There was a time when intellectuals could not just explain their ideas, they had to weave them into a novel. That is exactly what F. T. Marinetti did when he wrote Mafarka the Futurist. In the same year, he launched the artistic and political movement of Futurism by publishing its Manifesto. Similar themes in the novel could be found in the manifesto such as destroying of the past, glorification of war, celebration of youth and “scorn for women.” Italian Futurism was inspirational to Fascism that was to appear a few years later. The novel, despite its semi-pornographic content, is worth studying for it provides a historical representation of early twentieth-century views on war, gender relations, imperialist ambitions and optimism towards technology.
The story is confusing and multi-layered. To be understood, it could be approached from different angles. One interpretation could focus on its theme of imperialism, where the setting of the novel, that is Africa, is a land to be “raped” (that was actually the case at the time of writing the novel). Some scholars viewed it as a homosocial/homosexual fantasy, explaining why women have to be eliminated. Racism is another theme since Arab Africans massacre Black Africans, especially women. There might be merit to all such theories, however, this article will mainly focus on the one theme that runs through the novel from beginning to end: misogyny. Women from different ethnicities are on the receiving end of brutal treatment. They are portrayed as “opposites” of men. But one must discuss other contrasts beyond the feminine and the masculine. Curiously, other dichotomies to be tackled below seem to somehow reflect the same gender conflict such as passivity and virility, the natural and the mechanical, the past and the future.
For an easier read, I provide the summary below in a chapter-by-chapter format.
Chapter 1: The Rape of the Negresses—the sadistic orgy that sent the author to court
The first chapter of the novel, Le Viol des Négresses (the rape of black women), is its most notorious for its graphic description of sexual violence. In fact, it was the main reason the author was taken to court.
The setting of the novel is North and Central Africa. The plot follows Mafarka-el-Bar, a North African Arab king and warrior with great imperialist ambitions to rule over all of Africa. He had just dethroned his uncle, Boubassa, and defeated his army, to become the king of Tel-el-Kibir. (Later in the novel, he’ll also defeat King Brafane-el-Kibir.) Mafarka-el-Bar, whose name (el-Bar) means “the righteous” in Arabic, sees one of his soldiers about to rape a women from the defeated population, so he scolds him:
‘Son of a bitch! Vile scorpion! Horned viper!…Let go of that negress!… I forbid you to touch a hair… But where has my chief captain gone? … Abdullah! Abdullah! Abdullah!…’
The sound of a wounded woman groaning alternated with the din of a violent struggle in a grove of fig-trees twenty cubits below the battlements of the fortress from whose height Mafarka-el-Bar, king of Tel-el-Kibir, kept watch on the counting of his negro prisoners, shouting orders to his officers. 1Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Mafarka the Futurist: An African Novel, trans. Carol Diethe and Steve Cox (London, United Kingdom: Middlesex University Press, 1998), 5.
When Mafarka chides his soldiers for raping women, it is not out of moral reasons, but because he considers all sexual relations to be as a waste of energy that could be better used in battle, or in creativity, as will be demonstrated in the closing chapters.
Mafarka being the embodiment of Futurist ideals, he considers “his people” made up only of warrior-soldiers, hence he expresses contempt towards those whose lives belong to and depend on farms.
‘I love war, I do… Do you understand? And my people love it as much as I do!… As for the country people, let them eat manure… They deserve it! 2Ibid., 12.
Though Mafarka is abstaining from sexual relations, he requests to see a “hot” virgin from the leader of the farms, a despised man with a pimp-like reputation:
‘I want a fiery virgin, supple and filmy like those sails down there in the silks of the sea, which look as if they’re walking on their knees, so heat-exhausted are they, so pleasured on the cushions of the sea’s boudoir!…’ 3Ibid., 14.
The reader is then introduced to Magamal, Mafarka’s beloved brother. He serves as a feminine contrast to the hyper-masculine character of Mafarka. He is often described in terms of feminine beauty. The interaction (including a kiss later on) between the two brothers carries incestuous-homoerotic undertones. In their first exchange, Mafarka reproaches him for his reckless conduct during the battle, while wishing to eliminate any traces of femininity in his brother’s character and physique:
‘Oh! I know your courage well, but I loathe that ridiculous feminine sensitivity that alternates between plunging you into mad fits of exaltation and the next minute routing you with childish weakness… O my beloved brother, I am well aware that you lack my catapult muscles, to strangle an enemy whilst feigning to embrace him. Despite all efforts of your will, your body has remained as soft and fragile as the juicy body of young girls. Your eyes, made for kisses, are not like my own, terrors for birds of ill omen; but you must harden your eyes, arm them with barbs, like mine! Look!’ 4Ibid., 16.
Next, at the end of the first chapter, is the most infamous scene of the book. The conversation above between the brothers was interrupted by a scream. They rush into its direction to find themselves standing before a post-conquest celebration, an orgiastic rape scene involving the captured “four thousand negresses.” Mafarka immediately suspects that the blame lies with the former generals of his defeated uncle’s army, who are now members of his own army. He believes they are secretly trying to corrupt and weaken his soldiers with sexual pleasures. He also thought the generals are putting the soldiers in a drunken state to easily lead them into a mutiny.
Thousands of sailors were huddled there, dishevelled and dead drunk, stripped to the waist, with muddy faces and their arms spattered with wine and blood. 5Ibid., 22.
The mass rape scene is not written in an organized manner, perhaps intentionally, where the reader is not sure where the rape ends and the killing starts. It is obvious, however, that the women are either dying through the violence of the rape, or killed afterwards on the banks of a pool, or, as specifically mentioned, drowned in macabre games by their rapists. The scene brings to mind a Dantesque hell or one of Marquis de Sade’s bloody orgies:
It was the bodies of young negresses who lay spreadeagled beside the filthy pool, that hundreds of naked warriors were ruttishly assaulting, whilst the others queued up, awaiting their turn. 6Ibid., 23.
One remarkably repulsive element in the author’s depiction of the scene is the complete dehumanization of the female victims: heaped up in pyramids and decomposing into greenish paste mixed with bodily excretions!
[Mafarka] saw that the strange human cyclone was spinning round a pool covered with green slime, in which swam hundreds of delirious bathers, and from which there rose the acrid, pestilential stench of hemp, urine, grease and sweat.
It was a fantastic pressing machine of yellowish bodies heaped up in pyramids and collapsing as they exuded their juices like monstrous olives under the burning cogs of the heavy solar wheel. This wheel kept up its frightful motion by grinding all these human heads like enormous, crunching, dolorous seeds; and the pool seemed to have formed little by little out of the fetid oil of this stinking, greenish paste. 7Ibid.
Marinetti used above bizarre industrial language (“pressing machine”) above, by which he combined a favorite theme of Futurism, that is machine fetishization, along with lust and death (decomposition) in the same paragraph. The purpose here is to describe the destructive effect of lust on men. That is to display a link between sex and death, one that had always existed in fiction, and is strongly present throughout this novel. At its heart, women are believed to have a deadly corruptible effect on men. Such idea would be emphasized in Mafarka’s speech below dressing down the rapist soldiers. Then multiple times throughout the book, until the climax of the novel in the final scenes.
The soldiers are described as hashish-drugged and “dead drunk” acting as if they are possessed by a demonic power, or in a ritualistic trance, overwhelmed with excitement while waiting for their turn to join the rape:
Some soldiers had sat down to form a wide circle all around the pool. Crouching cross-legged, they rocked their torsos back and forth, clapping the palms of hands as hard as wooden castanets, to beat out the rhythmic movements of their rutting brethren.
