This paper discusses veil no longer as a hijaab but as a symbol of political stance, an emblem of resistance, and a demarcation between men and women as well as France and Algeria. This diversity of the veil's function indicates a duality that correlates with the concept of Manicheanism. Moreover, the stem object of this paper is Frantz Fanon's "Algerian Unveiled" which will be elaborated by new perspectives.

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Veil as a Symbol of Manicheanism in the Colonial World Between Algeria and France
Himawan Pradipta
Universitas Padjadjaran
“The colonial world is a Manichean world.”
Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth
The tug of war of both interests and identity-claims between Algeria and France seems to never meet its finalé, even until today. Its menacing yet seminal phenomena remains unclear in terms of not only duality between men and women, but also of a borderline dichotomizing Algeria and France as own-standing nations. Fanon, indeed, has explicitly discussed about this in his prominent “Algerian Unveiled” in which the two countries are anthropomorfized into a form of, not surprisingly, men and veiled women whose each stance plays key roles in beholding, and thus maintaining, their country to be considered as the “more superior.” However, his predominantly historical approach to construe how the colonization is latently carried out by France, still leaves cracks, and even holes, that enable scholars and historians today to question, re-enact, and build interpretations about this long-lasting, debatable issue over centuries. What I am endeavouring to do here is, humbly speaking, to fill those gaps by offering new perspectives about how Fanon constructs, both literally and metaphorically, women as “the weaker vessel” in the presence of men, and in what mechanism Fanon depicts veil as political stance, configuration of resistance, and demarcation.
Before going to my elaborations, I would put forward the axiomatics consisting of men in one end and women in the other, stemming from the manicheanistic point of view. The case in “Algerian Unveiled” is no exempt from this paradigma. For instance, the women’s attributions such as veil and haïk, claimed Fanon, are the most visible targets for the “bold and impatience glance” of the Europeans in order to mobilize and manipulate Algerian’s country system and history. He also elaborated that not only was it the European men who persevered in liberating those women from the “jail”, but also the Europeannes, if I may say, who rather

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felt “uneasy” seeing veiled women before them. As I read through this part, it immediately gives a profound impression that the Algeriennes are indeed weak and inconsolable. Yet, if the women are depicted to be so remote from the social lives, as they are being “kept by her husband in their houses”, then what encourages Fanon to argue that the European men would react in “an aggressive way” when they are not able to see what is hidden beyond the women’s veils? The European men’s exotic, untamed desire to tyrannize the women but still ineptly hesitant by the urge of being polite to them, became a paradoxical fact that exacerbated what I call as a doubling discourse, allowing the position of men and women as both the colonizer and the colonized at the very same time.
Firstly, it is nearly impossible to talk about the Algeriennes without referring them to, among other things, their veils. This piece of typically-long, plain cloth, interestingly enough, is no longer limited to the fact that it covers women’s head as hijab—that is, as an emblem of their religious bearing and a survival kit from public harrassment. Instead, they began to acknowledge it as a struggle of independence, in the attitude of the “moudjahidates”, or woman combatants. In fact, as Catherine Lloyd argues, those women “have been forced into the forefront of fighting terrorism because many of them have been victims or . . . as a result of the killing of members of their family (1999: 481). They were, both physically and psychologically, reinforced to join the army because they were told that it was simply for the sake of their country and the akhiraat; moreover, to strengthen the impression of their being Moslem combatants, they cover their heads as a form of loyalty to their beliefs as well as their represented citizen. This stupefying outlook, indeed, became the ultimate shield for the Algeriennes, even nowadays, to survive beneath the European settlers’ toes. Conversely, the actuality turned out to be far beyond anyone’s expectation: the Europeans’ lascivious desire for the “queen of all women” glared so blindingly that they did not even realize they were burning from the inside out.
An exclusive interview between Mme Houria Imache Rami, a mujahida, and Meredeth Turshen in 2001, showed us a more frightening atmosphere than simply the Frenchmen mischievously “wanting” the Algeriennes as I have briefly described earlier. Rami stated that “we [she and other women combatants] were equal in the war—it was afterward that our citizenship was taken away from us.” Let alone the fact that at that period, women were preserved as “war boot[ies]” and the European settlers dreamed to uphold this weakness as a provocative justification to overpower them, and thus, their country. The war, unfortunately,

