is reached through a
proleptic imaginary that succumbs to the narrative’s determinis-
tic temporality, its loops, endowing a sense of inevitability to
failure, suggesting that failure of the process of recognition in
which they plan to participate is, rather than a disruption or a
flaw, a part of the design.
The nonchalance, the absence of concern, with which the
narrator maintains the secrecy of his name throughout the story
is matched by the detachment with which he relates his secret
past of familial exploitation—he reveals casually that his mother
5. SAHARAN-MEDITERRANEAN TRANSITS 143
had tried to sell him off to one of her clients: ‘“He’ll only touch,”
she promised.’ I ran away from home after that, lived on the
street, played football with a group of louts and discovered just
how professional I was at the sport. In fact, for a while before I
warned them to stop understating my talent, my football friends
were calling me … What’s his name? Pele?’ 2 While he is not yet
in exile, his detachment functions as preparation, an exercise, in
being exiled—he is not looking for roots, he is seeking distance
in order to maintain a carefully preserved disconnection, a lack
of care and concern for both who he is and who he was.
The entire story is marked by an intentional lack—of
names, of origins, of exact locations beyond a city or an area.
The absence of names (of characters and their origins) in the
narrative reinforces their condition as undocumented (without
ID or identification). The lack, the condition of negativity and
absence, has been noted to mark the identity of the undocu-
mented, the sans-papiers, the without. 3 The absence of the narra-
tor’s ‘real’ identity is highlighted in the beginning of the story,
in Gao, before he crosses the Sahara. And, indeed, amidst dan-
gerous elements of the Sahara and its smugglers and the moun-
tain on the Mediterranean and its rag-tag group of migrants des-
perate to reach Europe, the narrator-in-transit would be cautious
about revealing his real identity. However, it must be noted that
from the beginning of the story—before he even crosses the Sa-
hara with other migrants—he never reveals his name. That is,
even while on his own, where presumably there would be no
need to have his guard up against the curiosity of others, his
name remains unknown. Therefore, Atta submits a preemptive
strike of illegibility on her narrator. By ‘preemptive strike’, I
mean epistemological closure on migrant identity and its subse-
2
Atta, 82.
3
For an interrogation of the status of being ‘without’, see Jacques Der-
rida, ‘Derelictions of the Right to Justice’, Negotiations: Interventions and
Interviews 1971–2000, ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg, 133–146 (Palo Alto,
CA: Stanford Press, 2002).
quent political recognition and subjectivity. And it must be clear

that this not just about affording anonymity to the nameless
characters, places, origins, but rather this is about how anonym-
ity is a part of their anomic status, which not only divests name
but, in a Rancierian sense, the political recognition and ‘sensibil-
ity’ that the name and identification provide across nation-
states. The absence of the narrator’s true identity is not just a
reflection on the dangers of transparency during the journey,
but a reflection of his illegibility, whether in Africa or in Europe.
Atta’s foreclosure upon migrant identity—and by associa-
tion, political recognition—before the other shore is reached is
further illuminated by her instrumentalization of a trope casual-
ly tied to migration out of Africa, whether in the media or
scholarship—‘exodus’. Various narratives of African migration
link the journey within and out of Africa to an ‘exodus,’ with its
liberatory potential of escaping oppression. Today’s perilous
Sahara crossing could be conceived as Moses’ wilderness before
the redemptive journey to the Promised Land, the trans-
Mediterranean voyage to abundant labor markets in the north,
can begin. But, Atta subverts the trope’s redemptive potential
when her characters are thwarted from salvation to occupy a
limbo on the Moroccan mountain at the end of the story. The
original exodus narrative ends in triumphal return—a return
from history’s exile, but for undocumented migrants in the story,
triumph in the form of liberation or arrival is thwarted, because
they never arrive at their European destination, but rather re-
main stranded in the Moroccan mountains. Because the journey
narrative does not ‘end’ with the anticipated destination (the
EU), but rather another transit point, the Moroccan coastal en-
campment, the narrative does not provide redemptive closure in
the form of arrival. Rather than arrival, the migrants are figured
into an uncertain, unlocatable, volatile process where an expo-
nential, permanent transience marks the end of the story. In ef-
fect, the foiled closure forecloses on the possibility of the narra-
tor regaining an identity and, therefore, access to political
recognition and subjectivity, in his desired destination. He re-
mains nameless indefinitely. Anonymity is not restricted to
characters and their origins, but it also marks the transit spaces
they occupy, suggesting cultural identities being reshaped under

conditions of a post-colonial geography, whereby the production
of space is intertwined with the production of identity. The lack
of names and identification of places is a disorienting conse-
quence of the reconfiguration of African territory in the modern
age, a product of migration and migrant identity. Moreover,
while the end of the story is marked by immobility and obstruc-
tion, the story’s proleptic imaginary reveals that anticipation of
arrival on the European shore does not necessarily deliver salva-
tion to the narrator to regain an identity. The wilderness of the
exodus could extend from one shore to another, with no Prom-
ised Land in sight. Arrival does not ensure regaining an identity
and the access to the political recognition and subjectivity it
accords, and it could very well offer more of the same—a dead
end at the intersection of identity, citizenship, mobility.
The limbo is not only related to the thwarted endpoint of
their journey but to the suspense surrounding the true identity,
the real name, of the narrator. Allusions to an exodus begin dur-
ing the desert crossing when the narrator meets a woman who
begins to read to him the story of Moses from a pocket Bible. 4
The woman, Patience, becomes the narrator’s companion in the
informal encampment up a Moroccan mountain, where she con-
tinues to obsessively read verses about salvation to block out the
devastation around her (‘she says it’s only God that can save us
now’). 5 When the narrator realizes the proximity of the sea and
the distance to Europe, he tries to tell Patience, but she halts the
exchange with a verse from Exodus: ‘I have heard the com-
plaints of the Israelites. Tell them at twilight they will have
meat to eat, and in the morning they will have all the bread
they want …’ 6 In Exodus, the desert wilderness functions as the
passage from exile to salvation and the homeland. The wilder-
ness/desert functions not only as a site of punishment but also
4
Atta, 86.
5
Ibid., 90.
6
Ibid., 93.
salvation where God transforms the barrenness into a Paradise,

or rejuvenation of the spirit through recognition of God. 7 Salva-
tion is often identified with desert imagery, because the wilder-
ness-desert operates as the testing ground of morality in the face
of adversity and danger that would ultimately deliver redemp-
tion. But after crossing the desert, the providentially mandated
moment of salvation does not arrive for the undocumented mi-
grants in the story. They are dumped off at the foot of a Moroc-
can mountain close to the Mediterranean coast, where they find
an informal encampment set up by migrants who had been wait-
ing to cross the Mediterranean for months, even years. Emerging
through the desert-wilderness, the characters do not become
liberated, become political recognizable, much less powerful,
and many don’t even assume their real names. Rather, the mi-
grants retreat further up the mountain to hide from surveillance,
police detection, subsequent detention and deportation, while
the narrator remains without a true name or identity, becoming
further illegible, discursively, perceptually, and politically.
The topographical division that the story presumes to set
up from Gao to Sahara Desert to Moroccan mountain encamp-
ment through an optic of redemption from the desert’s intermi-
nable wandering and loss of identity disintegrates as Atta sets up
a continuous zone of limbo, hiatus, and retreat, suggesting that
the journey of suffering toward the point of salvation is not
bound by place, namely the fearful desert, but is prolonged in-
terminably. Because the narrator’s mother has lodged herself in
7
In Paul and Apostasy, Escahtology: Perseverance, and Falling Away in the
Corinthian Congregation (Tübingen, Germany: Mohr Siebeck, 2000), B.J.
Oropeza discusses the centrality of the wilderness to ideas of retreat
and eschatology: in opposition to Paul, who saw the desert as a place of
danger, the wilderness was interpreted differently as a place of retreat,
or ‘hiatus between the ‘historical’ exodus … and the eschatological
conquest of Jerusalem and the Land of Israel: ‘the wilderness was seen
in terms of a purification which would culminate in the conquest of the
land of Jerusalem … Eschatological preparation in the desert was a
means to that end’ (122).
his mind, he imagines her horrified reaction to the transit camp

as a type of limbo, purgatory, wherein migrants wander be-
tween worlds:
This place is no stop, my mother says; it is the anteroom to
hell. It is where spirits wait to pass to another world. It is the
only time left for those who have stopped living and are yet
to be pronounced dead; the ground between madness and
reason; the Mountain of Babel, where Africans speak in for-
eign and nothing they say makes sense, so I need not listen.
How is it possible, she asks, that I be denied asylum in Spain
when this place resembles the aftermath of a war zone? 8
The narrator imagines his mother saying that the camp appears
as ‘the anteroom to hell’, but this purgatory does not feature as a
limbo between African hell and European heaven, African heav-
en or European hell, or in exodus terms, dangerous exile and
salvational return. Atta forecloses on the possibility of salvation
offered by the exodus trope and the integration of its narrative
(read by Patience) into the larger transit migration narrative
when the Sahara Desert crossing (associated with the suffering
of the scriptural wilderness) does not end in redemption, but
rather exponential wandering—the desert crossing is replayed
without relief on the mountains around the Mediterranean
where migrants are interminably crossing back and forth with-
out ‘stop’ between heaven and hell, life and death, discursive
reason (intelligibility) and madness (‘babbling’ upon ‘Babel’).
Even the Tower of Babel loses its name, its identity, its ability to
be recognized and is jarringly renamed (like the narrator) the
‘Mountain of Babel,’ and like the undocumented who is separat-
ed from his proper name becomes less discursively recognizable,
less linked to its original referent. The ‘Mountain of Babel’ is not
exactly an incoherent reference, yet it does bear the imprint of a
past story’s theme of incoherence but in its present form.
8
Atta, 89–90.
The theme of incoherence and unintelligibility in a biblical

narrative is revisited upon the contemporary analogy and its
analogue. A consequential, punishing incoherence in a past story
is revisited on its present analogy, suggesting the discrepancy
between the story narrative and the exodus narrative, clouding
the correspondence between the signifier and its referent in the
omission of the Mt. Sinai. The renaming of the mountain as Ba-
bel Mountain indicates they are far up Babel, nowhere near Mt.
Sinai, exiled to incoherence itself—the ‘apex’ (so to speak) of the
clandestine or sans-papiers juridical and epistemological predic-
ament.
Atta’s ‘anteroom to hell’ appears to be an apt description of
the condition of the undocumented: a perpetual deferment of
arrival, liberation, and survival, has been analyzed as a purgato-
ry, a state of limbo, between worlds and nations, claiming an
unfinished citizenship. In Lydie Moudileno’s analysis of the un-
documented, or sans-papiers in France, this limbo is defined by a
lack of belonging to any nationality: unable to freely cross bor-
ders, the sans-papiers finds himself thwarted from returning to
his country of origin. At the same, his stay in the host country is
precarious and conditional upon concealing his true origin. 9
Therein, he remains stuck, but without the rights of citizenship.
In ‘Twilight Trek,’ the limbo of the migrants is not fixed—it is
narrated in Morocco, but anticipated in Europe, as well, where
the undocumented will experience an unfinished path toward
citizenship, and the political representation and subjectivity it
accords, without proper identification. The elusive ‘endpoint’ of
the migrant’s final destination reflects upon the deferred, nega-
tive, absent status of the undocumented’s subjectivity, toward
which the narrative proleptically gestures.
In The Poetics of Political Thinking, David Panagia explains
the lack of identitification of undocumented migrants, the sans-
papiers in France, in terms of a lack of political signification,
9
In Fuzzy Fiction, Jean-Louis Hippolyte attributes these ideas to
Moudileno through the conversations they’ve had (26).
representation, and subjectivity related to democratic rights and

equality. 10 Lacking a name (because without papers and hence
without a fixed signifier), they exist in a mimetic economy that
denies them currency. In a Rancierian reading, he discusses how
political accounts are structured by aesthetic modes of represen-
tation, the ‘mimetic economy’, which evinces a political reality
through acts of representation. Theories of representation are in
circuit not only with epistemological commitments but political
thought. 11 What once been ‘pre-discursively sanctioned’ 12 has
been preempted into the discursively unrecognizable, inscruta-
ble, illegible—a signifier without a referent—effectively locking
down the circuit of representation to the politically and juridi-
cally recognizable.
In fact, the portrayal of migrants as nameless hordes—
inscrutable and illegible—has been linked to media signifiers,
such as floods and deluges, which have contributed to nativist
fear and panic in Europe. Jacques Lacan has claimed that this
fear is tied to the feeling of being deluged by the unnamable,
potentially immense hordes, masses and streams of ‘others’ who
threaten to negate the existing and familiar world, or even, to
make it disappear. 13 This influx of ‘others’ is considered over-
whelming in the perceived context of a shortage of space for
identity construction. The influx of the unnamable is considered
10
Davide Panagia, The Poetics of Political Thinking, (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2010), 120–121.
11
The mutually constituted discourses of the juridical and the popular
with its literary conventions are also analyzed for their construction of
the undocumented in Mireille Rosello’s ‘Fortress Europe and Its Meta-
phors: Immigration and the Law’ (1999).
12
Panagia, 2010, 121.
13
Henk van Houtum and Roos Pijpers, ‘The European Union as a Gated
Community: The Two-Faced Border and Immigration Regime of the
EU’, Antipode 39, no. 2 (March 2007), 297. The authors were referring
to Lacan’s L’Angoisse, Le Seminaire, Livre X (2004) and Roberto Harari’s
Lacan’s Seminar on ‘Anxiety’: An Introduction (New York: Other Press,
2001).
and imagined to be dangerous for the fulfilment of being ‘Euro-

pean’ in terms of authority, citizenship and identity, and for the
economic well-being and public safety (protection) of Europe-
ans. The discursive heart of juridical and social practices for the
undocumented is articulated by Didier Fassin: ‘Words do not
only name, qualify or describe. They found actions and orient
policies. By calling “clandestins” those foreigners who are on
French soil and in an irregular situation, we place them in a cat-
egory that conjures up certain images—for example, that of the
worker who has illegally entered the country—and justifies poli-
cies preventing or repressing such acts of transgression. These
images and policies are in some way fashioned after our process
of naming.’ 14
The apocalyptic scenario of a destructive wave of migrants
flooding Europe to the point of recognizability resonates in poli-
cies that have externalized the European border onto African
territory and its governance. The externalization of the border
has contributed to the reconfiguration of African territory and
mobility, so that it is currently rendered unauthorized from
within various of Africa to the EU. French philosopher Etienne
Balibar analyzes the intersection of the EU’s border and identity
management in Africa, where it has erected a fence reinforced
by ‘fortifications, including ditches, roads, towers of observa-
tion, the cutting of trees, and leveling of hills, on both sides of the
border separating the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla on
the Moroccan side of the Strait of Gibraltar.’ Balibar briefly dis-
cusses the historical transformation of border management from
within to its current displacement to the ‘other side’:
[The fence is] located on the South Bank of the Mediterrane-
an and divid[es] from its environment a European (or more
generally Northern) enclave, whose existence results from
complex colonial processes and vicissitudes, and [acquires]
now a broader function. My hyperbolic suggestion is that [it]
14
Didier Fassin, ‘“Clandestin” ou “Exclus”? Quand les Mots Font de la
Politique,’ Politix 34 (1996), 77.
can be viewed as [a] section of a ‘great Wall of Europe’ un-

