1. Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 313; and Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 2002), 327.
2. Alan Jones, “Introduction,” in Early Arabic Poetry, Volume Two: Select Odes, ed. Jones, Alan, 1–24 (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 1996), 5.
3. “The Gospel According to John” (1:1, 3), in The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha, ed. Michael D. Coogan, Marc Z. Brettler, Carol A. Newsom, and Pheme Perkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1881.
4. John Ashbery, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” in Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975), Collected Poems 1956–1987, ed. Mark Ford (London: Carcanet, 2010), 486; Foucault, Les mots et les choses, 298; Foucault, The Order of Things, 311; quoted in James A. Steintrager and Rey Chow, “Sound Objects: An Introduction,” in Sound Objects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 9.
5. Michel Serres, Genèse (Paris: Grasset, 1982), 33; and Michel Serres, Genesis (1982), trans. Geneviève James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 13.
6. The Qurʾān, trans. M. A. S. Abdel Haleem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 14.
7. Qurʾān, 38–39.
8. Qurʾān, 85.
9. Qurʾān, 168.
10. Qurʾān, 192.
11. Qurʾān, 284.
12. Qurʾān, 305.
13. See Mohammed Arkoun, ʿAlī Ḥarb, Abdelwahab Meddeb, ʿAlī Zīʿūr, Jamal Eddine Bencheikh, Burhān Ghalyūn, ʿAbbās Bayḍūn, Ḥāzem Ṣāghīyah, Nizār al-Zīn, and Mālik Shibl, Tasāʾulāt ḥawl al-huwīyah al-ʿarabīyah (Damascus, Syria: Bidāyāt li-l-Tibāʿa wa-l-Nashr wa-l-Tawzīʿ, 2008); I am committed to using small-f french throughout as a stubborn reminder of the absence of capitalization in Arabic script—which very quickly invaded and demoted French to french in the postcolonial era—as well as an equalizing gesture against the standard capitalization of “French” vis-à-vis the inconsistencies that plague “Francophone” and “francophone”; see yasser elhariry, “f,” in “Literature and the World,” ed. Simon Gikandi, special issue, PMLA 131, no. 5 (2016): 1274–1283. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin have commented on “‘english’ literatures” and “english” as social practice in The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literatures (1989; repr., London: Routledge, 2002), 10–11, 45, 51–53. While to my knowledge there have been no similar critical efforts to decapitalize Arabic, it seems to me that the postfrancophone authors I discuss here assail the originary status and authority of Arabic in the Maghrebi literary landscape as much as they do french. Further inquiry into postfrancophone poetics may ironically reveal a lingering colonial logic of hybridity as it underlies the postfrancophone orientation. While a postfrancophone poetics successfully rehabilitates old Arabic forms as it hacks and hijacks french, it remains impervious to the Arabics that follow the pre-Islamic, early Islamic, and classical periods.
14. See the Transnational Modern Languages book series. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih speak of a minor transnationalism, while lingual porosity has been described by Steven G. Kellman in terms of translingualism: see Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, eds., Minor Transnationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Steven G. Kellman, The Translingual Imagination (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000); Jacquelin Dutton, “World Literature in French, Littérature-Monde, and the Translingual Turn,” French Studies 70, no. 3 (2016): 404–418. In francophone postcolonial studies, only Lia Brozgal and Leslie Barnes have given postfrancophonie any consideration: see Lia Brozgal, Against Autobiography: Albert Memmi and the Production of Theory (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 162; Leslie Barnes, Vietnam and the Colonial Condition of French Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 20–21. Of particular interest is Mohamed-Salah Omri’s theory of literary tarāfud or confluency between languages in the Maghreb. Drawing on critical usages of the concept of the faille (in Abdelkébir Khatibi) or fault line (in Frederic Jameson, and Franco Moretti), Omri posits that
the Maghreb compels us to take into account the multilingual dimension as a fault line of its own, one which cannot be accounted for as a translation between languages or the substitution of one by another; but as confluency/tarafud, a form of confluence and interaction of languages within the same text. (Mohamed-Salah Omri, “North Africa: An Introduction,” in A Companion to African Literatures, ed. Olakunle George [Hoboken, NJ: Wiley–Blackwell, 2021], 110)
15. Abdelwahab Meddeb, “Notes,” in Récit de l’exil occidental par Sohrawardi: traduit et commenté par Abdelwahab Meddeb, calligraphies d’Hassan Massoudy, ed. Abdelwahab Meddeb (Saint-Clément-de-Rivière, France: Fata Morgana, 1993), 22. Unattributed translations are mine. Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyá al-Suhrawardī’s text may be read in the original Arabic in Œuvres philosophiques et mystiques, vol. 1, ed. Henry Corbin (Tehran, Iran: Institut franco-iranien, 1952–1970). The first french translation, which Meddeb criticizes, may be consulted in Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyá al-Suhrawardī, L’archange empourpré: quinze traités et récits mystiques traduits du persan et de l’arabe, trans. Henry Corbin (Paris: Fayard, 1976).
16. Hoda El Shakry, The Literary Qurʾan: Narrative Ethics in the Maghreb (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020), 22.
