Lacanian selfhood, parental figures, and trauma Between Two Worlds

Lacanian Selfhood, Parental Figures, and Trauma in Zainab Salbi’s Between Two Worlds Wisam Khalid Abdul-Jabbar Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, Volume 11, Number 2, July 2015, pp. 161-178 (Article) Published by Duke University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/jmw/summary/v011/11.2.abdul-jabbar.html Access provided by The University of Alberta (9 Jul 2015 02:38 GMT) Lacanian Selfhood, Parental Figures, and Trauma in Zainab Salbi’s Between Two Worlds WISAM KHALID ABDUL-JABBAR A B S T R A C T This article explores Zainab Salbi’s autobiography, Between Two Worlds (2005), using a Lacanian analysis. The Lacanian reading of the early Mirror Stage of ego formation can be extended to better understand Salbi’s narration of her childhood and how this world of anticipation is crushed by a Symbolic world that comes to be dominated by Saddam Hussein and the traumatic eruptions of the Real. The article suggests that by introducing the figure of the mother as le grand autre, Salbi’s autobiography subverts the typical conceptualization of the Lacanian Symbolic order, which is dominated by the patriarchal signifier. I also argue that Saddam, an intrusive Name-of-the-Father, validates the biographical endeavor and lures the narrative discourse into being. KEYWORDS Jacques Lacan, Zainab Salbi, Saddam Hussein, trauma, autobiography T his article uses Lacanian theory to examine Zainab Salbi’s autobiography, Between Two Worlds: Escape from Tyranny; Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam, published in 2005 and written in English with Laurie Becklund.1 Salbi is a US citizen who was born in Baghdad in 1969. She moved to the United States as a nineteen-year-old through an arranged marriage. She is a writer, a social activist, and founder and president of Women for Women International, which is dedicated to helping women survivors of war. On one level Salbi’s autobiography is a narrative account about a woman who feels entrapped between the two worlds of Iraq and the United States. I use Jacques Lacan’s work to argue that the text also dramatizes how the symbolic world, represented by the patriarchal presence of Saddam Hussein, JMEWS • Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies • 11:2 • July 2015 DOI 10.1215/15525864-2886523 • © 2015 by the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies 161 JMEWS • Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies • 11:2 July 2015 162 intrudes on Salbi’s world. Equally important, the influential mother figure in the autobiography blurs the distinction between the Imaginary and the Symbolic orders, as Salbi’s mother exercises influence in them until she is occluded by Saddam. The autobiography largely focuses on Salbi’s childhood in Iraq. She narrates the impact of her father becoming Saddam’s private pilot when she was eleven years old. She explains that her mother taught her survival skills, such as wearing a convincing fake smile and erasing certain memories, as she grew up in the presidential circle. Salbi also discusses her struggles with an abusive husband, her adoration of an ailing mother who suffers from “a progressive neurological nightmare” (BTW, 243), her happy second marriage, and the organization she founded.2 Being the daughter of Saddam’s private pilot dramatically influenced her upbringing, especially because the president became a family “friend.” She was sent away to remove her from the presidential gaze. Autobiography has a long history in the Arab literary tradition, dating as far back as the ninth century (Reynolds 2001, 2). Women writers have strived to generate works that would become part of that tradition. Fadia Faqir (1998, 8) points out that Arab women persistently articulate their “individual identity” and “position in history” in their writings. Arab women transcend their position as “subjects,” especially “when the authorial ‘I’ links the act of writing biography to individual and collective identity” (Booth 2001, xvi). For many, writing autobiography in English “becomes a sign of liberation from traditional values and restrictions” (Nash 2007, 154). Salbi captures this sense of freedom especially in the chapter “Becoming Zainab,” when she decides to move beyond the “pilot’s daughter I had been [and] the arranged marriage I had escaped” (BTW, 199). Lacan offers a subtle and sophisticated framework for analyzing Salbi’s work. Psychoanalytic theories, including Lacanian, are of increasing interest to Arab intellectuals. Lilia Labidi (2002, 84) argues that the “debate in the Arab world concerning psychoanalysis . . . goes beyond the narrow confines of specialists . . . and [is] more evident among women than among men.” Arab women have shown profound interest in this area: “They have given themselves over to the study of psychology and psychiatry and the feminization of these fields.” Arab writers such as “Muhammad Arkoun, Abdallah Laroui, Nawal Saadawi, and Fatima Mernissi, among others . . . call for a psychoanalysis of society” to contribute to “the theory of the self as the subject of civilization” (ibid., 87). Lamia Ben Youssef Zayzafoon (2005, 74) has examined “Lacan’s metaphor of the ‘veiled phallus’ in view of those discourses produced on Algerian women’s participation in guerilla warfare at the moment of decolonization.” In Trials of Arab Modernity: Literary Affects and the New Political Modernity (2013), Tarek El-Ariss discusses Rifaʾa al-Tahtawi’s poetry in light of Lacan’s (1977, 4) model of the Mirror Stage. Unity, Identification, and Fragmentation To explain “the trajectory from infant to adult,” Lacan introduces three concepts: “need, demand, and desire—that roughly correspond to three phases of development, or three fields in which humans develop—the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic” (Klages 2006, 76). The Real describes the periods before the Imaginary and the Symbolic, before language and sociality. Logic and language cannot explain it. It is inexplicable, elusive, and ready to erupt the Symbolic world in experiences of trauma: “The Real expects nothing, especially not of the Subject, as it expects nothing