The Francophone writer Habib Tengour, born in Mostaganem, Algeria, in 1947, likes to say that he lives “between Constantine and Paris.” Indeed, although Tengour writes in French, his French gives expression to the liminal space that exists around and between the literary and cultural traditions of France and Algeria. His poetry is equally likely to invoke The Odyssey as it is the muʿallaqāt of pre-Islamic Arabia,1 and his writings brim not only with the voices of other Maghrebi writers, like the Algerians Kateb Yacine and Mohammed Dib, but with the giants of French letters, like André Breton, Arthur Rimbaud, and Charles Baudelaire; German Romantics like Friedrich Hölderlin; medieval Sufi poets like Ibn ʿArabi; and on and on and on. Over almost fifty years, having published more than fifteen works of poetry, essays, and drama, Tengour has built a house of literature whose windows and doors are open wide to...
An Excerpt from Your Voice Saw/Your Voice Lives/We Go On (2019), by Habib Tengour
anna levett is visiting assistant professor of comparative literature and French at Oberlin College. She specializes in Arabic, French, and Francophone literature, with particular interest in Mediterranean studies and global modernism. Her work has appeared in Expressions maghrébines, the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, the Journal of North African Studies, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. In 2022 she was awarded the American Council of Learned Societies’ Pauline Yu Fellowship to complete her first monograph, which explores the connections between Sufism and surrealism in the work of late twentieth-century Arab authors and artists.
Anna Levett; An Excerpt from Your Voice Saw/Your Voice Lives/We Go On (2019), by Habib Tengour. Qui Parle 1 December 2023; 32 (2): 443–456. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-10832250
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