In this NBN episode, Hollay Ghadery speaks with Robert de la Chevrotiere about his novel, Tall is Her Body (Kensington, 2025).
Readers of Black Cake and Family Lore will be captivated by this sweeping, multicultural family story of keen observation and the supernatural in which one man’s journey to wholeness—both emotionally and physically—is shaped by the lands of his childhood and those of his ancestors, still reeling from the effects of colonialism and immigration.
Before the oracular gadèt-zafè came to warn his mother she would die, 6-year-old Fidel knew only the everyday mystery of the Guadeloupe around him. The lush greenery, the dusty roads, the sugar cane growing and the neighbors arguing, the push and pull of love and resentment between people who rely on each other—his world is small but full. Until a few moments of violence change his life forever.
Orphaned, Fidel returns to his mother’s native Dominica and whirls from one relative and reality to another, learning pieces of his own story. His heritage is one of layered secrets and sharp divisions—between the grandmothers who love him and the aunt who wants him dead, the Catholic orthodoxy of his school and the Obeah knowledge of his grandfather, and the indigenous and the colonial. The violence he’s witnessed inhabits not only strangers but himself. The spirits of the dead visit him with advice, threats, and explanations. And when he sees a path toward happiness in Canada, he must reconcile his intense, bittersweet love of his home with the possibility of leaving it.
Robert de la Chevotiere is an Afro-Caribbean immigrant to Canada, who teaches French and English language arts. He is a member of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia and has recently had a poem published in Arc Poetry Magazine’s 2021 fall issue.
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