“Redeyef: The Mother of Rebels” A Poem by Jamel Slii (Translated by Ali Znaidi)

[Video of Jamel Slii Reading his Poem in Redeyef.]

This is the original poem in Arabic:

قصيدة: “الرديف أم الثائرين” ~ للشاعر جمال الصليعي
الرديف ..
هذه الرديف
أرض أقفرت عشبا
لكنها أخصبت بالعز منتصبا
هذه الرديف أم الثائرين
أتت تعلم الغافلين المجد و الغضب
من قبل أن يعرف الثوار مسلكهم
خط الرجال هنا دربا لهم خضبا
السابقون الى الثوراة
مسكنهم حر المناجم
حيث الصخر قد كتب
لاشي فوق هدير الشعب منفجرا
بركان غيظ رمى النيران و اللهب
فاخلع نعالك هذه الأرض طاهرة
جرى عليها دم الأحرار و انسكب
مر النار
مر النار تكتب
تفاصيل اغفلها النائمون
و انت تراقص قد اللهيب على حشرجات السبات
و أنجز قليلا من الموت تحتاجه كي تفيق الحياة
قليل قليل من الزيت فوق اذا الشعب يكفي
لتأتي اذا الشعب رافلة مزدهاة
يواعدك الجوع بين الرغيف البعيد
و بين مواعيد عرقوبها خلبي اللغاة
ولست فقيرا لا لا لست فقيرا
ولكن نواقير مصرك أعطت عناقيدها للجباة
ونحن الذين استخضنا بشاعرنا اذ أراد الحياة
وجاء البغاة فقالوا له نرى خيركم في الممات
لنا الأرض قالوا و خيراتها من عليها
و شطئانها الساحرات
و نمنحكم قفة الفقر و الجهل
و الحزب و الصحف الكاذبات
مر النار تكتب
فقد كذبت هذه النخب المشتراة
تريك أناقتها في النهار
و في الليل تأوي
الى فرش الممـ….. الموميات
لها عسل الوهم في قطران الطلاة
مر النار تكتب
مر النار تكتب فان لنا من رصيد الدماء
كفايتنا دائما للنجاة
لنا فائض من كرامة شعب أبي
و لكن طيبتنا مدخل للطغاة
و في آخر الصبر مقبرة للطغاة
مر النار تكتب
مر النار تكتب فأمك حاضرة للشهادة
كانت اعدت بنيها لكل الدروب و كل الجهات
مر النار تكتب
تفاصيل….. يجهلها الساسة العابرون
و أهل الخراج و وفد الجباة
مر النار تكتب
اذا الشعب يوما أراد الحياة
فلابد ان تستجيب الحياة
ولابد ان يسقط الظالمون الطغاة

“Redeyef: The Mother of Rebels” A Poem by Jamel Slii (Translated by Ali Znaidi)

Redeyef..

This is Redeyef—

a land devoid of grass,

yet, fertile with honour, erect.

This is Redeyef; the mother of rebels.

She came to teach the mindless

glory & anger.

Before the revolutionaries know their pathway

men, here, had traced for them a pigmented path:

The harbingers of the revolutions,

their home is the mines’ heat

where rocks had written,

Nothing is above the explosive roar of the people—

a volcano of wrath which spewed fire & blaze.

So, take off your shoes because this land is pure

on which the blood of the free flowed & spilled.

Order the fire!

Order the fire to write

details neglected by the sleepers,

while you are dancing with the blaze’s stature

to the hibernation’s rattles,

& perform a little bit of death, something you need

in order for life to wake up.

A little bit, a little bit of oil over “If The People” would suffice,

so that “If The People” comes swaggering & ceremonious.

Hunger is dating you between a remote loaf of bread

& appointments whose jam to-morrow is full of flowery words.

& you are not poor. No, no, you are not poor,

but the hearts of your land had given their grapes to tax collectors.

& we who fought an uphill battle/

& our model was our poet who “chose to live.”

But tyrants came & said to him, We see your good in death.

The land is ours, they said, and so are its resources

and whoever treads on it,

& its mesmerising beaches.

& we bestow on you the bag of poverty and ignorance,

the party, and the phony newspapers.

Order the fire to write:

These purchased élites have lied.

They show you their elegance in the daytime,

& at night, they shelter in

the mattresses of the mumm… mummies,

& they have not but the honey of illusion in the painters’ tar.