These had laid down all the writhing, battered negresses in the slime, as they wielded their tanned black members, more sinuous than tree-roots.
You saw the lithe glistening bellies of the young women, and their little breasts the colour of burnt coffee, writhing with pain under the heavy fists of the males, whose loins of bronze threshed tirelessly up and down amid the churning dance of green putrefaction.
Some men sang funeral dirges, others bit furiously into their victim’s shock of hair, then stopped, their mouths full of blood-smeared hair, and knelt for a long while, staring into those pitiful eyes contorted with pain, dread and lust.
For sometimes the women bucked with a pleasure all the more bitter for being unwilling, in the backlash of a forcible spasm. Their agile black legs, with delicate ankles, beat the air in a convulsive movement, like serpents’ tails, and fastened in turn with a whiplike crack down on the back of the male. 8Ibid., 24-25.
As if it was not enough to write the mass rape-murder scene with barely any sympathy for its victims, Marinetti went further by adding women who enjoyed the animalistic aspect of their own assault. (At the time of the novel’s publication, it was a common belief that a victim of rape might cooperate involuntarily with her rapist.) Then the author went even further with one particular character who acts like she’s having a wonderful time, making jokes and talking dirty!
The youngest among them, with an elegant, supple, tainted beauty, was called Biba. Her waist was slender, and her sweet glossy hips, the colour of fine vanilla, appealed to the nostrils as much as to the lips. The whole of her wildly writhing body clung to her lover’s body like a length of wet cloth and answered with sharp spasms, over and over, to the deep stabbing of the penis.
With every blow, Biba lowered her eyelids over her long dark eyes that seemed to bathe in a golden liquor; and each time she uttered cries of dolorous joy so sharp and lacerating that they pierced and dominated the hubbub of the echoing ravine.
Doleful, her hoarse violet voice begged his caress:
‘Mahmoud, Mahmoud, kill me, kill me like this! Oh! you cram me with hot pleasure! You fill my little pussy’s mouth with sugar and halva. It’s happy to be so gorged on sweetmeats! Now its lips are sucking a big lump of red-hot sugar that’s suddenly going to melt…’ 9Ibid., 25.
Throughout the scene, it seems as if the writer finds pleasure in detailing the sadistic acts.
But nearly all the women were silent, stifling their cries and following with a stupid, faltering, fearful look the ripples dug into their bellies by the force of the male, like the swirling of sea-water under the oar.
Yet their lovers jabbered back at them, vexed by this tragic dumbness, which they dubbed absurd and offensive. They speeded the shuttling of their rumps, urging each other on with bantering jokes, gymnastic leaps and raucous laughter. 10Ibid., 26.
In the following paragraph, the author describes the female bodies being treated like dogs’ food, where the soldiers are mimicking the behavior of dogs while assaulting them. Another purpose of the imagery of dogs would be the author’s intention of displaying how men degraded themselves by giving in to sexual pleasures.
Sometimes [the rapists] rose high up above their victim’s body, and spat out the long, long, triumphant parabola of a fat gob of saliva; then they flopped heavily back and ground their mouths into the hollow valley of the vulva, noisily lapping, like dogs, and all the while threshing their legs in the mud to spatter the spectators squatting on the bank, who laughed all the louder.
[…]The spectators’ applause, the breathless actors’ grunts, the clicking of jaws and smacking of feet in the mud, mingled with the death rattles from breasts dying in the throes of pleasure. 11Ibid.
Another example of linking death and sex: some victims are dying during orgasmic pleasure. The well-known expression in French of “la petite mort” (the little death) in reference to orgasm probably crossed the author’s mind as he wrote these words. (Note this book was originally written in French.)
Another character that Marinetti presents here is the warrior, Zeb-el-Kibir, whose name in Arabic means “the big cock.” (El-Kibir is Arabic for “the great.”) His passage is perhaps the culmination of a grotesque scene. He calls on others to join him in a horrific regatta in the pool:
At this moment, a lanky giant raised his muzzle and huge, bronzed chest out of the mire where his mistress lay almost submerged, and bellowed his wish to be heard.
[…]He had been nicknamed Zeb-el-Kibir, in honour of his gigantic member, and his quenchless genital powers had earned him fame
At last he spoke, with a voice from the darkness of a vault:
‘We must all embark on our negresses’ bodies and set sail… Right now we’re riding on the crests of the waves. Let’s race our vessels… Each man aboard his mistress! I already have mine under my belly, with a fair wind blowing. My oar is firm, oh how we scud along! Look! My black craft is going under… It’s almost invisible… Because of its terrible speed… See, I’m sailing faster and it’s plunging ever deeper in the waves… Yes, yes, let’s all sail on! No one can pass me! A prize to the man who drives his boat to death before the rest! Allah! My own boat has stopped moving!… Never mind! It must keep going… See how it slips and slides.’ 12Ibid., 27.
The sadistic sexual violence continues:
And the slaughter grew dreadful, there in the murky pool and on its banks.
[…]But how much longer was he to keep on commanding these bloody manoeuvres, nodding his beard of furious white steam to stoke up these rutting oarsmen’s rage?
Only Mafarka-el-Bar took on this dreadful problem, and the better to settle it he dug his spurs three times into Efrit’s flanks. The horse took a giant bound and landed stiff-legged smack into the vast heaving of obscene buttocks.
A long time passed while the rancid, fetid smell of sperm and blood maddened that fearsome horse, and he trampled madly over that mass of hideous suppurating faces and crimson manes. With his joyful, dancing, careless prance, he seemed amused by the crunch of rib-cages that twanged and throbbed, under his iron shoes, like benjohs. 13Ibid.
At last, Mafarka in fury brings the scene to a stop, then he scolds the generals accusing them of preferring to use their cocks over their swords. What is implied here is that these generals were conquered because they are incapable of controlling their sexual cravings:
Then, standing upright in his saddle, Mafarka-el-Bar brandished his dazzling curved scimitar round his head like a halo, and spat his foaming rage, nausea and deep disgust far and wide over that stinking human tide:
‘Mangy curs! Pimply swine! Hares’ hearts! Rabbits’ ears! Race of scorpions! Vile chicken-shit!… So instead of a brain, you’ve only a fetid cancer inside your stubborn foreheads, to make you discharge so much rank pus from your mouths, and the rotten slits of your eyes!
‘So the vulvas of fettered women are the enemies you love to fight!… You’ve beaten and disembowelled them, torn them open? Ah! Ah! that’s truly something to feel proud of, go on now!’
Then he aimed his fiercely clenched first at a group of old men lurking among the enormous swarm of turbulent soldiers’ and raised his voice to add:
‘And you are the instigators of this noble performance… I recognize you all, Boubassa’s famous generals, now more than ever worthy to be his! In truth, that is what I expected from minds like yours, more twisted and filth than pigs’ tails!… So here I am on the battlefield where you have won your finest victory!… I want to give this pool a memorable name, a name already tinged with glory! I know, let’s call it ‘Boubassa Pool’! For he would readily approve if he were here… And perhaps he would enjoy it as much as you and more seeing women torn apart and smashed in murderous rut!… By your soldiers, of course, not you,!… For your impotence alone can match your cowardice! All your soldiers and officers made yourselves worthy of each other the moment you decided to make your cocks your favourite swords, the only swords you wield with any skill!… So wield them again, to beget sons of whores and vulva-licking dogs, like yourselves!… 14Ibid., 28-29.
