All history as reconstruction of the past is of course myth

By Timothy Marr* [Access article in PDF]

American Literary History - Volume 18, Number 3, Fall 2006, pp. 521-549
Oxford University Press

The poem, through candor, brings back a power again
That gives a candid kind to everything.
We say: At night an Arabian* in my room,
With his damned hoobla-hoobla-hoobla-how,
Inscribes a primitive astronomy
Across the unscrawled fores the future casts
And throws his stars around the floor. By day
The wood-dove used to chant his hoobla-hoo
And still the grossest iridescence of ocean
Howls hoo and rises and howls hoo and falls.
Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.

Wallace Stevens, from “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”

* “. . . the fact that the Arabian is the moon is something that the reader could not possibly know. However, I did not think it was necessary for him to know.”

Wallace Stevens, Letters

Wallace Stevens’s poem represents the enigmatic impact of the moon’s light moving across the floor of his room as the ethnic necromancy of a mysterious Arabian. Stevens figures poetry itself as an unearthly source of light that illuminates most fully when the hemisphere is shrouded in the darkness of night. The errant orbit of the crescent, symbolic of Islam, provides an outlying vantage point freed from the earth’s terracentric singularity. Such strangeness casts an indecipherable pall over continental complacencies while still influencing the ebb and flow of oceans. Other instances of Islamic irruptions explored in this essay share some of these crepuscular aspects of the moon’s present yet otherworldly power. For Stevens, the unsettling luminescence of the moon, voiced by the inscrutable “hobbla-how . . . hoobla-hoo,” ultimately comprises the empowering gift of poetry that promises expansive access to a more “candid kind.” This essay argues that the appearance of Islam in American situations, intimated here by Stevens’s lunar “Arabian,” has been a dynamic and variable intercultural process since the earliest days of European settlement in the continents that came to be called the “New World.” The exotopic resources that such a presence provides have disrupted the geographical insularity of hemispheric literary studies and supplied broader planetary latitudes from which diverse critical and creative projects have been launched and enriched.

The violent attacks of Arabian hijackers on 9/11 revealed the hemisphere’s vulnerability to an “overseas” menace that pierced the boundaries of the Americas in ways that have been said to have “changed everything.” As the strange privacy of Stevens’s moon and the stunning surprise of the terrorist attacks attest, such irruptions occur in a range of aesthetic and political registers in the post-contact history of the hemisphere. Similar to the historical communities of Muslim maroons who rejected assimilation and formed communities of resistance throughout the territories of the Americas, literary writers have evoked the spectral elusiveness of Islamic difference to imagine a variety of unincorporated spaces that lie beyond the full control of continental systems of cultural power.

The best work of the new hemispheric approaches to American studies has dislocated the US from its metonymic centrality by tracing cross-cultural ramifications throughout the broader expanse of the Americas. Such innovative approaches as “New World studies” (Roland Greene), “inter-Americas studies” (Claudia Sadowski-Smith and Claire F. Fox), “trans-American literary relations” (Anna Brickhouse), the “trans-American imaginary” (Paula Moya and Ramon Saldivar), and “an Americas paradigm” (Sandhya Shukla and Heidi Tinsman) have bridged the boundaries that have long confined cultural inquiry within narrow frameworks of nation, ethnicity, and language. This emergent enterprise has illuminated subaltern indigeneities, heterogeneous circuits, and hybrid conjunctures long obscured by established genealogies and canons. The essays in this issue contribute to this burgeoning intercultural dialogue by demonstrating anew the fresh comparative lineages revealed by situating the local intricacies of creolization within the trajectories of a greater regionalism. By transgressively expanding the nodes of American literary studies along the longer axis afforded by north-south transcontinentalism, the critical enterprise of the new hemispherism is generating American studies that are more responsive to the complex routes of transcultural exchange.

While the new hemispheric studies have effectively countered national exclusivities and other essentializing insularities, the hemispheric boundedness of the enterprise, however expansive, can privilege another form of geographical exceptionalism. The same epistemological limitations that required scholars to move beyond the limits of the nation and consider creolized perspectives within the broader Americas also exist within the new paradigm of trans-American studies. The longitudinal interculturalism that charts a greater geometry within the radius of American studies (that, for example, associates Canada and the Caribbean or links Latin America with Los Angeles) also has necessary limits to the arc of its enterprise. Elena Glasberg’s work on Antarctica powerfully dramatizes how the geographical space of that unpopulated and uncolonized continent, whose pole is one ground zero of all longitudes and latitudes, confounds national and hemispheric imaginaries. While seen from a planetary perspective, continents become the largest islands on earth and hemispheric approaches devolve into a new bipolarity that can impede the imperative for planetary thinking by leaving the other side of the planet out of focus and in the dark. The longitudinal strengths of a hemispheric paradigm for literary studies thus need to be supplemented with the latitudinal linkages that characterize transoceanic systems of exchange that crisscross both the Atlantic and the Pacific. Because the oceans leave no traces of these multifarious passages, it takes a great leap to chart the rhizomatic routes that connect the Americas with the hemisphere where the other half lives.

The denotative grammar of the exception presumes an absent other within its missing clause. Any determination of what is exceptional, therefore, is dependent upon an effaced passage that haunts the sentence with the possible reappearance of its unspoken enigma. Islam stands as one of the primary exclusions upon which both national and hemispheric exceptionalisms in the Americas have been constructed. The diverse world of Islam (dar-ul-Islam) is the most formidable frontier of alien difference embracing the breadth of the continents that are not American. Since before the settlement of the Americas by Europeans, the Islamic world has encircled its intertropical African and Asian rims, ranging on the Atlantic shore from the Arab Moors of the Maghreb (ironically a word that means “west,” referring to the North African territories of Islam west of Arabia) to the Muslim groups further south in the Senegambian region of West Africa (Mandes, Fulbes, Wolofs) and on the Pacific shore to the Moros of Mindanao, the easternmost extreme of the Malay diaspora from the East Indies into the Pacific. Islam thus embraces lands that geographically define the outermost edges of the Americas both in the east and in the west without having a political presence within the hemisphere other than Muslim populations residing in its countries. Despite being politically relegated to the fringes of the hemisphere, the history of Islam’s displaced yet looming absence has nevertheless frequently taken form as a spectral presence throughout the Americas since their first “discovery.”