of speech. But it is there, identical to its own existence, a noise in which one can hear everything, ready to submerge with its splinters what the reality principle has built under the name of external world” (Bailly 2009, 97). The Real is “repressed [and] functions unconsciously, intruding into our Symbolic reality in the form of need” (Homer 2005, 82–83). In Salbi’s account, eruptions of the Real are abundant. Lacan explains how the infant forms the ego through the illusion of a unified conscious self that he or she identifies with an image in the “Imaginary” order. The desire to identify and materialize that characterizes the Imaginary order initiates the ego into being through the “Mirror Stage,” which Lacan (1977, 4) describes as “a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation—and which manufactures for all the subject [ego], caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented bodyimage to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic.” The Imaginary is a phase that objectifies completeness and negates absence, deficiency, and want. The Imaginary world is a condition in which the infant becomes aware of his or her bodily functions and mobility and develops a sense of the external world. Lacan first introduced the Mirror Stage at the International Congress of Psychoanalysis at Marienbad, Czech Republic, in 1936. Later he developed it in relation to his concepts of Self and Other at the Sixteenth International Congress of ABDUL-JABBAR • Lacanian Selfhood, Parental Figures, and Trauma A Lacanian reading of an autobiographical text such as Salbi’s revisits a well-grounded correlation between narration (language) and psychoanalysis: “Narration . . . repeats and represents unconscious discourse in the only way the unconscious can be known: as a sequence of opportunities for linguistic substitution and (re)combination” (Davis, Flieger, and Mehlman 1983, 853). Language and the unconscious are instrumental to understanding autobiographical texts, which are self-expository and self-conflicting. Ben Stolzfus (1996, 2–3) points out that literature, like the unconscious, constitutes language: “If we accept the premise that the unconscious is structured like a language, then literature contains repressed material that engenders a never-ending dialogue with the Other—a fictitious self made up of the confluence of the Imaginary and the Symbolic.” From a Lacanian perspective, the writing subject is ironically “fenced in by language” and therefore “primordially divided” (Benstock 1988, 16). 163 JMEWS • Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies • 11:2 July 2015 Psychoanalysis in Zurich in 1949. For Lacan, the role of the mother is unquestionably significant, because she introduces the infant to the mirror: “She talks to the child, often guiding it; ‘Look, who is that in the mirror?’ . . . Often, the mother confirms the baby’s discovery in a form that uses its name: ‘That’s John in the mirror!’—a formation that suggests the image in the mirror is a double, another baby, and reinforces the baby’s own perception of itself as an object” (Bailly 2009, 37). On another occasion, Lacan assumes that “the mother’s gaze is the child’s first mirror; the child’s identity or notion of itself as a whole being is first formed in that gaze” (ibid.). The child experiences an image of himself or herself as complete,which gives the illusion of mastery. The mother provides an act of self-recognition as the infant sees a complete “I-Ideal” of himself or herself in the mother’s face, which “situates the agency of the ego” (Lacan 1977, 2). In other words, the Imaginary world is characterized by the “formation of the Ego through the identification with an image of the self ” (Homer 2005, 18). The mother image initiates the Mirror Stage and provides the seed for the formation of the ego: “At the heart of Lacan’s theory and his understanding of the human psyche are lack and fragmentation. All of us have longings for love, for physical pleasure, and for countless objects, but nothing can fulfill our desire to return to the imaginary order and be at one with our mother. This fragmentation, or divided self, concerns Lacan when he examines a literary text” (Bressler 2003, 136). The human being dwelling in the Imaginary is unaware of the fragmentary and transient nature of the inhabited world. To Lacan, the child is deluded in the very act of recognizing himself or herself in the objectified image. Therefore the child’s identification with the “objet a” (which registers desire for whatever the subject lacks) is alienating and ambivalent: Thus, this Gestalt—whose pregnancy should be regarded as bound up with the species, though its motor style remains scarcely recognizable—by those two aspects of its appearance, symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination; it is still pregnant with the correspondences that unite the I with the statue in which man projects himself, with the phantoms that dominate him, or with the automaton in which, in an ambiguous relation, the world of his own fabrication tends to find completion. (Lacan 1977, 2) 164 In this sense the child remains beguiled by the pleasant entrapment of the Mirror Stage, a much-desired deceptive reality, since the baby feels fragmented prior to acquiring motor-control skills. The Mirror Stage captures the first time the child thinks of himself or herself as “me.” The ego becomes the product of the “me” and not the “I.” That is, the ego is the product of the subject and not the self, which is quite alienating to the “I.” It is alarming for Lacan that the “I” mistakenly unites itself ABDUL-JABBAR • Lacanian Selfhood, Parental Figures, and Trauma with another object in a process of false identification and the fabricated world seamlessly comes to represent “completion.” This is characteristic of Salbi’s world, as she thinks of her identity as an extension of her mother’s. Salbi speaks of childhood in images of her mother’s body or of herself as a reflection of her mother’s: “Mama was the most raucous and fun to watch. Her body shimmied faster than a tambourine in tight little waves no one else could match” (BTW, 11). Like the Real, the Mirror Stage (stade du