Order the fire to write,

Order the fire to write, we have enough blood credit—

always sufficient to get rescue,

we have a surplus of a prideful people’s dignity,

but our kindness is the tyrants’ gate,

but at the end of patience it will be the tyrants’ cemetery.

Order the fire to write,

Order the fire to write, your mother is ready for martyrdom,

& she had prepared her children for all paths and all directions.

Order the fire to write

details… ignored by the ephemeral politicians,

the community of land tax collectors,

& the delegation of tax collectors.

Order the fire to write,

If the people choose to live one day,

life can do nothing but give in,

and unjust tyrants can do nothing but collapse.

Jamel Slii’s Bio:

Jamel Slii is a Tunisian poet. He was born in the Tunisian city of Douz on November 25, 1955. He lived in Libya in the 1970’s. Then, he returned to Tunisia. He read his poetry in many Arab countries. He published his first collection in 1998 under the title of The Valley of Ants which is, in fact, a long poem.

His Excellency Mr. the Minster and Corruption: An Article Written by Kamel Riahi and Translated by Ali Znaidi.

His New Novel Is Among the Arabic Booker Longlist.

Tunisian El Wad Is Breaking into the Files of Corruption through Novel Writing:

 An Article Written by Kamel Riahi and Translated by Ali Znaidi.

The Front Cover of His Excellency Mr. the Minister; a novel longlisted in the Arabic Booker (Aljazeera)

Kamel Riahi – Tunisia

Houcine El Wad was known as an outstanding researcher in Arabic literature and a professor in the Tunisian and Arab universities who was preoccupied with Arabic old poetry, about which he authored several research papers and studies until 2010 when he came out on the cultural scene with his novel The City’s Scents under the most important Tunisian novelistic series “Ouyoun El Mouassira” (Contemporary Gists) which is run by the famous Tunisian critic Taoufik Baccar.

With debut novel he won the Tunisian Golden Comar, a prize given to the best Tunisian novel. After one year he published his second novel His Excellency Mr. the Minister under the same series to be longlisted in the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. Besides, he is the only Tunisian in this year’s contest.

Taoufik Baccar has revealed that Houcine El Wad’s novels that he published were written years ago, but they remained hidden in the drawers, either due to despair of the reality of culture in Tunisia or as a result of fear of publication or appearing with a new identity after being known as a critic and a successful researcher.

Besides, the delay of publishing these works arises from such an audacity through questioning the Tunisian political reality in the former regime against which the Revolution of January 14^th was waged, particularly through his novel His Excellency Mr. the Minister.

The Degeneration of Value

Introducing the novel, Tunisian university researcher Chokri El Mabkhout puts a significant title highlighting the theme upon which Houcine El Wad’s novel touches which is “Dégage Ya Issabatou Essourraq,” (O, band of thieves! Go away!) a slogan raised by the Tunisian people during their revolution against the dictator. Thus he gives priority to the people’s outcries over the discourse of the élite.

El Mabkhout said,

Houcine El Wad wrote this novel years ago before the revolution.

And there is no doubt that, at the time of its writing, he was inspired

by what was circulated about the state of corruption and thieves,

and the scandals of its ministers and their leader and his royal family.

The novel narrates the story of someone who found an anonymous manuscript in the National Library. The failure to find its owner induced him to publish it, waiting that its owner would recognize it.

The manuscript includes a plea of one of the ministers who was accused by the regime after lawyers refused to defend him. In it, he wrote his story with his cousin, the corrupted prime minister and the server of the old regime who led him to political doom through appointing him as a minister of natural resources and property, taking advantage of his deteriorated economic situation as a primary school teacher.

The man turned from an opponent of the regime to a server and defender and from an authentic labour unionist to a foe of the labour union which defends the rights of the downtrodden, to the extent that he described the comrades of militancy as “state haters” after calling for a general strike.

The primary school teacher with principles became also a tool of the regime – the party – to sell the properties of the state and recklessly abandon them to the private sector. Though the minister did not steal as it is stated in his plea, he signed all thefts in a legal way bankrupting the state in favour of “His Excellency” through abandoning the properties of the state at the cheapest prices.

The novel looks closely in more than 250 pages at the path of the degeneration of value in front of money influence, as if Houcine El Wad is bringing out the human subconscious to us, reminding of the French saying “a clean hand steals nothing.”

