1920-2003
Mohammed
Dib was born in Tlemcen in western Algeria. He never attended the traditional
Koranic school, but was raised as a Muslim. He began to write poems at the age
of fifteen. Between the years 1939 and 1959, he worked odd jobs (teacher,
accountant, weaver, interpreter, and journalist. In 1959 he moved to France,
where he became known as a member of the group “Generation of ‘52” the year
when Dib and Mouloud Mammeri’s work first appeared.
His debut work was the novel La grande
maison, published two years before the outbreak of the Algerian revolution.
Other works followed, including L’Incendie (1954), and Qui se
souvient de la mer (1962), which has been published in English as Who
Remembers the Sea. Before his death in 2003, he had published some 35
books, which have been translated into many languages.
In 1998 he received the Prix Mallarmé for
his collection of poetry L’Enfant-jazz. Three books of poetry have been
published in English, Omneros (with Formulaires Los Angeles: The Red
Hill Press, 1978; Omneros reprinted by Los Angeles: Seeing Eye Books,
1997) and L.A. Trip (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2003
BOOKS
OF POETRY
Ombre
gardienne
(Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1961); Formulaires (Paris: Éditions du
Seuil, 1970); Omneros (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975); Feu beau feu
(Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1979; reprinted by Paris: Éditions de la Différence,
2001); Ô vive (Paris: Éditions Sindbad, 1987); L'Aube, Ismaël
(Éditions Tassili, 1996); L'Enfant-jazz (Paris: Éditions de la
Différence, 1998); Le Cœr insulaire (Paris: Éditions de la Différence,
2000); L.A. Trip (Paris: Éditions de la Différence, 2003; bilingual
edition, Los Angeles: Green Integer: 2003)
ENGLISH
LANGUAGE TRANSLATIONS
Omneros [with
Formulaires], trans. by Carol Lettieri and Paul Vangelisti (Los Angeles: Red
Hill Press, 1978); Omneros, trans. by Carol Lettieri and Paul Vangelisti
(Los Angeles: Seeing Eye Books, 1997); L. A. Trip, trans. by Paul
Vangelisti (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2003)
You
can purchase L.A. Trip at this link:
http://www.greeninteger.com/book.cfm?-Mohammed-Dib-L-A-Trip-&BookID=159
Below
is a selection of poems and an essay on Dib
invasion
of patience
opening
her own way
and
always alone always
calm
under a pall
always
the length departing
advancing
as much as ebbing
the
reverent wave
kneeling
water most naked water
patient
before barriers
forsaken
just the same
water
beyond herself to gorge
a
drumming of birds
and
to live blind as well as black
-Translated
from the French by Carol Lettieri and Paul Vangelisti
(from
Omneros, 1975)
at
the lowest point
go
on into the flames
with
a clamor of insects
an
indiscernible dust
a
shape through blazing
with
an enigma that makes you
gesture
beneath the barren voice
and
going on catch fire
immobile
on a ridge
take
your place for the vigil
and
leave at night in a flood
or
in blood like an outcry
beyond
the reach of words
-Translated
from the French by Carol Lettieri and Paul Vangelisti
(from
Omneros, 1975)
evidence
of being
in
the blanched morning she's
nearly
as tall as a flame
it's
the water entering for no other purpose
and
gathering all that quivers
then
the clipped wing across life
some
motion water nothing more
but
no other reason guiding
this
escaping fire the water gone
the
water this rumble diffused
this
disquiet of olive trees
the
water this dog blind
as
an illumination of bees
-Translated
from the French by Carol Lettieri and Paul Vangelisti
(from
Omneros, 1975)
from
L.A. Trip
50:
Big Sur
Looking
out on the Pacific
from
a rocky basin.
Oh
sad, so very sad.
Far
from town. And,
there
is again the wind.
Making
you weep!
This
resembles what.
And
what does God resemble?
The
look of a blind man.
A
look all around
not
here or elsewhere.
