I

PEOPLE’S DEMOCRATIC AND REPUBLIC OF ALGERIA

MINISTRY OF HIGHER EDUCATION
AND SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH
ABDELHAMID IBN BADIS UNIVERSITY OF MOSTAGANEM
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

Metaphor: A Settled Scene in the World of Rhetoric,

an Enigma in the World of Language Teaching

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT FOR THE DEGREE OF

MAGISTER IN DIDACTICS AND LANGUAGE COMMUNICATION.

Presented by

Mrs. GHENIM née MESMOUDI Naima

Board of Examiners:
Dr. SERIR Ilhem, M.C. Chairman University of Tlemcen
Pr. BAHOUS Abbés, Prof. Supervisor University of Mostaganem
Mr. NEDDAR Bel Abbés, CC. Co-supervisor University of Mostaganem
Pr. AZZIZ Barbara Nimri, Prof. Examiner University of Oran
Mrs. BENNEGHROUZI Fz, CC. Examiner University of Mostaganem

Academic Year
2007-2008
 II

Acknowledgements

My deep thanks are due to my teacher Abbes Neddar. He has demonstrated

throughout the academic year a genuine and fruitful involvement. He knows that one
of my dearest dreams is to see Arabic culture spread abroad, to make public this
beautiful poetry that shows only one thing that poetry is the food of the Arab spirit. I
trust his enthusiasm and I look forward to try to fulfil this daring dream. I owe a
depth of gratitude to my supervisor Professor Abbes Bahous. He is a lover of poetry
and literature and this has been of a great inspiration. I want to thank Barbara Nimri
Aziz for her efforts. Every page in my work has benefited from her care and
intelligence. I am grateful to her. Special thanks are intended also to my friend Oukil
Omar who has proved his capacities in the problems related to the computer.
 III

Dedication

My family deserves my deepest gratitude. They contributed to make my

working conditions easier. Their love and support was a great moral strength and my
gratitude is far beyond what words can possibly express.
 IV

Abstract

Metaphor is poetic in its essence and wisdom is its fundamental nature.

Metaphor and poem have an equally identical function since they bring into being a
symbolic image, a reflection that bears a lived experience. It is symbolic since the
signifier is not clearly conveying the signified. It is a lived experience as it springs
from a culture: climate, history, myth, manner, customs and institutions. I have
entitled my work: Metaphor: A Settled Scene in the World of Rhetoric, an
Enigma in the World of Language Teaching. It is “a settled scene” because it is
beautiful and attractive. It is charming and appealing to the reader. It is pleasant for
the ear and the heart but it is also “an enigma in the world of language teaching”
because it is inaccessible to reason. It is hard to define with logic. It becomes then
the matter of the spirit and the heart to comprehend. It is an enigma that carries truth,
a hidden truth, that one seeks to unveil, to unearth, charm and magnetism emanating
from mystery, obscurity. From the moment the heart and the spirit take part in this
“settled scene”, intuition befalls as necessary equipment, even though; metaphor is
an analogical image that is fundamentally based on similitude. It is not in the vein of
the algebraic signs, because it is an ambivalent and multivalent image as distorted as
a dream. This distortion might be an act of censorship. My questions are: why does
metaphor not say directly what it means? Why does it not reveal its meaning without
disguise? Is it like a dream only a wish fulfilment? What is the origin of this
distortion in metaphor that resembles that distortion in dream? These questions
incited my motivation to venture into the fascinating "usage” of this figure of speech
that is metaphor.
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Table of Content

Introduction The Impact of Words on Mind.......................................................1

Chapter One Types and Domains of Metaphor...................................................7
1.1 Types of metaphor ....................................................................................... 8
1.2 Domains of Metaphor ................................................................................ 11
Chapter two Metaphor the Last Confidential Key............................................19
2.1 Metaphor a Linguistic Ornament between Censure and Confession ...20
2.2 Metaphor, between two levels of understanding: semantics and
pragmatics ........................................................................................................ 31
Chapter three Metaphor and Culture.................................................................42
3.1 Metaphor: an Abstract Image Grounded within its Culture ...............43
3.1.1 Cartoons:.............................................................................................. 44
3.1.2 Strip Cartoons ..................................................................................... 44
3.1.3 Advertising .......................................................................................... 46
3.1.4 Movies .................................................................................................. 46
3.1.5 Literary works..................................................................................... 46
3.1.6 Rituals .................................................................................................. 47
3.1.7 Dream interpretations ........................................................................ 48
3.1.8 Myths.................................................................................................... 48
3.1.9 Physical Symptoms ............................................................................. 49
3.1.10 Social Institutions .............................................................................. 49
3.1.11 Social Practices .................................................................................. 51
3.1.12 Laws ................................................................................................... 51
3.1.13 Foreign Policy .................................................................................... 51
3.1.14 Forms of Discourse ........................................................................... 52
3.2 Metaphor and Schema Theory ................................................................. 59
Chapter four Metaphor and Education..............................................................66
4.1 Metaphor and Authoritarian Teaching ................................................... 67
4.2 Metaphor and Authoritative Teaching: ................................................... 73
Conclusion.............................................................................................................87
Bibliography..........................................................................................................91
Index.......................................................................................................................98
Annexes................................................................................................................103
 1

Introduction:

The Impact of Words on Mind

 2

Roger Caillois in Gardes-Tamine’s book tells a story1 that shows the impact
of a word on people, and the source of its energy. The account is of a blind man, on
the Brooklyn Bridge, in New York. One day the poor blind man was asked about the
daily sum of money that he was able to pull together, and the blind man said that two
dollars a day are considered as a great achievement for him. The questioner man
noted the label on the man’s chest, where the handicap is mentioned, then wrote
something on the other side saying to the blind man “here are some words that will
increase enormously your income; I will come back after a month, to see the
efficiency of my act.” After a month the unknown man drew closer to the blind man,
“dear, sir” said the beggar “how can I thank you? It is magnificent, I perceive now
from ten to fifteen dollars a day. What have you written on this notice that conveys
much charity?” The stranger man said “it is easy, it was written “blind from his
birth”, I wrote instead “spring is coming, I will not be able to see or appreciate it.”
(Gardes-Tamine 1996: 7)
The difference between the two formulations is infinitely vast, in the sense
that the first one is only informative, whereas the second appeals to emotions and
feelings. Words and magic were in the beginning the same thing, and up to now
words enclose much of their magical power. By means of words one can give to
another the utmost happiness or convey absolute desolation, it becomes then
necessary to plead for the help of rhetoric whenever it is crucial to act upon people.
Words are merely the distinctive way to communicate. We talk to the doctor;
we talk to our husbands and wives; we talk to our friends and opponents; we talk to
ourselves. We are surrounded by words. There is a rush of words on television, on
the radio, on newspapers. I have tried to find out the different areas where words are
indispensable and in spite of what I would think the whole life is based on words.
Indeed we live in a world of words.
Metaphor is one of the heaviest and intense figures of speech. It denotes
‘transport’ in Greek. It transports a concept from where it is normally located to
somewhere else where it is not usually found. This tricky and risky play with words
incited my motivation to venture into the fascinating "usage” of this figure of speech.
Metaphors are common in our daily communication. The previous investigations of
metaphor such as Ricoeur’ The Rule of Metaphor or Lakoff’s Metaphors we Live
 3

By have identified metaphor as not merely a figure of speech that helps expand
language by fusing one word with another, but as the essence of all figurativeness
that even makes our expanding thought possible. Metaphors are not only the
privilege of poets and philosophers. I try in Chapter One to classify metaphor from
the complex i.e. the one that is used by poets, to the simple one. I have to note that
the word simple does not mean easy and free from troubles because even a dead
metaphor such as “Juliet is the sun” requires a psychological process that involves
considerations of relatively enduring patterns of relations as well as analogical
reasoning. I have then tried timidly to unlock the three sliding doors only, metaphor
and love, metaphor and politics, and metaphor and religion. Metaphor is not limited
to these three areas. It takes as I have said a vast place in our daily communication. I
have limited myself to these three areas because all the metaphors that will be
quoted throughout my work belong to these three areas of study.
The collocation as well as the aesthetic of the words in metaphor is another element
that stirred my interest and motivation. This analogical image transports an effect
with all its collocations that could remind us another word. It could be a hidden truth,
a censure, a disguised truth or an illumination that comes out of confusion. Let’s take
the metaphor by Poe in “The Raven”
“Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!” Quoth the
Raven “Nevermore”
This is the first metaphorical expression in the “Raven”2 that covers a melancholic
state of mind, and uncovers at the same time the non-existence of the raven. It is only
in this verse that the raven becomes emblematical. While some poets use metaphor
as an aesthetic knot, full of mysteries, Poe uses it as a last answer to all that has been
previously narrated. It is a kind of knot that releases all the knots that occurred
before. This is why in the second chapter I have made an attempt to find out the
reasons for the use of metaphor. 1-Why does metaphor not say directly what it
means? 2- Why does it not reveal its meaning without disguise?
Arabic is a shy language. This language seems like a language which resists, or a
language of resistance. There are so many taboo words you could not find in Arabic
literature, you find the writer insinuating, talking about these things without
mentioning the names, at the end everybody know what he is talking about. My
 4

hypothesis is to show the extent to which ingenious metaphors could help a shy
language, like Arabic.
Metaphor lacks any interests in reality as well as morality. We just look at it and
discover the paradise above. I will limit myself in this dissertation to metaphor only.
It is to my perception the most important figure of speech and the right use of it is as
Aristotle said is a sign of an inborn talent it cannot be learned from others.
My second question introduced in Chapter Two is about the relationship between the
semantic and the pragmatic signification of a word, in our case the weight of
metaphors engaged in an excursion from the semantic meaning to the pragmatic one.
In other words does metaphor belong to the semantic meaning or to the pragmatic
meaning?
Words also reflect attitudes and beliefs, ideas and facts. In short language
denotes cultural reality. Thus my first question in Chapter Three is about the relation
between the code and the culture which creates, and transmits to the next generation.
Since metaphor is also a code I will try to identify it within and through the culture
that surrounds it. Metaphor as Lakoff expresses is not only within the domain of
literature, there are other imaginative inventions such as cartoons, dreams, myths,
social practices that shape metaphor. I have tried to find examples of Arabic poets
who have been influenced by the Western modernistic movement with all its
characteristics as the use of free verse as well as the use of myth and rituals that
revolutionises the traditional ways in which metaphor was constructed in Arabic
verse. My second query within Chapter Three is the relationship between schema
theory and the use of metaphorical language. It is incredible how knowledge is
organised in the mind despite its hugeness. Prototype theory gives us an idea about
the complexity as well as the order of things in the mind. Metaphors are governed by
this order. In this chapter I want to show the limits of metaphor, regardless of its
fundamental features as being free and highly imaginative, it is nevertheless bound
with an extremely organised system of thinking. I do not want to end on a pessimistic
tone and say that metaphor at the end is not free. I would rather say that metaphor is
free but its freedom operates within the limits of a highly complex network in the
mind.
 5

Chapter Four is completely dedicated to the didactic application of metaphor in

education. Is it valuable to teach metaphor to foreign language learners? I have tried
to draw a dichotomy between authoritarian and authoritative teaching and the
relevance of metaphor within these two perspectives of teaching, not to say two
philosophies of teaching.
The aim of my research is first of all to show how boring our life would be without
metaphor, how tedious and monotonous would be our life without metaphor. It
would be somehow dull to speak like an automat. Imagine if we are not endowed
with this capacity to play with words, to create new combinations, to generate
original and innovative way of speech, how dreary, how lifeless our life would be. I
have been working mostly on Arabic poetry. This literature is so beautiful, so
fantastic, I found poets who produced extraordinary metaphors. In Arabic we say
“Lakad adrakat hu, hirfatu al-adab” which literally means that he has been struck or
blown the profession of words. I can also translate it metaphorically as “He has been
blown the frenzy of words” It cuts two ways in the sense that it is a blessing and a
curse. It is a blessing for a poet because he is manipulating the fragility of words, and
the words become like the drug of the spirit, but at the same time it is a curse because
he is subjected to the dead memories of the races who contributed to it. Sometimes I
felt as though my whole work is an elegy on this beautiful literature. The most
difficult is that it is dying and I am seeing its death. I try to console myself by saying
that language is not important, what is important is what the language says. This is
why I work a lot through the tremendous efforts of Arabic to English translations
done by Salma Khadra Jayyusi and her daughters Lena and May besides other Arabic
to English translators such as the Iraqi Sargon Boulus and Naomi Shihab Nye.
 6

Notes to Introduction:

1-[My translation] The quotation below was originally in French. I have translated
the passage in the body of the paragraph.
“On raconte qu’il y avait à New York, sur le pont de Brooklyn, un mendiant
aveugle. Un jour, quelqu’un lui demanda combien les passants lui donnaient par jour
en moyenne. Le malheureux répondit que la somme atteignait rarement deux dollars.
L’inconnu prit la pancarte que le mendiant portait sur la poitrine et sur laquelle était
mentionnée son infimité. Il la retourna et écrivit quelques mots sur l’autre face. Puis
la rendant à l’aveugle : voici, dit-il, je viens d’écrire sur votre pancarte une phrase
qui accroîtra notablement vos revenus. Je reviendrai dans un mois. Vous me direz le
résultat. Et le mois écoulé : Monsieur, dit le mendiant, comment vous remercier ? Je
reçois maintenant dix et jusqu'à quinze dollars par jour. C’est merveilleux. Quelle est
la phrase que vous avez écrite sur ma pancarte et qui me vaut tant d’aumônes ?
-C’est très simple, répondit l’homme, il y avait : « aveugle de naissance », j’ai mis à
la place : « le printemps va venir, je ne le verrai pas ». (Gardes-Tamine 1996 : 7)
2- The Portable Poe, contains the article “The Philosophy of Composition” that
discusses Poe’s plots. It is said that nothing is clearer than every plot. It is elaborated
to its dénouement before anything is attempted with the pen. This is true because the
metaphor that I quote above is a kind of plot that is revealed only at the end of the
passage where it is simultaneously a dénouement.
 7

Chapter One:

Types and Domains of Metaphor

 8

1.1 Types of metaphor

1- Explicit metaphors
These are the less ambiguous metaphors because the tenor and the vehicle are
compared visibly. It takes the form of X is Y. In fact the vehicle follows the tenor. It
is something which is explicitly compared by something else. When Mahmoud
Darwish, the Palestinian poet in (Jayyusi 1987: 205) said
Beirut our tent
Beirut our star
Beirut, shape of shade
She tempts us with a thousand overtures
And with new alphabets
Beirut our only tent
Beirut our only star

Beirut in the above poem is overtly compared to a tent and then to a star. The
comparison here is unambiguous and clear.
2- In contrast, embedded metaphors are much complex to decipher, because the tenor
or the vehicle are not actually identified. Let’s illustrate this with the same author
(ibid: 201)
This land absorbs the skins of martyrs.
This land promises wheat and stars.
Worship it!
We are its salt and its water.
We are its wound, but a wound that fights.

The land is the tenor. It is being compared to something that “absorbs the skins of
martyrs”. It is not explicitly stated, because we need additional effort to know that a
tomb absorbs the skins of martyrs. We finally figure out that the land is the tenor and
the tomb is the vehicle. However it is more poignant to write “this land absorbs the
skins of martyrs.” Than to say “this land is our tomb”.
3- The extended metaphors is also a metaphor with a tenor and a vehicle that is
constantly renewed in more than one sentence. Amal Dunqul, an Egyptian poet
(ibid: 217) compared the city to a wrecked ship in an extended metaphor

I feel I am alone tonight;

and the city, with its ghosts and tall
buildings, is a wrecked ship
 9

that pirates looted long ago

and sent to the ocean’s bottom.
At that time the captain leaned his head
against the railing. Beneath his feet
lay a broken wine bottle. Shards
of a precious metal. And the sailors
clung to the silent masts,
and through their ragged clothes
swam sad fish of memory.
Silent daggers, growing moss, baskets
of dead cats… Nothing pulses
in this acquiescent world.

Translated by Sharif Elmusa and Thomas G. Ezzy

Another example of extended metaphor in the form of poem written by T.S. Eliot
that has been quoted by Joanna Thornborrow and Shan Wareing (1998: 103)

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

The cat here is the tenor that is not mentioned at any instance and the fog is the
vehicle. We have to accept a kind of smart play of the poet in his use of the yellow
colour because we all know that cats could have different colours. There are some
signs that show that the fog is compared to a cat for example the tongue, the back,
the sudden leap, the silent move. These are the grounds of the metaphor, which is
extended on more than one level. All the qualities that are shared between the cat and
the fog are mentioned.
4- Anthropomorphic metaphor: it is also called personification. It is a technique
whereby human features are attributed to objects, animals, and concepts.
Anthropomorphic metaphors are frequent in cartoons as well as children’s books. I
have not found a better illustration of this phenomenon than Through the Looking
 10

Glass, a work by Lewis Carroll. Alice is fascinated by the eccentricity of this new
world where flowers, insects and pawns can talk:

“she (Alice) said afterwards that she had never seen in all her life such a face as
the King made, when he found himself held in the air by an invisible hand, and
being dusted: he was far too much astonished to cry out, but his eyes and his
mouth went on getting larger and larger, and rounder and rounder, till her hand
shook so with laughing that she nearly let him drop upon the floor.”
(Carroll 1994: 24-5)

The king that is a pawn of the chessboard is given human characteristics such as the
widening of its mouth and eyes. It is able to talk too, because when Alice let him
drop upon the floor the wooden piece said “I assure you, my dear, I turned cold to
the very ends of my whiskers.”
5- Pathetic Fallacy is another form of metaphor, whereby human reactions and
emotions are revealed and exposed through nature and environment. This devise was
particularly developed through the late eighteenth century and the beginning of the
nineteenth century. There is an example in British literature in (Dickens 1994: 1):

“London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in
Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as
if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be
wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an
elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimneys-pots,
making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-
flakes- gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.”

We all know that the weather affects our mood, but in writing it seems that
the mood affects the weather. David Lodge in (1992: 85) quotes John Ruskin who
said that all violent feelings produce in us falseness in our impressions of external
things that he characterises as the pathetic fallacy. The writer invents the kind of
weather that corresponds to his mood. Any fiction deprived from this rhetorical
devise would be lacking in something. It would be missing a touch of magic.
Dickens in the example above transforms metaphorically an ordinary scene into an
apocalyptic picture.
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6- The Mixed Metaphor

Thornborrow and Wareing in (1998: 106) consider the mixed metaphor as a less
praised devise, because the tenor that is the subject of the metaphor stays the same,
whereas the vehicle and ground change. They gave the example “a bottle neck is
strangling the traffic flow.” In literature it shows a lack of control, or lack of
language awareness.

7- The Dead Metaphor

It is the less admired metaphor. It could have been an original metaphor in the past,
but it has been naturalised to a certain point that people use it without being aware of
it as a metaphor.

1.2 Domains of Metaphor

Metaphors of love:
Nizar Kabbani in his poem “Language” said:
When a man is in love
how can he use old words?
should a woman
desiring her lover
lie down with
grammarians and linguists?
I said nothing
to the woman I loved
but gathered
loves’s adjectives into a suitcase
and fled from all languages.

(Translated by Diana Der Hovanessian and Lena Jayyusi 1987: 375)

Love usually begins with a metaphor, as it has an emotional depth, moreover it

has a great influence over our poetic memory. It cultivates intimacy therefore
excluding all those who are unable to penetrate the speaker’s mind. Love usually
begins with a beautiful metaphor and ends up with an elegy a kind of funeral song,
that sounds again the echo of the metaphor.
 12

Words like love, beauty, dignity contain reality or truth that is not yet fulfilled since
man has acquired this capacity to express his feelings. He is in constant struggle, a
sort of conflict between what he says and what he could have said. He seeks
perfection; nevertheless, he is always dissatisfied, frustrated by the limits of words
over the intense hearts that have beaten and that continue to beat over and over again.
One becomes aware of the difficulty of writing not by reading but through doing or
trying a small experience to recognize the dangers and the difficulties of words.
Lacan in Carminiani (1994:88) argued “I always try to say truth; however we can
never say the whole truth.” 1
We try to express truly what is going on in the mind and the heart. Every person
is able to say pleasant words when he is in love, but when a poet is in love, it is hard
to believe what he is able to say. No one can anticipate what he is able to state. He is
so emotional that he deviates from all the norms of language to the extent that he
creates striking effects that become hard for ordinary people to understand. Even so
every person is able to benefit from the linguistic delight. The poet may lament his
beloved’s hard-heartedness to beg her to admit defeat. He offers an extensive record
of the features of her beauty: the eyes are likened for Poe to the “twin stars of Leda”,
for Al Sayyab an Iraqi poet to “the two palm tree forests in early light”. For Hijazi,
an Egyptian poet, in (Jayyusi 1987: 261-2) the eyes are even his last refuge

Your eyes are my last refuge

Where I hide my face in your gaze,
Waiting for my end
Where light is most intense.
Your eyes are grass and dew
Where for a moment I spread my shadow
Then continue on my way.
Translated by Sargon Boulus and Peter Porter

The cheeks, the lips and teeth are also compared to the appropriate precious
stones. A lover is a man wounded by Cupid’s arrow and the wound is also
metaphorically characterized in Kabbani’s poetry by a “storm-tossed ship”,
nonetheless the wound is at the same time freeing a wonderful feeling Kabbani said:
 13

Who are you

Woman entering my life like a dagger
Mild as the eyes of a rabbit
Soft as the skin of a plum
Pure as strings of jasmine
Innocent as children’s bibs
And devouring like words?
(Jayyusi 1987: 370)2

Ahmad Chawki, the great Egyptian poet of the twentieth century was regarded as
“the Prince of poets” “Amir al Choaara” in Arabic. He interprets love as a
progression from a fleeting look to a meeting. He writes “a glance, a smile, a hello, a
talk, a rendezvous then a meeting.”3 I have translated the word “kalam” into “talk”. I
had difficulties to find the right word for “kalam”. “kalam” denotes a refined talk. It
is neither “a chat” nor “a discussion”. A man in love brings into play the
enchantment of words, the magic that draws a woman to write down her heart with
the name of her beloved. He sends her some words that go in straight line towards
the ear, words that shake her existence, and shift her past to present and her present
to the past, words that lay her down in the most pleasant fogs, words that are not in
the vein of words. They are harmless but very energetic. They spring back like a
torch in the obscurity of the dark. He brings the sun, the moon, the stars and he
moves her in and out to finally take a trip with her on Sinbad’s carpet.

Metaphors of politics:
“ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL
THAN OTHERS.”
(Orwell 1945: 90)

When I used the title “metaphors of politics” I have to stress first of all the
difference between politics and ideology. According to the Marxist belief, ideology
refers to false ideas. Marx (1970) makes use of the metaphor “camera obscura” to
describe ideology. Engels in (Boudon 1991: 56) uses “distorting spectacles” another
metaphor to express ideology that is ideology is nothing but a distorted and deformed
truth. We have seen in Animal Farm4, the story written by Orwell how ideologues
 14

implement their goals through an emotional discourse rather than a scientific

discourse. Ideologies are strongly linked to dictatorial and oppressive power. Orwell
makes it clear in “Animal Farm” that those who do not conform to the regime must
be killed. When the ideology is implemented it becomes politics and politics is not
free from metaphors, because metaphors have a highly emotional dynamics. In
Algeria the well-known metaphor used by Algerians to describe their people is
“flock of sheep” we usually hear “we do not have citizens; we have a flock of
sheep.” Mohamed Hachemaoui5 explains in El Watan newspaper the pastoral
metaphor as symbolic of a political system is as old as the world. The president is
the “shepherd of the men”. The shepherd ensures the safety of his herd, the
disappearance of the shepherd involves the fatal wander of the ewes. The shepherd is
the only human being in charge for the destiny of the ewes; the faithful ones have
other duties only that to obey the sovereign
Man experiences the supremacy and the influence of words over an audience.
Unfortunately some men turn out to be more than gifted in the art of rhetoric to use it
for evil purposes. It is like Nobel’s invention of nitro-glycerine, which is similar to
words, in the sense that it cuts both ways. This invention has great benefits and at the
same time brought great sorrow to humanity. Words are naked, undressed, they are
with nothing on and it depends on Man and his inclinations to dress them the way he
wants. Words have more often served for criminal propagandas, but who are to be
blamed words or their users? Adolph Hitler said in his book My Struggle:

“All propaganda has to be popular and has to adapt its spiritual level to the
perception of the least intelligent of those towards whom it intends to direct itself.”

Hitler like other politicians was talented in the use of rhetoric. He possessed
such qualities as invention, disposition, style and a solid memory that has power both
to convince, to argument and the style adapts to the spirit and the inventiveness of
words, before the eloquence of the body, the voice and gesticulation. George Lakoff,
a professor of linguistics explains in an open letter on the internet how President
Bush has convinced most of the country that war in the Gulf is morally justified.
Lakoff found that the justification is based very largely on a metaphorical system of
 15

thought. He checked every metaphor and what was hidden behind. For example he
reported the American officials in speaking of the “rape” of Kuwait that
conceptualised a weak and defenceless country as female and a strong military
powerful country as male and as response to this most Iraqis pronounced an Arab
proverb “It is better to be a cock for a day, than a chicken for a year.” Lakoff
explains also what is hidden by seeing the state as a person, in performing the state as
person metaphor, Bush is hiding the internal structure of the state, that is class
structure, ethnic composition, political parties, ecology to the benefit of national
interest. Lakoff explains other metaphors such as America seen as the “hero” exactly
as in a fairy tale and Iraq seen as the “villain”. (There are other interesting metaphors
Lakoff discusses provided in details in annex three.)

Metaphors of religion:

“ And the King (of Egypt) said: “Verily, I saw (in a dream) seven fat cows,
whom seven lean ones were devouring, and seven green ears of corn, and
(seven) others dry. O notables! Explain to me my dream, if it be that you
can interpret dreams.” Yusuf, the man of truth was the only capable to
explain the dream of the King, he said
“ For seven consecutive years, you shall sow as usual and that the (harvest)
which you reap you shall leave it in the ears, (all) except a little of it which
you may eat.”
“ Then will come after that, seven hard (years), which will devour what you
have laid by in advance for them, (all) except a little of that which you have
guarded
( stored).
“Then thereafter will come a year in which people will have abundant rain
and in which they will press (wine and oil).”
43, 46, 47, 48, 49, Surah 12. Yusuf from the Koran6

The holy Koran is a marvellous treasury chest so far as rhetoric is concerned.

There is an evocation of sights and sounds, and the musical quality under a divine
imagery and where the literal objects carry more than literal meaning. When Holy
Koran was first introduced to the Arabs, it caused a linguistic and figurative
revolution to the extent that poets and orators consider that it is humanly impossible
to create such an eloquent work. They finally believed that it is the work of the
divinity, the supernatural being. The Koran is sacred for Muslims. It is the source and
 16

resource at the same time. It is the source of all what concerns grammar, and all the
Arabic rules in general. It is also a resource because it carries the eternal wealth, the
eternal wisdom, the eternal pride of Arabic language. The holy Koran is full of
stories, especially stories of prophets. God embodies within them the condition as
well as the essence of human life in an adequate style which is full of metaphors that
correspond plenty to the abyss of the stories. In the “Surah” above, Yusuf interpreted
a dream that is full of metaphors. It has shifted his existence from anonymity to
legendary and from an unfortunate to a privileged and his first dream has become a
reality, the dream where he saw that eleven stars and the sun and the moon were
prostrating themselves to him, his father forbade him to say his dream to his brothers
because “Shaitan” (Satan) is an open enemy to Man. Yusuf, the man of knowledge
and wisdom has become the person in charge of the store-houses of the land he
guarded them with full knowledge. I don’t know if I can allow myself to make a
comparison between a literary critic and Yusuf, since the former is originally a man
who is also like an artist able to turn out from reality to decipher the reveries of those
who were given the name of “daily dreamers”, those who are gifted to mould their
fantasies in the outer world, they write down their dreams without actually knowing
that by doing this they are engaged in a process of externalization and more than that
in a process whereby they try to adjust to society. The literary critic like Yusuf is in
charge of “the store house”. He can enlarge and broaden the product. He is
concerned to shed light on it with full knowledge and wisdom.

