I have chosen to analyse Mohamed Suleiman Mohamed's works through the critical lens of the French philosopher Clément Rosset, whose book The Real and its Double, one of his most noteworthy works, begins with the following sentence: ‘Rien de plus fragile que la faculté humaine d'admettre la réalité, d'accepter sans réserves l'impérieuse prérogative du réel.’ (Rosset, 1976: 7) (Nothing is more fragile than the human faculty of recognizing reality, of accepting unreservedly the imperative of the real). Most characters in Mohamed Suleiman's novels face this challenge because they are full of hopes and dreams. The title of his first novel Kiu (Thirst) exemplifies his creative works. The hunger for the realization of their dreams is the driving force of all the characters in the narrative. It transforms reality, obliterating it in order to create an unstable space that is explored in all his works.

Absent characters

Mohamed Suleiman Mohamed's stories are open-ended. Quite often there is a fuite en avant, or headlong rush, an escape, or a disappearance. In Kiu, the heroine, Bahati, disappears at the end of the novel. She leaves her mother's home for a meeting with her ex-husband and never returns home. The last scene of the novel focuses on the mother, waiting for her daughter to come back.