When Noenka’s husband refuses her request for divorce, she flees her hometown in Suriname, on South America’s tropical northeastern coast, for the capital city of Paramaribo. There life for queer Black women like her is a daunting balancing act between meeting societal expectations, discovering love, and staking out a sense of self. As Noenka sifts through questions of race, sexual expression, and familial memories, desperation leads to disaster, and the consequences of being cast out of an unbending world are made brutally clear.

Originally published in the Netherlands in 1982 to overwhelming critical acclaim, Astrid Roemer’s fragmentary novel – with its tales of plantation-dwelling snakes, rare, pungent orchids, and circling vultures – is a mesmerizing classic of intersectional feminism and lesbian literature. Her prose cuts like a knife, carving out the oppressive realities of postcolonial life in shining, resonant fragments, revealing a deeply human portrait of a defiant woman: I’m Noenka, which means Never Again. Born of two polar opposites, a woman and a man who pull even my dreams apart. I’m a woman, even though I don’t know where being female begins and where it ends, and in the eyes of everyone I’m black, and I’m still waiting to discover what that means. Each step Noenka takes through this rainforest nation echoes as proof of her Madness.