“What is a myth? A force that leaves a trace. Where does this force come from? From a shared dream.”
Régis Debray
There are myths that speak of Us, that speak in Us. Such as Europa, this myth that gave its name and face to our continent. It was from Sidon, the current Saida in Lebanon, that the beautiful Europa, daughter of Agenor, was abducted by Zeus, transformed into a winged bull. This explains to us at least, based on the myth of its origins, that the destiny of Europe is linked to that of the Mediterranean. Why does Europe often tend to forget this, to reject or rather disown its origins, to hide its provenance?
The Mediterranean is not Europe, it does not have its own myth to explain its origins. It is stories and dreams that undoubtedly build its founding myths. It is threaded throughout our dreams and only finds its consistence, and perhaps even its existence, through all these stories that we tell ourselves. Once upon a time, or rather, several times, the Mediterranean…
The time of mythologies is combined and intertwined to the time of stories and to the time of dreams of the Mediterranean.
The Time of Mythologies
They are frequently explained in the plural, but the Mediterranean world has this singularity, the longue durée of history, of being the place where the One, through the monotheisms that shape the belongings. Judaism, Christianity and Islam draw their own territory and frequently build exclusive identities that separate much more than they bring together. The practices nevertheless cross over the dogmas, and the people are often much more intelligent than the principles, which seek to put them in opposition. They know how to cross the borders drawn by these great religious verticalities of the One, which try to build the myth with all their power.
It is beyond, or rather below, dogmas that the multiple belongings of Mediterranean societies develop. This is the case of the “shared holy places”, studied by Dionigi Albera[1]and shown, with Manoël Pénicaud, in a series of revealing exhibitions, the first of which was held at the Mucem in Marseille.
Religious borders, always there, present in their anthropological substance, are overflowed and crossed by a large number of devotional practices, common pilgrimage sites that, secretly, undermine or overturn the well-established myths of separate worlds, between Jews, Christians and Muslims.
The Mediterranean world is indeed heterogenous, and one of its profound realities is undoubtedly that the Other always exists in the Mediterranean. Figures of otherness that compose and recompose unique identities.
However, monotheisms leave a deep mark, set the rhythm of long-term belonging, and outline specific genealogies. Being Jewish, Christian, Muslim, in the Mediterranean, is not a simple myth. It is a foundational reference from which it is difficult to escape, especially in times of conflict, where we take refuge in the “community”. Disenchantment with the world, secularisation or laicisation, depending on what they are called, are far from having abolished religious belonging, defined by each of the monotheisms. It is impossible to escape their imperiousness, while we try to think about the Mediterranean in the 21st century. They continue to be structuring in personal mythologies and especially family mythologies.
But they do not occupy the entire symbolic field. Ancient myths also continue to exist, according to unique historical and cultural genealogies. Greek and Latin myths, for some, especially Europeans, myths of Pharaonic Egypt which are always current, for others, such as those of the Hittite world, Babylonian legends of Enkidu or Gilgamesh, legends of the “sea peoples”, of the Aramaic world or of Carthage which continue to populate the mosaics of our imaginaries.
The longue durée is that of the myth, and cannot be abolished by the mere crackling of current events, ephemeral and fleeting. As Roland Barthes rightly points out in his Mythologies: “Myth has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal.” And hr adds: “Myths are nothing but this ceaseless, untiring solicitation, this insidious and inflexible demand that all men recognize themselves in this image, eternal yet bearing a date, which was built of them one day as if for all time.”[2]
The archaeology of our Mediterranean imaginaries rests on foundational myths. It would be illusory or deceptive to want to forget today, in the name of modernity, this distant stratum that shapes us, that makes us who we are, in the longue durée of history.
The Time of Stories
The time of stories frequently combines with the time of mythologies in the emergence of the depths and through the long murmur of the centuries. But it crackles in another way, it escapes a fixed word, codified by religious dogmas, tablets of the law or a memory instituted through legends.
