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Valérie Bah
A speculative comedy comprised of a carousel of Black and Queer voices being pushed further underground by urban prosperity.
Subterrane connects us to a constellation of Black queer and trans voices, the hair braiders, tattoo artists, holistic healers, weed dealers, and sidewalk horticulturists struggling to make a life in New Stockholm. Together they illustrate how entire communities, despite being exploited in the name of prosperity, resist and enact their own freedom. New Stockholm, a settler colonial metropolis like any other, is unofficially divided between two worlds. Its upwardly mobile form the facade of its gleaming eye, but their prosperity and affluence are not the focus of hot young artiste Zeynab’s government-funded experimental documentary. Her lens trails into the city’s depths instead, to the polluted and overlooked district of Cipher Falls, one of New Stockholm’s last affordable neighbourhoods, where creatives and other anti-capitalist voices increasingly find themselves pushed into demeaning, dead-end jobs. In this sprawling underground network, Zeynab’s lens focuses on activist Doudou Laguerre, as he attempts to sabotage an insidious construction project.
Esplanade Books2024
“A riot! Valérie Bah strikes just the right notes in this ludic exploration of lives caught in the clash between gentrification, activism and art-making. Arguing against the disposability of Black, queer/trans and working-poor individuals whose shimmering idiosyncrasies, from the endearing to the startling, thrum on the margins of a bustling metropolis, Bah's character-driven polyvocal text demands that we not look away from the humanity on whose backs urban centers are built. Irreverent, raucous, hallucinatory – this novel illuminates tendrils of beauty tumbling out from fissures of urban decay.” –Myriam J. A. Chancy, author of Village Weavers and What Storm, What Thunder
Available October 2024
Trade paperback
200 pp 7.5" x 5"
ISBN13: 9781550656671
CDN $22.95 US & International
US $18.95
Ebook
7.5" x 5"
ISBN13: 9781550656718
CDN $14.99