A SELF-PORTRAIT IN EXTERIOR (AN ESSAY ON MOHAMMED DIB’S LAST BOOK)

Abstract

The essay centers on the outstanding Algerian French language writer, Mohammed Dib, and his last book ‘Laёzza’, which became a ‘confession of the soul’ by a man who had foreseen his impending death and wished to narrate, in a free form of short stories and autobiographical sketches, his life and spiritual experience, his perception of the surrounding world and destinies—of his native Algeria and his second home, France. Dib’ s writings and his last work are contemplations on the fate of the Maghreb people who had been long living in the West, as well as the French who have been understanding more and more that the problems of ‘integration’, ‘multiculturalism’ and other doubtful achievements of the former metropolitan power vis-à-vis the formerly colonized people, have been linked to such ‘postcolonial products’ as riots, terrorism and various other grades of the ‘time of anger’, for a long time emerging in the now independent ex-colonies. Many things foreseen by the writer at the beginning of the millennium came to be true nowadays, and thus in his farewell book he had not only reminisced about the past or contemplated upon the present, but also forecasted the future.