Translated from French by Aidan Rooney
Paperback ISBN: 9781962770415
Ebook ISBN: 9781962770422
This item will be released on September 25, 2025.Cécé, née Célia Jérôme, lives in the Cité of Divine Power, a neighborhood warped by gang life in the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. Here she has witnessed the deaths of her mother and grandmother; here she takes care of her bedridden Uncle Frédo. At night in the Cité, she hears gunfire—the ever-present sound of men disputing their territory—alongside radios on full volume, vendors selling their wares, children fighting and playing. Caught up in “the race to exist,” Cécé buys herself a smartphone and adopts the social media moniker Cécé La Flamme, amassing a following by posting images of her surroundings: her lunch, gullies, and stark images of dead bodies on the street. For Cécé, these document her movements in the Cité; for her followers, they are glimpses of a world wholly other than their own, brutal but compulsive viewing. Cécé is a portrait of a young woman desperate to lay claim to her experience. It is a searing account of the commodification of violence in the age of social media, of community and survival, of human connection.