Terrorism (Un) Veiled Frantz Fanon and the Women of Algiers

Terrorism (Un)Veiled: Frantz Fanon and the Women of Algiers

Jeffrey Louis Decker

She was therefore enveloped in veils and flowing robes like explosive material which has to be well packed. In some Arab societies, this uncovering of a finger or a toe was considered a potential source of fitna [i.e., chaos motivated by feminine seductiveness] in society which might therefore lead to anarchy, uprisings, rebellions and the total destruction of the established order! -Nawal El Saadawi Truth is not an unveiling which destroys the secret, but the revelation which does it justice. -Walter Benjamin

A photograph of war-torn Beirut, 1985, runs alongside the New York Times Book Review cover story of Bob Woodward's book entitled Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987.1 Everywhere in I would like to thank Jenny Sharpe, Neil Lazarus, and Kaja Silverman for

commenting on an early draft of this essay.

1. David C. Martin, "Mighty Casey," review of Veil: The Secret Warsof the CIA, 1981-1987, by Bob Woodward, New YorkTimesBook Review, 18 October 1987, 1. C1990

by Cultural Critique. 0882-4371 (Winter 1990-91). All rights reserved.

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the photograph are signs of the manichean conflict between the first world and postcolonial societies. In the background is the face of a building desolated by an explosion. Hanging from the edges of the wrecked facade are banners inscribed with the English words "MADE IN USA" and "DEATH TO USA." In the foreground of the picture three conspicuously veiled Muslim women in black garb move silently past. Two of these women return the photographer's gaze. The scopic effect on the first-world viewer is that the voyeur sees himself or herself being seen.2 The third Muslim woman mottles my perception. Looking elsewhere, her gaze exceeds the frame of the picture and frustrates my desire to realize the object of her look. Furthermore, the third woman appears to be in the process of lowering her veil in order to uncover her face. Where will her gaze move next? Will it be in my direction? Yet, when I look again, she seems to be simultaneously raising her veil over her face in a gesture that will serve to conceal her body completely. What is she hiding? As a Western observer, I wonder ... Why do they look that way?3 As stated above, this photograph is placed next to the review of Woodward's book Veil. The book discloses the fact that the American Central Intelligence Agency functions primarily by radically concealing its operations from the public-first as well as third world. This comes as no surprise to anyone who knows the history of the CIA; and Woodward's Veil adds evidence to the historical record by uncovering for the reader a number of recent

The credit for the Beirut bombing photograph is given as Reuters/The New York Times. 2. Jacques Lacan, "What Is a Picture?" in The Four Fundamental Conceptsof Psycho-Analysis,trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 106, states, "It is through the gaze [of the Other] that I enter life and it is from the gaze that I receive its effects." 3. The questions posed in this paragraph, and the issues raised in this paper in general, are not intended to imply a "response" on the part of Arab women. In other words, my project is not intended to make the Other "speak" and thus fulfill the Westerner's desire for a presupposed answer. Instead, this paper attempts both to destabilize Western hegemony concerning knowledge of the Arab world and to posit a contingent Arab agency. Of course, my own provisional attempt to unsettle the Western discourse on the Arab world and to disclose the effects of certain decolonializing and feminist strategies cannot avoid a certain complicity with cultural imperialism.

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covert campaigns.4 As Woodward's title indicates, and as he suggests within his expose, "Veil" is the code word par excellence for that fall under the the CIA's internal operations-campaigns modern definition of, and yet always remain an unspoken form of, terrorism. But there is more here than meets the eye. Why the veil? Specifically, why should the Reagan administration CIA choose "Veil" as the "top-secret code word for covert operations"5particularly covert operations directed against an orthodox Muslim society such as Libya? More broadly speaking, what significance does the veil have in the history of terrorism? My project is to theorize the cultural force of the veil within the discourse of terrorism in an effort to understand better terrorism as a response to contemporary historical crises. This will, I hope, assist an ongoing effort to reconstruct what has been excluded from the Western historical register: namely, the struggles of third-world people and, more specifically, women's place within these movements. Terrorism, as it is constructed in Western discourse, signifies all that is horrific concerning the violent tactics of "our" enemies, especially those enemies who "hide out" in the Middle East and neighboring regions. However, it must be acknowledged that there is no force more terroristic than the violence of the "legiti4. Bob Woodward, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981-1987 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987). As stated, Woodward's Veil provides additional evidence to the historical register by revealing a number of recent covert campaigns, some previously undisclosed. The revelations include, first, the CIA guerrilla-warfare training manual that advises the so-called Nicaraguan contras on both the "selective use of violence" to "neutralize [read assassinate] carefully selected and planned targets" (388-89) and, second, the secret war aginst Libya in which the CIA trained and supported small units of foreign nationals in the Middle East for what it called "pre-emptive self-defense" against terrorists. This CIA campaign, as we are now aware, resulted in the deaths of eighty people and in the wounding of two hundred, leaving urban devastation and missing its target being Sheik Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, who target altogether-the was suspected of having a connection to the three terrorist bombings at American facilities in Beirut (393, 396-97, 405). Finally, Woodward uncovers the "deception and disinformation program"-carried out under the official code word "Veil"-directed against Qaddafi and Libya and indirectly directed against the American press and, by extension, the American people (475). 5. Woodward, Veil, 4.

