‘Goodbye, Tangier’: The curse of ‘The woman with a man inside looking at a woman’ | Culture

Salma the Moumni did not need to know that, on average, women think about how their body exposes to others about eight times every five minutes. She already did it since teenager, when girls stop being and learn to dress and make up to be desired or to take them seriously. What this Moroccan writer ignored is that she was not the only one imagining how she was perceived. The click came with Brainwashedthe 2022 documentary of Nina Menkes on the influence of the male gaze in the cinema. “It was seeing a student to tell that when she showed up, I thought about what I would be seen from the outside and understand that my hypervigilance was universal,” he explains on the terrace of the Finestres bookstore in Barcelona the last afternoon of March. Of that, of the eternal curse of the woman with a man inside looking at a woman, she goes her first novel, Goodbye, Tanger. The text, a finalist of the Medicis Award and France Culture des etudiants in 2023, has now translated Palmira Feixas del Francés to Spanish for the sixth floor publishing house.

At 26, this writer raised in Tangier and installed in Paris has debuted with a crude monologue in which about twenty misplaced explores the ravages of male gaze, shame and racial prejudices in migrations. “I wanted to give voice to a socially silenced woman. When we grow up, we confuse the idea of ​​freedom with silence. The price of living freely is to not be able to speak clearly: we must be discreet, quiet, invisible. I wanted to discover what happens when a woman decides not to shut up. When she speaks and speaks for 123 pages,” says the author. What happens, as they can imagine, is nothing complacent.

Male and colonial look

In Goodbye, TangerAlia is a twenty biseñualañera who has fled from Tangier to France with the university’s excuse after her intimate photos were filtered in an anonymous Instagram account. If Alia had photographed herself naked in her room in her last year of institute, only for her eyes, it was because of the intrigue that her body aroused. I needed to verify how it was perceived from the outside. Understand why her figure disturbed the men who besieged her with her gaze on the street, why they whistled and told her that “he was looking for problems” although he always walked a crest or with wide sweatshirts. Terrified by the shame of their parents accessing these leaked photos, anguished by the penalty of jail that stipulates the article of the Moroccan Criminal Code on “the public offense to modesty” of the bare bodies, Alia flees to Lyon, scenario from which everything experienced in a few years is remembered: the photos, the fault, the backpack of family morality.

The reification that lived in the streets of his city will also pursue it in Europe, where racism hits double and feels that “neither of the Maghreb of France nor the whites of France.” “There, the most wanted category in Pornhub is’beurette‘, a pejorative term of slang to designate the French young people of Maghreb parents. In Spain, ‘Morita’ is the closest thing. If I wanted to write about this in the book it is because it is a bit intraduible, it is a very specific fetish. The single word produces me, ”he clarifies.

His novel also seeks to disassemble another reservoir look: the colonial and romantic vision of Tangier. The Moumni amends the postcard that makes it a hedonistic park for the men and women of the Global North. “This tangier has nothing to do with that of the generation beatthat of the Rolling Stones and all those American and European authors who have exoted her as a paradise of freedom in which to catch drugs and go to bed with young people. I am very sorry for that look, ”he clarifies. In his text, that inheritance Encarna Quentin, a French pijo teenager installed by family businesses in Tangier with whom Alia will maintain an abusive relationship in the institute, a kid who knows how to be unpunished because his life in Morocco“ is nothing more than a parenthesis ”for his condition of expat. “Alia and Quentin may not be the same or have a neutral relationship, not only for gender or race, but because of the historical weight of their identities. As much as they try, reality and symbolic power between France and Morocco always imposes itself,” clarifies the author.

The dissociative turn

“Even pretending that you are not satisfying male fantasies is a male fantasy,” said Margaret Atwood in The thief girlfriend (Editions B, 1996) about the patriarchal stigma that has made women their own vigureur. The Soumni is not the first or the last one who writes on the influence of the male look, but he gives him a very interesting intersectional turn in female dissociation. One that expands horizons and intersectionality regarding everything we had read or seen. Twenty years before the Moroccan was born, John Berger already defined it through advertising and art in Modes of see ” Visual pleasure and narrative cinemaan essay where he proved that the male look of cinema was the only one to date, guilty of having “deformed” our vision of the erotic. That text, precisely, is the one that served as a theoretical basis for Brainwashedthe documentary that impacted the Moroccan author.

Although the provocative Nancy Huston threw essentialism when facing the matter in controversy Reflexes in the eye of a man (Galaxia Gutenberg, 2013) and the second season of The White Lotus fetichized street harass The adventure From Antonioni, the interesting thing about El Soumni and other authors of the present is the depth with which they explore female dissociation. Cat Person, Kristen Roupenian’s story about a sexual encounter in which the protagonist looked at herself by maintaining relationships from the roof, caused a peak of visits never seen in The New Yorker For the identification that aroused that scene and even took to the cinema with more grief than glory. In Spain, researcher Núria Gómez Gabriel has caused a niche and cult phenomenon with Traumacore: Chronicles of a feminist dissociation (Holy sky, 2023), where they typify a generation of deranged women who go for life “doing as if nothing”, dissociated, but always paranoid by how they will be perceived. One of the consequences, according to Gómez Gabriel, of having been educated to be always strong, empowered and made themselves.

If we have known so much theory, why do the young women of today remain slaves and sergeants of their hypervigilance, always looking for the best profile for the imaginary chamber that never stops recording them? The Mouumni has no answers. “I want to think that this self -control will disappear with age,” he says. With what is delighted is with one of the reactions to his text: “It is incredible how disturbing that results for men, my friends ignored how threatening the female experience. It has been an uncomfortable reading for them. I love it. That, precisely, is what I was looking for.”