Sufis in Mecca

This chapter directly picks up where Stétié ends, with a textual analysis of a poetic cycle of chapbooks by Meddeb. I argue that a renouveau in the Francophone lyric is made possible through his translations of classical Arabic and Sufi poetry. In his chapbooks, Meddeb attempts to refashion himself, after his two successful and widely acclaimed first novels Talismano (1979) and Phantasia (1986), as a mystical, wandering Sufi poet. With Tombeau d’Ibn Arabi (1987), Les 99 stations de Yale (1995), and Aya dans les villes (1999) in particular, Meddeb manically focuses on an adaptational, modern rewriting in French verse of the history of Sufi saints, poets and poetry. Meddeb simultaneously draws on the formal and structural poetics of the pre-Islamic odes (as we will have seen with Tengour and Jabès), but he recasts them in light of the life of the Sufi saints and mystics rather than the pagan poets. Meddeb’s major innovation lies not only in the poetic combination of sacred and profane poetic registers, but also in an original combination of French and Arabic poetic registers with the world of modern American poetics. A central literary case whom I revisit in the conclusion to Pacifist Invasions, a critical re-evaluation of Meddeb reveals him to be indispensable for the successful poetic reconstruction of Francophone studies. I demonstrate how, much like the Sufi poet, and in keeping with ‘Ā’ishah al-Bā‘ūniyyah’s Principles of Sufism, Meddeb’s new Francophone lyric self-inflects as consciousness in search of what lies beyond its knowledge of its current state: situated in relation to itself, its paradoxical internal genealogy, its contemplative meditational mode. The poetic import of Meddeb’s lyric consists of the masterful blending of the figure of the Sufi poet and the Arabic tongue with contemporaneous intonations in French poetry. Meddeb’s writing transverses concurrent and widely divergent poetic trends, and connects them to one another in an original French-language arabesque. Beneath the surface of his first poetic experiments, Meddeb had couched a hidden, propagative poetics of the trace, barely perceptible, held together by thematic and generic modulations, a double lyric voice, and the infralinguistic.