Among us, we believe in the nefarious effects of the evil eye (the evil gaze). We conjure them with our hand spread out like a fan. I close my hand back upon a pen to write my exorcism: this text.
Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem
By opening up this conversation, by recovering fragments of Mmi 3ziza’s story, can I make a step toward unlearning the enforced forgetfulness of nation-states, the imposed borders and binaries of neocolonial orders? And why did I need to cross an ocean before I could mentally stitch the desert?
Omar Berrada, Wombs Unlinked: Trans-Saharan Afterlives
To live as a postcolonial thinker from the Global South in a world ruled by colonial taxonomies and civilizational hierarchies that value Western forms of life and knowledge above all else is to wage a daily battle against the incitement to epistemic estrangement and the expectation that we look at the world through colonial and imperial eyes only (Fanon 1965; Said 1978; Alloula 1986; Anzaldúa 1981; Mohanty 1986; Pratt 1992; Henni 2018 and 2022; Tuhiwai Smith 2021; Sadiki 2021). It is to contend with the constant risk of becoming disaffected from ourselves and each other as a condition for our recognition, or even mere participation, in the unequal global terrain of intellectual work, even as we remain perpetual strangers, tolerated and tokenized at best, in the Western worlds that recruit us into their epistemic and imperial folds.
Inspired by the epistemologies of Malek Alloula’s hand spread out like a fan in an act of decolonial exorcism (1986) and Omar Berrada’s restitching of the fragments of his family history in an act of resistance against the enforced forgetfulness of local genealogies and imaginaries (2021), this experimental essay is meant as a rehearsal (Wilson-Gilmore 2022) for the decolonial future in which I hope we will all someday dwell together. Composed as a tapestry of decolonial reflections, a talisman to ward off colonial ways of seeing, a witnessing (hooks 1994; Kabel 2024), and love letter (Anzaldúa 1981; Khúc 2021; Ihmoud 2024) that is at the same time an epistemological intervention in the emerging field of North African decolonial studies, this essay suggests that the continued decolonization of our subjectivities, imaginaries, ways of feeling and knowing as postcolonial thinkers, scholars, artists, and knowledge producers from the Global South remains a most necessary and urgent task in this time of perpetual wars, genocide, climate catastrophe, and ruthless Western domination.
In writing this piece, I use the terms “decolonial” and “postcolonial” interchangeably. In doing so, I seek to make it clear that by postcoloniality, I mean existing in the wake of colonialism, thus intentionally highlighting the continuities rather than ruptures between existing under colonialism and living in its aftermath. This is what decolonial scholars of Latin America like Aníbal Quijano (2000), Maria Lugones (2010), Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh (2018), amongst others, call the coloniality of power in their efforts to emphasize its ongoing nature, thus distinguishing both coloniality from colonialism and the post-colonial nation-state from decoloniality as a way of being in the world. Like these decolonial Latin American writers and the postcolonial thinkers of the Middle East and North Africa like Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Malek Alloula, Lila Abu-Lughod, Leila Ahmed, Talal Asad, and Saba Mahmood who have more directly shaped my thinking, my main preoccupation in what follows is with the question of postcolonial subjectivity, epistemology, memory, and imagination as these are mediated by power/knowledge in a context characterized by continued Western domination and the hegemony of colonial logics. While I never wish to downplay the significance of the decolonization of occupied lands, as Palestinian and Indigenous communities all over the world importantly remind us (Sa’di and Abu-Lughod 2007; Khalidi 2021; Tuck and Yang 2012), I want, nevertheless, to join others in insisting that the work of epistemic decolonization is ongoing and necessary, including in communities no longer officially living under colonial rule.
In imagining a decolonial epistemology, I make at least two sets of interconnected arguments that I also try to embody through my writing and citational praxis. First, I propose that decolonizing the epistemologies of the Global South requires not just decentering the West as the locus of all knowledge, but also a decolonial redefinition of knowledge itself through the enactment of new epistemic orientations that unravel colonial hierarchies, distinctions, and normative assumptions. In particular, a decolonial epistemology invites us to become more attuned to the lived, the quotidian, the embodied, the felt, the visceral, the mnemonic, the sensory, the aesthetic, the relational, and the communal as sources of knowledge and abundant insight (Arondekar 2023). Second, I argue that decolonizing our epistemologies and subjectivities as thinkers from the Global South requires not only an intentional investment in learning from each other and forging intellectual connections between us—for example by building transnational networks and publishing in journals such as this one which are based in the Global South and seek to promote South-South intellectual dialog. It also necessitates a refusal of the triumphalist story that the West tells about itself, through the cultivation of decolonial citational practices of transnational solidarity that center the insights and experiences of subjugated thinkers within the West itself.