The generals flee the scene as Mafarka breaks up the orgy and chases after them with his scimitar.
The chapter ends with Mafarka encouraging his brother, Magamal, to spend the night with his bride, whose marriage has not been consummated yet. But Magamal answers that he wants to keep fighting with his brother, response which makes Mafarka proud. There is his brother who prefers war rather than the arms of his bride:
‘All praise to you, brother, for speaking like this on the evening of a victory… I can see that you are as capable as I am of keeping a leash on your potent cock, like a mastiff that’s only let out on stormy nights, to keep thieves away from the bedroom door!’ 15Ibid., 32.
It is obvious that Arab culture had an influence on the story of Mafarka, but one idea has not been explored by literary critics, and that is whether the prophet of Islam himself inspired the writer. However, it is not a surprise since that pursuit could be extremely offensive considering that the novel contains pornographic scenes. Without deep analysis, one could still see the similarities between both: Mafarka-el-Bar (note: Mafarka “the righteous”) is a brave Arab general who leads soldiers on conquests of foreign lands. His ambitions are expansionist (he dreams of controlling all of Africa). He is not a mere warrior, he follows certain morals and scolds his soldiers when needed. Tales of incredible sexual potency with servant girls and female slaves are intertwined with tales of military victories. Later in the novel, we see Mafarka on a grand and supernatural (pseudo-religious) mission to establish something immortal, to survive beyond his own imminent death.
Chapter 2: The story of the man who ate a fish stuffed with a magical “horse’s dick”
Mafarka enters the camp of another enemy, the warrior-king Brafane-el-Kibir, disguised as an old, filthy beggar. He offers to entertain the king and his audience with tales. The king accepts. In the guise of a beggar, he starts telling a story about Mafarka (himself), claiming that he was once a horse trader. (This chapter features the age-old technique of a story within a story—a mise en abyme.)
‘My tale concerns Mafarka-el-Bar!…’ the storyteller then began, in a voice sounding broken by asthma and hoarsened by the catarrh of old age. ‘For perhaps you do not know that the king of Tel-el-Kibir was once just a simple horse trader at Rimlabour fair? But in truth he was very rich and well respected among all of the horse traders, given the number and beauty of the horses that pawed the ground around him while he bargained and gesticulated, sitting on his mat, wearing his splendid mauve silk galabieh. A demon disguised as a rich merchant, who had sneaked into the hubbub of the fair, suddenly stopped, frozen in admiration before one of Mafarka’s horses, which caught everybody’s eye because its truly extraordinary colouring… The horse was a superb stallion, completely black but for its mane and tail, which were red as two torches…’ 16Ibid., 43.
King Brafane rudely interrupts him and asks about the horse’s phallus, using the slang Arabic word, zeb:
‘And his zeb, what was that like?’ gurgled Brafane-el-Kibir, chewing the long bamboo of his pipe.
All the negroes burst out laughing, and the shaking of their bodies where they lay caused their rough, dry sexual organs to jangle against the glass ornaments and leather sheaths suspended from their belts. 17Ibid., 44.
The storyteller immediately reorients the story to play along…
‘The zeb…’ added the smiling storyteller, ‘the zeb of this horse was coloured purple. But its top was encrusted with sapphires — just like the one that the virgins of Tel-el-Kibir dream about on the night before their wedding!…’ 18Ibid.
His audience bursts out laughing. He continues with his story: the merchant (the demon) purchased the horse without hesitation. Soon the merchant would regret his decision. The first problem was that his red mane and tail catch fire as they come in contact with rapid wind when the horse gallops away, setting everything in sight aflame. The second problem was the horse’s sexual excitement:
It was the month of April, when animals need to mate, and there wasn’t a single mare this cursed stallion met that he didn’t want to mount… Wild with the smell of the moist vulva, he whipped his mane against the flanks of the female, which bucked in the heat, and lashed out desperately. Three times the demon was unhorsed like this, although he was an excellent rider… The third time, he broke his arm! 19Ibid.
The demon merchant wants to take revenge against the horse trader (Mafarka), so he castrates the horse and invites Mafarka to dine with him:
‘[H]aving cut off the stallion’s zeb, he had it made into a tasty dish and ordered it to be served at table, on the evening appointed, in the hall of his palace, whose windows drew in the green air and salty coolness of the sea.
‘The cooks stuffed the zeb with curds and flavoured it so well with violet and cinnamon that an exquisite hot, sweet odour caused every head in the house to swim voluptuously. And that night the young serving women, fizzing with excitement, nosed about at the doors of the banqueting-hall, clicking their tongues and rubbing their breasts to quell too pleasant an itch…
‘”Here is a wonderful fish!” said the demon to Mafarka, sitting cross-legged in front of the mat upon which the transformed zeb lay in splendour in its fish of chased gold. “Here is a fish of shape unknown and flavour sublime!… You may eat it whole, for I tasted another this morning and I don’t want to spoil the pleasure by repeating it!” 20Ibid., 45.
Note the playful sexual imagery of a fish stuffed with a stallion’s magical phallus, which is also stuffed.
The servant girls who were itching with sexual excitement (above) are about to enjoy getting ravished!
‘Mafarka required no second asking, but picked up the so-called fish in both hands and began to push it slowly into his enormous mouth, slicing into it with his teeth, as one eats a banana. As soon as he’d swallowed it down, rolling eyes agog with pleasure, he started to breathe out loud, to the depths of his lungs… “The windows should be open! Too hot!… Still too hot!… There’s not a breath of air in town tonight!!… No sea breeze!!… That bay is too narrow!!… We’d better off stark naked! Take off your clothes!” he told the demon, who instantly obeyed. Then Mafarka laid hold of the young female servants who were waiting at table, and tumbled them on the cushions, one after another, laughing like a lunatic. They too laughed and cried out in turn: “Ouch!… my fine steed, push only your head into my little manger! Ouch!… Only the head… Yes!… Ow!”
‘And Mafarka grew ever more violent as he passed from one to the next… Suddenly, he leaped in fury at the demon, bellowing: “Your palace belongs to me!… Get out!… If you don’t clear off, I’ll split your buttocks open!…” His penis was so freakishly lengthened in the surge of his rage that the horrified demon fled from his palace and never dared to return!…’ 21Ibid., 45-46.
The magical phallus drives Mafarka insane then he starts behaving like a horse in heat, copulating with every female he could find. He terrifies the demon himself out of his palace. At that point, the king and his audience are perfectly amused by the story.
The story continues: after “screwing” scores of servant girls and “pretty slaves,” Mafarka takes a moment to have a nap by the sea. Meanwhile, his penis is growing to an enormous length. Some sailors mistake it for a rope and use it as a mast for their sail, thereby he is carried while sleeping by sea to the city of Tel-el-Kibir.
‘Mafarka stretched out voluptuously, but his overgrown zeb, which measured eleven cubits, was too cumbersome!… So he thought he would coil it up neatly at the foot of his couch, like a rope. Having done this, he fell fast asleep. Now it happened that next morning a sailor still heavy-eyed with sleep mistook this cock for a coil of rope and made it fast to a jib. Then he threw the whole lot over the parapet to the sailors standing in the bow of the sailing ship. These began to haul in rhythm, calling “Heave-ho…Heave-ho!” to clew up the sail. At once the outsize cock hardened, stood up and hoisted the jib, which flapped and filled with wind. So Mafarka, still sleeping, was taken on an airy flight, riding the sea with his stuff cock like a vibrant mast, under the sail swelled by a favourable wind.’ 22Ibid., 47.
