[12/01/26] Alexandre, Alfred: The Ballad of Leïla Khane

Wendy's Subway, paperback

Translated by Nathanaël

Publication Date: December 1, 2026

Publisher Marketing: 

Alfred Alexandre’s The Ballad of Leïla Khane is a poem of epic love and exile. A variation on the Persian myth of Laylâ and Majnûn, the ballad in three acts recasts the lovers’ tragic story between two cities, the ancient city of Carthage—where St. Augustine was plunged into “the effervescence of shameful loves”—and the Colombian city of Cartagena de Indias, where the poet learned that “(K)hane was, in a forgotten language, the other word for grace.” Opening each poem with the refrain “Leïla says that . . . ,” the poet traces, in her voice, the lovers’ arrivals and departures across oceans, in language’s harbors and absences, and throughout time remembered and figured anew. Against colonial erasure, the ballad becomes, with each invocation, a site of imagined return, and an echo of the archipelagic landscape of the Americas, in which their “bodies in love are like islands.”

First published in 2019, The Ballad of Leïla Khane is the first book to be translated into English by Martinican writer Alfred Alexandre, a leading voice of post-Créolité.