A witness who swears to “tell the truth and nothing but the truth” is expected
to speak clearly, that is to commit himself to say things less than in the ordinate way,
excluding figurative language, that is not including metaphor, metonymy,
synecdoche, hyperbole, understatement, irony and euphemism. The use of these
figurative devices is considered for some people as a break out from truth, and an
open room for lies and misrepresentations. We have seen earlier how words are the
tools of lovers, politicians and above all divinity. However, we have noticed that
rhetorical devices are used far and wide depending on their user and his
determination to say truth or to hide it.
 17

Notes to chapter 1:

1-[My translation] « Je dis toujours la vérité: pas toute, parce que toute la dire, on n’y
arrive pas. » (Carminiani 1994: 88)
2- The original version of this poem by Kabbani

‫من أنت‬
? ‫من أنت يا أمرأة‬
... ‫أيتها الداخلة كالخنجر في تاريخي‬
‫أيتها الطيبة كعيون األرانب‬
.. ‫والناعمة كوبر الخوخة‬
‫أيتها النقية كأطواق الياسمين‬
.. ‫والبريئة كمرايل األطفال‬
‫أيتها المفترسة كالكلمة‬
... ‫أخرجي من أوراق دفاتري‬
.. ‫أخرجي من شراشف سريري‬
‫أخرجي من فناجين القهوة‬
.. ‫و مالعق السكر‬
‫أخرجي من أزرار قمصاني‬
.. ‫وخيوط مناديلي‬
‫أخرجي من فرشاة أسناني‬
.. ‫ورغوة الصابون على وجهي‬
‫أخرجي من كل أشيائي الصغيرة‬
‫حتى أستطيع أن أذهب إلى العمل‬

3- The original version of Chawki’s verse:

« ‫ فلقاء‬, ‫ فابتسامة فسالم فكالم فموعد‬,‫ » نضرة‬:‫قال أحمد شوقي‬

4- “Animal Farm” is maybe the best fictional example to show the move from
ideology to politics. Old Major is the one who has made a dream and tried to make
his comrades aware of their unfortunate life he said: “Now, comrades, what is the
nature of this life of ours? Let us face it, our lives are miserable, laborious and short.
We are born, we are given just so much food as will keep the breath in our bodies,
and those of us who are capable of it are forced to work to the last atom of our
strength; and the very instant that our usefulness has come to an end we are
slaughtered with hideous cruelty.. no animal in England knows the meaning of
happiness or leisure after he is a year old. No animal in England is free. The life of
an animal is misery and slavery: that is the plain truth. (Orwell 1945: 3) This is what
 18

we call an emotional discourse. The less knowledgeable the audience, the more
effective is the discourse. The Islamic discourse in Algeria has also achieved an
alarming position. Ignorance and immaturity constitute more often a fertile soil for
ideology and hypocrisy.
5- Mohammed Hachemaoui is a political scientist, who regularly publishes his
analyses in the daily newspaper El Watan. He entitled this article “Le système
politique algérien repose sur l’ordre pastorale Berger et troupeau: la métaphore
de l’ordre pastoral” on El Watan 25 June 2005.
6- The original version of the Surah ‘Yusuf’ in the Koran

‫"و قال الملك إني أرى سبع بقرات سمان ياكلهن سبع عجاف و سبع سنبالت خضر و أخر يابسات يأيها المال‬
‫افتوني في راياى إن كنتم للرءيا تعبرون قالوا أضغاث أحالم و ما نحن بتأويل األحالم بعالمين‬
‫و قال الذي نجا منهما و ادكر بعد أمة أنا أنبئكم بتأويله فارسون‬
‫يوسف أيها الصديق افتنا في سبع بقرات سمان يأكلهن سبع عجاف و سبع سنبالت خضر و أخر يابسات لعلى‬
‫ارجع إلى الناس لعلهم يعلمون‬
‫قال تزرعون سبع سنين دأبا فما حصد تم فذروه في سنبله إال قليال مما تأكلون‬
‫ثم يأتي من بعد ذلك سبع شداد يـأكلن ما قدمتم لهن إال قليال مما تحصنون‬
"‫ثم يأتي من بعد ذلك عام فيه يغاث الناس و فيه يعصرون‬
 19

Chapter two:
Metaphor the Last Confidential Key
 20

2.1 Metaphor a Linguistic Ornament between Censure and Confession

Arab scholars were opened to the Aristotelian 1 definition of metaphor much

earlier than were European scholars. For this reason metaphor has a more complex
history in Arabic literature. Al Jahiz was among the first, who put forward a
definition for metaphor. According to him, it is the borrowing of one aspect of a
word and attributing it to another. He did not differentiate between metaphor and
other figures of speech as we know them now, but maybe he follows Aristotle in that
metaphor is the quintessential figure of speech, with the other entire tropes as
metaphorical too. Aristotle considers the use of metaphor as a sign of genius;
therefore, it cannot be used commonly and frequently as ordinary language. He
grants it an ornamental quality. Our concern in this chapter is to find out if there are
other reasons except the aesthetic one for the use of metaphors. In the tales of A
Thousand and One Nights, we come across countless metaphors. These accounts are
collections of short stories or episodes strung together into a long tale, including
animal fables, proverbs, stories of ‘jihad’, moral tales, and humorous tales. They
possess an allegorical dimension in which their patent emphasis on material wealth
functions as a metaphor for the lasting richness of spiritual life. The general
preoccupation of the lower echelons of society is also metaphorically conveyed in a
secret key that is the promise that Allah equips the deprived and unfortunate and
makes them beyond the rich and strong. Everybody has a story to tell, whether rich
or poor. It is a sort of prospect and also a metaphor of a world of equal opportunities.
At the same time, Scheherazade, the major character in A Thousand and One
Nights, the well thought-out story-teller, performs through her narrative the
everlasting human desire for earthly life, which suggests that literature, imaginary
tales preserve life. We can say in this case that literature is the metaphor of life.

In One Thousand and One Nights, the king, the oppressor can destroy cities
and kill their inhabitants, but he cannot guess the outcome and effect of imaginary
tales nor compete with the common sense of an inexperienced young lady. He
capitulates, he lays down his arms. Regardless of his importance and his authority, he
has to wait in order to gratify his curiosity, to appease as Joyce said “the most
 21

satisfying relations to the sensible.” Scheherazade nurtures his mind, and her
imagination carries him in an outer world, a fabulous and fantasist world, hence she
becomes his Achilles' heel. She converts him into a passionate listener, rather than a
great warrior. He becomes addicted to her lively spirit. We have rarely seen in any
European literature such a glorious acknowledgment, a mark of respect that has been
paid to the powerful influence of literature. This is why metaphor has long and
complex roots in Arabic literature.

Writing is liberating, it is a kind of therapy. To unearth the psyche, and bring

to light the unseen, it is a kind of meditative introspection. To unveil the veiled is a
rendezvous between unconscious and conscious, between censure and confession.
The meeting of these contradictory and conflicting neighbourhoods is not free from
troubles. It is flesh and blood, it is reminiscence and nostalgia. It is present and past.
It is happiness and grief. It is desire and frustration. It is a filthy muddy soil. It is
complete confusion, and while we fall in a well of disorder and turmoil a rope is
conveyed. It is a monologue. It is imperturbable placidity; it is calmness close to
somnolence, and thoughts take shape and order in disorder. Here is a letter from
Friedrich Schiller, a German writer, to his friend Korner who complains of his lack
of creative power.

“The reason for your complaints lies, it seems to me, in the constraints which your
intellect imposes upon your imagination. Here I will make an observation, and
illustrate it by an allegory. Apparently it is not good-and indeed it hinders the
creative work of the mind-if the intellect examines too closely the ideas already
pouring in, as it were at the gates. Regarded in isolation an idea may be quite
insignificant, and adventuresome in the extreme, but it may acquire importance
from an idea which follows it; perhaps, in a certain collocation with other ideas,
which may seem equally absurd, it may be capable of furnishing a very serviceable
link. The intellect cannot judge all these ideas unless it can retain them until it has
considered them in connection with theses other ideas. In the case of a creative
mind, it seems to me, the intellect has withdrawn its watchers from the gates, and
the ideas rush in pell-mell, and only then does it review and inspect the multitude.
You worthy critics, or whatever you may call yourselves, are ashamed or afraid of
the momentary and passing madness which is found in all real creators, the longer
or shorter duration of which distinguishes the thinking artist from the dreamer.
Hence your complaints of unfruitfulness, for you reject too soon and discriminate
too severely.”
(Letter of December, 1, 1788) 2
 22

An intellect is hardly ever so contentedly planned as to be in full control of

itself at all times and periods. It is more than often disturbed in its lucid and constant
processes of thought by ideas that are excessive and superfluous, maybe absolutely
grotesque and illogical. Indeed, the greatest thinkers have had reasons to complain of
this dream-like, tormenting and distressing rabble of ideas, which disturbs their
profoundest contemplations and their most virtuous and sober meditations. These
dream-like reflections transcribed and structured as a monologue that takes different
shapes and silhouettes; it is poetry, a short story or a novel, in short, it is prose and
poetry. The latter is the art which pays more tribute to beauty; it praises and honours
the splendour of beauty. Consequently prose remains the only writing style which is
confined with the burden of human misery and despair. Even so, prose has kept back
some of the features of poetry: rhythm, rhyme, imagery and metaphors.
Metaphors are used aesthetically in verses as well as prose. They are in
charge to make individuals close to their nature, to their destiny. They are garlands,
ornaments, captivated embellishments that reflect our dreams, our illusions, but also
our doubt and disbelief, our depth and strength, our weakness and limitation. This is
the whole complexity of life that is reduced and shortened in what we call a
metaphor.
Metaphors are used for aesthetic purpose because they result in a crystal
ambiguity, which is delightful to the eye, mouth and ear. This aesthetic ambiguity
was the source of Sufi mystical poetry. Metaphors are used also to break away from
the monotonous way of speaking. Metaphor is a sort of innovation and it depends
only on the poet’s talent and inventiveness, and the more imaginative the poet, the
more sophisticated his or her metaphor. Metaphors are also conveyed to fill lexical
gaps, when there is no other choice, and since not every idea is communicatively
successful with the right words so metaphors here play the role of bridge, P. Ricoeur
(1997: 62) names these metaphors ‘forced metaphors’, for example “light” for
spiritual clarity, “blindness” for confusion. However he does not consider them as
figures of speech because according to him the fundamental nature of any figure of
speech is its distinctiveness as being free, he also described another phenomenon of
lexical imprecision that is “polysemy” it is just the opposite of synonymy, it is not
 23

several names for one sense but several senses for one name (1997: 114) Leech in
(1990: 90) gives a polysemic example by using componential analysis: ‘man’ has
two definitions one is + human + adult +male, the other is broader but consisting
only of the feature
+ human for example (Man invests all his efforts to improve his life.) However
Ricoeur considers polysemy as a healthy phenomenon in any language, he says:

“For all these reasons, polysemy is not just a case of vagueness but the
outline of an order and, for that very reason, a countermeasure to imprecision.
That polysemy is not a pathological phenomenon but a healthy feature of our
language is shown by the failure of the opposite hypothesis. A language without
polysemy would violate the principle of economy, for it would extend its vocabulary
infinitely.”
(Ricoeur 1997: 115)

The context of occurrence differs from polysemy to metaphor, since the latter is
characterised by the freedom of occurrence, so there should be no confusion between
polysemy and metaphor, thus examples like “the neck of the bottle” or “the leg of the
table” cannot be graded as metaphors because ‘neck’ and ‘leg’ are here to fill a
lexical gap. These words might have been used as metaphors in the past, but they
have been included within the lexical terminology to lose their figurative quality, this
is how a living metaphor shifts into a dead metaphor. Ricoeur considers the good
metaphor as the one that is newly invented, involving realism, clarity, mobility,
naturalness, coherence, he says also that metaphor “burdened with age”, for example
it is known that Corneille was the first one who used the metaphor “consume a
Kingdom”, “dévorer un règne” in French, this metaphor was a great innovation at
that time before people endorse it in their general use and therefore contribute to the
fading away of metaphor to become a “dead metaphor”. Dumarsais in Le Guern
(1973:68) follows Ricoeur’s views, he explains that even the richest languages are
short of necessary signs to express particular ideas. So people are obliged to borrow
words suitable for other ideas to express what they actually want to communicate.
Jakobson, however considered the metaphor as a type of aphasia that is a severe
speech disability, whereby users of language have troubles with the selection of
words, so he categorizes metaphor as a trope that belongs to the selection axis.
Jakobson considered also metonymy as well as synecdoche as type of aphasia but
 24

which belong to the combination axis, he proceeds afterwards to classify certain

cultural phenomena according to this distinction between these two aphasic
disturbances that is between metaphor and metonymy. 3
Jakobson goes on the same footpath of Aristotle in classifying poetry and drama
within the metaphoric; for example Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot where there is
no progress through time, no logic in what concerns cause and effect, it is hardly
comprehensible, however it could be embedded as a metaphor for the human
condition, in this case the curtain is the only separation between life and art. Aristotle
in (1996: xiii) focuses on the point that art has a mimetic function, he regards both
painting and poetry as forms of mimesis, Man is prone to create likeness. He gains
pleasure from it. Mimesis in art is at the same time close to human reality, but remote
in its production. Ricoeur (1997: 40) explains this dual perplexed mimesis as the
depiction of human reality as it is, with a representation higher and elevated of what
it is. With these two elements combined, we can only bring back metaphor, since it is
really something representative of reality and grandiose in its fundamental nature, in
this case we can only join Aristotle’s view in considering poets as philosophers in
comparison with historians, since they tend to express universals rather than
particulars, he makes a distinction between the historian and the poet by claiming
that “one says what has happened, the other the kind of thing that would
happen” (Ricoeur 1997: 282). Heidegger (1996: 16) in turn interprets poets as
philosophers, he asserts that the metaphorical exists only inside the metaphysical.
Ali Jafar al Allaq, an Iraqi poet tries in his poem entitled “Poet” to describe to us the
virtues as well as the deficiencies of these fantasist writers:

Who among you has begun his days

seeking out the color of the dew and stones,
searching and searching
for themes that have neither been profaned
nor sung to satiety?
Whenever he felt
that the stallions he pursued were too elusive,
that the songs he tried to work were too abstruse,
he would cast his vexed eyes
over the flock of his days,
as one filed by behind the other,
every one the same.
 25

This is the dusty song of papers.

Can you smell its blossoms
as it draws him to his room,
to the loved ones he has been neglecting,
and lists for him the number
of his dreams, his deserts, and his books?
He surveys his days
and his preoccupations,
gazes on his loved ones,
sincere and cast aside.
He counts his books: one, two, four.
Then he slips away,
restless and morose.
Of him they say he is, as usual dazed,
as one well might be
who contemplates a stream to touch the taste of dew.
They say he is impervious
to offenses,
they say he is too quick to find offense.
they say he is dismal elated absent-minded
as one well might be
who is given to contemplation of streams and crows.
He remembers his friends
and forgives them their taunts.
He laughs
and releases all his birds into the fog.

Translated by Sharif Elmusa and Thomas G. Ezzy (Jayyusi 1987: 152-3)

 26

“He releases all his birds into the fog”. This is really what poets do. In doing
so they are maintaining the child internalised in them. Children give idiosyncratic
names to things. As soon as they advance, they change their language into
conventionality that is they change their words into the words that are agreed on by
society. In doing this they become members of their society, this is maybe the price
of membership. While the poet creates metaphor, he is in some way restoring his or
her individuality. He takes his revenge, a very old vengeance against his forced
gathering with his community. Unsi Al-Haj, a Lebanese poet, explains ironically this
double dealing use of words in his poem: “Autumn Leaves are Virgin Mary”

That melancholy that inhabited me once has died.

Master Time, with its winds and rains, has taken its place.
Now, I find poetry strange:
I call children “children,”
I call a woman’s knee “a woman’s knee,”
And a severed willow branch “a severed willow branch.”
But, in the days of that tearful mist,
I never spoke the prevailing, the common names,
Not just out of pride
For in the days of melancholy I called
Autumn leaves, for example, “Virgin Mary”
And how I felt they really were!
As I said,
I never called these things by name
I only saw them,
And Ah! How rich I was!
Everything that touched me, charmed me.
Everything I touched, I charmed.
I was not ignorant,
But I did not know.
I believed that I was immortal,
Until one morning,
The melancholy evaporated
And I did not know how
It dies like musk
Translated by Patricia Alanab Byrde in (Jayyusi 1987: 251)
 27

Metaphors are used also to say things in a more delicate and refined way,
particularly when we live in societies where religion fathoms the spirits, in other
words, countries where religious prejudice opens more room to intolerance and
fanaticism. The metaphor becomes then a sort of remedy, I would say even an
indispensable prescription, the only open door to say things when we come close to
taboos, so can we say that the aesthetic purpose becomes a luxury in our case?
In a short story that I wrote A Woman in Black Loubna a character did not want to
go to see Mustapha, unless her mother gives her blessing. After much thought
Myriam, Loubna’s mother gave her benediction but in a whole metaphor:

“God gave us two ears and only one mouth so that we listen twice than
what we speak, I have perceived the sound of your question, nevertheless I
suggest to you to built a tent in the region of this river, when your visitor
comes layout carpets and cushions, and give him mint tea, after all every
human being is a nomad as regards love, the sand storm may disfigure the
landscape, and causes difficulties, it peppers your exposed skin and eyes,
nobody and nothing is able to dash your hopes, you will persist like a good
nomad to make your route deep into the Sahara with your camel caravan,
you will accomplish something when after much suffering you make your
home around an oasis.”
(Ghenim, 2008: 4-5)4

So can we say that the use of metaphor here is aesthetic for the most part or is it a
running away from the burden of taboos?
I will surprise people who are going to interpret my proposals, because though it
seems that I am complaining about taboos, but had I to choose between a country
liberated from taboos and a prolific country in this domain I will choose the latter for
many reasons that are not of our concern at present.
I found so many examples of Arab poets who produced so beautiful metaphors
thanks to their innate gift that Aristotle coined as ‘tekhnê’. This word is usually
translated into ‘craft’, ‘skill’ or ‘art’. They proved their capacity to project
themselves into the emotions of others, producing mimesis, a capacity that Aristotle
regarded in some way insane (1996: x)
Arab poets are probably aware of all the concepts that have been introduced by
Aristotle such as mimesis (imitation), katharsis (purification), harmatia (error),
tekhnê (art). They have an intuitive perception of all these concepts, even for
 28

autodidacts that is those who have not gone further in their studies. However there is
one more concept particular to our culture the word ‘taboo’ that is deeply engraved
in the minds of our poets. Let’s take a passage from the poem “Rendezvous in the
Cave” written by the Egyptian poet Ahmad Abd al Muti Hijazi to see how a taboo is
more arresting, more poignant when it takes the shape of metaphor:

Your eyes are two words never uttered.

Having failed to be spoken
they remain themselves,
two nuns in black habit
waiting desperately for their wedding night.

Translated by Sargon Boulus and Peter Porter in (Jayyusi 1987: 262)

Taboos are not specific to the oriental cultures only, however they have
cautious implication in our culture, they intensify censure and make it deeper. As
soon as a taboo takes the shape of a metaphor, it intensifies it, it mystifies it, it
baffles it. A taboo adds more obscurity and sophistication to metaphor contributing
inadvertently, that is by pure accident to the beauty of metaphor. This is to some
extent one of the reasons that makes me prefer a taboo country rather than a liberated
one. The question: “is art prosperous and comfortable in a liberated or repressed
country?” is definitely a question that calls for another area of research. I do not
pretend to answer such a difficult question, yet I do believe that art is not
comfortable in a repressed country, it is more secured in a liberated one, however the
more repression the more there is need for astuteness and perspicacity. Sigmund
Freud in ( Seldes 1985: 143-4) said:

“No matter how much restriction civilization imposes on the individual, he

nevertheless finds some way to circumvent it. Wit is the best safety valve modern
man has evolved; the more civilization, the more repression, the more need there is
for wit.”

Metaphor in this case is a fine key to circumvent restriction and repression. It is that
extravagant key that helps poets to evade the cell and the ceiling of conventionality,
so it seems that the more repression the brighter and wittier is the metaphor.
 29

The British philosopher P. Grice 5 assumes that every person who is reading
activates first the literal meaning, and then if it violates some rules of conversation,
for example the maxim of relevance, the psyche stipulates intuitively the conveyed
6
meaning. Searle the initiator of speech acts, offers the same rational analysis of
figurative language interpretation. He assumes like Grice after him that metaphors
require additional cognitive efforts to be understood because such utterance infringes
one of the conversational maxims, usually quantity, or quality. However
psycholinguists, such as Gibbs and Kemper in (Ortony 2002: 254) contest Searle and
Grice. They consider that listeners and readers can often understand the figurative
interpretations of metaphors without having first to analyse and reject their literal
meanings. I will provide more explanation on this point in the next part that is
metaphors between two levels of understanding: semantics and pragmatics.
In Poe’s text, “Ligeia” there is a slight move from the literal meaning to the
metaphoric one. There are three literal sentences, followed by two metaphorical
utterances. We feel like psycholinguists that the mechanism of cognition in literal as
well as metaphorical is the same, in other words we do not need special mental
processes to understand tropes:

“The “strangeness,” however, which I found in the eyes, was of a nature

distinct from the formation, of the color, or the brilliancy of the features,
and must, after all, be referred to the expression. Ah, word of no meaning!
Behind whose vast latitude of mere sound we intrench our ignorance of so
much of the spiritual. The expression of the eyes of Ligeia! How for long
hours have I pondered upon it! How have I, through the whole of a
midsummer night, struggled to fathom it! What was it-that something more
profound than the well of Democritus-which lay far within the pupils of my
beloved? What was it? I was possessed with the passion to discover. Those
eyes! Those large, those shining, those divine orbs! They became to me twin
stars of Leda, and I to them devoutest of astrologers.”
(Van Doren Stern 1977: 228)

There are no rules that dictate that lexical words as ‘orb’ or ‘star’ or
‘astrologer’ can be combined to create the conveyed meaning. The process by which
we figure out a metaphor is not autonomous from the world we live in. It is an
exercise of imagination, whereby the mind is able to leap from the highest point to
the lowest point, from the zenith to the nadir. It is not a smooth and flat deviation,
 30

but a sudden and dreary movement away. It is said that “the mind takes delight in
these sudden leaps, in seeing likeliness between unlike things” (Perrine 1973: 67).
For example, there are merits of the comparison in the Koran between God’s light
and a lamp in the central part of a niche.

“Allah is the light of the heavens and the earth. A likeness of His light is as a
niche in which is a lamp: the lamp is in a glass, the glass as it were a brightly
shining star, lit from a blessed olive tree, neither of eastern nor western the oil
whereof almost gives light though fire touched it not. Light upon light! Allah
guides to His light whom He pleases. And Allah sets forth parables for men, and
Allah is cognisant of all things.”
Surah An-Nur 35- 7

We feel as if image together with metaphor and symbol shade into each other.
Metaphors are not experience themselves; rather, they provide a connection between
a new concept and something one has previously experienced. Learning comes in
discovering how something new relates to something people already comprehend,
and beauty is momentary in the mind. The Irish novelist Joyce tried to explain beauty
through his autobiographical character Stephen Dedalus:

“Plato, I believe, said that beauty is the splendour of truth. I don’t think
that it has a meaning but the true and the beautiful are akin. Truth is
beheld by the intellect which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of
the intelligible: beauty is beheld by the imagination which is appeased by
the most satisfying relations of the sensible. The first step in the direction of
truth is to understand the frame and scope of the intellect itself, to
comprehend the act itself of intellection. Aristotle’s entire system of
philosophy rests upon his book of psychology and that, I think, rests on his
statement that the same attribute cannot at the same time and in the same
connection belong to and not belong to the same subject. The first step in
the direction of beauty is to understand the frame and scope of the
imagination, to comprehend the act itself of aesthetic apprehension.”
(Joyce1989: 188, 9)

Anybody who comes across a metaphor, he is definitely arrested by beauty,

he is detained for a moment in the unexplained attractiveness. He is bewitched and
enchanted by the emotional coming out. James Joyce makes the distinction between
two kinds of emotions: the static and the kinetic. He said that the aesthetic emotion
must not excite desire, because desire presses on possession, like pornographical art
 31

that he considers as improper art, since it awaken in us a kinetic sensation which is

purely physical. He insists on the word kinetic as a reaction of the flesh to possess, to
go to something, whereas the static emotion like the tragic, the dramatic is aesthetic
emotion because the mind is elevated above desire and loathing. Here he insists on
the word static because beauty that is expressed by the artist induces an aesthetic
stasis and not a simple impulse reaction.
(Joyce 1989: 186-187)
Joyce quotes then Aquinas who says “ad pulcritudinem tria requiruntur,
integritas, consonantia, claritas.” He translates it so “Three things are needed for
beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance.” Joyce explains wholeness that is the first
step of apprehension as an aesthetic image which is presented in space or in time,
that is either spatial or temporal. It is an image that is appreciated in its integrity, or
its wholeness. He clarifies then harmony as the apprehension of the aesthetic image
as complex, multiple, detachable, separable that is independent as a thing. He
concludes then with radiance that caught much of his attention.

“The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of
the aesthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been
arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous
silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac
condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase
almost as beautifully as Shelley’s, called the enchantment of the heart.”
(Joyce 1989: 193)

2.2 Metaphor, between two levels of understanding: semantics and pragmatics

Now that I have tried to understand the use of metaphors, especially the case
of writers who belong to a Muslim sphere, where many movements are prohibited,
every action is controlled. Since a word is an action so it is to be controlled, for all
the effects that it causes on the reader. It has the primary function to reveal truth, to
make it known, but at the same time it has to manage the susceptibilities of the
people. We have seen that metaphor is one of the figures that can reveal truth and
handle people’s vulnerability. I can refer to the most extremist attitude in some rural
communities in Algeria where some people cannot even dare say “my wife”, “my
husband” they say instead “makhlouka”8, “makhlouk” which means “ a living
 32

creature” to the least extremist attitude whereby a pregnant woman is embarrassed in

front of her father, even though she is married.
The writer cannot break away from his community. He is the conception of a
society, his product reflects his environment and the metaphor is of utmost
importance in these cases. However, this does not contradict the use of metaphors for
the aesthetic purpose, the artefact of the metaphor which transforms words into
“objet d’art”. This conversion is for some linguists within the domain of semantics
only. For others it is within the domain of pragmatics. My purpose is to try to
determine if metaphors are within the domain of semantics or pragmatics.
Max Black in (Martinich 2001: 457) is probably the most notable philosophical
advocate of the classification of metaphor as a semantic phenomenon rather than a
syntactic one. Davidson adheres to the same view of Black. His thesis backs the idea
that metaphor means what the words mean, that is a metaphor is understood through
its literal interpretation; however he claims that metaphors cannot be paraphrased, for
they do not carry anything to be paraphrased. The question that comes to mind then
is: if metaphor belongs exclusively to the domain of semantics, why is it impossible
to paraphrase it? Is it because it is too novel to be paraphrased, or is it because it
belongs to the domain of pragmatics?
It is easier to paraphrase Fatema is a gazelle, that is she is graceful, whereas it is
impossible to paraphrase the poem “the Gazelle” that was written by the Iraqi poet
Yasin Taha Hafiz in (Jayyusi 1987: 237-8)

Incessantly
A wild gazelle
Leaps and flounces,
Runs, madly glances, looks around
Right
And left
In fear of a trap
This wild rebel
Is tethered now in a stone bower
She remembers her quick leapings
How she fell
How they jumped on her…
Reprovingly she looks
At her tragic world
In this little coffee house
 33

I am alone
My spirit is tethered to a fence
Powerless to run
To the nearest tree
It contemplates the crowd moving
The flood of the street
And a desire swells deep
Inside it
For the great escape
That can expand the spirit
In this human wilderness

Translated by Sharif Elmusa and Christopher Middleton

Umberto Eco (1992: 171) says that original and creative metaphors cannot be
paraphrased unless on the form of a long hazardous account, this is for him what
makes the difference between a dead and a creative metaphor, thus it is easier to
paraphrase a dead metaphor in comparison to a creative metaphor. Translation as
well as paraphrasing of metaphor may generate non-sense and absurd meaning or at
least a loss of the aesthetic value. The impracticality of paraphrasing conveys us to
categorise metaphor either within the field of semantics or pragmatics.
Martinich (2001: 457) expresses his opposition to Black while recognising, however,
that Black’s views were predictable, that is that metaphor belongs to the field of
semantics because the pragmatic theories such as Searle’s 1969 revision of Austin’s
theory of Speech Acts and the theory of Grice on linguistic communication were not
yet developed.
Martinich expounds his theory by analysing metaphors in the same line as speech
acts in the sense that both fail to fulfil the conversational maxims he says:

“Every metaphorical proposition is false. Every metaphor flouts the first

maxim of quality. This is not to say or imply that the point of a metaphor
(what the speaker intends to communicate) is false. On the contrary, the
point of a metaphor is typically true. Further, the point of a metaphor is
conversationally implied in virtue of the fact that the speaker flouts the first
maxim of quality. This is not to say or imply that any metaphorical
proposition is a lie. Indeed no metaphor can be a lie. It can be inapt or
inept, imaginative or dull, cheery or morbid, or any number of other things.
But no metaphor is a lie.”
(Martinich 2001: 450)
 34

Grice in (Brown and Yule 2001: 32) introduces the notion of implicature and
maxims in 1975, he says that there are conventional implicatures, which are
established by the conventional meaning of the words used and conversational
implicature that attracts more the interests of the discourse analyst. Grice presents a
number of maxims:
Quantity: Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the current
purposes of the exchange). Do not make your contribution more informative than is
required.
Quality: do not say what you believe to be false. Do not say that for which you lack
adequate evidence.
Relation: Be relevant.
Manner: Be perspicuous.
Avoid obscurity of expression.
Avoid ambiguity.
Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).
Be orderly.
Jerry Morgan in Ortony’s (2002: 127)) said that the relation between the
literal and the metaphoric meanings is not only a mere coincidence as the case of
ambiguity 9 whereby the relation between the two meanings is fortuitous. In the case
of metaphor one meaning is derivative from the other. Searle has gone even further
claiming that, other associations such as myths and our knowledge of the world in
addition to the literal meaning make us able to grasp the metaphor meaning. Morgan
(2002: 127) finally joins Searle in incorporating metaphor within pragmatics, he
states that:

“A metaphor is a matter of utterance meaning, and that the proper domain

for an account of metaphor is pragmatics, not semantics. Moreover, I think
talking of metaphor as a kind of meaning is a mistake itself, in that it
naturally leads to thinking of metaphor as a property of sentences. But I
think it is not a property of the sentence, but a matter of what one does in
saying the sentence. To make clearer what I mean, let me compare
metaphors with indirect speech acts. Although I do not mean to say that
metaphor is just another kind of indirect speech act, there is an important
similarity.”
(Ortony 2002: 127)
 35

Semantics and pragmatics remain discrete and complementary fields of study.

They constitute a fine pair that cannot escape some disagreements from time to time,
in particular when it comes to the negotiation of the meaning of metaphors. For
“the distinction between semantics and pragmatics, therefore, tends to go with the
distinction between meaning and use, or more generally, that between competence
and performance” (Leech 1990: 319).
For Widdowson (1984: 13) on the other hand, metaphors and ambiguity are not
atypical use of language. They give opportunity for creativity up to originality in
certain cases. But if we bound language, it will be unable to adapt to the constant
change in communicative purpose, and metaphors in particular are not to be
bargained to established rules only, otherwise they come to an end by being
concealed into the semantic system and they cease to be metaphors at all.
Widdowson (ibid: 13) explains the distinctiveness of metaphors in “that they depend
on a disparity between the established rules of the code and the extempore
exploitation on a particular occasion of potential resources for meaning which are
not reduced to rules.”

