Confined to a psychiatric hospital following the murder of her young daughter, Emma Bratte refuses to speak any language but her mother tongue. Dr. MacLeod has brought in an interpreter, Flore, to help him evaluate Emma's fitness to stand trial. "Both crazy and too lucid," an articulate and knowledgeable Emma relates her long battle against despair, through striking images of her lonely but determined and creative struggle to win the love of a mother misled by a racist society and then through tales of the suffering and resistance of some of her female forebears. These narratives, which are both epic and dramatic, and their contrasting reception by the officious psychiatrist and the sensitive Flore, produce rich layers of experience and meaning in this concisely narrated work.

A poet, short story writer, young adult fiction writer, storyteller, and novelist, Marie-Célie Agnant was born in Haiti and has lived in Québec since 1970. Many of her books evoke the hardships endured by women in the West Indies and the difficulty of legitimizing this part of history even today. Her work has been published in Québec, France, and Haiti, and translated into several languages. Her novel Le dot de Sara (Remue-Ménage, 1995) was a finalist for the Desjardins prize, her collection of short stories Le silence comme le sang (Remue-Ménage, 1997) was a finalist for the Governor General’s prize for fiction, and she has won the Prix Gros Sel for her children’s book La légende du poisson amoureux (Mémoire d’encrier, 2003), the prose creation prize awarded by the SODEP for “Sofialorène, si loin de la délivrance,” and the prestigious Prix Alain-Grandbois for her third collection of poems Femmes des terres brûlées (Éditions de la Pleine Lune, 2016).

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