Back

Hybridity and National Identity in Algeria: Fériel Assima’s Rhoulem ou le sexe des anges

Annedith Schneider

Published in 1996 in Paris by Arléa, Fériel Assima’s Rhoulem ou le sexe des anges [1] is clearly marked by the civil crisis afflicting Algeria since 1991. [2] Writers have been one of the many groups targeted for attack by terrorist groups in this violence, which may explain, in part, why Assima writes under a pseudonym. That she details in such unfavorable terms the situation in Algeria can only make a pseudonym seem a greater necessity. [3] Assima has published one other book, Une femme à Alger: Chronique du désastre ,[4] in which a female narrator recounts in the first person the disintegration of Algerian society around her.
Rhoulem presents a similarly nightmarish depiction of Algeria, but does so by focusing on the life of a hermaphrodite, the title character. Raised as a boy, Rhoulem is abandoned by his mother at the age of fourteen at a sewing workshop, where the unnamed director teaches him to read and write and eventually makes him her assistant. After four years in the workshop outside the city of Oran, he decides to go secretly to the capital Algiers in order to pursue his dream of opening a sewing supplies shop. Since he has no money, he spends several months without leaving the Oran region waiting for another man, Hakim, to find him employment in Algiers. When he does get to Algiers, he is immediately tortured and raped by the ”commandant,” the man who is to be his employer. He is eventually put to work as a dancer in a cabaret, where he is befriended by a singer Azria. This period of relative calm comes to an end after a brief sexual encounter with a cabaret patron, Gabi, ends badly. Rhoulem revolts during a performance and attacks the commandant. Rhoulem then flees the cabaret, but is found by the commandant and his henchmen, who torture him and leave him for dead. The director finds him in this state and takes him back to Oran, where he dies.
At first, the political climate seems to be no more than the background for the story of Rhoulem, and the narrators rarely comment directly on the political situation. But as the violence spreads from Algiers and begins to be felt in the provincial city of Oran, near where the workshop is located, it is evident that this is more than the localized violence of a few thugs, and it is also evident that Rhoulem’s torture and eventual demise, even if at the hands of neither government nor Islamist forces, is possible because of the general climate of violence and repression. Rhoulem, a hermaphrodite labeled male, may be able to stand as a figure for a hybrid nation that has chosen to label itself Algerian, Arabic and Muslim.
When Rhoulem is born, his mother and the midwife are horrified to discover that the baby is ”ni fille ni garçon” [”neither girl nor boy”] (9), [5] but they quickly decide that the child will be raised as a boy. Although the narrator describes Rhoulem as having both male and female sexual characteristics, it is male anatomy, from the beginning, that is emphasized:

Comme une petite corne orgueilleuse, au bas du ventre, la verge s’épanouissait à sa place , mais au lieu des testicules, c’étaient bien deux lèvres épaisses qu’on distinguait. Les deux sexes semblaient soudés l’un à l’autre et, quand on croyait en discerner un, on oubliait l’autre; quand on reconnaissait l’autre, la forme en était si étrange qu’on n’était plus sûr de rien. Les deux femmes accablées considéraient en silence la soudure qui avait “gâté” le fruit de ce petit d’homme . (7, my emphasis)