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mate" nation-state (I am referring to the CIA's Phoenix Program, the government-sponsored death squads in Central and South America, the destruction of entire cities during World War II, etc.). It seems to me that, following the recent work of Richard Rubenstein, terrorism can only be defined as "politically motivated violence engaged in by a small group claiming to represent the masses."6 The focus of this paper concerns the use of terrorism as a political strategy in the decolonializing campaigns of the FLN (National Liberation Front) fighters in Algeria against French occupation in the mid- and late 1950s. More specifically, I will attempt to unpack what Frantz Fanon, in his 1959 essay entitled "Algeria Unveiled," calls the "historic dynamism of the veil"7specifically, the political effects that the veil generated when it was manipulated by women of Algiers in their effort to help promote the resistance that eventually led to Algerian independence in 1962. The Algerian woman's entrance into the Revolution as political agent was simultaneous with the deployment of the necessarily violent "technique of terrorism," a technique analyzed by Fanon and captured in Gillo Pontecorvo's 1966 film The Battle of Algiers.8

Western accounts of terrorism as counterhegemonic resistance in Algiers have, alternatively, remained doubly veiled: while, on the one hand, the link between terroristic tactics and a successful campaign for decolonization in Algiers has been largely repressed from the Western historical memory, perhaps the most significant agents of this particular revolutionary strugglewomen-have been the target of this exclusion. Fanon's text, I believe, opens up a space for a fuller account of the veil and the 6. Richard Rubenstein, Alchemistsof Revolution: Terrorismin the Modern World

(New York:Basic Books, 1987), xvi-xvii. 7. Frantz Fanon, "Algeria Unveiled," in A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier(New York:Grove Press, 1967), 63. Furtherreferences to the text will be cited parenthetically. 8. The use of the veil by Third-Worldwomen under revolutionarycircumstances is not restrictedto Algeria, of course. During the Iranian Revolutionof 1977-79, for instance, Iranianwomen donned the veil as a sign of both defiance towardthe Shah'sregime and devotion to Islamicidentityand the resistivecause. For an account of women's roles in revolutionaryIran, see Guity Nashat, ed., Womenand Revolutionin Iran (Boulder, Colo.: WestviewPress, 1983).

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feminine specificity of its complex effects in relationship to the anticolonial struggles of Arab women. Theorizing the politics of femininity in relationship to the anticolonial struggles of the Algerian woman will be the primary task of this paper. Specifically, I will attempt to articulate more fully the way in which two disparate accounts of the veiled Muslim woman-best known in the West as "victim" of Muslim orthodoxy (and, to a lesser extent, colonialism) by feminists and nonfeminists,9 but also, through Fanon's writing, as revolutionary "agent" not be conceptualized separately but, of decolonialization-should rather, simultaneously as the effect of a dominating power and historical specificity. Visibility and the construction of subjectivity in colonial Algeria is the primary focus of Fanon's essay. His central concern is the way in which the "detail[s]" (37) of everyday "dress" in Algeria are potentially transformed in and into a "revolutionary fashion" (59). Fanon immediately turns his attention to what is most visible in Algerian society: the veil-as both dress and mask-of the Algerian woman: "In the Arab world, for example, the veil worn [I]t generally sufby women is at once noticed by the tourist.... For the tourist and the forfices to characterize Arab society....

eigner, the veil demarcates both Algerian society and its feminine component" (35-36). For the colonizer, the Algerian woman behind the veil marks the frontier of colonialism. Fanon's point has been more recently echoed in Malek Alloula's The Colonial

9. For critical accounts of the (post)colonialwoman as subjugated within a sexist political-religiouseconomy of Muslim orthodoxy, see Fatima Mernissi, Beyondthe Veil:Male-FemaleDynamicsin ModernMuslimSociety,rev. ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), Nawal El Saadawi,TheHiddenFaceof Eve: Womenin theArabWorld,trans. Sherif Hetata (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982), trans. MaryJo Lakeland(New FatnaA. Sabbah,Womenin theMuslimUnconscious, York: Pergamon Press, 1984), and ElizabethWarnockFernea, A Streetin Marrakech(Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1980). For a popularized and Orientalized account of Arab women in "backward"and oppressive Muslimsocieties, see Linda Bird Francke,"A Veiled Threat,"New YorkTimesMagazine,27 March 1988, 30-32. The seeming failure to translatethe Algerian women'srole in the decolonial campaigninto everydaylife afterthe Revolutionis outside the scope of this essay. For a critique of women's place in postcolonial Algeria, see Juliette Minces, "Womenin Algeria,"in Womenin theMuslimWorld,ed. Lois Beck and Nikki Keddie (Cambridge:HarvardUniversityPress, 1978).

