We Are the Birds of the Coming Storm

We Are the Birds of the Coming Storm is a wild novel that oscillates between fiction and reality. The story centers on two young women: Voltairine, a dancer who no longer dances but whose body is still haunted by the movement of dance, and her soulmate Emile, a young woman recovering from unexpected cardiac arrest. The girls are inseparable, and both their lives have been shattered by the horrors of rape.  The opening of the dreamlike novel sets a bleak stage as Voltairine watches Emile lying in a hospital bed, her temperature dropping to dangerous levels. Voltairine is filled with sorrow and faces the blunt reality that her soulmate is going to die, chronicling each minute in her diary. However, Emile ultimately survives the attack.

Later, at the cinémathèque, Voltairine and Emile meet a young girl whom they call “the little girl at the end of the lane,” who is obsessed by the Haymarket Affair of 1886. Shes an odd girl, obsessed with words, scribbling pages of notes throughout the movie screenings. She helps draw the pair out of their state of painful helplessness, and eventually the trio openly rebels against the newly elected oppressive regime of barbarian kings who rule their society. 

We Are the Birds of the Coming Storm explores repression, revolt, and madness, telling a story that is not only revolutionary but also cautionary—of three women who let their spirits fly like birds as the daunting storm ascends.

“The book is really good. . . . Though We Are the Birds of the Coming Storm begins, at first glance, as a story ‘about friendship between women — about the difficulty of finding someone to ‘protect [your] absurd manias — grief and loss, sexualized violence and mental health, Lafons novel takes a highly nuanced turn and asserts itself as a novel ‘about the power of nothing, in an atavistic sense: it becomes a novel about the anticipation, of what comes before.”

“Lafon’s novel is unafraid to tackle the darkness of rape and the struggle of women who fight to take back their lives. An unusual narrative style emphasizes the pain, chaos, energy, and madness of the story it tells, while slipping into a world that exists yet sometimes seems unreal in its haunting power.”

“We Are the Birds of the Coming Storm [is the story] of female protagonists seeking their own identities. . . . . Identity is not out there to be claimed but something that they must define. Outside influences seek again and again to violate their boundaries of personal definition, to force another, undesired, definition onto them. . . . Lafon cuts straight to the heart.”

A wild novel navigating between fiction and reality. The main characters: two young women, the narrator, a dancer who no longer dances but whose body is still haunted by the movements of dance, and her soulmate Emile, who recovers from sudden death syndrome. They share the painful experience of having been raped. A third character, whom they call ‘The Little Girl at the End of the Lane, an odd girl obsessed with words—her own and of the writers she finds meaningful—will draw them out of their state of painful helplessness. The trio will take back the night, determined not to let ‘the barbarian kings who rule society ‘cut [their] nerves.

We Are the Birds of the Coming Storm (a line from a poem by a nineteenth-century American anarchist woman) is about rape, dance, radical politics (particularly anarcho-feminism), repression (overt and subtle), revolt, madness . . . A revolutionary tale told in poetic prose, it is also a cautionary tale—as one critic said, its subject could be: ‘On the danger of not going far enough, for birds of the feminine sex.

Lola Lafon is a French composer, singer, and writer. David and Nicole Ball have translated nine books from French, including Abdourahman A. Waberis Passage of Tears, also published by Seagull Books.