Hédi Bouraoui: Transculturalism and Maghrébinité

The Maghreb Review, Vol. 42, 4, 2017 © The Maghreb Review 2017 This publication is printed on FSC Mix paper from responsible sources HÉDI BOURAOUI: TRANSCULTURALISM AND MAGHRÉBINITÉ ELIZABETH SABISTON* Hédi Bouraoui, native of Sfax, Tunisia, and adopted son of Canada, has been described variously as multicultural, cosmopolitan, ethno-cultural (his least favourite description), a citizen of the world. It needs to be emphasised, however, that he is, and remains at heart, a Maghrebian writer. If he is most famous as the promoter of literary and creative Transculturalism, the concept is based on his native region, and his connections with it. If Virgil’s Georgics, unlike the epic Aeneid, was based on the region where the poet was born, Bouraoui, similarly, never forgets his roots throughout his long literary and academic career. The American Sarah Orne Jewett once wrote that to know the world, you must first know the parish, and Bouraoui knows his parish well. If Tunisia, and Sfax, appear front and centre in works like Retour à Thyna (novel, 1996), Sfaxitude (poetry, 2005), and the iconic, allegorical Rose des Sables (conte, 1998), it is never absent from any of his works. He is sometimes not included among Maghrebian writers because his work does not focus on exile and alienation, on exoticism; nor does he see himself as a postcolonial writer. He views his own background as an advantage, not a disadvantage, and displays throughout his work and his career the Tunisian rich humour, the love of storytelling, conviviality, family, the passion for the Mediterranean Sea, and the surrounding fertile land of olive trees, figs and dates. These provide the basis, the standing-ground, for his explorations of other cultures, for his attempts to find the unity in diversity which is the reality of his native land, a crossroads of cultures from ancient times, as well as of his adopted land, with its ideal of the Canadian mosaic. In every one of his works, fiction, poetry, narratoème, there is always a strong Maghrebian presence, whether it is set in the Far East, Egypt, Paris, Italy, the Mediterranean islands, the Caribbean, Canada, the United States. Haïtuvois (1980) represents a turning-point in his work, where the identification of Self and Other, formerly colonised North African and Haitian, of African descent, is foregrounded. Vers et l’Envers (1982) finds kindred souls even in eastern Europe, in Bulgaria, during the International Year of the Child – for are children not the same everywhere? To name just a few characters and narrators of Maghrebian lineage in his novels which are set elsewhere, there are Virgulius (Bangkok Blues, 1994), Barka Bousiris (La Pharaone, 1998), the nameless narrator of La Femme d’entre les lignes (2002), Tassadit (Paris berbère, 2011), Jasmin (La Réfugiée, 2012, whose titular character is Laotian), Samy Ben Meddah (Puglia à bras ouverts, 2007) and Le Conteur (2012). And of course, there is Hannibal Ben Omer of the * York University, Canada 388 ELIZABETH SABISTON Mediterranean trilogy (2008, 2009, 2010) – a wanderer with a purpose, in quest of father and mother in the Mediterranean islands. I propose to examine the Maghrebian presence across a number of these works, but I will focus particularly on La Composée (2001), whose heroine Héloïse returns constantly to Tunisia, not so much because of birth but by choice. At the end of La Composée she is definitively settled in Tunisia, by the sea. But after the Jasmine Revolution of 2011, as his heroine returns to her source, her creator Hédi Bouraoui returns to La Composée in a new work, La Plantée (2017), where Héloïse addresses the question of whether she has made the right choice. Tunisia, and its destiny, haunt Bouraoui, as they do his heroine, who is herself a visual, if not a verbal, artist. MEMORIES OF SFAX Tunisia, and particularly Bouraoui’s native city of Sfax, appear prominently in Retour à Thyna and Sfaxitude. If the novel Retour à Thyna offers the reader an introduction to the history of the city, Sfaxitude is a poetic hymn to the town, whose title parallels Bouraoui’s project with ‘Négritude’, Léopold Sédar Senghor’s naming...

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