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Harem, 0 where the latter locates this issue in the guise of Algerian women in French postcards of the colonial conquest. The conflation of "Algerian society and its feminine component" in the character of the woman within the veil allows Fanon to disclose the manner in which Orientalism functions:ll the colonizer makes the colony (land and people) dependent by constructing it as powerless-in this specific case, as both non-white and feminine. This helps to account for Fanon's speculation that, even for the colonized, sexual difference is significant. While Algerian men wear veils of a certain type, the function of their "masculine garb" is distinct from the women's because the former have regional variations-a "certain margin of choice, a modicum of heterogeneity." The Algerian women, on the other hand, are seen differently: "The woman seen in her white veil unifies the perception that one has of Algerian feminine society. Obviously what we have here is a uniform which tolerates no modification, no variant" (36). There are two issues at stake concerning the Arab woman's veil and its relationship to power and resistance: phallocentrism (or patriarchy) and colonialism. By traditional Muslim standards, women inhabiting public space are bound by specific rules and rituals, most recognizable among them being the wearing of the veil. As Fatima Mernissi states, the "veil means that the woman is present in the men's world, but invisible; she has no right to be in the street."'2 To play her role within the phallocentric economy, the Algerian woman must be more veiled (and less noticeable) than the Algerian man, whose space she now occupies. Yet women's role in the Algerian Revolution problematizes a formulation such as Mernissi's. Fanon concludes "Algeria Un10. Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). As some critics have pointed out, Alloula's admirable account of Orientalism within French colonialism suffers, at times, from a sexism of its own. As Carol Shloss notes in "Algeria, Conquered by Postcard," New YorkTimes Book Review, 11 November 1987, the Algerian woman is problematically perceived by Alloula "as property and as symbolic marks of (dis)honor or status for the men in their families" (24). Part of my project is to avoid this phallocentric tendency by locating a revolutionary agency within the guise of the Algerian woman. 11. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism(New York: Vintage, 1979). 12. Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, 142-43.

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veiled," for instance, by pointing out that "revolutionary war [in Algeria] is not a war of men." Rather, the struggle for independence during the last years of the 1950s is "kept alive by the woman in the home" (66). In light of the numerous accounts (such as Mernissi's) of the oppressive position of women within Muslim orthodoxy-for which the veil is both a literal and a figural of feminine subordination and sexual difference-what sign significance can or should we grant to Fanon's contrary statement concerning women's agency during the struggle for Algerian independence? Under the Revolutionary circumstances of Algeria during the late fifties, the struggle over sexism-in relationship to the French occupier as well as the indigenous Muslim male population-is not unrelated to the Algerian woman's place in the FLN's armed struggle for independence. A transformation of the Muslim notion of femininity, even if only momentarily during decolonization, is central to theorizing the general range of possibilities for Algerian women's subjectivity and agency. For all of its insight, Fanon's account of Algerian women's agency in "Algeria Unveiled" inadequately conceptualizes the feminine specificity of the colonized woman within the politics of terrorism.'3 This failure to address the circumstances of the Algerian woman from a feminist (as well as a decolonial) position is anticipated in his 1952 book entitled Black Skin, White Masks. In the latter text, Fanon's innovative psychoanalytic account of colonization unfortunately forecloses any analysis of colonization's effects on women of color: "Those who grant our conclusions on the psychosexuality of the white woman may ask what we have to say about the woman of color. I know nothing about her."'4 Alter13. Fanon is certainly not the only theorist of decolonization to confront inadequately the complexities of the feminine specificity of the colonized woman. More recently, writers such as Malek Alloula (mentioned above) and Homi K. Bhabha, who have added much to our understanding of decolonization, also fall short on this account. Bhabha will be taken up below in relationship to the question of femininity and the Algerian woman's struggles against phallocentrism and colonialism. 14. Fanon, Black Skin, WhiteMasks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 179-80 (my emphasis). The similarities between Fanon's "know-nothing" account of black femininity and Freud's and Lacan's well-known discussions of the general enigma of woman are uncanny.

