From Les Damnés de la Terre to “Par les Damnées de la Terre’’ by Melek Chekili

Gary: 

Today’s special episode is by Melek Chekili. Melek is a Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative Literature specialized in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Southern California. She works on Maghrebian women’s voices and the ways in which they have been using the materiality of their voices, namely singing, in stormy political contexts, namely during French colonization and the Arab Spring. She holds a BA in English and Spanish and an MA in legal and financial translation from the University of the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. She is a volunteer translator at Translators Without Borders, and has been a French assistant lecturer for the past three years.

Today she’ll be talking about the reinterpretation of Frantz Fanon, one of the most important anti-colonial writers in French history, by writer Assia Djeber. Djeber was an Algerian woman who studied in France and wrote in French. In 2005 she was elected to the prestigious Académie française, the first writer, man or woman, from the Maghreb. In this episode Melek examines how a woman born in French Colonial Algeria uses Frantz Fanon’s theoretical works as a template to give voices to the voiceless.

Melek: 

Today, I’m going to be talking about voices that have been marginalized and silenced not by the absence of a spokesperson, but surprisingly by the very act of their representation.

When it comes to influential works in the field of postcolonial studies, one usually thinks about Frantz Fanon. Fanon was born in 1925 in the former French colony of the island of Martinique and died in 1961. He was a West Indian psychoanalyst and political thinker and his work have become influential in the field of post-colonial studies. He completes his studies in medicine and psychiatry at the University of Lyon in France. From 1953–56 , he serves as head of the psychiatry department of Blida-Joinville Hospital in Algeria , which was then part of France. While treating Algerians and French soldiers, Fanon begins to observe the effects of colonial violence on the human psyche. He begins working with the Algerian liberation movement, the National Liberation Front . His most prominent works are Peau noire, masques blancs (1952; Black Skin, White Masks) and Les Damnés de la Terre (the Wretched of the Earth) published shortly before his death establishing him as a leading intellectual in the international decolonization movement.

However, my intent in this episode is to bring to the forefront Algerian feminist writer and filmmaker Assia Djebar. Djebar is a prominent figure in giving their voices back to those whose voices have been excluded from the fight, namely women. Assia Djebar was born in Cherchell in Algeria in 1936 to an Amazigh family (the Amazigh people being the indigenous populations of North Africa before the invasion of the Arabs) and she died in 2015. She studies history in Paris—she is the first Algerian woman to study at the École Normale Superieure—and publishes her first novel La Soif in 1957. She takes part in the Algerian war of liberation against French colonialism, and during the time, she works with Frantz Fanon for the newspaper El moudjahid, conducting interviews with Algerian refugees in Tunisia and Morocco, before going on to teach history in Rabat and later in Algiers. In the late 1960s, she moves to France where she worked at the Algerian Cultural Center. In 1997, Djebar is appointed professor and director of the Center for French and Francophone Studies at Louisiana State University. However, all through her career, she maintains a strong link to Algeria, residing there regularly. Between the ages of twenty and thirty, she writes four novels. But in the mid-1960s, she decides to abandon writing in French, the language of Algeria’s colonizer and turned to cinema: ‘’Cinema offered her new ways to approach language as well as the world of the women in her home region’’ (Courtisane, 2020). She directed two films, the first one is entitled La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua (The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua) released in 1979 and in which she goes back to the mountain of Chenoua in order to listen and give voice to the oral histories as transmitted by otherwise silenced women. The second one entitled la Zerda ou les chants de l’oubli (the Zelda or the songs of Oblivion) was released in 1982, and raises the issue of women’s language and the circulation of women’s voices through a focus on the soundtrack aiming at a deconstruction of the purported translation into images of the colonial Maghreb. Djebar gives an explanation to what she designates as ‘’a silence’’, her silence, of more than ten years between the publication of her last novel to her decision to turn to cinema.

