Transcultural Migration in the Novels of Hédi Bouraoui: A New Ulysses by Elizabeth Sabiston

Abstract

Reviewed by: Transcultural Migration in the Novels of Hédi Bouraoui: A New Ulysses by Elizabeth Sabiston Éric Touya de Marenne Sabiston, Elizabeth. Transcultural Migration in the Novels of Hédi Bouraoui: A New Ulysses. Rodopi, 2021 ISBN 978-90-04-44085-2. Pp. 216. Sabiston traces Bouraoui’s development as creator-critic. The Tunisian/Canadian author’s impulse to “make it new” (to use Ezra Pound’s expression) is enriched by ancient roots. He creates in his novels “a postmodernist mythology, which does not forget the old, but builds on and transforms it” (5). Bouraoui’s characters are on a quest for origins. Through their journey, the author explores the notion of identities and migrations which, cast in a mythic framework, bind old and new. In this fictional context, immigration becomes the means to an end: the “rencontre avec l’autre,” which often turns out to be “l’autre en soi” (6), and ultimately storytelling. Hence, characters become creators, writers, or artists, narrators of their own history, which is also the reader’s own in the common sea of humanity. What emerges in Bouraoui’s creativity is, above all, the humanistic values for a new age too often wedded to technology at the expense of compassion, tolerance, and understanding of the otherness of others. Analyzing three of Bouraoui’s novels that focus on the Mediterranean, Sabiston first examines how in Cap Nord (2008), the north shore of the sea (mother of humanity and cradle of civilization) represents in fact an illusory Eldorado for North Africans. On the other hand, the invisible south is scarcely perceived at all from the North side. If Cap Nord focuses on the quest for a father who saw himself as a writer and intellectual, Les aléas d’une odyssée (2009) continues the quest, though this time the quest for a mother. In this framework, language constitutes a bridge between peoples and cultures, a path through which Bouraoui develops the theme of transculturalism in various forms. Sabiston suggests that “Les aléas d’une odyssée is not so much a reworking of The Odyssey, as an inversion of it” (35). The poet is Laura, not Homer, and she refuses the role of Petrarch’s Laura as passive muse and inspiration. The third novel of the Trilogy, Méditerranée à voile toute (2010), is an extraordinary achievement in its spanning of three generations and its interweaving of past, present, and future. It telescopes the mythic and historical worlds of Ulysses and Hannibal, and the fluctuations between reality and the virtual reality of the postmodern age: “Unlike Hannibal, Telemaque has not yet known immigration and errance, or wandering” (57). Hence, Bouraoui’s heroes and heroines are not only wanderers, they are quite literally immigrants, displaced individuals, by choice, force, or circumstance. Sabiston considers that Bouraoui’s works comprise a re-visioning of history in this regard and that his almost mystical communion with the Other takes on an added dimension. Sabiston’s book successfully unveils the coherence of Bouraoui’s work. Through the different chapters, she convincingly illustrates how, taken as a whole, his novels “constitute a lyrical love story embracing male and female principles which comprise a new humanism. The reader is invited to immigrate into these unique texts which break boundaries of gender and genre, as well as of nations and cultures” (208). [End Page 225] Éric Touya de Marenne Clemson University (SC) Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French