Khady Koita Book order

Blood Stains, a best-seller in France, is a Diaspora memoir about growing up in a traditional family in Senegal and emigration to Paris. Its feisty protagonist, Khady, suffers genital mutilation at age seven, a brutal rite that entails lifelong distress, sexual trauma and harrowing childbirths. Married off at thirteen to a man two decades older, the teenager bears five children, and, as a battered wife, blows the whistle on an immigrant community that serves men's interests. Not content to remain a victim, however, the young woman fights for education, earns an independent living and becomes an activist. Her courageous battle against FGM as founder and president of the European Network brings her to the U.N. to urge international support.

"Readers of this book will want to take advantage of the editors' detailed summaries of the novel's characters--including 'keys' to surrogate/conflated characters (such as H.D.'s use of her sometime nom de plume, Delia Alton, as both author and protagonist of this novel) and H.D.'s use of dream and symbolism. Valuable for modernists; required reading for H.D. scholars."--Choice "Engages many important critical questions: the place of the occult in modernism, women writers' response to war, the historical and biographical contexts of H.D.' s late writing. The editors give a forceful presentation of the novel's significance."--Eileen Gregory, University of Dallas "A haunting novel of spiritual duress and survival, it remains eerily relevant today."--Donna Hollenberg, University of Connecticut Never before published, The Sword Went Out to Sea is the first book in H.D. prose trilogy that continues with White Rose and the Red and concludes with The Mystery. This complex, semi-autobiographical novel combines H.D.'s interest in the occult and experiences during the Blitz, and sheds light on the aesthetics and origins of literary modernism.