Ignoring
the whole world.
Before
having created you
a
look in the crowd.
Jessamyn,
nothing more.
High
up these heights,
from
these rocks the eye
weighing
the Pacific. And.
—Translated
from the French by Paul Vangelisti
(from
L.A. Trip, 2003)
68.
The Night
With
the angel. Alone
pounding
the night.
As
the desert made it:
cold
and at the height of summer.
The
night but without its fear.
Such
more than ever
continuing
inexhaustible
Californian
blue.
Cackling,
jabbering
and
Jessa, she, sighing.
She
in flight, escaping.
Going
into that night
Going.
And going.
—Translated
from the French by Paul Vangelisti
(from
L.A. Trip, 2003)
PERMISSIONS
"invasion
of patience," "at the lowest point," and "evidence of
being"
Reprinted
from Omneros (Los Angeles: The Red Hill Press, 1978). English language
translation ©1978 by Carol Lettieri and Paul Vangelisti. Reprinted by
permission of Paul Vangelisti.
"50:
Big Sur" and "68. The Night"
Reprinted
from L.A. Trip (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2003). English language
translation ©2003 by Paul Vangelisti. Reprinted by permission of Green Integer.
A
Quiet Man in the Vast and Chattering Desert
by
Douglas Messerli
I
first “met” Mohammed Dib in correspondence concerning our planned Poets’
Calender in late September 1996. He responded in October, contributing three
short poems, and soon after, in January 1997, sending a photograph for use in
the book. I have the feeling that we communicated long before that—certainly I
had been interested in his work for years before I wrote him, having read his
only novel translated into English, Who Remembers the Sea. But these letters
and notes are the beginning, in my files, of a fairly regular correspondence,
in which I also sent him various Sun & Moon books and our translation
journal, Mr. Knife, Miss Fork, and my large anthology of American poetry, From
the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990.
Over the years he wrote to me, in both
English and French, in a short note of January 1997, thanking me for the
anthology and noting that he had met John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, and Charles
Bukowski. Another short note, this in French from November 1997, speaks of Guy
Bennett’s upcoming re-publication of his collection of poems, Omneros
(first published with Formulaires by Paul Vangelisti in a translation by
Vangelisti and Carol Lettieri on Paul’s Red Hill Press in 1978). Dib also sent
me books, including Le Talisman, Feu beau feu, and L’Enfant-Jazz.
It was clear to Dib that I was interested in his work, and it was only a matter
of finding a good translator and the right work for Sun & Moon or Green
Integer to publish.
Unfortunately, the Poets’ Calender was
never published, but we did later print a short story he had sent us in 1001 Great
Stories, Volume 2. And throughout the early years of the millennium, we kept
regularly in touch, exchanging publications. At one point in 2000 Dib wrote me,
asking if I might send him a map of Los Angeles (I sent him the indispensable,
voluminous Thomas Guide of the greater Los Angeles area) and a book of photos
of Los Angeles. I searched for an appropriate collection of Los Angeles photos,
but was unable to send it before he notified me he’d discovered one himself.
By 2002, I had discovered that his desire
for these publications had to do with his writing L.A. Trip, a work
about his Los Angeles experiences from 1974, when he lived in the city as
Regents Professor in the French Department of the University of California—Los
Angeles. He had also asked Paul Vangelisti to translate this new work into
English, and when Paul suggested that Green Integer might publish it, I quickly
agreed. We signed an agreement with Dib, and attempted to collaborate on a
joint bilingual publication with his French publisher, Éditions le différence.
For some reason the French decided not to publish with the English text,
despite Dib’s own insistence upon a bilingual edition. Indeed, the work, in
part, is about the two versions sitting side by side. So we went ahead with our
publication plans, preparing to issue our dual-language version in 2003, the
same year as the French only edition appeared in Paris. Dib was preparing to
travel to the United States to celebrate the American publication, and Paul was
excited to get the chance to greet his old friend again, and I to meet the
author in person.