It is another time that emerges, in our Mediterranean world, a time of writing and literature, which composes something similar to a “narrative identity”, to use this beautiful notion favoured so much by the philosopher Paul Ricoeur.[3] Thus, it is not an identity fixed in the Same, in final references to the past, but in the search for an identity in becoming, which is explained in several different voices.
Once upon a time, or rather, several times, the Mediterranean. Each person can build their own imaginary library of the Mediterranean, their different stories that inspire their ways of seeing the Mediterranean, of feeling its deep drives, the rhythms and folds that lead us into its history, its stories.
A Mediterranean takes shape through the texts, and thus becomes an “effective history
“. Everyone can disperse or build their own portable library. It is open, becoming, and is enriched with each new reading.
Here you will find a florilegium, a kind of “Mediterranean breviary”,[4] to borrow the title of the beautiful book by my friend Predrag Matvejevitch, which is one of the stones on which this “narrative identity” of the Mediterranean, of my Mediterranean, can be built. A journey through seven texts, to begin with, in this imaginary library of the Mediterranean, which can expand to infinity, as in the past the library imagined by Borges…
Albert Camus, Goliarda Sapienza, Federico García Lorca, Alaa al Aswany, Stratis Tsirkas, Mathias Enard and Dominique Eddé. Seven faces of a prism of multiple refractions, of a mosaic of texts, of stories, open to the infinity of our researches, of our expectations, of our needs for stories to be told…
Helen’s Exile by Camus is a key text. I discovered or rediscovered it while studying in Cairo. At a table in the Hourriya café, in Bal el Louk, not far from the neighbourhood where I lived at the time, I preferred to play truant and immerse myself in Camus’s work. The Mediterranean sun has something tragic about it, quite different from the tragedy of fogs. Certain evenings at the base of the seaside mountains, night falls over the flawless curve of a little bay, and there rises from the silent waters a sense of anguished fulfilment.
In this text from 1948, first published in the journal Les Cahiers du Sud, dedicated to his friend the poet René Char, Camus expresses his search for limits, for measure in the face of excess, and sets out his foundational vision of a midday thought, so necessary in our time, carried away by hubris.
Goliarda Sapienza prolongs, in her own way, this sense of the solar tragic through her masterful text The Art of Joy. A tumultuous, personal, family and political chronicle of an Italy victim of the vertigo of fascism. Yet, it keeps the spark alive. No, it’s impossible to describe to anyone this joy, full of vital excitement, at defying time as a couple, being partners in stretching it out, living it as intensely as possible before the hour of the last adventure. (…) Tell me, Modesta, tell me.
Federico García Lorca is also a tragic figure, and not only in his last moments, murdered by Franco’s police. He gave birth to a deep fervour, a taste for life, with his friend the musician Manuel de Falla, through the revival of cante jondo, in the competition held in the Alhambra in 1922. His Theory and Play of the Duende allows us to decipher the mysteries of creation. Each art, as is natural, has a distinct mode and form of duende, but their roots unite at the point from which flow the dark sounds of Manuel Torre, the ultimate matter, and uncontrollable mutual depth and extremity of wood, sound, canvas, word. Dark sounds, behind which in tender intimacy exist volcanoes, ants, zephyrs, and the vast night pressing its waist against the Milky Way.
Alaa al Aswany, for whom I had the pleasure of being editor in the past, has managed to explain Cairo in his own way, which is not Naguib Mahfouz’s way. The Yacoubian Building tells the story of an entire urban world, a secret for those who do not know how to listen to the whispers and desires that are gradually revealed… The distance between Baehler Passage, where Zaki Bey el Dessouki lives, and his office in the Yacoubian Building is not more than a hundred meters, but it takes him an hour to cover it each morning as he is obliged to greet his friends on the street. Clothing- and shoe-store owners, their employees (of both sexes), waiters, cinema staff, habitués of the Brazilian Coffee Stores, even doorkeepers, shoeshine men, beggars, and traffic cops − Zaki Bey knows them all by name and exchanges greetings and news with them.
