Kateb Yacine (born on August 2, 1929 or August 6, 1929; died on October 28, 1989) was an Algerian writer known for writing novels and plays in both French and Algerian Arabic. He was also recognized for supporting the rights of the Berber people.

Biography

Kateb Yacine was officially born on August 6, 1929, in Constantine. However, some believe he was born four days earlier. His birth name was Yacine Kateb, but he later chose to use the name Kateb Yacine as his pen name because he often heard teachers say students’ last names first.

He was born into a family with a strong background in learning and religious traditions from the modern Sedrata in the Souk Ahras region of Algeria. His maternal grandfather was a deputy judge in Condé Smendou. His father was a lawyer, and the family moved often as his father worked in different parts of the country. In 1937, young Kateb attended a Quran school in Sedrata. In 1938, the family moved to Little Kabylie, where he studied at a French school in Lafayette (Bougaa). In 1941, he enrolled in a secondary school in Setif as a boarder.

In his third year of secondary school, Kateb was involved in the demonstrations of May 8, 1945. These protests led to the Sétif and Guelma massacre, where thousands of Algerians were killed by French forces. Three days later, he was arrested and imprisoned for two months. After this, he became an advocate for Algerian independence. He was expelled from school, and his mother’s mental health worsened. During this time, he read the works of Lautréamont and Baudelaire. His father sent him to a high school in Bône (Annaba), where he met a cousin named Nedjma. He lived with her for about eight months.

While living with Nedjma, he published his first poetry collection in 1946. He had become politically active and gave lectures for the Algerian People’s Party, a major nationalist group. In 1947, he traveled to Paris, which he called “the lion’s den.”

In May 1947, he joined the Algerian Communist Party and gave a lecture about Emir Abd al-Qadir in Paris. The next year, he published a poem titled Nedjma ou le Poème du Couteau in a French magazine. He worked as a journalist for the newspaper Alger Républicain from 1949 to 1951.

After his father died in 1950, Kateb worked as a longshoreman in Algiers. He later moved back to Paris, where he lived until 1959. During this time, he worked with Malek Haddad, met M’hamed Issiakhem, and spoke with Bertold Brecht in 1954. In 1954, his play Le cadavre encerclé was published and performed in France but later banned.

His novel Nedjma was published in 1956. During the Algerian War of Independence, he was forced to live abroad because of harassment from the DST, a French intelligence agency. He lived in many countries, including France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Yugoslavia, and the USSR, working as a guest writer or doing odd jobs.

In 1962, after Algeria gained independence, he returned to Algeria and resumed writing for Alger Républicain. He traveled frequently between 1963 and 1967 to Moscow, France, and Germany. His play La Femme sauvage, written between 1954 and 1959, was performed in Paris in 1963. Other plays were staged in 1967. In 1964, he wrote six essays about the relationship between Algerians and Native Americans for Alger Républicain. He also wrote about meeting Jean-Paul Sartre while his mother was in a psychiatric hospital. In 1967, he went to Vietnam and wrote a play about Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese struggle against imperialism.

In 1970, the play was published and translated into Arabic. In 1971, he returned to Algeria and began writing in dialectal Arabic, focusing on popular theatre, epics, and satires. He worked with the Théâtre de la Mer in Bab El Oued, sponsored by the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, and performed plays for workers, farmers, and students across Algeria for five years.

Between 1972 and 1975, he toured France and East Germany with plays like Mohamed prends ta valise and La Guerre de deux mille ans. The Algerian government assigned him to direct a regional theatre in Sidi Bel Abbès, a form of exile. He was not allowed on television and performed plays in schools and businesses. He was often criticized for promoting Berber traditions and the Tamazight language, as well as for supporting gender equality, such as opposing the requirement for women to wear headscarves.

In 1986, he shared an excerpt of a play about Nelson Mandela. In 1987, he received the Grand Prix National des Lettres in France. In 1988, his play Le Bourgeois sans culotte ou le spectre du parc Monceau about Robespierre was performed at the Avignon Festival. He lived in Verscheny, France, and traveled to the United States and Algeria. He died before finishing a work about the Algerian riots of October 1988. In 2003, his works were accepted into the Comédie-Française.

Kateb Yacine believed that the French language, which was used by colonizers, was a legacy of the Algerian War for independence. In 1966, he said, “La Francophonie is a neocolonial political machine, but using French does not mean I am an agent of a foreign power. I write in French to tell the French that I am not French.” He was trilingual and worked to translate his writings into the Berber language. His work reflects Algeria’s search for identity and the hopes of its people.

Kateb Yacine had three children: Hans, Nadia, and Amazigh Kateb, a singer in the band Gnawa Diffusion.