Joseph Zobel
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Joseph Zobel
Zobel, Joseph (b. 1915). Martinican novelist, best known for La Rue Cases-Nègres (1950), a semiautobiographical account (subsequently filmed) of a black child growing up on a Martinican plantation in the first half of the 20th c. The physical and economic hardships suffered by the estate workers, including José's grandmother, recall the harsh conditions of the plantation system which, in former centuries, exploited the labour of their slave ancestors. However, the child's enthusiasm for the small pleasures of rural life provides a counterpoint to the theme of unremitting, ill-rewarded toil. As in many real West Indian households, the grandmother is the source of love, support, and ambition, motivating the boy towards the escape-route of scholarships and social mobility. La Fête à Paris (1953) follows José to France, the setting also of some of the short stories in Le Soleil partagé (1964). Zobel's fiction is, however, mainly devoted to the life of the working-class poor in Martinique; the note of compassionate social protest is already evident in the tales of Laghia de la mort (1946) and the peasant novel Diab-là (1946; written 1942). His more recent works include Les Mains pleines d'oiseaux (1978), Quand la neige aura fondu (1979), and Mas Badara (1983).
[Beverley Ormerod]
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Joseph Zobel
Joseph Zobel (April 26, 1915, in Martinique – June 18, 2006 in Alès, France) is the author of several novels and short-stories in which social issues are at the forefront. Although his most famous novel, "La Rue Cases-Nègres", was published some twenty years after the great authors of Negritude published their works, Zobel was once asked if he considered himself "the novelist of Negritude."[1]
Works
His most famous novel, La Rue Cases-Nègres (often translated as Black Shack Alley or Sugar Cane Alley), was published in Paris 1950. The novel is an account of a young boy raised by his grandmother in a post-slavery, but still plantation-based, Martinique. The struggles of the impoverished cane sugar plantation workers, and the ambitions of a loving grandmother who works hard to put the main character through school are the core subject of the novel, which also describes life in a colonial society. Zobel stated that the novel was his version of Richard Wright's Black Boy in that they are both semi-autobiographical.[1].
The novel was adapted to the screen by Euzhan Palcy in 1983 as Sugar Cane Alley.
While La Rue Cases-Nègres is the most renowned work from Joseph Zobel, the author started his writing career in 1942 during World War Two with Diab-la (a tentative English title could be : The Devil's Garden), a socially conscious novel similar to Jacques Roumains' Masters of the Dew (published one year or more later). With Diab-la, Zobel tells the powerful story of a sugar cane plantation worker freeing himself from colonial exploitation by creating a garden in a fishermen's village of Southern Martinique.
Leaving Martinique in 1946 to pursue ethnology and drama studies in Paris, Joseph Zobel spent some years in Paris and Fontainebleau, before relocating in Senegal by 1957. Writing a few short stories, he had a notable impact in the cultural life of French-speaking West Africa as a public radio producer.
Also a noted poet and a gifted sculptor, Joseph Zobel retired in a small village of Southern France by 1974 and died in 2006.
References
External links
- Obituary in The Guardian, 1 July 2006
- Reference Website on Joseph ZOBEL (French Language).
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Oxford Companion to French Literature
The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Copyright © 1995, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
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