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Ethnic and Racial Studies
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Postcolonial subjectivity:
Masculinity, shame, and memory
Amal Treacher
Published online: 02 Feb 2007.
To cite this article: Amal Treacher (2007) Postcolonial subjectivity:
Masculinity, shame, and memory, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 30:2, 281-299, DOI:
10.1080/01419870601143950
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Postcolonial subjectivity: Masculinity,
shame, and memory
Amal Treacher
Abstract
Egypt in 1952 was poised to overthrow the past and make a fresh and
vigorous future. The revolutionary coup instigated and led by a group of
Army Officers succeeded in overthrowing the monarchy and severely
undermining British rule and influence. The hopes following this
dramatic event were not borne out as the early successes did not lead
to a more dynamic future. Instead, corruption continued, the economy
declined, industry did not flourish, and an adequate welfare system was
not put in place. There are various explanations for this state of affairs,
and while these are valid and provide answers, they do not adequately
address postcolonial subjectivity. Postcolonial masculine subjectivity is
fraught, endures and has to be endured. This article will focus on shame
and remembering/forgetting as states of mind, and silence as a response,
in order to explore how a colonized past led to the wish for a different
future while simultaneously inhibiting a different future to be made.
Keywords: Egypt; memory; postcolonial masculine subjectivity; shame; silence.
A new future?
I was in Cairo in July 2002 during the fiftieth anniversary of the
Egyptian Revolution. The media and public events focused on
the success and liberation brought about through the interventions
of the Free Officers (a group of Army Officers) who overthrew the
monarchy and severely undermined British domination and influence
in Egypt. While the public discourses focused on celebration and
triumph, in private something else altogether was going on. My
emotionally reticent Egyptian father could not stop crying over the
failure of the revolution (in our home we had to call it a coup) and
how the dream had turned to dust. I was shocked for I had never seen
my father like this. I then discovered that many Egyptian men of a
Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 30 No. 2 March 2007 pp. 281299
# 2007 Taylor & Francis
ISSN 0141-9870 print/1466-4356 online
DOI: 10.1080/01419870601143950
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certain class, age and influence were also in despair about what should,
and could, have been.
This article is a partial explanation of what went wrong and a
limited exploration of how colonialism endures so that the future
cannot be there for the making. It is written on behalf of my father and
in contradiction to much of his analysis, which centred on multi-
international politics and fiscal interventions. In this way, his
explanations coincide with more dominant accounts as to why the
revolution failed and these centre on matters of global capital,
continuing American and Western imperialism, the interventions of
the IMF in all issues fiscal (for example, Heikal 1986, Mitchell 1988,
2002, Gordon 1996). These are valid explanations, which cannot, and
should not, be dismissed. Public life, however, is full of emotions.
Emotions matter for they are related to the formation and experience
of social and political events, to the construction and negotiation of
political and other discourses, and to the making and breaking of
solidarities and divisions (Perri 6 et al . 2007). I concentrate on
opening up a space to explore how emotions impact on political
situations and how past colonial relations endures in postcolonial
subjectivity so that it has become internalized by men who live it and
enact it. I have chosen to focus on shame, silence and memory as
interlinked states of mind that led to and perpetuate this disadvan-
taged society. The problem is how to think about this without arousing
immense shame and without reinforcing shame, which ironically shuts
down thought. Indeed, I know full well the difficulty of thinking, the
fumbling clumsiness, the inadequacy, the pain of incapability
(Kureishi 2004 p. 93) that occurs as I attempt to put into words that
which has not been previously spoken.
One strong and intractable strand of postcolonial theory is a
concern to understand the subjectivity of colonized and colonizer, a
wish to transform the political and psychological conditions of the
countries that can crudely be termed the Rest as opposed to the West.
This division is constructed around a worldview that believes in the
absolute superiority of the West over the Rest, of polarized discourses
that centre on the normal and the abnormal, the developed and the
undeveloped, the vanguard and the led, the liberated and the salvable
(Nandy 1983, p. x). Nandy argues that colonialism
colonises minds in addition to bodies and it releases forces within
colonised societies to alter their cultural priorities once and for all.
In the process, it helps to generalise the concept of the modern West
from a geographical and temporal entity to a psychological category.
The West is now everywhere, within the West and outside; in
structures and in minds (Nandy 1983 p. xi).
282 Amal Treacher
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Colonized subjects are precisely that subjects, subject to the
desires and needs of others, and at the sharp end of profoundly
ambivalent, if not madness-making statements you are not like us,
you are to become like us. Indeed, the profound difficulty centres on
how to speak from the position of the I when you are not the
subject of the sentence, when you are already spoken for, when those
speaking do not listen to the viewpoint of the Other (Young 2003,
p.1).
