Atiq Rahimi’s Exophonic Entanglements: Multilingual and Multimodal Poetics

Abstract

In 2008, first-generation Afghan migrant novelist-artist Atiq Rahimi published his first translingual work in French, Syngué Sabour: Pierre de patience. This article interrogates his multilingual and multimodal aesthetics across his translingual oeuvre. In his exophonic novel Les Porteurs d’eau (2019), Rahimi valorizes a polyvocal and culturally diverse Central Asian history. The Prix Goncourt–awarded author introduces Afghanistan’s past and present beyond its intracultural challenges. The epitome of the Rahimi-esque aesthetic is the author’s publication L’Invité du miroir (2020), which acts as a revolt, a transnational dialectic crossroads where multilingual fiction meets classical Persian calligraphy and nonfiction to explore the human spirit.