[To celebrate the publication of Poems for the Millennium: Vol 4, edited by Pierre Joris and Habib Tangour (University of California Press, 2013), a comprehensive anthology of the written and oral literatures of the Maghreb, Jadaliyya is publishing the editors' introduction and a selection of poems (Mehdi Akhrif, Omar Berrada, Ahmad Al-Majjaty, Djibril Zakaria Sall, and Cheikha Rimitti. For more information and to purchase the book, click here]
Introduction
This book has been incubating in our minds for a quarter century now, and we have been gathering material for even longer—with the aim of assembling and contextualizing a wide range of writing from North Africa previously unavailable in the English-speaking world. The result is, we believe, a rich if obviously not full dossier of primary materials of interest not only to scholars of world literature, specialists in the fields of Arab and Berber studies, but also to a general audience and to contemporary readers and practitioners of poetry who, to deturn a Frank O’Hara line, want “to see what the poets in North Africa are doing these days.” It is a project meant as a contribution to the ongoing reassessment of both the literary and cultural studies fields in our global, postcolonial age. Its documentary and trans- genre orientation means that it not only features major authors and literary touchstones but also provides a first look at a wide range of popular cultural genres, from ancient riddles, pictographs, and magic formulas to contemporary popular tales and songs, and is also in part a work of ethnopoetics. Drawing on primary resources that remain little known and difficult of access, and informed by the latest scholarship, this gathering of texts illuminates the distinctively internationalist spirit typified by North African culture through its many permutations.
A combination of traditional and experimental literary texts and ethnopoetic material, this fourth volume in the ongoing Poems for the Millennium series of anthologies is a natural progression from its predecessors. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris edited the first two volumes, which present worldwide experimental poetries of the twentieth century. Volume 3, as a historical “prequel,” covers the new and experimental poetries of nineteenth-century Romanticism worldwide. This volume—which we have at times half-jokingly thought of as a “sidequel,” for its southerly departure from Europe and North America, the series’s main focus— is conceptually linked in its attempt to present the historical processes that led to the most innovative contemporary work. And the first two, core volumes in fact include—although in a minimal manner, of necessity—a few of the Maghrebian authors who are revolutionizing writing in their countries today. Those books also show the importance of oral literature in contemporary experimentation, a theme deepened and broadened in the volume at hand. Throughout the years of work on this book, our shorthand working title was “Diwan Ifrikiya,” which has the advantage of being brief and concise, though the disadvantage of being slightly obscure compared to the longer, less elegant, but more explicit appellation Book of North African Literature. “Diwan Ifrikiya”—as we refer to it throughout this introduction—combines the well-known Arabic word for “a gathering, a collection or anthology” of poems, diwan, with one of the earliest names of (at least part of) the region that this book covers. Ifrikiya is an Arabization of the Latin word Africa— which the Romans took from the Egyptians, who spoke of “the land of the Ifri,” referring to the original inhabitants of North Africa. The Romans called these people Berbers, but they call themselves the Amazigh, and even today tribal names—such as Beni Ifren—in their language, Tamazight, include words derived from ifri.
“Diwan Ifrikiya” is thus an anthology of the various and varied written and oral literatures of North Africa, the region known as the Maghreb, traditionally described as situated between the Siwa Oasis to the east (in fact, inside the borders of Egypt) and the Atlantic Ocean to the west, spanning the modern nation-states of Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco—as well as the desert space of the Sahara. Given the nomadic habits of the Tuareg tribes, the larger Maghreb can include parts of Mali, Niger, and Chad, plus Mauritania, to the great desert’s southwest, famous for its manuscript collections. (The spread of the various Amazigh peoples is also describable in terms of their basic food, namely the breadth and limits of the use of rolled barley and wheat flour, or couscous.) We have also included the extremely rich and influential Arab-Berber and Jewish literary culture of al- Andalus, which flourished in Spain between the ninth and fifteenth centuries. This culture was intimately linked to North Africa throughout its existence and even after its final disappearance following the Reconquista, given that a great part of Spain’s Muslim and Jewish population fled toward the south then, seeking refuge in North Africa.