This article focuses on an enduring theoretical and political matter
and that is how can we recognize our inheritance/s, how history
persists in the present no matter our wish for it to be otherwise, and
further how can we undertake these acts of recognition responsibly. It
remains a problem to trace how conscious and unconscious inheri-
tance, individual and collective histories are passed down. It is a vexed,
if not impossible endeavour, to locate and trace issues of emotion in
and on public life, and also the consequences of private feelings on the
public polity. I am suggesting, and it is provocative but not meant to be
offensive, that previous histories of colonization corroded the capa-
cities to make something anew. An analysis of Nasser and his
generation, these Egyptian men who started full of zeal and optimism
and failed is not meant to encourage liberal pity or empty guilt. Nasser
was the leader of the group of Army Officers (the Free Officers) who
led the revolution and Nasser became President of Egypt in 1954. It is,
however, all too easy to reinforce the Arab region as inhabiting a
culture of misery or oppression and thereby missing issues of
resistance, power, commitment and enjoyment of life. To echo a
question of Edward Said can so utterly indecisive and so deeply
undermined a history ever be written? In what language, and with what
sort of vocabulary (Said 2003, p.55).
These deep psychic fractures, I suggest, led to a difficulty in
developing a political life of the mind, which in Arendts account,
centres on being a morally accountable agent and on issues of
responsibility and judgement in short, being a subject who acts
and thinks. This recognition calls for judgement, and judgement for
Arendt is never final, but is always and by necessity to be woven back
into action and woven back into thought (Arendt 1998). From a
different angle but concerned with similar political matters is Fanons
preoccupation with matters of responsibility, for the fundamental right
of being human that centres on agency, obligation, on promises to self
and other, and on political authority (1965/1967). Following Arendt, I
am proposing that political authority is gained through persistent
thought and judgement, and that it is only through a stringent
exploration of public life that a decent polity can be recovered (Arendt
1998). Further, I am concerned with the conditions necessary for
human beings to make a world in their own fashion and not be
Postcolonial subjectivity 283
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subjected to the power and domination of the colonizer. Judgement,
action and thought are essential requirements for a different politics to
be made and sustained and also to overcome remnants of the past.
Recognition is crucial for this endeavour. Recognition which is
cognisant of how history pulses through the present, and those
political, social and inner landscapes are peopled with burdens of
history . . . and that a history not of our choosing unfolds in the
deepest recess of the mind (Rose 1998, p.6). This, however, comes too
close to a psychological exposition and that is not my intent I am
calling for the moral and political effort of leading a nation with
integrity and knowledge.
Why do dreams die is the implicit question of this article and this
heartfelt puzzle pulses through many political conversations in Cairo.
Avery Gordon in Ghostly Matters posits that dreams die due to
explicit externally imposed and internalised white supremacist stan-
dards of value . . .. to folding up inside . . . and to what Morrison
sometimes just calls the thing the sedimented conditions that
constitute what is in place in the first place (Gordon 1997, p.4). As
Gordon puts it humanity is complex and subjectivity is never
adequately glimpsed by perceiving people as either victims or as
superhuman agents. Gordon explores how complex personhood
means that all people remember and forget, are beset by contra-
diction, and recognise and misrecognise themselves and others. . .
people suffer graciously and selfishly too, get stuck in the symptoms of
their troubles, and also transform themselves; further the stories
people tell are entangled and interwoven between what is available
and what their imaginations are reaching towards (Gordon 1997, p.5).
Egyptian men were denied complex personhood, the human want to
be responsible, to act, and were reduced as men to a state in which,
collectively and individually, they had to barricade their souls against
the thousand indignities they suffered as men ruled by outsiders
(Soueif 1999, p.263). They suffered through intangible power by which
I mean the elusive, subtle but omnipresent ways that power can be
glimpsed and experienced. Power, tangible and intangible, makes itself
felt in many ways for it can be invisible, it can be fantastic, and it can
be dull and routine. It can be obvious, it can reach you by the baton of
the police, and it can speak the language of your thoughts and
desires. . . it can travel through time, and it can drown you in the
present. It is dense and superficial, it can cause bodily injury, and it
can harm you without seeming ever to touch you . . . it can cause
dreams to live and to die (Gordon 1997, p.3).
I am focusing on men and masculinity partly because they are
neglected within much political theory and because they were and
remain the ones in power though women were and are politically
active;
1
and because men and masculinity are profoundly affected by
284 Amal Treacher
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historical trauma no matter discourses to the contrary. History is
neither neutral nor without political and psychological effects. Kaja
Silverman in Masculinity on the Margins explores how historical
trauma impacts on masculinity (Silverman 1992). By historical trauma
Silverman means a historical event with ramifications extending far
beyond any individual psyche an event which brings together a large
group of male subjects into such an intimate relation that they are at
least for the moment unable to sustain an imaginary relation with the
phallus, and so withdraw their belief from the dominant fiction
(Silverman 1992, p.53). Here Silverman is drawing upon Laclaus
notion of the social dominant fiction which involves a will to totality
and is the mechanism by which a society tries to institute itself on the
basis of closure, the fixation of meanings; further the dominant fiction
neutralises the contradictions which organise the social formation by
fostering collective identifications and desires. Social formations
constantly depend upon their dominant fictions for their sense of
unity and identity (Silverman 1992, p.54). These dominant fictions
arise in part because, as Jameson asserts, history hurts as that which
refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as
collective praxis, which its ruses turn into grisly and ironic reversals of
their overt intention (Silverman 1992, p.55).
