Welcome once again to The Rogation Dragon, the occasional newsletter which celebrates the occasion of my having had a thought. In this edition, a book review and an attempt at meta-theology.
A few years ago I started using some of my daily prayer time, and specifically a decade of the rosary, to revisit different periods in my life. I pray for people who were important to me then, for people I harmed, and so on. After I’d been doing this for a little while I decided to also make it fun, by reorienting my reading, watching, listening habits around the person or time I was praying over. Sometimes I’d revisit old favorites, sometimes I’d pick new books or movies which seemed in some way relevant to that time. This week we have reached my sophomore year of high school and boy howdy, I did not know how well I’d chosen when I selected Nina Bouraoui’s Tomboy and Joni Murphy’s Double Teenage. I’ll give you Teenage soon but here let’s start with Bouraoui.
Sex Traitor
“I am always chosen by the boys’ team. I play against my team.”
Tomboy is a semiautobiographical… not novel, really, but set of provocations and reflections, about a girl variously named Yasmina, Nina, Ahmed, and Brio, growing up in Algeria in the decades after the War of Independence. The sentences are so short that at first they seemed to slip off the surface of my mind. It took me a while to fall into the rhythm of this book. Once I did, I found an attitude I recognized from my own adolescence, though played out under much rawer circumstances.
Nina is always a traitor and kind of likes it. Treason is forced on her by her birth, to a French mother and an Algerian father. She writes, “I have two passports,” but what that really means is that she can walk uneasily in the shadows of two different sets of streets.
She’s surrounded by violence, and specifically violence against women. She knows that that’s part of why she slips out of the social skin of a girl and into that of a boy. Being a tomboy is escape and betrayal—refuge, and abandonment of those who can’t find refuge.
I also fantasized myself as traitor. My Christian conversion may have even begun when I discovered that in the Christian understanding of sin we are all traitors, to God and to ourselves, inescapably caught as double agents whose best actions always feel like betrayals. Like Nina I imagined myself to be “violent” in some abstract way. Nina, surrounded by extremely concrete violence, says things like, “The sea is a kind of violence.” “I become violent”—what does this mean? Lol she never even hits anybody so what is she saying? She says, “...I accept the violence of being here, alive, in Rennes,” and you can just hear Wednesday Addams, can’t you? In low tones of despair and contempt, dressed in like her Thanksgiving Indian outfit: “I accept the violence of being here—alive—in Rennes.”
But slowly this insistence on the violence of nonviolent things reveals its hidden truth: Violence can pervade a place, a life, an experience, so that all experience is interpreted by its context of violence.
There are so many moments here which I loved as an adult, but would have loved even more had this book been available when I was in high school. Nina answers a woman who says, “What a beautiful girl. What’s your name?” with, “Ahmed.” And then: “Her shock. My defiance. Her unease. My victory. I make the whole world ashamed. I soil childhood.” I soil childhood! YES, feed it into my FACE.
There’s a terrific, painful scene which closes with these lines:
You lend me your favorite pants, Amine, a very tough thick, blue fabric. I keep them for a long time. I take them hostage. I refuse to return them. Your mother protests. I live in your clothes, precisely where you hold your hidden sex.
Isn’t it at this very moment, by this gesture, by this theft, that homosexuality takes hold?
Amine is her best friend, the boy whose life she imagines as her lost mirror: “Look closely at my face, Amine, because you will miss it for a long time. Your face is my face.” She imagines Amine among the white French people:
This is what they’ll say about you: “You don’t even look like an Arab; you don’t look ethnic at all.” You will answer: “But Algerians are not Arabs.” ARAB is a projection of their neuroses and fantasies. They invent what they could never get from you. Furthermore, they will say: “You don’t have a special status; you’re not even a refugee. What do you know about suffering, terror, and that life?” You will be ashamed then, ashamed of being scared on the street. Ashamed of thinking that you are being followed: locking and bolting the door, not giving out your phone number, not putting your name on the mailbox. But you will not be afraid of Algerians. You’ll be afraid of French people, their violence, their thirst for blood, and their thirst for stories. You will be afraid of those vampires, afraid of those who want to know everything, make sense of everything, understand everything about Algeria’s mystery and its situation. They will ask you.