The time span of “Diwan Ifrikiya” reaches from the earliest inscriptions— prehistoric rock drawings in the Tassili and Hoggar regions in the southern Sahara; the first Berber pictograms—to the work of the current generation of postindependence and diasporic writers. Such a chronology takes in diverse cultures, including Amazigh,
Vandal, Arab, Ottoman, and French constituents. It also covers a range of literary genres: although concentrating on oral and written poetry and narratives, especially those which invent new or renew preexisting literary traditions, our gathering also draws on historical and geographical treatises, philosophical and esoteric traditions and genres, song lyrics, current prose experiments in the novel and short story, and so forth.
From a wider or outside perspective, the overall chronological arrangement makes perceptible the crucial importance of this region in the development of Western culture, adding hitherto little-known or unknown historical data while showing how the Maghreb’s present-day postcolonial achievements are major contributions to global world culture. In ancient times, the Maghreb was seen as the Roman Empire’s breadbasket—we hope this book shows that at the intellectual and artistic levels this has remained so ever since. To be candid: North Africa is a region whose cultural achievements—including their impact on and importance for Western culture— have been not only passively neglected but often actively “disappeared” or written out of the record. This is true for the majority of this area’s autochthonous writers and thinkers, even those few whose achievements have been recognized north of the Mediterranean—often because they became diaspora figures working in Europe. A few examples may suffice: Augustine is certainly considered a major church father, but his North African roots, if not totally obscured, are given little credit. Apuleius, the author of one of the first prose narratives that prefigure our novel, is known as a Latin or late Roman writer, not a Maghrebian. It is also interesting to note in this con- text that the last poet whose mother tongue was Latin was a Carthaginian, and that by an odd circumstance the first nonoral poet in our chronology, Callimachus—whose forebears immigrated to Cyrenaica (Libya), possibly from the Greek island of Thera, where the first ruler of the Battiad Dynasty came from—wrote in Greek.
We know that during the heyday of Arab-Islamic culture, and more specifically between 1100 and 1300 c.e., scribes and thinkers first safeguarded, then translated and transmitted to the Europeans, much of the Greek philosophy and science that we pride ourselves on as the roots of Western civilization. Many lived and worked in al-Andalus, that thriving center of culture on European shores—a place where a millennium ago Arabs, Jews, and Christians learned to live together in productive peace. Yet the core figures of this period of Arab culture, such as Ibn Khaldun, Ibn Battuta, and Al-Hasan Ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi—whom we know as Leo Africanus—if not unknown, are seriously marginalized in the West. Lip service may be paid to, say, Ibn Khaldun, as the father of sociology, or a French author of Lebanese origin may write a successful novel based on the figure of Leo Africanus, but the actual texts of these writers, thinkers, and mapmakers are rarely available to the Anglophone world—or are available only to specialists or, again, without much context with which to read and appreciate them.
Even if Arab culture went into a long sleep and the high-cultural productions of the Maghreb often became mere imitations of the classical Mashreqi (Near Eastern) models—and thus less creatively innovative—during the centuries between the fall of al-Andalus to the Spanish Christians and the conquest of North Africa by the colonial powers, there was much cultural activity then. This is especially true for the autochthonous Berber cultures which, despite having been Arabized (at least to the degree of accepting Islam, in many instances in a modified, maraboutic form), kept alive vital modes of popular oral literature, for example Berber tales and sto- ries, plus elaborations and updated versions of the Arab-Berber epic of the Banu Hillal confederation. European anthropologists gathered much of this ethnopoetic material in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but it has since faded from view, we surmise both from a lack of interest shown by the old colonizers and from a justifiable and understandable unease among Maghrebians toward this material so often labeled “primitive” or “preliterary” by those who recorded it. Besides which, the current Maghrebian societies are too busy trying to invent their own contemporaneity and to modernize themselves to have much time or desire to invest their limited resources in reassessing their remote pasts. If this anthology helps to dispel some of this unease or even incites other researchers and writers to look deeper into these hidden and buried histories, it will have accomplished one of its main goals.
