Mohammed Bennis - Poetry and Language

Poetry and Language

Mohammed Bennis is a poet of interrogation and adventure. He has been concerned, from the start, about the interrogation on Moroccan poetry and Arab culture in contemporary Morocco. Among his famous essay books is one titled Hadathat al-Sou’al (Modernity of interrogation) (1985) . This interrogation allowed him to open the way towards the modernity and the freedom and became the mark of its poetics and cultural route. In time, it has taken a radical dimension, to embrace the poetry, the culture, the modernity and the freedom. Bennis's relationship to French culture is ambivalent. While he rejects the ideology of francophone policy (which for him represents a form of colonizing globalization), he does hold the French language in a very high regard: “As a modern Arab poet, I am committed to French culture and its modernity. The French language was the home of a poetic revolution and it gave my Arabic language a poetic strength, more valuable than any of other modern languages.” Thus he is attached to the modernization of the language, to the freedom of expression based on the fundamental values of modernity. He has followed since youth the tracks of “the poets which made of the human life, in its secrets as in its fears and its illuminations, their space of writing.” His poetry, which grounds itself, at once, on the measure and the trance, is the creative union of two cultures: the ancestral Arabic culture, between the Middle East, Andalusia, Morocco, and the international culture.