An engineer by training, the Tunisian Yamen Manaï chose literature to express his revolts, his frustrations and his despair in the face of the excesses of the world. At 40, he already has to his credit a body of work consisting of four novels, all of which have won numerous awards. His last opus, beautiful abysssays the rage and fury of Tunisian youth confronted with dictatorship and patriarchy.
” In Tunisia, the summer was very hot at times and we were forced to stay at home for a good part of the afternoon. So I read a lot. My mother was a teacher, my father was a professor of Arabic literature. We had a lot of classical Arabic literature and a lot of translations of works from around the world. The books at that time came to my rescue. Sometimes we managed to escape, we went to join our friends until I stopped trying to get out. I prefer the company of books to all other hobbies. »
Thus speaks the writer Yamen Manaï. Passionate about reading since his childhood, this young Tunisian, barely forty, is today himself the author of four novels. Published by the Tunisian publisher Elyzad, Manaï’s novels have all won local and/or international literary prizes, making their author a promising figure among the rising generation of French-speaking novelists. His publisher never forgets to recall that in the space of ten years of literary career, his colt won ten literary prizes, including some of the most prestigious such as the Grand Prix du roman Métis and the Prix des five continents of La Francophonie. Excuse a bit!
An engineer by training, Yamen Manaï has lived in Paris since the age of 18. It was by landing in the French capital that he embarked on the exhilarating adventure of writing, building novel after novel a singular, committed and inventive work. In 2010 he published his very first novel The Walk of Uncertainty (Elyzad) whose action takes place between France and Tunisia, literature and scientific thought. The serenade of Ibrahim Santos (Elyzad, 2011), his second novel, plunges the reader into the world of magic realism à la Marquez and it will be followed by The Fiery Cluster (Elyzad, 2017), which is an ecological-political fable. His latest opus, beautiful abyss, is a short novel of 110 pages, published in 2021, halfway between social criticism and learning story. With striking writing, it has just been awarded the Orange Book Prize in Africa.
With the theme of the frustrations of Tunisian youth, told through the revolt of a teenager against his family and society in general, because they killed his dog, his only companion, under the pretext that he would not spread rage, beautiful abyss obviously thrilled the Orange Prize jury. In his press release, he drew attention to the quality of Manaï’s writing, while ” fury, rage and passion “. The author himself recognizes that he wrote this fourth novel with a sense of urgency, which mobilized all his creative energy, even his whole being.
” The writing of Bel abîme was dazzling, remembers the novelist. For once, I experienced the inspiration in tense and continuous flow for a week to the point of not knowing how to feed myself and to the point of not sleeping properly until I put an end to this story. From this point of view, it is different from the others because it took me two and a half years to write them. I had put them aside, I came back to see them. It was high tide, low tide. But there I was on board ! In Bel abîme, I have often been told that it was a book that should be read in apnea. Me, I also wrote it in apnea. »
A learning novel
Written as a first-person monologue, beautiful abyss tells, at a first level, the story of unconditional love between a 15-year-old kid and his dog Bella, whom he picked up in the streets of the suburbs of Tunis. ” Bella was my friend. Bella was my love. Bella was all that mattered and never will “, laments the narrator-protagonist.
One could speak of a learning novel because it is a question here of a quest depicted through the story of this adolescent who is suffocating in his narrow social and family environment, governed by the laws of an intolerant Islam and the patriarchy. The fusional love he feels for his dog Bella, who makes him happy when he comes back from school, who is also the only one waiting for him in front of the gate, allows him to give free rein to his feelings.
However, Bella is hated by the parents of the narrator. Taking advantage of the boy’s absence, they manage to get rid of the dog. She will be shot by city officials. Upset by the loss of his dog, the teenager takes revenge by killing his father, the mayor of the city, the deputies, responsible in his eyes for the disappearance of his object of affection. It will be a real carnage.
But Bella is not just a dog, she is also a metaphor and support for a political fable. Inspired by the revolt of Tunisian youth against the Ben Ali dictatorship, this novel can also be read as a sociopolitical allegory. There is in the suicidal approach of the protagonist of Manaï something mohamed bouazizi who, we remember, set himself on fire and through whom the revolution came about. It’s hard not to be sensitive to the sense of urgency, fever and rage that underlie these pages. But the originality of the author is to have been able to tell the social and political anomie of his country through the story of the teenager and his dog.
” In all cultures, explains the author, dogs were frowned upon. The dog is he who sniffs the behind of his fellow man. He is the one who will copulate in public. He is a being who does not care at all about social conventions. Me, I wanted to denounce with this book the hypocrisy of Tunisian society, which has the almost major challenge of appearing in its best light, even if behind the scenes are disastrous. To denounce this masquerade, the social conventions which in fact reflect great hypocrisy, in fact a dog is perhaps the best suited being. The book arrived like a thunderbolt and I didn’t feel like I had a choice. I was told that I used a teenager and a dog to show Tunisia. Me, I said that this tandem used me, me, to tell Tunisia. »
Nuance and hope
beautiful abyss wants to be a fierce criticism of Tunisian society, its excesses and its hypocrisies. Yamen Manaï said that the idea for this novel was born from the spectacle of a fight that occurred in 2020 in the Tunisian hemicycle, broadcast on television. The drift of politics had also been the starting point of the author’s previous novel, entitled The Fiery Clusterwhere it was about the death of bees and the rise of religious fanaticism.
A committed writer, Manaï writes to tell, to denounce, but also to repair the world: “ Writing is cathartic for me, he explains. I often write because I’m feeling bad. This spectacle of deputies bumping into each other, like the spectacle of the Bataclan attacks, which was the trigger for my penultimate novel, gives me the temptation to hate the human race. But literature reconciles me with my fellow human beings, reconciles me with the world, gives nuance, hope, restores their humanity to everyone. The teenager from the Bel abyss, we would read his story in a news item, it looks like he’s a monster. Literature gives it back its humanity, gives it back its beauty. »
The mission of literature is to re-enchant the world, likes to repeat Yamen Manaï. This ambition, which gives meaning to his own trajectory as a novelist, is undoubtedly not unrelated to the enthusiasm that his stories arouse in the cenacles of literary juries as well as among his readers.
► beautiful abyss, by Yamen Manai. Elyzad, 112 pages, 14.50 euros.