miroir) is more than a phase in the child’s mental development. Rather, it is “a stadium (stade) in which the battle of the human subject is permanently being waged” (Bowie 2009, 21), and it has implications for the reading of literary texts. Lacan observes that the image the child forms of himself or herself in this stage of identification largely determines the person the child will be when the Symbolic order impinges on it. The idyllic Imaginary world, with its illusion of unity, is transitory and ends when culture, as part of the Symbolic order, intervenes: “The infant must separate from its mother . . . in order to enter into civilization. That separation entails some kind of loss . . . of the primal sense of unity it originally had” (Klages 2006, 77). The Symbolic world manifests itself in language, laws, and culture. Language is a system in which the signifier determines the subject. Language and law exercise a castrating effect, because they can never be mastered and yet must be accepted for a person to be rendered civil, raising questions as to how this is “castrating.” The presence of the father introduces the child to this Symbolic order. Unlike the Freudian Oedipus complex, which refers to the actual father, Lacan introduces the father as a signifier, which he terms the “Name-of-the-Father,” and marks the Oedipus complex as the initiator of the transition to the Symbolic world and relations between perceptions of self and others. Lacan (1988a, 141) explains the significance of language as a determining factor in the Symbolic order: “It is speech, the symbolic relation, which determines the greater or lesser degree of perfection, of completeness, of approximation, of the imaginary.” The intersubjective aspect of the Imaginary world is now reinvented. “The name-of-the-father is the moment at which subjects are stitched into a wider intersubjective textile, language and linguistically structured legality, the realm of culture. . . . This sews the subject into the symbolic order and this redoubles him as both an imaginary individual and a subject of legal responsibility and social expectation” (Lewis 2008, 57). I use Lacan’s conceptualization of the father as a metaphor for the phallus, a signifier of power and law, to understand Salbi’s relation to her biological father, an employee of the symbolic father Saddam, whom Salbi calls Amo (paternal uncle). The Lacanian term Name-of-the-Father employed here “does not depend on the presence of an actual, literal father. It is so woven into the culture that it will be perceived, regardless of whether the father is around or sets out to interrupt the infant’s desire” (Parker 2008, 128), or the child’s destiny, for the purposes of this article. 165 JMEWS • Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies • 11:2 July 2015 166 As an analogy to ensure that the three realms are not mistaken to function independently, Lacan uses the Borromean knot, “named after an Italian noble family —Borromeo—who used the formula of interlocking rings in their coat of arms as a symbol of strength in unity. . . . It is a configuration in which the structure would fall apart if any one of the three rings was broken” (Bailly 2009, 89). Malcolm Bowie (1991: 91) argues that the Lacanian topology of the Real, Imaginary, and Symbolic “can be used to pinpoint the sources of conflict in all kinds and conditions of men and women, and are available for the study of ordinary mental functioning no less readily than for the treatment of neurosis and psychosis.” Lacanian forms of identification and discord encode Salbi’s autobiography, as the subject attempts to identify herself with an external objet a, through which the drive of fantasy asserts its existence for Lacan. The struggle over a divided self and the influence of the mother are distinctive features of Salbi’s account. In the prologue of Between Two Worlds Salbi establishes a link with the mother in the first line: “I stand on the balcony of the old house with the courtyard on the Tigris where my mother spent her childhood” (BTW, vii). This daughter-to-mother connection continues in the first chapter, which elaborates on the familial link between mother and the motherland: “My mother grew up in a house on the Tigris River that must have been grand then, with its courtyard and sixteen rooms. The house belonged to my grandfather. . . . Mama inherited [it] from him. . . . [She also inherited] a gold coin forged a thousand years ago by Abbasid caliphs who moved the political and cultural center of the Islamic empire from Damascus eastward to Baghdad” (1). Salbi’s desire to emulate her mother connects her to the inheritance of a cultural history, as allegorically implied by the Abbasid gold coin: “I assumed I would wear it when I grew up and became, hopefully, as smart and beautiful as she was. Of course, I also assumed back then that Iraq would always be my home” (BTW, 2). The opening words in the autobiography are “my mother,” which describe the focus of the story to follow. The narrative reflects a strong identification with the object of the mother: “She was a teacher when I was little and when she came home from school she would take a nap on the sofa. . . . She radiated utter peace as she slept. I would squeeze in next to her, take in the slightly sweaty smell of the classroom she brought home with her, and try to make my breaths match hers exactly” (1–2). This identification with her mother is accentuated and unequivocally desired on literal and figurative levels: “I spent many hours driving around with my mother, running errands and shopping, driving to and from school. . . . She kept a busy social calendar then, and in the car was the place I got to spend time with her. She loved Baghdad—she was of Baghdad. . . . What I learned of my heritage, as was true for almost everything else in the first nine years of my life, I learned through her” (2). The mother, in Salbi’s view, functions as more than a protecting and comforting parent. She embodies family and culture at large, which is evocative of the Imaginary order. “The imaginary is like a comfort zone” that resonates with “a sense The Mother as le Grand Autre of the Symbolic Order The infant