Tensions between modernity and tradition prevail in Tunisian Salih Suwaysi’s (1871-1941) early 20th-century maqamat (rhymed prose), as they demonstrate his deeply-felt, nationalistic sentiment toward his birth city of Qayrawan. The maqamat idealize Qayrawan as a glorious Arab-Islamic city under assault by French colonial ambitions and modernization. For historians, Suwaysi’s maqamat augment our understanding of the French occupation of Tunisia, yet these writings have received little attention by scholars who have instead focused on Suwaysi’s poetry and his novel, considered Tunisia’s first. Typically analyzed by literature specialists, the maqamat examined in this paper serve a different purpose: with their autobiographical style they are examined to elucidate historical change as written by a local Tunisian author during the middle period of French rule in Tunisia. While they are an atypical source for historical writing, with careful contextualization both within the literary genre and the historical time period, they demonstrate the change over time that historians seeks in various kinds of primary sources. A gifted writer competent in many literary genres, Suwaysi had little formal education and is not considered a major figure in modern Tunisian history. His sense of connection to his home city appears throughout his maqamat and invites analysis on place and urbanism, while allowing for an appreciation of his contribution to our understanding of Tunisia’s history during the French Protectorate (1881-1956). The maqamat reflect contemporary Tunisian society and explore a range of changes resulting from the Protectorate, including modes of travel and transportation, and urban and industrial development. They also demonstrate the author’s romanticized, nostalgic view of Qayrawan and of the authenticity of the desert. His critiques are couched in the language and the influence of the 19th century’s most prominent Islamic reformers: Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad ?Abduh. The maqamat then illustrate a complex link between 19th-century Islamism and a developing Tunisian nationalism in the early 20th-century while also revealing the dichotomy between past and present evident in a variety of forms of Arabic literature. The paper will analyze Suwaysi’s life and the contents of the maqamat set against the French colonial occupation of Tunisia and within the role that indigenous literature plays in constructing national identity.

Although he is known as ‘the father of the Tunisian short story,’ Ali Du'aji made important contributions to the literary magazine al-‘alam al-adabi. These are unknown to the west and all but forgotten or overlooked by contemporary Tunisian academic literary circles. Al-‘alam al-adabi, founded in 1930 by the Tunisian novelist Zin al-‘Abdin al-Snusi, contributed to the vibrant literary culture that dominated the 1930s and 40s in the city of Tunis. The importance of shedding light on this journal and Ali Du‘aji’s work in it, lies in the fact that he was recently dismissed by the current Tunisian minister of education (on a public television program: Essaraha raha) where he described one of Du‘aji’s short stories as ‘immoral’ and suggested its removal from school textbooks. As one of the founders of the Avant-Gardist literary group Jama‘at taht al-sur (Under the Wall Café), Du‘aji lived a short life (1909-1949) and was estranged from his aristocratic milieu for the sake of living an enriched literary life. This paper explores the unknown contributions of Du‘aji to al-‘alam al-adabi and the importance of taking a look at his largely forgotten work, especially with his art being denigrated by an elected official who oversees the national education system. As the issue of Tunisian identity predominates national political debates in Tunisia and abroad today, a close look at Du‘aji’s work will show how Du‘aji – and the Tunisian avant-garde of the 30s – was concerned with the same issues we are confronted with today such as the role of traditions in society and the lack of education. Furthermore, Ali Du‘aji’s short story contributions to al-‘alam al-adabi display an effort to take literature beyond the aristocratic or traditional/moral world of ordinary people and into the unconventional world of his socially marginalized characters. He proceeds to do so with a grand sense of humor and a desire to shake the ‘socio-religious’ restrictive and overly domineering norms of Tunisian society with simple narrative techniques that convey his bohemian art and vision of life. There is no doubt that many of Du‘aji’s works have been neglected because of his unconventional writing and his personal rebellious lifestyle, which brought upon him more censure than praise when he wrote in the 30s but also today.

The question of identity, national as well as personal, is a perennial one in the modern history of the Tunisian people. Crystallized and problematized as a central issue under colonialism, the question peaked during the 1930s with the naturalization crisis and the intensification of the nationalist movement, and has continued to haunt postcolonial Tunisia, reaching a new peak in the current revolution. With a focus on the 1930s, this paper looks at how Mahmoud Aslan -- one of the few Tunisians who had opted for French naturalization under the protectorate regime and arguably the first Tunisian who wrote fiction in French -- articulated and negotiated the question of identity in his work. In 1933, he wrote a play called Entre Deux Mondes in which Europeanized Tunisian characters struggle to define themselves vis-à-vis the colonial context and the prospects of decolonization in a time of effervescent nationalism. Aslan’s fiction, tales and essays also have an autobiographical resonance and reflect the dilemmas and soul searching of the westernized elite. Aslan preached a Western-Muslim rapprochement and envisioned himself a living example of cosmopolitan hybridity and human progress, but his countrymen chose to marginalize him and to forget his work, although the modernism embraced later by his independent nation had unmistakable affinities with his views. Today, however, his views are no longer minority views and they resonate among many Tunisians in the culture wars unleashed by the revolution.

