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." [23] Khanna's hesitancy about "prostrat[ing] before the narrative of exploitation" aligns with Mohanty's critique of the construction of the third-world woman as victim. However, it is with critical caution that Khanna reiterates this "narrative of exploitation" as the imaginary cohesion of a feminist "we" because it leads to the possibility of arriving at the ethical questions fundamental to feminism's development: "How does one respond to another, and how does one address conflict with an end in sight that allows for transnational feminism and scholarship?" [24]
Khanna's work echoes "French Feminism in an International Frame," an early piece by Spivak in which she critiques Julia Kristeva's About Chinese Women as an example of French Feminism's unquestioned avant-garde individualism and its use of non-western women as a means to "touch the other of the West, of metaphysics, of capitalism" and still feel "privileged as a woman." [25]Critiquing the field's Eurocentric solipsism, its continual self-questioning, Spivak writes:
However unfeasible and inefficient it may sound, I see no way to avoid insisting that there has to be a simultaneous other focus: not merely who I am I? but who is the other woman? How am I naming her? How does she name me? Is this part of the problematic I discuss? [26]
This questioning "promotes," in Spivak's words, "a sense of our common yet history-specific lot." [27] Hatoum's work constructs spaces that foster this line of questioning, and since her work is inevitably presented and framed through "Middle East Politics" by the institutions and texts through which it is known, this questioning is inflected by viewers' images and assumptions about the repressed and traumatized women of the Middle East. Her work makes the assumptions about women's imagined "place" visible and also works to defamiliarize and destabilize the universal/particular binary that has impeded feminist theory's progress toward greater inclusiveness and applicability as it critiques its own colonial legacy and is forced to grapple with an increasingly intersected global terrain of power, privilege, and impoverishment. The trajectory of Hatoum's work moves toward exposing, reconfiguring, and complicating the imaginary, discursive, and spatial relations among women, therefore working against a singular "third world woman" who embodies the composite sign of women's multiple and traumatic histories.
Though I risk taking the reader on a circuitous route to Hatoum's work, I now turn to the post-colonial fiction of Assia Djebar and Mahasweta Devi. Djebar's "There is No Exile," from Women of Algiers in Their Apartment and Devi's "Doulouti the Bountiful" from Imaginary Maps do not repeat the particularity of Hatoum's Palestinian identity, but help theorize the impediments to and possibilities for re-imagining the links and distinctions among women. Hatoum's work evokes but does not confirm images of suffering within unsettling, dangerous, and violent political circumstances. Likewise, these writers offer fictional narratives that highlight and subvert pervasive images of women's victimization in post-colonial nations and histories. Hatoum's work asks viewers to reflect upon their imaginary relations to representations of gender within structures of power. Likewise, these fictional texts complicate readily available images of women's suffering by theorizing ways to imagine women' s "common yet history-specific lot." [28]
Djebar's story "There is No Exile" illustrates but also struggles against the melancholy of Algerian women's lives. The title begins to suggest that the one gift exile can offer—distance—is not possible for Algerian women. Djebar wants us to see that there is no exile for these women, or, more subtly, that there may not be an exile that could detach Algerian families from the gendered interpellations of the country they were forced to leave. Furthermore, in "There is No Exile," women's role embodying the image of tradition becomes all the more crucial in a family's narrative of displacement.
Appropriate for a story that thematizes the links among space, gender, and mourning, "There is No Exile" begins with a family's reaction to the death of a young man who lived next door. Cries of women represent the facticity of this death. The unnamed narrator states, "All three of us, my two sisters—Aïcha, Anissa, and I—recognized it by the way the women received it: it was death." [29] When told the arrival of a man who will propose marriage to her is imminent, the narrator's recognition of and identification with the women's grief becomes more complicated. After this announcement, the narrator sees her mother preparing pastries, and thinks to herself: "A sense of protocol was instinctive in Mother: an inheritance from her past life she could not readily abandon." [30] Before the narrator exclaims that she doesn't want to marry, she sees Hafsa—a well-educated woman who mocks the image of homeland as the motherland—and her compelling gaze. Hafsa's eyes suggest that her engagement with the scene of her friend's betrothal contains both detachment and connection. The narrator states:
I raised my head; it was then, I think, that I met Hafsa's gaze. There was, deep in her eyes, a strange light, surely of interest or irony, I don't know, but you could feel Hafsa as an outsider, attentive and curious at the same time, but an outsider. I met that look. [31]
After crying, the narrator questions why her position as an Algerian woman should remain the same since she is in exile: "Perhaps when life changes, everything should change with it, absolutely everything." [32] Because the gendered strictures particular to Algeria are carried into exile as "instincts," exile doesn't offer respite from patriarchal customs that disenfranchise women; nor does it free them from the cultural assumption that they embody melancholy and are therefore reliable sites for witnessing. And yet, a suggestive conversation takes place between these women that awaits the narrator's reply:
She went on a while, but I've forgotten the rest, except that she repeated we very often with a note of passion. She said that word with a particular vehemence, so much that I began to wonder toward the end whether that word really meant the two of us alone, or rather other women, all the women of our country. To tell the truth, even if I'd known, what could I have answered? Hafsa was too knowledgeable for me. And that's what I would have liked to have told her when she stopped talking, perhaps in the expectation that I would speak. [33]
This meeting of looks, this evocation of a reply yet-to-be-heard, this discussion of "we" between women divided by tradition and the privileges of education can be described as a fictionally-rendered moment of "ethical singularity," a formulation Spivak explains in the "Translator's Preface" to Devi's Imaginary Maps. Ethical singularity is a one-to-one encounter that acknowledges differences and similarities between women and offers a conception of the imaginary without Manichean antagonisms. Spivak does not posit "ethical singularity" as a substitute for collective political action that shapes the symbolic order; "ethical singularity" is, rather, a "necessary supplement." [34] Spivak explains:
We all know when we engage profoundly with one person, the responses come from both sides: this is responsibility and accountability. We also know that in such engagements we want to reveal and reveal, concealing nothing. Yet on both sides there is always the sense that something has not got across. [35]
Ethical singularity is an encounter that inspires the desire to reveal and share in the spirit of similarity, while also recognizing the limits imposed by language as well as the powers any one individual is beholden to or possesses. It is a one-on-one encounter that simultaneously acknowledges difference and similarity and inspires responsible and responsive engagement with the potential to expand beyond the mirroring of the intimate pair. Listening to Hafsa and awaiting her own response to Hafsa's emphasis on "we," Djebar's narrator describes the expanse of her reflections: "I began to wonder toward the end whether that word really meant the two of us alone, or rather other women, all the women of our country." [36]
For Spivak, translating Devi's work from Bengali into English is an enactment of ethical singularity because Imaginary Maps must translate into multiple cultural contexts. Spivak writes that since it will be published in India and the United States, Imaginary Maps "faces in two directions, encounters two readerships with a strong exchange in various enclaves. As a translator and a commentator, I must imagine them as I write." [37] yProven Meetingstrippeddevi Meeting Stripped Devi Szh Products Religious Services Organizations Regions Central Canada Meeting Stripped Devi Seeing Feminism in Exile; The Imaginary Maps of Mona Hatoumd x Meeting End d Meeting Stripped Devi Meeting sProven Meetingstrippeddevi Meeting Stripped Devi Szh Products Religious Services Organizations Regions Central Canada Meeting Stripped Devi Seeing Feminism in Exile; The Imaginary Maps of Mona Hatoume j Meeting Stripped Devi Meeting Stripped Devi y Meeting Stripped Devi Stripped