is dominated by the image of the mother at the age of six to eighteen months, until the counterpart—the image of the father—intrudes. If that complex intrusion fails to take place, then the child suffers some sort of fixation in the Imaginary register. For Lacan, “the imaginary” describes an intersubjective structure of mirrors. It suggests “an implicit ethical imperative to break the mirror, an imperative to disrupt the imaginary in order to reach ‘the symbolic’ . . . which for Lacan is the register of language, social exchange, and radical intersubjectivity” (Gallop 1985, 59). In 1955, to further differentiate between the Imaginary and the Symbolic registers, Lacan introduced le petit autre. This is the small other, which is used interchangeably with objet petit a and contrasts with le grand autre, the Other. In his translator’s note Alan Sheridan points out that “the term [objet petit a] should remain untranslatable, thus acquiring the status of an algebraic sign” (Lacan 1977, xi). The small other is “the other which isn’t another at all, since it is essentially coupled with the ego, in a relationship which is always reflexive, interchangeable” (Lacan 1988b, 321). The objet petit a represents the initiation of a lack that recurs later in life in different shapes and forms. “According to Lacan, during the mirror stage, we come to recognize certain objects as being separate from ourselves, what Lacan calls objet petit a. . . . These objects include eliminated bodily wastes, our mother’s voice and breasts, and our own speech sounds.” In their absence “such objects become symbols of lack for us and this sense of lack will continue to plague us for the rest of our lives” (Bressler 2003, 134). The objet petit a is therefore “inscribed in the imaginary order,” because it is “a reflection and a projection of the ego” (Evans 1996, 135). In the Symbolic order, however, le grand autre “creates and sustains a neverending lack,which Lacan calls desire.” Lacan uses the Freudian concept of castration as “a metaphor for the whole idea of Lack as a structural concept. For Lacan, it isn’t the real father who threatens castration. Rather . . . the father becomes a function of the linguistic structure. The father, rather than being a person . . . , becomes a structuring principle of the Symbolic” (Klages 2006, 83, 84). The Lacanian notion of the father who initiates the Symbolic order (as a signifier that encodes order and law) is helpful for analyzing Salbi’s account of her father. In this case the father ABDUL-JABBAR • Lacanian Selfhood, Parental Figures, and Trauma of oneness or merging with parents, family, friends,with people who share a religion, a homeland, a race, nationality” (Parker 2008, 130). Salbi’s Elysian abode in the motherly realm is short-lived. Very much like the Lacanian Imaginary world, hers is “a world of illusion . . . in which the human being seeks to provide himself or herself with consolation by identifying with chosen fragments of the world, by finding an imagined wholeness of the ego reflected in the seeming wholeness of the perceived thing” (Bowie 1991, 10). 167 JMEWS • Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies • 11:2 July 2015 168 signifies le petit autre, in sharp contrast to her encounter with Saddam, who signifies le grand autre. In Salbi’s case, the father figure, Saddam, holds her imagination, whereas the mother continues to guide her. Does this mean that she is torn in her desire? Does the shift to the Symbolic order entail the dissipation of the objet a mother who was so influential? In Salbi’s life the parental father is associated with the good old times, and his authority dissipates with time. The dominance of the mother image into her adult life, however, blurs the Lacanian distinction between the Imaginary and Symbolic orders. The protective and persistent authority of the mother continues to dictate the tempo of Salbi’s life in culturally acceptable ways and therefore becomes part of the Symbolic order. Salbi describes her mother as a representation of authority and entry into the Symbolic. In contrast, her father is not a distinctively authoritative figure—he was agreeable and gentle and largely absent, as he was always flying passengers to foreign countries. “I sometimes forget how close my father and I were then and how easily he made me laugh. In one photo of us together we are modelling twin dishdashas, long cotton tunics that are worn by both sexes. How many fathers have matching outfits made for them and their two-year-old daughters?” (BTW, 8). The fantastic attribute that she ascribes to her father in fact draws him to the Imaginary rather than the Symbolic register: “Because he was away from home so much, he came to take on, in my mind, qualities of the mythic Santa Claus, another romantic figure in a uniform who flew through the skies bearing gifts. But it was Mama and her friends who showed me what life meant and how it should be lived” (9). This account of how the father dwells in the world of romance and myths while the mother continues to exercise guidance substantiates the argument that the figure of Salbi’s mother transcends her early associations with the Imaginary world and grows into the image of le grand autre, a figure of desire. Salbi’s biological father, in contrast, ultimately recedes into the Imaginary order. Salbi frequently identifies the presence of her mother with the inculcating acts of “showing her what life meant.” The mother later even sends her daughter to the United States through an arranged marriage. Since Lacan equates le grand autre with language and authority, Salbi’s narrative inscribes the figure of her mother in the Symbolic order as le grand autre. Salbi introduces the world of order and law as culture and tradition. “Like all Iraqi children, I was raised to obey my parents, tell the truth, respect my teachers and other adults, and do nothing to dishonour my family. These are complex concepts, but to break any of these rules was essentially ayeb, which means ‘rude’ or ‘discourteous’” (BTW, 40). Salbi’s mother reproduced a family pedagogy centered on the construct of ayeb (shame). Prior to the incursion of the presidential gaze, the continued dominance of the maternal image make it part of the fabric of the Symbolic order in Salbi’s narrative. The most prominent figure continues to be The Name-of-the-Leader: The Dictator as the Lacanian Interposed Subject The intrusion of Saddam into Salbi’s world commences with the beginning of his presidential authority in 1979 and transforms the Symbolic world into one of monstrosity and fear. In Salbi’s account, Saddam interposed his image to dominate schools and other social systems. As father-uncle-leader, his final word was absolute, and unquestionable obedience was compulsory. “All children of Iraq were taught to call him ‘Amo Saddam,’ which means ‘Uncle Saddam.’ . . . Loyalty to Amo Saddam was so instilled in every student in school that it became almost indistinguishable from loyalty to family and to Iraq itself. . . . Everyone was expected to join in an extracurricular activity showing our patriotism” (BTW, 59). Saddam wished to govern not only the country but also the thoughts and desires of its people. His determination to be present in every Iraqi citizen’s house speaks of his intent to dominate the Iraqi unconscious, which is characteristic of the Name-of-the-Father as an intersubjective signifier. Saddam becomes the unspoken presence that speaks through daily horrors. All Iraqis were trapped in this rhetoric of the unconscious versus conscious presence of Saddam, which Lacan (1988b, 89–90) calls ABDUL-JABBAR • Lacanian Selfhood, Parental Figures, and Trauma Salbi’s mother, though Salbi has already entered the stage of language, dance, laughter, and other social signifiers: “Watching these parties from our roof in the arms of my grandmother, my only fear was that I would never live up to the standards my mother had set, never emerge from my shyness to learn to dance like her or laugh with such unadulterated joy” (11). This statement presages events to come. Instances of the mother as the symbol of authority are abundant. Salbi narrates, for instance, how she was reprimanded for mistreating Radya: “Radya was the daughter of a security guard . . . who came to live with us when she was fourteen, a common way of providing income and improving living conditions for poor girls” (BTW, 13). When the young Salbi ordered Radya to bring her lunch and called her a “servant,” her mother restored balance and asserted social justice: “When my mother came home, she scolded me in front of Radya, made me apologize, and gave me my own household duties” (13). The mother continues to exercise a justice standard in a society with deep social class differences. But this maternal Symbolic power is eventually replaced. the discourse of the circuit in which I am integrated. I am one of its links. It is the discourse of my father, for instance, in so far as my father made mistakes which I am condemned to reproduce. . . . I am condemned to reproduce them because I am obliged to pick up again the discourse he bequeathed to me, not simply because I am his son, but because one can’t stop the chain of discourse, and it is precisely my duty to transmit it in its aberrant form to someone else. 169 Salbi speaks of how Saddam’s foreboding presence thwarted her attempts to develop a complete sense of herself as an autonomous individual: Technically, he was my father’s employer. My father was his pilot, a commercial airlines captain Saddam drafted to serve as his personal pilot in the early 1980s. When I was growing up in Iraq, people used to refer to me as the “pilot’s daughter.” I hated that term. I still do. It stole from me my very identity, everything I wanted to be. It defined me in terms of my father and defined him, in turn, by his most infamous passenger: a despot JMEWS • Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies • 11:2 July 2015 millions of Iraqis feared. (BTW, 4) This sense of entrapment in an already framed identity continued as an uphill battle. Saddam’s domineering presence was hard to escape. “He wasn’t related to me or my family by blood, but some of my childhood and virtually all of my teenage weekends were merged with his nonetheless” (3). The presence of Saddam in Salbi’s life, formerly defined by the pleasant company of her parents, is presented as the sinister intrusion of a third party who inscribes his own language and sense of order. This emergence is a signifier in the Lacanian Symbolic register: “The laws of the symbolic intervene as a third party in all human relationships” (Lewis 2008, 57). This Nameof-the-Father notion translates into the presidential gaze of Saddam’s presence overshadowing Salbi’s world. In Salbi’s account, this intrusion is actualized by the oppressor’s presence in their lives and is accentuated through its intimidating impact on the mother: “ When did it all start? I suspect the answer to that question is this: the moment a mother is afraid to answer a young child’s question honestly” (BTW, 6). Salbi refers to two central traumatic rupture events in July 1979 at different points in the autobiography: An announcement came on the car radio saying that Ahmed Hassan Al-Bakr . . . was stepping down from the presidency in favour of his cousin, Vice President Saddam Hussein. I asked about this puzzling new development and got a clear directive from my mother. “Some things aren’t meant for little ears honey,” she said over her shoulder. “Some things that enter one ear need to fly straight out the other. They need to be erased from your memory.” (3) On July 22, 1979—Saddam Hussein made sure his cameramen were there to record the 170 date—my mother was sitting at the kitchen table staring at the screen of our little blackand-white TV. . . . Looking very stern and sad . . . he announced that he had come upon “disloyal” people in the government. . . . After the president had the last of these “traitors” taken into custody . . . the men shifted uncomfortably in their seats. . . . I know I didn’t fully grasp as a nine-year-old that those men were about to face a firing squad. (17) The Uncanny Eruptions of the Real as Trauma Lacan (1977, 167) observes that the Real is uncannily “impossible” to represent: “The language we would use to represent the real evokes our distance from the real. . . . It cannot be