Dihya Lwiz is a novelist and a poet who wrote in the Kabyle language and in Arabic, residing in Algeria. Marcia Lynx Qualey interviewed Lwiz in 2014 to discuss her exploration of the “black decade” in her fiction.

Dihya Lwiz passed away in 30 June 2017, aged 32, from cancer. She regularly published her poems on facebook, and her last publication was the below poem:

So Then We Have Not Yet Begun by Dihya Lwiz

So then we have not yet begun
The road toward wisdom
The road toward freedom
For those we always look on
how is it all so easy
It seems, for us it never is
We do not know why
We refuse to leave yesterday
We like habits
We like destruction
Among all the good there is
We like the twisted things in which we live
We fear we’ll change

Because perhaps then it will change

To honor the memory of Dihya Lwiz, several national newspapers from from Algeria republished this last piece in the days that followed her funeral, and readers published their translations of it to the French language. Arab Lit Quarterly translates it awkwardly to English here, to give a sense of the themes she explored in her novels and poetry.

We have more Poetry at The Ritual. All rights reserved by Mind on Fire Books.

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