Written in Sand Beckett, Aesthetics, and Postcoloniality in Mohammed Dib's Le desert sans detour

This article reinterprets the Algerian writer Mohammed Dib's 1992 novel Le desert sans detour 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 cliched 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.