Quinn Mecham and Dr. Dilworth Parkinson, Humanities, Classics and Comparative Literature

I began this research project with the intention of briefly surveying all of the major literature of post-revolutionary Francophone North Africa and extracting the domestic political themes from each text. I soon realized that this was an extraordinarily difficult if not impossible task for several reasons: 1) The corpus of texts is extremely large and without adequate bibliography; 2) The corpus of texts is largely unavailable with many relevant texts out of print; 3) The political themes treated in these texts are not ordinarily accessible through brief survey because of their gothic, abstract, and deeply symbolic nature.

Because of these difficulties, I decided to narrow my study significantly by looking only at the modern literature of Tunisia, while approaching this literature through the same paradigm and hypothesis which I had envisioned in the initial study. I believed that Tunisia would make a good test case because of the brief political openness which followed the somewhat recent deposition of the country’s longtime president, Habib Bourguiba.

My hypothesis was as follows: “Nationalist enthusiasm and the excitement of building a new state is currently being replaced by political disillusionment and despair in the modern French literature of Tunisia.”

I approached this hypothesis by first trying to isolate records of all works published by Tunisian authors in recent years. With the help of several French bibliographies, I was able to create a complete bibliography of Tunisian literature for the years specifically around the time of President Bourguiba’s deposition, approximately 1986-1990. I soon focused on this time period as my primary interest because of the important political activity which took place during these years. Next, I isolated all works published in French from this time period which I felt had the potential for developing political themes. I was able to accomplish this through the use of a number of short literary abstracts published by North African literary scholars in France. I also traveled to Egypt where I spent several days in the library of the American University of Cairo perusing the Arabic literary criticism of modern Tunisian literature. Here I also obtained numerous hints of which works would be most important to my study. The largest difficulty which I encountered in my study was that of obtaining the desired texts. Surprisingly, the bookstores of Cairo have no interest in Tunisian literature and distribute almost nothing published by Tunisian authors. The libraries and research centers of Cairo also have sparse collections. Many of the texts I found unavailable in the United States as well, primarily because of short publication and distribution histories.

I was able to locate two of the most important works of political fiction from this time period, however. These texts proved to be the basis for the remainder of my work. They are both narrative fiction of novel length and are as follows: 1) Le Conclave des Pleureuses by Fawzi Mellah, 1987. 2) La Montagne du Lion by Mustapha Tlili, 1988.

I analyzed the political themes of both of these works as they relate to modern Tunisian history and found them extraordinarily rich in aspect. Based on my hypothesis, I expected them to be very politically open (because of the political freedoms which appeared in 1987), and also to demonstrate political disillusionment and despair.

To a large extent, both of these works served to confirm my initial hypothesis, but not completely in the ways which I expected. My thesis for the final report has changed as follows: Since the 1987 coup which overthrew President Bourguiba, political themes in French Tunisian literature have centered around Bourguiba’s Tunisian rule, focusing on his abuses and methods of political control.

Le Conclave des Pleureuses, the first of my two focus works, was very concerned with the recent change of power in Tunisia and could be described as a symbolic and abstract meditation on Bourguiba the man and on his long, strong-handed rule. The book contains intense discussion of his long-rumored senility and the political and human rights violations of which Bourguiba was accused in his later years. However, as the narrator of this novel concludes, he feels unable to justify the accusations against Bourguiba for lack of solid evidence and leaves the reader with the impression that the past president was a curious, tenacious, and senile leader, but not a tyrant.

La Montagne du Lion is much more critical of modern Tunisia and in a less abstract way than Le Conclave des Pleureuses. Though an intensely literary work, the accusations are everywhere present. According to Tlili and his narrator, Tunisia was too strong-armed, too tyrannical, too intent on economic development and too dependent on Europe during the thirty years of Bourguiba’s presidency. The abuses of the revolution were too great to go unaccounted for and it is literature which must tell the story.