Homely Strangers: Rethinking Group Identities in Maryse Conde’s Crossing the Mangrove

The concepts of home, identity, and belonging have been intensely debated in contemporary postcolonial literature. In the field of contemporary West Indian fiction, writers like Caryl Phillips, Andrea Levy, Michelle Cliff, and Maryse Condé have all used motifs of distance and proximity in their fiction. Although most writers approach postcolonial identity through the glorification of familiar “common” grounds like gender, motherhood, colour, or folk culture, they cannot escape the reiteration of Western representational frames regarding identity. By focusing on Maryse Condé’s Crossing the Mangrove, my paper addresses the issues of collective identity and belonging through the motifs of strangeness and estrangement. My aim in this paper is twofold. First, with the theoretical support of Sara Ahmed and her work on “stranger fetishism,” I will argue that Condé’s strangers reflect the inherent strangeness and estrangement of the local Guadeloupean community and undermine the fiction of the sentimentalized space of home. Secondly, I will argue that Conde destabilizes the fiction of “home” in order to put forward a revised definition of group identities. According to Maryse Condé, the West Indian tangled root system— and hence the futility of roots and origins—can in fact constitute the only “common/uncommon” ground for postcolonial West Indian representation. Following Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben, my paper argues that although Condé distances herself from the biological character of community building—avoiding the pitfalls of race, colour, history, and the past—she does not define West Indian subjectivity on the basis of missing or negative qualities either. In other words, Condé’s fiction does not prescribe a list of properties owing to or against which the West Indian subject is measured. Through this prism, I aim to show that Crossing the Mangrove interrupts the traditional categories of Western representation and creates a post-western mode of “being-together” simply by existing as a “singularly plural coexistence,” where each subject exposes their individual boundaries and limitations