trans. Lara Vergnaud
A rare book that depicts the isolation and poetry of rural life.
Everyone is asking about his identity. Gay? Muslim? French? Moroccan? Instead of choosing a side, he writes a book. A book about the forest and the city, Paris and Tangiers, shame and forgiveness, dating apps and spiritual discovery. A book about growing up as a diaspora kid in rural France, with desires that want to emerge at any cost. Told in mesmerising prose, How to Leave the World is a beautiful non-answer.
Shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses 2025
Marouane Bakhti is a writer and arts journalist. Born in Nantes, France to a Moroccan father and a French mother, he studied history and journalism at the Sorbonne. He writes criticism for Mouvement magazine and lives in Paris. How to Leave the World is his first novel.
Lara Vergnaud is a literary translator of French and has translated over a dozen novels, including works by Zahia Rahmani, Fatima Daas, Mohamed Leftah and Mohamed Mbougar Sarr. Lara was born in Tunisia, grew up in the United States and currently lives in southern France.
Visceral scenes and fragments of shame, desire and displacement crystallise as sentences that are felt before they are understood. Bakhti writes diaspora as distension, a condition of freezing and unfreezing through successive intimacies and encounters: ‘Voice, silence, voice, silence.’ What it takes to imagine social and physical freedom is what it meant to keep reading this incredible book.
I was struck by its kaleidoscopic scope, despite its brevity – from the earthy and vital imagery of Bakhti’s childhood, through the transformational effects of grief and faith. A beautiful book!
This is an astonishingly good debut book. I was immediately drawn in and adored the beautifully crafted prose. With sensitivity and nuance, Marouane Bakhti explores the complexities of family and cultural identity as a member of the Moroccan diaspora – and one who happens to be coming to terms with his sexuality. There is so much heart in this story, you can’t help but feel like it was a privilege to have been taken on this journey. Marouane Bakhti is without doubt a promising new writer and I am excited to see what he does next.
In 2005, Françoise Vergès published a book with Aimé Césaire, in which she recorded – three years before his death – powerful remarks by the poet, as incisive and combative as ever, yet imbued, as always, with the universal humanism to which he had remained committed throughout his life. It is fortunate that, drawing inspiration from this interview, Another Sun allows us to hear, in their intertwining, the voices of Césaire and Vergès herself, conveying a message of emancipation and fraternity/sorority that our world needs to hear today.
Waiting at Martinique Aimé Césaire International Airport, in the city of Le Lamentin, Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro browses the airport kiosk. Alongside books by Césaire, it offers titles by Frantz Fanon, Maryse Condé and Patrick Chamoiseau. She picks up a copy of Nègre je suis, nègre je resterai, a conversation between Françoise Vergès and Césaire published in 2005, and embarks. In Another Sun, Rodríguez Castro and Vergès revisit that seminal conversation, resulting in an eclectic text shaped by ongoing struggles.
With poems by Danielle Legros Georges, Wole Soyinka, Ishion Hutchinson, Clarisse Baleja Saïdi, Aimé Césaire and Jean Érian Samson.
Françoise Vergès is a writer, decolonial anti-racist feminist and curator. She is currently working on the fabrication of premature death, imperialism and anti-imperialism, the colonial roots of fascism, private property and racism. In parallel, she is working on a film about communist anti-colonial struggles on Réunion and in the Southwest Indian Ocean based on her parents’ personal archives and her own. Her recent publications include: Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism (2024); A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonizing the Museum (2024); A Decolonial Feminism (2021); The Wombs of Women: Race, Capital, Feminism (2020); and Resolutely Black: Conversations with Françoise Vergès, with Aimé Césaire (2019). She has written documentary fifilms on Maryse Condé and Aimé Césaire (both 2013) and was a project advisor for Documenta11 (2002) and La Triennale de Paris (2012). Vergès is currently senior research fellow at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation, University College London.
Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro is a writer and editor. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Freie Universität Berlin in 2018, recipient of a fellowship with Anne Waldman at Naropa University in 2019, and a textual residency fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2025. Her essay ‘El nuevo sublime’ was a finalist for the National Essay and Criticism Award in Colombia in 2019. Rodríguez Castro is the editor of Dream of Europe: Selected Seminars and Interviews, 1984–1992 (2020), a collection of previously unpublished lectures by Audre Lorde, which was shortlisted for the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism in 2021. She is also the author of The Echo (2025) and Blood (2026).
