Code Noir
Fictions
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction
Winner of the Danuta Gleed Literary Award
“Code Noir is storytelling at its deepest and most intimate. These stories are magic and you must enter them as if you, too, are wondrous.” —Dionne Brand, author of Nomenclature, Theory, and Map to the Door of No Return
Canisia Lubrin's debut fiction is that rare work of art—a brilliant, startlingly original book that combines immense literary and political force. Its structure, deceptively simple, is based on the infamous Code Noir, a set of real historical decrees originally passed in 1685 by King Louis XIV of France defining the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire. The original code had fifty-nine articles; Code Noir has fifty-nine linked fictions—vivid, unforgettable, multilayered fragments filled with globe-wise characters who desire to live beyond the ruins of the past.
Accompanied by black-and-white drawings—one at the start of each fiction—by acclaimed visual artist Torkwase Dyson, and with a foreword by Christina Sharpe, Code Noir ranges in style from contemporary realism to dystopian literature, from futuristic fantasy to historical fiction. This inventive, shape-shifting braid of narratives exists far beyond the boundaries of an official decree.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Windham Campbell Prize–winning poet Lubrin (Voodoo Hypothesis) makes her fiction debut with a thrilling and inventive collection centered on Black life in the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora. Each of the 59 entries follow a full-page drawing by artist Torkwase Dyson that incorporates a passage from the 1685 Codes Noirs, the French laws for chattel slavery. The stories place characters in a range of situations, from the quotidian—making yogurt in a German abbey ("Goodbye, Achilles"), meeting a lover in a Chinese restaurant ("The Wild Formulas of Love")—to the earth-shattering: a friend beaten by police ("No ID, or We Could Be Brothers"), a family torn apart by deportation ("Other Forms of Hunting"). Highlights include the moving "At the Spirito Santo Station," about two tourists' encounter with a Senegalese man in Venice, and the incandescent "Black Rhino," about an orphan baby learning to talk. Throughout, Lubrin plays with form and genre, interspersing traditional narratives with more experimental modes such as dramatic dialogues ("The Boy, the Girls, the Dog, and I Was There"), epistolary exchanges ("Theatre of the Spectacular," "A Philosophical Question"), and aphoristic writing resembling prose poetry ("Earth in the Time of Aimé Césaire," "Bad Temper"). Her gorgeous and innovative style shines on nearly every page ("We entered a great expanse, glistening and with every bright colour in every pattern, all networks and perfumes against amnesia"). It's a monumental achievement.
