A bildungsroman told from the point of view of a little girl, Time of the Cotton Madras paints a portrait of what was modest peasant life in Morne-Rouge, Martinique, was like in the 1920s. The narrator’s daily life is filled by the presence of her mother Délie, Aunt Clotilde, Aunt Acé and Madame Casimir, and goes by as she works in the fields, as children are born and raised. A life still burdened by the weight of ancestral slave oppression.

With the same warmth that Françoise Ega showed in Letters to a Black Woman, Time of the Cotton Madras is a charge against colonial stereotypes and patriarchy. For Ega, writing is the ideal means to achieve emancipation and, above all, an effective universalism, in line with the demands of black feminism.