In his introduction to a special issue of Research in African Literatures exploring the question of dictatorship in a series of African literary texts, Josaphat B. Kubayanda notes that the different articles in the collection suggest that ‘there is in the literary discourse of post-independence Africa, a realist strategy that allows readers and critics to remap and redirect atten-tion to the dictatorial and oppressive space of the real Africa and the poet’s Africa’.1 When investigating the figures and representations of dictator-ship, this strategy, which operates more specifically in novels and fictional writings, unveils ‘a crucial link between ethics, aesthetics, and politics’ and ends up creating ‘complex problems of interpretation’.2 One of these prob-lems originates in the fact that the efforts by African postcolonial writers
‘to remap and redirect attention’ to the dictatorial space have often been misunderstood or at least underestimated in their very complexity. Far from being specific to African writings, this problem finds similar echoes in the interpretation and reception of what was called ‘the dictator-novel genre’ in Latin American literature. Often dated back to Guatemalan Miguel Angél Asturias’ seminal novel El Señor Presidente (1946), the Latin
1 Josaphat B. Kubayanda, ‘Introduction: Dictatorship, Oppression, and New Realism’, in Research in African Literature, 21.2, Dictatorship and Oppression (Summer 1990):
5–11 (6).
2 Kubayanda, ‘Introduction’, 8.
American dictator novel had its crucial moment in the mid-1970s with subsequent works by Alejo Carpentier (Cuba), Gabriel García Márquez (Columbia), Augusto Roa Bastos (Paraguay), and Juan Rulfo and Carlos Fuentes (Mexico). In The Voice of the Masters, an acclaimed collection of essays about writing and authority in modern Latin American literature, Roberto González Echevarría refers to the Arabic background of the dic-tator figure in the Hispanic tradition. He outlines its very intricacy as it becomes, in modern literature, ‘a figure as complex and, if one wants, abstract as Don Juan, and perhaps just as original and philosophically rich’.3 The parallel with the figure of Don Juan is compelling as it opens up the representation of dictatorship to the field of theatrical performance and hints at the rewriting of literary myths. This manifold complexity of dictatorial literature is reinforced by two further factors. The first has to do with the ambivalence of the term ‘dictatorship’ itself and the type of regimes it designates in political science. As noted by Juan J. Linz, the term, from its original Roman meaning referring to a limited and extraordinary emergency rule, ‘has become a loosely used term for opprobrium’, increas-ingly ‘hard to distinguish from other types of autocratic rule when it lasts beyond a well-defined situation’.4 To return to literature which might be less sensitive to this semantic ambivalence, the second factor is generated by a form of conceptualization since ‘novels dealing with dictators do not establish clear-cut distinctions between the various types that appear in history but tend to deal more abstractly with authority figures and with the question of authority’.5 Moreover, the intersection between fictions of dictatorship and postcolonial power throw into question the efficiency of literary strategies in resisting authoritarianism, notably the metaphorical techniques used to circumvent censorship, and the fictional portrait of the dictator as a device for political critique. While fictions of dictatorship often mobilize the subversive power of description, parody, and humour
3 Roberto González Echevarría, The Voice of the Masters. Writing and authority in modern Latin American Literature (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), p. 6.
4 Juan J. Linz, Totalitarian and authoritarian regimes (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2000), p. 62.
5 Echevarría, The Voice of the Masters, p. 65.
to deform the rhetoric of dictatorial power, there is a risk of reproducing the idioms and aesthetics of the ruler’s discourse, leading to ‘a form of reciprocal paralysis’,6 which was described by Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe as ‘impouvoir’ [impotence].7 In short, dictatorial lit-erature remains a very challenging subject not only in its definition and strategies of representation but also in its ethical, aesthetical and political interpretations.
As Josaphat B. Kubayanda demonstrates in another article, modern African dictator novels share with their Latin American counterparts the same concerns about post-independence disillusionments and new perfor-mances of tyranny, whether social or political. Grouping together African and Latin American experiences of dictatorial literature, Kubayanda argues that ‘literary works from those regions portray totalizing codes that pin-point an unfinished business of decolonization’.8 This idea of an unfinished business of decolonization – which requires a permanent reworking of lit-erary materials to explore, denounce and tackle the persistent discourses of tyranny and despotism – can be compared to the experience of dictatorial literature in the Arab world.
According to Housam Aboul-Ela:
although there has not been a moment of explosion in the genre of the Arabic dictator novel like the Latin American moment of the mid-1970s, the specter of dictatorship has pervaded most of Arab (or at least North African) fiction as a theme in the past several decades. (2011)
Egyptian fictional writings, for instance, have constantly included repre-sentations and performances of authoritarianism: from Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz’s seminal Children of Our Alley to Gamal El-Ghitani’s allegorical Zaynī Barakāt and more recently Alaa Al-Aswany’s acclaimed
6 Cécile Bishop, Postcolonial Criticism and Representations of African Dictatorship: The Aesthetics of Tyranny (London : MHRA/Legenda, 2014), p. 84.
7 Achille Mbembe, De la Postcolonie (Paris: Karthala, 2000), p. 142.
8 Josaphat B. Kubayanda, ‘Dictatorial Literature of Post-Independence Latin America and Africa’, in Research in African Literature, 28.4, Multiculturalism (Winter 1997):
38–53 (38).
