Cantique de l'acacia

The child was not born yet, but Io-Anna had tattooed her future name in the lower back: Joyce. And Grace, the mother-in-law, fortune-teller, enchantress and healer, had been visited by a promising vision. "Trust is the path of what escapes misfortune. That word, Io-Anna left it on deposit with Grace so that it would be forwarded to Joyce later. Because she does not know if she will have the heart to tell him, herself, what she had the heart to live: how, to escape an unjust patriarchal order, she escaped on a bike, to through the marsh mud, with Sunday the peddler who will later become the father of the child; how little Joyce arrived, inanimate, on a floating raft. "You have to be three to make a child," says Grace, "the male, the female, and the Invisible." At the foot of the acacia, the tree of innocence, a magnificent hymn to the courage to live, carried by three generations of women in revolt in Africa today.--English abstract by Seuil.