S. V. PROZHOGINA, Doctor of Philology, Institute of Oriental Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences

Such a phenomenon in modern literature as the work of Tahar Bekri (b.1951), an ethnic Tunisian Arab working in France at the University of Nanterre (where he teaches Arabic literature), is difficult to consider in terms of belonging only to one national literature.

Indeed, who are they, today's numerous Maghreb writers and poets-Algerians, Moroccans, Tunisians who write both French and Arabic, North Africans by origin, and by vocation, as the classic of Moroccan literature Dries Schraibi (1926 - 2007) once told me - "just writers", "just poets"? One could answer that they are simply artists of the modern world, where everything is mixed up, where different peoples, nations, and languages coexist on the same territory, where the West and the East today are not so much civilizational, but rather political landmarks...

However, Tahar Bekri, living in the West, constantly recalls in his work that he is a Tunisian, Maghrebin, "Mediterranean", because to this day he draws his inspiration from different sources, is filled with the pain of his native land, although no longer completely belonging to it, traveling around the world (he is often invited to numerous poetic events). festivals), learning about it and thus pushing the boundaries of their original, natural and" regional " conditionality, expanding the range of their impressions and feelings of modernity.

But the native land is not only geography, it is also history, which shaped the fate of the poet, who in his youth knew the fate of a prisoner, a political prisoner, an exile, and a wanderer...

Takhar Bekri's generation also had to fight for justice, although the era of national liberation struggle was already over at the time of his manhood. But even in his student days, life in the country was not easy, and young people, as today, resisted "evil and violence", reminding the authorities that the people will never accept the loss of social ideals that matured in the era of independence.

Having found himself in exile in the West, Bekri, like other compatriots and fellow North Africans in Peru, realized that even here many ideals are unattainable: the "Freedom, Equality and Fraternity" once promised to the French now definitely seem like an illusory slogan...

But a poet by vocation, he will work hard, write, keeping in his soul the hope of "seeing the dawn" and over his homeland, and "a ray of the Sun" that will "warm" him even in the cold of exile. It is not without reason that his scientific work - his doctoral dissertation - was devoted to one of the most lyrical, but also the most tragic figures of the new Maghreb literature - the Algerian Malek Haddad, who also endured life in a foreign land, who passed away early, but devoted all of it, "without a trace", to the singing of the Freedom of his native ^land1. And the first poetry books of T. Bekri-collections of poems "Plowman of the Sun", "Song of the Wandering King", etc. are filled with this hope.²

But somehow, gradually, a melody of sadness, melancholy, an intonation ^of sadness reigned in his poetry, and his hope seemed to fade away in the sense of the ever-growing alienness of the world around him. If in his poetry of the end of the XX century, the leitmotif of bitterness and pain, longing and even despair gradually accumulated in the soul was heard (perfectly expressed in one of the poems with words about the "fragments" of his "heart in the oceans of wanderings"), then in his poetry collections of the beginning of the XXI century - "Horizon Engulfed in fire", " Homeless Wind"and especially-in the books of poems "The Burning call of the sea","If music must die" ⁴-there is already only a sad melody as the theme of the death of illusions, lost hopes and even the hopelessness and hopelessness of life.

The formula of human existence in exit, in a foreign land, which he once found in moments of heavy reflection, did not help the poet's soul either:"Forget everything and go on"⁵. And even the image of the sea that once filled his poetry as a possibility for a person to find "boundless" rainbow "horizons", as a need to move from the gloomy dead ends of the past to a bright future, turned into a hard riverbed of Life, or even just into a certain "drop of blood", gradually" drying up", "trampled" on the ground. the" dark asphalt " of genesis ... ⁶.