The beggar (Mafarka) recounts that once the ship arrives at Tel-el-Kibir, Mafarka entertains King Boubassa (the aforementioned dethroned king) with his “dick stories.”
King Boubassa, impressed by the stories and the size of his penis, asks to personally experience it. What is narrated next is meant to explain to them how Mafarka became king of Tel-el-Kibir:
[King Boubassa] wanted to try the virtues of such as miraculous zeb for himself. Mafarka-el-Bar hastened to satisfy the king, so it is said, and taking advantage of the submissive posture adopted by the latter, he gagged him, put him in chains and stole his sceptre!…’ 23Ibid., 48.
King Brafane interrupts to ask about what became of the demon’s horse. The beggar answers that it is still tormented by its search for its missing phallus, carrying death and disease wherever it goes.
‘He’s galloping in the desert, looking for his zeb… Oh, you’ve no doubt seen him already, at nightfall, bounding along the curve of the horizon, shaking his burning mane, and flooding the valleys with the fountain of blood that gushes from his stomach!… The demon’s horse seems to be particularly drawn to big camps of cavalry. He strives to gallop round them, painting a huge red circle with the unquenchable torrent of his blood, which spreads disease and death all around!… 24Ibid., 48.
Then the entertaining story takes a different turn as the beggar warns them that whole armies have perished because of that cursed horse. He affirms that the only way to keep the horse safely away is to loudly sing, dance and drink, to the point of heavy intoxication. Well, out of fear, or perhaps the mood was right, a boisterous party starts. And, of course, the party will include an orgy!
At the command of the king, bottles of rum and dancers were brought in:
[T]he most frenzied of the dancers [were] tearing wildly at their clothes, from which their steaming breasts jutted above their slender, muscular waists. Some displayed equine buttocks, gleaming with sweat, and marble breasts, Other negresses, graceful and oily, slipped elastically out from this human press like a piece of soap between a pair of hands.
Their voices squealed in a dismal and monotonous tearing of the throat, which lulled the bodies jumbled in dark corners, either dozing off or already stone-dead from alcohol.
And all the while, the sullen music leaped here and there, whipping the tottering silhouettes of the warriors black and blue in the gloom, laced with the sweet, sour and rancid smell of moist sexual parts. 25Ibid., 51.
Then all of a sudden, when Mafarka (the beggar) realizes that they were inebriated enough, he screams that he could actually see the cursed horse just outside the castle. Brafane sends away his armies in pursuit of that deadly horse. He gives Mafarka his best war horse to join them. But Mafarka shoot off faster than the army, cuts off a wound in the flank of the horse and with the blood, he colored its own mane and tail red. As such, the fictional horse would be a reality, visible by the moving forces. In the frenzy of war, and under their drunken stupor, he leads the armies to clash into each other, resulting into their total destruction. Mafarka had just defeated his rival’s armies and fled away with his favorite horse.
Note that Mafarka’s method of destroying his enemy is through inciting them to give in to their lusts. Yet another example of tying together sex with death.
Chapter 3: Mafarka’s brother is injured by rabid dogs
In one of Mafarka’s battles, a siege ensues. They’re under attack by the rival army of Faras-Magalla who sends rabid dogs to attack them. Magamal, Mafarka’s brother, manages to kill the dog that chases him but not before he gets a scratch on the ankle.
Chapter 4: Mafarka rejects copulating with the virgins of the town
To Mafarka’s horror, Magamal starts displaying symptoms of rabies. A great event to celebrate their victory is being prepared. It has been decreed that all the virgins of the town should present themselves to Mafarka and submit to his desires. Mafarks seems for a moment uncharacteristically giving in to a lustful celebration, perhaps out of desperation over the condition of his brother. One of the virgins seduces him:
‘We have fruit picked for you, and armfuls of flowers to gladden your nostrils, scorched by the wind of battles: for it is you who have saved the town. You know the art of conquest, better than any other warrior, your strength is fearsome, your chest more solid than the ramparts!… We do not know this, we have been told… We had never seen you… You were always on the highest towers!… You must certainly despire us for being fragile, useless and shy!… Your big eyes frighten us!… But if you want to take us in your arms, all of us, one after the other, and bring your lips close to us like roses, we will let you have your way… And that will please our parents, and us too, a little…’ 26Ibid., 80.
Mafarka addresses the girls:
‘Oh! I am taking you all!… Yes! And I mean to kiss your bodies in countless artful pleasing ways, once I have peeled their silky outer skins. I guess that they are burning, juicy and shaped for the skills and violent brawls of love. And I too, in spite of all the sword thrusts given and received, in spite of so many nights crushed rather than slept through on stone, I know, I know how to tame and coax the sly little pussy that nestles between your thighs, with its pink nose and downy fur, and its purr when smoked…’ 27Ibid., 82-83
He continues his salacious talk while bragging about his virility:
‘I know what it takes to make you squirm with pleasure as I tickle you all over, all over… under your feet and in the fragrant tuffets of your armpits, which clamour love like dogs baying the April moon!
[…]I go capably to work, forcefully rubbing between women’s thighs and dealing great blows of my cock into their pretty hole, to lay low the angry pussy that stretches, caterwauls, and yawns, licks her coat and burns her whole surrounding with her breath! 28Ibid., 83.
Mafarka is struggling with sexual self-restraint. His struggle approaches a psychotic level as he ends his interaction with the flirtatious girls expressing his desire to kill them:
‘As you see, I do not despise you at all… I love and understand you with all my knowing thirst of my flesh, which is pitted with deep wells, dried up and dark. But you will be unhappy afterwards! For what I most relish in you all is the wish to kill you! What can you ask of a living dagger such as I am? 29Ibid.
Note that female seduction towards Mafarka throughout the novel is often punishable by death.
Chapter 5: Mafarka punishes belly dancers by having them thrown to the sharks
The victory celebration continues for another evening. We encounter Mafarka showing off an aquarium of dangerous fish (a marine femme fatale!):
‘Look, there’s the pufferfish. No copulating with that one!’ he added with a snigger, ‘for it discharges its poison through its reproductive organs. There’s the female… Not pretty, is she?… And a good thing too, as her kisses are more dangerous than the male’s.’ 30Ibid., 90.
When the evening grows boring, two virgin belly dancers are brought in to Mafarka for entertainment:
All of a sudden, Babilli laid herself down before Mafarka and slowly, infinitely lazily, unhooked and shed her dress like a golden peel, so that her body burst out of it with the delicious lustre of a fruit whose cool pulp must also burn.
Her sister Libahbane bent over her, simulating slow caresses. She passed her hands back and forth over Babilli’s thighs and round belly, without touching. Then slowly her fingers travelled over the pointed breasts, which shimmed with phosphorous gleams. […] For a long while, Babilli trembled in pleasure, with the delicious monotony of an extended orgasm… 31Ibid., 100-101.
At that point Mafarka interrupts the performance and declares:
‘We’re going to play a very amusing game, but it requires absolute darkness! Put out those red torches!’
He was obeyed. The resin brands gradually guttered out.
‘Libahbane and you, Babilli, [the two belly dancers] come forward amongst us and choose the strongest, most handsome males…’
‘But we can’t see!’ replied Libahbane. 32Ibid., 101.
