Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Camille's Lakou

Camille's Lakou

Léticée, Marie

Paperback

Series: Global Black Writers in Translation

General FictionLiterary Fiction

ISBN10: 0826507670
ISBN13: 9780826507679
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
Published: Aug 15 2025
Pages: 160
Weight: 0.50
Height: 0.39 Width: 5.83 Depth: 8.82
Language: English
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.

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