In the discussion of the texts selected, the emphasis has been on the ways in which each one contributes to a larger life-writing project, and on the ways in which these works explore the relationship of the writer to literary creation and to the world around them. As was suggested in the introduction, in the work of all of these writers there is a meditation on an individual experience and on the relationship of that experience to that of others, leading to diverse forms of creative, and political, intervention. A number of other elements unite these writing projects, which are interventions both in a linguistic space (the word) and in a social and political space (the world). In each of them there is an engagement with the question of identity, particularly concerning the use of language, within an analysis of the effects of colonisation and the legacy of resistance to oppression for the individual, for the immediate community and for the wider community. Despite the schism that they have experienced between oral and written language, and the consequences of being linguistic and social ‘outsiders’ (the term étrange in its multiple meanings in French is a recurrent one), within both their culture of origin and the culture that they acquire through education, all succeed in making a space in which to create, to write, to speak. For all of them there is a commitment to the retrieval of historical memory and of a multifaceted cultural memory, and a quest for knowledge and self-knowledge that takes place in the relationship to an archaic past and to a personal and collective recent past and present. There is increasingly a development of experimental writing strategies in order to achieve this more fully.