I am concerned with the effects of colonization on political action
and thinking to argue that the predominant discourses that asserted
that colonization was over, that the way was now open to a victorious
and unproblematic present, that history had been triumphed over,
ensured in part that the future could not be made differently. Political
discourses are laden with particular silences, secrets, shame, and
hauntings which paralyse thinking and judgement. The difficulty is
that when nations imagine that they have made it, that it is all in their
grasp, there for the possession, that everything starts to go so terribly
wrong (Rose 1998, p.47). One way that it went terribly wrong was the
denial that we are all peopled and burdened by connections and bonds
that we would rather not have within us. Politics never neutral is
always full of fantasies and emotions. Fantasy, as Jacqueline Rose
points out fuels or at least plays its part in, the forging of the collective
will, for it is not just private but is a part of, active in, the social and
political domains (Rose 1998, p.3). To echo Gordons preoccupation
we need to develop a language to describe and analyse the affective,
historical and mnemonic structure of such hauntings so as to find a
way of mourning modernitys wounded (Gordon 1997, p.19).
A brief history of Egypt

1952

1970
As Salmoni and Johnson point out Egypt was the first country in the
Middle East to experience European territorial encroachment during
Postcolonial subjectivity 285
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the 17981801 Napoleonic invasion, this was followed by the
authoritarian bureaucracy of Muhammad Ali who was placed as
Ruler of Egypt by the Ottoman Empire (Salmoni and Johnson 2005,
p.1/2). As a result of his successful reforms Egypt attracted European
interest and at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth
century brought European occupation mainly the British under
Lord Cromer who granted himself and the British administration vast
and pervasive powers in Egypt.
1952 to 1970 was the period of Nassers presidency the best known
member of the Free Officers and perhaps the most popular Arab
leader. The driving forces of Gamal Nasser and his generation were
disaffection, disappointment and anger towards the ruling party, the
monarchy and the imperial powers. This disaffection and fury arose
during the early twentieth century and continued to grow with
increasing popular support and vigour. The political formations of
the Free Officers occurred during this period who along with many
others were radicalized by alienation and sought to correct the
political situation, and to remedy economic inequality. There was
fury and frustration at the levels of bribery and corruption. Political
urgency to remedy the ills of Egypt had been growing since the 1920s
and a profoundly nationalistic movement had taken hold with growing
demands for the erosion of the political powers of the British and the
French.
2
Much talk centred on the restoration of Egypts glorious past
and embedded in these beliefs was the possibility of greatness again.
Dignity for Egyptians and Glory be to Egypt were the rallying calls of
the time and continued to be so until the 1967 war with Israel. There
was a six-point plan, endlessly reiterated and never acted on, and the
six principles focused on: an end to colonialism and its agents, an end
to feudalism, the elimination of the domination of government by the
owners of capital, the establishment of a strong national army, social
justice, and the establishment of a genuinely democratic system of
government (Amin 2004, p.22).
As Alexander argues Nassers decision to fight for the Suez Canal
resonated with deep currents in Egypts political soul. Thousands of
Egyptians had died building the Canal in the 1860s and the debts
incurred by the Khedives in order to finance it bought the country
under foreign occupation in 1882 (Alexander 2005, p.87). Here was
Nasser laughing in the face of world powers, reminding them that
Egypt too, was a nation, Egypt too had her pride (Alexander 2005,
p.88). The people resolutely supported Nasser and they called out in
the streets we shall fight, we shall fight. The common watchwords of
the Egyptian peoples were we will fight and we will not surrender.
The important success of Nasser in 1956 over the Suez Canal was
heralded as the trouncing of imperialist nations and specifically the
defeat of England. This bold political move on the part of Nasser was
286 Amal Treacher
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greeted with hope, and profound belief, that this would be the
beginning of the Arab regions ascendancy. Nasser declared and was
thoroughly believed that [W]e got rid of colonialism, British occupa-
tion, we are not going to accept by any means another sort of
colonialism, another sort of collective colonialism, however it is
disguised (quoted in Alexander 2005, p.88).
The following years were spent with Nasser resolutely endeavouring
to create a coherent and powerful Arab region that had power and
influence, and also a pan-African union. Indeed, many African anti-
colonial movements found support in Cairo. Internal affairs, however,
were neglected and social, cultural, and political structures and
institutions were not put in place that would ensure the social welfare
of the Egyptian peoples. The serious defeat of Egypt in 1967 and the
scars of this military and political beating live on. Following this
defeat, Egyptian morale plummeted as the hollowness of the regime
was exposed. Optimism was replaced by anger and bitterness and this
erosion of hope and possibility was and is reinforced by a number of
diverse events the collapse of the Soviet Union, the persistent
conflict in Israel/Palestine, the increasing dominance of multi-interna-
tional capital and the continuing fury that focuses on the impotence
and pervasive corruption of the Egyptian government.
