ABSTRACT
At its widest scope, this book is about the weight of necessity and the relentless human desire to transgress it, in art as in life. By necessity, I mean tradition, fate and, to certain extent, the modern colonial condition. The life and work of the Tunisian Mah.m¥d al-Mascadi (1911-2004) are the prisms through which I explore how the past elicits a dual response: allure and resistance, almost in equal measure. By the allure of the past, I mean the seductive power of the Arabic literary heritage and the Qur c§n on one side, and the canon of Western literature on the other. Part of the past is also the pressures of the dogma of religion and French colonialist attempts to erase Tunisian cultural identity. In literature, this appeal is resisted through a poetics, which engages the past by means of parody, performance, an original use of the language and idiosyncratic conceptions of the spiritual and the tragic. On the ground, al-Mascadi applied his effort and pen to resist colonialism, make sense of modernity and help forge an identity for his people.
