Hybridizing the Myth, Allegorizing Algeria

This chapter teases out the ways in which Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma resists the cohesive power of the Algerian myth of origins elaborated around the time of independence to reveal a Mediterranean transnationalism. The chapter starts by interrogating the conflicted history of the colonial concept of Mediterranean hybridity as both cultural syncretism and biological assimilation from the 1890s to the late colonial period. It then examines exile and the predominance of subjective estrangement in Kateb’s writing. In light of virtually unknown fragments cut out of Nedjma, it shows that the quest for Algeria’s identity cannot be completed without spatial deployment in the Mediterranean island of Djerba. Djerba supplies a model of felicitous mixing between strata of Mediterranean migrations, providing late colonial Algeria with a mythical space where to hone the very workings of its nation-building aspirations in a plural context evocative of Algeria’s own diversity. Kateb’s text reveals a Mediterranean ethos at the core of Algeria’s founding narrative, performing what writer Nabile Farès later dubbed the “re-allegorization of national myth” in a Mediterranean mode.