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..
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.
Read more about this topic: Joseph Zobel
Famous quotes containing the word works:
“There is a great deal of self-denial and manliness in poor and middle-class houses, in town and country, that has not got into literature, and never will, but that keeps the earth sweet; that saves on superfluities, and spends on essentials; that goes rusty, and educates the boy; that sells the horse, but builds the school; works early and late, takes two looms in the factory, three looms, six looms, but pays off the mortgage on the paternal farm, and then goes back cheerfully to work again.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We do not fear censorship for we have no wish to offend with improprieties or obscenities, but we do demand, as a right, the liberty to show the dark side of wrong, that we may illuminate the bright side of virtue—the same liberty that is conceded to the art of the written word, that art to which we owe the Bible and the works of Shakespeare.”
—D.W. (David Wark)
“It is the art of mankind to polish the world, and every one who works is scrubbing in some part.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)