Tahar Bekri is a Tunisian poet with writing and poetic creation anchored in time and multiple space. Present, past and future times intertwine, speak to each other and stimulate exchange and tolerance. The poet expresses his most intimate emotions and thoughts on the passage of time and the political convictions in favor of living together. Since his first publications, which date from the 1980s, he has always shown his attachment to the lands he inhabits, which he has inhabited. His very first text was entitled Le Laboureur du Soleil, published by Silex, which implies a plural identity that he claims to this day with his latest opus, Chants pour la Tunisie, a collection of poems accompanied by two pretty paintings by Annick Le Thoër, who is none other than his wife. Thus, his sensitive sensitivity, coupled with a philosophy of life, has not altered with the passage of time inexorably and which can, eventually, damage the body, but not the way things in life and intellect are transmitted, and this, through chosen words, hard-hitting words, words that forcefully express what the poet feels and thinks of the world, of the people, of the lands, of the middle sea, with cultural and ideological references that marked a life.
The poet explains that, during the summer of 2021, he was on vacation in Le Pouldu, in the south of Finistère, in Brittany. He was in front of the “legendary place painted by Gauguin”, and where the history of Tunisia is not far away since chance has made that opposite is the island of Groix, where “the destiny of Tunisia was sealed” in 1954:
“Every day place Gauguin
At Le Pouldu where the earth ends
He looked at the island of Groix opposite
Bourguiba’s exile surfaces there. »
The links are woven and the poetic spectacle of the place overwhelms him. This sparked a desire to write, daily! The result is enchanting, I must say. We note that the sixty-one poetic songs, published by Al Manar, are written at random from the wanderings of thought. They can be read in one go, with in the end, curiously, a desire to come back to them, to reread them to savor them more, to become impregnated with them. Strong, voluptuous love runs through the book like these verses:
“The vibrant echoes of your name
In the desire without measure
No rope to anchor
But the moving needles
Tense like bows
On the violins of impatience
Expectation full of horizons. »
The country of origin, Tunisia, is eternally present. This calms the pain of exile, that of North Africans and sub-Saharan Africa. The verses express the need for exile which is sadness and can also be strength. Tahar Bekri says with great poetry the link of the exiles of migrants who cross the Mediterranean today, risking their lives, with sensitive and delicate touches that basically say sadness for Africa:
«Ô more…
In the emerald depths
The volcano never sleeps
I will repeat with Neruda
“If all the rivers are gentle
Where does the sea get its salt from?”
I will say to the foam
The pain of the wanderers
At the ebb and flow
How many oars do you need?
To guide the boat to its destination? »
” They say :
The minarets are our bayonets
The helmets our domes
The mosques our barracks…
O fleeting life
Save your followers from harm
Mercantile and murderous. »
Everything is forbidden and the memory of murdered poets resurfaces in his verses. In canto 31, it is the memory of the Algerian poet Tahar Djaout, assassinated by the Islamists in Algiers, that he presents. Tahar Bekri had defended Algerian intellectuals, and in particular Tahar Djaout. For him, the role of poetry is to sustain life and not to give death:
“In the land of the poem
your anthem
Raised at the cost of sacrifice…
Should truths thus die? …
Your duty is to feed your dream
Your duty is beauty. »
The poems of Bashar Ibn burd, Al Hallaj, Nerval, Robert Desnos, Lorca, Benjamin Fondane, Max Jacob, Paul Celan are memorized and underlined. The intimate and the History intertwine in the writings of Tahar Bekri: a signature, an identity, a true, committed poet, faithful to his ideas and his political positions, and this, since his adolescence, without firing a shot, despite the suffering suffered. The book Chants pour la Tunisie, contains flashes expressed through a chiseled writing, a poetic structured and unbridled at the same time, thanks to the magic of a rich lexicon and a culture rich with a life, that of Tahar Bekri who claims to be multicultural, pleading for a strong link between the two shores of the Mediterranean.
* Benaouda Lebdai is a university professor in colonial and postcolonial African literature.
