Kateb Yacine's Journey beyond Algeria and Back

It is this revolutionary call that Kateb Yacine uses as the premise for his 1970 play, L'homme aux sandales de caoutchouc. 2 In it, he acknowledges the struggle of the Vietnamese people on both the particular level and the universal. He reminds the audience or reader of his play that the Vietnamese inflicted upon the French a defeat "without precedent in the history of the contemporary world" (Stora 23; emphasis added), a defeat that would not go unnoticed in Algeria. Even before the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Kateb began thinking about Vietnam as a setting for his play. In 1949, while a journalist in Algiers, he sketched out the first scenes, which he further developed in the 1960s during his visit and stay in Vietnam (Kateb, Éclats 64). The final version would not be published until just after Ho Chi Minh's death.