The Slumber and Wake of Dada in Mahi Binebine’s The Slumber of the Slave

Abstract

Mahi Binebine published his first novel The Slumber of the Slave* in 1992. Unlike his subsequent publications which all received the due critical acclaims, this first book did not seem to draw the expected attention and went almost unnoticed. It was praised by few critics and was considered as a shy debut. Nevertheless, for a first novel, Le Sommeil de l’Esclave, seems – to me – to gather all the elements of an incoming successful career. Let us not forget that we are thirty years back, and that we are before a former mathematics teacher who spent eight years in Paris, and who decided to chose a completely different path, and give free vent to his imagination and creativity**.Accordingly,and for a first novel, one can already track down some traces of genius. Obviously, we can ask ourselves where the man draws his source of inspiration from, and wonder about the «secret of the craft» which the man has shown, and which many other craftsmen, before him, had failed to prove