Abstract
This article focuses on British-Sudanese writer Jamal Mahjoub’s novel Travelling with Djinns (2003). I argue that the novel attempts to reconfigure European history and cultural memory through a transnational, exilic perspective by exploring the British-Sudanese protagonist Yasin Zahir and his son Leo’s road trip through contemporary Europe. Traveling enables Yasin to challenge official historical accounts, and envision cultural memory as fluid and dynamic. Not only does he conjure up forgotten memories of European migrants, minorities, and exiles, but he also interlinks these memories so that new solidarities can be formed across lines of ethno-cultural and/or religious division. The novel implies that only by reconfiguring the past and working through their traumatic memories can culturally hybrid individuals such as Yasin defy essentialist notions of European identity and develop a new sense of belonging.
Introduction
The British-Sudanese writer Jamal Mahjoub’s 1 novel Travelling with Djinns (2003) remaps European history and cultural memory through a transnational, exilic perspective by exploring the 37-year-old British-Sudanese protagonist Yasin Zahir and his seven-year-old son Leo’s random trip across western Europe. 2 Written from a first-person point of view and comprising a large number of flashbacks, the novel revolves around Yasin’s personal quest during this trip. While he traverses different spaces, he tries to understand the reasons behind his alienation and disorientation in England, Sudan, and Europe.
I argue that the trip turns into a metaphorical journey in time in which Yasin unpacks and reevaluates his private memories interconnected to the cultural memory of Europe and Sudan. Traveling makes it possible for Yasin to develop a fluid and dynamic understanding of cultural memory. He challenges a white Christian interpretation of European memory by visiting sites of important transcultural encounters (e.g. Rhineland, Trier, and Metz) and remembering works by multicultural and/or exile authors (e.g. Walter Benjamin, Joseph Roth, and Alexandre Dumas). He recalls memories of Atilla’s invasion of Europe, Muslim Spain, the Crusades, European colonialism, the First and Second World Wars, and the Holocaust. More importantly, he forms multidirectional connections among different memories (e.g. colonialism and the Holocaust) and intertwines them with his and other immigrants’ current experiences. In this way, he imagines new solidarities across lines of ethno-cultural and/or religious division.
In the following, I will analyze the ways in which Travelling with Djinns debunks a homogenous and static understanding of European history and develops a palimpsestic and cosmopolitan model of cultural memory. First, I will provide a brief overview of recent theoretical debates on the transnational and transcultural quality of cultural memory by examining the works of Andreas Huyssen, Michael Rothberg, and Max Silverman. Second, I will discuss the ways in which Mahjoub’s novels portray a complex, heterogeneous vision of North African, Middle Eastern, and European identities, cultures, and national histories. Next, I will examine Mahjoub’s problematization of Eurocentric history education in the postcolonial Sudan. Additionally, I will demonstrate how Mahjoub depicts the trope of travel as an important means to develop a hybrid and fluid understanding of memory. I will show that during his travels, along with the spaces, sites, and buildings that Yasin visits, his second-hand car and book collection also evoke memories. I will argue that Yasin’s intertextual reference to Walter Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking my library: A talk about book collecting” (1931) challenges the reader to see Yasin’s belongings as containers of fragmented memories. Lastly, I will analyze how the novel interconnects the dilemmas of postcolonial (illegal) migrants with Jewish exile intellectuals during the Holocaust.
Theoretical discussion
By depicting cultural memory as dynamic, transnational, and transcultural, Mahjoub meaningfully contributes to the recent discussions in memory studies, which focus on the nature and role of cultural memory in a global and transnational age. Three important scholars who have radically challenged 3 a singular, authentic, and competitive understanding of memory are Andreas Huyssen (2003), Michael Rothberg (2009) and Max Silverman (2013). In Present Pasts (2003), Huyssen rightly states that in our era of increased instability of time and fractured spaces, in which global media has infiltrated our everyday lives, we envision the past as “memory without borders” rather than “national history within borders” (2003: 4). In the early 1980s, broadening debates on the Holocaust in the West led to accelerated memory discourses, and the epochal change of 1989–1990 triggered a global or transnational vision of memory. Huyssen underscores that even as the Holocaust emerged as a universal trope, at the same time it was particularized and localized, functioning as a metaphor for other traumatic histories and memories. He warns that the Holocaust memory might in some cases serve as a screen memory and prevent a genuine engagement with local histories; overall, however, he believes in the democratic potentials of today’s critical memory cultures, which “with their emphases on human rights, on minority and gender issues, and on reassessing various national and international pasts go a long way to provide a welcome impetus for writing history in a new key” (2003: 27).