Andrew Ortony (2002: 10) assumes that semantics as well as pragmatics

cannot stay as antithetical in what concerns metaphors. Even the radical pragmatics
position acknowledges the literal meaning or sentence meaning, it is not unexpected
a conversion from one to the other, or a deviation from sentence meaning to
utterance meaning. Neddar (2004: 37) describes the difference between these two
meanings. He gives the example of an English expression “I feel cold”, he argues
how this sentence may refer to different speech events: it can be an indirect request
for the hearer to close the window, it can also be a complaint from the patient to his
doctor, or a kind request from someone who is with his girl friend to express his
needs of affection. There is indeed a pragmatic association from one expression to
another that involves three utterances. Each one of them is strongly related to the
context.
This transition from sentence meaning to utterance meaning is at the centre of
discourse analysis. Schiffrin (1994: 21) gives a good explanation about the two
 36

different definitions of discourse, the first that sees discourse as a particular unit of
language that is above the sentence, and the second that sees it as a particular focus
on language use. Schiffrin sees these two definitions as a consequence of the
differences between structural and functional approaches to language. She uses
Hymes’s tableau that depicts all the differences:

Structural (e.g. Chomsky) Functional

Also called Formalist
Structure of language Structure of speech (act,
(code) event)
as grammar as ways of speaking

Use merely implements, Analysis of use prior to

perhaps limits, may analysis of code;
correlate with, what is organization of use
analysed as code; analysis discloses additional features
of code prior to analysis and relations; shows code
and use in integral
Referential function, fully (dialectical) relation
semanticized uses as norm
Gamut of stylistic or social
Elements and structures function
analytically arbitrary (in
cross-cultural or historical Elements and structures as
perspective), or universal ethnographically
(in theoretical perspective) appropriate
(“psychiatrically” in
Functional (adaptive) Sapir’s sense)
equivalence of languages;
all languages essentially
(potentially) equal Functional (adaptive)
differentiation of
languages, varieties, styles;
Single homogeneous code these being existentially
and community (actually) not necessarily
(“replication of equivalent
uniformity”)
Speech community as
matrix of code-repertoires,
Fundamental concepts, or speech styles
such as speech community, (“organization” of
speech act, fluent speaker, diversity”)
functions of speech and of
 37

languages, taken for Fundamental concepts

granted or arbitrarily taken as problematic and to
postulated be investigated

(Schiffrin 1994: 21)

To sum up, the structural approach, regards language as a mental

phenomenon, it sees languages as deriving from a common genetic linguistic
heritage. The latter tends to explain children’s acquisition of language in terms of a
predisposed capacity to learn a language, on top of all; this approach examines
language as an autonomous system that is independent from society. The functional
approach, on the other hand regards language as a societal phenomenon, with no
common inheritance. It looks at the child’s acquisition of language, not in term of
internal endowment but as a necessary tool of communication to satisfy needs and
proficiencies in society, so the functionalist approach tends to relate everything to
society in what concerns language.
To come back to discourse, then, the formalists such as Stubbs (1983: 1)
regards discourse as “language above the sentence or above the clause” Structural
analysis spotlights the units as functioning in relation to each other, disregarding the
context in which discourse takes place; whereas, functional analysis values this
relationship, language with context as the valid distinctive attribute of discourse. I
think that the attribution of Lakoff and Johnson of metaphor to the cognitive system
catches its roots within the formalist approach. Lakoff sees metaphor mainly as a
cognitive phenomenon rather than a linguistic one.
 38

Notes to chapter 2:
1-The Greek like Aristotle and Quintilian define metaphor as the transfer of one
object to another, without using such comparative terms as “like” or “as”, they
assume metaphor in terms of four classes:
1- From animate to inanimate
2- From inanimate to animate
3- From animate to animate
4- From inanimate to inanimate

2-From the website c:\documents and settings\administrateur\bureau\II_THE

METHOD OF DREAM INTERPRETATION.htm

3-
Metaphor Metonymy
Paradigm Syntagm
Similarity Contiguity
Selection Combination
Substitution [Deletion] Contexture
Contiguity Disorder Similarity Disorder
Contexture Deficiency Selection Deficiency
Drama Film
Montage Close-up
Dream Symbolism Dream Condensation &
Displacement
Surrealism Cubism
Imitative Magic Contagious Magic
Poetry Prose
Lyric Epic
Romanticism and Realism
Symbolism

( Lodge 1983: 81)

4- See the whole text A Woman in Black written by Ghenim Neema in annexe two.

5- Grice argued that speakers and listeners expect each other to interpret their
utterances as if they were acting in a rational and cooperative way. To achieve this
speakers and listeners are required to manage several maxims: 1- Quantity: the
speaker’s contribution should be as informative and revealing. 2- Quality: the maxim
 39

of quality is to say only what one believes to be true. 3- Relevance: the maxim of
relevance requires us as speakers to make our utterances relative to the discourse
going on and the context in which they occur.
Manner: the maxim of manner is to be orderly clear and to avoid ambiguity.
Grice distinguishes between violating the maxims and flouting them. If the speaker
lies, expecting the audience to believe his proposals, he is violating the maxim of
quality. If he exaggerates, expecting the addressee to recognise the exaggeration, he
is flouting the maxim instead of violating it. All figures of speech such as
hyperboles, understatements, euphemisms, metaphors flout at least one of the
maxims.

6-Speech act is “An attempt at doing something purely by speaking. There are many
things that we can do, or attempt to do, simply by speaking. We can make a promise,
ask a question, order or request somebody to do something, make a threat, name a
ship, pronounce somebody husband and wife, and so on. Each one of these is a
particular speech act.” (Trask1999: 285)
Kreidler distinguishes seven types of speech acts: Assertive utterances are
intentionally informative, Peformative utterances contain such verbs as “bet, declare,
baptize, nominate, pronounce.” Verdictive utterances are speech acts in which the
speaker makes an assessment or judgement about the acts of another, including
ranking, assessing, appraising and condoning. Expressive utterances are retrospective
and speaker-involved, the most common expressive verbs are “acknowledge, admit,
confess, deny, and apologize.”
Directive utterances are deliberately performed to get some acts or refrain from
carrying out acts. Commissive utterances include promises, pledges, threats and
vows. The verbs that point up commissive utterances are as follows “agree, ask,
offer, refuse, swear” but all followed with infinitives. Finally there are utterances that
are essential to establish relationships between members of the same society, they are
called phatic utterances. Comments about weather, health or whatever expected in
the particular society are phatic in the sense that they maintain social bonds.
(Kreidler 1998: 183-194)
 40

There is also what we call indirect speech act, for example if you say to a person,
who has just come to your room “You left the door open.” And particularly if it is
cold outside, he will probably understand it as a request and not as a statement. It is a
kind request for the person to close the door. Humorists make a lot of uses of these
direct and indirect speech acts to create fun. Suppose, for example a visitor, carrying
suitcases and bags, he is lost, he finally stops a passer-by:
Visitor: Excuse me, do you know where the Ambassador Hotel is?
Passer-by: Oh sure, I know where it is. (and walks away)
We notice that the passer-by answers the question literally, instead of responding to
the request. The passer-by replies to the question as if it was direct, whereas the
utterance was an indirect speech act. Yule considers the use of indirect speech act as
a more gentle and polite way of request, in comparison to direct command.
(Yule 1985: 101)

7- The original version of Surah ‘Nur’ ‘The Light’

- ‫"هللا نور السماوات و االرض مثل نوره كمشكاوة فيها مصباح المصباح في زجاجة الزجاجة‬
‫كأنها كوكب دري يوقد من شجرة مباركة زيتونة ال شرقية و ال غربية يكاد زيتها يضيء و لو لم تمسسه نار‬
)35( ‫نور على نور يهدي هللا لنوره من يشاء و يضرب هللا األمثال للناس و هللا بكل شيء عليم" سورة النور‬

8- I said that some rural people in Algeria do not dare say “my husband” or “my
wife”. They say instead “makhlouk” or “makhlouka”. I have selected the short story
“My Father Writes to my Mother” written by the Algerian author Assia Djebar that
clarifies this idea. She said in her story:

“Whenever my mother spoke of my father, she, in common with all the women in her
town, simply used the personal pronoun in Arabic corresponding to ‘him’. Thus,
every time she used a verb in the third person singular which didn’t have a noun
subject, she was naturally referring to her husband. This form of speech was
characteristic of every married woman, from fifteen to sixty, with the proviso that in
later years, if the husband had undertaken the pilgrimage to Mecca, he could be
given the title of ‘Hadj’.”
(Bruner 1993: 162)

This rule is neither written, nor spoken. However all adults in the pos-colonial
period, especially girls and women know that husband and wife must certainly not be
referred to by name. Nevertheless Assia Djebar shows in this short story the
 41

progressive move of the mother from “he” to “my husband” which is already a huge
effort to “Tahar”, the name of her husband: the most daring manifestation of
affection.

9 -Ambiguity is defined by Leech in (1990: 79) as a one-many relation between

syntax and sense, that is ambiguity is in the middle of sentences as syntactic units
and propositions as semantic units. He gave the example: Hugo is drawing a cart.
Ambiguity here stands from the fact that this statement suggests at least two distinct
propositions:
‘Hugo is drawing (a picture of) a cart’ or ‘Hugo is drawing (pulling) a cart’
 42

Chapter three
Metaphor and Culture
 43

3.1 Metaphor: an Abstract Image Grounded within its Culture

Noam Chomsky said in Language and Mind

“When we study human language, we are approaching what some might
call the “human essence,” the distinctive qualities of mind that are, so far
as we know, unique to man.”
(Bolinger 1975: 1)

When I was young I was always asking myself whether an animal that is
taught a language can or maybe able one day to understand any figurative language,
and since then I have not get any reply. People usually attribute this capacity to use
metaphoric language only for human beings because and since we have seen in
chapter one that the mind is required to go beyond the literal form; things are not said
in the ordinary way. Aristotle in (1996: ix) considers sensation as a shared feature
with many other animals, however he grades humans in high position in their ability
to derive universal judgements from their experiences. Whereas animals are more
driven by their instincts, the human beings are more driven by understanding, this is
what Aristotle calls ‘tekhnê’ that is craft, skill or art, which is the capacity of Man to
produce necessities to enhance the quality of human life. Aristotle (1996: x)
considers metaphor as the most important feature of poetic language, because it
depends on the ability to perceive similarities, therefore the poet for him is a person
capable to project himself into the emotions of others. ‘A natural talent’ as well as ‘a
touch of insanity’ is required for this.
A figure of speech is more narrowly definable as a way of saying one thing
and meaning another and some rhetoricians have classified as many as 250 separate
figures. Chomsky used the phrase “human essence” that we grant our approval
because the code is drawn from the core, it is hardly ever simulated since its
genuineness originates from the soul. Furthermore, we believe that even lies and
misrepresentations enclose an internal dynamism, in other words they constitute a
form of adjustment between the self and what is culturally tolerable. In this chapter,
we have attempted to understand the metaphor and its relation to a given culture,
saying this we have first to define culture. Culture is without doubt one of the most
challenging concepts in human sciences, it has been initiated in the nineteenth
century. Edward Said in (1994: xii and xiii) defines it in two parts, first definition
 44

entails all those customs and practices, present aesthetically which are somehow
independent from economy and politics, the second discreetly definition regards
culture as the paramount of knowledge and thought, often forcefully associated to a
nation, to the extend to the dislike of foreigners and the veneration of one’s own
culture. As soon as these cultural boundaries are created and moulded, they build up
a sort of bridge that is active from one generation to another. George Lakoff and
Mark Johnson in (Kramsch 2000: 91) said “Culture is not only in the semantic
structures of a language, but also in its idiomatic expressions that both reflect and
direct the way we think. Different languages predispose their speakers to view
reality in different ways through the different metaphors they use.” Lakoff in
(Ortony 2002: 241, 2, 3) gives extensive details about how conventional1 metaphors
could be made real not only in literary works but also in other imaginative inventions
such as cartoons, dreams, visions, myths he mentions other less obvious ways of
realizing metaphors such as physical symptoms, social institutions, social practices,
laws and even foreign policy and forms of discourse and history. We have found his
research interesting in the sense that all these areas of studies that he has mentioned
are integrated patterns of culture. We will try to develop each of these models of
culture and its impact on the code.

3.1.1 Cartoons:
Conventional metaphors are made real in cartoons. Lakoff in (Ortony 2002: 241)
gives the example of steam coming out of the character’s ears to show anger. The
heart bursting outside the body to show love and other examples such as the
character running to put on show his capacity to flout obstacles but always drawn to
a close at the bottom of a whole, which shows the difficulties of life.

3.1.2 Strip Cartoons

Lakoff has not dealt with comic strip, maybe because it resembles so much the
cartoon. I have chosen the comic strip of the Algerian caricaturist Dilem in the
nineties who puts in scene, the day of 'Aïd el Adha, a sheep fleeing at high speed,
followed by a man holding up a knife. In the bubble, the sheep says: “But why do
 45

they want to slaughter me I am neither a woman nor an intellectual? “Ibrahim carries

out the order of God”, Dilem expresses metaphorically and satirically the power of
religion. By means of a fatwa (an undisputable judgement) a simple human being can
have the power of death and life over people. Slim, is another Algerian caricaturist of
the seventies. He was mostly famous for his imaginary character “Bouzid” who
generated the curiosity of people to the point that they begun to identify themselves
with him. He succeeded to adhere in the collective imaginary of all Algerians.
Lakhdar Barka2 stresses all the points that make “Bouzid” a phenomenon of wonder
in our country. This extreme type character is in fact metaphorically representing a
rural man with his “matrag” stick, “kembouche” that is the turban around his head,
his “abaya” and “seroual arbi” clothing that are supposedly inappropriate in a city.
Lakhdar Barka attributes the success of “Bouzid” for all these apparent
characteristics but also for all the antagonistic contradictions in his personality that
makes him a strong and tough macho but at the same time a tender and kind-hearted
man. Cleanth Brooks in (Hudson: 180) insisted on the point that all great literature is
in some sense paradoxical. He gave the example of Achilles in the Iliad and
attributed his success to the two opposing characteristics in his personality, one as
being nearly godlike leader of men and the other as a foolish spoiled child. If there
were only one characteristic, he would have lost his greatness.
I cannot limit myself only with comic strip cartoons, because there are others
which are provocative and offensive as the appearance of the twelve drawings in the
Danish press that provoked emotions in the Muslim world because the representation
of Allah and his prophet Mohammed are forbidden. One drawing depicts a grinning,
knife-wielding Mohamed flanked by two veiled women. Another, which appeared on
the front page of a newspaper in Germany, and in La Stampa newspaper in Italy,
shows the Prophet wearing a bomb-shaped turban, topped by a hissing fuse. I do not
want to take part in this endless disagreement3 between those who praise freedom of
speech and those who control the press, however what I want to focus on is that the
metaphor of the bomb-shaped turban, though it is silent and unspoken it has been
understood on both sides of the hemisphere. Protests have included street
demonstrations, flag burnings, death threats, bomb scares and a crippling consumer
boycott of Danish goods by businesses in several Gulf States.
 46

3.1.3 Advertising
Lakoff has not dealt with advertising. Metaphor is used in advertising for the
marketing and the promotion of a product. Thornborrow and Wareing in (1998:203)
give the example of a pregnant woman beside a car. The relationship between the car
and the pregnant woman is made explicit by the text “Nature isn’t the only one that
can carry a family in comfort.” The metaphor here shows the resemblance4 between
the car and the woman in that they can both carry children safely.

3.1.4 Movies
Lakoff has not dealt with metaphors in movies, maybe he follows Jakobson who
classifies films within the metonymic rather than the metaphoric in contrast with
drama that he classifies within the metaphoric (see page 43) Despite the fact that I
agree with Jakobson that a film is metonymic, however there could be some
sequences which are metaphoric. I haven’t found a better example than the dance
with the globe in The Dictator. Charlie Chaplin plays satirically the role of Hitler
‘Hynkel’ in the movie, with his Prussian military helmet. The haunting ballet dance
with a balloon globe in his palatial office depicts metaphorically the power-mad
dictator and his idealistic dreams. At the end of the sequence the balloon explodes on
his hands. Many journalists would have written paragraphs and paragraphs about
Hitler, whereas Chaplin has summarized so many words in the globe dance only.

3.1.5 Literary works

It is the domain where metaphors have the opportunity to be grasped and
appreciated Faulkner said “The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life,
by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger
looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality
possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will
always move.” (Cox 1982: 22)
Faulkner believes that every good writer puts into words truth that is grasped
according to his perception of life. He is able to seize in his memory a particular
moment of life and throws it out in the shape of something which resembles reality,
but filled with much fantasy, this is to my perception the fundamental nature of
 47

metaphor. The literary work is effectively related to culture, therefore and

metonymically we can say that metaphors are strongly related to culture, since
metaphors are inside the literary works. For example, any who reads Things Fall
Apart will involuntarily come across words that are culturally infused, words like
palm oil, agbala, Igwugwu, ilo, obi, chi, besides the proverbs and idioms5 that are
highly inspired from the margins of the Ibo culture “Proverbs are the palm oil with
which words are eaten.” This sentence shows with a nice metaphor the value of
proverbs in Ibo society, since palm-oil is the pressed oil from palm-nuts
indispensable in cooking as well as proverbs that are fundamental, they are deep-
seated in this culture, therefore words are more graspable as they are uttered
pleasingly in the form of proverbs.

3.1.6 Rituals
I am going to consider the cultural rituals that I find in Things Fall Apart, and since
Stendhal considers literature as a “big mirror that represents reality” we improve
our research lying on this province, that we consider as the imitation of reality in its
entire spheres. Let us assume ritual as one of the main fields that works out our
metaphorical conception.
In Things Fall Apart, Chapter Four, Okonkwo beats his wife during the Sacred
Week, he went to Ezeani, the priest of the earth goddess to get clemency, but the
latter refused to meet him and said “I shall not eat in the house of a man, who has no
respect for our gods and ancestors.” No work was done during the Week of Peace, in
some clans it was even an abomination to die during this time, and if it happens so,
the dead body will not be buried; he will be instead cast into the Evil Forest, to
become afterwards an evil spirit hungry to do harm to the living. There are
metaphors which are realised in these rituals, for example this “Week of Peace”
becomes holy like Ramadan in Muslim countries, which suggests that many actions
are prohibited. In chapter six there is also a wrestling-match which is not simply a
team game but a ritual event, the place is significant, it is in front of the sacred silk-
cotton tree. The drummers, who become superior to the others, they are possessed by
the sacred spirit, it is a game that is metaphorically converted into a ritual, the
celebration is a great excitement. The drums as well as the hearts beat and the winner
 48

of the wrestling match is heartily taken by the crowd home, with the loftiest song of
victory.

3.1.7 Dream interpretations

The interpretation of dreams cannot be possible except if we refer to our gathering
of our everyday conceptual metaphors. We have given the account of Yusuf in the
introduction; we have seen how he has wisely interpreted the king’s dream to come
to the conclusion that the famine years eat greedily what the good years produce.
Yusuf’s interpretation is based on conceptual metaphors. When Yusuf was in prison,
two young men were laid down with him; one of them said:

“Verily, I saw myself (in a dream) pressing wine.” The other said:
“Verily, I saw myself (in a dream) carrying bread on my head and
birds were eating thereof.” (They said): “Inform us of the
interpretation of this. Verily, we think you are one of the Muhsinun
(doers of good).”
36 From Surah 12 Yusuf Koran

Yusuf interpreted this dream:

“O two companions of the prison! As for one of you, he (as a

servant) will pour out wine for his lord (King or master) to drink;
and as for the other, he will be crucified and birds will eat from his
head. Thus is the case judged concerning which you both did
inquire.”
41 From Surah 12 Yusuf Koran

3.1.8 Myths
Myths are also part of culture, for example the myth of Oedipus, who killed
his father, and married his mother. This myth that has been applied by Sigmund
Freud to explain the child’s incestuous desire and guilt, the use of the myth becomes
metaphoric when it comes to literature. Two examples are to our view very symbolic,
the case of Hamlet, it is almost not possible to explain the emotional intensity of
Hamlet towards his mother and his stepfather without referring to the Oedipus Myth.
In the Sound and the Fury there is also an impasse of the father-son relationship,
 49

Quentin did love his sister when he failed to love his mother, and his obsession with
his sister’s virginity is another myth that of something unspoiled and pure to believe
in. Lakoff refers to Pamela Morgan’s example about Greek Mythology, where
Poseidon is seen as the God of the sea, earthquakes, horses, and bulls, for her the
listing appears at first arbitrary but in fact all these are large moving objects that can
exert a force on you. So logically Poseidon should truly be seen as the god of
external events.
We can also give some details concerning the expression “Achilles’ heels”. In the
Iliad Achille was a courageous and intelligent man. He was drowned into a magic
potion by his mother while he was young. This is apparently the reason of his
strength and diligence. By the end of the story Achille was killed by Paris, who
strikes him in his heel, the only part of Achille’s body which has not been soaked
into the magic potion. “Achille’s heel” is a mythical expression that is used
nowadays metaphorically to express the weakest point in every human being that can
be used by an enemy to overthrow you.

3.1.9 Physical Symptoms

Psyche is also another mode of conventional metaphor that converts a
psychological state of mind into a real physical symptom. For example someone has
a lot of problems, he feels a sort of nuisance that is translated into the feeling of a
weighty head. Lakoff illustrates with the case of someone who walks stooping his
shoulders as if he is “carrying a heavy weight”, he points up that this physical
symptom is metaphorically drawn to express the psychological state that is
“difficulties are burdens”.

3.1.10 Social Institutions

Lakoff offers the metaphor “time is money” illustrated by expressions like
“he is wasting time”, “he is saving time”. Social institutions are also planted in the
ground of culture because if we keep only with Lakoff’s example of time and try to
 50

analyse the perception of time through different authors we will find tremendous
dissimilarities, it changes from Proust to Beckett to Faulkner. In “Long Black Song”
the short story written by Richard Wright, we identify that two persons, Sarah and
the “white” man who live in the same area, that is the South of America, and speak
the same language that is English do not actually understand each other when
approaching the theme of time and life. The game with the clock is used
metaphorically by Wright to express two perceptions of time. The ‘white’ man in
(Wright 1938: 108) asks Sarah
“Haven’t you got a clock?”
“Naw”
“But how do you keep time?”
“We git erlong widout time.”
“But how do you know when to get up in the morning?”
“We just git up, thas all.”
“But how do you know what time it is when you get up?”
“We git up wid the sun.”
“And at night, how do you tell when its night?”
“It gits dark when the sun goes down.”
“Haven’t you ever had a clock?”
She laughed and turned her face toward the silent fields.
“Mistah, we don need no clock.”

The metaphor of “time is money” catches its roots from the time of the industrial
revolution, when people started to be paid for their efforts by the amount of time they
spent in. This metaphor has been invented in the factory. It is the creation of a social
institution.
The clock is also used metaphorically in Faulkner’s the Sound and the Fury.
Quentin always turns the face of the clock down before going to bed and one day he
went to the dresser, took up the watch, tapped the crystal on the corner of the dresser
and caught the fragments of the glass in his hand. He put them into the ashtray and
twisted the hands off and put them in the tray. He tortured this watch just like Sarah’s
daughter with the only difference that one wanted to escape into a timeless world
because his father has told him once that time will make a person forget all sorrow
and remorse, but Faulkner’s Quentin did not want to forget, whereas Wright’s Sarah
lives in harmony with this world.
 51

3.1.11 Social Practices

We know that we can smell by using our nose. For example we smell that
someone is smoking, we smell something burning, we smell sweet flowers, however
smelling becomes metaphorical when it happens for a person to detect something by
instinct for example to smell trouble, or to smell a bad or a good story. The phrase
“touch something with the hand” is comprehensible literally but if we use the word
touch for something that we cannot reach with the hand for example “touch the right
chord” that is to appeal cleverly to someone’s feelings, or “her story touched us all
deeply” or “he never seems to have been touched with the slightest remorse for his
crimes.” All these examples bear out a metaphorical length, since touching has been
mutated from the touch of the hand to the touch of feelings.
Lakoff gives the example of the conceptual metaphor “seeing is touching”, the thing
that is seen is almost touched, the metaphor is made real in the social practice by
evading eye contact on the street, it becomes then a dreadful practice to undress
people with the eyes.

3.1.12 Laws
Law is also a domain where conceptual metaphors are made real I Lakoff in (Ortony
2002: 243) gives the example of the belief in America law that corporations are
persons. This metaphorical tenet allows corporations to be harmed and blamed if
ever they are legally responsible for something to go to court.

3.1.13 Foreign Policy

We come back to the metaphor of “a state is a person” that has been analysed
by Lakoff. There are other inferences to this metaphor, a state has become a person
and acquires all the features of a person, in other words it has now “friends” and
“dissidents” it is “healthy” or “weak” and health epitomizes strength, that is the
power of a state, every “dissident” is seen as a threat. When Iraq attacked Kuwait
America came to “rescue” Kuwait, president Bush said in his address to Congress,
 52

“The issues couldn’t have been clearer: Iraq was the villain and Kuwait was the
victim.” A “Just War” is conceptualized as a fairy tale with the whole allusions
besides, which is the villain, the victim and the hero: the “villain” is Iraq, the
“victim” is Kuwait and the “hero” is America.

3.1.14 Forms of Discourse

George Lakoff in (Ortony 2002: 243) expresses how common metaphors
could be made real in discourse forms; he thinks about three academic discourse
forms: the guided tour, the heroic battle, and the heroic quest. The guided tour is
drawn from the metaphor that thought is motion, therefore either ideas are well
ordered and efficient in reaching a conclusion or they turn in a circular reasoning in
anticipation of their own burial that is to withdraw with no conclusion. Someone who
is given a guided tour, is a metaphor of someone who is engaged in a rational
thinking, hence, the discourse form of the heroic battle is detained from the metaphor
that argument is war, words become then like bullets, and unavoidably each war
entails a hero and a villain, the hero is the scientist and the villain is his dissident,
therefore the heroic quest is the discourse form that is a metaphor for the scientist’s
difficult journeys of discovery.
We deduce through Lakoff’s research that each metaphor has as we might
expect an experiential foundation, be it a dream, a ritual, a form of discourse. All
these are the roots of realization of metaphors. So much of what is real and valid in a
society, grows to be comprehensible and graspable in metaphors. Experimental base
and realisation of metaphors turn out to be like two sides of a sheet of paper. One is
the multifaceted individual experiences; the other is the revealing experiences that
are structured by conventional metaphors, with the only difference that experiential
bases precede, whereas the realisation comes after. In other words experiential bases
pave the way to the realisation of metaphors, and each realisation of metaphor in one
generation happens to be converted into experiential base for the next generation.

Now that we have seen the strong relation of a code to its culture, in our case
the metaphor within a frame of thoughts, we consider that it is important to mention
 53

the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I am less inclined to accept it as will be explained.

Philologists and linguists have been involved in the study of human languages and
their meanings since the eighteenth century. Sapir and Whorf realized in their work
that the language one uses determines, or influences their user’s thoughts. Hudson
quotes Whorf:
“….the background knowledge system (in other words the grammar) of each
language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather itself
the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual’s mental activity, for
his analysis of impressions, for his synthesis of his mental stock in trade.
Formulation of ideas is not an independent process, strictly rational in the old
sense, but is part of a particular grammar, and differs, from slightly to greatly,
between different grammars.”
(Hudson1998: 96)
Whorf believes that English words are not detached from the Newtonian view
of objectified time that is in seeing time as something valuable. He compared the
English words to the Hopi’s words and he deduced that an English and a Hopi
physicist can hardly understand each other’s philosophy of time, since Hopi language
does not look upon time as a measurable unity, but merely as relation connecting two
successive events. This is true to a certain extent. We have given an example in page
(50) about Wright’s short story, where two people, Sarah and the “white” man who
live in the same area, (South America), and speak the same language (English) do
actually have different discourses when approaching the theme of time and life. This
example is just to highlight that the lack of correspondence is not only specific to
people who speak different languages, but it is even more unusual and arresting
when it comes to people within the same speech community. These differences from
one language to another are at the centre of difficulties in translation. “Despite the
general translatability from one language to another, there will always be an
incommensurable residue of untranslatable culture associated with the linguistic
structures of any given language.”
(Kramsch 2000: 12)

Let us examine some of the metaphors in al’Mutanabbi’s poetry

(c. 303-54/ c. 915- 65) that outraged many critics during medieval times. In one
famous poem he describes his encounters with several social problems “the age has
 54

hurled rough times at me, my heart is numb from its missiles/ And neatly where the
arrows stuck me the point of one stuck the other” (al’Mutanabbi 3, 11 101-2) in
another example he describes his hero Sayf al Dawlah, the leader of Syria during one
of his battles:
“With other shepherds, not you, have the wolves trifled; other blades, not you, have
the bows blunted. You in your possession the souls of men and jinn. How would
Kilab [the enemy tribe] hold on to theirs? They did not flee you [literally, forsake
you] out of rebellion, but one shrinks from going to water when death is the drink.
You pursued them all the way to their watering places, [till the clouds were
frightened that you would search it for them].

Al-Mutanabbi’s metaphors are distinctive, his poetry represented the highest artistic
creation in the renaissance of Arabic verse compared to traditional metaphors, his
apparent gift both complex and singular moulded with an agile imagination and a
linguistic playfulness that usually bend the sacred syntactic rules in order to produce
recherché metaphors. Al-Mutanabbi is considered as the most prominent Arab poet
of all times, he became the epicentre of one of the longest and the fiercest debate in
history, primarily because of his radical innovations in metaphor because the pre-
Islamic metaphor was considered a dead metaphor.

Let us now examine the status of metaphor in the poetry of al-Ruwwad (the
Pioneers), who rebelled around 1940, especially in Iraq against traditional poetic
forms, including the Romantic one and started what we call now Shi’r al Hurr or
“free verse”, which has become the dominant poetic form in most of the Arab world.
An example of new metaphor can be seen in the stanza from “Rain Song” by Badr
Shakir Al-Sayyab, one of the leading poets of free verse in (Jayyusi 1987: 427).
Your eyes are two palm tree forests in early light,
Or two balconies from which the moonlight recedes
When they smile your eyes, the vines put forth their leaves,
And lights dance………….like moons in river
Rippled by the blade of an oar at break of day;
As if stars were throbbing in the depth of them.
 55

When this poem was first published in 1960, many critics failed to decipher the
similarity between the eyes and the two forests of palm trees in the first line and the
balconies under the moon in the second line. Al-Sayyab portrays those eyes in more
than one metaphor, which is not a common tendency. Nevertheless in giving a
picture of the complex reality of her eyes as he experiences them, and the frontier of
words above the reality, makes him fail and succeed, fail in fully capturing his
imagination, and succeed in reaching crystal ambiguity.