As a transnational, postcolonial, and decolonial feminist thinker and anthropologist of Morocco living in the heart of the North American empire, I have written elsewhere about the conundrums and aporias that come with occupying such a fraught positionality, including the ironies of seeking a return home through a colonial discipline like anthropology, and the risk of benefitting from notions of Western epistemological superiority due to my Western academic training and location (See Guessous 2020a and 2020b, for example). As a feminist scholar, I have been deeply preoccupied with the ways in which feminist histories and politics from the Global South, and especially from Muslim majority contexts, have been recast as an imperial gift (Ahmed 1993; Abu-Lughod 2015; Ahmed 2017; Shakhsari 2020; Abu Lughod, Hammami and Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2023) and put in the service of the West’s teleologies of progress (Brown 2006; Farris 2017). Like the decolonial feminist Francoise Vergès, I have no interest in partaking in what she calls civilizational feminism, which “borrows the vocabulary and objectives of the colonial civilizing mission, modernizing the policy that Frantz Fanon summarized thus: ‘Let’s win over the women and the rest will follow,’ by putting first and foremost ‘women’s rights’ at the center of global politics, hence offering arguments to neoliberalism and imperialism difficult to refute (who is for forced marriages, girls being sold, women being denied rights?)” (2019, vii). Instead, I have drawn inspiration from the work of postcolonial feminist thinkers to search for feminist insights in the less traveled paths of memory.
What feminist stories are buried in our memories and elided in dominant feminist historiographies about postcolonial places like Morocco? What subjugated knowledges, lived, affective, and embodied experiences have been “forced into hiding” (Hirschkind 2020, 1) by the scripted ways in which we have been taught to tell our feminist stories, and by the redoubtable durability of the Orientalist grids (Said 1978) through which we have heard them told and retold?
How can we search for feminist insights in the less obvious places, in the fainter paths of memory as Sara Ahmed so beautifully calls them, paths that “might have become fainter from not being traveled upon” and that require “not going the way we have been directed” (Ahmed 2017: 15)? How can we become better attuned to the small decolonial stories “that are not publicized but are nevertheless there” (Esperitu and Duong, 2018: 611)? How can we orient our energies towards writing feminist stories “with [our] eyes like painters, with [our] ears like musicians, with [our] feet like dancers…with [our]tongues of fire” (Anzaldúa 1981: 171).
Deeply indebted to the insights of feminist epistemology, my aim in this essay is to think more broadly about the cultivation of a decolonial praxis from the Global South and its diasporas in which others might also recognize some of themselves. In doing so, I am aware of the limits, dangers, if not impossibility of such an endeavor, which risks being so general that it erases necessary specificities of location and positionality, and thus reproduces the colonial tendency to speak in abstractions from nowhere in the name of a putatively universal Truth. I therefore combine my epistemological reflections with deeply situated interludes, which are intentionally unfinished, fragmentary, and experimental in form, and that I hope will make more evident the locations, stakes, and conjunctures contributing to this epistemological reflection. These passages also enact a blurring of disciplinary conventions of writing in a spirit of not only inter-disciplinarity but what Driss Ksikes wonderfully calls “indiscipline” (2021), namely the intentional rejection of the logic of disciplinarity itself. By combining different modes of writing and theorizing, this essay seeks to unsettle false oppositions between memory and history, the aesthetic and the analytical, the intimate and the theoretical. Finally, these fragments attempt—and hopefully invite—a disruption of positivist and colonial notions of knowledge that insist on distance (from the self, the felt, and the ordinary) as a marker of intellectual rigor. Instead, I take up Anzaldúa’s invitation that we write with all our senses (1981, 171) and attempt to enact the reclaiming of affect that I suggest is key to a decolonial epistemology intent on making us feel as well as know otherwise.
