Rue des Voleurs - maybe something sinister within?
‘Rue Des Voleurs’ is about an old theme and a new theme. The old theme is French ‘Orientalism’, the fascination of the French for the Levant, the Middle East, Islam. The author, Mathias Enard, is himself an academic who can claim to specialize in Arabic and Persian- he is, then, a modern example of the Gallic Orientalism that is centuries old. This Orientalism, in a way, dates back even to the medieval Crusades, the motor for which was French Kings such as Louis IX (’Saint’ Louis). The Crusader kingdom of Outremer resisted Islam at the same time as it was strangely bewitched by it. Throughout the 19th century, French art was permeated with Orientalism- Ingres, Delacroix, among others. Ingres would indiscreetly slobber over odalisques and harems on flashy canvases suffering from a somewhat stale eroticism.
So, Mathias Enard is attempting to update this old theme, this French Orientalism, in his 2012 novel, ‘Rue Des Voleurs’, set in Morocco, moving briefly to Tunisia, then culminating in Barcelona, in Spain. Enard, however, imposes an analytical, even sceptical, gaze upon the Levant, in place of the morbid fascination shown by an Ingres. The first person narrator, Lakhdar, is the lens through which we see modern Morocco, the Arab Spring, and Islamic Fundamentalism.
And this is the new theme in ‘Rue Des Voleurs’- Islamic Fundamentalism, as opposed to the old one of ‘Orientalism’. ‘Orientalism’ is a sort of fantasizing mirage, a possibly racist prism to distort the Middle East into a romantic playground, where the Westerner can abandon himself in a haze of hashish, amidst compliant odalisques granted him by a turbaned Sultan. Islamic Fundamentalism provides the West with a much harsher, more confrontational depiction of Arabs and Islam, if it still has an element of the exotic left over from the ‘Orientalist’ perspective. Reference was made in the Reading Group to the book on Orientalism by the Palestinian intellectual, Edward Sayyid- I recall consulting a paperback edition of this, on the cover of which was a French 19th century painting of a naked boy, a snake curled round him, in a hall to strangely entertain seated men in Islamic dress. The book was rather dry and too academic, I feLT.
The first page of the novel shows the ‘orientalist’ viewpoint of the Westerner, with a curt description of tourists who dream of marijuana and promiscuity with the ‘natives’, mostly local lads being bought by western men, ‘though there are those who hope to shag some princesses of the Thousand and One Nights.’
Of course, Orientalism is a fantasy only, as Lakhdar reminds us by admitting that the ‘natives’ are far from free in the matter of sex. The book is not about Orientalism, which is essentially a delusion of the past. Enard is telling us- lecturing us?- about what he regards as a delusion of the present, Islamic Fundamentalism. He perhaps associates this with hypocrisy and nihilism. Lakhdar is meant to be the laser beam whereby we travel into the heart of Islamic Fundamentalism. Enard puts at the start of the book a quotation from Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’, and Enard is implying that Islamic Fundamentalism is indeed a heart of darkness.
Lakhdar’s father is a conventional Muslim- ‘a man of a single book, but a good one, the Koran’, his wife as submissive as he is pious. It is this father who ejects Lakhdar from the home after finding Lakhdar naked and making love to a cousin, Meryam; it is this father who is the judgmental, intolerant ogre- the religious father.
And so the tone of the book becomes more and more assertive, or polemical- concerning Fundamentalism as a threat to whatever is human.
Lakhdar is homeless and desperate, resorting to eating the rotten fruit discarded in the market. His friend since childhood, Bassam, then seems to be his rescuer. Bassam takes Lakhdar to Sheikh Nouredine, in charge of the ‘Group for the Diffusion of Koranic Thought’. Lakhdar is impoverished and in need- and thus vulnerable to the extremist propaganda of the Sheikh, who is apparently financed by the Saudis.
Bassam, the same as Lakhdar, has hoped to migrate to Spain, to Europe, for what might be termed a ‘new life’- but Sheikh Nouredine has presented him with an alternative, that of being a Muslim. Bassam in turn recruits the indigent Lakhdar, who is given clothes, food, a bed, and a job- as a bookseller.
Lakhdar is the thread that runs through the book, and he is possibly meant to represent the genuine, the true, Arab, who, in the end, has to reject Fundamentalism as brainwashing nonsense, bound to culminate in bullying, violence, massacre. Even while working as a bookseller for Sheikh Nouredine’s group outside the local mosque, Lakhdar harbours a secret scepticism about the Shiekh’s particular Fundamentalist project, about the whole idea of Radical Islam. And yet...
Perhaps unintentionally, Enard creates a sinister framework or superstructure around his central character, Lakhdar. The aim of Enard’s novel is a critique of Fundamentalism. But what of Lakhdar, the ‘secular’, ‘sceptical’ Arab? The Reading Group’s moderator, Frederic Jagu, had pointed out at the session’s start the way Enard’s first work had been fixated on death. Death too is a leitmotiv in ‘Rue Des Voleurs’. And it is Lakhdar who becomes associated with death, indeed murder.
