6 - Conquering the ‘Indecipherable Soul’ of Morocco: Women behind the Veil, Urban Spaces, and Colonial Power

Summary

The secretive space of the body of the Muslim woman behind the veil and enclosed within the walls of the harem have long been recurrent tropes in Western conceptualizations of Muslim cultures. This image of the secretive Orient fosters male imperialist fantasies of conquest and access to the forbidden space of the (feminine) Other. Within postcolonial and colonial studies, the veil has widely been read in terms of gender and colonial power relations, both within Islamic societies and in the European male colonist's assertion of power over the colonised woman, by ‘unveiling’ her in fictional narratives (Orientalist painting and travel narratives), as well as direct colonial rule. For example, Malek Alloula's influential study on French photography of North African women, the Colonial Harem, presents the pornographic postcard trade in French Algeria as a male power fantasy that is played out when the photographer in his studio ‘unveils the veiled and gives figural representation to the forbidden’. Franz Fanon interprets the French colonial policy of encouraging Algerian women to unveil as an effort to ‘destroy the structure of Algerian society and its capacity for resistance’. Fanon equates the colonisation of Algeria with the unveiling of its women, arguing that the ‘Algérienne’ becomes a metaphor for the colonised land itself. Furthermore, Edward Said has argued that Orientalism sexualises a feminised Orient for Western possession, and the historian Anne McClintock has described all colonial conquest as an ‘erotics of ravishment’. This chapter explores how photographers, journalists, and the three writers under study engage with this classic trope of the secretive feminised Orient and how the trope is unsettled by the unique circumstances of Spanish colonialism in the Rif, namely cultural and ethnic commonality and colonial fragility.

‘The faces of Castilian and Andalusian peasant girls’: Demystifying the Otherness of Muslim and Jewish women in the writing of Burgos, Giménez Caballero, and Barea

En la guerra initially seems to embrace the trope of the mystery of Oriental femininity. Alina observes that Moors and Jews in Melilla seemed to compete to conceal their women (14) and laments that she only catches fleeting, almost phantomly glimpses of them wrapped in ‘billowing white burkas’ (25).