pas bleue (1982). Retirement and final publications Retiring in 1974, Zobel settled in the village of Générargues where he continued to write and even rewrite some novels: Les Jours Immobiles became Les Mains pleines d’oiseaux and La Fête à Paris became Quand la neige aura fondu. In 1995, Zobel published D’Amour et de Silence, an art book of watercolors and some unpublished poems and extracts from his personal journal. His final publications were published in 2002: Gertal et autres nouvelles, a novel combining unpublished texts and extracts from his personal journal which he held from 1946-2002; Le Soleil m’a dit, a complete poetic work. Works His most famous novel, La Rue Cases-Nègres (often translated as Black Shack Alley or Sugar Cane Alley), was published in Paris 1950. The novel is an account of a young boy raised by his grandmother in a post-slavery - but still plantation-based - Martinique. The struggles of the impoverished cane-sugar plantation workers, and the ambitions of a loving grandmother who works hard to put the main character through school are the core focus of the novel, which also describes life in a colonial society. Zobel stated that the novel was his version of Richard Wright's Black Boy (1945) in that they are both semi-autobiographical. The novel was adapted for the screen by Euzhan Palcy in 1983 as Sugar Cane Alley. While La Rue Cases-Nègres is Zobel's most renowned work, the author started his writing career in 1942 during World War II with Diab-la (a tentative English title could be "The Devil's Garden"), a socially conscious novel similar to Jacques Roumain's Masters of the Dew (published a year or more later). With Diab-la, Zobel tells the powerful story of a sugar-cane plantation worker freeing himself from colonial exploitation by creating a garden in a fishermen's village of Southern Martinique. Leaving Martinique in 1946 to pursue ethnology and drama studies in Paris, Zobel spent some years in Paris and Fontainebleau, before relocating to Senegal by 1957. Writing a few short stories, he had a notable impact in the cultural life of French-speaking West Africa as a public radio producer. A noted poet and a gifted sculptor as well as a writer, Zobel retired to a small village in southern France in 1974 and died in 2006. Bibliography Bishop, Marie-France, et al. “Joseph Zobel.” Dictionnaire Des Écrivains Francophones Classiques : Afrique Subsaharienne, Caraïbe, Maghreb, Machrek, Océan Indien, H.