Writing against the Currents of Cultural Deracination: Colonial Mimicry and Postcolonial Representation in Mohamed Al 'Ali 'Ar'Ar's Mā lā Tadhruhū al-Riyāḥ What the Winds Cannot Wipe Off

ABSTRACT: This research considers the representation of cultural deracination in Mohamed Al 'Ali 'Ar'Ar's novel Mā lā Tadhruhū al-Riyāḥ . The book engages with the discourse of colonial mimicry bringing to the surface the bitter ramifications of asymmetrical construction of the colonized's identity. In his depiction of the "mimic man" in colonial Algeria, Ar'Ar calls for his readers to probe into the experience of his protagonist, al-Bashir, whose dazzlement of the colonizers' power brings him under France's "mission civilisatrice." Following a Conradian journey to Paris, as a soldier in the French army, al-Bashir has to face a civilizational shock. In placing the novel in conversation with Bhabha's mimicry, the research traces how the text interrogates the implications of colonial mimicry on a character entirely fraught with futility and lack of certainty that stem from his self-immersion in Ngũgĩan "cultural Parrotry." Correspondingly, the protagonist experiences cultural depersonalization, which inevitably leads him to undergo an "identity shift" in order to abolish stigmatization. The study thus follows al-Bashir's rebellious metamorphosis from being the metonymically Westernized similar-but-not-quite "interpreter" to being the "civilized master." Interestingly, the article concludes that the protagonist's name change accelerates his mimetic conversion to produce a blurred copy of the colonizer: "al-Bashirturned-Jacques" emerges as a fully-fledged oppressor whose subjugation of his fellow countrymen is hard to ignore.