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natively, the entire focus of "Algeria Unveiled" is on the colonized woman. Yet Fanon's account of the Algerian woman's role in the battle for Algiers remains inadequate because it fails to theorize the function of the veil as it relates to both the oppressive inscription and the resistive deformation of femininity, fetishism, and power. During the Revolution, sexism as well as colonization were issues with which Algerian women struggled. A feminist psychoanalytic conceptualization of the veil and women's place within it will, I hope, help produce a more powerful and complex account of the oppressive as well as the revolutionary position of the colonized woman who inhabits a veiled space. It is my contention that anti-essentialist feminism can be utilized to textualize the "veiled" terrorist strategies of resistance produced by Algerian women during their struggle for independence. More specifically, I will utilize Julia Kristeva's discussion of the figure of the veiled Phallic against the grain of Kristeva's writingl5-to Mother-largely create a productive affiliation between analyses of phallocentrism and of decolonialization. Through the fictions of Western maternity and Muslim femininity, the veil becomes the site for one affiliation between feminist and decolonializing politics. Paradoxically, the veil also allows dominant power to function effectively (and differently) within

15. I am using Kristeva "against her will" in this paper in at least two ways. First, she does not theorize the revolutionary potential of the fiction of the veiled Phallic Mother; I will elaborate on this point later within the text of this paper. Second, Kristeva has (as Barbara Harlow points out) recently appealed to what appears to be a kind of paranoid politics where postcolonialism is concerned: "While the Latin American or Arab marxist revolution growls at the doors of the United States, I feel myself closer to liberty and truth working within the space of this contested giant, which is perhaps on the point of becoming another David confronting the Goliath of the Third World." (Julia Kristeva, "Memoire," L'Infini 1 [1983]: 54; this citation is translated by Barbara Harlow in her "Theory and Strategy in the Third World: Introduction," Critical Exchange 22 [Spring 1987]: iii.) It should not escape the reader's detection that Kristeva's desire for thirdworld containment and siege is precisely the ideology that supports the countercounterterrorist acts of organizations such as the CIA. Finally, it should be noted that I am also attempting to avoid some of the Orientalizing gestures of Kristeva's earlier and more sympathetic writing on the third world, such as About Chinese Women, trans. Anita Barrows (New York: Urizen Press, 1977). For an insightful discussion of this issue, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "French Feminisms in an International Frame," YaleFrench Studies 62 (1981): 184.

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phallocentrism and colonialism. In what follows, I will addressfirst by way of a brief discussion of psychoanalysis and then through a feminist explication of Fanon's account of the role of effect of the veil Algerian women during decolonialization-the as simultaneously an oppressive inscription and a counterconstruction of feminine specificity that produces different subjectivities and, potentially, revolutionary agency. Psychoanalytic accounts of the veil-and the fantasy of the woman's place behind it-offer us a conceptual tool for comprehending the veil's resistive as well as its oppressive effect. Here, one needs only to think of Lacan's theory of the veiled paternal phallus. According to Lacan, the phallus is the privileged signifier and the site of power in the dominant or Symbolic order.'6 As such, it functions efficiently only by misrecognition. It is therefore necessary for the phallus to be veiled properly in order for it to produce its powerful effects.'7 It is important to note that, for Lacan, no one actually inhabits the place of the phallus; the individual fantasizes that a signifying gaze emanates from the place of the phallus, which demarcates absolute meaning, origin, subjectivity, and power.18 16. The Symbolic order is, for Lacan, the place where subjectivity is constructed through the entry into language. Here a persistent tension exists between a desire for unity of self and other (what is supposedly lost in the child's Imaginary relationship to the mother) and the knowledge of fragmentation or loss of unity. See Lacan's "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I" in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 1-7, for a discussion of this stage of infant development. 17. Lacan, "The Meaning of the Phallus," in Feminine Sexuality:Jacques Lacan and the ecole freudienne, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: Norton, 1985), 82, states, "The phallus can only play its role when veiled, that is, as in itself a sign of the latency with which everything signifiable is struck as soon as it is raised to the function of signifier." 18. Michel Foucault's historical study of the architectural composition of the Panopticon in relationship to the birth of the modern prison is what I perceive to be an example of both the functioning and the social effects of Lacan's theory of the phallus. The Panopticon and the phallus's functions and effects are similar for a number of reasons. Visibility and invisibility are central to each-neither the phallus nor the tower can play its role effectively unless concealed properly. The phallus is always externally veiled; the tower is internally shaded by Venetian blinds and zigzag hallways. While no one inhabits the place of the phallus, anyone can visit the tower-only to find it empty (or that no one inhabits it for long). Finally, both are veritable signifiers that produce power, terror, intimidation, and deterrence. See Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1979), 195-228.

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For Lacan as well as Kristeva, the woman-or more specifically, the veiled Phallic Mother-is the Other who is thought to have this illusory power. 19Yet, if the category of woman is simultaneously constructed by a "male" fantasy of desire for the Other and experienced by a class of individuals-women-as real, how can women resist, disrupt, and disfigure their spoken position that places them in the impossible position "behind" the veil of signification?20

