SOURCE: "Two Caribbean Women Go to Africa: Maryse Condé's Hérémakhonon and Myriam Warner-Vieyra's Juletane," in College Literature, Vol. 18, No. 3, October, 1991, pp. 96-105.

King is an American educator, critic, and editor whose works include French Women Novelists: Defining a Female Style (1989). In the excerpt below, she considers the themes of gender and nationality in Hérémakhonon.

Hérémakhonon (the title is a Malinké word meaning "to wait for happiness") is the story of a Guadeloupean teacher who goes to an unnamed West African country resembling Sekou Touré's Guinea as a co-opérante for the French government. While French West Indian bourgeois men had of course gone to Africa for many generations as members of the French colonial bureaucracy, Véronica is part of a distinctly modern world in which women, particularly foreign women, have moved beyond traditional roles; she teaches philosophy, to male...