Cajou’s “Color Complex”: Narrative Technique, Reader Response, and the Reception of Postcolonial Texts Available to Purchase

This essay investigates the critical reactions and receptions to the narrators of Michèle Lacrosil’s two novels, Sapotille et le Serin d’Argile (Sapotille and the Clay Canary) (1960) and Cajou (1961). The former narrator has received universal sympathy while the latter has been often severely criticized and blamed for the identity crisis and racism she faces as a Caribbean immigrant in Paris. These reactions can partly be understood by the different narrative styles each novel employs and how those styles affect reader response. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, these reactions also reveal limitations in prevailing theories of Caribbean subjectivity and about the reception of the female identity quest in postcolonial literature, the tendency to silence female voices when these voices go against the grain.