Shame and silence
Shamed and humiliated over centuries Egyptian men in power could
not inhabit authority, for they were made through the projections of
the colonizer and they lived with their own shame and the shame of
their fathers. As Kaufman poignantly expresses it, to live with shame
is to feel alienated and defeated, never quite good enough to belong.
And secretly we feel to blame. The deficiency lies within us alone.
Shame is without parallel a sickness of the soul (Kaufman 1992, p.
12). The wellbeing of the soul is of profound importance in the Arab
region. Shame is an intensely painful experience and emotion and it
evokes and is provoked by other emotions humiliation, retaliation,
mortification, helplessness and ridicule. Humiliation is precisely one of
the tropes of colonization colonized, taken over and made to feel as
if they cannot and should not rule, Egyptian men were castrated.
Humiliation after all is an especially serious way of being shamed and
is feared as such. A good society can be understood as one that
protects its members from humiliation but colonization is a particu-
larly damaging insult to the persons dignity as it is precisely predicated
on humiliation and corrosion of human relations of reciprocity. In a
careful exploration of Fanons concept of objectification Schmidt
argues that objectification is not best understood either as turning
persons into things, or as depriving them of their freedom, but as a
Postcolonial subjectivity 287
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carefully orchestrated and systematic refusal of genuinely human
relations (Schmidt 1996, p.36). Shame arises from violation and
exposure, it threatens the self and in the absence of its being recognized
and known shame expands unchecked and becomes toxic (Mollon
2002, p.20). The corrosion arises as the Negro becomes conscious of
his presence, as a result of the regard of the Other . . . he is simply not
there. He is there in a certain way. The eye which catches and cages
him, has seen him as a man, but a man in spite of. . . As a result, he
encounters himself in a state of surprise and embarrassment. He is a
little ashamed, not in the crude sense of not wanting to be this or that,
but in the more resonant sense of shame, the shame that touches every
consciousness which felt that it has been seen (George Lamming
quoted in Macey 2000, p.165, italics in original).
Multiple experiences of shame mark many mens lives and it can,
frequently is, channelled into hostility towards the vulnerable, the
weak and materially impoverished, those with no power or status. This
is precisely what happened in Egypt post 1952, and this I speculate is
part of the reason for the despair and shame felt during the
anniversary of the fiftieth revolution. My fathers tears were not just
about his dream; they were simultaneously about his own shame at
what had happened to the poor and the dispossessed.
Shame cannot be thought about because to survive the experience
shame itself has to be denied and because shame is an expression of a
moral obligation that has not been fulfilled. Alongside the emotions
generated when we are done to, shame occurs when we act, or when we
do not make a difference to the society we inhabit. Shame is not just an
internal and visceral emotion, for it expresses our deepest values and
commitments; freeing ourselves from shame implies unloading these
values and commitments (Ben-Zeev 2000, p.514). Shame, indeed,
strengthens bonds and enables us to be cogniscent of our relationships
and obligations to others. Shame is over-determined for it is a feeling
that can be profoundly private and it frequently occurs in relationship
to others but it can be ashamed of itself thereby turning inwards,
denying its very existence.
In Martha Nussbaums book Hiding from Humanity (2004), shame
is complex and it is subtle, for it goads onward with regard to many
different types of goals and ideals, some of them valuable. In that
sense, it is not inherently self-deceptive, nor does it always express a
desire to be a sort of being one is not. It often tells the truth: certain
goals are valuable and we have failed to live up to them. And it often
expresses a desire to be a type of being that one can be: a good human
being doing fine things. In that sense, shame should not be thought of
as a nonmoral emotional it frequently has a moral content (p. 206/
7). Importantly, for Nussbaum shame can be, and frequently is,
288 Amal Treacher
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constructive and is not necessarily that which is solipsistic and
destructive.
Shame is a persistent reminder of obligations to others and this
ethical imperative can lead to silence as it binds people to one another,
to an ideal, and to the nation. Shame can be a binding emotion as it
can be the cause of bringing people together into a cohesive but not
necessarily homogenous entity. The Egyptian people loved Nasser as
he filled a void, he represented hope, and hope after all is essential
when there has been little optimism around. In a telling account,
Aburish tells of an incident in 1954 following a failed assassination
attempt on Nassers life, Nasser recovered fast and spoke [E]ach of
you is Gamal Abdel Nasser. Gamal Abdel Nasser is of you and from
you and he is willing to sacrifice his life for the nation (Aburish 2004,
p.54); following the delivery of these few lines there was uproar of
approval and love for Nasser, for Egypt, for the nation. In these few
yet powerful words Nasser pulls together the audience in love for
himself, the nation and draws explicitly on the trope of Egypt for
the Egyptians. Egypt for the Egyptians was a powerful organizing
political motif exemplified by Nasser who believed in his own union
with the people. Nasser who could shift registers and switch effort-
lessly from classical Arabic to dialect was able to reach across class
divisions and seemingly unify the people. Matters of unity and dignity
were critical discourses at this period and are further illustrated by the
adoration heaped on the female singer Umm Kulthsum who was
revered as the Voice of Egypt. This singer from the fellaheen
(peasantry) was an icon for Egyptians and an important symbol of
unification, hope and optimism (Danielson 1997). Kulthsum and
Nasser functioned, and were represented, as unifying figures through
which the Egyptian people could believe that they were liberated,
dignified and that a time of hope had finally arrived.