Since then, Islam has provided transcultural resources for improvising different kinds of cosmopolitan literary intervention. American writers drew in divergent ways upon these liminal latitudes of Islamic difference to negotiate and contest the confining binaries of national and hemispheric racial invention. This essay explores a selection of expressive moments, like Stevens’s evocation of his Arabian, where people and performances marked with Muslim signs irrupted into literary expressions in the Americas as transnational critical spaces. What I call islamicism—the transcultural orientalism ascribed to Islam by those uninformed by its actual ethos—has served peculiarly well as a mediating third dimension because its heterogeneity confounds the continental categories of race and religion that have constituted hegemonic definitions of nation and hemisphere

Authors have imaginatively embodied this deterritorialized Muslim otherness in fugitive literary characters whose alien agencies have both defined the contours and punctured the complacencies of disparate new-world projects. The specific examples analyzed in this essay are predominately drawn from my own situation as an Anglophone American studies scholar whose specialty is US literature and culture. Such a traditional focus nevertheless demonstrates my argument that examining the presence of Islam in the Americas also requires turning the longitudinal comparativism of the hemisphere on its axis to reveal its eclipsed transoceanic genealogies. Such an angle of analysis also comprises a largely unexamined element of emergent comparative work in trans-American studies. Even in the literature by canonized US authors from the nineteenth century such as Mark Twain, Joel Chandler Harris, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Herman Melville, the creative latitudes and niches that Islamicist approaches provided to their artistic negotiations of racial difference are revealed. The article also explores how African Americans in the US found new transnational freedoms in their association with Islamic cultural difference ranging from the Arabic literacy of enslaved antebellum Muslims to the transnational empowerment that reversion to Islam provided to jazz musicians and members of the Nation of Islam in middle of the twentieth century. This study concludes in the same post–World War II moment by briefly examining a powerful short story by Paul Bowles, a US expatriate in Morocco, that dramatizes how African Islamic difference frustrates the capacity of American intercultural understanding. Bringing transoceanic perspectives from the Islamic world into a variety of American literary situations offers insights into more worldly modes through which hybrid racial positions were imagined in the Americas.

1. Islam and the Perspective of Transhemispheric Studies

From the onset of exploration, Europeans had associated the appearance of the Americas within their geographical imaginaries with the fantasy of displacing the Muslim world. The year of Columbus’s journey coincided with the reconquista that aimed to expel the Muslim Moors from Spain. Columbus’s belief that he had landed in Asia, rather than locating the intervening continents of the Americas, is registered by the designation of Native Americans as Indians. The Chief Admiral of the Ocean Sea’s first speech to the Spanish King and Queen upon his return from his first voyage began with a 323 word sentence that surprisingly focused on Islam rather than on America. Islam had long been viewed by Europeans as a divine scandal whose claims of a post-Christian dispensation provoked millennial desires to subdue and supplant its despotic usurpation. Columbus spoke of the banners of Spain being placed on the towers of the Alhambra and of the Moorish King kissing their royal hands as he departed the gates of Granada into exile. Columbus’s royal benefactors had sent him westward that same month with letters of instruction and an Arabic interpreter to effect further victories over “the sect of Mahoma and to all idolatries and heresies” (89–90). By circumventing the Islamic world and bringing the Christian gospel directly to the potentates of Asia, Columbus’s detour aimed to enlist new converts to serve as eastern allies in the mission of ousting Islam from its hegemonic hold over the Holy Land since the times of the Crusades.

The eschatological project of overcoming the contentious challenge of Islam was interrupted by the surprising appearance of the Americas as an intervening field for conversion and colonization. Enrique Dussel has argued that Europe’s “discovery” of America gave birth to the possibility of Eurocentric modernity because, by so doing, its “status altered from being a particularity placed in brackets by the Muslim world to being a new discovering universality” (89–90). The rhetorical heritage of interethnic imagination that pitted Muslims (in such varied ethnicities as Moors, Arabs, Turks, Tartars, and Malays) as oppositional threats to visions of Christian victory was applied to the new territories in an attempt to comprehend its unincorporated difference. This transposition of Moorish prototypes onto American actualities persisted during the years of the Spanish American empire. For example, the Spaniards of the Coronado Exhibition of 1540–42 to the territories that later formed part of the land that Mexican was forced to cede to the US were deceived by an Native slave whom they named “Turk” because of his tawny skin color. The Turk made up tall tales of the immense wealth in gold to be found further inland and was strangled when his deceptions were discovered. Such an imagination also marked the broader literary imagination of the Americas as shown in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, first published in 1588, which spoke of the “Indian Moors who obeyed their Spanish Lords” (11). Max Harris has analyzed how Iberian street festivals called moros y cristianos, featuring mock battles in which Spanish Catholicism celebrated its triumph over Moorish others, were adapted to the American empire to dramatize their defeat of indigenous Aztecs. Such performances eventually evolved into sites from which native peoples could fashion their own “hidden transcripts” for resistance and revenge (23).

Muslim Moors comprised some of the earliest settlers in the Americas and, augmented by the enslaved Africans transported from Muslim West Africa, formed a significant part of the population of the early Americas. (Almost 20% of the present citizens of Suriname are Muslims, the highest percentage in the hemisphere.) Nevertheless, Islam has remained for the most part an exiled or excluded outsider to the different Christian cultures that controlled the colonization of the Americas. Whether relegated beyond the pale of the Atlantic and Pacific frontiers of the hemisphere or buried within the hybrid abyss of the creolized Americas, the oppositional alterity of Islam has nevertheless provided an outside challenge that writers have deployed in different ways to perform diverse and contrasting forms of ideological commentary.

Latin American literature is especially welcoming to this critical enterprise of transculturalism because of the way that the Islamic moorings of the Spanish past have been submerged within its imagined genealogies. The foundational literary example of the imposition of Islam onto South American situations is Domingo Faustino Sarmiento’s Facundo: Civilización o Barbarie (1845), which frequently figures the Argentine gauchos—the nomadic outlaws of the inland pampas—as barbarous Bedouins or Tartars, and its caudillos as Muslim despots in an American mould. Christina Civantos’s Between Argentines and Arabs: Argentine Orientalism, Arab Immigrants, and the Writing of Self and Other (2005) explores how Arab difference is negotiated as an transcultural field of national formation by Argentines of European descent such as Sarmiento as well as Arab immigrant writers in Argentina. In the mid-twentieth century, another Argentine, Jorge Luis Borges, wrote a series of short stories and sketches in which rich references to the Islamic world offered access to a variety of alien cultural multiplicities, sometimes (as in the fascinating story “Averroës’ Search”) as a means of confounding the expressive limits of intercultural imagination itself. More recently, the Brazilian-Lebanese author Milton Hatoum fictionally dramatized Ana Castillo’s contention in The Massacre of the Dreamers: Essays on Xicanisma (1994) that machismo has Arabic roots by figuring the patriarchal progenitors of his Portuguese-speaking characters in his novels The Brothers (2000) and The Tree of the Seventh Heaven (1989) as migrant Muslims adapting to the frontier city of Manaus in the Amazonian outback. Latin American studies could benefit from examining more deeply the many ways that the Islamic contributions to Iberian and Latin American cultures, however effaced, have nevertheless informed the hybridity of identities, practices, and expressions in the Spanish-speaking “Nuevo Mundo.” Even the exclamation “Olé!” is a hispanicized form of Allah!

