The Desert at Dusk by Tahar Bekri

This poetry by a prominent Tunisian writer is, in part, an exile’s nostalgic evocation of his birthplace and childhood. In both form and content it suggests the Arabic of pre-Islamic poetry. It is a re-imagining of a particular form—the ancient odes to the desert. Along with this it is something very new: imagery, muscular and bright, that indicts radical, violent Islamists. Their perversion of Islam is reflected in the image of a sullied and suffering desert—the desert at dusk.