Shame, however, can bind to the past, to that which cannot be, to
facing up to truths and to mourning that which has passed and a
dream that turned to dust. Hope was reinforced by Nassers own
speeches and an analysis of his speeches reveal that his most oft-used
words were honour, glory, dignity and pride (Aburish 2004, p.112).
Nasser represented hope and was a defiant, living symbol of the
Egyptian peoples desires and will. Nasser was a charismatic speaker
but frequently his speeches could be devoid of policy except for a six-
point programme which was endlessly reiterated but never acted on, let
alone instituted.
Nasser too inherited a history of colonization, was formed within
those humiliating relationships and imbued both a history of
radicalism and the inevitable contempt delivered on Egyptian men
by the colonizers (English, French, and Turkish men). Nussbaum
points out that following the German defeat in World War I there was
Postcolonial subjectivity 289
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a demand for men to be masculine, powerful and potent (Nussbaum
2004, p.201). Similarly, I would argue that for Egyptian men the social
demands were for them to be proud, full of honour and integrity, and
to tell little if anything of their own shortcomings, let alone the
limitations of the revolution. Shame, as Nussbaum points out is a
highly volatile way in which human beings negotiate some tensions
inherent in their humanness; and the way we navigate being finite and
marked by the huge demands and expectations placed upon us
(Nussbaum 2004, pp.173/4). Marked profoundly by the wounds of
having been colonized, and having witnessed the destruction of lives,
for they had seen lives ended on the scaffold, cut down on the
battlefield, destroyed by exile and by retreat. Caution and calculation
became a habit (Soueif 1999, p.255).
Shame cannot always be thought about the event can be forgotten
or interpreted differently and it shuts down on thought for it cannot
bear to be known and the conditions that brought it about elucidated
and explored. As Jacqueline Rose argues [S]hame is very precious, but
in a strange tautology, it also seems to be ashamed of itself (Rose
2003, p.1). Shame is about exposure of the self to the other, or the
nation to another nation, yet is felt as a profoundly visceral and
internal feeling; but it is also tautological for how can the conditions
that brought it about be known and recognized when exposure is what
it hates most, and most militantly struggles against (Rose 2003, p.1).
To expose that which may bring about shame feels cruel perhaps it is
cruel it always brings dilemmas and conflicts. Shame, I am
suggesting is one of the emotions and states of mind through which
Egyptians could not, cannot, think about their situation. Shame is felt
about the past, about colonization and its legacy, about the social,
political and emotional conditions of life and thought stalls on an
event that it cannot bear to contemplate, can go no further (Rose
2003, p.7). Silence and shame can be deeply connected for shame
involves a hole, and in the deepest depths of shame we fall into a
limbo where there are no words but only silence. In this no-place there
are no eyes to see us, for the others have averted their gaze no-one
wishes to see the dread that has no name (Mollon 2002, p.23).
Shamed as men of colour and positioned as irrational, powerless,
passive and incapable of authority and of rule, they are neither subject
nor object. Hanif Kureishi questions how people formed under
colonization and racism live in a world dominated by white political,
social and cultural power; spaces and places in which the white man
possess everything and will not part with it willingly. In short, a world
in which the non-white seems to exist, can only exist in the gaps in the
white world (Kureishi 2004, p.107). The difficulty put starkly, is how
can the person of colour, the Egyptian, speak as the subject of a
290 Amal Treacher
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sentence? West-Newman states how the West has colonized minds and
the effect of this most profound of internalizations is:
the lost capacity to define what it means to be human, to have
knowledge, to live in proper relationship with the environment and
with the less visible but even more important world of the spirit.
Effective colonisation cuts from under the colonised all conceptual
ground for critique. It leaves no space to claim that things might (or
should be otherwise) (West-Newman 2004, p.192).
In short, to speak can feel impossible and it can also be unbearable
to witness self and other can be inextricably linked in a chain of
silence and avoidance. To shame can be cruel and to think about the
issues concerned can feel impossible. For example, I could not speak
with my father about what he could have done differently it felt
impossible. I felt silenced and complicit: complicit with a view that it
was all out there with Nasser, with the Free Officers, with the
British, with history, with whatever as long as it did not touch those in
the room. My post-revolutionary generation shrug our shoulders and
declare what can we expect? At the risk of returning responsibility
back to colonialism and in a different but none the less powerful way
robbing Egyptian men of their agency, it cannot be stated strongly
enough how colonialism colonized minds, hearts and the imagination.