Like a proud little horn, at the base of the belly, the penis lay in its place, but in place of testicles, it was indeed two thick labia that one discerned. The two sexes seemed welded one to the other, and when you thought you could distinguish one, you forgot the other; when you recognized the other, its form was so strange that you were no longer sure of anything. The two women, overwhelmed, considered in silence the welding that had ”spoiled” the fruit of this little man.
The first thing the narrative describes is the baby’s penis ”in its place,” which determines how everything else is described. Similarly, the labia do not have a place of their own, but rather take the place of the testicles. The narrator insists on the maleness of the baby, even as the narrator’s own description shows how difficult it is to make a clear distinction, as the ”two sexes” seem almost to defy description, let alone distinction. Although Rhoulem incorporates both male and female aspects, it is his [6] ”maleness” that is described as primary, and it is his ”maleness,” not his ”femaleness,” that is ”spoiled” by the mixture. The midwife at Rhoulem’s birth attempts to settle the issue when she insists that Rhoulem is male, albeit with some faults, but faults that can be hidden: ”la cardeuse disait que certaines femmes mettent au monde des enfants bossus, et qu’une bosse, c’est plus dur à cacher qu’un sexe mal formé” [the carder said that some women give birth to hunchback children and that a hunch is a lot harder to hide than a malformed sex] (7).
It is worth noting in the passage above the repetition of forms of the word soudure. It is a ”soudure” that spoils Rhoulem’s maleness, and the two sexes are described as being ”soudés” to each other. A soudure refers to two parts being joined together, as in a welder’s solder, but it is also the location of this joining (”lieu de cette adhérence” [the place of this joining]) or the ”point de contact” [point of contact] between the two parts being joined. [7] This suggests both that Rhoulem has two distinct sexes, and that he is the point of contact between the two sexes, or in other words, that he is both sexes and neither sex. The contradictory language of this novel presents Rhoulem in this manner several times.
Even as Rhoulem is named and sexed as male, the text makes it clear that he is not solely male. With regard to supposedly ”male” and ”female” traits, it will be useful here to consider briefly Michel Foucault’s arguments regarding the constructedness, not of gender, but of sex itself. As is apparent from the description of Rhoulem at birth, he has markers of both sexes; yet he is marked as male. As Foucault notes, historically, ”the notion of ”sex” made it possible to group together, in an artificial unity, anatomical elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, and pleasures [. . .].” [8] Hermaphroditism, in particular, emphasizes the indeterminacy of identity, whether linguistic or sexual. In part, the sexual ambiguity arises from the linguistic impossibility of naming what exactly a hermaphrodite is. Kari Weil, in Androgyny and the Denial of Difference, argues that androgyny is a ”rhetorical mode that presents male and female as opposed elements,” whereas the hermaphrodite is a mode that ”by undermining the nature of opposition itself, reveals a disturbing inseparability of the terms.” [9]
Given the gendered quality of most first names, it might seem difficult to name a child who appears to fit neither of the categories of male or female (or even one who appears to fit both categories). That the midwife gives him a name suggests not only that she and his mother will not wait for some final arbitration of his sex, but that, in fact, his sex is settled. ”Rhoulem, et rien d’autre! Avec cette chose qu’il a au milieu des jambes, on ne peut l’appeler qu’ainsi, et c’est très bien comme ça. Allez! On va pas s’amuser à changer de nom tous les quarts d’heure!” [Rhoulem and nothing else! With this thing he has between his legs, he can’t be called anything else, and it’s just right like that. We’re not going to play around changing names every fifteen minutes!] (8). The midwife maintains that Rhoulem’s name is appropriate given ”this thing he has between his legs.” What that thing is, however, is not a fully developed penis, but rather a marker of Rhoulem’s hermaphroditism. This passage concerning Rhoulem’s sex and name repeatedly asserts and undermines the certainty of Rhoulem’s sex. If ”Rhoulem and nothing else” is the watchword, why suggest that the alternative is to change his name every fifteen minutes? His mother underscores this later in the text when Rhoulem is nine: ”Un jour, ça poussera comme il faut et tu pourras rejoindre les hommes. Mais si tu veux entrer plus tôt dans leur rang, vas-y tout de suite! Apprends à y faire comme si de rien n’était” [One day that will grow as it ought to and you’ll be able to catch up with the men. But if you want to join their ranks sooner, go ahead right now! Learn to act as if nothing was wrong.] (11, my emphasis). While she suggests that Rhoulem is only temporarily outside the world of men and that he will be able to catch up with them as he ”ought to,” the description of Rhoulem seems to make this promised meeting less than a sure thing. Significantly, when Rhoulem is fourteen and his mother abandons him, she leaves him in an environment that is decidedly not the ”world of men”: he becomes, in fact, the only apparent male in sewing workshop otherwise inhabited solely by women.
Just as the examples above point to contradictions in which the speaker asserts certainty, even as her own words undermine that certainty, so the name the midwife chooses prefigures a particularly tentative version of ”maleness.” The name Rhoulem rendered in Arabic script derives from the root gh-l-m, [10] referring to a verb meaning ”to be excited by lust,” or ”[to] be seized by sensuous desire.” [11] Of the noun forms derived from this root, Rhoulem’s name comes closest to the word ghulam, meaning slave, servant, boy, youth or lad. I will focus for the moment on the latter three meanings as particularly relevant to Rhoulem. Of course, the terms boy, lad, and youth all signal masculinity, or at least the potential masculinity of an adult male; however, the figure of the young man holds an ambiguous status in Arabo-Islamic literature. Significantly, the verb ghalima implies someone who desires, but the noun, on the contrary, refers to the object of such desire, so that the boy, for example, is the one desired, or who incites desire. This accords also with a historical cultural context in which young men were often the objects of desire for older men. A young man, or ”beardless youth,” as he was often described, although unambiguously male, played a role that designated him as not yet fully a man. In this transitional stage between adolescence and full manhood, a young man, as an object of adult male desire (whose own heterosexuality was never put in question by this desire) [12] posed as great a danger of fitna (social disorder) as any beautiful young woman. [13] [14] As sources of potential social disorder, both women and young men were subject to restrictions designed to keep them separated from adult men. [15] Rhoulem’s name would seem to lock him into this usually transitional stage for his entire life.
In the introduction to the memoirs of a nineteenth-century hermaphrodite, Michel Foucault links naming to the public sexing of a child. [16] According to Foucault, until the eighteenth century, a child of ambiguous sex, upon reaching the age when it might be expected to consider marriage, could choose either sex, and it is to be imagined that this might upon occasion have been determined by the sex of the one the ambiguously sexed person wished to marry. [17] Thus according to Foucault’s account, the father’s naming was not irrevocable, and the hermaphrodite could eventually choose his or her own sex. By the nineteenth century, such flexibility was no longer tolerated. Science required the individual to have one ”true” sex, from birth to death. When someone was named ”incorrectly,” it had to be corrected, not according to the choice of the person involved, but according to supposedly objective scientific criteria. But such criteria were inevitably tied up with the what constituted socially acceptable desire. In both periods described by Foucault, desire must be turned into heterosexual desire, which then determines the sex of the hermaphrodite. In the case of Herculine Barbin, for example, despite clinical reports that describe sexual organs that are neither clearly male nor female, Barbin was required to assume a masculine name and identity. S/he had, after all, loved a woman, which within a heterosexual framework determines sex more than anatomy ever could.
Significantly for the naming and sexing of Rhoulem, norms dictating that the individual must have only one sex (and all the better if it is male) determine that those doing the naming will see only what supports their choice of sex for the child. In his introduction to Heculine Barbin , Michel Foucault writes, ”Everybody was to have his or her primary, profound, determined and determining sexual identity; as for the elements of the other sex that might appear, they could only be accidental, superficial, or even quite simply illusory” (viii).
* * * * *