Looking back on my life growing up in Rabat, I am reminded of the importance of the sensorium as a source of decolonial knowing, remembering, and writing. I recall the soothing sounds of the adhan punctuating everyday life, reminding me that secular time is but one form of temporality. I remember the beautiful shapes and colors of fresh vegetables, fruits, and spices meticulously curated by grocers who are at the same time artists of the everyday. My body conjures deeply felt memories of the sweet and tender embrace of beloved friends, the affectionate kisses and hugs of family members, the joy of everyday interactions with grocers, bakers, butchers, newspaper vendors I have known since childhood—forms of daily intimacy and sociality that transcend the privileging of romantic love and the narrowing of affective worlds that are characteristic of life under capitalist and heteropatriarchal modernity. I think of the rich and warm aromas of couscous on Fridays and harira during the month of Ramadan–how shared culinary practices depend on knowledges passed down across generations, invoking the multi-temporality of postcolonial life-worlds as well as the olfactory and gustatory nature of memory.
I remember stories about my paternal grandmother, Allah yarhamha, applying perfume before getting photographed, insisting through this intimate gesture on the fullness of her subjectivity as well as the limits of modern regimes of visual representation. By applying a few drops of perfume on her wrists and behind her ears which were always adorned with beautiful gold earrings, she reminds us of what the eye of the camera cannot see, despite its claims to omnipresence, and therefore resists the ocular-centrism of modern epistemologies. That she most cherished expensive French perfumes, even as she stumbled with pronouncing their names (Yves Saint Laurent was one she especially struggled with as a speaker of Arabic) is a reminder of the complexity and ambivalence of postcolonial desire, resistance, and subjectivity.
This complexity is beautifully captured in those unforgettable chapters on the politics of skin and beauty in Fatema Mernissi’s fictionalized memoir about growing up in the old medina of Fes during the French colonial period. There, she describes her mother, Douja, refusing to trade her traditional beauty rituals with putatively “superior” French and modern cosmetics produced in the laboratories of Europe, even though these were less offensive to the modernizing sensibilities of her husband and the younger men of the Fes household who felt repulsed by the sight and smell of henna, ghassoul, and other traditional beauty recipes. She makes an exception however and enthusiastically embraces the Channel 5 perfume that her husband bought for her in the ville nouvelle, which makes me wonder: Was it the sandalwood of Channel 5 that attracted her to it, or the jasmine that reminded her of growing up on Yasmina’s farm before she married into a bourgeois urban family? How do we think of this olfactory exception from a decolonial perspective given the well-known Orientalism that pervades Europe’s perfume industry? Was this a case of sensory conscription or of decolonial nostalgia and reappropriation? And how does this story of bourgeois men’s repulsion towards women’s traditional beauty practices–a theme that saturates Qasim Amin’s much celebrated writings on the liberation of women where his “virulent contempt” (Ahmed 1993, 157) for Egyptian women’s bodily practices cannot be missed—complicate emancipatory narratives about modernity and progress? And conversely, how do stories of traditional men’s acceptance of modern ways of being, like the ones that my aunt Nouzha tenderly shares about her father (my grandfather), Allah yarhamhou, discreetly tolerating her youthful and rebellious smoking even though it went against gendered norms of respectability (Guessous 2021), tell us about the ironies of teleological accounts of modernity?
A decolonial epistemology asks that we attend to the sensorium as an abundant (Arondekar 2023) archive that is saturated with decolonial insights about the aporias and complexities of postcolonial subjectivity lived in the shadow of empire. By cultivating an attunement towards the decolonial potentialities of the sensorium and the everyday, we can begin to unlearn “the enforced forgetfulness of nation-states, the imposed borders and binaries of neocolonial orders” (Berrada 2021: 221); and in so doing, broaden our understanding of archives (Brozgal 2020; El Guabli 2023) by recovering and reclaiming lost narratives (Lamrabet 2016; Luste Boulbina 2022), erased (Brozgal 2020; Sadiki 2021), classified (Henni 2022, 2024), and unwritten histories (Berrada 2021; Salime 2023; Boum 2013 and 2023) as well as the “ordinary plenitude” that we have grown accustomed to ignoring (Arondekar 2023: 8). Through the “stories of the excluded, the silenced, and the forgotten” that haunt us (El Guabli 2023, 1), “that are at once visible and invisible, known and unknown, remembered, and forgotten” (Brozgal 2020), that have the “power to make ghosts perceptible” (Jarvis 2021, 2), we can better resist the sensorial, epistemic, and conscripting powers of colonial modernity (Asad 1992; Scott 2004). Through a decolonial praxis that “makes intimate what is rendered distant, renders tactile what is made invisible, and unifies what is divided,” (Kapadia 2019, 10) we can begin reimagining what it means to know beyond the logics of colonialism, forever wars, and capitalist modernity.