17. Abdelfattah Kilito, “La langue du lecteur,” Je parle toutes les langues, mais en arabe (Arles, France: Actes Sud, 2013), 138–139. In contrast to Kilito’s aestheticization and ludic reversal of readerly poetics, Hafid Gafaïti argues for a nuanced, political reading of the Maghreb’s lingual battles, which have simplistically cleaved the Algerian context in particular, producing a Manichaeistic schema that pits “democratic and progressive” francophones against arabophone “barbarians linked to international Muslim fundamentalist terrorism” (Hafid Gafaïti, “The Monotheism of the Other: Language and the De/construction of National Identity in Postcolonial Algeria,” in Algeria in Others’ Languages, ed. Anne-Emmanuelle Berger [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002], 20).
18. Mildred Mortimer, “Introduction,” in Maghrebian Mosaic: A Literature in Transition, ed. Mildred Mortimer (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001), 1; and Jane Hiddleston, Writing after Postcolonialism: Francophone North African Literature in Translation (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 2.
19. René Maran, Batouala: véritable roman nègre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1921); René Maran, Batouala, trans. Adele Szold Seltzer (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1922). Maran was the first Black writer to win the Prix Goncourt, France’s coveted literary prize, which he earned for Batouala. Critical amnesia notwithstanding, the novel is nevertheless generally considered the foundational text of francophonie and a precursor to Négritude. See “The Negro Who Has Won the Goncourt Prize,” Current Opinion 72, no. 3 (1922): 356–358; Edmond Jaloux, “La vie littéraire: Le Prix Goncourt et le Prix ‘Vie heureuse,’” La Revue hebdomadaire 31, no. 1 (1922): 106–111; Léopold Sédar Senghor, “René Maran, un précurseur de la négritude,” Liberté, I: négritude et humanisme (Paris: Seuil, 1964), 407–411; Chidi Ikonné, “René Maran, 1887–1960: A Black Francophone Writer between Two Worlds,” Research in African Literatures 5, no. 1 (1974): 5–22; Chidi Ikonné, “What Is Batouala?” Journal of African Studies 3, no. 3 (1976): 373–391; Iheanachor Egonu, “Le Prix Goncourt de 1921 et la ‘Querelle de Batouala’,” Research in African Literatures 11, no. 4 (1980): 529–545; Iheanachor Egonu, “Les ‘romans de la jungle’ de René Maran,” Neophilologus 71, no. 4 (1987): 523–530; Keith Walker, Countermodernism and Francophone Culture: The Game of Slipknot (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 279; Abiola Irele, “From the French Colonial Novel to the Francophone Postcolonial Novel: René Maran as Precursor,” in French Global: A New Approach to Literary History, ed. Christie McDonald and Susan Suleiman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 282–297; Christopher Miller and Christopher Rivers, “Prize Fights: René Maran, Battling Siki, and the Triumph of the Black Man in France, 1922,” Contemporary French Civilization 36, no. 3 (2011): 219–247; Felisa V. Reynolds, “René Maran, Forgotten Father of the Francophone Novel,” Journal of the African Literature Association 7, no. 1 (2012): 55–65; Jane Hiddleston, Decolonising the Intellectual: Politics, Cultures, and Humanism at the End of the French Empire (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2014), 52; and Ibrahima Diouf, “Un véritable roman barbare? La langue française à l’écoute de la barbarie dans Batouala (1921) de René Maran,” Francofonia, no. 70 (2016), 83–99; see André Breton, “Un grand poète noir,” in Œuvres complètes, vol. 3, ed. Marguerite Bonnet, Philippe Bernier, Marie-Claire Dumas, Étienne-Alain Hubert, and José Pierre (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 400–408; André Breton, “A Great Black Poet,” in Martinique: Snake Charmer, trans. David W. Seaman, intro. Franklin Rosemont (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 84–94; Jean-Paul Sartre, “Orphée noir,” in Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française, ed. Léopold Sédar Senghor (Paris: Puf, 2011), ix–xliv. Sartre’s legacy as a postcolonialist has been discussed by Kathleen Gyssels, “Sartre postcolonial? Relire Orphée noir plus d’un demi-siècle après,” in “Esclavage moderne ou modernité de l’esclavage?” special issue, Cahier d’études africaines 179–180 (2005). Just as interesting as Breton’s view of Aimé Césaire, if not more, is Suzanne Césaire’s assessment of surrealism in “1943: le surréalisme et nous,” Le Grand camouflage: écrits de dissidence (1941–1945), ed. Daniel Maximin (Paris: Seuil, 2015), 76–83; Suzanne Césaire, “1943: Surrealism and Us,” in The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent (1941–1945), ed. Daniel Maximin, trans. Keith L. Walker (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012), 34–38; Frantz Fanon, L’an V de la révolution algérienne (Paris: Maspero, 1959); For a comparison of the lineages of the Maghrebi literary field as reconfigured by the figures of Taïa and Slimani, see yasser elhariry, “Hyphens & Hymens: francoarab Literature of the Maghreb,” in A Companion to African Literatures, ed. Olakunle George (Newark, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2021), 133–149. For a reading of Bouraoui’s depiction of Maghrebi sexuality, see Mehammed Amadeus Mack, “Uncultured Yet Seductive: The Trope of the Difficult Arab Boy,” in Sexagon: Muslims, France, and the Sexualization of National Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), 130–179. Denis Provencher’s work has been an indispensable model and guide for inquiry into the rapid developments of gender in the Maghreb, particularly in Queer Maghrebi French: Language, Temporalities, Transfiliations (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2017), and his volume, coedited with Siham Bouamer, on Abdellah Taïa’s Queer Migrations: Non-places, Affect, and Temporalities (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021), published shortly after Jean-Pierre Boule’s Abdellah Taïa, la mélancolie et le cri (Lyon, France: Presses universitaires de Lyon, 2020); Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey, 1986), 3. See also Albert Memmi, Portrait du colonisé précédé de Portrait du colonisateur (1957), pref. Jean-Paul Sartre (Paris: Gallimard, 1985); Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfeld (London: Earthscan, 2003). For an illuminating critique of how cultural practices under colonialism find an insidious afterlife in translational practices, see Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, eds., Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 1999).