As the etymology of Rhoulem’s name suggests, he is an object of desire, or an incitement to desire, but what of his own desire? If Rhoulem is the object of desire for many characters in the novel (the narrator, the commandant, Gabi, Azria), a desire that takes many different forms, Rhoulem’s own desire seems, by contrast, constrained. At the opening of the novel his one obsession is to open a shop where he might sell sewing materials. While it might be argued that this is merely a result of his growing up in a sewing workshop, as he describes his ambition to the director, he emphasizes not the functional materials of sewing (plain cloth or thread, for example), but rather the ornamental: ”Des paillettes. Brillants, rubans, satins, fils d’or, perles! Si quel’un s’en va là-bas, il t’apporte une valise; tu fais ton bénéfice de l’année dans les trois mois. [. . .]. Des paillettes...Garanti!” [Sequins. Diamonds, ribbons, satins, gold thread, pearls! If someone goes down there, he brings you a suitcase; you make a year’s profit in three months. [. . .] Sequins . . . Guaranteed!] (24). Of all the words about sewing, it is ”sequins” that Rhoulem repeats. His fascination with sequins, is all the more striking if one considers that sequins are essentially miniature mirrors. [18] As the words of an apparently male character, such an enthusiasm would inevitably lead to associations with the stereotypically flashiest forms of drag.
Sewing occupies a significant place throughout Assima’s narrative. That she sets the opening scenes of the novel in a sewing workshop and that sewing occupies such an important place in Rhoulem’s aspirations is directly related not only to Rhoulem’s status as a hermaphrodite (who is himself a ”soudure,” a joining of disparate parts or the place of that joining), but also to the larger political statement of the novel. Sewing is an activity that creates a ”soudure” by joining pieces of cloth together to make whole garments. Rhoulem’s desire for the materials of sewing may reflect a desire to make whole things from parts. Given that the current violence in Algeria stems in part from the inability to bring together disparate elements of the nation (secularists, Islamists, ethnic groups, democrats, feminists, etc.), Assima suggests a link between Rhoulem’s desire and a desire to find a way to get Algeria’s parts to hold together.
* * * * *

Designating Rhoulem as male despite signs that he is not solely male accords also with the male bias that turns up in the origins of the words for hermaphrodite in both French and Arabic. The French word comes from the name of the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, Hermaphroditus, which is itself a blending of the parents’ names. As legend has it, one day a nymph Salamacis sees Hermaphroditus bathing in her stream. This nymph, however, is immediately marked as different from other nymphs. She might be described as the most ”feminine” of the nymphs compared to her active sisters:
A Nymph dwells there, unsuited to the chase,
unskilled to bend the bow, slothful of foot,
the only Naiad in the world unknown
to rapid-running Dian.
[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]
[S]he only scorned the javelin and the quiver,
nor joined her leisure to the active chase.
Rather she bathes her smooth and shapely limbs;
or combs her tresses with a boxwood comb,
Citorian; or looking in the pool
consults the glassed waters of effects
increasing beauty; [. . .] [19]
She falls in love with him, but ”[h]e knows nor cares for love” (l. 499) and rejects her advances. She persists until he threatens to run away, so she pretends to leave, but hides and watches him as he undresses and jumps into the water. Salamacis also undresses, enters the water and ”winds herself about him, as entwines/the serpent [. . .]/[. . .] around the eagle’s feet” (ll. 448-551) and ”as the ivy clings to sturdy oaks” (l. 553). The misogynist imagery underscores the overall impression of the poem: a strong, and one might say, honest hero (oak tree, eagle) is undone by a weak but devious foe (serpent, ivy). Salamacis prays to be united with Hermaphroditus forever, and the gods respond by making them one being which ”with a two-fold form/nor man nor woman may be called” (ll. 570-571). Upon this union, the new being retains the male name, and implores the gods for vengeance because ”he is not wholly male, but only half” (l. 577), thus suggesting that not only in name, but in spirit (if not in flesh), he is male. Hermaphroditus may be but half a man; Salamacis disappears altogether, losing both voice and name. It might be argued that Salamacis got what she asked for, after a fashion, but Hermaphroditus remains a male figure with, at most, feminine faults—not unlike Rhoulem.
The word in Arabic for a hermaphrodite also describes the hermaphrodite in terms of a man’s loss of masculinity. The word khuntha comes from a root kh-n-th, meaning to be effeminate. Although the Islamic legal tradition seems as willing to designate an ambiguously sexed child female as male, [20] the etymology of the word clearly views the hermaphrodite as someone who is ”rightly” male. [21] It would make no sense, after all, to talk of a hermaphrodite as an effeminate woman. The same root also provides the word mukhannath, which refers to a man who assumed ”nonsexual feminine attributes of appearance or behavior” (Rowson 69). They were most often court performers, prized, tolerated or condemned depending on the social climate of the times. [22] Rhoulem thus might be described as both a khuntha and mukhannath.
As Paula Sanders notes, for medieval Islamic societies ”the boundary between male and female was drawn firmly and was deeply embedded both in views of the cosmos and in social structures” (74). Violation of these boundaries would be seen to result in social anarchy, or fitna. Since all aspects of daily life from clothing to prayer were determined according to one’s sex, the situation of the hermaphrodite presented significant problems. It was believed that everyone had a true sex, even if that sex was known only to God; the problem was to make sure that the apparent hermaphrodite observe the rules governing both men’s and women’s behavior without violating one set of rules while following another. [24]
By this summary, I do not mean to suggest that practices of medieval Islamic society can simply be applied to contemporary Algerian society, but just as present-day European literatures are influenced by older traditions, I would argue that both this Islamic tradition and its European counterpart can also shed light on understanding the situation of a literary hermaphrodite. In the context of Algerian francophone literature, [25] it is especially important to consider the multiple traditions affecting contemporary literary production. In the case of Rhoulem we see a striking convergence in an insistence on marking a hermaphrodite not only with a sex, but also preferably the male sex.
* * * * *

