Nedjma

Kateb Yacine's masterpiece, published in Paris in 1956, is the pre-eminent and most influential Maghrebian novel. It was the first Maghrebian work to take into account not only the unique realities of the North African colonial experience, but also the experimental tradition established by such writers as Joyce, Faulkner, and the French authors of the Nouveau Roman. Most of the action of the novel takes place in eastern Algeria in the decade before the War of Independence. It describes the adventures of four young Algerian men—Rachid, Lakhdar, Mustapha, and Mourad—in a series of subplots and adventures, including imprisonment, murder, kif smoking, and voyages to the ancestral Nadhor and to Mecca, often with or in search of Nedjma, an ethereal object of desire and fantasy whose origins are ambiguous: she was conceived in a cave by an abducted French woman and one of the men who violated her, who include the main character Rachid's father and Si Mokhtar, an important character in the story.

The plot is so complex and rich that it defies brief summary. In any event, Nedjma's success lies in its powerful writing, its fragmented Postmodern structure which was new to Maghrebian discourse, and its several possible readings, authorizing, for example, interpretation of Nedjma (nedjma means ‘star’ in Arabic) as symbolic of the rising star of Algerian nationalism.

[Eric Sellin]