Shades of the Prison House
I wrote this essay in April, 1987, while a junior in college. It was my first publication — in a student literary magazine.
“Descended from a Berber tribe, the Berbers themselves do not recognize me as one of their own, because I am Jewish not Muslim, a townsman not a highlander; were that my name was the exact one of the Italian painter, the Italians would still not embrace me, because I’m an African, not a European. I will always be Alexandre Mordekhai Benilouche: a native in a colonial country, a Jew amid global anti-Semitism, an African in a world dominated by Europe.”
— Albert Memmi, Pilar of Salt (1955)
https://www.jewthink.org/2021/02/23/albert-memmi/
As a child, I taunted my parents by saying that didn’t’ feel I had a religion, to which they would turn to one another with concerned the-boy-feels-isolated glances, then turn back to me and say “No, no. You have two religions, not just one.” Two religions, no religions … same difference. As long as I was free.
My sister and I grew up going to Church at Christmas and celebrating YomKippur in the Fall and/or Passover in the Spring; we both went first to French school (the French International School of Washington) then to American School. Yet the fusion of cultures and religions was an imperfect one. In my neighborhood I was a Frenchie, but at the French school I was among the few who didn’t think that footballs were round. I didn’t quite make it as a young Jew — my sister recalls thatduring a discussion at one of the few Saturday school sessions I attended, I suggested that we discuss what we’d each gotten for Christmas. At the same time, Church always had a false-teeth-in-murky-water feel to it for me — too much talk of death. I ended up feeling Jewish only around relatively devout Christians, and Christian only among relatively conservative Jews; American when around French people, and French around Americans.
Though my parents encouraged my sister and me to embrace both Judaism and Christianity, both French and American cultures, what my sister and I were exposed to was not what they had grown up with, not what they associated with their heritage. Joining friends for a seder at Passover, many of the songs we sang and the dishes we ate, being of European origin, were unfamiliar to my mother who was born of a Tunisian Sephardic (North African) Jewish family and raised in Tunis. At Christmas, we went to a nearby Episcopalian church whose ornate decorations were unlike those found in the midwestern Lutheran churches in which my father spent many a Sunday of his youth.
Jews told me that by Jewish law I’m Jewish, but I took the invitation to be a trap. I refused to have my position in society — as a Jew, or Christian be determined from my blood. I wantedto embrace my Jewish and Christian heritages, without being either a “Jew” or a “Christian”.
As a senior in high school I thought of applying to college as an Afro-American, not to cash-in on “affirmative action benefits,” but to escape a skin-determined identity which I had not chosen. My mother is North African, I reasoned, therefore I am an African-American: I wanted the freedom to have light skinwithout being “White”.
Beware of linking identity to position, I thought to myself. Beware of defining a people, any people, as a Race based on religious faith, or family name, or skin color, or heritage or birthplace. Religious faith, skin color, heritage, name and birthplace are matters of personal identity; Race, Creed, and Class, and Nationality are political and economic positions in society. Linking religious faith, skin color, heritage, and birthplace to Class, Creed, Race, and Nationality one creates a world of rich Jews, poor Blacks, and oh-so-successful Asians…
I began to understand why it was ridiculous for me to believethat I am entitled to the status of an “Afro-American”. Being”Afro-American” is not a matter of being descended of an African people: that my mother was born in Tunisia is irrelevant. “Afro-American” is a position in American society, and it is not my position.
I began to understand the importance of directionality in the relation between identity and position: one feels excluded because one is part of an excluded group (one moves from position to identity), and one is part of an excluded group because one feels excluded (one moves from identity to position). Yet to move from position to identity leads to masochism, to move from identity to position leads to self-affirmation; the former leads to hatred, the latter to respect; the former is imprisonment, the latter liberation. From internal prison-houses emerge external prison houses — masochism is the most primary of all addictions. So liberation begins with empowerment, embracing one’s own voice, one’s own face and body, memories and heritage, grand-parents’ recollections of great-grandparents, words of a mother’s friend. We move only then to define our positions for ourselves, rather than be defined by them …
I began to read the works of a schoolmate of my mother’s, the Tunisian author Albert Memmi. My mother and Memmi both went to high school in Tunis at the lycée of the Alliance Israelite Universelle an organization of French Jews devoted to the propagation of French culture among the Sephardim — and went to university together in Paris. Under Muslim rule, Jews had been largely excluded from public life — as non-Muslims they were non citizens (dhimmi). Consequently, under French rule, most Tunisian Jews — my mother and Memmi included — welcomed French colonial rule, adopting French customs, wearing French clothes, and going to French schools run by the Alliance Israelite. Others attacked assimilation:· “Alliance Israelite Universelle, you must die… What you want is not emancipation of the Jews, but their assimilation and suicide.”
What you want is not emancipation for the half-breeds, but their assimilation and suicide… In the portrait of Jews in Tunisia, I began to see my own reflection: to be both colonizer and colonized is to be neither, to be both Jewish and Christian is to be neither, to be both American and French is to be neither. As soon as I say to myself that because I feel excluded, because of my skin, my blood and my heritage, my identity, I will work to change my position, and affirm those parts of my heritage which express that identity, I begin to be liberated, now as an adult.
“Keep the focus on the action, not the institution,” I remind myself, “don’t confuse the vehicle with the objective; all cocoons are temporary and disappear.” [5]
Don’t confuse believing with being a Believer. All positions are temporary and disappear.
[5] Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters.