Silence, however, cannot be equated with absence, with a lack of
knowledge, with not knowing what to say, it does not occur only
through fragility and human vulnerability. Silence can be just thatan
active choice that signals that it is the only place to be. At other times
silence arises from a fear of being done and undone by language, for
sometimes, what is there to say? Lived experience, however, is
shredded. Shame and silence are contradictory. Silence and talk arises
from double consciousness, and here I am using this term to refer to
the possibility and impossibility of knowledge. Much public discourse
and private conversation is preoccupied with the colonized history,
with the cruel and damning effects of imperialism, with fiscal matters,
in short on the effects of imperialism on public polity. Egyptian men,
and they are not alone, were silent, however, when it came to their own
subjectivity and the consequences of this past on their own actions,
feelings, and imaginations. It is this silence that I argue is problematic
for it can gag a different route into the present and the future. Here, I
am drawing upon Michael Lambecks useful formulation of subjectiv-
ity as he defines subjectivity as simultaneously about being subject to
power, moral agency and being the subject of ones own experience
(Lambeck 2002 p. 26). It is the first aspect of this definition that
Egyptian men would understand, about being subject to power, forces
of globalization and international capital and being dominated by the
Postcolonial subjectivity 291
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West, but the second as subject to their own experience would be
foreign and unwelcome. This is not a psychological issue, though it
does bear on that, but rather is a profoundly political one-I want
unashamedly explanations that give moral agency, political life and
responsibility to those of us who have a colonized past.
Mastery, repetition and memory
Repetition, mimicry and identification with the colonizer are impor-
tant and interlinked processes which are neglected, no ignored, in
much political analysis of Egypt. Repetition an inevitable psychic
process occurs as an attempt to integrate traumatic experiences
(caused by war or by colonization) harmoniously into psychic
organization. Silverman draws on Freuds analysis of repetition and
mastery to explore how the male subject attempts to tame unpleasure
evoked through symbolic and linguistic repetition (Silverman 1992,
p.57). Repetition, however, is inextricably tied into mastery in which
the male subject renegotiates his relation to an event by shifting from
a passive to an active position. Freud exploring the fort/da story
3
argues that his grandson at the outset was in a passive situation he
was overpowered by the experience; but, by repeating it, unpleasurable
though it was, as a game, he took on an active part (Silverman 1992,
p.57). Repetition and mastery are dreadful full of dread and with
hideous effects they are unfortunately inevitable as the compulsion to
repeat experiences of an overwhelming and incapacitating sort
mastery on the other hand, results when those same experiences are
actively repeated (Silverman 1992, p.58). Masculinity constituted in
part through mastery, activity and power is particularly vulnerable to
unbinding effects of colonization and its corrosive effects of shame,
humiliation and exclusion. Silverman explores how it is not surprising
then, that when the male subject is brought into a traumatic encounter
with lack . . . he often experiences it as the impairment of his
anatomical masculinity. What is really at issue, though, is a psychic
disintegration the disintegration, that is, of a bound and armoured
ego, predicated upon the illusion of coherence and control (Silverman
1992, p.62). Nasser on the Arab stage was the expression of Arab
pride, a leader who had humbled the old imperial powers and
maintained his independence of the superpowers. Nassers transforma-
tion into a hero of Arab nationalism marked a change in his relations
with the Free Officers and began to be addressed formally as Al-
Rayyis (meaning Boss or President); they stood up when he entered
the room and the relations became much more formal. Maria Golia
describes it pithily [T]he men in charge, meanwhile, seem to mimic the
despised colonialists, posing with a self-importance they mistake for
authority and understanding (Golia 2004, p.101).
292 Amal Treacher
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I am arguing, perhaps controversially, that the psychic mechanisms
of repetition, mimicry, lack, produced a trauma which caused paralysis
and hindered a different social order to be forged and sustained.
Authority could not be inhabited with integrity. The only power
known was that of exploitation, corruption and subjection. It has,
however, to be remembered that these Egyptian men were the first
Egyptians to rule Egypt for centuries, and these experiences hindered
stringent thought about how to create a different society that was not
in hock to, or a poor imitation of, the West.
As the term palimpsest indicates the layering of history can never be
wiped out as all present experiences contain ineradicable traces of the
past which remain part of the constitution of the present (Ashcroft
2003, p.174). Schwarz argues that histories are complex as becoming
postcolonial is not only a protracted, uneven transformation, pitting
colony against metropolis; it has its subjective dimensions, in which
that which is already the past and that which is the present never
quite seem to stay in place (Schwarz 2000, p.268). These internalized
relationships to history and to the colonized self and colonizer other
are embedded in the unconscious, are stubbornly durable and
relentlessly pervasive and they constitute our deepest and most
stubborn attachments.