20. Alison Rice, Time Signatures: Contextualizing Contemporary Francophone Autobiographical Writing from the Maghreb (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 273.
21. Salah Stétié, Le français, l’autre langue (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 2001), 15–16.
22. On the entwinement of the Islamic and francophone traditions, see Carine Bourget, Coran et tradition islamique dans la littérature maghrébine (Paris: Karthala, 2002); Sura Qadiri, Postcolonial Fiction and Sacred Scripture: Rewriting the Divine? (Oxford: Legenda, 2014); El Shakry, The Literary Qurʾan; Assia Djebar, Loin de Médine (Paris: Albin Michel, 1991); Assia Djebar, Far from Madina, trans. Dorothy S. Blair (London: Quartet Books, 1995). For a comprehensive summary of the book’s receptions, as well as an erudite analysis of the politics of its historical sources, see Hanan Elsayed, “‘Silence’ and Historical Tradition in Assia Djebar’s Loin de Médine,” Research in African Literatures 44, no. 1 (2013): 91–105. In this context, a postcolonial francophone poetics (in distinction from a postfrancophone poetics) “highlights ambivalence,” as “the voice of the text cannot be assumed straightforwardly to be that of the author” (Jane Hiddleston, “Introduction,” in Postcolonial Poetics: Genre and Form, ed. Patrick Crowley and Jane Hiddleston [Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2011], 3). “This use of multiple voices in literary works,” pursues Hiddleston in reference to Clarisse Zimra’s work, is at play in “Assia Djebar’s ‘threshold’ poetics,” for Djebar “creates indeterminacy and prevents the reader from associating the literary text with any specified authorial identity, ideology or argument” (3). Zimra has long paid attention to the plurality of voices in Djebar’s work: see “‘When the Past Answers Our Present’: Assia Djebar Talks About Loin de Médine,” Callaloo, no. 16 (1993): 116–131; “Not So Far from Medina: Assia Djebar Charts Islam’s ‘Insupportable Feminist Revolution’,” World Literature Today, no. 70 (1996): 823–834; “Still Besieged by Voices: Djebar’s Poetics of the Threshold,” Postcolonial Poetics: Genre and Form, ed. Patrick Crowley and Jane Hiddleston, 109–128 (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2011); Kenneth Harrow, Jonathan Ngaté, and Clarisse Zimra, eds., Crisscrossing Boundaries in African Literatures (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press and the African Literature Association, 1991). Ambivalence and thresholds lay the foundations for a key aspect of francophone poetics, dubbed “performative encounter” by Mireille Rosello,
a multidimensional event that creates subjects because a protocol of exchange suddenly functions as the precondition of the emergence of the encounter. New subject-positions, a new language, and a new type of engagement appear at the same time, none of the elements depending on the preexistence of the others. (France and the Maghreb: Performative Encounters [Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005], 2)
23. See Jocelyne Dakhlia, ed., Trames de langues: usages et métissages linguistiques dans l’histoire du Maghreb (Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 2004); and Claudia Esposito, Edwige Tamalet Talbayev, and Hakim Abderrezak, eds., “Le Maghreb méditerranéen: littératures et plurilinguismes,” special issue, Expressions Maghrébines 11, no. 2 (2012).
24. Edwige Tamalet Talbayev, “Abdelkébir Khatibi’s Mediterranean Idiom,” in Abdelkébir Khatibi: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism and Culture in the Maghreb and Beyond, ed. Jane Hiddleston and Khalid Lyamlahy (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2020), 92.
25. Abdelkébir Khatibi, La langue de l’autre (New York: Les Mains Secrètes, 1999), 30; quoted in Alison Rice, “Tireless Translation: Travels, Transcriptions, Tongues and the Eternal Plight of the ‘Étranger professionnel’ in the Corpus of Abdelkébir Khatibi,” Abdelkébir Khatibi: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism and Culture in the Maghreb and Beyond, ed. Jane Hiddleston and Khalid Lyamlahy, 73, 65–87 (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2020).
26. Rice, “Tireless Translation,” 74.
27. Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique générale (Paris: Payot, 2005), 40, 267; and Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin, ed. Perry Meisel and Haun Saussy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 20, 195.