Djebar sees the cinematographic medium, mainly through the use of the soundtrack, as a way to make the muted voices be heard, make them ring loud and clear. Her work is deeply informed by the condition of women in Arab Muslim societies, colonial and post-colonial history, and the problematic relationship between woman and writing, but also the problematic relationship between writing and its its limits in making those feminine voices express themselves. She discovers that she cannot carry out this capturing of voices through writing.

In her movie la Zerda ou les chants de l’oubli, Djebar achieves the deconstruction of scenes of archives from European cinema, shot between 1912 and 1942 ( Courtisane, 2020). The soundtrack makes it possible to generate other images of a despised Maghreb by giving their voices back to the Maghrebi people using anonymous voices collected or re-imagined. Through the recurrent sentence heard in the soundtrack; eldhakiratu saw emraya makhdusha. Leyla ala leyla nakhnukuha, “Memory, is the voice of an oppressed woman. Night after night, we strangle her’’, and especially the tone of the voice used to express this sentence, Assia Djebar sheds light not only on the silenced voices of the oppressed colonized, but alludes specifically to those feminine voices which have been particularly denied any expressive opportunity. The latter has been stifled not only by the colonizer but also by anti-colonial figures, namely artists, painters and photographers who, by aiming at giving voice to The Wretched of the Earth, merely impose their own authorial voice. By gazing to the cause, through their cameras or paint brushes, those artists further debase and deprive the oppressed from their ability to use their own voices, and speak for themselves. The vital need to speak up and use the voice, is expressed in that scene through a synchronization between the voice and the feeling that its silencing conveys; the feminine voice heard as a voice off repeats that phrase, several times, at a gradual speed, until she is unable to breathe anymore, completely strangled by the silencing. It is after catching her breath, that she is finally able to keep talking. This scene is powerful for it clearly presents the vital act of breathing and the ability to use one’s voice as one and the same. Denying someone the use of the voice is tantamount to a denial of life and thus, to murder, a strangling as depicted in this scene.

Djebar in relation to her movie la Zerda ou les chants de l’oubli says the following words:

( the sound, underneath the images, could not be a commentary, it had to fill a void, and make one feel that void… It needed to ‘’denounce’’, warn, without being controversial nor ‘’engaged’’. I thus understood that, through sound, I had to bring, suggest, maybe resuscitate the invisible voices, that of those who hadn’t been photographed, because they were hiding in the darkness, because they were despised’’.

This remark justifies my willingness to turn to those invisible voices through this project drawing on what I designate as Frantz Fanon’s selective and incomplete representation of those voices. By definition, a representation is the action or fact of one person standing for another so as to have the rights and obligations of the person represented . If one applies this definition to the representation that Fanon makes of the voices of the Wretched of the Earth, one understands that the voice expressed is not that of the oppressed, but that of the representative or mediator, that is indirectly conveying what it is assumed to be the voice of the oppressed, when in reality, what is heard is an authorial voice that ‘’jams’’ (Fanon, 1959, 85) the sound of the voices of the Wretched of the Earth. It goes without saying that Fanon is paradoxically able to make use of his voice as opposed to the Wretched of the Earth whose voices are being mediated by him. Even though Fanon endeavors to legitimize the silenced voices of the colonized, as opposed to the pervading aggressive, deafening voice of the oppressor, and that he somewhat succeeds in amplifying the voices of the oppressed men through his central role as a mediator, these voices always speak through him. His authorial voice prevents, among the cacophony of the oppression, the sound of any other voice from rising and being heard. What is more, not only does Fanon mediate the voices of the Wretched of the Earth but their voices also come to his ears through mediation. By that, I am referring to his job as a psychiatrist in the city of Blida, Algeria where, since he spoke no Arabic or Berber, he had to rely on interpreters with his Muslim patients.

