“Freedom through this strange kind of love”: Impersonal be(com)ing and Barbara Adair’s In Tangier We Killed the Blue Parrot

Abstract

Barbara Adair’s first novel In Tangier We Killed the Blue Parrot, published in South Africa in 2004, draws on the American writers Paul and Jane Bowles’s time in Tangier, Morocco, and fictionalizes their struggles to write as well as their efforts to love, not only each other but also their same-sex Moroccan lovers. In this article, I take seriously the notion of impersonal intimacy as articulated by Leo Bersani to explore the potentialities of realizing and sustaining an indeterminate in-between space of be(com)ing that In Tangier articulates. I further suggest in this article that the impersonal be(com)ing opened by In Tangier offers a response to the obsession with known and knowable categories of identification that Ashraf Jamal provocatively diagnosed over a decade ago as the predicament in South African cultural production and reception as well as his insistence on “rethink[ing] the human in South Africa and how, as a constitutive part of the process, [to] restore the capacity for love” (2005: 20).