explained or described, but only inferred” (Parker 2008, 129). He explains that the Real is “the essential object which isn’t an object any longer, but this something faced with which all words cease and all categories fail, the object of anxiety par excellence” (Lacan 1988b, 164). Trauma is eruption of the Real in the sense that it is resists Symbolic signification (Fink 1995, 92). It is the unspeakable traumatic kernel of the self. The Real as trauma and anxiety infiltrates Salbi’s world through the mysterious and the inexplicable. “So I asked many questions . . . but when I felt my world begin to turn upside down, I couldn’t ask what was wrong. . . . I looked to Mama for an explanation, but the expression on her face told me not to ask” (BTW, 41). When she tells her mother that she knows that Aunt Ishraq and her cousins are being deported to Iran, her mother urges her to push these words into oblivion and never speak about it again: “Well, don’t mention this subject again, not even to your cousins. . . . You must not say anything about this to anyone. Do you understand?” (41). Her mother insists that this subject should not take any verbal form. The fear that the presidential gaze evokes materializes in these inexplicable and unpredictable eruptions of the Real. Salbi attributes the traumatic fits to being part of Saddam’s world, which torments her parents: “After a while, I couldn’t always tell the difference between the people my parents were and the people Amo was making them pretend to be” (BTW, 84). Her mother’s status in Iraq was falsely designated by Saddam’s secret police as “a special file” tying her with non-Iraqi, Iranian roots, which meant possible deportation. The constant threat of deportation and the recurrence of the “special file” are connected to trauma and inevitable return of the Real. The imprisoning outcomes of the Symbolic order under the ruthless rule of Saddam triggers moments that are emotional and indulgent: “‘I feel like a bird in cage,’ Mama kept saying, ‘Let’s get away, let’s go to America!’. . . Then Baba, the voice of logic,would say ABDUL-JABBAR • Lacanian Selfhood, Parental Figures, and Trauma Salbi is not sure whether it was this moment on the TV screen or the news coming from the car radio that caused the trajectory of her life to shift so drastically: “But I felt fear stream out of that small television screen and chill our kitchen, where until that moment I had always felt safe. I remember exactly the look on my mother’s face. I remember her eyes growing very round and fixing hard on the screen. I had never seen that look on her face before, but I recognized it anyway: it was horror” (BTW, 18). It is Salbi’s mother who announces that their life is going to be different. The more Saddam dominates Salbi’s world, the more the mother recedes to backseat influence. I argue that Saddam’s appearance reasserts the Symbolic order as patriarchal authority. 171 JMEWS • Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies • 11:2 July 2015 172 something like ‘You know we can’t just leave, Alia. This is our home. What would we do? Where would we live? Do you think we can afford the same lifestyle if we move?’” (94). Salbi’s mother, once a limitless source of jubilation, falls into depression: “My father would fly away, and I would be left to watch my mother beat her wings against the bars around her, alternately trying to escape her cage and feather her nest” (95). Her father’s situation was not much better in terms of his career. One day Saddam handed him “an official report signed by Kamel [one of Saddam’s cousins]. . . . The report called my father a ‘threat to national security’ because he was both close to Amo and traveled abroad frequently” (BTW, 96). In response to Salbi’s father’s pleas, Saddam voiced his verdict: “‘You have a choice. . . . you can choose my friendship or you can choose to be my pilot.’ . . . I imagined my father, the proud captain of a 747, standing next to Amo, petrified and near tears, completely at his mercy. Baba, who never wanted anything except to fly, chose friendship and survived” (97). The Real infiltrates their lives in such eruptions of terror. In Salbi’s world the Real always resonates as insidious approaching footsteps of Saddam or his men that threaten to change the pace of their lives, breaking through the forced normality of the Symbolic order. Waiting for the unexpected to happen has depressing effects on the parents. “After Baba was forced to choose Amo’s friendship over being his pilot, . . . my father came to seek his escape in drinking as the years went on, and he looked ever more tense and serious” (BTW, 106–7). Salbi’s mother developed a defensive mechanism against the horror stories she heard all the time: “My mother’s way of staying alive under the gaze of the man who caused all these horrors was to shut her mind, and I learned from her example. Thinking was dangerous, so I learned not to think or form an opinion” (119). The mother eventually decides that Saddam is “the Devil in all its meaning. He charms people, he seduces them, and then he harms them’” (119). The mother’s pleas that Salbi stop listening to atrocity stories is a request to suspend language itself. The mother’s interpretation of Saddam as the devil implies his persistent return, like the Real, in different forms. Even as an adult Salbi confesses the inability to speak the name of the enigmatic figure of trauma: “Every instinct in me—survival, loyalty, anger, horror, resentment, guilt, and most of all, fear — conspires to prevent me from speaking Saddam Hussein’s name out loud” (3). Indeed, in exile Salbi had “gone around the world, meeting with victims of war and the awful mass rape the world seems to accept as an inevitable consequence of war. . . . I began encouraging women to break their silence and speak out so their oppressors could be punished. Yet, I have been unable to break my own” (4). To rebuild a Symbolic world, Salbi conquered fears that demanded silence: “I was permitted to remain silent, telling other people’s stories and never my own, hiding in plain sight, ever fearful someone would recognize me someday and say hey, there she is, the pilot’s daughter, the friend of