der construction, except, and this is very important, that the
Great Wall of China was built over the centuries inside the
Empire. The great Wall of Europe is built on the other side
(but in fact what this shows is also that we find ourselves in
a geo-historical situation in which the location of the border,
and therefore also its concept, is a complex and equivocal
notion). 15
The Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, Europe’s only land

border with Africa, have been transformed into ‘aggressively
defended fortress cities, enclosed by security fences that are pa-
trolled by the Moroccan army and Spain’s Guardia Civil’ 16 and
reinforced with ‘infrared cameras […] as well as tear gas canis-
ters, noise and movement sensors and control towers.’ 17 Balibar
has described the African-European border as ‘a normalized
state of exception,’ in which ‘the violent police operations con-
tinuously performed by some European states (with the help of
neighboring non-European subject states, such as Libya or Mo-
rocco) on behalf of the whole [European] community, including
the establishment of camps, amount to a kind of permanent bor-
der war against migrants.’ 18 As Ali Bensaâd explains, Europe has
increasingly tried to ‘deport’ migration controls, ‘mustering the
Maghreb countries into the role of a sub-contractor for repres-
15
Etienne Balibar, ‘Strangers as Enemies: Further Reflections on the
Aporias of Citizenship,’ Working Paper no. 06/4 (Hamilton, Canada:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster Univer-
sity, 2006).
16
Amanda Crawley Jackson, ‘Cette Poetique du Politique: Political and
Representational Ecologies in the Work of Yto Barrada,’ L’Esprit Cre-
ateur 51, no. 1 (Spring 2011), 55.
17
‘World’s Barriers: Ceuta and Melilla,’ BBC News, November 5, 2009.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/8342923.stm
18
Etienne Balibar, ‘At the Borders of Citizenship: A Democracy in
Translation?’, European Journal of Social Theory 13, no. 3 (August
2010), 315.
sion delocalized far from European borders.’ 19 Morocco, in par-

ticular, has become a ‘deterritorialized site of filtration,’ coerced
through agreements and financial aid into acting as Europe’s
gendarme. 20
The transformation of Morocco into a borderland and more
broadly the reconfiguration of territorial and mobility in Africa
is also taken up in Atta’s tale of lack. What is significant is that
this lack defines not only the characters’ names and identities
but also those of the spaces they occupy. of identities and names
(not to mention destination endpoints) is that it is not just the
undocumented who are divested of their proper names, but the
mountain where they set up camp is never named (Gourougou
Mountain). Instead, As I mentioned, the narrator’s internal dia-
logue attempts to describe by making biblical allusions, like the
Tower of Babel. But even then, he misses the mark because the
Tower of Babel is then distorted into ‘Mountain of Babel.’ The
mountain is doubly made illegible to coherently describe the
conditions of the mountain upon which they are stranded. And,
while the exodus trope is embraced by the story to some point,
it does not feature the Sinai Mountain, or even some distortion
of its name, but rather a ‘Mountain of Babel/Babble’, highlight-
ing the incoherence visited upon the encampment by virtue of
their political, representation illegibility. The dissonance be-
tween the mountain and encampment, place and people, sug-
gests that not only have the characters become illegible but the
spaces of Africa, as well. As I mentioned, current migration nar-
ratives link the journey within and out of Africa to an ‘exodus,’
with its liberatory potential. But many narratives also ignore the
currently redrawn African territory—be it the Sahara, the North
African Mediterranean coastal cities, or the cites south of the
19
Ali Bensaâd, ‘The Militarization of Migration Frontiers in the Medi-
terranean,’ in The Maghreb Connection: Movements of Life Across North
Africa, eds Ursula Biemann and Brian Holmes (Barcelona: Actar, 2006),
18.
20
Jackson, 54.
Sahara—as passages of potential captivity on the road to libera-

tion (from poverty, war, familial pressure). But for the undocu-
mented migrants in the story, the exodus does not end in trium-
phal return—a return from history’s exile—but rather liberation
and arrival are endlessly deferred—an exodus that remains in
rotation, a movement captured in suspension. This is because
the Promised Land has redrawn the map of Africa into chaotic
rather than redemptive zones for its aspiring migrants.
Atta reflects further on the un-recognizability and illegibil-
ity of the continent for its internal migrants by highlighting the
contemporary transformation of the Mediterranean from one
port of call among many in a journey into a dead-end and a
trap. The Mediterranean Sea, mythologized as the center of
movement and travel across many eras, ends up offering immo-
bility and paralysis for migrant characters, who live in the en-
campment for years, waiting for the right moment to bypass the
newly erected barriers, so they may cross. In contrast, as inhos-
pitable as the Sahara seems to those crossing, it offers a mobility
that the encampment at the edge of the Mediterranean does not.
Historically, the Sahara has featured as Africa’s Other, as Ann
McDougall discusses:
the perception that would see the Sahara as ‘other than’ the
real Africa, as home to those who perpetuate violence on it.
It accentuates, by inference, the concept of the Sahara as
‘enemy’ to that real Africa, providing an ideal canvas on
which to play out any number of scenarios. 21
According to McDougall, the Sahara as Africa’s Other, inhospi-

table chaos, gap, a chasm, abyss, in its evacuation of meaning-
fulness and coherence, is at the same time in its emptiness sub-
ject to be filled with meaning, to be inscribed with the potential
imposition of order. McDougall traces this archaeology of
21
Anne McDougall, ‘Constructing Emptiness: Islam, Violence, and Ter-
ror in the Historical Making of the Sahara,’ Journal of Contemporary
African Studies 25, no. 1 (2007), 25.
knowledge, construction of emptiness and its (re-) signification

as Africa’s Other, to the current imposition of order in the form
of War Against Terror campaigns now targeting the Sahara De-
sert. 22 But in Atta’s rendering of the Sahara, it is not inhospitable
and not emptied of meaning—abject Other, expelled from Africa
for its lack of trustworthiness, its criminality, its fearsomeness.
The most criminal aspect of the desert crossing—besides the de-
sert border crossing itself—is the Tuareg smuggler who demands
extra funds mid-journey across the Sahara. The desert, typically
theorized as a homogenous pure space of possibilities for travel-
ing, hiding, smuggling, wandering, ‘losing oneself’ 23 to the point
of disorientation, a space engulfed by the real place of the sur-
rounding territories, is depicted in ‘Twilight Trek’ as a produc-
tion of histories of African and African-Arab border control,
monitored by members of the surrounding nations, corrupted by
power struggles, and overlaid with a transnational smuggling
network. The traditionally conceptualized fantastical ‘void’ of
the Sahara Desert is realistically conveyed as a ‘worldly’ place.
Moreover, the desert offers and fulfills its promise of movement,
because it is here rather than the Mediterranean Sea where the
migrants are able to move freely, despite fear of restrictions by
border police. And, even when the fearsome natural elements
22
McDougall notes the conceptual alignment between the Sahara and a
site, home to ‘terror’ and ‘terrorists’, not to mention the war launched
upon them. The current coup in Mali to create a Tuareg state, Azawad,
is evocative of this construct, since the developments of the overthrow
are too couched in terms of ‘chaos’. Linking ‘Islam’ with the Sahara
(both contemporary ‘ambivalent’ topics, McDougall claims) ensures that
both Islam and the Sahara will ‘continue to have an uneasy, potentially
threatening relationship, with the area defined as “Africa”.’
23
See Lidia Curti’s reading of the Sahara Desert from a ‘westerner’s’
perspective in Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky as a path to ‘losing oneself’ or
‘going native,’ the ultimate path to ‘zeroing the ego’ in ‘Death and the
Female Traveler: Male Visions’ in The Postcolonial Question: Common
Skies, Divided Horizons, eds Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (London:
Routledge, 1996), 125.
(sand and heat) seem to overcome the characters, they are able
to have a voice as much as they feel choked by heat and sand. It
is here where signifiers and their referents correspond, in oppo-
sition to the confusing and jarring site, and its name ‘Mountain
of Babel,’ by the Mediterranean Sea.
So, although the desert and sea may appear as one contigu-
ous secreting passage, a dangerous exilic ‘wilderness’ stretching
interminably ahead for the migrants, the desert offers a mobility
that the encampment at the edge of the Mediterranean, a site of
immobility, does not. In fact, the Sahara in the narrative is what
the Mediterranean would have been in the past. One would
think that because the narrative begins with a transit point (be-
fore the journey across the Sahara) and ends in a transit point
(the journey across the Mediterranean), this time of transit and
waiting would link these spaces, suggesting a conceptual paral-
lel evocative of David Abulafia’s notion of the Sahara Desert as a
‘Mediterranean’ construct. He writes:
The Sahara was a true Mediterranean in the sense that it
brought very different cultures into contact, and across the
open spaces they brought not merely articles of trade but
ideas, notably religious ones, and styles of architecture ap-
propriate to the Muslim culture they implanted on the
northern edges of Black Africa. We talk of the Mediterranean
and of the Mediterranean Sea, and we often assume we mean
much the same thing. But here lies the root of a significant
confusion. ‘Mediterranean’ means that which is between the
surrounding lands. Yet histories and geographies of ‘the
Mediterranean’ may concern themselves mainly with the
lands that surround the Mediterranean Sea and the peoples
who have inhabited them, to the extent of paying rather lit-
tle attention to the bonds that have linked the opposing
shores of the Mediterranean world … 24
David Abulafia, ‘Mediterraneans,’ in Rethinking the Mediterranean, ed.

24
William Vernon Harris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 64.

The Sahara as a structural ‘Mediterranean’ in itself is evocative

of the desert networks of mobility allowing people and cultures
to travel across Africa in the story, effectively undermining the
emptiness, void, and chaos of the Saharan-Desert-as-Other that
captures and subsumes networks and their movements. Howev-
er, Atta’s story reflects that this is no longer the case: despite the
mythical mobility of the Mediterranean, it is the desert that of-
fers meaning in the journey, a correspondence of signifiers, and
moreover, movement, which the Mediterranean and its en-
campment lacks in the story. The temporality of the last transit
point in the story, the encampment on the Mediterranean Sea
itself, mythologized as the center of movement and travel across
eras, ends up offering immobility and paralysis for migrant
characters, who live there for years waiting for the right mo-
ment to cross, waiting to gather enough money.
However, both sea and desert are mirrored to some extent,
in that the heterotopic imagining of the Mediterranean in this
story is possible through imagining the desert and vice-versa.
The heterotopic potential of the relationship is that the desert is
not only the Mediterranean’s ‘other’, it also disrupts its utopic
imagining. It is through the relationship between the desert and
Abulafia uses the Mediterranean as a template to be applied to ‘Middle

Seas’ in other parts of the world, like the Sahara, which is characterized
by ease of contacts between very diverse cultures. This not only puts to
task the divide separating North and sub-Saharan Africa and the ten-
dency to view the Sahara Desert as an impenetrable barrier dividing the
continent into the northern ‘white’ and sub-Saharan ‘black’ Africa, but
he explores the shared history and culture among the regions of Africa
linked by the Sahara Desert through centuries of continued exchanges
and interactions. Contact among the Sahara and its peripheries contin-
ue to this day to be platforms of interconnected peoples and cultures.
Despite trans-Saharan cultural contact spanning centuries, this inaccu-
rate perception of Africa as two distinct zones separated by an empty
wasteland of desert continues to influence the way people think about
this region and the continent as a whole.
the sea that either is imagined in the text. For example, it is the
desert that in fact unravels the utopia of the Mediterranean as a
site of exchange and mobility. Indeed, the Mediterranean coastal
town is not a site of travel, ease of movement, networks—not
like the desert imagined in the story. If heterotopias ‘always pre-
suppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them
and makes them penetrable’, 25 then it must be emphasized that
neither are absolutely enclosed systems—they are open unto
each other. Just as it is through the porous sites of the utopic
cosmopolitan Mediterranean open to the thwarted and sup-
pressed mobility of the undocumented on the Mediterranean
that these sites heterotopically reveal the fantasy of the Mediter-
ranean, then it is through the thwarted and suppressed mobility
of the undocumented crossing the desert that the utopic Medi-
terranean is revealed.
Reconfiguration of territory through the erection of borders
has given rise to the undocumented, the unnamed within Africa,
suspended not only between places but between perceptual,
epistemological, and juridical ‘sanctioning’. They could be seen
but not seen as bound by laws to political representation. Atta’s
pre-emptive closure of epistemological recognizability for mi-
grants who have yet to reach a future shore is not a typical fore-
shadowing because the story closes not at the expected destina-
tion but at a transit point in the journey, but rather it is a reve-
lation of what is to come after the story ends. Atta positions the
speculative figure of the unnamed and unrecognized narrator as
a reflection of a possible, future scenario—exponential divest-
ment of political recognizability (in the EU) after the story ends.
In a sense, inevitability is a design of the future EU arrival
she has her narrator imagine. The narrative begins with a transit
point and ends in a transit point, seeming to loop the journey in
rotation and in suspension, suggesting one continuous limbo.
While the story ends with the characters in limbo on the Moroc-
can mountain, it still gives us glimpses of a possible future for
25
Foucault, 1986, 26.
these transmigrants (migrants in transit) once they are delivered

from this limbo—one in which they are not quite freed from
illegibility/incoherence/inscrutability. This future-oriented gaze
characteristic of the story is first indicated by the contrast be-
tween the absented social topography of Morocco and the atten-
tion the narrator accords the microtopographies of its borders
that mark the trip ahead: ‘the barbed wire fence,’ ‘Ceuta,’ ‘Melil-
la,’ and the Mediterranean’s ‘saltwater’. 26 Because transit migra-
tion is more of an uncertain process that introduces the possibil-
ity of a ‘continuum between emigration and settlement’, it is
perceived as a ‘contingency’, which explains the lack of percep-
tual engagement with Morocco as an uncertain locale. The ab-
sence of a current social topography also works to orient the
reader back to the microtopography of passages that lead to
their future—the fence, the water, the Spanish-occupied en-
claves of Ceuta and Melilla, separating the migrants from their
destination/destiny (essentially, features that mark Morocco as
the EU’s externalized borderland).
One gets a sense of what awaits him on the other shore
when his mother’s voice, in his mind, urges vigilance toward
past stories and headlines that point to the gap between arrival,
in terms of a spatial destination, and an arrival, in terms of citi-
zenship, documentation, legal identity, and political representa-
tion. She begins, ‘Here are real stories from a modern African
exodus’:
… man from Rwanda, came by truck with his family. This
was long before the barbed wire was erected around Ceuta.
The family got into Ceuta all right; then they were kept in
detention for months, waiting for their lawyer to prove that
they were really from Rwanda.
What about the Sierra Leonean who, shortly after the barbed
wire went up, tried to scale it several times, until his skin
was practically shredded? He decided to swim the sea to get
26
Atta, 93.
to Spain. He had only one hand, by the way. The saltwater

stung his skin; he still made it to shore. His missing hand
was there to prove that he was fleeing a civil war.
What about the Nigerian who secretly regretted that her own
homeland was not war-torn, and hoped that the baby in her
belly would be considered worthy of asylum … 27
The narrator’s mother, or rather what he thinks his mother

