During the winter of 1966, a Boeing 707 of Sabena arriving from Bujumbura landed on Belgian soil. A half-asleep girl, holding a small brown suitcase in her hand, trotted behind a flight attendant, who handed it over to a man wearing a white shirt with a funny white collar, a black suit, and on the back of the jacket a small golden cross. The hostess greets "Monseigneur" before splitting the crowd and disappearing.

The heroine of the novel is a Métis child of a Burundian mother and an unknown Belgian father, taken from her maternal family to be, like many others, given in adoption to a "good Catholic family" in Belgium. Throughout the narration, the hidden part of the narrator questions her "licit" part in the hope that one day both will join. The reader follows the slow metamorphosis of the child and the amputation of his memory until his fierce struggle against oblivion, his efforts to "reattach" his broken halves lead to the discovery of his astonishing identity.

To raise the curtain, to open the padlock of the little brown suitcase, is to traverse a singular journey imbricated in a collective history long shelved in the cupboard, a secret of state and a secret of Church: the forced rapt of the half-breeds, “the children of shame” born under Belgian colonization before the Independences. A moving and lucid autofiction, which shows to what extent a religious institution can place itself above the laws and make suffer in the name of a distorded pseudo-morals.