Given how quickly Rhoulem’s mother and the midwife decide that he will be named and raised as a boy, one might expect that, if anything, his sex would be more established with the passage of time, as he grows up dressing and acting like a boy and having others refer to him as male. His sexual ambiguity remains hidden until he leaves for Algiers. Until then, there is no doubt, at least no doubt expressed through linguistic markers, about his gender. He is always ”he.” And when it does become an issue in the workshop, he is still perceived as male, even if a deformed male, ”un homme coupé” [a cut man]. In Algiers, he is ”he” until he performs as a dancer in a nightclub, when he begins to be referred to by both feminine and neuter pronouns, as well as by masculine pronouns. [26]
His identity, however, makes no straightforward move from masculine to feminine; if, anything, it only becomes more unstable, as suggested by the following reaction of a cabaret patron to Rhoulem’s dance:

—C’est merveilleux, c’est magnifique, s’exclame un homme installé je ne sais trop comment à ma table. Il a le bassin étroit... Il danse aussi admirablement qu’une femme. [. . .] Magnifique, merv. . . Aïe! qu’est-ce qu’ elle nous fait là? Aïe! Je meurs! (103-104, my emphasis)

It’s wonderful, it’s magnificent, exclaimed a man who had somehow settled himself at my table. His narrow pelvis. . . He dances as beautifully as a woman. [. . .] Magnificent, wond. . . Aie! What is she doing to us there? Aie! This is too much!
In this short passage, Rhoulem is successively referred to by neuter, masculine and feminine pronouns. It might be argued, that the neuter pronoun ça refers to the spectacle or the dance, but given the subsequent use of both the masculine and the feminine pronouns, which can only refer to Rhoulem, it is consistent to consider that all the pronouns refer to Rhoulem. In a scene at the end of the novel, in what will be Rhoulem’s last performance before his death, he is referred to by other characters only in the feminine (”la danseuse,” ”cette gazelle,” ”elle” [151]), and by the narrator in both the masculine and the feminine (”il,” ”la danseuse” [152]).
The only other passage where such a shift in pronouns occurs is when the third-person narrator describes a horrific assault on a mentally disabled young man, who is repeatedly beaten up and raped by Rhoulem’s co-workers at the cabaret.

Les hommes étaient assis, chacun devant une bouteille de vin. L’un d’eux tenait au bout d’une corde une masse de chaire laiteuse. Un monstre, un amas de bourrelets, de chair grasse et flasque. [. . .] Il ne voyait qu’ une boule blanche. Un homme, brusquement, enfourcha la masse , qui poussa un râle plus terrifiant.
Dans cette forme boudinée, Rhoulem reconnut soudain le corps d’un garçon obèse, une sorte de mammifère chauve qui criait et se débattait. (73-74, my emphasis)

The men were seated, each one with a bottle of wine in front of him. One of them held at the end of a rope a mass of milky flesh. A monster, a heap of folds of skin, of fat and flabby flesh. [. . .] He could see nothing but a white ball . Suddenly, a man mounted the mass , which let out an even more terrifying howl.
In this bulging form , Rhoulem suddenly recognized the body of an obese boy, a sort of bald mammal who cried out and struggled.
Not only is the victim’s masculinity, but his very humanity, is disregarded as he is referred to as ”a mass,” ”a ball,” ”this form” and ”a bald mammal.” He will later be referred to as ”la bête” [the beast] (74). At the same time as he is dehumanized, he is brought closer to the feminine. Apart from the linguistic gender of the above terms, he is described as a mammal, a class of animals one of whose defining characteristics (also suggested by the word’s etymology) is the presence of breasts, a female trait. (His skin is furthermore described as ”laiteuse,” or milky.) Despite the dehumanizing treatment, one of his tormentors still recognizes him as male and cannot bring himself to penetrate another man. One of the other attackers responds:

. . . un homme? C’est ça, hein? Parce que, pour toi, c’est un homme, cet animal? On est des pédés, alors, d’après toi? Des pédés? Tu préfères les femmes! Tiens, et comme ça, tu peux toujours pas te la faire, cette femme!”
[. . .] Il perça de plusieurs coups la pâte molle, exactement comme s’il pénétrait une femme . (74, my emphasis)

