Abdelwahab Meddeb Research Articles

Abdelwahab Meddeb and Anour Majid: Revisiting The Muslim Heritage or Celebrating the Diversity of Islamic Tradition

This paper is a celebration of the diversity of Muslim thought and tradition, an invitation to revisit the Islamic legacy and rethink mainstream Muslim scholarship in the light of the plurality , multivoicedness and richness of the Muslim faith. It is incidentally a questioning of the inability of contemporary Islam to establish interfaith dialogue with kin monotheist religions, as well as a deep interrogation of our understanding of the creed and our praxis as believers in the third millenium, compelled as we stand, to adhere to the global spirit and meet the high stakes of modernity. This conandrum interpellates the Muslim community to reconsider the rigidity nay sterility of today’s Islam, championned by the growingly powerful fundamentalist movements thriving in’ Dar Al Islam’. Islam never had a Dante who summoned the intellectual audacity to make his writing address political events as they appeared in the reality of history. I dream of this genius that Islam did not create : he would have constituted the opposite of Ibn Taymiyya. ( Meddeb, 95)

Novel Traces of the Qur'an?

Novel Traces of the Qur'an?

Écriture et réception plurilingues dans la poésie tunisienne de langue française

This article offers a linguistic and stylistic analysis of Tunisian Francophone literature focused on the creative practices of plurilingualism. I specifically aim to elucidate the modalities and expressions of plurilingual writing and its hermeneutic power. To this end, I identify and parse the use and reception of foreign languages, particularly the Arabic language, in two poetry collections, Portrait du poète en soufi (2014) by Abdelwahab Meddeb and Prière du vieux maître soufi le lendemain de la fête (2010) by Jalel El Gharbi. Ultimately, I will demonstrate that the linguistic creations bringing this practice into play govern, to varying degrees, a plurilingual hermeneutics to be defined.

Religion and Literature, Identity and Individual: Resetting the Muslim-Christian Encounter

In the first two decades of the twenty-first century inter-faith encounters have become a casualty of a paradigm shift in the thinking about the global order from the political-ideological bi-polar worldview of the Cold War era to a multipolar world marred by the prospect of culture wars along civilisational fault lines shaped by religiously-informed identity politics. On the back of 9/11 and other atrocities perpetrated by violent extremists from Muslim backgrounds, in particular relations with Muslims and the Islamic world are coined in binary terms of us-versus-them. Drawing on earlier research on cosmopolitanism, cultural hybridity and liminality, this article examines counter narratives to such modes of dichotomous thinking. It also seeks to shift away from the abstractions of collective religious identity formations to an appreciation of individual interpretations of religion. For that purpose, the article interrogates the notions of cultural schizophrenia, double genealogy and west-eastern affinities developed by philosophers and creative writers, such as Daryush Shayegan, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Navid Kermani.

Ecstatic Communities: Sufism, Modernism, and Political Possibility in Abdelwahab Meddeb’s Talismano

Abdelwahab Meddeb’s Talismano (1979 [1987]) depicts a carnivalesque political revolt in postcolonial Tunis. In light of the novel’s explicit intertextual gestures to Georges Bataille, I argue that Bataille’s theory of community sheds light on both the meaning and import of this revolt. Community, for Bataille, refers to an experience of unselving; this theory emerges in part out of Bataille’s readings of Christian mystics such as St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross. In the same way, the revolutionary community that Meddeb depicts in Talismano is predicated upon an experience of mystical annihilation inherent to Sufism. Yet where Bataille deploys his ideas about community in opposition to European political ideologies of the 1930s and 40s, the revolutionary community of Talismano is positioned against the dominant contemporary ideologies of the Arab world – namely, arabité, fundamentalist Islam, and militant secularism. I argue that Talismano resurrects and rethinks Bataille’s political ethos for the postcolonial Maghreb, while situating Bataille’s modernist ideas in the longue durée of Sufism.

Privileged Instants: Meddeb’s Tombeau d’Ibn ‘Arabi

This article looks at Abdelwahab Meddeb’s unique contribution to deconstructive thought through his use of poetic language and a language of double-matrice. His poetic language of the tombeau is a contemplation on the dead which deconstructs spatio-temporal differences between here/there, self/other, the living and the dead. Ibn Arabi’s presence in Meddeb’s writing is both a tombeau to the Sufi poet and a form of modern mystical writing in and of itself.

