On an early morning in spring, my dog and I leave our house built against the Arab wall and walk down the narrow street in the direction of the Atlantic beach. We do the same walks every day:
- in the morning: we pass by the harbour and its 3m tall fences, then arrive to the small one-way road to Isla de las Palomas. the breath-taking place where the Atlantic and the Mediterranean meet (their waters of different colours, different tastes and different temperatures). We continue across the 11km long Los Lances beach, on the Atlantic side. If the Levante wind blows (the wind from the East), the beach is taken over by kite surfers and windsurfers. If it doesn’t, we observe the calm sea and the sailors fishing tuna according to the Phoenician technique of almadraba. Municipal police bike back and forth. Border police drive their cars parallel to the beach. National police just seem to appear out of nowhere.
- In the evening: we walk up to the old medina and pass through the “Christian” castle of Guzman el Bueno to access the upper town, where bored teenagers smoke pot in the neomudejar library park. We arrive at the Miramar square, facing Gibraltar straight. As the sun sets, the mount Musa in Morocco, becomes redder and redder. As the evening darkens, house lights are turned on in the Moroccan and Spanish side, maybe in a light signal conversation. When the night finally falls, the dark sky is illuminated by Tangiers, the biggest city around.
In this presentation, I discuss Sara Ahmed’s chapter “The Orient and Other Others” in Queer Phenomenologies, through my own observations of the Spanish town of Tarifa, where I stayed while conducting research on the South Mediterranean crossing.
Tarifa is an excellent example of Ahmed’s thesis. Long before reading Ahmed’s text and just by walking through its streets, I was struck by the institutional efforts to reinforce European identity and distance Arab Muslim identity. At the same time, while Arab bodies are pushed away, Arab domesticated cultural presence as well as geographical proximity are reminded through restaurant names, menus, clothing stores, guided visits, tourist memorabilia shops, most businesses owned by locals making a living from Northern European tourists.
For Ahmed, geography, institutions and history, which she often refers to as genealogy, are orientation devices that can be used and manipulated to create the notions of “us” against “them” and reproduce “whiteness”. This statement follows Said’s argument that both geography and history are socially constructed and therefore may be analyzed as an ideological discourse of power. In my presentation I use the data collected from my on-site observations to investigate how that discourse manifests through “space”, including geographical position, direction, movement and urban planning.
Before continuing, I want to briefly mention what I have left aside. I will not be talking about the most powerful institution of whiteness in the region: FRONTEX, the EU Border Agency. Frontex presence is insidious and it permeates all the other institutions in the town. Nevertheless, like white supremacy itself, it is not visible to the eye. Because I have chosen to focus on my observations I will not be discussing FRONTEX. I will not be discussing either the thousands of migrants crossing from Morocco to Spain because that part of my research was not done in Tarifa. Last but not least, my presentation focuses on the construction of the Arab culture and Muslim body as the “other” but it does not account for the specific processes of racism, violence and erasure against South Saharian black migrants, who are the majority attempting the South Mediterranean crossing. An analysis of anti-black racist strategies will demand an across border research on how Moroccan and Spanish authorities collaborate with each other, finding commonalities and depicting South Saharian migrants as the “stranger danger”. This analysis is outside my scope but in my mind.
Orientation Towards Morocco: creating the Other. POSTCARDS
While I was in Tarifa I started collecting postcards of the town. I was attracted to them because they rarely show Tarifa. In Tarifa, postcards show Morocco, that “other” in the permanent horizon. What does it mean that the image the town gives of itself is its “orientation towards” Morocco? And, following Ahmed’s reflection, what is then the town “orientated around”? In her chapter “The Orient and Other Others”, Sara Ahmed, adhering to Edward Said’s analysis of the Orient, states that “"...the Occident coheres as that which we are organized around through the very direction of our gaze toward the Orient." (italics in text, 116). I believe therefore that these postcards are visual demonstrations of the process of orientalism: they do not only “gaze” at the “other” but they position the “table”, the point of view from which we are gazing, in Europe, which extends behind us, the observer, with its history, its values and its whiteness. According to Ahmed, “The world comes to be seen as orientated “around” the Occident, through the very orientation of the gaze toward the Orient.”