. . . a man? That’s it, eh? Because for you, it’s a man, this animal? We’re homos then, according to you? Homos? You prefer women! Come on, and like this, you still won’t be able to do her, this woman!” [. . .] He pierced the feeble lump, exactly as if he were penetrating a woman .
One cannot help seeing this dehumanization of a young man as also a process of the attackers seeing him as less male, and hence according to their logic, more female, underscored by the phrase, ”exactly as if he were penetrating a woman.” The choice of words in this passage is also striking. At the same moment as the speaker feminizes their victim, he also links the sexual act and violence through a slang expression ”se faire quelqu’un,” which means both to possess someone sexually and to kill.
Whereas the most explicit violence actually committed in this novel is against those whom other characters perceive as men who are ”less than men,” the threat of violence—whether a child’s bluster or the possibility of death—is directed at female characters. Whatever the degree of violence against women in the novel, it is by and large sexual violence. A six-year-old boy exposes himself and spits at the director. The only response she receives from an elderly man giving her directions is: ”Fallait sortir avec ton mari” [You shouldn’t have gone out without your husband] (161). The suggestion, of course, is that without a male protector, the director risks harm from males. Even, if in this case, the threat seems small, it gives an idea of the pervasive atmosphere. In a more menacing example, a young woman in the sewing workshop discusses the impossibility of going out: ”On sait ce qu’ils racontent: les femmes violées, égorgées. Moi, j’ai entendu les maçons, quand ils sont venus. Ils disaient: “Si on savait le stock de femmes qu’il y a ici, ça ferait un malheur!”” [You know the stories they’re telling: women raped, their throats slit. Me, I heard the masons, when they were here. They were saying, ”If they knew the stock of women here, it’d be a tragedy!] (121). Such examples abound in the text, many mentioned only in passing, as though banal, everyday events. Even when such a threat is derided, as in the following example, it is suggested that it can be laughed at because the person making the threat is not an adult male. ”Un garçon a alors juré sur sa tête qu’il le dirait à Bazouz et qu’il la ferait battre au sang. La fille s’est mise à rire, puis elle a répondu: —Attends d’abord d’avoir autre chose qu’une cacahuète dans la culotte” [A boy swore that he’d tell Bazouz and that he’d have her beaten until she bled. The girl started laughing; then she answered: ”Wait until you have something bigger than a peanut in your shorts.”] (170). While such a response derides the child’s threat, it is a response based on belittling the boy’s masculinity, thus indirectly making the specter of adult violence all the more visible.
Rhoulem is the character subject to the most explicit violence. When Rhoulem first leaves the workshop, it is to follow the promise of employment in Algiers. Instead, Hakim arranges for him to exchange sex for food in order to support himself and his mother, whom Hakim has located. Finally, after several months, Hakim takes him to meet the commandant in Algiers, whose first action is to have Rhoulem tortured (to demonstrate, it is explained, what will happen if he tries to run away). Later as Rhoulem lies nearly unconscious from his wounds, the same man rapes Rhoulem and slashes his back and feet several times with a knife before leaving him. After recuperating from his wounds, Rhoulem is put to work not in the kitchens as promised, but as a ”danseuse” under constant threat of violence. As in the other examples in which sex and violence, or the threat of violence are linked, what is at issue is intimidation and assertion of power over another.
Judith Butler in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ”Sex” ,[27] refers to bodies that ”simultaneously materialize, acquire meaning, and obtain a legitimate status.” [28] As Butler notes, some bodies emphatically do not matter in the sense that they are unintelligible, have no political status, and therefore cannot be said to exist as such. The hermaphrodite provides a good example of this. The interest in sexing a hermaphrodite is so great precisely because the hermaphrodite is unintelligible, has no definite political or social status, and therefore cannot exist as a hermaphrodite. Bodies that do not matter, in Butler’s formulation, are abject, literally that which is cast off, and if a hermaphrodite is cast off, has no status or did not really exist to begin with, then violence against the hermaphrodite seems if not inevitable, at least not terribly surprising either.
* * * * *

Although my earlier discussion of the historical cultural status of hermaphrodites may have suggested interpreting this novel as a statement regarding sexuality, the narrative leads rather to a more general consideration of the status of hybridity in Algeria. Given Rhoulem’s trajectory from a place of relative security and stability to one of violence and chaos, we might view him as an allegorical figure for Algeria since 1991 when the current cycle of violence began. This interpretation seems particularly compelling given the book’s publication date (1996) and the writer’s description of increasing disorder in the Algeria of the novel.
Early in the novel violence is discussed as something that happens to other people, in the stories that are passed from one person to another like newspaper accounts of faraway tragedies. ”Quand on leur a expliqué que Rhoulem n’était pas rentré, ils se sont lamentés avec nous. Ils ont raconté des histoires de corps qu’on retrouve, sur les routes, dans un sale état” [When they were told that Rhoulem hadn’t come back, they bemoaned the situation with us. They told stories of bodies found along the roads in a horrible condition] (44). Similarly, on a bus to Algiers the director hears women complain about ”[leur] vie de misère” [their life of misery] et ”la vie chère” [the high cost of living] (90). Upon her return to Oran, however, the violence and impossibly expensive staple goods are no longer the story of the Algiers, but of her own workshop. The guard dogs are poisoned, and shortly thereafter, the workshop’s storeroom is burglarized. The director notes, ”J’apprends désormais à écouter le crépitement des balles, au-delà de la ville” [I’m learning to count the sound of gunshots out beyond the city] (119), and ”Les balles claquaient de plus près . . . On s’est mises à les compter” [The shots rang out closer . . . We started counting them] (122). By the end of the novel, the director will see the direct effects of this violence on Rhoulem.
Having a protagonist stand as an allegorical figure for the Algerian nation has been a strategy of several Algerian novels. Rhoulem is different, however, in that Assima uses a hybrid figure, rather than a female character, has as been the case in other Algerian works. [29] If indeed Rhoulem does serve as a figure for the Algerian nation, how does Rhoulem’s hermaphroditism translate to a national context? Algeria’s discourse of nationalism might designate French influence (or indeed any non-Arab influence, including Berber, although this latter is not brought up in the text of Rhoulem) as corrupting of a supposedly pure Arab linguistic and cultural heritage, as exemplified by the slogan, ”Algeria is our nation, Islam is our religion, Arabic is our language.” In fact, however, the Algerians of this novel seem to have made their peace, if a somewhat uneasy one, with French influence. As the director reads a history of the compound which at that moment houses the sewing workshop, the text describes the skill with which French colonists built the walls. ”Le descriptif, d’ailleurs, soulignait que la ceinture avait été renforcée en maints endroits et qu’à aucun moment on n’avait relevé la moindre destruction [. . .]. (Qu’un tel mérite fût reconnu aux colons me fit sourire, et je me demandai comment une telle étourderie avait pu passer)” [The description, moreover, underscored that the wall had been reenforced in many places and that at no time had the slightest damage been noted [. . .]. (That such praise was conceded to the colonists made me smile, and I wondered how such absent-mindedness could have gotten by)] (31). Ginane, the director’s assistant, despite being a veteran of the war of Independence, seems at times even nostalgic for French influence: ”C’est fini, le temps qu’on avait des hommes beaux comme des acteurs, et qui savaient parler français comme un livre de grammaire” [They’re over, the times when we had men as handsome as actors, who knew how to speak French like a grammar book] (42).
Although the novel alludes to the battle between secular and religious forces, religion plays a relatively small role in this novel. Ginane expresses what might be a motto for many of the characters in the novel: ”Juifs, chrétiens, musulmans... Moi, je comprends plus ce que ça veut dire” [Jews, Christians, Muslims... Me, I don’t know what that means anymore] (124). Individual religious observances, however, are portrayed positively, as when the director prays with another woman, shortly after Ginane’s exasperated exclamation. Armed religious organizations are only alluded to twice in the novel. First, Ginane criticizes the ”frères”: ”Au moins, les Français, on savait qu’on cherchait à les chasser d’ici, mais ceux là, des frères, par-dessus le marché! Pas moyen de s’en débarrasser! La purée de nous autres! Ça n’a jamais filé droit. Jamais!” [At least, with the French, we knew that were trying to chase them out of here, but those, the brothers, beyond all bounds. No way to get rid of them! Our very own mess! That’s never gone right. Never!] (144). Second, Bazouz talks about how the commandant had had to placate some ”excités” who had sent death threats regarding construction he had undertaken, which they believed would be ”un lieu de débauche” [a place of debauchery] (63). Even this latter example, by opposing the ”excités,” whom the reader can only infer are members of a militant religious group, to the brutal commandant, and by labeling them disdainfully, makes them seem relatively harmless. Although the commandant is referred to by a military title and might evoke the FLN, the text indicates no such connections.
The text also supports understanding Rhoulem’s repressed female traits as the repression or exclusion of women. Ginane, the director’s assistant and a veteran of the Independence war, for example, views Algeria’s problems in terms of sex:

