By Professor Abdelwahab Meddeb & Doctor Of French Jane Kuntz
"Talismano" is a novelistic exploration of writing visible as a hallucinatory trip via half-remembered, half-imagined cities--in specific, the town of Tunis, either because it is now, and because it as soon as was once. strolling and writing, trip and magazine, replicate each other to provide a calligraphic, magical paintings: a palimpsest of varied languages and cultures, highlighting Abdelwahab Meddeb's beguiling mastery of either the Western and Islamic traditions. Meddeb's trip is before everything a sensual one, nearly decadent, the place the narrator luxuriates within the Tunis of his stories and intercuts those impressions with memories of alternative towns at different instances, reviving the legendary figures of Arab-Islamic legend that experience light from reminiscence in a speedily westernizing North Africa. A fever dream positioned at the knife-edge among competing cultures, "Talismano" is a testomony to the ability of language to rouse, and subdue, adventure
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Sample text
Unfettering members, lightening the belly’s comely softness, tightening the breasts’ jewel-like florets, damning languor of almond eyes. The corpse washer decided to stitch up her vagina to simulate virginity in the afterlife, triumph of law and order: emergency surgery to transform the cadaver so that the clan might save face before the law broken by the intimate infraction of bodies in cramped corridors reeking of confinement and overuse. Everything is back in its place: if, out of a desire for violence, you’d like to disorder them again, you’d best veil your intentions; enemies of the law are appointed only in the shadows.
Indeed, figures of authority of all kinds—from fathers to clerics to the landowning bourgeoisie—are all targets of collective wrath in the carnivalesque, almost nightmarish popular revolt at the heart of this novel. Proud of his own genealogy (hailing from Andalusia on his father’s side, Tripolitania and Yemen on his mother’s), Meddeb nonetheless satirizes the noble families of Tunis, Fez, and other cities as they struggle with modernity and with the long-suppressed underclass. The basic frame of Meddeb’s story involves the narrator as prodigal son, imagining his return to Tunis, particularly to the city’s old Arab core, or medina (the Arabic word for “city”), where he was born and raised.
But I watched him in fascination and disdain as he worked, yardstick in hand, pencil behind ear: is he truly the only manual laborer in a family that boasts theologians, wealthy merchants, feudal lords, bureaucrats, doctors, notaries, lawyers, judges, and other notables? Slight of build, he alone among us possesses the cunning certainty of accurate movement. I never before stopped to actually observe him at work. I knew him only as presence: a useful milestone along my route, a buffer against the danger looming over any ramble through the city, be it from one floor of our villa to the next, or from the fresh morning scent of spring flowers there all the way to the acrid stench of urine so ill-suited to the street’s name—’ asal meaning honey.