Let’s go back to Sapir and Whorf’ hypothesis. As we know Al Sayyab’s poem has
been translated from Arabic to English, we know that no translation can capture the
whole fortitude of a metaphor, for Sapir and Whorf there will always remain a vast
untranslatable lexis. Translation in Al-Sayyab’s poem has taken away the cultural
connotation of palm tree which is “nakhil” in Arabic, these connotations are essential
to the Arabic identity. Furthermore if we compare only the title of Al-Sayyab’s poem
“Unshudat al Matar” and its invented equivalent in English “The Song Rain” we feel
a loss in the musical value that is meter and rhythm. However, we believe that a
strong version of the Sapir-Whorf’s hypothesis may easily lead to prejudice and
discrimination, since they blame language as being a barrier in the access of the
modern scientific thought. Social sciences are at the present very profitable, and
curiosity toward linguistic relativity principle has been given a new lease of life.
Kramsch has at long last concluded that:

“The translatability argument that was levelled against the

incommensurability of cultures is not as convincing as it seemed. If
speakers of different languages do not understand one another, it is not
because their languages cannot be mutually translated into one another-
which they obviously can to a certain extent. It is because they don’t share
the same way of viewing and interpreting events; they don’t agree on the
meaning and the value of the concepts underlying the words. In short, they
don’t cut up reality or categorize experience in the same manner.
Understanding across languages does not depend on structural
equivalences but on common conceptual systems, born from the larger
context of our experience.”
(Kramsch 2000: 13)
 56

A further illustration of modernistic metaphor is found in al-Sayyab's poem

“A Stranger at the Gulf” which is acknowledged by readers and critics alike as one of
his most influential lyrics. It was written while the poet was in exile in Kuwait in
1953 and was published as the first poem in his most acclaimed compilation,
Unshudat al-Matar (The Rain Song), in 1960. The poem is intuitive and deeply
emotional that it is usually hard to read even a single line or stanza without being
carried by its sweeping rhythm, which mysteriously echoes two realities at the same
time: the roar of the sea and the rage of the poet's emotion. The poem hits the reader
like successive harsh waves. Here is one of them in which the poet yearns to go back
to Iraq but is so poor that he cannot afford a ticket to cross the sea:

Like a homeless stranger I walked among strange cities and

fearful villages
Yet I sang your beloved soil (my homeland)
And carried it with me, for I have been Christ dragging his
cross in exile
And I heard the footsteps of hungry masses, their bare feet
bleeding while stumbling
Throwing into my eyes dust from you (homeland) and from
their feet.
Disheveled, I still wander on the roads, with my soiled feet,
Under foreign suns
In my fluttering rags, stretching my moist hand for alms
Yellow hand because of shame and fever: disgrace of a
strange beggar
Among foreign eyes
Among contempt, rejection, evasion, and charity
And death is much easier than pity
That charity foreign eyes shed
Drops of water, of metal [coins]
Out, out you damned drops, blood, you coins
You wind, you needles that would sew the sail for me
when do I return?
To Iraq? When do I return?
You the shimmer of the waves tossed by an oar in the Gulf
You big stars of the Gulf sky ... you damned money.

Oh, I wish that ships did not charge passengers

Or the earth were just flat land without seas!
I am still counting you, money, and dream of increase
I still decrease by you, money, the days of my exile
I still light with your glow my window and my door
On the other shore there [in Iraq], so speak to me, money, tell
 57

me
When will I return? When will I return?

To use I. A. Richards's in (Ricoeur 1997: 80) very useful terms tenor and
vehicle in talking about the work of metaphor. The tenor, the drift of the meaning in
the lines, is the yearning for home and the vehicle is money. The yearning is
embodied in money, and money has to be earned through begging, humiliation, and
disrespect. In a string of metaphors, money becomes tears of pity, becomes the blood
desire of the speaker, becomes the wind that pushes the sail, and becomes the very
sewing needles that make the sail. Yet the speaker is painfully aware that money is
so distant that it becomes the elusive shimmers of the waves, and finally he
poignantly realizes that money is as far away from him as the stars in the Gulf sky. It
is a multifaceted metaphor. The wave of the stanza is utterly crushed on the rock of
reality. Unlike the first metaphor in “The Rain Song” in which ambiguity functions
as an aesthetic dimension, metaphor in this poem clusters so many meanings around
it that its “vehicle”, money, is fused with the “tenor” and is rendered symbolic of the
yearning itself. This kind of metaphor is symbolic primarily because the metaphor
intermingles with reality and the reality becomes metaphorical.

Influenced by T. S. Eliot and other modernist poets in English, al-Sayyab

introduced a very fruitful property of modernism by his clever insertion of myth on
top of the long-established structure of the Arabic poem, steering the poem into new
adventuresome spaces. The fact that Al Sayyab has been influenced by T. S. Eliot
obliterates Sapir and Whorf’s hypothesis. It is true as we have seen throughout this
chapter that a code is strongly related to its culture and that language has great
influence on our thoughts. Nevertheless the mind is evermore, open to other cultures
and other languages. The experiment gave the poem more narrative elements, such as
characterization, dialogue, and the use of masks. It also opened up the metaphor by
offering it new dimensions: namely, the mythical and the intertextual. In a ten-part
poem titled “The Book of Job” published in his collection Manzil al-Aqnan (The
House of the Slaves), al-Sayyab lyrically fuses personal suffering (he wrote the poem
when he was dying of Lou Gehrig's disease) with the existential and the biblical and
the Qur'anic. In this context, metaphor branches out to interact with more levels of
imagination and thought. Simawe Saadi here translates part one:
 58

Praise be to You, no matter how long the plight will last,

And no matter how relentless the pain becomes,
Praise be to You, for disasters are gifts
And calamities are some of your bounties.
Haven't You given me this darkness?
And haven't You given me this dawn?
Would the earth thank You for the drops of rain
And feel insulted if rain has not come?
For long months these wounds
Like knives tear my sides
And the disease does not relent in the morning
Nor does the night cease its pains by killing [me].
Yet, if Job ever cried, he would cry:
"Praise be to You, for disasters are magnanimity,
And these wounds are the Beloved's gifts,
I press them to my bosom,
Your gifts are never absent from my heart!"
I hold my wounds and tell my visitors:
"Behold and envy me, for these are my Beloved's gifts."
And when fever's fire touches my forehead
I pretend it was Your fiery kiss.
My sleeplessness is beautiful, for I shepherd Your sky
Until the stars disappear
And Your grandeur touches my window.
Splendid is the night: Owl's hooting
And a car's honking in the distance
And moaning of the sick, and a mother retelling
Her ancestors' stories to her child.
The forests of the sleepless night, the clouds
Keep covering and uncovering the face of the sky
And brighten it under the moon.
But when the pain forces Job to scream, his cry is:
"Praise be to You, who shoots with Fate
And who decrees, later, the remedy."

The use of myth is an essential characteristic in al-Sayyab's poetry, in which

metaphor acquires a new role in addition to its above-discussed functions. In “The
Book of Job” if we examine the phrases, the metaphors effectively function to
characterize the speaker, and the speaker's relationship to God and to the biblical Job.
Simawe Saadi labels this kind of metaphor intertextual metaphor, as it engages in
profound intertextuality that, together with the myth, the hymnal rhythm (which is
lost in translation), makes the poet's cosmic vision linguistically possible
 59

3.2 Metaphor and Schema Theory

We have seen through the first question of this chapter the correlation
between metaphor and culture. Therefore schema theory becomes imperative to go
deeper in our exploration of metaphors within the organized background knowledge.
These schemata that urge us to anticipate or predict aspects in our interpretation of
metaphors
Yule reported an account about a cultural incident in an Australian factory. Easter
was close; therefore all the workers knew that they have a holyday. The factory
supervisor asked a Vietnamese worker about her plans he said:
“You have five days off. What are you going to do?”
The Vietnamese got the wrong idea about the schematic knowledge of this question,
therefore she thought that she has been laid off (rather than having a holiday) schema
changes from one person to another, hence what is good for one maybe bad for
another. (Yule 1998: 87)
In the act of communication we are required to participate in a wider, complex set of
connections between groups and organizations that represent the society we live in.
Communication or discourse understanding between writer, speaker and reader,
listener cannot be successful, unless the two conversationalists share the same
knowledge representations, well organized rigid, permanent and determined in the
mind, Yule and Brown called these stereotypic data, that are fixed in memory as
default elements. (Yule, Brown 2001: 236). Eleanor Rosch, a psychologist at the
university of California at Berkeley carried out a set of experiments that explain
these default elements. Her experiment has been called the prototype theory, her idea
is that people considered some kinds of birds as ‘birdier’ than other birds, and what
is true for birds is true for furniture, vegetable and tools, but lets illustrate with the
test with her students on birds, the surprise is that the majority of her students
considered the robin as the best example of birds, the sparrow, canary, blackbird,
dove and lark were highly classified, parrot, pheasant, albatross, toucan and owl
came somewhat lower. Flamingo, duck, and peacock were even less low. Ostrich,
 60

emu and penguin came near to the ground in rating, whereas came the bat as the
latest of all which denotes that it should not be regarded as a bird at all (Aitchison,
1987: 53). I have found Rosch’s research very interesting because this prototypical
division implies further reasons why the boundary between metaphor and
approximation is hazy, because the statement “A penguin is a bird.” Would sound
metaphorical than “A robin is a bird.” Though both sentences are not metaphors, the
former is closer to metaphor, since we know that penguins do not fly. This theory
brings the evidence for the limits of the use of metaphor. It is somehow as if I am
contradicting myself, because I have not ceased from the beginning of my work
focusing on the essential feature of metaphor that is “freedom”. I am afraid to sound
pessimistic, however I have to note down that though “A penguin is a bird” might
sound like a metaphor “a chair is a bird” is not conveying a metaphor at all. The
subject matter is how knowledge of the world can be organised in human memory
despite that it is not something limited, it is instead something huge and unlimited
and how human memory is activated in the progression of discourse understanding in
our case metaphor understanding. Henry James said in (Ford 1995: 250)

“Experience is never limited, and it is never complete; it is an immense sensibility,

a kind of huge spider-web of the finest silken threads suspended in the chamber of
consciousness, and catching every airborne particle in its tissue. It is the very
atmosphere of the mind; and when the mind is imaginative-much more when it
happens to be that of a man of genius-it takes to itself the faintest hints of life, it
converts the very pulses of the air into revelations.”

This regulated knowledge based on a collective and communal experience can be

called schematic knowledge. It is the knowledge which is attained to cope with a
particular culture or sub-culture. Schematic knowledge according to Widdowson is
“a necessary source of reference in use whereby linguistic symbols are converted
into indices in the process of interpretation. But we should note, too, that language
development itself, the acquisition of knowledge of symbolic meaning, is activated
by the need to extend schematic knowledge so as to cope more effectively with the
social environment.”
(Widdowson 1990: 103)

Widdowson raised an important issue by adding the phrase “to extend

schematic knowledge” because if one’s conceptual apparatus consists of a set of
concepts or conceptual schemata which are already fixed, how can we acquire new
 61

knowledge then? Pylyshyn suggests that metaphorical devices such as internal

analogues, images, prototypes can increase our conceptual schemata, he believes that
schemata is not fixed, he suggests that this capacity to change is at the origin of the
assimilation, accommodation problem. (Ortony 2002: 545) Metaphors are seen by
Boyd and Pylyshyn as having real fundamental referents and providing epistemic
access. We have seen in this chapter how a code is culturally rooted in its culture,
constituting thus our schematic apparatus; it becomes then necessary to seek out
what a discourse is?
“Discourse communities are characterized not only by facts and artefacts, but by
common dreams, fulfilled and unfulfilled imaginings. These imaginings are
mediated through the language that over the life of the community reflects, shapes,
and is a metaphor for its cultural reality. Thus the city of London is inseparable, in
the cultural imagination of its citizens, from Shakespeare and Dickens.”
(Kramsch 2000: 8)

Discourse communities are symbolized not only through manufactured articles

and art, such as painting, drawing, sculpting, but also through a common mental
picture of all things that are shared by persons within the same community. The latest
years have been very fruitful and dynamic in the knowledge of discourse production
and understanding. This intellectual capacity that helps to create discourse that is to
send and receive messages mainly when the assessment is correct and guides to
successful communication. The use of Artificial Intelligence has softened the
progress of discourse, in the sense that it tries to understand how pre-existing
knowledge and language interact. According to Cook discourse analysis, artificial
intelligence and knowledge schemata are strongly related to each other. In each
discourse there are mental representations of any particular situation, while key
words are linked up, the mind sets in motion our knowledge schema, to make the
discourse comprehensible. Cook gives an example about the course of mental
schemata in discourse production and comprehension, he imagined a witness in the
court, where she is asked to say the whole truth: she begins as follow:

1- I woke up at seven forty. I made some toast and a cup of tea. I listened to the
news. And I left for work at about 8: 30.
This description might well be sufficient to the court, but let’s suppose the witness
had said:
 62

2- I woke up at seven forty. I was in bed. I was wearing pyjamas. After lying
still for few minutes, I threw back the duvet, go out of bed, walked the door
of the bedroom, opened the door, switched on the landing light walked across
the landing, opened the bathroom door, went into the bathroom, put the basin
plug into the plughole, turned on the hot taran some hot water into the wash
basin, looked into the mirror……..

Maybe both paragraphs share truthfulness or as Grice labels it the maxim of quality.
However the judge could have accused this woman as ridicule, or as making laugh at
the audience. The second version comprises unnecessary and redundant details that
could have been omitted, example when she said I woke up at seven forty, we know
that she was in bed. This pre-existent knowledge could be called ‘a getting up
schema’. There are things in discourse that are assumed to be present by default.
(Cook 1989: 68, 9) Yule suggests that each utterance has three poles. The first is
locutionary act which is producing meaningful linguistic expression, the second is
illocutionary act which is the function that is carried through the utterance, it is also
called the illocutionary force of the utterance. The third is the perlocutionary act
which is the effect one intends to have on the hearer. He brings more details for the
illocutionary force of an utterance since he interprets it relatively close to what is
known as a speech act (Yule 1998: 48, 9)
(See page 39 for more details about speech act)
We have seen in chapter one that metaphors are a matter of utterance meaning, that is
they belong to the domain of pragmatics, so they logically cover the three acts, the
locutionary act, the illocutionary act and the perlocutionary act. Bruce Fraser in
(Ortony 2002:341) believes that a theory of pragmatics and a theory of illocutionary
acts are the same.
Widdowson explains that the indexical meaning resides in the correlation
between the linguistic sign and the significant aspect of schematic knowledge. He
puts together the systemic knowledge and the schematic knowledge to achieve
meaning in an actual language. He distinguishes then two kinds of schematic
knowledge. He calls the first “ideational”, which is the background knowledge about
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the content area of a text, and he calls the second “interpersonal”, it is the whole
structure of text, from organisation to rhetoric. He notifies that the negotiation of
meaning is a constant course of interpretation and adjustment between systemic and
schematic knowledge, or let’s say between symbol and index. Every person engaged
in the act of reading and where the ideational and the interpersonal are familiar many
symbols, are not activated because they are not necessary indexically. The schematic
content is a helpful support for our understanding of a text, since a lack of it is a
source for additional efforts and attention.
(Widdowson 1990: 104, 5)
We can presume through Widdowson’s research that the schematic content is
also a cooperative acquaintance for our understanding for metaphors. The
appreciation and the understanding of metaphors depend on shared grounds, the
metaphor triggers our shared beliefs, be it between only two people or a small group.
Whenever a speaker utters a metaphor, the hearer attempts to make a way into the
speaker’s mind to seek out in the knowledge of the speaker to find out implicated
assumptions that are shared between both of them, so metaphor cultivates intimacy,
it generates a sense of community, it is also regretful because it keeps out
involuntarily all those who are unable to penetrate the speaker’s mind.
Let’s take the examples given by Lakoff and Turner about the animal’s qualities that
represent metaphorically human characteristics:
1- Pigs are dirty, messy, and rude.
2- Lions are courageous and noble.
3- Foxes are clever.
4- Dogs are loyal, dependable, and dependent.
5- Wolves are cruel and murderous.
These image schemas of animals are widely used in all literatures. Sheng Ying6
illustrates with the classic example “Achilles is a lion” in western literature. She said
that people in western countries and China have a similar image schema about a lion.
Chinese people would understand easily this metaphor, however in traditional
Chinese culture, the image schema of a tiger is much better than lion to characterize
courage and bravery. This example is only one type of cross-cultural variation.
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Notes to chapter 3:
1- a-The conventional metaphor, or conceptual metaphor is a metaphor that is
perceived as a matter of thoughts, rather than a matter of words. The conceptual
metaphor theory introduced by Lakoff and Johnson challenges the traditional
linguistic views embraced by Aristotle that regards metaphor as a matter of words
rather than thoughts. Conceptual metaphor obliterates the traditional view of
metaphor as a purely literary device that is metaphor is only the privilege of poets.
b-the active metaphor is open to a plurality of interpretations, it is also
highly arranged on context dependency ground for example the metaphor “life is a
box of chocolate” which suggests that life provides pleasure and joy, but it implies
also destruction and damage since the one who throws himself into it reduces to
rubble his health. Advertisement is the domain of active metaphor, it is used cleverly
to influence and manipulate the addressee that is the customer. Active metaphor is
also used in poetry to become the poetic metaphor.
c-The poetic metaphor lacks the immediacy of the context, it is a form of
interaction that is delayed because of the absence of the author, the addressee is
involved to decode the message, to finally produce meaning that is to bring into
being his own interpretation.

2- “L’Interlangue dans les Caricatures de Slim: Le Phénomène Bouzid” This article

has been written by Lakhdar Barka S.M, a teacher at the University of Oran, in
Insaniyat, an Algerian journal of anthropology and social sciences. Nº7- Janvier-
Avril, 1999, (Vol. III, 1)

3-Disagreement: The difference between the East and the West according to Samuel
Huntington is leading to future conflicts. His thesis “the clash of civilisations”
contains challenging proposals. According to him the distinctions among people are
no more ideological, political or economic, they are cultural.

4- Resemblance: Paul Ricoeur in (1997: 82) asks himself whether the relationship
between tenor and vehicle belongs necessarily to the order of comparison, that is
based on resemblance only. He argued afterwards and said “perhaps the modification
 65

imparted by the vehicle to the tenor is even greater because of their dissimilarity than
because of their resemblance.”

5- Idioms: It is often assumed that idioms are “dead metaphors” since people do
make out the sense by recognizing the metaphorical evidence example ‘spill the
beans’ which denotes revealing a secret. There is a conceptual metaphor behind that
sees the mind as a container, and ideas as physical entities. ‘Button your lip’ is to
keep a secret, ‘lose your marbles’ is to go crazy.

6- SHENG Ying is a female teacher at the Ningbo University. Her article “the Role
of Culture in Metaphor” is an essay about the cross-cultural variation in metaphor
between China and the western culture that shows the impact of culture in the use of
metaphor.
Jan. 2007, Volume 5, No.1 (Serial No.40)
US-China Foreign Language, ISSN1539-8080, USA
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Chapter four
Metaphor and Education
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4.1 Metaphor and Authoritarian Teaching

“Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but
Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root
out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning
animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to
them.”

(Dickens 1995: 9)

In the previous chapter, we have seen the relationship between metaphor and
the culture which creates it, and then we have examined the relationship between
schema theory and metaphorical formulations. We have observed the strong link
between language and life. Language reveals life, and life reveals language, and
since metaphor belongs to language, so it reveals life, probably in a complex and
intricate way, nevertheless it is a different vision of life, a vision that is distorted for
some and maybe straight and truthful for others, so far life remains the scenery of
metaphors.
The classroom is a small breathing space; it is a miniature representation of life, it is
then to be expected for the teacher as well as learners to deal with metaphors. Our
concern in this chapter is to draw a dichotomy between authoritarian and
authoritative teaching and the relevance of metaphor within these two perspectives of
teaching, not to say two philosophies of teaching.
At the present time, people tend to question authority in education. People are more
inclined to grant more autonomy to learners. We have to take into account that the
more autonomy is granted to learner, the less authority is left for teacher, and the
more authority is awarded to teacher, the less autonomy is left for learner. I have
uncovered an example in literature which epitomises schooling pupils into obedient
compliance, by a fictional teacher called Thomas Gradgrind, a man of evidence, he is
described by Dickens as a man with “a rule and a pair of scales, and the
multiplication table always in his pocket, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of
human nature”. Gradgrind embodies what educational psychologists call now “an
authoritarian teacher” in chapter two from Hard Times, Gradgrind asked a girl called
Sissy Jupe “Give me your definition of a horse”. The girl fell in absolute anxiety by
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this question and the teacher replied “Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!”
he blamed her of ignoring the smallest facts of a very commonest animal that is a
horse, he asked then one of the boys definition of a horse and it is hard to believe
how the boy Bitzer described it, it is almost a dictionary which speaks:

“Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders,

four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy
countries, sheds hoofs, too. Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with iron.
Age known by marks in mouth.”
“Now girl number twenty” said Mr Gradgrind “you know what a horse is”

(Dickens 1995: 12)

The authority of the teacher as “professeur” is unquestionable in this case. He
plays the dominant role. He is the main protagonist. He attains this position by virtue.
The high merit he has achieved grants him a superior position. He is in control of his
classroom. He has the ability and influence to ask his pupils to behave the way he
wants whether they like it or not. “So the exercise of authority in interaction is more
or less authoritarian”.
(widdowson 1990:188)

Widdowson draws two portraits of a teacher. The former is a teacher as

“professeur”, the later is a teacher as “enseingant”. The exercise of authority differs
deeply in the sense that the later, that is teacher as “enseignant” is granted an
authority which is based fundamentally on his professional qualifications, his
dominance is derived from his ability to teach. Knowledge is the meeting point
between learners and teacher and empathy is no more than a result of a transaction.
“In this case there is no claim of right but a claim to knowledge: not ‘Do this because
I tell you and I am the teacher’ but ‘Do this because I am the teacher and I know
what’s best for you.’ Transactional exercise of authority, therefore, is more or less
authoritative.” (Widdowson 1990: 188)
To provide a non-authoritarian presence is a matter of teacher’s endowment,
his personal talent to make his students feel at ease as if they are in safe hands.
Learning is stimulated by the student’s need to attain knowledge, to accomplish his
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own goals, without the feeling of being commanded and ordered to do things. Can
we say that the learner in this case is completely independent?
The ideological tendency in western civilisation in comparison to eastern civilisation
is in the direction of a less authoritarian teaching, it is more or less assumed that this
is indispensable, or the crucial key to an open society, therefore the learner-centred1
activities become more fashionable since they create a sort of collaboration in the
classroom, the learner feels more liberated, he set his thought free but always within
the frame of controlled conditions of learning. Widdowson maintains the authority of
a teacher as “enseignant” as the ultimately accountable protagonist for the
management of classroom transaction for any pedagogy.
For him there is no pedagogy at all if we undermine the legitimacy of the teacher’s
authority. Finally the learner’s autonomy is set within the borders pencilled by the
teacher, so sensibly the learner ‘apprenant’ is not autonomous, he is dependent and it
depends on the teacher and the kind of dependency, he grants his learners.
Now that we have seen the difference between authoritarian and authoritative
teaching, we make an attempt to understand the role of metaphor within these two
perspectives of teaching.
Metaphors are linguistic tools in education; they serve to expand and extend
our capacities: cognition, reflection and memorisation. Pylyshyn as well as Boyd
share the opinion that language extends the senses by granting further knowledge, the
goal of metaphor is to provide a continuing epistemic access to a proposed situation.
Roland Barthes (1989: 14) believes that metaphor has a methodological existence as
well as a heuristic force, as soon as we deal with it, we learn by discovering things
for ourselves, exploiting at the same time our past experiences.
We have seen Bitzer’s answer about the signification of a horse; it is a scientific
description, a technical definition. It is almost a dictionary which is speaking and not
a boy. I have opened the Concise Oxford Dictionary to search another definition for
another animal, it was incredible:
Wolf: “Erect-eared straight-tailed harsh-furred tawny-grey wild gregarious
carnivorous quadruped allied to dog preying on sheep etc. or combining in packs to
hunt larger animals.”
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It is said that this is the real meaning, it is as if we are compelled to know all these
afflicting words such as ‘gregarious’, ‘carnivorous’, ‘quadruped’ to use language
correctly, moreover these words are far less familiar to the ordinary user of English,
thus we are blamed as being ‘vague’ and ‘inaccurate’ if we do not know the scientific
definition. The dictionary is materialized as something we handle forcefully, further
as put in ’s words “the dictionary comes to be looked on as legislative organ, to
which one turns for a standard of ‘good’ as opposed to ‘bad’ usage. This attitude is
indeed encouraged by the phrase ‘the dictionary’, with its misleading similarity to
‘the bible’.” (Leech 1990: 205)

Now let’s just imagine that Sissy Jupe in Dickens’s Hard Times has answered Mr
Gradgrind in this way:

“The horse is a very elegant animal, while he is well dressed, and marches with
regular steps of equal length as in a ceremonially march, a tuned demonstration he is
simply pleasing to the eye. When he is gnashing his teeth, he is simply angry, so he
has a steady march, as if he faces the enemy, even so he is also graceful. When he is
frightened he rides as a full gallop with all four feet of the ground at each stride over
the fields, he is more than smart. His hair as well as his tale is now and again in plaits
and at times it is liberated, flying from side to side like a skirt of a fresh lady in the
winds. He is simply my tower, at what time I mount it up; I feel my head and my
shoulders above the earth”

We cannot even imagine this poor lady answering Mr Gradgrind in this way. He
could have been puzzled, confused to be confronted to pupils of this kind, who are
somehow indecipherable, unable to read. It is especially hard for an authoritarian
teacher who have a precisely standardize set of perceptual tools with which to value
his fellow humans to deal with pupils of this type. I don’t know but we can imagine
the most unpleasant probability whereby Mr Gradgrind would have perhaps sent this
girl to the House of Correction as an outrage, indignation to his rational thinking.
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No little Gradgrind
“ had ever seen a face in the moon; it was up in the moon before it could speak
distinctly. No little Gradgrind had ever learnt the little jingle, Twinkle, twinkle,
little star; how I wonder what you are! No little Gradgrind had ever known wonder
on the subject, each little Gradgrind having at five years old dissected the Great
Bear like a Professor Owen, and driven Charle’s Wain like a locomotive engine-
driver. No little Gradgrind had ever associated a cow in a field with that famous
cow with the crumpled horn who tossed the dog who worried the cat who killed the
rat who ate the malt, or with that yet more famous cow who swallowed Tom
Thumb: it had never heard of those celebrities, and had only been introduced to a
cow as a graminivorous ruminating quadruped with several stomachs.”
(Dickens 1995: 16)

Authoritarian teaching destroys, tears down the kernel of creativity. It pays

more tribute to the semantic meaning; that becomes like a straitjacket, it is the safe
and the secured way of using words far from the ambiguity of metaphors and
paradoxes. Hopefully language is continually extended, new concepts are introduced
through borrowings that are assimilated into the language so that they become more
familiar to many people to the point that they do not seem strange and odd, but rather
something ordinary. Language is in a constant renovation, figures of speech such as
metonymy2, synecdoche3, hyperbole4, understatement5, irony6 and euphemism7 are
only portions of this process. Simone de Beauvoir said

“when I had to use words, and I found myself in a world of bony-structured

concepts. Whatever I beheld with my own eyes and every real experience
had to be fitted somehow or other into a rigid category: the myths and
stereotyped ideas prevailed over the truth: unable to pin it down, I allowed
truth to dwindle into insignificance.”
(Leech 1990: 34)
We guess then through Beauvoir’s words that writers including poets are
strong enemies to jargon; they are, in this respect capable to unknot the cord.
Creativity generates irrational combinations of words that become reasonable, not to
say rational in the case of prose and poetry. There is a simple example of this
irrationality in Nizzar Kabbani poem “I feel hatred for her, and I need to hold her
close” The poet here is destroying the stereotyped concepts ‘the feeling of hatred’
and ‘closeness’ as being contrasting emotions. This absurdity provokes and incites
people to look at words from different visions. Poets do in fact have their own vision
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of life. They create their own worlds and words where the illogic turn out to be
consistent and valid, understanding this, the feeling of hatred and love in Kabbani’s
poem develops into a complex fusion rather than inconsistent notions.
We have imagined Sissy answering Gradgrind in a poetic way, just differing
absolutely that of Bitzer’s, there is a simile8 between the hair of the horse and the
skirt of a fresh lady. There is also a metaphor between the horse and a tower that
stretches her definition further than its elastic limit, besides the mood of the horse
when he is frightened, or angry that add more liveliness, to become a moving picture
in the imagination. Bitzer’s definition of a horse is inanimate, whereas the imagined
definition of Sissy is animate. We can only notice that there is an aspiration for the
prose ideal. It is a kind of extension to the communicative resources, as well as the
accompanying of feeling. It is a sort of break with the conceptual bonds with which
language imprisons its users. It is undisruptive for an authoritarian teacher to keep
the minds under lock and key. Two alternatives remain then for creative pupils:
either to find the key and unlock the door, or keep with thoughts buried in the mind;
that is to survive or to die.

In chapter fourteen from Hard Times, we feel that Mr Gradgrind is simply

disappointed with Sissy Jupe, he said to her:
“No. The course you pursued, you pursued according to the system- the system-
and there is no more to be said about it. I can only suppose that the circumstances
of your early life were too unfavourable to the development of your reasoning
powers, and that we began too late.”
(Dickens 1995: 95)
Regardless of all the difficulties that Gradgrind faces with Sissy, so far he
really liked her. He becomes possessed by an idea that there was something in this
girl which could hardly be set forth in a customary profile.
In this novel Dickens centres his attention on the theme of the need for
imaginative engagement with the world, and the danger of schematisation. He insists
throughout his fiction that there is more important than figures and averages in what
concerns education. He implicitly attacks those who see the world through statistics.
It is observable from the opening words in his book “Facts alone are wanted in life.”
and through his metaphor “Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.” The
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mind is assimilated to a container for facts. The past is revolutionised, people used to
plant vegetable, to live in complete harmony with nature, unfortunately the past is ill-
assorted with technology and development, hence facts arise to a substitute for
vegetables, so at present we can only plant facts, uproot facts, inhale facts, to blow
out facts. The fertile and productive soil is damaged as well as the mind and
imagination. Dickens draws our attention to “a range of imagination in most of us,
which no amount of steam-engine will satisfy.”
Hard Times grows as a picture for the hard times of flexible heads and thoughts. We
have seen in this section the danger of authoritarian teaching and the risk of
conformity and the nearly impractical use of metaphors within this type of teaching.

