[2] His time in Diamant and Saint-Esprit allowed him to become well acquainted with the local fishermen and to learn more about their lifestyle, which would later influence his popular novel La Rue Cases-Nègres.
During World War II, there was a blockade on the French West Indies preventing anybody, including Zobel, from leaving Martinique or traveling to France.
The Martiniquais appreciated Zobel’s stories because they accurately portrayed the habits and customs of the island and its people without exaggerating the exoticism of their lifestyle.
Most notably, in 1950, Zobel published one of his principle works, La Rue Cases-Nègres, a story greatly influenced by his childhood and time in Martinique.
Some anecdotes of his experiences in Dakar are recounted in the collections of short stories Mas Badara (1983) and Et si la mer n’était pas bleue (1982).
[3] In 1995, Zobel published D’Amour et de Silence, an art book of watercolors and some unpublished poems and extracts from his personal journal.
His final publications were published in 2002: Gertal et autres nouvelles, a novel combining unpublished texts and extracts from his personal journal which he held from 1946-2002; Le Soleil m’a dit, a complete poetic work.
The struggles of the impoverished cane-sugar plantation workers, and the ambitions of a loving grandmother who works hard to put the main character through school are the core focus of the novel, which also describes life in a colonial society.
While La Rue Cases-Nègres is Zobel's most renowned work, the author started his writing career in 1942 during World War II with Diab-la (a tentative English title could be "The Devil's Garden"), a socially conscious novel similar to Jacques Roumain's Masters of the Dew (published a year or more later).
With Diab-la, Zobel tells the powerful story of a sugar-cane plantation worker freeing himself from colonial exploitation by creating a garden in a fishermen's village of Southern Martinique.