Origins and turn of the 20th century
A glance at a planisphere confirms that Tunisia was at the crossroads of ancient worlds, and a closer reading of its history shows that it was both a point of convergence and a cradle of civilizations. Indissociable from the greatness of Carthage, its past is revealed through various emblematic texts. Fans of the ancient world will be able to pick up Tertullian's theological reflections as well as St. Cyprian's Correspondence. These 3rd-century writings are available from Les Belles Lettres, which also offers the indispensable Noces de Philologie et de Mercure by the slightly later Carthaginian writer Martianus Capella. In 2002, the prestigious Bibliothèque de la Pléiade collection (Gallimard) celebrated the intelligence and erudition of Ibn Khaldûn, born in Tunis in 1332, with Le Livre des Exemples, a scholarly work that covers politics and history as well as all the sciences that can be defined as human. Other references, whether Punic, Latin, Arabic, Judeo-Arabic or Berber, deserve to feature in this short evocation, although some have been lost, hastily translated or limited to pure orality, but a temporal leap allows us to access the 19th century, which constitutes a real turning point in what is aptly called "Tunisian literature".
Just as French was taking root in Tunisia through bilingual school education, a few years before the start of the colonial period (1881-1956), Arabic was reinventing itself as a modern language. This renaissance took place within the broader Nahda movement, but was not without its clashes, if we are to believe the reception given to a lecture given by Abou el Kacem Chebbi in 1929 at the Khaldounia. The young man, born in 1909 and who unfortunately did not live to see his 25th birthday, was an Arabic-language poet strongly influenced by the Romantic movement, who questioned the imagination of his peers and precursors who, in his opinion, favored beauty over sentiment, emphasizing his point by denouncing the representation of women reduced to their finery in the Arab world.
His perfect contemporary, Ali Douagi, also carries a reputation as a public agitator, since his use of dialect in his stories and plays displeased some. He is nonetheless esteemed as one of the first to have introduced the genre of the short story, and as a realistic and sometimes mocking painter of Tunisian life between the wars. Both were regulars at a café, Taht Essour, which symbolically gave its name to the group of intellectuals who liked to meet there, to which Mustapha Khraïef (1909-1967) belonged. He was a poet and journalist whose talent did not rival that of his brother, Béchir Khraïef (1917-1983), a writer renowned in particular for his stance in favor of women. At the same time, while the Poèmes d'un Maudit by the unfortunate Marius Scalesi (1892-1922), a Sicilian-born poet writing in French, was being published posthumously, a Judeo-Tunisian literature was emerging. In 1929, Vitalis Danon, Jacques Véhel and Ryvel published a collection of poems named after the ghetto, La Hara conte. All three joined the Société des écrivains d'Afrique du Nord, founded in 1919 by Pierre Hubac, who was behind the creation of Editions de la Kahena, which published the works of Mahmoud Aslan and others. Mahmoud Messadi, for example, published a short story in French, Le Voyageur, in 1942, before going on to become one of the greatest writers in the Arabic language. We owe him, for example, a philosophical play in eight acts, Essoud(Le Barrage), now studied at school and published in 1955, on the eve of independence signed on March 20, 1956.
After the French protectorate
Tunisia became a republic in 1957, but remained under the yoke of a repressive government, first under Bourguiba and then under Ben Ali. The Arab Spring of 2010 is still fresh in everyone's memory. Criticism of those in power has led to endless exile for some, such as Hachemi Baccouche (1916-2008), author of Ma foi demeure and La Dame de Carthage, and Albert Memmi (1920-2020), who took French nationality in the 1970s. His novelized autobiography La Statue de sel (published by Folio), which has won numerous awards for his literary work, is as much a quest for origins as it is an incessant questioning of the notion of identity, a theme dear to Hédi Bouraoui, who had to curb the influences of his two homelands, tunisia and Canada(Transpoétique - Éloge du nomadisme, éditions Mémoire d'encrier), and to Rafik Ben Salah who - in a wink - published Récits d'Helvétie with L'Âge d'homme in 2019, fifteen years after his Récits de Tunisie appeared with the same publisher.
While French-language Tunisian literature is flouting borders and gaining recognition abroad - journalists such as Abdelwahab Meddeb (1946-2014), the Gabès-born poet Tahar Bekri (1951) and novelist Mustapha Tlili (published in Gallimard's Collection Blanche, from La Rage aux tripes in 1975 to Un après-midi dans le désert in 2008) - Arabic-language works are multiplying and tackling another barrier: the "three taboos" of sex, religion and politics. An audacity that is sometimes subject to censorship, as was the case with Kamel Riahi's Le Scalpel, banned under Ben Ali and now unwelcome in Saudi Arabia, but which has the distinct advantage of highlighting important issues: women's rights in Zaynab by Aroussia Nallouti (Actes sud, 2005) or Pas de deuil pour ma mère by Hassouna Mosbahi (Elyzad, 2019), transsexuality in Messaouda Boubaker or family relationships in La Chaise à bascule by Amel Mokhtar. While essays have had pride of place since the revolution, the new generation seems to have rediscovered its ability to refer to a single language. Walid Soliman, who is not only a writer but also a translator, and Wafa Ghorbel, who transposed her own Black Jasmine into literary Arabic, are perhaps the sign that a new Tunisian identity is in the process of being invented, and that it will be able to unify its multiple facets.