would say if she were with him, recalls the past stories of cross-
ing migrants as figures of what is to come, a short-circuiting of
the boundaries between the past belonging to public discourse,
the present belonging to the narrator’s conscience, and the fu-
ture belonging to those on the other side of the Mediterranean.
Ultimately, she urges vigilance to the difference between a spa-
tial end and a political and legal closure of the undocumented
identity, whether it will be of illegibility, insensibility, defer-
ment, documentation, citizenship, or unfinished citizenship. As
Panagia concisely sums up in his Rancierian reading of border
crossings,
the regime of the page imposes itself with actuarial rigor
through the narratological demand that we justify our
movements in and across borders. That demand is premised
on our cultural, aesthetic, and political competence in telling
a story and to have that story make sense—that is, count as
sensible. Those not fluent in the credentialing skill of narra-
tive accountability will inevitably be questioned, suspicion
will arise, and the possibility of access will fall into limbo.
The narratological expectations that accompany border
crossings are a partition of the sensible that count as the per-
ceptual criteria for circulation within a set spatio-temporal
distribution that is a nation. In the case of the sans papiers, as
I have argued elsewhere, the possibility of part-taking in
crossings becomes further complicated by their anomic stat-
ure: without papers, the sans papiers are also without names.
27
Ibid, 93.
Thus it’s not only the case that they can be denied entry,
they are also unaccounted for as sensual intensities worthy
of perceptual attention, and hence insensible within the cur-
rent system of mimetic representation that could afford them
their human status. 28
The narrator’s mother leaps toward the future, at least in his

conscience, indicating that even once the ‘Promised Land’ is
reached, Africans will still have to ‘justify [their] movements in
and across borders’ and entry is premised on ‘cultural, aesthetic,
and political competence in telling a story and to have that story
make sense—that is, count as sensible.’ But, how does the narra-
tor count as ‘sensible’, or worthy of ‘perceptual attention,’ when
he doesn’t even have a real passport or name? How will he ‘jus-
tify’ his own border crossing when he cannot even speak French
while his passport states he comes from a Francophone country,
thus not ‘fluent in the credentialing skill of narrative accounta-
bility’? Even those for whom asylum should be legally guaran-
teed must possess ‘cultural, aesthetic, and political competence
in telling a story and to have that story make sense—that is,
count as sensible,’ to be accountable for their claims. As border
subjects, they not only have to cross national borders but also
the ‘partition of the sensible’ to remain in the new host country.
Just as the unreal space of the Mediterranean is revealed as
such through the dialogic space of the desert, the hidden spaces
of the undocumented Sub-Saharans interact with the Mediterra-
nean coastal town, reflecting a heterotopic porosity. The transit
point is by no means a closed one. Secrecy and undetectability
extend from the desert to the town on the Mediterranean. While
this story holds less fantastical features than other texts I have
analyzed, like other texts it deals with generic fantasy—the pro-
leptic imaginary nested in the Exodus narrative, which reveals
the desert as both continuous with and distinct from the Medi-
terranean—to uncover the social fantasies of nativism, which
28
Panagia, ‘The Improper Event: On Jacques Rancière’s Mannerism,’
Citizenship Studies 13, no. 3 (2009), 301.
render the entire Saharan-Mediterranean route into a passage

manqué, with no end in sight. In essence, the story foils the na-
tivist fantasy by foiling the exodus trope, because the migrant
characters are abandoned in a limbo of political unrecognizabil-
ity. The migrant ‘tides’ and ‘floods’ and ‘exodus’ of nativist so-
cial fantasy are appropriated in the text, and revealed through
the proleptic imaginary as an empty social fantasy, since the
migrants are left adrift in limbo.
The proleptic imaginary of the story suggests that the illeg-
ibility and incoherence and ‘sensibility’ of the migrants as they
begin their journey across the Sahara and into Morocco will on-
ly reveal a passage manqué that extends from shore to shore, a
wilderness that imposes further incoherence, inscrutability, and
illegibility upon the migrants, with no Promised Land in sight.
Before the story ends, the unnamed narrator realizes his new
friend, Patience, had taken the money he gave her to reserve
both of their ‘spots’ for the trans-Mediterranean journey and
fled, leaving her pocket Bible behind. Stranded at the encamp-
ment on the edge of the Mediterranean, he flicks through it furi-
ously, from ‘Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus’ up to ‘Revelation,’ with-
out finding the biblical sign as to why she fled and without find-
ing the story of Moses leading the Israelites she told him. He
reads over the lines she quoted and does not recognize them or
realize they could be found, for one, in the Book of Exodus, sug-
gesting a discrepancy between what he heard and what he can
locate right in front of him. A breakdown of the correspondence
between that to which is referred and its referent ends the story
just as it began (in the same way that the beginning of the story
reveals the discrepancy between the name on his ID and his own
real name).
In the sense that what may be is contemplated as though it
were already in actual existence, the story submits to the antici-
patory, proleptic imagination by suggesting possibilities of the
future based on the past (the stories of African migrants ‘ripped
from the headlines’, so to speak, are an indication of the future
toward which the narrator is heading). Why even offer a future-
oriented gaze when the story is bound by suspended temporality
(limbo) as it relates to suspended identity (contingent nameless-
ness) which leads to suspended citizenship (undocumented sta-

tus in Africa and Europe)? Why offer a future that concedes the
resumption of movement when the ending of the story fore-
closed on its narration? It is not just that the migrants can be
denied entry to Europe, but also perceptual attention, rendering
them ‘insensible within the current system of mimetic represen-
tation that could afford them their human status’, once they
cross.
I submit that inevitability is part of the design of the mi-
grant’s path and process, as Atta sees it. If reconfiguration of
African territory into a European borderland has worked to
promote the discipline of the invasion of ‘nameless hordes’ to
Europe, 29 then creating a sense of inevitability to failed migrant
crossings is also a means of promoting the discipline of borders
in the public’s imagination, allayed by replayed media affirma-
tions of deferred migrant crossings, reduced to filmed intercep-
tions of flimsy boats on the Mediterranean to display the ever-
preserved integrity of European borders. 30 The apprehension of
migrant mobility constitutes different means of European space
production—one anticipatory, policy-based, and preemptive of
territorial invasion by migrant masses, and the other retrospec-
tive, media-staged, performative, and redemptive of territorial
integrity from invasion. Enlisted in the management of Europe-
an borders, Morocco has played part in the invasion drama. 31 In
29
Atta, 97–98.
30
Biblical references to the military characteristic of locusts advancing
like a well-organized army, their concentration in numbers as they
swarm and congregate to the point of eating their own weight in food,
and, subsequently, transforming the Garden of Eden into desert waste,
their plague-like effects, are plentiful. In Exodus, the Lord brings a
powerful east wind to carry locust swarm from the desert into the de-
veloped areas, destroying and ravaging pastureland and agricultural
fields. See John Beck, Dictionary of Biblical Imagery (Grand Rapids, MI:
Zondervan, 2010), 158.
31
Pacts between the EU and North African states have given rise to a
general anti-immigration stance. Mass border charges occur at Ceuta
the Tangier newspaper Al-Shamal, a 2005 article describing sub-

Saharan Africans trying to scale the security fences separating
Morocco from the Spanish-ruled enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla
featured the headline ‘“Black locusts” are taking over Moroc-
co!’ 32 Moroccan authorities banned Al-Shamal for using racist
language, but the European and North African press continued
to use terms like ‘massive invasion’ and ‘plague’ to describe mi-
grants. 33 Migration ‘invasions’ and ‘swarms’ fit into apocalyptic
visions of nation-state obsolescence: the well-organized military
advance of swarms emerging from the biblical Abyss leave utter
irrevocable devastation in their wake activated by the Apoca-
lypse. Yet, EU’s own fortress anxieties, often expressed through
apocalyptic images of migrant ‘exodus’ and ‘floods,’ have trans-
formed Morocco into an outsourced EU border-patrol nation. 34
and Melilla involving the loss of lives. Moroccan authorities have inten-
sified internal anti-immigration campaigns, deporting migrants and
abandoning others in the Saharan desert. Libya has also come under
severe criticism for playing the EU’s police in Africa. Xenophobia has
fueled strict internal measures against illegal immigrants.
32
Al-Shamal, September 12, 2005.
33
Elie Goldschmidt, ‘Storming the Fences: Morocco and Europe’s Anti-
Migration Policy,’ MERIP 239 (Summer 2006).
http://www.merip.org/mer/mer239/storming-fences
34
Analysts of African migration to the EU, like Hein de Haas and Sarah
Collinson, have pointed out the ‘apocalyptic imagery’ (de Haas, 1305),
including ‘exodus,’ ‘plagues,’ and ‘floods,’ in discourse of migration to
the EU. See de Haas, ‘The Myth of Invasion: The Inconvenient Realities
of African Migration to Europe,’ Third World Quarterly 29, no. 7 (2008):
1305–1322. See Sarah Collinson, Shore to Shore: The Politics of Migration
in Euro-Maghreb Relations (London: RIIA, 1996). Collinson discusses the
‘paranoia complex … which centered on apocalyptic images of a Eu-
rope under siege’ (40), where the threat of Islam, combined with the
rising North African demographic, was deemed most serious. Also, see
Please see J. David Cisneros, ‘Contaminated Communities: The Meta-
phor of “Immigrant as Pollutant” in Media Representations of Immigra-
tion’, Rhetoric & Public Affairs 11, no. 4 (2008), 569–601; David Shari-
atmadari, ‘Swarms, Floods, and Marauders: The Toxic Metaphors of the
Clearly the EU’s borders dynamic and discourse have had reso-
nance in Morocco.
In the EU, migration panic and anxiety are simultaneously
generated and contained within recurring media images intent
on delivering an endpoint to the clandestine journey narrative
through a perpetual loop of stranded migrants captured in the
process of interception, showing apprehended transgressors nev-
er reaching their destination. Ursula Biemann refers to this me-
dia event-compression in clandestine migration imagery’s ‘fixed
spatial determination’ as a cinematographically staged ‘shot,’
wherein ‘reality is no longer represented but targeted … [and]
this particular shot becomes the symbol that encapsulates the
meaning in the entire drama’ of EU territorial redemption. 35 The
staccato of western media images capturing intercepted mi-
grants simultaneously evokes European anxiety in discovering
migrant ‘invasions,’ yet also brings satisfying spectacular closure
to territorial transgressions by showing them resolved—migrant
‘tides’ and ‘floods stemmed, an ‘exodus’ averted. These apoca-
lyptic projections of EU obsolescence in the midst of migrant
plague-like ‘tides’, ‘floods’, ‘exodus,’ and the ensuing disorder
ironically function in the media also as a means of ordering and
disciplining the coming ‘invasion’ and its inevitable destructive
influence.
So while western media images replay the ‘end’ of migra-
tion, endlessly deferring arrival beyond European shores for mi-
grants and the apocalyptic end, the closed-circuit imagery di-
rects the audience gaze backward toward the endlessly deferred
‘endpoints’ of a clandestine African ‘exodus,’ intercepted on the
Migration Debate’, The Guardian, August 10, 2015. Lastly, Jean

Raspail’s 1973 French novel Camp des Saints (Paris: Laffont, 1973), The
Camp of the Saints (trans. Norman Shapiro, Petoskey, MI: Social Con-
tract Press, 1994), which warns of an approaching apocalypse in the
form of non-European migration floods, is a precursor to contemporary
apocalyptic migration discourse.
35
Ursula Biemann, ‘Dispersing the Viewpoint: Sahara Chronicle’, 79.
edges of an already endangered Europe, which still implicitly

(since the eschatological analogy still stands) views itself as the
‘Promised Land.’ The media aesthetic’s elusive ‘endpoint,’ the
cinematographically recursive foiled border crossing, assures
that appearances remain as they are in a ‘timeless time’. This—
the continuity of ‘appearance’ generated by the media—is the
power of circulation itself, in Rancierian terms.
According to Jacques Rancière in his exploration of aesthet-
ic politics, the ‘policing’ power of circulation assures a continui-
ty of appearance, scene, aesthetic, a paradigm of visuality that
orients the attention in such a way that what emerges as rele-
vant is that which makes ‘sense’, what is available to sense per-
ception, what is already sensible (as what is available to bodily
sensations and comprehension). 36 For Rancière, politics is what
36
The ‘partition of the senses’ is discussed further in Jacques Rancière’s
Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rock-
hill (New York: Continuum, 2004). Rancière asserts that politics arise
as the dissensus that disrupts the flow or circuit of the sensible, that
which is counted as sensible (audibility and visibility of new political
subjectivities is the source of a fundamental dissensus). But dissensus is
not quite reduced to dissent or antagonism. For Rancière, aesthetic acts
are ‘configurations of experience that create new modes of sense per-
ception and induce novel forms of political subjectivity’ (9). Thus, polit-
ical subjectivity is understood in terms of actions, silences, thoughts,
dreams, perceptions, or enunciations, not in terms of social content, but
as the production of formal arrangements and forms of sense distribu-
tion, which are aesthetic. Rancière provides a historical example of the
plebeian secession on the Aventine Hill in Ancient Rome in 1830, when
the plebeians demanded a treaty with the patricians which was denied
on the basis that plebeians did not have human speech, to illustrate
dissensus as simultaneously the disruption of the sensible/perceptible
and the emergence of a political subjectivity. In an interview with
Panagia, ‘Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Rancière’
(2000), Rancière explains the narratological demand to justify right to
speech begins not with an argument but a mandate to ‘invent the scene
upon which spoken words may be audible’ (116), and this in his formu-
lation is politics-as-dissensus: the emergence of a subjectivity whose
interrupts the index of knowledge/sensible, what he refers to as

a dissensus that entails a ‘discomposition’ of the ‘correspondenc-
es of signification’ that disrupts the assignation of value, identi-
ty, or reference to an object. 37 I bring dissensus up in the field of
visibility and audibility established by the circuitous loop of in-
terceptions because although the objects are made visi-
ble/audible in the shots, they only emerge therein as subjects
(demanding political subjectivity) at the border of the EU, as
border subjects, clandestine, un-ID’d, undocumented, and un-
named, whose anomic stature also render reigning modes of
perceptibility to be suspended at the border. By ‘border sub-
jects,’ I do not mean subjects who inhabit and traverse territorial
and cultural borders as part of the everyday, but I mean subjects
who are identified with the border as frontier, the border’s ex-
cluded, those who attempted to disrupt the circulation of ap-
pearances as they were in a mobility-media regime, the consen-
sus, by not only crossing the border but the ‘partition of the sen-
sible.’ But for migrants, those who cross the border and enter
without ‘proper’ identification, the possibility of perceptual at-
tention as a condition to political subjectivity is also suspended,
internally, within borders.
The temporality of border subjects in the media closed-
circuit loop of interceptions (also policing reassurance that
things appearances remain as they are, a consensus of an un-
easy, dying Europe) is a temporality of deferral, waiting, an elu-
sive endpoint—just as it is for Atta’s characters. And, it is one
that she imagines reproduces itself in the condition of undocu-
mented migrant existence even after arrival, a limbo between
perceptual attention/sensible/partition of the sensible, political
representation, and citizenship. The power of circulation, to
appearance, determined by their own construction of a scene for ‘politi-

cal interlocution,’ is insensible because, according to phenomenological
preconditions they do not possess human speech, so it cannot register
according to the reigning modes of perceptibility.
37
Panagia, 2009, 299.
keep things appearing as they are, consensus, on the border is

continuous within, not collapsing the border dynamic, but re-
leasing the border dynamic within, to seeing migrants as bor-
ders.
Arrival in Europe will not herald the promised transfor-
mation into legible and sensible, but will rather reveal itself as
an unresolved exodus, a precarious and prolonged wilderness—
at the edge of society and what it deems coherent and sensible,
outside of the realm of rights and legal protection. The wilder-
ness of the insensible will extend to encompass the passage
across the sea and, correspondingly, shapes and ultimately
overwhelms the encounter with Europe. The story ends at a
transit point, just as it began, sustaining a transience that leads
to exponential transience. The temporality of deferral, waiting,
elusive endpoint reproduces itself in the condition of undocu-
mented migrant existence even after arrival, a limbo between
perceptual attention, political representation, and citizenship.
CHAPTER 6.
DEATH AT THE BORDER:
MAKING AND UNMAKING THE
MIGRATING BODY 1
In her 2009 tripartite French novel Trois Femmes Puissantes

