Voices of the Marginalized in Tunisian Narrative Author(s): Sonia S'hiri Reviewed work(s): Source: Research in African Literatures, Vol.

28, No. 3, Arabic Writing in Africa (Autumn, 1997), pp. 56-72 Published by: Indiana University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3820992 . Accessed: 24/06/2012 05:34
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Voices of the Marginalized in Tunisian Narrative

Sonia S'hiri

This paper proposes to introduce a Tunisian writer whose work falls on the periphery of mainstream Arabic-language writing in Tunisia. Hasouna Mosbahi. The peripheral status of his work springs from adopting thematic and stylistic choices that distinguish him within the contemporary Tunisian context. Mosbahi has a taste for stretching if not challenging and subverting the Established, whether it is in literature, politics, or society. The language and the narrative techniques he uses work in harmony with the topics he addresses. He thus mixes genres, registers, varieties of the Arabic language to fit the lives of the different groups of Tunisians he portrays. His work is highly intertextual, allowing the voices of marginal and marginalized individuals and groups in Tunisian society to be raised. These range from the wise and mad peasant folk of Kairouan to a generation of wretched oppressed Tunis "intellectuals." The focus in his work is shifted away from the single-voiced, idealized discourse of the Establishment to the heteroglossic reality of the country. It is cast in order to account for the forgotten, alienated, and stigmatized elements and their language. The focus is turned towards the celebration and mourning of all the mad antiheroes who have gone silent or have ceased to exist under pressures from the center. Despite his successful reception from readers, the writer himself has been subject to institutionalized processes of silencing and marginalization through exclusion from the official critical and/or publication machine. As Jean Fontaine rightly pointed out, "Tunisian authors are mainly published in newspapers and magazines; very few enjoy the privilege of having had entire books published; furthermore, a network of relationships exists in the journalistic sphere, and Tunisian writers are obliged to cope with it if they desire to achieve recognition as writers" ("Arabic-Language"183). The determination of this writer to continue addressing the taboo, "unimportant," and "offensive" subjects that populate his work reveals his truthful preoccupation with negotiating a say in the sociopolitical environment of his country, through his writing. The comments and statements he offers in his literary writing strive to undermine and question an infinite number of received ideas pertaining to religion, literary genres, the Arabic language, sexuality, gender relations, children, and regionalism, to name only a few. Before examining Mosbahi's works in more detail, a brief look at the development of Tunisian narrative writing is in order.

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As is often the case with other Arabic literatures, Tunisian narrative fiction emerged and developed mainly during this century, drawing both on its Arabic heritage and on the European heritage. In Tunisia, the European influence was mainly French. Exposure to the colonizers' culture, as Ezzedine Madani points out (11-12), led many of the local intellectuals and artists, who belonged to the reform movement that was flourishing at the turn of the century, to adopt the novel as a new medium of expression. Their choice, he argues, was aesthetic as much as it was practical. It was aesthetic because the novel was not as rigid as Arabic classical poetry and more creative than essays on literature. It therefore allowed for artistic and intellectual expression and moral advice on the most trivial of daily issues, unlike the other genres available to them. On the practical side, the reformers acknowledged, first, the need to be versed in the oppressor's language and culture in order to be able to counter it properly. Second, they felt the need to find an appropriate artistic medium of expression that reached as many of their compatriots as possible in order to warn and educate them against personal and social ills and rally them against the French colonial powers (Madani 12). Hence, the year 1906 witnessed the publication, in instalments, in the journal Khairallah,of the first Tunisian novel, by Salah Souissi el-Kairawani. The main goal of the generation of writers that followed was to establish the didactic moralistic narrative. From the thirties till the fifties, a second generation of writers developed. This led to the sophistication in subject and form in the novel and the short story epitomized by Ali Douaji's realist writing and Mahmoud Messadi's "existential reading of the [Tunisian-Arab] heritage" where he blends together "metaphysicalanxiety, literary commitment and linguistic brilliance" (Fontaine, Histoire187). Since independence in 1956, Tunisian literature has seen a progression that corresponded with different historical events marking the changes in the country. It moved from patriotic, to realist, to avant-garde writing, reaching the eighties with a deep disillusionment with the political, social, and economic situation in the country (see Fontaine, Littrature, and "Arabic-Language"187-89). On the other hand, attempts at imposing a generic typology on the Tunisian narrative dividing it into novel, novella, story (Hikaya) and short story has proved difficult, as Moustapha el-Kilani points out. Definitions of these genres, in his view, were too vague, inadequate, or foreign, and therefore inapplicable to the local literature. The narratives they attempted to classify often resisted rigid generic boundaries. They instead reflected a distinctive Tunisian character that feeds on a combination of an awareness of reality, reliance on collective memory, and the oral heritage (Fontaine, Litterature 64). Tunisian writers in the nineties have slightly more opportunities to publish their works as books because of the increase in the number of publishing houses both in their country and abroad that are willing to take their work on board. At the expense of being extremely conclusive, I will mention only four works from this period. First, Aroussiya Nalouti's Tamass (Mutual contact) (1995), which perceptively and poignantly explores the mother-daughter and mother-son relationships and gender relationships in