2. The Detour of the Moor: Arab Surrogacy and Racial Performance

There are transnational moments in the most canonical literary works in which the orientalist appearance of Islam is used to confound conventional customs. An example from nineteenth-century US literature dramatizing how such a process can be accomplished by the use of a single word can be seen in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, in which Amy March, in her “Last Will and Testament,” writes about bequeathing a “turkquoise” ring she hopes to inherit, thereby humorously marking her avarice with an Islamicist misspelling that announces its moral impropriety (184). Samuel Clemens’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), located at the center of the national canon both temporally and geographically, exemplifies how irruptive instances from the Islamic world, even in the most burlesque of ways, can lay out literary latitudes of cosmopolitan critique useful for commenting on the racial complexity of the US.

Halfway through Huckleberry Finn, Jim complains to the Duke—who is plotting another episode of deception on the shore of the Mississippi River—that their practice of roping him alone in his wigwam to prevent others from capturing him as a “runaway nigger” was “mighty heavy and tiresome” and caused him to “trembl[e] all over every time there was a sound.” The Duke ciphers out a solution that temporarily liberates Jim by dressing him in a theater costume, painting his face a “dead dull solid blue,” and posting a sign that reads “Sick Arab—but harmless when not out of his head” (209). Jim is “satisfied” and the Duke encourages him to “make himself free and easy” while they are away, and if anybody approaches, to “hop out . . . and carry on a little, and fetch a howl or two like a wild beast.” Huck notes that the average man wouldn’t wait for the howl because Jim was the “horriblest looking outrage” who looked like a dead man “drownded nine days” and “considerable more than that” (210). When Huck returns to the raft at night four chapters later, he falls over backwards into the river in fear when he catches a glimpse of Jim’s shocking disguise in the flash of the lightning.

Critical interpreters of the “considerable more” of this disguise have centered their analysis on the minstrel excesses that reconfine Jim within a different regime of racialized distortion. For example, E. W. Kemble’s illustrations of Jim in these trappings from the first edition of the work demonstrate Henry B. Wonham’s contention that such an extravagant masquerade merely absorbs Jim’s identity within the degenerate burlesque of “coon caricature” (144) (Fig. 1). To be sure, Clemens draws upon cultural stereotypes of both minstrelsy and orientalism in globalizing the specter of Jim’s fearsome difference and his ludicrous subalternity. Popular Near Eastern travel narratives looked askance at the tolerance of Muslims for “santons”—madmen in their midst who were viewed as both harmless and holy—and viewed them as representative examples of how Islam infected the promise of healthy Christian democracy with the vectors of despotism, disease, and delusion. Clemens’s own Innocents Abroad (1869) depicted Arabs not as “free sons of the desert” with “picturesque costumes,” but satirically as “a pack of hopeless lunatics” (547). That this scenario does inscribe Jim with a new set of ethnic fetters is symbolized by his ironic journey downstream deeper into the land of slavery. Jim is still in his costume when the Duke recaptures him for the reward money, ostensibly by being able to explain why he is dressed as such a “strange nigger” (268).

In another light, however, the metamorphosis of Jim into an outlandish oriental in the midst of the Mississippi effectively, if only temporarily, thwarts the ability of others to capitalize upon his political subjugation. Samuel Clemens’s absurd expansion of Jim’s ethnicity into an alien Arab bewilders racial binaries (”blue” skin) and frustrates the very possibility of comprehensibility (”out of his head”; “howl”). Fashioning a blue race through the circuitous evasions of Jim’s hideous Arabness, Clemens creates what Édouard Glissant has called a “detour” that allows him to preserve Jim’s liberty from those interested in seizing his black body. Marooning Jim away from the catastrophic categories of the racist legalisms of the land, indeed outside his plot into the very margins of his text, Clemens—as he does with his invented pseudonym—craftily creates a riverine ruse of quarantine that offers Jim a certain circumference
Figure 1
“Harmless.” E. W. Kemble’s illustration of Jim dressed as an “Arab” in theater clothes in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) by Samuel Clemens. The sign reads “Sick Arab—but harmless when not out of his head.” From the Rare Book Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

of freedom, even from the machinations of “Mark Twain’s” own masterful authority. The Duke’s clever contrivance exemplifies the nomadic privileges of Samuel Clemens’s own strategic creativity. A Tramp Abroad (1899) included an illustration of the author smoking a long pipe, dressed up in Turkish clothes with a fringed fez and pointed slippers, while “Painting my Great Picture.” These Islamicist moments demonstrate how Moorish positioning produced a liminal space of transnationalism in which writers could locate liberties not allowed to them through localized figuration alone. Escaping continental conventions served also as a strategy of globalizing the authority of their imaginative resources.

Seventeen years after Clemens published Huckleberry Finn, Booker T. Washington also deployed the detour of the Moor to illustrate the “curious workings of caste in America” that grant privileges to one person of color that are deprived to others. In his autobiography Up from Slavery (1901), he tells an anecdote about a near lynching in a small town when a dark-skinned man enraged the residents by visiting the local hotel. Further investigation revealed that the imperiled transgressor was a visitor from Morocco who spoke good English. “As soon as it was learned that he was not an American Negro, all the signs of indignation disappeared,” Washington explained, adding: “The man who was the innocent cause of the excitement, though, found it prudent after that not to speak English” (103). That the indignities heaped on American blacks could be converted to innocence and liberty if dark skins were seen as a sign of cosmopolitan worldliness dramatized an important lesson to African Americans. They came to understand that the strategy of inhabiting the Moor produced an emancipating detour from the path of racial violence that tragically was often the destination of resistance. Embodying the social self as foreign was a resource for freeing oneself from the hegemony of continental conventions, one whose critical latitudes licensed a resistance to localized racial norms not permitted to those confined by its dictates. Polyracial groups in the eastern US such as the Melungeons and the communities of “Moors” in Delaware and South Carolina are sociological examples of the liminal freedoms of the maroon communities that survived in many locations in the hemisphere. The rise of the Moorish Science Temple after 1913 in northern US cities attracted African-American followers by reminding them that by becoming “Moors” they were part of a great “Asiatic” race that should not submit to the domestic indignities of race-based subordination. The Moorish explorer Estevanico, who explored the North American continent from Florida to New Mexico during 1528–39, has been celebrated by generations of Africans and African Americans as an original black discoverer; his story is the first example in Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s Black Profiles in Courage: A Legacy of African-American Achievement (1996).

