Martinique (France) / All works
Novel
Black Shack Alley
La Rue Cases-Nègres
Joseph Zobel · 1950
Synopsis
José grows up with his grandmother, M'man Tine, in the shacks of the workers on a sugar cane plantation in Martinique, where the children go hungry while the adults wear themselves out in the fields. From this community he receives his culture and his knowledge, and he proves brilliant at the village school. In Fort-de-France he partly finds his mother again, Délia, a laundress and servant in the house of a béké, and enters the lycée, a path seldom open to a poor black child.
Context
The novel is autobiographical: José, its narrator, is the author's double. Several Parisian publishers, Albin Michel among them, turned down the manuscript, whose language seemed to them too marked by Creole; it came out in Paris in 1950 from Jean Froissart and received that same year the Prix des lecteurs, awarded by the readers of La Gazette des lecteurs. Présence africaine reissued it from 1974, and Euzhan Palcy adapted it for the cinema in 1983 under the title Sugar Cane Alley.
Who it is for
For reading the Martinique of the plantations at a child's height, and the price that school costs those who pay for it.
Prizes and reception
Prix des lecteurs on its publication in 1950; Euzhan Palcy's adaptation received a Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
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