Meddeb, Abdelwahab (b. 1946). Tunisian novelist, poet, and essayist of the younger generation after Independence. His first novel, Talismano (1979), established him as an experimental writer who uses the art of displacement with great skill, establishing a complicity with the Arabic language and culture. In his second novel, Phantasia (1986), he raises the fundamental Maghrebian questions of selfhood and alterity, dealing with the voluntary exile of the artist. Thus, we witness a confrontation of occidental and Arabo-Islamic cultures. In his collection of poems, Tombeau d'Ibn Arabi (1987), his poetic prose captures the letter and the spirit of the most important medieval Arabic poet whose young Persian lover, Nidam, foreshadows Dante's Beatrice. Meddeb is also an essayist and a translator from Arabic to French (see his Les Dits de Bûstami, 1989).
[Hedi Bouraoui]