28. Tamalet Talbayev, “Abdelkébir Khatibi’s Mediterranean,” 92.
29. Abdelkébir Khatibi, Amour bilingue (Montpellier, France: Fata Morgana, 1983); reprinted in Abdelkébir Khatibi, Œuvres de Abdelkébir Khatibi, I: Romans et récits (Paris: La Différence, 2008), 205–283; Abdelkébir Khatibi, Love in Two Languages, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990); and Dominique Combe, “Khatibi and Derrida: A ‘Franco-Maghrebian’ Dialogue,” trans. Jane Hiddleston, in Abdelkébir Khatibi: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism and Culture in the Maghreb and Beyond, ed. Jane Hiddleston and Khalid Lyamlahy, 201, 197–217 (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2020).
30. Abdellah Taïa, Infidèles (Paris: Seuil, 2012), 128; and Abdellah Taïa, Infidels, trans. Alison S. Strayer (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2016), 103.
31. See yasser elhariry and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, eds., “The Postlingual Turn,” special issue, SubStance 50, no. 1 (2021): 3–9.
32. The translation of the title is Pierre Joris’s, in Habib Tengour, Exile Is My Trade: A Habib Tengour Reader, ed. and trans. Pierre Joris (Boston: Black Widow Press, 2012). Indebted to Mediterranean literary traditions, Tengour’s writing is particularly engaged with Homer, and the title L’épreuve de l’arc directly references the french translation of the title of Book 21 of The Odyssey, where Odysseus bends or strings his bow before slaying Penelope’s suitors. Tengour recounts the episode in the closing pages of L’épreuve de l’arc, as well as in the section “Café Marine (Lettres)” of the poetry collection L’arc et la cicatrice [The Arc and the Scar, 1983] (Paris: La Différence, 2006), 39–55. Odysseus and the motif of the bow recur throughout the collection, and the expression “l’épreuve de l’arc” appears in L’arc et la cicatrice, 42.
33. Habib Tengour, L’épreuve de l’arc: séances 1982/1989 (Paris: Sindbad, 1990), 11.
34. Pierre Joris notes that
Tengour’s main books [. . .] are the prose narratives Sultan Galiev (1985) and L’Épreuve de l’arc (1990), a cycle started with Le Vieux du montagne (1983). Aware of the question of genre definition, he succeeded in side-stepping the French cartesian (and commercially motivated?) preference for calling any text that is, or looks like prose, a “roman,” i.e. novel, by calling his cycle a “Relation.” The choice of this term is not innocent. The French word “relation” (as does its Spanish hom*onym) names a genre: the travelogue. But this French word (and genre) is immediately ghosted by its Arabic equivalent: the riḥla. (“Introduction,” 13)
⤴In postcolonial francophone thought, the relation constitutes a poetics in its own right, codified by Édouard Glissant in Poétique de la relation (Paris: Gallimard, 1990); Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).
35. Assia Djebar, Le blanc de l’Algérie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995); Assia Djebar, Algerian White, trans. David Kelley and Marjolin de Jager (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2000); and Assia Djebar, La disparition de la langue française (Paris: Albin Michel, 2003).
36. Hiddleston, Writing after Postcolonialism, 13.
37. Kateb Yacine, Nedjma (Paris: Seuil, 1956); and Kateb Yacine, Nedjma, trans. Richard Howard, intro. Bernard Aresu (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1991).
38. Danielle Marx-Scouras, review of Charles Bonn, Kateb Yacine, “Nedjma” (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1990), Research in African Literatures 23, no. 2 (1992): 232.
39. Habib Tengour, “Héritages de Kateb?” in Dans le soulèvement, Algérie et retours: jalons: essais (Paris: La Différence, 2012), 99.
40. Habib Tengour, “Héritages de Kateb?” 101.
41. Indeed, Tengour could easily be situated in the company of Algerian new novelists like Assia Djebar, Kateb Yacine, Mohammed Dib, Rachid Boudjedra, Nabil Farès, and Yamina Mechakra, whom Valérie Orlando analyzes in The New Algerian Novel (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017).
42. A possible reference to Louis Zukofsky’s long poem “A” (New York: New Directions, 2011), which he had begun in 1928 and continued to write until the time of his death in 1978; and El Shakry, The Literary Qurʾan, 20.
43. Tengour, L’épreuve de l’arc, 66–81, 127.
44. Tengour, L’épreuve de l’arc, 54.
45. Tengour, L’épreuve de l’arc, 54; and Alfred Delvau, Dictionnaire d’érotique moderne (Basel, Switzerland: Karl Schmidt, 1864; re-edited Neuchâtel: Imprimerie de la Société des Bibliophiles Cosmopolites, 1874).
