Maryse Conde's Crossing the Mangrove

The stranger gave him a look of incomprehension, which settled for Moise at least one point: This was not a Guadeloupean, for even the Negropolitans who have been yellowing their hides for years from the sunless winters of the Paris suburbs know what these words mean.

Conde's novel is interesting, but I cannot help but feel disappointed. I was expecting something akin to a detective novel, but what Conde provides us here is a series of character portraits of the various inhabitants of a small town in Guadeloupe. The Rashomon effect is present in how each character (who gets their own chapter) explains and recalls their experiences with the deceased stranger, a Colombian of uncertain racial origin who comes to live in their small town, impregnates two different local women, and is discovered dead with no apparent explanation for his death other than a curse dating back to his European ancestors. Indeed, this man is supposedly a descendant of a cruel sugar planter who lived in Guadeloupe known for torturing his slaves. Since the man shows up, everyone recalls their own life stories and how it relates to the dead man. Each story reveals a lot about Guadeloupe, a French Caribbean island known for its ethnic diversity since Indians, blacks, mulattoes, 'whites', Desinor the Haitian, and others congregate in this small island. The novel also has an interesting passage where one character recalls reading Jacques Roumain's Masters of the Dew, a Haitian whose flowery language is quoted and appears to be a definite influence on the beautiful prose used by Conde and her translator in Crossing the Mangrove. So this short novel about the mysterious cases of the death of a stranger is actually about Guadeloupe itself, and the French Caribbean more broadly. The internal battles of color, class, political autonomy versus French colonialism, and exile. Conde is also very humorous in her satirical look at the contradictions of Guadeloupean social relations, the legacy of slavery, leftists versus right-wing parties, and Negritude. Indeed, one of the characters, the mother of the mentally handicapped child, marries a man who publicly defended autonomy and used Creole, but when with French whites listened to opera, spoke eloquent French and went out of his way to serve them. Many of the most vocal of nationalists demanding autonomy from France were also those who lived on the state budget, derived from French France. Unfortunately, the indefinite conclusion regarding what really killed the stranger made the novel a little disappointing. Still, its an interesting read that reveals much of 20th century Guadeloupe, an island losing its people to exile in France, receiving Haitian immigrants who provide cheap labor and a scapegoat for self-loathing blacks, the dying sugar industry, shrinking forests, and the incredible ethnic diversity of Guadeloupe.

Another great quotation:
"Those days are long gone, alas, since Guadeloupe, that cruel stepmother, no longer nurtures her children, and so many of them are forced to freeze to death in the Paris suburbs."