Climb to the Sky (CARAF Books: Caribbean and African Literature Translated from French)

Climb to the Sky collects a novella and eight stories by one of the most celebrated and versatile French Caribbean writers, Suzanne Dracius. Set in the author’s native Martinique and spanning the twentieth century, these narratives display a powerful grasp of the individual set against an often violent history. The multi-generational novella "Her Destiny on Climb to the Sky Street" opens with the gripping account of a runaway slave’s survival of disease and abuse aboard a slave ship and concludes with his descendant, a young woman living in a post-abolition world whose life of abuse and torture by her employers nonetheless resembles that of a slave. In "Sweat, Sugar, and Blood," a woman held captive by her husband in their home must choose between safe ignorance and dangerous knowledge. Other stories, such as "Chlorophyllian Creation" and "Written in Lime Juice," convey the intimacy and directness of autobiographical essays. Each of Dracius’s heroines achieves a transcendental experience through her own imagination and will, whether she is escaping natural catastrophe (such as the eruption of Mount Pelée), enduring jail time under interrogation by the national police, or coping with the ennui of life in a bourgeois home. Although the results of these historical, natural, or existential circumstances are unpredictable, what unites these women is deliverance.CARAF: Caribbean and African Literature Translated from the French

Literature & Fiction

DRACIUS, Suzanne

Literary

University of Virginia Press

The Dancing Other takes readers to France and Martinique to reveal the struggles of people who belong both places, but never quite feel at home in either. Suzanne Dracius tells the story of Rehvana, a woman who feels she is too black to fit in when living in mainland France, yet at the same time not dark-skinned enough to feel truly accepted in the Caribbean. Her sense of dislocation manifests itself at first in a turn to a mythical idea of Mother Africa; later, she moves to Martinique with a new boyfriend and thinks she may have finally found her place—but instead she is soon pregnant, isolated, and lonely. Soon her only reliable companion is her neighbor, Ma Cidalise, who regales her in Creole with supernatural tales of wizards. Rehvana, meanwhile, watches her dream of belonging fade, as she continues to refuse to accept her multicultural heritage.

The Dancing Other (The French List)

United States

Seagull Books

In&nbsp;Elektrik, eight women writers from Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe come together to explore, in poetry and prose, the complex nature of Caribbean existence. A single mother has an intimate encounter with a migrant worker; a teenager discovers her sexuality in the shadow of her twin sister; a poet summons a chorus of sirens, only to warn them: "Keep your voices' beauty from waylaying sailors." Through glittering translations from French, Elektrik sings the experience of Franco-Caribbean identity today. These writers communicate through the silence of the past to the unknowability of the future--forever in the rare language of literature.

Elektrik: Caribbean Writing (Calico Series, 8)

Dambury, Gerty

Kanor, Fabienne

MARS, Kettly

Agnant, Marie-Célie

Octavia, Gaël

Jean-Gilles, Mireille

Bonhomme, Adlyne

Two Lines Press

LUMINA SOPHIE dite surprise (French Edition)

IDEM

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Books by DRACIUS, Suzanne