“This feeling of the end of the world, when you are ten years old and you understand, at three foot nine, that you’re going to have to abandon the dryness of your ochre earth if you don’t want to die. I would have stayed there for thousands of years, on my knees against my land, if I hadn’t have been so thirsty.

Mama stroked the skin of my neck, all wrinkled and dry, she saw me old before I reached the age when you become a woman. She fixed her eyes on the stars and, silently, she took Papa’s hand. There is no need to talk for hours when you know that the time has come to leave everything. I was the one you hold on to when you are ready to die on the pathways of the abyss.

I was the one for whom farmers or teachers are ready to become obscene profiteers, who take everything and give nothing, as long as the skin on my neck was hydrated. I heard when Mama said we will soak up any humiliation. It doesn’t matter. We will survive. I had to die thousands of kilometres away from home.”

“Celine Lapertot’s first novel, What my silence wrote, was like a knife wound. One day too many, an abused child kills her torturous father. Women who dance under the bombs is a long cry of fury, sounded with a calm and almost gentle persistence, that of Antigone back among the dead: she will never give up.”Elle