Video: Fabienne Kanor Reads from “Humus”

French-Martinican writer and filmmaker Fabienne Kanor has been a writer-in-residence at City of Asylum/Pittsburgh for the past three months. Before returning to France, City of Asylum hosted a reading for her and Marvin Victor, another writer-in-residence.

Kanor read an excerpt from her novel Humus, a work which uses multiple narrators to reconstruct the history of African women in the West Indies slave trade. Joining her for the reading was Pittsburgh-based poet, singer, visual artist, and filmmaker Christiane D. Leach. Together the women created an event somewhere between performance art and literary reading. At times Leach’s vocals provided emotional accents to Kanor’s words while at other moments her voice dominated the stage.

Below is an excerpt of the reading highlighting the collaboration between Christiane D. Leach and Fabienne Kanor.