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Dialectics of Desire, Victimhood and Postcolonial Migrancy in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Leaving Tangier

This article explores the complex economy of desire that structures the immigrant’s spatial imaginings of Spain and how it is played out in the interaction between Moroccan and Spanish cultures in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s postcolonial novel Partir (2006), translated into English as Leaving Tangier (2009). This novel frames immigration within a discourse of transnational migrancy and shows its destabilizing effects on the psychic life, especially in terms of psycho-sexual relations among and between migrants and nationals. More specifically, this paper focuses on the conflicting world views as manifested through same-sex relations between two key characters, Miguel, a gay Spanish male, and Azel, an educated young Moroccan who is compelled to be his companion. Within this discourse, the immigrant is subjected to and produced through orientalist fantasies within a postcolonial rhetoric of homoerotics. Instead of self-actualization, the migratory process engenders a sense of deep shame and existential uprootedness as the dream of deliverance turns into an irredeemable psychic trauma. Through his aggressive focus on the psycho-sexual lives of his protagonists and secondary characters, Ben Jelloun critically emphasizes the persistence of relationships that continue to bind the Moroccan identity within an entrenched power relationship between colonizer and colonized.