A vivid Haitian debut novel, first published in French in 1990, about women from different worlds who are bonded together by the power of ""Vodou,"" and as victims of their country's repressive fury when revolutionaries challenge its corrupt Duvalier regime. The characters of Cocotte (the black peasant woman whose reminiscences dominate a multivoiced narrative), her mulatto mistress Violaine, and the latter's doomed lover Alexandre are boldly drawn (perhaps overdrawn), and impassioned declarations are unrestrained in a rich brew of a novel that, despite its excesses, abounds with magic, color, and earnest political and human emotion.