La pelle et la pioche aux hommes. Qu’ils se remettent à travailler la terre, et qu’ils nous laissent bâtir le pays comme on l’entend. [. . .]. La femme, ça a toujours été leur vrai problème. Quand elle a fini de pondre, on la met de côté. Voilà pourquoi le pays avance sur un pied. [. . .] Oui, ma chère, ils sont tous nés avec un sexe à la place du cerveau. (41-43)

Let men take up their spades and pickaxes. Let them get back to working the land, and leave us alone to build the country as we see fit. [. . .] Woman, that’s always been their real problem. When she’s done producing children, they put her aside. That’s why the country is moving forward on one foot.
[. . .] Yes, my dear, they’re all born with their sex in place of a brain.
When she talks about the state of the country and the economy, she says foreigners refuse to have anything to do with them or to undertake joint development projects, because Algerian men present themselves badly. Of the potential economic partner, she says, ”S’il avait en face de lui une femme, tout simplement!” [If he just had in front of him a woman, that’s all!] (42). It strikes me as no accident that the most vocal critic also happens to have fought in the Independence War. If women are accorded little space in public discourse, perhaps it is only a ”moudjahidate,” or woman veteran, who can say anything at all.
Although sex and gender are certainly at the center of this novel, they do not entirely exclude other issues of identity. If this novel were simply a tale of the increasing violence in Algeria, or a story of the powerless as the first victims of violence, a similar story might just as well be told with either a strictly male or female character in the role of a poor orphaned youth who leaves a safe provincial environment for the corruption of the big city where the hero or heroine eventually meets a violent and untimely end. [30] A hermaphrodite, however, allows the text to raise the issue of hybridity, not simply the difference of the disempowered; it also allows the text to suggest several hybridities (language, culture, religion, sex) without necessarily making any one of them the sole focus of the novel. Rhoulem appears to serve as a figure for national hybridity in which he represents an impossible combination of traits, an impossibly hybrid Algeria that cannot get beyond its apparent internal oppositions to occupy comfortably a third position of ”neither and both,” especially with regard to the roles men and women play in that nation. Rather than seek a definitive and static allegorical structure in the novel, it may be more productive to consider Rhoulem as a figure for hybridity—a nation—that is itself constantly shifting, just as Rhoulem’s gender and the way people talk about it shifts throughout the novel. Similarly, his attempts to repress one aspect of his identity recalls Algerian nationalistic discourse that attempts to repress (sometimes violently) certain aspects of Algerian identity, be it culture, language, religion, or even sex.
The novel presents three views of Algeria, which might at first seem distinct, but which in the end are clearly interconnected through Rhoulem’s travels: the provincial setting of the workshop outside the city of Oran, the underworld of the capital, and the wealthy milieu of the Westernized elite of the workshop director and her friends she meets in Algiers. The unnamed director of the workshop and sometime narrator does go in search of Rhoulem, but her activity comes too late to save him, and she can only return him to Oran where he dies. Whereas Rhoulem may stand as a figure for Algeria, it is possible to see the director as representative of those, who although well-intentioned, are either apathetic or incapable of seeing what is going on around them, in part because they, too, are implicated. That the director sees Rhoulem without recognizing him in time to save him and that it is her cousin Gabi who initiates the chain of events that will lead to Rhoulem’s death are no accident. Even if we avoid the temptation to read this novel as an elaborate allegory, the issues of violence and inaction in the face of that violence are no less present or relevant.
* * * * *

