Third World Historical Documents: Kateb Yacine, "Mohamed Pack Your Bags" (1971)
Olivia C. Harrison
Image courtesy of Hajime Narukawa
Third World Historical articulates a research agenda for a project suggestively housed as a special section in the pages of CSSAAME (42.2). Borderlines features experimental writings that enact the project’s attention to questions of form. Here, the intention is to engage in a collaborative project that is its own form of archive building, a portal that speaks to the wider themes of the Third World Historical. The essays in Borderlines highlight the visceral and the relational as distinct from abstract concepts of revolution as complete breaks. The words in these pieces are never failure, or defeat but stories of complicity, compromise, and fragmentation. By emphasizing relationality, movement, and complicity we aim to think concretely about moving between a world overwhelmed by structural forces that preclude action and an imagined world filled with boundless agents detached from history, an equally self-defeating proposition.
Eight years after Algeria obtained its hard-won independence from France, which ruled the country from 1830 to 1962, the anti-colonial writer Kateb Yacine returned to his native land to work with a popular theater troupe, Masrah al-bahr (the Theater of the Sea) in Kouba, a working-class neighborhood in Algiers. Internationally recognized for his French-language plays, poetry, and novels—he won the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association Lotus Prize in 1975 and France’s Grand prix national des Lettres in 1987—Kateb dedicated the last two decades of his life to an art form that is inherently collective, itinerant, and ephemeral: popular theater in Algerian Arabic and Taqbaylit (Kabyle). Of the thousands of pages drafted by Kateb and his collaborators in Al-nishat al-thaqafi lil-‘umal (the Workers’ Cultural Action, hereafter ACT, the name the troupe adopted in 1972), only a few hundred remain, held in the Kateb Yacine archive of the Institut des mémoires de l’édition contemporaine (IMEC) in Normandy, France. Handwritten or typed up in French, Algerian Arabic, and Taqbaylit, alternately rendered in Arabic or Latin script, these documents are but a fragment of the archive of the ACT, which is to a large extent oral, improvised, and unrecorded. Based on a handful of audio cassettes and the manuscripts and typescripts held at IMEC, Kateb’s widow, Zebeida Chergui, published an anthology of two of the troupe’s plays, Mohamed arfad valiztek (Mohamed Pack Your Bags) and Harb alfayn sana: Malik al-gharb (The Two-Thousand Year War: The King of the West), as well as Boucherie de l’espérance: Palestine trahie (Butchery of Hope: Palestine Betrayed), a play drafted in French by Kateb between 1967 and 1969 that served as the matrix text for several of the ACT’s productions, including Mohamed arfad valiztek (1971), Harb alfayn sana (1974), Malik al-gharb (1977), and Filastin al-maghdura (Palestine Betrayed, 1978). The excerpt I include below is my translation of the opening scene of Mohamed Pack Your Bags as it is recorded in Chergui’s anthology, Boucherie de l’espérance.
Mohamed arfad valiztek premiered in Bir Khadem, Algiers, on October 17, 1971, for the first iteration of National Emigration Day, launched by president Houari Boumédienne on 17 October 1968 to honor the two hundred or so migrant workers killed by Paris policemen months before Algerian independence from France. It remained the ACT’s most popular play, reaching an estimated 45,000 spectators during its French tour, from February to June 1972, and another 350,000 in Algeria in the next four years alone. Drawing on the oral traditions of al-halqa, the “chain” or circle formed around traditional storytellers, popular tales featuring a down-on-his luck character, Juha, and the languages of the Algerian masses, Mohamed Pack Your Bags was a far cry from the nationalist paean the regime expected of Kateb. In 1978, the government of Chadli Benjedid stopped funding the troupe and relocated it to the Western province of Sidi Bel-Abbès, where the ACT continued to perform until Kateb’s premature death in 1989.
An often bitingly funny satire of the backroom deals between the Algerian and French government that resulted in the emigration of an estimated 750,000 Algerians by the time the first decade of independence was over, Mohamed arfad valiztek is, to my knowledge, one of the first texts that historicizes migration within a colonial genealogy that includes not only the 132 years of French colonial rule, but adjacent colonial contexts as well. Indeed, the version of the play that premiered in Algiers and toured throughout migrant communities in France begins not with the trials of its eponymous protagonist Mohamed in France, but with a tableau of colonial Algeria and colonial Palestine that anchors his itinerary in a distinctly transcolonial history. In the scene that follows, Zionist and pied-noir (European) settlement in Mandate Palestine and French Algeria are satirized as a misunderstanding of historic proportions, with each settler claiming to offer hospitality to his respective “Mohamed” (a racialized term used in French Algeria to speak of Muslims). To read this scene simply as a satire of the colonial battle over indigeneity—this land is my land—would be insufficient. For the play as a whole is devoted to the plight of the Algerian migrant in France, the eternal “guest” of a host country that has forgotten why he was there in the first place. As anti-colonial anti-racist activists in France today remind us: “We are here because you were there,” in the colonies. The opening parallel between French Algeria and Mandate Palestine serves to highlight the colonial genealogy that has produced what we now call the migrant crisis, forgetting all too easily that the first migrants in this story were the settlers—often impoverished families— who crossed the sea to people the land claimed by colonizing powers.