4.2 Metaphor and Authoritative Teaching:

Some linguists define metaphor as a correlation between two unlike things,

others like Stephen Ullmann define it as a semantic pathology. Pavio and Walsh
define it as “a solar eclipse”. Bruce Fraser defines metaphors as:

““black holes in the universe of language”: We know that they are there;
many prominent people have examined them; they have had enormous amounts of
energy poured into them; and sadly, no one yet knows very much about them.”
(Ortony 2002: 340, 1)
I have tried to define metaphor respectfully before introducing the second
kind of teaching, which is authoritative teaching. Metaphor is merely the same as a
dream. It is no more than a dream. As contrasted with a night dream, it is a daydream
fulfilled in a linguistic way. It is the trophy of a lively imagination. Metaphor and
dream are akin in the sense that they are order out of disorder. They are consistency
out of inconsistency. They are native of nature. They breathe in it. They are inspired
from it. They are used to restore life, to renovate nature in a perplexed and
bewildered style, but how many times has man been at a complete loss when faced
with life? Metaphor to my perception is a memory image of life with all its intricacy,
 74

joyfulness and even its insignificance. Hence man is disorientated, confused, but also
pleased and cheerful when faced with metaphor, warmly and intimately as when he
is faced with life.
Sometimes we get up in the morning and we laugh at our dreams saying
“dream is nonsense” but sometimes the dream follows us all day. We cannot get it
out of our minds. It is easier to say “it is nonsense” or maybe it is a way to avoid
interpretation. It is a way to evade revelation, what is hidden behind?, maybe
something displeasing or something enjoyable it has no informative value, but
merely expresses an affect. If we offer an apple to someone and he refuses it
asserting that the apple is bitter without even tasting it we deduce then that there is
something behind which he represses, that is something in the interpretation which
he objected on. The metaphor as well as the dream is disguised to such a point that it
misrepresents things. Distortion is intentional. It is a means of disguise. When a
writer has unpleasant truths to say, he feels himself just as in a dream. He is between
wish-fulfilment that is to reveal everything and repression that is censorship. The
writer stands in fear of editing accordingly he disguises the expressions of his
opinions so these metaphors become then “necessary misrepresentations”. The
harsher the supremacy of censorship is, the more systematic becomes the disguise
and over and over again the more ingenious and creative the employed means to get
the reader on the right path of the writer’s ideas. In Algeria, the official language is
the Classical Arabic. All the Algerian pupils learn this language earlier in their lives.
Unfortunately, this language which used to be the expression of great literature is
nowadays used by preachers and politicians. The Classical Arabic is nowadays a
means of ideological expression. For this reason many talented students use the
foreign language as a language of exile9. Censorship domination is religious, social
and political. Metaphors become secret codes in which every sign is translated into
another sign of known meaning and success in interpretation remains a matter of
inventive guess of direct intuition. The best interpreters are those who grasp
similarities. They are able to recognise the true picture in the distorted one. They are
able to depict those symbols that are as old as language itself. Henri Morier
registered more than three hundred symbols that I have tried to translate to see the
worth and connotations of every word. (See annexe one)
 75

We know that seeing things in different ways is a necessary prerequisite for

scientific as well as literary innovation. William James believes that “men, taken
historically reason by analogy long before they have learned to reason by abstract
characters.” (Ortony 2002: 447)
We deduce through this reflection that the faculty for analogical reasoning is
an innate part of human cognition. It is an intuitive appealing. I have carried out a
survey among my students: third year American literature. The number of the
students was a hundred and fifty. The question was: Do you prefer a teacher who
uses metaphors or do you prefer the direct way of expression? They were seventy
nine to prefer the teacher who uses the direct way of expression. They were forty one
who prefer the teacher who uses metaphor. They were twenty four to prefer both
ways of expression. (See the whole survey in annexe four) For the question: Do you
use metaphors in your daily speech? They were a hundred and twenty two who
answered “yes” and they were only twenty three who answered “no”. It is a
considerable number of students who use metaphors in daily speech. For the former
question one of my students wrote to me: “I prefer a teacher who uses metaphor,
because the one who uses it rightly is an intelligent person. Metaphor helps to be
more intelligent, because it puts the brain into hard work.” It is true that metaphor
puts the mind into hard work. It is an extra effort for the brain. It is hard but it
stimulates intelligence. Memorisation then is to be expected because we rarely forget
something that takes part of our intelligence. For that reason I think that the students
were seventy nine to prefer the teacher who speaks without metaphors. Metaphor
requires a certain amount of active involvement on the part of the reader, thus its
occurrence in the classroom calls for the attention of the two protagonists: the teacher
as well as the student. We come across the movie “Dead Poets Society” that was
highly inspired from Goodbye, Mr. Chips, a book that was written by James Hilton
which is a commemoration of the victory of free and liberated will, independent
thinking and the growth of personality. Robin Williams is the English teacher (John
Keating), but it is originally Chipping in the book. He brought enthusiasm to the
class of young scholars whose only sense of entertaining was spending time together
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in their study groups. Keating did not spoon feed the boys in his class. He simply
opened the minds to those who only thought that going to prep school was the easiest
way to get to Harvard. I have selected this movie because Keating’s way of teaching
contrasts deeply Gradgrind’s. Keating is what educational psychologists call now an
authoritative teacher. Here is one of the opening moving reflections of the movie:

(Keating is standing on his desk)

John Keating: Why do I stand up here?
Dalton: To feel taller!
John Keating: No!
(Dings a bell with his foot)
John Keating: Thank you for playing Mr. Dalton. I stand upon my desk to remind
myself that we must constantly look at things in a different way.

It is not easy for educators to see and bring the best in every child. It is even
more difficult to recognise the potential embedded in each and every one of them.
Keating in this movie encourages his students to believe in themselves, in their
dreams. He respects them as individuals who are to find their own unique voices in
society one day. He is that exceptional teacher, a visionary who sees beyond the
students for who they are now.
He introduces them to such great writers and philosophers as Thoreau, Frost,
Emerson, and John Keats. Here is a passage of Henry David Thoreau in “Walden”
quoted by Keating to stimulate his students to venerate life, to suck the essence of
life.

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the

direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he
will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

Keating quotes also Thoreau who said in “Walden”

“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; That is where they
should be. Now put the foundations under them.” Keating wants to make Todd
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Anderson overcome his inhibitions. He focuses on the point that success too easily
won is often no success at all, and usually great achievements are based on focus,
persistence, determination and very hard work. Keating uses poetry as a form of
expression, as well as a didactic improvement. He makes them notice, on one
occasion an old picture of students and he offers a philosophical view. He introduces
them to those students, who are now maybe “fertilizing daffodils”, but in the picture,
their eyes are full of hope, as if they are destined for great things, nevertheless they
refuse to wait until they fall. They are whispering their legacy that is always “to suck
out all the marrow of life”

Keating asks Neil to read a passage by Dr. J. Evans, and Neil starts reading:

“Understanding Poetry,' by Dr. J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D. To fully

understand poetry, we must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme and figures of
speech, then ask two questions:
1) How artfully has the objective of the poem been rendered and 2) How important
is that objective? Question 1 rates the poem's perfection; question 2 rates its
importance. And once these questions have been answered, determining the
poem's greatness becomes a relatively simple matter.”

Keating then asks his students to rip out the entire page, and then he asks them to tear
out the entire introduction. He wants them to savour words and language far from
metering and measuring poetry. He wants them to learn to think for themselves. He
focuses on the point that ideas and words can change the world. He gives, then the
reasons for his request he says:

“We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write
poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled
with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering -- these are noble pursuits
and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love -- these are what
we stay alive for.”
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To quote from Whitman

O me! O life! of the question of these
recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless,
of cities fill'd with the foolish...
What good amid these O me, O life?
Answer
That you are here--That life exists and
identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you
may contribute a verse.”

All Keating’s students begin to appreciate poetry by themselves. They succeed to

revive the “Dead Poets Society”. They breathe life in a cave that has become a secret
meeting place for the members of this society, Neil starts reading a traditional
opening message that has become the hymn of this friendship: “I went to the woods
because I wanted to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the
marrow of life.” HenryDavid Thoreau.

Keating initiates his students to Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” which
focuses on the theme of choice and lost opportunities. “Two roads diverged in a
wood and I, I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference.”

Robin Williams, here, symbolizes the spirit of a prophet, touching the

children who came to him with a sense of life. More essentially, this story shows
how weak and delicate that sense of beauty is. How, knowledge is powerful as soon
as we are touched by this huge love for understanding ourselves and the world, and
to get in touch with a book grow to be vital, crucial. We cannot resist the generated
ecstasy, we are plainly elevated to the seventh heaven. Robin Williams invites his
students to write a poem; accordingly they get ready to let it known, except for Todd,
 79

the most inhibited of all his students; however the surprise was the greatest with
Todd and the whole class keeps speechless.

TODD
M-Mumbling,"Truth. Truth is like, like
a blanket that always leaves your feet
cold."

KEATING
Forget them, forget them. Stay with the
blanket. Tell me about that blanket.

TODD
Y-Y-Y-You push it, stretch it, it'll
never be enough. You kick at it, beat
it, it'll never cover any of us. From
the moment we enter crying to the moment
we leave dying, it will just cover your
face as you wail and cry and scream.

Todd is making here an analogy between truth and a blanket. He is trying to

put in plain words the shortage or the deficiency of the word TRUTH in metaphoric
thoughts. He portrays truth as a blanket that you force down to cover you altogether,
however it covers only your face. The thirst for truth marks a great frustration, from
the moment we enter crying that is birth, to the moment we leave dying that is death.
Todd portrays frustrations by the three words one more significant than the other
“wail”, “cry”, “scream”, to finally assume that truth is something inaccessible and
difficult to get to.

The author and poet Gibran identifies the role of the teacher in his well-
known book the Prophet. He masters the use of parable and metaphor to broaden
humanity's vision, helping make known the unknown. The greatest truths are most
easily conveyed in the simplest stories. I thought of Gibran because he has almost the
 80

same philosophy of teaching as Keating in Dead Poets Society, the philosophy that
stimulates and inflames the learner’s curiosity to knowledge that is instigated first in
the self. Here is a passage written by Gibran from his book the Prophet where he
reveals his philosophy on teaching:

On Teaching

Then said a teacher,"Speak to us of Teaching."

And he said:

No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in
the dawning of our knowledge. The teacher who walks in the shadow of the
temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith
and his lovingness. If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house
of wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind. The
astronomer may speak to you of his understanding of space, but he cannot
give you his understanding. The musician may sing to you of the rhythm
which is in all space, but he cannot give you the ear which arrests the
rhythm nor the voice that echoes it. And he who is versed in the science of
numbers can tell of the regions of weight and measure, but he cannot
conduct you thither. For the vision of one man lends not its wings to
another man. And even as each one of you stands alone in God's
knowledge, so must each one of you be alone in his knowledge of God and
in his understanding of the earth.

This passage calls our attention to Roland Barthes’ (1989: 315) portrayals of
the good teacher and the good student, those who acknowledge the plurality of their
determinations; because they probably believe that the truth of a relationship of
speech is elsewhere in a different place. He explains (ibid: 78) in that case why he
has entitled his book “the rustle of Language”. Barthes describes brilliantly the
rustle as ‘the noise of an absence of noise’. It is metaphorically used for language
that produces meaning which is exposed to many interpretations, furthermore, even
non-meaning generates a meaning in the distance. He comes out to the conclusion of
the difficulty of the sign by using the metaphor of the Pandora Box10
 81

Widdowson in (1988: 124) invites every teacher of literature to reconsider the

function of creative writing in the teaching of language. He recommended stylistics
as a suspension bridge that could help making a connection between those who
regard literature as a sacred artefact with the inclination to dissociate it completely
from language teaching and those who see it as a needless luxury by questioning its
practical relevance to language teaching. He says in (1988: ibid)

“It seems to me that we urgently need an attitude to literature, and a teaching

approach based upon it, which, while acknowledging that literature is strange and
mysterious and an object of reverence, also recognises that it is a use of language;
and so comparable with other uses of language; and that it is only one of the
strange and mysterious ways in which human beings manage to communicate with
each other.”

Authoritarian education is strongly related to the development of social

economy. In this case education becomes more concerned with production. It is
concerned to make students more suitable to the societal necessity whereas
authoritative teaching is strongly related to the individual. It is a kind of cure and the
teacher in this case is the creator of a context in which he smoothens the progress of
knowledge. He supports and encourages the students. Krishna Kondaiah10 believes
that metaphor could facilitate and help in the development of familiarity with a
foreign language. He recommends then for teachers to provide tools and strategies11
to their learners to assist in the building of efficient semantic memories in the target
language. The long term memory is the only judge of the effectiveness of this
experience. The metaphorical system offers patterns in linguistic data which may
help build solid semantic mappings of lexis in the learner’s brain as opposed to rote
learning (that is learning by heart) and learning from lists. The only problem with the
foreign language is the lack of sufficient time of exposure since metaphor is a lived
experience, it reinforces the input by engaging the students to discover the other
language by comparing the native language with the foreign one, in this case they
might retain more knowledge of the vocabulary and the semantics of the target
language. Kondaiah gives an interesting note that shows how learning through
experience is efficient. He gives a result of a study that has been conducted in 1987.
He said that students were retaining 10% of what they had read, 26% of what they
 82

had heard, 30% of what they had seen, 50% of what they had seen and heard, 70% of
what they had said, and 90% of what they had said as they were doing something.
A society creates itself through education, as soon as it enhances a pedagogy that
encourages creativity12, it is contributing to a democratic society. The teacher in this
case is contributing deliberately to the improvement of democracy in his country.
Aesthetics develops in students capacities and capabilities to imagine a better
society, because if creation does not help in the betterment of a society what does it
help for?
 83

Notes to chapter 4:
1-Learner-led has been advocated by Breen and Candlin, the type of syllabus here is
rather, process syllabus as contrasted with procedural syllabus that is teacher-
directed. Prabhu is the instigator of the task-based syllabus which is procedural.
White explains what is learner-led by making an analogy with the building of the
house. He said:

“a learner-led syllabus is rather like building a house a section at a time, with only
a general idea of what the final dwelling will be like. The only aspect which is
likely to be agreed on in advance is the ultimate outcome, though even that will
have to be negotiated among participants before construction.”
(White 1988: 95)

2-Metonymy: Reddy gave a good example to explain what a metonymy is

Example: You’ll find better ideas than that in the library, is derived from the conduit
metaphor by a chain of metonymies. That is, we think of the ideas as existing in the
words, which are clearly there on the pages. So ideas are “there on the pages” by
metonymy. Now the pages are in the books- and again, by metonymy, so are the
ideas. But the books are in the libraries, with the final result that the ideas, too, are
“in the libraries” (Ortony 2002: 187)

3-Synecdoche: a figure of speech by which a more comprehensive term is used for a

less comprehensive or vice versa, as whole for part or part for whole, e.g. “there were
six guns out on the moor” where ‘guns’ stands for shooters. (Drabble, M. Stringer, J.
1996: 289)

4-Hyperbole: the use of exaggerated terms to emphasize the importance or extent of

something. Puttenham translated it as “the over reacher”. Marlowe was particularly
addicted to this figure of speech: e.g. “was this the face that launched a thousand
ships? And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? (Dr Faustus).
(Drabble, M. Stringer, J. 1996: 289)
 84

5-Understatement: Raymond and Gibbs believed that “Understatement also distorts

truth: speakers say less than what is objectively warranted as when someone
comments about a very drunk person that “he seems to have had a bit too much to
drink.” Litotes are a particular kind of understatement in which the speaker uses a
negative expression where a positive one would have been more forceful and direct.
Litotes express an overt lack of commitment and so imply a desire to suppress or
conceal one’s true attitude.
(Ortony 2002: 267)

6-Irony: Fowler asserts that irony is traditionally seen as referring to situations that
postulates a double audience, one which is “in the know” and aware of the actor’s
intention, whereas the other is naïve enough to take the situation or utterance at its
face value. (Ortony 2002: 262)
Edward Said uses many ironies in his book Orientalism, they are used cleverly by the
author, but there is an irony which I have appreciated much, for two reasons: one
because it suggests a huge distinction between reality and what is expected, the
second because it captures the spirit of the book: “if the Judean desert has been silent
since God spoke there, it is Chateaubriand who can hear the silence, understand its
meaning, and-to his reader-make the desert speak again.”
(Said 1995: 173)
A successful translation is the preservation of the original meaning of an utterance,
so it is like a linguistic understanding here is a translation of Catherine Malamoud of
the above passage of Edward Said “Si le désert de Judée a été muet depuis que Dieu
a parlé, il y a Chateaubriand qui peut entendre le silence, comprendre sa signification
et-pour son lecteur-faire à nouveau parler le desert.” (Said 1980: 201)
Winner and Gardner found that metaphor and irony have a common structure, both
are based on an opposition at the pragmatic level: what the speaker says is
intentionally at odds with the way the speaker knows the world to be. However, it is
the relationship between what is said and what is believed and meant that metaphor
and irony diverge in structure.
(Ortony 2002: 428)
 85

7-Euphemism is the use of a word which is thought to be less offensive or unpleasant

than another word. For example indisposed instead of sick, or to pass away instead of
to die.

8- A simile is a comparison between two unlike things. Miller assumes two facets in
understanding the similes: the awareness of the occurrence of the simile and the
interpretation of the roots of its use by giving the motives of the author for using it.
(Ortony 2002: 373)

9- A language of exile in the Algerian case is often either French or English. Despite
the fact that some students are very talented in the Classical Arabic, however they
prefer to avoid Arabic and evade into a foreign language. This paradox is not based
on a survey or analysis, it is empirical. It is basically what we observe at the
university. Since it is almost impossible for anybody to overcome a native culture
with all its self-consciousness, inhibitions and principles, the foreign language
becomes a kind of refuge where it become easy to blow up social and cultural
censorship and maybe above all the self-censorship. The use of a foreign language is
an exile in itself, but the use of metaphor in a foreign language is a double exile.

10- Pandora Box: It is originally from the Greek Mythology. Pandora was created by
the god Zeus that was sent to the earth with a box containing evil. When she opened
the box evils came out and infested the earth. (Oxford Dictionary: 915) Roland
Barthes seized this myth to explain metaphorically the problems of signs and the
generated breakdown as soon as the process of interpretation started. Barthes uses
metaphor here as a didactic tool so I guess that he allows its use in a scientific paper,
or let’s say that he does not reject it as unscientific.
10- Krishna Kondaiah is an English teacher at Kyoto Municipal Saikyo Senior High
School, Japan. His article “Metaphorical Systems and their Implications to Teaching
English as a Foreign Language” is from Asian EFL Journal: English Language
Teaching and Research Articles.
 86

11- Metaphor could be taken as a strategy in the foreign language teaching because it
is easier to remember a metaphor than any other discourse. Alexander Gilmore (PhD
in Applied Linguistics) was our visiting Professor from the University of Kyoto at
the University of Mostaganem on the tenth of March 2008. He is a strong believer in
the communicative competence model, but he stated his frustration in what concerns
the practicing of this model with the Japanese students because as he said “they
cannot produce any utterance unless they are sure that it is correct.” Then he said “all
my questions then are rhetorical” that is he does not expect any answer when he asks
a question. Then he gives a nice metaphor that summarises discourse in Japan he said
“discourse is bowling” and I replied to him in a metaphor too “so it is not tennis”. He
said “no it is not tennis”, which means that discourse in this community is rather a
smooth and flat one, it is not a diverging or an opposing discourse. It is not a give-
and-take discourse, whereby you can disagree and conflict with the other. The use of
metaphor here has facilitated the understanding of the idea.

12- An anecdote in what concerns creativity:

I have a personal experience in writing as a pupil at primary school. Our teacher
invites the entire classroom to write a short paragraph about someone we do not like,
or somebody for whom we feel abhorrence and repulsion. Everybody begins to write,
unfortunately, I had no one in mind so I have just imagined a girl and tried to
attribute hideous features to her. I could not visualize my teacher’s impression, since
this girl grows to be more than malicious and horrifying. My teacher come close to
me and said “I beg you, just tell me who this girl is?” I perceived through his
question that the girl was someone real and authentic for him, someone we can meet
on our daily life. I just remember that I did not want to deceive him, and for that I
had to lie by asserting that the girl was my neighbour.
 87

Conclusion
 88

“they’ll have me whipp’d for speaking true: thou’lt have me whipp’d for
lying, and sometimes I am whipp’d for holding my peace.”

(Shakespeare 1994: 45)

My first question when I started working on metaphor was “Am I going to

work on prose or poetry?” As time passes I found myself working almost exclusively
on poetry. I realized then that poetry is metaphor and metaphor is poetry. It is almost
redundant to say “a poetic metaphor”. It is as if we say “liquid water” or “a water
fish” or “a wooden tree”. The second obstacle that I encountered in the study of
metaphor is about the approach. Is it better to be literary or linguistic? At first I was
only enchanted by the poetic side. I was convinced that no one can better understand
metaphor than the one who produces it, that is a literary man. I was simply deaf and
indifferent to the linguistic side, but gradually I realised the importance of linguistics.
The reconciliation between these two traditionally divided disciplines: literature and
linguistics can only be rich and productive. In the introduction I have tried to convey
the influence of words over people. I said that we live in a world of words. We are
surrounded, enclosed by words, and it is through metaphor that words do in fact
dream. If some people have ceased to dream, words do really continue dreaming.
Away from this world of words, there is a world of silences, hush, not a word.
Silence is hurting, thoughts are buried in the mind, but they take shape and profile,
always in that excruciating silence. We hang around. We observe and at the end of
the day, we feel a sudden revelation. I have exposed throughout my work how
metaphor is a clever key to circumvent censorship. In El Watan 26 of May 2008
Baaziz, a committed Algerian singer talks about his extradition from the airport of
Tunis. In his interview he focuses on subversion that is resulted from censorship. He
said “the more prohibition, the more desire to do things.” He said “It is deplorable
for a powerful authority to be afraid from a modest singer.” Baaziz is also prohibited
in his own country, because he reveals injustice and crisis in the Algerian society in a
direct and a straight way. He does not handle things with kid gloves. Metaphor is a
judicious trick in these difficult cases, whereby the artist reveals truth without
releasing it totally. In the question number fourteen in my survey one hundred and
twelve of my students believe that art is more comfortable in a liberated country.
 89

There was one answer that attracts my attention: “Art is more comfortable in a
liberated country, but in a repressed country we have much more to say than in a
liberated one.” This is the major problem of our artists. They have a lot to say, but
they are watched and bound by a corrupted political system and an Islam tinted by
fits of hypocrisy and regression. They have limits and they know perfectly the
borders of those limits. Metaphor is subtle. It is that delicate remedy for artists to
express themselves under restriction. Things are not said directly, they are
understated. It is regrettable for our artists to be forbidden in their own countries
simply because they are saying the Truth. They are deprived self-expression, so most
of them are living abroad. They export themselves to import their art. It is easier for
them to work in France, however their home is the native land. They are in a kind of
forced exile. Hegel almost categorises art with religion and philosophy in its power.
It is for him a means to reveal the profoundest interests of humanity, and the most
inclusive truths of the mind. He says in (1993: 9)

“It is in work of art that nations have deposited the profoundest intuitions
and ideas of their hearts, and fine art is frequently the key-with many nations there
is no other-to the understanding of their wisdom and their religion.”

The Orient is in a state of inertia in what concerns art. It is experiencing at the

present that intolerable silence. The soul, is carrying great weight of awareness. All
that we know, all that we have known, all our future inspirations breath a first breath
in that secret depth, that spiritual room, the soul. Lakoff and Johnson in their book
“Metaphors We Live By” explain how metaphors make our thinking more vibrant
and vivid but moreover they actually structure our perception and understanding.
They gave the example of “time is money metaphor” that engenders a whole
metaphorical nature in everyday activities for example: You're wasting my time or
this gadget will save you hours or I don't have the time to give you, how do you
spend your time these days? That flat tire cost me an hour, I've invested a lot of time
in her. It seems that we live by metaphors, let’s take the same metaphor and see its
meaning in Algeria: is time money? I was unfortunate to find that time is fate, time is
a foe, time is worthless. This way of thinking causes irreversible attitudes: absentee
and skive of work is on a daily basis. Time is not scheduled, thus meetings are not
 90

respected. Suppose that you are a headmaster of a hospital or a school and you are
confronted to four or five absentees everyday: how are you going to react? Maybe
the finest metaphor that resumes the insignificance of time in our country is the
agendas that are used by students for note taking. It is striking how metaphors shape
our thoughts. If an agenda that is the concrete word for time is used for other
purposes except time, it means only a complete destruction of time that generates this
absolute lethargy that infests our people.

To sink in a world of silence denotes beyond doubt the validation of stronger

cultures to interpret, to suppose and finally to deduce the meaning of words as well
as silences of dominated cultures. Edward Said, for example in his book Orientalism
expresses how the French shaped their culture as well as the Orient culture in such a
way that it highlights the sense of superiority of European culture, and since people
have the tendency in this day and age to rely more on books than on a direct contact
with individuals there is no échapatoire and the fall in representation or
misrepresentation is definite. In this respect, the one who draws near a language
comes within reach of its culture, so the study of language is a cultural activity. In
my research on metaphors, in particular the oriental ones, I felt depth of perception
and emotional reaction. On one hand I am bound to the Orientalist’s views, I throw
myself in a well-known well, a style of life that is almost virtuosic but with the great
threat to become as Said says like Robinson Crusoe’s parrot when he articulates his
first words. On the other hand I aspire to break away from the writings beforehand
and trust only the eye and the brain, with the risk to fall myself in
“misrepresentation”, the embarrassment and shame is more tormenting as insiders of
the oriental culture than the outsiders. While I read Swimming up the Tigris by
Barbara Nimri Aziz I discovered some fresh elements about Iraq and its people. It is
controversial because Aziz is an outsider to this society, yet she brings tremendous
truth in what concerns the reality of life in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, the embargo
and the misery of the Iraqis. Many questions then come to my mind: who is more
objective an outsider or an insider? Who is more qualified to select what is
representative of our culture: the outsider who spends years studying it, or an insider
who lives and breathes within it? Let me express it honestly and openly: have I
chosen the most representative authors in what concerns metaphorical formulations?
 91

Bibliography
 92

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 98

Index
 99

A
active metaphor .................................................................................................................................................... 64
Aitchison .......................................................................................................................................................... 60, 93
Al Jahiz ................................................................................................................................................................... 20
Al-Haj, U ................................................................................................................................................................. 26
Alsayyab, B.S. ......................................................................................................................................................... 12
Anthropomorphic metaphor ................................................................................................................................... 9
aphasia ................................................................................................................................................................... 23
apprenant .............................................................................................................................................................. 69
Aristotle .................................................................................................................... 4, 20, 24, 27, 30, 38, 43, 64, 93
authoritarian ......................................................................................................................... 5, 67, 68, 69, 70, 72, 73
authoritative ......................................................................................................................... 5, 67, 68, 69, 73, 76, 81
Autumn Leaves are Virgin Mary............................................................................................................................. 26

B
Barthes, R ............................................................................................................................................. 69, 80, 85, 93
Beauvoir, S ............................................................................................................................................................. 71
Beckett, S ......................................................................................................................................................... 24, 49
Bessiére, J .............................................................................................................................................................. 93
Black, M ........................................................................................................................................... 32, 33, 104, 105
Bloom, A ................................................................................................................................................................ 93
Boulus, S ...................................................................................................................................................... 5, 12, 28
Brooks, C ................................................................................................................................................................ 45
Bruner, C ................................................................................................................................................................ 40

C
Caillois, R .................................................................................................................................................................. 2
Carminiani, P .............................................................................................................................................. 12, 17, 93
Carroll, L ........................................................................................................................................................... 10, 92
Chateaubriand ....................................................................................................................................................... 84
Chomsky, N...................................................................................................................................................... 36, 43
conventional metaphor .................................................................................................................................. 49, 64
Corneille ................................................................................................................................................................. 23

D
Darwish, M ............................................................................................................................................................... 8
Dead Metaphor...................................................................................................................................................... 11
Dedalus, S .............................................................................................................................................................. 30
Dickens, C ...................................................................................................................... 10, 61, 67, 68, 71, 72, 73, 92
discourse ................................................................................................. 34, 35, 37, 39, 44, 52, 59, 61, 62, 125, 126
Djebar, A ................................................................................................................................................................ 40
Dumarsais .............................................................................................................................................................. 23
Dunqul, A ................................................................................................................................................................. 8

E
Eco, U ............................................................................................................................................................... 33, 94
Eliot, T.S ............................................................................................................................................................. 9, 57
enseignant ....................................................................................................................................................... 68, 69
Euphemism ............................................................................................................................................................ 85
Explicit metaphors ................................................................................................................................................... 8
extended metaphor ................................................................................................................................................. 8
Ezzy, G ...................................................................................................................................................................... 9
 100

F
Faulkner, W .....................................................................................................................................46, 49, 50, 92, 94
Fraser, B ........................................................................................................................................................... 62, 73
Freud, S .................................................................................................................................................................. 48

G
Gardes-Tamine, J ................................................................................................................................................. 2, 6
Ghenim, N .............................................................................................................................................................. 27
Gibran, K.D. ...................................................................................................................................................... 79, 80
Gilmore, A .............................................................................................................................................................. 86
Goodbye, Mr. Chips......................................................................................................................................... 75, 92
Gradgrind .................................................................................................................................. 67, 68, 70, 71, 72, 76
Grice, P ...................................................................................................................................... 29, 33, 34, 38, 39, 62

H
Hafiz, Y.T. ............................................................................................................................................................... 32
Hamlet ................................................................................................................................................................... 48
Hard Times ......................................................................................................................................67, 70, 72, 73, 92
harmatia ................................................................................................................................................................ 27
Hegel, G.W.F. ................................................................................................................................................... 88, 94
Heidegger............................................................................................................................................................... 24
Hijazi, A.A. .............................................................................................................................................................. 28
Hilton ............................................................................................................................................................... 75, 92
Hitler ................................................................................................................................................ 14, 46, 125, 128
Hudson, R.A. .................................................................................................................................................... 53, 94
Huntington, S ................................................................................................................................................... 64, 94
Hyperbole .............................................................................................................................................................. 83

I
implicature ............................................................................................................................................................. 34
inconsistency ......................................................................................................................................................... 73
intertextual metaphor ........................................................................................................................................... 58

J
Jafar al Allaq, A....................................................................................................................................................... 24
Jakobson, R ................................................................................................................................................ 23, 24, 46
James, H ..................................................................................................................................................... 30, 60, 75
Jayyusi, S.K ...................................................................................................... 5, 8, 11, 12, 13, 25, 26, 28, 32, 54, 94
Joyce, J ................................................................................................................................................. 20, 30, 31, 92

K
Kabbani, N .................................................................................................................................................. 11, 12, 71
katharsis ................................................................................................................................................................. 27
Kondaiah, K ...................................................................................................................................................... 81, 85
Kramsch, C ......................................................................................................................................44, 53, 55, 61, 95
Kreidler, C.W. ................................................................................................................................................... 39, 95

