Memmi understands why in the jails overflowing with guerilla fighters and political dissidents during the bloody Algerian War the French police and military confiscated his writings analyzing the psychology of the Colonizer and the Colonized or his semi-biographical novel, The Pillar of Salt. His writings were powerfully relevant to those in prison because like Memmi, these prisoners sought to understand the paradoxes of their Oriental culture within a European colonial state. He realized that Muslim, Berber, and Jewish Tunisians like Algerians recognized themselves in his work—namely in the portrait of the colonized. Memmi captured and exposed to the world the innermost longings, needs, and contradictions of someone whose precarious subaltern existence in French North Africa was plagued with the question of why France, the mother country, denied him or her a legitimate, equal place in French Tunisian society. However, unlike his Muslim brothers and sisters, France set up a hierarchy in order to prevent solidarity amongst its marginalized communities, albeit their shared mother tongue, Arabic. Paradoxically, the Portrait of the Colonizer is also that of himself because his situation was less abject than that of his Muslim counterparts. Also, Memmi’s challenge to Albert Camus’s estrangement to the explosive contours giving shape to a French North African radically opposed the one unilaterally negotiated at the birth of this warring twentieth century. As Memmi’s existentialist novel depicts a dystopic Mediterranean society stemming from the double alienation of colonialism and Nazism, it differs drastically from Camus’s brilliantly poetic Mediterranean utopia in Noces. Memmi, and other École d’Alger writers of non-European mother tongues, found themselves at odds with Camus’s most cherished idea of a French Mediterranean utopia. But as Memmi aptly confesses, Camus’s The Stranger has been misread by its European audience: it is not a metaphysical novel exploring existential anguish; it is the story of Camus’s foreignness to his own soil since he too is a stranger. What was the political and historical environment that allowed for Memmi and other writers he inspired to forge not only a different literary aesthetic, but also a national conscience for Tunisia’s, Morocco’s, and Algeria’s future independence? Memmi’s highly critical literary and theoretical works reflect his own anguish as he came to age between two World Wars and resisted internalizing the scorn of French society for his Jewish community during a critical moment in Tunisian history.