The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form

This is the story [qiṣṣa] of the Tunisian hero ‘Barq el-Lil’ who lived through the hazardous historical events of the hijri tenth century. He witnessed the arrival of Khayr al-Din, Hazardous Wednesday, the Spanish occupation, and local people fleeing to the area of Zaghouan—and his deeds were extraordinary throughout.


The Poetics and Politics of
Solidarity: Barg el-Lil (1961) and Afrotopia

Itzea Goikolea-Amiano
Introduction Bachir Khreyif's Arabic novel Barg el-Lil (1961) traces the adventures of a black slave across the rivalry between the Spanish and Ottoman empires, the two main early-modern Mediterranean empires, as it played out in sixteenth-century Tunisia. 1 Barg el-Lil (literally 'night lightning', probably a reference to his swiftness) is a black pícaro or trickster character. 2 He disguises himself in every possible way, as pícaros do, to escape fights or being captured by those claiming ownership over him. Barg can fade into busy streets and survive impossible crises. He tumbles down from rooftops, crosses the suq, hides in a cemetery, and encounters all sorts and classes of people along the way. Uprooted and enslaved as a child, Barg carries the weight of violence and oppression, though he also tricks his way into temporary positions of privilege and becomes a prominent agent in shaping Tunisian history. Through its slave protagonist and an early textual reference to Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, the novel hints at the multiple influences that-embedded in the history of trans-Saharan connections and Mediterranean relationshave shaped Tunisian history and culture. The form of ideology discussed in this chapter is that of the historical novel in the context of Tunisian independence and postcolonial state nationalism but also of debates about 'committed literature' and the pan-Africanist wave that swept through the Maghreb and the whole continent. Barg el-Lil was the first historical novel in Tunisian literary history and the first Arabic novel to have a black slave as protagonist. Unlike the 'ancient founders of the nation' like the Numidian king Jugurtha or resistance figures like the Emir Abdelkader who animated historical fiction in neighbouring Algeria, or the iconic peasant of Egyptian literature, Barg el-Lil focuses on the adventures of a black slave who manages to escape his tyrant owner and whose actions lead a fastpaced narrative. 3 The three layers of this chapter will progressively take us closer to the text and its narrative. The first layer situates Barg el-Lil within Khreyif's literary career in the context of print culture and the decolonial momentum in Tunisia, where literary form, language, content and ideology are entangled. If Khreyif's choice of a black slave as protagonist needs to be read in relation to Negritude and pan-Africanism, the 'afrotopian' momentum, and Bourguiba's colour-blind policies, 4 and the fact that its protagonists belong to 'the masses' (to use the terminology of the time) and are makers of history, is to be read in relation to 'committed literature' (adab multazim), a term hotly debated in Arabic literary circles and periodicals across the Third World in those decades. By situating emancipation in relation to both colonialism and slavery and 3 Zineb Ali Benali, 'Les ancêtres fondateurs: Élaborations symboliques du champ intellectuel algérien (1945)(1946)(1947)(1948)(1949)(1950)(1951)(1952)(1953)(1954) by repudiation, women's confinement, and the state's institutional violence, some of the key issues addressed by the PSC. The novel also discusses masculinity, and moments of inter-racial intimacy and solidarity mark the friendship between the two male protagonists-the central African slave Barg and local free man Sha'shu'. All in all, the novel posits pre-modern gender politics as repressive, but suggests that solidarity, friendship and love, and the subaltern heroes' individual wit and force, can challenge and dismantle it, which is interesting in light of the state-and Bourguiba-centric reformism. Tunisia had been a French Protectorate since 1881, with significant communities of Italian, Maltese and Greek immigrants since the beginning of the century. 10 At the time Bachir Khreyif (or Béchir Khraïef, 1917-1983 started writing in the late 1930s, the majority of the Tunisian print culture was Francophone. 11 Khreyif was born in the town of Nefta in the south-western Djreid region, known for its many Sufi lodges, but was raised in Tunis after his family moved there. Like many of his peers, Khreyif first received a traditional education and studied (and memorized) the Qur'an and classical Arabic poetry and languageskills which enabled him to read the sixteenth-century chronicles and exemplary biographies ( Like its coeval al-Nadwa (Cenacle), al-Fikr sought to define the nature of the writer's mission in society. 