and satires, performed in dialectal Arabic. Beginning this work with the theatre company 'Théatre de la Mer' from Bab El Oued in 1971, sponsored by the Ministère du Travail et des Affaires Sociales, Kateb traveled all over Algeria for five years, putting on plays for an audience of workers, farmers and students. Between 1972 and 1975 Kateb 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. The Algerian government in Sidi-Bel-Abbes more or less sentenced him to direct the city's regional theatre as a kind of exile. Having been forbidden to appear on television, Yacine staged his plays in schools or businesses. He 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. 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. In 1988 the Avignon Festival staged 'Le Bourgeois sans culotte ou le spectre du parc Monceau', a play about Robespierre that Yacine wrote at the request of the Arras Cultural Center for the bicentennial commemoration of the French Revolution. Yacine settled in Verscheny in Drôme, traveled often to the United States and continued to make frequent trips to Algeria. At his death he left an unfinished work on the Algerian riots of October 1988. In 2003 his works were admitted to the Comédie-Française. Taught in the language of the colonizer, Kateb Yacine considered the French language the Algerians' spoil of the war for independence. He 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". Trilingual, Kateb Yacine also wrote and supervised the translation of his texts into the Berber language. His work manifests his multicultural country's search for identity and the aspirations of its people. Kateb Yacine is the father of three children, Hans, Nadia and Amazigh Kateb, singer for the band Gnawa Diffusion. Bibliography Books by Kateb Soliloques, poems, Bône, Ancienne imprimerie Thomas, 1946. Reprint (with