In his influential book Multidirectional Memory (2009), Rothberg also argues that the collective memory of the Holocaust emerged in a dialogue with the processes of decolonization and civil rights struggle and contributed to the articulation of other histories of violence such as colonialism, slavery, and the Algerian War of Independence (1954–1962). Rothberg contradicts the notion that memory has an intrinsic value and challenges the framework that depicts collective memory as “competitive memory” — in other words, as “a zero-sum struggle over scarce resources” (2009: 3). Instead, he proposes a multidirectional model of memory that is “subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing” (2009: 3). By transgressing essentialist visions of the past and exclusivist identities, multidirectional memory could readdress questions of justice and political recognition while enabling new solidarities across the lines of ethnicity, race, and nation.
Silverman, however, promotes “palimpsestic memory” as a new politico-aesthetic model of cultural memory. In his book Palimpsestic Memory (2013), he examines the interconnections between histories and memories of the Holocaust and colonialism in French and Francophone fiction, film, and theoretical texts. According to Silverman, the palimpsest successfully reflects the hybrid and dynamic qualities of memory and captures most completely the spatialization of time because it functions “according to a complex process of interconnection, interaction, substitution and displacement of memory traces in which the particular and the universal, and memory and history, are inextricably held in an anxious relationship” (2013: 28). By challenging linear time and discrete space and emphasizing the ambivalent connections between the particular and the universal (rather than representing them as binary opposites), palimpsestic memory, like multidirectional memory, could facilitate dialogue among people of different national, racial, and ethnic origins.
Indeed, in Travelling with Djinns, the trope of travel offers a rupture in the linear progressive vision of time by triggering Yasin and Europe’s sorrowful memories. The fluctuating narrative structure of the novel, in which past and present constantly intersect and there are numerous intertextual references to the works of famous multicultural writers of the past, allow for a palimpsestic, cosmopolitan vision of memory. I discuss this further in the third section of this article entitled “Travel and palimpsestic imagination of memory.” Mahjoub challenges readers to engage actively in the remapping of European cultural memory and to interconnect their memories with displaced and dispossessed populations.
Mahjoub’s oeuvre
Mahjoub contests a monologic understanding of history, cultural memory, and identity in all of his novels. He believes in the essential role of literature in transforming our mindset. In his lecture “The writer and globalism” (1997), Mahjoub emphasizes that literature “provides a means of reflective expression and communication” and “can link the diverse cultures which are now, for better or worse, stuck with one another, and whose encounter now defines the world we live in” (1997: np). Indeed, set in a variety of national and regional spaces in North Africa and Europe, Mahjoub’s novels thematize the complex experiences of travelers, migrants, and multicultural characters throughout the centuries, and portray their suffocating confrontations with essentialist identity politics. They explore the history of interactions and exchanges among European, North African and Middle Eastern societies. Furthermore, they critically portray the reasons behind the First Sudanese Civil War (1955–1972) and the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983–2005) between the Arab-dominated north and African-dominated south.
In his earlier novels Navigation of a Rainmaker (1989), Wings of Dust (1994), and In the Hour of Signs (1996), Mahjoub focuses on Sudan’s tumultuous history, wracked by religious, cultural, and political differences. He critically examines not only the Turco-Egyptian period (1821–1885) and Mahdiyya period (1885–1898) but also the era of Anglo-Egyptian colonialism (1899–1955) and the two civil wars. In his novels The Carrier (1998), Travelling with Djinns (2003), and The Drift Latitudes (2006), he investigates the complex question of European identity, history, and memory. 4
Critics have celebrated Mahjoub’s interweaving of the life stories of exiles and travelers from different geographies and historical periods through multilayered narration. Caroline Mohsen (2000: 541) underscores that an important strength of Mahjoub’s earlier novels is their promotion of a heterogeneous and dynamic understanding of culture, identity, history, and space by combining different styles, such as memoir, journal, and epistolary, and the utilization of fragments and flashbacks along with the processes of redoubling and mirroring.
