A Poetic Genealogy of North African Literature

Engaging the poetic to expand our imagination of Maghrebi literature in French Poetry, as the Moroccan writer Abdelkbir Khatibi describes it, is a form of dissymmetry that exposes readers to the unexpected, and to the possibility of a transformative encounter with the text. Drawing on literary, philosophical, theoretical, and theological texts in multiple languages and scripts, as well as on the visual arts, Thomas C. Connolly delves into the poetic works of Khatibi and six other major Maghrebi authorsJean Amrouche, Tahar Djaout, Nabile Fars, Mohammed Khar-Eddine, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Jean Snacas well as the French poet Arthur Rimbaud, to think anew about the origins and legacy of Francophone poetry in the Maghreb. Instead of turning away from the poetic when it becomes indecipherable, A Poetic Genealogy of North African Literature engages poetic texts on their own terms, allowing them to dictate the search for meaning, thereby expanding our understanding of what Maghrebi literature in French was, is, and might become.