The Politics of Representation and Transgression

"There is lots of modernity in Arab countries today that people refuse to see or to stare directly in the face. And then Tunisia is one of the most advanced Arab countries in terms of women’s rights. We have laws that protect our liberties. It’s our schizophrenic and paradoxical side. When one is behind closed doors, one can do anything, but you really can’t advertise it. Besides, what shocks people, it’s not the fact of whether or not what I tell exists, but rather that I show it. There is real hypocrisy there…Tunisian society is a society of the Not-Said. You’ve got to shake up this mentality a little, and my film is there for that!" - Nadia El Fani, Interview with Afrik.com, found at http://spot.pcc.edu/~mdembrow/Interview%20El%20Fani%20Afrik.com.htm

Bedwin Hacker offers a decidingly different view of the Arabic world than we're used to seeing. Kalt, a Tunisian woman, hacks into the French media system to broadcast a message asserting the presence of the Third World (in the Fanonian sense), in a country that would as soon erase them from presence. The film, both within its plot, and and as a product of its very production, asserts the place of the Middle East in the "modern world." Bedwin Hacker's message asserts "This is not a technical error," belieing the ease with which French residents of Middle Eastern descent are subject to constant interrogation, threats of deportation, and almost societal erasure. El Fani also flaunts the sexuality of her characters, daring to portray lesbian and bisexual relationships, in a film aimed at an audience substantially shocked by such displays.
The film shares many associations with Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead. Where El Fani contents herself with a character who hacks French media to leave peaceful, if disruptive, messages, Silko crafts the rumblings of a revolution in the Americas. She consciously rewrites history, offering a true chronology of black and Native life on the continents that counters the prevailing mythology, an act which both reclaims the past and estranges an uninformed reader. It is intriguing that for El Fani to find a place for her society in the modern world, she must offer a saga of the present, but for Silko to find a place in the present, she must insist on a new version of the past. Both Middle Eastern and Native American societies may be perceived as "primitive" in the societal imagination, but the Middle East is known to be present, if perhaps in a different developmental time. Native Americans, however, are frequently dismissed as long gone. It's telling then that Silko introduces dynamic Native characters of all types, dismissing the tropes that insist on an obsession with nature or "spiritual" ways, to populate a world of twisted, but real characters, an action clearly against mythic time.
The sexuality in Bedwin Hacker finds an interesting mirror in the sexual perversions of Almanac, from the police force that makes sex videos from its interrogations, to Trigg, the sexual maniac in the wheelchair, to Judge Arne, who enjoys intercourse with his beagles. It's not much of a stretch to argue that no one in this novel is "normal." Activities that one might find repulsive and disturbing are repeated to the point of the commonplace, to the point where they no longer shock, as the reader instead develops almost an ennui of the grotesque. This aesthetic of constant discomfort forces a careful reading, an attention to minutae.
There exists a decidedly Robin Hood -esque conception at work in both texts. In Bedwin Hacker, the manifestation is more obvious, as Kalt uses the master's tools to attack his vision of reality. In Almanac, it is instead the more general outlaw aesthetic of La Escapia and the Barefoot Hopi. Although there is a certain nobility to these portrayals, of the weak against the powerful, it intrigues me that the authors chose to fill their works with active transgressions against the social order, compared to some of other texts we have used, like Children of Men and Dawn, where the transgression occurs more in the space between the reader and the text. What work do these transgressions do? Do they keep the positionality of subaltern characters as the Other, or do they serve to deconstruct the categories at work? Are such transgressions an inevitable part of this form of literature?