(translated to Three Strong Women in 2012), Marie NDiaye ex-
plores the trials of three loosely connected women, who reveal
the traffic links between France and Senegal. 2 In the first part,
Parisian lawyer Norah reluctantly returns to visit her ailing fa-
ther in Senegal. In the second, Fanta's troubled French husband
narrates his reasons for convincing her to migrate from Senegal
to rural France. In the last, young and impoverished widow
Khady is forcefully deposited in the hands of a smuggler by her
mother-in-law to be trafficked to France (presumably so she can
stay with her cousin Fanta and send money back to her in-laws).
Thus, it is a novel at once about the African diaspora in France
and the undocumented journey from Africa to European territo-
ry. In creating these linked, albeit not interchangeable, charac-
ters who are in various stages of the ‘journey’ in their sense of
French identity and belonging, NDiaye reveals a presumption of
1
This chapter was first published in the ‘Essays of the Forum
Transregionale Studien’ (2/2016).
2
The novel was translated to Three Strong Women by John Fletcher in
2012. The text I quote is from the translation, with the exception of one
section he omits translating.
169
validity and licitness that the women bear as Africans in their

relationship to France—whether their journey is undocumented
or not.
Set apart from other critiques of the novel that equally ana-
lyze all three characters, 3 this essay focuses on the last ‘strong
woman’ of the triptych—Khady Demba. Although it focuses on
Khady as an allegorical figure of today’s African migrants
pushed out of a homeland that refuses to provide for them (due
to unemployment, poverty, corruption) and into perilous jour-
neys, it also draws on the other two ‘strong women’ to demon-
strate how gender, race, and class limit these women—whose
survival presumably depends on their strength. The other ‘strong
women’ function as a socioeconomic counterpoint to Khady,
who is impoverished and does not have access to the material
resources and social capital available to the other women. In
their European-African journeys, the border is not neutral, but
rather a site of power that privileges and marginalizes—
certainly based on axes of race, nationality, and gender, but also
on class. Due to the material restrictions on Khady’s trek North,
on foot and in the back of trucks, across the African continent,
through the Sahara, and toward the Mediterranean, NDiaye
forecloses on the possibility of neglecting the material effects of
specific borders: there is no cookie-cutter airport to homogenize
the journey into one unforgettable global experience. In Khady’s
story, the actual journey across borders is not an afterthought in
the new homeland, as it is with the other women in the novel,
but rather it encompasses her entire narrative. With Khady,
NDiaye focalizes the specifics of a Saharan border topography
3
See Anna-Leena Toivanen, ‘Not at Home in the World: Abject Mobili-
ties in Marie Ndiaye’s Trois Femmes Puissantes and NoViolet Bulawayo's
We Need New Names’, Postcolonial Text 10, no. 1 (2015); Deborah
Gaensbauer, ‘Migrations and Metamorphosis in Marie Ndiaye’s Trois
Femmes Puissantes’, Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature 38, no. 1
(2014); Anne-Martine Parent, ‘À leur corps défendant: défaillances et
excrétions dans Trois femmes puissantes de Marie NDiaye’, L’Esprit Cre-
ateur 53, no. 2 (2013).
6. DEATH AT THE BORDER 171
that puts into momentum Khady’s narrative until the denoue-

ment: from the border town suffocated by the sand of the Sahara
(a ‘town infested with sand, with low sand-colored houses and
with streets and gardens covered in sand’) 4 to the haphazard
camp set up by undocumented sub-Saharan migrants in a ‘make-
shift tent of plastic and foliage’, 5 deep in a Moroccan forest atop
the Mediterranean whose branches the migrants use to build a
ladder to climb atop the razor-wire fence separating Morocco
from European territory, the Spanish enclave of Melilla.
Like the last chapter, this chapter also delves into transit
migration. But unlike the last chapter, the focus here is not on
the distinction or similarity between the Sahara Desert as the
starting point of the journey and the Mediterranean as the trans-
it point. In fact, the entire journey is one continuous passage of
assault on Khady’s body. This enduring passage is significant
because here we do away with place difference and the charac-
ter’s reflection upon it. If migrant routes make the Mediterrane-
an or Sahara Desert and towns on either sides heterotopic by
creating a dialectical relationship between the inside and out-
side of their destination sites, simultaneously internal to, a part
of norms regulating the cultural spaces they other, and external
to them, then Khady’s route signals her continuous passage of
exclusion from beginning to end. There is no apprehension of
being an insider in any site she crosses. Certainly, Khady repre-
sents the abject from the start, but it also appears that NDiaye
signals that we are now woefully beyond any heterotopic imagi-
nation. NDiaye suggests that for women like Khady, there has
never been an open, adventurous, Africa or Mediterranean, free
of interminable obstruction. It has to be emphasized that places
outside the norm, the utopic, do not make up heterotopia, but
rather their subjective relationality to insider, utopic places that
4
Marie NDiaye, Trois femmes puissantes, Paris: Gallimard, 2009; Three
Strong Women, translated by John Fletcher (New York: Knopf, 2012),
716.
5
Ibid., 744.
makes them heterotopic by the migrants. So as bleak as it seems,

this is it, this is where we are: perhaps for some, ‘we were never
heterotopic,’ so to speak.
Unlike other chapters where there is a discussion of the fan-
tastical as giving life to the heterotopic imagination, and where
the social fantasy interacts with the genre-based fantasy to do
so, here the only perception of impact of the social fantasy, as it
interacts with genre-based fantasy, is its impact on the material,
the corporeal, the breaking body of Khady. The focus here is the
impact of the discursive (including metaphors of social fantasy)
on social reality. In detailing Khady’s journey, it is not that
NDiaye projects such a hyper-focus on the everyday violence of
borders that she completely detaches from the abstract, meta-
phoric, and discursive aspects of borders that articulate lines of
difference and identity. In fact, she poses all her characters on
the brink of various discursive and ideational borders to mark
various steps in identity formation. Rather, NDiaye highlights
the interconnectedness of the material and metaphor-
ic/ideational in apprehending the border. She does this by play-
ing with the abstract—literalizing metaphors and the figurative
to highlight the way language and the ideational intersect with
and even affect and shape the material. In doing so, she draws
attention to the categories in which the world is represented and
to the way these conventions shape social reality. And, NDiaye
does this by appropriating a nativist social fantasy and then tak-
ing it apart, while allowing the fantastic hermeneutic of the
novel linger.
The device of shape shifting allows for a variety of discur-
sive borders to be established in the novel. Shape shifting from
human to bird gestures toward a border other than the national
one the characters straddle: the border between the human and
nonhuman. After all, the transformation of the women to fungi-
ble, commodified, consumable objects also lies at the center of
the novel: certainly for Khady who never loses sight of her ‘un-
shakeable humanity’ 6 despite being trafficked and prostituted,

but also for Norah and her sister who, as children, are treated by
their father like disposable objects that could be exchanged with
his wife for a son he considers indispensable enough to abduct.
Moreover, it also gestures toward an ethnic identity and affilia-
tion metamorphosis for Norah and one based on development
and resiliency of independence and individuality for Fanta.
Fantastical avian imagery is dispersed throughout the nov-
el. But, especially in a brief ‘Counterpoint’ at the end of each
section, Khady and the other women metamorphose into birds,
signaling both death and rebirth. The first section opens with
Norah, standing outside her Dakar childhood home, flustered by
the appearance of her ancient, decayed, birdlike father who
seems to have ‘flitted down’ 7 from a poinciana tree. In response
to her father’s summons to Senegal, Norah arrives expecting to
find the father she remembers from childhood—a fashionable,
arrogant, successful businessman: ‘[…] this man who […] had
worn none but the chicest of perfumes, this haughty and inse-
cure man.’ 8 Instead, she finds an unkempt old man that she
compares to a ‘plump old bird,’ 9 giving ‘the effect of his being
too heavy a bird, one that fell over each time he landed’. 10 In the
‘Counterpoint’, a birdlike Norah has joined her father in the
poinciana tree:
[…] perched among the branches now bereft of flowers, sur-
rounded by the bitter smell of the tiny leaves; she was there
in the dark, in her lime-green dress, at a safe distance from
her father’s phosphorescence. Why would she come and
alight on the poinciana if it wasn’t to make peace, once and
for all? 11
6
Ibid., 840.
7
Ibid., 10.
8
Ibid., 30.
9
Ibid., 30.
10
Ibid., 13.
11
Ibid., 80.
When she ponders, ‘Poor soul, who'd have thought he'd wind up
a plump old bird, clumsy flying and strong smelling?’, 12 she
could have hardly thought that she too would end up transform-
ing into a bird, turning into her father. Her metamorphosis is
identitarian, perhaps indicating a liberating reconciliation in
terms of her troubled relationship with her father and her pater-
nal heritage. Or, her death is a metaphor of her single homoge-
nous French identity, her rebirth a reconciliation of her varied,
syncretic identities—French and Senegalese, as suggested by
Deborah Gaensbauer in her essay ‘Migrations and Metamorpho-
sis in Marie NDiaye’s Trois Femmes Puissantes’. Gaensbauer
acutely captures the use of fantasy to bring women’s ‘migration
struggles’ to the fore of a discussion on dehumanization: ‘Their
experiences of dispossession, elucidated by means of an innova-
tive use of the literary fantastic, are reflective of the traumatical-
ly dehumanizing, unequal power relations governing contempo-
rary women’s migration struggles.’ 13 Michael Sherringham
claims that the fantastical is a common element in NDiaye’s
work, which ‘makes very different modes of understanding coex-
ist—the real and the fabulous (or the fantastic), science and
folklore (or superstition), the European and the non-European.’ 14
In the second section, a teacher in her native Senegal, Fanta
ends up isolated in the south of France due to her white French
husband's scandalous fight with students at the Dakar high
school where they both taught. In the ‘Counterpoint’, rendered
12
Ibid., 30–31.
13
Deborah, Gaensbauer, ‘Migrations and Metamorphosis in Marie
NDiaye's Trois Femmes Puissante,’ Studies in 20th and 21st Century Litera-
ture 38, no. 1 (2014), 1.
14
This is Gaensbauer’s translation from the French in the same article,
5. The original states ‘…fait coexister des modes de compréhension très
différents—le réel et le fabuleux (ou le fantastique), la science et le
folklore (ou la superstition), l’européen et le non-européen.’ Michael
Sheringham, ‘Mon cœur à l’étroit: espace et éthique,’ in Marie NDiaye:
l'étrangeté à l'œuvre, eds Andre Asibong and Shirley Jordan (Paris: Press-
es Universitaires de Septentrion, 2009), 175.
through the perspective of a neighbor woman of whom her hus-

band is contemptuous, a birdlike Fanta appears waving toward
the neighbor in a gesture of solidarity:
[…] her neighbor's long neck and small delicate head that
seemed to emerge from the bay tree like a miraculous
branch, an unlikely sucker looking at Madame Pulmaire’s
garden with big wide eyes and lips parted in a big, calm
smile […]. She waved to Madame Pulmaire, she waved to
her slowly, deliberately, purposefully. 15
Through this birdlike metamorphosis NDiaye suggests that, de-

spite her troubled husband and the vagaries of a racist French
society, Fanta is poised for resiliency—the ability to recover her
autonomy after a vertiginous ‘uprooting’ from Senegal, as also
suggested by Gaensbauer in her critique of the novel. 16 Her fan-
tastical metamorphosis, like Norah's, is also based on the death
of an old identity and rebirth into a new one. In the last section,
Khady’s transformation into a bird in the novel takes on a value
beyond metaphor, as suggested by the real—rather than meta-
phorical or identitarian—death of her body. The appearance of
birds mark various stages of Khady’s migration—as symbols of
her fellow migrants’ squalor and torment, for one: as she starts
out on her journey, Khady hears the shrieking of crows ‘in their
fury at being always hungry.’ 17 Birds also symbolize her traffick-
ers’ ferocity and as signs of illusory episodes: suffering from ex-
haustion and hunger, she perceives the similarity between the
trafficker’s round sunglasses and agitation and nearby crows,
wherein the trafficker transforms into a terrifying crow ‘subtly
changed into a man in order to carry Khady off.’ 18 Birds also
function as memory triggers: seagulls hovering over migrants
pushed toward a flimsy boat provoke a flashback to a childhood
15
NDiaye, 587.
16
Gaensbauer, 10.
17
NDiaye, 632.
18
Ibid., 644.
memory of birds at the fish market where she bargained on be-

half of her grandmother, a memory that fortifies her ‘unshakable
humanity.’ 19
Trois Femmes Puissantes ends with Khady leaving the forest
atop the Mediterranean beach, rushing the barbed wire fence
separating Morocco from Spain, clambering to the top with oth-
er sub-Saharan migrants while hearing border guards firing into
the air on either side, and finally falling—a descent without end.
Her story ends with her ‘letting go, falling slowly backward, and
thinking then that the person of Khady Demba—less than a
breath, scarcely a puff of air—was surely never to touch the
ground, but would float eternal, priceless, too evanescent ever
to be smashed in the cold, blinding glare of the floodlights.’ 20 As
her head hits the ground after her fatal fall, she sees a bird with
long gray wings above the fence: ‘[…] that's me, Khady Demba,
she thought in the bedazzlement of that revelation, knowing
that she was that bird and that the bird knew it.’ 21 The brief
‘Counterpoint’ section following Khady’s story reveals the
thoughts of a restaurant worker in France, Lamine—a man who
betrayed Khady on her travels: he would think of her and thank
her, as a ‘bird would vanish in the distance.’ 22
Khady’s metamorphosis into a bird is set apart from those
of the other ‘strong women’ in the novel: her transformation
signals a death and rebirth that are not identity-based or prem-
ised on difference and subjectivity in the migration process.
Here, there is a merging of the real and the fantastical. While
the other women transcend the boundaries of who they once
were to become other types of women in the context of their
migrations, her transcendence is from life to death to a rebirth
into another life. The death of her body is literal, rather than
19
Ibid., 840.
20
Ibid., 757.
21
The translator, Fletcher, did not include this significant paragraph,
the last before the ‘Counterpoint’, in his translation.
22
NDiaye, 759.
metaphorical. Unlike critiques that center shapeshifting as a way

