Keteb Yacine
Algerian novelist, poet, and playwright. Kateb wrote in French until the beginning of the 1970s, when he started to write his théâtre de combat in vernacular Arabic. Kateb's Nedjma (1956) was the first Maghribi novel to be instantly recognised as a classic, and has since acquired the status of a national revolutionary novel.Kateb Yacine was born in Condé-Smendou, near Constantine, into an ancient, highly literate family. His father was Kateb Mohamed and his mother was Kateb Jasmina. Kateb was raised on tales of Arab achievement as well as the legends of the Algerian heroes. After attending Koranic school, he entered the French-language school system. In 1945 Kateb's studies at the Collège de Sétif were interrupted by his arrest, following his participation in a nationalist demonstration in Setif. The demonstration had turned to rioting and massacre of thousands people by the police and the army. Kateb was imprisoned without trial and freed a few months later. During his imprisonment Kateb discovered his two great loves, revolution and the poetry. One of Kateb's best-known poems, 'La rose de Blida' (1963), was about his mother, who, believing him to have been killed during the demonstration, suffered a mental breakdown.
From 1947 Kateb began to regularly visit France until he settled there permanently. At the age of seventeen Kateb published his first book, Soliloques (1946), a collection of poems. In 1948 he published a long poem, 'Nedjma ou le poème ou le couteau', in which the character of Nedjma, a mysterious spirit woman, appeared for the first time. Nedjma is also the name of his cousin whom the author loved but could not properly court.
From 1949 to 1951 Kateb worked as a journalist, principally for Alger Républicain. He travelled through Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Soviet Central Asia. He was for a time a dockworker and from 1952 he devoted himself entirely to writing. Kateb's most famous work, Nedjma, appeared in 1957. The work incorporates local legends and popular religious beliefs and treats the quest for a restored Algeria in a mythic manner. Its discontinuous chronology and multiple narrative voices have deeply influenced Francophone North African literature and writers elsewhere in the Third World. Kateb himself has admitted that William Faulkner was the most important influence on his style of writing.
Nedjma recounts a tale of intra-clan conflict against a background of the violence and disunity of Algerian society under French colonial rule. The story is set in Bône, Algeria. Owing to the fragmented style, the plot of the work is difficult to follow. Nedjma, a name meaning, "star" in Arabic", is a married woman of great beauty and uncertain past. She is loved by four revolutionaries. The more they discover about her, the less they really know. Nedjma never changes but the other characters pass through all the ages of life. Nedjma, portrayed in an ethereal way, embodies the attachment of traditional Algerians to their clan. Critical attention has concentrated on the novel's unusual structure. The action is not chronological - the narration has similarities with the arabesques and geometric forms of Islamic art.
Kateb took up the themes and figure of Nedjma in many of his poems and plays. His first play was Le cadavre encerclé (prod. 1958), a drama of colonization and alienation filled with surrealist images. In the mythical expression of the Algerian tragedy, Nedjma represented all the values of Arabic civilization trampled upon by history. Le polygone étoilé (1966), his second major prose work, introduced several characters from Nedjma. As the author himself explained, everything he has done constitutes "a long single work, always in gestation."
Influenced by Aeschylus, Rimbaud, and Brecht, whom he met in Paris, Kateb decided to break away from lyrical tradition and create a more political theatre. Among Kateb's later works is the play L'Homme aux sandales de caoutchouc (1970, The Man in Rubber Sandals), in which the Vietnamise hero is Ho Chi Minh. In small roles are such characters as Mao Zedong, Chiang Kai-shek, Pierre Loti, and Marie-Antoinette. A series of vignettes highlights the military history of Vietnam and the plight of the transient Algerian labor force in Europe. Characters are presented face to face, the French opposite the Vietnamese, the Viet Cong opposite the Americans. Brief sequences and spoken chorus alternate. The trial of an American Everyman, called Captain Supermac, occupies the last third of the play. Kateb had visited Vietnam in 1967 when American troops fought with the South Vietnamese and warplanes bombed military and civilian targets in the north. The play was simultaneously produced in Algiers and Lyon.
The open warfare against French rule ended in 1962 when Algerians, voting in a national referendum, approved independence and France recognized Algeria's sovereignty. Since the early 1970s Kateb lived in his native country. Several of his plays were produced in France and Algeria, where he led a popular theatre group. In a short play, Mohammed, prends ta valise (1971), Kateb wanted to show the class complicity that exists between the French bourgeoisie and the Algerian bourgeoisie. He had remarked that the revolutionary writer "must transmit a living message, placing the public at the heart of a theatre that partakes of the never-ending combat opposing the proletariat to the bourgeoisie." Kate died on October 28, 1989, in Grenoble, France.