1. Kateb Yacine was officially born in 6 August 1929 in Constantine, though it is likely that his birth occurred four days earlier.
19 Facts About Kateb Yacine
1. 2.
Kateb Yacine was born into a scholarly maraboutic Chaoui Berber family from the modern Sedrata, in wilaya of Souk Ahras.
3.
Kateb Yacine's father was a lawyer, and the family followed him through his various assignments in different parts of the country.
4.
Kateb Yacine was in his third year of college when the demonstrations of 8 May 1945 occurred.
5.
Kateb Yacine participated in these demonstrations that ended with the massacre of between six and eight thousand Algerians by the French army and police in the Setif and Guelma massacre.
6.
Kateb Yacine had already become 'politicized' and started giving lectures under the auspices of the Algerian People's Party, 'the great nationalist party of the masses'.
7.
Kateb Yacine went to Paris in 1947, "into the lion's den" as he put it.
8.
Kateb Yacine was a journalist at the daily 'Alger Republicain' between 1949 and 1951.
9.
Kateb Yacine returned to Paris where he would stay until 1959.
10.
Kateb Yacine lived in numerous places, subsisting as a guest writer or working various odd jobs in France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Yugoslavia and the USSR.
11.
Kateb Yacine resumed writing for 'Alger Republicain' but traveled frequently between 1963 and 1967 to Moscow, France and Germany.
12.
In 1964 Kateb Yacine published six essays on 'our brothers the Indians' in 'Alger Republicain' and recounted his meeting with Jean-Paul Sartre while his mother was being committed to the psychiatric hospital in Blida.
13.
Between 1972 and 1975 Kateb Yacine went with on tour performing the plays 'Mohamed prends ta valise' and 'La Guerre de deux mille ans' to France and to the German Democratic Republic.
14.
Kateb Yacine was often criticized for his emphasis on Berber tradition and the 'Tamazight' language, as well as for his liberal positions on issues of gender equality such as his position against women being required to wear a headscarf.
15.
In 1986 Kateb Yacine circulated an excerpt of a play about Nelson Mandela, and in 1987 he received the Grand prix national des Lettres in France.
16.
Kateb Yacine settled in Verscheny in Drome, traveled often to the United States and continued to make frequent trips to Algeria.
17.
Kateb Yacine declared in 1966 that "La Francophonie is a neocolonial political machine, which only perpetuates our alienation, but the usage of the French language does not mean that one is an agent of a foreign power, and I write in French to tell the French that I am not French".
18.
Trilingual, Kateb Yacine wrote and supervised the translation of his texts into the Berber language.
19.
Kateb Yacine is the father of three children, Hans, Nadia and Amazigh Kateb, singer for the band Gnawa Diffusion.