Transculturality and ecology in francophone North African poetry: Human/non-human and global/local communities

As an alternative to a model of world literature complicit with global capitalism and its ecological destruction, critics have proposed the ‘planetary turn’ to name the emergence of a mode of thinking capable of accommodating both social and ecological diversity. Global relationality in this context is understood not only as connectivity between different cultures but also that between the human and the non-human, and emphasizes not only cultural differences and interactions but also our deep embeddedness in and reliance on the ecological environment. Planetary thinking champions the dynamic entanglement between manifold peoples and cultures at the same time as it insists on the connections between the human and the physical world. This article focuses on the ways in which francophone postcolonial North African poetry also betrays a peculiar attentiveness at once to cultural hybridization and to the riches of the ecological landscape. The Moroccan Abdellatif Laâbi and the Tunisian Tahar Bekri are contemporary writers whose poetry has combined, over the last forty years or so, a passion for multilingualism and cultural exchange with a fascination with the singular plant life they discover at home and abroad. Both use both French and Arabic, though most of their work is in French, and write against the forces of oppression left by the legacies of colonialism in part by celebrating transculturality. Both also evoke a form of intimate communion with the ecological environment, and portray it as a force with agency in order to condemn the history of ecological destruction. Their ‘ecocosmopolitan’ poetry in this way proposes a salutary communality that responds in far-reaching ways to human mastery and oppression as it acts both on cultural difference and on the delicate ecology of planet.