There’s so much I love in this passage; it’s even about that thing Keiko says in Convenience Store Woman, that people hate it when you don’t have “the obvious types of anguish.” All forms of deviance must be intelligible to the normal!—this is what the normal demand. But of course deviance is not only suffering. Part of what I loved in Tomboy is its balance between the misery and the delight of outcast status: “I will forever feel this vertigo of solitude as well as this excitement of being alone with my body, my voice.”
Nina says she and Amine “will lie often, telling about our country, Algeria... as if we are trying to be loved by Algeria.” I hope it is not self-pitying to say this isn’t completely foreign (so to speak) to my experience as a white American who grew up in D.C. when it was the Chocolate City. This kind of love-lying is what you do when you know the beloved is already lost, not just to you but entirely: vanished into history.
There are aspects of Bouraoui’s style which didn’t work here, I think. She often carries on a paragraph or a thought too long, so that what began mordantly ends as preaching. I cut off the quote above at “They will ask you” but she goes on to explain why asking you is bad. There’s a powerful passage about how being a foreigner, being an Algerian, is to have a big suitcase, to be “encumbered.” At the height of this description she drops the bitter knowledge, “Some day they will search these suspect suitcases.” And she’s right, and she doesn’t need to say more, but she does. But this is my sole complaint about a slender novel, memorably translated by Marjorie Attignol Salvodon and Jehanne-Marie Gavarini, and featuring a fantastic, evocative cover photo.
Theology At Its Best Reveals
its own inadequacy. The purpose of theology is to help people find a door—and also to help them see that the door is less interesting than what lies beyond it.
This purpose can be obscured by theologians but also by teachers and students of theology. Sometimes people who love St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, are so caught up in their gratitude for the door he showed them that they speak as if the important thing about Aquinas is the door: the method, the concepts, the words on the page. Our Thomas was a wordy fellow but I don’t think he himself made this mistake.
To half-discover, half-create a door or two, to adorn and illuminate at least one passageway so that people can find it in the dark and trust that it leads somewhere strange: this is the job. It doesn’t require that you prove a point to anybody. The purpose of proofs and treatises is the same as the purpose of dialogues: to create a relationship with the one who encounters your work, so that they can squeeze through your too-narrow door into the place beyond.
Theology can be a door or a lens; or a tooth you put under your pillow, to make you dream true dreams about Love Violated, Who is the only answer to our violence.
icymi
“Exist, You Bastards—For Now!” An essay on a NYRB translation of a grim, totally wild Soviet novel in which ideology distorts language, human anatomy, and the seasons—but not Forgiveness Vespers. Uh, it’s appropriate for Great Lent????
I also involved myself in Catholic discussions of what it can mean to “bless same-sex unions.” My first & basic post is here. A longer discussion of the role of the priest—touching on the way the economy shapes the kinds of love we imagine—is here.
Now Playing
Tribe 8, “I Was a Fag in Another Life.” j/k I can’t find that on YouTube and I’ve never owned it on CD. So I’m relying solely on memory, which I guess is just as appropriate for the Tomboy post as the song would have been.
Reading
this fantastic appreciation of Barbara Ling’s production design for the magnificent, utterly underrated 1987 film Less Than Zero.
Re-reading
Peter L. Berger, “The Fading Shadow of the Habsburgs.”
A Prayer: The Canon of St. Andrew of Crete vs. Meta-Pharisaism (“I thank God that my sins are not as the sins of this Pharisee!”)
Via an Orthodox Christian friend, from Ode 9 of the canon: “Christ became man, calling thieves and harlots to repentance. Repent then, O my soul! For the doors of the Kingdom are already opened and the Publicans and penitent Pharisees and adulterers pass through before thee.”
There’s hope for us all.