Colonizer and the Colonized

It would be untrue to say that I foresaw the full sig nificance of this book in 1957 when I wrote it. I had written a first novel, The Pillar of Salt, a life story which was in a sense a trial balloon to help me find the direction of my own life. However, it became clear to me that a real life for a cultured man was impossible in North Africa at that time. I then tried to find another solution, this time through the prob lems of mixed marriage, but this second novel, Strangers, also led me nowhere. My hopes then rested on the "couple," which still seems to me the most solid happiness of man and perhaps the only real answer to solitude. But I discovered that the couple is not an isolated entity, a forgotten oasis of light in the middle of the world; on the contrary, the whole world is within the couple. For my unfortunate pro tagonists, the world was that of colonization. I felt that to understand the failure of their undertaking, that of a mixed marriage in a colony, I first had to understand the colonizer and the colonized, perhaps the entire colonial relationship and situation. All this was leading me far from myself and from my own problems, but their explanation