Rewriting Algeria: Transcultural Kinship and Anticolonial Revolution in Kateb Yacine’s L’Homme aux sandales de caoutchouc

Abstract

Amir Aziz examines L’Homme aux sandales de caoutchouc (The Man in Rubber Sandals), a 1970 play by the Franco-Algerian writer Kateb Yacine. L’Homme narrates the dramatic journeys of characters of disparate geopolitical and historical contexts, such as Mohamed, a North African peasant conscripted into the French colonial army, and Alabama, an African-American soldier serving in the Vietnam War. Aziz argues that L’Homme blends both history and fiction to produce an enduring historical and literary archive of subaltern voices that conveys the motifs of transcultural kinship and anti-colonial revolution characterizing North Africa and Indochina during the turbulent era of decolonization. Aziz contends that L’Homme shows how differing anti-colonial narratives may instead be conjoined as teachable lessons in national unity, where Vietnam functions metonymically as political exemplar to emulate and cautionary metaphor to bear in mind for a post-independence Algeria.