The writer Ibrahim El kouni or the wizard of the disert

It is quite difficult to summarize all the literary skills and qualities of the Libyan writer, Ibrahim El Kouni, who says about himself that he is made “of Tuareg (Amazigh) consciousness and  Arabic culture”. Hence, he has exploited beneficially all the civilisational legacy and cultural wealth of North Africa, in order to enrich his literary works which have reached eighty-one books that are all based- with some exceptions- on the desert with its philosophical, spiritual and mythical dimensions. Moreover, El Kouni has been fed by Western languages and cultures like English and German, and he has also studied all of the Hebraic religions.

 The French magazine Lire has designed him among the best 50 living writers in the world, and he won 15 world prizes in literature; he is the only writer who has achieved that in North Africa and Middle-East. He has also been nominated for the Nobel Prize several times.

Ibrahim El Kouni was born in Ghadames, Libya, in 1948, and he completed his elementary and secondary studies in the Libyan south. Then, after postgraduate studies in literature in his country, he joined Gorki Institute for Letters in Moscow.

Now concerning his way of writing, the style of El Kouni is peculiar and exciting in the same time, leaning on precise words and beautiful metaphors to describe natural landscapes or human feelings, and to create also very accurate and realistic dialogues so that the characters are fully embodied, despite the symbolic and philosophical aspect of his novels among which one can cite :  The Tetralogy of Eclipse (1989), The Stones Bleeding (1990), and Gold Dust (1990). As for me, I have read a novel by him he wrote exclusively for a cultural magazine from Dubai called South-West of Troy, South-East of Grenade, which is a historical novel set in Libya.

The most specific trait of Ibrahim El Kouni’s novels is undoubtedly their complex and long stories encompassing several different characters, which makes the reading hard somehow. Yet, the poetic and pleasant style of the author allows the reader to stay attentive and interested in the events of the novel and the ideas of Ibrahim El Kouni who has also managed to upend the misconceptions about the art of the novel.  Indeed, El Kouni has heard, during his stay in Moscow, the widespread theory of Georg Lukács stating that the novel is fundamentally an urban form of expression in which the events cannot take place outside of the city. However, the Libyan writer has been able to create long and complex novels and epopees set in the desert, with deep and diverse meanings. 

As Ibrahim El Kouni says : “The place of the novel is not merely the physical place, but also the spiritual place which is the human being.”

Moreover, El Kouni made a profound analysis about the duality of the desert and the city reaching philosophical meaning, when he explained that stability matches the material nature while travel represents the human soul which is mobile and changing. Afterwards, he projected this idea on the duality of masculinity and femininity where the woman favours stability in one place in order to build a family, which explains the matriarchal system in the Tuareg’s society, and men are more inclined to move and travel since travelling is the equivalent of freedom and the discovery of oneself and the other.

Of course, despite the insight of this reasoning in some respects, it remains arguable and debatable, like all the constructive works of art which induce to think and observe the world around us.

Finally, it’s worth mentioning that Ibrahim El Kouni has also published works dealing with language, notably series of books untitled Statement about the Language of Theology, which tackles fundamental existential topics regarding the first language which has produced all the other languages and the initial civilisation from which the world civilisations emerged. In this work, El-Kouni has exploited his studies about different languages and his interest in the history of religions, literatures and philosophies. 

Lyes Ferhani