Hybridity is certainly the dominant trope of this novel, announced in the title itself. As detailed above, Rhoulem’s name in and of itself signals a transitional hybrid state, but even without knowing the particular etymology of his name, the very joining (”soudure”) of an evidently non-French name with a French expression, ”le sexe des anges,” suggests such associations. [31] Such a reading might be further supported by considering the book cover, which depicts a sketch by Michelangelo of a human figure, muscled as might be expected of Renaissance images of masculinity, but with long hair gathered up in a feminine style. The sketch, entitled ”The Libyan Sibyl,” was preparatory for part of the painting of the Sistine Chapel. Although sibyls were traditionally female, the image is strikingly androgynous, as is the painting that was eventually produced from it. [32] The cover image of the sibyl might be further linked with the title in that both sibyls and angels were considered by the traditions that created them to be figures of prophecy and annunciation. [33]
Naming Algeria Muslim, secular, Berber, Arab or any other single term might be compared to naming an ambiguously sexed child either male or female. As I argued earlier in this paper, how a child is named depends upon what the person bestowing the name wishes the child to be—and similarly for the nation. The current violence in Algeria over what Algeria ”ought to be” is remarkably akin to the attempts at making Rhoulem ”male.” As such, Rhoulem’s fate may be a sobering prophecy for Algeria.
Finally, the subtitle, ”le sexe des anges,” also recalls the expression ”discuter du sexe des anges,” meaning literally to discuss the sex of angels, and more figuratively, to engage in idle discussion. Assima suggests in her title both Algeria’s national obsession with questions of identity and the futility of attempting to find a pure Algerian identity, or any ”pure” national identity. The issue is not whether Rhoulem is male or female or something else, but whether the people around him can accept such undecidability.
Bibliography

Assima, Fériel. Une femme à Alger: Chronique du désastre. Paris: Arléa, 1995.

-----. Rhoulem ou le sexe des anges . Paris: Arléa, 1996.

Ben Jelloun, Tahar. L’enfant de sable . Paris: Seuil, 1985.

-----. Tahar Ben Jelloun. ”Maux d’horreur.” Le monde des livres 15 mars 1996: 5.

Bernard, Philippe. ”Persécuté en Algérie, un transsexuel peine à obtenir l’asile en France.” Le Monde 27 avr. 1998: 9.

Bouhdiba, Abdelwahab. Sexuality in Islam . Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Routledge, 1985. Trans. of La Sexualité en Islam. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1975.

Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ”Sex.” New York: Routledge, 1993).

-----. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity . Thinking Gender. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Coudert, Allison. ”Angels.” The Encyclopedia of Religion . Ed. Mircea Eliade. New York: Macmillan, 1987.

Crane, Gregory R., ed., The Perseus Project , http://www.perseus.tufts.edu. Feb. 1998.

”Dark Questions for Algeria.” Los Angeles Times 23 Jan. 1998: B8.

Foucault, Michel, ed. Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century Hermaphrodite . Trans. Richard McDougall. New York: Colophon, 1980.

-----. The History of Sexuality, An Introduction. New York: Vintage, 1978.

Gafaiti, Hafid. ”Between God and the President: Literature and Censorship in North Africa.” diacritics 27.2 (1997): 59-84.

Geesey, Patricia. ”Algerian Fiction and the Civil Crisis: Bodies Under Seige.” World Literature Today 71.3 (1997): 485-494.

Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman . Trans. Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell U.P., 1985.

Jameson, Fredric. ”World Literature in an Age of Multinational Capitalism.” The Current in Criticism: Essays on the Present and Future of Literary Theory . Ed. Clayton Koelb and Virgil Lokke. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1987.

MacDonald, D.B. ”Mala’ika” [Angels]. Encyclopedia of Islam . 1983 ed.

Marx-Scouras, Danielle. ”Reconciling Language and History in Maghrebine Literary Criticism.” The Maghreb Review 9.3-4 (1984): 58-66.

Meijer, Irene Costera and Baukje Prins. ”How Bodies Come to Matter: An Interview with Judith Butler.” Signs 23.2 (1998): 275-286.

Michelangelo. The Libyan Sibyl . Sistine Chapel, Rome. 4 Feb. 1998 <http://www.christusrex.org/www1/sistine/24c-Libian.jp>.

Peirce, Leslie. ”Seniority, Sexuality, and Social Order: The Vocabulary of Gender in Early Modern Ottoman Society.” Women in the Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern Women in the Early Modern Era . Ed. Madeline C. Zilfi. Leiden: Brill, 1997. 169-196.

[Pellat, Charles]. ”Liwat.” Encyclopedia of Islam . 1983 ed.

Rowson, Everett K. ”The Categorization of Gender and Sexual Irregularity in Medieval Arabic Vice Lists.” Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity . Ed. J. Epstein and K. Straub. New York: Routledge, 1991. 50-79.

Sanders, Paula. ”Gendering the Ungendered Body: Hermaphrodites in Medieval Islam.” Women in Middle Eastern History . Ed. Nikki R. and Beth Baron Keddie. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. 74-93.

Tenkoul, Abderrahmane. ”Mythe de l’androgyne et texte maghrébin.” Littératures maghrébines: Colloque Jacqueline Arnaud. Vol. 1. 2-4 December 1987. Collection Itinéraires et contactes de cultures 10. Paris: Harmattan, 1990. 2 vols. 115-120.

Weil, Kari. Androgyny and the Denial of Difference . Feminist Issues: Practice, Politics, Theory. Charlottesville: Unversity Press of Virginia, 1992.

Zoubir, Yahia H. ”The Painful Transition from Authoritarianism in Algeria,” Arab Studies Quarterly 15.3 (1993): 83-110.