The longtime neglect of such a major cultural area is part of a wider, now well- documented, Eurocentrism; permit us to cite an example germane to the project at hand. In the early days of Modernism, Ezra Pound spent time and energy establishing the roots of European lyric poetry, which he located in the French/ Occitan troubadour tradition, a lineage that has become canonical over the past century. Open your American Heritage Dictionary, and you’ll see that it gives the Latin tropare as the root of troubadour—an etymology that on closer inspection, however, turns out to be reconstructed, presumed, and unattested (i.e., marked with an asterisk). In fact, the field of romance philology has done everything in its power to negate any traces of a non-European origin of—or even strong foreign influence on—European lyric poetry. And yet it has been known since at least 1928, via the work of the Spanish linguist Julián Ribera, that the obvious root of troubadour is the Arabic tarab, “to sing,” specifically to sing a musical poetry that produces an exalted state. (One could also link this ecstatic sense of tarab to Federico García Lorca’s duende.) Pound, like nearly all other European and American writers and researchers, was looking for European origins—though in his 1913 essay on the troubadours he had a vague inkling that something else was going on, as far as the tunes of the troubadours’ canzos are concerned: “They are perhaps a little Oriental in feeling, and it is likely that the spirit of Sufism is not wholly absent from their content.” It is that kind of belittling and, in the final analysis, deeply denigrating attitude that “Diwan Ifrikiya” addresses and, we hope, redresses somewhat.
This anthology is organized into five approximately chronological diwans, inside which the authors appear in chronological order. Reading through them, one can get a sense of temporal progression and thus of the changes brought by history. The First Diwan, subtitled “A Book of In-Betweens: Al-Andalus, Sicily, the Maghreb,” starts with an early, anonymous muwashshaha—that lyrical poetic form invented in al-Andalus which moved Arabic poetry away from the imitation of classical qasida models going back to pre-Islamic forms. After a wide presentation of Arab and Jewish poets who made al-Andalus so incredible and possibly unique, the diwan ends with Ibn Zamrak’s wonderful description of the Alhambra.
The next diwan, “Al Adab: The Invention of Prose,” presents a range of materials —from literary criticism through Ibn Khaldun’s writings (the ur-texts of what will become sociology) to historical, literary, and cultural documents—that will give the reader a sense of the breadth and width of this pulsating and formative civilization. The Third Diwan, “The Long Sleep and the Slow Awakening,” moves us from the end of the fifteenth century (and thus the end of al-Andalus, which can be dated to the final victory of the Spanish Reconquista, in 1492) to the end of the nineteenth, a period during which Arab culture—both in its cradle, the Middle East, and in its Western extension, the Maghreb (in fact, in Arabic Maghreb means “West,” in both a geographical and a deeper cultural, even mystical, sense)—fell prey to what is usually called decadence, at the political, social, and cultural levels. For the Maghreb, however, even these centuries held creative excitement: it was then that one of the great poetic forms of North Africa, the melhun, came into its own by revitalizing its classical roots through both formal and linguistic innovations, including the use of the Maghrebian vernacular. The innovations and final grandeur of these poems, song lyrics really, are difficult to bring across in translation; suffice it to say that the poems have stood the test of time and still represent the core repertoire of the great melhun singers.
The Fourth Diwan, “Resistance and Road to Independence,” covers about one hundred years: from the mid-nineteenth (the aftermath of the French colonization of Algeria) to the mid-twentieth century, that moment when the people of the Maghreb begin to demand—and fight for—sovereignty. The shock of colonization may at first have numbed these populations, but in the twentieth century they produced a literature of resistance while on what we have called the long road to independence. A specifically national or nationalist thought also emerged then, as a range of differences—between, before all, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco—rose to the surface and began to be theorized. Emblematic of this period are the diwan’s two framing figures: Emir Abd El Kader, born in Mascara in 1808, the great nomad warrior who gathered the tribes to fight the French, was a superb writer and poet, and Sufi mystic, and a follower of Ibn Arabi’s thought, who died in exile in Damascus; and Henri Kréa, the French-Algerian poet who fought for Algeria’s independence and died in Paris in 2000. An amazing span—with other amazing figures, such as Abu al-Qasim al-Shabi, Frantz Fanon, and Kateb Yacine, whose work includes some of the first great classics of modern Maghrebian literature.
