‘Je suis une personne très moqueuse, heureusement’. Maryse Condé's antipathy to pious clichés and reassuring stereotypes is well known. Régis Antoine, for instance, writes: ‘Travaillant dans la dérision, la satire et la dénonciation de l'intolérable, elle vise à déplaire intellectuellement, pour éveiller’; and Leah Hewitt describes her as ‘an iconoclast who picks apart the clichés of the communities she has lived in’. Condé's sardonic humour forms, in her own view, the basis of her realism: ‘La réalité du monde noir est tellement triste que si on n'en rit pas un peu, on devient complètement désespéré et négatif. Pour moi, me moquer est une façon de regarder les choses en face’. Realism, in this sense of writing against the stereotypical, is achieved through vigilant attention to reality, which Condé presents as a conceptually simple matter of unbiased observation: ‘Finalement, l'oeuvre d'un écrivain c'est quoi sinon présenter la vie autour de lui dans sa complexité et dans son étrangeté?’

Much has already been written on Condé's ironic realism and her refusal to conform to literary or cultural conventions; much has also been written specifically on Traversée de la mangrove. But there is one aspect of this novel which demands a rather different theorization of Condé's treatment of the stereotype, and which therefore allows us to see more precisely how multi-level and all-pervasive her ‘irreverence’ is. The transgressive force of her work compared to other Antillean writers is not in fact restricted to its clearer, more hard-headed vision of reality, involving narrative events, themes and characters. Its irreverence also operates on the level of the very small structures of the text: the structures of paragraphs and, most strikingly, of individual sentences. It attacks the stereotype also through purely discursive manoeuvres.

This implies that the stereotype has its own discourse; or, as Barthes would put it, its own code.