Our responses and feelings towards self and other, are riven through
our conscious and unconscious fantasy life. Shannon Sullivan (2003)
and Stephen Frosh (2002) draw upon the work of the French
psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche to explore how fantasies about the
skin, the body are internalized and perpetuated through parental care
and the fantasies are transmitted to the infant. While, they pursue
these arguments to explore and understand racism and how it is
perpetuated, I want to apply their understandings to colonialism in
order to move towards a partial conceptualization of how colonialism
endures. Subjectivity formed under colonized conditions perpetuates
itself through generations. For Laplanche, the other, the environment,
the external world is crucial for our formation as human beings. We
become human through the historical, cultural, temporal aspects of
human existence (Sullivan 2003, p.20); and through these aspects of
existence we take in the political, social and emotional worlds
inhabited by adults profoundly. This world privileges whiteness and
functions within a hierarchy of dominance and subordination. There is
nothing abstract or elusive about these categories they are how we
become human. As Frosh puts it, the child is formed by signifiers
which arise from the external other and yet are constitutive of the
childs own unconscious, in a never-ending cycle from generation to
generation (Frosh 2002, p.398). The adult subject, already formed
within colonial and imperial relations passes on political and social
injunctions and values, transmitting social and political messages
Postcolonial subjectivity 293
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consciously and unconsciously. To speak of the unconscious is not to
render any of us exempt from responsibility but rather is to address the
social practices economic exploitation, political authority, matters of
status that structure these political institutions.
The shadow of history/shadow of the ego
It could be argued that one issue for Egyptians is to remember and re-
claim their colonized past, but personal memories of political and
social histories are not spoken about; instead, a noisy silence fills the
void. Abraham and Torok (1994) have most usefully elaborated
transgenerational haunting, for them haunting is the secret carried
within families and across generations. These secrets have life they
pulse with energy and are always at risk of return. Colonialism haunts
and rather like the repressed, it will not disappear. As Elliott argues,
societies and the present, always risk becoming haunted by what is
excluded. And the more rigid the position, the greater the ghost, the
more threatening it is in some way (Elliott 2002, p.153). Colonization,
colonizes hearts and minds and its effects are elusive; it endures
because as Avery Gordon puts it, it makes its mark by being there and
not there at the same time, when without a doubt that which appears
absent can indeed be a seething presence (1997, p.4). The inscriptions
of colonialism are imbricated and cannot be sloughed off by
discovering and telling another narrative or by focusing on acts of
resistance.
The consequences can be devastating and are always at risk of
return. We both know about and deny these secrets. There is a wish to
know the past but so as to know when Egypt was great and had
achieved much. Egyptian governments draw upon its rich cultural past
in order to gain power and status, to attract European tourists much
needed for financial survival, and to compensate for being oil poor.
For example, Nasser was resolutely determined to build the Aswan
Dam (no matter the environmental consequences which are dire), but
the Dam was to restore dignity and pride to the Egyptian peoples in
short, a remedy for past historical injustices and legacies.
Remembering and forgetting are closely intertwined. Luisa Passer-
inis essay Memories between silence and oblivion explores the
difficulties of remembering, silence and forgetting (2003). For Passerini
the profound impossibility is that in order to remember something,
you and others have to know that something is absent, forgotten even.
In a further twist, to forget something, you have to forget that you
have even forgotten. To produce a different political future these men,
had to, just had to believe and know the future was there for the
making and the past could not, should not, have mattered. The
tragedy is that through that denial the past became endlessly
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reiterated. Drawing on Freud, Adam Phillips points out that we
remember and forget simultaneously as we use memories to forget
with. To remember is akin to mourning and these men had lots to
mourn as do the following generations a mourning that has to
centre on what was done, lost, made absent, and more difficult
to speak of: the endless compulsion to repeat. For Freud, forgetting
makes itself known through action: we do not remember anything of
what we have forgotten and repressed, but we act it out. We reproduce
not as memory but as an action; we repeat without knowing we are
repeating (Phillips 1994, p.21). When we are in the event we cannot
remember and to act we have to forget: to forge a different future you
have to believe and know that it is yours for the making.
One place to begin to think is how do you live with, act from, an
excess of memory and forgetting? How do you/we create a space for
reflective memory? Not as oppressive nostalgia, but a space from
which to know. This is both a political and an ethical imperative. As
stated above, Arendt argues that a political life of the mind centres on
being a responsible and a morally accountable agent: a subject who
acts. Arendt, conscious of humans as multiple, fragmented, suffering,
and that our thinking is always divided but her emphasis is that it is
consciousness sees us, has to see us, through. I am exploring how
historical conditions of colonialism impeded thought and judgement,
and similar situations of exploitation, corruption and repression
became endlessly repeated. For example, in the attempt to rid Egypt
of British and French colonization, Nasser accepted large sums of aid
from the United States and the USSR and Egypt increasingly relied on
these monies even though it was unnecessary. Again, we are in the
arena of pushes and pulls: to push away from Britain and France,
Egypt pulled itself towards America, which incidentally Nasser
admired for its restraint in the Middle East and never believed that
the U.S. would attempt to dominate and exploit the region.
