Kateb Yacine (; 2 August 1929 or 6 August 1929 – 28 October 1989) was an Algerian writer notable for his novels and plays, both in French and Algerian Arabic, and his advocacy of the Berber cause. Biography Kateb Yacine was officially born on 6 August 1929 in Constantine, though it is likely that his birth occurred four days earlier. Although his birth name is Yacine Kateb, he once said that he was so used to hearing his teachers calling out names with the last name first that he adopted Kateb Yacine as a pen name. He was born into a scholarly maraboutic Chaoui Berber family from the modern Sedrata, in wilaya of Souk Ahras (in the Aurès region). His maternal grandfather was the 'bach adel', or deputy judge of the qadi in Condé Smendou (Zirout Youcef). His father was a lawyer, and the family followed him through his various assignments in different parts of the country. Young Kateb (which means 'writer'), attended the Sedrata Quran school in 1937, then in 1938 the French school in Lafayette (Bougaa) in Little Kabylie, where the family had moved. In 1941 he enrolled in the colonial 'collège' (secondary school) of Setif as a boarder. Kateb Yacine was in his third year of collège when the demonstrations of 8 May 1945 occurred. He participated in these demonstrations that ended with the massacre of between six and eight (according to nationalists forty-five) thousand Algerians by the French army and police in the Sétif and Guelma massacre. Three days later he was placed under arrest and imprisoned for two months. From that point on he became a partisan for the nationalist cause. Expelled from secondary school, watching his mother's psychological health decline, passing through a period of dejection and immersed in the writings of Lautréamont and Baudelaire, his father sent him to the high school in Bône (Annaba). There he met 'Nedjma' ('the star'), an 'already married cousin' with whom he lived for 'maybe eight months', as he later acknowledged. While living with Nedjma he published his first collection of poetry in 1946. He had already become 'politicized' and started giving lectures under the auspices of the Algerian People's Party, 'the great nationalist party of the masses'. Yacine went to Paris in 1947, "into the lion's den" as he put it. In May 1947 he joined the Algerian Communist Party and gave a lecture in the