Description: "An exhausted security guard dreams of home. A sculptor and a pothead have great sex--in the shadow of wax ex-lovers. A diversity workshop devolves into a familiar nightmare. Throughout this deadpan collection, determined, damned, and triumphant characters appear and reappear, and their links become clear over the course of the fragmented narrative. The author playfully traces the portrait of the intertwined lives of a group of Black queer and trans friends as they navigate the social violence, traumas, and contradictions of their circumstances ... the stories in Bah's The Rage Letters--set in Montreal and beyond--are sometimes brief, often conversational, and always generative of possibilities through the characters' desire, rage, and acts of rebellion"--
Brief description:
Valérie Bah is a Tiohtià ke-based filmmaker and writer whose work explores intergenerational trauma & healing, as well as mundane/radical acts of survival. Couched in magical realism, Val's narratives are driven by Black feminist thought and lived experience.
Review Quotes:
Press coverage for Les enragé.e.s and
"Les enragé.e.s describes, in a spirited language, the happy obstinacy of those who, despite setbacks, refuse to let their joy be diminished by the violence of a society that tolerates them only at the price of their silence or their obedience."
-- Le Devoir
"My intention was to write stories, construct riddles around liberation. How does someone in a very banal, realist scenario unlock something that gives them more space, or how [do] they get to see themselves in the front seat?" -- Valérie Bah, from an interview with Montreal Review of BooksCheck out an excerpt in The Offing https: //theoffingmag.com/fiction/the-night-owls/
"A daring and jubilant work" --Quill and Quire https: //quillandquire.com/review/the-rage-letters/