Maude Vézina is a doctor in population health. In Yu Kamher first novel, she draws on her public health research work to skilfully construct a fictional narrative, set in the intimacy of Lao women.
There is a traditional practice in Laos called “yu kam”, which women who have just given birth undergo in order, they believe, to promote their recovery. During this ritual of the bed of fire, which can last up to a month, the new mother must lie on a bed heated by embers and is subjected to a strict diet, essentially composed of hot infusions, rice and salt.
It is on this bed of fire that lie Mee and Miou, two friends who have just given birth and who come to terms with their new reality in very different ways. How to talk about mental health in a language where the word “depression” does not exist? Tim, a Quebec journalist who came to Laos to document postpartum depression, will cross paths with Mee and Miou through their friend Seng, who joins him to break this taboo.
In simple, gentle writing, Maude Vézina tackles, without falling into darkness, a difficult and universal subject that she knows well, having written a master’s thesis on the bed of fire and postpartum depression in women. Lao. Transported into a culture so far from ours, nourished by the precise and lively descriptions of the city of Vientiane, it is also on an immersive journey that the author invites us, through a story that promised to be rather predictable and linear, until fate gets carried away, one breath away.
Yu Kam
Maude Vezina
Quebec America
256 pages