Before further analyzing this process, it is important to specify the use of the term “Orient” in the context of Tarifa. Tarifa is the southmost town in continental Europe, only 14km away from the African continent. For example, if you live in High Park and come to OCAD U on your bike, that is the distance you ride back and forth every day. It is therefore not very far, and from Tarifa you can perfectly see the Moroccan shore, houses, fields, etc. Tangiers, the largest and most cosmopolitan city around, is only 38km away, 1h50 min of transport including the ferry and border crossing. When you are in Tarifa and looking towards Morocco, you are never looking East, you are always looking South, which is another category of phenomenological space. Ahmed writes “certain “directions” are “given to” certain places: they become the East, the West, and so on.” (113) which actually implies that these certain places do not need to occupy these geographical directions to be considered the East nor the West. In this particular example, Morocco is the Orient and Tarifa the Occident even though that is not their geographical position. As well, Morocco is the South and Africa, while Tarifa is the North and Europe. These other ontological categories are important in understanding how the line of whiteness is reinforced in Tarifa, as the West in this case, is also the North and European.
Ahmed reminds us in her introduction to Queer Phenomenologies that establishing geographical locations require a social agreement on how to measure space and time, which implies that locations are socially constructed and that “the social dependence upon agreed measures tells us more about the social than it does about space.” (xiii). What happens with the devices and methods we use to depict space like cartography and maps? In his analysis on cartography as a tool of colonization used by the Spanish in Latin America, Raymond B. Craib states that “maps must be understood as social constructions laden with value, as cultural and class productions that serve interests, express intentions, and naturalize a particular ideological position” (13). Craib also reminds us that because maps are perceived as objective and neutral they also serve to establish a dominant discourse of self-representation as “true” or objective. With the intention of analyzing this discourse, I visited the Tourist Office in Tarifa and asked for as many different free maps as possible to see what image is the town offering of itself to tourists. A young handsome Northern European man welcomed me and informed me, in terrible Spanish that, while they did not publish maps in Arabic, they did in English, French, German and some Scandinavian Languages. This performative relation around the map: who gives the map who receives the map, equally participates in the reinforcement of a dominant discourse, that of the line of whiteness.
In his position as the Tourist officer, the handsome Northern European acts as an agent of the institutional power and discourse. He is the giver of the map and the giver of whiteness. Ahmed states that “recruitment functions as a technology for the reproduction of whiteness" (133). This explains why, in a region consumed by youth unemployment, someone “whiter” and more “European” because “Northener” is hired by a public institution even with a low level of the local language. This institution is certainly “invested in the line of whiteness” (124) more than in the economical survival of its inhabitants.
The receivers of the maps, British, French, German, Scandinavians are as well “whiter”, Northener and more European. Therefore the line of whiteness stretches from the hands of the giver to those of the receivers and becomes stronger and straighter with each exchange. But, I am more interested in the non-receivers: the Arabic-speaking visitors from Morocco who in order to access the map, the space, have to use one of the languages of the white colonizers: French or Spanish. If there is no map given to Arabic-speakers is because the direction of the movement “towards” is always from “here” to “there”, therefore unidirectional. The “Other” as a visitor is not considered, which is shocking seeing the quantity of Moroccan tourists arriving every day in Tarifa. In contrast, European tourists are encouraged to visit Tangiers for the day and send postcards of Tarifa showing Morocco. This unidirectional movement is, using Said”s words a “configurations of power” (5) and cannot be reversed because as Ahmed argues "...the making of “the Orient” is an exercise of power: the Orient is made oriental as a submission to the authority of the Occident”(114). The “orientation towards” is never reciprocal because it necessitates submission. The “other” cannot be understood as a tourist, an equal with agency to cross the border from “there” to “here”, they can only be perceived as a migrant and therefore, submitted to the institutions of arrest.
Institutions invested in the line of whiteness
In “Orientalism”, Said reminds us of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony as the dominant ideology, and how this hegemony is reinforced through two strategies: the political society that imposes the ideology and the civil society where ideas are influenced through consent (6). I believe both strategies are set in place in Tarifa to control non-white bodies: the first one corresponds to the institutions of arrest (police, border and detention centre) and the second to establishments dealing with biopower (restaurants, religious sites, cemetery).