Stratis Tsirkas, a Greek from Alexandria, also narrates the city, the cities. Cities Adrift in the Mediterranean, through Jerusalem, Cairo, and Alexandria, from the 1940s, which he brings back to us. He echoes a distant history and brings a forgotten world back into existence. I wasn’t very familiar with Alexandria; and yet this was where my mother was born, where my father had married her; it was from this city he had brought her back to Kifissia as his bride. I had been here for only a month last autumn, and that wasn’t much help. I would need months on end, a whole string of empty days, to get to know a city like this. I would have to wander around purposelessly, turn into streets that led I knew not where, make my own discoveries: a blue-paved courtyard, the pattern on a dislocated wrought-iron gate, a small mosque striped yellow and pink like a football player’s vest, and a tree growing nearby, its trunk glistening and leaves all astir with turtledoves. I would have to pause in front of old doorways, decipher dates engraved on stone or woodwork, and let my thoughts wander in the past: this house escaped the great fire of 1882, that one was built the year my mother was born.
Mathias Enard, our contemporary, has been able to grasp the flow of violence that has run rampant in the Mediterranean. With a single, long sentence, in Zone he describes this world in full uproar. Hence, literature gives body to what cannot be said and allows us to find ourselves again and not be carried away only by the indescribable tumult of the world as it is.
today, December 8, I dreamed, sitting between two dead cities the way a tourist, swept along by the ferry that carries him, watches the Mediterranean flow by under his eyes, endless, lined with rocks and mountains those cairns signalling so many tombs mass graves slaughter-grounds a new map another network of traces of roads of railroads of rivers continuing to carry along corpses remains scraps shouts bones forgotten honoured anonymous or decried in the great roll-call of history cheap glossy stock vainly imitating marble that looks like the twopenny magazine my neighbour folded carefully so as to be able to read it without effort,
Dominique Eddé, both from Beirut and from the island of Sedef, in front of Istanbul, has this visionary power that literature gives, this art of guessing what is coming, of sensing the worst, examining the autocratic Syrian regime of the Assads, whose fatal fall he foresees. Kamal Jann is a book both powerful and indispensable for understanding the disaster, and trying to emerge out of it.
Sayf Eddine Jann is the head of the Syrian intelligence service. He is dozing in the sitting room of his house in Mazzeh. The doors are closed, the curtains drawn. Only the continuous hum of the air conditioning ruffles the silence. The air is cool but stagnant and heavy. It is almost a piece of furniture. The giant sofas are so deep, it takes courage to sit back in them.
The few fragments taken from the texts of these writers make up a mosaic of my Mediterranean imaginary, a setting in stories of this world that each one can reconstruct, in their own way. This Mediterranean through texts, this imaginary library, could equally open up and extend to films, music or pictorial works that nourish our vision of the Mediterranean world, in various dimensions. Open variations, not entirely on the same theme, but at least around the same world, our Mediterranean world, which frequently feeds on dreams…
The Time of Dreams
Dream is an imagining power in history. It inspires, attracts and magnetises us, from within. Victor Hugo, in Le Promontoire du Songe[5] has well demonstrated its exceptional strength. We live on questions posed to the imaginary world. (…) Whoever we are, we are adventurers of our idea. And he adds: Dreams, dreams, dreams. Some big, some tiny. The house of dream is a faculty of man. The Empyre, the Elysée, the Eden, the portico opened up there on the deep stars of dream, the statues of light upon the entablatures of blue, the supernatural, the superhuman, it is the place preferred by contemplation. Man feels at home in the clouds.
The Mediterranean dream does not have the depth of a myth, the same substance as time, unless it is confused with the dreams of empires, like that of Alexander, which extended far beyond the Mediterranean, or the Mare nostrum of the Roman Empire, which was a unilateral dream. In contrast, the Ottoman Empire dreamed little or not at all about the Mediterranean, despite Piri Reis and the scope of his conquests.
The Mediterranean dream, as the historian Emile Temime[6] has shown, seems to be quite recent. The Saint Simoniens, in the 19th century, are the main artisans. A “Mediterranean system”, as Michel Chevallier dreamed, since 1832, which is a transport system capable of uniting the train and steam.
