Tocqueville

Tocqueville is a 2010 book of poetry by Libyan-American author and professor Khaled Mattawa. A reimagining of the history of democracy, and especially its chaotic foundations, the book responds to Alexis de Tocqueville’s nineteenth-century study, Democracy in America. The poems break apart and reorganize elements of de Tocqueville’s work into a vivid and lyrical projection of what “democracy” means, and evokes, in the twentieth century. Mattawa is highly skeptical about any utopian vision of democracy, portraying democracy as a continual process of debate and value reexamination, rather than an ultimate state. The poems are visual, often referencing non-textual media including photography and film.

The titular poem, “Tocqueville,” is a twenty-six-page reimagining of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. It consists of a discussion between two American citizens on their perspectives of how democracy works. The poem’s topics range from consumerism to social justice; it is broken up by short narrative segments, soliloquies, and letters. The two citizens end up on a conception of American democracy that is chaotic and nebulous. They agree that they are not powerful enough to change much about America, but that through collective action, they can. The two also criticize the passive, inactive citizen who rests on his or her privilege rather than actively engages with fellow citizens.

The poem also pivots around the same motif as Tocqueville’s nineteenth-century work. This motif is the actuarial spreadsheet, which seeks to quantify risk, and drive decision-making by reducing lived experience into statistics. In Mattawa’s version, he is intensely interested in how the statistical and actuarial can reflect bias and injustice, particularly against racial minorities and the poor. Mattawa calls out the cognitive dissonance that often buttresses American capitalism: members of these marginalized groups can sometimes rise up and seize political and rhetorical power, but often end up selling out to the forces that weigh their brothers and sisters down. Mattawa is careful not to declare anyone totally exempt from perpetuating injustice, showing that even those who exploit and reap the spoils of injustice become prisoners of conscience.



Mattawa’s poems collectively titled “Power Point” are especially experimental in form and subject. They position the reader as the viewer of a movie preview during a sophisticated presentation delivered by an expert in his field. Almost impossible to transcribe without destroying their delicate composition, the poems discuss case studies about the emotion of desire, the age of new media, and emerging trends in neurotechnology. The final poem, “Power Point III,” paints a dystopian picture of American alienation. In the poem, a man sits alone in a hotel room, addicted to an obscure technology product. Ironically, while being the source of his alienation, the technology is the only thing that brings him comfort.

Tocqueville is a contemporary reframing of the same ironies and struggles in American democracy laid out by Alexis de Tocqueville in his seminal work. Through his experimental poetic forms, Mattawa renders the work even more democratic, aware of the fact that politics, language, and image collide constantly in contemporary life, consolidating through time our ever-evolving notion of America.