of arguing for the relatedness of the African migrant women
despite vast differences between their social and economic posi-
tions, I argue that shapeshifting marks Khady apart from the
other ‘strong women’. Her literal death before metamorphosis
takes place does not afford her the indeterminacy and ambiguity
that the metaphoric death and rebirth of the other migrant
women allow.
While the women are connected by avian imagery, it func-
tions as a metaphor in the novel until Khady Demba appears to
transform into a bird upon her falling death. This is the point
where the fantastical element of the novel is assured. That is
because when there is a suspension of the real and uncertainty
emerges—did Khady die or transform into a bird?—is the fantas-
tical element apparent. So indeed the fantastical supports and
strengthens the metaphorical connections.
In literalizing symbols, figures, and metaphors, NDiaye re-
veals the divide between representational elements of displace-
ment and the border zone and their material-historical reality.
By ‘representational’, I mean the abstract, metaphoric, and dis-
cursive aspects of social and spatial categorizations. One con-
cern is the use of the concept of borders to articulate difference
and subjectivity in social and cultural studies to the point that
the term slides into metaphoric usage. 23 Cultural geographers
Keith Woodward and John Paul Jones III address the depolitici-
23
One example (cited in Keith Woodward and John Paul Jones III, ‘On
the Border with Deleuze and Guattari’, in B/ordering Space, eds Henk
van Houtum, Oliver Kramsch, and Wolfgang Zierhofer (Burlington, VT:
Ashgate, 2005) is John Welchman, who states: ‘No longer a mere
threshold or instrument of demarcation, the border is a crucial zone
through which contemporary (political, social, cultural) formations
negotiate with received knowledge and reconstitute the ‘horizon’ of
discursive identity’ (John C. Welchman, ‘The Philosophical Brothel’, in
Rethinking Borders, ed. John C. Welchman [Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996], 177–178).
zation at the heart of a representational and discursive use of

space for critics and theoreticians:
[…] when critics and theoreticians turn to the concept of
borders as an apparatus for articulating various lines of dif-
ference and subjectivity in social and cultural studies (e.g.,
Anzaldua, 1999; Kirby, 1996; Welchman, 1996), the term
may slide into metaphoric usage. According to Smith and
Katz, this maneuver can introduce absolutist and Euclidean
versions of spatial thinking that may dematerialize and
therefore depoliticize social space, as if borders did their
work solely within the netherland of abstract neutrality. 24
Indeed, these are criticisms lodged at theorists and critics, re-

moved from the realm of novelists. 25 However, holding the mi-
grant up as a metaphoric prism for the broader narratives of
humanity—the migrant-as-metaphor trope or displacement as a
trope—has been a fashionable literary tactic for fiction writers
up until recently. In 1985, Salman Rushdie wrote that the mi-
grant is the ‘defining figure of the 20th century’. According to
Rushdie, ‘this century of wandering’ has produced refugees and
writers carrying ‘cities in their bedrolls’, where ‘migration’ is not
limited to the act of crossing borders and frontiers but functions
as a prism through which other acts can be understood:
Migration across national frontiers is by no means the only
form of the phenomenon. In many ways, given the interna-
tional and increasingly homogeneous nature of metropolitan
culture, the journey from, for example, the Scottish High-
lands to London is a more extreme act of migration than a
move from, say, Bombay. But I want to go further than such
literalistic discussion: because migration also offers us one of
the richest metaphors of our age. The very word metaphor,
24
Woodward and Jones III, 237.
25
Many theorists like David Harvey are critical of the use of theoretical,
abstract, metaphoric, and discursive aspects of the social and spatial to
the detrimental neglect of the material effects of borders.
with its roots in the Greek words for bearing across, describes
a sort of migration, the migration of ideas into images. Mi-
grants—borne across humans—are metaphorical beings in
their very essence; and migration, seen as a metaphor, is
everywhere around us. We all cross frontiers; in that sense,
we are all migrant peoples. 26
Moreover, he suggests that migrants model what it was to be

human due to the loss of what renders their humanity—roots,
culture, social knowledge—and their attempts to create new
ways of being human. Migration here of course alludes not spe-
cifically to displacements of people across frontiers but to a state
of displacement that is universal and generally befalls human-
kind.
Salman Rushdie is certainly not the only writer drawn to
the creative and liberatory connotations attached to migration:
Parul Sehgal's article ‘New Ways of Being’ recounts how various
writers of the past century have made migration-as-trope a de-
termining feature of their literature and politics.
Roberto Bolaño once asked, ‘Can it be that we're all exiles?’
Aren't the themes of immigrant literature—estrangement,
homelessness, fractured identities—the stuff of all modern
literature, if not life? ‘Is it possible that all of us are wander-
ing strange lands?’ Kafka spoke to everyone when he wrote
in a (possibly apocryphal) diary entry: ‘Enclosed in my own
four walls, I found myself as an immigrant imprisoned in a
foreign country; […] I saw my family as strange aliens
whose foreign customs, rites and very language defied com-
prehension; […] though I did not want it, they forced me to
participate in their bizarre rituals.’ 27
26
Salman Rushdie, ‘On Günter Grass’, Granta 15 (March 1985).
http://granta.com/onguntergrass/
27
Parul Sehgal, ‘New Ways of Being’, New York Times, March 10, 2016.
Skepticism toward the migrant-as-metaphor has been more pro-

lific in the past few years. 28 Rushdie and others have been sub-
jected to various critiques for making of the migrant one of the
reigning literature and of displacement as a trope, revealing, in
opposition to the likes of Bolaño that the terrain of migration, is
not merely an internal psychic landscape. 29
Trois Femmes Puissantes is part of a wave of literature that
shows the optimism of the migrant novel—complete with up-
ward-mobility narratives accompanied by nostalgia for the
28
In response to Rushdie's claim that migrancy is characteristic of hu-
mankind, Amitava Kumar states: ‘[…] [the trope of migrancy] emerges
as an obsession in the pages of a writer like Rushdie. For him, in fact,
“the very word metaphor, with its roots in the Greek words for bearing
across, describes a sort of migration, the migration of ideas into imag-
es”. Rather than oppose the metaphorical to the literal, it is the idea of
the metaphorical itself that Rushdie renders literal and equates with a
universal condition […].’ Kumar adds: ‘There is a danger here in mi-
grancy becoming everything and nothing.’ Kumar suggests that this
obsessive celebration of migrancy is a result of the shame of having to
represent the Other to the west without having much to represent, a
shame of not living up to the tokenism foisted on the nonwestern writ-
er. Amitava Kumar, Passport Photos (Berkeley: UC Press, 2000), 13. See
Aijaz Ahmed, ‘Rushdie’s Shame: Postmodernism, Migrancy, and Repre-
sentations of Women’, Economic and Political Weekly 26, no. 24 (1991).
Also, see Shailja Sharma, ‘Salman Rushdie: The Ambivalence of Mi-
grancy’, Twentieth Century Literature 47, no. 4 (Winter 2001).
https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1G191653352/salmanrushdi
etheambivalenceofmigrancy
29
In Sehgal's ‘New Ways of Being’, she writes about Neel Mukherjee’s A
Life Apart and Sunjeev Sahota's The Year of the Runaways ‘[…] re-
count[ing] the stories of Indians making a miserable transition to life in
England—from the costs of the journey (much dignity, one kidney) to
the caste politics at either end to the first beating, the first sight of
snow.’ In addition, undocumented migrant narratives, like Laila Lala-
mi’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, Sefi Atta’s ‘Twilight Trek’, and
Tahir Ben Jelloun's Partir, cast a more skeptical eye toward migration
and throw more of a focus on the politicized nature of borders.
homeland and animated by the protagonist’s struggle to balance

demands of individualism and community orientation—is wan-
ing. Part of this more skeptical literature involves revealing the
harsh material realities of the journey to migrate and settlement
in the new land. Another part involves shining a light on various
anti-migrant sentiments. And another involves interrogating the
metaphors that make up the migrant in the national imaginary.
NDiaye’s task of metaphor play and literalizing metaphor is
not restricted to sentencing Khady to death before her shape
shifting takes place while the other women are sentenced to a
more identitarian ‘death’— again, revealing that the conse-
quences of migration are life threatening, rather than merely
threatening to familiar ‘roots, culture, social knowledge’.
NDiaye's task of literalizing metaphors also extends to the anti-
immigrant imaginary wherein various metaphors are at work. 30
This interrogation of the anti-migrant imaginary and its meta-
phors are featured in other trans-Mediterranean undocumented
migrant narratives: for example, in Sefi Atta's short story about a
Nigerian migrant who crosses the Sahara to find that a forest
atop the Mediterranean is where many migrants have camped
for as long as years to cross the sea, ‘Twilight Trek,’ she inte-
grates the tropes of apocalypse that undergird anti-migrant pub-
lic discourse—like migrant ‘tides’, ‘floods’, and ‘exodus’
stemmed and averted—into a story that allegorizes the quest of
Moses for a Promised Land in Revelations. 31 Trois Femmes Puis-
santes also plays with anti-migrant tropes, such as the metaphor
of contamination that is literalized through Khady’s ailing and
30
See J. David Cisneros, ‘Contaminated Communities: The Metaphor of
“Immigrant as Pollutant” in Media Representations of Immigration’,
Rhetoric & Public Affairs 11, no. 4 (2008), 569–601; David Shariatmada-
ri, ‘Swarms, Floods, and Marauders: The Toxic Metaphors of the Migra-
tion Debate’, The Guardian, August 10, 2015.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/10/migration
debatemetaphorsswarmsfloodsmaraudersmigrants
31
Sefi Atta, ‘Twilight Trek’, News from Home (Northampton, MA: Inter-
link Publishing, 2010).
contagious body pushing through border after border until she

arrives at the edge of the Mediterranean.
Disease after disease befalls Khady as she crosses one bor-
der after another. She is perceived to not only be infected but to
infect many. In the novel, each border marker, from sea to
checkpoint, trigger a fresh layer of illness, pain, and suffering.
The vicissitudes of the journey—intersecting at the border and
the pain it inflicts—tear her body apart. First, on a rickety
docked boat prepared to breach the border of the Mediterranean
Sea on the way to Europe, she injures her calf on a nail while
scrambling out once she becomes alarmed the boat was becom-
ing crowded. At first, she cannot see the injury in the dark, only
feels the blood running down her leg. In the morning when she
wakes up on the beach, a man asks her about her wound, which
she is able to see for the first time: ‘It was a gaping wound, en-
crusted with dried blood covered in sand.’ 32 The man, Lamine,
befriends her and they pair up, as she finds he plans to head
across to Europe, as well.
In a truck hurtling across the Sahara, Khady’s wound has
still not healed. At a checkpoint, the couple encounters soldiers
who assault Lamine and terrify Khady to the point that she
hands over the rest of her money to save Lamine. After surviving
the checkpoint, Khady is left without money and works as a
prostitute in a small room at the back of a ‘chophouse’ she and
Lamine find in a small border town on their route across the
Sahara. Khady prostitutes herself to secure enough money for
their trip across the Mediterranean to Europe, and there her
body suffers: it's unclear whether she contracts a sexually trans-
mitted disease, but ‘some customers would complain, saying
that it had hurt, that the girl was infected’, 33 because ‘a recent
attack of pruritus that made Khady’s vagina dry and inflamed
also caused [their] penis some discomfort.’ 34 In the small border
32
NDiaye, 682.
33
Ibid., 727.
34
Ibid., 726.
town marked by a checkpoint, she becomes an assemblage of

pain: the calf wound from her first injury, ‘swollen and foul
smelling’; 35 an ‘attack of pruritus that made Khady’s vagina dry
and inflamed’; ‘multiple shooting pains in her back, her lower
abdomen, and her calf’; 36 ‘her burning vulva.’ 37 When she accu-
mulates a little bit of money, she finds one day that Lamine has
disappeared with it.
Anti-migration rhetoric of potential contamination at the
hands of outsiders is figural and usually gestures toward a politi-
cal, cultural, and ideological compromise of the nation or region's
purity from incoming hordes that presumably seek to infect with
their social practices. (This does not mean that the social body is
not also represented as vulnerable to physical contamination, as
well.) The figural collapses into the literal through Khady’s body
in Trois Femmes Puissantes. Khady’s sickness and potential infec-
tiousness come to literalize the anti-migrant ‘plague’ metaphor,
as she crosses borders to reach the Mediterranean and carry out
the final stage of her journey to Europe.
The trope of containment against contamination that
frames undocumented immigration situates those within borders
as expressing acute anxiety over the encroachment of outsiders.
As recently as 2015, outrageous newspaper columnists used
words like ‘cockroaches’ to describe the migrants. 38 While it's
easy to discount the effectiveness of certain columnists for their
general outrageous behavior, politicians like UK PM David Cam-
eron have referred to the migrants in terms of ‘swarms.’ Allu-
sions to infestation are drawn to task for dehumanizations and
35
Ibid., 730.
36
Ibid., 730.
37
Ibid., 728.
38
Katie Hopkins, ‘Rescue Boats? I’d Use Gunships to Stop Migrants’, The
Sun, April 17, 2015.
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/suncolumnists/katiehopkins/
6414865/KatieHopkinsIwouldusegunshipstostopmigrants.html
allusions to infestation. 39 We can turn to less recent instances

such as when ‘governing parties in Spain’ 40 referred to undocu-
mented migration as an ‘antisocial plague’ 41 in 1990. And the
construction of these symbols and associations is not restricted
to Europe. In the Arabic-language Tangier newspaper Al-Shamal,
a September 12, 2005 article describing sub-Saharan Africans
trying to scale the security fences separating Morocco from the
Spanish-ruled enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla featured the follow-
ing headline: ‘“Black locusts” are taking over Morocco!’ 42 Mo-
roccan authorities banned Al-Shamal for using racist language,
but terms like ‘massive invasion’ and ‘plague’ to describe the
migrants' attempts to escape from Africa into the territory of the
European Union continued being used. The polluting, degenera-
tive, contaminating figure of the migrant operates centrifugally
in terms of symbolizing the extent to which the conceptions of a
nation's purity are bound in the discursive construction of na-
tional communities.
In an effort to secure the porous borders of Fortress Europe
during the ‘Age of Terror’ (or the specter thereof), the European
Commission issued the Hague Programme, a five-year plan de-
39
Jessica Elgot and Matthew Taylor, ‘Calais Crisis: Cameron Con-
demned for ‘Dehumanising’ Description of Migrants’, The Guardian, July
30, 2015.
http://www.theguardian.com/uknews/2015/jul/30/davidcameronmigr
antswarmlanguagecondemned
40
Maria Petmesidou and Christos Papatheodorou, Poverty and Social
Deprivation in the Mediterranean: Trends, Policies and Welfare Prospects in
the New Millennium (London: Zed Books, 2016).
41
Ministerio de la Presidencia, Situation of Foreigners in Spain: Basic
Guidelines of Spanish Foreigners’ Policy, Communication to the Congress
of Deputies, Madrid, 1990. Cited in Petmesidou and Papatheodorou,
Poverty and Social Deprivation, 2016.
42
Al-Shamal, September 12, 2005.
signed to ‘protect the field of freedom, justice, and security’, 43