The larger cultural strategy dramatized by this process of transoceanic positioning exemplifies the racial performance that Joseph Roach has called the process of “surrogation” in which restored substitutes are made to fill “a vacancy caused by the absence of an original” (36). Despite the cultural effacement of Islam in the Americas, its alterity was never fully repressed and returned within the intercultural repertoire of “circum-Atlantic performance.” Although literary characterization is a performance on a different type of social stage, Clemens’s “sick Arab” circulates as a textual “effigy” through which he is able to improvise a multiplicity of perspectives through the strange surrogacy of its alien mediumship.

While the Moroccan whom Booker T. Washington mentions disguises himself behind his foreign tongue, the Duke reinvents Jim as an Arab by investing him with the trappings of Shakespeare’s King Lear. This signifies that Clemens was not merely engaging in the liberties of Middle Eastern minstrelsy but also parodying the pretenses of aristocracy, as the King and Duke’s Royal Nonesuch episode on land also reveals. A more specific historical context for Clemens was the career and reputation of a man who, along with Frederick Douglass, was the most globally prominent African American of the mid-nineteenth century. Ira Aldridge was born to free blacks in 1807 in New York City, where he trained in the theater, but he soon sought freedom from American racial restrictions by emigrating to Europe to pursue his ambitions as a professional actor. Aldridge established his fame by acting vengeful roles such as the Zanga the Moor in Edward Young’s The Revenge and Hassan the Moor in Monk Lewis’s The Castle Spectre, as well as playing the role of rebellious slaves in abolitionist New World dramas. His most famous performance was in Shakespeare’s Othello, The Moor, in which he began starring in the leading role during 1833. At the age of 42, he revived Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, which hadn’t been performed for over a century, and played Aaron the Moor as a hero rather than a villain (Fig. 2) (Lindfors, “Mislike Me” 349).

Part of Aldridge’s public persona was the invention of his genealogy as a son of a converted prince from the Fulbe people of Senegal, a region of French West Africa populated primarily by Muslims. Playbills and his published Memoir of 1849 featured a biography that told of how Ira’s father had been transported by a missionary to New York after his own father and family were butchered by a political foe. He trained as a minister, married an American, and returned to Senegal, where Ira was born. Frustrated in his desire to lead his people to Christianity, the story goes that Ira’s father went into hiding and eventually returned with his family to the US to serve the religious needs of African Americans (Marshall and Stock 14–16). This imagined story of a regal African birthright cemented Aldridge’s renown as an “African Roscius,” leading one historian to claim that he developed an “adroit theatrical strategy” of “making a career out of playing a Moor playing a Moor” (Lindfors, “Mislike Me” 347).

Aldridge’s dramatic genius, evident in the invention of this biographical detour which like Othello pointed back to Muslim Africa, was broadly celebrated on the European continent, especially in Germany and Russia, more than it ever was in Britain. During 1852–55,

Figure 2
Ira Aldrich as Shakespeare’s Aaron from Titus Andronicnous, The Anglo-African Magazine 2 (January 1860), frontispiece. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.

1858–59, and frequently after 1862, Aldridge made extended continental tours during which he delivered his lines in English regardless of the language spoken by the rest of the company. “Princes and people vied in distinguishing him,” theater critic Dutton Cook noted in 1881, “crowded houses witnessed his performances, and honors, orders, and medals were showered upon him” (273). It was during these tours later in life that Aldridge expanded beyond the Shakespearean roles of Othello, Aaron, and Shylock and began to act Macbeth and King Lear in whiteface. The French novelist and critic Théophile Gautier saw one of his early performances as King Lear in St. Petersburg in 1858 which at that time was not well-known to the Russian public (236). He commented on Aldridge’s costume which included “a flesh-coloured headpiece of papier mâché, from which hung some silvery locks of hair” as well as wax that “filled in the curves of his flat nose” and a “thick coat of grease paint” and a “great white beard.” Gauthier comments (in words that were excised from the American translation): “That Aldridge had not whitened his hands was a caprice which is easily comprehensible, and they showed below the sleeves of his tunic, brown as monkey’s paws” (qtd. in Marshall and Stock 230–31).But when Aldridge wished to visit the US that same year, his wife—a white Englishwoman—refused to brave the contumely that they would encounter on the other side of the Atlantic. He died in 1867 in Poland and was buried in Lodz.

Aldridge’s career dramatizes how the racial performance of a Moorish past, assembled symbolically from the high culture of Shakespearean drama and the invented romance of African royalty, constituted part of the grounds for a global celebrity that transcended the limitations of hemispheric racial norms. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper in Iola Leroy, for example, recalled the pride experienced by African Americans while traveling in Europe when they learned about the “princely honors” Aldridge had achieved as a “successful tragedian” (84). His celebrated capacity to play infidel Moors and a king in whiteface illustrates the transgressive freedoms he gained by abandoning the restricted social roles faced by African Americans in the US to perform more creative registers of racial fashioning on the stages of the Old World. Burlesquing Aldridge’s example in the figure of Jim, Clemens conscripts his legendary liberty by appropriating his strategic performance of an African ethnicity. In both cases, a Moorish difference provides a transhemispheric stage upon which more cosmopolitan racial roles could be rehearsed.

3. Arabic Freedom in the Slave Community

The most extended treatment of an Arab in nineteenth-century US fiction was the character of Aaron in novelist and folklorist Joel Chandler Harris’s two books The Story of Aaron (So Named) The Son of Ben Ali (1896) and its prequel Aaron in the Wildwoods (1897). Although Harris’s Aaron tales have been almost completely ignored by literary critics, partly because they have been classified as children’s literature, they exemplify how islamicism was deployed by writers to negotiate the cultural politics of racist backlash at a time when the US was unifying around legalized disenfranchisement and segregation. In the 1890s, Harris abandoned the African-American storytellers Uncle Remus and African Jack in favor of an Arab slave whose cultural power was both more globally resonant and less politically threatening. Aaron allowed Harris to negotiate the ambivalence of racial identity by exoticizing its difference as a resource for social stability at the same time that he dramatized the hidden and supernatural sources of an underappreciated African power.