L
Lakhdar Barka, S.M. ......................................................................................................................................... 45, 64
Lakoff, G ....................................................................................... 2, 4, 14, 15, 37, 44, 46, 49, 51, 52, 63, 64, 89, 125
Le Guern, M ..................................................................................................................................................... 23, 95
Leech, G .................................................................................................................................... 23, 35, 41, 70, 71, 95
Ligeia ...................................................................................................................................................................... 29
 101

Lodge, D ..................................................................................................................................................... 10, 38, 95

Long Black Song ..................................................................................................................................................... 50

M
Martinich, A.P. ........................................................................................................................................... 32, 33, 95
metonymy .....................................................................................................................................16, 23, 24, 83, 127
Middleton, C .......................................................................................................................................................... 33
mimesis ............................................................................................................................................................ 24, 27
Mixed Metaphor .................................................................................................................................................... 11
Morgan, J ......................................................................................................................................................... 34, 49
Morier, H.................................................................................................................................................. 74, 97, 104
Mutanabbi, Al .................................................................................................................................................. 53, 54
myth .................................................................................................................................. 4, 48, 57, 58, 85, 113, 128

N
Neddar, B.A. ..................................................................................................................................................... 35, 95
Nye, N.S. .................................................................................................................................................................. 5

O
Orientalism. ........................................................................................................................................................... 96
Ortony, A............................................................................................... 29, 34, 35, 44, 61, 62, 73, 75, 83, 84, 85, 95
Orwell, G .......................................................................................................................................................... 13, 92

P
Pandora Box ........................................................................................................................................................... 85
Pathetic Fallacy ...................................................................................................................................................... 10
perlocutionary ....................................................................................................................................................... 62
Perrine, L .......................................................................................................................................................... 30, 95
Plato ...................................................................................................................................................................... 30
Poe, E.A. ..............................................................................................................................................3, 6, 12, 29, 92
poetic metaphor .............................................................................................................................................. 64, 88
polysemy .......................................................................................................................................................... 22, 23
Prabhu ................................................................................................................................................................... 83
pragmatic ........................................................................................................................................4, 33, 35, 84, 128
prototype theory ............................................................................................................................................... 4, 59

Q
Quality ............................................................................................................................................................. 34, 38
Quantity ........................................................................................................................................................... 34, 38

R
Raven ............................................................................................................................................................... 3, 111
Rendezvous in the Cave ........................................................................................................................................ 28
Ricoeur, P .............................................................................................................................. 2, 22, 23, 24, 57, 64, 95
Robinson Crusoe .................................................................................................................................................... 89
Rorty, R .................................................................................................................................................................. 95
Rosch, E ............................................................................................................................................................ 59, 60
Ruwwad, AL ........................................................................................................................................................... 54

S
Saadi, S ............................................................................................................................................................. 57, 58
Said, E................................................................................................................................................... 43, 84, 89, 96
Sapir-Whorf’s hypothesis ....................................................................................................................................... 55
 102

Scheherazade ................................................................................................................................................... 20, 21

schema theory ......................................................................................................................................................... 4
Schiffrin, D ........................................................................................................................................... 35, 36, 37, 96
Schiller, F ................................................................................................................................................................ 21
Searle, J.R. ............................................................................................................................................ 29, 33, 34, 96
Seldes, G .......................................................................................................................................................... 28, 96
semantic ......................................................................................................................... 4, 32, 35, 41, 44, 71, 73, 81
Shakespeare, W ......................................................................................................................................... 61, 88, 92
Sheng, Y ........................................................................................................................................................... 63, 65
simile ...................................................................................................................................................................... 85
Slim .................................................................................................................................................................. 45, 64
Sound and the Fury, the............................................................................................................................. 48, 50, 92
speech acts .....................................................................................................................................29, 33, 34, 39, 40
Stern, V.D. ........................................................................................................................................................ 29, 92
Struggle My ............................................................................................................................................................ 14
Stubbs, M ......................................................................................................................................................... 37, 96
Synecdoche ............................................................................................................................................................ 83

T
tekhnê .............................................................................................................................................................. 27, 43
tenor ........................................................................................................................................... 8, 9, 11, 57, 64, 120
Things Fall Apart ................................................................................................................................................... 47
Thoreau, H.D. ................................................................................................................................................... 76, 78
Thornborrow, J....................................................................................................................................... 9, 11, 46, 96
Thousand and One Nights ..................................................................................................................................... 20
Through the Looking Glass .............................................................................................................................. 10, 92
Trask, R.L. ............................................................................................................................................................... 96

U
Ullmann, S .............................................................................................................................................................. 73
Understatement .................................................................................................................................................... 83

V
vehicle .................................................................................................................................................8, 9, 11, 57, 64

W
Waiting for Godot ................................................................................................................................................. 24
Wareing ................................................................................................................................................. 9, 11, 46, 96
Welleck, R .............................................................................................................................................................. 96
White, V.R. ............................................................................................................................................... 83, 96, 114
Widdowson, H.G. .................................................................................................... 35, 60, 62, 63, 68, 69, 80, 96, 97
Williams, R ....................................................................................................................................................... 75, 78
Woman in Black, A ................................................................................................................................................ 27
Wright, R .............................................................................................................................................. 50, 53, 92, 97

Y
Yule, G ....................................................................................................................................... 34, 40, 59, 62, 93, 97
 103

Annexes
 104

(Annexe 1)
Some symbols listed by Henri Morier
I have translated all these symbols to show the multitude of connotations a single
word might have. I have then classified them in alphabetical order. Metaphor is
based on symbols, it is valuable. It is the poet’s treasure and pleasure. However we
have to note that a symbol changes from one culture to another to take the example
of the “black cat” which is for the French has negative presage, witchcraft, sorcery,
but for the Scottish it has a good presage, it brings good luck.

 A thumb turned upside down: request for death penalty

 Acrobat: risky equilibrium, surmount difficulties, skilful accomplishment
 Almond-tree: sweetness, hope
 Anchor: safety, eternal life
 Angle-iron: rectitude, uprightness, impartiality
 Apple: temptation, accomplished sin, prosperity, discordance, heart’s
preference
 Arm: power, corrective justice, crime, vengeance, fanaticism
 Armour: protection of the strong
 Ash: ruin, death, disillusion, old age
 Axe: to have the right of death and life on people, authority, brutality
 Azure: infinite, perfection, ideal, spiritual world
 Basket: abundance, offering, generosity
 Beach: uniform extension for similar spirits, those who have spiritual
affinities, end of earth and the start of the infinite, solitude
 Bee: work, zeal, industry, social spirit.
 Beetle: immortality in ancient Egypt
 Bell: prayer, religion and sometimes alarm
 Belly: birth, origin, instinct of nutrition, low instincts, supplying centre
 Black cat: bad presage, sorcery, Satanism
 Black horse: the spirit of property, distributive justice
 Black swan: universal matrix, primordial water of Abime
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 Black: mourning, absence

 Blood: life, love, crime, health, noblesse, heritage
 Blossom: birth, development, growth, expectation
 Blue: tenderness, ideal, platonic love, angelic
 Boot: power of the army, tyranny, foreign domination, pan Germanic
 Box-tree: resistance, hardness, steadfastness
 Bramble: evil, animosity, hostility, envy
 Bread and salt: hospitality
 Bridge: abolition of distances, liaison, meeting with different point of views
 Broken chain: freedom, liberation
 Broken column: a premature, interrupted career, glorious defeat
 Broken sword: peace, disarmament, defeat
 Broom: cleaning, purification, political cleansing
 Brush: art of painting
 Building: intellectual structure
 Bulwark: fame, glory, popularity
 Butterfly: lightness, indifference, inconstancy, immortality of the soul
 Buzzard: silliness
 Caducei: peace, business, eloquence, emblem of medicine, two opposing
forces: disease and remedy
 Canary: inadvertence
 Cap: delusion, mania
 Capricorn: judgement day, ambivalent soul, the upper part of the
mythological animal symbolises the evasion of the human being into the
spiritual world. The lower part (in the form of fish) means that the soul can
fall into primordial waters.
 Cassette: treasure, avarice, secret
 Cat: nocturne mystery (the animal of Isis), instinctive life, sensuality,
laziness, sensitive to magnetic phenomena, cruelty, egoism, opened to the
intuitive world and secured against the rational world
 Cedar: health, longevity, immutability, fixity
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 Chain: link, captivity, servitude, tyranny, union, continuity, descent,

determinism
 Chameleon: versatility, cowardice, adaptability
 Chestnut-tree: fidelity
 Chimera: fantasy, vain imagination
 Cicada: thoughtless, lack of foresight of the artist
 Circle: continuity, perfection, infinite, evocation of supernatural powers
 Citadel: refuge, protection, resistance
 Clearness: happiness, revelation, truth, science, intellectual world, purity,
moral world
 Cloud: danger, premonition, threat of fate
 Clown: human condition, contradiction between what we are and what we
seem to be
 Cock: vigilance, (Christian symbol of the conscience awakening and of
resurrection) daring, aggressiveness, pride, chauvinistic spirit
 Column: support, help, collaboration, in the ancient Egypt four columns
symbolise stability
 Compass: emblem of the exact science, circumspection, minute detail
 Cow: nutrition
 Crane: silliness, trickery, imbecile
 Crescent: fecundity, Islamism, for the Christians of the middle ages it is
paganism
 Cross: Christianity, faith, piety, resignation, suffering, calvary, sacrifice,
importance
 Crossed swords: battle, war
 Crossroad: conjecture, importance, regular change of fate, necessity to take
important decisions in life.
 Crow’s foot: stimulation, emulation, the knight’s dignity
 Crown: royalty, glory, noblesse, noblesse of the soul, martyr, eternal life
 Crutch: infirmity, weakness, default, help, support
 Cudgel: corporal punishment
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 Cypress: mourning, death, sadness

 Dagger: vengeance
 Daisy: freshness, taste of innocence and youth
 Dance: seduction, desire, pleasure, protection of an internal life, divine
inspiration, aspiration for the ideal, liberation from constraints
 Dancer (man): primacy of instinct on the intellect
 Dancer (woman): grace, love, lightness, metamorphoses, symbolism in act
 Dead leaf: death, aged, decline, disillusion, lost love
 Dog: fidelity, vigilance, intelligence, death intuition
 Donkey: stubbornness, blunder, simplicity, intuitive knowledge
 Door: entry, opening on a new world, access to mystery, ivory door: lying
reveries (Homére)
 Dove: pagan symbol, blissful love, (Venus’s bird), biblical symbol: peace,
divine forgives, Christian symbol, Holy Ghost, immortality of the soul
 Dragon: the manifestation of evil, the difficulty to overcome, combative
character
 Dune: sad and savage solitude, despair
 Eagle: power, domination, empire, genius, sign of Saint Jean
 Ebb: flowing back things, an opposite movement
 Ebony: mourning, sadness
 Egg: origin, sufficient cause
 Embers: latent force, secret passion, ardent love but hidden
 Equilibrist: perilous situation, artist’s condition, overcome all the constraints
 Eye: clairvoyance, vigilance, surveillance, omniscience, God
 Feather: lightness, art of writing, duvet, softness, laziness
 Fern: sincerity, elegance and distinction
 Finch: cheerfulness, indifference
 Fire: life, passion, ardour, eagerness of creativity (artist), destructive force
(infernal force)
 Fish: manifestation of terrestrial life, according to the zodiac it is the end of a
cycle and departure of a new progressive cycle, hope for a new life
 108

 Flame: life, ardour, love, faith

 Flute: pastoral poetry, with a simple and natural expression
 Frog: megalomania, ugliness
 Front: thought, dignity, noblesse of the soul, genius, audacity
 Frowned eyebrow: willpower (Jupiter), worry, gravity, apprehension of
punishment
 Fruit: product, abundance, fecundity, happiness
 Funambulist: equilibrist, tightrope walker, clown
 Goat: stubbornness, caprice, cunning happiness, preservation of life
 Gold: sun shine, beauty, warm, royalty, moral worth, kindness, purity,
franchise, noblesse, power, wealth, ambition, avarice, corruption
 Goose: artlessness, naivety, simplicity, initiation and awkwardness
 Grasped hand: understanding, friendship, pact, collaboration
 Green fruit: youth, lack of intellectual and moral maturity
 Green: sprint, hope, colour of delusion, sometimes it is perfidy
 Guitar: art of song, insouciance, superficial and passing love
 Half-boot: comedy
 Hand: work, human interference, intelligence and sometimes partiality
 Harbour: shelter, safety, end of a career
 Hawthorn: prudence
 Headband: blindness due to ignorance
 Heart: kindness, intuition, love, life, courage, honour, sometimes importance
 Hedge: difficulties encountered through our existence
 He-goat: generating force of nature, impulsive intelligence, pagan and
obscene life, Satanism
 Hinge: a point of departure, the inversion of an intellectual movement
 Hive: cooperative work, society
 Home: welcome, love, familial life, place for convergence, pathological
point, infection
 Horizontal finger: (index) indication, orientation, a call for intellectual
attention
 109

 Horns: sign of lunar crescent, sign of divine power delegated to the earthly
human being (Moise) or mythic (licorn) or metaphysic (Satan)
 Ice: indifference, instability, death
 Incense: adoration, religion, flattery
 Inclined finger: accusation
 Ink-well: the writer’s activity, art of writing
 Iron: hardness, inflexibility, firmness
 Irons: captivity
 Ivy: attachment, fidelity
 Jackal: the divinity of death in ancient Egypt
 Jug and wine: hospitality
 Key: a way to preserve mystery, the mystery itself which is a means of
knowledge, secret, confidence, initiation, eternal life.
 Lack of balance: partiality, injustice
 Lamb: gentleness, innocence, naivety, Jesus
 Lamp: intimacy, studies, devoted faith
 Lantern: signalisation of danger
 Laurel: glory, triumph
 Lead: heaviness, mediocrity, malleability, lack of resistance, influence,
meanness
 Leaf: spring, youth
 Leopard: heraldic animal of Great Britain, power related to trick and ruse,
untamed mood
 Lighthouse: denunciation of danger, knowledge, spreading out of truth, safety
 Lion: puissance, courage, majesty, instinctive life, the moral of the master in
opposition to the moral of the slaves
 Lock: solution for a problem
 Mallow: fade, lack of personality
 Marsh: desolate stagnation, absence of life
 Masque: dissimulation, crime, perfidy, intrigue in love
 Mill: monotony in the existence, fatality, work tyranny, illusions
 110

 Mirror: coquetry, vanity, narcissism, introspection, know the self, self-

criticism
 Mole: blindness, undermining work, hypocrisy
 Moon: vague reverie, inaccessible aspiration, melancholy, romanticism
 Nail: nagging defence, the mark of power or evil
 Narcissus: egocentrism, vanity, egoism, introspection, know the self to the
Muslims, adoration, piety
 Nectar: exquisite quality, immortality
 Nightingale: lyricism of love
 Oak: longevity, health, robustness, proud but lacking flexibility
 Octopus: the incarnation of evil (from Hugo: Les Travailleurs de la Mer)
 Oil: benediction, consecration, absolution, an excessively detailed work
 Olive tree: peace, forgiveness
 Open hand: generosity, prodigality
 Orange-tree: virginity
 Ostrich: blindness, close the eyes to all the dangers
 Owl: night, wisdom, reflection, science
 Palm: glory, martyr, elegance
 Parrot: gossip, absence of analysis, unconsciousness of the uttered words,
silliness, knowledge essentially based on memorisation
 Paste: substratum of work, basis of work, labour
 Peach: temptation, succulence, pleasure
 Peacock: vanity, coquetry, presumption, plagiarism, ostentation, resurrection
for the first Christians
 Pearl: exceptional quality, precious features, distinguished glow, aristocracy
 Peel: useless, vain residue, futility
 Pelican: spirit of sacrifice, paternal love, for Musset it is the artist’s devotion
to his audience
 Phoenix: sacrifice, resurrection, immortality
 Pick: relentless work
 111

 Pig: fecundity, prosperity, the spirit of the land, sensuality, dirtiness,

ignominy, greediness, weakness of the flesh inseparable from the human
condition
 Pipe: taste for tranquil and regular activity, meditation
 Pivot: the starting point of an intellectual movement, support
 Plant: growth, flexibility, adaptability, natural
 Poison: corruption of feeling, moral health
 Pomegranate: (fruit) sensual love, passion
 Post: execution, indication, support
 Precious stone: richness, exceptional moral values
 Prism: analytical way, decomposition, mirage, presentation of false colours
 Purple: senatorial dignity, imperial
 Raised finger: a call for moral attention, punishment menace, sometimes
silence to call for auditory attention
 Ram: stubbornness, aggressiveness, courage, authority, brutal love, the spirit
of sacrifice
 Raven: gravity, wisdom, divine and prophetic power, (Apollo’s bird), the
voice of the conscience, sign of death
 Ravens: collective cowardice, cupidity, ill will, immanent justice, vice
punishment
 Ray: the power of union, collaboration, fascism
 Reddish horse: declaration of war, massacre
 Reed: flexibility, weakness, passive resistance, life of the spirit, chat,
indiscretion
 Reef: mortal danger
 Ring: link, union, a promise of fidelity
 Road: human destiny
 Rock: moral solidity, source of faith
 Rolling stone: incapacity of immobility, wanderer, vagabondage
 Rope: swindle, criminality, poverty
 Rose: youth and feminine beauty, freshness, delicacy, ephemeral life, love
 112

 Rose-bush: juvenile love

 Ruin: mark of dead civilisations, precariousness of human works
 Salamander: resistance to fire, ardour of love
 Salt: power of taste, power of the mood,
 Sand: instability of the foundations, precariousness of a given work
 Sandal: pilgrimage, fraud, usurpation of the divinity, ratification of a
convention
 Scales: equality, justice and sometimes scepticism
 Scorpion: perfidious attack, arrogant disposition of the self, metaphysical
suicide
 Shadow: presentiment, menace, imperfection, stain, error
 She-wolf: maternal instinct, tenderness, courage and ferocity, lechery
 Shield: protection of the weak
 Sickle: harvest, agriculture, work, communism
 Sky: infinite, ideal, eternal life, God
 Slipper: idleness, comfort, middle-class cowardice
 Smile: friendship, agreement, hope, mockery
 Snail: lowliness, middle-class wisdom
 Snake: benefic symbol, therapeutic virtues, Moise’s show in the temple
 Snow: purity, innocence, virginity
 Sphinx: mystery, enigma, sign of the unknown
 Sponge: acquittal, amnesty, impunity
 Stag: virility, pride, divine message
 Stairs: (upstairs) hope, desire, love, (downstairs) introspection, depression,
decline, death, demission
 Star: orientation, guide, hope, ideal, happiness, purity, reverie, infinite,
inaccessible worth
 Stone: hardness of the heart, solidity, grounds of an edifice
 Stork: birth of a baby, devotion, gratitude
 Stronghold: refuge, security
 Sugar: obsequiousness, flattery based on interest, illicit benefit
 113

 Sun: source of knowledge, source of joy, happiness, well

 Suspended hand: offer, reconciliation, trust
 Swan: slow and hard moral rise, progress that guides to perfection,
resurrection into purity, (spiritual fecundity: myth of Leda)
 Sword: honour, courage, chivalric gift, fidelity, to have faith in fate,
patriotism
 Sword: penal justice,
 Tap: insipid or dull chat
 Tapeworm: parasitism
 Tarantula: caprice, agitation, delusion
 Taurus: divine power of creativity, imperious power of nature, fertility,
fecundity, blindness courage, straight attack
 Tavern: hospitality, peace, a halt
 Telescope: knowledge and relativity
 Threshold: entry, welcome, exceed into another part of the existence, an
opening to another life
 Tight door: the way of sanctification
 Tisane: imaginary disease, infirmity of the aged, deteriorated health
 Topaz: wealth
 Torch: beam of science that enlightens the world, life, survival, transmission
of knowledge
 Torrent: impulsiveness, disorder and abundance, inspiration of the genius
 Tower: vigilance, surveillance, production of a work
 Trail: clear path, indicative trace
 Trap door: pitfall, obstacle caused with malevolence
 Tree: genealogy, blooming, prosperity
 Trefoil with four leaves: extreme rarity, luck, happiness
 Trench: separation, distance, antinomy, mood’s incompatibility
 Triangle: equilibrium, harmony, divine perfection, union of the divinity into
three persons
 Trophy: victory
 114

 Trumpet: the power of intercession, the announcement of the last judgement

 Turtledove: tender love, in the New Testament: the introduction of Jesus to
the Temple
 Vacant nut: false appearance of intelligence
 Valley: resurrection, terrestrial existence, test, difficult passage, agony
 Vampire: sadistic cruelty
 Velvet: sweetness, caress, pleasure, freshness
 Venom: moral corruption, nastiness, jealousy, vigour
 Vessel in tow: passivity, servile imitation
 Vulture: cruelty, cowardice, the moment where the prey is powerless and
unable to defend itself, and according to psychoanalysis it is the obsessed
symbol of a natural son
 Wall: obstacle, limitation, ignorance
 Water: fickleness, adaptability, transparency
 Weathercock: inconstancy, unpredictable spirit, versatility
 Whip: punishment, delusion
 White horse: victory, fidelity, triumphant truth, for the Celt it is the presence
of water
 White sheet: innocence, birth
 Wild boar: destructive power, ferocity, opportunity, in the Germanic
mythology, it is the courage of the warrior or the hunter
 Willow: consolation, plaintive sweetness, melancholy, feminine grace,
slenderness
 Wind: impetuous power, changeable, noise, speedy flow, futility, silliness,
irrationality sometime it is purification
 Wing: speed, lightness, lyricism
 Winged hat: commercial intelligence, speedy exchange
 Wisp of straw: impuissance, events and fate
 Wolf: the intuition of the danger, presentiment of death, cruelty, dignity
before death, stoic, unlike the dog the wolf roars his misery and despair
 Wrecked tower in ruin: death, misfortune
 115

 Yellow: wealth, deception

 116

Annexe 2
The text below “A Woman in Black” is a short story written by Ghenim Neema.

« La vie passe, rapide caravane !

arrête ta monture et cherche à être heureux. »
From the Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayyam

Tuesday

She opened the letter hastily, she looked wondering.

“Sweetheart,
My name is Mustapha, I am an architect I often walk along your house each time I finish my work in
the café, I see you often standing behind the window, you appear like a bat in the dark, two moons
come into sight and one is helpless to set them apart I leave speechless.
I know that you are forever and a day dressed in black,
but it suits you deeply,
I want to remove that cloud of sadness
Your eyes are shining, dazzling, your face is radiant.
My legs become weighty each time I see you,
I lift my eyes to yours
I stay a moment to fill them with your beauty and then continue for a long walk
I asked the children who are for all time playing behind about
your name,
Your preference to study law,
Your dearly loved father,
Your everything,
It seems that I have loved you all my life.
I wish I could be the breeze that comes up to your home to caress that angelic face, and you may fall
on my thirst and dryness like rainwater to help me breathe a new life as one who has been given
artificial respiration.
At times I write your name on my papers like a little boy, other times I draw your face on a cup of
coffee, the most excruciating is the moment my client asks for sugar, I have to put then that small
spoon and that small white cube to see you twirling to sink in the bottom of that goblet, there I want to
go after you to hold you, to breath our last breath together.
You are a difficult book I wish I could read to understand, to appreciate and not throw it aside but
keep it the rest of my life.
I want to read you as we read a nice poem, I want to listen to you as we pin our ears back to a lovely
song.
I am just a lost boat that seeks a shelter to protect itself from the open seas, from unpredictable
weather conditions, it is a very hard winter, I refuse to go along the winds, that night there was a hard
frost and faraway I sow strong walls, waters set me in motion, I rise and fall, if only I could through
my arms around you, the virulent flow pour me at long last into safe hands. I want to lie at anchor in
your harbour.
My boat is not the brightest nevertheless it lends a hand to hold you. It is a pitiable boat that yearns for
its harbour, would you like to be my harbour?
Would you like to come Thursday at six o’clock to the Euphrates River?
I imagine that this place that surrounded one of the greatest civilisations have the capacity to be the
cradle of our love.
Seeing the circumstances that tend to obliterate our panorama, and the fumes that blind our vision. I
will understand remorsefully if you do not come.”
Loubna takes the weight off her feet on a sofa, she is out of breath.
“Loubna can you come to eat something? you did not swallow a thing from the crack of dawn”
“Yes mama I am coming”
Loubna was a girl whose emotions and feelings lay incredibly near the shell, and her mood often
determinates her manners, she moved downstairs at a snail's pace as if she wanted to go back to her
breathing space, she had lived all her life in retirement, she perceives things in a different way as if
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she blames the mirror of corruption and betrayal because it fails to imitate the real image, it is as if she
invites the mirror to think a bit before broadcasting. She is a bouquet of emotions and feelings.

Her mother looked at her in peculiar curiosity and interest, an expression of apprehension spreads
throughout her face.

“How do you feel?”

“Oh, eh-h-h!”
“Don’t be afraid, you can talk to me, something is disturbing you? ”
“No, but someone sends me a letter, a very charming letter, it just that I am not used to men’s flattery
”
“Who is this man?”
“He is named Mustapha, he is an architect and he works nearby in a café”
“Do you know him?”
“I often see him for a moment walking slowly along our house, I could hear him creeping around
outside”
“ It seems that love has knocked your door, though I do not believe in love because love is like a
ghost’s apparition, everybody talk about it some people accept it as true, others express doubts about
it, but very rare are those who have seen it, and those who have seen it say that this magnetism comes
out not by means of intrinsic worth, but rather through charming drawbacks.
I still keep in mind my wedding ceremony, it was the most obscure day in my life, we were thrown
your father and I like two meteors coming from two different planets, in the same arena, it is
enormous how tradition could convince through habitual and consistent customs, you think one day
you will get rid of it, but it prevails it has the last word, the irrational becomes rational, the absurd
becomes sensible and the hard to believe becomes hard to distrust and even hard to hesitate on. They
put up the shutters, they lock up the door, each one of us has to face the unknown, we were presented
with a fait accompli, you cannot walk out, there is no exit, and questions begun to embark on my
mind.
Is he handsome?
Is he nice?
Is he polite?
Is he respectful?
Will he enjoy being with me?
All of a sudden I perceive a pair of shoes well polished in front of me, he lifted my veil gently and
said
“ Welcome home darling”.
I won’t forget his first look; we were alone on a stage. In the theatre we want to be taken aback with
effects that we expect, we anticipate acts, but only with imaginary staging, I was expecting a repulsive
man, lacking in courtesy, yet my head fall short in discovering an exceptionally attractive man, his
complexion was clear and pure as a baby skin, his mouth as well as his cheeks were an assortment of
pink as well as cherry-red colours. I was faced by a painting full of colours in agreement, his
apparition was idyllic. It seems that god draws him to a close, when he put the pencil away nothing
was to be transformed, nothing was to be added, but there was something more stunning than colours,
the light that springs back from those fresh green eyes. Time causes many offences, it has washed out
those bright colours, it has wrinkled his skin as well as mine, it has fainted my roses but the bright of
his eyes was the only affront towards time, the light that emerges from his eyes succeeded to
illuminate his last resting place.
His tomb is for all time radiant.”

Miriam bursts into tears, she cannot hold back those clear, crystal drops, Loubna comes near her
mother to comfort her “ words as well as tears show your love, your words are crying, your tears are
talking, they are expressing grief, tell me mother if this is not love, so what is it?”

“ My little daughter, you have grown up to be a very beautiful lady, you remind me your father, you
bear an immense resemblance to him, there are things in life which are not viable to put in plain
words, our ancestors imagined writing in this region of Mesopotamia at about 3500 BC, they were
successful in converting thoughts into black and white shapes, nevertheless I think that the spirit is too
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complex to be decoded with verbal skill only, love is like coal, and affection is like alcohol, while the
flame trims down you are hopeless to light it up, you put some alcohol to enjoy a flash of torrid and
hot blazing. Your father was a great lawyer, he was especially cultured, and we hardly speak to each
other because there was a huge gap between him and me. I knew scarcely how to read and write, but
even so he helped me to improve, at times he used some sophisticated words, I could not understand, I
acted audaciously as if everything was lucid and understandable and the dictionary became then my
secret liaison.”

“I guess that it was not easy to get on with such discrepancies between you and him.” replied Loubna
in a more philosophical tone

“ No one had the right to chose, the circumstances were strong enough to make women marry, they
were obliged to say “I do” against their will. Pressure, up to torture or starvation were the distasteful
weapons to harass us. We were overtaken, we were captured and carried out to our parent’s in-laws,
and marriage was a sort of parade, in the vein of the Romans, while they conquered a city, they carried
up the upper class the same as slaves, to fan the flames of their conquest. The bride is covered up with
golden chains to walk in the victory march, it was a trial of strength to be intimate with somebody
straight away as a token of virginity for females as well as virility for males.”

“ And have you done it” Loubna enquired, apprehensively

“Yes we have, people were waiting outside, we had to do it, we have done it, when I was young
mother used to frighten me of men, to such an extent that I thought that a simple glimpse of a man is
able to make me pregnant, I used to evade those fleeting glances. I was young and stupid.”

“ Mustapha would like to meet me on Thursday at the water's edge of the Euphrates River.” Loubna
articulated these words in a soundless voice.

“ Oh, these waters with its wadis1 and passes have attracted the first nomads, they covered a lot of
ground before reaching this fertile and prolific soil, they were travelling by night, following the map
pictured in the sky by the stars.”

Loubna cuts off her mother’s words, she went on with more perseverance but always in a quiet and
moderate tone of voice, as someone who is ready to be heard.
“ Mutapha arranges to meet me”
Miriam replies with fits of laughter

“ God gave us two ears and only one mouth so that we listen twice than what we speak, I have
perceived the sound of your question, nevertheless I suggest to you to built a tent in the region of this
river, when your visitor comes layout carpets and cushions, and give him mint tea, after all every
human being is a nomad as regards love, the sand storm may disfigure the landscape, and causes
difficulties, it peppers your exposed skin and eyes, nobody and nothing is able to dash your hopes,
you will persist like a good nomad to make your route deep into the Sahara with your camel caravan,
you will accomplish something when after much suffering you make your home around an oasis.”

