NYPL Heritage Book Club: Cécé by Emmelie Prophète

Join staff at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library for a book discussion of Cécé by Emmelie Prophète, translated from the French by Aidan Rooney.

This is a virtual event. You must register here with your email address in order to receive the link to participate. The link will be sent to you by email approximately one day before the program.

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.