His cousin, Meryam, with whom he had eventually unfortunate sex, proceeds to an illicit abortion, and dies of it. Meryam’s mother perishes a few months later, pining for her daughter. Lakhdar, only aware of this grim news much later from a stray letter Bassam had hoarded, is then pervaded with guilt, senses his own responsibility, and there is a degree of ashamed necrophilia too, as Lakhdar recalls with a shudder how he had fantasized for months about making love to Meryam- to, in effect, a corpse.
In this incident, Enard may be wanting to point the finger at the hypocrisy of religion in Morocco, where the phony supposition is that ‘God, the family and tradition watch over’ women. On the other hand, one might just as much criticize Lakhdar himself, the Arab youth who has, in the end, driven his own cousin- the tragic Meryam- to death through subverting ‘God the family and tradition’. There is an ambivalence here, but the reader may hesitate as to whether Enard has actually intended this ambivalence.
Lakhdar arrives at the HQ of the Group for the Diffusion of Koranic Thought to find it empty, after a terrorist attack at Marrakech. Lakhdar, ever the not so ethical opportunist, steals money that is left behind. The HQ is eventually burnt down.
Lakhdar, who has the quality of never being at home anywhere, moves to new employment, typing out books for a French publisher, M. Bourrelier. One of Lakhdar’s jobs, it turns out, is to list all the dead, all the casualties, name by name, on the French side in the First World War. Here is (yet another) example of Enard’s obsession with death. Why is the author so determined to be morbid? It is probably more than a desire in this book to associate Islamic Fundamentalism with death- rather, in the cosmos according to Enard, death is the focus, and life is just an irrelevance next to death. And, oddly, it is Lakhdar who becomes the personification of Enard’s death principle, whether or not such is Enard’s conscious ambition in the book.
After Meryam, the Moroccan girl over whom Lakhdar weeps a while, another female comes into orbit around him- Judit, a Spanish student of Arabic who is visiting Morocco. Perhaps predictably, she, the same as Meryam, is going to confront tragedy, always arriving in Lakhdar’s wake...
Lakhdar is a wanderer- from job to job, from country to country, from Morocco to Tunisia to Spain. What Lakhdar involves is neither certainty nor stability; he is the danger factor. While Enard may wish to paint Lakhdar as a ‘citizen of the world’, there is something not quite wholesome in Lakhdar’s cosmopolitan veneer. I would adumbrate that Lakhdar belongs nowhere because he is fundamentally not safe, however sophisticated he may appear in comparison with the ever more dedicated fanatic, Bassam.
There turns up another job for Lakhdar- as a ship hand, working the straits between Morocco and Spain. Then the vessel he toils on is impounded because the company that owns it has gone bankrupt. Lakhdar has in the meantime heard tales from a crewmate of the world far beyond Morocco, of the fate of a crazy headstrong Ukrainian, of the culture of violence in Karachi, and so on...
Lakhdar- and here we witness his opportunism once again- resolves to enter Spain as an illegal immigrant. Homeless in Morocco, clandestine in Spain- Lakhdar is the central character as outsider. Enard may intend us to sympathize with Lakhdar, but, I would contend, against Enard’s wishes, it is Lakhdar who eventually emerges as a hub of peril himself. Throughout the book, from start to end, Lakhdar is associated with death. At the beginning, it is his cousin, Meryam, and her mother, who cease to live. Then, the macabre Senor Cruz, his employer about whom we will talk later, perishes from poison. Finally, he kills, in Barcelona, his friend, Bassam, characterized as an inane tragic dupe who has been indoctrinated into radical Islam. Bassam, Lakhdar fears, is about to engage in murder for the sake of the Koran.
The whole novel is a chronicle with death at its core.
This preoccupation with death is at its height in the case of the very unpleasant Cruz, who becomes Lakhdar’s new boss in Spain. Cruz’s career consists of putting in coffins the bodies of drowned refugees lost on the coast. Cruz symbolizes possibly the leech- like, vampire- like, greed of the West, wanting profit from the misery of the Third World poor. Cruz himself is the personification of death, with a tendency to watch videos full of gore and killing- Cruz is stimulated by death, just as other men seem fixated on sex in pornography. Lakhdar becomes the assistant of Cruz. Cruz then dies, through Strychnine, most likely self- administered- but Lakhdar, who pilfers from Cruz’s safe, realizes he will be a suspect, and thus turns into a double fugitive- an illegal immigrant, and a putative murderer.