Mahjoub’s The Carrier received great attention among critics because of its intertwined interrogation of scientific knowledge production by European and Arab scholars in the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. It connects Arab astronomer Rashid al-Kenzy’s life in seventeenth-century North Africa and Europe to the contemporary experiences of Danish-Arab archeologist Hassan, who dedicates himself to discovering Rashid’s story. Tina Steiner (2008: 41) contends that Mahjoub’s The Carrier successfully depicts the cross-cultural and translational qualities of knowledge production immersed in power struggles by emphasizing how the North African, Arabic, Greek, and Asian traditions drew on each other in the development of science and scientific knowledge. In a similar way, Brenda Cooper (2008: 66) points to the important historical-political agenda of The Carrier in that it demonstrates the implication of science in political power relating to the issues of wealth, trade, and colonialism. For Theo D’haen (2005:134) a major strength of The Carrier is that the marginalized people in the West become the subjects rather than the mere objects of European history.
Travelling with Djinns also has garnered attention from critics more recently. Jopi Nyman (2013), who has written various articles on Mahjoub’s novels, emphasizes that Travelling with Djinns lays bare a complex understanding of European history by revealing the haunting legacies of the European colonization of Africa. He aptly states, “To understand Europe is to understand the intertwined histories between it and its Others and to recognize the various cultural and historical layers of Europe that are often forgotten and to see it as a transcultural construct” (2013: 235). Maria Jesus Carbacos Traseira (2012: 197) points out that while Travelling with Djinns emphasizes the interconnectedness of Africa and Europe, it also promotes a transcultural and transnational vision of the world by intertwining different traditions, texts, and authors.
Colonialism and Eurocentric history
An important concern of Travelling with Djinns is to contest a homogenous understanding of national and civilization histories, which trigger competitive notions of cultural memory and hence clashing identity discourses. The novel explores the ways in which the educational policies of European colonizers created an identity crisis in the colonized populations by indoctrinating them with a superior and progressive vision of European history. It suggests that this model strongly influenced the native populations in the postcolonial period, leading to ethnic and religious conflicts.
Yasin, who has a Sudanese father and English mother and two siblings, spent his childhood and adolescence in postcolonial Khartoum, Sudan, which was ravaged by civil wars, corruption, and economic crisis. As a teenager, Yasin witnessed the devastating experiences of his journalist father, who was imprisoned several times due to his unrelenting criticism of corrupt Sudanese politicians. These traumatic years left an indelible mark on Yasin. Feeling isolated, restless, and disillusioned, he has not been able to develop a sense of belonging to Sudan or England: “I have two passports and quite a variety of other documents to identify me, all of which tell the world where I have been, but not who I am, nor where I am going to.” 5 An important cause of Yasin’s identity crisis is his lack of knowledge of Sudan’s complex history along with his unfamiliarity with Europe’s subaltern pasts. In the prologue of the novel he states, “My history is not given, but has to be taken, reclaimed, piece by solitary piece, snatched from among the pillars of centuries, the shelves of ivory scholarship” (5). When Yasin thinks about the past, he clearly sees the catastrophic consequences of British colonialism, which created a generation with an inferiority complex and hatred toward the ethnic, racial, and religious others in the nation. The British educators indoctrinated the students with the superiority of European culture and formed hierarchies between Arabic and African ethnicities. 6
According to Yasin, after Sudan’s independence in 1956, schools went on propagating a narrow approach to history. He criticizes the postcolonial government’s support for engineering sciences at the expense of revising the history curriculum in schools across the nation. The younger generation was encouraged to become doctors and engineers so that they could contribute to the fast development of the country. When Yasin attended secondary school, all subjects in the humanities were dropped, and his teachers did not change their Eurocentric style of teaching history. Yasin had to memorize historical events, such as the Scramble for Africa and the Treaty of Versailles, and names of famous personalities such as Otto von Bismarck and Lord Kitchener. However, his teachers did not thoroughly discuss how these events or personalities affected Sudan in particular and Africa in general. Yasin remembers how, as a 13-year-old boy, he was desperately trying to make sense of a confusing world: The problem was that the world out there was a mystery, and part of that mystery stemmed from the fact that we didn’t seem to have a history. We had stories, but we didn’t really have museums or books to put them in. How we came to be assembled here at this confluence of streams seemed to be a question no one was particularly interested in asking. (62)
Yasin resented the fact that while in Sudanese schools Europeans were depicted as makers of modern history and agents of progress and modernization, the history of the Sudanese people was seen as peripheral and stagnant. The failure to narrativize Sudanese oral stories and establish state institutions, such as museums, that would produce and disseminate a new national narrative created a gap between the literate elite and the majority of the population. Unable to identify with and feel proud of the history of different Sudanese kingdoms or to confront the diverse historical experiences of Sudanese of various ethnic and religious affiliations, the new generation was disoriented and, consequently, internalized an inferiority complex.
