stage with the shooting by a colon ofKadidja, an important revolutionary mat-riach. This gratuitous colon violence is an eye-opener for the Algerians who, realizing that Western 'humanism' in colonial practice is in reality a vicious disregard for human life, turn to Sa' id, the thieving peasant and social reject, for inspiration. Sa' id, the plays focal point and the antithesis of Western values, along with his ugly wife Leila presents a critique of the Western cult of beauty, and 'goodness'. His utter abjectness, paralleling Genet'» own, is a mode of 'sainthood'. In the course of the play, Sa'id, while pursuing negation, descends from thief to traitor by betraying the very cause which has tried to make a 'hero' of him and has thereby threatened the authenticity of his being. During this second phase of the liberation struggle, there is added a conscious adoption of evil to the earlier hatred and violence. Evil is chosen as a means to a more ethical social order and as a path towards a new positive ethic. This phase of the war when the Algerians reject the 'right thinking' of the West is the period ofdisalienation, which Fanon has called the period of decolonisation where 'the masses mock at [the white colonisers] values, insult them and vomit them up'.8 ^ In a new explosion of violence the Arabs under the exhortation of Kadidja surrealistically reappear and unleash their hatred upon their oppressors. As in The Blacks, Genet suggests that violence is inherent in the colonial system. Though the missionary admits that the Arab violence is a blacklash to the oppressor's cruelty, the agents of the alien government, like the gendarme and the Cadi, maintain law and order through force. We know that during the Algerian war the French army's atrocities became infamous; and France was, in fact, often accused of neo-fascism. Again, as in the earlier play, the question of rediscovering native identity or at least of shaking off the foreigner s culture becomes crucial. History notes that the Algerian people, perhaps more than most colonised nations, faced the danger of losing their identity. This was because France, seeking to make Algeria a perfect appendage of metropolitan France, wished to dominate over it in all spheres : administrative, civic as well as cultural. Added to this was France's cultural arrogance regarding its traditions of humanism and universalism which automatically led it to impose its culture on its colonies. The Algerian war was consciously fought by the Algerians, in one respect at least, to regain this lost identity.9 Since the battle in the play is also to be fought on the psychological plane, we note that images and their projection become all-important factors; the colons employing all manner of stagecraft to reinforce their slackening power in the eye of the Arabs. France's power as a colonising nation is exposed as an empty image carefully projected—it is shown as morally bankrupt and politically effete seeking in the image of its colonies self-delusions of grandeur. Genet's surrealist play does not attempt to define the Algerians' identity in realistic terms, choosing instead to make Sa' id, the peasant theif, a symbol of his people. By doing so Genet inverts the ideas of the "North African Syndrome", by which Western psychiatrists and neurologists had sought to establish the racial inferiority of the Algerians: the symptoms of which were a predilection for irrational violence, aggressiveness and even criminality.10 They explained that like the lower animals the North Africans had undeveloped cortical functions Journal of Arts and Ideas 89