Enard’s attitudes remind one of Charlie Hebdo. Enard, the same as Charlie Hebdo, has a left- wing liberal angle, coloured by the laicity of the Republic. Enard, the same as Charlie Hebdo, seems fascinated by Muslims and the Maghreb. But is the commitment to criticize Fundamentalism- with both Enard and Charlie Hebdo- something, in a way, of an imposition of a Western viewpoint on the Third World? Lakhdar is presented as the model moderate Arab- tolerant enough of Westerners to have a Spanish girl, Judit, as his partner. And, ultimately, Lakhdar kills his nearest friend, Bassam, who is a probable Islamic terrorist.
For me, whatever Enard’s goal may have been, the Lakhdar the author has created possesses a smug sinister veneer. Did Enard want to show Lakhdar as a hero on the side of ‘western freedoms’? He ends up in Court as a killer. This issue that Enard is grappling with- of Fundamentalism against Liberalism- is such a complicated one that Enard’s efforts hit a quagmire, and the writer is bogged down in Lakhdar, around whom the novel revolves. Enard possibly has not mastered personalities or plots sufficiently; his novel is like the veritable loose cannon wandering here and there out of the author’s control.
The book resonates with death, and Lakhdar is the hub of this festival of death. Even Lakhdar’s girlfriend, Judit, ends up with a brain tumour that might be terminal. If Lakhdar is meant to represent the hope, the rebirth, implicit in the Arab Spring, why is he always, as it were, the shadow of death? Enard probably planned to associate Fundamentalism- Sheikh Nouredine and Bassam- with death and its darkness- but, somehow, the book misfires. It becomes, in spite of itself, much more ambivalent than it intends to be.
In the book, there are references, again and again, to a medieval Moroccan traveller, Ibn Batouta, with whom we are surely meant to identify Lakhdar. Both are voyagers. Ibn Batouta’s tales about phantoms and tyrants provide the reader with some old- fashioned Orientalism a la Schezerezade. But they are a distraction. Lakhdar is the modern secular Arab, far from being an Orientalist throwback; however, one story of Ibn Batouta, about resisting an overweening Sultan, has contemporary echoes, channelled through Lakhdar- that Fundamentalism is a dictatorial creed needing to be resisted.
The book is in three sections. The final one, ‘La Rue Des Voleurs’, is situated in Barcelona, where Lakhdar has come with nearly 5,000 Euros thieved from the unfortunate- the deceased- Cruz. In Barcelona, he meets Judit again, and he settles in a seedy, deprived area- ‘el carrer Robadors’, ‘la Rue Des Voleurs’, ‘The Street of Thieves’- and thus, we arrive at the novel’s title. It is a place of drugs and prostitutes, a mafia region, where, oddly, Lakhdar seems safe.
And, again, Lakhdar is depicted as the ‘liberated’ Arab, who discovers wine in Barcelona- alcohol is a ‘sin, certainly, I concede, but one of the most pleasant and least expensive’.
Lakhdar, the Arab rebel against Islam, has always something unconvincing about him.
There is a riot- a general strike- in Barcelona, but, for Lakhdar, it has the character of a political game, petty posturing theatre, next to the upheaval in the Arab world.
One additional point suggested by Enard is that the Far Right in the West and Islamic ‘extremism’ are symbiotic, are two sides of the same sort of hate- the type of viewpoint one might locate in Charlie Hebdo.
The book now reaches its coda and climax.
Bassam in Barcelona...
Bassam and Lakhdar are two opposites, one inverting the other. Matter and anti- matter, destined for mutual destruction.
Bassma nd Shiekh Nouredine have somehow managed to jet into the Catalan capital. Bassam and Lakhdar interact once more. Bassam is portrayed as the typical fanatic, loathing the supposed sexual ‘freedom’ of the West, and a pawn under the malign domination of Sheikh Nouredine.
Lakhdar, suspecting Bassam of being involved in a forthcoming terrorist plot, slays his friend with a knife. Bassam is made out to be almost desirous of death, to be looking to Lakhdar to be unchained from the stark cruelty of Fundamentalism-‘he did not struggle, he did not cry out, he pushed his hand to my back, to help me perhaps’. The last paragraph of the novel details a murder, reminiscent of Camus’ ‘L’Etranger’, a pre- destined, unavoidable murder. Bassam’s existentialist speech in Court has the air of Camus’ earlier work- Enard in effect copies its theme of indifference before death.
‘I am not a Muslim. I am more than that.
‘Do with me as you please.’
Another contributor to the Reading Group in addition pointed out the parallel with Camus. There was debate about Islamic radicalism, about whether it is any more immoral or irrational than Western imperialism. My own perspective is that of the pacifist, afraid of force from whatever side it comes.
And so, the Reading Group terminated. Spring had arrived in London, but alas tepidly, and there was none of the beautiful heat of Morocco or Spain- nor were there the beautiful, yet dangerous, passions of the Mediterranean. I went to the steel and brick setting of South Kensington Station, as dull as ever, and the Underground train proceeded through the dark tunnels on the way to Hammersmith.