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Between Hama in southern Tunisia and the capital, passing through Sfax, Mahdia and other Tunisian cities, the vital adventure of Kamal Zoghbani (1965-2020) spread. A rich adventure reflected in the published literary and intellectual production (2), which is relatively poor, as well as rich and creative in content and content. “The other” is a collection of stories, two novels are “Waiting for life” (Golden Coumar Award 2002, reprinted by “Dar Miskeliani”) and “The Happiness Machine” (2016 – “Dar al-Tanweer”, which won the “Bashir Khareef Prize for literary creativity” in the novel. Year 2017). There is also his book, “Mixtures of behemocracy and revolution”, in which he compiled some of his texts written before Ben Ali’s departure and others that were written in response to developments in the political trajectory in Tunisia after Ben Ali, in addition to many scattered texts and dozens of unpublished interventions and conferences in many cultural seminars created by him. Throughout the country.
His free, rich and sarcastic writings did not diminish his richly practiced life and “going to the extreme in the art of living.” Her life was in continuity with her thinking and writing, because “she lived as she thinks and thinks as she lives.” He wrote about the art of “Ashrawi devotion”, in the introduction to the book about his clan, “Sinan al-Azabi, who in his opinion is the basis of resistance and a fundamental critic of it: resistance to various forms of sadness , discomfort and shame, especially to madness and its derivatives ”.
In his critical book “Mixtures of Behimocracy and Revolution”, he approached the perfection of the Ben Ali era from another generally uninhibited angle. To describe the Ben Ali era, he invented the term “bhimocracy”, which he considered appropriate to describe the form of government in the Ben Ali era in particular, and all the forms of government that prevailed in the Arab region in general after the Waves of national liberation in the 1950s and 1960s. Rather, he decided that they are the feature of contemporary history with all its worlds and societies, both advanced and backward. And “bohemia”, as he defined it in his introduction to the book, “is that kind of political rule that makes stupidity, stupidity and mental and emotional dysfunction as a general rule and a system of existence that is implanted in the mind and the imagination of the masses in a systematic way for the sake of which all possible mechanisms of disappearance are mobilized. It’s something that makes intelligence, action and the creative art of life rare and exceptional things that are closer to perversion, if not unusual forms of idiocy and insanity. However, he asked to differentiate between “Bahamian” and “foolishness” on the one hand, and between idiocy on the other hand, and to differentiate between “the fool” and the stupid on the one hand, and between the “fool” and “the sincere”, giving us the example of “Don Quixote” and “Prince Meshkin” And Jack Al-Qadri, and they are not silly personalities, but they are “punitive” that unite the extremes of wisdom and the maximum madness and “open our eyes to dimensions of being that are not at the level of the middle eye that is immersed in the everyday and the rolling “.
Through the interesting texts of the book, the writer practiced his pleasure of moving between races and accents, such as that smooth passage from narrative to direct political writing to philosophy, and from humor to seriousness, exercising his penchant for breaking the limits between them and give them a special imprint and a unique richness, since it began by dissecting a Behemocracia idea, its components and manifestations. Then he introduced the art of writing, cinema and the debate between love, creativity and revolution through his wonderful text on the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, without skimping on analysis and narration in analyzing the mechanisms of domination and control of capital and its stupid culture through advertising, stereotyping and modeling.
In his latest novel, which is born from his contemplation of the idea of the “illusion of happiness”, which the dictatorship seeks through its various tools and devices to persuade people, and which he sees as a high repressive mechanism with the that attracts people and prevents them from self-reflection and the aspiration to liberation and self-realization, he returned through the characters of his novel and their events to Mocking the manifestations of stupidity and pettiness in contemporary Tunisian society, he tried to paint a panoramic image of a country that has been under a despicable dictatorship for many decades. All through events ranging from the 1980s to the early 2000s and from the oases of Gabes to the bars and streets of the capital.
