N.A. If you have ever lived in a small town, a village or experienced a mindset and murmurs of a small place you will relate to the stories this book tells regardless of how close you are or have ever been to Guadaloupe. Being used to reading long Russian novels, I am more acquainted with the feeling of loving or disliking my characters in a more prolonged way. But in Crossing the Mangrove you go deep into a character’s ways of being in dips, like dipping under a water, checking out all the visible fishes and guessing what might be elsewhere in the sea if you could only swim further. Conde gives you hints of historical context, of the relations between different groups, of power relations – of all the different ways of living in a small village Rivier au Sel leaping into adjacent places from time to time. The proximity is not only geographical. Set amidst the realities of colonialism in both subtle and very obvious ways the stories resurface racism and power relations entangled into the day to day life of protagonists.
What I love about collective reading and reflection is that it opens a way of observing and being with a book beyond my own capacity to read closely. I, for instance, didn’t really notice that each character is written with a different style and voice. Or that all the female characters are written in the first person, and male one from a third person perspective.
To follow the style of the book after the first round of discussion, we each picked a character, reread their chapter and played it back in the room. It made us pay attention to specific details and questions.
In the first round of the discussion, there was a question of whether there was much about independence in the book. I could spot a passage on it reading the chapter of Leocadie Timothee.
“When school went back in October, Déodat Timodent had been transferred to Rivière au Sel from Le Moule for disciplinary reasons.
Everyone knew him because he had spoken out in La Voix du Peuple against the way history was being taught, recalling that the Gauls were not our ancestors. Now the administration was reprimanding him for much more serious misdemeanors. In a warehouse on the wharf he had got together with four of his closest friends, a shoe-maker, a carpenter, an elementary school teacher and a doctor (this one was a mulatto), and discussed communism. At the time it was considered a dangerous, underground doctrine. Today, everyone’s a Communist or in favor of independence.”
A friend has read from Lucien Evariste’s chapter something else that contrasts this passage interestingly:
“Lucien was glad to be back home as soon as he had finished his MA. More often than not, though, he poignantly bemoaned the torpor of this sterile land that never managed to produce a revolution. If only he’d been born somewhere else! In Chile! In Argentina! Or just a stone’s throw away, in Cuba! Triumph or die for freedom!”
Once you know the story and the plot of Crossing the Mangrove, once you read the book for the first time it’s actually very precious for picking it up over the time, reading individual chapters of it- pulling threads, following histories and building a picture of a village and its connections to the world.
A.A. It takes a village to raise a child, as the saying goes. In Crossing the Mangrove, it takes one to understand a death as well. The fictional town of Rivière au Sel unfolds before us like a pop-up book, filled with colorful characters, small-town intrigues, and gossip. Condé draws us into the story with the promise of revealing what caused the mysterious death of Francis Sancher, but as we gather fragments of his life reflected through the locals whose lives he touched, the narrative quickly transforms from a portrait of one man into a panorama of an entire village. As the world undergoes a major war and the consequent transformations and upheavals from mid-century onward, we glimpse only muted shadows of these events in the background of Guadeloupeans’ struggles and aspirations. We don’t emerge from this book knowing Condé’s position on Guadeloupe’s independence or what led to Sancher’s death, but rather with a sharpened eye for recognizing how our deeply interconnected worlds resonate equally with events as small as one man’s death and as large as an empire’s end.