23 Although the question of the responsibility of writers toward their people had already emerged in the 1920s, the term iltizām (commitment) became current only after Taha Husayn decried Sartre's notion of littérature engagée in 1947. Ironically, as Yoav Di-Capua notes, 'in warning the young of the dangers of commitment, Taha Husayn gave this burgeoning intellectual movement its Arabic name'. 24 When the Egyptian critic Salama Musa (1887-1958) adopted socialist theories and the Beirut-based periodical Al-Ādāb became 'the mouthpiece of a whole generation of committed writers and poets', the idea of a committed literature (al-adab al-multazim) took a more leftist hue, and as such came to dominate the Tunisian and pan-Arabic field in the 1950s and 1960s. 25 The first 1959 issue of al-Fikr, for example, was devoted to the social role of universities, with essays comparing the state of higher education and the role of intellectuals in Asian, African and European countries and the Arab world. While poetry dominated the Tunisian and Arabic literary field and print culture until the 1950s, al-Fikr gave room other genres, too. 26 An entire issue in July 1959 was devoted to 'the story' (qiṣṣa), a genre the editors felt was missing from the Tunisian postcolonial literary field. In fact, in the late 1950s and early 1960s it was often difficult to draw a clear demarcation between the story or tale and the novel or long narrative (riwāya). Novels appeared as serialized stories in journals, and some writers produced texts 'in a sort of intermediary form, somewhere between a short novel and a long short story'. 27 Finally, language debates divided Tunisian print culture like other parts of the Arab world. Many French-educated Tunisians challenged the colonial preference for the vernacular or Darija over literary Arabic on the basis that the latter was incompatible with modernity. (We will hear echoes of these arguments in the criticisms of Khreyif for his use of Tunisian Darija. 28 ) At the same time, criticisms of the use of Darija also reflected elitist conceptions of literature. Despite a long tradition of vernacular popular poetry across the whole Arabic-speaking region, modern intellectuals tended to dismiss it as unworthy or illegitimate because it did not fit into the prevailing notion of adab, which entailed 'conformity to linguistic norms, such as those governing purity and correctness'. 29 Throughout the 1960s Khreyif published in al-Fikr, where Barg el-Lil appeared in serialized form and where he took part in the debates on language, committed literature, and genre. Literature for Khreyif had to relate to the socio-political reality of the world around it and draw from the lives of the common people, and although he became most famous for his historical novels he considered plays and stories-rather than novelsto be the genres most suited for tackling people's concerns (see Orsini in this volume). 30 In a 1959 article in al-Fikr he rejected the apocalyptic future of 'isolation' (in'izāl) from the pan-Arabic literary field that critics envisaged for literature containing Tunisian Arabic. 31 He pointed towards the living nature of language and signalled the 'co-existence' (ta'āyush) of standard and vernacular forms of Arabic. Khreyif did not advocate the end of Tunisian affiliation with the body of Arabic classical literature; rather, he wanted to continue to belong to such tradition while making it compatible with Tunisian locatedness, expressed particularly through dialogues. Finally, he asked al-fuṣaḥā' (people of eloquence) to stop being pretentious and to consider Darija a respectable language (lugha muḥtarama). Khreyif's criticism of the elitism of the intellectuals echoes Egyptian Salama Musa's call for writing 'in the language of the simple people' and his accusation that traditional literature was 'the literature of the rulers', whereas committed literature was 'responsible, devoted to social problems and had a declared position with respect to war, imperialism, exploitation, suppression of women and gender injustice in law and economy'. 32 Khreyif later modified his position and argued, in an article published in al-Fikr in 1964 with the title 'al-Iltizām khanq al-adab' (Commitment chokes literature), that iltizām could, and at times did, divest literature of its creative soul. Khreyif decried the writers' constant political positioning and need to justify every choice, which sounded pedantic (ḥadhlaqa) to readers. Instead of committed literature he called for 'liberated literature' (adab mutaḥarrir), and affirmed that 'the role of the intellectual is to express his opinion freely'. 