An Eye for an Eye: The Violent Colonial Gaze in The Battle of Algiers

The colonial gaze, in my opinion, is the most important part of any colonial discourse.  As a post-colonial theorist it is vital to understand the colonial gaze—because it plays a major role in colonization and the interactions that ensue after different cultures and peoples come in contact.  The colonial gaze defines the ways in which the colonizer visually and psychologically portrays the colonized and vice versa.  However, the colonial gaze can be hard to understand because of its visible and invisible representations.  When I say it has invisible representations, I mean the psychological implications that influence the actions of both the colonizer and the colonized.  We already know from our readings that the colonial gaze plays a vital role in colonization, but it also plays a major role in decolonization—the colonized invert the gaze and use it as a weapon against colonial authority.  For this blog post I would like to focus on the physical inversion of the colonial gaze so that it functions as a weapon for decolonization.      

I’ve briefly touched on the concept of the colonial gaze before, and I have provided many textual examples to help understand its place in colonial discourse.  However, I find understanding it visually is the best way to understand the implications of such a powerful weapon of colonization—and in this case decolonization.   Therefore, let us turn to a movie that represents the colonial gaze as a violent weapon for decolonization—the 1966 movie, The Battle of Algiers. For those of you who don’t know, The Battle of Algiers is about the fight for the city of Algiers between the colonial French and the colonized people of Algiers.  This movie is full of scenes that depict the colonial gaze that takes place between the colonized and the colonizer.  However, there is one particular sequence of scenes that I would like to focus on when it comes to this concept.

These scenes focus on a sequence of bombings which are carried out by three Arab women whose men are part of the FLN—an anti-colonial group that aims at taking back the city of Algiers from colonial authority by any means necessary.  This link will take you to the scenes I am most interested in examining—sorry I was unable to fully embed the video into this blog post.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hYtN2zWX8c

I’d like to point out a few things before I explicate these scenes. 

 Because the colonial gaze was used to imprison and incriminate the colonized—Ali La Pointe’s own personal flashbacks  within the movie show his own troubles with  colonial authority because his “visual” difference as an Arab could be seen—the colonized soon realized the power of the colonial gaze and how it might be made into a weapon. 

The first step in undoing the gaze was through purification.  In the movie, this was done by the Algiers by first upholding their own moral and religious values as Muslims from the taint of colonialism—all people must give up their corrupt colonial behavior that has come to permeate their Arab society.  If we remember in Leila Ahmed’s work we read about how certain radical religious groups in post-colonial societies often used violent laws and behavior to purify the colonized society from colonial infection. One scene depicts a group of children beating a publically drunk man to death.  This is a prime example of what Ahmed describes.  The second part of decolonization within the movie, and perhaps the most important part of inverting the colonial gaze, to make it a weapon, is mimicry. 

 Now we can begin the explication of these scenes.   

Remember in his article “Of Mimicry and Man” Homi Bhabha explains the duality or ambivalence that the colonized experience.  Bhabha argued that it was through ambivalence that the indigenous destroyed the authority of colonial powers and recognized their own strength.  It is through this ambivalence that the colonial gaze is inverted and made a weapon for decolonization.

In the sequence of scenes above, it first opens on a room with three Algieran women.   Each is combing her hair, and then suddenly and violently they chop their hair short and dye it a lighter shade.  You can see the colonial gaze in the women's eyes as they hold the scissors to their hair in front of the mirror. The scissors serve as the physical undoing of the colonial gaze as they cut away the colonized  identity. They mimic the colonizer in appearence and play act the loyal colonial subject.  Suddenly, the colonial gaze becomes self reflexive. They become the docile and loyal colonial subjects. However, this is only in appearance, because their ultimate goal is to blow up a French soda shop, a French dance hall, and a French airport.  Let me remind you that they do so willingly, and because it is only a woman who can now penetrate and invert the colonial gaze—women were seen as harmless and helpless therefore they couldn’t possibly carry out acts of violence and terror, men were seen as the ones with power.  But at the same time they became that which the colonial authority wanted to see, even though they were blind to the true motives of the colonized.  Thus, the colonial gaze is inverted through the visible/invisible ambivalence of mimicry and made a physical weapon for decolonization. 

I’d like to make one more explication of the colonial gaze within The Battle of Algiers.  The colonial gaze is often seen as extremely violent.  Violence begets violence, and the old saying “An eye for an eye” becomes the motto of both colonial authority and the colonized.  The more the colonial gaze pierces the subconscious of the colonizer and the colonized the more violent the interaction becomes.  The colonizer is further convinced that the colonized need to be controlled and civilized.  The colonized is further convinced that it doesn’t need to be repressed by the colonial gaze.  Thus the concept of relativism is destroyed all together and peaceful reconciliation can no longer be achieved.  Violence begets violence, and all become dehumanized.  The colonial gaze ceases to exist or becomes extremely hypersensitive.  The colonized become the colonizers and the colonizers become the colonized.