The State of Corruption

A novel that delves into the cellars of politics cannot neglect the reality of moral corruption embraced by the one-party state through several manifestations. For instance, woman is one of the mechanisms of the functioning and management of that corruption – be she a secretary, a politician, or her royal majesty.

There, in the ministries’ offices and palaces, prostitution activates as an essential mainstay that forms a parallel line of political prostitution. All that is framed according to a special view of politics as an intimate foe of morality because the latter, according to the politicians of the state of corruption, is considered as idiocy.

That’s why the prime minister or His Excellency was changing his wives as often as he was changing his socks, paying no heed to their beauty or young age, while he was climbing the ladder of political positions because, according to him, high standing and power are the sole criteria of marriage.

Thus Houcine El Wad’s novel touches upon a new old triad of politics, money, and sex, declaring, as critic Chokri El Mabkhout stated “a radical collusion between these three hypostases.”

Houcine El Wad’s novel supports a new trend in the Tunisian novel which was absent and modest – that is, of “the political novel.” This novelistic pattern began developing in this glimmer of freedom lived by the Tunisian writer, despite the great perils that threaten the Tunisian novelists, many of whom hasted in writing the political in a superficial and sermonical way.

But Houcine El Wad had been safe from that because perhaps he wrote his novel before the revolution, or because perhaps he broke into creative writing and fiction at an advanced age and experience as he was born in 1948.

Despite its originality, seriousness, and its strong language that is sometimes sarcastic due to the insertion, for example, of daily speech and colloquial Tunisian, weak points appeared in it here and there and especially sometimes the reader’s feeling of boredom due to its slow events.

Besides, the novelist did not succeed in the frame story because the novel as a whole is a plea before the court written by the minister to defend himself. And because the reference to this through the required expressions is absent he sometimes narrates chapters without referring to the origin of the text as a plea. And whenever he mentioned that, the technique sounded unaccountable, projective, and intrusive.

This article appeared in aljazeera.net 14/12/2012 by Kamel Riahi.

You can read the original text in Arabic here.

Translated from Arabic by Ali Znaidi.

 

A selection of poetry by Tunisian poet Amel Moussa in Turkish: An Article Translated by Ali Znaidi

Amel Moussa

A selection of poetry by Tunisian poet Amel Moussa in Turkish: An Article Translated by Ali Znaidi

Tunis – Al Hayet

Wednesday, December 5^th, 2012

A translated selection of poetry by Tunisian poet and researcher Amel Moussa was published in Turkish language in Istanbul under the title of Enough Flesh to Become a Cloud by Callisto Kitap. The translation that was described as precise and focused on the aesthetics of the text was made by Turkish poet and translator Metin Fındıkçı who has already translated more than thirty books by such names as Mahmoud Darwish, Adonis, Mohamed Bennis, Maysoun Sakr, and others from Arabic into Turkish.

This book by Amel Moussa whose poetry was translated into several languages like Italian, French, English, Spanish, and Polish includes fifty-two poems like “I Turned My Body into Wings,” “Photos without Light,” “A Painting Not Endured by the Wall,” “Joseph,” “Living with Three Elements,” “Female of Water,” “The Desire Recitation,” and “He Feminises Me Twice.”

Poet Amel Moussa is considered one of the important poetry names in Tunisia. The most prominent features of her experience are the erotic dimension which is intertwined with mysticism and the preoccupation with the realms of the self.

Originally appeared in Al Hayat 05/12/2012.  .

You can read the original text in Arabic here.

Translated from Arabic by Ali Znaidi.

Only One Tunisian Novel to Compete for the 2013 International Prize for Arabic Fiction

Today December, 6^th, 2013 the longlist for the 2013 International Prize for Arabic Fiction was announced. Only one Tunisian title did make the rolls which is Saadatouhou Essaid Elwazir (His Excellency Mr. the Minister) by Tunisian novelist, critic, and university professor Houcine El Wad.

Houcine El Wad’s novel His Excellency Mr. the Minister (Front Cover)

You can have more ideas about the author and this novel here.

Houcine El Wad’s His Excellency Mr. the Minister: A Radical Collusion between the Capital, the Body, and Politics. An Article Written by Alia Ben Nhila and Translated by Ali Znaidi.