33 The history of the publication of Barg el-Lil sheds light on the importance of periodicals as the first port of publication and the slippage between stories and novels. Many Maghrebi works published in periodicals in the first half of the twentieth century have either been forgotten or, if they were later published in book form as novels, their original serialization as stories is unacknowledged. 34 A paradigmatic example is Abdelmajid Benjelloun's Fī al-Tufūla (In Childhood), acclaimed as the first Moroccan novel published in 1957, whereas the stories that constitute it appeared in the periodical Risāla-t al-Maghrib between 1949 and1951. 35 In fact, publishing literary books in early postcolonial Tunisia was difficult, at least until the 'Maison Tunisienne d 'Edition' was established in 1966. 36 In the case of Barg el-Lil, though Khreyif completed it as single piece in March 1960 and sent it to the Tunis city council (Ali al-Balhawan) literary competition on Tunisian history, it was only after it won the prize that al-Fikr began to serialize it in December 1960 ( Fig. 7.2), before its book publication in 1961 ( Fig.  7.3). 37 Note that whereas the instalment in al-Fikr spelt the name of the protagonist according to the Darija pronunciation (Barg, with three dots), the note by al-Fikr's editors and the cover of the novel reproduced the standard Arabic pronunciation (Barq, with two or no dots).  moved to Tunis after he was expelled from Algeria by the colonial authorities in 1956, decried the 'inverted Manicheism of the "Negroism" of the Negritude writers', these debates moved race and anticolonialism from the margins to the centre of Francophone public discourse-in the Maghreb and Tunisia as well. 40 Although Bourguiba was pro-Western in contrast to Nasser's Egypt, Muammar al Qaddafi's Libya, and the Front de Libération Nationale's (FLN) Algeria, by the late 1950s he sought to reinforce the international position of Tunisia as a non-aligned state. 41 In the 1960 Tunisia hosted the All African Peoples Conference (AAPC), which gathered the international movement for freedom and democracy while aiming to build a black nation. First held in Accra (Ghana)  to the dictates of both the United States and the Soviet Union'. 44 They also situated emancipation in relation to the history of slavery and the forced uprooting of Africans to different world diasporas. Barg el-Lil tells the story of one such enslaved sub-Saharan in early-modern Tunisia.

Barg el-Lil in Tunisian and Third World Postcolonial Print Culture
Parallel to the transnational 'afrotopian' context, there are national dynamics also to be considered. Led by Bourguiba, the nascent Tunisian postcolonial state aimed to create a politically unified modern and secular nation. 45 Bourguiba implemented 'policies intended to ingest heterogeneous entities and homogenize the nation', subsuming regional, racial and class differences under full citizenship. Yet Bourguiba's project for modern Tunisia clearly privileged the secular and urban middle classes and their cultural orientation, and throughout the 1960s the one-party state sidelined the working class, students, and peasants in the already marginalized interior while it consolidated its power in ways that benefited landowners and the urban middle classes. 46 Bourguiba's policies were 'colour-blind', Afifa Ltifi argues, and although they aimed at 'suppress[ing] the memory of slavery', they reinforced its stigma and the inequality between their descendants and other Tunisians. 47 In light of Bourguiba's 'colour-blind' policies, the fact that Barg el-Lil connects North and sub-Saharan Africa foregrounds a postcolonial pan-African geographical imagination and sheds light onto the silenced history of the trans-Saharan slave trade, which underpins Khreyif's exceptional vision and suggests that he was alert to the afrotopian moment. The novel opens with Barg as a seventeen-year-old black man who 'began his life [in Tunisia] as a slave of Sidi Hamid b. al-Nakhli, the scholar who devoted his life to searching the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life'. 55 Barg's owner, in other words, is the man who Miguel de Cervantes claimed to be the author of the Arabic original text of which Don Quixote was a translation. This intertextual gesture in the very first sentence of the novel helps locate the world Barg inhabits, a world shaped, like Cervantes's, by a constant shift across borders and margins. 56 The imprint on Cervantes' magnum opus evokes the notion of the 'transcontinental Maghreb' with its millennia-old relations and interconnections. 