When Yasin starts a new life in England and marries a British-Danish woman, Ellen, he engrosses himself in European history and reads a large number of books to “span the yawning gap” in his “knowledge of how the world worked” (26). Indeed, not only does Yasin become more knowledgeable about Muslim Spain, the Crusades, and European mystics, but he also learns about the complex experiences of European Jews during the Holocaust. He is convinced that in order to tackle his and his peers’ alienation and disorientation because of racism and religious biases in Europe, he needs to confront the past and create a hybrid European cultural memory.
Travel and palimpsestic imagination of memory
The random road trip that Yasin takes with his son Leo from Denmark provides a perfect opportunity for self-discovery through reconfiguration of his and Europe’s past. At the beginning of their journey, Yasin emphasizes that they ought to be “re-examining the past, looking back at what has gone before” (17). He aims to understand what the “heart of Europe” is, which he considers as his “dark continent” (59). Furthermore, he wants to familiarize Leo with a diverse vision of European memory so that he doesn’t experience an identity crisis in the future: “He needs to know the history in order to see beyond the glass towers and the steel and concrete. He needs to know how we came to be where we are today” (23). Yasin wants his son to confront the dark face of European modernity and technological advancement achieved at the expense of the exploitation of the natural resources and manpower of colonized countries via slavery, violent war, and ethnic cleansing. Leo needs to familiarize himself with the traumatic stories of his Sudanese ancestors and Europe’s minority populations and form critical connections between their experiences and the cultural racism against Europeans of African and Arab descent.
The title of the novel, which alludes to a Danish expression and contains the word djinn, which is a word of hybrid linguistic origins, suggests the metaphorical and transcultural nature of the trip. While Yasin is driving, he remembers one of his previous trips with his father-in-law, Claus, who mentioned an old Danish expression 7 about a person’s troubles following him wherever he travels. In this expression, one’s troubles are metaphorically represented as nisses. In Danish folklore, nisses were originally considered to be household and farm spirits who, if treated right, helped with chores and rewarded their hosts with prosperity. Upon hearing the word, Yasin forms a transcultural association and asks Claus if nisses resemble djinns. Various etymologies have been suggested for the word djinn (also written as jinn). It might derive from the Arabic root of janna, which means “those who are hidden, mysterious” or “covered” (Waardenburg, 2002: 26). It could also be a derivation from the Latin word genius (“guiding spirit”) or a borrowing from an Aramaic word used by Christians that refers to “degraded deities” (Waardenburg, 2002: 26). Djinns 8 are portrayed in the Qur’an as invisible spirits that assume human and animal form and possess supernatural qualities. I contend that the djinns, which constantly haunt the present time frame of the novel, might stand for Yasin’s and Europe’s repressed sorrowful, troubling memories. They might also represent the ghosts of European exiled intellectuals of multicultural origin who guide Yasin during his journey. By constantly traveling and visiting myriad sites and spaces, Yasin interacts with these djinns. These interactions create a rupture in the linear, progressive time of modernity by bringing back peripheral narratives to the center. They renew Yasin’s understanding of his identity and European culture.