Saadatouhou Essaid Elwazir (His Excellency Mr. the Minister) is a new novel written by Houcine El Wad (or Houcine El Oued), published by Dar El Janoub Editions (Sud Éditions, Tunis) in 268 pages of medium size under the series “Ouyoun El Mouassira” (Contemporary Gists) which is run by Professor Taoufik Baccar, and introduced by university professor and researcher Chokri El Mabkhout.

 

His Excellency Mr. the Minister reveals the radical collusion between the capital, the body, and politics which, according to El Mabkhout, “are three hypostases that make transparent a disguised and propagated corruption that originated from an incestuous union, though ambiguous and equivocal, between the desire for easy money, sex addiction, and lust for power.

Animals that enslaved each other and that lean towards the perpetuation of enslaving the human race in the whole world, either in an explicit and naked manner as is the case in our Arab lands, my country and the like, or generally in an implicit and gentle manner as is the case in those countries that made their counter powers and are still fine-tuning them according to the existing authorities’ deceit and maneuver.”

 

Dr. Houcine El Wad is a teacher of literature and criticism. He was born in Moknine in 1948. He obtained a State Doctorate in Arab Literatures from the Tunisian university in 1987. He taught in the department of Arabic language in the Faculty of Arts in King Saud University. He also worked as a director of Institut Bourguiba des Langues Vivantes in Tunis (Bourguiba Institute of Modern Languages), a general secretary of the national committee, UNESCO, ALECSO, and ISESCO, and a dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of Kairouan.

 

He wrote many books and he is the director of the series Mafatih (Keys) issued by Dar El Janoub Editions. He wrote many books about old and modern Arabic literature, and modern methodologies, for instance, (al binyatou alqasassiya fi Risalat al-ghufran) The Fictional Structure in The Epistle of Forgiveness (1972), (fi tarikh al-adab: mafahim wa manahij) (On the History of Literature: Concepts and Methodologies) (1979), (fi manahij addirassat al-adabiyya) (On the Methodologies of Literary Studies) (1982), (Al-Moutanabbi wa attajribatou aljamaliyya inda alarab) Al Moutanabbi and the Aesthetic Experience of Arabs (1987), (madkhal ila shir al Moutanabbi) An Introduction to Al Moutanabbi’s Poetry (1991), (Dirastoun fi shir Bashar) A Study about Bashar’s Poetry (1992), (al lougatou ashir fi diwan abi Tammam) Language Poetry in Abu Tammam’s Poetry Book (1999), (jamaliyyatou alana fi shir Al-Asha al Kabir) The Aesthetics of the Ego in Al-Asha’s Poetry (2001). He also wrote introductions for other writers’ books and numberless articles in the supplement of Al-3amal (The Action) and Al-Fikr Magazine (Thought Magzine). He was an activist especially between 1972 and 1974 during the emergence of the movement of the literary Avant-gardism.

 

As for the narrative art, his (Rawa-ihou al-Madina) The City’s Scents won the Tunisian Golden Comar in 2011 and it was received with a great appraisal from the intellectuals and critics. Critic Taoufik Baccar said that its style is ranked to the level of world literature which is a rare thing in the national literary production because it epitomises in all its traits all the old Tunisian cities. In it, he described the social environment in its colours and fragments and particularly its scents – be they lovely or stinky because it is the essential element that galvanises the literary text in which scents of mosques, oil mills, souks (traditional markets), and even dirt and brothels throng together, plus the massive use of proverbs by the characters. All that is delivered in the framework of a humourous and sarcastic viewpoint, but at the same time it is not a neutral viewpoint as it is most of the time critical and exasperated.

 

It seems that El Wad’s novel (His Excellency Mr. the Minister) also enjoys a good reception. Professor and Arabic language and literature researcher Chokri El Mabkhout wrote an introduction for it in which he stated that El Wad wrote it years ago before the Tunisian revolution and he was inspired, at the time of its writing, by what was circulated about the state of corruption and thieves, and the scandals of its ministers and their leader and his royal family, leaving the rest, which is the most important in art, to the logic of the story and the novel making. The artistic world which was made by the writer’s imagination seemed similar to faces of reality whose some secrets were divulged by the days, but, according to El Mabkhout, “You will not find in this novel, even if you guess and compare, any minister in person. And I mostly presume that you will keep guessing without reaching any certainty. And it would be difficult for you to delineate this event or that occurrence whatsoever the effort you made. You will only notice the logic of the running of the state—the state of the countries’ looters and sellers, the devastators of minds, and the enslavors of people.”

