My four women seems a very personal tale. Had you harboured the concept for a long time, or did the idea come to you recently? Why this text, and why now?

This text is about the four women who have made me who I am. I had discussed with my publisher the possibility of a book that would let me get closer to the source of my writing, and I soon realised that I didn’t want to place myself centre-stage. I wanted to dig deeper into the past, to look further back in time. It was important for me to understand where all my inspiration came from. For ten or so years I have been carrying around with me the page from the official Guadeloupe Gazette that shows my ancestors: Angélique, her husband and former master Jean Féréol Pineau, their eight children. I knew that the day would come when Angélique would emerge from the shadows and reveal herself to my readers. I had already referred to Julia at length in Exile according to Julia, and I wanted to examine her in greater depth. As for Gisèle, my aunt Gisèle, the mystery that shrouds her story has haunted me ever since childhood. And then there is my mother, Daisy, who is still here today and who has asked me a hundred times to write the story of her life, a story which she believes reads like a novel.

Why did you choose to set the “reunion” of these four women in a prison cell? Is this prison a metaphor for memory? Is memory itself a prison or, on the contrary, is it a space where these women can roam with a freedom they never had in real life?

These four women, three dead and one living, are united in my mind, and I owe them my identity. If, today, I am this woman called Gisèle Pineau who is a writer from Guadeloupe, it is only because they were there before me. In a way, I am the fruit of their wombs, the result of all their battles, of all their dreams. My ancestor Angélique gave me my name, taken from her former master Mr Jean Féréol Pineau. I inherited my first name from my aunt Gisèle, as if it was an old dress too big for my small childish body. Julia, in her Parisian exile, never let me forget my roots in the Creole country of Guadeloupe. Finally, Daisy, gave me the gift of the French language, and a love of using words to make up stories. These women are therefore obliged to be together, imprisoned together in my memory.

In this book, you show that the much-celebrated abolition of slavery in 1848 did not rapidly change matters for women. They remained slaves, particularly to their husbands. Do you think that male slaves experienced a more immediate sense of liberty?

It must be pointed out that the 1848 abolition was not only granted to slaves. Many fought for this freedom that they had caught a glimpse of after the first abolition. For a long time, the history books were written by men whose ancestors had never known the shackles of slavery. They asked my ancestors to be grateful and move on. They told them: “Look to the future, this is all in the past! Stop re-hashing the same old story! You are free now!” Free to live in squalor. Free to live with the tarnished memory of a silenced history. Free to live with the shame of being descendants of a line whose humanity was denied. Men and women suffered in different ways after 1848. The men got drunk on this liberty, drowning their sorrows with urgency to forget that they had been defeated twice over. Defeated once because they had been reduced to animals, defeated again because they were hurt and denied their role as men, husbands, fathers. During the period of slavery, these men could not even say: “This is my wife! These are my children...” Because, above all, wives and children were their masters' property and eye-candy, for their masters' use and enjoyment... And these women had to support their partners, console them, dress their wounds. And they broke their backs trying to find the strength to overcome the shame, the anger, the despair.

Your book features women who fight for their freedom, like Angélique and Julia, and women who live in a dream world, like Daisy and Gisèle. Which category do you lean towards?

These four women have each played a role in my creation. As is said of a house, they have laid my foundations, and I needed all the materials they passed on to me in order to construct myself. Julia's earth, Daisy's dreamy sands, the water of Gisèle's tears, the cement that bound Angélique's marriage. My writing came from this hard earth, this sad water and the dust of these dreams, from loss and urgency...

The issue of exile seems highly subjective in your novel. Angélique does not feel that she belongs to Guadeloupe, which for her remains the land of her masters, and she envies her friend from Congo who misses his African homeland. But when Daisy goes to Africa, she feels nothing. She feels like a stranger there. As for little Gisèle, she feels exiled in France, where she was born, despite never having known Guadeloupe. How can we understand where we come from?

For a long time, both in France and in Guadeloupe, I have been accused of having no identity. This book tells my intimate family history, but it also tells the story of West Indians. It tells us that West Indians don’t just drink rum, dance to zouk music, eat Creole sausage and celebrate carnivals... My story belongs to everyone, it is a shared history which each person, whether here or there, can relate to. Behind each one of these women lies an integral part of Guadeloupe's history, France's history, mankind's history, with its wars, its need to conquer, dominate and possess, its need to enslave and its barbarism... I come from this history. And, today, I no longer need to prove that I belong to one country or another. I am no longer searching for an identity.

You mentioned in an interview with Chantal Anglade that it was these women's bodies that  produced a mixed-race generation, since they bore their masters' children. Do you think that, as a result, women felt more disorientated and struggled more with their identity than men?

Women reduced to slavery quickly entered into contact with their masters. They knew their beds, their flesh. They bore their offspring. For a long time they had to straddle the world of the Blacks and the Whites. They had to use constant cunning to survive, and had to see themselves as traitors in the eyes of their fellow slaves. Among my ancestors, these two worlds are brought together by pleasure and pain. In the book I wrote in 1998 with Marie Abraham, West Indian women, voices and traces, 150 years after the abolition of slavery (Editions Stock), I interviewed women in the present day and gave a voice to those in the past, our mothers, our grandmothers, our female ancestors... These women have an unfaltering sense of identity. They know that they are the pillars of Creole society, the central supporting pillar which everyone can lean against and build on. In the West Indies, they have always embodied both strength and self-sacrifice. Today, many women renounce this role. They no longer want to be cast in the mould of feigned submission. For so long, they have suffered the harsh tyranny of men, fathers and husbands and sons... No doubt they are tired of all these man-made wars on earth... All these domestic battles that they have had to fight from the beginning of time...

In a particularly moving passage, Daisy tells her sister Gisèle, who died of a broken heart, “If I had known how to write, I would have told your story[...]. Except that I would have changed the ending.” Do you think literature has this power to “change the ending”, re-write history and change lives?

Yes, writing has the power to portray things in a different light. It allows us to create stories out of a blank page, characters out of ink and paper. It allows words that are not in the habit of frequenting one another to meet, just like in real life people don’t frequent one another if they are different, too black, too ugly, repulsive... Re-writing the past can dry tears that have been shed, it can console us with words that caress our skin like comforting kisses...

Little Gisèle, who narrates her family life in her diary, writes of the suffering endured at the hands of her violent father, until one day he discovers her journal. Following this incident “she promises her brothers that she will never write stories in which people can recognise themselves again.” Is it possible to keep this promise?

It’s true that I had sworn to not write stories in which people could recognise themselves anymore. At the time, I was so scared of getting a beating that I’d have sworn anything on my life. Was it at that moment that I became a writer, without even realising it? Undoubtedly. I went on to use all the tactics I could think of to continue writing about the things that most affected me, that stirred up my suffering. And I kept going. I created so many characters who were related to me and who I rejected as strangers. I kept talking about my obsessions, my fears, my sorrows. With this book, My four women, I have finally stopped. This story, this history, is where I come from.

London, February 2007