How can I compare and contrast the ways in which Earl Lovelace and Marysé Condé explore issues related to the legacy of colonialism in the...

Marysé Condé and Earl Lovelace, both authors whose works deal heavily with the impacts of European colonialism, have written on the interactions between Africans relocated to the New World as slaves and the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean. While these authors have expressed several similarities in their approach to this topic, several important differences can also be seen in the attitudes of their works.

It is important to note that both Condé and Lovelace are in many ways the people whom they write about, Condé a French Guadeloupean and Lovelace a Trinidadian. Both of them explore the interactions between the various Caribbean peoples brought into contact with each other by the forces of colonialism, Condé in her novel Tree of Life and Lovelace in his work The Dragon Can't Dance. While both books are primarily about conflicts of different ethnicities, they both also explore the conflict of rural and urban life and settings.

Much of Lovelace's focus is on the celebration of Carnival Monday, and the degeneration of a once powerful and religiously charged observance into a light and playful display intended only to satisfy the senses. His work, much like his life, is strictly about Trinidad, highlighted by his idiosyncratic use of Trinidadean dialectic patterns with the English language. To Lovelace, this linguistic interplay is intended to be representative of the various paradoxical relationships that colonialism often produces between disparate peoples.

In contrast, Condé writes a tale which is far more worldly. The multi-generational tale of a Guadeloupean family touches on the building of the Panama canal, the roar of cultural growth in San Francisco, and a return to the colonial seat with a journey to Paris. In many ways, Condé weaves a tale of personal tragedy against a backdrop that is the exclusive product of colonialism, while Lovelace presents a story that is of the social impacts of colonialism.

Lovelace once opined that "we should look critically at the process by which cultures are created," while Condé has stated that her writing must ultimately be of a political significance; aside from stylistic preferences, this schism of moralistic cultural review versus political statement is the defining difference between the two authors.