Desert Songs: Western Images of Morocco and Moroccan Images of the West.

• Author: Miller, Susan Gilson

By JOHN MAIER. The Margins of Literature. Albany: STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS, 1996. Pp. xix + 354. $21.95 (paper).

No single book has had an impact on the study of the Middle East in the past twenty years greater than Edward Said's Orientalism. Students who don't know Cairo from Khartoum, who have never heard of Jean-Leon Gerome, and who think that Sir Hamilton Gibb was a British general know that much of Western cultural production about the Orient over the past two centuries has been tainted by a false sense of superiority. Said's theme has sunk so deeply into the popular consciousness that the word "Orientalism" need only to be evoked, and a certain critical apparatus, a particular terminology, and a predictable set of formulations fall neatly into place.

Desert Songs closely follows this paradigm, taking Orientalism as its intellectual signpost. The author, who spent time in Morocco on a Fulbright fellowship, wishes to correct some of the worst abuses of Eurocentrism by introducing works "produced by the 'Orientals' themselves" that let us "hear the many voices of the East in a way that was virtually impossible before" (p. 2). All of the works cited relate to Morocco, all are written either by Moroccans or Americans, and all are available in English. France's century-long cultural investment in Morocco is not mentioned, and no French sources have been consulted; as for Arabic, the sources cited are texts in translation. The author confesses that after "years of struggling with Arabic . . . he has only a tenuous grasp" of the language (pp. 10-11). Despite the promise that we will be hearing something new, many of the works cited will be familiar to both specialists and non-specialists. Moreover, the book is fitfully edited, with many typos and a method of notation that requires continual and tiresome cross-checking.

The interpretive slant is evident in chapter one, which harks back to the classical period and looks at the Aeneid as a foundation text of Western fantasies about the Orient. Opposing the symbolic East, personified by Dido, is Aeneas, the Western hero and "phallic self" (p. 42) "who, with his rhetoric of self control . . . anticipates modern technostrategic thought" (p. 59). During the Gulf War, the Western phallic self raised its ugly head once again, seeking ways to "penetrate" (a favorite word) the feminized East. In a chapter entitled "Silence and Ecstasy," Maier takes up the problem of "ecstatic performance,"...