For the Phallic Mother to play her paradoxically subjugated and omnipotent role within culture she must be more veiled (and less obvious) than the Primitive Father.21 Because the Primitive 19. This is because the mother (unlike the father, who, as the third term in the Oedipal relationship, introduces difference through the rupture of the motherchild dyad) is the site of a stable fantasy of unity for man, who needs to displace those uncertainties brought on by his entrance into the Symbolic order. However, there is a paradox operating in this formula that suggests the function of the Symbolic order and women's position within it: while the Other is the site of knowledge, language always operates by falling short of its meaning, and thus knowledge is always incomplete. In other words, if there is something that appears to be present in the Other, it is (ironically) "lack." As both Lacan and Kristeva make clear, within a phallocentric economy of masculine desire, the category of "womenas such does not exist"; rather "she" is a fetishized fantasyalbeit one to which "men" are "infantiley" susceptible. See Kristeva, AboutChinese Women,16, and Lacan, "God and the Jouissance of Woman," in FeminineSexuality, 144. 20. Kristeva claims that the "Phallic Mother" is more potent than the "Primitive Father" because "she" is theorized as omnipotent in the Symbolic Order due to her pre-Oedipal relationship with the child. In order to theorize the disruptive potential of the Phallic Mother, Kristeva writes against Lacan's notion of the Imaginary in the form of what she refers to as the "semiotic." (In Lacan's writing, the Imaginary is the pre-Oedipal space where there is no distinction between self and Other, no difference between child and mother, no language, no lack, and therefore no unconscious. Unlike Kristeva's concept of the semiotic, Lacan claims that once an individual enters into the Symbolic order and accepts the phallus as the representation of the Name-of-the-Father, there is no possibility for returning to the Imaginary and taking up a position in this space. Doing so, according to Lacan, results in psychosis or madness.) Kristeva's semiotic issues from what escapes repression in the symbolic order. Located in the pre-Oedipal phase, it is a language that resists closure. The semiotic constitutes pre-Oedipal pulsations and rhythms; it is a heterogeneous language that is connected to the mother's body (as opposed to the paternal phallus); it unsettles the order of the Symbolic. The semiotic constitutes a marginal space or position-always transgressing the boundaries of the dominant discourse in a manner that destabilizes its hegemony. 21. Kristeva, "The Novel as Polylogue," in Desire and Language: A Semiotic Approachto Literatureand Art, trans. Thomas Gore et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 199.

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Father is "more noticeable" than the Phallic Mother, he is theorized as "less dangerous" than she.22 More importantly, I wish to suggest (as Jane Gallop does in a different context23) that Kristeva's writing enables her to take on the maternal (im)posture of the Phallic Mother in order both to criticize and to exerciseits power.24 In this manner, Kristeva can be read as resisting and subverting the Imaginary fantasy of unity imposed by phallocentrism. By lifting the veil of representation and theatricalizing the spectacle of woman, she exposes the (im)position of the socalled Phallic Mother. The aim of unveiling the Phallic Mother is to exercise her signifying power and thereby produce a "jamming" in the phallocentric machinery so that it (mis)represents women as speaking subjects. This, in turn, might be tantamount to dephallisizing the Father by revealing his arbitrary foundation. It should be repeated that in my above discussion of Kristeva I am appropriating her largely against her will. It is not her "intention" to promote the revolutionary potential in the Phallic Mother. Her discussion of the Phallic Mother, as often as not, tends only to criticize her (im)position. However, it is my contention that the oxymoronic logic of the veiled Phallic Mother-she simultaneously and undecidably contains both lack and powerallows her to display a maternal mimicry, while also producing power (concealed by the veil, she produces, in the Lacanian sense, phallic effects). The oxymoronic effect of the veiled Phallic Mother allows her to generate unsettling effects. Unlike the fictitious figure of the Phallic Mother, the woman of Algiers potentially takes up the 22. Kristeva, "Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini," in Desire and Language, 237. Although it remains somewhat open to debate as to whether Kristeva defines "woman" as maternal on the grounds that she has a maternal essence, I choose to privilege the moments in which Kristeva undermines this essentialist stance by stating, for example, that the maternal posture is an "impossible syllogism"-an impossible paradox. Thus the logic of the Phallic Mother as oxymoronic. For another example of Kristeva's discussion of motherhood, see her essay "Stabat Mater," in Tales of Love, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 234-63. 23. See Jane Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 113-33, for a provocative appropriation of Kristeva as Phallic Mother as well as an analysis of Kristeva's use of the concept of the Phallic Mother. 24. See Kristeva, About Chinese Women,38.

