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Homage To A Humanist At Heart: Dr. Jallal Boussedra

By Mustapha Marrouchi

07 February, 2011
Countercurrents.org

I learned from a former student of mine, Khaled Ghazel, now based in the United Kingdom, that Dr. Jallal Boussedra had died in Tunis after a long battle with cancer. Jallal had taught Khaled, who keeps fond memories of him. Upon hearing the news, I felt a pang of anguish for I knew Jallal well. Shortly after, I realized that all that incredible creative energy he had was no more. What a loss! A man in his prime vanished, gone, wiped out forever. Suddenly, I found myself busy unearthing a picture I had of him. In it, he is standing with his left hand in his pocket while his right hand gesticulates to the folks seated around a table, thanking them for joining him for dinner. I was at the table. I can see myself sitting not too far away from him. The gathering was held at a beautiful restaurant in Sidi Drif in 1994 after the last day of a conference, held at the University of Tunis I, in which I had participated. In the picture, Jallal looked young and jolly. As usual, he had a cheeky smile on his face as if to recapitulate the main outlines of his life in a genealogical sketch and family tree. He seemed to Hbe looking in two directions: the past trepidations of his life and their future—ancestors on one side and his own children on the other—with himself in the middle. Today, as I take another gander at the picture, I realize that the “pastness of the past,” present, and future of the moment tangibly mirror the past, present, and future of life itself within his realm and reach at the time of our encounter.

There is no easy or ready-made method for recalling the life and work of someone you love, someone whose zest for life in its essence was so positive, so remote from his everyday chores or even his career. Still, here is one more occasion to remember a wonderful man, great friend, and learned scholar. He was Jallal Boussedra and 60 years old when he passed away in December 2010. He died in Tunis after a long struggle with an insidious illness. Jallal smoked heavily. He literally breathed two packs of cigarettes a day. He also enjoyed a drink or two. Single malts were his favorite, but he enjoyed wine as well, red wine in particular. A bon vivant to his dying breath, Jallal was an excellent cook, especially when he had people to his place. In point of fact, he could have been a great chef. He enjoyed sharing his culinary practices with everyone who paid him a visit. I remember savoring many scrumptious dishes in his beautiful home in La Marsa, a chic suburb of Tunis, where he lived until his untimely death. Jallal exuded love not only in his cooking but also in his view of the world around him. His concerns were secular and he adhered to them to the very end. A vintage Renaissance scholar, he worked tirelessly on bawdy houses and tobacco in Elizabethan England. His preferred playwrights were Christopher Marlowe, John Ford, and above all, John Webster. The Duchess of the Malfi was his favorite play.

Jallal was quintessentially Tunisian. He had a voracious appetite for fun as well as for knowledge throughout his entire life, working long hours day and night to achieve his goal. His parents left the South of Tunisia in the early part of the 20th century to settle in Tunis where Jallal was born, grew up, and went to school. When I first met him in the early 1990s, he struck me as someone who knew more about Renaissance drama than anyone else. Yet, he did not show off or flaunt his knowledge or boasted about his mighty expertise of the Early Modern Period. On the contrary, he came across as humble, meditative, and teasing; given to an incredible sense of humor, which accompanied him to the very end. He taught drama at the University of Tunis I, where he was much loved and admired by his students. They found in him not only an excellent teacher but a humane and caring individual who was always ready to listen to them, advise them, guide them, and feel for them when they were down. As a result, he was always sought after because he was less likely than some of his colleagues to be identified as Monsieur le Professeur, a title he resented. He preferred “bricoleur” instead. “An instructor must entertain his students,” he used to tell me. “He must not think of himself as an important person, like many do, but rather a mere student of texts.” True, insofar as for Jallal persuasion was his forte. He taught by example. To project this attitude, he made good use of his collegiality, as well as his kindness. In his work, perfection—of form, harmony, and rhythm—was common; in fact, it occurs in his scholarship, which I read on various occasions, with a frequency unimaginable in his entourage at the university. Yet even in such extraordinary company, Dr. Boussedra stood in solitary eminence, at the very pinnacle of the art of knowing. This he did with an air of modesty.

One of his great strengths was the detail he provided about his subject and how, in practical terms, it dictated his way of seeing and/or telling. He enjoyed comparing and collating texts. He really was a traditional scholar, a philologist, who cared little for Theory. He always insisted that a thorough knowledge of the primary text—say, King Lear, was essential to understanding the work of art before undertaking to read The Anatomy of Criticism or Learning to Curse. Granville-Barker was his livre de chevet. Jallal had a voracious appetite for drama in general and the theatre of the macabre in particular. He enjoyed watching plays as well as reading them trippingly on the tongue. “The tempo is very important,” he used to tell me. “The score of the play is like that of a sonata, it demands rigor and patience to be grasped and appreciated,” all this in addition to being locked into a rigorous schedule at his university and home, where he brought up two lovely daughters. There at the university he had at his disposal a wealth of resources he could consult and include into his lectures, which he prepared with care and style. Each one of them was a performance to boot. The wonder of it all is that Jallal took in everything that was available to him, made it his own, and then pressed it on into new territory, even though the circumstances of his life and career were ever further removed from his creative energy.

The pity of it is that from time to time Jallal had much that was penetrating to say about life in Tunisia, whether it be political, social or academic. To my mind, he knew his environment well. It is a shame he did not live to see the Jasmine Revolution that turned things upside down in Tunisia. He would have been thrilled to bits to witness the radical change taking place today in that little big country, which may stand as a beacon on the hill, a lighthouse to democracy for the rest of the Arab world. He was well aware of his power to generate excellent commentary on situations such as the one we have been witnessing in Tunisia since the last month or so. That he died prematurely is unfair, not to say absurd. I for one will miss him terribly. A consummate intellectual and trustworthy friend to the very end, he will always be on my mind, in my heart, as well as in my memory. What endeared him to me and also to the rest of those who knew him was his patience, humor, overwhelming kindness, and generosity. Remembering him today, one is reminded of the fact that there was scarcely a moment of leisure with him that was dull, even though there were flat moments in his life. The heights and depths of emotion one feels at the time of his loss are there in the memories he left us, along with the tremendous range of expression and ravenous articulation of affection.

Beyond the bursts of joy I personally shared together with him, I will always remember a man with a good heart, a man who would take it upon himself to never let you down, a man who made you smile no matter what the misery was, a man who had an incredible optimism of the will; in fine, a man who loved to love people even if in the end he got nothing in return. Like a mathematician with a rare insight into the heart of natural numbers, what their basic properties are, the way they cohere, combine, and behave in groups, Jallal saw into the existential human condition, discerning its goodness, complexity, abundance, and most of all, understanding. No one else at the university where he taught had that chutzpah to such a degree. This meant that he was able on the spot to put its design through every permutation. And on top of all that, he had the rare skill and the instant mind-to-hand intuition to make you happy. That was his reason for being—to make all those around him merry regardless of creed, gender, age, ethnicity or color. Today many of us feel orphaned by his untimely death, a death that must not be proud at snatching him from us so young and full of hope. Unappeasable are the times without Jallal and his infectious laughter. I want to end with a line from Hamlet, which I am certain, he would have loved to hear, had he lived to see another day:

—Good night, sweet prince;
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!—(V.ii.)



 




 


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