What influenced this state of his soul, which always reacted sharply to the world around it? Yes, everything that somehow happened both in the near and distant reality, not indifferent to the heart. And failures in the policy of integration of Maghreb (especially) immigrants in France, and outbreaks of mutual Franco-Arab hostility, and even violent riots of "suburban" youth (from the generation of North Africans who were already born in France), demanding "equal rights" and "normal work", but receiving in return police raids and expulsion from the country. And the endless conflict in the Middle East, which caused the poet

compassion for the fate of Palestine; and the growing social tension in his homeland (which eventually turned into a political protest, into the initial bloodshed, and then into the so-called "Jasmine Revolution", which, as can be seen today, also ended in the collapse of its ideals...).

But whether it is absolutely necessary, as the Scripture says, that "darkness" should be replaced by "The Light of a new day", and a person should "arm himself with the weapon of Light" ⁷, or a "ray of the Sun" suddenly broke through from his native land, or T. Bekri's journey to Turkey and acquaintance with the legacy of its great poet Yunus Emre ⁸ (1238-1320) awakened the desire to write about Love, which frees a person from loneliness and fills the heart and soul with a sense of proximity to the bottomless Sky, from which Light pours.

Anyway, in 2012, a new collection of poems by T. Bekri appears, called "Remembering Yunus Emre", but dedicated to " The Memory of the Martyrs of the Revolution "(or the so-called "Arab Spring").

...He always gravitated to prose and created a lot of purely narrative texts, and it was not for nothing that he loved "white" verse. But if all his previous collections of poetry (as always bilingual, Arabic-French) could fully relate-not only in their emotional richness, metaphorical, but also in their formal expression (clear terzins, quatrains or two-stanzas, rhythmic as the heartbeat, poems-pen-outlined thoughts that captured images of the world) - to in the new collection-rather, almost aphoristic prose sounds rhythmically (although not always clearly), although it is filled with artistic images, as if concentrating, summing up the long thoughts of the poet, who again saw the Light at the end of the "tunnel" of his life that seemed endless in the darkness...

Now he does not contemplate the "drops of blood" frozen on the dark sidewalk, but sees at the end of the night "fragile red poppy petals" that could not trample the "boots of the military", and knows that "nothing will stop" the run of the "stream that broke out from under the snow", as he could not "fire of tyrants ""destroy the roof tiles" of the houses where the people who rebelled on their land lived (T. Bekri. "Remembering Yunus Emre", p. 10). The world around him suddenly appears to the poet like a "rosebud", although surrounded by "thorns", but filled with the promise of "flowering", like a volcano "sleeping" for the time being in the mountains, where the fire of "lava ready to break out" can lurk under the ashes... (p. 12)

He calls upon the "dawn" to bathe the "rising day" with the rays of dawn, and the swallow to "spread its wings", touch the mountain peaks, drive away the "night haze" from them, and clear the sky of "dark clouds"... (p.14). And as if conjuring himself, he reminds that a person should not be like an ostrich and hide his head under his wing or "bury it in the quicksand of his memories" (p. 16). "Be a better songbird or a red-breasted robin" - if only the voice of a person would sound,if only his heart would burn, "without fear of burns... "(p. 18).

Foreign land, travel, exile, and exile suddenly become a special space - not only for the search for Freedom, for which one has to pay a heavy price, but also for the territory of a special "hardening" of the human essence, a forge of the strength of the human spirit, which comprehends the need for solidarity (p.20).

There is also a "ray of Star" that illuminates "a new path at the end of the night", fear disappears, and there is a desire to protect Love, to protect it from the" fragments " of a meteor that exploded in the sky (p. 24).

The lyrical hero of the poet's new book is all in search of a "reliable pole" to escape in the "whirlwind of waters", not to drown, even if the waves, "like a knife, cut the throat" (p.26).

Free yourself from unnecessary "utopias", from the fog of illusions, but do not lose hope and your almost youthful, romantic fascination with "ghostly mirages of the Desert of the world" (p. 34). Go only to the Light. And if someone suddenly tries to "lower the darkness" again, the poet knows that it is necessary to resist, as the sunflower does, turning its petals only to the sun (p. 36).

