Mohammed Dib
Mohammed Dib ( Arabic محمد ديب, DMG Muḥammad Dīb ; * July 21, 1920 in Tlemcen , Algeria ; † May 2, 2003 in La Celle-Saint-Cloud near Paris ) was an Algerian journalist and writer .
Life
Dib was born in Tlemcen (western Algeria) into an impoverished middle class family. His father died when he was a child. At 15, he started writing poetry. At the age of 18 he took up a job as a teacher in Oujda ( Morocco ).
He later worked as a weaver, teacher, accountant and translator for the French and British military and as a journalist for the Alger Républicain and Liberté newspapers . During this time he also studied literature at the University of Algiers .
Two years before the Algerian revolution, he married a French woman in 1952 and joined the French Communist Party . In the same year his first novel La Grande Maison (Eng. The big house ) appeared.
Because of his commitment to the Algerian independence movement, he was expelled from Algeria in 1959. His novels, which portrayed life in colonial Algeria realistically, also played a role. In contrast to most of the other Algerian exiles who fled to Cairo , Dib moved to France .
He owed his residence permit there to the influence of various writers (including Albert Camus ) on the French authorities. From 1967 he lived in La Celle-Saint-Cloud near Paris.
From 1967 to 1977 Dib taught at the University of California in Los Angeles. He also held a professorship at the Sorbonne . Some of his late works are set in Finland , where he often traveled.
Dib died on May 2, 2003 in La Celle-Saint-Cloud. The French Minister of Education, Jean-Jacques Aillagon , posthumously recognized him as a “bridge between Algeria and France, between the north and the Mediterranean”.
plant
The aim of Dib's novels was to convey the Algerian culture and way of life to a wider - mainly French-speaking - public. The Algerian Revolution (1954–1962) influenced his work, he wanted to make the world aware of the Algerian struggle for independence. He advocated (political) equality and made the demand that “the things that differentiate us must always be secondary”. In a way, the many awards he received from the established French literary scene counteract his aspirations for emancipation.
His debut novel La Grande Maison was the first part of an Algerian trilogy that deals with the life of an extended Algerian family. The trilogy describes the life of the protagonist Omar , in the first part the time before the Second World War. The second part, published in 1954, was titled L'Incendie (Eng. The Fire ) and covered the time during the Second World War. Omar's fate as a grown man is told in the third part, Le Métier à tisser ( The loom ), published in 1957 . The entire trilogy has autobiographical features.
The Algerian trilogy is written in a naturalistic style (similar to that of Émile Zola ), whereas Dib's later works often had a different, sometimes surrealistic , narrative style. In his novel about the colonial war in Algeria Qui se souvient de la mer (Eng. And I remember the sea. Fantastic novel ) from 1962 he used elements of science fiction and his last novel LA Trip was written in lyrical form.
From 1985 to 1994 he wrote four autobiographical novels about an Arab who visits Finland and to whom a child is born from a romance with a Finnish woman. The last of the four books describes the child's visit to his father's home. In addition to his own works, Dib worked on the translation of several books from Finnish into French.
Awards
- 1994: Grand Prix de la Francophonie de l'Académie Française
- 1998: Prix Mallarmé for L'enfant-jazz
Fonts
- La Grande Maison (Roman, 1952), German: Das große Haus published by Volk und Welt, 1956
- L'Incendie (Roman, 1954), German: Der Brand published by Verlag Volk und Welt, 1956
- Le Métier à tisser (Roman, 1957), German: The loom was published by Volk und Welt, 1959
- Qui se souvient de la mer (Roman, 1962), German: And I remember the sea. Fantastic novel , 1992. (Radio play version by Ulrich Gerhardt . Prod .: DLR Berlin, 2004.)
- L 'infante maure (Roman, 1994), German: The Moorish Infanta translated by Regina Keil, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1997, ISBN 3-462-02607-0 .
Web links
- Literature by and about Mohammed Dib in the catalog of the German National Library
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Dib, Mohammed |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Algerian writer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 21, 1920 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Tlemcen |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 2, 2003 |
| Place of death | La Celle-Saint-Cloud near Paris |