My Mother, My Country - Reconstructing the Female Self in Guadeloupean Women's Writing

This study is an in-depth exploration of mother-daughter relationships in the texts of five Guadeloupean women writers, both celebrated and less known. The five authors whose texts are examined are Maryse Condé, Myriam Warner-Vieyra, Michèle Lacrosil, Jacqueline Manicom and Simone Schwarz-Bart. The author sets out to prove that in the realm of French Caribbean «female-centric» fiction, a disturbed or ruptured relationship with the biological mother results in the disintegration of the daughter’s psyche and self. The mother-daughter bond functions as a focus for the exploration of other significant themes, which include a quest for an identity and identity formation, intimately linked to the issue of history and origins. Difficult male-female relations and the demoralizing questions of race, class and culture differences are also explored.