 

His Excellency Mr. the Minister is a novel which Houcine El Wad wanted it to be a trial of a minister that lawyers refused to defend him due to his dirty files of corruption because he worked in the entourage of “His Excellency.” And perhaps he means by it the ousted president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali. It depicts some stages of the life of a minister who was a primary school teacher suffering from poverty, deprivation in all its forms, and life’s hardships which chance and greed put him in the position of a minister in a state governed by corruption in which he did nasty jobs and when those jobs were over his master threw him into the cellars of the Interior Ministry, the hecatombs of tribunals, and the abattoir of the madhouse.

 

But, although the novel was written years ago before the revolution of January 14^th and the events are similar to what is happening today in Tunisia after the revolution, the difference, as it seems, lies in the fact that some lawyers after the revolution do not refuse to defend the corruptors who were involved in bribery and even some of them are rushing to defend the remnants of the former regime and not only the minister or even the biggest symbol of corruption in the corrupt state.

 

Originally appeared in the Tunisian daily Assabah 05/11/2011 by Alia Ben Nhila.

You can read the original text in Arabic here.

Translated from Arabic by Ali Znaidi.

 

 

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Ali Znaidi’s Second Poetry Chapbook

My second poetry chapbook Moon’s Cloth Embroidered with Poems was published on October 4, 2012 by Origami Poems Project in the USA.  It is in fact a micro-chapbook. Many thanks to to editors Lynnie Gobeille and Jan Keough.

Besides, a selected poem from the micro-chapbook was also published in the same site. You can read it here.

Ali Znaidi’s Moon’s Cloth Embroidered with Poems

 

 

By the way the Origami Poems Project accepts submissions of translated poetry.

My micro-chapbook is available as a free PDF download here.

 

 

 

 

 

Ali Znaidi’s Debut Poetry Chapbook

Ali Znaidi’s Experimental Ruminations (Cover)

 

My debut poetry chapbook Experimental Ruminations was published on September 20, 2012 by Fowlpox Press in Canada. Many thanks to editor Virgil Kay.

 

 

It is available as a free PDF download here.

 

“Scentless” Tunisian Novels! An Article Written by Abdeddayem Sallami and Translated by Ali Znaidi.

[Habib Selmi’s The Scents of Marie-Claire] Among the woks that put an end to the generalisation stating the inexistence of a Tunisian novel. Photo borrowed off http://www.alarab.co.uk

“Scentless” Tunisian Novels!                                                           

By Abdeddayem Sallami

Translated by Ali Znaidi 

In 1966 Sonallah Ibrahim published his little novel The Smell of it and said about it “it is a novel that is on the edge of the autobiography” because although it tells the experience of a Leftist intellectual, we can find in it an identification with his experience as he left the prison after five years and he was thrown into the street without a shelter or a wage.

In the street he observes the conflict of three philosophies triggering the novel’s events: The philosophy of the Nasserite state which raises slogans against imperialism and makes the citizens hope for gaining wars and overcoming hunger, the philosophy of street which tends to individualism, showing off, and transgression against the system of social values, particularly the value of altruism, and the intellectual’s utopian philosophy which is based upon the dreams of Socialism, and the realisation of social justice for everyone.

***

We now remember the novel of The Smell of it which was not predestined to circulate among readers the way his The Star of August did because we found in the scent of its events and its modern artistic styles a persistence in keeping to linger in the mind after the passing of more than fifteen years after the date of its reading.

Perhaps among the causes of subdividing this rememberance is the inexistence of “scent” in most of the Tunisian novels which we examined with all our senses and reading alertness. Despite the variety of novel titles during the last two decades and the novelists’ diversification of the advertising styles to the point the advertising act became more pleasing than their novels, most of those novelistic publications remained lacking the minimum of life’s signs. They even were almost completely to be linguistic corpses waiting for festering in a bookshelf or in a pavement despite the beautiful dedications in them.

Although we find some exaggeration and generalisations in one of Dr Mohamed El Bardi’s university lessons stating that there is no Tunisian novel, and even we find a geographical concept that narrows down the meaning of literature, the status quo of the Tunisian narration permits us to say that there is a novel in it, yet it does not go beyond the personal endeavours.

