Quote by Mayotte Capécia: “I am a woman, and I am a Black woman; both facts demand their own resistance.”

Being a woman under patriarchy and being Black under racism are not the same struggle — each creates specific forms of oppression. But they overlap and compound each other in the life of a Black woman, making resistance to both simultaneously necessary and distinct.

Je suis martiniquaise was published in 1948, the same year the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted. Martinique was then a French overseas department, and debates about identity, assimilation, and Blackness were central to Martinican intellectual life, shaped by the Négritude movement that Aimé Césaire had launched from the island.

Martinican novelist whose 1948 autobiography Je suis martiniquaise was one of the first autobiographical works by a woman from Martinique to receive international attention. Frantz Fanon's critical engagement with her work in Black Skin, White Masks made her a significant figure in the Négritude-era debate about identity.