Mohammed Bennis

At the same time, several days of studies has been dedicated to him by: "The Associations of Literary studies in Sfax" in Tunisia, 1991; "The lights’s association of Sous for culture and art in Agadir", 1991; "The Association of Young Researchers in Language and Literature in Meknes", 2006; "The Association of Men of Literature of Morocco" in Rabat, 2006; "The Association of Mediterranean Culture in Tangier", 2007; "The French Institute" in Tangier, 2013; The Maghreb Association of Creation of Bouselem in Tunisia, 2014; The Book Festival in Marrakech, 2015; The Faculty of Letters and human studies in Rabat, 2015; The Arab Poetry Festival of Mehdia in Tunisia, 2016, The Assilah Forum Foundation, 2016, paid an international tribute to him. and The House of Poetry in Paris organized a poetic evening for him on 21 March 2017, World Poetry Day.

He settled in Mohammedia in 1972 where he taught Arabic language. Since 1980, he has been professor of modern Arabic poetry at the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences of Rabat's Mohammed V-Agdal University. He has retired since 1 September 2016, after 44 years of teaching. He has since devoted himself to writing.

He served on the judging panel for the 2008 International Prize for Arabic Fiction. And since 2013, he is member of the Scientific Committee of Sheikh Zayed Book Award.

Open to hospitality and dialogue, Bennis has translated works from French. They include The Wound of the Proper Name (Abdelkebir Khatibi), The Rumor of the Air and other works of Bernard Noël, Tomb of Ibn Arabi, Les 99 Stations de Yale and The Malady of Islam (Abdelwahab Meddeb), A Throw of the Dice. (a poem of Stéphane Mallarmé, published in a bilingual edition, alongside Isabella Checcaglini and Bernard Noël, at Ypsilon Éditeur in Paris in 2007), and Archangélique by Georges Bataille in 2010. and As love As life, (selected poems) of Michel Deguy in 2018. Whilst at university, he translated French language texts into Arabic, and participated in Arabic and International poetry festivals.

In France in 2002, he was awarded, the rank of Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France. He is also an honorary member of the World Haiku Association in Japan. In 2017, he has awarded the Medal of Culture, Creation and Art by the president of Palestine, Mahmoud Abbas.

Bennis was also a founding member, with Mohammed Bentalha, Hassan Nejmi and Salah Bousrif, of the "House of Poetry in Morocco" in 1996, and was its president until 2003. Concerned about the international state of poetry, in 1998 he sent a call to Federico Mayor, chief executive officer of UNESCO, arguing for a World Poetry Day. Thanks to this initiative, on 15 November 1999, UNESCO declared 21 March to be World Poetry Day. Ten years later, when politicians seized the "House of Poetry in Morocco", he published an open letter titled "Fear of the Meaning", in which he denounced action against the freedom of poets and poetry. He was also one of the signatories of the Democratic Manifesto, published by Moroccan intellectuals on the occasion of the revision of the Moroccan constitution, in answer to the demand of the "Movement of February 20th".

He is the Author of some forty books of poetry, prose, essays and translations —among them 16 poetry collections — and studies on Moroccan and modern Arabic poetry. Bennis has been published in numerous newspapers and reviews across the Arab world. Some of his poems and texts have been translated and published in collective works, reviews and newspapers, in Europe, the United States, and Japan. From 1995, his poetry collections and books have been translated and published into French, Spanish, Italian, Turkish, German and Macedonian. He also writes on painting. Some of his works have been realized by painters as books and folio volumes in Morocco, Europe, the United States, and Japan. Kitab al-Hobb (The Book of Love), which was published in 1994 with the Iraqi painter Dia Azzawi, is the story of a common adventure.

Bennis has been concerned with the interrogation of Moroccan poetry and Arab culture in contemporary Morocco. Among his essays is one titled Hadathat al-Sou’al (Modernity of interrogation) (1985). This interrogation allowed him to open the way towards modernity and freedom, and became the mark of its poetics and cultural route. In time, it has also embraced poetry, culture, modernity and freedom.