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modern Tunisia. Second, Amal Mokhtar's Nakhabual- Hayat (A toast to life) (1993), which exhibits a woman's psychology as she escapes from a lover to a trip to Germany where, despite her lack of resources, she indulges in a number of atavistic existential adventures in her search for herself. Taboo subjects is what her life is made of. Third, Hasan Ben Othmane's short story collections Lafawqa al-'ardila tahtaha (Neither above the ground nor underneath it) (1991) and his 'Abbas yafqidu al-sawab(Abbas loses his reacensored from 1987 until 1991 for "insulting political figures." Both son), books are no less than carnival in full swing. Both launch a fierce attack on social, political, and religious problems, but all in exquisite irony and humor. Fourth, Fadhila Chabbi's Al-'Ismwa al-hadid (The name and decadence) (1992), which, yet again, as with her poetry collections, was published at the author's own expense. This book, consisting of an explosion of ideas, feelings, and delirious words, decomposes patriarchy and its allies. It celebrates woman the goddess and the Arabic language in a "novel"that is hardly separable from the poetic language of which it is constructed. Mosbahi, who now lives in Germany, first published two short story collections and then a novel Hikayatjunun ibnat 'ammihaniyya (The story of how my cousin Henia went mad), which was first published in Tunis in 1985, reappeared in Paris with additions in 1995 and was translated to German. Al-Sulahfat(The turtle) appeared also in Paris for the first time in 1995. His latest work, a novel, Halwasat tarshish (Hallucinations of Tarshish), appeared in Morocco at the end of 1995. The world Mosbahi creates in these narratives is effectively devoted to the lives of marginalized individuals and groups in Tunisian society. He not only depicts fools, mad people, village saints, people disadvantaged because of their physical disabilities and the like, his narratives also deal with the perfectly "wise" and "intelligent" who are marginalized nonetheless because they are "intellectuals" at a time when oppression and censorship make the law of the land or simply because they happen to belong to a group (country people) that is deemed peripheral both socially and politically in the country. To best introduce Mosbahi's work, I would like to relate an incident that reveals one of the basic pillars of what makes good writing in his opinion. About a decade and a half ago, when he was still living in Tunisia, he attended one of the literary evenings organized in one of the cultural centers of the capital. Upon listening to one of the poets recite yet another poem about Beirut, he reportedly addressed the poet, saying, "How on earth can someone coming fromJendouba [one of the most destitute parts of Tunisia at the time] stand up and carry on telling us about Beirut?" Needless to say, this exasperated comment was not in any way meant to undermine the importance of the transgressions and desecration Beirut and its inhabitants were suffering at the hands of various groups that Tunisians would also consider as "enemies." Nor was it meant to ignore the symbolic nature Beirut had acquired not only at the Arab level but for a generation of Tunisian writers and poets who were witnessing violence and bloodshed in their own country, against their own people (Fontaine,

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"Arabic-Language"189). What this comment meant to do, mainly, was to refer the poet back to his own reality, what he knows best, in order to address it with the honesty and courage it deserves. This is what Mosbahi does both in his short stories and in his novel. He does not pretend to know anything other than what constitutes the ingredients of the different stages of his life and that of the immediate group with whom he identifies. The urgency for him resides in primarily expressing interactions anchored in his own environment. What follows will provide brief synopses of the three different works and identify some of their most salient stylistic, generic, and thematic features, with particular emphasis on The Story of How My Cousin Henia WentMad. Mosbahi is a good example of generic evasiveness. Hallucinations of Tarshish depicts the hopes, struggles, and annihilation of a generation of Tunisian artists and thinkers or "intellectuals" who, when they failed to commit suicide, managed to survive self-delusion or, seeking a life in exile, simply had to give in to the political and social disillusionment that chased them into their lonely middle age. "Tarshish"in the title was the ancient name of Tunis, as the quotation in the epigraph explains. It was a city renowned for standing up against rulers who strove to subjugate it and perpetrate fear among its inhabitants. That may be the reason, perhaps, why it is described as a city that possesses none of the companion-like, friendly, and sociable atmosphere promised in the Arabic root of its name, "Tu'nis." Without much further recurrence to allegory or symbolism, the narrative unfolds a bitter criticism and re-creation of the oppressive atmosphere that reigned over the country during the last decade of rule of the "old dictator,"former President Bourguiba. The narrator of the novel is a Tunisian man who, after spending ten years abroad without one single time trying to get in touch with his family and friends, decides to go back for a visit. He also decides to rediscover his country from his tourist hotel in one of the suburbs of Tunis, instead of staying with his friends or family. The terror he feels is paralyzing the country finally infiltrates his soul and is amplified by the news of the suicide of one of his old circle's liveliest poets and companions. The despair of another old companion of his and his total desensitization to human suffering as a result of the endless shocks faced by a country turned into a police state are vividly conveyed in the long monologue in which his friend engages. Evoking Zeinab, another one of their former companions and the center of attention of all of the males in the circle, his friend says: "... [W]here can I find you dear Zeinab so that I can complain to you about the sorrows of my defeated generation, my generation which loved you when you used to ululate amidst the militia clubs and tear-gas bombs. Everything has turned into rubble now. We were living a happy dream and woke up to find ourselves in one of the sad barracks thrown into the desert. A barrack surrounded by a high fortress in concrete on which stand heavily armed soldiers.

