that was called “structuralism,” I didn’t feel involved in the back and forth play between the various positions. I observed at a distance these battles that raged on and off between the eminent spirits of Paris, each who wished to think better and faster than the others. My marginality protected me; it was an agreeable shelter.11
In this passage, the word “distance” instructs us on how to read his work. We should not assume that Khatibi wished to participate in these debates as a sort of geographically, socially, and intellectually distant commentator. Khatibi never wanted that. Instead, his chosen position resembles that of a tinkerer—a bricoleur, in the lingo of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Derrida—a pragmatic itinerant with his rattlebag of tricks. Khatibi was a writer for whom allegiance to any particular intellectual path was not an overweening concern: “I read all philosophers out of school, out of their traditional context. I’m unaffiliated in this way.”12 The ideas that circulated in the air of French intellectual life were certainly important to him, and he used them. But when we bear in mind the considerations that inform his life in Morocco, we can see his choice to live there as revealing of a fierce sense of independence.
Khatibi’s regard for Morocco was not without the critical sensibility that defines his life and work in general; even so, the land of his birth provided him with a commodious home. In 1990 he would marry Lalla Mina El Alaoui. They had two children, Ahmed and Chama.
A POET’S LEGACY AND THE POETICS OF THE ORPHAN
Khatibi’s work is held in high regard in Francophone circles and generally received with ignorance elsewhere. For a writer with such a large bibliography, friends of such celebrity, and an oeuvre that speaks to many of the central concerns of postcolonial and postmodern life, the fact that Khatibi isn’t better known outside of Francophone scholarship is curious.13 No doubt, part of that relative obscurity is due to his having lived in Morocco, as the simple fact remains that writers who reside in the sites of political and literary power are more often rewarded with greater visibility—and vice versa. But in the Anglophone context, and even in the French metropolitan context, Khatibi’s legacy has suffered from his association with writers who have achieved greater renown.
Edward Said, for example, infamously dismissed Khatibi. Speaking of him in a 1998 interview with Stephen Sheehi in the Los Angeles magazine Al-Jadid: A Review and Record of Arab Culture and Arts, Said observes, “Khatibi is a nice guy but peripheral. He is perceived as a kind of Moroccan equivalent of Derrida. But he doesn’t have the force or the presence of the place or the location inside French culture that Sartre or Foucault do or had.”14 Said’s disregard for Khatibi, a writer with concerns resembling his own, seems almost inexplicable. His remarks smack of condescension.
In hindsight, Said missed a chance to appreciate Khatibi for what he does best. Part of Khatibi’s difficulty in finding a more welcoming readership relates to the difficulty of his work, to his style and its tendency to defy categories. He challenges generic conventions and refuses to abide by the protocols of intellectual and academic disciplines. But placing Khatibi in a literary lineage is no less complicated than viewing him as a type of philosopher, as Said does. Khatibi acknowledges that he composed his first poems in Arabic and then in English under the “inescapable influence” of Baudelaire.15 He also writes of the early importance for him of Victor Segalen, whom he discovered in 1957 and credits with showing him how to “unify anthropology [ethnologie] and literature.”16 The citation of Segalen is revealing, not just because Segalen was virtually unknown when Khatibi read him, but also because another seminal postcolonial French-language literary-critical thinker, Edouard Glissant, has acknowledged Segalen’s importance as well. Segalen’s writings about world cultures—whether in Tahiti or China—stand as an underdeveloped narrative thread in Francophone literature.
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