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site of revolutionary agency on the historical world stage of colonial resistance.25 At the moment of decolonization in Algiers, the veiled Arab woman-due to both her feminine specificity and her marginal subject-position as colonial subject-produces a disturbing and ambivalent effect as well. Of course, in orthodox Muslim society the veil is a metaphor for women's literal absence from public modes of production due to their subordinate sexual status.26 And yet, marginally positioned

behind the veil of racial and

sexual Othering, the Arab woman gives the simultaneous and undecidable effect of power and lack, presence and absence. Initially, the Algerian woman's veil is a uniform that unifies the colonized feminine figure in the "whites" of the occupier's eyes. As such, the veil appears to grant stable and homogeneous signification to the colonizer. The haik-the large white square veil that covers the entire body of the Algerian woman-is the veil par excellence: "it clearly demarcates," according to Fanon, the "Algerian colonized society." This paradoxically concealed, yet

25. Although my use of the Phallic Mother is as a theoreticalfiction that can assist in conceptualizing the contours of feminism and decolonializationfor women in Algeria during the Revolution,motherhood is nonetheless an actual site of resistancein some areas of the third world. The "mothersof the Plazade Mayo"in Argentina, according to Jean Franco, interrupt militarydiscourse by publicly displaying photographs of the sons and daughters who have been categorized as the "disappeared."By naming themselves the "mothersof the disappeared,"these women break with traditionalnotions of biologicalmotherhood that are tied to the reproductionof individualchildren. Instead, motherhood is reconstructedby these women to signify their commitmentand to give voice to an officially silenced community.As Franco perceptivelypoints out, In using the term "mother"in this way, these women show how mothering is not simply tied to anatomybut is a position involvinga struggle over meanings and the history of meanings, histories that have been acquired and stored within unofficial institutions.While "mothersof subversives"is univocal,strippedof any connotationbut that of reproduction, "mothersof the disappeared"signals an absence, a spacethat speaksthrougha lack-the lackof a child-but also a continuinglackwithinthe governmentof any participatorydialogue, of any answerto the questionof how their childrendisappeared. See Franco, "Beyond Ethnocentrism:Gender, Power,and the Third-WorldIntelligentsia,"in Marxismand the Interpretation of Culture,ed. Cary Nelson and LawrenceGrossberg(Urbana:Universityof Illinois Press, 1988), 514. 26. See Mernissi,"Womenand the Impactof CapitalistDevelopmentin Morocco [PartI],"FeministIssues2, no. 2 (1982): 69-104, and Part II, FeministIssues3, no. 1 (1983): 61-112.

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visibly marked Algerian woman, "in the eyes of the observer, is unmistakably 'she who hides behind the veil"' (36). "Algeria Unveiled" describes the way in which marginalized subjects can manipulate representation and power from their (im)position behind the veil of signification during decolonization. In this manner the Algerian woman "relearns her body, re-establishes it in a totally revolutionary fashion" (59). Her revolutionary subjectivity is produced by the effect of the sartorial transformation of the veil. During the Algerian revolution, the "veil . .. was to become the bone of contention in a grandiose battle" (36). At this moment, both veil and Algerian woman become a kind of fetish object of colonial desire. This produced the well-known colonial formula for fighting the battle: "Let's win over the women and the rest will follow." The result is that up through 1955, in an effort to weaken resistance to the occupier, the colonizers place "into application a whole technique of infiltration" centering on the Arab woman. The "precise political doctrine" (38) of the French is to unveil the Algerian woman and expose her to the colonial gaze. The discourse of colonial authority in relationship to Arab women operates within two different economies of fetishism. In Marxist terms,27 the unveiled women of Algiers-whose "bared faces and free bodies" symbolize for the occupier the Arab women's "conversion" to the dominant value system-occupy the site of commodity fetishism for the European colonizer; that is, she "circulate[s] like sound currency in the European society of Algeria." In this formulation she is both the figurative and the literal object of economic exchange, which results in the colonialist form of what Fanon refers to as "penetration" (42). The other register of fetishism operative in the colonizer's relationship to the Algerian woman is psychoanalytic.28 In Fanon's account, the colonized woman only discloses from behind the veil of colonial desire "a strand of hair, a bit of forehead, 'a segment of an overwhelmingly beautiful' face" (43). The fetish-object of colonialism is the veil. And, as a fetish-object, the veil gives the simultaneous and undecidable effect of lack and power. The Al27. See Karl Marx, "The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secrets," in Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1976), 1: 163-77. 28. See Sigmund Freud, "Fetishism," in Sexuality and the Psychologyof Love, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 214-19.

