Mediterranean criss-crossings: Exile and wandering in Tahar Bekri's poetry

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article reflects on the notion of criss-crossing envisioned as multi-directional passage in the Mediterranean contact zone. I trace Tahar Bekri's engagement with the two tropes of exile and wandering in Le Chant du roi errant and Les Chapelets d’attache. Estranged from a single linguistic or national logic, Bekri's poems perform multiple literary and aesthetic crossings between the Northern and Southern shores of the Mediterranean. I examine how Bekri's poetry reinvents mobility as a productive concept lying at the source of new forms of cross-cultural contact. I conclude that Bekri's literary cosmopolitanism creates an imaginative site of belonging from which communal solidarity is enacted in a transnational framework.