Kateb Yacine: a revolutionary inside the revolution

Abstract

Kateb Yacine is considered to be one of the pillars of Algerian literature. In 2018, on the occasion of the inauguration of the Kateb Yacine Garden in Paris, his son, Amazigh Kateb pronounced the following words in memory of his father: “This garden is very nice. It is small and humble as Yacine was […]. I should have found it unnecessary to inaugurate an enormous park with plants […] this one is nice. It’s a park among the houses, with people living here that will see the garden daily, and I find this good, I think that it embodies Yacine’s image and his modesty. He loved wandering. He took his straw hat and his cane to pick flowers, and voilà, he loved walking because he would say it was good for writing, it felt good”. These words reflect a modest man’s personality and his life philosophy. A wandering poet at the crossroad of two worlds, engaged with freedom and with the people, and always in search of the genuine Algerian identity. A man for whom “poetry and revolution” were the same thing (Aouadi, 2003, 9).