Remembering Algerian novelist Kateb Yacine: An eternal captive to his idea of life

A revolutionary novel

The Arab audience is only familiar with a sliver of his works, most notably Nedjma, via translations erroneously believed to resemble the original closely.

The novel revolutionised Francophone storytelling. Its Algerian author left an indelible mark on contemporary French literature, which, for many decades, had looked down on works written in French by non-French people.

However, the Arabic translations never produced an exact parallel of the book. They failed to capture its core and the ideological and philosophical references it included by no fault of the translators. The novel's inherent complexity is impossible to capture.

Critics have agreed that Nedjma is a novel whose depths cannot be replicated, with perhaps even the author unable to explore the multiple layers of interpretation fully.

Dr Saeed Boutagine, the author of the latest and most meticulous translation, described the book as offering various linguistic, lexical, and stylistic possibilities that ultimately prove to be merely theoretical approaches, failing to achieve their intended purpose. 

And so the Arab world has much to discover in the works of this great writer.

Two reputations

The West's image of Yacine is a more accurate portrayal. It does not reduce his career to a single novel, even though Nedjma was widely acclaimed, nor does it confine him to the label of "novelist," which he had rejected, considering himself primarily a poet and dramatist.

While Nedjma was a significant milestone in Yacine's literary journey and solidified his position in Algerian and Arab literature, his true significance as a writer is that he broke new ground in Francophone literature, whether through poetry, theatre, or novels.

By introducing a new form and writing style, Yacine became the undisputed pioneer of contemporary Algerian literature. It is a title only Mohammed Dib may contest. And no one comes close to Yacine's status as the true innovator of Algerian novels written in French. 

No poetry without chaos 

Arab readers are not familiar with Yacine's poetry because of a lack of translations. Publishers also failed to get his political and intellectual articles into Arabic, which could have portrayed him in a more positive light.

In the early 1980s, Yacine was frequently portrayed as an irreligious and antagonistic towards Islam. He was dismissed the Arabic language as primitive, accusations that he often ridiculed in his published interviews. 

Yacine was a rebellious and revolutionary poet in both his themes and writing methods, unafraid to tackle taboos, particularly political ones. This fearlessness caused him problems, some of which were serious, but that did not stop him from speaking his mind. 

He believed that poets stand out not just through the quality of their poetry and the originality of their subjects but also because of their personality. He sought a unique blend of courage, recklessness, and awareness.

In his eyes, poets need not be concerned with knowing and respecting boundaries but rather with what the ideas being pursued in their work demand of them. As long as they continue to believe in the value of poetry, they remain perpetually bound to their ideas. 

In a conversation published in the book The Poet as a Boxer, which collects Yacine's interviews from 1959 to 1989, he made this clear to the French theatre director and actor Jean-Marie Ciro:

"Even within the progressive movement, the authentic poet must articulate his dissent and different views. If he fails to do so fully, he will suffocate. His job is to create his own revolution within the political revolution, as he is the perpetual generator of chaos amidst any upheaval." 

Yacine had his own poetic dictionary, which he claimed was the result of the inner rebellion found in the mind and heart of any poet who believes in his work and his art form and their refusal to conform to tribal and other imposed norms.

He believed that the poet's tragedy is to be used in the service of a revolutionary struggle, which cannot and should not align with trivial matters. He saw the poet as the pure essence of revolution and life. 

In search of identity

Perhaps his instability throughout his life stemmed from his sense of being different and his constant quest to understand his identity as a poet and an Algerian revolutionary.

Despite growing up in a poor family in eastern Algeria to illiterate and apolitical parents, he still sought out opportunities to learn French. Though he became more proficient in the language than most native speakers themselves, he would deliberately speak with an accent to assert his own identity.

His apolitical upbringing did not stop him from joining Algerian groups fighting for independence or taking part in political activities and protests against the French occupation, including the 8 May 1945 demonstrations in the city of Constantine, which claimed the lives of 45,000 people. He was later arrested in Setif and imprisoned for a few months.

That same year, his mother's mental illness caused her to lose touch with reality, robbing him of the woman who had introduced him to poetry in his youth. By the end of that eventful year, he fell in love with Zuleikha, the muse for Nedjma.

Kateb Yacine experienced a life of exile and alienation. He was exiled from Algeria by the French authorities in 1951 and did not return until after the Declaration of Independence. Yet he soon left again due to feeling estranged in his homeland. "I felt as if I had come from Mars," he said.

He then embarked on a new adventure that took him to Russia, Vietnam, Syria, Egypt, and the United States.

While at the peak of his literary success, he made the unexpected decision to return to Algeria for good – and to stop writing in French. 

Leaving French behind 

Yacine's reasons to stop writing in French differed from those of his compatriot, Malek Haddad, who took the same decision.

Haddad believed that Arabic was more deserving of his genius than French, which he saw as the enemy's language. But he was not fluent in Arabic, and so it amounted to literary suicide. Haddad stopped writing altogether despite being considered the most influential writer of his generation and having a promising creative future.

In contrast, Yacine's decision to drop French was wise and forward-thinking. He remained committed to his eternal love: theatre. In 1970, he returned to Algeria to settle there permanently, informing his publishers that he would no longer write and focus on theatre instead.

Despite his reputation for bohemianism, indifference, and absurdity, Yacine believed that theatre was the most suitable art form for the era and the ideal tool for intellectuals to communicate their ideas to the world.

He considered it more effective than journalism, which he practised professionally, and more capable of reaching both hearts and minds than poetry. As for novels, he viewed them simply as a form of expression which, no matter how widely read, could not compare to the power of theatre so long as it was written in the vernacular.  

Theatre as the voice of people 

Yacine was convinced that popular theatre should be the voice of the people. To that end, it needed to be written in their own, familiar language. To write a play in Standard Arabic or French was futile in his eyes.

And so, he embarked on a theatrical journey that lasted nearly two decades until his death. His most famous play, Muhammad, Pack Your Bag defined Algerian theatre. It was translated into French and later into Standard Arabic by Said Boutagine.

Unfortunately, unlike many of his other plays, including The Betrayed Palestine and The Man in the Rubber Sandals, it was not published. 

Yacine immersed himself in theatre, refusing any temptations to return to other forms of writing. He often scoffed at the suggestion that writing is synonymous with publishing works.

In one of his final interviews, when asked why he no longer wrote, he responded with irritation: "No one knows what happens between me and my typewriter. No one has the right to say that I do not write. I am still writing. If you entered my room, you would find thousands of papers scattered all over."

"The world knew me as a writer who wrote and published books in French, but after my return to Algeria, I wanted to work in the vernacular theatre, which also requires writing."

"The difference is I did not publish what I wrote. But I've written Muhammad, Pack Your Bag, The Thousand Year War, and Intelligence Powder. But instead of being published, these works were instead performed on stage and touched millions of spectators, most of whom could neither read nor write."

"I write these plays for myself, but they were performed on stage for them, for the illiterate audience and in their language. That is why I did not feel the need to publish any work during these years."

Yacine spent his days as a captive to his idea of life, which he thought could only be defined by chaos and could only come together through fragmentation.

It seemed as if he was living out Nedjma in a cycle of incomplete events, a reality he had written with the intention of erasing it.

Whatever else, he could not erase the impact he had on this world.