My Husband Is Worse Than a Madman: He's a Man : Translated from the French by Yves Henri Cloarec

An older woman from the Comoros Islands remembers and narrates her troubled life with her first husband: the vulgar, controlling and wife-beating government bureaucrat she once believed would be the man of her life. In addition to the violence of which she was the victim, the young bride she was had to confront humiliation and exile from the safety and comfort of her family; but, because she "was brought up that way," taught that such was the life of a wife, she accepted everything-for a time. Indeed, as her wise grandmother used to teach her: "Despite its venom, the scorpion still ends up in the hen's gullet."

My Husband is Worse than a Madman is not merely an attack on male hegemony in Comorian society, nor is it even solely a call to the raising of consciousness of women there. It is also a biting satire of the effects of colonialism on small nations. Attoumani celebrates the cultural integrity of his island nation in spite of France's colonial and post-colonial dominion. The novel exists in a unique space at the intersection of Gender, Religion, Culture, Colonialism... and a devilish sense of Irony tempered by sensitivity.