Nedjma

"Kateb Yacine is one of the most illustrious French-speaking Algerian writers. He was quite a complex and labyrinthine poet at first. Nedjma is an allegory of Algeria. It was also the name of his cousin, whom he was deeply in love with. In Arabic, Nedjma means star. She was already married, so it was a complicated, unfulfilled love story. Nedjma is a very complex story, because he recalls the very mythical past of Algeria, going back many, many centuries to the Numidians. One has to understand that Algeria has a vast, complex history. We had different influences. We had t he Romans for 400 years. We had the Ottomans for 300 years. France was only there for 130 years. He plunges into the mythical past and it’s almost like an ancient Greek chorus. It’s very labyrinthine, but it’s very much the allegory of Algeria through Nedjma . I’ve got a huge admiration for Kateb Yacine. He traveled a lot and did very menial jobs all his life, in France and in Belgium . He even went to Russia . He did what he could. He was very involved in the independence war from an early date, following the massacre in Sétif in 1945. He got arrested and went to jail for a few months. That’s when he became resolutely independentist. He saw many relatives being killed. In fact, 45,000 people were killed by the French following that riot for freedom. It was very, very sad. A lot of Algerians fought against the Nazis, freeing France. Then, when they themselves started to dream of independence, they got crushed and it escalated into a mass murder. Those 45,000 people were killed not so far from where my father and his family lived. There’s an anecdote that in 1956 Kateb Yacine’s publisher said to him, ‘Oh, it’s very complicated, this story of Nedjma . Why don’t you write about sheep? You’ve got such lovely sheep in your mountains!’ That, to me, shows a great deal about how far we’ve come in terms of our relatedness and how we’ve been treated as colonized people. It is. Kateb Yacine is not necessarily about the meaning as much as it’s about the feeling. As I said, he’s a very labyrinthine author. A lot of people get lost when they start reading Marcel Proust for the same reason. They think, ‘Oh so many aristocrats and so many encounters and so many pages, I’m lost.’ But that’s exactly what he wanted you to do. He wanted you to forget what you’ve just read three pages before. He wanted you to enter a transient state where you forget yourself and enter a dream-like feeling, where you yourself start reminiscing about your childhood. That’s when literature is not necessarily a washing machine manual with utter precision on each page. Sometimes we don’t remember the exact fact. What we remember is the feeling, the sensation. It’s a trigger for an emotion, and that’s the most important takeaway one can have with a good book. And I think Kateb Yacine is one of those authors."