ABSTRACT
The critical reception of Maryse Conde's first novel En attendant le bonheur (ELB) in the United States is a paradigmatic instance of the omissions that stem from a misunderstanding of the complex social and cultural and political contexts in which Conde's novel was produced. This chapter examines the implications of the text's numerous — and often oblique — intertextual references to major Francophone Caribbean and African-American texts. Veronica is a young Guadeloupean intellectual from a prosperous middle-class background who leaves France to work as a teacher in an unnamed African country that is reminiscent of Guinea in the 1960s. From the outset, the protagonist characterizes the motivations for her journey in terms of a search for her lost African origins. By the end of the novel, however, the protagonist has abandoned her quest and is on her way back to France, having recognized that that she has simply got 'the wrong ancestors'.
