In the wake of Algerian independence and the institutionalization of Modern Standard Arabic as the language of the State, two Algerian writers – Nabile Farès and Tahar Djaout – continued to explore the notion of Algerian national identity through literary expression in French. Contemporaries of Farès and Djaout, such as Tahar Ouettar (who writes in Arabic), have criticized their continued use of the French language as “one of the many ways in which French colonialism persists in Algeria,” asserting that “it is our right, indeed our duty [as Algerians] to oppose it.” Yet during the late 1970s and 80s, as the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was gaining in popularity and confrontations between young Berber-rights activists and Islamic “intégristes” were wreaking havoc both in universities and on the streets of Algeria, the choice to write in Arabic would also have been fraught with a completely different and equally controversial set of political implications. It is in this environment that Farès and Djaout attempted to create a distinctly new poetics in which language, politics, and identity were inextricably interwoven. And it is precisely the high stakes of their aesthetic choices (grounded in fragmentation, hesitation, and writing followed by rewriting) that render their works so rich. Smattered across the pages of Farès’ L’état perdu, for example, are symbols borrowed from several indigenous alphabets that destabilize the eye in its path across the page, forcing it to recognize and integrate multiple systems of signs, including the kinetic, oddly spaced French. Djaout’s Insulaire & Cie, on the other hand, incorporates transliterations of Kabyle place-names and historical figures into poems that appear conventional on the page, but when read aloud give the French reader pause and the Kabyle listener the pleasure of identification. Through close readings of key passages of poems by Fares and Djaout and attention to reception of their works among both French and Arabic critical circles, this paper argues that both poets deliberately sought to eschew the notion of a singular, non-porous national or linguistic identity based on any one of the languages or ethnic affiliations that continue to exist in Algeria, including Modern Standard Arabic, dialectical Arabic, French, Kabyle, Tourareg, Mozabit and others. Rather, through the intertextual poetic practices that are examined in this paper, they privilege what Soraya Tlatli has referred to as “the act of becoming, the movement from one language to another that escapes linguistic and cultural categorization.”