I would like to argue that a unique voice endowed with the authority to interpret a multiplicity of fighting voices reveals a gap, the void that Djebar was referring to, and is thus worth delving into. Fanon claims in his writings on the use of the radio during French colonization in Algeria, that the willingness for the colonized to have access to their voice (s), materialized in 1956, a year in which ‘’the real shift occurred’’ as he puts it (Fanon, 1959, 82). With the start of the Revolution, and thus the Algerians’ awareness of their voice and that of their fellow revolutionaries, came the recognition of the need to possess their own radio channel. A “Voice of free Algeria’’ was to arise. What is interesting is the indefinite article ‘’a’’ used to introduce‘’Voice of free Algeria’’ used by Fanon, for it seems to reflect an acceptance of a multiplicity of voices as opposed to the dictatorial singular voice of the colonizer as the symbol of a purported sacrosanct truth. However, as Fanon puts it, ‘’the programs were then systematically jammed by the colonizer, and voices of Algeria “soon became inaudible’’ ( 85). The attempts at silencing the true voices of Algeria, propelled the colonized to build their creativity. In fact, the colonized invented what they thought they had heard, and in that way, by repeating it to others, several voices were echoed and transmitted. Therefore, Algerians came to play an active role in the Revolution, carrying out a shift from their muted position prior to the Revolution. Clearly, those who Fanon refers to as the Wretched of the Earth, and whose voices he interprets , already interpret their own voices under the scope of the resistance against the colonizer. However, the main difference is that the reciprocal interpretation of each other's voices has a different impact: the centrality given to the possibility for the colonized to use their voice(s) is blatant here; what matters is not really the content of that voice (“often absent, physically inaudible’’), but the mere existence of that unifying voice, its physical presence triggering the creation of a multiplicity of voices and reflecting the change underway. It is a voice that through interpretation becomes a multiplicity of Algerian voices.

Now that the tone has been set, that the predominance of the voices and their expression by their owners have been conveyed, what about formulating the following hypothesis: it is through the singing voice that the multiplicity of the voices of the Wretched can communicate without mediation, and ‘ring out loud and clear’.

Writer Adam Shatz, examining the life of Fanon ( Shatz, 2017, para.19), argues, when referring to Fanon’s work as a psychiatrist in the city of Blida in Algeria and his communications with the patients, that ‘’restoring the symphonic order of everyday life was the goal of social therapy, and Fanon pursued it with vigilance [.]’’… And here we can add that the symphonic order of the colonized’s everyday life cannot be restored without their individual involvement within the symphony, through the use of each one of their voices. Indeed, if one follows the metaphor of the symphony, by definition, in order to perform efficiently, an orchestra requires an expression of each and every one of its musical voices. My willingness to turn to music and to the singing voices does not come from nowhere. In fact, Fanon himself turns to the singing voice, namely in jazz music in his chapter On National Culture from The Wretched of the Earth. He advocates for a transition from the Black man jazz singer’s ‘’husky voice’’ as he puts it, to a voice that “will ring out loud and clear’’ (Fanon, 1961, 453), aiming at deconstructing the largely entrenched instrumentalization of the past of the colonized for the colonizer’ s own pleasure: namely, jazz music associated with the “poor, miserable black man’’. Nowadays, jazz has indeed developed branches outside of the realm of the lament through Bebop or more strikingly as far as its designation is concerned, “free jazz’’ which made an appearance in the 1960s , as an attempt to break down jazz conventions.

What is more, the singing voice appears as a healing medium. Djebar for example, in her movies, hopes to create a community that would alleviate the isolated suffering of those oppressed women put aside and silenced by history. The singing voice goes beyond the semantic signification of words, to render the emotivity of the spoken voice and pave the way to a non-verbal communication; this is the golden rule of Djebar’s filmmaking. For Djebar, the truth of the being can only be expressed through fractures, broken words, losses of voices, screams without voices. Because this formulated pain belongs to the realm of what cannot be uttered nor communicated, the violence suffered can only be expressed through the singing voices. Ululation used by North African women in the context of the Revolution towards independence, for example, reflects this wordless and yet powerful singing voice.