According to the Open Society Institute “Spanish police forces habitually carry out massive identity checks and raids on the basis of race or ethnicity, often in areas with high concentrations of foreigners”. For a small town of 18,000 inhabitants (many of them non permanent) Tarifa has a shocking number of different police bodies: border agents, municipal police, national police, immigration police, as well as an impressive number of walls and fences: the Arab wall, the harbour fence, etc. Police agencies, border controls, detention centres, fences are all devices of arrest committed to detaining or stopping those bodies not fitting into the straight line of whiteness and reminding them of the impossibility to ever fit into this line. “Stopping is therefore a political economy that is distributed unevenly between others, and it is also an affective economy that leaves its impressions, affecting the bodies that are subject to its address." As the Open Society Institute reports demonstrate, detention due to racial profiling are “habitual” in Spain. Ahmed points out that “we can describe whiteness as a bad habit” and goes on to specify that “Habits […] do not just involve the repetition of “tending toward,” but also involve the incorporation of that which is “tended toward” into the body.” (131). In this case we have at least two bodies involved, the one who arrest “habitually” and the one who is arrested “habitually”. Ahmed reminds us that the process of inhabiting the world, or feeling at home, is “an effect of the habitual”. The body who arrests is the one who feels at home while the one arrested is constantly “out of place”. This dynamic of in and out, of around and towards is a mechanism utilize by the white institution "When we describe an institution as “being” white, we are pointing to how institutional spaces are shaped by the proximity of some bodies and not others: white bodies gather and cohere to form the edges of such spaces." (132) The white space is therefore the one where white bodies feel at home.
The white space is the one being guarded by the white institutions of arrest, but this is not the only strategy to keep non-white bodies away. Going back to Gramci’s strategies of hegemony, the second set of domineering tools are those of civil society influenced by consent. I argue that these correspond to what Foucault describes as Biopolitics in that bodies are supervised “through an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls”. I believe that in Tarifa, these strategies serve to control and reject specifically the Muslim body. For example, while every weekend Moroccan tourists arrive by ferry, there is no Halal restaurant in town nor one single stand in the public market serving Halal produce. Furthermore, the closest mosque is situated in Algeciras, 23km away and Muslim burials are no longer performed in the public cemetery. Instead, Muslim bodies found at sea are piled up in the same grave that contains the corpses of those assassinated during Franco dictatorship. While these strategies of rejection may temporarily affect the Muslim tourist, the violently impact the Muslim community in the region that are continuously made feel “not at home” and non-existent within the white Christian space.
Rewriting Muslim History
This Christian space is created as well through an astonishing retelling of Arab Muslim history. The town of Tarifa was named after Tarif ibn Malik, who was the first Muslim general to enter the Iberian Peninsula in 711. The Arabs built the wall, the medina or downtown and the commercial harbour, as well as promoting the fishing and agriculture industries still in place. The Arab control over the town ended in 1294 when Guzman el Bueno conquered the town. Now, I do not expect anyone here to know who Guzman el Bueno was, other than we share the same family name, but just to sum up Guzman el Bueno is a legendary figure of Christian Spain, the “reconqueror” warrior of Christianity.
Ahmed reminds us that “genealogy itself could be understood as a straightening device” (125) for whiteness, and whiteness, as we have seen, expresses itself through the space we can reach into as well as how our bodies inhabit that space. I propose that one way that this could be translated for history is in the field of urban planning: how are our streets designed, how are our bodies considered, what are our streets named? In Tarifa, Tarif ibn Malik has been given a who-knows-where street in the new part of town, never visited by tourists and mainly never “inhabited” by anyone. Guzman el Bueno, on the other hand, has his own castle downtown, opened for tourist and school visits. Large canons were brought in in 1800 and are still pointing towards Morocco.
Ahmed states “If history is made “out of” what is passed down, as the conditions in which we live, then history is made out of what is given not only in the sense of that which is “always already” there, before our own arrival, but in the active sense of the gift: history is a gift given that, when given, is received.” But what happens then in the cases where genealogy or history questions the line of whiteness? As Said states history is ideologically constructed, and therefore it can be rewritten. Guzman el Bueno castle was in fact built by Abderraman III, who also built the Cordoba mosque, and Guzman himself may have been according to some historical sources, an Arab Muslim soldier from Morocco, who took over Tarifa for political power and financial gain.
In her chapter, Ahmed states "Too much proximity with others, we might say, could threaten the reproduction of whiteness as a bodily or social attribute”. 14km is certainly a relation of geographical proximity to which we can add 900 years of historical proximity, from 711 to 1617, year of the eviction of the Moors. This proximity qualifies Tarifa as a “contact zone” that Ahmed defines as “a space of contact between cultures that is also where bodies encounter other bodies”.
The “other” is therefore very close in Tarifa which may explain, but not justify, the institutional efforts to reproduce the line of whiteness. Proximity being perceived as a threat or potential bending of the line, Tarifa needs to present itself whiter, northerner, more European in order to preserve its position and continue to feel at home.