The Sufi, the Idol, and the Icon: Meddeb’s Visions

The article proposes a reading of the image in Abdelwahab Meddeb’s works through the prisms of the icon, the idol, and mysticism. As the central aspect of the Sufi experience, vision structures an argument that reads the many genres of Meddeb’s œuvre (fiction, autobiography, poetry, essay) as so many interventions aimed at liberating the visual from the grasp of writing. Meddeb’s work on the visual operates as a point of departure for an important political process: liberating the gaze becomes a necessary step towards resisting oppression and extremism.

Abdelwahab Meddeb and the Po/Ethics of Sufism

This article examines Abdelwahab Meddeb's engagement with Sufism across his literary and critical writings. It theorizes Sufi po/ethics as the aesthetic dimensions of Sufism, in which spiritual experience is simultaneously enacted and expressed through conceptual language and symbolization. Mobilizing Syrian critic Adonis' study on the intersection between Surrealism and Sufism, the article analyzes Meddeb's 1979 novel Talismano. It argues that the work functions as a Sufi surrealist text, rather than a postmodern novel par excellence as is often argued. The essay concludes that Talismano invites hermeneutical practices in dialogue with Sufism as an ethical-aesthetic tradition.

Abdelwahab Meddeb, Sufi Poets, and the New Francophone Lyric

This is the first work of criticism to read Abdelwahab Meddeb as a poet. Selfconsciously indeterminate from philosophical and poetic perspectives, Meddeb's poetry is indebted to European, especially French, high poetic modernism; to the French literary turn to the United States; and to the author's desire to be read in the lineage of the major Sufi poets of classical Arabic literature. Turning his back on the hegemony of postcolonial literary prose with the 1987 chapbook Tombeau d'Ibn Arabi, Meddeb generates a new francophone lyric infused with the Sufi traditions of al-Andalus, North Africa, and the Near and Middle Easts. His new lyric rewrites itself as a Sufi consciousness in search of what lies beyond its knowledge of its current state, and his tonguing of the new francophone lyric leads us to a long overdue analytical paradigm.

Mémoires et imaginaires du Maghreb et de la Caraïbe éd. par Samia Kassab-Charfi et Mohamed Bahi

Kassab-Charfi, Samia, et Mohamed Bahi, éd. Mémoires et imaginaires du Maghreb et de la Caraïbe. Paris: Champion, 2013. ISBN 978-2-7453-2531-0. Pp. 327. 75 a. With its evocation of multiple artistic currents flowing between the Caribbean and the Maghreb, this essay collection offers new insights into the nature of the Francophone world. As the editors remark, their project was undertaken in the wake of celebrations honoring the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Frantz Fanon, the Antillean psychiatrist and writer who became the Francophone voice of Algerian independence. Dedicated to the memories of Fanon and Édouard Glissant, the collection is beautifully prefaced by authors from both cultures, a roster that includes Algerian Boualem Sansal and Martinicans Patrick Chamoiseau and Monchoachi. At the tomb of Aimé Césaire in Martinique,Tunisian Abdelwahab Meddeb finds references to the Maghreb, and particularly to a uniquely Moroccan countryside depicted in the work of Mohammed Khair-Eddine. A poem by Guadeloupean Ernest Pepin,“À tous les reconduits,” is dedicated to all the would-be immigrants on the seas of the world. Editors Kassab-Charfi (Tunisia) and Bahi (Morocco) present their collection as an attempt to open a new critical complexity, with contributors including scholars from both regions under discussion, as well as from France, Great Britain, Canada, and the United States. The book’s first section features essays on the “figures tutélaires,” originators of a cultural and identitary rhizome that extends beyond their own geographical region. Fittingly, the section begins with Fanon, and the phrase engraved on the memorial plaque in his native Martinique—“Ô mon corps, fais de moi toujours un homme qui interroge!”(33)—becomes the starting point for an exploration of his work by Jean Khalfa. Thomas Demulder finds points of contact between Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939) and Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma (1956), each of which played a leading role in developing “une langue scriptuaire propre: identitaire” (59).Adel Habbassi analyzes the inspiration found in the work of Césaire by Moroccan poet Mohammed Khair-Eddine at the moment of Maghrebian independence, while Catherine Delpech traces the similar trajectories of Martinican Édouard Glissant and Algerian KatebYacine as they intersected in Paris after World War II. The book’s second section traces different types of exchange, some nonliterary, between the Antilles and the Maghreb, such as the historical migration of the sugar trade from Morocco to the Antilles. The third section,“Histoire et mémoire,” looks at writing from each culture in a non-comparative perspective, and a fourth section, “Sémiotique,” opens the collection to the plastic arts. Kassab-Charfi concludes the volume by bringing together fascinating representations of human forms in works by island artists Ernest Breleur from Martinique and Tahar M’Guedmini from Djerba (Tunisia). The only regrettable omission from this collection is that of women writers, but this is probably an unintended result of the submission process rather than editorial policy, since one of the editors has herself published extensively on women writers of the Maghreb. Because of its comparative approach, the book offers new perspectives on well-known 260 FRENCH REVIEW 89.1 Reviews 261 works while bringing younger figures to our attention, contributing interesting specifics to the amorphous reality of francophonie. Dartmouth College (NH) Mary Jean Green Loichot, Valérie. The Tropics Bite Back: Culinary Coups in Caribbean Literature. Minneapolis: UP of Minnesota, 2013. ISBN 978-0-8166-7984-3. Pp. 304. $25. Ever since Columbus’s misapprehension of Cariba, the Carib Indians’s name for themselves, as cannibal, the West has associated the Caribbean region with this tabooed violence and with “its tamed counterpart, the Caribbean itself—its land, people, and language—all reduced to delectable objects” (vii). Drawing her title, in part, from Maryse Condé’s call to resist this ontological othering of Caribbean people by“biting back,” Loichot analyzes their relationship to food as material sustenance, cultural production, and metaphor (x). Her project is informed by the multivalent meaning of the“coups”of the title. She examines culinary coups that operate as a“strike or blow” circumscribing the Caribbean subject past and present and, conversely, ones that resist the identity prescribed by...