57 Arguably, inscribing this shared Mediterranean history through Don Quixote, one of the acclaimed masterpieces of Western literature, engenders reciprocity and symbolically challenges colonial hierarchies that are inscribed in linear conceptions of history travelling from tradition and 'backwardness' to modern 'civilization'. 58 Another trace of this intertextual connection and literary crosspollination comes through the character of Barg as a pícaro or trickster character. It has long been argued that sixteenth-century Spanish picaresca echoes Arabic anecdotal narratives or maqāmāt and oral zajal poetry. The anticlerical element in the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), the best-known prototype of Spanish picaresca, is 'so manifest', one critic argues, that it has been suggested that the work 'might have been written by a morisco'. 59 By casting Barg el-Lil the pícaro as an enslaved Central African young man, the novel subverts the pervasive silencing of the Maghrebi involvement in the enslavement of black Africans. 60 The violent uprooting and enslavement of Barg, and of virtually any Tunisian descendant of sub-Saharan slaves, is presented explicitly through Barg's own memories: he remembered how he was securely transported-as an innocent prey-to the caravan of turban-wearing whites [baīḍ mu'ammamīn]. There he found his mother, tied and weeping, her eyes full of tears. […] She had resisted, then given up with resignation. […] [When] she saw her child […] she tried to reach him with her chest, as her hands were tied at the back. The slave trader whipped her and she screamed like a lioness, exposed her canine teeth ['anīyāb] dried of all saliva, while the boy, like a fawn, tried to rebel against the abductor. 61 Such violence is inflicted on Barg by 'turban-wearing whites', a clear reference to Bedouin slave traders. Racism underpins not just the trauma of his, and his mother's, enslavement, but every aspect of Barg's life in Tunis: 'He is black. And this is the whites' world' (dunīyā al-baīḍ), the narrator notes. 62 Whiteness marks not only the slave traders but Tunisians in general-and privileged white people worldwide. We can in fact read the reference as a pun on Frantz Fanon's Black where blacks are exploited by Tunisian whites-or rather 'white, but not quite'. 63 At the same time, in the passage quoted above the metaphorical animalization of Barg, and especially of his mother, associates them with instinct and aggressiveness and, disturbingly, instead of instilling a critical view towards the perpetrators of violence, it naturalizes the racist (and speciesist) tenet by which they are kidnapped, mistreated, traded, worked, sold, and exploited.
Through Barg's memories of the caravan route, the narrative evokes some of the most notorious enclaves of the trans-Saharan trade routes: 'From Central Africa the caravan headed to Timbuktu and Bornu. There they sold, bought and interchanged ostrich feathers, coral, shells, textiles, pottery and arms. They then continued their way to the Fezzan'. 64 By placing Tunisia within the 'significant geographies' of the trans-Saharan (slave) trade and relations, Barg el-Lil connects both sides of the Saharan desert and problematizes the long-standing cleavage between the so-called Bilād al-Baīḍān (the Lands of the Whites) and Bilād al-Sūdān (the Lands of the Blacks). 65 The action-driven narrative shifts into a reflexive mode through the memories of violence and Barg's longing to 'go back to the world of blacks' (dunīyā al-sūd). 66 But if the novel illuminates the traumatic experiences of forced uprooting and enslavement, Barg is no passive victim. On the contrary, the text challenges understandings of slavery as utter victimhood, and Barg shows agency not only in managing his own life but also in shaping Tunisian history. While historical accounts attribute the withdrawal of the Christian forces to their being decimated by leprosy, in the novel it is the arsenic that Barg throws into the pond of the Citadel that kills the soldiers and forces the Christians out of the country. 67 In Borderlands, 'at the juncture of cultures, languages crosspollinate and are revitalised; they die and are born', Gloria Anzaldúa reminds us. 73 The sixteenth-century Tunisian Borderland in Barg el-Lil is truly multilingual. Different registers of Arabic, Turkish and Italian are heard on the streets of Tunis, and the music and chants of the Andalusis mingle with those of Beduins, Genoese, and Majorcan 73 Anzalduá,Borderlands,p. 20. Barg's cultural attachment to central Africa is embedded in music and dance. Music is in fact a fundamental element of the novel and triggers narrative action. It is through music and dance that the protagonist attracts the attention of his beloved neighbour Rim while he dances to the sound of glass jars and bottles at Sidi b. al-Nakhli's ( Fig. 7.4), which 'enables his ancestral musical intuitiveness'. 