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Blue
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.
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.
128 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 23, 2007
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April 11, 2022
First published in French in 2007 as Les Testament des solitudes, Blue is an award-winning autofiction novel by Emmelie Prophète, translated by Tina Kover. A poet first, Blue was her first novel, a "transitional" work that bore the clear imprint of her poet identity, as she described it to Brad Listi on the Other People podcast. She could never write its like again.
Prophète's fiction debut starts about a month after 9/11. The unnamed narrator waits on a flight to Haiti in Miami airport as she muses on death, grief, solitude family histories, presents, and questionable futures in the context of entwined Haiti and US narratives.
To try and get closer to what Prophète accomplished: she used words and the page to invert the power relationship between the narrator with her "limited" Haitian passport and an increasingly hostile and surveillance-prone USA determined to treat passengers like terrorists. Through poetic prose replete with recurring motifs that appealed to sight, scent, sound, taste, and touch, Prophète imbued her narrator's memories with the power to transgress national borders, land mass, ocean, and time itself. Her forgetfulness, grief, despair, confusion, anger, love, frustration, yearnings, isolation, and hope are the terraforming engine that uprooted the two countries from their fixed positions.
We start one sentence by a Starbucks and the next near the mountains in southern Haiti. The travel is seamless. To realize the nameless narrator's powerful desire to gather her life and the lives of those she knew to tell their stories, Prophète's Blue became its own time zone within which countries merged in a non-linear reality that felt more real to my lived experience in the Caribbean than any reality outside its covers discernible to ordinary sight.
Some of the portals to this parallel world were death, coffee, pictures, faces, music, dance, blood, disasters, the color blue.
I often puzzle over how to critique translations with no knowledge of the original but I can only assert that all I have written before is an obvious credit to Tina Kover's translation prowess. I noted in particular how certain words played key roles in weaving the novel's intricate sensory and thematic patterns, vitally important in a novel that worked for me like a long poem. I gave paragraphs the kind of intense focus I bestow on stanzas—not at all the way I usually read a novel with no related examination pending.
When I learned of this book I started it immediately. I could not understand the low rating I saw on Goodreads and Amazon, knowing the high hurdle of quality Black writers from the Latin Caribbean must overcome for their works to be translated into English. My only response to those reviews is a quote from Sofia Samatar's 2014 essay in The Guardian:
"Black and African writing does need freedom. It needs freedom from the repetition of tired complaints and the issuing of dusty and ineffective prescriptions...Our literature doesn’t need better writers; it needs better readers."
I hope my review will be a reason you decide to be that reader. Enter Blue's realm where Wednesday greets you at the door in fashionable wear, where the walls talk of ruin, in your hand are stones of solitude, and you are surrounded by blue.
Bookstagram | Twitter | The Book Slut
Prophète's fiction debut starts about a month after 9/11. The unnamed narrator waits on a flight to Haiti in Miami airport as she muses on death, grief, solitude family histories, presents, and questionable futures in the context of entwined Haiti and US narratives.
To try and get closer to what Prophète accomplished: she used words and the page to invert the power relationship between the narrator with her "limited" Haitian passport and an increasingly hostile and surveillance-prone USA determined to treat passengers like terrorists. Through poetic prose replete with recurring motifs that appealed to sight, scent, sound, taste, and touch, Prophète imbued her narrator's memories with the power to transgress national borders, land mass, ocean, and time itself. Her forgetfulness, grief, despair, confusion, anger, love, frustration, yearnings, isolation, and hope are the terraforming engine that uprooted the two countries from their fixed positions.
We start one sentence by a Starbucks and the next near the mountains in southern Haiti. The travel is seamless. To realize the nameless narrator's powerful desire to gather her life and the lives of those she knew to tell their stories, Prophète's Blue became its own time zone within which countries merged in a non-linear reality that felt more real to my lived experience in the Caribbean than any reality outside its covers discernible to ordinary sight.
Some of the portals to this parallel world were death, coffee, pictures, faces, music, dance, blood, disasters, the color blue.
I often puzzle over how to critique translations with no knowledge of the original but I can only assert that all I have written before is an obvious credit to Tina Kover's translation prowess. I noted in particular how certain words played key roles in weaving the novel's intricate sensory and thematic patterns, vitally important in a novel that worked for me like a long poem. I gave paragraphs the kind of intense focus I bestow on stanzas—not at all the way I usually read a novel with no related examination pending.
