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Mohammed Dib (1920-2003) |
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Prolific Algerian French-language novelist, short story writer, and poet. Many of Mohammed Dib's novels present characters who represent contrasting forces – good and evil, priviledged and unpriviledged, etc. Among Dib's acclaimed works is the trilogy Algérie (1952-1954), which paints a portrait of the plight of the poor peasants and workers. Some of his later novels were set in a Nordic country, that resembles Finland, where he spent extended periods of time. He also translated Finnish folktales. As a poet Dib examined old myths and inner layers of consciousness. "It was late; I was wondering if I shouldn't be leaving the noisy, dark café. Sitting alone at a table, I was observing groups of people around me who were talking and smoking nonstop. In the dim background, players slammed down their dominoes with sharp whiplike snaps that wore on one's nerves in the long run. The walls were covered with dirty smudges and, higher up, the dark yellow plaster grew ever filthier until it reached the soot-blackened ceiling. Against the walls were long, wide wooden benches that could hold as many as ten people, while old dusty straw-seated chairs were strewn about in the middle of the room. A dense cloud of smoke hovered over everything and slowly dissipated into a diffuse, acrid vapor in the white glow of the lightbulbs." ('At the Café,' in At the Café & The Talisman by Mohammed Dib, translated by C. Dickson; afterword by Mildred P. Mortimer, Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2011, p. 3) Mohammed Dib was born in Tlemcen, a city in western Algeria, near the
border of Morocco. His father, whom Dib lost at the age of eleven, worked alternately as a
carpenter, a shop keeper, and a business man. Dib was
raised as a Sunni Muslim but he never attended Koranic school. It
was only after Dib learned to read and write French that he learned to
read Arabic. He attended primary school, high school, and after
studying for a period at the university in Tlemcen he completed his
studies in the city of Oujda. Between the years 1939 and 1959 Dib
worked in odd
jobs – as a teacher in a primary school at Aoudj Bghal, accountant
in Oujda, employee for the Algerian railways, carpet designer in a
weavig factory, interpreter for the American and Allied forces from 1943 to 1944, and
journalist. At the age of fifteen, Dib began to write poems. His
first piece of verse was published in 1946 under the signature of Diabi. During
World War II Did studied literature at the
University of Algeria. For a short stint in 1943, he was a
French-English translator for the Free French forces. In 1950-51 he
worked for the Communist newspaper Alger républicain, and also wrote the Liberté of
the Algerian Communist Party. In 1951 he married Colette Bellissant, a
French woman, the daughter of his former French teacher. They had four children. Dib was a member of the group known as the "Generation of
'52," the year when Dib and Mouloud Mammeri entered the literary stage,
or sometimes called the "Generation of '54" according to the war. These
writers (of whom the most important were Dib, Mammeri, Mouloud Feraoun,
and Kateb Yacine from Algeria; Albert Memmi from Tunisia; Ahmed
Sefrioui and Driss Chraïbi from Morocco) products of colonial education, and they wrote about
being torn between two cultures. As a novelist Dib made his debut with La grande maison
(1952, The Big House), the first in a trilogy of a large family,
published two years before the outbreak of the Algerian
revolution. The novel won the Feneon Prize, awarded annually to a
French-language writer and a visual artist. Set on the eve of World War
II, the story tells of a young boy, Omar, to whose life is
returned in L'incendie (1954, Fire), published at the outset of the Algerian war. The
events take place in May 1945 but open a window into the flammable
subject of why Algerians were fighting for indepencence.
Omar moves to the poor rural region. He learns to speak
French and keeps his thought secret from the Europeans, who scare
their children: "If you don't behave yourself, I'll call an Arab here." The local population rises up against injustice. The final volume of
the trilogy, Le métier à tisser (1957,
Tunisian Loom), tells about the world of the workers in the tradition of French realism. Omar, now an
apprentice to a carpet weaver, wittnesses how the fire of political
consciousness spreads beneath everyday oppression. The 1954-1962 war of independence had a powerful effect on
Dib. He was bilingual but to gain audience to his work he had to write
in French, in the oppressors' language – a problem which Dib
shared with his colleagues, Kateb Yacine, and
others. Together with two
hundred other Algerians and Frenchmen, he signed in 1955 the manifesto Fraternité
algérienne. When
the French colonial police expelled him from Algeria in 1959 for working
toward national independence, several prominent authors, including
Andre Malraux, Louis Guilloux, and Albert Camus, pressed authorities to
cancel their decision. As a result of their lobbying efforts, Did was allowed to remain in France. Dib maintained that he was not in exile; he regarded himself first and foremost as an Algerian, and made regular visits to his native Maghreb. Noteworthy, regardless that Camus exhibited an attitude of disdain and distrust towards all that is Arab, Muslim, and Oriental, Dib declared, that Camus is an Algerian writer. From 1967 he lived with his wife in La-Celle-Saint-Cloud, a Parision suburb, whehe many of the residents were North Africans. Although many of Dib sociopolitical novels are composed with traditional narrative technique, he has abandoned the realistic mode in some works to convey mythic or dystopian visions. Among Dib's experimental publications, inspired by Cubism, science fiction, Faulkner, Kafka, and the ideas of Jung, are Qui se souvient de la mer (1962, Who Remembers the Sea), set in a crumbling, science fiction like city in the time of the Algerian revolution, where national liberation and sexual liberation are just different sides of the same coin, Cours sur la rive sauvage (1964, On the Savage Banks) and La danse du roi (1968, Dance of the King), written in fragmented style, and Habel (1977), exploring the question of sexual ambivalence. After Qui se souvient de la mer Dib began to turn away from national concerns. In 1976-1977 Dib worked as a techer at the University of