Drawing on the void triggered by the negligence of the legitimacy of the voices of The Wretched, let’s return to Fanon’s role as a mediator of the voices of the oppressed. I argue that it is through an acknowledgment of the presence of a void, an incompleteness, created by what I designated as Fanon’s selective mediation of voices, that these voices, can reclaim their legitimacy and existence as full beings. In musical jargon, music interpretation refers to the interpreter’s own ideas of how a piece should sound, in the absence of— or in a strategic opposition-- to the composer’s intent. By interpreting their own voices through singing, the Wretched of the Earth, escape and resist the composer’s creation, in the context of the topic at hand, the colonizer’s, or any other potential authorial voice.

It then seems that it is through the Wretched of the Earth’s singing voices that Fanon’s voice is humbled. I would like to claim that the French rapper Rocé’s album, an anthology of twenty-four tracks, recorded between 1969 and 1988, with the explicitly Fanonian title, Par les damné.e.s de la terre (by the wretched of the earth), has achieved this aim: Rocé has been a passionate reader of Fanon since he discovered Black Skin, White Masks as a teenager. Fanon’s 1952 study of racism in France captured the feelings of alienation that Roce had experienced as a young man of color in Paris, Rocé’s mother being from Algeria’s small black community. Starting with the title of the album, one notices not only an echo of Fanon’s endeavors in his Wretched of the Earth, but also and mainly an extension of his project, to all those who have been silenced or neglected in Fanon’s work. The added preposition “par’’ in French corresponding to “by’’ in English alludes to the expression of the voices of the Wretched of the Earth by them and for them. Rocé argued that one of the main aims of his album was to enable the Wretched of the Earth to speak for each other instead of having someone speaking on their behalf. By the same token, the additional “e’’ in the word “damnées’’ which marks the feminine in French, reveals the voices of those put aside by Fanon, namely women. Thus, Roce listens, without interpretation, to those voices that through the album tell and sing themselves. He legitimizes those voices that have been purportedly destined to whisper or to keep silent altogether, and hopes to make the receivers of the album listen to them as well.

Unsurprisingly, Roce was initially drawn to Fanon because he was an iconic and influential figure, endowed with charisma and power when it comes to anti colonial struggle and resistance. But what really struck him, Roce claims, is “the link that Fanon made between the deconstruction of imperialist culture and the creation of a new world” (Rocé, 2018). Where Fanon exposes this link through his own authoritative mediating voice, in “par les damnées de la terre’’, this link is directly expressed through one of the voices that Rocé presents, that of Dane Belany in her track recorded in 1974 in New York entitled “Complexium’’. Dane Belany is the daughter of a Senegalese father and a Turkish mother. Educated in Paris, she was in the 1960s seen as a “sexy jazz singer” who combined the “charms of Paris and subjugation of Harlem” (Shatz, 2019). I wanted to focus on this particular track, not only for the obvious reason that it expresses a feminine voice, that as we have mentioned several times now, has been neglected or ignored by Fanon, but also because it is the interpretation by a Wretched of the Earth of a few lines from a play by the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, who had been Fanon’s mentor; the piece originally appeared on an album dedicated to Fanon, Motivations. Isn’t it powerful and quite ironic that Dane Belany dedicates to Fanon what appears to be her muted voice, as a symbol of a myriad of similar muted voices in Fanon’s work? Moreover, through her interpretation of Césaire’s poetry, and through it Césaire’s words and voice, she somehow inverts the process by which iconic figures like Fanon or Césaire present themselves as mediators for the oppressed.

Let’s briefly delve into Belany’s music itself: two elements caught my attention: the singing voice and the music. The whole track consists of a repetition of the monologue of the rebel in Césaire’s play And the Dogs Were Silent:

Mon nom : offensé

Mon prénom : humilié

Mon état : révolté

Mon âge : l’âge de la pierre

My name: Hurt.

My last name: Humiliated.

My state: revolted.

My age: the stone age.

Through these words, conveying the coexistence of the omnipresence of pain, humiliation and the refusal to give up the fight of maintaining that memory alive, rises the voice of a woman who has within her the memory of the past that she inherited, that rage that is embedded within her.