Image courtesy of Archives Kateb Yacine / IMEC
When posters for Mohamed Pack Your Bags appeared on the walls of the foyers (employer-owned housing for migrant workers) where the play was touring in France, Algerian workers reportedly panicked, thinking far-right activists had plastered their housing quarters with anti-immigrant signage. That same year, 1972, the white nationalist party the National Front (FN, now National Rally or RN) was founded, marking the beginning of the ineluctable ascent of anti-immigrant parties across Europe and the West. Masrah al-bahr entered a vibrant political scene in France, where migrant workers were beginning to mobilize against anti-immigrant discourses and practices, often under the banner of Palestine (e.g., the Committees in Support of the Palestinian Revolution, the precursor to the Movement for Arab Workers). Mohamed Pack Your Bags is a document of popular Algerian resistance to disenfranchisement by the FLN government, working hand in hand with the former colonizer to export cheap labor in exchange for lucrative oil contracts. It is also part of a transcolonial archive of antiracist militancy in Algeria and France, in which the example of the Algerian and Palestinian revolutions serves to rally migrant workers against postcolonial racism in France. This archive continues to grow, with contemporary playwrights such as Mohamed Rouabhi, rappers such as Kery James, Médine, and Zone d’Expression Populaire, and antiracist groups such as les Indigènes de la république (Natives of the Republic) taking Palestine as a rallying cry for the anti-colonial and antiracist cause in the present. The Third World is alive and well in postcolonial France.
Mohamed Pack Your Bags, Scene 1
Translated by Olivia C. Harrison
Mohamed I and Mohamed II are working the land, one in Algeria, the other in Palestine.
ERNEST. Hello, Mohamed!
MOSHE. Shalom!
MOHAMED I. Hello, sir!
MOHAMED II. Salam!
MOSHE. Salam?
Another Arab
Who has lost his caravan!
MOHAMED II. Shalom?
Where is this wandering Jew going?
Mohamed I and Mohamed II start walking at the same time.
ERNEST. Where are you going?
MOHAMED I. Home.
MOSHE. Home?
MOHAMED II. Yes, what about you?
ERNEST. Me too.
The two groups start walking, Mohamed I accompanied by Ernest, Mohamed II by Moshe.
ERNEST. Where do you live?
MOHAMED I. Over there.
MOSHE: Where exactly?
MOHAMED II: Right here.
ERNEST, aside. Where is he going?
MOSHE, aside. Where is this one going?
MOHAMED I, aside: It looks like…
MOHAMED II, aside: …he’s following me!
MOSHE. Phew! We’re here!
MOHAMED I: This is my village.
The two groups lay down to sleep. Mohamed I and Ernest in Algeria, Mohamed II and Moshe in Palestine. They all wake up to the sound of a rooster.
ERNEST, getting up. Perfect timing!
MOSHE, getting up. God has sent me this rooster!
They go out, each running after a rooster.
MOHAMED I, observing the scene: Where does he think he is?
MOHAMED II, same posture: He’s running after a rooster that can only be mine.
MOHAMED I. Maybe he wants to buy it!
Moshe and Ernest return, each holding a rooster.
ERNEST, to Mohamed I. I’d like to invite you…
MOSHE, to Mohamed II. Do you like chicken?
MOHAMED I. I was about to invite you.
ERNEST. You’ll invite me
When you’re in your own home.
MOHAMED I. This is my home!
MOHAMED II. This is my village.
MOSHE. No, this is my home!
MOHAMED I. Come on, are you crazy?
MOSHE. I’m telling you, this is my home!
ERNEST. What is the name of your village?
MOHAMED II. Come on, you’re mad!
What’s the name of your village?
MOHAMED I. Algeria, and yours?
ERNEST. France!
MOSHE. Israel, and yours?
MOHAMED II. Palestine!
MOHAMED I. If only this rooster could speak…
ERNEST. He’d say France!
MOSHE. Israel!
MOHAMED I. He’d say Algeria!
MOHAMED II. He’d say Palestine!
ERNEST. France!
MOSHE. Israel!
MOHAMED I. Algeria!
MOHAMED II. Palestine!
The two groups start fighting, drum roll. Enter General Decock in Algeria, General Cock in Palestine.
GENERAL DECOCK, to Mohamed I and Ernest.
Stop right there! In the name of France,
I order you to leave that rooster alone!
GENERAL COCK, to Mohamed II and Moshe.
In the name of his Royal British Majesty,
I command that you leave that rooster alone!
ERNEST. This rooster is mine!
MOSHE. No, it’s mine!
MOHAMED I. This is my rooster!
MOHAMED II. It’s my rooster!
GENERAL DECOCK. No, it’s a Gallic rooster.
GENERAL COCK. No, it’s an English rooster!
ERNEST. This is my village!
GENERAL DECOCK. No, this is France’s village!
GENERAL COCK. It’s a British village!
MOSHE. It’s the village of Israel!
The rooster crows.
Olivia C. Harrison is associate professor of French and comparative literature at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Transcolonial Maghreb: Imagining Palestine in the Era of Decolonization (2016) and coeditor of Souffles-Anfas: The Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics (2016).