California, Los Angeles, recalling this time in his book L.A. trip: roman en vers (2003),
which came out at the same time both in French and English. "Quasi le
matin sur Mt Washington. / Que va-t-il se passer à présent? / L. A. où
es-tu? Où Invisible City?" he asked. (The book appeared posthumously.) Between the years 1985 and
1994 Dib created a series
of novels, which more or less followed a coherent and chronological
order, and reflected the personal life of the author. Les Terrasses
d'Orsol (1985, Orsol Terrace), the first volume in his second
trilogy, was set in a fictitious Arab country, but made an
excursion to a cold country in Scandinavia. Le Sommeil d'Éve (1989, Eve's Slumber) and Neiges de Marbre (1990, Marble Snow) were set in a Nordic country (Finland?) and depicted a romance between a Nordic woman, who is slowly going mad, and Mediterranean man. They have a daughter but are estranged. In the character of the woman Dib refers to Aino Kallas's novel The Wolf's Bride (1928). In L'Infante maure (1994) the child, named Lyyl (not a Finnish first name, Lyyli comes closest to it) is taken to her father's homeland, where she sees the other part of her heritage. Dib also translated into French texts by Finnish writers with Natalia Baschmakoff, and he visited Finland several times. In 1985 the summer issue of the literary magazine Europe, edited by Dib, was mostly devoted to Finland. In 1961 Dib published his first collection of poems, Ombre gardienne. His other collections include Formulaires (1970), Omneros (1975), Feu beau feu (1979), and Ó vive (1987). Dib has said that he was essentially a poet; he ceased to write novels in the 1960s and 1970s. In Dib's fiction, female chatacters are healing forces; in his early works they are not so much independent actors as mediators. In La grande maison Omar's grandmother is a suffering victim of poverty, but in Qui se souvient de la mer women actively participate in the revolution. Contemplating the midnight sun in Neiges de Marbre Dib said: "We have made night and day into to Signs; we have made the
Sign of night dark, light the Sign of day. What has happened to this
part of the world; its days, its nights. Has it fallen in-between,
where each component of the time is confined to saying its opposite. In
summer you are exiled from the night in the dead of the night; in
winter, exiled from the day at high noon." ('Geomancing Dib's Transcultural Expression in Translation' by Madeleine Campbell, in CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, Volume 15, Issue 7, 2013, p. 7; https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol15/iss7/10/. Accessed 1 July 2025) Dib's
poems are enigmatic, his writing is condensed, much is left unsaid,
connectives and articles are often omitted. Some poems bring to mind
Surrealist experiments in
automatic writing. "I try each time to translate a vision, and I try in
the most precise manner to approach that vision by means of the most
exact words, the most precise and the most realistic," Dib told in an
interview in 1983. (quoted in 'Dib, Mohammed,' World Authors 1985-1990, edited by Vineta Colby, New York: H. W. Wilson Company, 1995, p. 201) Dib also wrote tales for children and a number of articles. In 1998 he received Prix Mallarmé for his collection L'Enfant-jazz. Mohammed Dib died at home in La Celle-Saint-Cloud outside Paris on May 2, 2003. A few months before his death, he stated provocatively: "Algerians should be ashamed today of writing in an archaic language, Classical Arabic, which would be, for the French, the equivalent of writing in Latin or Greek". (Language Conflict in Algeria: From Colonialism to Post-Independence by Mohamed Benrabah, Bristol: Multilingual Matters, 2013, p. 141) The Algerian government honoured the author posthumously during the Algiers book fair in 2003. French Culture Minister Jean-Jacques Aillagon called Dib "a spiritual bridge between Algeria and France, between the north and the Mediterranean." For further reading: Le théâtre des genres dans l'oeuvre de Mohammed Dib by Charles Bonn, Mounira Chatti, Naget Khadda (2023); Au commencement est le paysage: l'ancrage tlemcénien de l'œuvre de Mohammed Dib by Sabiha Benmansour (2021); Mohammed Dib, le maitre d'Œuvres by Rachid Mokhtari (2021); Representing Algerian Women: Kateb, Dib, Feraoun, Mammeri, Djebar by Edward John Still (2019); The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions, edited by Waïl S. Hassan (2017); To Hold the World Visible: Writing and History in the Work of Mohammed Dib by Jonathan Adjemian (dissertation, 2016); Mohammed Dib: essentiellement poète by François Desplanques (2016); 'Mohammed Dib's Short Stories on the Memory of Algeria' by Imene Moulati, in Writing Africa in the Short Story: African Literature Today 31, edited by Ernest N. Emenyonu (2013); 'Algeria Trilogy: The Big House (La grande maison) (1952); Fire (L'incendie) (1954); Tunisian Loom (Le métier à tisser (1957),' in The Facts on File Companion to the French Novel by Karen Taylor (2006); Study Of Land And Milieu In The Works Of Algerian-born Writers Albert Camus, Mouloud Feraoun, and Mohammed Dib by Fawzia Ahmad (2005); Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb by Jarrod Hayes (2000); Colonial and Anti-Colonial Discourses: Albert Camus and Algeria: An Intertextual Dialogue with Mouloud Mammeri, Mouloud Feraoun, and Mohammed Dib by Ena C. Vulor (2000); Patrie/Watan: Representations of Algeria in the Early Works of Albert Camus, Mouloud Feraoun and Mohammed Dib by Fawzia Ahmad (1996); 'Dib, Mohammed,' in World Authors 1985-1990, edited by Vineta Colby (1995); (1987); Mohammed Dib, écrivain algérien by Jean Déjeux (1977); North African Writing, edited by Len Ortzen (1970) Selected works:
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