68 The sweet memories of Barg's childhood back home include dancing around the embers of the open fire before going to sleep. 69 This association of Barg with an intuitiveness that comes all the way from a remote past (salīqat[u]hu al-'arīḍa) again problematically connects him with the realm of nature and a past antithetical to modernity. 70 At the same time, the history and memory of black people in Tunisia are linked to rituals of trance and possession by divine spirits that are associated with a particular set of rhythms and movements and that Tunisian readers would probably connect with Stambeli musicians, the descendants of sub-Saharan slaves. 71 Their performances-like the Gnawa in Morocco-illustrate the current folklorization of minority cultures. 72 sailors. 74 The port is frequented by privateers who come and go, carrying booty and captives from across the Mediterranean; captives are imprisoned in the Citadel or sold in the city markets along with Circassian and sub-Saharan slaves. A sizeable number of moriscos rescued from Christian harassment at the fall of the Muslim kingdoms of al-Andalus also dwell in the capital, along with Andalusi migrants, whose musical chants bring much delight; some of them join the force fighting the Spaniard invasion, eager for revenge. As the narrator notes, among the 'linguistic expressions inherited from that time and still in employ is the following: "No one knows the Rumi expulsion better than the Andalusi"'. 75 74 Ibid., p. 114. 75 Khreyif, Barg el-Lil, p. 120. Rumi refers to the Christians (al-rūm).
If language plays a fundamental role in signalling the force of structural violence, it also highlights the agency of the slave protagonist. Barg performs a pidginized and incorrect Darija in order to avoid the legal responsibility he had previously committed to, and declares: 'let the free comply, let the free comply, I am a slave, I can't comply with anything' ‫شيء(‬ ْ ‫َز‬ ‫ز‬ ْ ‫ن‬ َ ‫أ‬ ‫ما‬ ‫أنا‬ ‫وصيف،‬ ‫أنا‬ ٌ ‫ُر‬ ‫َه‬ ‫َز‬ ‫ز‬ ْ ‫ن‬ َ ‫أ‬ ، ٌ ‫ُر‬ ‫َه‬ ‫َز‬ ‫ز‬ ْ ‫ن‬ َ ‫.)أ‬ 76 Barg mispronounces the verb anjaza, meaning 'to do', 'comply', or 'carry out', as anzaza, the way children do; and pronounces the adjective ḥur, 'free', as hur. Khreyif helps the reader by placing vowel diacritics, not normally used, on the mispronounced words. This is the only instance in the whole novel in which vowel diacritics are used, showing that Barg's one-time incorrect use of language, which he otherwise masters, is intentional. His linguistic performance marks his wit and agency, and at the same time it is a reminder of the infantilizing and othering of the blacks in Tunisia.
Like Gha'ib Tu'mah Farman's al-Nakhla wa al-jīrān (The Date Palm and the Neighbours, 1965), which mixes classical Arabic and Baghdadi dialect 'to recover scenes and anecdotes typical of periods of transition, change and challenge', especially from the point of view of the lower classes and women, 77 Khreyif uses the vernacular in Barg el-Lil to evoke the social world of his characters. Vernacular expressions like 'Yā afandī', an Ottoman title of nobility, or 'Dāda' for governess, or old toponyms like 'Mazghana' for Algiers (which Khreyif clarifies in a footnote), derived from the name of one of the Berber tribes dwelling there, pepper the novel. 78 When introducing Sha'shu', one of the main characters and soon to become Barg's best friend, the narrator tells us that he is 'a karrākayī, that is, his job consists in rowing when the wind blows, as they say', before situating this Tunisian term for a Mediterranean oarsman within the system of forced labour. 79 If popular language provides aesthetic value, the historical explanations betray a pedagogical impulse that resonates with Salama Musa's conception of the writer as an educator. 80  institutions, city houses and gates by their sixteenth-century names, at times quoting the Tunisian historian Ibn Abi Dinar (d. c. 1699), and includes contemporary names in footnotes to allow readers to locate them: Barg 'was outside the Qasba, where the ruins lay of the corridor built by al-Mustansir about three centuries ago so that his female slaves could traverse it without wearing the veil on their way to leisure activities in the royal hall at Ras al-Tabia. Only a few faded traces remain that tell the story-for those willing to listen to it-of the beautiful, coloured feet that lightly and merrily stepped on them'. 