This is a novel of education: social, political, radical, and medical. The protagonist is collective, a group of medical students from French Guiana at the University of Montpellier, France, who learn what separates them as Caribbean people from their French and African counterparts.

Juminer characterizes the three principal types of men drawn together in the stuggle for emancipation: "those who sooner or later will opt for violence; those who, by their sterling example, prefer to work patiently in the socioprofessional arena, in order to instill a certain moral and civic sense in their countrymen; and finally, those who wear their bourgeois legacy like a curse and will be ready to try anything, including terrorism, to prove that they are not enemies of the people."