My little bridge to the Other

 Witness of a personal experience of intercultural creation,

using translation, virtual publishing and e-correspondence

 Texte of a conférence adreessed,  in the name of  the Union of Tunisian Writers,  to the forum on "Translation and civilisation's dialogue" organised as a parallel event of the World Sommet on the Information Societe  (WSIS) Tunis 2005

By Salem Labbène

original in arabic

  Hello everyone.

 Let me introduce myself – Salem Labbène, fifty years old. On the cultural scene since the 1960s and the journalistic and communications scene since I completed my studies at the Tunis Institute of Press and Information Sciences in 1979 and the French Press Institute in 1984. With several artistic concerns, I have not put down exclusive roots in any of the gardens of creation. And that is a stance taken against any kind of segregation in the field of the arts.

 I’m often asked how I should be introduced to people. Writer, poet, dramatist, musician, visual artist or what? I just say “communicative artist” and add “self-taught with certificate”! Because my main activity since I was a tender youth has always been educating myself.

 “Modesty,” said ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi, “is a form of hypocrisy. A humble being has no awareness of his humility.” But I find myself objectively forced to ask myself this question.

 I really am honoured that the Union of Tunisian Writers has picked on me to speak to you here. It asked me to talk about ‘my personal experience’. Of course this is very nice for my narcissistic side and I cannot hide the fact that I adore this! But why Salem Labbène, when Tunisia abounds with writers, musicians, visual artists, dramatists and other artists whose experience is much greater than mine (still at the stage of a dream in the process of construction).

 That is the question I have to answer if I am not to feel guilty for taking a more deserving person’s place ! And although I am sincerely convinced that my multidisciplinary artist’s approach lacks neither sincerity nor authenticity, I refuse on principle to fall into the error of believing I’m already someone important!

 So, before accepting this assignment, I had to find the answer to this. And then it came to me, quite simply: since this is a summit on the world knowledge and information society, it is not Salem Labbène the writer who is speaking to you but the other Salem Labbène, who is more of a writing activist.

 Yes, I did say activist ! And I can even tell you a little story about my self-proclamation as such. It is a story that goes back to the late 1990s. The first cybercafés was starting to open. And Tunisia was officially starting to define itself as having a ‘presence in globalised communicational space to let our culture shine forth’.

 Immediately a convert, I at once set up on my own in my own way and as far as my own force and means allowed me in my new role as activist. With time, as my experience matured, I took as my objective participation in building up a knowledge society that would be authentically Tunisian, all the elements of which would master the NICT, which would be present with no hang-ups in the globalised communicational space and would actively participate in bringing about a new global culture with a human essence, of planetary dimensions, and with a host of colours and shades.

 That was a whole programme whose ambition went far beyond the capacities of certain organisations and other great bodies of activists. Well, that was my personal programme – no less than that!

 I thought quite simply that if every scholar, thinker, writer or other artist committed himself to his own upgrading in the subject, the challenge would be taken up by the whole of Tunisia in record time. So I declared my fight against my own ignorance, to make up for my own slowness, before anything else. And that was how I challenged myself to put my own creation on internet.

 Since I have promised to only talk about the writer I am since the start of my adventure to train myself in the NICTs, and of my creation only insofar as I effectively used it to further this adventure, or of what I got in exchange, I must no less recognise certain objective conditions that pushed me to throw down this gauntlet. I shall merely say two things here: sometimes bad luck is good! For all the gains made through this adventure I owe to the difficulties I encountered when I wanted to publish my ‘notebooks of wanderings’ as I had designed and prepared them in 1997. Otherwise I would never have pressed ahead with this virtual publishing adventure and never have achieved my first web pages, the first of which was called labbennart.tripod.ca. The URLs of these pages stopped being active when the Canadian free web tripod.ca services were abandoned.

 When I recovered my manuscript from the last printing in May or June 2000, I did not think I would find the solution so easily. My Notebooks of Wanderings were in fact accessible on internet before late December 2000. This was thanks to a simple provocative phrase sent to me by an anonymous surfer on a talk forum. Here it is: ‘Any writer who remains unknown in the internet age is a writer who doesn’t deserve to be known’.

 When I talk about my experience, I’m in the habit of saying I did nothing exceptional – it was child’s play. And any writer who takes the trouble to train himself can do it.  The best thing about the NICTs – especially internet – is that they offer themselves to their users and hand over all their secrets without any need for teachers.