The shifting narrative structure of Travelling with Djinns, which constantly unearths and juxtaposes superimposed layers of Yasin’s and Europe’s past, successfully portrays the ways in which Yasin’s road trip enables a palimpsestic, cosmopolitan vision of memory. While Yasin moves forward by “instinct alone” and without a “destination in mind,” “the vast undulating sheet of time tends to shift suddenly” (7). This indicates that because of his interaction with various European spaces and sites, Yasin is bombarded with fragmented mental images from books, memoirs, and films that attest to the experiences of European migrants, minorities, and exiles in the past. The conflation of these images portrays an alternative, dynamic historical imagination of Europe: The face of this continent is scarred by the passage of people. From east to west, north to south. From the earliest Neolithic wanderers to the Mongol hordes, from the Huguenots to the Calvinists, pilgrims, refugees, gypsies. It is a history of railway tracks and roads. A history of transgression, of frontiers and border lines being crossed and recrossed. The Romans, the Visigoths, the Jews, Bosnians, Albanians, Kosovans, the blind, the sick, the old, the crippled. These are the people upon whose sacrifice the history of Europe is written, and our collective destiny is written in the course of those migrations. (173)
For Yasin, each encounter and engagement with a different urban and provincial space, site, and building, along with the variety of individuals he encounters, evokes additional dissonant memories, and the reader is expected to form analogies among these memories. Some of the memories are traumatic and refer to racialized/ethnic violence, such as the massacre of the Jews during the First Crusade in 1096, Jewish and Muslim expulsion from Spain in 1492, European colonialism, and the Holocaust. Yasin’s attempt to impose a personal order on these fragmented, chaotic memories can never be finalized because as long as he moves on, he will summon additional memories, leading to newer configurations.
Yasin’s weaving of an exilic cultural memory during his trip empowers him and transforms his gloomy mindset: “I feel as though, after years of being lodged in a swollen river, unable to move, growing resigned to my own drowning, I have finally broken free” (81). His vision aligns with Trinh T. Minh-ha’s (1994) dynamic understanding of travel. She maintains that every voyage involves “a re-siting of boundaries” (1994: 9) because one “embarks on an undetermined journeying practice, having constantly to negotiate between home and abroad, native culture and adopted culture, or more creatively speaking between a here, a there, and an elsewhere” (1994: 9). Although Yasin has avoided traveling long distances all his life, he does not want to stop driving. Traveling becomes Yasin’s new dwelling: “I feel that this is right, this is where we belong. Moving. Always moving” (278). Movement opens up a transcultural space in which he negotiates his hybrid identity by interacting with the djinns of displaced prominent intellectuals and contemporary illegal migrants.
Entangled memories: Europe and Africa
Yasin’s second-hand Peugeot and the book collection that he carries along are important repositories of superimposed memories of Sudan, Africa, and Europe, challenging an essentialist understanding of European cultural memory. Before I discuss what kind of dissident memories these objects evoke and how these memories might be interrelated, I would like to focus on Yasin’s metaphorical relationship to these objects. A pivotal intertextual reference in the novel that helps us understand Yasin’s engagement with these objects is Walter Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking my library: A talk about book collecting” (1931). Yasin recollects this essay during his trip from France to Spain on a bus. A few decades earlier, Benjamin traversed the same road to escape the Nazis.
