Marketing Information

Winner of the 2020 Sheikh Zayed Book Award for Literature

Reviews

From Banipal Magazine:

This collection of poems, The Penultimate Cup, reflects Moncef Ouhaibi’s long experience stretching over thirty years and based on fusing attachment to the Arabic poetic and intellectual tradition and on the other hand attachment to poetic modernity in its Western and Arab manifestations. The cup in the title, and in one of the poems, may symbolize the infinite and the constant hope for new life, new horizons and new poetry that is completely open. When the cup is the penultimate cup, with its symbolism and its inspirational aspect, it is open to interpretation in several ways: the cup that suggests confrontation of the unknown that takes shape in what we might call the last cup, which may or may not appear. Or it may represent the penultimate suffering that might end in death or life, and here the dialectic of struggle between life and death, between the end and what comes before the end.

Although Ouhaibi says that “the penultimate cup” is a phrase he picked up from an interview with the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, he has managed to use it in a context that refers to a poem about Mahmoud Darwish that appears in the collection. The poem picks up on Darwish’s famous poem, "I Don’t Want This Poem to End," combining the symbolism of Darwish not wanting to end the poem and of the penultimate cup that Ouhaibi doesn’t want to be the last.

The poems give voice to the Arab presence in Arabia and Yemen and to the world of the Phoenicians by summoning up the Syrian ordeal, and North Africa and the West (the Iberian peninsula and the world of Andalusia and the Moriscos, and southern Portugal), Lampedusa and Genoa in Italy, Sète (Paul Valéry’s town in France) and Paris. But here place is present in its ambiguous relationship with both the past and the present, not in the context of a linear historical chronology, which would not be appropriate in poetry. Poets are not historians in any sense, even if they rely on some historical data.

The Penultimate Cup includes sixty poems of various lengths, some of them quite lengthy. They are varied in subject matter and themes. They have aspects that range from the philosophical, the historical, the metaphysical, the aesthetic, the linguistic and the rhythmic. The poems are as open to life and the real world as they are to the past and to tradition. They address humanity and dig into the emotional depths of humanity. They address the collectivity and pose multiple questions on its behalf. As a whole the poems in the collection create a space with multiple identities, eastern and western, Arab and international,

Author Biography

Moncef Ouhaibi, born in 1949 in Tunisia, is Professor of Arabic Literature at the Universities of Kairouan and Sousse and a permanent member of the Tunisian Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts.

He has published numerous poetry books in both Arabic and French, as well as writing short films and documentaries, notably En attendant Averroès (Waiting for Averroès), Paul Klee à Hammamet (Paul Klee in Hammamet), Devant les portes de Kairouan (Before the gates of Kairouan), and Pays qui me ressemble (Country that looks like me), which has been translated into several languages. He has been nominated for several prizes including the Comar d’Or literary prize, the Okaz Poet award for Arab poetry, and the Nikos Gatsos literary prize.