“Bridal bed between the East and the West”, Prosper Enfantin and Emile Barrault imagined a new alliance between these separate worlds, and their attempts were sometimes fruitful, such as the drilling of the Suez Canal by Ferdinand de Lesseps, a disciple of the Saint-Simonians. But colonial conquests would put an end to the Mediterranean dream of the Saint-Simonians as a place of possible reunion.
The Catalan Noucentistes will also draw, in their own way, their own Mediterranean dream, in a more classical form, of Greek and Latin inspiration.[7] Antoni Gaudí, as Juan Goytisolo reminds us,[8] outlines the possible forms of a Mediterranean, more syncretic, architectural dream, of which La Pedrera, la Sagrada Família or Park Güell are masterful expressions.
1930s intellectuals would try to revive this Mediterranean dream. Through journals such as Les Cahiers du Sud, in Marseille, by Jean Ballard and Gabriel Audisio, Mirages and Les Cahiers de Barbarie, in Tunis, with Armand Guibert, and various groups and collectives that dreamed of putting an end to the “spiritual conflict” that put East and West in opposition. “The Mediterranean man must find his plenitude in the conjunction of cultures, of diverse civilisations,” argues Gabriel Audisio, who influenced the young Albert Camus, in Algiers, and also the philosopher and writer Jean Grenier, through his Inspirations méditerranéennes, while in Nice Paul Valéry chaired the CUM, Centre Universitaire Méditerranéen, founded in 1933, and aimed to make the Mediterranean “a civilisation-making machine.”[9]
These 1930s intellectuals, mostly French-speaking, would try to build bridges, outline reunions or possible alliances between cultures and civilisations, of which the Mediterranean is the epicentre. But the rise of fascism, the deep inequalities of the colonial situation, the great tumult of the Second World War, followed by the fierce battles for decolonisation would put an end to this Arc, expression of a Mediterranean dream.
&
And today? What remains of a possible Mediterranean dream? In what conditions could it be reinvented and become a shared dream?
The first of the conditions is that it should no longer be a unilateral dream, a simple European dream that is always imagined in order to shape “its” South. A dream of a citadel Europe, a prisoner of itself, locked within its hatreds and fears.
A Mediterranean dream, of the 21st century, can only be drawn from a writing of history, in equal parts, between the shores of the Mediterranean, following a “politics of the spirit that does not seek to arrange the rest of the world with European ends,” as the German intellectual Wolf Lepenies[10] emphasised in his lessons in the Collège de France.
Endgame for any vertical, top-down or unilateral vision of the Mediterranean, too often defined as a simple “periphery of Europe”. The Mediterranean is a world in its own right, which follows its own rhythm, has its own breath, and draws its own historical horizon, its objective inscribed in an circle open onto the beyond, which never turns on itself…
A Mediterranean dream, which, contrary to the discourses of realpolitik specialists, is not the ghost of a finally reconciled world nor a mirage born of a fictitious dialogue between cultures and civilisations.[11]
A Mediterranean dream, of the 21st century, that looks more directly at the tragedy and nightmares of our time, starting with the ongoing genocide in Palestine, the dynamics of wars and confrontations of all kinds, right before our eyes, without ever forgetting this “Mediterranean death” that made our common sea a new marine cemetery for migrants.
A Mediterranean dream, which does not lie in consenting to the current disaster. Rather, it develops as a force that imagines, as an art of drawing connections between Mediterranean societies, much more linked to each other than we think.
A Mediterranean dream, made of territorial integration and connectivity, that is not just a world route for ships and trading, but between the men and women of this world, who have so much to learn from each other.
As Jean Giono so aptly wrote, in an enlightening text:[12] “It is not on this sea that exchanges were made, but with the help of this sea. Take a continent instead and nothing would have happened and nothing from Greece would have passed to Arabia, nothing from Arabia would have passed to Spain, nothing from the East would have passed to Provence, nothing from Rome to Tunis. But on this water, for millennia, homicides and love are exchanged and a specifically Mediterranean order is established there.”