They are endeavours which are not governed by the rule of “who worked hard and succeeded” because they are pertaining to the field of creation and creation does not accept relativisation or negligence because all through a century the corpus of the novel in Tunisia did not exceed 400 publications, and even the publications of the same novelist remained scarce and quality relied on the principle of “the cock’s egg” [something that happens once in a lifetime] which made most of the readers know only one novel of those novelists.

Perhaps we ascribe this to the fact that we find “extremism” in some of the new Tunisian novelists in their riding of the wave of narrative experimentation and their endeavour to go beyond its rules which were set by the theories of Western critics. This made their novels full of voidness, the chaos of meanings, and the gratuitousness of events to the point they became devoid of a narrative flesh or a semantic scent and intending to virtually say everything, but in fact they say nothing.

***

To put an end to the generalisation that states the inexistence of a Tunisian novel, it is sufficient to remember novels that achieved the essence of narration and formed, though scarce, a narrative accomplishment that gave its owners the right of the outstanding presence in the Arab novelistic scene, for instance, Slaheddine Boujah’s The Slave Trader (Al-Nakhkhas), Ibrahim Dargouthi’s The Dervishes Return to Exile (Addarawish Yaoudouna ila al Manfa), Mohamed El Bardi’s Henna, Habib Selmi’s Bayya’s Lovers (Ushaq Bayya) and The Scents of Marie-Claire (Rawaih Marie-Claire), Abou Bakr Ayadi’s The Last of the Subjects (Akhir Arraiyya) and The Time of the Dinar ( Zamanou Addanous), and Mohamed Ali Yousfi’s Sun Tiles (Shams Alqaramid). These are novels that relied upon a great awareness of the value of the storytelling act, committed themselves to most of its artistic rules, paid attention to the people’s status quo, and revealed what was unspoken about in the daily life with all its colours.

Originally appeared in Alarabonline 23/08/2012 by Abdeddayem Sallami.

You can read the original text in Arabic here.

Translated from Arabic by Ali Znaidi.

Tunisian Hedi Thabet and Science Fiction Writing: An Article Written by Kamel Riahi and Translated by Ali Znaidi.

Tunisian Hedi Thabet and Science Fiction Writing

Hedi Thabet Leafing through His New Novel Tanit’s Temple (Aljazeera)

Kamel Riahi-Tunisia (Translated from Arabic by Ali Znaidi)

Hedi Thabet is considered among the contemporary Tunisian novelists who gave a major addition to the Tunisian narration, despite his late plunge into novel writing, gaining a virgin road and opening a new door in the realm of narration, that is, of science fiction literaure.

Thabet surprised the Tunisian cultural scene in 1999 with his novel (Ghar Eljinn) The Cave of the Jinns, and then followed it by the novel of (Jabel Elliyine) Elliyine Mountain. Both novels were characterised by an unfamiliar genre feature, that is, of ‘the science fiction novel’ to begin a new novelistic project which is formed on the margin of the classical realistic, social, and political novel.

But afterwards Hedi Thabet published his novel (Al Qoronfoul La Yanboutou fi Assahraa) The Carnations Don’t Live in the Desert, winning the Tunisian prestigious Golden Comar. This novel was about to abort the experience of science fiction writing for him. But his persistence in his project and his fondness for science fiction literature made him return to the scene with his novel (Law Aada Hannibal) If Hannibal Returned. His political novel The Rape did not also prevent him from his project. Thus he returned to his beloved field with his novel Tanit’s Temple.

New Choices:

Through his works Thabet broke all expectations. A professor of French literature who hold degrees from French universities and a man belonging to the Sixties and Seventies Generation with all his francophone weight chooses Arabic as a medium for his novels. He could have easily written in French but he chose the hardest way, especially if we remembered the reception crisis of the literary genre he chose, that is, of science fiction, in Tunisia.

Contemplating the life of Hedi Thabet who one day extricated himself from the political activity in which he was involved for years preferring the cultural choice, one cannot find strange this adventure in which he believed, despite the decrease of possibilities for him as a former politician and a new novelist to publish. Although he was not able to publish his novel The Rape, which he wrote in the beginning of the eighties, only in the late nineties, he kept resisting the ogre of books censorship and dissented from it through science fiction literature breaking the horizon of its waiting for a new culture that apparently seems an intellectual luxury, but in its deepest nature, gives a flagrant criticism of the Tunisian and Arab society, and divulges the working mechanisms of the disease of benightedness, reactionism, and illiteracy that are decaying its body.

