Amal KHLIF
Amal KHLIF is a Tunisian poet and cultural activist.
She has published three collections:
قلب على رأس إبرة (A Heart on the Point of a Needle 2015, untranslated)
السيدة كليمونتين (Madame Clementine, 2018, untranslated)
ثلاث رسائل (Three letters, 2022, untranslated).
Her poems regularly appear in French translation in the magazine Attaques (Al Dante).
She is co-founder of the Collectif Chaml (https://collectifchaml.wordpress.com/), the fruit of a meeting between young Tunisian women, eager to change society's view of women, to deconstruct the myth of "The Tunisian Woman". The contents of Chaml's website reflect the breadth of its activities: women's writing; testimonials; society; culture & education; arts; politics; sexuality; WritingReading; news; media; translations.
Amal Khlif, who has been described as "the tree that hides a forest of women", eloquently marks the birth of a new generational voice in Tunisian poetry:
I belong biologically to women, sexually to beauty, sentimentally to beautiful stories, humanly to the non-violent, philosophically to the existentialists, emotionally to the romantics, politically to the anarchists, to the skilled female labor class of the value-added sector in the Third World, practically to the ambitious, I belong geographically to the Mediterranean Sea, to the plains of almond trees, peach trees, apricot trees... I belong across the borders to green Tunisia. I belong to the shores and oases, to the mountain peaks, to the deepest point of the sea. Historically, I belong to the revolution, the generation of the coup d'état the the crisis, terrorism and to the blessed transformation and change...
To the moment of awareness
To the pain of the past when memory vomits
To the itch of wounds and the sighs of oppression
I belong to resentment, to forgiveness
To the ultimate moment when everything fades, when fatigue engulfs, when oblivion engulfs
All would be simple and clear
If my soul didn't flee my clear and simple allegiances to slip out of my body and embrace the immensity of the night and chase the lost specter of the stars
And soar in the wind laden with colored scents that imprint their color on my soul then cast me into darkness
If my soul didn't escape from me at the strongest moments of belonging to disappear and cling to the light particles of the absolute
I belong to the next stage where the whole world disappears and disintegrates
I belong to the universe, to the black hole
I belong to absence