As the “foreman of the field-hands” (4) who “was very busy during the day, and sometimes at night, managing the affairs of the plantation” (69), Aaron acts as an agent to preserve the system of white power on the Abercrombie plantation in “Middle Georgia,” even finding time to kindly instruct the children of his “White-Haired Master.” At the end of the book, when Union army foragers on Sherman’s march proceed to confiscate the plantation’s livestock and free its slaves, Aaron—”dressed in his Sunday best” (188)—not only tries to hide the horses and mules but chooses to stay even after granted his freedom. His final act is to consecrate the actions of another Union soldier, sent by Abraham Lincoln to protect the plantation from being ransacked, by bowing his head over their handshake “as if giving silent utterance to a prayer” (198). Harris fantasizes a post-bellum order in which Northern whites protect the property of noble southerners with the assistance of freedmen who remain loyal to a white social system which maintains its authority even after emancipation. By enlisting Aaron in support of this order, Harris converts the alien difference of both Islam and Judaism into support for a revived Abrahamic patriarchy in which Christians retain their hegemonic authority. Oliver Herford’s illustrations in the first edition emphasize Aaron’s semitic physiognomy and light skin color to disassociate him from the other African slaves (Fig. 3).

Harris’s choice of an Arab slave, like Clemens’s figuration of Jim as an Arab, also demonstrates his attempts to locate latitudes from which he can criticize social injustices without compromising the racial codes of some of his readers. The transgressive power of Harris’s character consistently perplexes those with the purported authority to enslave him. Aaron’s legendary reputation as the “most remarkable slave in all the country round” (5) stems from the fact that he is seen as “no nigger” (13). In his younger days, Aaron was an “unmanageable” runaway (36) who was “very dangerous” (37) and “too tricky to travel with” (56). Harris locates the source of this renegade freedom in the strangeness of Aaron’s African genealogy. His Arab parents were forcibly transported from Senegambia and passed on to him his “thin lips” and “prominent nose” and his capacity to read Arabic. Aaron’s facility with Arabic is linked with his ability to understand “the language of the animals” with whom he is leagued against the malignity of bad masters. The White Pig, for example, exhorts him to “Return to the swamp, Son of Ben Ali, where we have no such names [as Aaron]. The paths are all there. I have kept them hard and firm” (135). The Congressman who sends the Union squad to protect the plantation—a former teacher there

Figure 3
“De Squinch Owl Lighted on A’on’s Hand.” Illustration by Oliver Herford in Joel Chandler Harris, Aaron in the Wildwoods(1897), p. 184. From the Rare Book Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

whom Aaron had saved from being lynched—calls the Son of Ben Ali in his official orders “the fugitive, who was and who remains a mystery” (197). It is this elusive freedom that renders Aaron into a cipher for the power and dignity of Africans who have hidden cultural resources that cannot be subdued, such as his unique ability to tame the wild energies of the black Arabian stallion Timoleon, whom Aaron acknowledges as the “grandson of Abdallah” (21).

This fugitive power of Aaron’s earlier years as a slave, when he was forced to actively resist the authority of a mean master, is accentuated in the next book Aaron in the Wildwoods. Aaron’s Arab alterity possesses the “key” that unlocks the mysteries and secrets of the swamp, transforming it from a “treacherous quagmire” [6] into a sustaining refuge that preserves his freedom from his owner, patrollers, hunters, and “nigger dogs.” Aaron’s mysterious audacity and craftiness enable him to harness supernatural forces to preserve his independence and attend to the crippled boy Little Crotchet on the Abercrombie plantation whenever he wishes. White masters and black slaves alike, as well as the book’s readers, are bewildered by Aaron’s capacity to survive on the margins, his ability to move through the wind and see “prophecies in the constellations.” This incomprehensible power leads his master to call him a “yaller rapscallion” (67) and an “imp of Satan” (83), and another white man to compare him to a picture he saw in the Arabian Nights of a man who had the power to “call the elements” to help him. Many of the blacks on nearby plantations believe him to be a conjuror because of his intimate kinship with nature, his alien physical characteristics, and the fact that he has a “thang to his tongue” (19 and “don’t do like a nigger” (97).

In an article in Scribners’ Magazine two years before The Story of Aaron was published, Harris commented on where he derived the cultural power he embodied in the figure of the Son of Ben Ali.

In Georgia, the prevailing type—not the most numerous, but the most noticeable—is the Arabian. Old Ben Ali (pronounced by the Negroes Benally), who left a diary in one of the desert dialects of Arabic, was blessed with an astonishing prepotency, and his descendents after him, so that it is always easy to discover the “favor” of the old Arab in a Georgia negro who is especially intelligent or enterprising.

(”Sea Island,” 274)

“Favoring” the hybrid Arabian with such “astonishing prepotency,” Harris elevated (”blessed”) the African without having to empower blacks in ways that would undermine the national reconciliation of white supremacy being contemporaneously enacted in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision. According to Harris, the historical Ben Ali “never was a slave in the ordinary meaning of that term” and, as a foreman, was as “fierce a taskmaster as a negro ever had” (”Sea Island,” 274). Harris here enlists the extrahemispheric exoticism of the Arab to intimate the latent potential for restoring African freedom and authority. Featuring an actual Arab slave as the progenitor of his own narrative power enabled Harris to negotiate Muslim alterity as a supernatural means of controlling slavery as well as overseeing his own creative license.

Invoking Ben Ali as the father of Aaron, Harris drew upon the heritage of an actual Muslim overseer on a large plantation on Sapelo Island in Georgia named Bilali Muhammad, whose name was derived from the Ethiopian Muslim to whom the Prophet had granted the privilege of calling the faithful to prayer. The antebellum presence of Muslims in African-American communities in the coastal areas of Georgia and South Carolina, according to Michael A. Gomez in his Black Crescent: The Experience and Legacy of African Muslims (2005), was “active, vibrant, and compelling” (159).Agronomist Thomas Spaulding, who developed one of the largest systems of cotton agriculture in the US South, purchased Bilali and his family member from the Bahamas because he possessed skills in planting the high-quality long-staple seed that came to be known as Sea Island cotton. Bilali Muhammad was a Fulbe originally from the Senegambia region of Muslim West Africa whose writing in Arabic was for a long time called the Ben Ali Diary and considered to be autobiographical, until translators over eighty years later revealed it to be part of an Islamic legal text. Ronald A. T. Judy extensively analyzed the “heterography” of Ben Ali’s enigmatic writing, finding it to be “a text whose polyvalence refuses to be comprehended by western literary criticism’s unadulterated paradigms” (227). William McFeely called it “an icon, in the true sense—a holy object connecting Africa to America in the hand of a deeply religious man” (36). Harris’s translation of the talismanic Ben Ali Diary into his own fictional expression symbolizes the resources of Arab agency that remain resistant to American control. Aaron—whose only Arabic name is the Son of Ben Ali—reveals this genealogy by unwrapping a leather “memorandum book” containing written Arabic words that appear to the children like “pothooks.” Aaron responds “Ain’t a word in it I can’t read” and proceeds to speak its accents, prompting the black nurse to claims that it is “no creetur talk” (12). Aaron’s Arabic literacy symbolizes the resources of a mysterious African past that empowers his escape from the clutches of the demeaning system of slavery. Harris in this way transforms the illegibility of Ben Ali’s “Diary” into an exotic genealogy for the power of his own literary invention.