Thus it ever was? This is how it should be?

What is it to ‘go beyond’? Perhaps only to stay a short while, bobbing on a moment in the seas of time. That staying upright — is it remaining in place, on the spot? is it being carried away briefly and then coming back without obvious loss to where we were before? staying enclosed by the inverted commas? does it make any difference other than that of the difference between one moment and the next, indistinguishable and yet not the same? Twenty years ago, or thereabouts, the Paris-based Tunisian poet, Abdelwahab Meddeb together with other North African writers who use French, visited the French Department, Queen Mary University of London. A group of students had translated portions of their poems and prose into English; the poets read them in French and the students their translations. Many of these students were Muslim, born and bred in London for the most part. Meddeb (his given name means ‘servant of The Most Generous’), after the poems had been read in both languages, told stories. He took them back to a North Africa most of them hadn’t seen, still less lived in. One of these was unforgettable as he told it: a Muslim enters at night into a monastery, to come upon a scene of feasting, of merriment. He takes part in the wild celebrations, the drinking, the singing: abandonment, no enmity. Movement beyond the line, the morning brings quiet and tiredness — he retreats into the day breaking. Meddeb didn’t say whether the society closed up again to exclude him. Is it that only at a moment of abandon does one find unity? Two young Israeli soldiers last August heard music — Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style’ — coming from a club in Hebron. They entered to find the celebrations of a wedding among young Palestinian men.

Islam and the Challenge of Civilization

Abdelwahab Meddeb’s Islam and the Challenge of Civilization offers newperspectives on and fresh associations among historical events in a way thatdraws the curtain and adjusts the view among Muslim public intellectuals.Situated within the broad scholarship of Islamic thought, it engages criticallyand creatively with various doctrinal issues that are being manipulated bysome Muslim opinion leaders to support their own bellicose positions. Theauthor reveals the linkages between Islam and other revealed faiths, especiallyduring the former’s “golden age,” which witnessed productive encounters betweentheologians and philosophers of diverse religious orientations.The book comprises six chapters in addition to a prologue, an epilogue,notes, and two appendices. In his prologue, the author argues that “violenceproduced by belief is not unique to Islam but finds virulent expression evenamong beliefs issuing from the Indian subcontinent” (p. viii) and emphasizesthe need for a “check on violence via the return to context” (p. ix). He seeksto awaken Muslims “to the fact that times have changed” (p. x) and that “theworld is a different place” (p. x), which is why “when it comes to religiousidentity” (p. x), Islam cannot continue to “perceive Christianity as if it werestill its medieval antagonist, despite modern notions of nations and peoplesthat have circumscribed the religion” (p. x). The following statement sums upthe author’s thesis: “In short, if Islam is to be cured of its current affliction, itmust get to that post-Islamic, post-religious place where Christianity and Judaismhave managed to arrive” (p. x). This sounds interesting and prompts ameticulous reader to watch out for an elaboration thereof. Unfortunately, suchan elaboration never appears ...

