About this Book
Return to Thyna is Hédi Bouraoui's third novel, set in his native city of Sfax, Tunisia — the ancient Roman site of Thyna, whose history layers beneath the modern Tunisian city of Taparura. The novel weaves together personal memory, postcolonial identity, and the contested meanings of freedom and belonging in North Africa.
The novel opens with Zitouna arriving by sea: dressed in a blue djellaba, pale, composed after private tears, she carries with her the last words of a poet named Kateb — words that must be deciphered and told. Through her journey, the novel traces the lives of young men and women caught between colonial history and the unfulfilled promises of independence, navigating violence, exile, and the possibility of self-determination.
The novel has received two prestigious prizes: the Prix de la Ville de Sfax and the national Prix du Jury Comar, recognizing its literary significance as a work of Maghrebian literature.
Excerpt
In a blue djellaba bordered with white embroidery, hair covered with a traditional hat decorated with pieces of gold and pearls, a silk scarf with white and dark red geometrical motifs around her neck, Zitouna sets foot on the ground on a crowded pier. She is pale. In this immaculate boat which brings her, and during the little detour she had to make to arrive here, she cried, but only she knows it. Her eyes, without makeup, have just flooded her unhappy face with tears. Forgotten the stage setting! Zitouna, rolling on the sea at the end of the Tapa-rurian night, has just traversed her sad universe under the magical purple impulse of dawn. She surreptitiously drowned it in the foam of the waves carrying her towards this crowded jetty, and here she is from now on peaceful and free to deliver Kateb's tale to all the waiting ears. Kateb dead, no longer with power over her, who, she realizes, slipped into his final words a truth which must be deciphered. From this moment, purified of the crime, Zitouna, pale and determined, will tell the tale in exactly the tone of those who have power to decipher the undecipherable. Her pallor will increase, but she will find the key because she has renounced the attempt to seek it. She arms herself finally with readiness for life.
It is the Roman Thyna dressed in the Tunisian manner who advances in person to the heart of the modern Taparura market, in order to plant there the truth of its heresy, in the image of Kateb's.
About the Author
Hédi Bouraoui is a poet and novelist born in Tunisia, who lives in Toronto, Canada. He has published twenty collections of poetry and seven novels. His work spans French and English, and engages deeply with questions of cultural identity, migration, and the Maghrebian experience. Return to Thyna is his third novel.
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