Saddam” (4–5). ABDUL-JABBAR • Lacanian Selfhood, Parental Figures, and Trauma Gift Giving and the Enunciation of Autobiography Saddam nevertheless becomes the enunciator of autobiography, an intrusive Nameof-the-Father that validates the biographical endeavor and lures the narrative discourse into being. Lacan situates the term enunciation outside the realm of “statement.” Statement is the conscious act of speaking, while enunciation is linked to the intention to speak prior to articulation. For Lacan (1977, 316), enunciation is located in the unconscious. In other words, Lacan argues that “the source of speech is not the ego, nor consciousness, but the unconscious; language comes from the Other, and the idea that ‘I’ am master of my discourse is only an illusion” (Evans 1996, 56). The enunciator has a virtual existence in the unconscious of the autobiographer, which dominates beyond the life span of the figure it represents. The symbolic death of Saddam as a leader in 2003 arguably triggered the act of writing. Lacan (1993, 193) asserts the existence of the Name-of-the-Father as an intersubjective signifier: “It’s characteristic of the intersubjective dimension that you have a subject in the real capable of using the signifier as such, that is, to speak, not so as to inform you, but precisely so as to lure you.” The Symbolic order pertains to a “symbolic function” (Lacan 1977, 72), which Lacan draws from the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who proposed that “the social world is structured by certain laws which regulate kinship relations and the exchange of gifts. The concept of the gift, and that of a circuit of exchange, are thus fundamental to Lacan’s concept of the symbolic” (Evans 1996, 203). The gifts received from Saddam in Salbi’s symbolic order are insidious and attached to danger. In her account, her father did not sound happy when he announced that he had received a significant promotion to be the president’s pilot: “‘This is not something that should be talked about outside the family,’ Baba said sternly. . . . This is not something that should go to your head’ ” (BTW, 72). His misgivings resonate with Lacan’s (1977, 46) counsel “for men to learn to fear deceiving words accompanying faithless gifts.” Her father’s promotion and the ensuing introduction of Saddam the employer persistently haunts Salbi. Years later, when Salbi is talking about her university classes and new friends, her father states, “Remember, your friends are your friends because of who your father is” (BTW, 139). No matter how hard she tries, Salbi seems to have a predetermined and predefined sense of self: Just when I was beginning to think there was a chance I could create my own identity, he was stealing it back from me. People liked me at the university, and I thought it was because I was cool or because I was a good student or maybe even just because I was me. . . . An awful fatalism washed over me. No matter how hard I worked, no matter who I became, I would always be defined by my father’s passenger, or former passenger, the man millions of people feared. (140) 173 Shortly after the promotion, Salbi discovers why “Baba never wanted to be the president’s pilot.” The position was attached to other political and social obligations. “Amo apparently wanted us to move into a house on palace grounds, but Mama said Baba used the distance from my school as a reason for us to stay in our home. . . . Amo gave us a weekend farmhouse instead” (75). The gift-giving principle, which Lacan associates with the Symbolic order, has a binding impact. Gift giving links language with law, which cements the Symbolic order: For these gifts are already symbols, in the sense that symbol means pact and that they are first and foremost signifiers of the pact that they constitute as signified, as is plainly seen in the fact that the objects of symbolic exchange—pots made to remain empty, shields too heavy to be carried, sheaves of wheat that wither, lances stuck into the JMEWS • Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies • 11:2 July 2015 ground—all are destined to be useless, if not simply superfluous by their very abundance. (Lacan 1977, 46) Gift giving is therefore not a response to the Symbolic order but is initiated by and necessary to it. In Salbi’s early life the law in the hands of Saddam degenerates into aggression enunciated by intervals of gift giving: “The president showered us with gifts, but also monitored our every move. We knew that our house was bugged, and we knew many family friends who had been executed for saying the ‘wrong thing’ about his policies or his mistress. Looking back, I think of Mr. Hussein’s presence in our life as a poisonous gas that leaked into our home. We inhaled it gradually” (Salbi 2009). His presence bred apprehension and caused traumatic symptoms that incurred the crippling return of the unspeakable Real. In an interview with Riz Khan (2007) on Aljazeera English, Salbi explains how gift giving also worked as symbolic binding: Saddam gave us a lot of things. I always say . . . the devil is a fallen angel you know; he is not a Hollywood movie, red-faced man with horns. . . . he has a charming charisma to him, and definitely in the case of Iraq, Saddam gave us a lot . . . the development of the country, of the city particularly; there were always cars and gifts and all of these things being given but I think what he took away from us in the meantime was actually our very souls, that we got into a stage where we were fearing each other. 