Kateb Yacine and the Ruins of the Present

Abstract

Several years before his death, the Algerian writer Kateb Yacine (19291989) recalled the early phase of his career in Paris, saying that le jour oui il y a eu des embuscades en Algerie, le jour oui il y a eu des morts franqais en Algerie, oui il y a eu le sang, a partir de la le public a commence a s'interesser a l'Algerie. Les 6diteurs ont commence faire automatiquement la chasse aux Algeriens. Dib et moi nous avons et6 publies grace a l'actualite, aux embuscades qu'il y a eu dans France-Soir tous les jours. [the day there were ambushes in Algeria, the day there were French casualties, the day there was blood, then the public began to be interested in Algeria. Editors began to hunt automatically for Algerians. Dib and I were published thanks to current events, the ambushes that were going on every day in the pages of France-Soir.] (Corpet, Dichy and Djaider 60)1 Kateb attributes his entry on the Paris scene, and the arrival of Algerian literature generally, to a violent intervention of history. In his thinking, this constituted a relation of cause and effect between political struggle and literary style, two of his life-long commitments; it also suggests a relationship between history and the means of its expression. Still, the relationship between Kateb's work and the history surrounding it needs clarification. After all, the first significant cluster of Francophone Algerian authors studied in the academy today, called the generation de '52 (or '54, if the speaker wishes to emphasize the start of the war) of Mohamed Dib, Mouloud Mammeri, and Mouloud Feraoun, seems to have emerged with the gradual attainment of literary proficiency in French, concurrent with the coalescence of a sense of potential autonomy and political cohesion, rather than with the suddenness of an ambush. Furthermore, these authors published their first work before the actual outbreak of the hostilities of which Kateb speaks in the interview cited.2 Did the advent of Algerian literature in French, and Kateb's own publication, really depend on editors hunting Algerians, much as the Army was doing? This cause would seem better suited to explain the appearance, from 1954 on, of a variety of temoignages [eyewitness accounts] of the war itself, than to explain the publication of a complex and difficult novel