Excerpt from Cécé by Emmelie Prophète, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

My mother was born in the big room, with the help of a midwife. My grandfather had already left.

"With some stuck-up tramp of a girl. Nothing to her name and already mother to four kids." There was no stopping Grand Ma once she got started. The passing years did nothing to diminish her anger.

Of my mother, only two likenesses remain. One is a small, yellowed ID photo taken when she was six years old for her school enrollment. She's staring into space, probably intimidated by the photographer. She looks sad. In the other, she's standing to the right of Grand Ma, who's seated in a large chair, with Uncle Frédo to her left. No one is smiling. They're all rigid. The background image is a waterfall. Water, grass, rocks ... a landscape that should be charming but isn't. My mother, Rosia, is wearing a long pink dress with straps and ruffles that go down to her white stockings. Her shoes are black. Grand Ma is dressed in a white outfit and heeled sandals. She has a small purse on her lap. The purse is still in the dresser. Uncle Frédo has on a white suit and a small red bow-tie around his neck, his shoes are well-polished, and he's standing up straight. He's four and Rosia eight.

I look a lot like my mother. When I was little, I'd stand up to Grand Ma and say that it was me. That made her laugh. A sad laugh. My mother died when she was twenty. I was two and have no memory of her. Not even a smell. Nothing.

"I think she caught that dirty disease," Grand Ma would whisper, by which she meant AIDS.

Pastor Victor and his wife Andrise came to explain to her that evil forces had killed her daughter and were killing lots of young people like her in the city. But Grand Ma was no fool. The young doctor she had met at the General Hospital – very clean, honest-looking, and so nice she prayed to God right there that Frédo would become like him – had told her it was AIDS.

Rosia was already in pretty bad shape when she'd finally taken her to the hospital. She'd been wasting away for several weeks and my grandmother was worried. The young doctor asked only affirmative questions, already sure of his diagnosis.

"You've lost a lot of weight? You have trouble swallowing?" "You have frequent diarrhea, and vomiting?"

"You have lesions on your skin? You've been coughing?" He was handsome and impassive. He recommended tests, just to be sure, and that the girl, given her state, be hospitalized. Grand Ma had no money. The public hospital was on strike. The young doctor sent Grand Ma to one of his colleagues at the Health Center in Portail Léogâne who gave her some serums for free, medicine that would help Rosia feel better. She died a month later.

Grand Ma said she regretted not beating her, not keeping her away from the hoodlums who had convinced her to drop out of school at fifteen, after a chaotic trajectory. She could have been like that young doctor who had given them the medicine. She could have gone to college. But she started drinking and taking drugs, and got herself pregnant at eighteen with no idea who the father was.

"Anything can happen when you're high all the time," said Grand Ma. Whenever Grand Ma chewed her out, and slapped her, Rosia would leave home for days.

"I did everything to protect you, though," Grand Ma would whisper as she stroked my hair. "I always kept you close, even if it suited your idiot of a mother. You'll sleep against my back until you're all grown up and settled. I won't let anyone take you away from me. I've already paid my price with your mother."

Excerpted from Cécé by Emmelie Prophète. Copyright © 2025 by Emmelie Prophète. Excerpted by permission of Archipelago Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.