The Desert as Myth and Memory in the Face of Modernity in The Bleeding of the Stone by Ibrahim al-Koni

Abstract

This article offers an analytical reading of Ibrahim al-Koni’s The Bleeding of the Stone, showing how the desert is crafted as a narrative agent, a living archive, and an ethical matrix. Combining an ecopoetic approach with memory studies and an anthropology of nomadism, the study demonstrates how al-Koni’s poetics interweaves Tuareg orality, ritual practice, and a critique of extractivist modernity. Close readings of key scenes (erased tracks, mechanized hunting, mineral and animal motifs) sustain a step-by-step argument moving from myth to memory and finally to cultural resistance. Findings indicate that the novel does not merely represent loss; it stages an ethics of survival grounded in slowness, interdependence, and attention to the nonhuman. The conclusion stresses the text’s transnational relevance to current debates on ecology, identity, and knowledge regimes.