driven by an agenda to counter terrorists and ‘illegal’ immi-
grants. Undocumented migration has been on the rise since
1995 when several European Union nations enacted the
Schengen Accords to soften internal EU borders and fortify ex-
ternal ones. The razor-wire fence separating Morocco from
Spanish enclaves—from which Khady falls to her death—is the
result of European plans to ‘deport’ migration controls to African
territory on the Mediterranean. 44 The Spanish enclaves of Ceuta
and Melilla, Europe’s only land border with Africa, have been
transformed into what have been described as ‘aggressively de-
fended fortress cities, enclosed by security fences that are pa-
trolled by the Moroccan army and Spain’s Guardia Civil’ and
reinforced with ‘infrared cameras […] as well as tear gas canis-
ters, noise and movement sensors and control towers.’ 45 Etienne
Balibar has described the African-European border as ‘a normal-
ized state of exception’, 46 in which
[…] the violent police operations continuously performed by
some European states (with the help of neighboring non-
European subject states, such as Libya or Morocco) on behalf
of the whole [European] community, including the estab-
lishment of camps, amount to a kind of permanent border
war against migrants.
43
See European Council, The Hague Programme: Strengthening Freedom,
Security, and Justice in the European Union, 2005/C53/01, OJ C53/1,
March 2, 2005(a).
44
Ali Bensaâd, ‘The Militarization of Migration Frontiers in the Medi-
terranean’, in The Maghreb Connection: Movements of Life Across North
Africa, eds Ursula Biemann and Brian Holmes (Barcelona: Actar, 2006).
45
‘World’s Barriers: Ceuta and Melilla’, BBC News, November 5, 2009.
46
Etienne Balibar, ‘At the Borders of Citizenship: A Democracy in
Translation?’, European Journal of Social Theory 13, no. 3 (August
2010), 315.
The notion of the pure body of the European Union under threat
of ‘invasion’ and deadly degeneration by the specter of migra-
tion is a significant and abundant metaphor, which is used to
envision and shape the political border. The bodily discourse
that shapes anti-immigration stances constructs the figurative
‘national body’ or ‘regional body’ as an organism that must be
protected from contamination or infection by contagion that the
migrant body represents. Julia Kristeva's theory of ‘abjection’
addresses the boundary between the inside and outside of the
body and the anxieties produced by transgressions of that
boundary. ‘Abjection’ defines simultaneously the fear, loathing,
and fascination experienced when the bodily is expelled or re-
jected. She draws a similar metaphoric relation between the
body and cultural formation.
The space of the border and the figure of the border crosser
are reflective of a collective border anxiety: this border anxiety
is over the collapse of the border between subject and object,
between the living and the corpse, between seeing the migrant
as human or subhuman/superhuman. It is the ambiguity of the
border zone that elicits anxiety, as Kristeva explains: ‘It is thus
not lack of health or cleanliness that causes abjection but what
disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders,
positions, rules.’ 47 According to Elizabeth Grosz, the abject
demonstrates ‘the impossibility of clear-cut borders, lines of de-
marcation, divisions between the clean and the unclean, the
proper and improper, order and disorder.’ 48
Thus the abject is not literally lack of health or uncleanli-
ness but the implications of the abject, as drawn by Kristeva—
disruption of order, the indistinguishability of inside from the
outside, the instability of the border itself. In Trois Femmes Puis-
47
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1982), 4.
48
Elizabeth Grosz, ‘The Body of Signification’, in Abjection, Melancholia,
and Love: The Work of Julia Kristeva, eds John Fletcher and Andrew
Benjamin (New York: Routledge, 1990), 89.
santes the abject is literalized via Khady’s body—her flesh, tears

and bleeds, compelling a ‘seepage of a foul, reddish liquid’, 49 her
gums bleed onto the bread she eats, her inflamed vagina is sus-
pected of contamination and infection. Her body is sacrificed to
the literal—it leaks wastes and fluids in violation of the ‘clean
and proper body’, in a quite extraordinary series of illnesses.
Cultural fears of both a physiological and cultural contamination
of the clean and social body are mapped onto Khady’s body.
Why use Khady’s body to literalize the metaphor of national
contamination and the implications of abjection? NDiaye calls
attention to the boundary breakdown between the figurative
and the literal, the metaphor and its literalization, between the
rhetorical and the material/physiological, between the making
of the border as pure and contaminable in anti-migrant rhetoric
and the making of Khady’s diseased body in Trois Femmes Puis-
santes. Here, the boundaries between rhetoric and substantiation
dissolve. In doing so, NDiaye suggests that the figure of contam-
ination has become literalized in the public sphere already—
migrants are thought of as physically contaminated, diseased,
and contagious. Border politics’ naturalization of the trope is
already in place to mark their un-belonging.
Khady’s body has already been used as an allegory for a
gendered, racialized, and nationalized body politic. NDiaye’s
literalization, Khady’s disintegrating body, highlights the links
between the rhetorical figure and the body. She is both the ab-
ject that lacks health and the abject that disturbs order (of the
border). Perhaps this evokes Nietzsche's notion of the slippage
between figurative and literal language, the dismissal of a direct
‘correspondence’ between reference and referent, the unreliabil-
ity of language to adequately account for that which lies outside
language. 50 But, because ‘metaphorization of the literal, by
49
NDiaye, 801.
50
Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense’, in Phi-
losophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the Early
1870s (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979).
drawing attention to the literal […] to words themselves, signals

a distance between word and world’, 51 literalization compels the
opposite: figurative distance here is closed and indeterminacy is
checked, as the gruesome details of Khady’s sickness gradually
become more focalized throughout the novel.
NDiaye’s literalization of the figurative highlights the con-
nection between the making of the border as pure and contami-
nable in anti-migrant rhetoric (border politics) and the making
of Khady’s diseased body (degeneration and disappearance).
That is, this correspondence closes the wide gap between the
theoretical instrumentalization of the border—‘border talk’—
and the real geopolitical implications mapped on the bodies of
migrating women like Khady. Certainly, borders are signifiers
with much potential for border metaphors to reimagine identity
and representation but a lone emphasis on the ‘textual character
of space’ that explores the representational aspects of social
space often eclipses the ‘brute force underlying social structures’
in materialist analyses of a global border regime. 52
But, Trois Femmes Puissantes is in no way a text reflecting
the cleavages between the ideational and material preoccupa-
tions of social space and borders. In fact, NDiaye is portraying ‘a
world in which language and experience are indivisible.’ 53 The
literalization of the figurative involves NDiaye’s subversive lit-
eralization of an othering metaphor—of disease and contamina-
tion by those who harbor anti-migrant stances—upon the tar-
get—the poor and victimized figure of Khady. NDiaye wrestles
the vehicle from the tenor by suggesting that a central aspect of
the figurative—that which determines contagion, the border—
has consequences: it has made Khady a metaphor come to life.
NDiaye has appropriated the metaphor and explored the way it
51
Neil ten Kortenaar, Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie's ‘Midnight's
Children’ (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2005), 59.
52
Woodward and Jones III, 235.
53
Peta Mitchell, Cartographic Strategies of Postmodernity: The Figure of
the Map in Contemporary Theory and Fiction (New York: Routledge,
2012), 163.
leaves an imprint of literalization on those it captures in its

sites—interminable illness, potential contagion, death. Indeed, a
feature of allegory is the literalization of metaphor. And, one
can certainly say that Khady is an allegorical figure of the
‘plague’ and ‘pollution’ threatening Europe's purity, in racist an-
ti-migrant rhetorics and imaginaries. Through the character of
Khady, NDiaye makes literal what in the pretext is metaphori-
cal. But beyond the figure of Khady, the possibility of an allegor-
ical reading wherein correspondence is achieved throughout the
entire narrative falls apart.
The structure of the plot reinforces the connection be-
tween language effects and experience as the exponential break-
down of Khady’s body the further she ventures forth on her
journey is determined by the order of the borders she crosses.
The border puts in motion processes of illness, contamination,
and death. Her sickness is not completely arbitrary and natural,
but rather a product of crossing the border, a manmade site of
violence. Although the narrative does not make explicit that she
crossed the border into Morocco, it is clear that after she leaves
the desert border town, she begins living in a ‘makeshift tent’ in
a forest bordering the Mediterranean, but sicker than ever (pre-
sumably the Gourougou forest in Nador close to the border of
the Spanish enclave of Melilla, where several sub-Saharan mi-
grants have been known to be living, for as long as a period of
several years, awaiting the right moment to climb the fence and
into European territory). If her previous encounters with the
border zones had resulted in the bleeding of her flesh, a bleed-
ing of her possessions had apparently gone into effect while she
was sick and unconscious in the forest. When she wakes up from
her feverish state, she realized she has been divested of all her
possessions and IDs: ‘Khady’d noticed she had nothing anymore:
no bundle, passport, or money.’ 54 Crossing borders, her humani-
ty is gradually stripped: her ID cards and documents disappear,
her money is gone, her ‘bundle’ is no longer, her immune system
54
NDiaye, 836–837.
is degenerated, her body wastes away as her skeletal figure indi-

cates.
Khady’s continuous assertions of her own ‘unshakable hu-
manity’ 55 on the journey fortify her already indomitable sense of
self—‘that she was indivisible and precious and could only ever
be herself’, 56 ‘that she, Khady Demba, was strictly irreplacea-
ble.’ 57 But also, on the journey these assertions float to the sur-
face of her consciousness in response to her interminable objec-
tification as a trafficked and prostituted woman—‘human cargo’,
‘human traffic’, ‘human capital’—all that which is paradoxically
both human and simultaneously fungible, commodified, con-
sumable, inhuman. At the start of her journey as she is being
shuttled from place to place, she relaxes because: ‘She was her-
self, she was calm, she was alive.’ 58 Through a veil of misery, she
thinks that ‘she would never forget the value of the human be-
ing she was.’ 59 After she is prostituted for years, she tries to
make her way North once again and in the back of another truck
across the Sahara, she catches sight of herself in the rearview
mirror: ‘[…] a gaunt, gray face with matted, reddish hair, a face
with pinched lips and dry skin that happened, now, to be her
own and of which, she thought, one couldn’t be sure it was a
woman’s face, any more than it could be said that her skeletal
body was a woman’s’. At that point, she counters her image with
the unassailable sense of self that emerges from her conscious-
ness: ‘[…] yet she was still Khady Demba, unique and indispen-
sable to the orderly functioning of things in the world.’ 60
Wounded and ill, Khady keeps venturing forth on her dan-
gerous journey wherein she asserts her humanity to herself re-
peatedly. She is physically being broken down piece by piece at
each border and her response to this dehumanization—
55
Ibid., 840.
56
Ibid., 678.
57
Ibid., 676.
58
Ibid., 712.
59
Ibid., 794.
60
Ibid., 829.
continuous assertions of her humanity—only serves to highlight

the space of the border as a deliberate site of degeneration and
disappearance. NDiaye commits to the rendering real of what is
usually conceived of as a figure of speech—immigrant as
‘plague’, ‘vermin’, ‘disease’—and, thus language is endowed
with a distinctly material presence in the figure of Khady, there-
by exemplifying the power of words to effect a social reality. In
doing so, she carries the logic of the power of rhetoric to its fi-
nal conclusion: if she literalizes the metaphor of the migrant by
mapping it on the body of Khady, riddling her with one illness
after another, gesturing toward the power of government and
popular rhetoric to make one diseased, abject, and unassimila-
ble, then she also recognizes the power of government and pop-
ular rhetoric to create the border zones that leave their imprints
on her body. The boat on the beach, the checkpoints, the border
towns, the forest atop the Mediterranean beside the Moroc-
can/European border effect a literalization/realization of the
metaphors that its governments assign into an assemblage of
irredeemable waste: ‘seepage of […] foul reddish liquid[s]’, 61
‘gaping wound[s]’, ‘encrusted […] blood’ 62—that to which
Khady is reduced despite her assertions of unassailability, un-
shakability, indispensability, preciousness, uniqueness, humani-
ty.
As with other chapters, the interplay between social and
generic fantasy is apparent. Nativist fantasy is inflicted on
Khady’s body and breaks it apart. Her body shows the very real
consequences of social fantasy. But ultimately, this signals both
an embrace of and a break from a fantastic hermeneutic. The
literary fantastical, the avian imagery interspersed throughout
the novel (especially Khady’s transformation into a bird during
her fall), points to Khady’s very real demhumanization, an ex-
ponential breaking-down of her body after each border she
crosses.
61
Ibid., 802.
62
Ibid., 761.
It is not as if metaphor alone makes reification possible, but

what has been made effable in its objectification in metaphor
was now potentially real due to metaphor. The danger in meta-
phor lies in the ‘puncturing of its figurative life’, 63 investing in
present and future metaphors their potential for realization. In a
discussion on the impact Nazi-Germany rhetoric has had on sub-
sequent political rhetoric, James Edward Young explores the
slippage of metaphor into reality:
After the Holocaust, we might ask whether by making some-
thing imaginable through metaphor, we have also made it
possible in the world. That is, to what extent does ‘imagina-
tive precedent’—the kind we effect in metaphor’—prepare
the human sensibility for its worldly reification? […] one
might ask to what extent […] the repeated figurative abuses
of the Jews in Nazi Germany prepared both killers and vic-
tims for the Jews' literal destruction. 64
Although I do not make any claims on periodizing this slippage

between rhetoric and reality, I do make a claim on the intercon-
nectedness of the figurative and literal in shaping migration
(‘the plague at the border’) upon which NDiaye capitalizes to
convey the novel's various borders shaping the physically de-
generated, polluted figure of Khady as she migrates across.
The final scene of the novel, with which I began the chap-
ter, is a denouement of the border zone throughout the novel:
Khady’s drop from atop the border fence down to her death is
simply the last step in the processes of degeneration, dissipation,
and disappearance that the border put in motion. It also pro-
vokes another assertion of her humanity and unassailable sense
of self: atop the barbed-wire fence tearing her fence, she is
climbing and then
63
James Edward Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative
and the Consequences of Interpretation (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1990), 93.
64
Ibid., 93.
[…] letting go, falling slowly backward, and thinking then

that the person of Khady Demba—less than a breath, scarce-
ly a puff of air—was surely never to touch the ground, but
would float eternal, priceless, too evanescent ever to be
smashed in the cold, blinding glare of the floodlights. 65
Her death and rebirth into a bird she spots in the sky are real
(not identitarian or ideational or symbolic), as suggested by the
‘Counterpoint’ where her traveling partner claims he feels her
gaze through the bird hovering above him in France (where he
was able to successfully migrate). In this case, the device of
shapeshifting deviates from the realism of the novel—where
previously shapeshifting was metaphorical, it has been literal-
ized in Khady’s demise. But even up to this last bizarre moment
of the text wherein shapeshifting and reincarnation take place,
our attention is drawn to the power of literalization and lan-
guage—as it is being called into question by a bizarre reality
constituted by literalized metaphors and, yet simultaneously, as
it points to its own textual performance of how reality is put
into motion by language.
While NDiaye constructs a variety of border transgressions
in the text relating to ethnic and national identity—as well as
personal and individual—through representations of characters
crossing a border between life and death into an ultimate re-
birth, she gradually hones in on the micro-topography of the
border and border towns she represents Khady crossing. In do-
ing so, she detaches from the metaphor and the figurative per-
spective of the border to embrace the literal dimensions and
scope of such a voyage. At the same time as she focalizes the
material realities of this specific border, she apprehends the way
metaphors have a way of shaping the material reality of the
border. She suggests the two are inextricable as represented
through the breakdown of Khady’s body—the product of unre-
lentingly violent machinations of the border, established
and shaped by government rhetoric and popular anti-migrant
65
NDiaye, 846.
sentiment that are also often figurative in scope. NDiaye’s insist-

ence on making metaphors and figures of speech literal is an act
of transgression that highlights the rules governing literal and
figurative language use. The literalization of figurative language
draws attention to the categories and conventions within which
the world is perceived and represented and to the way these
conventions shape social reality. The repetition of symbols in
the popular imagination have accumulated to represent the mi-
grant identity as a source of contamination from which Europe
needs protection and containment.
CONCLUSION
Compelling narratives of the immigrant experience after arrival

