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Contributor

Cécile Oumhani

A portrait of writer and translator Cécile Oumhani.
Photo © Thierry Hensgen
Contributor

Cécile Oumhani

Cécile Oumhani was born in Belgium of a Belgian and Scottish mother and a French father. She developed strong personal links with Tunisia through marriage. She currently lives near Paris, where she devotes herself to writing after teaching at the university of Paris-Est Créteil as a senior lecturer. Among her recent publications in poetry: Tunisie carnets d’incertitude and Passeurs de rives. Among her novels, Tunisian Yankee received the Prix Afrique méditerranéenne-Maghreb ADELF 2016 and was a finalist of the Prix Joseph Kessel 2017. She also received the Prix Virgile européen francophone 2014 for her work as a whole. Cécile Oumhani is on the editorial board of French journals Siècle 21 and Apulée, as well as the Indian online journal “Caesurae: Poetics of Cultural Translation.”

Articles by Cécile Oumhani

We Take the Present in Our Own Hands: Writing by Tunisian Women
By Cécile Oumhani
What do Tunisian women write today?
But We Still Have Our Words
By Cécile Oumhani
In the Marais that Friday, November 13, the air was light and mild as I left the indie press festival Salon L’Autre Livre, reinvigorated by reunions and conversations with poet and publisher friends.…
Tunisia: A Time of Uncertainty
By Cécile Oumhani
As we board the plane just before sunrise, a police car pulls up on the tarmac. Hardly have I reached my seat, when I hear a man yelling at the back. He sits handcuffed between two policemen. “Let…
After the Revolution: Tunisia, September
By Cécile Oumhani
The improbable woman was dressed in black Her diverse shadow and her hallucinations were there only to redefine the furtive with appropriate optimism, I could not elude her —Slaheddine Haddad,”A…
Layers of Dust and Debris
By Cécile Oumhani
Another year and its layers of dust and debris. Ten years gone by and the pictures, the words still as sharp and vivid. Glass you dare not touch with your fingers. It all happened across the Atlantic,…
A Scream Has No Alphabet: An Interview with Aïcha Arnaout
By Cécile Oumhani
Born in Damascus, the poet and novelist Aïcha Arnaout has lived in Paris since 1978. We have had quite a few conversations over the past few years, often at the Marché de la Poésie,…
Translated from French by Cécile Oumhani
Multilingual
Singing Lands of Freedom
By Cécile Oumhani
Echchaâb yurid isqât ennidhâm!  The people want the fall of the regime! Each word rhythmically chanted by the crowd. A slogan ringing in Tunis in January, now resounding in cities…
Voices, Voices Everywhere: Democracy in Tunisia
By Cécile Oumhani
“A young man has set himself on fire in Sidi Bouzid,” B. told me one morning over coffee last December.  He could not find a job and the police would not even let him be a fruit vendor.…