The Yacoubian Building. More generally, in the Arab world, both the ‘real-ist strategy’ and the ‘unfinished business of decolonization’ identified by Kubayanda have been shaping a dictatorial literature that, albeit lacking ‘a singular moment’9 similar to the Latin American one, continues to develop a critical discourse that investigates and reveals ‘the intrinsic fallibility of power’.10
At the crossroads of African and Arabic experiences of dictatorial lit-erature, Bensalem Himmich’s Majnūn al-ḥukm (literally ‘Mad of Power’) stands as a unique and rather original piece. First published in Arabic in 1990, the novel received the ‘Al-Nakid’ award (Prize of the Arab Critique) and was chosen by the Author’s Union in Egypt as one of the best novels of the twentieth century. Himmich’s work gained international success fol-lowing its translations into Spanish (El Loco del poder, 1996),11 French (Le Calife de l’épouvante, 1999),12 and English (The Theocrat, 2005).13 Himmich’s novel provides an original insight into the life and reign of Al-Hākim bi Amr Allāh (literally ‘the ruler by order of God’), the sixth Fatimid caliph who ruled Egypt from 996 to 1021. As suggested by the title, Al-Hākim’s reign was largely dominated by madness, excess and a paradoxical if not ambiguous exercise of power. In the Encyclopaedia of Islam, the entry on
9 Hosam Aboul-Ela, ‘Imagining more Autumns for North Africa’s Patriarchs: The Dictator Novel in Egypt’ in Words without borders, 2011. <http://www.wordswith-outborders.org/dispatches/article/imagining-more-autumns-for-north-africas-patri archs-the-dictator-novel-in-e> [1 August 2017].
10 Spencer, Robert, ‘Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the African dictator novel’, The Journal of Commonwealth literature 47.2 (2012): 145–58 (146).
11 Translation by Federico Arbós, Libertarias Prodhufi Edición, Collection Alquibla, 1996. The volume includes a preface by Spanish writer Juan Goytisolo and a postface by the translator Federico Arbós.
12 Translation by Mohamed Saad Eddine El Yamani, Editions Le Serpent à Plumes, 1999. All the following French quotes are from this source. A second edition is pub-lished in 2010 by Moroccan and French publishers La Croisée des Chemins and Atlantica-Séguier.
13 Translation by Roger Allen, The American University in Cairo Press, 2005. The volume includes an introduction by the translator. All the following English quotes from Himmich’s novel are taken from this source. Elsewhere, translation is my own unless otherwise noted.
Al-Hākim admits that ‘it is difficult to form an exact idea of his person-ality, so strange and even inexplicable were many of the measures which he took, and so full of contradictions does his conduct seem’.14 While Al-Hākim’s political regime is defined as ‘a tyrannical and cruel despot-ism, with intervals of liberalism and humility’, his personality ‘remains an enigmatic one’ as ‘he seems to have been several persons in succession or even simultaneously’.15 Building on this complex and rather pathological portrait of the Fatimid ruler, Himmich’s work weaves together history and fiction to offer an original approach to dictatorial literature.
The novel is organized into four chapters introduced by a short pref-ace, ‘Préambule de la fumée’ [Prelude to the Smoke], itself formed of two sections offering a brief third-person account of Al-Hākim followed by a fictional fragmentary text credited to the ruler. The first two chapters, as rightly noted by Roger Allen, ‘provide ample evidence of the problematic nature of Al-Hakim’s personality’.16 Chapter 1 offers an extensive record of Al-Hākim’s contradictory decrees and arbitrary interdictions, culmi-nating in the way he used a giant slave named Massoud to sodomize any merchant found to be cheating people in the market. Chapter 2 investi-gates Al-Hākim’s councils where he respectively enjoyed sessions of violet oil treatments, had his delirious sayings recorded in writing, chaired court sessions asking the culprits to surprise him in order to gain forgiveness and discussed with his devotees the dissemination of his claims to divin-ity. The third chapter, which is surprisingly the longest of the novel, offers a detailed account of the revolt of Abū Rakwa, an Umayyad prince who won the support of North African tribes and tried to invade Cairo in an attempt to topple the Fatimid ruler. The fourth and final chapter describes Al-Hākim’s burning of the old Cairo to take revenge on the population
14 Marius Canard, ‘al-Ḥākim Bi-Amr Allāh’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, edited by: P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W. P. Heinrichs
<http://ezproxy-prd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk:2066/10.1163/1573-3912_islam_SIM_2637>
1 August 2016 [accessed 20 April 2018].
15 Canard, ‘‘al-Ḥākim Bi-Amr Allāh’.
16 Roger Allen, ‘Translator’s introduction’ in Bensalem Himmich, The Theocrat (Cairo:
The American University in Cairo Press, 2005), vii-xv (ix).
that attacked him with slanderous statements, and ends describing how his sister, Sit al-Mulk, plotted his assassination, crushed all opposition and took control of power.
Drawing on Echevarría’s work and other theoretical material about historical fiction and aesthetics of tyranny, my aim is to assess the efficiency of Himmich’s novel in representing and reflecting on the question of dic-tatorship. After exploring the inherent limitations of historical fiction, I propose a critique of the topos of madness as a feature of the dictator figure.
I then show how parody and language are used both to promote and resist the dictatorial discourse. Finally, I argue that Himmich’s work features an implicit call for self-constitution as a potential way out of dictatorship and despotism.