Fiction and testimony in the work of Mohammed Dib
From his earliest writings, Algerian writer Mohammed Dib (1920-2003) never gave in to the use of didactic, transparent language, nor to the expectations of so-called “commissioned” literature. It's the work of the language in its syntactic cutting, the weighing of the letter, that's important. In fact, the Dibian witness is masked: he conceals within himself what I'd like to call a literary witness, i.e. a textual device, plural in its declensions, which, going against the expected, allows for other times, (re)plays the texts in their unspoken, questions the memory of the texts, renews the very conception of the witness and asks the following question: what witness when fiction gets involved?
This essay, covering fifty years of uninterrupted creation, sets out to delineate the various passages of witness that Dib's work encourages, but cannot avoid questioning the very nature of exegesis and the position of the exegete: do I become, at the end of this relay, the ultimate witness who wishes, from the depths of his heart, to pass the baton to a new guarantor?
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