When I learned of this book I started it immediately. I could not understand the low rating I saw on Goodreads and Amazon, knowing the high hurdle of quality Black writers from the Latin Caribbean must overcome for their works to be translated into English. My only response to those reviews is a quote from Sofia Samatar's 2014 essay in The Guardian:
"Black and African writing does need freedom. It needs freedom from the repetition of tired complaints and the issuing of dusty and ineffective prescriptions...Our literature doesn’t need better writers; it needs better readers."
I hope my review will be a reason you decide to be that reader. Enter Blue's realm where Wednesday greets you at the door in fashionable wear, where the walls talk of ruin, in your hand are stones of solitude, and you are surrounded by blue.
Bookstagram | Twitter | The Book Slut
January 27, 2022
The January book of the Nervous Breakdown Book Club
A month or so after 9/11, a thirty-year-old Haitian woman sits in an airport after attending a funeral in Miami for one of her mother’s sisters. She reflects on this in-between state (the airport waiting area) where she feels most comfortable; on her country's poverty and how that silences people, especially thinking of her mother. The first-person narrator reflects on how she herself will never leave Haiti; how nothing was better for her aunts who emigrated, that death is found elsewhere too. She reflects on how she found her voice in poetry as a teenager in the quarter of Port-au-Prince she always returns to.
This is a novel, but I wasn’t surprised to see the author’s biography lists her as a poet first. Every sentence is imbued with poetic prose. I don’t need plot, but I’m left feeling I missed out on the essence of this work, perhaps because my lived experience is so different from hers—a way to be "lost in translation.”
*
Almost immediately after I finished the book, I read the next piece in Siri Hustvedt’s Mothers, Fathers, and Others: Essays, which I’m slowly making my through. It’s titled “Translation Stories.”
The above is what I struggled to articulate to myself after reading this novella. Hustvedt expressed it for me.
*
The podcast interview (connected to the "book club") with Emmelie Prophète is illuminating and sobering.
A month or so after 9/11, a thirty-year-old Haitian woman sits in an airport after attending a funeral in Miami for one of her mother’s sisters. She reflects on this in-between state (the airport waiting area) where she feels most comfortable; on her country's poverty and how that silences people, especially thinking of her mother. The first-person narrator reflects on how she herself will never leave Haiti; how nothing was better for her aunts who emigrated, that death is found elsewhere too. She reflects on how she found her voice in poetry as a teenager in the quarter of Port-au-Prince she always returns to.
This is a novel, but I wasn’t surprised to see the author’s biography lists her as a poet first. Every sentence is imbued with poetic prose. I don’t need plot, but I’m left feeling I missed out on the essence of this work, perhaps because my lived experience is so different from hers—a way to be "lost in translation.”
*
Almost immediately after I finished the book, I read the next piece in Siri Hustvedt’s Mothers, Fathers, and Others: Essays, which I’m slowly making my through. It’s titled “Translation Stories.”
A poem is made only of words, but the reading of the poem is not made only of words—reading is an embodied act of felt rhythms and sounds and meanings in a person who lives in and out of a culture.
The above is what I struggled to articulate to myself after reading this novella. Hustvedt expressed it for me.
*
The podcast interview (connected to the "book club") with Emmelie Prophète is illuminating and sobering.
January 22, 2022
Blue isn’t an easy novel to read. It is short and requires work from the reader, in the sense to keep pace with what’s going on. Time is fluid and it travels without warning. There is a lot of back and forth – given it is a stream of consciousness novel, and that to me is one of its major selling points.
Blue is a lyrical memoir of Haiti. It is a story of the narrator and her life there before she moved. It is a story of her mother and two aunts and all of this is replayed as the narrator sits at an airport, waiting for a flight from Miami back to her native island.
Emmelie Prophète writes about Port-au-Prince through the daily lives of its inhabitants, the ones that aren't visible sometimes – resisting and inviting voyeurism. We don’t get to see the city as much through its blueprint as much as we do through the narrator – in a minimal space of that of an airport. The comparisons are made – from where the narrator is to what has been left behind, and sometimes event similarities. That of women being subdued, of people making sense of their identities as they go along, and how Haitians are portrayed in North American media, and how it impacts them as people.