A Mediterranean dream, which knows how to assign its full place to the young generations, who are largely the majority on the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean, and who can no longer accept the authoritarian political immobility and the social status quo that is imposed on them.
A Mediterranean dream, which knows how to fully live with tragedy and defy the abysses, to never be shipwrecked in the nightmares that lie before us.
A Mediterranean dream, finally shared, in that it knows how to invent the future, and reject the return or the revenge of empires, which seek to impose the reductive grammar of their forces and therefore never give up the taste of freedom.
A Mediterranean dream that inspires and draws new horizons and manages to define a whole shared world in the face of the great environmental challenges of our time. The world is warming, and the Mediterranean even more so! The waves of fires that every summer reach our lands remind us without interruption that the Mediterranean is a fragile world, and that it is really time to learn to protect this shared asset, held between our hands.
A Mediterranean dream, which has nothing retrograde or nostalgic about it, but rather knows how to defend and pursue its ways of life, its lifestyle or lifestyles, à la Mediterranean, and is nourished even more by all the sap of the arts and creation. The creative Mediterranean[13] is not a myth or a deceptive illusion.
The contemporary artistic scenes of the Mediterranean world are alive and fertile, and are now carving out their place internationally. They bear witness to the reverse of the disaster. Why not build from this common background, a true salvo of future?
A Mediterranean dream is within us, among us, it persists time after time and opens, in the face of war, the horizon of other possible worlds.
Here undoubtedly lies that force that leaves the mark we seek.
Thierry Fabre*
*Thierry Fabre, founder of the Rencontres d’Averroès, in Marseille. Essayist, critic and curator. His notable works include Traversées and Eloge de la pensée de midi (Actes Sud, 2007); a series of books about Les représentations de la Méditerranée; and numerous texts, articles and catalogues about the Mediterranean world. He has recently published Faut-il brûler Averroès ? Ce qui nous arrive (Editions Riveneuve, 2025).
[1] See, in particular, Religions traversées, under the direction of Dionigi Albera, París, Actes Sud/MMSH, 2009, and recently, Lampedusa, une histoire méditerranéenne, Paris, Seuil, 2023.
[2] Roland Barthes, Mythologies, excerpt cited by Jean Lacroix in Le Monde, 6 May 1957.
[3] The concept of narrative identity stills shows its fecundity as it applies both to the community and the individual. We can speak of the ipseity of a community, as we have spoken of the ipseity of an individual subject: individual and community are constituted within their identity by receiving such stories, which become for both their effective history. In P. Ricœur, Anthologie. Textes choisis par Michaël Foessel et Fabien Lamouche, Paris, Points Seuil, 2007, p. 232.
[4] P. Matvejevitch, Bréviaire méditerranéen, Paris, Fayard, 2001.
[5] V. Hugo, Le Promontoire du Songe, Paris, Gallimard, l’Imaginaire, 2012.
[6] E. Temime, Un rêve méditerranéen, Paris, Actes Sud, 2002.
[7] See Eduardo González Calleja, “La Méditerranée espagnole”, in Les représentations de la Méditerranée, Paris, Maisonneuve et Larose, 2000.
[8] Juan Goytisolo, A la recherche de Gaudí en Cappadoce, París, Fayard, 1992.
[9] See Thierry Fabre, “La Méditerranée française”, in Les représentations de la Méditerranée, Paris, Maisonneuve et Larose, 2000, pp. 84-85.
[10] W. Lepenies, Qu’est-ce qu’un intellectuel européen ?, Paris, Seuil, 2007, p. 40.
[11] R. Debray, Un mythe contemporain : le dialogue des civilisations, Paris, CNRS Editions, 2007.
[12] J. Giono, “La Méditerranée” (1959), with the collection of short stories Provence, Paris, Gallimard, 1993, p. 252.
[13] La Méditerranée créatrice, under the direction of Thierry Fabre, Paris, Editions de l’Aube, 1994.