It was no shock to me that my parents, like so many others, emerged out of a kind of fog. My father, an unrepentant chatterbox, claimed that his father had gone to dig for gold in Paramaribo, Dutch Guyana, abandoning his mother, who was breast-feeding her baby on the More à Cases. Other times he claimed his father was a merchant seaman, shipwrecked off the coast of Sumatra. Where did the truth lie? I think he re-created it at will, taking pleasure in enunciating the syllables that made him dream: Paramaribo, Sumatra. Thanks to him, from a very early age I understood that you forge an identity.

— Maryse Condé

There was no denying the fact that the death of sugarcane was sounding the knell for something else in the country. What can we call it?

— Maryse Condé