Kateb Yacine (1929–1989)

On the surface, this play is a comedy - or at least a farce. A man who does not seem to be working (and is called Puff of Smoke) gets thrown in jail by the Sultan (so he does not bring bad luck to a hunt) and when he is released, he turns into a philosopher - or so everyone thinks. And so starts a series of meetings between the Sultan and the man (and a chorus) where the discussions get more and more farcical, with an occasional deep thought thrown in -- usually at the wrong place.

But slowly, as the farce and the comedy progress, a darker side of the play start emerging and some of the initially farcical moments start to get almost sinister undertones. Puff of Smoke stops being the comedic relief and actually tries actively to swindle the Sultan - selling him the "intelligence powder" which gives its name to the play. The underlying accusations and opinions are obvious from the name - for the reader anyway.

The play ends in death - unexpected and almost coming from nowhere - especially if you initially dismiss the darkness. You cannot hide from fate - no matter what you do - that is the underlying story of the play. Or one of them anyway

I will admit that this play confused me a bit and I had to read some of the analysis of it - while the main premise was clear, it was a bit too random and a bit to farcical so I was sure I was missing something. I was not - not in the main topics anyway. Maybe the play was too short, maybe I am just not used to the style - the chorus being an active participant that everyone else sees and interacts with is interesting. And I am sure I missed some of the symbolism.

An interesting play - even if it is not my style exactly, it still works on some level. Its middle part made me think of a story from the western cannon - Andersen's "The Emperor's New Clothes" but it turned in a different direction at the end (a much darker one at that).… (lisätietoja)

When I was reading this I found myself thinking a lot about Camus's L'Étranger, in which, you remember, a random Algerian Arab is shot and killed by a pied noir. (‘Because it was hot’, essentially.) You never hear much about this Arab victim – he's just there at the wrong time. Well this book is a kind of response to that. The characters here are all young out-of-work Algerian Arabs, and the few Europeans that appear are remote, unknowable characters who (as in Camus) are liable to erupt into moments of inexplicable violence. They are dismissed en masse as ‘colonisers’ – les prétendants sans titre et sans amour.

This should be really interesting, right? This is a period you hear too little about – after the Sétif massacre of 1945 but before the Algerian War itself had started, a period when European-Arab relations were teetering on a precipice (one character spends his time at school carving INDEPENDENCE FOR ALGERIA on the desks). As cannot be stressed too often, Algeria at this point was a fully-integrated part of France; indeed the départements which comprised its major regions were older than some of those in mainland France (Savoie, for example).

But I had real problems with this book. For me it was at first boring, then incomprehensible (and then finally, despite myself, intriguing – but more of that later). I have to come out and say that there could be a language issue here – I was really struggling to follow the prose. But then again, a lot of native speakers apparently find it equally impenetrable, so at least part of the effect is stylistic. Paragraphs sprawl, unspaced, across several pages, circling in and out of different time periods, switching between characters without warning, and bursting into a prose-poetry full of odd metaphors and random exclamations:

Le musicien sent fondre son talent dans la solitude ; il raccroche le luth ; le calme de Kamel ne fait que l'affubler du masque de cruauté que Nedjma compose à qui ne tombe pas dans son jeu ; elle pleure sans prendre garde aux protestations de Lella Fatma : « ...un homme si bon, tout en miel, à croire que ce n'est pas le fils de sa mère ! Que veux-tu donc ? Un goujat qui vendrait tes bijoux, un ivrogne ? » Invivable consomption du zénith! prémices de fraîcheur...

[Can I even bear to translate this? It's along these lines:]

The musician feels his talent melt into the solitude; he puts down his lute; Kamel's calm merely cloaks him with the mask of cruelty that Nedjma creates for anyone who doesn't play along with her game; she weeps, taking no notice of Lella Fatma's protestations: ‘such a good man, like honey, to think that he's not his mother's son! What are you waiting for? Some pig who sells off your jewellery, a drunk?’ The unbearable consumption of the zenith! the beginnings of a coolness…

What the fucking hell is going on here? I have no idea. If you think that this must make more sense in context, then believe me, you're quite wrong. Yacine's style has been described as Faulknerian, I suppose because of the hyperbolic poetic language, but it wasn't Faulkner he reminded me of. I had a bolt-of-lightning moment when, after I finished the novel, I read the introduction to my Éditions Points copy and saw that Yacine's favourite author as a kid had been none other than Gérard de Nerval.

(‘Fuck me!’ I said out loud when I read this bit; unfortunately it was after midnight last night, and my wife jolted awake and into a sort of anti-burglar stance on the bed. Bafflingly, she didn't seem to share my excitement, although as she dropped back on to the pillow there was an expression on Hannah's face that I interpreted as meaning, ‘If I'm immediately shutting my eyes again, it's only so as to better reflect on the Nervalian aesthetic in Yacine's prose.’ Although she didn't say that, she just said ‘Turn the cocking light out Warwick.’)

Nerval is sort of the missing link that helped me understand what Yacine is trying to do. The character of Nedjma herself resembles nothing more than one of the strange femmes fatales in Nerval's Les Filles du feu, and the phrases I used in my review of that book – ‘oneiric’, ‘instability of time and place and person’, ‘floats off into poetry’ – apply perfectly here. Nedjma gives her name to the novel, but she's not really there in the actual story, just a sort of distant radiant presence. Nedjma in Arabic is نجمة, which means star, I'm pretty sure, and she exerts a sort of astral attraction for the main characters (‘Le crépuscule d'un astre … c'était toute sa sombre beauté’).

I was on the point of giving up on this book several times. And then suddenly, two-thirds of the way through, without quite knowing why, something about the rambling, chaotic prose just started to click with me. There are some wonderfully moody descriptions of the eastern cities of Constantine and Annaba (the latter referred to by its colonial name of Bône) – Constantine, for instance, is sketched as ‘a city of brooding menace, always tempted by decadence, shaken by millennarian trances’. A description of someone preparing a lump of hash to smoke is beautifully exact and gave me flashbacks to living in Morocco:

…the man with the boxer's nose unsheathed his knife, broke off a piece of greenish substance as fat as half a date-stone, and reduced it into sticky atoms with a patience, a sad, sardonic forbearance, that made Rachid tremble….

(This could be Paul Bowles.) And then again, a few pages later, a reference to ‘the shy Morse code of the cicadas’ which stopped me dead with delight, even though I had no idea what was going on at that point in the story. The climax of the book is a description of the Sétif massacre, which in terms of linear narrative is about the first thing that happens but which is not actually described until near the end. The final couple of sections loop back to the beginning to make the novel circular, and I was amazed to find myself considering flipping back to the start to re-read the opening passages which I had hated so much the first time around.

This is a really confused review, isn't it? I can't give it more than two stars because it just wasn't enjoyable or engaging enough – but by the end it had succeeded in convincing me that it was quite an important book in its own way. Other Algerian writers consider Nedjma the foundation-stone of Algerian writing in French, and although I can't really recommend it I can easily imagine some people getting obsessed by it: it has that drugged, visionary quality.

(By the way, I'd really like to write a book in which the heroine of this meets up with the heroine of André Breton's novel to have Mexican food in the city of Niamey. You could call it Nedjma and Nadja eat nachos in Niger.)… (lisätietoja)