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One movement and you die! They screamed at anyone who considered stepping out of line." (95)1 The short stories of The Turtlealternate between retrospective narration of a past as a child or a young man in Tunisia and recounting a present in Europe and Munich in particular. Deep feelings of loneliness, loss, and alienation emanate from the stories in connection with expatriate life and return to an unrecognizable home country. Furthermore, political and social comments are formulated. A particularly captivating story that many a child in the Arab world may identify with is "The Turtle," after which the collection is named. It depicts the endless process it took a child before he was recognized as a respectable and valuable human being by the world of adults, especially his parents. It describes the alarming amount of physical and moral humiliation and abuse he had to endure in the process. TheStoryof How My CousinHenia WentMad belongs to a category of its own at the generic level, the linguistic stylistic level, and the content level. At the level of content, TheStoryof How My CousinHenia Went Mad stands as a celebration and as an insider's depiction of Bedouin life or country life in Tunisia ("Bedouin" is used here in the sense of peasant, non-urban dwellers). This is a way of life that is now rapidly going extinct and that has long stood on the periphery of the highly centralized system dominating Tunisia. The inhabitants of the countryside represented a high proportion of the population (around 55 percent). This should come as no surprise in a country whose economy relies primarily on agriculture. In Tunisia, however, country people are often referred to as 'jbali," "'arbi,"or "'rubi" and "bidwi,"depending on the region they come from, and stand in contrast with "baldi,"or city dweller. Needless to say, all these designations have pejorative connotations in a country in which urbanization is equated with civilization and anything else with ignorance, naivete, and savagery-a view that may be traced back at least to the fourteenthcentury writings of the Tunisian historian-sociologist Ibn Khaldoun. This view was perpetrated further in the sixties and seventies through the various media's stereotypical misrepresentations of country folk and their stigmatized clothes, manners, and language. This city-centered stance is not only questioned but effectively disproved by Mosbahi, who grew up in such an environment and spoke its stigmatized language. Far from a romantic or an idealized representation of the people, his stories strive to reflect as close an approximation as possible of the way he pictured the existence of his people and their own perceptions of the world as he remembers them from his childhood days. He goes in his historiographic endeavors to the extent of reproducing the real names of places and people in his narratives. He quotes directly form their oral literature, both sung and told, adopting their own idioms and manners of speech and imitating their narration techniques in his own narratives. He manages to capture their imaginative gifts by recasting them in his own imaginative rearrangement of their world. Although the book covers of the three works classify them into two short-story collections and a novel, their generic boundaries are only

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for superficially clear-cut. Hallucinationsof Tarshish, instance, first starts off as a narrative with temporal and spatial references and a progression in its events. Two-thirds of the way through, however, it turns into a consecutive collection of intimations, dreams, quotations, and stories whose only link is that they come from the diary of the friend of the narrator who has committed suicide. The hallucinations promised in the title seem to take over the story line. They scatter it into the infinite narrative whose main purpose is to give glimpses of the intricacies of life in Tarshish. In the case of TheStoryof How My CousinHenia WentMad, the generic boundaries are blurred from the outset within the title itself, thus setting the tone for the other stories in the collection. The stories in The Turtle follow the same pattern overall. A quick glimpse at the composition of the title "The Story of How My Cousin Henia Went Mad" reveals three things. First, that the short story is in fact a Hikaya, that is, a tale belonging to the oral tradition genre. The narrative techniques utilized positively confirm this orientation. For instance, superstition, the supernatural, and legends occupy a key position in the development and turns in the plot, as much as they do in people's interpretations of their fates. A generic link may be established here with the magic realist writings of South American writers like Isabel Allende or Gabriel Garcia Marquez. A more immediate link can be sought, however, with the local tradition of storytelling that nourished the imagination of centuries of the different inhabitants of the land. The region described in the stories is particularly fertile in the legends of the Bani Hilal tribes that swept over the country from the east a few centuries ago. The stories themselves, as will be demonstrated later in this essay, explore the power that storytelling bestows on its narrator by virtue of the grip it has on the imagination of the listeners. Second, the title shows that the story is about the narrator's cousin, which may suggest a realist, even autobiographical touch to it. Almost all the stories are in fact anchored in real time and space. The time tends to be the decades surrounding the date of independence, that is, from the fifties till the seventies. The space is Tunis, Munich, but mainly the harsh countryside of Kairouan in Tunisia and the mountains surrounding it. Third, the story is about how the cousin went mad. This suggests that the narrator thinks that the story line, the process of madness, is worth the readers' attention. For in telling a story, a balance needs to be struck between the point that its teller explicitly or implicitly tries to make with it and the need to make it appropriate, nongratuitous, and worth the receiver's attention. To achieve this purpose, a "narrative should be nonobvious, and worth telling," says the narratologist Gerald Prince. It "should represent, or illustrate, or explain, something which is unusual, problematic, something which is (made) relevant for and matters to its receiver .. ." (159). Sociolinguist William Labov, in his study of natural narrative among black adolescents in New York, points out: There are many ways to tell the same story, to make very different points, or to make no point at all. Pointless stories are met (in English) with the withering rejoinder, "So what?" Every good

