Camille’s Lakou

Camille has worked her way up from the Guadeluopean lakou where she was born and raised to the heights of Orlando, where she is a successful motivational speaker. Her assistant, Evelyn, is struggling as a single mother, especially since she has been keeping the existence of her son a secret from her family in Jamaica. As Camille relates the story of her life to Evelyn, she urges Evelyn to see her difficult life as one of great fortune--＂My girl, a woman falls, but she never despairs＂--and to fully share her joys and successes with her loved ones.

Camille’s Lakou tells the story of Camille, a young Caribbean girl living with her single-parent mother in a 1960s urbanized zone at the edge of Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe, following her through her adult life as a Caribbean migrant in Florida. Author Marie Léticée explores neocolonial culture clash and identity conflict themes that will be familiar to readers of the Francophone Caribbean coming-of-age novel and its revisions by women writers such as Capécia, Lacrosil, Manicom, Schwarz-Bart, Condé, Pineau, and others. Léticée makes it her own by fleshing out a time and place not well-represented in Guadeloupean literature. While previous bildungsromane from the writers mentioned here typically focus on rural peasant or urban bourgeois settings, Camille’s Lakou shifts location to an impoverished urban environment. ＂Lakou＂ is translated as ＂courtyard＂ or, more colloquially, ＂yard.＂ The author explores the culture and politics of lakou society while raising the issue of how this social dynamic is transformed through the impact of globalization and dispersal into a diasporic experience outside the island milieu of Camille’s childhood.

In a collaborative translation effort between the author and Kevin Meehan, Camille’s Lakou will bring the realities and joys of Léticée’s Guadeloupe to an English audience for the first time.

Marie Léticée is the pen name of the multimedia, multilingual Guadeloupean writer and educator Akosua Fadhili Afrika. Her first novel, originally titled Moun lakou, was published by Ibis Rouge Éditions, a French Guyanese press, in 2016. A sequel, Du haut de l’autre bord, appeared in 2020 and charts the further development of characters introduced in Moun lakou. Both novels are now distributed by Orphie Éditions, which acquired Ibis Rouge in 2021, and a third volume is in progress.

Kevin Meehan is professor of English and Caribbean studies at the University of Central Florida. He is the author of People Get Ready: African American and Caribbean Cultural Exchange and articles published in journals including Callaloo, Small Axe, Narrative, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. He and Marie Léticée have previously published their co-translations of Haitian poetry.