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Kateb Yacine كاتب ياسين | |
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| Born | Kateb Yacine (1929-08-02)2 August 1929 Constantine, Algeria |
| Died | 28 October 1989(1989-10-28) (aged 60) Grenoble,France |
| Resting place | El Alia Cemetery |
| Occupation | novelist,essayist,activist |
| Language | French,Arabic |
| Nationality | Algerian |
| Period | 1940–1989 |
| Notable works | Nedjma,Le Polygone étoilé |
| Notable awards | the Grand Prix National des Lettres in France, 1987 |
| Children | Amazigh Kateb |
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Kateb Yacine (Arabic pronunciation:[kæːtbjæːsiːn]; 2 August 1929 or 6 August 1929 – 28 October 1989) was an Algerian writer notable for hisnovels andplays, both inFrench andAlgerian Arabic, and his advocacy of theBerber cause.
Kateb Yacine was officially born in 6 August 1929 inConstantine, though it is likely that his birth occurred four days earlier.[1] Although his birth name isYacine Kateb, he once[when?] said that he was so used to hearing his teachers calling out names with the last name first that he adopted Kateb Yacine as a pen name.
He was born into a scholarlymarabouticChaouiBerber family from the modernSedrata, inwilaya ofSouk Ahras (in theAurès region).[2] His maternal grandfather was the 'bach adel', or deputy judge of theqadi in Condé Smendou (Zirout Youcef). His father was a lawyer, and the family followed him through his various assignments in different parts of the country. Young Kateb (which means 'writer'), attended the SedrataQuran school in 1937, then in 1938 the French school in Lafayette (Bougaa) in LittleKabylie, where the family had moved. In 1941 he enrolled in the colonial 'collège' (secondary school) ofSetif as a boarder.
Kateb Yacine was in his third year ofcollège when the demonstrations of 8 May 1945 occurred. He participated in these demonstrations that ended with the massacre of between six and eight (according to nationalists forty-five) thousand Algerians by the French army and police in theSétif and Guelma massacre. Three days later he was placed under arrest and imprisoned for two months. From that point on he became a partisan for thenationalist cause. Expelled from secondary school, watching his mother's psychological health decline, passing through a period of dejection and being immersed in the writings ofLautréamont andBaudelaire, his father sent him to the high school in Bône (Annaba). There he met 'Nedjma' ('the star'), an 'already married cousin' with whom he lived for 'maybe eight months', as he later acknowledged.
While living with Nedjma he published his first collection of poetry in 1946. He had already become 'politicized' and started giving lectures under the auspices of theAlgerian People's Party, 'the great nationalist party of the masses'. Yacine went toParis in 1947, "into the lion's den" as he put it.
In May 1947, he joined theAlgerian Communist Party and gave a lecture in the 'Salle des Sociétés savantes' on emirAbd al-Qadir. During a second visit toFrance the following year he published 'Nedjma ou le Poème du Couteau' (a hint of what was to follow) in the revue 'Le Mercure de France'. He was a journalist at the daily 'Alger Républicain' between 1949 and 1951.
After his father's death in 1950, Yacine worked as a longshoreman inAlgiers. He returned to Paris where he would stay until 1959. During this period in Paris he worked withMalek Haddad, developed a relationship withM'hamed Issiakhem, and in 1954, spoke extensively withBertold Brecht. In 1954, the revueEsprit published Yacine's play 'Le cadavre encerclé', which was staged byJean-Marie Serreau but was banned in France.
'Nedjma' was published in 1956 (and Kateb would not forget the editor's comment: "This is too complicated. In Algeria you've got such pretty sheep, why don't you talk about your sheep?"). During theAlgerian War of Independence, Yacine was forced to travel abroad for a long time due to the harassment he faced from theDST. He lived in numerous places, subsisting as a guest writer or working various odd jobs in France,Belgium,Germany,Italy,Yugoslavia and theUSSR.
After a stay inCairo, Yacine returned again to Algeria in 1962, shortly after the independence celebrations. He resumed writing for 'Alger Républicain' but traveled frequently between 1963 and 1967 toMoscow, France and Germany. 'La Femme sauvage', which he had written between 1954 and 1959, was performed in Paris in 1963. 'Les Ancêtres redoublent de férocité' was staged in 1967. 'La Poudre d'intelligence' was also staged in Paris in 1967 and an Algerian Arabic version in Algiers in 1969. In 1964 Yacine published six essays on 'our brothers the Indians' in 'Alger Républicain' and recounted his meeting withJean-Paul Sartre while his mother was being committed to the psychiatric hospital inBlida ('La Rose de Blida', in 'Révolution Africaine', July 1965). He left forVietnam in 1967, completely abandoning the novel and wrote 'L'Homme aux sandales de caoutchouc', a play celebratingHo Chi Minh and the Vietnamese struggle against imperialism, that was published, performed and translated into Arabic in 1970.
The same year Yacine returned to make a more permanent home in Algeria. During this period he had a significant change in philosophy: he refused to continue writing in French, and instead began working on popular theatre, epics and satires, performed in dialectal Arabic. Beginning this work with the theatre company 'Théatre de la Mer' from Bab El Oued in 1971, sponsored by the Ministère du Travail et des Affaires Sociales, Kateb traveled all over Algeria for five years, putting on plays for an audience of workers, farmers and students.
Between 1972 and 1975 Kateb went with on tour performing the plays 'Mohamed prends ta valise' and 'La Guerre de deux mille ans' to France and to theGerman Democratic Republic. The Algerian government inSidi-Bel-Abbes more or less sentenced him to direct the city's regional theatre as a kind of exile. Having been forbidden to appear on television, Yacine staged his plays in schools or businesses. He was often criticized for his emphasis on Berber tradition and the 'Tamazight' language, as well as for his liberal positions on issues of gender equality such as his position against women being required to wear a headscarf.
In 1986 Kateb Yacine circulated an excerpt of a play aboutNelson Mandela, and in 1987 he received the Grand prix national des Lettres in France.
In 1988 theAvignon Festival staged 'Le Bourgeois sans culotte ou le spectre du parc Monceau', a play aboutRobespierre that Yacine wrote at the request of theArras Cultural Center for the bicentennial commemoration of theFrench Revolution. Yacine settled in Verscheny inDrôme, traveled often to theUnited States and continued to make frequent trips to Algeria. At his death he left an unfinished work on the Algerian riots of October 1988. In 2003 his works were admitted to theComédie-Française.
Taught in the language of the colonizer, Kateb Yacine considered the French language the Algerians' spoil of the war for independence. He declared in 1966 that "La Francophonie is aneocolonial political machine, which only perpetuates our alienation, but the usage of the French language does not mean that one is an agent of a foreign power, and I write in French to tell the French that I am not French". Trilingual, Kateb Yacine also wrote and supervised the translation of his texts into the Berber language. His work manifests his multicultural country's search for identity and the aspirations of its people.
Kateb Yacine is the father of three children, Hans, Nadia andAmazigh Kateb, singer for the bandGnawa Diffusion.
