Transcultural Migration in the Novels of Hédi Bouraoui: A New Ulysses by Elizabeth Sabiston
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Maghreb Review, Vol. 46, 3, 2021 © The Maghreb Review 2021 This publication is printed on FSC Mix paper from responsible sources BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS Books reviewed in The Maghreb Review can be ordered from The Maghreb Bookshop. Our catalogue is also available on our website: www.maghrebbookshop.com ELIZABETH SABISTON, TRANSCULTURAL MIGRATION IN THE NOVELS OF HÉDI BOURAOUI: A NEW ULYSSES, LEIDEN-BOSTON: BRILL RODOPI, 2021, PP.216. Hédi Bouraoui (born 16 July 1932) is a Tunisian-Canadian author of novels, récits, poetry and narratoèmes. He is also a critic and academic professor specialising in the study of literature. Elizabeth Sabiston introduces Bouraoui’s work as an invitation to a voyage that is more of an Ulyssean journey in which the archetypal voyager is Ulysses, the mythic figure who dominates much of Bouraoui’s novels, narratoèmes and poetry. While Ulysses travels through tumultuous seas Bouraoui’s journey takes him across the perplexing social, cultural, and political changes witnessed in various northern and southern locations in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. However, unlike Ulysses who was determined to reach a specific target (home), Bouraoui’s characters/questers are happy to settle in various parts of the world, which ultimately become home for them. Consequently, his novels’ events could take place in contrasting locations between North and South of the globe from Sardinia, Crete, Mallorca, and Malta North of the Mediterranean Sea, which is portrayed as both metaphor and reality, to Djerba and Kerkennah islands in Tunisia. Migration thus becomes central to his oeuvre and with it come the themes of exile, the transcendence of cultural boundaries, otherness, and the quest for origins, in addition to politics, geopolitics, philosophy, language, and transculturalism. Bouraoui does not portray migration solely as a journey northwards for economic gain since, as he insists, the north is no longer the long-dreamt of Eldorado, but a journey to meet the Other “rencontre avec l’Autre” p.6, and of self-discovery through the discovery of the Other. These endless journeys and quests have led Bouraoui to storytelling and tale spinning, in other words to his prolific literary oeuvre which has received the attention of authors (Abderrahman Beggar, Rafik Darragi, Elizabeth Sabiston), doctoral researchers ( Noureddine Slimani, Angela Buono, Eric Jacobee Sivry), conferences leading to published proceedings (Suzanne Crosta & Elizabeth Sabiston), and a panoply of authors of articles in academic journals. These works demonstrate that over a sixty-year career Bouraoui has put emphasis on breaking down boundaries of geography, culture, genre and gender, central to 416 BOOK REVIEWS which is his masterly use of language and his wide-ranging relationships with it. He often refers to himself as the author “D’un certain malentendu”, as if at times language possesses him, rather than the other way around. In his novel Émigressence (p.134), Bouraoui writes “J’ai choisi de vivre dans les mots: I chose to live in words,” as he sees them/language as a homeland and a means for contact with the Other. Elizabeth Sabiston devoted her first book, The Muse Strikes Back: Female Narratology in the Novels of Hédi Bouraoui (Sudbury: Laurentian University, 2005) to his earlier novels. The book’s focus, as the title indicates, is the foremost importance of the female voice in Bouraoui’s work and the allimportant female dimension of his novels. In Transcultural Migration in the Novels of Hédi Bouraoui: A New Ulysses, Sabiston discusses Bouraoui’s later novels. To a large extent, it can be seen as a sequel to her first book aiming to complete the study of all of Bouraoui’s works. The book is made of twelve chapters of fluctuating length and structure. After a brief introduction in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 is devoted to Bouraoui’s novel Cap Nord (2008) followed by the discussion of Les Aléas d’une Odyssée (2009) in chapter 3, and Méditerranée à voile toute (2010) in chapter 4. Chapters 5 and 6 discuss Sept portes pour une brûlance, and Paris berbère, respectively, while chapters 7 and 8 are devoted to La Refugiée (2012) and Puglia a bras ouverts (2007). Le Conteur (2012) is...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".