ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on examples from francophone North African literature as one instance of postcolonial texts which place us at this ‘threshold of the untranslatable,’ where the reading experience itself can be no other but a perpetual translation. Hence, in using the language of the ex-colonizer it was important for postcolonial bilingual writers to go beyond a passive form of contestation, where the postcolonial text remained prisoner of western literary models and standards, restrained by the dominant form and language. Despite the heated debates on nationalism and national literatures, these postcolonial bilingual writers chose the word over silence. Hence, the word lisanayn in the title can be read as a sign for the two languages, French and Arabic, which are forever simultaneously at work in the bilingual postcolonial writer’s mind. Furthermore, the complete signification of the French title can only be understood in its relationship with the Arabic title: they are interdependent.