Le Jasmin Noir

Le Jasmin Noir is the debut novel of Tunisian writer and academic Wafa Ghorbel, published in 2016 and awarded the Prix Découverte at that year's Comar d'Or. Written in French, it is a fierce, lyrical work often described as part of a new Tunisian surrealism.

The novel takes an unusual epistolary form: its heroine writes letter after letter to a silent addressee — a "monster" who will never receive or read them. That absent-present figure is really a pretext, giving the young woman a space to name the pain that consumes her. At the heart of the book is a childhood shattered at the age of eight by a trauma that forces her, ever after, to choose between her own desires and the norms her society demands.

Both an intimate confession and an indictment of those who steal childhood innocence, Le Jasmin Noir moves through suffering, exile, and the fragile, often unsuspected strength of women. It is a cathartic reckoning with betrayed trust and the near-impossibility of rebuilding a lost serenity — writing offered as a way to face the demon and reach, at last, toward the light.