It came as a shock to us all,
accordingly, to receive the news that on May 2 Dib had suddenly died. We knew
he had long suffered from diabetes, but he had seemed a lively octogenarian, and
we knew he had long been looking forward to his American voyage.
Born in Tlemcen, Algeria, Dib attended a
school where he learned French before he studied Arabic. Although raised as a
Muslim Dib never attended the traditional Koranic school. His father, a
carpenter, died when Dib was young.
Already at the age of fifteen, Dib began
to write poems, while working from 1939 to 1959 at various odd jobs, including
teacher, accountant, weaver, interpreter, and journalist. During World War II
he studied literature at the University of Algeria, and from 1950-51 wrote for
the newspaper Alger républicain and Liberté, the Algerian
Communist Party paper.
Dib’s first major work was the novel La
grande maison, the first book in a trilogy, published in 1952, two years
before the outbreak of the Algerian War for Independence, L’Incendie
(1954) and Le Métier à tisser (1957) representing the other two volumes.
These years from 1954 to the war’s end had a profound impact on Dib, and
several of his books throughout the period reflect his wartime experiences,
particularly his novel of 1962, the year of Algerian independence, Qui se
souvient de la mèr (Who Remembers the Sea), the only of his longer
fictions to be published in English. The difficulty in living in Algeria while
writing in the oppressors’ language of French eventually led him to leave his
home, settling outside of Paris in 1959.
Many of Dib’s fictions use more
traditional narrative techniques to describe the socio-political issues of the
day; but influenced as he was by Cubism, science fiction, William Faulkner,
Franz Kafka, and Jung, Dib gradually moved away from realism, writing from
mythic or dystopian visions.
This is particularly true of his great
war-time novel, Who Remembers the Sea. For those of later generations,
the Algerian War of Independence may not evoke many memories. It is important
to understand that it was one of the first and most important of decolonization
wars, a war which was fought through guerrilla warfare, retaliation, and
terrorism that would later define Arab terrorist acts.
What began on November 1, 1954 as a
guerrilla battle of the National Liberation Front against military
installations, police posts, warehouses, and communications facilities—a
national struggle for the “restoration of the Algerian state, sovereign, democratic,
and social, within the framework of the principles of Islam”—would end with
over 300,000 (the Algerians place that figure at 1.5 million) people dead and
over 2 million Algerians uprooted, many later dying of starvation, disease and
exposure. Both sides extensively used torture, but the French were particularly
effective, arguing, like the American government today, that the prisoners of
this war lay outside the controls of the Geneva Convention. Mass rapes, the
submerging of prisoners in freezing water or excrement and the repeated use of
electric shocks were extensively used as tools of torture. After the war Paul
Aussaresses, then director of the French secret service in Algiers, admitted
that over 3,000 prisoners considered to have “disappeared” were, in fact,
tortured and executed. These facts and their implications for French culture
created divisions that exist still today throughout France and the Arab world.
It is notable, accordingly, that Dib’s
novelistic presentation of these events are not at all presented within a
realist context. The narrator describing the war-torn city spends many of his
hours at a regular meeting place, a café, where various friends and he discuss,
often quite obliquely, the daily horrors of the war. Much of his energy is used
up in simply getting to the café and returning home, during which he and others
are attacked by strange bird-like creatures called (in Dib’s own vocabulary)
“spyrovirs” and “iriace,” science-fiction like-beings which, like rockets and
low-flying cruisers, terrorize the citizens of the city, often cornering them
in cul-de-sacs and squares. At home the narrator is equally greeted with the
moans, cries and gossip of the women. The peaceful and placid roar of the sea
seems to have abandoned them, as they lie awake each night, counting the
numerous explosions and blasts, imagining the torture and murder of their own
people.
