Abstract
The Arabic or French novels of Gamal Ghitani, Ibrahim Al-Koni, Pierre Loti, Charles Wallut, Eugène Fromentin, and André Gide are legendary stories located outside of time and linked to a mystical quest . The travel to reach an oasis is symbolical, and the life within it an oasisnade, or oasis narrative. As a dream or a mirage, the oasis is an important imaginary representation for orientalist literature linked with the French colonial process. The main problem for the writer is how to describe poetically such a geographical reality as an oasis inside the complementary reality of the desert, using colours, the “écriture artiste”, or patterns such as the foundation story, the Garden of Eden, or the maze. The identity of the traveller is completely changed through the encounter with the oasis in a spiritual or cultural way.
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Notes
- 1.
The Call of the West.
- 2.
The Hidden Oasis.
- 3.
A frozen sea.
- 4.
The keif in Arabic culture is a word that gives the idea of a feeling of emptiness and fullness that can be felt when one is outside ordinary reality with the help of commonly used drugs, such as hashish. It also has a more general meaning of living to the full.
- 5.
Ksours (singular: ksar) are granaries to store wheat, corn, and many food items; they are usually divided into cells called “ghorfas”. They can occupy a very wide area and become real towns. Fromentin probably uses the term in the colonial sense, because French colonialists developed “ksours” to control the space.
- 6.
Marc Kober, “Fiction des oasis dans la littérature égyptienne contemporaine”, CRESC and PRODIG. Conference “Oasis dans la mondialisation: ruptures et continuités” December 2013, HAL Id: hal-01024367 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01024367. Submitted 16 July 2014, pp. 13–20.
- 7.
The “hamada” is a rocky plain in the desert . It is sometimes associated with a “reg”.
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Kober, M. (2017). A Travel Through Oases in French and Arabic Literature. In: Lavie, E., Marshall, A. (eds) Oases and Globalization. Springer Geography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50749-1_2
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