by Shara Kronmal

Cécé by Emmelie Prophète translated from the French by Aidan Rooney is a compelling novel about a young Haitian woman, Cécé, who lives in a poor and dangerous neighborhood of Port-au-Prince called the Cité of Divine Power. The novel, published in September 2025, begins some time after the death of the narrator’s grandmother and guardian who died of fear during an episode of gang violence. Cécé has few options to support herself and resorts to prostitution. Later she learns to sell her social media presence for money and “likes.”

In Cécé’s world, death is everywhere. Her mother, who was addicted to drugs, abandoned her after her birth and died of AIDs when Cécé was two years old. In the Cité, people die of gang assassinations, alcoholism, AIDs, and other scourges of poverty and despair. Death is ever present and those who live there “were all aware that everything and everyone was fragile.”

Cécé is relatively protected from her environment until her grandmother dies. She’s a spirited child, small and unattractive, who runs wild in her neighborhood, has a foul mouth and defends herself violently against a school bully but even so remains somehow decent and innocent. Once her grandmother dies, in the same bed where she and Cécé are listening to the gunfire outside their home, Cécé is vulnerable to sexual violence, fear of going hungry, the indignity of sex work, and having to hustle for enough to eat and maintain her online status. She witnesses life at its worst and is traumatized by it.

The novel is full of vivid description. About the soundscape: “The Cité of Divine Power was essentially noise. Noises muffling other noises. Shots fired in broad daylight to frighten a shopkeeper …, radios on full volume, …, neighbors arguing, screams of children getting beaten.” The Cité is also filthy. There are no public services; homes have no electricity or running water, and garbage is everywhere. “People had stopped noticing the general state of deterioration, the chaos taking up every square inch of the Cité. Deep down, they were just as decayed as their surroundings.”

The Cité stinks. It’s imbued with the smells of stagnant water, cooking fat, products to whiten the skin, spices, alcohol, feces and more—odors which “came together and choked everyone.” Periodically bodies, shot, disfigured, or decapitated, show up among the debris. Cécé’s photos of the dead add to her fame on social media and are even bought by foreign journalists.

It’s a world awash in the horrid. A world that even the author, separated by only a few miles from the real-life Cités, can only imagine. Because if you’re not from the Cités, you don’t enter them. In the novel, the only exceptions are a few journalists in search of lurid details for their news reporting and white missionaries from the United States — “well-meaning folks in white T-shirts on which was written ‘Jesus loves Haiti’ or ‘Haiti is for Jesus,’ who cried at our poverty but understood the utility of our misery when it came to selling the promise of an eternal and better life in the Kingdom of Christ.” Modern-day colonialists who provide no more relief than the politicians and police and who, occasionally, wind up hostages to the gangs.

Somehow Cécé perseveres. Using the earnings from her social media-influencer business and from Carlos, the main client from her sex work, she supports herself and her Uncle Fredo, an alcoholic who returned from an attempt to make a life in the United States and becomes Cécé’s responsibility. She circulates among her neighbors and even with some of the gang leaders. She tolerates Carlos but refuses to leave the Cité with him. The Cité is her home and, it seems, her destiny.

In a 2021 interview with the French journal, Le Point, the author says: “In writing this book, I wanted to give voice to these Haitians [ordinary people like Cécé and her neighbors] who live in the middle of this violence, because we hear about the gangs, but not them.” (Translation mine.) Prophète’s novel succeeds in this. It is lush with Cécé’s voice; the reader sees the Cité through her eyes in all its dirt and squalor and meets the people who surround her, who give her life meaning. And somehow, surprisingly, Prophète manages to do this without making her novel a tragedy. Prophète, like Cécé, does not romanticize Cécé’s circumstances; like her protagonist, the author is clear-eyed and practical, without indulging in stereotypes.

Cécé is a window into a world the reader will likely not encounter otherwise. Experiencing this world through the novel and its formidable narrator is a gift from the novelist and the accomplished translation by Aidan Rooney. As the novel ends, Cécé continues to post on social media, and one can’t help but hope she gets the last word in.