There is so much to unpack in this novel. From the outside world to the inside sanctum of thoughts and prayers, Prophète reveals the narrator’s emotions and thoughts in relation to incidents of the past and how it all ties up to the present.
Blue also conveys a sense of solitude – the airport, the island, the inner workings of the mind, the stream of consciousness, and more than anything – the distances between places gives the reader a strong feeling of isolation and contemplation.
The writing is fluid. The translation is reflective of it, on every page. Kover makes it a point to show most of the time and not tell through the translation. It makes you want more, and imagine the most. Sometimes it is tough to keep up with the plot – so much so that it seems like there is no linear plot and yet you know it is the story of a place, of home that is synonymous with the colour Blue, the one that is about forgotten memories, painful ones, that surface once in a while, as you wait to be transported.
Blue is a lyrical memoir of Haiti. It is a story of the narrator and her life there before she moved. It is a story of her mother and two aunts and all of this is replayed as the narrator sits at an airport, waiting for a flight from Miami back to her native island.
Emmelie Prophète writes about Port-au-Prince through the daily lives of its inhabitants, the ones that aren't visible sometimes – resisting and inviting voyeurism. We don’t get to see the city as much through its blueprint as much as we do through the narrator – in a minimal space of that of an airport. The comparisons are made – from where the narrator is to what has been left behind, and sometimes event similarities. That of women being subdued, of people making sense of their identities as they go along, and how Haitians are portrayed in North American media, and how it impacts them as people.
There is so much to unpack in this novel. From the outside world to the inside sanctum of thoughts and prayers, Prophète reveals the narrator’s emotions and thoughts in relation to incidents of the past and how it all ties up to the present.
Blue also conveys a sense of solitude – the airport, the island, the inner workings of the mind, the stream of consciousness, and more than anything – the distances between places gives the reader a strong feeling of isolation and contemplation.
The writing is fluid. The translation is reflective of it, on every page. Kover makes it a point to show most of the time and not tell through the translation. It makes you want more, and imagine the most. Sometimes it is tough to keep up with the plot – so much so that it seems like there is no linear plot and yet you know it is the story of a place, of home that is synonymous with the colour Blue, the one that is about forgotten memories, painful ones, that surface once in a while, as you wait to be transported.
March 29, 2022
An incredibly moving and reflective read, beginning with our narrator sitting at an airport - in transit - on her way back home to the blue province - Haiti following her aunt's funeral. In non-linear poetic prose, it seamlessly moves between the present and past to tell the story of the women of this family, three sisters, one of which is our narrator's mother and their growing up. While she waits, her thoughts meander - stitched along, engaging with all of the sensory, much on coffee and death. It's about much more than the story contained within and what is left out, the silences are pregnant with meaning. I'll never not be captivated by stories that show women's sheer will and strength and the cost of survival and carving out freedom. It's also about the beautiful landscape of the blue province and the every day there; the theft of its resources too. Motherhood is servitude and sacrifice, and womanhood is the burden of bearing witness. Women barter their bodies to fund escape, only to find themselves exiled in unaccepting foreign lands disappearing into a different kind of servitude. It's a month after 9/11 when our narrator is sitting at the airport, so the hostility towards migrants is palpable, the alienation is a different kind of acute. Between the women, familial bonds are strained by - migration leaves scars too; there is shame in returning home. She grieves at the familiarity and finality of death. We are lost somewhere between the present and memories, in transit like our narrator - time loses meaning, but we want to stay with each sentence. Vivid, poetic, and suffused with much emotion. Tina Kover does an excellent job of translating.
February 2, 2022
I discovered Emmelie Prophète's 'Blue' recently and read it today. This is my first book by a Haitian author 😊 So happy!
A woman is sitting in an airport. She is travelling from one country to another. It might as well be from one world to another. She thinks about her mother and her mother's two sisters, and how their lives panned out very differently. The rest of the book moves between the past and the present and across geographies as we get to know the stories of the narrator's mother and her sisters.