The tone of Belany’s voice is jerky, combative and powerful. What is more, prior to recording her album, an illness made her lose her voice and she was thus unable to sing, but decided, despite all, to recite the words and go on with the release of her album. What appears at first sight as a weak voice, in reality reflects the strength of that voice, which, despite the obstacles, the attempts at silencing it, rises and rises again from its ashes, appearing as a vector of an ever-lasting memory.

As far as the music is concerned, Belany’s voice seems to reflect the existence of the multiplicity of voices that we have been advocating for so far. In fact, there is a combination of the African djembe and the “darbuka’’, a typical North African percussion instrument and the use of the bagpipe-like musette that invokes the sounds of the Middle East (Shatz, 2019). In addition, one can hear in the background, ululations, evoking the struggle of the North African liberation through women’s voices. It seems that through Belany’s voice, there is an attempt to pay tribute and point to the existence of a common struggle embodied by the multiplicity of the voices of those who carry it.

Bearing in mind this purported success when it comes to the direct expression of the voices of the oppressed through singing, it would be perhaps too optimistic not to be aware of the fact that the idea of loudness of the voice itself, can be instrumentalized and used against the legitimization of the restrained voices of the Wretched of the Earth. In that view, the reception of a voice that “rings out loud and clear’’ can be mixed.

One can think of the infantilization of those who want to speak, but who make use of their voices in a way seen as inadequate or disproportionate, which ends up further de-legitimizing the content of their voices. Ululations for example, as a battle cry, often associated with women’s emotions, can be debased as a sign of women’s hysteria, through their purported over-emotionality, which ends up depriving ululation from its resisting feature, and reducing it to a symbol of women’s overreacting behaviors.

Feminist scholar Gayatri Spivak goes as far as to claim that the impossibility for the subaltern to be heard is rooted in the act of speaking itself: “All speaking, even seemingly the most immediate, entails a distanced decipherment by another , which is, at best, an interception. That is what speaking is’’ (Spivak, 2010, 64). However what is interesting in the musical voice as opposed to verbal language is its ability to escape mediation and (mis)interpretation. One can interpret and distort words, not voices.

In the end, bearing in mind these limits of the possibility for the “subalterns’’ to speak and make efficient use of their voices, perhaps, the cure for healing the deafness when it comes to hearing the multiplicity of the singular voices of the Wretched of the Earth lies in singing: being listened to as singers, might enable them to be listened to as legitimate owners of their voices. Singing paves the way towards a perception of the voice with hindsight, away from the well-entrenched stereotypes regarding hysteria and the un-legitimacy of the loud voice. In singing, the voice changes in tonality, loudness, and rhythm are accepted and expected. For that reason, starting to get used to those varying singing voices can pave the way towards a more open consideration of the non-singing voice. Tenor Ivan Koslovsky was known for whispering the words, and yet being able to capture the full attention of his audience (C mpearls 85 , 2020). This instance lends further credence to the power of the singing voice, which just like in the case of Dane Belany, originates from its determination, firmness, humbleness, and ability to mobilize, rather than its loudness, or strength. It is perhaps through listening to these singing voices, as exemplified in Par les damné.e.s de la terre, or through Djebar’s filmmaking, that one learns to simply hear and listen to voices.

I have intended in this episode to share with you some research carried out so far, focusing on the consideration of voices and the potentialities of the voice that goes beyond the word, involving two prominent post colonial francophone figures Frantz Fanon and Assia Djebar, and the more contemporary figure of Rocé whose work crystallizes the stakes when it comes to mediated voices in contrast with unmediated voices. Thank you for listening.

I have intended in this episode to share with you some research carried out so far, focusing on the consideration of voices and the potentialities of the voice that goes beyond the word, involving two prominent post colonial francophone figures Frantz Fanon and Assia Djebar, and the more contemporary figure of Rocé whose work crystallizes the stakes when it comes to mediated voices in contrast with unmediated voices. Thank you for listening.