Mafarka responds:
‘That is the game! You choose by obeying your nostrils, or better still, the instinct of your vulva, for your eyes might deceive you.’ 33Ibid.
Mafarka had determined to kill the girls. By playing that bizarre game, he might be giving the girls a chance to choose another man to seduce thus saving their own lives, though probably he expected or even hoped, they would select him.
In the darkness…
Suddenly Mafarka felt the body of a woman slide into his arms, both burning hot and icy cold. […] [T]he unknown mouth that drowsed upon his own smooth and sinuous, and his insides heaved with terror and delight. 34Ibid.
He instantly stands up outraged and repulsed:
‘Enough, enough!’ he yelled. ‘Begone! Begone! You slaves there, light the torches! Fetter these women and let them be thrown to the fishes!’
[…] ‘Yes, yes! Let them be thrown to the sharks! You’ll love them more when they’re dead!… But living, no, no!… They may not pass amongst us alive!’ 35Ibid.
After sealing their fate, he turns to them and attacks them with insults:
‘Curse you! Curse you!… Like butterflies and flies, you have unseen proboscis to suck out the strength and savour of the male!… Like spiders, you disguise yourselves to look like rose-buds, and you even give off heady scents to attract insects like ourselves, so fond of flowers!… You strew yourselves with scales, so as to look like the sea when it sparkles in the sun, and our longing for coolness makes us your prey!… You deck yourselves with tinkling objects, because it is with little bells that tigers are tamed!… All the poison of hell is in your eyes, and the saliva on your lips shines to kill… yes, to kill as well as daggers, or still better!’ 36Ibid., 102.
Chapter 6: Magamal rips apart his bride
The evening is interrupted by a slave, who informs Mafarka of the deterioration of Magamal’s condition. Mafarka then runs into the palace to discover that his brother had been driven mad by the bite of the rabid dog. In a rabinous rage, he has torn apart his bride, Ouarabelli-Charchar, limb from limb on their first night together.
Mafarka slipped on something soft and clotted, did not understand, but a hot sweet stench of human sap and decay stung his nostrils, and his eyes, slowly growing used to the half-light made out the shreds and fragments of a female body strews gruesomely all around him, like the aftermath of a lethal flagellation.
Then, trembling with anguish, he bellowed for the slave, who came forward with his lamp of burning resin.
The bed appeared to be daubed in a scarlet pulp, and wrecked by a devilish combat. Out of its blood-soaked depth and tufted with scattered locks of hair, spilled vertebrae and bones that seemed to have been chewed by the teeth of a tiger in a rut.
With a fluttering heart, as if in a dream, Mafarka stared for a long time at that grisly offal, which exuded a sensual black odour. These were the pitiful remains of the divine Ouarabelli-Charchar!… 37Ibid., 113.
That scene follows the theme of the book that sex and death are always associated. It is as if Magamal is being punished for returning to his bride to have his first intercourse with her. A true Futurist man does not give in to love and marriage! It should be noted the author did not just have the woman killed in a horrific manner, but he also dehumanized and reduced into “scarlet pulp” and “grisly offal.”
After watching his dear brother die, Mafarka runs away screaming.
Chapter 7: Mafarka fights the last of his enemies using the dead body of his brother!
Mafarka takes a ship on a cruise at night, and he carries a large mysterious black sack on his back. In it lies the body of his dead brother. He does not realize that one of his companions is Sabattan, the grandson of his former rival Boubassa, disguised as a sailor. The cruise is contemplative and at times hallucinatory. As soon as Mafarka falls asleep, Sabattan, along with others, stealthily approach to kill him. But he wakes up and fights back. At a certain point in the fight, he lifts up the cadaver of his brother and hurls it at Sabattan while screaming an apology to his dead brother. In a way, he’s giving his brother a chance to take revenge for his own death. Having killed the last of his enemies on that ship and being conscious of his own mortality following the death of his brother prompts Mafarka to devote his life to a higher mission.
Chapter 8: Mafarka talks to his dead mother and promises a grandchild in place of his brother
Mafarka sails to the hypogea (plural of hypogeum, meaning underground tomb or crypt) where his parents are buried. When he falls asleep, he conceives of the idea of giving birth to a unique child. Curiously, he feels movement near his heart:
And as he still slept, he dreamt of drowsing in dense cornfields. A pain in his chest made him start. It was the urgent stabbing of a beak, pecking down at the shell of his heart.
‘My son! My son! So you’re asking to be born!..’ he shouted. ‘My son, sublime bird of the sky, with melodious wings!’ 38Ibid., 131.
In the hypogea, he faces the mummy (embalmed body) of his “mommy” (intentional play on words by the author) and presents her the dead body of his brother. In the emotional scene, his mother, Langourama, accuses him in the harshest words of killing her son. He acknowledges his guilt and in return he promises the following:
A son will be born of me, a son of flesh and blood!… But immortal, Mother, do you know?… And, from the depths of eternity, you will be able to watch him, still alive before you… still radiating youth!… So dry your tears!… You are to weep no more!… Keep your tears for the day of my death, which will be soon! 39Ibid., 137.
Mafarka sees his own death as a necessary price to pay, as he will be replaced with a younger, more powerful son. This is a reference to the theme of self-sacrifice in Futurist writings who often stated that they are ready to die so their Futurist revolution succeeds. However, that ideal is shared by most revolutionary movements.
Chapter 9: The Futurist Address—Dying young is glorious!
Mafarka’s followers and subjects realize that their victorious king is seeking a different mission. They travel to the hypogeum to beg him to take the supreme command of the kingdom. Now that his rivals are all dead, he could rule over all of Africa. His response was a fiery speech declaring that he has a different mission in life now. (This chapter, as its title indicates, is a Futurist manifesto within the novel, where parts of the speech were actually were rephrased and reused by Marinetti in other Futurist essays.) Mafarka rejects their pleas:
I want to surpass myself by creating, through the sheer effort of my heart, a youthfulness more radiant than my own, an eternal youth! […] The truth is that I fled for fear of growing old with that worthless sceptre in my hands! 40Ibid., 141.
Glorification of youth is a major theme in Futurism, to the point of urging the young to overthrow their elders. That explains the next passage where Mafarka addresses Abdullah, his captain, with disappointment:
What kind of heart have you got, if you haven’t felt the urge to kill me and take my place? 41Ibid.
That was another reference to self-sacrifice which will be revisited again at the end of the novel in the interaction between Mafarka, the father, and his son.
To Mafarka, and the Futurists, young death is preferable to slow aging!
‘I glorify violent Death at the end of youth, Death that plucks us when we are worthy of her deifying passions!… Woe to him who allows his body to age and his mind to wither!…’ 42Ibid., 147.
Mafarka tells his followers he’s no longer interested in power. Instead his eyes are set on the advent of a mechanical bird, i.e. his human-machine hybrid son:
[Y]ou can inform everybody that I have become a builder of mechanical birds!… You’re laughing?… Oh, so you don’t understand?… I’m building — giving birth to — my son, an invincible giant bird who possesses big flexible wings, made to embrace the stars! 43Ibid., 143.