For Yasin, not only Benjamin’s exile experiences but also his intimate relationship to the books in his collection are important: As he unpacks his books they remind him of the cities where he collected them: Florence, Basel, Riga, Munich and others. The collector is possessed by a kind of djinn (a spirit according to him) which makes him believe that ownership is the most intimate relationship one can have to objects. Benjamin, the djinn, constructed his own labyrinth out of his collection of books, and then, like an illusionist, he turned and vanished inside. (305)
Yasin, who summarizes to the reader the last paragraph of Benjamin’s “Unpacking my library,” emphasizes that Benjamin did not care for the functional, utilitarian value of the books in his collection; rather, he considered them as embodiments of memories. Via the labyrinth metaphor, Yasin depicts how Benjamin’s unpacking of his book collection created an alternate world of clashing memories, a new dwelling, triggering Benjamin’s metaphorical journey in the past as a djinn. Furthermore, the labyrinth metaphor denotes that overcoming its enclosures and restricted paths, which might embody traumatic memories, requires careful contemplation and resilience. Reaching to its center, however, might enable self-discovery, personal transformation, and a renewed understanding of the past. Indeed, in his essay, Benjamin stated that, for a true collector, “the whole background of an item adds up to a magic encyclopedia whose quintessence is the fate of the object” (1969: 60). Each book not only evokes memories of its publication period, craftsmanship, and former owner but also helps the collector remember fragments of his or her life when he or she acquired the book. Every time collectors unpack their books, they impose a new order on their recollections or, in other words, recreate new understandings of the past, new labyrinths that result in a personal transformation. 9 Benjamin’s understanding of memory in this essay resembles Rothberg and Silverman’s approach to memory. Benjamin portrays memory as dynamic and fluid and underscores how a collector’s engagement with an object can open up a metaphorical space in which discrepant memories interact in an open-ended way.
Yasin’s emotional attachment to his old car, a French, silver-blue 1973 Peugeot 504, assembled by an amateur mechanic in England, resembles the Benjaminian collector’s relationship to his objects. Yasin notices that his car, which was produced in Europe until 1983, attracts the attention of some people who “seem to see in it a symbol of their own past, a sense of continuity, a memory perhaps, of sitting on Grandpa’s knee and learning to drive one summer” (9). Like these people, Yasin is emotionally attached to the car and feels sheltered in it because it reminds him of his childhood in Sudan. Since this specific model was produced in Nigeria until 2006, it embodies many memories from Africa: “The Peugeot 504 is a legend anywhere in Africa or the Middle East. It is prized above any one of a number of competitors because it is as tough as a tank” (9). Yet, another important reason why Yasin feels drawn to old cars, such as the Peugeot 504, is because they carry violent memories of colonialism and neocolonialism. His engagement with these cars makes him more conscious of the Janus-faced character of late capitalism: Cars nowadays are cleanly designed to make you forget there is anything as dirty as internal combustion involved; no burning of fossil fuels, no flattened rain forests and polluted rivers, no millions of square miles of devastated nature sacrificed so that you can travel in comfort. (9)
Yasin’s Peugeot plays a pivotal role in his reconfiguration stage of European memory because it renders visible the dark face of European modernity. The memories it evokes depict an interrelated picture of European colonialism, imperialism, and the neo-capitalist world order. First, the Peugeot conjures up memories of Nigeria’s colonization by Britain and its devastating consequences for the population. During this time, the British colonial administration deepened the rifts among different ethnic and religious groups to consolidate the colonial state. Second, it embodies memories of Nigeria’s problematic experiences in the postcolonial period. After gaining its independence from Great Britain in 1960, Nigeria underwent a civil war (1967–1970) marked by ethnic violence 10 that claimed more than one million lives. Furthermore, despite the oil boom in the 1970s, 11 corrupt governments and the exploitative oil policies of multinational corporations prevented the population from transcending poverty (see, for example, Falola, 1999; Frynas, 2000). 12 Although the Nigerian government put in place incentives (for instance, tax relief, provision of infrastructure) to encourage foreign investors to establish import substituting industries, many transnational companies such as Peugeot used these agreements to further entrench technological dependence in order to maintain their market power (see, for example, Dibua 2006). For Yasin, Europeans’ obliviousness to the fate of the Third World countries is inconceivable. Rather than focusing on the functionality of their belongings, he thinks, they should pay more attention to their background stories or, in other words, listen to their discrepant stories.