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narrator is continually warding off this question; when his narrative is over, it should be unthinkable for a bystander to say "So what?" Instead the appropriate remark would be "He did?" or similar means of registering the reportable character of the events of the narrative. (366) The narrator in "The Story of How My Cousin Henia Went Mad" obviously believes the story a narrative worth transmitting. That it is about a woman who is leaving her position at the center of her obscure microsociety as the model, resilient daughter, wife, and mother for the background, peripheral status of the rebellious, mad woman who roams the village streets seems to be the very point of the story. Almost all of Mosbahi's stories and his novel take it upon themselves to present stories about individuals and groups who do not belong to the center. Furthermore, the storytellers in them are all aware of the power of storytelling grants them both over the individuals and characters in their stories and over their audience. In a mainly illiterate, pre-television, even pre-radio society, the villagers' need to keep up-to-date with the lives of other members of the community and escape their harsh reality is satisfied by storytelling. Exchanging and making up personal narratives is the basis of "gossip"and the phatic communion conversations (or talking for the sake of talking) that are crucial to the organization and unity of the community. Storytelling, where imagination and reality merge, drawing upon the resources available from the legends, collective memory, and individual memory of the storytellers plays a role in maintaining the identity of the group, but mainly keeps it entertained. This situation puts storytellers in an ambivalent position towards the listeners-on the one hand, needing their recognition by arousing their interest and then manipulating that recognition to exert power over them. Storytelling skills seem, for instance, to enhance the sex appeal of the professional storyteller among the women and owe him a reception reserved for distinguished guests among the men (Hulmu yawmin min 'ayyami al-sayfi 'A dream on a summer day'). A deaf and mute character in Hal 'ataka Hadithu qaryatmim (Have you heard the gossip of Village M?) is in possession of 'juicy" details about the affair, monopolizing the gossip of the village, between a married woman and the village chief ('umda). Mainly lonely and despised by his people because of his disabilities, he fantasizes about the power and advantages that they would bestow on him were he able to speak and tell them about what he saw through the gap in the door. He sees himself the center of attention as they surround him and say, "Tell us the story and we will give you whatever you want." This may range from a cigarette to winning respect in the village and marrying all its young women if he is skillful in manipulating the disclosure of information. This strategy cost another character his life in Jarimafi qaryatkaf (A crime in Village K). After he succeeded in gripping the attention of a group of young men about a story in which he supposedly slept with the inaccessible daughter of one of the village notables, they begged him to tell them how

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he did it even though they believed it to be a lie. The audience gradually grew frustrated as he withheld the most important information from them, the resolution of the story, for longer than they could bear. One of them hit him on the head and he died. Storytelling may thus require an inside knowledge of what tickles the imaginations of the audience, but failure to deliver can be disastrous. This is what distinguishes good storytellers from amateurs and unaccomplished ones in the stories. Confidence in the ability to captivate audiences by starting a story they consider worth their while has to be matched with a feeling of responsibility towards them. It even becomes the audience's right to solicit the story from the teller anytime they wish to hear it. Henia's small boy in "The Story of How My Cousin Henia Went Mad," who told of how his mother mistook him for a turkey and hit him on the head with her weaver, was stopped for weeks by the villagers who enjoyed laughing at the incident. After he got tired of telling it again and again, he resisted but was eventually persuaded by his audiences and even laughed with them. Often only one step away from these storytellers, Mosbahi's narrator chooses topics that are either taboo or are considered insignificant because they are related to a socially marginalized group. What follows considers some of these topics and the Tunisian character of the language in which they are depicted. Mosbahi's stories, as pointed out above, are about marginalized individuals and groups in Tunisian society. Fools and "weirdos," physically or mentally disabled people, women, children, and the poor figure intensively in all his stories about the country folk of Kairouan. The focus on peasant life in itself, though, signals a willingness to highlight that which is best kept quiet about in a society that values urbanization and "modernity." Mosbahi thus deliberately disproves in his stories the two contradictory stereotypical views that urban-center dwellers have of the peasant way of life. First, he portrays the country folk so as to bring out their humanity. He tries to discard the stereotype of the brutish, ignorant, and unsophisticated Bedouin that prevails in cities (and which Bedouins themselves have internalized in their perception of themselves). Bedouins thus acquire individual faces and become "heroes" worth reading about. Readers are acquainted with their aspirations, fears, and horizons. Within the space of the narratives, their "strange" names, manners, and perceptions of the world are normalized. They become the standard. Second, Mosbahi demystifies the romanticized picture that draws Bedouins in harmony and at peace with nature. He instead emphasizes the often forgotten or disregarded difficulties they encounter because of the harshness and hostility of their land. He does not hesitate to point out the shortcomings of the arid land and the barrenness of the mountains. Cruelty to humans seems the main objective of nature in most of the stories. Fear of drought and death is a constant feature of their lives. They are portrayed in a direct and continuous struggle with the elements, whether they are heat, wind, or cold. The immediate impact, when not paid for in human lives, is felt in the divisions that afflict family life and its structure. Fathers start migrating to