46. Tengour, L’épreuve de l’arc, 239.
47. For overviews of the qaṣīdah (plural qaṣāʾid) and discussions of early Arabic poetics, see Arthur John Arberry, The Seven Odes: The First Chapter in Arabic Literature (New York: Macmillan, 1957); Geert Jan Van Gelder, Beyond the Line: Classical Arabic Literary Critics on the Coherence and Unity of the Poem (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1982); Abdelfattah Kilito, L’auteur et ses doubles: essai sur la culture arabe classique (Paris: Seuil, 1985); Abdelfattah Kilito, The Author and His Doubles: Essays on Classical Arabic Culture, trans. Michael Cooperson, foreword by Roger Allen (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001); Adonis, Introduction to Arab Poetics, trans. Catherine Cobham (London: Saqi Books, 1990); Jaroslav Stetkevych, The Zephyrs of Najd: The Poetics of Nostalgia in the Classical Arabic Nasīb (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Poetics of Ritual (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); James Montgomery, The Vagaries of the Qasidah: The Tradition and Practice of Early Arabic Poetry (Cambridge, UK: E. J. W. Gibb Memorial, 1997); Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, The Poetics of Islamic Legitimacy: Myth, Gender, and Ceremony in the Classical Arabic Ode (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); Julie Scott Meisami, Structure and Meaning in Medieval Arabic and Persian Poetry: Orient Pearls (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003); and Geert Jan Van Gelder, ed., Classical Arabic Literature: A Library of Arabic Literature Anthology (New York: New York University Press, 2013). The muʿallaqāt (or suspended odes, the most famous of the qaṣāʾid) may be consulted in fresh translation by leading scholars of Arabic including Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych and others in The Muʿallaqāt for Millennials: Pre-Islamic Arabic Golden Odes (Al-Dhahran, Saudi Arabia: King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture, 2020). In french, Jacques Berque’s translation is among the most influential: Les dix grandes odes arabes de l’anté-islam: une nouvelle traduction des mu‘allaqât (Arles, France: Actes Sud, 1996).
48. See Jareer Abu-Haider, “Qifā nabki: The Dual Form of Address in Arabic Poetry in a New Light,” Journal of Arabic Literature 19, no. 1 (1988): 40–48.
49. Tengour, “Faire résonner les langues,” Dans le soulèvement, 132.
50. Tengour, L’arc et la cicatrice, 74; see 79–84 for variations on the aṭlāl or opening motif of the ruins and the halt.
51. The Muʿallaqāt for Millennials, 44.
52. The Muʿallaqāt for Millennials, 45.
53. Imruʾ al-Qays, Trans. Abdelwahab Meddeb, L’exil occidental (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005), 27.
54. Tengour, L’épreuve de l’arc, 38.
55. Stéphane Mallarmé, “Crise de vers,” in Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris: Gallimard, 2003), 206; and Stéphane Mallarmé, “Crisis of Verse,” in Divagations: The Author’s 1897 Arrangement together with Autobiography and Music and Letters, trans. Barbara Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007), 203; my emphasis.
56. Mallarmé, “Crise de vers,” 207; and Mallarmé, “Crisis of Verse,” 205.
57. Qurʾān 59: 22–24, 367. The list of names is reproduced bilingually, to dramatic effect, in Taïa, Infidèles, 125–126; Taïa, Infidels, 100–101.
58. Pierre Joris offers a useful outline of the literary stakes of postindependence Maghrebi cultural production in “On the Nomadic Circulation of Contemporary Poetics,” Justifying the Margins (Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing, 2009), 7–23.
59. Tengour, “Faire résonner les langues,” 133. For more information on ʿAbbāsid literature, see ʿAbbasid Belles-Lettres, ed. Julia Ashtiany, T. M. Johnstone, J. D. Latham, and R. B. Serjeant (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, Abū Tammām and the Poetics of the ʿAbbāsid Age (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 1991). On Abū Nuwās specifically, see Philip Kennedy, The Wine Song in Classical Arabic Poetry: Abū Nuwās and the Literary Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); and Philip Kennedy, Abu Nuwas: A Genius of Poetry (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005).
60. Tengour, “Faire résonner les langues,” 133. Tengour’s description of the qaṣīdah here transmutes it into a kind of earworm, as theorized by Peter Szendy in Tubes: la philosophie dans le juke-box (Paris: Minuit, 2008); Peter Szendy, Hits: Philosophy in the Jukebox, trans. Will Bishop (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). On the “creux de l’oreille” [the hollow, the crook of the ear] in Maghrebi poetry, see yasser elhariry, “Khatibi Misses the Mark,” in “North African Poetry in French,” ed. Thomas C. Connolly, special issue, Yale French Studies 137–138 (2020): 125–146.
61. Lautréamont’s centrality to the poetic revolutions of 19th- and 20th-century vanguardism and literary criticism cannot be overstated: see Julia Kristeva, La révolution du langage poétique: L’avant-garde à la fin du XIXe siècle; Lautréamont et Mallarmé (Paris: Seuil, 1974); Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). André Breton’s 1919 re-edition of Lautréamont’s Poésies I [Poems I] (1870) and Poésies II [Poems II] (1870) in the pages of the review Littérature single-handedly remapped Lautréamont within surrealism’s new constellation of poetry and poetics, and Lautréamont plays a central role in Breton’s theory of the poetic image in the first Manifeste du surréalisme [Manifesto of Surrealism] (1924): see André Breton, Manifestes du surréalisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 50; André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), 38. Tengour reprises Aimé Césaire’s discussion of Lautréamont in Discours sur le colonialisme [Discourse on Colonialism] (1950) in a different key: where Césaire was interested in a critique of colonialist–capitalist exploitation, Tengour’s interest in Lautréamont unleashes a mode of lingual reverse colonization. See Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme suivi de Discours sur la Négritude (Paris: Présence africaine, 2004), 55–58; and Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham, intro. Robin D. G. Kelly (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 65–67.
