The writings of Maryse Condé are critical to their core. Her novels dismantle the pieties of everyday life to expose what lies beneath: the fragile narcissism of subjects who erect facades of ideology and self-importance around the naked core of their being to ward off ever-impinging social violence. This pervasive social violence takes a number of forms in Condé's critical and creative vision – from the most intimate tribulations between mother and daughter to the anonymous violence of systemic dependency in a neo-colonial society that insistently reminds every individual – in employment, in consumption, in leisure and travel, in education, in language – that a distant metropolis determines the parameters of their existence. Condé is concerned with the survival of human beings in this undermining context; her writing constructs individuals as more than simply human animals, as subjects with a right to more than the minimal social benefits (health care, unemployment insurance, aid for single mothers, and other benefits that Guadeloupians enjoy in contrast to those living in many other Caribbean nations). The contemporary subjects of French neo-colonialism produce constantly, like the slaves who were their ancestors who refused to be reduced to animalistic quotas of production by their masters and produced a new culture from the shattered remains they found at hand – Wolof, Norman and Breton, Bantu, East Indian, Native American, Chinese, and many others. In a situation of structuralized dependency on the metropolis, however, certain paths of production remain blocked. Where would one find the capital to start a hotel when one must compete with Meridian, Sofitel, and Acor? How can one place locally produced goods in competition with mass-produced European items, particularly when a local preference for all that is European negates any value-added benefit from the marker ‘Made in Guadeloupe’?

The colonial progression of modernity into every dimension of Guadeloupian life has captured colonized subjects in a net of systematic dependency, from consumerist consumption to political irrelevancy as subjects of Matignon and the European Union. Everything that human beings in this circumstance use to build a fortress of subjectivity – biological destiny, language, food, and belief-systems – comes from beyond the individual, from the pre-formed material of the given.