One of the central concerns that has consistently marked the literature of the French-speaking Caribbean is, of course, that of accurately conveying the physical and emotional reality of the postcolonial individual. Gayatri Spivak, in her seminal essay “Can the Subaltern Speak,” reflects on the problematic disparity between the necessarily elitist— albeit sympathetic—discourse of the postcolonial writing subject and the supposed mutism of the object of this discourse. Addressing more specifically the Caribbean situation, Maryse Condé questions the troublingly narrow configurations of the individual and collective in the works of “canonical” male writers of the French-speaking Americas in “Order, Disorder, Freedom.” Similarly regionally focused, Edouard Glissant considers the possibilities offered by opacity in representing postcolonial communities, and evokes in particular his own fraught efforts to write “the novel of the We” (Discours 267). He and others also pose the question of how to negotiate the African dimension of Afro-Caribbean identity within an overwhelmingly racist and racialized New World context. Destined, it seems often, to appropriate, challenge, and rework discourses of subjecthood presented by imperialist European writers and theorists, postcolonial intellectuals have long struggled with the issue of representing the individual from an original and, for the most part, counterdiscursive perspective. Historically, the most celebrated writers of the region have tended to present readers with whole and sympathetic characters who, although often troubled if not outright traumatized, ultimately show themselves capable of sustaining coherent and even progressive dialogue about themselves and their condition—or allow an omniscient narrator to do so in their stead. These are intact and exemplary characters—commendable or cautionary—to whom the reader is able to “attach” with relative ease.