Kateb Yacine and the Ruins of the Present

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 “génération 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 “témoignages” [eyewitness accounts] of the war itself, than to explain the publication of a complex and difficult novel [End Page 139] like Kateb’s Nedjma (1956).3 Though one cannot deny the relevance of Nedjma to the immediate context of wartime events, nothing Kateb said in the interview just cited precludes the novel from responding to other imperatives beyond the need to comment specifically on contemporary events, or generally on the independence struggle. Nedjma comments not so much on historical events themselves, but on the way they might be retold, both within and outside the disciplines of history and archaeology. Colonial historians had set great store by the ruins (notably those of Roman origin) that dotted the North African landscape. The 1950s, however, saw the beginning of a broad questioning not only of what had passed for historical fact during the colonial period, but also of the very modes of historiography applied to colonized peoples and monuments, whether standing or ruined. In the case of North Africa, this involved a reevaluation of one of the leading sources for the history of the region, the fourteenth-century historiographer Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406). In the mid-nineteenth century, French scholars had “discovered” and interpreted Ibn Khaldun as the cornerstone of their belief in the circularity of North African history and in its supposed unproductivity. One hundred years later, however, such beliefs were becoming controversial among historians; Kateb’s Nedjma contains historical discourses that participate in the debate over how to read Ibn Khaldun, as well as in the broader discussion of how to write a history of the Maghreb that would mesh with popular myth and collective memory, thereby allowing the colonized to become actors in it, in their own right. I will argue that Nedjma proposes a style, if not an actual methodology, for “reading” ruins, insisting not only on their relevance for understanding North Africa’s past, but also on their productivity in creating the conditions for a politically viable Algerian present.