Chiasmus and Après-Coup: Andalusia as Trauma in Rachid Boudjedra's La Prise De Gibraltar

Critical readings of Rachid Boudjedra's 1986 novel La Prise de Gibraltar have invariably emphasised the text's fictionalisation of history and its debunking of foundational myths. Yet the novel's reliance on the mythopoetic trope of al-Andalus has surprisingly received little attention. This article restores the mythical recording and affective resignification of Tariq Ibn Ziyad's 711 Andalusian conquest to the core of the novel's take on historicity. Abdelkebir Khatibi's reflections on the trope of al-Andalus have taught us that all engagements with the Andalusian past bear the indelible mark of trauma. Building on Khatibi's concept of al-Andalus as 'traumatic chiasmus', I trace the deep-time resonance of Tariq Ibn Ziyad's conquest of Spain through its juxtaposition with the novel's second traumatic episode - the women's insurrection against the French in Constantine in 1955, an event that indirectly causes the narrator Tarik's post-traumatic thyroid-related obesity. Beyond this bodily manifestation, I argue that the novel stages a post-traumatic form of historical consciousness rooted in the wound (trauma in Greek) constituted by the conquest of Gibraltar as 'phantasme central' (92). This wounded mode of historical existence produces a meandering aesthetics inflecting Boudjedra's historiographical model - a mode of writing-in-mourning, whose recording of the past is remarkable for eluding the historical event. Instead favouring the retrospective, affective vision of après-coup (Jean Laplanche), Boudjedra delineates a reflective apprehension of history. This vision hinges on the repetitive concatenation of moments of trauma, which excavates the intrinsic violence of myth and its mystifying ends; it also complicates postcolonial incarnations of time and historical existence.