Madame St. Clair
Madam St. Clair, Queen of Harlem is the story of a real-life woman’s rise from the slums of Martinique to the heights of Sugar Hill during the Harlem Renaissance. This remarkable story has been told before (for example in the 1997 film Hoodlum, in which Cicely Tyson plays Madam St. Clair). What is unique about Raphaël Confiant‘s contemporary telling is his focus on her early life in his native Martinique, as well as the complications that arose from her being a French-speaking black in Harlem. Confiant has devoted a long career (more than 40 books) to explorations of Martinican and Francophone diasporic culture. Many of his early works were written in Creole, though most of his later work, including Madame St. Clair, in French. Our edition is beautifully translated by Patricia Hartland and Hodna Bentali Gharsallah Nuernberg.
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