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Article Excerpt
In her very influential work entitled Beyond the Veil, the Moroccan feminist, sociologist, author, and intellectual, Fatima Mernissi, presents the notion that Muslim society is characterized by a double theory of sexual dynamics. There is an "explicit theory" of female sexuality with its belief that men are aggressive in their interaction with women, and women are passive. According to Mernissi, "the machismo theory casts the man as the hunter and the woman as his prey. This vision is widely shared and deeply ingrained in both men's and women's vision of themselves" (33). Mernissi however argues that there exists a contradictory "implicit theory" of female sexuality, as epitomized in Imam Ghazali's The Revivification of Religious Sciences, an eleventh century classical work. The implicit theory involves an interpretation of the Koran and is driven, Mernissi claims, "far further into the Muslim unconsciousness" (32). This conception of female sexuality casts the woman as the hunter and the man as the passive victim. While both theories acknowledge women's qaid power, that is their power to deceive and defeat men not by force but by cunning and intrigue, in the implicit theory, this power of the female, associated in particular with her active sexuality, is seen as an element that is the most destructive to Muslim social order in which the feminine is regarded as synonymous with the satanic (33).
Comparing Freudian and Ghazalian theories of sexuality as two different cultures' conceptions of sexuality, one based on a model in which female sexuality is passive, the other on one in which it is active, Mernissi further argues that theories of women's sexuality have a direct influence on perceptions of female aggression. Thus, for Freud, she contends, the female's aggression, in accordance with her sexual passivity, is turned inward and favors the development of masochistic impulses. Mernissi writes that
the absence of active sexuality [in Freudian theory] moulds the woman into a masochistic passive being. It is therefore no surprise that in the actively sexual Muslim female, aggressiveness is seen as turned outward. The nature of her aggression is precisely sexual. The Muslim woman is endowed with a fatal attraction which erodes the male's will to resist her and reduces him to a passive acquiescent role. He has no choice; he can only give in to her attraction, whence her identification with fitna, chaos, and with the anti-divine and anti- social forces of the universe. (41)
Tahar Ben Jelloun's novel, La Nuit de l'erreur, a polyphonic and multilayered narrative constructed around a rape, is a text that reflects the explicit and implicit theories in a diegetic dialectic. Highlighting both the victimization and the empowerment of the female, the narrative foregrounds in particular the implicit theory of female sexuality and activates the myth of the sexually active female who poses a threat to masculine order. In this article, I argue that La Nuit de l'erreur can be read as a subversive text not just for its fantastic appropriation of the concept of active female sexuality aimed at the deconstruction of masculine power, but also because it activates the implicit theory of active female sexuality to articulate a discourse of liberation.
ZINA'S BIRTH AND DESTINY
Telling her story, Zina, the heroine of La Nuit de l'erreur, ties her identity to the inauspiciousness of her birth and to "a destiny imposed on her." Both the birth and the destiny of Zina have literal and symbolic connotations. The inauspiciousness of her birth that Zina repeatedly evokes relates to her conception through the gang-rape of her mother (78, 238, 239) and to her own gang-rape later in life (65-69). While the moment of her literal birth itself was inauspicious, shadowed by the demise of her grandfather, the family patriarch, the text's repetitive description of Zina as a female offspring conceived on a night of misfortune, a night during which she should not have been conceived (73, 78, 96), constitutes a polyvalent marker. It refers to her literal conception at the time of her mother's violation as well as her symbolic conception, her second birth, at the time of her own ravishment. The narrative thus situates Zina, the protagonist of La Nuit de l'erreur, as the product of rape at two levels: her mother's and...
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