ABSTRACT
Jacques Berque understood the deep impact of French colonial policy in Tunisia and neighbouring Algeria particularly between the two World Wars when he described it as an act, which severed the people from their historical and cultural roots and ‘usurped’ the very signs by which they named their world (Berque 1967: 36). The recovery of these roots was nothing short of ‘restoring signs to things’ (Berque 1967: 86). Al-Mascadi confesses that he and his generation experienced this assault first hand as a ‘transplanting of a foreign language and culture over the national traditional language and culture’ (Al-Mascadi 2003: 264). For Tunisian ‘native’ intellectuals these must have been disorienting times; for writers the pressures to put the pen at the service of the nation must have been overwhelming. Al-Mascadi, even years after the independence of his country, insisted on titling his collected essays, Tacsil li kiy§n. The title is translated as something like, ‘Affirming the Authenticity of a Being’; so much was the desire to dig deep into what makes the voice authentic and to make authenticity reach the very being, in an attempt to recover the roots or to ‘restore signs to thing’.