Miriam holds her daughter in her arms, saying, “I wish you all the love and happiness, that
you deserve.” Loubna pounces steadily on her mother and says “ if only father was here, I could say
father, father” “ you can converse with him, he is able to hear you” replied Miriam with poise, after a
moment of evasiveness and silence, Miriam says reservedly “ One day during our first year together,
he noticed the name Loubna in a beautiful Sufi poem, he succumbed to the beauty of this name, he
aspired to have a girl only to call her Loubna. He was always saying that masculinity as well as
femininity consist of an assortment of ingredients that dwell in every human being, be it man or
woman like a blood cell that contains white and red corpuscle, and a man who pour scorns on a
woman is a man who is deficient in corresponding with his own feminine side. He was saying that
Scheherezade2 saved her life by carrying out Shahryar to reconcile with this part buried inside him,
and all these women that he killed in his bed by pulling out their hearts to stock them up on a plate,
where in fact a trophy, a sort of triumph against that dormant embryonic part inside him.”

Wednesday
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That night Loubna was tossing and turning in her single bed, she took a sleeping capsule and finally
slept among Mustapha’s latest words lingering dreamily in her ears “would you like to be my
harbour?”
The wake up up was not a pleasurable moment, Loubna could not open her eyes, she moved from her
bed little by little. It seems that she was asleep for twenty hours; she felt that she can open her eyes
then, she was looking at the mirror, brushing her long silky hair. The hairbrush fell down. Loubna
bent over a place that was like a mathematic class, the rows were lined up perfectly, everyone holds
his slate, everything happens as expected, but what differs radically from a mathematic course group,
is that no one has failed to give the right answer. The answer was divine. This class was soundless,
unvoiced and wordless. Beneath a shelter of an aged tree dwell Loubna’s father, Loubna could
identify his tomb from millions ones, she gets nearer her father, reading some surates from the Koran,
she removed some wild flowers and put in their place some refined ones, time did no succeed to make
him fainter in her memory and her love for her father was still nurtured in secret. Loubna looked
silently and hopelessly with large heavy eyes and wet cheeks, and after a long moment of stillness and
quietness she said:

“ Dear father I discovered a great deal of human laws with you, without even knowing them, but
during these days I have discovered a great deal of human actions, in this war each and every one is a
loser, I have lost you for ever, my mother and I were constantly wondering why you were so
fascinated by the bombs when they are dropped on our city, that day they were bombing down the
road very heavily, like mad at about 90 miles an hour and you were as usual going opposite the crowd,
to see the effects of bombing, my mother and I were waiting faraway in a state of panic and terror and
people were rushing as if it was doomsday, we were unable to leave you. Each time mother
reproached you this practice, you steered clear of, by expressing amusement and you avoided cleverly
her rebukes by saying “there is only one probability in a million that any other bombs fall on a place
that has already been bombarded” but you failed to appreciate the consequences of your actions
because that day the unpredicted took place out of the blue. I did not know that petroleum was the
fundamental part of this war; otherwise I would have placed a syringe in the ground to pump oil, to
fill their backbones with, merely to keep hold of you, to see your face once more.

I am oppressed by fear of oblivion. I remember once you said “To do war one needs only five per cent
of his brain, whereas to get one’s hands on peace the whole brain have to be in erection” but tell me
father how can you exchange a few words with people whose egos are beyond measure? They have
reached the top limit of selfishness and egotism that drives them to the lack of consideration for
others. I have been dumbfounded by their capacity of hiding truth, the tragedy is that lies take over
truth, fallacies are outspoken and outspread.”

Loubna fell silent for a moment and then continued as someone who is expressing guilt, she felt
herself on the wrong side of the law because she believed that her words are stressful for her father,
she did not want to perturb his motionlessness and peacefulness, she continued then “I know father
that all human beings contradictory to the other breathing species know that their existence may
possibly be cut short at any minute and that even if they accomplish the full expectation of human life,
their growth is bound to be followed by eventual decomposition after death, but I have never expected
to lose you in such a stupid and unconventional way.
Forgive me father, forgive and forget my impulsive words, if only you were still breathing, I could
ask your opinion concerning my other half, for the reason that a great number of people today have a
tendency to marry after a long period of two to three years inspection and check up, they love each
other two or three months and they bear each other the rest of their lives, but I remember once you
told me that a man or a woman in his or her search for the other half have got to look first for a friend
and not for a sensational heartache because, not only love hardly ever last forever but the heartbreak is
in a little while over and done.”

Loubna laid a hand on her father’s grave, and with her handkerchief, she removed some debris of
earth that was located on it. She took a look that carries great weight to that hundred-year-old tree, it
was a huge tree that has a silhouette of a mammoth, and it covered the whole tomb chamber. Loubna’s
eyes grew to be like two watering cans, she filled the ground with tears. The cemetery is the only
place, which tastes year in year out that salty liquid, it is the garden of remembrance and those tears
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are in fact as a token of our recollection of what went before. In life we have two photo albums, one
resides outside the body, it has different shapes, it is either rectangular or round but it’s peculiarity is
that you can flick through it and each time we turn a page we go around our life, but this book is
lifeless and motionless, the other one resides inside the body in an infinitely protected area, it is safely
protected in a skull safe, this cranium is the shelter of memory, and memory is the shelter of
reminiscence and nostalgia, it is a magic box, that appears like a birdcage, where living things are full
of beans, full of life, it is more proficient than a computer, neither time nor remorse can reduce it in
size, however and unlike the supercomputer it does not depend on electrical energy and it can store
and stockpile an infinite number of memories. It is boundless and limitless.

On her way back, Loubna turned away from her customary pathway, to watch Mustapha in his work,
the café was not distant from the habitual itinerary. Loubna dropped first on her favourite baker, he
was an aged man with a white bear, a very charismatic person, with a tenor voice, high and warm, it
was a voice that one can hear far above the ground, each time Loubna tiptoed around him, he
welcomed her with a fresh song, and shortly after he finished she replicated over and over again “
angels go down to hear you and run off to lay in the seventh heaven.” Mohamed was a friend to
Loubna’s father, he was on familiar terms with her, he knew her from her first purchase, he still
remember the day he saw a small hand only, like a needle of scales behind the counter, carrying two
coins, Mohamed gave her accordingly a loaf of bread. He did not suspected what was going on
because Loubna set her tears into motion, she was crying and saying “I gave him two coins and he
gave me only one loaf of bread”. Mohamed made fun of it years and years after, he used to laugh at
her, but even so Loubna carried out buying bread from him, she feels affection for him, in addition to
his bread that Loubna found irresistible, she could spot Mohamed’s bread from a mass mountain of
other pieces of bread, because Mohamed persisted to keep the traditional way of doing it. Loubna told
him before leaving “your bread is an earthly thing that has been purified in fire and those who eat it
will sear inhumanity from their heart, and maybe clean out the chamber of their heart.”
Loubna carried on, speeding up her footsteps, far away she sow a group of homing pigeons
chitchatting, she came within reach of them crumbling a part of her bread, she threw it to fall into
pieces on them. They encircled her, she became like a puddle of Indian ink on a white sheet of paper,
she took to the air with straight, upright wings, to land up at the back of the café. It was a blind
landing, an urgent situation that compelled to an emergency landing, it was raining cats and dogs.
Loubna’s raincoat was without doubt well shelved but not on her back. She arrived completely
sodden, it was the wettest October, the street had been converted into a shipping canal. She looked at
him through one of the large windowpane, in the front door, she perceived Mustapha in his fine-
looking set of clothes. Loubna looked at him with folded arms, he did not dream to see her in the
vicinity of this district, and even if he noticed her he would consider it as a figment of imagination, an
hallucination, the rain was pouring on the pane, she looked at him as someone who has a feeble
vision, and through his glasses helpless to see without a flaw, nonetheless she noticed cups of coffee
and cups of tea disappearing, leaving and appearing, those serving dishes were causing a traffic jam,
and each goblet was in a hurry to land up on a safe and sound table. The café is still an inaccessible
place for women, Loubna is aware about that, she remains far-off it. It is simply hard for a girl to
visualize herself in the café, it is like a marvellous treasure chest that a girl is unable to open, it
becomes then a phantasm feasible only through dreams, the only way out to take pleasure in this place
is to put a man’s concealing outfit to get the entry permit. It is the unexplained place, where men are
doing mysterious things, it is probably the place where Satan relaxes by putting his feet up to enjoy
the fruit of his labour.

Mustapha was fervent, enthusiastic, eager to see all his clients served on the spur of the moment, he
was well organized, entertaining, he knew how to grab his client’s attention. He felt concerned with
every single detail in his work; furthermore he was able to read between the lines what was likely to
arise. That night Mustapha worked like a mule harder and harder, in order to afford tomorrow a big
bouquet of flowers. He left his work at 4 o’clock, after a time-consuming day. The muezzin was
calling for prayer, Mustapha performs his ablutions and makes his way into the mosque, he seized the
Koran and began to read some surates, he usually comes to the mosque to find solace and comfort, it
is the only site where Mustapha can alleviate the intense weight of his troubles and needs, the
splendour of this mosque has delivered more enchantment, the red Persian carpets, along with the
beautiful chandeliers delighted and tendered the ambience, nonetheless Mustapha has a preference for
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the esplanade that is located in the middle of the mosque, it is the place where God’s clemency and
benevolence fall in profusion, Mustapha raises his head to the clouds, saying
“ Dear God,
I come to you like a blind man, who senses the ground full of pits and crevices, but
constantly worried and anxious to fall into one of these vacant hollows. Your light allows a sightless
man to see your entrance hall, I open your doorway with my walking stick, but always fretful to drop
into the darkness and the emptiness of the several holes in the ground, I was surprised of the
smoothness and the softness of this ground, hence I walked on with more confidence and poise, my
heart had been wrapped in cotton wool, to become the energetic heart that yearns infinitely for its
creator.
Dear God you have raised me from non existence into life, you have elevated me by means of
an effortless breath from a clay into man, you put me on a pedestal ahead of all other breathing
species, you did not expect that man will be disloyal to you, since he has become skilled at slaughter
and butchery. Man has become expert in the art of mass murder, bloodbath becomes his daily
painting, and scenes of atrocities become his distraction, his leisure activities. I beseech you to bestow
your pity and mercy on him, while sin against you is one thing but sin against man is worse. I plead
you not to slam the door in my face, free me from ambition, greed, intellectual pride and blind
submission to traditions, free me from acts of vengeance, corruption and treachery. You are the
shepherd and I am your devotee ewe, you are the head of the orchestra, and I am your flautist, you are
the sun and I am your oil lamp, our dilemma is that we have made two wishes some time ago, the first
wish is the ending of the dictatorship and the second wish is the settling of a democratic state but these
two wishes have made our lives so miserable, we have reached the depths of despair so that we were
obliged to do a third wish, which is to return to our earlier lives, we thought that democracy is
something that persons can pack like a present and send it like mails by post. I beg you to keep your
compassionate eyes all over the large skies to save us from harm and injustice.”

During the night Loubna opened her cupboard to select the prettiest dress, alas the whole
storeroom looked from the exterior like a ledge overflowing with books covered in black, she
hesitated a moment, because she bore in mind the word “bat” and maybe she wanted to wipe out the
black colour from her sight, she removed each and every black dress, to discern one timid and fearful
dress, creased from top to bottom, it was an emerald green dress spotted with ruby red cherries.
Loubna seized it, she ironed it and put it safely on the sofa, she put all her clothes and accessories in
order. The scarf, the belt, the handbag, was in perfect assortment with that jade-coloured dress. She
switched the light off, and tried to close her eyes, but she lose sleep in addition to the sleeping pills
which did not succeed to sleep either, they winked at her as if they were pulling her leg to keep her
wide awake.
In the state of war insomnia, restlessness and agitation get day after day through sheer
persistence on people, so that at the end they wear them down. Throughout the long night Loubna felt
as if she was knotted to her bed, disturbed nights turn out to be more and more intimidating, hours of
darkness were threatening hours of daylight, and the night time grew to be the additional room for
sunlight-time.

Thursday

That morning was not one, which tended to lower the spirits, it looked like being a nice day,
the sun was shining. Loubna opened the window, to get some fresh air, she saw a ray of hope coming
to enlighten her room, she breathed deeply and moved down to take her breakfast, the rich aroma of
the fresh coffee have reached the loftiest ceiling of the house.
“Good morning mama” said Loubna in an undertone voice.
“Good morning dear.”
“Oh Loubna, my Loubna! do not tell me that you have lost your earrings once more.” Miriam
exclaimed with submerged amazement on her face.
“I have lost just one as usual, it is always the right one, I have a collection of left earrings,
and each time I open that treasury chest to perceive those amputated earrings I just close it up, because
it is regretful for them to come to an end alone in a tiny coffer after a period of splendour and glory.”
“It was such a precious and pretty pair of earrings.” Miriam ended her remark placidly;
nevertheless she carried on ironically “I hope that you won’t lose yourself one day.”
“What do you think I can do?”
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“I think that we have to find a good therapist, to help us understand this recurrent tendency to
lose precious and valuable articles.”
“No, I do not think that it is necessary, other people are more in need of a therapist than me.”
“To whom are you referring?”
“I am referring to those unknown soldiers, those who walk arrogantly in that green uniform,
they like walking and speaking to our people, they are like lost children, they like the journey except
that they are not delighted with what they are doing, I think that they are fighting against their will.”
“ Do you remember when they first reached our destination, they were so beautiful.”
“ I suppose that one is able to detect them now without that green uniform because their
facial appearance becomes more and more greyer as an alternative to that fair skin texture that
illuminates their countenance in earlier times.”
“Do you think that they know that they are doing harm to our nation?” Enquired Miriam with
composure
“ I think that the heart knows the truth despite political and economic divergences, but even
so the heart is defeated over and over again because it does not know the rules of persuasion, for that
motive the heart calls for reason, the queen of arguments, it persuades and manipulates the heart, yet it
cannot hide from view the symptoms of a rotten heart, since those symptoms grow to be apparent
without delay.”
“So you think that the grey face is the warning signal of a sick heart?” Enquired Miriam
undecidedly.
“Yes” replied Loubna undeniably, she carries on “ I presume that not only the grey face is the
indicator of a sick heart, but it turns out to be the marker of gloominess, dreariness and bleakness for
those who turn their backs on their hearts.”

“I think that our coffee is getting cold.” Remarked Miriam spontaneously.

Loubna knocked back her coffee and asked her mother kindly “Would you do me a favour
mama.”
“Yes, dear you can ask for my eyes, I will give them to you.”
“You know mama that I have never wear make-up, because father used to say that a beautiful
woman does not need make-up nor very luxurious clothes and ornaments, but today I would like to
make my face look more attractive, can you make me now mama?”
“Of course dear, close your eyes and wait me for a split second.”
Miriam brought her toilet bag that was chocked-a-block with varied cosmetics, she
orchestrated the make-up on the table from the face powder, lipstick, mascara, eye-shadow, to the
blusher and perfume and set in train those miraculous and magical objects of art, the concert lasted for
half an hour in complete stillness and quietness. Miriam broke the silence, saying “Do not open your
eyes, let me bring the mirror.”
“Can I open my eyes?” Loubna enquired on the spur of the moment.
“Sure, you can set your eyes on the mirror at this moment.”
“This is a miracle.” Loubna asserted without restraint.
“ You see how these powder and paint could deepen in the radiance and the luminosity of the
features to get a more pleasant appearance.”
“ That’s beyond doubt, I love you mama.”
“ Me too, darling.” replied Miriam affectionately
“ Can you just come with me to my bedroom?”
“ Of course, lets go.”
“You should dress for cold weather today.” Miriam recommended warmly.
“ No, it looks like being a nice day.”
Loubna spent hours and hours arranging herself, she wore her pretty decent dress, she was
smartly festooned with rings, earring and a bracelet with a lozenge diamond in it.

The pathway carried Loubna along the waterway. Suddenly there was a huge bulky cloud
coming from the North, followed with an ear-splitting storm and a reservoir of rain ripped open to lay
down an unbelievable storage of water. Thunder, lightening were accompanying the tone of the
climate, like a band players of rock music. The place became like a field were a hundred of dead
bodies lie, the sky was dispatching heavy drops, it was evidently an angry outburst of concentrated
metal bombs. Someone said anxiously “Everybody flat on one’s stomach.”
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Loubna was bleeding from a severe cut in her knee; she could do nothing but scream, a flow
of blood was sliding down the road. Her eyes were not closed for more than a minute, the wound was
getting more and more unbearable, she raised her hand to her forehead. Her face was glittering with
tears and rain, so that one is unable to discern rain from tears, she lost consciousness for practically a
minute, some persons hurried to help the injured there, they rapidly bound their handkerchief in
circles round the aching place. A man of a dark skin and a prominent moustache put his coat on her
saying “ clasp your hand behind my neck so that I can carry you without hurting you.” The distressed
signal of the ambulance was getting higher, it was the only component of that car that seemed fresh
and recent. Loubna and other breathing bodies were carried and squeezed into that aged emergency
carriage.

“Loubna, are you cold?” enquired Miriam sombrely.

“No, but I feel a sharp pain in my knee”

Morphine could not ease her pain her mother wept over her, she was saying “Don’t break my
old heart; if you die my grey plaits will follow you with grief to the grave.”

“You can help me to go to meet our creator mama.”

“Don’t say that, remember what I have told you about a good nomad, you will live to tell the
tale, and I am sure that you will stop your caravan somewhere to welcome happiness, remember what
Omar khayyam said “ Time is running away, Oh speedy caravan! draw your trip to a close and try to
find happiness.” (my translation)

“I don’t think that we afford the luxury to be happy, our happiness dwell in those moments in
time whereby misfortune makes short moments of stillness, and those happy moments have to leave
again at once. Look at this land every thing is connected with the other, and every place that is stroked
will create malaise, discomfort into another place. It’s such a shame to destruct such a beautiful
place.”
“ We have to stand firm, life is expensive, but every day is worth to be lived.” Miriam stated
devotedly

“I have learnt much about life today, more I believe than all other days, I think that I know
why father used to hustle and bustle to get to every place where bombs were tossed abundantly. He
was brave in doing that, he risked life and limb, to lend a hand to another one to breath a second life.
He saved many lives, to lay down at long last his own life.”

“Look”, Miriam put into words, “look it is Donald Rumsfeld on TV, maybe he is going to put
in the picture this catastrophe.”

“As Thomas Jefferson put it:

“We are not to expect to be translated from despotism to liberty in a featherbed.” It took time
and patience, but eventually our Founders got it right – and we hope so will the people of Iraq – over
time.”
Donald Rumsfeld

Miriam bent over her daughter to feel that long, warm, delicate body, she said “sleep now
serenely my little daughter.”
“I think that I am already sleeping.” Replied Loubna in a voice near to the ground.
Miriam seized her daughter’s hand firmly, she feels that she represents the whole of her life,
and it was true, she grabbed her hand as someone who is scared to see the most loved and cherished
person confiscated, or taken away into another world.

“Hold your hand mother and lay it on my heart, it has something to say to you, do you hear
“tick tick, tick tick, tick tick.” Listen I think that it is beating all over again. “My heart is telling me
that every human being is required to think a good deal of himself, before trusting himself, the one
who trusts himself before thinking of himself will end like the lion who was about to die from thirst
 124

but every time he came near the river to perceive his shadow, he turned down, he was scared of
himself and finally threw away to die in absolute dehydration.”

Loubna run her memory from side to side to bring eventually Mustapha to mind, she felt then
that her heart is sorer than her knee. In the intervening time Mustapha was waiting near the river with
his bulky large bunch of flowers. He saw a flock of sheep and goats moving on to the greener grazing
land, some Bedouins imagined him as a tourist who is paying special attention to the majesty of this
river. The jebels3 hoisted their carcass to the sky in such a menacing and bloodcurdling aptitude.
Mustapha remained their until the sun went down, it was a spectacular nightfall, the colours of the sky
were changing while the sun slowly went down, Mustapha finally walked out to leave that hospitable
scenery, but before leaving he put down delicately that lovely flowers, those plants of life were
dispatching heavenly odours, Mustapha faded away in sight. A caravan trade was running away
speedily to stop at the neighbourhood of those flowers, a little girl moved down, she seized the
bouquet from the floor then climbed onto the convoy. The caravan trade left few traces that had been
swept afterwards by smooth and flat winds.

Notes

1-Wadi is river, some words do not fit to be translated into another language, some words are only not
in good physical shape in another language, because they carry profound meaning in their language.
Wadi is incredibly revered in the Arabic culture because it is in short supply like a precious stone
before the vastness and the hugeness of the Sahara. Wadi has moved a lot of Arabic poets, so that I
have kept it in the Arabic language as homage to those writers.

2-Scheherezade is the central character of The Arabian Nights, she is the woman who succeeds to
prevent her husband King Shahryar from killing her, by entertaining him with a tale a night,
Shahrayar believes that all women are innately unfaithful, he wanted to be sure to conserve his
honour, therefore he started murdering each wife after the wedding night to the point that the wasir
finds difficulties in getting new women, however the plate that is full of women’s hearts is imaginary
because I wanted to convey this image of a trophy. Scheherezade uses suspense to grab hold of her
husband’s thought, among these famous tales are Ali Baba, Sinbad the sailor, and Aladdin, these tales
have exercised a great influence over people’s minds in Orient.

3- Jebels is mountains
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Annexe 3
Metaphor in Politics
An open letter to the Internet from George Lakoff (1991)
Professor of Linguistics,
University of California at Berkeley
January 15 is getting very close. As things now stand, President Bush seems to have convinced most of the
country that war in the gulf is morally justified, and that it makes sense to think of ``winning'' such a war.
I have just completed a study of the way the war has been justified. I have found that the justification is based
very largely on a metaphorical system of thought in general use for understanding foreign policy. I have analyzed
the system, checked it to see what the metaphors hide, and have checked to the best of my ability to see whether
the metaphors fit the situation in the gulf, even if one accepts them. So far as I can see, the justification for war,
point by point, is anything but clear.
The paper I have written is relatively short -- 7,000 words. Yet it is far too long for the op-ed pages, and January
15 is too close for journal or magazine publication. The only alternative I have for getting these ideas out is via
the various computer networks.
While there is still time, it is vital that debate over the justification for war be seriously revived. I am therefore
asking your help. Please look over the enclosed paper. If you find it of value, please send it on to members of
your newsgroup, to friends, and to other newsgroups. Feel free to distribute it to anyone interested.
More importantly, if you feel strongly about this issue, start talking and writing about it yourself.
Computer networks have never before played an important role in a matter of vital public importance. The time
has come. The media have failed to question what should be questioned. It is up to us to do so. There are a lot of
us connected by these networks, and together we have enormous influence. Just imagine the media value of a
major computerized debate over the impending war!
We have a chance to participate in the greatest experiment ever conducted in vital, widespread, instantaneous
democratic communication. Tens of thousands of lives are at stake. During the next two weeks there is nothing
more important that we can send over these networks than a fully open and informed exchange of views about the
war.
Here is the first contribution. Pass it on!
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Metaphor and War
The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf George Lakoff Linguistics Department University of
California at Berkeley ([email protected])
Metaphors can kill. The discourse over whether we should go to war in the gulf is a panorama of metaphor.
Secretary of State Baker sees Saddam as ``sitting on our economic lifeline.'' President Bush sees him as having a
``stranglehold'' on our economy. General Schwartzkopf characterizes the occupation of Kuwait as a ``rape'' that is
ongoing. The President says that the US is in the gulf to ``protect freedom, protect our future, and protect the
innocent'', and that we must ``push Saddam Hussein back.'' Saddam is seen as Hitler. It is vital, literally vital, to
understand just what role metaphorical thought is playing in bringing us to the brink of war. Metaphorical
thought, in it- self, is neither good nor bad; it is simply commonplace and inescapable. Abstractions and
enormously complex situations are routinely understood via metaphor. Indeed, there is an extensive, and mostly
unconscious, system of metaphor that we use automatically and unreflectively to understand complexities and
abstractions. Part of this system is devoted to understanding international relations and war. We now know
enough about this system to have an idea of how it functions. The metaphorical understanding of a situation
functions in two parts. First, there is a widespread, relatively fixed set of metaphors that structure how we think.
For example, a decision to go to war might be seen as a form of cost-benefit analysis, where war is justified when
the costs of going to war are less than the costs of not going to war. Second, there is a set of metaphorical
definitions that that allow one to apply such a metaphor to a particular situation. In this case, there must be a
definition of ``cost'', including a means of comparing relative ``costs''. The use of a metaphor with a set of
definitions becomes pernicious when it hides realities in a harmful way. It is important to distinguish what is
metaphorical from what is not. Pain, dismemberment, death, starvation, and the death and injury of loved ones are
not metaphorical. They are real and in a war, they could afflict tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of real
human beings, whether Iraqi, Kuwaiti, or American.
War as Politics; Politics as Business
Military and international relations strategists do use a cost- benefit analysis metaphor. It comes about through a
metaphor that is taken as definitional by most strategic thinkers in the area of international politics. Clausewitz's
Metaphor: WAR IS POLI- TICS PURSUED BY OTHER MEANS. Karl von Clausewitz was a Prussian general
who perceived war in terms of political cost-benefit analysis. Each nation-state has political objectives, and war
may best serve those objectives. The political ``gains'' are to to be weighed against acceptable ``costs.'' When the
costs of war exceed the political gains, the war should cease. There is another metaphor implicit here: POLITICS
IS BUSINESS where efficient political management is seen as akin to efficient business management. As in a
well-run business, a well-run government should keep a careful tally of costs and gains. This metaphor for
characterizing politics, together with Clausewitz's metaphor, makes war a matter of cost-benefit analysis: defining
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beneficial ``objectives'', tallying the ``costs'', and deciding whether achieving the objectives is ``worth'' the costs.
The New York Times, on November 12, 1990, ran a front-page story announcing that ``a national debate has
begun as to whether the United States should go to war in the Persian Gulf.'' The Times described the debate as
defined by what I have called Clausewitz's metaphor (though it described the metaphor as literal), and then raised
the question, ``What then is the nation's political object in the gulf and what level of sacrifice is it worth?'' The
``debate'' was not over whether Clausewitz's metaphor was appropriate, but only over how various analysts cal-
culated the relative gains and losses. The same has been true of the hearings of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, where Clausewitz's metaphor provides the framework within which most discussion has taken place.
The broad acceptance of Clausewitz's metaphor raises vital questions: What, exactly, makes it a metaphor rather
than a literal truth? Why does it seem so natural to foreign policy experts? How does it fit into the overall meta-
phor system for understanding foreign relations and war? And, most importantly, what realities does it hide? To
answer these questions, let us turn to the system of metaphorical thought most commonly used by the general
public in comprehending international politics. What follows is a two-part discussion of the role of metaphorical
reasoning about the gulf crisis. The first part lays out the central metaphor systems used in reasoning about the
crisis: both the system used by foreign policy experts and the system used by the public at large. The second part
discusses how the system has been applied to the crisis in the gulf.