Abdelwahab Meddeb: A literary path towards an Islamic atheism?

This paper examines the literary and political work of Tunisian poet and theorist Abdelwahab Meddeb over the past thirty years, looking at the ways in which he consistently makes the case for an atheism that grows inevitably out of Muslim doctrine, especially where both vernacular and intellectual interpretations of this take root. Meddeb dually anchors his work within Muslim and French literary and philosophical traditions. On the one hand, he maintains that his work continues where that of philosophers from the Muslim canon was interrupted. This is at a point, Meddeb argues, that is just short of declaring an atheism derived logically from Islamic teachings. He also, however, situates his work firmly alongside that of French philosophical figures – Jean-Luc Nancy in particular. Yet despite his insistence on a dual affiliation, Meddeb’s work seems largely to be exposing Islamic structures in an unprecedented way to a post-theological mode of thinking that ultimately deviates from Islamic philosophical pr...

Abdelwahab Meddeb: A literary path towards an Islamic atheism?

Abdelwahab Meddeb: A literary path towards an Islamic atheism?

Confessions of a Sometime Opium Eater

Life can be frustrating. For others, not for me. I am thinking of “others” faced with me, the rhetor(ician). Let me explain this: so far I have lived my rhetor(ician)’s life by observing others getting caught in a state of “admiration.” Whenever I reply to the unthinking question “And what do you do?” with “I am a professor of rhetoric,” I wait for the reaction, I smile inwardly, sometimes pour myself a drink, and watch “admiration” enfold. Descartes: “Admiration is a sudden surprise of the soul that makes it focus its attention on objects that seem rare and out of the ordinary” (Les passions de l ’âme, 2:lxx, my translation). When, adding insult to injury, my interlocutor tries to get things back on an ordinary track and persists, asking “I see [do you?], you mean [no, I don’t] like [bad start for a definition] ‘communication’ [here, substitute a string of annoying approximations, as you please]?,” I don’t loosen the snare but rather tighten the noose: “No, rhetoric, just as the word says.” And I see how frustrating life can be for those who think and believe they know what rhetoric is—including that peculiar brand of unconfessed pedants: English teachers. I am at my worst, of course, when I am asked, “In French?” (they assume I teach elocution at a charm school). Indeed for Descartes “admiration” is one of the six architectonic passions. So, I make it my philosophical duty not to let my interlocutors off the hook on which they have snagged themselves. I should let go, I know, but I won’t. I want to exploit the kairos. The energy of “admiration” literally lies in “surprise” (and materially in Cartesian physiology); that is how the soul is “caught” unawares, forcing it to reset itself and its atoms, if it can. That energy (see how relentless Descartes is) is made of two components: novelty and forcefulness (“insofar as the impulse it triggers is powerful right from the start”). In sum: admiration has a knock-out effect, like a tennis backhand coming from nowhere and applied with full power right on contact, never mind the follow-through and all those courtly frills.

Anne Frank Goes East: The Algerian Civil War and the Nausea of Postcoloniality in Waciny Laredj's Balconies of the North Sea

Countering the Eurocentric view that the entire Muslim world denies the Holocaust, this paper demonstrates how Maghrebian writers have engaged in the Shoah through the local aesthetics of Sufi Islam and the blood ties of Andalusia rather than the patronizing prism of western humanism. Waciny Larej 's Balconies of the North Sea (2002) is a typical case of the transgressive Arabic literature which continues to be ignored by Western academia for various political and ideological reasons. Through the testimonial accounts of Yassine and Anne Frank, Larej instrumentalizes the Holocaust and uses the textual space of the novel as a proxy setting for the war crime tribunal thwarted by Bouteflika's decree of national amnesia. Whereas Holocaust testimonial literature is based on a crisis of truth (Shoshana Felman), the testimonial literature ensuing from the Algerian Civil War revolves around a crisis of state responsibility.

9/11 and the Affair of the Muslim Headscarf in Essays by Tahar Ben Jelloun and Abdelwahab Meddeb

Ben Jelloun's L'Islam expliqué aux enfants and Meddeb's La Maladie de l'islam, both prompted by 9/11, share the similar intent and didactic function of countering reductive representations of Islam fostered by Islamic extremists and the media, and of tracing historically the link between terrorism and the Muslim faith. Taking into account their location (Ben Jelloun and Meddeb are prominent Maghrebian intellectuals who have been residing in France, for decades), this article demonstrates that these essays do not foster a better understanding of Islam by their French readership. In particular, thay fail to present a balanced account of the issues surrounding the headscarf affair in France and contribute to the confusion between Islam and terrorism, in part because international news bears on domestic issues. In addition, this article addresses 9/11's impact on the translation of literature from the Francophone Arab world.