That the alterity of Arabic writing was a resource for slaves as well as for enterprising white writers such as Harris is revealed by the rediscovery of the 1831 autobiography of Omar ibn Said, a Fulbe Muslim from Senegambia who had made the pilgrimage to Mecca before being enslaved and transported to Charleston in 1807. This unique narrative has been acknowledged as the earliest piece of Arabic writing to be found in the US, and the only slave narrative to be written in Arabic.After escaping from a cruel master in South Carolina, he was jailed as a runaway in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where he gained so much attention by writing petitions in Arabic with coal on his cell wall that he was eventually purchased by a more benevolent owner with whom he lived until his death in 1864.

Omar identified English as the “Christian language” and his Arabic script signified the passport of both his literacy and his religion as well as a transoceanic resource preventing others from accurately interpreting the meaning of his words. His continuing use of the Arabic language, which he called “the talk of the Maghreb,” also empowered him with a strategy of resistance that Édouard Glissant has called “opacity”—”the welcoming opaqueness through which the other escapes me” (Britton 18–19). His willingness to write verses from the Bible in Arabic led many to view him as an exemplar of how a literate Muslim was not a threatening black African but an avuncular Arab (”Uncle Moreau”) willing to convert to Christianity and accept his status as a superior slave in America. A deeper look under the disguise of his Arabic expression, now revealed by scholars freed from the desire to interject a Christian bias, reveals that ibn Said was able to maintain and even to celebrate his faith in Islam through invocations in Qur’anic literary style as well as transcend earthly enslavement by asserting that God is ultimately “our Owner.” That his Arabic literacy has had different connotations for African Americans is demonstrated by the fact that one of his Arabic writings was honored as part of the cultural wealth of blacks displayed in Boston’s Faneuil Hall during a 1858 commemoration of the Boston Massacre that served also as a protest against the Dred Scott decision. Centering himself within a Maghrebi center of gravity, ibn Said was able to challenge the hemispheric power of both slavery and Christianity to absorb his identity and thereby to maintain a certain latitude of freedom even while remaining physically in bondage. Such liberty was accomplished through the expressive power and resistant inscrutability of his own words, words that themselves have since come to be viewed not as a threat to or resource for the intellectual hegemony of whites but rather respected as a multilingual part of the African heritage in the Americas.

4. Muslims, Maroons, and Transcultural Rebellion

Jim’s masquerade as a Blue Arab on a raft in the midst of the Mississippi and the Son of Ben Ali’s fugitive freedom in the swamps of Georgia both posit temporary spaces of marronage that create imaginative alternatives for African freedom in the late nineteenth century. Latin America has a rich history of Muslim rebels Muslim rebels resisting their treatment in the Americas, the most important being the 1835 revolts in Bahia, Brazil, and the most recent the 1990 Jamaat al Muslimeen attempt at a coup d’état in Trinidad and Tobago. Such a rebellious presence also found expression in antebellum literature written by North American writers. Harriet Beecher Stowe (as well as the lesser known David Hunter Strother) drew upon the liminal freedoms of the swamp well before Harris did to evoke a militant Muslim liberty committed to resisting the confining rigidities and injustices of enslavement. By contrast, Herman Melville constructed a transpacific horizon of islamicized difference in his fictional treatment of the Senegalese mutineer Babo off the west coast of Chile and his evocation of the malign machinations of his Asian characters. In these instances, the global horizons of Islamic difference provided transcultural resources for representing the rebellion against race-based systems of American slavery.

After resigning her title character to his grave at the hands of Simon Legree in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853), Harriet Beecher Stowe undertook a more dramatically militant critique of slavery. Stowe features a black man who refuses to be a slave in her creation of the creolized rebel in Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856). The swamp symbolizes the resources of Dred’s resistance and is portrayed as a heathen geography: “regions of hopeless disorder” on the fringes of “civilized life” (1:255). In concocting the multiplicity of Dred’s character, Stowe combines an extravagant mixture from her own cultural archive to multiply the holy vengeance of his power. She makes him the colossal son of Denmark Vesey destined to extend his abortive rebellion against civilized hypocrisy, alluding to her belief that Nat Turner was carrying on the legacy of the revolutionary spirit. Taking his father’s Bible with him, Dred rejects the teaching of the New Testament, holding the ethic of meekness to be a doctrine of enslavement and dwelling instead on the righteous wrath of Old Testament vengeance. In so doing, Stowe exoticizes the Bible by calling it an “oriental seed” rich with “endless vitality and stimulating force” (1:256). However, Stowe also signifies an African source for Dred’s dissent through his mother’s polycultural Mandingo heritage that gave him his name and a legacy of intelligence, beauty, pride, and capacity that enables him to oppose oppression. Mandingos were predominately Muslim, one possible reason for Dred’s adoption of a “fantastic sort of turban, apparently of an old scarlet shawl, which added to the outlandish effect of his appearance” (1:241). Dred’s avenging enthusiasm thus not only borrows from Nat Turner’s woeful tirades but also from the martial spirit of Muslim resistance, a transgression that Stowe minimizes both by executing Dred and by trying to contain his jihad within the spatial and temporal limits of the Bible.

William Tynes Cowan’s book The Slave in the Swamp: Disrupting the Plantation Narrative (2005) explores the cultural threat symbolized by maroons such as Stowe’s Dred who could maintain their independence on the margins of settled society in the US South. Cowan’s archetypical maroon is a “sable outlaw” named Osman who is glimpsed hiding like Dred in the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia in a Harper’s Monthly travelogue by the popular illustrator David Hunter Strother. At the climax of the author’s exploration into the intricate and isolated swamp, Strother uncovers “a gigantic negro, with a tattered blanket wrapped around his shoulders and a gun in his hand” whose “purely African features were cast in a mould betokening, in the highest degree, strength and energy” (452–53). Osman functions in Cowan’s analysis as a startling inscrutable racial Other who disrupts the racial complacencies of both narrator and reader with the gothic mystery of his fugitive freedom. Cowan does not analyze the ramifications of Osman’s Islamic name, but like the “briery screen” that Strother portrays surrounding Osman in his visual illustration, these roots lead back across the routes of transatlantic migration to the moorings of African Islam and the inability of the Americas to absorb its contentious alterity (Fig. 4).

