An award-winning Haitian novel about silence, beauty, and the
solidarity of tears.
Airports are distillations of the world. I like thinking of them that
way. The hope of leaving and the desire to come home, existing side by
side. Any voyage is possible. My mind flies off toward the blue province
once again. I don't know, anymore, why I always associate it with blue.
It isn't even my favorite color.
Traveling alone from Miami to Port-au-Prince, our narrator finds comfort
at the airport. She feels free to ponder the silence that surrounds her
homeland, her mother, her aunts, and her own inner thoughts. Between two
places, she sees how living in poverty keeps women silent, forging their
identities around practicality and resilience. From a distance, she is
drawn inevitably homeward toward her family and the glittering blue
Caribbean Sea.
Blue comes alive through vivid images crowding the page, just as
memories do in real life, as if the author is trying to sort through
them, to come to grips with her own emotional conflict. Balancing the
pain and anger are spiritual bonds that connect the author to the women
who have come before her, who have created her, and with Haiti itself,
her motherland. No amount of glittering opportunity up north can prevent
her from finding her way home.