Picturing the Maghreb: Literature, Photography, (Re)Presentation (review)

Reviewed by: Picturing the Maghreb: Literature, Photography, (Re)Presentation Hélène Tissières Picturing the Maghreb: Literature, Photography, (Re)Presentation by Mary B. Vogl Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. 227 pp. ISBN 0-7425-1546X paper. Picturing the Maghreb is a very well-grounded literary study of contemporary French and North African writers that analyzes the use and impact of photography in their novels set in the Maghreb. Mary Vogl discusses in depth the power of photography that is known to transmit misleading information, simulating a depiction of reality: "Among the visual media, photography is one of the most powerful means of [End Page 189] representation because of its immediacy and also its supposed objectivity, the illusion of reality, and factuality that it provides the viewer [. . .]" (3). She reminds the reader of the exploitation of images by the colonizer, who most often chose to present an exotic view of North Africa, appropriating the Other to express a personal fantasy, promoting long-lasting clichés that to this day have devastating effects. She also recalls the Maghrebian cultural approach, which has been known to demonstrate a strong reticence towards images. While considering the numerous debates around the use of photography, she challenges the way writers turn to pictures, examining their positions towards such a powerful and manipulative representation. In order to do so, she refers to a wide number of recent critical studies and theoretical essays on photography (Barthes, Baudrillard, Berger, Sontag, and others) to present different observations and to retrace the signification of terms related to the camera and the taking of pictures, drawing a parallel to the terminology of conquest. Furthermore, in order to enrich the problematic she develops in her study, Vogl also considers photography books that focus on North Africa. Vogl's study is centered on a selection of novels and essays by Michel Tournier, J. M. G. Le Clézio, Tahar Ben Jelloun, and Leïla Sebbar, all of whose works are known and discussed in the West, at times even seen by critics as maintaining exotic and ambiguous views. Thus Vogl, by presenting the numerous facets of the debate and setting it in the larger context of literature, raises many fascinating questions, which do not necessarily always offer answers, but nevertheless bring us to reflect on crucial matters that engage us in reconsidering historical and cultural approaches as well as examining complex concepts that shape our culture. With regard to this latter matter, it is interesting that she has decided to turn only briefly to the Moroccan author Abdelkébir Khatibi, who has written extensively on the links between literature and visual images and who has reflected in depth on Segalen's redefinition of Exoticism, proposing elaborate thoughts on matters such as authenticity, otherness, and manipulation. Nor does she refer to the Tunisian writer Abdelwahab Meddeb, whose concepts often are seen as obscure and intricate. Both Khatibi and Meddeb have chosen to work away from dichotomies which they find dangerous (Occident/Orient; authentic/inauthentic; true/false). Focusing on views that have widely circulated in the West and molded the present political positions, Vogl has chosen to concentrate on the diverging views developed by the four authors analyzed, which closely reflect society's trends and at times are found caught in its web. She recaptures and summarizes the problematic treated with insight and sensitivity, inviting us by turning to literary texts to seriously question our interaction with images and search for ways to use visual representation in a constructive manner that breaks away from hegemonic and oppressive relations. Hélène Tissières University of Texas at Austin Copyright © 2004 The Indiana University Press

Islam and Its Discontents: An Interview with Frank Berberich

OCTOBER 99, Winter 2002, pp. 3–20. © 2002 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Frank Berberich: How can one describe, five days after the events of September 11, the situation in the Arab world? How are the New York events received? The Arab and the Islamic world seem torn, but it is clear that this action has some sympathizers; on the one hand it is certain that the majority of those opinions are opposed to a Western military reaction. On the other, one has the feeling that the manner in which Americans interpret this action ignores that these events are inscribed in a history to which it is indispensable to return. Abdelwahab Meddeb: The Islamic world is complex and multiple. Those who judged this act barbaric and condemned it without hesitation are the Westernized in the Islamic world. And they are numerous, more numerous than one would think—in quantitative terms maybe ten percent; they are Westernized in their minds and in their habits, they accept occidental modernity and have chosen it as their way of living and being. Further, there is a majority that thinks otherwise—without necessarily rejoicing, as was shown in certain Palestinian camps in Lebanon or on a street in East Jerusalem; those manifestations must have been very limited because even if such a feeling corresponds to an immediate emotional reaction, those who have a modicum of political vision very quickly realized the catastrophic scope of such images—for it is also a question of a war of images and the question of the image is central to this whole affair. But everyone thinks that this act is a response to an American foreign policy based on a partisan application of power. This opinion is not only expressed by Muslims or Arabs, I’ve also heard it developed by Europeans. If a country, a people, or a state wants to become the leader of the world, it needs to be equitable in its management. To be clear, I’d say that a choice needs to be made between an imperialist policy founded on war and an Translated by Pierre Joris

