Kateb Yacine

Kateb Yacine (Kateb of its name, Yacine of its first name) is a writer Algérie N born with Constantine the August 6th 1929, died with Grenoble the October 28th 1989.

Biography

Kateb Yacine was born on August 6th but more probably on August 2nd, 1929 with Constantine but is registers in Condé Smendou, today Zirout Youcef. It is resulting from a maraboutic family Berber Chaoui well-read woman of the Algerian East (Nadhor), called Kheltiya (or Keblout), which was arabisée then scattered under the colonial period. His/her maternal grandfather is Bach adel , judge temporary of the cadi, in Condé Smendou (Zirout Youcef), his father lawyer, and the family follows it in her successive changes. The young person Kateb (name who means “writer”) enters in 1934 to the Koranic school of Sedrata, in 1935 at the French school with Lafayette (Bougaa into low Kabylie, current wilaya of Sétif) where its family settled, then in 1941, as intern, with the colonial college of Sétif, Albertini then Kerouani after the indépendence.

Kateb Yacine is in class of third when the manifestations of the May 8th 1945 burst in which it takes part and which is completed on the massacre of thousands of Algerian by the police force and the French Army. Three days later it is stopped and held during two months. It is definitively acquired with the national cause while it sees his mother “becoming insane”. Excluded from the college, crossing one period of abatement, plunged in Baudelaire and Lautréamont, his/her father sends it to the college of Bône (Annaba). He meets " there; Nedjma" (the star), " cousin already mariée" , with which it saw " perhaps eight mois" , it will entrust and publishes there in 1946 its first collection of poems. Already it is politicized and started to make conferences under the aegis of the PPP, the great nationalist party, of mass, the time. In 1947 Kateb arrives at Paris, “in the mouth of the wolf” and pronounces in May, to the Room of the Learned societies, a conference on the Emir Abdelkader, adheres to the Algerian Communist party. During a second voyage in France it publishes the following year Nedjma or the Poem or the Knife (“embryo of what was going to follow”) in the review the Mercure de France. Journalist with the republican daily newspaper Algiers between 1949 and 1951, its first great report takes place in Saudi Arabia and with the Sudan (Khartoum). On its return it publishes in particular, under the pseudonym of Saïd Lamri, an article denouncing the “swindle” with the holy place of Mecque.

After death in 1950 of his father Kateb Yacine in 1952 docker with Algiers is. Then it settles with Paris until 1959, where it works with Malek Haddad, binds with Me hamed Issiakhem and, in 1954, discusses lengthily with Bertold Brecht. In 1954 the review Esprit publishes “the encircled corpse” which is put in scene by prohibited Jean-Marie Serreau but in France. Nedjma appears in 1956 (and Kateb will remember " reflection of a reader: It is complicated too much, that. In do Algeria you have of so pretty sheep, why you do not speak about sheep? ). During the war of liberation, Kateb Yacine, badgered by the Direction with the monitoring with the territory, knows a long wandering, invited as writer or remaining using possible small trades, in France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Yugoslavia and Soviet Union.

In 1962, after a stay with the Cairo, Kateb Yacine is of return in Algérie shortly after the festivals of Independence, takes again its collaboration with Algiers republican , but carries out between 1963 and 1967 of many stays with Moscow, in Germany and in France while the wild woman , that he writes between 1954 and 1959, is represented with Paris in 1963, " The Ancestors redouble férocité" in 1967, " Powder of intelligence" in 1968 (in dialectical Arabic with Algiers in 1969). It publishes in 1964 in " Algiers républicain" six texts on " Our brothers Indiens" and tells in " Afrique" young person; its meeting with Jean-Paul Sartre, while his/her mother is interned with the psychiatric hospital of Blida (“the Rose de Blida”, in African Révolution , July 1965). In 1967 it leaves to the Vietnam, completely gives up the form romantic and written to the man with the rubber sandals, part published, represented and translated into Arabic in 1970.

The same year, being established more durably in Algeria and refusing to write in French, Kateb starts, “great turning”, to work with the development of a popular, epic and satirical theater, played in dialectical Arabic. Beginning with the troop from the Theater from the Sea from Bab El-Oued in 1971, dealt with by the social Affair and Ministry of Labor, Kateb traverses with it during five years all Algeria in front of a public of workmen, peasants and students. Its principal spectacles have as titles Mohamed take your bag (1971), the Voice of the women (1972), the two thousand year old War (1974) (where reappears ancestral heroin Kahena) (1974), the King of the West (1975) [[Hassan II]], " Palestine trahie" (1977). Between 1972 and 1975 Kateb accompanies the rounds by Mohamed take your bag and of the two thousand year old War in France and GDR. It is “exiled” in 1978 by the Algerian capacity with Sidi-Beautiful-Abbots to direct the regional theater of the city. Interdict of antenna on television, it gives its parts in the schools or the companies. Its evocations of the Berber stock and the language tamazirt, its libertarian positions, in particular in favor of the equality of the woman and the man, against the return to the port of the veil, are worth many criticisms to him.

In 1986 Kateb Yacine delivers an extract of a part on Nelson Mandela, and receives in 1987 in France the national Grand Prix of the Letters. In 1988 the Festival of Avignon creates the Middle-class man without breeches or the spectrum of the park Monceau writes at the request of the Arts center of Arras for the bicentenary of the French revolution (on Robespierre). It settles with Vercheny (Drome) and goes on a journey to the the United States but continuous to make frequent stays in Algérie. Its death leaves unfinished a work on the Algerian riots of October 1988. In 2003 its work is registered with the program of the Comédie-Française.

Informed in the language of the colonizer, Kateb Yacine regarded the French language as the “spoils of war” of the Algerians. “The francophonie is a political machine néocoloniale, which does nothing but perpetuate our alienation, but the use of the French language does not mean that one is the agent of a foreign power, and I write in French to say to French who I am not French”, he in 1966 declared. Become trilingual, Kateb Yacine also wrote and supervised the translation of its texts into Berber. Its work translates the search of identity of a country to the multiple cultures and the aspirations of people.

Kateb Yacine is the father of Nadia, Hans and Amazigh Kateb, singer of the group Gnawa Diffusion.

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