[1] All page references to this work will appear after quotations in the text. I am grateful to Whitney Sanford for bringing this novel to my attention and for the opportunity to discuss it with her, Susan Van Deventer and David Agruss at Cornell University in July 1997.
[2] After candidates from the Islamist Front Islamique du Salut (FIS) won a majority of the first-round elections in December 1991 (the first multi-party elections in Algeria’s post-Independence history), the ruling FLN canceled the second round scheduled for January 1992. Since then the FLN and Islamic groups opposed to FLN rule have been waging a terrorist campaign against each other and against civilians. It has been estimated that by January of this year 65,000 people had been killed in the fighting. See ”Dark Questions for Algeria,” Los Angeles Times 23 Jan. 1998: B8.
[3] As Tahar Ben Jelloun writes in a review of Rhoulem, ”Le fait de signer par un pseudonyme et de ne jamais apparaître en public lui a donné des ailes et des libertés” (”Maux d’horreur,” Le monde des livres 15 mars 1996: 5).
[4] Paris: Arléa, 1995.
[5] All translations from Rhoulem ou le sexe des anges are my own.
[6] I recognize the problem of using masculine pronouns to talk about a character whom I am arguing is hermaphroditic. In most of the text, however, Rhoulem is designated by ”he” or ”him,” and as I argue later in this chapter, the change to feminine and neuter pronouns happens at particular moments in the text for specific reasons. Outside of those moments, therefore, I will use masculine pronouns to refer to Rhoulem.
[7] ”Soudure,” Dictionnaire Grand Robert, 2nd ed.
[8] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction , trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978) 154.
[9] Androgyny and the Denial of Difference (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992) 31-32.
[10] The Arabic ghain, a glottal sound nonexistent in French or English, is often transliterated with the letters rh in French, and gh in English, which would give us Rhoulem’s name as Ghulem in English transliteration.
[11] Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic , 3rd ed. I am grateful to Susan Van Deventer for pointing this out.
[12] In relations between adult men and young men, power and desire remained the prerogative of the usually older, penetrating man. A man’s masculinity and heterosexuality were only put into question if he sought out and enjoyed the role of ”passive” partner. These were not fixed roles, either, as the young man who was ”passive” with one partner, might play the ”active” role with another partner. See Everett K. Rowson, ”The Categorization of Gender and Sexual Irregularity in Medieval Arabic Vice Lists,” Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity , ed. J. Epstein and K. Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991) 57-58, 64.
[13] Rowson notes, ”[T]estimony to a parallelism between the desire for boys and that for women is provided by a series of texts explicitly devoted to just the opposite point, that is to disputes over [their] comparative merits” (58).
[14] A feminine inflection of this word, ghulamiyya referred to a woman who cut her hair short and dressed in boy’s clothing. Both the masculine woman and the feminine man, according to documents of the middle ages, were the objects of great passion in a court milieu. Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, Sexuality in Islam , trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1985), 201-202.
[15] Leslie Peirce, ”Seniority, Sexuality, and Social Order: The Vocabulary of Gender in Early Modern Ottoman Society,” Women in the Ottoman Empire: Middle Eastern Women in the Early Modern Era , ed. Madeline C. Zilfi (Leiden: Brill, 1997) 169-196.
[16] Michel Foucault, ed., Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century Hermaphrodite , trans. Richard McDougall (New York: Colophon, 1980). Page references to this work will appear after quotations in the text.
[17] Thomas Laqueur argues that Foucault’s explanation is perhaps utopian. ”[G]ender choice was by no means so open to individual discretion, and one was not free to change in midstream. But he is right that there was no true, deep essential sex that differentiated cultural man from woman.” See Laqueur’s Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard U.P., 1990) 124.
[18] My thanks to Aimée Boutin for this observation. Mirrors and narcissism in a psychoanalytic context frequently evoke the feminine.
[19] Gregory R. Crane, ed., The Perseus Project , http://www.perseus.tufts.edu., Feb. 1998, ll. 460-476. Subsequent line references will appear after quotations in the text.
[20] See Paula Sanders, ”Gendering the Ungendered Body: Hermaphrodites in Medieval Islam,” Women in Middle Eastern History, ed. Nikki R. Keddie and Beth Baron (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 74-93, for a detailed discussion of the complex rules governing how to determine the ”true” sex of a hermaphrodite. Subsequent page references to these works will appear after quotations in the text.
[21] Everett K. Rowson discusses the etymology of the Arabic word for hermaphrodite in ”The Categorization of Gender and Sexual Irregularity in Medieval Arabic Vice Lists,” Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity , ed. J. Epstein and K. Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991) 70.
[2223] See Rowson, who discusses the status of the mukhannath in the eleventh century, perhaps the high point of their fortunes. Even then, as he notes, ”public appreciation, and even fame, were accessible, but respectability was emphatically not” (72). We might compare this to the case of an Algerian transsexual who in late April 1998 was in danger of being deported from France. See Philippe Bernard, ”Persécuté en Algérie, un transsexuel peine à obtenir l’asile en France,” Le monde 27 avr. 1998: 9. My thanks to Mark McKinney for forwarding this article to me.
[24] In a European context, Kari Weil notes that the hermaphroditic body counters the doxa that everyone has a ”true” sex. Androgyny and the Denial of Difference (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992) 30.
[25] Given the lack of information about the author Fériel Assima, the author of Rhoulem ou le sexe des anges , it is difficult to make an argument concerning cultural influences on the author, but given the cultural setting of the novel itself, I believe it is valid to consider these influences relevant, even if, however unlikely, the author turns out to have no connection whatsoever to Algeria.
[26] Despite Rhoulem’s expressed desire to open a shop, from the moment he leaves the workshop, his survival and eventual death will depend on exploiting his body.
[27] New York: Routledge, 1993.
[28] Irene Costera Meijer and Baukje Prins, ”How Bodies Come to Matter: An Interview with Judith Butler,” Signs 23.2 (1998): 279.
[29] The most prominent example that comes to mind is Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma (Paris: Seuil, 1956).
[30] There is a long tradition of such cautionary tales in both Arabic and French. When a female character is involved, she is often tricked into prostitution, which leads to illness, rather than violence, and death.
[31] According to orthodox Muslim and Christian theology, angels are sexless.
[32] Michelangelo, The Libyan Sibyl , Sistine Chapel, Rome, 4 Feb. 1998, <http://www.christusrex.org/www1/sistine/24c-Libian.jp>.
[33]Allison Coudert, ”Angels,” The Encyclopedia of Religion , ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1987), and D.B. MacDonald, ”Mala’ika,” Encyclopedia of Islam , 1983 ed.
Back