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gerian woman's veil is thus doubly ambivalent:29 in sexual terms, it is a substitute for the original fantasy of the maternal phallus that paradoxically produces the anxiety of castration; in colonial terms, the veil is a substitute for lost racial purity which stabilizes racial difference while concurrently generating the disruptive effect of racial difference. The "rape of the Algerian woman in the dream of a European is always preceded by a rending of the veil" (45). It is always a "double deflowering"-a racist and sexist penetration through a veiled victim. During what Fanon refers to as the three stages of the Algerian Revolution, it is the French strategies of colonization that initially "determine" that form that indigenous resistance takes (47). During the first stage of the Algerian Revolution, the pre1956 circumstances dictate that Algerians resist the colonial offensive by taking up the "cult of the veil." The Arab woman, in response to colonial France's desire to unveil her, secures her covering more tightly.30 Fanon is aware of the significance of the colonial gaze in producing the colonial subject; as a form of resistance, the "woman who sees without being seen frustrates the colonizer. There is no reciprocity" (44). The veiled Algerian woman is not passive; she provokes "multiple reactions" in the colonizer which depend upon how she "manages to be present or absent" (43). Her potential political agency is guaranteed by the effect of the veil. Ultimately, it is the veil that produces a resistance of specular and "spectacular" proportions (47). During the first stage of the Revolution only men are involved in the armed struggle. However, after 1955 the "enemy gradually adapted himself to the forms of combat" (48) used by the FLN. After some hesitation on the part of the male leaders, a 29. My use of the concept of "double ambivalence"is indebted to Homi K. Bhabha'sdiscussionof fetishismand its relationshipto the stereotypein colonial discourse. See Bhabha, "The Other Question... " Screen24 (NovemberDecember 1983): 26. Also see his "Of Mimicryand Man: The Ambivalenceof Colonial Discourse,"October28 (Spring 1984): 125-33. For a dissentingcritique of Bhabha's (and implicitly my own) use of the concept of ambivalence, see Abdul R. JanMohamed, "The Economy of ManicheanAllegory: The Function of RacialDifference in ColonialistLiterature,"in "Race,"Writing,andDifference, ed. Henry Louis Gates,Jr. (Chicago:Universityof ChicagoPress, 1986), 78-79. 30. In "AlgeriaUnveiled,"Fanonstatesthat the veil became the site of colonial struggle as early as the 1930s (37).

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significant innovation is made in the combat strategies of the FLN-women join the public struggle. The second stage is thus inaugurated. Almost immediately after this development, the battlefield switches from the countryside to the European quarters of the cities. Here terrorist tactics are first fully utilized, and it is the Algerian woman's "presence and . . . action" (48) that promote the cause of revolution. At this moment of the struggle it becomes necessary to unveil the Algerian woman and to allow her to take up "both her role as 'a woman alone in the street' and her revolutionary mission" (50).31 The coming-out process of the Algerian woman is not, as Fanon existentially represents it, an authenticating experience. Rather it is a radically anti-essentialist gesture that allows the Arab woman to lift the veil of colonial uniformity and to exercise a potentially heterogeneous form of power. Against his own existentialist impulse, Fanon illustrates this very point when he refers to the effect of the "revolutionary fashion" (59) of the Algerian woman, who has the capacity to refashion, as a weapon for resistance, the colonial inscription. The roles of the unveiled terrorist woman in the European quarters of the colonial city centers are many: she bears messages or carries money belonging to the Revolution in her bag, or her function may be to "lead the way" for the FLN's guerrilla soldiers who follow behind. The "Algerian woman penetrates ... into the flesh of the Revolution" (53-54); this suggests the phallic proportions to which she has risen, while revising her previous position as privatized fetish object of patriarchal and colonial desire. Instead of embodying the passivity of the fetish object, the woman terrorist actively takes on her position as the purveyor of fetishism. The display and deformation of fetishism allows her to disrupt the colonial order through a manipulation of both racial and sexual presence and absence, power and lack. The new figure of the Algerian woman, not unlike the fictional Phallic Mother, terrorizes the dominant order by theatricalizing her (im)position from behind the veil of signification. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, the unveiled Algerian 31. As Fanon notes, women in the rural areas were often unveiled (36, n. 1).

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woman is transformed into a "woman-arsenal": "Carrying revolvers, grenades, hundreds of false identity cards or bombs, the unveiled Algerian woman moves like a fish in the Western waters. The soldiers, the French patrols, smile to her as she passes, compliments on her good looks are heard here and there, but no one suspects that her suitcases contain the automatic pistol which will presently mow down four or five members of one of the patrols" (58). In her bag she carries an impressive assortment of weapons such as guns, hand grenades, and bombs, at one time reserved for male FLN fighters only. The Algerian woman also has on her person "hundreds of false identity cards," generating the undecidable effect of the veil, which functions to produce the possibility for a plural subjectivity; now raised, now lowered-now you see her, now you don't. In 1957 the veil reappears. The reason is that everyoneAlgerian men and women, Europeans, in the countryside and in the city centers-is now suspected of involvement in terrorist activities against the colonialists.32 Under these circumstances it is necessary for the Arab woman to "conceal the package from the eyes of the occupier and again to cover [her]self with the protective haik" (61). Again, it is crucial that she displays lack in order to deform the potency of the occupier's gaze. As Fanon states, "Showing empty and apparently mobile and free hands is the sign that disarmsthe enemy soldier" (62, my emphasis). While the unveiling during the previous period of resistance allowed the Algerian woman's body to be "pared down," she reveils her body in the third stage, allowing it to "swell" with weapons: "Whereas in the previous period the body had to be made slim and disciplined to make it attractive and seductive, it now had to be squashed, made shapeless and even ridiculous" (62). The swelling, squashed, shapeless body of the reveiled Algerian woman recalls the figure of the veiled Phallic Mother. While the other within the maternal body is either a fetus or the supposed phallus, within the veil of the woman terrorist there are bombs "bound to her body by a whole system of strings and straps." 32. It is not coincidental that Fanon's example of colonial re-entrenchment at this moment of the struggle is colonialism's newly issued threat of castration of revolutionaries (56).