Nomadism and Transcultural Writing in the Works of Abdelwahab Meddeb

Nomadism and Transcultural Writing in the Works of Abdelwahab Meddeb Ronnie Scharfman Multitude, solitude: termes égaux et convertibles pour le poète actif et fécond. Ce que les hommes nomment amour est bien petit, bien restreint et bien faible, comparé à cette ineffable orgie, à cette sainte prostitution de l'âme qui se donne tout entière, poésie et charité, à l'imprévu qui se montre, à l'inconnu qui passe. Charles Baudelaire, "Les Foules" Où que j'aille, cette ville me hante. Abdelwahab Meddeb, Miroirs de Tunis FROM PETRA TO PARIS, from Marseilles to Mecca, from Cairo to Carthage, from Malta to Moulay Idriss, with frequent halts in the Tunis of his childhood and the Fez of his predilection, the narrator of Abdelwahab Meddeb's texts is a "walker in the city." In his autobiographical novels and essays, poems and polemics, screenplays and translations, we recognize a coherent literary project whose protagonist is a poet without borders, be they temporal, geographical, cultural or political. For the urban nomad of Meddeb's writing, the body walking through the city, moving through subjective and historical time and space and registering sensations, is the point of departure for meditations on the multiplicity of personal and cultural memories . To walk is to heighten the effects of synesthesia, associations rhetorically figured through the poetic metaphor. "Je marchais dans le dédale du matin" the poet says in the cycle of prose poems entitled Tombeau d'Ibn Arabi.1 For those familiar with Meddeb's first book, the 1979 novel Talismane, the opening line, with its jarring syntax and the identity it establishes between self and city, is unforgettable: "Me voici de retour exprimé ville à dédale."2 Similarly, several pages later, the reader discovers this wonderful neologism, "je me retrouve de plain-pied médinant" (Talismano 24). The coined verb "médiner" signifies more than just walking through the "médina," the traditional , labyrinthine section of Maghrebian cities. For Meddeb, it is a dual activity, both physical and mental, a form of meditation which is constitutive of his very writing. Like Baudelaire's "flâneur," Meddeb's wandering through the city's maze of signs is textualized as the kaleidoscope of a consciousness. To play on Meddeb's coinage, then, this essay will explore the idea of "medination," that form of contemplative wandering through cities that is generative of texts.3 My corpus of investigation will be limited, mainly, to more Vol. XLI, No. 3 105 L'Esprit Créateur recent works: the 1995 Tombeau d'Ibn Arabi; the 1999 collection of poetic travel "medinations," Aya dans les villes, which we might situate, generically, under a rubric Meddeb designates elsewhere as "entre fiction et reportage"; and, beginning in 1995, the on-going editorial project of the journal, Dédale. Throughout Meddeb's œuvre there are cities of many different types, both real and imagined, although these distinctions are, of course, porous, as the poet's consciousness and imagination know no frontiers. There are, first of all, memory cities. These include cities visited and remembered, lingered in or lived in, cities that are sites of memory, always multiple in Meddeb's reflections , and cities that stimulate memory. There are cities whose cultural layers, once discovered, once uncovered, deploy memory. Then there are cities of the literary imagination, invented sometimes, invisible, superimposed, reconstructed , dreamt, hallucinated. The overlap usually occurs in the form of a decor for a poetic vision, a synesthetic experience prompting associative "medinations " on the relationships among civilizations, from the archaic to the contemporary . And the privileged locus for these musings is the city as maze. Significantly, France, that is, the "Frenchness" of Paris, of Marseilles, even the cities of the Maghreb in their French colonial incarnations, is relegated to the background in these texts. When Paris and Marseilles are evoked in Aya dans les villes, in "Métropole bis" and "Un tombeau pour l'exil," respectively, it is to foreground them as sites of heterogeneous populations juxtaposed with each other in their multiple traditions, languages, physiognomies . But the chthonic elements of Paris in the text entitled "Métropole bis" are invisibile, as the melancholy Sufi "flâneur," lonely and disoriented, lured by the absent...