Quebecer Édith Blais reflects on 450 days as a hostage in Africa in new book
CBC
Almost 250 days into her 15-month captivity in Mali, Édith Blais realized her life was no longer her own, and she didn't know if she'd ever get it back.
Separated from her travelling companion, Luca Tacchetto, and the group of women with whom she'd earlier been held hostage, the Quebec woman found herself in a truck racing across the Sahara in the company of yet another group of armed men. Despite the imminent danger, all she felt was numbness.
"I no longer had the strength to fight against oblivion,'' she writes in a new book about her ordeal. "I had become docile, a puppet in their hands. I was their hostage: both a treasure and a nobody.''
The fact that Blais survived to tell her story is improbable.
She and Tacchetto, her sometimes boyfriend, were kidnapped in December 2018 by an armed Islamic terrorist group in eastern Burkina Faso as they drove toward the border with Benin.
Some 450 days later, the pair made world headlines after escaping their captors in Mali and flagging down a passing truck, with Blais carrying a jug of water and 57 poems that she'd written in captivity.
Those events, and everything that happened in between, are chronicled in The Weight of Sand, which was released in French earlier this year and is now being published in translation in English.