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Je sais que dans vos mains
se tissent tant de soleils.
(Djaout, Solstice barbelé 39)
Certes, je ne suis qu'un Barbare.
(Djaout, L'Exproprié: roman 51)
You could be forgiven for thinking that writing poems was one of Tahar Djaout's (1954–1993) youthful indiscretions. A glance at a chronological list of the Algerian writer's publications will show how early poetry collections—including Solstice barbelé (1975), L'Arche à vau-l'eau (1978), Insulaire & Cie. (1980), L'Oiseau minéral (1982), and L'Étreinte du sablier (1983)—gradually give way to novels and a collection of short stories.(1) Besides the first version of the highly poetic and digressive L'Exproprié—published in 1981 but written mostly in the mid 1970s—prose works include Les Chercheurs d'os and Les Rets de l'oiseleur (both 1984), L'Invention du désert (1987), and a heavily modified version of L'Exproprié in 1991. The novel Les Vigiles appeared two years before Djaout's assassination outside his home in late May 1993.(2) The posthumous publication of Le Dernier Été de la raison (1999)—an unfinished novel found among Djaout's papers—would seem to confirm the evolution of the poet into the novelist.(3) This progression toward the novel is underwritten and informed by the social and cultural commentary that was the basis of Djaout's journalism, first at El Moudjahid, then at Algérie-Actualité, and finally at Ruptures.(4) And yet despite this clear movement away from the poem, Djaout would repeatedly affirm that poetry, among all modes of writing, was by far the most important, "la parole première, la parole finale aussi […] le couronnement de toute écriture" (Gontard 43). "Le poème, pour moi, c'est l'essentiel, le summum de l'expression," he explains to Tchého: "On peut un peu tricher avec une œuvre en prose, mais le poème ne pardonne pas" (30).(5) In conversation with Hamid Adbelkader, he would explain: "j'aime travailler sur la langue et la symbolique des mots. Je suis avant tout ce poète, sans cesse happé par son monde poétique, essayant d'insérer celui-ci dans ses romans. Je ne saurai trahir la poésie" (24).(6)
Besides one short, early monograph (see Merahi), little critical attention has been paid to Djaout's poems.(7) If you were to go to bookshops in Oran and Algiers today and ask for books written by...