 I owe my apprenticeship in developing the web to three things:

The first is that the computer software provides written help that suits everyone to help master it. The second is the active spontaneous solidarity that has sprung up between surfers through their talk forums. The third is the free hosting of websites that has developed over time from a few megabits at the very beginning with obligatory publicity, to a disc space that today is limitless without any kind of publicity.

 Having benefited from this situation, I can only thank my provoking mentor and repeat after him that ‘any writer who remains unknown in the internet age is indeed a writer who doesn’t deserve to be known’. I would even add that any culture that remains unknown in the internet age is a culture whose beneficiaries, especially the intellectuals and other creative artists, are guilty not only of neglecting their personal interests but also of failing in their duty to the culture which is theirs.

 My first contact with virtual publishing presented the question of dialogue with the Other who does not belong to my linguistic space. I instantly chose to make my site a bilingual space where Arabic and French existed side by side. Unable to deliver an entire French version of my Notebooks of Wanderings, I opted to accompany each Arab text with a brief summary in French. Technically, the presence of two languages on the same site was not easy. But this effort enabled me to become friendly with a number of creators of various nationalities, whose support allowed me to take some decisive steps in the direction of my project’s objectives.

 Indeed, between late 2000 and April 2002 the embryo of my site was developed, going from a few rudimentary-looking pages that only contained the Notebooks of Wanderings to a space that embraced a more ambitious aim than the known ‘perso’ pages. It took on the dimensions of a cultural project born of a humanitarian concern that I still bear alone but that arouses a certain interest in some friends which gives me courage and day by day opens up new horizons for its achievement.

 This is Petit Pont (www.leptypont.afrikart.net). The site enjoys free hosting on the AFRIKART platform; I intended it to be a bridge of intercultural dialogue between a Tunisian, Arab, African communicative artist and creators from around the world, via works that embraced all forms of cultural and artistic creation. My hope is that it will be a stage in achieving my project of an ‘international circle of dialoguing creators’.

 At this time, the site’s main headings are ‘LEPTYPONT virtual publishing’, where some of my digital books are found. Some are in Arabic with some translations, and others are originally created in French. All are displayed for reading in HTML format and for downloading in PDF format. A second space is reserved for the LEPTYPONT musical and scenic research group, a group I founded in autumn 2002 to put on creation shows. A third space is reserved for the Selma Dibej Gallery, where my digital pictures are displayed, with free e-card service exploiting the same works. The fourth space is reserved for My Open Window, where I show my latest texts as I write them, where I announce my projects and where, especially, there are pages that I develop myself and offer to creative friends around the world to display what they are writing, painting or photographing.

 Up to 2002, I deliberately lived completely cut off from the Tunisian cultural scene. When 2003 was declared National Book Year, I judged the moment right to leave the activist stage of mere awareness and theorizing on what I called ‘the civilisation of the virtual content’ or setting myself a few challenges, for another stage that requires in-field work on the cultural scene.

 Thus I decided to make my site more than a simple personal laboratory where I learned and still learn techniques of internet communication. I gave it the role of a model that could be shown to the public to act as an example. From a simple space where my creations were stored for my own needs and those of a few friends, my site had to be transformed into a work of art, certainly developed by an amateur but accomplished enough to mark its presence on the web and on the Tunisian cultural scene.

 And so in 2003 I took the initiative, only counting on my own means and on the encouragement of the lady Director of the Tahar Haddad Cultural Club, to organise a cultural event that I called ‘From the age of the book to the age of the multiform message – creation and modernity: new tools and new challenges’. The event lasted a week (from 19 to 26 April 2003) and was an opportunity to announce the existence of the leptypont site, to put on the first Tunisian display of digital pictures, works signed by myself, and to celebrate, again for the first time in Tunisia, the appearance of a virtual book, my trilogy, The Notebooks of Wanderings. The LEPTYPONT musical and scenic research group appeared for the first time, giving a two-and-a-quarter-hour show, and during the week at least four round tables were organised to deal with the issue of the tool of cultural creation and communication in the age of NICTs that are invading every field of expression.

My aim via this cultural event was to bring about an inter-creator dialogue through their work, a dialogue that would link me to Tunisian friends first of all and then go on to encompass the world. But for reasons I still can’t explain, my initiative did not arouse the interest I had hoped for among the concerned parties. Had the event turned into provocation by offering too much novelty? Did it thus disturb the status quo rather than persuade the hesitant?