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gave birth to another kind of desire for the European men—that is, a self-harming plea that fortified the urge of colonizing the women, but, of course, as Fanon claimed, if there is a terror, then there is also a counterterror: “moves and countermoves”. Later, the women began to realize that what hid themselves against the colonizer was, clearly enough, their veils, which then became the most powerful equipment for a resistance. Fanon further asserted that the desire of the European man progressively altered to shape a
frenzy to unveil the Algerian woman; it was [the] gamble of winning the battle of the veil at whatever cost, that were to provoke the native’s bristling resistance (“Algerian Unveiled”, 43).
This duality of point of view from each nation, therefore, creates an intelligible fact that Fanon rejects the idea of the neutral majority. No one in Algeria, he said, “is allowed to remain neutral and watch the events in a detached way.” This is complicit with what happens in Gille Pontecorvo’s 1966 The Battle of Algiers, particularly when Fathia dons her veil only to pass through the city. Here, her being forced to shift her appearance from a somehow disguised, venerated woman to an elegant, sophisticated eye benefit for the foreigners in the country, enables diverse judgments from the society. Take an example of any Algerienne encountering the same situation as Fathia that her siblings or members of family who are still wearing veils see her strolling around the city. However, it is not that, I believe, Fathia does not know that that would happen to her, but what is more ironic is that other people from her species would rationalize it by, unconsciously, ‘other’-ing Fathia whilst the Europeans looking to her. Furthermore, a number of questions would arise: Is Fathia, by changing her dress, also changing her national identity? Does her decision to be involved in the French system implicitly make her a Frenchwoman? Or does she simply want to hijack it?
Suppose the Algerienne possesses the power to crash French systems, what kind of alibi that she will maintain to explain her possession? Unluckily, “Algerian Unveiled” gave insufficient, if not few, clues regarding to this question; Fanon, however, believed that “a distinct identity, concern with keeping intact a few shreds of national existence, is attributed to religious, magical, fanatical behavior,” but he lacked the basis to endorse his proposals. Mildred Mortimer attempted to fill that in by reminding us to what Foucault in “Histoire de La Sexualité” had proposed: “Islamic culture is bound to the non-dire, or unspoken, in other words, to silence; it prohibits personal disclosure.” Nonetheless, the concept of being silent is

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predominantly, and mostly, mistaken by that of being the weaker. In fact, if the Frenchwomen could boast their appearance with their gowns, opulent hair-dos, and discerning make-ups, and the men with their “racial superiority”, if the French are so open and “out loud” about their own countries, then indeed there must be the “other end” of this axiomatics to balance the contour, which is the Algeriennes. Shortly, there would never be any noise without silence, and vice versa. At this point, if we scope this standpoint more scrupulously, we would question ourselves: who is the colonizer now?
Realizing that now we have seen the happenstances on each tip of the axiomatics, we could say that we are on the ground with Fanon’s rejection on neutrality. Surprisingly, the occurrences between Algeria and France more or less also take place in most Southeastern Asia countries, one of which is Indonesia, where highly-fashionable women partially wear their hijab, letting their bust adrift, even in the eyes of the foreigners. This time, these women do not go to war, nor do they “keep themselves inside houses,” rather they drag their feet onto the stage of worldliness. What captivates me the most in bringing this up is that those women seem to tend to cast away the personal generalization about veils as merely a symbol of Islamic traditional attributes, turning it into a fashion icon that does not whatsoever signify their spiritualities. Knowing that, I should remind you, Indonesia is one of the populously- Moslem countries in the world, such phenomena needs, indeed, a special highlight, specifically when related to Fanon’s case. Julia Suryakusuma, in her article “A Bra Storm in a D-cup” in The Jakarta Post, coins this type of clothing deviation as jilboobs, asserting that the Moslem tradition being well constructed as a symbol to limit the perception between men and women, has instead become one’s crucial element for their own illusory pageant against other women. She also discusses that while these women acknowledge their religious beliefs by modestly throwing a piece of cloth on their head, but they, too, want to be recognized as women from its primordial necessities, which is beauty. What I want to underline here is that these women treating themselves as “trophy” creatures admittedly indicates a unique form of a certain society. Fanon’s exclaim upon this society’s uniqueness refers not only to the disparity in binary but also to the multibinary—that is, the complex fusion from a single woman’s, or any other gendered entity’s, point of views. But does this mean that they are colonizing themselves?
I am not saying, however, that the jilboobers, like Algeriennes, do not make errands for resistance against the settlers—in any possible meaning. Truthfully, most of those women

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also have a dream of maintaining their “queenism” from civic, sexual harrassment or any other mortification. They want to claim that they are no longer the “abject of humiliation.” It is obvious, additionally, in the case of the jilboobers’, that they intend to come apace and let the others look out to (or manipulate?) them, prevalently overriding the idea of abjectivity, whilst at once, notwithstanding, discreetly humiliated. On the other hand, in The Wretched of the Earth, exceptionally in the last chapter, Fanon has described several cases regarding how Algerian women and children are positioned as soldiers without protest. More ironically, in one gravest example, Fanon jotted down a tremendously moving narrative about a former taxi driver joining a branch of Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) named B, whose wife was both tortured and raped by the French soldier because his family was left unattended. This is, in fact, relevant to what Fanon termed as “double deflowering,” in which the women encounter twofold deprivation of both her womanhood and humanity simultaneously. Up to this point, I could temporarily infer that there lies a multi-faceted spectrum of how the colonialization in Algeria is carried out, consisting of three layers: on the surface, we could see the Algeriennes without the veil, below it they with the veil, and beneath it they being raped. If, and only if, by “stranding their hair, liberating their body from the traditional embrace of the haïk, and offering their faces” to the European themselves already mean “rape” or, as Fanon expressed it, “a negative expression” of the Algerian denying herself and accepting the rape of the colonizer, then what would the “rape” on the lowest structure indicate? It would mean, if I may say, the ultimate rape of The Raped. What Fanon called as double now has been changed to “triple,” or even “multiple”, deflowering.
In addition, the concept of manicheanism in the case above is similar to the Mortimer’s intriguing elaboration on Muslim women showing up to public. She postulates:
If a Muslim woman is to be neither seen nor heard in public and divulges private matters, revealing in public the secret world, neither men nor women should ever reveal, she is, in effect, involved in a double transgression. (1997: 102)
One certain thing from her statement to be underlined is its last phrase: a double transgression. Halberstam’s notorious remark “we are all transgenders” meaning that by being a transgender, one transcends from her “facticity” and shape another one to complete her self, as a matter of fact, needs to be brought up in this circumstance. Simply put, if one transgression already indicates a doubleness, then what about double transgression? Does this

