Sounds Senses. Edited by yasser elhariry

Abstract

This richly inventive collective volume begins with a poignantly rhythmed ‘Prelude’ by Raphaël Sigal on the poetry of Ghérasim Luca, whose ‘French is a Silent, Buried, Dead Yiddish’ (p. 10) inspires questions such as the following: ‘Is there a francophone sound? Some sort of francophonics?’ (p. 6). Like an echo to this first piece, the final chapter, by Edwin Hill, is set apart; its vibrant analyses of the ‘diasporic frequencies’ of the tchip — a sound that has become ‘inseparable from French (linguistic) facts of life’ despite attempts to ban it — reveal that this recurring sonic performance has resoundingly been ‘heard and felt in institutional contexts of power’ (pp. 257, 262, 280). Between these two bookends lie stimulating chapters composed by scholars profoundly aware of sound. Edwige Tamalet Talbayev plunges into the work of Moncef Ghachem, the ‘Tunisian fisherman-turned-poet noted for his marine lyric and strong Mediterranean inspiration’, for whom the ‘language to be crafted is one held in suspense, […] ensconced in silence’ (pp. 62, 65). Thomas C. Connolly immerses himself in the ‘secret music’ of the Moroccan poet Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, ‘one of Maghrebi literature’s most (in)famous iconoclasts’, whose work participates in ‘rhythmic reterritorializations’ that may be akin to a scream (p. 80, 87), especially when the poet shouts them, but that also may be likened to flutes, interrupted instruments with much to say if they are not drowned out. Martin Munro evokes sound, space, music, and identity in a convincing exhortation to listen to both nineteenth-century Haitian poetry and ‘broader Caribbean history’ in order ‘to sound some of the forgotten parts, the silences that are no less important to understanding that history’ (p.117). Vlad Dina juxtaposes Ousmane Sembène’s Black Girl (1966) and Djibril Diop Mambéty’s Touki Bouki (1973) in an investigation of how voice, both on and off screen, offers characters with ‘hollowed bodies’ a chance at ‘aural “fullness”’ (p. 137), and Maya Boutaghou examines three films set in Algiers at different periods in a comparative cinematic ‘listening back’ to the reverberations of this pulsing city (p. 161), while Jill Jarvis turns to Abderrahmane Sissako’s Timbuktu (2014) in an invigorating study of ‘sonic mapping’, an ‘alternative form of place-making’ that underscores the role of the titular location as a ‘center, not a periphery’ wherein ‘French sounds and syllables’ are part of an ‘intricate acoustical ecology’ (p. 158). In ‘Sounds of Palestine’, Olivia C. Harrison eloquently calls for — and enacts — careful analyses of sound, this crucial element that has often been obscured in critiques that focus on ‘textual and visual representation’ (p. 206). Grappling with ‘aural exoticism’ and plumbing performances of ‘sounds and accents’ in Franco-Chinese literature are compelling gestures in Shuangyi Li’s contemplation (pp. 232, 212). They are complemented by Jennifer Solheim’s dynamic delineation of a ‘performance of listening’ in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (p. 239), in a chapter that elucidates a fascinating narrative strategy. In a deeply attuned set of reflections, yasser elhariry provides a ringing Introduction to this impressive collection of texts exploring ‘sounds and senses’ that possesses the potential to resonantly reconfigure ‘our sensorial and critical receptions and perceptions of francophone postcolonial cultures’ (p. 37).