Gender Roles In Conde's Crossing The Mangrove

Highlighting the violence of colonization, sexual politics, and identity is frequent in postcolonial novels and stories from female Caribbean authors. Danticat’s Breath Eyes Memory, and Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night, use the strategy of connecting rape to other forms of oppression. Portraying rape in these novels as a sensible effect of being colonized can be found in the mentioned authors text. Conde’s Crossing the Mangrove, focuses on identity and sexual politics that surround the Caribbean society. These novels display characters who go against the grain of sexual norms, or characters who are sexually abused by people who are close to them or in their community. The setting in these novels stage a fictional place and space allowing characters
The connection between identity and gender in these novels “represent a desire for elsewhere, for cross-racial, cross-national, cross gender, or sexual identifications and other moments of solidarity” (Foster). Much like Martine and Sophie who know the importance of marriage, Conde's Dinah suffers from much of the same torment and exile expressed in the contrasting novel. In the text, Dinah complains of an unhappy marriage, asking Sancher, “Does it make sense to you? What have I done to him? Why did he bring me all the way from Philipsburg to treat me the way he does” (Conde 81)? Even though much of the islands of the Caribbean share similar effects of colonialism and slavery, the Haitians in the diaspora were looked down upon more so, and Haiti itself had been painted as pitiful and morally ignorant by the rest of the world. This type of discrimination towards people from Haiti stems from ignorance of their history and identity. In this novel, lighter skin tones and relations to Europeans were associated with the upper class entitlement, while marriage with dark skin women was frowned upon. One of the first Lameanes, Gabriel, had been what was described in the novel as “hounded out” after marrying a “Negress” by his family was a white creole (Conde 7). However, this type of prejudices is not limited to the white creoles but to Guadeloupians as well. “As soon as we’d heard he [Francis] was a Cuban, Papa declared there were too many foreigners in Guadeloupe and that he should be deported with all those Dominicans and Haitians” (Conde 71). This reiterates the racism within the communities to differentiate themselves as African, Haitian, Dominican and other names beside being