In 2011, a controversy arose in Tunisia surrounding an interview in which Moncef Ben Salem (the current Tunisian Minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research) dismissed the novelist Ali Douagi (1909-1949) and his interwar literary circle Taht Essour as a group of profligates and alcoholics who mock Islam and feed on maggots and cats. [1] Because of these comments and the mysterious circumstances under which the Nahdha Party candidate was promoted to full professor, Tunisian academics opposed his candidature to the post of Minister of Education. Inspired by this controversy, the recent debate over religion and secularism in Tunisia as well as Al Nahdha Party’s announced plan to reform Tunisian education by the “re-Arabization” and “re-Islamization” of the high school and university curriculum, this paper seeks to reexamine the portrait of Taht Essour writers and artists through the interwar satirical newspaper Al Shabab. This weekly newspaper was founded in the 1930s by Mahmoud Bayram Ettounsi, an Egyptian political exile of Tunisian ancestry who returned to live in Tunisia during the interwar period after being banned from Egypt by King Fouad and Queen Nazali. Even though Al Shabab ran for only two years, it is full of political cartoons, anecdotes and satirical articles which provide invaluable information on literary and artistic life in interwar French colonial Tunisia. While the first section of this paper sheds light on the lives of forgotten intellectuals, reporters, and politicians such as Maître Tahar Essafi, Maître Munthir Al Nooman, Beshir Forty, Abdelaziz Aroui, Zine al Abidine Essnoussi, Othman al Ka’ak, and Mohamed El Jaibi, the second examines the connections of these literary circles with the artistic and political movements existing in Tunisia, the Arab world, and Europe at the time. The third part investigates the circumstances under which Abou Kacem Chebbi came to be Tunisia’s national poet. This section unearths the lost story of a poetry tribute held on the second anniversary of Abou Kacem Chebbi’s death to which neither Chadhli Khaznadar nor Jaladdin al Naccache (the invited guest speakers and established poets at the time) showed up for political reasons. A particular emphasis will be laid in the conclusion on the social class issues and the historical ties (real or fictitious) connecting these avant-garde Tunisian writers, poets, journalists, and artists to the political movements which will emerge in postcolonial Tunisia, from the first years of independence until the 14 January 2011 Revolution.

Memmi understands why in the jails overflowing with guerilla fighters and political dissidents during the bloody Algerian War the French police and military confiscated his writings analyzing the psychology of the Colonizer and the Colonized or his semi-biographical novel, The Pillar of Salt. His writings were powerfully relevant to those in prison because like Memmi, these prisoners sought to understand the paradoxes of their Oriental culture within a European colonial state. He realized that Muslim, Berber, and Jewish Tunisians like Algerians recognized themselves in his work—namely in the portrait of the colonized. Memmi captured and exposed to the world the innermost longings, needs, and contradictions of someone whose precarious subaltern existence in French North Africa was plagued with the question of why France, the mother country, denied him or her a legitimate, equal place in French Tunisian society. However, unlike his Muslim brothers and sisters, France set up a hierarchy in order to prevent solidarity amongst its marginalized communities, albeit their shared mother tongue, Arabic. Paradoxically, the Portrait of the Colonizer is also that of himself because his situation was less abject than that of his Muslim counterparts. Also, Memmi’s challenge to Albert Camus’s estrangement to the explosive contours giving shape to a French North African radically opposed the one unilaterally negotiated at the birth of this warring twentieth century. As Memmi’s existentialist novel depicts a dystopic Mediterranean society stemming from the double alienation of colonialism and Nazism, it differs drastically from Camus’s brilliantly poetic Mediterranean utopia in Noces. Memmi, and other École d’Alger writers of non-European mother tongues, found themselves at odds with Camus’s most cherished idea of a French Mediterranean utopia. But as Memmi aptly confesses, Camus’s The Stranger has been misread by its European audience: it is not a metaphysical novel exploring existential anguish; it is the story of Camus’s foreignness to his own soil since he too is a stranger. What was the political and historical environment that allowed for Memmi and other writers he inspired to forge not only a different literary aesthetic, but also a national conscience for Tunisia’s, Morocco’s, and Algeria’s future independence? Memmi’s highly critical literary and theoretical works reflect his own anguish as he came to age between two World Wars and resisted internalizing the scorn of French society for his Jewish community during a critical moment in Tunisian history.