The hidden Islamicist power subtly suggested by Stowe and Strother in their fictional renegades from the 1850s is traced more fully in the critical cosmopolitanism of their contemporary Melville. Melville deterritorializes much of his fiction by setting it upon the fluid currents of the oceans that, as Melville says of the Pacific, “makes all coasts one bay to it” (Moby-Dick 483). Melville islamicizes characters—such as Babo in “Benito Cereno,” Aleema in Mardi, as well as Fedallah, his crew, and even the white whale of Moby-Dick—so that they perform an overruling and excessive fatalism that mysteriously controls events within his literary regimes.

Babo and the dozen other rebels in “Benito Cereno,” as noted in the depositions included in Amasa Delano’s original travel narrative, are “all raw and born on the coast of Senegal” (Piazza Tales 828). Melville concentrates the revolt within the mind of Babo himself whose literacy, leadership, and name signify his Muslim heritage. Keith Cartwright has explored the significance of Babo’s Senegalese ethnicity and notes that his name was “rendered from the common Fulbe name Baaba . . . as were Muri (Mory) and Atufal (Artu Faal)” (185). Melville allies Babo’s plotting intelligence, which lives on in his story, with his own critical and creative authorship. His “dusky comment of silence” and mute destiny leaves his agency an unhomely reminder of a primal freedom that refuses to be conscripted by the hegemonic codes of continental law, even when thousands of miles and an ocean away from the African home to which he knew not how to return (Piazza Tales 87)

Figure 4
“Osman.” Illustration of maroon in the Great Dismal Swamp by “Porté Crayon” (David Hunter Strother) in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (1856), p. 452. From the Rare Book Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The inscrutability of Melville’s Pacific islamicism gains a more oriental and disembodied extreme with the dark despotism that possesses Aleema the priest of Mardi and Fedallah the shady genie of Moby-Dick. Melville’s naming of the “dusky” and despotic Aleema (142), who intends to sacrifice the angelic maiden Yillah but is instead killed by Melville’s narrator Taji, is linked with the ulema, the name of the Persian Shiite clergy. The “swart” Fedallah (217), whose name in Arabic means “the sacrifice of God,” runs the gamut of types of the weird and cunning Asian: he is called a Parsee (or orthodox Zoroastrian) and worships fire; he possesses a Muslim name and wears a turban; he wears a black Chinese jacket and coils his hair in braids on his head and, finally, is compared, like his “tiger-yellow” crew (217), with “the like of whom now and then glide among the unchanging Asiatic communities, especially the Oriental isles to the east of the continent” (231). When the Pequod is waylaid by Malays after it sails through the straits of Sunda between Java and Sumatra, Ahab applauds the “inhuman atheistical devils” for encouraging him to quicken his own pursuit of the whale (383). Melville links the piracy of these “rascally Asiatics” with the savagery of Ahab’s own monomaniacal revenge, replicated in the phantom crew that he secrets aboard. Nevertheless, Melville spares some of Ahab’s “humanities” (79) by displacing the captain’s perverse destiny and haunted fatalism onto Fedallah’s spectral body. A figure of evil fate who remains “a muffled mystery to the last” (231), Melville connects Fedallah with Ahab as a shadow to its substance. Melville yokes them together “an unseen tyrant driving them” and they remain in that condition in death, attached by whale-lines to the plunging Moby Dick, who absorbs their bodies within his living orbit and diving depths (538). Throughout his late poetry, Melville continued to distill Asian characters into suspicious sorcerers whose uncanny influence bodied forth a dark and primal antagonism.

Melville uses the language of Othello to intimate the malignity of the Leviathan that sheared off Ahab’s leg with the “seeming malice” of a “turbaned Turk” (184). Melville compares finding this white whale in the oceans of all the world to recognizing “a white-bearded Mufti in the thronged thoroughfares of Constantinople” (201) and when he does make his majestic first appearance it is “far out on the soft Turkish-rugged waters” (548). The white whale is also islamicized as an inscrutable figure of evil fate when Ahab loses his life. As Ahab throws out his last harpoon, “the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone” (572). These Islamicist references at the key locations of the whale’s irruption into the story suggest the special resonance invested in its mysterious capacity, like Babo’s staring white skull, to symbolize the exotic and ungraspable opacity ascribed to Islam. As an alien presence who freely swims the oceans surrounding the Americas, Melville’s Moby Dick intimates “That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds” (184).

Assuming the identity of Ishmael, Melville affiliated his narrator with a figure most widely known in the nineteenth century as the Abrahamic ancestor of the Arabs. The Islamicist stance of making Ishmael the only survivor empowered Melville to criticize Christian civilization from a position that, although biblical, was also one aligned with Islam, one from which he could speak with the contentious power of an established outsider. Melville’s Book of Ishmael integrates the infidel renegade and slave into the center of his narrative, and ultimately into the canon because of Moby-Dick’s importance to US literature.

All three of these works from the 1850s locate spaces peripheral to the circumscribed systems from which they can launch their critiques of slavery in the Americas. Setting these narratives in impenetrable swamps in the interior of the US South or, in Melville’s case, on board ships off the coast of Chile (”Benito Cereno”) or in the open ocean waters near the Muslim archipelago of Indonesia signifies the ends to which these authors had to go to figure the fate of freedom in the landed Americas with its hierarchical racial economies. The infidel challenge of Islamic difference intimated by these maroons, fugitives, and castaways signified both the militancy of their violent dissent and their author’s ability to engage Islamic latitudes to imagine temporary loopholes of transnational liberty.