81 Here the narrator captures the reader's attention through a story-telling formula, marked by dashes in the text, that creates suspense about the owners of the 'coloured feet'. At one point, Sha'shu', the karrakayī in the Ottoman army who Khayr al-Din Barbarossa appoints as governor of the citadel, entrusts Barg with surveying the prisoners. Barg takes the opportunity to learn their language, 'a mixture of the languages of the nations surrounding the Christians' sea [baḥr al-rūm]'. 82 Normally used between Muslims and Christians and between Christians of different origins, this lingua franca was an early-modern pan-Mediterranean koiné consisting of a mixture of mainly Romance languages. Khreyif's reference to it as the language of 'the Christians' sea' evokes Jocelyne Dakhlia's notion of the lingua franca as 'the locus of the overcoming of an alterity, but also a reminder of it' due to the underrepresentation of Arabic, Turkish, Tamazight or Greek, which replicates the 'asymmetry of the border'. 83 If the link between Barg el-Lil and Don Quixote establishes literary co-constitution, the lingua franca makes the asymmetry of the Mediterranean Borderlands explicit. And if the picaresca narrative of al-Hamadani worked against the prestigious Arabic genres of ḥādīth, sīra, the sermon, the theological debate, and 81 Ibid., p. 71. Note that Rās (cape) is spelt as is pronounced in Tunisian Darija, rather than Rā's as in standard Arabic. lyrical poetry, Barg el-Lil challenges elite-centred historiography by making common and subaltern people the protagonists of a fairly disregarded historical event, and by using a popular language peppered with sixteenth-century terms and Tunisian Arabic. If Barg el-Lil expands the representation of pre-colonial Tunisia and complicates understandings of slavery as utter victimhood, it is in the novel's gender politics that the debates of late 1950s postcolonial Tunisia are most evidently tackled through the form of historical fiction. How policies of state feminism were contested emerges powerfully in the novel. 85 As with the black protagonist, the narrative shows the power of structures, but also the power of female subaltern characters to navigate and challenge them. Barg el-Lil emphasizes love, particularly interracial romantic love and friendship between men, and envisions solidarity as the foundation of that 'bonding to survive the enormous pressures of the present' through which the future is made. In the novel, women's oppression is embodied by repudiation (i.e., the thrice repeated divorce initiated by the husband in the privacy of the  (1936)(1937)(1938)(1939)(1940)(1941), founded by Mahmoud Zarrouk but edited since 1937 by Tawhida Ben Cheikh (best known as the first Tunisian woman doctor), targeted the elites of the capital city and was particularly critical of colonial patriarchy. home), physical violence, and confinement within the home, as well as the state's patriarchal and repressive institutions like women's houses of correction. Some of these issues were reformed by the Tunisian Personal Status Code (PSC) approved in August 1956, less than five months after the country had attained independence. The PSC abolished polygyny, created a judicial procedure for divorce (thereby abolishing repudiation), and established the mutual consent of both parties as a requirement for marriage. 86 The PSC encoded modern understandings of sexual difference, family and kinship arrangements embedded in urban middle-class respectability, with the nuclear household becoming the new ideal union. It became a symbol of the postcolonial state-led reformist feminism encapsulated by Bourghiba and his project of modernity, which promoted gender equality while reinforcing an androcentric narrative of nationhood. Women's rights and the National Union of Tunisian Women (Union Nationale de la Femme Tunisienne; UNFT)-the primary means through which official policy related to women was translated into local practices-were instrumentalized and trapped 'between public declarations and favourable legislative measures and the effective absence from decision-making'. 87 As in 1950s Egypt, state feminism in Tunisia replaced intimate familial forms of male control with public patriarchy. 88 At the same time, the PSC aroused strong opposition among some social sectors of postcolonial Tunisia. Both the traditionalist scholars ('ulamā') of the Zaytouna Mosque and the remnants of the Old Destour Party-which Bourguiba had left to establish the Néo Destour Party in 1934-rejected the provision that abolished repudiation. 89 In Barg el-Lil Barg falls in love with Rim, a woman who lives in the building facing Sidi b. al-Nakhli's and secretly watches Barg dance to the rhythm of the instruments in the laboratory. Barg does not look at Rim directly but sees her reflected in a small mirror. The ritual is repeated every night for three months while Rim's husband is away on the Hajj; before leaving, he had sealed the house door to prevent her from going out-a sign of women's cloistering which the novel persistently denounces. 