The contemptuous mention of the vulva in the next paragraph is among the most notorious phrases of the novel:
‘That is how I am now releasing my will, which is still young and powerful, from my body — already crushed by useless striving… That is how I shall breathe my will into my son’s new body. He will be strong with all his beauty, unspoiled by the spectacle of death! I shall bequeath him my soul with a kiss, and live on in his heart and lungs, and behind the windows of his eyes… I shall hover above his lips’ red balconies… He is more beautiful than all the men and all the women on earth. His giant statue stands twenty cubits tall, and all day long his mighty arms can power wings more vast than all the tents of the Bedouin and all the roofs of your huts. For I tell you that I have given birth to my son without the help of the vulva! […] without the support and stinking collusion of the woman’s womb, it is possible to produce from one’s flesh an immortal giant with unfailing wings! 44Ibid., 145.
The warrior king declares:
[L]ove… womankind… […] I’ve wiped them from my memory! 45Ibid., 148.
In Futurist writings, love and woman are two sides to the same coin. Both are distractions to heroic men. Woman is worse that a distraction, she is a threat. She is Death! When Mafarka describes Death, he uses the feminine gender:
Death has you fast between her purple lips, and is sucking your blood. Her caresses are blotching your bodies, and her kisses voluptuously stripping off your flesh. 46Ibid., 149.
He farewells his followers, then leaves the reign of the kingdom in the hands of his captain Abdullah. Now he could devote the rest of his life to the birth of his son, Gazourmah.
Chapter 10: Mafarka finally gives in to sex with two peasant girls, then dismisses them
Blacksmiths are hard at work in building the mechanical being that is to be the child of Mafarka. They work so hard that over a hundred of them died. While waiting, Mafarka, has a sexual encounter with two young peasant girls, Habibi and Luba. The encounter serves to show Mafarka’s potency with women. Perhaps it is also a sign that his submission to lust foretells his impending demise. As in other seduction episodes in the novel, the girls are “dying to get fucked”!
Habibi said to Luba:
Have you looked into his eyes?… You’d think he was a wolf tearing at a lamb, when he holds us naked in his arms! […] [Yesterday] I just left him have me!… He crushed me with pleasure… Then he sprang to his feet, stepped over my naked body and went back to work without another glance!… But it does feel good, and I would spend my life loving him so, offered up every evening and lying in front of him… Only I’m sad when he takes the other women… 47Ibid., 152.
Note that in the above passage, Mafarka literally stepped on her naked body to carry on with his mission of “building” his son.
After he had enjoyed the young girls, he left them. When he returned to them, at the site of the Hypogea, he felt furious to find them inside.
‘What are you doing there?… Get out! Haven’t I told you a hundred times that you must not sit inside these sacred vaults?… Clear off!… […] Outside!… Would you have me slap your cheeks till you bleed, you little fools?'48Ibid., 154.
Besides having conflicting feelings about the girls, he also probably finds them “unclean” or “unworthy” of a sacred site such as that, where his family is buried.
Later on, he submits to their pleasures again. Habibi pours wine into his mouth. He responds:
‘Ah, what coolness, and what a garden of flowers you’ve put into my mouth!… It’s just as sweet — no, less sweet than your lips, my little Habibi, and yours, Luba!… You are not jealous?… Bravo! That is the way to be!… Not jealous at all!… And you both love me?… Then you must share me! Yes! Only, it’s tiring! But never mind, I’m young, young enough to satisfy both of you tonight!… For I want to come, come to the high peak of pleasure!… Tomorrow, I shall no longer exist!…’ 49Ibid., 156.
By the novel’s rules, giving in to lust means death is near, hence Mafarka is acknowledging again above that he will die soon!
He continues his sexual talk:
‘Show me your breasts, which are hard and stuff as though they would taunt all the world… They laugh, they laugh, your breasts, as they burn… And I hear them talking to me when I suck their tips… And you too, Luba, undo your clothes… Show me your pretty belly! No!… Wait! I want to pull your dress up myself! Let me do it! I love to slide my hand between your smooth, warm thighs… Oh, your belly is tiny under my outspread hand, how delicate and childlike, shy and as faithful as a servant, like a loaf of good hot bread, like the sun under the hand of God!… And your little vulva!… Ah, it’s hiding, the little thing, like a little creature that will and won’t!… Like a crab when the wave recedes… and then, quickly, splash! into the water, or shhh! into a hole!… I want you! I’ll catch you, little vulva!…’
He laughed and laughed amidst his tears, gripping Habibi round the waist. He threw himself upon her, and crushed her against the rocks with the weight of his thrusting… […]
And meanwhile Luba was licking his haunches up and down, with a knowing, meticulous grace…
Habibi, pinioned beneath Mafarka, smiled now and then to please him, and then grew serious again, her face absorbed, blown by the gusts of her climax, in a flush of hot crude passion. And she gasped under the onslaught of juicy pleasure, which spurted its gush of warm bliss through all her limbs.
At last Mafarka rose, a banana in his mouth, his eyes and moist lips laughing.
‘It’s your turn, Luba!’ he said, as he caught her by the waist.
And they rolled over on each other.
Mafarka dissolved in pleasure once again, writhing in a frantic rut, endlessly prolonged, until suddenly his head was felled by the brutal spasm and he collapsed on to the woman’s shoulder. 50Ibid., 156-157.
At the end of the sexual episode, he suddenly jumps up and yells at the girls:
‘Enough!’ he shouted. ‘Go! Leave! I’ve had enough!… No, no, little one… Now you are crying!… Why are you so sad?… You love me?… Oh, why love me like that?… It’s foolish to love me! You knew that you can’t give me joy! And besides, what would I do with joy, seeing that I always have his face in my heart… my beloved brother’s face! I can’t forget it… I keep seeing his blue smile and then, suddenly, his curled-up body, more hideous than a monkey’s carcass!… Oh no, no!… It’s horrible! Go away!… Your desire is like a boy trying to shake the trunk of my soul to make the fruit fall down… But I have no fruit to give you… Go away! I want to keep all my strength and sap for my son, who has bloomed on the high branch of my mind… He won’t leave it until I die… Your mouths love me too much! You are too thirsty for my body!… Go away! 51Ibid., 158.
Then he returns to the construction site to quell an uprising by the blacksmiths against the weavers.
Chapter 11: On the eve of his son’s birth, a seductress appears to Mafarka
At the Hypogea, a mysterious woman calls the name of Mafarka. She would represent his ultimate sexual confrontation.
[A] woman whose face alone emerged from the darkness, a pearly face, as if dazzled, washed by the memory of moonlight enjoyed long ago, in her childhood. Passionate black hair rebelled at the nape of her neck and flowed gladly all the way down her slim and muscular back. She opened her large bright eyes of violet silk, and spread the warm tenderness of her childlike gaze around her. Her half-closed lips sighed nostalgically:
‘Mafarka! Mafarka!'52Ibid., 163.
The motif of an enchanting female voice calling a man’s name leading him to his death recalls many myths of similar plot around the world. Various versions exist in Mexico, Egypt, Spain, Morocco and Arabia. The Irish version, known as the Banshee, is the most famous in the West.
“Moonlight” and “nostalgia” (mentioned above) are Futurist code words for love and feminine sentimentality, all of which are considered dangerous distractions for men.
The woman calls on Mafarka:
Listening to her, Mafarka’s soul lost the notion of silence, which all of a sudden became inconceivable. The world, the centuries, light, everything began with this voice which felt its way amorously over him like the hands of a woman caressing the manhood of her lover. She leaned her body forward a little, its outline almost invisible in the deepening gloom, scarcely a wraith of smoke, so supple that it swayed to invisible breezes! But her small bare hands implied all the burning nakedness of her flesh. Mafarka already felt the pull of that body upon him and inside him; and whose white feet, hidden again beneath her dark robe, were so smooth and soft to look at that he would have ilked to feel them on his face and mouth, and be gagged by their presence. […] He wanted nothing further from the world, now that he held joy, the joy of joys, between his hands like a treasure. And he let himself be lifted very high by this woman’s subtle perfume, as in his mother’s arms in former days. 53Ibid., 163-164.