Politically, his personality was a continuation of what he thinks and writes. The perfection of the young man who teaches philosophy and loves and writes literature is no different from the perfection of the old men who separated us and the relative fame and literary success (in a country that doesn’t like literature in the first place) did not convert him. not at all in a supremacist. Through his body, directly or through his pen, he continued to practice his convictions and grant him freedom from stupidity and the “dragon” of authority, and through many stages of his life from the student’s time, when he rejected an official honor for his superiority, until his last youth, where he, accompanied by Selim Doula, Jalul Azouna and others, founded the “League of Writers”. The Liberals ” is a parallel body to the Tunisian Writers ‘Union, which used to call it the’ Liars ‘Union’ after it sank into the praise of authority and humiliated for it, especially through the letter of appeal sent by the union through its president, in which all its members signed at the beginning of this millennium. Even in his day, he did not join the core of any political party, not because of asceticism, but because of his shortcomings in partisan work, and he continued to make his positions public during the time of the “ruling troika.” This cost him a physical assault by a thug from the ruling party’s “militias”. Furthermore, his asceticism and chastity in the southern countryside, which he brought with him from Hama, did not put him on the roads and labyrinths of the university, as he wanted to distinguish himself from the academic mainstream (known for its relations and cooperation with the Zionist parties or close to Zionists and Zionists in France in particular), directly expressing their disgust and humiliation with their humiliation. For parties that do not hide their filth, as recorded when the Franco-Tunisian tyrant Michel Bou Jinnah attended.
Kamal, who knew Qais Saeed closely for a short time and always boycotted elections, called on Tunisians, in a small position, to “vote for Qais Saeed”, keeping a critical distance from him when he came to power. Nor did it free him from criticism, nor did it exempt him from writing sarcastically, as in his brilliant text “The Hadith of al-Duhaya.”
He continued, directly through his body or his pen, practicing his convictions in the face of stupidity and the “dragon” of power.
Although he refused to participate in any political party despite the convergence of views and ideas with him, and despite the fact that most of his friends, led by the martyr Chokri Belaid and his friend Sinan Al-Azabi, were completely involved in the Direct party work, his position was not that of a miserable spectator, so his open letter to the French ambassador cannot be forgotten. In Tunisia, change the headquarters of the French Embassy in front of the Ibn Khaldun statue on the main street of the capital to another region, especially his participation in 2016 as coordinator of the project “Muhammad Ali Al-Hami Popular University”, of which He was one of the first founders and author of his founding statement published on the “Nawat” website. This project was generated by the need, according to the author, to take the revolutionary path to its maximum potential –which the party’s action could not fulfill– and it was only through a horizontal and local struggle based on sharing and proximity to listen carefully so that the maximum possible number of marginalized sectors understand, analyze and act in their reality. Both the private and the public. In this project, as stated in the founding statement, the founders sought to transform the educational act from being considered an act of domination of bodies and minds through apparent or hidden authoritarian coordinates (architectural, temporal, programmatic …) to a Free interactive knowledge exchange that will offer the possibilities of independent construction of the self and a positive contribution to the professional and social environment.
In sum, the life of the owner of “Zagbaniyya” (3), which is his natural artistic work that was not written, was in perfect harmony with his ideas and his vision of life and literature. A block with many different selves and faces … A faithful biography of creativity, intelligence, against vulgarity and the absurd, images of creative resistance as he wrote about it, instigated it and practiced it at all stages of his life. It was an image of what he himself wrote about Don Quixote “and if we make him” our God and now “, we will see him resist together the authority of humanity and theology and fight, especially that” bear “with a thousand faces and images : “Bahamas” with all its political, media, cultural and religious manifestations … He and the world have new meanings and values, and their hardships strengthen them in particular against various forms of restoration and domestication that continue to infiltrate them from all sides. ..
Margins
1- The intellectual al-Barri, a term taken from Professor Mustafa Al-Alawi, wrote in his eulogy for Kamal Al-Zoghbani.
2- Kamal wrote many blogs that serve as the nucleus of many articles and studies that he may have started, but Omar did not help him produce them in their final form and publish them. He also gave many lectures at many local cultural events, and his texts were scattered, and the only thing I would like to those who have been entrusted with the task of preserving their heritage is to collect all these interventions and produce them accordingly to their owner, in addition to many projects. in which he has been working for years and affirmed. With it, as a work on creativity and endurance, in literature, philosophy, film, and fiction, he sent his first manuscript to some of his friends.
3 Zagbania is the small land that was abandoned next to his residence, and turned it into a beautiful park, which he called Zogbania or Republic of Zogbania adjacent to the Republic of Tunisia.
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