UnCUT/VOICES press is proud to announce an autobiographical novel by Lawrelynd Bowin, from Guinea - Conakry, now settled in Belgium.
 
The multilingual author, a trained actor and dedicated mother, has a fine sense of dramatic dialogue and offers scenes of brutality tempered by resistance and flowing into love.
 
Like most UnCUT/VOICES books, Swimming in a Red Sea adds a new dimension to our understanding of FGM. Rare as an immigrant woman's bildungsroman, the narrative features an expatriate whose body reacts to clitoridectomy and infibulation with an insistent iconic complaint: spontaneous hemorrhage. Her vulva bleeds at random, imposing a sinister memento - including staining Belgian carpets and floors - on an otherwise unremarkable bourgeois routine. The intrusion disrupts the smooth surface of normality, transforming the unremarkable - caring for children, going to the gym, showering, shopping or cooking for dinner, not to mention pleasurable sex with her husband - into potentially lethal emergencies. As a result, the African-born wife and Dutch husband navigate with care their intercultural encounter - also a significant theme. Seeking herself but with strong ties to others, the author's example embraces a plethora of victims who have also been cut and endure the traumatic aftermath of life.
 
A Preface by Dr. Fabienne Richard, President of GAMS, and Afterword by Dr. Tobe Levin, Associate at Harvard and Oxford, locate Bowin's achievement in the context of African and African American literature in which FGM is a major theme.