174 Shari Benstock links autobiography to the Mirror Stage. Benstock (1988, 11, 12) argues that autobiography mirrors the self and “reveals the impossibility of its own dream: what begins in the presumption of self-knowledge ends in the creation of a fiction that covers over the premises of its construction.” In this sense autobiography, like the Lacanian mirror, initiates a “false symmetry” of the self that is often fictionalized. Autobiographical accounts, including Salbi’s, in contrast, “stress selfdisclosure and . . . posit a self called to witness (as an authority). . . . [They] rest on a For the first time in years, I could feel the girl that I had been nagging at me, bringing back memories I had struggled, at great personal cost, to suppress. I wanted to make myself whole again. I wanted to come clean . . . but I had been afraid for so long I didn’t know how to get rid of the layers of fear inside me. Because I had survived by hiding my past, even from myself, I had never really pieced together the story of my own life. (BTW, 5) Saddam’s reemergence in postinvasion Iraq translates as a return of the Real in an uncanny form. “When Saddam Hussein was finally captured in 2003 in that hole he had dug in the dirt, I found myself fighting tears. I didn’t want to enjoy another’s person’s humiliation, even if it was my enemy’s. I think my tears were more for me than for him, to protect my own humanity against feelings of vengeance and hatred” (5). The return of repressed memory is quite profound and therapeutic to the trauma she suffered for so many years. Salbi desires to reveal secrets in order to constitute a “whole” self that has survived the trauma of the Real. Salbi’s autobiographical account reinforces the link between the Symbolic world and confessional language. It distinctly marks the creation of her own Symbolic world as a matrix of gift giving and a “circuit of exchange,” which are, as argued above, central to Lacan’s notion of the Symbolic (Evans 1996, 203). ABDUL-JABBAR • Lacanian Selfhood, Parental Figures, and Trauma firm belief in the conscious control of [the] artist over subject matter; this view of the life history is grounded in authority” (Benstock 1991, 9). I contend that the Symbolic order, linked to language, generates autobiography, which is often seen as an endowment or gift. People write autobiography to leave a “legacy.” “Writing one’s life is a gift of love and memory passed on to one’s posterity, although it can also threaten family harmony because of the explosiveness of ‘secrets’” (Smith and Watson 2011, 160). To write autobiographically offers the opportunity—especially for feminists who seek to challenge the controversial Lacanian “lack”—to retrieve the phallic authority that was initially seized by the patriarchal signifiers of the Symbolic order, when the gift of language was hegemonically bestowed on or withheld from the receiver to enforce membership and compliance. The desire to reveal secrets as the enunciator of autobiography materializes though Salbi’s pivotal moment of confessional reality when Saddam is finally captured in 2003: 175 Conclusion In Salbi’s autobiography, the collision between the Imaginary and the Symbolic worlds produce alienation, or a divided sense of self. Yet alienation is central and permanent in the formation of identity for Lacan, as it entails predestined separation. “For Lacan, alienation is not an accident that befalls the subject and which can JMEWS • Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies • 11:2 July 2015 176 be transcended, but an essential constitutive feature of the subject. The subject is fundamentally split, alienated from himself, and there is no escape from this division, no possibility of ‘wholeness’ or synthesis” (ibid., 9). Salbi narrates the journey of the self as continuous fragmentation—a process of always living “between two worlds,” where “worlds,” I argue, transcends geographic implications. The mother’s influence, which marks the Imaginary order, also dominates the Symbolic order for Salbi, although the mother figure is eventually eclipsed by Saddam. This maternal symbolic power for a long while subverts the patriarchal signifier positioned assertively in the Lacanian Symbolic order. On one occasion Salbi confided to one of her friends that everything will be all right as long as her mother is there: “‘Don’t worry,’ I told her confidently. ‘My mother’s a teacher. You can ask her. Mama knows about everything’” (BTW, 37). In her attempt to escape the Symbolic order controlled by Saddam, Salbi journeyed through a parallel Symbolic order partly orchestrated by the mother to ensure her daughter’s survival of the trauma of the Real. It is marked by a strategy of “guided imagery” (BTW, 3). As an exiled adult in the United States, Salbi became involved in the plights of women victims of war. “I created a whole new identity for myself as the founder and president of a nonprofit women’s organization called Women for Women International” (4). Salbi’s unsuccessful marriage and experience of being “stranded in America by the Gulf War” (4) triggered a process in which nationalistic belonging as an object of desire is replaced by a gender-based understanding of subjectivity, self-realization, and belonging. Salbi’s life of exile in the United States prompted a journey of healing that allowed reconstruction of the Symbolic order through sublimation. She separated her personal identity from affiliations that could breed eruptions of the Real. Sublimation for Sigmund Freud is “a process in which sexual libido is redirected towards non-sexual aims” (Evans 1996, 13). Lacan (1992, 109, 110, 114), arguing for a dialectic that reverses the Freudian emphasis “on the object rather than on the instinct” that causes lack, speaks of sublimation as a “substitution” or “the symptom as compromise formation” that is “beyond the object” of desire, which in turn “shows you one of the most innocent forms of sublimation. Perhaps you can even see something emerge in it that, goodness knows, society is able to find satisfaction in. If it is a satisfaction, it is in this case one that doesn’t ask anything of anyone.” Salbi’s life in the United States positioned her in an “innocent form of sublimation” and “compromise formation” that helped her find satisfaction by helping people who suffered trauma under oppressive symbolic orders. WISAM KHALID ABDUL-JABBAR is a doctoral candidate at the University of Alberta. He holds master’s degrees in English from the University of Baghdad; in humanities from California State University, Dominguez Hills; and in English literature in Canada from Lakehead University. He has taught in Iraq, Libya, and Canada. His areas of research interest are postcolonial theory, immigration and diaspora, critical pedagogy, and Anglophone Arab literature. 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