Yasin’s old, faded paperback novels, many of which he inherited from his parents, are also repositories of multifaceted memories. Many of these novels are important pieces of world literature by such writers as Kafka, Faulkner, Homer, and Conrad. Their old price tags in shillings and pence, their worn covers and pages, and their unique cover illustrations conjure up images from a long-gone era. Although these books are not first editions or autographed copies, Yasin is sentimentally attached to them because they remind him of his teenage life in Sudan: Books that contained memories, not within their pages, but in remembering the time I was curled up on our back veranda at home, on that hard wooden sofa with the orange cushions that always smelled of dust, turning the yellowed pages for the first time. (225–226)
These books also carry significant value because they are metaphorical palimpsests, embodying superimposed memories of Yasin’s parents, their former owners, and their authors. They revive images of (British) colonialism, cultural hegemony, his father’s admiration of European culture, his English mother’s complex experiences in Sudan and the postcolonial period. Whenever Yasin unpacks and examines these books, he imposes a new order on their embedded memories. These memories influence Yasin’s current travel experiences and interact with other memory fragments.
During Yasin’s ferry trip to Tossa de Mar in Spain, where his brother lives, an interesting accident occurs. When the ferry becomes unbalanced, Yasin’s two big bags full of books fall into the sea and cannot be recovered by the crew. However, toward the end of the novel, he and his brother come across the books on the shore, which seems miraculous. I contend that the floating of the old books in the Mediterranean enables the memories embodied in these books to interact easily with other memories embodied by the sea. After all, the fluid structure of the sea and its currents form a stark contrast to stable geographies. As Iain Chambers (2008) aptly argues, the “polylinguistic” and “polycultural” structure of the Mediterranean “immediately invokes the movement of peoples, histories, and cultures that underlines the continual sense of historical transformation and cultural translation which makes it a site of perpetual transit” (2008: 32). The traveling of the books lays bare Mahjoub’s palimpsestic approach to memory: he deems it necessary that the memories of Europe’s culturally hybrid people disseminate and interact with memories of other groups. Some of these books might be found by strangers and trigger new configurations of superimposed memories. Even if Yasin decides to keep some of these books, his approach to them will be different because they are stained by new memory traces.
Entangled memories: anti-Nazi exile and postcolonial exile
Travelling with Djinns problematizes an essentialist and competitive notion of memory not only by evoking (and connecting) troublesome memories of the colonial and postcolonial era but also by setting them in dialogue with memories of the Holocaust. The first important moment that brings forth memories of the Nazi era and the Second World War is when Yasin remembers Eva Braun during his trip in Germany. One friend once told Yasin that she had a family house near the area in which he is driving. Yasin cannot find the house, but he starts a conversation with his son. To Yasin’s unpleasant surprise, Leo is familiar with Hitler and the swastika symbol because neo-Nazi teenagers draw it on the back of his school building in England. Yasin, who has often experienced racist prejudice in England because of his Arab and African origins, is worried about his son’s future. Leo’s remark makes clear the current resurgence of fascist and racist ideology in England and Europe, which is especially directed against Muslim migrants and citizens.
While Yasin does not further discuss Hitler and the Holocaust with his son, as he thinks that Leo is too young, he keeps thinking about the Holocaust all during his trip. Later in the novel, Yasin even attempts to connect the experiences of Jewish exiled intellectuals during the Nazi era with current (illegal) migrants and asylum seekers in Europe. For Yasin, remembering the multifaceted experiences of Nazi-era exiles provides orientation: If I have no firm beliefs left to sustain me, I do at least have a selection of temporary heroes. They seem to come and go, they wax and wane like everything else, but for a while they do lend some semblance of order to my world. (300)
An important moment in the novel, which triggers memories of Nazi exiles, is Yasin’s bus journey from Arles to Barcelona. On the Spanish border, “two police officers step on board and walk up the aisle flashing a torch into the faces of the sleeping passengers” (304). Although Yasin and all the passengers registered their passports with the driver in Arles, the officers decide to check only Yasin’s passport, probably because of his physical appearance and Arabic-origin name. This is, in fact, not his first negative experience with the border police. At the beginning of his trip from Denmark to Germany, the German border guards checked his name against the list of internationally wanted suspects. Since Yasin has British citizenship, he does not have to face the traumatic procedures that illegal immigrants face. Nonetheless, he feels like an outsider whose ethnic affiliation is reservedly tolerated. Meanwhile, Yasin observes the border post and sees four men stretched out on narrow benches along the walls of one of the rooms. These men are probably undocumented migrants. Yasin states, with irony, “Europe is again under siege. The new enemy comes without a uniform or weapon, risking life and liberty for more even odds” (305). By designating these men as enemies, Yasin evokes the aggressive rhetoric of conservative politicians and intellectuals across Europe who especially scapegoat (illegal) African and Arab immigrants and asylum seekers for threatening the ethnic, racial and cultural “purity” of Europe. As haunting reminders of Europe’s violent colonial and neocolonial histories, these individuals are treated as “human waste” 13 of globalization and demonized as potential criminals and terrorists who need to be disposed of through vigilant border surveillance and detention. Faced with the prospect of having their rights violated during their detention, these individuals’ attempts to find integrity and dignity as human beings are crushed.
