CÉCÉ, by Emmelie Prophète, translated by Aidan Rooney
The art of self-invention is hard to master for Cécé, the eponymous heroine of Emmelie Prophète’s unforgettable, award-winning Haitian novel, translated from the French by Aidan Rooney. There are few viable paths for young women in the Cité of Divine Power, a fictional slum on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince in the grip of gang rule. You can sell things, from rocks to water to repurposed trash, or you can sell your body.
Twenty-year-old Cécé turns to sex work following the death of the beloved Grand Ma who raised her. Cécé’s drug-addicted mother died of AIDS when she was 2. She has only her alcoholic, catatonic Uncle Frédo for family now, a man who made it to the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 only to vanish for the next 12 years, returning home entirely broken. The American dream hovers over the Cité, but almost never materializes.
First published in 2020 under the title “Les Villages de Dieu,” “Cécé” is the sixth novel by Prophète, who is also a poet and diplomat (she served as Haiti’s justice minister from 2022 to 2024). Her Cité is lawless and menacing, the procuring of food a constant strain. Violence is commonplace. Cécé counts corpses wherever she goes: the near-perfect bodies of slain adolescents; “newborns tossed by their mothers into trash cans”; assassinated gang leaders, one an unrecognizable “human rag,” another’s genitals charred and eaten. I’ve not experienced a book with such a high death count since we read Elizabeth Gaskell’s “Mary Barton” at school.
The Cité of Divine Power is brought to life with skill. Its streets blaze and vibrate, its makeshift homes are shadowy with dismay. The noise is constant: children screaming, neighbors tending wildly to their disputes, street vendors shouting, religious fanatics chanting all night. Gunshots are fired for the slenderest reasons. The streets reek of hot fat, fetid canals, human waste. One of Cécé’s clients stinks of “mint and drool.” Her only regular, Carlos, brings her food and wants her to meet his mother, but Cécé is disgusted by his bulk and his delusions.
If the novel sounds relentless, it isn’t. Cécé is a cool, cleareyed narrator, who takes pains not to sensationalize. Sometimes her restraint makes the reader feel impertinent for drawing conclusions at all. There is always the sense that Cécé could put it better herself.
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The post A Heroine to Root For in an Unforgettable Novel of Haiti appeared first on New York Times.
