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For readers of Homegoing and Frying Plantain, a stirring intergenerational saga stretching from the Caribbean to Canada where womanhood and mothering demands what the body wants to forget.
Woven together with folklore and memory, We've Been Here Before begins with the childhood stories of Lise-Rose, who struggles with speech and coming of age in a community anchored in both West African spirituality and the Catholic Church. Lise-Rose must choose either to follow the ancestral ways of her father, who is spiritually bound to the sea, or her mother, who has rooted herself in Catholicism. The path of her life changes, however, after an encounter with a shape-shifting figure from the village.
Like Lise-Rose's ancestors, her descendants struggle to honour ancestral knowledge while living on foreign lands. Margaux, Lise-Rose's great-granddaughter, embarks on a new life with her mother in Canada. Facing racism and isolation, they attempt to establish roots in a country that seems both limitless and oppressive.
Across generations, Sodhi explores how a woman reclaims a connection to her stories and ancestors while forging her own voice.
We’ve Been Here Before takes you to places that are achingly familiar, even if you’ve never been there at all. From hope to heartache, from the salt air of Dominica’s villages to the damp boot smell of Toronto’s elementary schools, this sparkling debut brims with sensory richness. Sodhi’s mothers and daughters, and their generations of hard-won wisdom, will linger with you long after reading.
A haunting and at times surreal tale of family ties reminiscent of Edwidge Danticat and Toni Morrison that promises to transform readers even as it transports them to another time, Dominica, Toronto and back, and across generations. In We’ve Been Here Before, Sodhi tells a powerful story of the ties that bind women together despite trauma and seemingly insurmountable odds.
Sodhi plunges us into the imaginative landscape and dreamspace of the Caribbean, crafting an intergenerational epic that moves fluidly across time, place, and memory.
We’ve Been Here Before is both tender and unflinching — a tribute to the strength and resilience of Caribbean women and a testament to how that power endures and transforms across time.