on another shore abound. But the significance of journey narra-
tives (and their build-up) in the broader work of diaspora narra-
tives cannot be underscored enough. The migration narratives
that I have explored reveal the importance of the journey when
the border, the shore, the fortress have been crossed, highlight-
ing that the narrative cannot be reducible to arrival and its af-
terlife. It has been noted that diasporic identity is ‘constructed in
resonance with this prior identity,’ 1 this prior identity having
developed in the homeland before immigration. Diaspora is a
collective, not only in its destination but its origination. Thus,
the collective memory of the homeland is required in its narra-
tion.
Migrant narratives reducible to arrival achieve the equiva-
lent of the portrayals of migrants washing ashore—dead or
alive—on European beaches, with which I opened this book.
The images I discussed successfully portray a popular discourse
on undocumented migrants: it is the migrants who do not be-
long rather than the beachgoers. The images portray migrants as
the ‘detritus’ and excess that should have remained hidden. The
body of work on migrant narratives that reduces it to the after-
life of arrival often achieves the equivalent of the European me-
dia archive. They portray migrants as out of place, unfamiliar,
1
Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exile and Diasporic Filmmaking
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 14.
195
unexpected, unrooted, alien strange arrivals without a journey,

history, or ‘prior identity,’ which would at least render a repre-
sentational ecology or what Ursula Biemann has called ‘sustain-
able representation’, conveying
…the story of how everything we do around the world is in-
terconnected here and now, i.e., how the western lifestyle,
known to have an effect on climate change, also has an im-
pact on herdsmen in the Sahel. […] Images are not excluded
from this process. As social relations, representations that
constitute meaning in one place are locked into the significa-
tion of another. 2
All the narratives analyzed in this book encompass the routes to

migration, as well as journey itself. These attempts at localiza-
tion not only give characters ‘roots’, a nation, a city, a locale,
but they also individuate them rather than presenting them as a
disembodied, abstract mass, part of a distant, spectacular scene
on the news. Journey narratives often show migrant characters
not as ‘out of place,’ an embodied unfamiliar excess on a Euro-
pean shore, but part of a journey, with roots and a ‘prior identi-
ty,’ allowing for the mapping of an interdependent relationship
of uneven development that connects the northern and southern
shore. Thus, this book reflects the authors’ intent in mapping the
journey across the Mediterranean, casting the literature as both
national and diasporic, emergent from and part of the African
Mediterranean rather than about it.
Although border crossing is often depicted as a clandestine
activity occurring in the ‘borderlands,’ research highlights inter-
connectedness between migrant crossings and larger political-
economic forces such as EU migration policies and security
measures, global markets, and North-South inequalities. 3 Re-
2
Ursula Biemann, ‘Dispersing the Viewpoint: Sahara Chronicle,’ 58.
3
While I discuss the violent asymmetry in globalization practices in
Chapter 4 on Egyptian migration, I would like to point out the ways
that this plays out in Morocco. Using investment and government data,
CONCLUSION 197
search also clarifies the way in which the process of migration

has been commoditized and exploited to serve various interests,
where migration to Europe is one form of exploitation of labor
by capital within the global economy. Migration benefits capital
on a global scale—its maintenance depends on its ‘use value’ for
global capitalism.
This book has unraveled the optimistic stance wherein
globalization represents the end of the nation-state and the
emergence of cultural relationships marked by multicultural
contentment—a celebration of difference and hybridity. The
journey narratives have migrant characters charting the interde-
pendent relationship of uneven development that connects the
northern and southern shores (aiding in the proliferation of bor-
ders that reinforce a hierarchy of mobility). As heterotopia in-
Amanda Crawley Jackson discusses the flow of tourists, images, narra-

tives and products into Morocco post-Schengen, an agreement which
has restricted the travel and migration of Moroccans to the EU. She
writes, ‘If, since Schengen, Moroccans have been largely unable to trav-
el to the West, the West continues to flow into Morocco, bringing with
it images and narratives of wealth and opportunity that will always
remain beyond the border, frustratingly close but always out of reach.
For example, the satellite dishes and information technologies (which,
ironically, emerged around the same time that Europe closed its exter-
nal borders) have enabled an unprecedented circulation of images, in-
formation, and dialogue across national boundaries, streaming the West
more than ever before into the homes of Moroccan nationals’ (60).
Moreover, the ‘volume of international trade passing through Morocco’s
factories and ports and the numbers of Western businesses locating to
Morocco have grown substantially’, since Morocco’s promotion as at-
tractive host to international investment. Lastly, the growth of tourism
and the settlement of Westerners in Morocco has been and continues to
be a key motivator for domestic growth. More generally, the asym-
metry and hierarchy of mobility can be discerned in globalized labor
practices: ‘local communities, particularly those in the global South,
provide a static and stable source of labor’ for the ‘cosmopolitan tastes
of Western consumers, who are able and free themselves, for the most
part, to circulate across the globe.’
corporates diverse places, moving between them and across

them, and revealing the processes that link together different
topoi, we can say that undocumented migrant characters make
the Mediterranean a heterotopic space: they reveal the Mediter-
ranean to be a heterotopic site on which multiple identities and
modalities of space/mobility converge, while at the same time
highlighting the utopic lens through which the Mediterranean is
seen. It is utopic in projecting a desire for a place and time to
come—of the familiar to be discovered, exposed through the
partition of the sea, the regimentation of mobility flows, on one
hand, and the retrieval of an ‘authentic’ past, on the other. The
former undergirds containment and the latter cosmopolitanism.
Both project realizable desires, to become familiar with some-
thing known in the past and to re-make familiar something that
is now unknown. The paradox encompasses both the attraction
and repulsion of the contemporary Mediterranean narrative, the
utopic and abject: the attraction of cosmopolitanism (the appeal-
ing disorder of diversity and adventure) and the repulsion of
containment (the ‘zone of conflict’ to be ordered and contained).
Undocumented migration literature reflects on the Mediterrane-
an paradox of perception through different levels of mobility,
which point to the way the Mediterranean is suspended between
cosmopolitanism and containment.
The importance of heterotopia in the ‘Mediterranean narra-
tive’ is not about how its past and present places compare. But
rather it is about how unfamiliar, marginal places of clandestini-
ty perform in relation to more familiar, hypervisible, sites of
tourism and redevelopment. The unfamiliar and liminal are not
only effects of central and visible sites but (re)construct these
sites upon which they reflect and form the dynamic heterotopia
of the ‘Mediterranean narrative’ in lieu of a suspended narrative
that looks backward. The Mediterranean and its towns on ‘both
sides of the shore’ are not inherently heterotopic, but it is rather
migrant routes that make them heterotopic by creating a dialec-
tical relationship between the inside and outside of their desti-
nation sites, simultaneously internal to, a part of norms regulat-
ing the cultural spaces they other, and external to them.
CONCLUSION 199
While the Mediterranean has been instrumentalized

through performance, rendering it a ‘fiction,’ 4 it is also the
product, the invention of the undocumented migrant figure. The
literature of undocumented migration defines the spaces of the
border—the detention center, checkpoint, fence, blockade,
boat—creating its own place-narrative of the Mediterranean, not
one of vague multicultural contentment, but of division and ir-
regular mobility. Spaces are not inherently ordered. In their or-
dering, spaces are practiced and lived rather than simply inhab-
ited. Thus, the migrant figure constructs the Mediterranean, eve-
ry step tracking its seductive and abject utopias, its past and
present depictions, its unitary and dividing qualities, its meta-
phoric and material representation, its dissonance between the
spaces he occupies and the spaces occupied by documented
travelers.
These narratives that seek to disrupt the state's imagined
geography of a homogenous space of leisure or alternatively
state control function as counter-geographies, where discourses
on place and identity are challenged, undermined, and replaced.
In these narratives, the undocumented migrant character re-
draws the borders of the state, transforming them from ‘place-
less places’ (Augé) devoid of topographical markers and absent
of historical and social relations to places deeply incorporated
into the web of relations of the region by way of its collective
memorialization (Lalami, Nini). Or, they redraw the borders as
one continuous passage that extends from a devouring, mon-
strous sea to a state of violent ravaging—migrant consump-
tion—on the other shore, to share with other migrants a less
optimistic view of destinations than ‘immigrant dreams’ are will-
ing to reveal (Binebine, Ben Jelloun).
The routes of migrants from the southern shores of the
Mediterranean, and further south, in enabling so many exchang-
4
Gil Hochberg, ‘“The Mediterranean Option”: On the Politics of Re-
gional Affiliation in Current Israeli Imagination,’ Journal of Levantine
Studies 1, no. 1 (Summer 2011), 57.
es, work against the image of chaos and disorder promoted by

popular discourses on undocumented migration. Achille Mbem-
be indicates that undocumented migrants interact on an or-
dered, practical cosmopolitan level, rather than through chaos
and disorder. ‘The cosmopolitanism of migrants,’ Mbembe ar-
gues, ‘has entailed the proliferation of illegal or clandestine
spaces’ through spatial strategies of varying networks, flexible
practices, and a straddling of identities. 5 This pragmatic cosmo-
politanism does not suggest a recuperative model of undocu-
mented migration powerful enough to transcend authority. Ra-
ther, it points to the complexity of organizing new forms of
community in a carefully constructed but always uncertain ob-
scurity. ‘Illegal immigrants,’ Mbembe points out, ‘generate mate-
rial and cultural resources in conditions of permanent instability
and quasi-absolute uncertainty.’ 6 They do not simply remain
aimless outsiders once they cross the border, but rather inte-
grate into different networks, provide linkage between country
of origin and reception by way of commute, and mobilize be-
tween different local identities while negotiating ‘traffic with the
global.’ 7
But to be clear, networks and south-north linkages do not
fully enable the creation of a diaspora that can magically trans-
cend the borders and walls erected by nativism and racism on
the northern shore. Once the national border is crossed, we must
understand that other borders proliferate beyond it. Both the
northern-southern shore linkage and the thresholds beyond the
national border are fleshed out in in the prose poem ‘Conversa-
tion about Home (at the Deportation Centre)’, and, later, its re-
vision in the poem ‘Home’, by British-Somalian author Warsan
Shire. Just as the continuous passage of ferocious savagery that
extends from southern to northern shore, and characterizes the
5
Achille Mbembe, ‘Ways of Seeing: Beyond the New Nativism,’ African
Studies Review 44, no. 2 (2001), 11.
6
Mbembe, 11.
7
Ibid., 11.
CONCLUSION 201
sea between, shapes Binebine’s novel, the entire journey from

dangerous homeland to perilous sea to violent land of arrival is
encompassed in Shire’s poem and its revision. Shire opens and
closes the poem with the ‘mouth of a shark’: in the beginning,
she writes, ‘No one leaves home in the mouth of a shark’. 8 In the
former, she ends with ‘now my home is the mouth of a shark.’
This metaphor of the dangerous watery passage reveals that
even if the refugee tries to escape—she ends right back at where
she started. 9 The circular passage connects the peril of Somalia
to the violence of the new land: in both works, she commits to
an accounting, a calculus of violability on both shores. In ‘Con-
versation about Home (at the Deportation Centre)’, she writes:
The lines, the forms, the people at the desks, the calling
cards, the immigration officers, the looks on the street, the
cold settling deep into my bones, the English classes at night,
the distance I am from home. But Alhamdulilah all of this is
better than the scent of a woman completely on fire, or a
truckload of men who look like my father, pulling out my
teeth and nails, or fourteen men between my legs, or a gun,
or a promise, or a lie, or his name, or his manhood in my
mouth.
In ‘Home,’ she writes of exchanging the perilous place at sea

during the journey, the ‘mouth of a shark’, with racial slurs:
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
8
This phrase can be found in both ‘Conversation about Home (at the
Deportation Centre)’ and the revision ‘Home’. See Warsan Shire, ‘Con-
versation about Home (at the Deportation Centre)’, in Teaching My
Mother How to Give Birth (London: Flipped Eye Publishing, 2011), 55.
Also see, Warsan Shire, ‘Home’, in Long Journeys. African Migrants on the
Road, eds Alessandro Triulzi and Robert Lawrence McKenzie (Leiden
and Boston: Brill, 2013), xi.
9
Shire, 2011.
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their own country and now they want
to mess up ours
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your back
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off
or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child’s body
in pieces.
An accounting of the linkages and of the diaspora’s borders be-

yond the national one reveal that the border is not crossed once
but mediated through encounters that promise a lingering sense
of displacement beyond a singular transitional space in the mak-
ing of a diaspora.
So where does the transitional space begin and end if the
sense of displacement lingers permanently? The transitional
space demands an erasure of identity. Stripping the self of iden-
tification is considered part of the process of undocumented mi-
gration, as the passage through transit is achieved by way of
itinerancy, ‘passing through,’ and ‘passing’, divestment of marks
of identification. 10 Since this book’s focus on undocumented mi-
10
According to Augé, the non-place is characterized as a subject’s pro-
pulsion or projection forward, in the individual’s relation with ‘moving
CONCLUSION 203
grant literature from Africa has reinforced the significance of the

narrative journey and its transit spaces to rendering a diasporic
identity, it has also revealed undocumented migration, hrig or
burning in Maghrebian dialect, as both a more sustained incin-
eration of identity and as an explosion of a hierarchy of geo-
graphic and social mobility in the border zones to animate the
recreation of identity. Of course all undocumented migration
literature is marked by a transit space—the flimsy craft stuck at
sea, the detention center on the other shore, the camps border-
ing the Mediterranean. By focusing on the function of the transi-
tional space in the diaspora, the writers in this book resist the
idea of migrations and their diasporas as seamless, singular bor-
der crossings. Rather they highlight that the crossing is frag-
mented, dispersed, mediated, thus becoming the metaphorical
site of conceptualizing the diaspora. Written in the temporary
journey motifs of transit, limbo, and rootlessness is a more per-
manent, scarring landscape of alienation.
Like the ‘mouth of a shark’ that begins and ends the poems,
the narratives in this book that portray transit spaces of the na-
tional border and ones that extend beyond it have undermined
migration, mobility, border crossing as a singular event, rather
on,’ ‘passing through,’ ‘passing over,’ a mobility that aims to suppress

the difference that place contains. Orientation is one effect of the non-
place: mobility, speed, and spectator position mediate the experience of
passing through or passing over ‘places’ to authenticate the identity of
the traveler as spectator by ‘partial glimpses’ of terrain, ‘landmarks, a
‘sequencing’ of landscapes. One aspect of this orientation is displace-
ment: this double movement can also be identified as the non-place
experience and its effect of placelessness. The non-place is not only a
space but the effect of the space, a double movement that traces the
points of itinerancy and its effects on the itinerant, so that the passage
is constitutive in erasing any trace or memory of the migrant’s identity.
The stripping of identity required of the passengers, indistinction, inde-
terminacy, anonymity, a form of ‘passing’ regulated by trafficking in
creating a place as well as a people unmoored from a topographical
web.
than a journey mediated throughout the multiple borders and

displacements that constitute the life of the diaspora—a contra-
diction that cuts across recuperative imaginings of migration
across the Mediterranean, which have figured the coming gen-
eration as ‘pioneers,’ 11 crossing physical, cultural, and aesthetic
boundaries to deliver old Europe a new trans-cultural and trans-
national infusion that will ultimately prefigure a new Mediter-
ranean supranational space: ‘another promise, another dream,
the opening of another space: the Mediterranean community.’ 12
This supranational space touted by official papers, speeches,
programs by the Schengen Convention and Euro-Med Partner-
ship missions, through ideals of mobility residing within globali-
zation, lies at the end of the global capital flow and circulation
of labor, products, ideas, people, but does not necessarily make
the figure of the migrant a cultural pioneer, that is, mobile, free,
and able enough to dissolve the boundaries that obstruct a
utopic Mediterranean community from forming.
Against the political reality and official histories scripted by
laws, declarations, and wishful scholarship, wherein, for exam-
ple, the metaphor of the Mediterranean as a cultural bridge is
naturalized into the sediment of the Mediterraneanist imaginary,
undocumented migration narratives stake out an oppositional
and creative space. Through retrieval of stories drowned at sea,
cultural creations also redefine the meaning of the Mediterrane-
an space. In these works, the fictional space of the Mediterrane-
an Sea also becomes an archive of narratives, identities, docu-
ments, IDs, a fluid repository of submerged lives, where official
scripts of a unified Mediterranean and banal clichés of cultural
bridges interact with distinct narratives of borders, transgres-
sions, and a contested global hierarchy of mobility, which often
11
Azouz Begag and Abdellatif Chaouite, Écarts d'identité (Paris: Seuil,
1990), 18.
12
Begag and Chaouite, 18.
CONCLUSION 205
finds migrants on both sides of the Mediterranean, on shore or

on land, in the ‘mouth of a shark’.
Indeed, there has been an increase in literary and other cul-
tural accounts that capture a transgressive diaspora through its
undocumented journey narratives from Africa across the Medi-
terranean since the 1990s. The narrations conceptualize a trans-
national space of the Mediterranean with its distinctive mythol-
ogies and historical dynamics, displacing it as a singular entity
that the resurgence of Mediterranean studies as a unified space
has inspired. These cultural productions constitute fictionalized,
narrated, lyricized, artistically rendered imaginations of globally
circulating narrations and images released back into the global
flow of images that inform discourses of crossing the Mediterra-
nean, in its North-South divergences and crossroads. These
transnational productions, at once vehicles and embodiments of
traveling images and narrations, then symbiotically represent
and construct the imaginations that give rise to a new Mediter-
ranean and its coming migrations.
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INDEX
1–9 ‘Twilight Trek’ 32, 34,