62. Tengour, L’épreuve de l’arc, 41–42.
63. Comte de Lautréamont, Les chants de Maldoror (Brussels: Albert Lacroix, 1869), 288–292; Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror (Les chants de Maldoror): Together with a Translation of Lautréamont’s Poésies, trans. Guy Wernham (New York: New Directions, 1965), 261–266. Readers of Lautréamont have long been drawn to his black apocalyptic light: see André Breton, “Préface aux Œuvres complètes de Lautréamont,” in Œuvres complètes by Comte de Lautréamont, ed. Jean-Luc Steinmetz (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 425–427; Aimé Césaire, “Isidore Ducasse, comte de Lautréamont: La poésie de Lautréamont, belle comme un décret d’expropriation,” in Œuvres complètes by Comte de Lautréamont, ed. Jean-Luc Steinmetz (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 428–433; and Francis Ponge, “Le dispositif Maldoror-Poésies,” in Méthodes (1961), Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, ed. Bernard Beugnot, Michel Collot, Gérard Farasse, Jean-Marie Gleize, Jacinthe Martel, Robert Melançon, and Bernard Veck (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 633–635.
64. Tengour, L’épreuve de l’arc, 42; my emphasis.
65. Qurʾān, 433; my emphasis.
66. Tengour, L’épreuve de l’arc, 27; my emphasis. L’épreuve de l’arc is a loud text, sated with sound, gossip, sonic pollution: see 23, 26–27, 32, 41, 62, 66, 73, 97, 101. The Algerian writer Hocine Tandjaoui offers a melomaniac’s account of the colonial soundscape in Clameur (Paris: 108 Edition, 2016); Clamor, trans. Olivia C. Harrison and Teresa Villa-Ignacio (Brooklyn, NY: Litmus Press, 2021).
67. Ziad Elmarsafy, Esoteric Islam in Modern French Thought: Massignon, Corbin, Jambet (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 82–83.
68. Qurʾān 24:35, 223; and Qurʾān 3:7, 34.
69. The textual sources on Muhammad’s night journey (isrāʾ) and ascension through the heavens (miʿrāj) may be consulted in Michael Sells, “The Mi‘raj (Sacred Cosmology and Mystical Orientation),” in Early Islamic Mysticism: Sufi, Qur’an, Mi‘raj, Poetic and Theological Writings, ed. and trans. Michael Sells (New York: Paulist Press, 1996), 47–55.
70. Suhrawardī, Œuvres philosophiques et mystiques, 289.
71. Suhrawardī, Récit de l’exil occidental, 16–17.
72. Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyá al-Suhrawardī, The Mystical and Visionary Treatises of Shihabuddin Yahya Suhrawardi, trans. W. M. Thackston Jr. (London: Octagon, 1982), 105.
73. Meddeb, “Notes,” 22.
74. Abdelwahab Meddeb, Matière des oiseaux (Saint-Clément-de-Rivière, France: Fata Morgana, 2001), 12; my emphasis. The dense nexus or poetic knot formed around ʿAṭṭār’s text is reprised and extended in Stacy Doris, Conference (Bedford, MA: Potes & Poets Press, 2000); and Gabriel Gauthier, Simurgh & Simorgh (Courbevoie, France: Théâtre Typographique, 2016).
75. Meddeb, Matière des oiseaux, 56; my emphasis.
76. Meddeb, Matière des oiseaux, 60; my emphasis.
77. Meddeb, Matière des oiseaux, 76; my emphasis.
78. Lautréamont, Les chants de Maldoror, 157–161; and Lautréamont, Maldoror, 139–144.
79. Tengour, L’épreuve de l’arc, 43; Comte de Lautréamont, Poésies I (Paris: Librairie Gabrie, 1870), 14; and Lautréamont, Maldoror, 318.
80. Lautréamont, Poésies I, 5; and Lautréamont, Maldoror, 305; and Tengour, L’épreuve de l’arc, 70.
81. Tengour, L’épreuve de l’arc, 97.
82. On Lautréamont’s parasitic mode of lyric, see yasser elhariry, “Soft and Sick, Lautréamont,” in “Poetry and Pandemic,” ed. Wai Chee Dimock, special issue, PMLA 136, no. 2 (2021): 300–309.
83. Tengour, L’arc et la cicatrice, 36.
84. Tengour, “Faire résonner les langues,” 133.
85. Tengour, L’arc et la cicatrice, 36.
86. Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, “The Muʿallaqah of al-Nābighah al-Dhubyānī: Plea of the Accused,” in The Muʿallaqāt for Millennials, 427.
87. Stetkevych, “The Muʿallaqah of al-Nābighah al-Dhubyānī,” 429.
88. Al-Nābigha al-Dhubyānī, “The Muʿallaqah of al-Nābighah al-Dhubyānī: Plea of the Accused,” in The Muʿallaqāt for Millennials, 434.