A double diwan concludes the book: although it covers only the past sixty or so years, its size demanded the split into two sections. We have divided it according to geography, grouping the two northeastern Maghreb countries (Libya and Tunisia) with the two relatively small countries in the south- west of our area, namely, Mauritania and Western Sahara, while keeping Algeria and Morocco for part 2. The writers in this diwan are those who came of age at the moment of independence and the two to three generations since then. This diwan’s size and literary achievement show that the great richness that characterized early Maghrebian culture, even if buried for a time by the “decadence” of one of its foundational cultures and then by the strictures of European colonial impositions, has burst to the fore again— with a vengeance. This richness brings to mind the days of multicultural al-Andalus, even if today we would call it multinational or hybrid or cross- border. For instance, the youngest poet in the last—the Morocco— section of the book, Omar Berrada, sets his work presented here in the company of the three international figures whom he honors: the late-nineteenth-century French avant-gardist Alfred Jarry, the twentieth-century North American performance poet bpNichol, and the great Sufi poet and mystic Ibn Arabi (1165–1240), whom we will meet on several occasions throughout “Diwan Ifrikiya.”
The diwans are interrupted, leavened, given breathing room—however you experience it—by a series of smaller sections, four “Books” and three “Oral Traditions,” whose roles are multiple: filling in detail, giving context, or foregrounding specific areas. Thus “A Book of Multiple Beginnings” pre- cedes the First Diwan, taking the reader from an early Berber inscription (see p. 10) to prehistoric rock drawings in the southern Sahara’s Tassili and Hoggar regions through the first centuries of recorded literary output. The Phoenician, Greek, and Roman writings from this period include some of the world-class achievements of Maghrebian culture.
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Creation myths and tales of origin logically open this section. This puts the autochthonous Berber peoples rightfully at the start of the Maghrebian adventure while also foregrounding a tradition—the oral tradition—that has consistently produced major literary achievements over several millennia. This tradition is so ample and important that we had to create three independent sections (“Oral Traditions 1–3”) dispersed throughout the anthology to try to do justice to its richness—which persists today, as the third of the sections, presenting contemporary oral work, shows. The distribution of these sections also reflects the fact that many of this anthology’s contemporary writers source and resource themselves in that oral tradition’s imaginary—one could go so far as to consider it the Maghrebian collective unconscious.
The other books concentrate on the poetry of the Sufi mystics (“A Book of Mystics”), on the very specific poetics of Arabic calligraphy (A Book of Writing) —a core sense-making, meditative, and aesthetic dimension of Arab culture—and, finally, on a few diasporic writers (A Book of Exiles), both those who have left North Africa for whatever reason but feel them- selves Maghrebian despite their exilic position and those who have come and stayed, deciding to become Maghrebian or return to lost roots. Ironically, this smallest of subsections could be the largest: the diasporic or exilic dimension is one of the main characteristics of Maghrebian literature, given that the majority of its authors live and write on two or more shores.
Although it may seem counterintuitive for A Book of Exiles to include such writers as Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, who are seen as essentially French (even if some of their work points to—and their late work indeed insists more and more on —the importance of their Maghrebian roots), their contributions here deal exactly with exile from the Maghreb and the related question of choice of language (see, for example, Derrida’s essay The Monolingualism of the Other, which is a response to and an elaboration of the Moroccan poet and thinker Abdelkebir Khatibi’s writings on this prob- lem). Their work also helps to contextualize the problems of the surround- ing obviously Maghrebian contemporary writers, who faced both the neces- sity of actual exile and the difficult decision of which language to write in. Although their mother tongue was usually one of several Berber languages or a darija (dialectal) variation of Arabic, more often than not they forwent these in favor of either the old colonial language, namely, French, or classical Arabic (which some Berbers, including even the great Algerian writer Kateb Yacine, consider as much of a colonial/imperial imposition as French).