From now on, he is sure that the" walls " that separate people are not as strong as the bridges that connect them (p. 40), and that even the highest, most formidable wave that tries to overwhelm humanity will sooner or later break on the shore (p. 44) with the same inevitability as it matures the pearl in the "prison of its shell" (p. 16). And even a person who glides along the mountainside, but goes to his goal, will never be afraid of the abyss that lies in wait for him on a difficult path (p. 52).

  
  
 Don't close your eyes. Between your awakening 
 and your sleep, the  
 Your  
 ... 
  
 

(p. 58)

The poet seems to be able to breathe more freely, and he, addressing himself and everyone who hears his voice, prays that he will be able to make it in time, despite the fact that he knows that "not all birds, having flown away, come back", to release "their songs to freedom", to let " the light ones fly out notes", as if freed from the rigidity of the mill, and join in the symphony of nature, which is always alive and inevitably blooming in the spring (p. 60).

And as if returning from "absence" in this world, as if freeing himself from the shackles that "bound the soul with darkness" (p.62), the poet no longer stirs up "the ashes of painful memories" (p. 64), but listens to the music of the present and tries to hear its harmony. He now knows that even the bees return to "their hive" only when they are "full of honey" (p. 70), that even the plant takes care of "the strength of its roots" to adorn the earth (p. 72), and that even " the wise man knows that his wisdom cannot grow higher mountains" (p. 78).

The main thing is to be able to "open the window", meet your new day, and then "the night will go away by itself

not to be tempted by fame, not to admire your reflection in the mirror, but also "not to look at the bottom of the well for a long time", hoping to see the Truth only there (p. 92). After all, she is nearby. It is enough to look around and see, for example, an olive tree that "does not lose its foliage" even in old age, or a simple sparrow that survives even in harsh winter precisely because other birds have flown to warmer climes (p. 94).

  
  
 And if anger chokes you, 
 't rear up like 
 angry Horse (p.98). 
  
 

This is not the poet's resignation to fate. This is a kind of reassurance for him, who was a little tired of storms and wanderings, but in many ways learned to "look at the Sun", love its life-giving rays (p. 100), see their reflection in the events of days filled with human hope for the future, forget about the "cold and snow" of a foreign land and go to "radiant Horizons opening in the distance"."(p. 112).

¹ In Russian, see translations of his novels published in the publishing house "Khudozhestvennaya Literatura": "The Embankment of Flowers does not Answer" (1989). About him nodr. see: Prozhogina S. V. Dlya beregov Otchizny dalnoy ... Moscow, 1992.

² См.: Bekri Tahar. Le labourcur du Soleil. P., 1983; Le chants du roi errant. P., 1985. Podr. see: Prozhogina S. V. Anthology of creativity of Takhar Bekri, Moscow, IV RAS, 2002.

³ See: Bekri T. Le coeur rompu aux oceans. P., 1988; Les chapelets d'attaches. P., 1994; Les songes impatients. P., 1995; lnconnus saisons. P., 2000.

^{Bekri T.} 4 L'Horizon incendie. P., 2002; Le vent sans abri. P., 2002; La brulante rumeur de la men P., 2004; Si la musique doit mourir. P., 2006.

^{Bekri T.} 5 Marcher sur I'oubli. P., 2000.

^{Prozhogina S. V.} Metamorphoses of the image of the Sea in Maghreb literature, Moscow, 2010.

⁷ See Paul's Epistle to the Romans, 13; 12-14.

⁸ Yunus Emre is a Turkish poet who followed the branch of Islam-Suffism. He had a great influence on Turkish literature. He is considered the founder of Turkish versification. The most memorable lines are "Sevelim ve sevilelim", which means"Let's love and be loved" in Turkish. Using the universal images of Sufi poetry by Yu. Emrs, the author of this article deliberately does not want to plunge the reader into its depths, exploring the collection of poems by T. Bekri in the framework of the evolution of the work of a modern writer of Tunisian origin, whose change in worldview is very symptomatic, since it has always been associated with the hope of reviving his flock to a better life... The Arab Spring resonated with him.

^{Bekri T.} 9 Au souvenir de Yunus Kinre. P., 2012.

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