89. Al-Nābigha, “The Muʿallaqah,” 435.
90. Al-Nābigha, “The Muʿallaqah,” 440–441.
91. Al-Nābigha, “The Muʿallaqah,” 440.
92. Al-Nābigha, “The Muʿallaqah,” 441.
93. Al-Nābigha al-Dhubyānī, “Supplique,” in Les dix grandes odes arabes de l’anté-islam, trans. Jacques Berque, 75–76; my emphasis. Berque does not include the verse on the rising constellation of stars in his translation.
94. Mallarmé, “Crise de vers,” 208; and Mallarmé, “Crisis of Verse,” 205.
95. Qurʾān 1:6, 3.
96. See, among others, Khalid Lyamlahy, “Moving beyond Mobility: The Aesthetics of Exile and Becoming in Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s Légende et vie d’Agoun’chich,” Journal of North African Studies 22, no. 2 (2017): 259–282; Khaïr-Eddine, “Toward an Aesthetics of Self-Sovereignty: The Symbolic of Anti-Authoritarian Discourse in Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s Agadir,” in “Performances of Sovereignty in African Dictator-Fiction,” ed. Charlotte Baker, special issue, Research in African Literatures 49, no. 3 (2018): 131–152; Teresa Villa-Ignacio, “Postcolonial Disgust and Poetic Responsibility in Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s Nausée noire,” in “North African Poetry in French,” ed. Thomas C. Connolly, special issue, Yale French Studies 137–138 (2020): 171–189; Thomas C. Connolly, “Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine’s Secret Music,” in Sounds Senses, ed. yasser elhariry (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2021), 79–97; The southern French publisher Éditions des Lisières has been a trailblazer in this regard, preceded only by the global translation workshops organized by the Centre international de poésie Marseille between 2000 and 2016 in Damas, Beirut, Tangier, Algiers, Alexandria, and Ramallah; for example, Salah Jahine, Walid Taher, and Mathilde Chèvre, Roubaiyat: quatrains égyptiens (Marseille, France: Le port a jauni, 2015); and Nathalie Bontemps, Golan Haji, and Philippine Marquier, Mu‘allaqa: un poème suspendu (Marseille, France: Le port a jauni, 2019).
97. Lital Levy, “Accent and Silence in Literary Multilingualism: On Postarabic Poetics,” Dibur 7 (2019).
98. Louis Massignon, “Les ‘Sept Dormants’ apocalypse de l’Islam (1950),” in Opera minora, vol. 3, ed. Youakim Moubarac (Beirut, Lebanon: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1963), 104, 111, 117.
99. Qurʾān, 184–185.
100. Arthur Rimbaud, Les déserts de l’amour (1872), Œuvres complètes, ed. André Guyaux and Aurélia Cervoni (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 191; Studies of Les déserts de l’amour include André Guyaux, “Les déserts de l’amour,” in Rimbaud: strategie verbali e forme della visione, ed. Stefan Agosti, Giovanna Angeli, Massimo Colesanti, Mario Matucci, Mario Richter, Jacqueline Risset, and Lionello Sozzi (Pisa, Italy: ETS; and Geneva, Switzerland: Slatkine, 1993), 53–64; Yves Reboul, “Sur la chronologie des Déserts de l’amour,” Parade sauvage 8 (1991): 46–52; Christophe Bataillé, Les enseignements du manuscrit des Déserts de l’amour d’Arthur Rimbaud: étude codicologique, DEA (dir. Michel Murat), Université Paris IV-Sorbonne, 2003; Steve Murphy, “Ironie et mélancolie dans Les déserts de l’amour,” in Stratégies de Rimbaud (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2004), 243–259; Christophe Bataillé, “Les déserts de l’amour d’Arthur Rimbaud: codologie, généricité, textualité” (doctoral thesis, dir. Michel Murat, Université Paris IV-Sorbonne, 2010). On Rimbaud’s relationship to the Qurʾān, see Jean-Jacques Lefrère, Arthur Rimbaud (Paris: Fayard, 2001), 14. “Islamic Rimbaud” has been discussed by Salah Stétié in Rimbaud, le huitième dormant (1993), collected with Rimbaud d’Aden (2004) and published as Arthur Rimbaud (Saint-Clément-de-Rivière, France: Fata Morgana, 2006). See also Thomas C. Connolly, “Rimbaud islamique? Le vertige artificiel des «Fleurs»,” Parade Sauvage 28 (2017): 199–218.
101. Mostafa Nissabouri, “Des grottes ouvertes . . .” [Caves opened . . .], trans. Addie Leak and Pierre Joris, For an Ineffable Metrics of the Desert, ed. Guy Bennett (Los Angeles: Otis Books, 2018), 10–11, 16–17.
102. Mostafa Nissabouri, “Plus haute mémoire” [Higher Memory], For an Ineffable Metrics of the Desert, 32–33.
103. Nissabouri, “Plus haute mémoire” [Higher Memory], 32–33.
104. On the poetics of exit in modern and contemporary french verse, see Jean-Marie Gleize, Sorties (Paris: Questions Théoriques, 2009); and Christophe Hanna, Nos dispositifs poétiques (Paris: Questions Théoriques, 2010).