Writing in French invariably connects the author with the old colonial metropole— no matter if he or she lives in the Maghreb or in self-imposed or forced exile elsewhere—as that’s where the major publishing houses are (only recently have independent houses emerged in the Maghreb). Writing in Arabic means dealing with small local publishers and getting caught up in all the political and censorship problems this has meant for most of the time since independence, or trying to publish in Lebanon or Egypt, the major Mashreqi publishing centers. The latter is also fraught with problems, as Maghrebian and Mashreqian cultures do not necessarily coexist easily. But no matter if they publish in Paris or Beirut, these writers have little chance of being translated into and published in English. The little interest and financial support our cultural institutions and publishers have been able to garner for translations from French and Arabic have been squarely devoted to Parisian, Beiruti, and Cairene authors. Even greater are the difficulties of those Maghrebian authors who chose to write in Berber—though Morocco and Algeria have each recently declared it an official national language—or use the ancient tifinagh alphabet, as does the Tuareg poet Hawad, who now lives in southern France. It is therefore also an aim of this gathering to pro- vide a space for the mixing and mingling (at least in English) of writers who in their own countries and in other (usually country- or language-specific) anthologies have to exist in a kind of de facto cultural apartheid.
Many if not most of the texts are appearing for the first time in English translation, while others are retranslations into contemporary American English of older Englished versions. The genres and the original languages—Tamazight (Berber), Greek, Latin, Arabic, and French—are mani- fold. Obviously a work of this order cannot be the work of one or even two persons. If we are the “author-editors” and, for some part, the translators of this anthology, we are fully aware of our limits: although between us we do have English, Latin, French, and Arabic, we do not know all the ages, all the languages, all the cultures that have contributed to this gathering. Our role has been threefold: (1) as the principal gatherers and arrangers of materials worked on by many other scholars, writers, and translators, (2) as the creators of the specific shape this book has taken (although here we owe a debt to Jerome Rothenberg, the collaborator with one of us on the first two volumes in the Poems for the Millennium series), and (3) as the purveyors of a range of translations done singly or in collaboration whenever no translations could be found, as well as of most of the contextual materials, such as prologues and commentaries, given to make more tangible and understand- able the textual productions—poems, narratives, mystical visions, travel writings—of an area of the world not necessarily familiar to the general reader. To keep the volume from being overlong and to maintain focus on the texts themselves, we have not provided an individual commentary for every author although in many cases further information is included in the prologues. We do know the Maghreb well: Habib Tengour is Algerian, was born and raised in Algeria, taught at the University of Constantine for many years, and, though now based in Paris, returns to his home country and other Maghrebian countries a number of times a year. Pierre Joris also taught for three years in the 1970s at the University of Constantine (where he and Tengour met) and has since returned regularly to this book’s three core countries: Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.
It is our contention that “Diwan Ifrikiya” is especially important today, at a moment in history when the West’s, especially the United States’, convulsive engagement with Arab culture is in such a disastrous deadlock. Paradoxically, the United States is publishing more books on Arab countries, regimes, economics, and politics than ever before, though nearly all of them concentrate on the negative and paranoia-creating aspects of “Islamic terrorism” and do their best to claim noncivilization status for the region they cover (by suggesting, for instance, that it suffers from a combination of “primitive,” bloodthirsty religion and misuse of modern Euro-American technologies) or are written from similarly dismissive perspectives. Such works do not permit the reader to understand what deeply animates these populations, in truth so near to us yet always pushed back and occulted. A book concerned with Maghrebian cultural achievements, in fields such as literature and philosophy, allows us to share in this universe, which is part of ours, no matter how deeply repressed. Knowledge of the Maghreb is, we believe, essential in a world where a nomadic mind-set is crucial for understanding (or inventing) the new century—especially if we do not want to repeat some of the deadliest errors of the last.
It is a marvelous coincidence that although we first thought of this book a quarter century ago, we actually gathered and wrote it exactly when Tunisia and Libya saw the start of a revolution, called the Arab Spring, that is still going and may be the shape-shifter that will determine the outcome of this century. We hope that through its polyvalent view of the region’s cultural achievements, our book will help to further a deeper understanding of this strategic part of the world.
Pierre Joris Habib Tengour
New York / Paris Spring 2011