Haiti, a lonely forgotten black island abandoned to its poverty and misery. A white woman, Madame lives in a fantasy in which she helps to teach, inspire and feed the retched masses of the world. She is in fact completely cut off from them - a continent away. The awakening of desire between Madame and her black servant boy, Patrick, will lead her from her isolation out into the real Haiti, where she will for the first time see and hear the land and its people, discover the reality of her own body, her identity and come face to face with her own mortality.