105. As Michel Houellebecq’s novel Soumission (Paris: Flammarion, 2015) demonstrates, France continues to be a nation haunted by the specters of colonialism, gripped by fears of the future that the colonial legacy may one day lead to as Islam continues to ascend and occupy a place of constant negotiation and renegotiation within the sphere of the republic. See Jocelyne Dakhlia, Islamicités (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2005); Réda Bensmaïa, “Islam,” in The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 266–269; See, for instance, one of the installments of the saga: Norimitsu Onishi, “The Mayor, the Teacher and a Fight over a ‘Lost Territory’ of France,” New York Times, June 8, 2021. Onishi’s full coverage of French cultural politics may be consulted on his New York Times page.
106. Richard Serrano, Against the Postcolonial: “Francophone” Writers at the Ends of French Empire (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), 175.
107. Omri, “North Africa: An Introduction,” 114; and Hiddleston, Writing after Postcolonialism, 10.
108. Tahar Bekri, Malek Haddad: L’œuvre romanesque; pour une poétique de la littérature maghrébine de langue française (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1986), 188.
109. Among the Maghrebis in this list, Khatibi and Meddeb have been the focus of a particular surge of interest: see “Le cas central d’Abdelwahab Meddeb,” in “Cultures du mysticisme,” ed. yasser elhariry, special issue, Expressions Maghrébines 16, no. 2 (2017): 93–153; Hiddleston and Lyamlahy, Abdelkébir Khatibi; Réda Bensmaïa, ed. “Abdelwahab Meddeb ou des itinéraires d’un ‘passeur de cultures’,” special issue, Expressions Maghrébines 19, no. 2 (2021); and yasser elhariry and Matt Reeck, “Abdelkébir Khatibi: Literature and Theory,” special issue, PMLA 137, no. 2 (2022).
110. Mildred Mortimer, Mouloud Mammeri: écrivain algérien (Sherbrooke, Canada: Naaman, 1982); and Mildred Mortimer, Assia Djebar (Philadelphia: Celfan, 1988).
111. Naget Khadda, ed., Écrivains maghrébins et modernité textuelle (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995). This volume was the third title to appear as part of Charles Bonn’s series with L’Harmattan, Études littéraires maghrébines, which has published twenty-three titles to date; see Brahim El Guabli, “The ‘Hidden Transcript’ of Resistance in Moroccan Tazmamart Prison Writings,” Arab Studies Journal 22, no. 1 (2014): 170–207; Brahim El Guabli, “Theorizing Intergenerational Trauma in Tazmamart Testimonial Literature and Docu-testimonies,” Middle East—Topics and Arguments 11 (2018): 120–130; Brahim El Guabli, “Narrating Tazmamart: Visceral Contestations of Morocco’s Transitional Justice and Democracy,” Journal of North African Studies 23, no. 1–2 (2018): 208–224; See Hiddleston, Writing after Postcolonialism, 3–5.
112. Mildred Mortimer, Journeys through the French African Novel (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1990), 69.
113. Hakim Abderrezak, Ex-Centric Migrations: Europe and the Maghreb in Mediterranean Cinema, Literature, and Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016); and Mortimer, “Introduction,” in Maghrebian Mosaic, 1–10.
114. Mohamed Ridha Bouguerra and Sabiha Bougerra, Histoire de la littérature du Maghreb: littérature francophone (Paris: Ellipses, 2010); and Pierre Joris and Habib Tengour, eds., Poems for the Millennium, Volume 4: The University of California Book of North African Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). We would do well to situate these efforts within the broader geographic vision proposed by the Women Writing Africa series, notably for our purposes Fatima Sadiqi, Amira Nowaira, Azza El Khloy, and Moha Ennaji, eds., Women Writing Africa: The Norther Region (New York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 2009); “Toward a ‘World-Literature’ in French,” trans. Daniel Simon, in Transnational French Studies: Postcolonialism and Littérature-Monde, ed. Alec G. Hargreaves, Charles Forsdick, and David Murphy (Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2010), 296.
115. “Pour une ‘littérature-monde’ en français,” Le Monde, March 15, 2007.
116. Emily Apter, “Afterword: The ‘World’ in World Literature,” in Transnational French Studies, 287. See also Roger Célestin, William J. Cloonan, Eliane DalMolin, and Alec G. Hargreaves, eds., “Littérature-monde: New Wave or New Hype,” special issue, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 14, no. 1 (2010).
117. Mildred Mortimer, Women Fight, Women Write: Texts on the Algerian War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2019).
118. Winifred Woodhull, Transfigurations of the Maghreb: Feminism, Decolonization, and Literatures (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1993); Françoise Lionnet, Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); and Valérie Orlando, Nomadic Voices of Exile: Feminine Identity in Francophone Literature of the Maghreb (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1999).
119. Valérie Orlando, Of Suffocated Hearts and Tortured Souls: Seeking Subjecthood through Madness in Francophone Women’s Writing of African and the Caribbean (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003).
120. Orlando, The New Algerian Novel, xii. See also Patrick Crowley and Megan MacDonald, eds., “The Contemporary Roman Maghrébin: Aesthetics, Politics, Production 2000–2015,” special issue, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 20, no. 1 (2016).
121. Thomas C. Connolly, ed., “North African Poetry in French,” special issue, Yale French Studies, no. 137–138 (2020).