Today Hedi Thabet was preoccupied in his project with writing the Carthagian history of Tunisia. After the Second Gulf War, he reverted to the character of Hannibal in his novel If Hannibal Returned resurrecting the great leader to write the history of Carthage on the one hand and write the reality of the Arab nation on the other hand. So he approached the Arab status quo and deconstructed the Western thought and the movement of international imperialism through the operation of cloning and resurrecting the Carthagian leader.

Thabet considered that he wanted to try to touch upon two things in this novel: First is comparing two imperial regimes; Carthage and Rome with the first building its hegemony through commerce without the need for military hegemony, and the second using the military power to impose its hegemony on the other, and unfortunately the second toppled the first and the civilisation of war and hegemony pervaded humanity. Second is warning about the return of American imperialism today to impose on the world an order that is akin to what Rome did before more than two thousand years. That’s why we must be like Hannibal to stop this imperial hegemony in order for the hands of the clock not to return two thousand years behind.

Political Fiction:

Returning to the literatures of science fiction we made sure the existence of this type of literature that is called ‘political fiction literature,’ a literature that originated from science fiction then it stood on its own right. Writer Mahmoud Kassem devoted for it a whole chapter in his book Science Fiction: The Literature of the Twentieth Century. Among the predictions of this literature were ‘the dominance of political violence,’ ‘the demise of the modern civilisaton of the West,’ and the ‘demise of communism.’

Kassem said,

There are other themes that are familiar to political fiction literature like the dominance of a certain ideology or the dominance of political violence over the form of social relations or religious extremism or the dominance of the era of dictatorship or the dominance of another human race that is similar to the human kind in evolution like monkeys or the woodman.

Except the last theme, all other predictions are realistic and can happen as we are living today in the era of new dictatorships and the dominance of ideologies.

Here we can mention George Orwell’s novel 1984 in which he predicted the dominance of big powers in which the human being lives a situation of alienation and is just a number that is subject to an endless surveillance in the authoritarian state of the “Big Brother.” In his novel Orwell described the world that became a nightmare in which spying pervaded all the places.

And in this category we can put a part of the novelistic realm of Hedi Thabet who plunges into science fiction to say the political reality. His writings attempt to criticise reality, deconstruct its problems, and reveal the depth of ugliness of the unspoken about in it. The writer speaks about the fact that his literary project is stirred by a societal project saying,

I started writing science fiction bearing in my mind a future societal project in which the human being becomes liberated from his/her humanity limitations: violence of all its forms, worshipping the self with all its defects, hegemony of all its aspects, and fear of all its dimensions.

This presentation is shown in both of his novels The Cave of the Jinns and Elliyine Mountain where the events take place between the Earth and Qanmad. The general form of scientific fantasy appears through space creatures, planets, mysteries, and wonders. However the ideas are societal, human, and earthly dealing with the diseases of violence, war, poverty, and racial discrimination.

This article appeared in aljazeera.net 07/09/2012 by Kamel Riahi.

You can read the original text in Arabic here.

Translated from Arabic by Ali Znaidi.

“The Boxing Ring” or the New Initiative of “Nas Decameron”: A Report Written by Alia Ben Nhila and Translated by Ali Znaidi.

“The Boxing Ring” or the New Initiative of “Nas Decameron”: A Report Written by Alia Ben Nhila and Translated by Ali Znaidi.

In the New Season’s Program of “Nas Decameron”:

A “Combat” in a “Boxing Ring” where “al-Qawwaloun”(The Tellers) Fight.

Hemingway, Alexis Philonenko, and the Senegalese Aminata Sow Fall.

The working program of “Nas Decameron” salon for October, November, and December, 2012 was agreed upon in the evening of Tuesday, August 28^th, 2012. It includes “The Boxing Ring” manifestation which aims at, according to what novelist Kamel Riahi declared to Assabah, “regaining the art of oral storytelling in our Arab-Islamic heritage through sessions animated by ‘The Tellers’ in an innovative modern way in an attempt to regain the Decameron episodes of Boccaccio in a new way.

