M71 Habib Tengour
Maghrebian Surrealism (1981)
In 1981 the Algerian Surrealist poet Habib Tengour (b. 1947) wrote the manifesto of ‘Maghrebian Surrealism’, in French, in which he posited that Surrealism originated, not in early twentieth-century France, but from the much older Islamic tradition of Sufism, which had long been practised in Arab North Africa (the Maghreb). Here, in this mystical form of Islam, he thought, could be found the Surrealist precepts of ‘mad love’, ‘subversion’ and ‘revolt’, and ‘pure psychic automatism’. Sufism has inspired many Islamic artists, including those of the One Dimension Group (M52) and the School of the One (M86).
Tengour is an ethnologist as well as a poet, and much of his work also explores Algerian identity and exile (particularly his own during the civil war) through the country’s music, stories and collective memories. Exile is also a form of Surrealism – a disconnection from home arising from a state of ‘confiscated identity’.
The manifesto ends with a list of potential Maghrebian Surrealists, which includes himself in exile, the poets Mouloud Feraoun, Kateb Yacine, Maroin Dib and Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, and culminates with the celebrated painter Baya Mahieddine, whose work André Breton famously misinterpreted as ‘Surrealist’ due to its bold colouring and the dreamlike quality of its imagery. In fact, Mahieddine never subscribed to this Western interpretation of her art, which she explained was rooted in her childhood and her home.
Tangour’s manifesto of ‘Maghrebian Surrealism’ was first published in issue number 17 of the French cultural magazine Peuples méditerranéens (Mediterranean People) in October–December 1981.
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During these past twenty years, some Maghrebians in exile have made an act of Relative Surrealism. They could hardly do otherwise: the family was an absence they mourned in front of a postal window, homeland a confiscated identity, and religion an I.O.U.
It is, after all, in Maghrebian Sufism that surrealist subversion asserts itself: pure psychic automatism, mad love, revolt, unanticipated encounters, etc. Always there is a spark of un-conscious Sufism in those Maghrebian writers who are not simply sharp operators – reread Kateb or Khaïr-Eddine.
Feraoun is surrealist in Si Mohand
Kateb is surrealist in tradition
Dib is surrealist in the derive
Senac is surrealist in the street
Khaïr-Eddine is surrealist in ethylic delirium
I am surrealist when I am not there