Mediterranean criss-crossings: Exile and wandering in Tahar Bekri's poetry

Abstract

ABSTRACT  This article reflects on the notion of criss-crossing envisioned as multi-directional passage in the Mediterranean contact zone. I trace Tahar Bekri's engagement with the two tropes of exile and wandering in Le Chant du roi errant and Les Chapelets d’attache. Estranged from a single linguistic or national logic, Bekri's poems perform multiple literary and aesthetic crossings between the Northern and Southern shores of the Mediterranean. I examine how Bekri's poetry reinvents mobility as a productive concept lying at the source of new forms of cross-cultural contact. I conclude that Bekri's literary cosmopolitanism creates an imaginative site of belonging from which communal solidarity is enacted in a transnational framework.

Keywords:

• Criss-Crossing
• Exile
• Wandering
• Bekri
• Poetry
• Cosmopolitanism

Notes

1 All translations, unless otherwise noted, are mine.

2 A few words about Bekri's own experience of exile may be helpful. A militant for the Union générale des étudiants tunisiens, Bekri was arrested for the first time in 1972. His passport was then confiscated. In 1975, he was arrested again and sent to the infamous Borj Erroumi prison where he was incarcerated for a year. In 1976, after his release, the government was encouraging dissidents to leave the country. Banned from university, Bekri left for France where he held the status of refugee until 1987, when President Ben Ali granted him amnesty. His first return visit to Tunisia took place two years later, right before he started composing Les Chapelets d’attache (1989–1991). He has taken several trips to the country since and has been a fervent supporter of the 2011 revolution and a virulent critic of the growing hegemony of Ennahda. He signed the “Manifeste des intellectuels tunisiens” published on June 5, 2012. I wish to thank M. Bekri for sharing these details with me during our recent conversation on the subject.

3 His forthcoming collection of poems, “Au Souvenir de Yunus Emre,” to be published next October by Tunis-based Editions Élyzad, will be his first bilingual volume. All translations between French and Arabic will be his.

4 The Mu’allaqat comprise seven pre-Islamic poems, which are said to have hung from the walls of the Ka’ba. Imru’ul Qais is said to have written the best poem of the Mu’allaqat.

5 See in particular Malek Haddad, “Les Zéros tournent en rond”; Jacques Derrida, Le Monolinguisme de l’autre; Albert Memmi, Portrait du colonisé.

6 See, for instance, the accounts recorded in Irwin, Night, Horses, and the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (Irwin 7), and Kitab al-Aghani 8 (al-Isfahani 62–77).

7 Bekri seems to be alluding here to chanson de geste.

8 The tenuousness of this anchoring is echoed in the last poem: “During the baptism/ of pain/ the clamor bogs down our frail shores” (107).

9 In an interview with Tiécoro Sangaré, Bekri warned against the purportedly liberatory dimension of a conception of cosmopolitanism that would not engage in a critique of global systems of dominance and exploitation: “this idea of a global or planetary village … the domination exerted by an economic power can be dangerous because it can entail the obliteration of small communities. The role of literature is to encourage respect for all cultures, whether minoritarian or not” (Sangaré). It is in contrast with these hegemonic models that I use the term “cosmopolitanism,” in a perspective cognate to Walter Mignolo's concept of “critical cosmopolitanism,” a form of “border thinking, critical and dialogic, from the perspective of those local histories that had to deal all along with global designs” (Mignolo 744).