“Nibtidi mnin il-hikaya [Where are we to start the tale?]”: violence,intimacy,and recollection

Abstract

Based on an ethnographic fragment from the author’s anthropological research at a Moroccan psychiatric hospital, this article is a reflection on the “border zones” of theory and experience, increasingly the stuff of everyday life, which are crucial for understanding life in the indeterminacy of the normal and the pathological, of subjectivity and depersonalization, of remembrance and forgetting, of emancipation and subjugation. The article follows the trace of Freud’s insight on the enigmatic bond of mimesis and alterity, creation and destruction that he called the “affective tie”, and which is understood here as an intimate heterogeneity, an “imprint” from another world, in which both self and other are born, in a process of becoming other. It addresses these questions through a discussion of the “traumatic writing” of Palestinian author Ilyas Khouri and the story of a woman patient at a Moroccan psychiatric hospital, whose existence is shared in “cohabitation” with a jinn, at the boundary of demonological possession and biomedical reasoning.