In addition, a decolonial praxis calls for citational and epistemic practices that challenge the triumphalist story that the West tells about itself as a benevolent, tolerant, defender of rights, democracy, and justice even as it carries out, sponsors, and justifies unspeakable acts of violence against humans and non-humans alike within and outside its borders, condemning all but the most powerful to conditions of slow death (Berlant 2007), un-grievability (Butler 2010), loaned life and rightful killing (Shakhsari 2020). By centering the subjugated insights and knowledges of those living in the various margins of the West, decolonial epistemologies invite the cultivation of forms of relationality, togetherness, solidarity, and exchange that privilege the forging of bonds and intimacies among colonized and marginalized subjects across time and space (Lowe 2015). From our “distinct yet interconnected geographies” (Ihmoud and Cordis 2022, 816), we can cultivate “transnational constellations of kinship, care, and rebellion” (Ihmoud and Cordis 2022, 826) and start collectively dreaming, building, and reclaiming forgotten decolonial geographies (Luste Boulbina 2022) that recognize the inseparability of our struggles for freedom and self-determination.
As I write this, Gaza has been under Israeli siege for over two-hundred days. During this time, more than thirty-five thousand Palestinians have been killed with thousands more missing, presumed dead, lying under the rubble. I write this with the bitter and heart-breaking knowledge that these numbers will be surpassed by the time this article goes to press. News reports have started sharing the shocking statistic that one out of every one-hundred people in Gaza has been killed, and that over one-hundred-thousand Palestinians in Gaza have been either killed, injured, or disappeared since October 7th. In the past months, I have been waking up every day and going to sleep every night haunted by images of dead, maimed, distressed, traumatized, displaced, starving, and dehydrated Palestinians in Gaza. I feel sick in my stomach and shed daily tears of shame, anguish, grief, and outrage as those in power in the West continue to watch with glib indifference and imperial impunity as Gaza becomes uninhabitable and is experiencing famine and environmental catastrophe that will make it unlivable for generations to come. I keep thinking of the mass graves where bodies were wrapped in blue tarps and laid side by side in a desperate attempt to provide them with dignity and reduce their aloneness, the bodies of those who were crushed and suffocated under the rubble unable to breathe or to scream, the bombed hospitals, schools, universities, churches, mosques, and refugee camps, the kidnapped and incarcerated children who are indefinitely kept hostage in Israeli prisons, the heartbroken fathers, mothers, grandparents, uncles, aunts, siblings, cousins, neighbors, spouses, and friends mourning the loss of too many loved ones and suffering from survivors’ guilt as they wonder why they are the ones still alive and what it means to live amidst so much death, the destroyed libraries that took years to lovingly build one donated book at a time, the women giving birth alone in the darkness and cold without clean water, medicine, warmth or shelter, the journalists being assassinated and collectively targeted for the crime of bearing witness to the horrors of colonial violence and destruction, multiple generations of families from elders to infants erased in an instant, thousands and thousands of orphans being left behind so much so that a new acronym had to be invented by medical and humanitarian workers to refer to Wounded Children with No Surviving Family (WCWNSF), crushed dreams, hopes, worlds, bones, promises, pretenses, and international conventions. This is what colonialism looks like. This is what it has always looked like, only this time it is being livestreamed. This is what the West does not want us to see or to remember. It does not want us to imagine ourselves lying under the rubble or being killed in “safe” zones because we were once the Palestinians, and we can all become the next Palestinians. There is no safety for those whose humanity has been rendered conditional through racial logics and who share a condition of perpetual disposability. While I might be far away, living in the settler colonial context of Turtle Island, made tolerable to those around me because of my university degrees and proximity to feminism which ironically makes me more palatable as an Arab and Muslim woman in a land that otherwise remains deeply anti-feminist, I stand here resolved to never look away and to never forget the horrors of today.
