Within the Opaque Mirror: The Poetry of El-Mahdi Acherchour

dc.contributor.authorCrowley, Patrick
dc.date.accessioned2023-02-13T13:18:07Z
dc.date.available2023-02-13T13:18:07Z
dc.date.issued2020-02
dc.date.updated2023-02-13T13:10:49Z
dc.description.abstractThe poetry of El-Mahdi Acherchour (1973) is hermetic, errant, marked by longing. His first volume, L’Œil de l’égaré (1997) nods towards the Andalusian Sufi mystic Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn al-ʿArabī (1165–1240), the epigraph to the second volume, Le Chemin des choses nocturnes (2003) acknowledges the French poet René Char (1907–1988) but draws the reader into the metaphor of the mirror that returns us to Ibn al- ʿArabī; not to his notion of unity beyond duality but to a reflection that traces the troubling of the lyrical subject, desire and the possibilities of a poetry without origin. These publications come as Algeria’s décennie noire draws to its end and if Acherchour’s poetry obliquely references the violence of that period, it does so by enfolding it into the pursuit of poetry through a language both clear and opaque. Drawing on recent scholarship (Elhariry, 2017), as well as the work of Glissant and Khatibi, this article tracks and analyses Acherchour’s pursuit of a poetics that secretes fragments of the past (personal, historical, poetic) into opaque forms that draw from both Ibn al- ʿArabī and French letters and, further still, from writers such as Borges. El-Mahdi Acherchour, a Kabyle, was born in Sidi Aïch and has lived mainly in Holland since 2005.en
dc.description.statusPeer revieweden
dc.description.versionAccepted Versionen
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdfen
dc.identifier.citationCrowley, P. (2020) 'Within the Opaque Mirror: The Poetry of El-Mahdi Acherchour', Yale French Studies, (137/138), pp. 251-272.en
dc.identifier.endpage272en
dc.identifier.isbn9780300250374
dc.identifier.issn0044-0078
dc.identifier.issued137/138en
dc.identifier.journaltitleYale French Studiesen
dc.identifier.startpage251en
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10468/14212
dc.language.isoenen
dc.publisherYale University Pressen
dc.relation.urihttps://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300250374/yale-french-studies-number-137138
dc.rights© 2020 Yale University Pressen
dc.subjectEl-Mahdi Acherchouren
dc.subjectAlgerian Poetryen
dc.titleWithin the Opaque Mirror: The Poetry of El-Mahdi Acherchouren
dc.typeArticle (peer-reviewed)en
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