 But to my great joy it did encourage the following:

1.      The creation of their own websites by some Tunisian friends who had attended or even heard about the event

2.      Avoiding the obstacle of the paper book as a condition for membership of the Union of Tunisian Writers. The Union accepted my application in July 2003 and made me the first person to become a member with only digital books to my credit.

3.      The appearance on the cultural scene of experimental events that integrated poetry within a musical or dramatic context; some were even inspired by the name of the show presented by the LEPTYPONT group – ‘A bridge to read differently’.

 But it was necessary to return quickly to laboratory work and do much more in other directions to enshrine the principle of inter-cultural dialogue via the work of creators. And it was on intenet rather than on the cultural scene that I focused.

 After translating some introductions to or samples of my Arabic texts in French, I decided to take another step. In autumn 2003 I started writing poetry directly in French (a language I had long loved). After my first French poem, on 9 February 2004 I threw myself into writing one tiny poem, a haïku, every day for a year and posting it every day on my site in two languages after posting a French version on a writing workshop called ‘Free writing’.

 Some Tunisian, French, Belgian, Spanish, Canadian and other friends joined me in this challenge. Each received my little poem and responded, taking it as their inspiration. The principles of interactive creation and of shared creative stimulus were starting to take shape. Luck introduced me to a Ukrainian publisher who suggested publishing my first twenty exchanges with three poet friends, illustrated by a Ukrainian woman visual artist. The first book of haïkus ever to appear in Ukraine saw the light of day as ‘Haïkus – an intercultural dialogue’. It could be that it was the first book in the world to use daily epistolary exchanges to bring together writers from four different countries who only knew each other via electronic correspondence. That was on 20 March 2004. A book of poetry born in virtual reality and recuperated on paper, as if proving that internet is able, if used for the purposes of constructive cultural dialogue, to open up vast horizons to inter-culturality, to friendship and to human solidarity. And I have the honour of having taken the initiative for such an exchange, of having invited friends to it and having every day sent out the original poem to which others replied.

The ‘Haïku year’ challenge was hard. It meant undoing preexisting certainties, for example that a poet has to wait for inspiration to write. The difficulty was not in writing a given number of poems but in publishing them every day whatever psychological or health state one was in. In fact the poet had to provoke inspiration and make the Muse obey his will. But it was also necessary to send out poems on internet whatever the burdens of daily life.

 I would really have liked to pass the finishing line with most of my friends who shared my first steps in this challenge. But unfortunately I finished my Haïku Year alone. But internet has this magical quality of coming up with unimagined surprises. Two days before I finished my challenge, a French poet, ‘admiring’ this experiment, set himself the challenge of taking over and writing one French classical poem a day for a year. I’m still moved by this! That my example was followed by ‘a cultural other’ is for me the best reward I ever had. 

 And since I had to go back again to the field work to publicize this experience on the Tunisian cultural scene, I took on a new challenge (after writing and virtual publishing), that of paper publishing as an author. I put my gathering of the Haïku Year into four books, called ‘My Four Seasons’, and decided to publish them at a rate of one season for each quarter year. Thus my first season, ‘A star for the dawn’, appeared in March 2005, my second, ‘The eyes of Nadegda’ in June, and my third, ‘Folly for my seasons of wisdom’ in September. As for my fourth season, ‘Keeping faith with the promise of jasmine’, this is now being printed and will appear in late December.

 In gratitude to all those who helped me, I have to say that this return to the cultural scene with my paper books has attracted a certain amount of interest from both written and audiovisual means of information. But the projects of the LEPTYPONT site are unfortunately on hold while I await the end of the publishing challenge. I admit that my own limits have made me a desperately weak human being. But my satisfaction comes from the fact that the project I set LEPTYPONT up for is starting to be viewed with a certain understanding and to find friends on the cultural scene who respect it and are ready to give help to develop it.

 So I shall end by saying, Who knows! Who knows if I won’t soon find the way to make my dream of hosting my site with an address like www.leptypont.org.tn. or www.leptypont.net come true, or if I won’t find the necessary encouragement to set up a true international association, instead of a simple virtual circle only meeting on a simple perso website, of dialoguing creators.

 Indeed, who, for example, would have thought that after sending off my application for membership of the Union of Tunisian Writers, in a way which though polite was rather provocative given that Union’s customs, I would be here today speaking to you in the name of that very same Union!

 Thank you for your kind attention.