The interaction between literature and politics preoccupies all the writers explored in the present study, but it is Kateb Yacine whose poetic creativity has been seen as no less than revolutionary. Kateb Yacine is above all perceived, and perceived himself, as a thoroughly militant poet, and he clearly envisaged his poetic work as an extension of his political activism. At the age of sixteen, Kateb took part in the mass demonstrations in Sétif against the French colonial presence in Algeria on the 8 May 1945, for which he was imprisoned for two months, and his literary work bears the mark of the violence of the French response that he witnessed at that moment. Official figures record the deaths of 6000 to 8000 protestors, though nationalists insist that the death toll was much higher, and this inaugural uprising constitutes, according to Kateb, ‘une date jalon du développement du nationalisme’. It is also, moreover, an abiding central focus of his literary work, it triggers a prolonged exploration, through writing, of the difficult birth of the Algerian nation, and at the same time marks the start of his commitment to freedom and independence as it is expressed in his journalism, his plays and his novels. Despite his sensitivity to the distinct requirements of journalistic and literary writing, and despite the anxieties towards the possibility of liberation expressed in his works, Kateb conceives his activity as a poet as deeply embedded in the call for change. Indeed, in a 1958 interview with Jean-Marie Serreau, reprinted from L'Action in Le Poète comme un boxeur, he asserts, ‘le poète, c'est la révolution à l’état nu, le mouvement même de la vie dans une incessante explosion’. Poetry, then, recounts and indeed performs a movement that is nothing less than explosive.

The revolutionary power of poetry or poetic writing is nevertheless a controversial, perhaps on some level an idealised notion, and Kateb's inspirational writing practice is, like that of Césaire, far from a political statement in itself. Kateb's works trace the evolution of the independence movement and of the emergent Algerian nation through the traumatic incubation period between 1945 and 1954 and beyond.