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cities and whole families go north at harvest time to pick up machines' leftovers. Children are turned into laborers on these occasions, some paying with their lives for some ears of wheat ("'Atash"[thirst]). Wives become alienated from their migrant husbands when they return ill, thin, tired, and smelling of "concrete, rust, and mazut" ("Nejma"). Issues related to sexuality, gender relations, children-adult relations, and artistic expression are explored in the stories as a means to ward off the dehumanizing regionalist stereotypes. Like other characters, women are described in terms of physical appearance (height, disabilities, features), but more with a sexual focus: hips, age, beauty, seductive abilities, or lack of them. The beauty criteria seem to favor tall women but also women who know how to "walkslowly and gracefully" on their way back from the spring. Being stocky with disheveled hair and running in the streets with men's boots (as the crazy characters end up doing) are signs of the loss of femininity and therefore of sexual appeal. Women are also described in terms of marital status (widow, spinand married woman). Their sexuality is ster, unmarried girl, or "Sabiyya," the center of the community's concerns. It can turn into a serious threat to the stability of the village if not harnessed through marriage, especially in the case of widows. Gossip invariably flourishes as soon as a woman resists pressure to marry. It also flourishes when her suitor or husband is not deemed worthy of her sexually. In "The Story of How My Cousin Henia Went Mad," the whole village showed indignation and even boycotted the wedding in protest against the choice of husband for the beautiful Henia. That she had agreed to the marriage came as a shock to the community who were expecting her screams of protest and even foresaw her running away.They could not understand why a father would agree to marry a daughter like her to his laborer, Muhammed "the rat."There was no doubt in their mind as to his deficient virility.He was too ugly, dirty, and small to satisfy her sexually. When she rejected him many years later, one of her younger cousins commented that her realization came too late. Despite this apparent freedom of expression when it comes to matchmaking, women's challenge of their menfolk remains restricted. Freedom from men's authority is, in fact, one of the signs of the end of the world, as an old woman points out to a group of girls, quoting the village saint in "HaveYou Heard the Gossip in Village M?"In the stories, the only way that women can free themselves totally of men is to go mad. That is the ultimate form of protest. To succeed in this, women have, first of all, to appropriate parts of public space that have not normally been allocated to them. Then they acquire manly characteristics in dress and manner. This perhaps helps them get around more freely and avoid becoming targets of sexual attacks. It paradoxically protects, in the process, the honor of the men they may have protested against in the first place. On the other hand, it is perhaps the only way they survive the fatal fate that normally awaits women who declare their freedom and want to keep their femininity at the same time. Sex and flirtation are thus high on the agenda of both men and women in these communities. Contact between the sexes, as is the custom in places

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where women's role is extended to matters outside the home, is possible and even tacitly regulated. At work, picking up wheat during harvest time, bringing water from the spring, or washing in the river are common situations for encounters of a sexual or romantic nature. Unlike in cities in Tunisia where women wore the traditional white veil to go out, country women never did. They wore the same clothes in and outside the home. Across the whole of North Africa (from Libya to Morocco), this consisted of a large piece of cloth (called malya,or Hrem,in Tunisia) that women held together at the shoulders with silver, gold, or iron jewelry, and tightened around the waist with a cloth belt fixed to another piece of jewelry. The color of the malyaand the shape and metal of the jewelry distinguished, and still do, the different tribes to which the women belonged, as well as their social class. Women's head covers and thejewelry that went with them were equally regulated by the conventions of the community. The malya and the worlds where it flourished that Mosbahi describes in these stories have been severely eroded by the onslaught of "modernity."The malyawas the first thing to go when women declared war on tradition. Dancing together at weddings and other festivities is allowed until puberty and love stories emerging on such public occasions are not only accepted but can be cherished by the community (as in "Al-Bi'r"[The well]). Singing, on the other hand, is everyone's right. Both men and women use it to express their innermost feelings and preoccupations whenever they feel the need to do so. Women, whose voices may be restricted otherwise, find a socially acceptable outlet in this form of artistic expression. Because desegregation between the sexes is not complete, women can use singing aloud in the river, for instance, or at weddings to cut across space and reach the men. This may cause them problems with their male relatives who try to stop them publicizing their feelings and voices (especially when their voices are beautiful). Many of the stories contain extracts of verses from this poetic tradition that relies purely on the voice of the singer. This genre that was typical only of country singing has lost its popularity as the taste of the younger generation has shifted in favor of the dominant urban genres. In an article on the status of women in the Arabic short story, Roger Allan says, "In short stories dealing with marriage and the family, children are frequently present, although their presence is often implicit. Stories that focus on children tend to be about them and their world, rather than on their role within the larger family structure. Where children do seem to be a factor is when they are the cause of a problem" (82). I would like to argue that this statement is only partially true of the representation of children in Mosbahi's work. It is a fact that children constitute the background noise in the villages described and are often mentioned as part of the landscape, usually together with noises made by animals and shepherds, for instance. Four stories in the two collections, however, are totally devoted to dealing with children's interactions with their parents and other members of the family. The first two stories of TheStoryof How My CousinHenia Went Mad relate the loss of a brother ("'Atash" [Thirst]) and that of a son ("Al-Bi'r"

