In Rivière au Sel, a small village in the heart of the Guadeloupean forest, the dead body of Francis Sancher is found. As is customary, a wake is held for the deceased. But who was is he exactly? Where did he come from? Everyone tells their story, their memories, their truths and their doubts. The novel Traversée de la mangrove, published in 1989 by Maryse Condé (born in 1937), is built on a collection of stories in a true polyphony of different, complementary and contradictory voices. It is finally the whole Guadeloupean society and the questions which cross it that the author presents and questions. Internationally recognized author for her postcolonial reflections and her novels, Maryse Condé is one of the most powerful contemporary voices of créolité and négritude in France. An intellectual and novelist, feminist and independence activist, she has built her work, with a tenderness and rage of her own, on the complex and fascinating question of Guadeloupean identity. In 2018, she was awarded the alternative Nobel Prize of Literature.

We read this book in the winter of 2021.