Part 1: The Systems

The State-as-Person System
A state is conceptualized as a person, engaging in social relations within a world community. Its land-mass is its
home. It lives in a neighborhood, and has neighbors, friends and enemies. States are seen as having inherent
dispositions: they can be peaceful or aggressive, responsible or irresponsible, industrious or lazy.
Well-being is wealth. The general well-being of a state is under- stood in economic terms: its economic health. A
serious threat to economic health can thus be seen as a death threat. To the extent that a nation's economy
depends on foreign oil, that oil supply becomes a `lifeline' (reinforced by the image of an oil pipeline).
Strength for a state is military strength.
Maturity for the person-state is industrialization. Unindustrialized nations are `underdeveloped', with
industrialization as a natural state to be reached. Third-world nations are thus immature children, to be taught
how to develop properly or disciplined if they get out of line. Nations that fail to industrialize at a rate considered
normal are seen as akin to retarded children and judged as ``backward'' nations.
Rationality is the maximization of self-interest.
There is an implicit logic to the use of these metaphors: Since it is in the interest of every person to be as strong
and healthy as possible, a rational state seeks to maximize wealth and military might. Violence can further self-
interest. It can be stopped in three ways: Either a balance of power, so that no one in a neighborhood is strong
enough to threaten anyone else. Or the use of collective persuasion by the community to make violence counter to
self-interest. Or a cop strong enough to deter violence or punish it. The cop should act morally, in the
community's interest, and with the sanction of the community as a whole. Morality is a matter of accounting, of
keeping the moral books balanced. A wrongdoer incurs a debt, and he must be made to pay. The moral books can
be balanced by a return to the situation prior to the wrongdoing, by giving back what has been taken, by
recompense, or by punishment. Justice is the balancing of the moral books. War in this metaphor is a fight
between two people, a form of hand-to-hand combat. Thus, the US might seek to ``push Iraq back out of Kuwait''
or ``deal the enemy a heavy blow,'' or ``deliver a knockout punch.'' A just war is thus a form of combat for the
purpose of settling moral accounts. The most common discourse form in the West where there is combat to settle
moral accounts is the classic fairy tale. When people are replaced by states in such a fairy tale, what results is a
scenario for a just war.
The Fairy Tale of the Just War
Cast of characters: A villain, a victim, and a hero. The victim and the hero may be the same person. The scenario:
A crime is committed by the villain against an innocent victim (typically an assault, theft, or kidnapping). The
offense occurs due to an imbalance of power and creates a moral imbalance. The hero either gathers helpers or
decides to go it alone. The hero makes sacrifices; he undergoes difficulties, typically making an arduous heroic
journey, sometimes across the sea to a treacherous terrain. The villain is inherently evil, perhaps even a monster,
and thus reasoning with him is out of the question. The hero is left with no choice but to engage the villain in
battle. The hero de- feats the villain and rescues the victim. The moral balance is restored. Victory is achieved.
The hero, who always acts honorably, has proved his manhood and achieved glory. The sacrifice was worthwhile.
The hero receives acclaim, along with the gratitude of the victim and the community.
The fairy tale has an asymmetry built into it. The hero is moral and courageous, while the villain is amoral and
vicious. The hero is rational, but though the villain may be cunning and calculating, he cannot be reasoned with.
Heroes thus cannot negotiate with villains; they must defeat them. The enemy-as-demon metaphor arises as a
consequence of the fact that we understand what a just war is in terms of this fairy tale. The most natural way to
justify a war on moral grounds is to fit this fairy tale structure to a given situation. This is done by metaphorical
definition, that is, by answering the questions: Who is the victim? Who is the villain? Who is the hero? What is
the crime? What counts as victory? Each set of answers provides a different filled-out scenario. As the gulf crisis
developed, President Bush tried to justify going to war by the use of such a scenario. At first, he couldn't get his
story straight. What happened was that he was using two different sets of metaphorical definitions, which resulted
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in two different scenarios: The Rescue Scenario: Iraq is villain, the US is hero, Kuwait is victim, the crime is
kidnap and rape. The Self-Defense Scenario: Iraq is villain, the US is hero, the US and other industrialized
nations are victims, the crime is a death threat, that is, a threat to economic health. The American people could
not accept the second scenario, since it amounted to trading lives for oil. The administration has settled on the
first, and that seems to have been accepted by the public, the media, and Congress as providing moral
justification for going to war.
The Ruler-for-State Metonymy
There is a metonymy that goes hand-in-hand with the State-as- Person metaphor:
THE RULER STANDS FOR THE STATE
Thus, we can refer to Iraq by referring to Saddam Hussein, and so have a single person, not just an amorphous
state, to play the villain in the just war scenario. It is this metonymy that is in- voked when the President says
``We have to get Saddam out of Kuwait.'' Incidentally, the metonymy only applies to those leaders perceived as
rulers. Thus, it would be strange for us, but not for the Iraqis, to describe an American invasion of Kuwait by
saying, ``George Bush marched into Kuwait.''
The Experts' Metaphors
Experts in international relations have an additional system of metaphors that are taken as defining a ``rational''
approach. The principal ones are the Rational Actor metaphor and Clausewitz's metaphor, which are commonly
taught as truths in courses on international relations. We are now in a position to show precisely what is
metaphorical about Clausewitz's metaphor. To do so, we need to look at a system of metaphors that is
presupposed by Clausewitz's metaphor. We will begin with an everyday system of metaphors for understanding
causation:
The Causal Commerce System
The Causal Commerce system is a way to comprehend actions intended to achieve positive effects, but which
may also have negative effects. The system is composed of three metaphors:
Causal Transfer: An effect is an object transferred from a cause to an affected party. For example, sanctions are
seen as ``giving'' Iraq economic difficulties. Correspondingly, economic difficulties for Iraq are seen as ``coming
from'' the sanctions. This metaphor turns purposeful actions into transfers of objects. The Exchange Metaphor for
Value: The value of something is what you are willing to exchange for it. Whenever we ask whether it is ``worth''
going to war to get Iraq out of Kuwait, we are using the Exchange Metaphor for Value plus the Causal Transfer
metaphor. Well-being is Wealth: Things of value constitute wealth. Increases in well-being are ``gains'';
decreases in well-being are ``costs.'' The metaphor of Well-being-as-Wealth has the effect of making qualitiative
effects quantitative. It not only makes qualitatively different things comparable, it even provides a kind of
arithmetic calculus for adding up costs and gains. Taken together, these three metaphors portray actions as
commercial transactions with costs and gains. Seeing actions as transactions is crucial to applying ideas from
economics to actions in general.
Risks
A risk is an action taken to achieve a positive effect, where the outcome is uncertain and where there is also a
significant probability of a negative effect. Since Causal Commerce allows one to see positive effects of actions
as ``gains'' and negative effects as ``costs'', it becomes natural to see a risky action metaphorically as a financial
risk of a certain type, namely, a gamble.
Risks are Gambles
In gambling to achieve certain ``gains'', there are ``stakes'' that one can ``lose''. When one asks what is ``at stake''
in going to war, one is using the metaphors of Causal Commerce and Risks-as-Gambles. These are also the
metaphors that President Bush uses when he refers to strategic moves in the gulf as a ``poker game'' where it
would be foolish for him to ``show his cards'', that is, to make strategic knowledge public.
The Mathematicization of Metaphor
The Causal Commerce and Risks-as-Gambles metaphors lie behind our everyday way of understanding risky
actions as gambles. At this point, mathematics enters the picture, since there is mathematics of gambling, namely,
probability theory, decision theory, and game theory. Since the metaphors of Causal Commerce and Risks- as-
Gambles are so common in our everyday thought, their metaphorical nature often goes unnoticed. As a result, it is
not uncommon for social scientists to think that the mathematics of gambling literally applies to all forms of risky
action, and that it can provide a general basis for the scientific study of risky action, so that risk can be
minimized.
Rational Action
Within the social sciences, especially in economics, it is common to see a rational person as someone who acts in
his own self- interest, that is, to maximize his own well-being. Hard-core advocates of this view may even see
altruistic action as being ones self-interest if there is a value in feeling righteous about al- truism and in deriving
gratitude from others. In the Causal Commerce system, where well-being is wealth, this view of Rational Action
translates metaphorically into maximizing gains and minimizing losses. In other words:
Rationality is Profit Maximization
This metaphor presupposes Causal Commerce plus Risks-as-Gambles, and brings with it the mathematics of
gambling as applied to risky action. It has the effect of turning specialists in mathematical economics into
``scientific'' specialists in acting ration- ally so as to minimize risk and cost while maximizing gains. Suppose we
now add the State-as-Person metaphor to the Rationality-as-Profit-Maximization metaphor. The result is:
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International Politics is Business

Here the state is a Rational Actor, whose actions are transactions and who is engaged in maximizing gains and
minimizing costs. This metaphor brings with it the mathematics of cost- benefit calculation and game theory,
which is commonly taught in graduate programs in international relations. Clausewitz's metaphor, the major
metaphor preferred by international relations strategists, presupposes this system. Clausewitz's Metaphor: War is
Politics, pursued by other means. Since politics is business, war becomes a matter of maximizing political gains
and minimizing losses. In Clausewitzian terms, war is justified when there is more to be gained by going to war
than by not going to war. Morality is absent from the Clausewitzian equation, except when there a political cost
to acting immorally or a political gain from acting morally. Clausewitz's metaphor only allows war to be justified
on pragmatic, not moral, grounds. To justify war on both moral and pragmatic grounds, the Fairy Tale of the Just
War and Clausewitz's metaphor must mesh: The ``worthwhile sacrifices'' of the fairy tale must equal the
Clausewitzian ``costs'' and the ``victory'' in the fairy tale must equal the Clausewitzian ``gains.'' Clausewitz's
metaphor is the perfect expert's metaphor, since it requires specialists in political cost-benefit calculation. It
sanctions the use of the mathematics of economics, probability theory, decision theory, and game theory in the
name of making foreign policy rational and scientific. Clausewitz's metaphor is commonly seen as literally true.
We are now in a position to see exactly what makes it metaphorical. First, it uses the State-as-Person metaphor.
Second, it turns qualitative effects on human beings into quantifiable costs and gains, thus seeing political action
as economics. Third, it sees rationality as profit-making. Fourth, it sees war in terms of only one dimension of
war, that of political expediency, which is in turn conceptualized as business.
War as Violent Crime
To bear in mind what is hidden by Clausewitz's metaphor, we should consider an alternative metaphor that is
_no_t used by professional strategists nor by the general public to understand war as we engage in it. WAR IS
VIOLENT CRIME: MURDER, ASSAULT, KID- NAPPING, ARSON, RAPE, AND THEFT. Here, war is
understood only in terms of its moral dimension, and not, say, its political or economic dimension. The metaphor
highlights those aspects of war that would otherwise be seen as major crimes. There is an Us- Them asymmetry
between the public use of Clausewitz's metaphor and the War-as-Crime metaphor. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait
is reported on in terms of murder, theft and rape. The planned American invasion is never discussed in terms of
murder, assault, and arson. Moreover, the US plans for war are seen, in Clausewitzian terms, as rational
calculation. But the Iraqi invasion is discussed not as a rational move by Saddam, but as the work of a madman.
We see US as rational, moral, and courageous and Them as criminal and insane.
War as a Competitive Game
It has long been noted that we understand war as a competitive game like chess, or as a sport, like football or
boxing. It is a metaphor in which there is a clear winner and loser, and a clear end to the game. The metaphor
highlights strategic thinking, team work, preparedness, the spectators in the world arena, the glory of winning and
the shame of defeat. This metaphor is taken very seriously. There is a long tradition in the West of training
military officers in team sports and chess. The military is trained to win. This can lead to a metaphor conflict, as it
did in Vietnam, since Clausewitz's metaphor seeks to maximize geopolitical gains, which may or may not be
consistent with absolute military victory. The situation at present is that the public has accepted the rescue
scenario of the just war fairy tale as providing moral justification. The president, for internal political reasons, has
accepted the competitive game metaphor as taking precedence over Clausewitz's metaphor: If he must choose, he
will go for the military win over maximizing geopolitical gains. The testimony of the experts before Congress
falls largely within Clausewitz's metaphor. Much of it is testimony about what will maximize gains and minimize
losses. For all that been questioned in the Congressional hearings, these metaphors have not. It important to see
what they hide.
Is Saddam Irrational?
The villain in the Fairy Tale of the Just War may be cunning, but he cannot be rational. You just do not reason
with a demon, nor do you enter into negotiations with him. The logic of the metaphor demands that Saddam be
irrational. But is he? Administration policy is confused on the issue. Clausewitz's metaphor, as used by
strategists, assumes that the enemy is rational: He too is maximizing gains and minimizing costs. Our strategy
from the outset has been to ``increase the cost'' to Saddam. That assumes he is rational and is maximizing his self-
interest. At the same time, he is being called irrational. The nuclear weapons argument depends on it. If he is
rational, he should follow the logic of deterrence. We have thousands of hydrogen bombs in warheads. Israel is
estimated to have between 100 and 200 deliverable atomic bombs. It would take Saddam at least eight months
and possibly five years before he had a crude, untested atomic bomb on a truck. The most popular estimate for
even a few deliverable nu- clear warheads is ten years. The argument that he would not be deterred by our nuclear
arsenal and by Israel's assumes irrationality. The Hitler analogy also assumes that Saddam is a villainous
madman. The analogy presupposes a Hitler myth, in which Hitler too was an irrational demon, rather than a
rational self- serving brutal politician. In the myth, Munich was a mistake and Hitler could have been stopped
early on had England entered the war then. Military historians disagree as to whether the myth is true. Be that as
it may, the analogy does not hold. Whether or not Saddam is Hitler, Iraq isn't Germany. It has 17 million people,
not 70 million. It is economically weak, not strong. It simply is not a threat to the world. Saddam is certainly im-
moral, ruthless, and brutal, but there is no evidence that he is anything but rational. Everything he has done, from
assassinating political opponents, to using poison gas against his political enemies, the Kurds, to invading Kuwait
can be see as furthering his own self-interest.
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Kuwait as Victim
The classical victim is innocent. To the Iraquis, Kuwait was any- thing but an innocent ingenue. The war with
Iran virtually bankrupted Iraq. Iraq saw itself as having fought that war partly for the benefit of Kuwait and Saudi
Arabia, where Shiite citizens supported Khomeini's Islamic Revolution. Kuwait had agreed to help finance the
war, but after the war, the Kuwaitis insisted on repayment of the ``loan.'' Kuwaitis had invested hundreds of bil-
lions in Europe, America and Japan, but would not invest in Iraq after the war to help it rebuild. On the contrary,
it began what amounted to economic warfare against Iraq by overproducing its oil quota to hold oil prices down.
In addition, Kuwait had drilled laterally into Iraqi territory in the Rumailah oil field and had extracted oil from
Iraqi territory. Kuwait further took advantage of Iraq by buying its currency, but only at extremely low exchange
rates. Subsequently, wealthy Kuwaitis used that Iraqi currency on trips to Iraq, where they bought Iraqi goods at
bargain rates. Among the things they bought most flamboyantly were liquor and prostitutes-widows and orphans
of men killed in the war, who, because of the state of the economy, had no other means of support. All this did
not endear Kuwaitis to Iraqis, who were suffering from over 70% inflation. Moreover, Kuwaitis had long been
resented for good reason by Iraqis and moslems from other nations. Capital rich, but labor poor, Kuwait imported
cheap labor from other moslem countries to do its least pleasant work. At the time of the invasion, there were
400,000 Kuwaiti citizens and 2.2 millions foreign laborers who were denied rights of citizenry and treated by the
Kuwaitis as lesser beings. In short, to the Iraqis and to labor-exporting Arab countries, Kuwait is badly miscast as
a purely innocent victim. This does not in any way justify the horrors perpetrated on the Kuwaitis by the Iraqi
army. But it is part of what is hidden when Kuwait is cast as an innocent victim. The ``legitimate government''
that we seek to reinstall is an oppressive monarchy.
What is Victory?
In a fairy tale or a game, victory is well-defined. Once it is achieved, the story or game is over. Neither is the case
in the gulf crisis. History continues, and ``victory'' makes sense only in terms of continuing history. The
president's stated objectives are total Iraqi withdrawal and restoration of the Kuwaiti monarchy. But no one
believes the matter will end there, since Saddam would still be in power with all of his forces intact. General
Powell said in his Senate testimony that if Saddam with- drew, the US would have to ``strengthen the indigenous
countries of the region'' to achieve a balance of power. Presumably that means arming Assad, who is every bit as
dangerous as Saddam. Would arming another villain count as victory? If we go to war, what will constitute
``victory''? Suppose we conquer Iraq, wiping out its military capability. How would Iraq be governed? No puppet
government that we set up could govern effectively since it would be hated by the entire populace. Since Saddam
has wiped out all opposition, the only remaining effective government for the country would be his Ba'ath party.
Would it count as a victory if Saddam's friends wound up in power? If not, what other choice is there? And if Iraq
has no remaining military force, how could it defend itself against Syria and Iran? It would certainly not be a
``victory'' for us if either of them took over Iraq. If Syria did, then Assad's Arab nationalism would become a
threat. If Iran did, then Islamic fundamentalism would become even more powerful and threatening. It would
seem that the closest thing to a ``victory'' for the US in case of war would be to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait;
destroy just enough of Iraq's military to leave it capable of defending itself against Syria and Iran; somehow get
Saddam out of power, but let his Ba'ath party remain in control of a country just strong enough to defend itself,
but not strong enough to be a threat; and keep the price of oil at a reasonably low level. The problems: It is not
obvious that we could get Saddam out of power without wiping out most of Iraq's military capability. We would
have invaded an Arab country, which would create vast hatred for us throughout the Arab world, and would no
doubt result in decades of increased terrorism and lack of cooperation by Arab states. We would, by defeating an
Arab nationalist state, strengthen Islamic fundamentalism. Iraq would remain a cruel dictatorship run by cronies
of Saddam. By reinstating the government of Kuwait, we would inflame the hatred of the poor toward the rich
throughout the Arab world, and thus increase instability. And the price of oil would go through the roof. Even the
closest thing to a victory doesn't look very victorious. In the debate over whether to go to war, very little time has
been spent clarifying what a victory would be. And if ``victory'' cannot be defined, neither can ``worthwhile
sacrifice.''
The Arab Viewpoint
The metaphors used to conceptualize the gulf crisis hide the most powerful political ideas in the Arab world:
Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism. The first seeks to form a racially-based all-Arab nation, the
second, a theocratic all-Islamic state. Though bitterly opposed to one another, they share a great deal. Both are
conceptualized in family terms, an Arab brotherhood and an Islamic brotherhood. Both see brotherhoods as more
legitimate than existing states. Both are at odds with the state-as-person metaphor, which sees currently existing
states as distinct entities with a right to exist in perpetuity. Also hidden by our metaphors is perhaps the most
important daily concern throughout the Arab world: Arab dignity. Both political movements are seen as ways to
achieve dignity through unity. The current national boundaries are widely perceived as working against Arab
dignity in two ways: one internal and one external. The internal issue is the division between rich and poor in the
Arab world. Poor Arabs see rich Arabs as rich by accident, by where the British happened to draw the lines that
created the contemporary nations of the Middle East. To see Arabs metaphorically as one big family is to suggest
that oil wealth should belong to all Arabs. To many Arabs, the national boundaries drawn by colonial powers are
il- legitimate, violating the conception of Arabs as a single ``brotherhood'' and impoverishing millions. To those
impoverished millions, the positive side of Saddam's invasion of Kuwait was that it challenged national borders
and brought to the fore the divisions between rich and poor that result from those lines in the sand. If there is to
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be peace in the region, these divisions must be addressed, say, by having rich Arab countries make extensive
investments in development that will help poor Arabs. As long as the huge gulf between rich and poor exists in
the Arab world, a large number of poor Arabs will continue to see one of the superstate solutions, either Arab
nationalism or Islamic fundamentalism, as being in their self-interest, and the region will continue to be unstable.
The external issue is the weakness. The current national boundaries keep Arab nations squabbling among
themselves and therefore weak relative to Western nations. To unity advocates, what we call ``stability'' means
continued weakness. Weakness is a major theme in the Arab world, and is often conceptualized in sexual terms,
even more than in the West. American officials, in speaking of the ``rape'' of Kuwait, are conceptualizing a weak,
defenseless country as female and a strong militarily powerful country as male. Similarly, it is common for Arabs
to conceptualize the colonization and subsequent domination of the Arab world by the West, especially the US, as
emasculation. An Arab proverb that is reported to be popular in Iraq these days is that ``It is better to be a cock
for a day than a chicken for a year.'' The message is clear: It is better to be male, that is, strong and dominant for a
short period of time than to be female, that is, weak and defenseless for a long time. Much of the support for
Saddam among Arabs is due to the fact that he is seen as standing up to the US, even if only for a while, and that
there is a dignity in this. If upholding dignity is an essential part of what defines Saddam's ``rational self-
interest'', it is vitally important for our government to know this, since he may be willing to go to war to ``be a
cock for a day.'' The US does not have anything like a proper understanding of the issue of Arab dignity. Take the
question of whether Iraq will come out of this with part of the Rumailah oil fields and two islands giving it a port
on the gulf. From Iraq's point of view these are seen as economic necessities if Iraq is to re- build. President Bush
has spoken of this as ``rewarding aggression'', using the Third-World-Countries-As-Children metaphor, where the
great powers are grown-ups who have the obligation to reward or punish children so as to make them behave
properly. This is exactly the attitude that grates on Arabs who want to be treated with dignity. Instead of seeing
Iraq as a sovereign nation that has taken military action for economic purposes, the president treats Iraq as if it
were a child gone bad, who has be- come the neighborhood bully and should be properly disciplined by the
grown-ups. The issue of the Rumailah oil fields and the two islands has alternatively been discussed in the media
in terms of ``saving face.'' Saving face is a very different concept than up- holding Arab dignity and insisting on
being treated as an equal, not an inferior.
What is Hidden By Seeing the State as a Person?
The State-as-Person metaphor highlights the ways in which states act as units, and hides the internal structure of
the state. Class structure is hidden by this metaphor, as is ethnic composition, religious rivalry, political parties,
the ecology, the influence of the military and of corporations (especially multi- national corporations). Consider
``national interest.'' It is in a person's interest to be healthy and strong. The State-as-Person metaphor translates
this into a ``national interest'' of economic health and military strength. But what is in the ``national interest'' may
or may not be in the interest of many ordinary citizens, groups, or institutions, who may become poorer as the
GNP rises and weaker as the military gets stronger. The ``national interest'' is a metaphorical concept, and it is
defined in America by politicians and policy makers. For the most part, they are influenced more by the rich than
by the poor, more by large corporations than by small business, and more by developers than ecological activists.
When President Bush argues that going to war would ``serve our vital national interests'', he is using a metaphor
that hides exactly whose interests would be served and whose would not. For example, poor people, especially
blacks and Hispanics, are represented in the military in disproportionately large numbers, and in a war the lower
classes and those ethnic groups will suffer proportionally more casualties. Thus war is less in the interest of
ethnic minorities and the lower classes than the white upper classes. Also hidden are the interests of the military
itself, which are served when war is justified. Hopes that, after the cold war, the military might play a smaller role
have been dashed by the president's decision to prepare for war. He was advised, as he should be, by the national
security council, which consists primarily of military men. War is so awful a prospect that one would not like to
think that military self-interest itself could help tilt the balance to a decision for war. But in a democratic society,
the question must be asked, since the justifications for war also justify continued military funding and an
undiminished national political role for the military.
Energy Policy
The State-as-Person metaphor defines health for the state in economic terms, with our current understanding of
economic health taken as a given, including our dependence on foreign oil. Many commentators have argued that
a change in energy policy to make us less dependent on foreign oil would be more rational than going to war to
preserve our supply of cheap oil from the gulf. This argument may have a real force, but it has no metaphorical
force when the definition of economic health is taken as fixed. After all, you don't deal with an attack on your
health by changing the definition of health. Metaphorical logic pushes a change in energy policy out of the
spotlight in the current crisis. I do not want to give the impression that all that is involved here is metaphor.
Obviously there are powerful corporate interests lined up against a fundamental restructuring of our national en-
ergy policy. What is sad is that they have a very compelling sys- tem of metaphorical thought on their side. If the
debate is framed in terms of an attack on our economic health, one cannot argue for redefining what economic
health is without changing the grounds for the debate. And if the debate is framed in terms of rescuing a victim,
then changes in energy policy seem utterly be- side the point.
The ``Costs'' of War
Clausewitz's metaphor requires a calculation of the ``costs'' and the ``gains'' of going to war. What, exactly, goes
into that calculation and what does not? Certainly American casualties, loss of equipment, and dollars spent on
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the operation count as costs. But Vietnam taught us that there are social costs: trauma to families and
communities, disruption of lives, psychological effects on veterans, long-term health problems, in addition to the
cost of spending our money on war instead of on vital social needs at home. Also hidden are political costs: the
enmity of Arabs for many years, and the cost of increased terrorism. And barely discussed is the moral cost that
comes from killing and maiming as a way to settle disputes. And there is the moral cost of using a ``cost''
metaphor at all. When we do so, we quantify the effects of war and thus hide from ourselves the qualitative
reality of pain and death. But those are costs to us. What is most ghoulish about the cost-benefit calculation is that
``costs'' to the other side count as ``gains'' for us. In Vietnam, the body counts of killed Viet Cong were taken as
evidence of what was being ``gained'' in the war. Dead human beings went on the profit side of our ledger. There
is a lot of talk of American deaths as ``costs'', but Iraqi deaths aren't mentioned. The metaphors of cost-benefit
accounting and the fairy tale villain lead us to de- value of the lives of Iraqis, even when most of those actually
killed will not be villains at all, but simply innocent draftees or reservists or civilians.
America as Hero
The classic fairy tale defines what constitutes a hero: it is a person who rescues an innocent victim and who
defeats and punishes a guilty and inherently evil villain, and who does so for moral rather than venal reasons. If
America starts a war, will it be functioning as a hero? It will certainly not fit the profile very well. First, one of its
main goals will be to reinstate ``the legitimate government of Kuwait.'' That means reinstating an absolute
monarchy, where women are not accorded anything resembling reasonable rights, and where 80% of the people
living in the country are foreign workers who do the dirtiest jobs and are not accorded the opportunity to become
citizens. This is not an innocent victim whose rescue makes us heroic. Second, the actual human beings who will
suffer from an all-out attack will, for the most part, be innocent people who did not take part in the atrocities in
Kuwait. Killing and maiming a lot of innocent bystanders in the process of nabbing a much smaller number of
villains does not make one much of a hero. Third, in the self- defense scenario, where oil is at issue, America is
acting in its self-interest. But, in order to qualify as a legitimate hero in the rescue scenario, it must be acting
selflessly. Thus, there is a contradiction between the self-interested hero of the self- defense scenario and the
purely selfless hero of the rescue scenario. Fourth, America may be a hero to the royal families of Kuwait and
Saudi Arabia, but it will not be a hero to most Arabs. Most Arabs do not think in terms of our metaphors. A great
many Arabs will see us as a kind of colonial power using illegitimate force against an Arab brother. To them, we
will be villains, not heroes. America appears as classic hero only if you don't look carefully at how the metaphor
is applied to the situation. It is here that the State-as-Person metaphor functions in a way that hides vital truths.
The State-as-Person metaphor hides the internal structure of states and allows us to think of Kuwait as a unitary
entity, the defenseless maiden to be rescued in the fairy tale. The metaphor hides the monarchical character of
Kuwait, and the way Kuwaitis treat women and the vast majority of the people who live in their country. The
State-as-Person metaphor also hides the internal structures of Iraq, and thus hides the actual people who will
mostly be killed, maimed, or otherwise harmed in a war. The same metaphor also hides the internal structure of
the US, and therefore hides the fact that is the poor and minorities who will make the most sacrifices while not
getting any significant benefit. And it hides the main ideas that drive Middle Eastern politics.
Things to Do
War would create much more suffering than it would alleviate, and should be renounced in this case on
humanitarian grounds. There is no shortage of alternatives to war. Troops can be rotated out and brought to the
minimum level to deter an invasion of Saudi Arabia. Economic sanctions can be continued. A serious system of
international inspections can be instituted to prevent the development of Iraq's nuclear capacity. A certain amount
of ``face-saving'' for Saddam is better than war: As part of a compromise, the Kuwaiti monarchy can be sacrificed
and elections held in Kuwait. The problems of rich and poor Arabs must be ad- dressed, with pressures placed on
the Kuwaitis and others to in- vest significantly in development to help poor Arabs. Balance of power solutions
within the region should always be seen as moves toward reducing, not increasing armaments; positive economic
incentives can used, together with the threat of refusal by us and the Soviets to supply spare parts needed to keep
hi-tech military weaponry functional. If there is a moral to come out of the Congressional hearings, it is that there
are a lot of very knowledgeable people in this country who have thought about alternatives to war. They should
be taken seriously.
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Annexe Four (Questionnaire for third year American Literature in

Mostaganem April 19th 2008) (students answered anonymously in 30 minutes)

1-Do you prefer to read a short story, a novel or a poem?

Short story 72/150, novel 40/150, poem 15/150, novel and short story 14/150

2-What are the most interesting books you have read?

Most students are more interested in classical literature

3- Do you think that literature helps you in the learning of a foreign language?
150/150 answered “yes”

4- Do you think that literature helps you in the encounter (meeting) with
another culture?
150/150 answered “yes”

5-Do you prefer to learn about history from (novels) i.e. fiction or from (facts)
i.e. history?
From history 62/150, from fiction 55/150, from history and fiction 22/150

6- Do you think that literature influences your daily behaviour?

86/150 answered “yes”, 37/150 answered “no”, 17/150 answered “maybe”

7- Do you think that literature contributes to the refinement (good behaviour) of

people?
107/150 answered “yes”, 17/150 answered “maybe”, 16/150 answered “no”

8- Do you prefer a teacher who uses metaphors, or do you prefer the direct way
of expression?
79/150 prefer the direct way of expression, 41/150 prefer the use of metaphors,
24/150 prefer both ways of expression.

9- Do you use metaphors in your daily speech (dialect)?

122/150 answered “yes”, 23/150 answered “no”

10- Do you use metaphor to express your sympathy and your dislike for
someone?
120/150 answered “yes”, 26/150 answered “no”

11- Do you think that metaphor reflects the personality of its user?
94/150 answered “yes”, 38/150 answered “no”, 9/150 answered “maybe”

12- Do you believe in the power of words?

142/150 answered “yes”, 4/150 answered “no”
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13- Do you think that words express really your thoughts? Do they fulfil at
100% your thoughts?
13/150 answered “yes”, 110/150 answered “yes, but not at 100%”,
15/150 answered “no”

14- Do you think that art is more comfortable in a liberated country or in a

repressed country?
112/150 answered “in a liberated country”, 11/150 answered “in a repressed
country”, and 7/150 answered “in both of them”

15- Is tolerance required in the encounter with a foreign literature? If “yes” you
say why?
99/150 answered “yes”, 25/150 answered “no”

16- Are you for or against censorship (control) in literature?

69/150 are “for”, 66/150 are “against”

17- What was the secret of Arabs’ power: Is it faith (religion), words (literature)
or both?
17/150 answered “religion” 2/150 answered “literature” and 113/150 answered “both
religion and literature”

18- What is your objective at the university: Is it the diploma or the quality of
knowledge?
51/150 answered “quality of knowledge”, 24/150 answered “the diploma” and
67/150 answered “both of them”

19- Have you ever tried to write?

105/150 answered “yes”, 40/150 answered “no”

20- If you ever try to write one day, which theme are you going to write about?
Love, social themes, religion, racism and other themes.

21- Are you for or against freedom of speech?

104/150 answered “for”, 29/150 answered “we are for freedom but with limits” and
6/150 answered “they are against”

22- What are the qualities you like in American culture?

Arts, ideas, hard work, self-reliance, freedom, their love for their country

23- What are the drawbacks (negative aspects) you dislike in American culture?
Racism, violence, false democracy, false ideas about Muslims, too much freedom

24- Which TV channel do you think is more objective: ELdjazira, BBC World,
CNN, LCI, or Algerian TV?
Eldjazira 70/150, BBC world 30/150, Algerian TV10/150, CNN 5/150, LCI 5/150,
no one 20/150
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25- Which TV channel or channels you watch daily?

MBC, Music channels, Eldjazira, Algerian TV, French channels, BBC world. These
are the most watched TV channels.

26- If you are offered 300 DA, do you prefer to buy a pizza or a book?
86/150 prefer “a book”, 35/150 prefer “pizza”, 14/150 prefer “both of them” and
8/150 “neither a book nor a pizza”

Questions / Answers YES NO MAYBE NO answer

N°1
Short story 72/150
Novel 40/150
Poem 15/150
Novel & short story 14/150
N°2
Classical literature 150/150
N°3 150/150
N°4 150/150
N°5
History 62/150
Fiction 55/150
History and Fiction 22/150
N°6 86/150 37/150 17/150
N°7 107/150 16/150 17/150
N°8
The direct way of expression 79/150
The use of metaphors 41/150
Both ways of expression 24/150
N°9 122/150 23/150
N°10 120/150 26/150
N°11 94/150 38/150 09/150
N°12 142/150 04/150
N°13
Yes indisputable 13/150 15/150
Yes but not absolutely 110/150
N°14
In a liberated country 112/150
In a repressed country 11/150
In both of them 07/150
N°15 99/150 25/150 26/150
N°16
Censorship 69/150 66/150 15/150
N°17
Religion 17/150
Literature 02/150
Both religion and literature 113/150
N°18
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Quality of knowledge 51/150

The diploma 24/150
Both of them 67/150
N°19 05/150
105/150 40/150
N°20
Love
Social themes
religion
racism and other themes
N°21
Freedom of speech?
Absolutely yes 104/150 06/150 11/150
Yes but with limits 29/150
N°22
Arts
Ideas
Hard work
Self reliance
Freedom
Their love for their country
N°23
Racism
Violence
False democracy
False ideas about Muslims
Too much freedom
N°24
El djazira 70/150
BBC world 30/150
Algerian TV 10/150
CNN 05/150
LCI 05/150
No one 20/150
N°25
MBC
Music channels
El djazira
Algerian TV
French channels
BBC world
N°26
Prefer a book 86/150
Prefer "pizza" 35/150
Prefer "both of them" 14/150
Neither a book nor a pizza 08/150
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