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[The well]). The narrator and focalizer in "Thirst"are concentrated in the sister. She sees her dream of success in pleasing her mother by collecting wheat spikes to feed the family ironically shattered by the tragic death of her younger brother on the way home from the fields. Ignoring her warnings, he drank while too thirstyand hot, and died. The monologue in which she engages reveals that her brother, who has reached high school, is the hope and pride of his family. He will save them from their poverty by taking them with him to town when he grows up. The privileges that her mother reserves for him infuriate her, though, and she dreams about going to school as well and learning how to think. In "The Well," the young man who dies by falling in the village well is also the hope and pride of his family. He is mourned by his father, the girl he loved, the village saint-fool, and by everyone who loved his songs, stories, and stunts. After introducing the event, the narrator reports its devastating effect on the family and community by alternating focalizations between a number of his mourners and/or reporting their thoughts and words. In The Turtle,"Shahwatal'ain" (The eye birthmark), explores the way in which a man is pursued in his dreams by the superstition that imbued his childhood imagination. Terrorized by other children about the deadly significance of his eye birthmark, he takes a while to recover from his illness and identity crisis despite his mother's reassurances and her fierce reaction against the other children. The depiction of this psychological scar is only matched by the description of the amount of physical and psychological abuse that the child in "The Turtle" receives from the adult community and his older sister alike. In a poignant testimony that is only too common in the Arab world, the narrator says, "They used to beat me up, all of them. My father, my mother, my sister Baya, my uncles, my aunts. Even distant relatives had their share .... All of them used to beat me up. My father did that almost every morning. Sometimes, he used to tie my hands and feet and throw me in the barn all day or all night without food or drink. When I was awayfrom him, he used to strike me with his stick in exactly the same way he struck obstinate or agitated animals" (17-18). The narrator further reveals excruciatingly long lists of insults and curses that he used to receive as a child. In an environment where life stands stern and hostile in people's faces, cruelty prevails at the expenses of anyone who is weak or different in any way from the rest of the community. Children seem to be the first to suffer until they are officially declared grownups. Most of them carry nicknames like adults identifying their characteristics, physical or behavioral, and struggle to coexist for most if not all of their lives, sharing the same resources. The primary characteristic of the language and the overall style of Mosbahi's writing is its simplicity and unpretentious nature. Its second characteristic is its "Tunisianness." It is of course difficult to see how the language of the narratives can be Tunisian when apart from the quoted sung poetry reported verbatim (in the Bedouin variety), the writer does not resort to the colloquial variety even in dialogues. On the surface, he preserves the diglossic distinction characteristic of Arabic between the "low" spoken variety and the "fusha,"the "high" written one. What happens in

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reality is that the written literary variety of the Arabic language used in writing the narratives is in fact paradigmatically saturated with Tunisian expressions and idioms. By ignoring the grammar and syntax of Tunisian Arabic, Mosbahi does three things. He avoids the still controversial issue of "slipping" into the colloquial variety. He still succeeds brilliantly in capturing the essence of the local spirit. Finally, he presents a way of being innovative with the standard language without "infesting" it with colloquialisms or loan words, as the purists would say. Injecting the Tunisian spirit through its idioms into fusha, however, particularly the Bedouin one, is not politically neutral. What it does is subvert the established language norms by tricking the standard into giving into the doubly stigmatized, Tunisian and Bedouin, by borrowing its cloak, i.e., its grammar and syntax (see S'hiri, forthcoming, on the position of Tunisian Arabic). Without going as far as claiming that the author has a relativistattitude towards language, it is fair to remark on his sensitivity to register change and shifts in variety in his different works, relative to the environment and the worldview of his characters. In this respect, Hallucinationsof Tarshish differs from both short story collections. In the former, intertextuality reigns supreme, ranging from direct and indirect quotation, to allusion, to irony and parody. The discourses it draws upon are infinite. They include all kinds of literature, Arabic and non-Arabic, oral (Tunisian) and written, political and journalistic language, and brothel language, to name only the most salient ones. The diversity of discourses reflects the diversity of the environments encountered in the novel. Moreover, the characters come from all over the country carrying with them the numerous varieties of Tunisian Arabic and the literatures available to the bilingually educated (French and Arabic) in the country. The variety of discourses intertwined in the novel stand as a witness to this heterogeneity. Intertextuality of a different kind characterizes the story collections, especially The Storyof How My CousinHenia WentMad, which is essentially confined to a mainly uniform group of people, that is, the peasants. Their overwhelming majority is illiterate; they all speak the same variety of Tunisian Arabic and share the same oral literary tradition both in terms of storytelling and poetry. Their perceptions of the world as reflected in their language are reproduced in the stories. The writer can even be seen as creating his own literary idiolect in these stories out of the variety of Arabic his protagonists speak. He uses, however, "higher"levels of discourse as well as including the Quran and religious and history books. It is of course worth remembering that Mosbahi is well-versed in the variety of language spoken by his characters as much as he is familiar with their environment. He has grown up in the countryside of Kairouan and possesses therefore first-hand knowledge of the linguistic resources nurturing his fictional world. It is what he does with these ingredients that is interesting. If cliches are nothing but dead metaphors, then many of the metaphors in these short stories are cliches brought to life through recontextualization. The simple fact of transposing them from the spoken stigmatized variety into the prestigious syntax of the literary variety lends them their innovative dimension. For speakers of Arabic who have no knowledge

