‘What images does the word slavery bring to your mind?’ was the starting point that initiated my interviews of Guadeloupians in the summer of 2013. ‘Shame’, ‘suffering’, ‘misery’, ‘fear’, ‘chains’, ‘whips’ and ‘sugarcane fields with overseers’ were the immediate, instinctive replies. From these premises, the interviewees delved further into their perceptions of how slavery has been remembered, commemorated and taught in Guadeloupe for the past twenty years. I was interested in their personal appreciation of erected memorials, statues and museums, and in their ability to identify with the yearly celebrations marking the anniversary of the abolition of slavery on 27 May 1848. I asked them to reflect further on the remnants of slavery in contemporary society, among their families and in their daily habits. Finally, I had them share their thoughts on education: is Guadeloupian society, in general, sufficiently knowledgeable about its slave heritage?

The idea of conducting these oral interviews originated in 2010 as a follow-up investigation to my book Claims to Memory: Beyond Slavery and Emancipation in the French Caribbean (2006). The last chapter focused on the sites of memory that I had photographed in Guadeloupe and Martinique – sites which either date back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries or were erected in recent years to commemorate the slaves’ struggle for freedom and the abolitionary process (Figures 1–4). The 200th anniversary of the first abolition of slavery in the French Caribbean in 1993, and even more so the 150th anniversary of the second abolition of slavery in 1998, marked turning points in the way that Guadeloupian and Martiniquais societies have expressed their slave heritage. Statues and monuments commemorating these islands’ slave heroes have sprung up throughout the cities and countryside, breaking the silence that had prevailed since the abolition of slavery in 1848. Shortly thereafter – under the impulsion of the socialist minister Christiane Taubira – the French government voted into effect the law of 21 May 2001 qualifying slavery and the slave trade as crimes against humanity. Subsequently, the governmental decree of 5 January 2004 founded the Comité pour la mémoire de l'esclavage [Committee for the Memory of Slavery], originally headed by the Guadeloupian writer Maryse Condé.