To remember one aspect of history is perhaps inevitably to neglect
or misrecognize domination coming from elsewhere. It may be ill-
advised to call on remembering as a solution to political ills as it seems
to suggest a psychological solution to a political problem, as if
retrospection and interiority will deliver a different political future.
Kureishi argues renewal means remembering, filling in the gaps, in
order to forget for good (2004, p.30) and the predicament, from a
different and inter-related angle, is how to make a political future anew
when the ego is most needed and yet paradoxically at its most fragile,
for the British so demoralized Egyptian men, that they cast profound
doubts over their capabilities. Locked in profound shame about the
past, about what has been inherited and perpetuated, the ego can only
believe in its own supremacy by blocking the shame and layers of
former identifications out of that which it has been made (Rose 1998,
Postcolonial subjectivity 295
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p.47). At a most basic level what could not be recognized was the fact
of being subject to a colonizing power. This lack of recognition was
compounded by another lack of acknowledgment and Egyptian
leaders are hardly alone in this is the extent to which matters of
authority and leadership are shot through with fantasy, unconscious
desires and fears, with longings for power and triumph.
Forging a different future?
The initial successes of overthrowing the monarchy and British
imperialism followed by Suez enabled Nasser and Egyptians to laugh
in the face of the world powers, reminding them that Egypt too was a
nation, Egypt too, had her pride (Alexander 2005, p.87) This was
crucially important for all countries with a history of colonization for
it allowed hope and a belief that life could be different. This period of
optimism with the beginnings of a strong Arab union and a more
equal society quickly evaporated. Nasser promised dignity, self respect
and revenge but this increasingly became empty rhetoric.
The profoundly precarious and vexed endeavour to have a political
life of the mind and to learn to live without consoling fictions did not
occur and as Rose expresses it learning to live without consoling
fictions is essential, for it is in the death of such numbing and
dangerous fantasies lies our only hope (Rose 2003b, p.68). Fantasy
both essential for action and for making something anew, and
dangerous in its capacity to trap all of us in thoughtlessness and to
forget our ethical and political obligations to other people. As Arendt
reminds us we are nothing without our promise to the other, without
our obligations, and without giving ourselves over to an idea, an ideal,
to the body politic (Jacobitti 1997, p.209).
Thinking the political past anew has to focus on that which occurred
and as Avery Gordon argues that which eludes, the hauntings, ghosts,
and gaps, seething absences, and muted presences (Gordon 1997,
p.21); and that which evades representation and naming (Kristeva
1989, p.14). We are in the arena of inarticulate experiences, of
symptoms and screen memories, of spiralling affects, of more than one
story at a time, of the traffic in domains of experience that are
anything but transparent and referential (Gordon 1997, p.21). These
silences and secrets as Abraham and Torok argue so persuasively are
pervasive and prevalent, powerful, omnipresent and yet elusive, subtle,
and indefinable. They are powerfully felt and have material and
political effects. Memories, forgettings, silences and secrets are
transmitted through historical discourses and public discourses and
they become internalized and inhabited in psychic life. There are
296 Amal Treacher
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always contradictions events known and denied, occurrences spoken
of and silenced, effects identified and disavowed. These contradictions,
thoughts unthought (to draw on Bollass evocative concept), ambiv-
alences and certainties require stringent and careful analysis, and a
continual revisiting of what has been and what persists in the present.
Resignation of thought and complicities are perhaps two states of
mind (individual and collective) which lead to stagnation, perpetua-
tion and above all hinder movement of thought, action, judgement and
recognition all of which are essential for a different and better political
social order to be made, sustained and developed.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Suki Ali and the anonymous referees for their
extremely helpful comments and encouragement. I am grateful to
Ahmed Kabesh (my father) and Amir Hawash.
Notes
1. see Nadje Al-Alis excellent book Secularism, gender and the state in the Middle East ,
which explores the contemporary womens movement in Egypt (2000, Cambridge University
Press).
2. For a useful collection of essays on Egypt from 1919-1952 see Re-Envisioning Egypt ,
edited by A. Goldschmidt, A. Johnson, B. Salmoni (2005, American University Press in
Cairo).
3. The fort/da game was a game that Freuds grandson played as a toddler in which he
threw and then retrieved a cotton reel saying fort/da repeatedly meaning here/there.
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298 Amal Treacher
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AMAL TREACHER is Associate Professor in Psychosocial
Studies, School of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of
Nottingham.
ADDRESS: Centre for Social Work, School of Sociology and Social
Policy, Law and Social Sciences Building, University of Nottingham,
University Park, Nottingham NG7 2RD, U.K. Email: B/amal.
treacher@nottingham.ac.uk/
Postcolonial subjectivity 299
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