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of the Tunisian variety, this subversive connection between the written and the spoken can easily go unnoticed. For anyone familiar with Tunisian Arabic, however, the words jump off the page and repossess the liveliness associated with their original sounds and pragmatic effects-the fact that they are used by real people in real contexts. It is important to concentrate on some aspects of Mosbahi's use of the language that makes it deep-rooted in the Tunisian and, in particular, Bedouin environment. Animals and landscape feature extensively in the stories not only as the basis of the peasants' livelihood but because they provide a wealthy source of images for comparison with humans. Metaphors and similes describing people's lives and physical or behavioral characteristics rely strongly on the animals, trees, and land that surround them. Most of these metaphors and similes are directly derived from the way people actually speak in this part of the country. Mixing animals and landscape images is not uncommon. As mentioned above, women's height is usually appreciated in this community and seen as a sign of beauty. Of a tall woman, therefore, people would say,"She is like a palm tree." Apart from being tall and beautiful, a palm tree is believed to be proud, generous with its fruit, and resistant to the tests of time. When a woman is said to be "talllike a she-camel," however, the comparison is by no means laudatory. For apart from sharing height with the she-camel, the woman would be believed to share equally the clumsiness, and lack of grace in posture and movement associated with the animal. Using these metaphors and similes emphasizes the amount of shared knowledge uniting the people. It allows them to join efficiency to economy, the prerequisites for successful interaction, according to Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson's theory of communication. Relying on these common points of reference allows the community to take shortcuts with longer and less expressive descriptions. In "The Well," the young man who died is likened to a "gazelle" and to a "pure colt" (15). The first comparison describes his beauty, health, and grace. The second means that he is noble, lovable, and reliable. His beloved's life "extended in front of her, a thorny wasteland" (19) on the day of his death. Only someone familiar with desert life can picture how desolate, lonely, purposeless, and difficult to cross that kind of life may be. The feudal landowner of "Thirst"walks among the villagers "inflated like a [stud] bull" (130). For the peasant girl who describes the man, there are no qualms about the uselessness of bulls. They may be good at showing off their huge sizes and dangerous horns, but when it comes to doing something useful like providing milk, calving, or ploughing, it is to humbler members of the species that people resort. Still from the perspective of the little illiterate girl, nothing could describe the sweepingly sweet sensation she felt when listening to the poetry her educated brother read for her better than likening it to "ripe figs" (11). The following animals, both wild and domesticated, birds, insects, plants, fruit, and landscape features figure at least once in the story collections. Some of the analogies with human behavior or characteristics drawn in the context of the stories follow in brackets:

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Farm animals: young donkey (young man rolling in the ground and stamping his feet); cow mooing (the sound made by a mad woman); horse face (long ugly face); billygoat (man smelling bad); lazy donkey (only responds to whipping); dog with rabies (untrustworthy, carries death in his bites); indomitable mare (free, inaccessible, and beautiful) Wild animals: rat (pointy face, small, ugly); hare (boy with pointy ears); turtle (neck sticking out to the front while walking) Plants, trees, fruit: rustling straw (the sound of a boy's laughter); dead tree (woman grown old under the weight of suffering); ripe apples (young maiden's cheeks); olive tree grove (man's wide dark eyes) Birds: chick (child, light and powerless); frightened bird (child, frail and shuddering); quail chicks (disperse quickly when they grow old) Insects: beetles (ugliness) Land: barren land, harsh mountain stones (a boy's dry, dirty, and large face filled with suffering) Animals and parts of their bodies are commonly used as insults. The boy in "The Turtle" is called "mule hoof," "dung beetle," "that donkey," and "young donkey (jahsh) head." "The Donkey" story in the same collection is an allegory that closely resembles a joke commonly told in Tunisia and probably other Arab countries. It is a comment on the fact the donkey remains the ultimate form of insult aimed at people's intelligence and manners. In this story, a traveler goes back to his city to find it destroyed by a donkey in protest for all the humiliation it suffered from the city inhabitants who had a tendency to call all their leaders "donkey." Idioms and proverbs that are directly taken from the Tunisian variety abound in the stories. A Tunisian, perhaps Maghrebi, collocation is transfer to fusha and associated with new words metamorphosing into the following metaphors in "The Well": 1. "fahat ra'ihatu al-faji'atiwa al-mawti fi al-qarya,"that is, the smell of disaster and death spread [literally, emanated] across the village; 2. "fahat ra'ihatu al-hadithi al-akhdar," that is, the smell of "green" talk (talk about sex) spread (emanated). A recurrent cliche/metaphor is "ghatisfi al-'araq,"that is, covered (literally, immersed) in sweat (as if sweat were kept in a container into which one could dive). Another image is that of the two young lovers who were abruptly interrupted and brought back to reality by the noise made by their playmates "as if a bucket of water has been poured over them." To be madly in love with someone is, in fact, to have one's "heartburnt" by the loved one ("A Love Story"). To be born, on the other hand, is "to open one's eyes" or to "descend from the mother's belly."To talk too much is to have "a millstone for a mouth," as in "afwahuhum rahan taduru" ("Nejma"). The smallest unit of time measurement is a blink, "ramshat

