J. Xavier LaChance / JXavier LaChance
What was the sin of Gomorrah... about which even the Bible is close-mouthed? In a patriarchal society, would not women having the upper hand, the ’whip hand,’ be considered worse than the abominations of Sodom?This is the story of a white woman in the dark heart of Africa, a woman abandoned to savagery for the sake of political expediency... to appease a post-colonial world, where white flesh is only so much meat. Chastity Benz is that woman, an author of romance novels, who finds the fabric of her Western reality shredded in the chaos of revolution. Stripped of family and publicly declared dead, Chastity is redefined in the too-real world of men who brutally enslave her, body and soul, making her the plaything of the heir-apparent to an African fiefdom.Thus is Sa’Adam of the Tazsh who, recognizing that she is wracked by various kinds and shades of guilt (manifested as winged demons, who inhabit her alcoholic haze of repression and suppression), forces her to descend into a psychological hell of self-discovery to emerge finally, if not as herself, as the woman she might have been. Throughout, she is either victim or victimizer...sometimes masochist in love, other times sadist in depravity. At all times, she is the daughter of former white colonialists, destined to bear the brunt of atrocities once visited on the African populace - the price she pays, in Gomorrah fashion, for the 'sins of the father.'Each of the hundred sequential scenes is expressly written as a stand-alone short story, complete with a surprising or poignant climax. Read it and weep... for the person you might have been.