Dib’s innocent narrator is clueless,
unable to even recognize, at first, that his wife is clearly involved in
terrorist acts, as she disappears for long periods of time, leaving their
children with neighbors or her husband. Yet he is comforted by her, upon her
returns, and able to continue as much as possible in his daily routines. It is
only upon her apparent death, when she does not return, that he must seek out
the secret entrance to what he has begun to perceive as an “underground city”
as vast as the city above it, which represents, perhaps, either escape or
death. It is only as he seeks the entrance to that invisible city that he comes
to perceive the seemingly innocent café as the center of the world of
terrorists and spies.
In a Postface to this novel, Dib attempts
to answer why he has treated the horror and misfortune of the Algerians in such
an abstract matter, and calls up Picasso’s great painting of the Spanish Civil
War Guernica as an example of how art can perhaps be more moving and
representative of reality in its abstraction as opposed to a realist
presentation. Putting his own suffering and that of his country in context, Dib
poignantly asks a question all 20th and 21st century writers must face: “How
can one speak of Algeria [or any other suffering culture] after Auschwitz, the
Warsaw ghetto, and Hiroshima? What finally can one do in order that what
nevertheless there is to say can still be heard and not be absorbed by what
that great demonic cloud that has for so many years been floating above the
world, not surround us?”
In this sense, we perceive many of the
voices of Dib’s fictions and poems as being quiet declarations (Dib describes
poetry itself as “silent music”) against what he describes in his later book of
stories The Savage Night, as “the vast and chattering desert that has
spread over a large part of the planet.” If art has any nobility, he argues, it
is that it helps us survive this painfully revelatory clatter of the hate,
horror, and meaninglessness that overcomes even the gentle throb of the sea.
Accordingly, many if not most of Dib’s
characters, no matter how glib and experienced they see themselves to be,
ultimately turn to quietude in order just to survive. There is no more apparent
example of this than the modern Algiers couple of his story “The Detour,” a man
and a woman, Ben and Soraya, who artfully steer their expensive Mercedes from
the Algerian town they have been visiting back to their city home. A detour
sign sends them inland, into the desert, where suddenly the road comes to an
end, and their magnificent machine becomes stuck in the sand. Night is
approaching, so the couple set out toward a distant light, meeting up with a
seemingly pleasant enough native who takes them to his home and feeds them. The
next morning, as they wait expectantly for help in freeing the car, the couple
is taken away to a pit, where an orator declares them to have been brought to
the small village by “the hand of god.” The village—arid, barren, desolate—has
suffered for years, and now the natives hope to free themselves from what they
perceive as an evil spell by sacrificing the couple. The story’s final
revelation is as shocking to this sophisticated couple as it is the reader:
This
time, Ben didn’t hold himself back—he allowed his great, bellowing laughter
to
ring out. But before he could dry his eyes, another group of ruffians threw
Soraya
into the bottom of the pit with him. She landed nearby without uttering
a
sound, as if she were already dead. Immediately afterwards, a lid made of
wooden
beams lashed hastily together was pulled over the mouth of the hole.
Ben
listened as huge boulders were rolled into place over their heads.
The
title story of this collection, “The Savage Night,” relates the tale of a
wealthy brother and sister, Nédim and Beyhana, as they travel the streets of
their city via bus from their beautiful villa to a poorer section of town to
release bombs in a local restaurant in an act of terrorism. Behi escapes, but
Nédim is shot, and she is forced to carry him long distances through the
streets while the military seeks them out until she can find a conveniently
isolated spot. So intense is their love for one another and their complete
belief in their cause, that even today, when we recognize the total savagery of
such acts, we can only sympathize with the young couple as the brother
gradually slips into death and Beyhana—still living years later in the villa
she has attempted as a youth to escape—is doomed to a life of terrifying
memories.
