University research has been preoccupied for the most part with the sexual and formal issue for a long time, and on the importance of this research, its hegemony has transformed many of them into similar copies that can hardly distinguish one and the uniqueness of the other, and the originality of the research is rare.
Because adventure is only in a free space, from time to time, original research appears to us that deals with new topics and the convergence of modern and contemporary literature, different approaches and triumphs of aspirations and ideas and beyond, and usually this research comes from outside the university research that sets controls that sometimes turn into coercions.
Within this framework, we can include the book, the Tunisian critic and poet Noureddine Al-Khabthani, "The image of the Negro in the Tunisian novel", which was accomplished outside these "academic constraints."
In cash criticism
The critic starts with an entrance under the title "novel and criticism", talking about the paradox in the literary scene. In front of a novel boom there is an "absence of the critical text or its atrophy", and the researcher returns to the cruel French existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre that the scene lives in a state of "critical anemia".
Sartre was talking about "Marxism, which he adopted after his ontological existential beginnings, as a theory that, through her interest in the categories of conflict, structures and laws of history, has been lacking in legislation for the presence of the individual person and the vitality of his role and entity."
The critic wonders about the reasons for the softening of the voice of criticism and the fact that it was a basis for the modernity of modern Arab thought, and the critic saw that with few exceptions led by the Palestinian thinker Edward Said and his fellow writer Faisal Darraj and the Moroccan Said Yekatin, contemporary Arab criticism provided only a repetition of the global code and echoed its gains "in various forms such as literal transmission And indoctrination, bias and fabrication, without a contribution of qualitative value in terms of theoretical production and conceptualization. "
Authenticity of the topic
A literary critic, Noureddine Al-Khabthani, has never preceded research on the subject of Negro in the Tunisian novel, and this topic remained absent until 2019 when it was presented by the Tunis Forum for the Arabic novel under the title "Issues of black skin in the novel: slavery, racism, liberation."
The research presented by Al-Khatthani was a starting point to delve deeper into the issue and the completion of this book issued by Dar Shama for publication in 200 pages and the researcher put it in six major sections: the image of the Negro and his status in the narrative paths, Schrödinger's metaphor or bridging towards undermining, beyond Zanzibar: the dualism of domination and resistance in Historical and narrative narrative, narrative style: features of the founding model and its limits, in how the pattern works: diversification of the established model: alienation, double enslavement and absence of history, exodus from the pattern, narrative form from exhaustion to penetration.
His research was based on a Tunisian novelist blog, some of which refer to the founding texts, "Haditha Abu Hurairah said" to Mahmoud al-Masadi and "Lightning the Night" for Al-Bashir Fall and contemporary texts such as "Juman and Anbar" by Masoud Boubaker and "water and fire" by Amna Al-Rumaili and "behind the mirage ... A little "by Ibrahim Al-Dargouthi and" the gorillas "by Kamal Al-Riahi and" Africa "by Abdul Jabbar Al-Ash and" Baganda "by Shukri Al-Mabkhout and" Bay Al-Arban "by Jamal Al-Jalasi and" Soft Jihad "by Muhammad Issa Al-Moadab.
He based his approach to the literature of criticizing the novel, the structural approach on the one hand, and the deconstructive approach on the other hand, without announcing it, but rather pointed to the need for multiplicity in the reading process to provide a good process of interrogation of the text.
He says, "We have settled that the context of pluralism and intertwining, and the beginning of acceptance of the culture of difference, would contribute to alleviating the falsehood of our belief in monism of truth and the stability of what is and the absolute meaning in the cavity of the origin of existence and significance."
Introductory concepts
The research attempts to proceed from controlling the basic concepts of it by examining the terms: slavery, racial discrimination, Negro and Negro; To pave the way for a picture of all this among the novelists, and concluded that the approaches are completely different, some of which were a form of strict congruence with the historical and social reference and the narrative imagination did not give the Negro the actor any opportunity to come out and penetrate in the direction of emancipation as in novels behind the mirage a little and Bay Alarban and Jamr and water.
And others from the texts sought that the Negro actor assume the role of rebellion and individual protest by moving the inhabitants of society and detonating most of its contradictions, which exposes him to assassination and liquidation as in the stories of the gorillas and pandas, while other accounts sought to complete the process of emancipation and its commitment to imagine penetrating the lack of historical real reference according to his opinion And sees this in the novels of Lightning Night, Juman, Amber, and Africa.
Details or injured name
The researcher starts investigating the image of the Negro in the Tunisian novel from the names of personalities or surnames attached to society from "Shushan" and "Shushanah" to "Lightning Night", "Kahlah", "Azraq", "Baganda" and "Gorilla", and explains the critic How did the narration cross out the names of the personalities, and it suffices with that nickname indicating their position in society or to which the community wanted that position, and starts from that preliminary deletion to investigate the image of racial discrimination, slavery and societal violence against the colored other.
The critic seeks to use various references, such as the works of the French philosopher Franz Fanon about Negroism and the theory of the German philosopher Hegel on the dialectic of the slave and the master, and the opinions of Jean-Paul Sartre on literature and Negro, to demonstrate the idea that the Tunisian novel did not write a single Negro, as the image of the Negro was colored through the narrations and according to affiliations The intellectual and aesthetic to which the writer belongs. Each time, the novelist raises a different mask on his face to talk about the Negro.
The narratives deepen according to those approaches and theses that you present from the existentialism presented by the texts of Mahmoud Al-Masadi, the institution to restore these questions about the human being by localizing the text in the place with the Tunisian novelist Abdel-Jabbar Al-Ash and his compatriot Ibrahim Al-Dargouthi, passing through political and social questions and writing the clarifier and revolution on the systems or writing Nostalgia in The works of the rest of the other writers.
The research attempts to pursue the artistic forms in which the Negro was presented, as it mostly reproduces the Western form produced by the white man to say black through imagination, and this, and if he achieved success in the level of some narratives in presenting liberation issues by giving the initiative to the Negro, in some accounts, it was sufficient to restore the image The stereotype of the Negro was a new slavery within the novel that is expected to break his shadow through imagination.
On the other hand, the critic believes that some narrations defied the reality of domination imposed by the Western imagination to express the Mashhadiyya towards a new image and push the literary race through what the critic described as "pressure on the prevailing narrative form and his heart on himself", to say with the miraculous and unreasonable what is constrained by the typical western form of the novel .
Here we recall what was repeated by the Syrian novelist and thinker Mamdouh Edwan whenever he spoke about African literature that we did not know of the arts of narration and the novel in particular, but a Western style is not all the novel, because the logic that governs the African novel based on oral narration and the generosity of myths and many religions is not the logic Which governs the Western European novel, which constitutes an obstacle to its reception if the reader embarks on it with a single culture.
The "status of the Negro" in the Tunisian novel, as revealed by the research with Noureddine Al-Khabthani, represented a common theme for many novelists, and still produces new narrative texts through new approaches. Perhaps the last novel, "Black Tear" by Othman Al-Atrash issued this year, which deals with the topic of Negro Through "Boussadia" the most famous Tunisian myth, this would enrich the fictional library and advance critical experiences of the approach of these works to social and psychological approaches.
This will open a debate, as happens with this book, on the role of the educated in managing the components of society, especially since the reality of blacks in Tunisia has proven that they are not a minority as in some countries, but rather they are an essential and main component of the social fabric.
But the process of political and social absenteeism and confining them in fields such as sports and popular singing needs to be analyzed, and perhaps the novel is able to present their issues and reveal what this absenteeism and his question according to the analysis of the speech have revealed, is it really an absence or absence or delisting from another important speech that he does not want him to appear as an identity?