While the bus is curling down a dark hillside to the Catalan fishing village Port Bou, located on the Spanish−French border, Yasin, immersed in thought, suddenly remembers Walter Benjamin’s traumatic story as an illegal immigrant: This is the place where Walter Benjamin fumbled his way from this world. He was detained by Spanish border guards and in a moment of desperation, envisaging the cruel prospect of a train journey back to Germany, to Buchenwald, or Auschwitz, he took an overdose of morphine. (305)
Yasin’s remembrance of Benjamin’s ordeals right after his disillusioning experiences at the Spanish border invites the reader to critically interconnect anti-Semitism and racism against Europe’s postcolonial migrants, especially those of Muslim and Arab origin. Etienne Balibar (1991/2011) argues rightly that “neo-racism” or “culturalist racism,” which developed in the era of decolonization and centers on the immigration complex, has become a transnational phenomenon in Europe today. At first glimpse, neo-racism “does not postulate the superiority of certain groups or peoples in relation to others but ‘only’ the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of life-styles and traditions” (Balibar, 1991/2011: 21). Neo-racists consider culture as a function of nature and, consequently, they see social aggression and xenophobia as biological outcomes of the mixing of the cultures. Balibar considers anti-Semitism a prototype of culturalist racism. Although “bodily stigmata play a great role in its phantasmatics, […] they do so more as signs of a deep psychology, as signs of a spiritual inheritance rather than biological heredity” (1991/2011: 24). For Balibar, there are overlaps between anti-Semitism and contemporary Arabophobia, which carries with it “an image of Islam as a ‘conception of the world’ that is incompatible with Europeanness and an enterprise of universal ideological domination” (1991/2011: 24).
Travelling with Djinns perpetuates a similar approach, in that, by evoking images from Nazi Germany in the face of Yasin and other (illegal) migrants’ problematic experiences, the novel challenges the reader to form analogies between past and present racisms. Mahjoub wants to transcend a competitive understanding of memory discourse, in which each group assigns more importance to its own stories of segregation and victimization. In an age in which Europe’s Jewish and postcolonial citizens are disconnected from each other, novels such as Travelling with Djinns invite their readers to question their prejudices and exclusionist understanding of memory and identity and encourage dialogue.
Conclusion
To conclude, I consider Travelling with Djinns as an innovative and highly important multicultural novel because of how it opposes a narrow notion of cultural memory and interweaves the memory discourses of colonialism, postcolonialism, and the Holocaust. The novel depicts the interconnections between ideology, hegemony, and historical discourse; furthermore, it explores the effects of a one-sided history education on the identities of minorities, migrants, and postcolonial individuals. According to Mahjoub, an important way to contest current racism, ethnocentricism, and religious biases in Europe is to confront an essentialist and static understanding of cultural memory. For him, the travel experiences of exiles and minorities play an important role in the creation of a palimpsestic and cosmopolitan model of memory. This model emphasizes an interrelated vision of the traumatic experiences of Europe’s minorities, exiles, and colonized subjects and highlights Europe’s exchanges and correspondences with other continents. Yasin doesn’t simply remember and understand these forgotten and silenced memories; he connects his and his peers’ experiences to the memories of exile intellectuals in the past. This promotes the conditions for ethical thinking since he feels connected to these individuals while being aware of their alterity. These individuals’ experiences transform Yasin’s vision of his and Europe’s identity and encourage the formation of solidarities among Europe’s minorities.
Footnotes
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.