Transpoétiquement votre, Anthologie (1966–2016) / Transpoeticamente vostro, Antologia (1966–2016) by Hédi Bouraoui

Abstract

74 BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS possible clue to race), at mid-desert wells. By contrast, the historic supply of West African gold to North Africa and beyond has left abundant evidence in gold coins and other artefacts. Intriguingly, we learn, some of these surviving objects of presumed West African origin are now being analysed in an attempt to define their chemical composition. Development of clear chemical signatures for this gold would mean that coins could be traced archaeologically over time and space: then some very intriguing historical trading links might be suggested, or indeed confirmed. This important and revealing study suggests overall that the Saharan historian would do well to heed the findings and wisdom of the archaeologist (and his scientific colleagues), as the archaeologist equally needs to heed the work and wisdom of the historian, to their mutual benefit. The opportunity is provided by this and the further planned volumes in the series, with their promise to continue illuminating Saharan ancient history with much-needed floodlights of new knowledge JOHN WRIGHT Richmond HÉDI BOURAOUI, TRANSPOÉTIQUEMENT VOTRE, ANTHOLOGIE (19662016 ) / TRANSPOETICAMENTE VOSTRO, ANTOLOGIA (1966-2016), ROME: EDIZIONI UNIVERSITARIE ROMANE, 2016, PP. 220. Mario Selvaggio’s bilingual anthology Transpoétiquement votre, Anthologie (1966-2016) / Transpoeticamente vostro, Antologia (1966-2016) is a carefully arranged selection of Hédi Bouraoui’s poetry spanning over a period of forty years. It contains one to three selected poems in French from most of Bouraoui’s poetry collections with a translation in Italian by Mario Selvaggio (himself a poet). Alternating between the French and Italian languages, the reader is invited to perform a constant movement not only through time, but also through the multiplicity of cultural and linguistic spaces explored. An entirely new space emerges from this type of reading, something that Bouraoui himself names the space of “l’interstice”. Indeed, central to the philosophy of his (poetry) writing is the notion of transpoétique. As Bouraoui himself explains in an interview I conducted with him in July 2011 in London, this notion is closely connected to the concept of the border, or rather the transgression of that border at the level of the cultural, political and poetic: “la transpoétique c’est le transvasement d’une poésie à une autre, le passage d’un registre à un autre, le va-et-vient entre les langues, les métaphores, les styles, les registres, les sonorités…”.1 As Bouraoui writes in his 2005 essay 1 See “Interview with Hédi Bouraoui in July 2011”, in: Bolfek-Radovani, J., Geo/graphies of Loss: Space, Place and Spatial Loss in Maghrebian and Canadian writing in French, BOOK REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS 75 Transpoétique, éloge du Nomadisme, the space that emerges from this approach to writing or ‘du faire poétique’ is a transucultural one: “Ce travail symbiotique, qui tisse parfois à notre insu cette nouvelle sensibilité, permet à chaque vecteur culturel d’établir des lignes de communication avec d’autres cultures tout en se transcendant, c’est-à-dire, en s’effaçant pour laisser la trace palimpseste de son processus créateur”.2 The anthology opens with two poems from the collection Musocktail (Chicago: Tower Publications, 1966) - “Création” and “Cocktail Poétique” that can be said to lay the foundation of Bouraoui’s innovative approach to writing. The ‘transpoetic’ aspects of Bouraoui’s poetics begin to take their full expression, however, in the collection Haïtuvois suivi de Antillades (Montréal: Éditions Nouvelle Optique, 1980). So, in “Les globules de ton île”, the first stanza of the poem begins with a powerful verse: “Je t’ai dans la peau HAÏTI”. As the author explains himself in the introduction, it is only within the cultural space of Haïti that he was able to recuperate the three main components of his identity: African, European and North American. The prose poem ‘Paix’ published in the collection Vers et l’envers (Toronto: ECM Press, 1982) marks the beginning of a new humanism and transcultural consciousness, as can be seen in the following verse: “La paix, c’est la véritable rencontre de l’Autre dans sa vérité; c’est l’acceptation totale de la difference”. Yet, one can witness a...