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This is not to say that, as opposed to the feminized terrorist body, the maternal body is in essence life-sustaining and benevolent. On the contrary, it also invites death. In her essay "Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini," Kristeva theorizes that the correlative to "maternal jouissance" is its "terrorizingaggressivity."33 The Virgin Mary in Bellini's paintings manipulates the treacherous sign of what is lost: she is always "elsewhere [and] inaccessible . . .within the very space of the lost-unrepresentableforbidden jouissance of a hidden mother, seducing the child through a lack of being."34 The veiled Algerian woman of the Revolution seduces as well but, in this case, in order to achieve national independence. The FLN's strategy of resistance is terrorism:a form of struggle that seems always to escape-to be elsewhere and inaccessible tocolonial detection and therefore produces terror in the dominant order. The Algerian woman's veil generates the desired effects of terrorism. As Fanon states, "Removed and resumed again and again, the veil has been manipulated, transformed into a technique of camouflage, into a means of struggle... . [F]rom 1957 on, the veil reappeared.... Here again, a new technique had to be learned: how to carry a rather heavy object dangerous to handle under the veil and give the impression ... that there was nothing under this haik (61). The veil positions the Arab woman as "present or absent" (43), elusive and transgressive, in between and beyond. The political strategy of the fictional Phallic Mother can, in part, be seen in the guise of the unreveiled FLN woman. Resistance is generated through the manipulation, transformation, and reappropriation of the traditional Arab woman's veil into a "technique of camouflage" for guerrilla warfare. The veil simultaneously produces in the "look" of the Algerian woman the ideological effect of in- and within-significance-that is, lack and power. Lacan also speaks about the technique of camouflage practiced in human warfare-in this case, in relationship to the concept of mimicry: [P]ractically nothing that can be called adaptation... is found in mimicry.... [There are] three headings that are in 33. Kristeva, "Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini," 263 (my emphasis). 34. Ibid., 247-48.

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effect the major dimensions in which the mimetic activityis deployed-travesty, camouflage, intimidation.... Mimicry reveals something in so far as it is distinctfrom what might be called an itself that is behind. The effect of mimicry is camouflage.... [I]t is not a question of harmonizingwith the background but, against a mottled background,of becoming mottled-exactly like the technique of camouflage practiced in human warfare.35 As Lacan states, mimicry is not adaptation, accommodation, nor acculturation; it is not a stable essence. Mimicry and its guerrillaand terrorist-like effects such as travesty, camouflage, and intimidation are radically anti-essentialist gestures that have the potential to unsettle the dominant order. Let us repeat Fanon, who womenpresents an emergent historical agent-Algerian of mimetic effects: "Removed and resumed producing capable the veil has been and transformed into manipulated, again, again a technique of camouflage, into a means of struggle" (61). In this sense, by the third stage of the Algerian Revolution, the Arab woman's veil, which is now perpetually being lifted and secured in an attempt to subvert the colonial occupier, allows her to practice a form of mimicry which is based on the colonizer's undecidable perception of the colonized as simultaneously present and absent:36 "In the presence of the occupier, the occupied learns to dissemble, to resort to trickery. To the scandal of military occupation, he [or she?] opposes a scandal of contact. Every contact between the occupied and the occupier is a falsehood" (65). Recall that through the effects of a tricky "presence," as well as "showing empty," the Algerian woman produces the "sign that disarms the enemy soldier." Finally, I would like to return to the photograph of the veiled Muslim women with which I began. The effects produced by the Muslim women in the photo are simultaneously undecidable and disturbing. Yet my project has not been to unproblematically unveil the Arab women in this photograph-or in decolonializing resistance-and thus reveal them essentially as victim of Muslim 35. Lacan, "The Line and Light,"in Four FundamentalConceptsof Psycho-Analysis, 99.

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orthodoxy and/or enigma of the West. Instead, I have attempted to theorize the unsettling effects of the Arab woman's veil upon the dominant orders of phallocentrism and (neo)imperialism. Traces of women's involvement in third-world political struggles are, in this manner, contingently disclosed; the postcolonial Arab woman, like her colonized foremother, generates the (in)visible effect of terrorist action and revolutionary agency.

36. The concept of mimicry in relationship to colonialism is most extensively taken up in the writing of Bhabha. See, for example, "Mimicry and Man." Mimicry has also been a concern in recent feminist theory, most notably in the work of Irigaray. See, for instance, her "The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine," in This Sex WhichIs Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 68-85. As stated above, my project in this paper is to suggest some potentially constructive affiliations between decolonializing and feminist discourses on resistance, specifically in terms of political strategies such as mimicry and veiling.