Reading Maryse Conde’s novel “Crossing The Mangrove” reminds me of Leo Tolstoy’s novel “The Death of Ivan llyich”. Both novels begin with the wake of the deceased. In Tolstoy’s novel. The narrator gave extensive descriptions of Ivan’s life till his dying moment. Maryse Conde’s novel poses a challenge for me because the only description of the deceased is found in the collection of twenty mourners’ eulogies. Set in the village Riviere au Sel in Guadeloupe, the deceased Francis Sancher was a stranger who came from outside of Guadeloupe. The novel begins with the discovery of his body and his wake; readers can only have a glimpse of him through the eulogies each mourner shared about him, yet he was a stranger to all of them. The first mystery I’ve found is that for death under such mysterious circumstances, there is no police or detective present at the crime scene or the wake. Did someone kill him? Did he kill himself, or was he destined to die because of a curse? Why is there no blood on his body? In this blog, we shall look at two of the mourners, Mira and Vilma’s eulogies, to understand that these two women, both impregnated by him, can have two different views about who he is.

Mira is the illegitimate and miserable daughter of a wealthy family. She wants to leave her island of malice (p,43). She met Sancher at the gully and placed her hope in him to take her away from her miserable life (p.44). After Sancher died, she gave birth to their son Quentin, and she wants him to know who his father was. In Mira’s eyes, Sancher was her savior whom she had waited for twenty-five years (36) and enabled her to gain a sense of real living (193). This narrow view of hers blinded her to who Sancher is, still a man of mystery. Vilma is an East Indian whose mother never recovered emotionally from the loss of Vilma’s older sister. Vilma came to Sancher’s house to look for a job and refuge because her parents are going to stop her education and marry her to a man she doesn’t love. She did not love Sancher initially, but love crept in, and she understood that Sancher was never hers (159). When Sancher died, she said she seemed to hear his voice speak mysterious words I had never heard before, lifting the enigma of who he was (p. 161). She was too distraught to tell readers who he was, so both women give readers an incomplete view of Sancher.

Unlike most mystery novels, which either end with the case solved or unsolved, the writer leaves it to the readers to put all the pieces of the puzzle together to form their judgment about whether Sancher is a freak or a hero, and whether he died because of the curse. She invites readers to come and cross the mangrove – a metaphor of the complexities of the characters’ identities as they intertwine and form judgments of the deceased, only to the reckoning of their own identity.