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Introduction to Tunisian Contemporary fiction
In this brief introduction to Tunisian contemporary fiction, I propose four workswhich I believe sum up the general orientation in fiction writing today.-Postmodern fiction (experimental novel)-Fiction with social and political concerns-Historical fiction 
Slaheddine Boujah
Slaheddine Boujah was born in 1956 in Sidi Farhat, a mausoleum of hismystic fifth grand father, which is built on his father’s land. Sidi Farhat is 3okilometers away from Kairouan, a town in the center of Tunisia, famous for itsIslamic monuments. He has a Doctorat d’Etat in Arabic literature. Now he is aMember of Parliament.Slaheddine Boujah writes within the experimental trend that hasflourished in Tunisia since the 1960s. This type of writing has paved the waytowards a revolution on the level of narrative techniques and content. Highlyinfluenced by the preceding generation, Boujah adopts subversive strategies of writing deliberately tampering with language, challenging the sacred andexploding taboos. He uses the stream-of-consciousness technique as a liberatingmode of narration in which the text is transformed into a fluid space free of order or any type of restraining hierarchy.
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A bold blending between opposite worlds characterizes Boujah’s writing.His novels accommodate the classic and the modern, the real and the imaginary,logic and magic. His aim is to break all types of taboos and disrupt theestablished and the official within a move to revolutionize techniques of narration. His texts deliberately disappoint the reader, or at least the reader wholooks for a story. The story disappears in his novels. It is replaced by a Chinese box-like text in which fragmented stories invite readers to participate in thegame of creativity.
Mudawanat al I’tirafat wa al-Asrar 
(The Book of confessions and secrets, 1985)was Boujah’s first published work which brought him real literary recognition.He was twenty-nine years old, then. He describes it as “a beginningcharacterized by freedom, unrestraint and the naivety of youth” (“Hiwar”, 28).The novel narrates the story of Abu ‘Umran Sa’id, a young man who becomesinvisible. He is able to see everything and everybody without being seen. Whenhe wrote the book, Boujah had Kafka’s
The Metamorphosis
in mind. Kafka’snarrative deals with a young man who wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a cockroach. Though different in plot, the two stories share thesame spirit: the human being’s putrefaction amid the others’ egoism andignorance. Like Kafka’s protagonist, who is shunned by his family and diesalone, Boujah’s protagonist becomes transparent, alienated from ordinary life.The fate of the human being is to be ostracized, muted and buried in oblivion.Commenting on his first novel, Boujah states: “I came to think that I became,with my Tunisian and Arab generation, inexistent gelatinous beings” (“Hiwar”,28).Boujah’s (The Book of confession) deals with a generation characterized by loss and lack of faith. His characters confess their religious doubts and political anxieties as they believe no longer in homeland. They live a spiritualand existential crisis with a firm certainty that they do not belong to their age.
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That is why they are portrayed as alienated individuals in a perpetual search for identity. They vacillate between a dead past and a dubious present.This oscillation is reflected on the shape of the novel. Boujah tries torevive an old Arabic form by dividing the pages of the narratives into a body of the text (matn) and a margin or footnotes (hashya). The events are narrated intwo different ways. The novel, which was acclaimed as one of the mostimportant texts of the mid 1980s, mainly in the Arab critical world, raisesserious questions concerning literary genres and techniques of writing.
Mudawanat al-I’tirafat 
is considered as a new way of writing based on atraditional basis.The Tunisian critical scene, however, received the novel rather cautiouslyand somewhat coldly. Many years later, Boujah himself confesses that hisexaggerated focus on language and his fixation on embellishing the style have ina way marred his book. He declares that his “critical knowledge has morespoiled his fiction writing than it has benefited it.” He calls The Book of Confessions “a laboratory novel” in which he experimentally mixed hisknowledge of classic Arabic texts and contemporary European schools of criticism. The outcome, he states, “lacks basic stylistic smoothness necessary torender it palatable for the Tunisian readers’ taste” (
 Al-Zaman
)Boujah goes on experimenting with writing in his second novel,
 Al-Taj waal-Khinjar wa al-Jasad 
(The Crown, the sword and the body, 1992). It is anarrative of memory in which he tries to write the history of his mystic ancestor,Sidi Farhat al-‘Amiri. The writer adopts the grandiloquent style of epicalnarratives. “I will sculpt you O homeland history”, the narrator states, “andmake of you the epic of the coming generations” (37).The narrative also attempts to revive some aspects of the political life inTunisia during the Husseini reign in the 18
th
Century. Sidi Farhat, “a rebelliousSufi, a dervish and a restless traveler” (14) managed to rally his followers anddisciples against the despotic regime of the King. The mystic rebellious man
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