Cécé

Some people will never leave. It hasn’t even crossed their mind. It’s not that life here was beautiful. Or that they were unaware that death wasn’t far behind. They simply didn’t have the means to go anywhere else, beneath another piece of sky that would be different than this one. Bethlehem or Blessed Spring, same problems, same chances at happiness.

You didn't pour your heart out around here, unless you'd lost someone close. Before and after funerals, sobbing and moaning was acceptable, but afterwards you went back to your own pain, which was often more violent than death itself, the ultimate deliverance, that in some cases was wished for.

Célia is a woman in her early twenties who lives with her Grand Ma in Cité of Divine show more Power, one of a number of slums of Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti. This novel is set in the late 2010s, not long after the devastating 2010 earthquake of Haiti, and the country has largely descended into a living hell of cités that are run by a series of armed lawless young gangs that engage in successive battles for local control, with little if any intervention by local police or government officials. Célia is living with her maternal grandmother, after the death of her mother, and as the novel opens Grand Ma has just died, leaving Célia without a means of income or protection, as she dropped out of school early, cannot cook or run a store, and has no other means of supporting herself or her alcoholic Uncle Fredo — save for the world’s oldest profession.

This is the age of the internet, though, and people living in cités and in other regions of the world want to know what is happening in Haiti. Célia gets a mobile phone, adopts the moniker Cécé la Femme, and starts taking and posting photos of the numerous corpses of murdered gang members, squalid conditions in the Cité, and statements from new gang leaders about the promises they will deliver to everyday people in exchange for protection fees. As Cécé's Facebook thread becomes ever more popular she gains the attention of Westerners, including religious leaders who are more interested in gaining followers than in supporting the country, and a French woman who is eager to sell beauty products such as whitening creams and other cosmetics and also has no interest in helping the people escape poverty.

Cécé does enrich herself by selling photos that she has taken, but she also tries to help the women closest to her in the cité by offering the cosmetics at little or no cost to sell to customers.

As the book closes the last gang member, Jules César, predicts that he will die soon. He is close to Cécé, and it’s just as hard to determine what her fate will be. She has thousands of followers, but undoubtedly has created innumerable enemies, and given the poverty in the Cité of Divine Power and her lack of protection it seems likely that she might also suffer a violent end.

I initially had mixed feelings about Cécé, in part because I wasn’t willing to accept that conditions were truly that bad in current day Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, despite my reading numerous news articles to the contrary. There truly isn’t anyplace else for poor Haitians to go to, as their neighbors on the island of Hispaniola, the Dominican Republic, actively and aggressively expel them to avoid having their own conditions worsen, and the Secretary of Homeland Security in the United States removed temporary protected status for residents of Haiti last year. Having given the book more thought, looking at the passages I had highlighted which are at the beginning of this review, and especially talking with Kay/RidgewayGirl about the book, I have increased my rating to 4.5 stars, in keeping with her rating. Thanks to Archipelago Books for another outstanding work of translated fiction, and I look for more works by Emmelie Prophète. show less

Were those soldiers baking in the heat even alive, with nothing to their names but the hour that had just gone by? The police wouldn't come. They all knew it. The policemen who lived in the Cité of course did too. There was nothing to report. A popular song was playing on a nearby radio. Everything was broken beyond hope.

Cécé lives in a slum in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, with her grandmother and uncle, until her grandmother dies and it's up to Cécé to support both her and her uncle. And so she sells just enough of herself to keep them going and finds refuge from the poverty and violence in social media, which may just become the thing that allows her to stand on her own feet.

This could be a very grim story, and it is. The conditions show more of the poverty Cécé lives with and the violence that exists alongside that poverty are horrific, but Cécé, despite her access to the curated lives of Facebook and instagram, isn't filled with self-pity. And she cares about the people around her, from her uncle, broken by his experiences in the US, to the girlfriend of a murdered gang leader. This is an excellent novel set in a place too rarely written about, I hope it finds a wide readership. show less

I was really liking this when I first started it. The main character's voice is distinctive, but there is not much of a plot. The same things happen over and over again, which is part of the point, but it was not interesting to read all the repetition. Then towards the end, the pacing got weird. I wouldn't mind reading this narrator/character in another story.

Cécé, malgré elle, devient enregistreuse de son époque. Armée de son seul téléphone, elle filme les aller-venues dans sa Cité, criblée par la violence des gangs et affaiblie par la pauvreté. Elle est une sorte de journaliste ce qui lui permet de gagner en influence, en argent et en protection ô combien fragiles. Cette histoire est à la fois froide comme la distance que Cécé veut imposer entre elle et son entourage et sensible comme l'amour de Cécé pour les siens, même si elle ne l'admettrait jamais.
C'est un court roman magistral sur la précarité, la fierté, le désespoir et la survie des Haïtien-nes qui vivent dans les pires conditions.