The Braid" is a novel by a french author Laetitia Colombani, first published in 2018. The book tells the story of three women from different parts of the world whose lives intersect in unexpected ways.

The first character, Smita, is a Dalit (untouchable) from India who dreams of a better life for herself and her daughter. Smita is determined to break the cycle of poverty and discrimination that has trapped her family for generations, so she decides to enroll her daughter in school despite the objections of her community.

The second character, Giulia, is a successful businesswoman in Palermo, Italy, who is struggling to keep her family's struggling wig-making company afloat after her father falls ill. As she works to save the business, Giulia discovers a dark secret about her family's past that threatens to tear them apart.

The third character, Sarah, is a lawyer in Montreal, Canada, who has sacrificed her personal life for her career. When she is diagnosed with cancer, Sarah realizes that she has missed out on important connections with family and friends and decides to take a sabbatical to travel and reconnect with loved ones.

As their stories unfold, the three women's paths cross in surprising ways, showing the power of human connection across cultures and continents. Through their struggles and triumphs, "The Braid" explores themes of family, tradition, and the universal desire for a better life.

Denouncing the injustices suffered by women 

This novel paints a critical picture of different societies, but they all share the same trait: structural inequality, which women in particular suffer. 

Smita is doubly despised, as an Untouchable and as a woman. 

Giulia has to accept a marriage she rejects in order to save her family. 

Sarah is crushed by a fiercely competitive world of work, and ends up sacrificed "on the altar of efficiency, profitability, performance". But in the end, "it's not her who's sick, it's society as a whole", sick of the inequalities and injustices that condemn individuals to suffering. 

The novel shows the extent to which being a woman can be a subjugated, almost criminalised, identity in a patriarchal society. Sarah, for example, has to hide her illness as if it were her fault: "She has breast cancer, it's not a crime." More subtly, the novel also highlights the gender stereotypes that stand in the way of happiness and fulfilment in love. For example, Giulia doesn't dare approach the man she likes because she's afraid of contradicting the social codes she grew up with.

The women's revolt

The Braid's three heroines don't remain passive in the face of these injustices. They revolt, like Smita. It's precisely the contempt in which she finds herself that enables her to analyze society with lucidity, to assert: "Men are equal before nothing." Smita's revolt even takes the form of irrepressible anger. This anger converts distress into liberating action. And even if "Her revolt is silent, inaudible, almost invisible", the Untouchable finds in this novel an echo and a tribute to her suffering and revolt. Driven by religious faith or faith in themselves, Smita, Giulia and Sarah find the strength to rise up against a society that wants to subjugate them. 

The courage of women

This novel is a tribute to all women in the fight against female inferiority. The three main characters are courageous heroines who endure in the face of adversity. The men, on the other hand, take a back seat, with characteristics traditionally attributed to women. Nagarajan, Smita's husband, is afraid to escape from the village, where Smita dares to take this bold decision. Giulia's father, in a coma, is explicitly feminized, even infantilized: "He looks like Sleeping Beauty," Giulia muses, looking at her father. This role reversal shows how gender stereotypes don't make sense. The cowardice of men even becomes the source of a rift between men and women, as Smita disconsiders Nagarajan: "She stopped loving him the moment he refused to fight".

Female solidarity

The novel traces three distinct quests of isolated women in a patriarchal society. But it also shows how women can overcome the obstacles they face by standing together. The secondary characters who help the heroines are also women, like Sarah's wigmaker, or the widow and pilgrim Smita meets. The braid that links Smita, Giulia and Sarah symbolizes the universal solidarity that binds all women together, whether they know each other or not.

An interweaving of narratives. The novel opens with a definition of its title: a braid is an "Assemblage de trois mèches, de trois brins entrelacés." This definition is obviously not insignificant: just as a braid is a harmonious tangle of hair, so the novel weaves, links, interweaves three narratives. These narratives, like hair, are apparently unrelated to each other. But the novel shows how the destinies of these three heroic women form a single whole, a single braid. The novel is also punctuated by verse poems in which a braider speaks. The braid symbolizes the link between the plot and the art of storytelling. In this, it embodies the figure of the author.