An ‘Ecrivain-frontalier’: Mohammed Dib’s Textual Identity Mohammed Dib is best known as the expatriate prolific writer who chose to live in France for most of his writing career. His works’ themes span from autobiographical depictions of his Algerian childhood to mythic depictions of his characters’ desires. His early writings-La Grande Maison, L’Incendie, Le Métier à tisser- in the ‘Algérie’ series can be viewed as ‘realistic’ or ‘natural’ depictions of his Algerian identity. They also contain questions and answers that reflect the retention of a dual consciousness of the mentality of the ‘frontalier’—a pioneer in an era of cultural boundaries and identity politics. Dib’s literary voice as a French-educated Algerian allowed him to explore the thresholds of multiple cultural experiences but, more importantly, he strengthened his position by disregarding a sense of apologetic explanations about his own Algerian environment in his writings. However, to find one’s voice and depict the helm of a dual cultural exposure is not the only task of this ‘écrivain frontalier.’ Dib also imparts a sense of organization of such experiences in his writing for his reader. The author’s early writings revealed a keen sense of the assertive ‘frontalier’ and reshaped his own literary creation that side-steps the facile image-to-describe formula about his birth culture. Indeed, the author of the Generation of 1952 goes a step beyond Jean Pélégri’s claim that “It is in [landscapes] that we find our sensibility and our metaphysics of the world around us flourish and grow.” (translation mine, Jean Pélégri in Ma Mère Algérie). Dib brings his identity and locus into an even more prominent position than a simple reconfiguration of multiple locational thresholds… he manages to retain his own turf on the creative terrain that could have remained subjected to one or the other cultural standards.