5. Over the Edge: Islam and the Limits of American Interculturalism in the 1940s

By the middle of the twentieth century, African Americans had found more sustainable latitudes of freedom by connecting with the global resource of Islam in ways that signified the stirrings of a revivified civil rights movement in the US. “‘Man, if you join the Muslim faith, you ain’t colored no more, you’ll be white,” Dizzy Gillespie remembers jazz musicians saying in New York during World War II, “You get a new name and you don’t have to be a nigger no more” (291). In his autobiography called To BE or Not . . . to BOP, Gillespie explains how a large number of jazz musicians turned to Islam in the 1940s because it provided them with the power of an alternative religious faith which also served as a social act enabling escape from the stigma of color and criticism of a Christianized culture complicit with the system of segregation. Muslims were allowed to mark W (for white) instead of C (for Colored) on their police cards, thereby opening the door to establishments who otherwise refused service to blacks. “When these cats found out that Idrees Sulieman,” Gillespie explained, “. . . could go into these white restaurants and bring out sandwiches to the other guys because he wasn’t colored, and he looked like the inside of the chimney, they started enrolling in droves” (291). Malcolm X told a similar anecdote about how a dark-skinned friend put a turban on and was served in a segregated restaurant in Atlanta. “He asked the waitress, ‘What would happen if a Negro came in here?’ And there he’s sitting, black as night, but because he has his head wrapped up the waitress looked back at him and says, ‘Why, there wouldn’t no nigger dare come in here!’” (Malcolm X Speaks 36).Although Gillespie saw no need to transcend his blackness by becoming a Muslim (he claimed that “WC is a toilet in Europe” [292] and later became a Bahá’í), he was “quite intrigued by the beautiful sound of the word ‘Quran,’ and found it ‘out of this world,’ ‘way out,’ as we used to say.” Life Magazine conned Dizzy Gillespie into posing for a picture on a prayer rug bowing to Mecca as part of its strategy to write him off as “too strange, weird and exotic to merit serious attention” (293). Although resentful of this particular manipulation, this Islamicist stance resembles the latitudes of dissent that Gillespie created for himself by performing his innovative music. The improvised style of Bebop, whose hip defiance Eric Lott says, “bucked the regulations of accepted articulateness” (598), vibrated a creolized space of alternative performance signified by Dizzy’s riffing on Hamlet’s existential soliloquy in the title of his memoirs. At one point, Gillespie embodied this liberty by wearing a turban when traveling abroad. “Sometimes Americans think I’m some kind of Mohammedan nobleman,” he commented, “I like to pretend I don’t speak English and listen to them talk about me” (Boyer 31).

Dizzy Gillespie figured his fellow musicians as turning toward Mecca to get beyond the hurt of racism and personally employed Muslim resources to exult in the fluid feel of a foreign freedom. By contrast, Langston Hughes appropriated jazz style even while figuring “Be-Bop Boys” as cashing in on the currency of exoticism in a short four-line poem: “Imploring Mecca/to achieve/six discs/with Decca” (51). However, it was Malcolm X that exemplified most publicly the full irruptive force of Islam as a radical reorientation of conventional racial realities. This substitution is reflected at the most basic level in Malcolm X’s effacements of his birth surname (Little) and his street nicknames, their replacement with a letter whose mysterious obscurity symbolized both an absence and a turning of the Cross on its axis, and ultimately the complete eclipse of his American identity when he became a Muslim named El-hajj Malik El-Shabazz, in honor of an ancient tribe of black people in the Near East. Some call this disowning process reversion instead of conversion because it replaces the markers and misnomers of second-class Negro citizenship with transnational freedoms signified by a Muslim power that existed in Africa prior to enslavement. The most prominent case was that of the boxer Cassius Clay, who, by erasing his association with the white nineteenth-century abolitionist for whom he was named, became Muhammad Ali and was celebrated in a different arena as the greatest man on earth because of the talking of his fists. Reverting to Islam—either through religious faith or through social expression—empowered some African Americans in the mid-twentieth century to protest the exclusions of racism. African Americans were able to perform alternative freedoms that elided national and hemispheric racial categories by restoring transoceanic genealogies of subaltern power and imposing these Islamic lineages within American situations.

While the adoption of Islam by African Americans in the 1940s invoked the unfulfilled dream of black emancipation, the literary works of the expatriate US author Paul Bowles at the same time narrated stories that dramatized the paralyzing limits of American intercultural understanding when confronted with their incomprehension of Islamic cultures. In the same years during which Henry Luce called US Americans to assume their role as global superpower, and the Americas were opened to displaced persons from the hellish fallout of post–World War II Europe, Bowles spelled out—in such works as the novel The Sheltering Sky (1949)—the abrupt end of American authority when confronting the radical and alien difference of African Islam in its Saharan hinterlands.

Bowles’s story “A Distant Episode,” originally published in the Partisan Review in 1947 as the Cold War was ensuing, narrates the violent degeneration into madness of a Professor of Linguistics who travels into the interior of North Africa in leisurely pursuit of varied dialects of Moghrebi, the local language. After being led into an abyss while in search of souvenirs, his tongue is cut out by the Reguibat, a Muslim tribe known for aggressively resisting French colonization and called the blue people for their robes of indigo dye. They capture him, dress him in a clownish costume comprised of strings of tin cans, and force him for a full year to perform antic gestures and “fearful growling noises” before paying audiences. Bowles’s comment that “he existed in the middle of the movements made by these other men” exemplifies the professor’s complete loss of agency (Bowles 46). Revived into painful consciousness after hearing the Arabic spoken by a man who purchases him, the Professor finally refuses to perform, causing the man to seek out and murder the Reguibat who had made the transaction and be arrested in turn for this act of revenge. Alone and starving, the Professor slowly deciphers the French words on a calendar in the house where he is held captive—”he had the feeling he was performing what had been written for him long ago.” Roaring and smashing his way to escape from his fate, he “gallops” through the town as “his yelling rose into an indignant lament as he waived his arms more wildly, and hopped high into the air at every few steps, in an access of terror” before leaving the gateway of the town and disappearing in the desert as “the lunar chill was growing in the air” (48–49). This stunning story, the most anthologized of all of Bowles’s work, dramatizes a horrible hybridity through which an arrogant and ignorant Westerner is stripped of all his authority and knowledge except the animalistic bellowing of his own inarticulate outrage and the terrible oblivion of his shapeless identity. Unlike Jim’s temporary masquerade as a sick Arab, Bowles’s Professor performs his tragic loss of cultural agency only to exhibit the primitive helplessness of a slave who can neither speak about nor make sense of the world he inhabits. Bowles’s story dramatizes the horror that ensues when Americans reach the ends of their hemisphere and confront the abyss of another half that makes no sense.As Jorge Luis Borges does in his short fiction, Bowles in “A Distant Episode” turns the process of enslavement around on its axis to reveal the destabilizing vertigo that ensues when purported cosmopolites reach the limits of their spheres of intercultural understanding. Bowles wrote in the moment when the Cold War came to constitute a new global bipolarity that divided the globe into first and second worlds representing opposing ideological camps. Like the moon in its cycles, however, Islamic opacity has survived that colossal system of world order. As Wallace Stevens suggested in his poem, the haunting “lunar chill” marks the alien horizons in whose margins we must learn to live even as the new hemispheric studies rescue Americans from other insularities of their own international imaginations.

*Timothy Marr Associate Professor in the Curriculum in American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, he is the author of The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism.