La Tresse is the first novel by Lætitia Colombani, published in 2017 by Bernard Grasset. Born in 1976 in Bordeaux, Lætitia Colombani is a French director, actress, screenwriter and writer. Thanks to La Tresse, she received numerous awards such as the Prix Relay des voyageurs lecteurs, the Trophée littéraire des femmes de l'économie and the Globe de cristal for best novel. In 2018, the novel was adapted into a children's album, under the title La Tresse ou le Voyage de Lalita. A real success, La Tresse is then one of those novels that are recommended and transmitted, by word of mouth.
"I wanted to give him this novel as a tribute to his courage. I was far from imagining such success. ».
It was while accompanying a friend suffering from breast cancer to choose a wig that Lætitia Colombani had the idea of La Tresse.
The Braid: three continents, three women, three stories
Three women, three lives, three continents and three destinies. This is what Lætitia Colombani tells in her novel La Tresse. First in India, we discover Smita, a young woman belonging to the Untouchables. In Indian society, the population is organized according to a caste system according to a criterion of purity. The Untouchables are then excluded from any caste, because, according to Hinduism, they committed impure deeds during their previous lives. Hindus consider that they pollute by their mere presence. As a result, they are deprived of any relationship with people integrated into the caste system. It is therefore outside Indian society that Smita, one of the three women in the novel, situates herself. Married to a rat hunter, she cleans the toilets of her village with her hands, as did her mother.
In Sicily, we meet Giulia, a worker who works in her father's hair treatment workshop. This is the last workshop of its kind in Palermo that has been passed down for three generations. She sorts, washes, bleaches and dyes strands of hair provided by the city's hairdressers. When her father is the victim of a serious accident, she discovers that the family workshop is drowning in debt. In Canada, we follow the fast-paced life of Sarah, a lawyer, mother of three and twice divorced. She will be promoted to head her cabinet when she learns of her illness.
Chapter after chapter, alternating the narrators each time, Lætitia Colombani makes us discover fragments of the lives of these women, between hopes and disillusions. While everything seems to oppose them, we understand throughout the pages that they are linked by something beyond them.
Portraits of women at the dawn of a new life
When we meet these women, they are at a key moment in their lives, at a crossroads. Faced with the adversity of life, they decide to take their destiny into their own hands, all driven by the same thirst for freedom. For Smita who lives in deep poverty, she dreams that her daughter can escape this tradition or rather curse that is transmitted from mother to daughter. She will do everything to ensure that her daughter has access to an education, even if she has to go against local beliefs and oppose her husband's wishes.
For Giulia, in her twenties, she refuses the idea of a fiancé imposed by the family as well as the dictates of society. When her father is hospitalized, she has to take over the family business. From then on, all the responsibility and burden of the workshop rests on his shoulders. Shaking up her life, which she wanted to be quiet, she found herself confronted with the adult world, with the delicate mission of saving the future of the company and its workers.
As for Sarah, a renowned lawyer, she has, throughout her career, built a wall between her professional and private life. But, this wall gradually cracks when she learns that she has breast cancer. Knowing the ruthless world in which she evolves, she will do anything to hide her illness. Thus, she will try, as best she can, to fight two battles at the same time: her many trials and her chemotherapy that exhaust her.
A quest for emancipation against the dictates of society
At the heart of La Tresse, Lætitia Colombani highlights the condition of women in our time, when the concept of "mental load" is increasingly addressed. She paints with accuracy and sensitivity portraits of women who are both strong and courageous. That of a mother ready to do anything for her daughter, a young adult at the dawn of her life as a woman and a modern woman, affected by cancer. Whether it's Smita, Giulia or Sarah, they all carry the weight of tradition and discrimination in their own way.
Despite cultural differences, the image and role of women from the point of view of society remain unchanged. In front of the man, she must be submissive, devoted, hardworking, be both a good wife and a model mother. Through this quest for emancipation, these heroines seek to assert themselves as women and to free themselves from social conventions. Preferring to choose their destiny, they run counter to a patriarchal society that has been established for centuries. In the hope of a better future, they take winding, complicated and dangerous paths to achieve liberation.
The Braid, a symbolic title
The title La Tresse is the keystone of the novel. If it reminds us of the intimate and universal gesture of a mother who styles her daughter's hair, it also symbolizes the bond between these three women. Therefore, we wonder how their struggles will manage to intertwine. How will Smita's desire for emancipation change Giulia's life at first, then Sarah's? And the answer is simple: what we call the butterfly effect.
Without knowing it, they are united in their destinies by an invisible link: that of a simple braid cut. Indeed, this braid cut is that of Smita who undertakes a pilgrimage to offer her hair to the god Vishnu, in the Temple of Tirupati. Donating your hair is an ancestral and millennial tradition that allows you to renounce any form of ego. Following this offering, we can imagine that Smita's braid ends up in Giulia's workshop, to become a wig. Maybe the one Sarah will wear during her treatments. This is the butterfly effect.
An intimate and universal novel
With poetry and simplicity, La Tresse is an ode to women, between solidarity, hope and resilience. Smita, Giulia and Sarah embody all women, both ordinary and authentic, inscribed in their daily lives. Through this novel, Lætitia Colombani demonstrates that the fight of every woman is that of all women. A fight against inequalities.
