'Salle des Sociétés savantes' on emir Abd al-Qadir. During a second visit to France the following year he published 'Nedjma ou le Poème du Couteau' (a hint of what was to follow) in the revue 'Le Mercure de France'. He was a journalist at the daily 'Alger Républicain' between 1949 and 1951. After his father's death in 1950 Yacine worked as a longshoreman in Algiers. He returned to Paris where he would stay until 1959. During this period in Paris he worked with Malek Haddad, developed a relationship with M'hamed Issiakhem, and in 1954, spoke extensively with Bertold Brecht. In 1954, the revue Esprit published Yacine's play 'Le cadavre encerclé', which was staged by Jean-Marie Serreau but was banned in France. 'Nedjma' was published in 1956 (and Kateb would not forget the editor's comment: "This is too complicated. In Algeria you've got such pretty sheep, why don't you talk about your sheep?"). During the Algerian War of Independence, Yacine was forced to travel abroad for a long time due to the harassment he faced from the DST. He lived in numerous places, subsisting as a guest writer or working various odd jobs in France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Yugoslavia and the USSR. After a stay in Cairo, Yacine returned again to Algeria in 1962, shortly after the independence celebrations. He resumed writing for 'Alger Républicain' but traveled frequently between 1963 and 1967 to Moscow, France and Germany. 'La Femme sauvage', which he had written between 1954 and 1959, was performed in Paris in 1963. 'Les Ancêtres redoublent de férocité' was staged in 1967. 'La Poudre d'intelligence' was also staged in Paris in 1967 and an Algerian Arabic version in Algiers in 1969. In 1964 Yacine published six essays on 'our brothers the Indians' in 'Alger Républicain' and recounted his meeting with Jean-Paul Sartre while his mother was being committed to the psychiatric hospital in Blida ('La Rose de Blida', in 'Révolution Africaine', July 1965). He left for Vietnam in 1967, completely abandoning the novel and wrote 'L'Homme aux sandales de caoutchouc', a play celebrating Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese struggle against imperialism, that was published, performed and translated into Arabic in 1970. The same year Yacine returned to make a more permanent home in Algeria. During this period he had a significant change in philosophy: he refused to continue writing in French, and instead began working on popular theatre, epics