Carnivals of Heterodoxy in Abdelwahab Meddeb’s Talismano

Chapter 2 analyzes Tunisian writer and critic Abdelwahab Meddeb’s (1946–2014) wildly experimental 1979 novel Talismano. The labyrinthine text takes the reader on a hallucinatory journey through Tunisia’s topography—historical and contemporary, imagined and mythical—through a multitude of languages, temporalities, and religious discourses. The story presciently traces the evolution of a popular rebellion as it winds its way through the cityscape of Tunis’s medina bearing a retinue of prophets, artisans, sorceresses, alchemists, and prostitutes. The chapter examines Meddeb’s polemical attack on Bourguiba-era Tunisia, in which hegemonic power is simultaneously concentrated in state and religious institutions. Talismano subsequently demonstrates the co-constitutional nature of religious and state epistemologies, as well as their attendant institutions and discourses. The novel counteracts these forces in its rescripting of the Qurʾan, as well as its invocation of Sufi figures, texts, and rituals. The chapter contextualizes Talismano’s Sufi poetics within the Meddeb’s polemical critical writings against “orthodox” Sunni Islam.