Mohammed Bennis - Writing

Through the concept of writing, Mohammed Bennis, has become involved in a plural textual practice (poetry, text and essays), where language, subject and society are put in a movement, the one towards the other and the one with the other. The first time in which Mohammed Bennis talks about writing, is in Bayan al-Kitaba (Manifesto of the writing)(1981), and, in Kitabat al-Mahw (Erasure writing)(1990). The concept refers to European (Friedrich Nietzsche, Stéphane Mallarmé, Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes in mind) and Arabic (especially Abou Tammam, Ibn Arabi, Andalusian-Maghrebian calligraphy and manuscripts), with the purpose, by Bennis, of adapting it to his own ends. For Mohammed Bennis, the writing is a physical act. It is, for him, an “orphan’’, because it “erases the myth of origin.’’ Writing orients the language, according to him, from the communicative function towards the reproduction of words and the interaction between the words, through a transfer of the construction’s rules of the text, on one hand, and according to a replacement of the singular sense by the plural sense, on the other hand. The writing is, in one of the definitions that Mohammed Bennis gives, “a critic of the language, the subject and the society, established in the experience and the practice .” However, “the writing’s subject is material” . It rises at the time of the practice, neither before nor later. And so it is “a liberating act”, “sensual love opened on the life.” It is even, a “trance taken by the erasure.” In this way, the writing abolishes the distance between I, You, He and She. It “eludes the demarcation between poetry and prose”, takes the passage opened between the different textual practices, devotes attention to “the appeal of place”, and urges the reader to change his report with the poem, and make its active reading.

From the concept of the writing, Mohammed Bennis grants an importance to his own composition of the rhythm. It is a question of creating a dynamic lyric that places the body and the senses in the center of the poem. From one collection to the other, the forms of his poems and the perspectives which opened its poetic method give evidence of that. Mohammed Bennis writes in this connection: “The construction of the poem, worked by the infinity of the subjectivity, by the stranger and the impure, undergoes unpredictable transformations. And so the poetic word, written in the margin of literature, does not stop destabilizing the syntax, diverting the image, decomposing the metrics and deforming the order saying itself clean, pure. The road of the poem is the one of the impure, where visible and invisible conjugate. This passage of the seed of the drunkenness becomes a reality in the poem. And here is the impure to wear, from now on, the sign of the pure, the beautiful and the stranger.” And thus the poem, at a time where the culture of consumption and information makes devastation, and where the destructions of the human being triumph, “looks to the parole not at what expresses, but at what creates to me and to you, a renewed birth, human, infinite creation, of the parole.” First task, therefore, of the poem, is to hold up the language to keep in the parole, our parole, its possibility of continuing to live in us and between us. “This is the parole, he writes, which prolongs the parole, human, language of the infinity and the stranger.” The poem, in this sense, is an accompanist who accompanies, with ecstasy, the solitaries in the thirst of their departure unlimitedly towards the beautiful and the free: “what it means the interaction of the breath between the poet and the others in and with the world.”

This is a significant method in the modernization of the language and the Arabic poetry. It is described by the English poet James Kirkup in a letter addressed to Mohammed Bennis : “You allow every word that enters yours poetic consciousness to achieve its full expressive force, and they all manifest themselves as true movements fro; the heart of poetry. You are like a wild bird that sings simply for the joy of singing. You are fascinated by the sound in every word that offers itself to each loving gesture of your poem that allows you to play with words and images echoing your thought. And so you fascinate your readers.”

Kirkup adds, “You use poetic language as if it were some elemental matter which you carve as a sculptor does - the artist who like a blind man is able to feel beneath his chisel the forms he hammers from blocks of marble or granite. And you discover your poem-status without premeditation, by bringing to light and inscribing each line, each verse embedded in the rock of consciousness in the dark of dreams.”

In the same way, the Spanish poet, Antonio Gamoneda writes: “Mohammed Bennis, strange angel who enters in my veins and flows in them like the waters of the instants and you ignite the friendship of light: take me with you to the gardens of the dead, to the place of palms glimpsed between two fugitive abysses. Enter the hole of my chest and show me the gift of the void incandescent and the pupils of animals conceived in crying, those who come to the doors of intoxication to inject us with the passion of light, that substance which birds cross and makes us crazy in the happiness of the sweet contemplation of death.”