Marie Léticée, "Camille's Lakou" (Vanderbilt UP, 2025)
About this episode
Marie Léticée discusses her novel 'Camille's Lakou', exploring themes of identity and culture in the Caribbean context.
Camille’s Lakou (Vanderbilt UP, 2025), a novel by Guadeloupean writer and educator Marie Léticée, 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. 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 bildungsromanefrom the writers mentioned here typically focus on rural peasant or urban bourgeois settings, Camille’s Lakoushifts 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…
People in this episode
Guest: Marie Léticée
Topics covered
- Caribbean literature
- neocolonial culture clash
- identity conflict
- bildungsroman
- diasporic experience
- globalization
- women writers
Keywords
- Camille's Lakou
- Marie Léticée
- Guadeloupe
- Caribbean migrant
- neocolonialism
- globalization
- bildungsroman
- women writers
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Vanderbilt UP
Books & works: Camille's Lakou
Places: Guadeloupe, Florida, Pointe-à-Pitre
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