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mean that the women are undergoing deviation towards the “public” or “the settlers”, and are ignoring the fact that they are being “raped” or “colonized”? If the women to whom Mortimer refers here is similar to the veiled women I have been discussing earlier, it would be, if I could say, wise, then, to treat the former in the “other end” of the axiomatics, in the same position which the Algeriennes have been thriving. From this standpoint, I should, of course, remind you the Fanon’s formula of the balancing discourse: terror and counterterror. It would be fairly unjust to claim that the double transgression only works on the women’s side, while the idea of becoming transgenders works for everyone, apart from whatever gender with which they are born. Simply put, only if the women and men are put on the same end with the supposed proportion, will the axiomatics, and thus Fanon’s formula, be complicit and well-adjusted. In other words, both Algeria and France are pursuing their own perseverance to resist in order to ‘colonize’ each other. McCormack concludes this point of view by stating:
Resistance ought not to be simply limited to political activism while exiled, or upon return, but in a new “home”, in the very process of securing a place in a new homeland. (2013: 8)
It is not, henceforth, a matter of the voice: whose voice is the more louder than the other, it is also not a matter of presence/absence, knowing that what is absence in itself does not necessarily mean that it is inferior. Instead, the two elements co-exist and complete each other, meaning that each of which is as same strengthening. The settler’s, either Algeria or France, logic is, Fanon continues, “implacable and one is only staggered by the counter-logic visible in the behaviour of the native insofar as one has not clearly understood beforehand the mechanisms of the settler’s ideas” (1959: 87). Neither side is really powerful or weak. Nor is it neutral, for claiming so will be problematic.
Another sign of demarcation in Fanon’s “Algerian Unveiled” is evident in his latent juxtaposition between France and Algier as, respectively, the parent (the older) and the child (the younger). From this point of view, it is asserted that the parents are much “more aggressive” in thinking ways and arranging manoeuvres while children are in physical activities. Such discrepancy at the same time also limits the chance for each to “speak and aspire their dreams,” which I believe that is the principal reason why McCormack puts forward his proposal on “parents” and “children” to enhance Fanon’s stance. He pinpoints, “’autant les parents se sont tu...autant le fils aujourd’hui se rebellent’ [the more the parents have not

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talked, the more the son today rebels].” Such statement indeed supports Fanon’s clarification that the child, deemed as the “weaker” one, would “tire out [the settler’s] adversaries until they are sick of him. It is the tactic that the colonized side will likely to suspend the settler’s “frenzy” just to exhaust them from the act of colonizing. Relating this to the case of the veil, the women being “under” their veils, although depicted as miserable beings, probably are laughing on the foolishness of the Europeans who want to take away their identities. “One [always] wonders what they are hiding.”
In conclusion, not only is it nowadays that veils are no longer perceived as a Muslimah’s traditional attribute but also back then, in 1950s, that they became the deadly secret weapons for the people of Algeria to resist upon their political stance and even national identities. Moreover, the demarcation between, literally and metaphorically, men and women by the veil indeed fortifies the fact that there was, and is, no such thing as neutrality in any context. Such absence stems from the idea of dualism in the men/women axiomatics that will always uphold its own moves and countermoves. This balance, nonetheless, remains a bleeding tug of war between the colonizer and the colonized in terms of interest-claiming and identity-shaping. What should be noted here is that both countries persevered, and potentially still are, to seize their independence by being polite to each other, while deep down inside, making fun of the other.
Works Cited
Fanon, Frantz 1959. "Algerian Unveiled". In Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism (pp. 42-45). New York: Grove Press.
Fanon, Frantz. 1961. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.
Lloyd, Catherine. 1999. "Organising Across Borders: Algerian Women's Associations in a Period of Conflict". Review of African Political Economy, p. 479.
McCormack, Jo. 2013. "Memory and Exile: Contemporary France and the Algerian War (1954- 1962)". Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, p. 1-8.
Mortimer, Mildred. 1997. "Assia's Djebar's Algerian Quartet: A Study in Fragmented Autobiography". Research in African Literatures, p. 102.

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T.S.Allen. (2014). "David Galula, Frantz Fanon, and the Imperfect Lessons of the Algerian War". Small Wars Journal, p. 1-14.
Turshen, Meredith. 2002. "Algerian Women in the Liberation Struggle and the Civil War: From Active Participants to Passive Victims". Social Research ProQuest, p. 889.