The directory «Plots»

Du'aji Ali
(1909—1949)

Tunis write. He wrote plays, sketches, stories and songs, as well as editing literary journals. Like Al-Shabbi, he wrote in Arabic but read much foreign literature: Chekhov, Flaubert, Jack London and Mark Twain. The latter's influence in particular may be detected in the ironic modern tone that Du’aji incorporated into his observation of contemporary urban life. One of his most successful works is Bar-hopping along the Mediterranean, a series of sketches about a Mediterranean cruise in 1933. Like a photographic negative of most travel writing, this provides a rare glimpse of what the dominant European culture looked like to an educated Tunisian citizen.

At the Beach at Hammam-Lif, the short sketch reprinted here, is typical of Du’aji’s portraits of everyday Tunisian life. Deceptively casual, it carries more weight than might at first appear. Its narrator, rootless and anonymous in the crowd, could be any alienated urban character from the West -Albert Camus’ The Outsider, for example wandering aimlessly a few years later along Algiers’ beaches. At the same time, though, this character’s cultural references –Romeo and Juliet on the one hand, the Palace of the Al-Hambra in Granada on the other- betray a consciousness of his dual heritage in both the West and the Arab world. In just a few deft paragraphs, Du’aji conveys the complex texture of Tunis’s new urban culture: simultaneously old and new, Arab and Western.

Tunisia, 1989, Ali Du'aji