Through the concept of writing, Bennis has become involved in a plural textual practice where language, subject and society are put in a movement. The first time he wrote about writing was in Bayan al-Kitaba (Manifesto of Writing)(1981). The concept refers to European (Friedrich Nietzsche, Stéphane Mallarmé, Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes) and Arabic (Abou Tammam, Ibn Arabi, Andalusian-Maghrebian calligraphy and manuscripts) texts with the purpose of adapting them to his own ends. For Bennis, writing is a physical act; it is an orphan, because it "erases the myth of origin". Writing, he says, orients the language from the communicative function towards the reproduction of words and the interaction between words. It does so through a transfer of the construction's rules of the text on the one hand, and according to a replacement of the singular sense by the plural sense on the other. The writing is, in one of the definitions that Bennis gives, "a critic of the language, the subject and the society, established in the experience and the practice." "The writing's subject is material", though. It rises at the time of the practice, neither before nor later, and so it is "a liberating act" and a "sensual love opened on the life." In this way, 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 interaction with the poem, making his reading active.

He pursued his university studies in literature at the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, Dhar Mehraz, Fez, from where he graduated as a Bachelor of Arts in Arabic literature in 1972. At the Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences of the Mohammed V-Agdal University, Rabat, Bennis defended his PhD thesis, supervised by Abdelkebir Khatibi, on the Phenomenon of Contemporary Poetry in Morocco in 1978. In 1988, at the same faculty, he defended a second doctoral thesis, supervised by Jamel-Eddine Bencheikh, on Modern Arabic poetry, structures, and mutations.

Bennis testifies to the role of the poet in the city. In 1970, conscious of this role, he joined The Writers Union of Morocco and, in 1973, became a member of its executive board. He was, however, quick to object when he observed the influence of politics and subsequently left the association. In 1974, with Mostafa Mesnaoui, he founded the review Attakafa El Jadida (The new Culture) which played an active role in the cultural life in Morocco. The review was banned and closed down soon after its thirteenth issue by the Ministry of the Interior in January 1984 during riots in Casablanca. The ban caused him to take up the challenge and to create in 1985, with writers and academic friends Mohammed Diouri, Abdeltif Menouni and Abdeljalil Nadem, the Publishing house Dar Toubkal, with the aim of contributing to the modernization of Moroccan culture.

Since the 1970s, Bennis has participated in Arabic poetry festivals and, from 1980, in numerous international poetry festivals in Europe, Canada, the United States, Latin America, Turkey, China and India. Profiles of his work have appeared in Ars plus (an Albanian literary journal), al Shu'arae review, The Poets (a quarterly cultural review of House of Poetry in Ramallah), and Banipal literary magazine. The Paris literary review Europe published an introduce dialogue with him in its issue 1015/1016, in November 2013.

Bennis published his first poems in 1968 in Al Alam newspaper in Rabat. In 1969, he sent his poems to the poet Adonis, who published them in the 9th issue of the Mawaqif poetry magazine. Ma Qabla al-Kalam (Before Words), Bennis’ first collection of poems, was published in 1969.

Bennis attended Quranic School, joining a public primary school in 1958 at the age of ten. He became interested in literature from an early age, particularly lyric poetry.

Mohammed Bennis (Arabic: محمد بنيس; born 1948) is a Moroccan poet and one of the most prominent writers of modern Arabic poetry. Since the 1970s, he has enjoyed a particular status within Arab culture. Muhsin J al-Musawi states that "Bennis’ articulations tend to validate his poetry in the first place, to encapsulate the overlapping and contestation of genres in a dialectic, that takes into account power politics whose tropes are special. As a discursive threshold between Arab East and the Moroccan West, tradition and modernity, and also a site of contestation and configuration, Muhammad Bennis' self-justifications may reveal another poetic predilection, too."