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'ain" ("A Crime in Village K"). In that same story, the most obvious sign that heat is unbearable is when "demons stand on their tails and start whistling" ("tantasibu al-'afaritu waqifatan 'aladhuyuliha wa tusaffiru"). Proverbs, which are an extremely common Tunisian speech mannerism (and are probably common in any culture with a strong oral tradition), are also sprinkled in the stories. They are the repository of folk wisdom and have a deterministic resonance about them. For instance, "al-nartukhallif al-ramad" (in "Have You Heard the Gossip in Village M?"), or "fire only leaves ashes behind it," is said of children who cannot measure up to their parents' good qualities. A saying that is attributed to Prophet Mohammed but that is espoused by Tunisian Arabic is repeated several times in the stories. It emphasizes that women cannot be trusted: "inna kaidahunna 'athim" ("women's cunning and deception are immeasurable"). A whole "story"is devoted to tracing the connection between people's nicknames or new surnames and the legends woven around their behavior and their physical characteristics ("On the Origin of the Names of Awlad Sendasin of the Jlass Tribes, Inhabitants of Mesyouta" ). It tells the stories of ten characters whose nicknames range from "The Urinator," "The Dust Raiser,"and "The Mourner" to "The Snake." Nicknames in the stories also designate characters with sight and hearing disabilities, such as "Omar 'Atrash" (Omar the Deaf) and "Ammaral-a'War"(Ammar the One-Eyed). A "curious" feature about names in the stories, though, is that some men's names or surnames are formulated around their mother's names. There is, for example, "Waladu [Tunisian pronunciation, "wild"] al-Hafyana,"the son of the barefooted; "Ibn mas'uda," son of Massouda; "Wild 'winat,"son of Awinat; "Wild 'wisha,"son of Awisha. The interesting thing is that some of them, like Ibn Mas'uda, have in fact another name and even another nickname/surname. In this case, the young man is known as Omar the Deaf. He is the one who got killed because he would not tell his audience what happened after he seduced the daughter of the notable. When telling the story, he reports the monologue he maintained with himself and in which he addressed himself as Ibn Mas'uda: "Isaid to myselfjust do it, Ibn Mas'uda, and whatever happens happens." Here Omar the Deaf is addressing himself, therefore he can call himself by his private name or the name that he first carried as a child in the private sphere of women. This practice is similar to the conventional form of identification used in Tunisia and perhaps elsewhere by fortune tellers and healers for whom only the mother's name and not the father's serves the purpose. This does not mean that the system is matrilineal, but perhaps that the mother's importance in unquestionably establishing the identity of the child is given priority in these crucial situations. More credibility is given to the origins of a child if the identity of his or her mother is established. In some of the other cases, this pattern may be explained by the following: either that the mother's personality is more prominent or distinctive than the father's or that the father has died and therefore the child is called after the mother by default. It may, on the other hand, be related to the fact that the character who is reporting the story is a child. Because children do live in the women's world where children "belong" to a particular

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woman and are identified after her, the child may simply be following the women's system of identification. This dual system still exists even in cities. Its origins may be traced back to the days when, because of sex segregation, the father's name was used in official situations and the mother's name was reserved for informal and special occasions, such as healing. This paper has introduced Hasouna Mosbahi's work, especially his short story collections, paying particular attention to the short stories that represented the life of the peasants in the Kairouan area of Tunisia. Mosbahi has allowed the voices of this marginalized group in Tunisia to be heard and appreciated for what it is. His stories present a celebration of a way of life that has long been scored and is now rapidly disappearing as a result of the onslaught of modernity, migration to the cities, and the striving for urbanism. His work comes as an injection of positive evaluation that humanizes Bedouins and destroys (and perhaps also confirms) some of the stereotypes held by city dwellers around them. The paper looked at the issue of generic boundaries in the works, storytelling as a focus in the stories and as inspiration for the writer's narration strategies. It also considered some salient themes in the stories such as sexuality and violence against children. Finally, it addressed the stylistic features that gave the stories their Tunisian character. The emphasis was laid on images and naming in their relationship with landscape and animals as reflected in the language of the Bedouins and recreated in the language of the stories.

NOTE
1. All translations from the Arabicare mine unless indicatedotherwise.

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tunisiennecontemporaine. Paris: CNRS, 1990. Fontaine, Jean. Litterature . "Arabic-Language Tunisian Literature (1956-1990)." Researchin African
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Labov, William. Language in theInner City.Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1972. Madani, Ezzedine. "'Alamat 'ala Tariq al-qissa wa al-riwayaal-tunisiyya."Al-Hayatal1(1977): 10-18. thaqafiyya Mokhtar, Amal. Nakhbual-Hayat (A toast to life). Beirut: Dar al-'adab, 1993. Mosbahi, Hasouna. Hikayatjunun ibnat 'ammihaniyya(The story of how my cousin Henia went mad). Paris: Gilgamesh, 1995. Al-sulahfat(The turtle). Paris: Gilgamesh, 1995. . Halwasat tarshish(Hallucinationsof Tarshish). Casablanca: Dar Toubkal, 1995. Nalouti, Aroussiya. Tamass(Mutual contact). Tunis: Sud, 1995. Prince, Gerald. Narratology: The Form and Function of Narrative. Amsterdam: Mouton, 1982. S'hiri, Sonia. "Linguistic Accommodation of the Maghreb to the Mashreq and the Identity of the Tunisian Speaker."Journal of Sociolinguistics, forthcoming. and Communication Cognition.Oxford: Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. Relevance: Blackwell, 1986.