This manifestation also aims at inventing a new type and pattern to introduce narrative literature in Tunisia, creating a space for a marathon of tales and stories to highlight and enhance Tunisian narration, especially emerging writers, making literature accessible for the common people through a simple, modern, and new discourse that walks away from the pulpit discourse, materialising the statement ‘the sound mind in the sound body’ into reality,  and showing the close connectedness between sport and writing.”

According to Kamel Riahi, this manifestation that will be launched by the free storytelling salon in “Nas Decameron” club was inspired by the realms of boxing or “the noble art,” and it will abide by its rules. The décor will be in the form of a boxing ring. Sound effects and scenography will be identical to the contests of this game.

Combating will be in the form of rounds including two writers who will read texts à l’italienne. The participant is allowed to use accessories, sound effects, theatrical expressions when reading his/her prose text. Texts will not be limited to Arabic, but also the use of French will be allowed. The winner will be awarded a shield akin to the one used in boxing.

On the margin of “The Boxing Ring” manifestation a seminar about writing and boxing will be held through presenting experiences of international writers who practiced boxing like Ernest Hemingway, an American novelist and short story writer who was born in 1899 and won The Literature Nobel Prize in 1945 for his novel The Old Man and the Sea, Mohamed Mrabet, a Moroccan artist and novelist who was born in 1936, and Rachid  Djaïdani, a French writer, screenwriter, actor, and director of an Algerian father who has many literary works,  among them, Viscera (2007), and many films.

Besides, History of Boxing by the historian of modern philosophy at the French universities Alexis Philonenko will be introduced.

A Combat Controlled by a Chronometer:

“The Boxing Ring” manifestation that will take center stage in The Culture House Ibn Khaldoun all day long on September 28, 2012 has rules, among them, we can cite:

*The narrative combat must not exceed 10 minutes and it will be controlled by a chronometer and a brassy bell, and after time ends reading will not be permitted.

*Contributions are accepted a week before the manifestation as a maximum limit.

*Reading must be inside the ring.

*The participant must not utter any word that is not related to the text, either before reading the text or after reading it.

*The participant must attend to hear the other participants whose combats will undergo a draw to decide on the combat contestants. The one who will violate this procedure will be sanctioned through deleting his/her name from the contest. It should be noted that reading will not follow the alphabetical order of the contestants’ names.

“Nas Decameron” is a salon founded by novelist Kamel Riahi and a number of writers and poets in May 2011 to introduce and discuss some of the international experiences in the fields of narration, short story, novel, cinematic and literary criticism, philosophy, psychology, and fine arts.

Introducing and Discussing International Novels:

The rest of the program of “Nas Decameron” for the 2011/2012 season will be as follows:

*05/10/2012: Discussing Aminata Sow Fall’s novel La Grève des bàttu ou les déchets humains (The Beggars’ Stike) which was translated into Arabic by Jamel Jlassi

*12/10/2012:  Adnen Jdey and Aymen Debussy discussing “Writing and Evil.”

*19/10/2012: Slah Ben Ayed and Kamel Riahi discussing “The Novel and the Sea.”

*26/10/2012: Kamel Riahi and Adnen Jdey discussing Frida Kahlo.

*02/11/2012: Aymen Debussy and Slah Ben Ayed discussing the novel and the film L’étrange histoire de Benjamen Button (The Curious Case of Benjamen Button)

*09/11/2012: Kamel Riahi and Chaouki Barnoussi discussing “Writings in the Prison Cell.”

*16/11/2012: Adnen Jdey and Slah Ben Ayed discussing “Literature and Philosophy.”

*23/11/2012: Aymen Debussy and Chaouki Barnoussi discussing “The Novel and Jazz.”

*30/11/2012: Chaouki Barnoussi and Kamel Riahi discussing Haruki Murakami.

*07/12/2012: Adnen Jdey and Aymen Debussy discussing “Writing and Photography.”

*14/12/2012: Adnen Jdey discussing Emile Cioran.

*21/12/2012: Kamel Riahi and Aymen Debussy discussing Mohamed Aribi (a Tunisian writer).

Originally appeared in the Tunisian daily Assabah 30/08/2012 by Alia Ben Nhila.

You can read the original text in Arabic here.

Translated from Arabic, with some rectifications, by Ali Znaidi.

“Nas Decameron” Members Preparing for Upcoming Activities. Photo borrowed off http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151207055139874&set=a.10151207055014874.505097.560539873&type=3