El houssi, Majid (b. 1942). Tunisian poet and academician. El Houssi practises in his four volumes of poetry, Je voudrais ésotériquement te conter (1972), Imagivresse (1973), Ahméta-O (1980), and Iris Ifriqiya (1981), a poetics of lyrical violence: his verse is full of audacious, sacrilegious, and Surrealist imagery couched in the traditional but renovated form of oratory, dhikr, or incantation. Childhood in a colonial situation and the subsequent cultural and linguistic alienation of the colonized are major themes in his poetry. Like the majority of Tunisian poets in French, El Houssi attempts to reactualize motifs, modes of expression and art-forms from the past in a continuous effort to explain and update reality.
[<auth>Hédi Abdel-Jaouad]
