ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Edmond Jabès's early evolution as a writer, his first enthusiasms and subsequent difficulties m establishing his presence on the Franco-Egyptian literary scene where he was known as an 'écrivain égyptien d'expression française'. Completed shortly before Jabès's death in January 1991, the posthumously published Livre de l'Hospitalité takes up the theme of étrangeté explored in many of the texts beginning with the post-war Cairene poetry and aphorisms collected in Je bâtis ma demeure and continuing with Le Livre des Questions and beyond. The tension between French and Egyptian culture is equally perceptible in Jabès's second phase, dating from the mid-i930s through to the end of the Second World War, as he grappled with the emergence of Parisian Surrealism in an Egyptian cultural milieu. The poet and critic Georges Henein was for Edmond Jabès a bridge between the Cairene arts and literary communities, and the cultural centre of Paris.
