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Despite the cultural diversity found in Africa and the complexity ofthe psychology of the colonizer and the colonized, several fundamental facts emerge regarding the function of language and literature in recent African history. The colonizer sought to instill a sense of inferiority in the colonized as part of the dynamics of conquest, placing special emphasis on education and language. These notions, lucidly discussed by such social thinkers as O. Mannoni, Frantz Fanon, and Albert Memmi, have analogues in the defense of language everywhere where lingua-political oppression occurs, be it in colonial Africa or on an Arapaho reservation in the American West. What is especially significant about the forced acquisition of a European language is the fact that this very tool of oppression tended to become the total of unity and rebellion for the oppressed. From a political viewpoint, the acquisition of a European lingua-franca entailed such logistics of liberation as communication and collective identity which overrode regional and tribal differences. From a cultural viewpoint, the language which had been used to colonize the minds of Africans knew two phases: first, one of simple acquisition of both language and attendant literary forms and second, one in which the European language was warped or "bullied" to fit the author's African cultural impulses. In the second instance we have, as a result of code-mixing and the transfer of cultural factors, the emergence of a unique and vigorous literature. In itself, this literature may be appreciated qua literature, but we should not forget that the code-mixing is often as concerned with the rejection of the language of oppression and the restauration of indigenous values as it is with traditional literary self-expression, as, for example, in the two poems by Algerian poet Youcef Sebti which bear the titles "La Soleil" and "Le Lune," thereby pooh-poohing sacrosanct French grammar by reversing the genders of "sun" and "moon" even as the articles reinstate the respective feminine and masculine genders of "sun" and "moon" found in Arabic.

Writer's block is not a new concept, but I should like to consider it in a new context: the realm of the young and rapidly developing Francophone literature of the Maghreb. I am suggesting that the writer's malaise before the blank page is a sign of a highly developed authorial relationship with one's language and materials and that the recent increase in the number of (1) testimonials in which Maghrebian writers bear witness to their sense of impotence when facing the purity of the white page and (2) reactions symptomatic of that frustration is evidence of development in the literature in question.

Most Algerian Francophone literature has been written since 1950, and thus the development of that literature has been intimately linked to the political events which forged the Algerian nation. Especially influential was the 1954-62 war of independence which for many years was a major contextual element in the literature. With the passage of time, the Revolution has begun to be less and less cognitive in the lives and works of the young writers. For some, Revolution lives on in the oneiric evocations of horrors glimpsed, for others it is something relegated to history, whereas for yet others it has become a political and social device. The role the Revolution plays in a writer's creativity has tended to dichotomize the literature into a conservative branch of inward- and backward-looking patriotism and a radical branch of outward- and forward-looking experimentation. Both branches present equally fervent defenses of their loyalty to their country based on a variety of arguments, but the radical branch, regardless of its relative worth in terms of internal affairs, certainly is the branch which tends to transcend national idiom and to express itself in terms of wide-spread and universal literary values.