Written in Sand

Abstract

This article reinterprets the Algerian writer Mohammed Dib’s 1992 novel Le désert sans détour through the analysis of its reference to Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot. I argue that for Dib, Beckett offers an important model for a post-revolutionary politics that expresses extreme skepticism over clichéd notions of historical progress and universal humanism. Recuperating this ignored Beckettian strand in Dib’s novel, I revise the critical reception that has read the text as apolitical and focused on spirituality. I offer a better understanding of Dib’s aesthetic as one emerging out of a dialectical tension between discourses of Sufi illumination and a Beckettian politics radically enmeshed in the world.