In another of Dib’s ironic tales, “A Game
of Dice,” two young radicals break into the house of an older man with the
intention of killing him as they have been ordered by their superiors. But the
old man, armed with a gun, shoots and kills one of the boys, betting the other
his life with the roll of the dice. Despite his recognition that reason will
have little effect on this young automaton—a boy whose life has been so
denigrated that he has no comprehension of the value of living—the man attempts
to inculcate in the youth some sense of moral values. When the boy is finally
let go, he enters the streets where life is held so cheaply that he is shot at
by his own cohorts.
Perhaps one of the most humorously dark
stories of this book most clearly demonstrates the silence inflicted upon
anyone with something of importance to say. Sitting in a suburban Paris café,
the author/narrator overhears a conversation between two men—who in the U.S. we
might describe as rednecks—Gilbert and Marcel. Marcel loudly discusses the news
he has just heard that all “the dark skins,” “the wogs, the spades, those
maguerrebin hustlers” have suddenly left the city en masse. Where they have
gone no one knows, but it is clear to him that, while their exodus has long
been sought, they have no appreciation for the cultural advantages that France
has afforded them.
Bemused but also startled by this strange
information, the narrator—who like Dib does not look like the
“maguerrebins”—has no choice but to remain silent in response to this absurd
discussion. Ultimately the two men, glad to be rid of “those bastards,” seem to
miss their former neighbors:
Shit!
Why in the hell did they up and leave? What’d they have
against
us? I just don’t get it. Our country wasn’t good enough
for
them? They’ll have nothing but dirt to eat back where they
come
from, I can tell you that much. The bastards! I had a few of
them
right next door to me. I got along just fine with them. Think
I
should’ve told them to stay?
“It’s
gonna seem awful empty, that’s for sure,” Gilbert replies. Dib’s narrative
comically reveals the frustrations of those French citizens living at the
fringes of their own culture, of having a voice without a voice.
In this respect Dib has represented one of
the major writers speaking for cultures dominated by or immersed within other
cultures. Like the underground city of Who Remembers the Sea, these
“conquered” cultures and their spokesmen do not completely disappear, but
change within their new worlds, transform themselves and the worlds around them
in quiet reinterpretations of history, retelling history within what Dib
describes as the “crypto-spaces,” creating a kind of shadow history (“If
Tolstoy is history,” notes Dib, “Dostoevsky is the shadow”). It is clear that
this kind of rereading of culture is precisely what Dib had in mind by writing
the bilingual “novel in verse” L. A. Trip. Like the narrators of so many
of his works, the author, in recalling his stay in Los Angeles, speaks in
fragments, witnesses rather than reveals. But bit by bit we see a city,
described—like Dib’s friend and translator Paul Vangelisti’s magazine of the
period—as “invisible,” transformed by the images of Dib’s imagination; a small
Black boy with his back turned to the author, a passing dog, a ringing bell, a
dove, a beautiful woman named Jessamyn with whom the author obviously has
fallen in love, the sounds and emptiness of his sleepless nights gradually
build up an American landscape—Dib’s American landscape. As he notes in the
very first poem/chapter, appropriately titled “Those American Things,”
Things
will open
their
eyes by themselves.
He
is silently disturbed
by
their silence. He,
dying
of longing.
Those
things at hand.
He
who was for them no stranger,
who
prowled around the. No.
Not
distressed. Silent.
Then
from being unknown
they
draw closer
for
his longing to live here.
He
is silently disturbed.
By the time he “moves off in silence” at
the end of the poem, he has become a kind of faux
American,
a kind of Black-hipster cowboy singing the Blues. The final “chapter” appears
only
in
English:
You
know, the man can’t help it
but
feel bad, yes just feel bad.
So
long, ma’am Jessamyn, so long,
Lord,
I just couldn’t help it.
There
ain’t no use crying, yeh Sir,
that’s
gospel true. Let’s us git.
So
long, ma’am Jessamyn, so long.
So
long, Mohammed, we will miss you, miss the re-discovery of who we are in the
crypto-space, in the eyes of such a sensitive and observant “stranger.”
Los
Angeles, November 29, 2003
Reprinted
from Or, No. 2 (April 2009).
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