9/11 18–19, 21 141–149, 152–162,
166–167, 154, 180–
A 181
abject 34, 37, 87, 102, 122, Augé, Marc 47, 199, 202
154, 171, 186–187,
199 B
Āl-Jalālī, Āḥmad Balibar, Etienne 150–151,
Al-Harāqa 3–4, 51–52 185
Al-Khamīsī, Khālid Bauman, Zygmunt 42, 139
Safīnat Nūḥ 35, 130– Beat Generation 28, 67–69,
136, 139 92–93
Alexandria 11–13, 25, 113– Ben Jelloun, Tahar
115, 122, 126–127, Partir 28, 30, 89–93, 95–
132–134 112
allochronic 59, 64, 67 Bible (biblical, scriptural)
alterity 16, 18, 20, 23–24, 132, 139, 145, 147–
29, 59–61, 78–81, 84, 148, 152, 161–163
102, 115, 129, 132, Bibliotheca Alexandrina
149, 153–154, 156, 126–127
188 Binebine, Mahi
American 64, 67–69, 92–93, Cannibales 30, 71–87,
96–97, 99–100, 141 92, 199, 201
Andalus 9, 28, 51–52, 57– border 2–4, 8–10, 16–17,
58 19–20, 30, 33, 37–38,
apocalypse 150, 163–164, 41–47, 50, 57, 59–61,
181 63, 70, 74, 113–114,
Atta, Sefi 116–117, 119–120,
225
132, 135–136, 138, neocolonialism 41

141–142, 149–152, consensus 166–167
154, 157–159, 162– containment 17–18, 21–25,
167, 170–172, 176– 74, 108, 183, 194, 198
178, 182–193, 195– contamination 33, 181,
197, 199–200, 202– 183–184, 186–189,
204 194
Bowles, Paul 10, 26, 28, 68, cooke, miriam 6–8
93–94, 96–97 cosmopolitanism 10–13, 15,
Braudel, Fernand 5, 10 17, 21–22, 24–25, 29,
Burroughs, William S. 26, 54, 74, 94, 108, 124,
28, 68, 93 157, 198, 200
counter-nostalgia 29, 33,
C 46–47, 56–58, 64–65,
cannibalism 76–77, 81–82, 69–70
84, 86–87
capital 27, 30–31, 35, 43, D
108, 118–120, 122, diaspora 35–36, 38–41, 92,
130–131, 134, 170, 135, 169, 195–196,
190, 197, 204 200, 202–205
capitalism 41–43, 120, 122, disease 182, 187–188, 191
130–131, 135, 197 dissensus 165–167
Cassano, Franco 8–9 documents (see ‘IDs’)
Cavafy, Constantine P. 12– dreams (oneiric) 76–86, 91
13, 25, 36, 54 dreams (wishes, non-
cemetery, sea 91, 95, 99, oneiric) 9, 27, 30, 34,
101–102, 111, 117– 59–61, 64, 71, 73,
118, 138 76–87, 89–91, 99,
Ceuta 150–151, 158, 163, 103, 109, 119, 138,
184–185 165, 199, 204
citizenship 8, 32, 38, 42, ‘immigrant dream’ 30,
76, 145, 148, 150, 159, 34, 71, 73, 77–79,
162, 166–167 84–87, 89–91, 99,
collective memory (see 199
‘memory, collective’) Durrell, Lawrence 8, 10–13,
colonialism 13, 16, 18, 26– 26, 36
28, 30, 59, 68, 80–81, dystopia 23, 74, 117
89, 104, 110, 150
INDEX 227
E 157, 160–161, 172,

Egypt 11–13, 17, 30–31, 191
33–35, 41, 113–116, flood 32–33, 71, 133, 135,
118–127, 130–137, 149–150, 161, 163–
139 164, 181
Alexandria 11–13, 25, folklore 15, 64–67, 69, 174
113–115, 122, 126– djinn 85–87
127, 132–134 monsters 73–75, 77, 87,
Egyptian 11–13, 30–31, 92
35, 115, 122–126, sea spirits 91–92, 105–
132–134 106, 109–110
Europe-Mediterranean shapeshifting 86, 172,
Partnership (EMP) 15, 177, 181, 193
18–20, 24, 37, 126– Foucault, Michel 4, 23–25,
130, 204 62–63, 111, 115–117,
exile 9, 12, 28, 35, 143– 122–123
145, 147–148, 153, France 8, 33, 38–39, 76, 81,
155, 179 92, 110, 148, 169, 170,
exodus 144–148, 152–153, 174, 176, 193
158, 160–164, 167, French 37–39, 80–82,
181 84, 96–97, 99–100,
expatriates 13, 92, 95, 97, 104, 150, 160, 169,
99–101, 103 174–175
Paris 38, 77
F Parisian 52, 77, 169
fantasy Freud, Sigmund 78, 80, 86,
genre 30, 34–35, 73–75, 91, 93, 105–107, 110
78–79, 85–87, 89–92,
102–103, 105, 108– G
112, 160, 172–177, Genet, Jean 97
191 globalization 27, 30–32, 35,
cultural 30, 32, 34–35, 41–43, 50, 57–58, 108,
46, 59–66, 72–73, 118–123, 130–132,
76–80, 85, 89–90, 134–135, 139–140,
92–93, 97–99, 101– 196–197, 204–205
103, 107–109, 114, Greece 8, 11, 98, 136
116, 123, 139, 154, Greek 9, 12–13, 125,
179–180
Graeco-Roman 16, 126– Lalami, Laila

127 Hope and Other Danger-
ous Pursuits 28–29,
H 33–34, 45–51, 53,
Hague Programme 19, 184– 56–70, 71, 92–93,
185 199
Hawlbachs, Maurice 49 limbo 32, 144–148, 157–
hell 34, 75, 147–148 159, 161, 166–167,
heterotopia 4, 23, 25, 28, 203
31, 33–35, 43–44, 50, Lukács, Georg 7
56, 62–63, 65–66, 87,
101, 111, 115–116, M
122–124, 156–157, Mahfouz, Naguib 13
160, 171–172, 197– Mali 41, 71, 141–142, 154
198 Malian 85
Horden, Peregrin, and Pur- Massey, Doreen 31, 108,
cell Nicolas 5–6, 8 121–122
hospitality 10, 15, 37, 73, ‘Double Imaginary’ of
81–82, 86, 94 Globalization 30–31,
Ḥusayn , Ṭāhā 54, 124–126 108, 119–122, 124,
138–139
I Matvejevic, Predrag 15, 26
Ibn Ziad, Tariq 28, 48–49, Mediterranean Sea 3–9, 15,
52, 54, 57–58, 69 23–24, 26–29, 34–35,
IDs (documents, papers, 49–50, 52, 54, 56–57,
cards, passport) 3, 17, 71–77, 91–92, 95, 99–
52, 112, 131, 135, 103, 105–106, 108,
141–145, 148,–149, 110–111, 113–114,
158–159, 160, 166, 116–118, 120, 124–
189, 204 125, 135–136, 138–
intertextuality 28–30, 36, 139, 142, 145, 153–
55, 92 158, 167, 181–182,
Islam (Muslim) 49, 59, 121, 198–199, 201, 203–
154–155 204
Mediterraneanism 14–15,
K 17, 21, 37
Kristeva, Julia 186 Melilla 150–151, 158, 163,
171, 184–185, 189
L
INDEX 229
memory, collective 40, 49– P

51, 58, 195, 199 paradise 28–29, 34, 47, 52,
metaphor 77–78, 81–82, 71–76, 78–79, 83–84,
125, 172, 174–175, 94, 118–119, 146
177–181, 183, 186– plague 163–164, 183–184,
189, 191–193, 201, 189, 191
204 postcolonialism 28, 72, 119,
Morocco 3, 17, 28–30, 32, 145
38, 41, 45–46, 48–50,
58–61, 64–70 R
Moroccan 19–20, 51–52, racism 105, 163, 175, 184,
54, 57–61, 66, 68–69 189, 200
Mrabet, Mohamed 96 Rancière, Jacques 144, 149,
Muslim (see ‘Islam’) 159–160, 165
realism 30, 71–73, 87, 90,
N 102, 110–111, 193
nativism 34–35, 71–72, refugee 38, 42, 75, 139,
149, 160–161, 172, 178, 201
191, 200 Rushdie, Salman 178–180
NDiaye, Marie
Trois Femmes Puissantes S
32–33, 169–177, Sahara Desert 7, 32–34,
181–183, 187–194 141–147, 152–157,
Nietzsche, Freidrich 187 160–163, 170–171,
Nini, Rachid 181–182, 189, 190
Yawmiyyāt Muhājir Sirrī sans-papiers 38–39, 143,
28–29, 51–53, 199 148, 159
non-place 23, 47, 123, 138 sea (see ‘Mediterranean
nostalgia 17, 29–30, 33, Sea’)
46–47, 49–61, 63–66, sea cemetery (see ‘ceme-
69–70, 108, 136, 138, tery, sea’)
180 Senegal 33, 41, 169, 173–
Nubian 132–134 175
Senegalese 174
O sexual
Orientalism 56, 58–61, 64– assault 82, 84, 87
67, 89–90, 92–93, 95, fantasy 60–61, 63, 98,
98–101 107
sexualization 97–99 transit 48, 202–204

sexuality 26 transit migration (transmi-
tourism 26, 92–93, 95, gration) 32, 41, 100,
101–102, 111 141–144, 147, 155–
Shire, Warsan 200–203 158, 160, 167, 171
smuggling 45, 89, 102, trafficking 33, 71, 76, 89,
113–114, 119–120, 131, 169, 173, 175,
130–131, 141, 143, 190
154, 169
Somalian 200–201 U
Spain 1, 3, 8, 19–20, 28, 45, uncanny (unheimlich) 17,
50–52, 55, 57–59, 61, 30, 33–35, 80–81, 86–
63, 75, 95, 97, 99–101, 87, 89–91, 103, 105–
105, 107, 147, 150– 11
151, 158–159, 163, utopia 4, 9–10, 14–15, 17,
171, 176, 184–185, 22–25, 27–29, 31–35,
189 37, 44, 46, 50, 55, 62,
Spanish 37, 95, 98–99, 101, 65–66, 87, 93–95, 101,
107 108, 111, 114–119,
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 122–124, 129, 132–
41–42, 65, 139 136, 138–139, 156–57,
subjectivity 28, 32, 38, 68, 171, 198–199, 204
82, 103, 119, 144–145,
148–149, 165–166, W
171, 176–178 waste 40–42, 139, 187,
191, 195
T
Tangier 10, 48, 64, 68, 89– Z
90, 92–95, 97, 100 Zuḥrī, Ayman
terrorism 19, 54, 107–108, Baḥr Al-Rūm 35, 113–
154, 184–185 120, 130, 132, 135
Todorov, Tzvetan 86

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The Two-Edged Sea

The Modern Muslim World

Series Editorial Board

Marcia Hermansen Martin Nguyen

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This series will provide a platform for scholarly research on Islamic

Heterotopias of Contemporary Mediterranean

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Table of Contents ......................................................................... v

At an informal interview with a journalist in a café in Rabat,

support afforded me the valuable time I needed to read and

both of whom provided me the warmth, support, and much-

The image of migrants washing up along southern Europe’s pic-

border’s space or time. In essence, even though the media terms

space—the tourist coach—but experiencing different modes of

coastal cities impose their own frontiers. 9, 10 Inspiring various

is dependent. 14 Although The Corrupting Sea’s relational ‘analysis

political difference. 18 On one level, one can see in her notion of

both spatially and chronologically as a Middle Seas of sorts in its

Mediterranean. He even attributes the development of Greek

brated for openness and utopic cosmopolitanism. From Law-

traced to the Middle Ages. After all, the Mediterranean is essen-

more intercultural (European-wise, at least), but distinctly set

Cavafy as a repository of cultures that belonged to not only the

cription-appropriation’. 32 This movement consists of the imaging

ens the straw man of a purported Arab identity that is essential-

It has been noted that the instrumentalization of the Medi-

Schäfer, ‘The Cultural Dimension of the Euro‐Mediterranean Partner-

By challenging Mediterraneanism, this book does not at-

However much the instrumentalization of the Mediterrane-

constituted now more by Arab cities, in opposition to Europe,

with undocumented migration, entry into Spain guaranteed pas-

Martyrs: Two Perspectives on Lahrig’, in The Cultures of Economic Migra-

the EU’s policy transformations, whether post-9/11 or much

mopolitan utopia for the appealing disorder of its diversity. 45

tier, is not lost, the attraction and repulsion of the contemporary

the Mediterranean wielded by grand narratives of EU-Med cul-

escape for its ‘sensual pleasures,’ its ‘authentic heritage,’ its

ter.’ 53 The recitation of the list of totems or familiar objects re-

a new Mediterranean supranational space: ‘another promise,

dermined by its heterotopic re-signification—the depiction of

hicles of performing the Mediterranean is the retrieval of a lost

Just as intertextuality allows the unpacking of nostalgia’s

of people, and certain categories of labor in which they engage,

between the discursively pre-sanctioned in schemas of represen-

ries because they deny the divisions of the Mediterranean upon

aestheticized and material constructions, its dissonance between

displacement on the other shore, calling attention to the une-

symmetry in terms of traveling cultures across the Mediterrane-

The totalization takes in the disjunctures of time and space in

rical and unbalanced perspective often eclipses the migration

road company) on Pajol Street in the eighteenth arrondissement was

Localization attempts to not only give the characters ‘roots’, a

journey narratives. Its main purpose is to contribute toward ad-

Spivak also urges us to acknowledge that migrancy is a result of

search also clarifies the way in which the process of migration

inside and outside of destination sites, or ways of heterotopical-

In Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits (2005), a

perial aggression, and transnational identities’. 2 Like other anal-