In writing her fifth novel, a fictive autobiography of the title character, Maryse Condé has said that she "felt a strong solidarity with Tituba," and at the same time she admits hesitating "between irony and a desire to be serious" in the invention of this "mock-epic character." This article explores the reader's relationship to the novel as a variation on this hesitation. Once Condé sets up Tituba's authority to narrate her story, the reader is left in the precarious position of hesitating

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... ween getting the author's irony and desiring to be serious about Tituba's narrative of a painful history. By using and effectively abusing the way in which irony has traditionally been seen to create a hierarchy of those who get it and those who do not, Condé moves her readers in and out of a stable position in relation to Tituba's narrative, inviting us to think more critically about how we read Tituba back into history.