90 When Rim's husband comes back from pilgrimage and finds out, he slaps her, beats her and repudiates her by pronouncing the divorce sentence three times. 91 Rim and Barg are separated, but destiny brings them back together when Barg is required to perform for her the role of the tayyās, i.e. marrying her and repudiating her so that she can remarry her former, now regretful, husband. 92 Barg accepts the role, but after spending the night with Rim he refuses to repudiate her and escapes from the legal scholars who threaten him with dire consequences by remarking, as in the passage quoted in the previous section, that as a slave he cannot comply with legal conventions. 93 Although the subplot between Barg and Rim focuses mostly on her mistreatment by her husband, it points to the social taboo of inter-racial love and turns both characters into new 'Antar and 'Abla, the protagonists of the pre-Islamic epic in which the romance between black and chivalrous 'Antar with 'Abla cannot be consummated due to his origin and skin colour. 94 Patriarchal oppression in the novel is reinforced by state institutions. Sha'shu', the karrakayī in the Ottoman army, was sentenced to the oars after being jailed for assisting an unnamed woman escape from Dar Juwed, a women's house of correction. 95  institutional sanction, while Sha'shu''s act is one of solidarity: he helps her because he considers her unjustly 'oppressed' (madhlūma) by her husband, who is a shaykh and thus a religious authority. By going back to the Hafsid period, Khreyif signals the transhistorical nature of patriarchal notions and practices and points towards the continuity between Hafsid, Ottoman, and French patriarchal systems. If by advocating women's emancipation and the need to do away with patriarchal structures and practices may seem to reinforce state-led feminist policies, the novel goes further and suggests that the so-called 'woman question' is as much about men and masculinity. Through Sha'shu' and Barg's friendship and discussions on women and gender relations, the novel presents a more complex and layered picture of how men's worlds and interactions are gendered, arguably reflecting the range of male attitudes in post-independence Tunisia.

Solidarity and Gender
The friendship between Sha'shu' and Barg begins after the latter escapes from Sidi b. al-Nakhli, who beat him for crashing the laboratory, distracted by music and by Rim's gaze. 97 When Sha'shu' bravely defends Barg from a general, who asks why he's defending a black slave, Barg claims to be Sha'shu''s slave. 98 Their friendship thus begins with an act of reciprocity between a local free man and a black slave, which signals how solidarity need not be unidirectional. From then on, the two men share hazardous adventures and intimate conversations. Despite the differences in race and status, they have many things in common, and both intervene on behalf of women suffering gendered forms of oppression. At the same time, Sha'shu' also comes across as a womanizer who boasts of having a woman in every port and holds misogynistic ideas about women. 99 When Barg confesses his love for Rim to him and cries because a reunion seems impossible, Sha'shu' laughs and tells him that '[women's] weakness is a false appearance that they use over men. Their tricks are sublime'. Sha'shu' then apologizes for laughing at his friend in a moment of vulnerability. Barg accepts his apology but counters his words saying that 'women deserve all attentions'. 100 Such retort may be said to represent an instance when male patriarchal solidarity breaks. Bonds of camaraderie between men 97 Khreyif,p. 18. 98 Ibid.,p. 93. 100 Ibid., are key to perpetuate the patriarchal system that awards men privileges for the simple fact of being men. The lack of solidarity between Barg and Sha'shu' is thus politically meaningful. 101 Moreover, despite being depicted as disenfranchised by patriarchal society, throughout the novel women display strategies to overcome gendered forms of oppression. They communicate with each other through the rooftops or employ coded taps on the walls separating them. 102 One becomes a spy for Spain and exploits her position as a concubine, thereby shaping history and politics. 103 Enslaved women-Circassians, Christians from Calabria and Valencia, and sub-Saharan women from Abyssinia and Sudan-build mutual bonds in the lodging houses before they are sold, and by sharing stories their 'sadness turn[s] into joy and happiness'. 104 One explains how she managed to seed discord among her abductors; another confesses that she fell in love with her master and had to use tricks to avoid being sold; yet another explains that she associated with a robber to whom she handed over her masters' valuable objects; together they sing, laugh and dance. 