Literary places in Constantine and Bône

Nedjma

Kateb Yacine

In eastern Algeria under French colonial rule, four young men, Rachid, Lakhdar, Mourad and Mustapha, circle around the beautiful, unattainable Nedjma, a woman of mixed blood who comes to stand for Algeria itself. Kateb Yacine's fractured, founding novel of Algerian literature maps the real east: the port and worksites of Bône, the gorge-cut city of Constantine, the ancestral lands of the Keblout tribe, and the colonial labour and violence out of which a national consciousness is being born.

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