He is so vulnerable with this woman that he is no more than a berry in her mouth. “Between her teeth” (above) is a reference to the conventional innate fear of castration by women. It has taken several forms in literature and art, one of which is the mythical vagina dentata (Latin for toothed vagina).
Mafarka could resist no more the siren whose name is Coloubbi:
With one leap, Mafarka hurled himself at her and took her in his arms, so roughly that the woman’s heavy tresses became undone and tumbled down. She did not mind, and offered no resistance, unbending under the assault so as to cling to Mafarka with a slow, delicious pressure from all her limbs, which seemed to melt, and yet stay firm and solid. 54Ibid., 165.
Mafarka is internally torn by his desire:
‘Oh, no!… Get out! Be off!’ he shouted, pushing her away. ‘What is it? What do you have inside you, that I should feel shaken and twisted to the roots?…’ 55Ibid.
Soon after, he tells her:
‘Ah! No! Come! Go! Approach! Nearer! In my arms! For the wine of desire is shaking my soul like the shutters in a deserted house![…] Take your mouth away! Take it away! Smile, just smile, slowly, like this, as one removes the cover from a lamp!…’ 56Ibid., 166.
She tries to bring Mafarka’s mouth to her breast:
Coloubbi appeared to be drowsing in a state of tranquil rapture, and yet with gentle stealth she was attempting to guide her beloved’s sensual mouth towards the flower of her breasts, whose acacia perfume was spiced with the scent of cloves, exhaled perhaps by her inviting armpits.
But Mafarka avoided this entrancing trap, and propping himself on his elbow, he began to stare lovingly into her eyes 57Ibid., 167.
Then he tells her:
‘Let me lick your body, from root to high branches. Let me bite your breasts, which gleam with fragrant gum, and your arms, twined like lianas round my neck!'58Ibid., 168.
Then she tries again to guide his mouth to her breast:
[W]ith a very gradual motion of her silky and terrible arm, Coloubbi was still drawing Mafarka’s mouth towards her breasts… Suddenly he leapt to his feet in horror, crying:
‘Oh, do not repeat my mother’s gesture!… Your breasts are cursed and barren!… Now go away!’ 59Ibid.
Coloubbi’s behavior brings to the forefront the Madonna-whore complex in disturbing ways. That complex had existed long before novel and was emphasized by Sigmund Freud. Men traditionally saw women as either “pure” Madonnas or shameless whores. What Coloubbi is doing is trying to assume both roles at once, mixing up the maternal with the sexual. Also, at the end, she calls the creature she claims to his mother, “my lover.”
Meanwhile, the weavers of Lagahourso attack their rivals and collapse the scaffolding carrying the blacksmiths of Milmillah resulting in a massacre and the destruction of the wings of Mafarka’s son. Mafarka is furious at the weavers and he forces them to rebuild the wings. They have to expedite their construction since a storm is coming.
The siren still follows Mafarka but he warns her:
‘Coloubbi, O divine essence of my youth! Yes, I love you with all my blood… But alas! I no longer belong to myself, and all I can love is my son!’ 60Ibid., 173.
Mafarka feels like she does not belong to the glorious scene of the birth of his son. As a woman, she was never part of his son’s conception. She is there, in his view, to ruin a happy moment. He humiliates her hoping she would leave:
‘Back, you foul hyena keeper!… Take yourself far away, with your pack that thrives on rotting sexual organs!… I won’t allow you to see my son! He is mine alone! It is I who made his body. It is I who engender him through sheer exertion of my will!… And I didn’t call on you to help me!… I did not lay you on your back and pump the divine seed into your ovaries, with heaves of pleasure!… The seed is still there, in my heart, in my brain! I have to be alone to bring my son to life!… Go away! I don’t want you spoiling his hot-headed youth with your eyes!… Go away!… Cover your face!… And do not undress! Hid your bosom from me!… Your skin is so transparent that I see the two snakes furiously butting their heads inside your breasts, as if trapped in two small silken bags!… Your anger? Your malice? Soon you’ll be weeping! And what do I care about those tears, which are not the blood of your tormented heart, but just the tears of love-sick plants?…’ 61Ibid., 183.
Coloubbi is leading a pack of vicious animals (hyenas) to enforce her status as a femme fatale, hence he calls her “the keeper of hyenas.”
After the furious speech, she walks away for the moment.
Chapter 12: The man-machine Gazourmah is “born,” Mafarka is killed
The creature that is to be the superhuman child is complete. He has been partially modeled after an airplane, constructed from bamboo, oak, hippopotamus sinew, whalebone, iron ribs and cloth wings. Once, he’s given a human spirit, he would be a hybrid of human, machine, animal and plant. Yet, he’s a superhuman since he could defy sleep, aging and other earthly needs. In this chapter, Gazourmah will be “born,” i.e. he will brought to consciousness
Mafarka gazes upon his son with admiration. Through his well-known pejorative against “vulvas” in the next line, he expresses his happiness that he was able to “birth” a son without intercourse with a woman:
‘Oh, the joy of giving birth to you like this — handsome, free of all the blemishes that come from the inefficient vulva and bias us to old age and death! … Yes, you are immortal, my son, my sleepless hero! 62Ibid., 188.
Like a true Futurist, the son who is not even conscious yet is already challenging the authority of his father by having a sexual desire for the woman, Coloubbi, rejected by him. To Mafarka’s shock, Gazourmah’s first gaze is towards Coloubbi, the siren, immediately accompanied by an erection of his metallic member.
Gazourmah’s leathery, copper-coloured penis stiffened like a sword. A torrent of life seemed to flood the new-born giant from head to toe, convulsing his muscles, which bulged out under his rough skin. His eyes glared wildly in the direction of an invisible spot, below, behind the rocks. 63Ibid., 189.
The author of Mafarka presented two oedipal conflicts in the novel, one between Gazourma and Coloubbi, and more prominently the one between Mafarka and Langourma, his actual mother. Thanks to Freud a few years earlier, the public had been fascinated by that complex.
According to the psychoanalytic theory, the Oedipus Complex is the development of sexual feelings in children, for a specific period, towards the parent of the opposite sex, in rivalry towards the other parent. For example, a boy views his father as a rival and develops a desire to eliminate him in order to have no competition in his relationship with his mother. By that token, Gazourmah sees his father, Mafarka, as a rival, hence he “desires” Coloubbi. As for Mafarka and his mother, the roots of the complex are less clear since we know nothing about his father. Though, Magamal, his own brother might have been the rival who had to be killed. However, we know that the complex survived into his adulthood where he finds no woman worthy of his attention. In fact, he acts like he deifies his mother.
Mafarka, gnawed by a strange jealousy, turned round. In the half-light, between two reefs, he recognized Coloubbi’s big, dark eyes, gleaming like a pair of gems. She was stealthily spying on Gazourmah’s birth!
