Mohamed Dib: the writer |
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Collection title
Collection EPTV
First broadcast date
05/02/2008
Abstract
Born in 1920 in Tlemcen, Mohamed Dib is probably the greatest Maghreb writer.
Before World War II, he was a teacher near the Moroccan border. He held several jobs, including that of carpet models designer. He worked for “Alger Républicain” which he left in 1951.
After many trips to the Eastern countries and Morocco, he chose to live in the western Paris conurbation. He was a teacher at the University of California in 1974. In 1975, he went to Finland where he returned several times.
He was awarded the ‘Grand Prix de la Francophonie’ in 1994 and the ‘Mallarmé ‘Prize for “the Jazz-Child”, in 1998.
Mohamed Dib died at La Celle Saint Cloud, May 2, 2003.
Audiovisual form
Portrait
Primary theme
Languages and literatures
Credits / Cast
- Bayou Ramdane Djazia - Journalist
Context
Mohammed Dib: the writer
Richard Jacquemond
Mohammed Dib (1920-2003) is considered one of the greatest French-speaking Algerian writers, along with Kateb Yacine (1929-1989), with whom moreover he worked on the Alger Republicain, a daily newspaper, between 1950 and 1952. This archive from Algerian television was filmed in 2008 and broadcast on May 2nd 2012, to mark the fifth anniversary of his death. It gives a brief biography of the writer, illustrated mainly by past and present images of Tlemcen, his home town, and an exhibition of Dib's books and writings, probably also in Tlemcen, where a foundation was established in 2001 to promote knowledge of his work.
The archive is as interesting for what it does not say as for it says. It shows Dib's life in Algeria: his childhood in Tlemcen, his first jobs, his first novels (the trilogy of La grande maison, Le metier à tisser and L'incendie), and finally his expulsion from Algeria during the War of Liberation (in 1959), “because he had crossed the red line” imposed by the colonial authorities. It is this trilogy which is his best known work in Algeria, because with its classical form and content it tried to describe as closely as possible the reality of Algeria in that period (the years before the war). It is more in keeping with the image the country likes to give of itself. In the same vein and backed-up by the images, the archive reminds us of the huge popularity of television series taken from Dib's novel L'incendie (adapted in 1974 by Mustapha Badie).
About the rest of his life and career, however, this short programme tells us nothing. Having moved to France in 1959 with his wife, Colette Bellissant (daughter of the French teacher in Tlemcen who was one of Dib's early mentors), he did not return to Algeria except for short stays and his work, while maintaining many links with his homeland, drew as much from, if not more, his many trips and stays in the U.S. or Finland (which inspired his “Trilogie nordique”), and particularly from a literary and poetic quest for answers to major, universal questions. Dib's absence from independent Algeria is revealed, in negative form, by the fact that there is not one sequence in this documentary of the writer in the flesh, so to speak. As if no filmed archive of him existed in his own homeland. It is also significant that the Arabic commentary does not mention that all Dib's work was written in French (the images in an exhibition of his books tells us that), except incidentally, when the commentary mentions at the end that in 1994 the writer was awarded the French Academy's Grand Prix of the French-language, the first given to a North African writer.
Bibliography
The present translator has been unable to find any of Mohammed Dib's work translated into English. All of it, however, is available in French. The major novels are available in paperback (published by:
Points Seuil,
Babel Actes Sud). There is also a very rich bibliography of articles and books about his work at
www.limag.refer.org, which is dedicated to North African literature. The web-site is in French.