105 Women also display solidarity with men and, by doing so, their position shifts from objects to subjects of solidarity. At one point an unnamed woman saves Barg from being tortured to death after he refuses to repudiate Rim. She shelters him in the basement of her house, treats his injuries, and hides him from her own husband, to whom she gives a potion so that she can spend the night with the black hero. Barg abruptly ends this relationship and leaves when he notices some possessiveness (saiṭara) in her. While denouncing the oppressive patriarchal structure within which womanhood is constructed as subaltern and as a uniform social category, Barg el-Lil constantly de-essentializes the category of 'woman' (al-mar'a, in singular, as it was used then) by highlighting women's heterogeneity. 'Are all women the same?', Barg asks himself. 'No way!' is his answer. 106 If patriarchal institutions and ideas are to be abolished, Barg el-Lil suggests that human bonding will occur through solidarity with those most vulnerable in the structures of power. The novel shows the power of love-especially Rim and Barg's inter-racial and taboo love-but it does not valorize romantic love alone. On the contrary, Barg el-Lil is an homage to friendship, particularly that between men of different social status and race like Sha'shu' and Barg. As such, this fictional past provides a blueprint for gender and race relations in postcolonial Tunisia.

Conclusion
The second Arabic Novel Forum hosted in Tunisia in March 2019 was dedicated to racism and slavery in Arabic novels. The guest of honour, Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury, affirmed that these issues are 'often silenced' and emphasized the role of culture 'in breaking taboos and tackling the real issues of Arab societies'. 107 The poster of the Forum featured Barg, the first enslaved black protagonist in a modern Arabic novel, as illustrated by Hassan Ta'rit for the 1961 cover of the novel (Fig. 7.5). Just how exceptional Barg el-Lil was in its time is even more apparent considering the new generation of Maghrebi and Arab writers who have started to break the silence around the history and legacies of trans-Saharan slavery, also in the context of the movements and discussions opened up by the Arab Springs and strengthened by the 2020 global anti-racism protests. Barg el-Lil is indeed an invitation to think about the past, to wonder about how peoples lived, struggled, loved, or strolled in the streets of sixteenth-century Tunis. Set in the context of a violent imperial clash between the Ottomans and the Spaniards, Khreyif's novel is endowed with what Muhsin al-Musawi calls 'a postcolonial consciousness', in that it tackles the thorny postcolonial issue of contacts between Europeans and Muslims, but resists 'contaminated discourses like the strictly nationalist and even the reformist that succumb to colonialist compartmentalization of the colonial subject'. 109 There is little doubt that Barg el-Lil discusses issues that were pressing in late 1950s and early 1960s' Tunisia, especially gendered and racialized subjecthood and the patriarchal nature of state institutions, society and culture, as I have argued. But Khreyif also aimed at complicating mainstream historical narratives in which the past is limited to the rulers' deeds. His historical novel pivots around a key event of early modern Tunisia from the point of view of subaltern characters, especially the Central African pícaro Barg. The multilingual and multicultural character of Hafsid Tunisia in Barg el-Lil prevents colonialist compartmentalization and resists the homogenization of the postcolonial state. At the same time, cultural heterogeneity does not mean that the sixteenth-century Tunisian Borderlands contains no asymmetries-indeed, the fact that the protagonist is an enslaved young man who was forcedly uprooted from his homeland and family is perhaps the clearest antidote to any idyllic depiction.
Barg el-Lil thus connects North and sub-Saharan Africa through the atrocious practice of slavery, but also makes the defeat of one of the strongest imperial powers of the time the slave's deed when Barg poisons the pond of the citadel and forces the Christian forces out of the country. If central Africa constitutes an important 'significant geography' in Khreyif's novel, Barg's pícaro character and the intertextual link to Don Quixote through Sidi Hamid b. al-Nakhli situate the Mediterranean as another polyvalent 'significant geography', a 'world' in which inter-connection, literary cross-pollination and the asymmetry of the linguistic border coexist.