Then the king felt an uncontrollable rage boil up inside him, and he picked up a stone and threw it in the woman’s face. She dodged it nimbly and, drifting on the waves as though riding on a swing of silvery gleams, she swam off on her side, singing her ironic song:
‘Oh I forgive you, Mafarka, for wanting to stone your son’s mother like that!… He is my son, you know, because his very first glance was for me!… I melted with joy under the rough whims in that first glance!… You see, all on my own I reach a dreadful climax through his strength as a man — a man who already dreams of killing me by emptying his veins into mine!…’ 64Ibid.
Again, Coloubbi, though she was never involved, claims to be Gazourmah’s mother. Mafarka is overwhelmed by disgust and jealousy. Coloubbi then clamps her legs together as if in dire need of having sex. She tells him:
‘I’ve seen the man who is alike my lover and my son!… I drank his first gesture of life, as if drinking straight from the udder of a cow, to refresh my soul for ever… I want to relieve him of the burder of his vigour!… I am his mother and his mistress… He is as much my son as yours!… Mafarka! Mafarka! Tell me about our child!’
‘Silence, you greedy bitch!’ Mafarka roared. ‘What do you want to know? And you could not hear me with your keen ears, poor shells defeaned by the dreadful shriek of lust! Your body is all hungry of mouth!… Admit it: if I present you with a heroic idea, you long to suck it like sugar-cane!…’ 65Ibid., 189-190.
To Mafarka, Woman is a killer of heroic ideas, hence the author pits female desire against male heroism.
Coloubbi responds to him:
‘If you kill me, I will be reborn, I will always be reborn in your son’s heart, like a prison tainted with terror and love!…’ 66Ibid., 190.
Mafarka breaks down in tears at her defiance that he could do nothing to get rid of her. He fears that she’s a mortal threat to his son. Then he realizes that this is the right moment to retrieve his mummified mother, Langourama, from the crypt to counterbalance the dangerous female presence of Coloubbi:
‘Langourma!… Langourma!… Come quick and see my son! He is handsome, more handsome than Magamal, and stronger! You’ll weep for joy! And from now on your tears will refresh your heart, like a water-cooler… 67Ibid., 193.
His interaction with the dead body of his mother devolves into a scene of bizarre Oedipal tension. His mother asks him to rock her like a baby:
‘Rock me, my child, as I once rocked you!…’
At these words, Mafarka felt his knees give way.
‘Yes, yes, my darling mother, I shall rock you unendingly to sleep, and for the second time I’ll close your eyes with long kisses! For now the time has come!… Oh, Mother, kiss me on the forehead as you used to do when you came to sit between my brother’s bed and mine!… And you would hold your breath so as not to wake us!… I’m very small, Mother, and afraid, like a child when the desert wind blows open the gateway to death on stormy night! Be happy! Forget me!’
‘Here, Mafarka… I’m offering my lips beneath the wood of the coffin… Yes! Yes! I can feel the heat of your lips!…’
‘Mother! Mother! I love you more than my youth!…’
‘Mafarka, kiss your son for me, on his mouth!… Don’t forget!’ 68Ibid., 194.
Now joy fills Mafarka’s heart and he excitedly tells Gazourmah to look to see his father’s mother gazing at him. Then Mafarka approaches his son to transfer his own spirit into him:
‘Gazourmah! Gazourmah! Gazourmah! Here is my soul!… Offer me your lips and open your mouth for my kiss!’
He jumped at his son’s neck, and pressed his lips to the sculptured mouth.
At once, Gazourmah’s formidable body gave a violent start, and his powerful wings unfurled, bursting the walls of the cage. (p. 196)
Mafarka pulls his mouth away to laugh with joy then…
‘Oh, my son, one more kiss so that I can drain myself into you!… Ah, don’t push me away like that! So you’re tired of me, as though I were a tight coat to be shed for a plunge in the sea!….’ 69Ibid., 196.
Suddenly, rivalry erupts between the father and son:
And suddenly a murderous impulse made him open his jaws to bite at Gazourmah’s cheeks!… But the father’s will did not flinch. […] Gazourmah could no longer contain his rebellious heart, which pranced with impatience in his huge chest. Suddenly he shook his body from side to side, and threw his father away from him like a furious bull tossing off its yoke.
Mafarka fell motionless on the rock, and sprawled there like a damp cloth. 70Ibid., 197.
Gazourmah’s violent killing of his father is not surprising. In fact, Mafarka expected it. In any case, Mafarka has already realized eternal youth through his immortal son. In Futurist writings where youth is glorified, the young are urged to dethrone, metaphorically kill, their elders.
Gazourmah is not finished in his rebellion against all authority. He declares to the Sun that he is about to dethrone it:
‘O Sun, I come to you as a ruler who cannot be assuaged by dominion over the world! I order you to guide me to the edge of the sea, where she dives between the islands of the clouds and is lost like a river in space!…
‘I want to follow you in your course, to enter the continents of fire where you go to bask in flame, O Sun, my slave! I long to slake at last my immemorial thirst for absolute power and immortality!… Oh, you can spare me that disdainful smile, for I am the stronger of us, the one who will one day succeed in chaining you to the high plateau of Africa!… In the meantime, Sun, bow down your head before me, you whom I took by surprise at the moment when you were looting my father’s heart of all its wealth!… Let go of those ingots!… On your knees!… Kiss my feet!… Enough! Stand up again. And now, Sun, cover my body with your incandescent butter, and then you will vulcanize my rubber limbs, for heavenly battles. 71Ibid., 199.
This cyborg versus sun contrast is an allusion to the Futurist idea that machines should reign over and transcends the inferior, natural world.
Mafarka is presented throughout the novel as the ideal Futurist man. But he is limited by his “Earthly” ties. He is still human. Thus, Gazourmah is the perfect embodiment of Futurism. He is born without the “contamination” of a woman’s vulva. He is a cyborg with superhuman abilities. One of them is flying. His youth is forever. He is a natural warrior, who’s capable of great violence, at even those closest to him. He knows the importance of repelling women. (He rejects the same seductress his father did.) Meanwhile his giant, metallic penis is a reminder of his great virility. Also, Mafarka’s reign extended over the whole of Africa, but Gazourmah (note the counter-Earth symbolism) is overthrowing the Sun at the end of the novel. In brief, Mafarka might be the ultimate Futurist man, but Gazourmah is the Futurist superman.
Coloubbi suddenly reappears naked on the scene before Gazourmah:
‘It is from your hands that I await death, O my son, O my lover!… Kill me, for I am the only witness of your divine birth!…’ 72Ibid., 201.
He crushes her on his metal chest:
A heavy blow. The wail of torn, sobbing waves. A gush of blood splashed a red spray over Gazourmah’s chest, as with a surge of his wings he rose into the open sky. So quickly that he scarcely heard Coloubbi’s dying voice beneath his feet:
‘You’re crushed my heart under your ribs of bronze!… It is the Earth you’ve killed in killing me!… Soon you will hear her first death-throes.’ 73Ibid., 202.
Gazourmah watches her emotionless as she dies. For emphasis on what she symbolically stands for, her death brings about destruction of the earth on a biblical scale.
In the final scenes, the author intended to equate the sexual with the feminine and the natural. All of which do not belong the Futurist vision. The apocalyptic destruction and dying Coloubbi’s self-reference as “the Earth” stand for the eradication of the feminine/natural, while the masculine/industrial (Gazourmah) takes over. Her death could also be symbolic of “mission complete,” i.e. women as a requirement for the continuation of the human race are no longer needed.
The novel ends with Gazourmah ruling over the universe.
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Endnotes