A decolonial epistemology is deeply felt. It refuses to stay unmoved, detached, disaffected, “reasonable” or “objective” in the face of colonial brutality and ongoing histories of mass killing, starvation, dehumanization, and domination. What is objectivity, after all, other than a license to objectify the lives of others and to hide behind masks of distance while maintaining the privilege of exit in the name of science? Instead, a decolonial epistemology values its proximity to and attachments to the worlds it hopes to honor and better understand. It seeks to embody, enact, bring about, conjure, and inspire decolonizing affects—those liberatory ways of feeling and being in the world that do not accept the normalization of colonial cruelty, indifference, abandonment, slow death, and detachment. A decolonial epistemology is motivated not by the accumulation of cultural capital or recognition that comes with claims of rationality, expertise, objectivity, distance, neutrality, and universality but by feelings of anguish and refusal, of hope, awe, and deep affection, by dreams of collective liberation and rebellious visions of decolonial futures that are contagious and that move others into action. For “there are no new ideas waiting in the wings to save us…There are only new ways of making them felt” (Lorde 1984, 39). In addition, a decolonial epistemology is not afraid of dwelling in maligned “bad feelings” (Moussawi 2021) like nostalgia, resentment, anger, ambivalence, or melancholia. It refuses to distinguish between thinking and feeling, what Latin Americanist thinkers like Arturo Escobar calls sentipensar, namely “a way of knowing that does not separate thinking from feeling, reason from emotion, knowledge from caring” (2020, xxxv).
Importantly, a decolonial praxis acknowledges its own vulnerability to colonial ways of thinking. It recognizes that the decolonization we aspire towards is never achieved once and for all; it is always a hope, a wish, a desire, a struggle, a becoming that can only be maintained (rather than realized) through the active and ongoing cultivation of a decolonial habitus of continuous work on the self that does not always operate in welcoming conditions. As Catherine Walsh describes it, the praxis of decoloniality can be compared to “the continuous work to plant and grow an otherwise despite and in the borders, margins, and cracks of the modern/colonial/capitalist/heteropatriarchal order” (2018, 101). Similarly, Edward Said emphasizes the monumental scope of resisting the productive nature of colonial forms of knowledge when he describes his project as “an attempt to inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals” (1978, 25). And finally, in what is perhaps one of the most powerful illustrations of the anti-enlightenment epistemologies of decolonial praxis, Malek Alloula compares his decolonial re-reading of French colonial postcards of Algeria(ns) to an “exorcism” (1986: 5). In doing so, like Gloria Anzaldúa before him who described her feminist writing as “speaking in tongues” (1981), Alloula makes clear his refusal of enlightenment conceptions of knowledge that require distancing “reason” from the “barbarism” and “superstition” of the past and of tradition. He also emphasizes the deeply embodied, affective, sensory, psychic, but also radical, transformative, and liberatory nature of decolonial praxis by comparing its epistemology of refusal to purging the body/mind/soul of forces and spirits occupying it against its will.
The decolonial in other words is not an identity; it is a praxis and an “epistemic position” (Bishara 2023, 397) that requires “being willing to get in the way” (Ahmed 2017, 66) of established rationalities and binary distinctions that uphold the authority of knowledge through the foreclosure of shared vulnerabilities. As Arturo Escobar describes it, asking ourselves decolonial questions requires a profound and ongoing rethinking of our place in the world; it “marks the beginning of a long journey toward a life consonant with other ontologies, a journey toward a profound consciousness of the relationality and interdependence of all that exists, which is in turn indispensable for imagining other possible worlds” (2020, 5).
This is why I have come to strongly believe that decolonial work is best practiced collectively and collaboratively in ways that blur some of the boundaries, distinctions, binaries, and hierarchies of colonial modes of knowledge and help us step out of institutionalized structures of knowing (Ksikes 2021) that limit our imagination and keep us trapped in colonial ways of thinking. Doing so can only broaden our understanding of what it means to live, to resist, to learn, and to exist together in this time-space of perpetual wars, genocide, climate catastrophe, and ruthless Western domination. It can also keep us more grounded in an ethical praxis of humility, relationality, and solidarity that is not about individual epistemic ownership or self-gain but decolonial visions of collective liberation, of life lived, and knowledge felt otherwise.
This essay is merely a beginning, a draft, and a rehearsal, written in the barzakh of memory, in the company of many ghosts and ancestors. As you stop reading, I hope you will look up and notice the white kites with their long strings dancing gracefully alongside the birds in the sky, bringing hope to the living and the dead through their tales/tails of witnessing and refusal, reminding us in the process of our pluriversal interdependence in this time of both ruthless violence and enduring decolonial love.
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