The above story is just a simple outline. The actual book is more complex, more fascinating than that. Emmelie Prophète's writing is very poetic. I am not saying this in a general way, but in a literal way. The book could be read just for that alone. I can't resist thinking how it would be, if the book, instead of being organized in paragraphs of prose, had been structured in poetry stanzas like a novel-in-verse. I feel that this would have made the book even more beautiful, because we tend to read prose in a faster flow, but we tend to linger on poetry lines to take in their beauty, and this book deserves this lingering, and this pausing and this experiencing of its beauty. The second thing I want to say about this book is that, probably because of this reason, this book cannot be read like a straightforward prose work. If we expect an initial setting up scene, an introduction to the characters, the story moving with the progression of events, some dialogue, and a climax with a revelation, it is not going to be there. Atleast, in the form we expect. A better way to read the book is to go in with no expectations and start reading from the first page, from the first word, and just go with the flow and continue reading, and let the book come to us. In test cricket, there is an advice given to batsmen, who go out to bat on the first day of a test match, when the ball is new and it is swinging. Veteran opening batsmen say that the best way to play under these conditions is to let the ball come to you, and not to go after the ball. We can translate that advice to this book, and go with the flow, and don't think too much, and just read, and let the book come to us. When we do that, at some point, the book opens its heart and speaks to us and reveals its secrets to us, and it is beautiful.
I'll leave you with some of my favourite passages from the book.
"We remained tethered to our sorrows, like horses of despair. We ran, heads bent low, wounded and silent. We shared nothing. Words lived only in our heads, or on scraps of paper. We surprised ourselves sometimes by suffering. Expressions were complaints, and we looked outside ourselves for ways to exist, to live. I hid myself away in books, lost my head over heroes of fortune late into the night, and woke in the morning with other solitudes. Terrifying and unspeakable."
"I watch the rain fall, a thousand fairylike drops on the tarmac. Life is beautiful when you’re watching it from a distance, watching it through the window of an airport somewhere else. I imagine that it’s even better when your head isn’t filled with several deaths and more farewells than you know what to do with. The rain is lovely here, soft and steady. Like it was once, on the corrugated metal roof of the house on hot July evenings. Those rains, which were also sometimes storms of fury that came straight from the graves of the dead in the cemeteries, carried away children and objects and even our memories."
"That was what always happened in this family after someone died. You had to die to earn the right to be loved."
"My mother’s heart makes the same sound as her sewing machine, which I have known my whole life. It’s older than my brothers and me. Its brand is a woman’s first name: Linda. It has always looked like a museum piece. All of my little-girl dresses came from beneath her magical needles that broke sometimes. I’ve seen many women from this family sitting behind that machine, which makes an ancient mechanical noise like Maman’s heart, like the heart of all women who have been poorly loved...I’ve seen sewing machines that looked like the ones belonging to other women in the quarter, but none ever looked like Linda or had a woman’s name like hers. She wasn’t the most beautiful, but she was unique. She had been built to withstand time, like her owner, to watch others pass through and go away, even the youngest ones. She outlived Maman’s two sisters."
"I used to be afraid of the dark. I was afraid that the flame of the lamp would flicker so hard it would fall. The crickets accompanied the night with their long traumatizing songs. But since then, the night has won me over to its cause of solitude, unobtrusive and infinite. I am overly reliant on its calm, making up for the years of unwarranted fear, of eyes shut tight. My only beautiful times have been in complete darkness and heavy rain. Every word of love, of fate, has taken the path of the night. Daytime is the cruel bearer of “I”: it is all that light on the beaten earth of my childhood quarter, and on the marshes of Gros-Marin, and the Church of Saint Paul, and the runway of this airport—reality and its incomprehensible detours, its aches, its way of not making concessions."
"My stories have always come to me when they’re already in progress, almost over, even my love stories. I have hidden myself too often beneath words and their images; I’ve only ever just brushed the surface of anything, I am nothing but a memory trying to exist, and no one would notice, possibly, if I disappeared. I tell myself that no one sees me in this airport; my fate is to be a fleeting memory. I would like to learn the business of everyday life, real life, quivering and ever changing."
"Each morning is the start of a new war against nature, against misery, against oneself or one’s neighbor. Survival has many meanings and almost no purpose."
Have you read 'Blue'? What do you think about it?
A woman is sitting in an airport. She is travelling from one country to another. It might as well be from one world to another. She thinks about her mother and her mother's two sisters, and how their lives panned out very differently. The rest of the book moves between the past and the present and across geographies as we get to know the stories of the narrator's mother and her sisters.
The above story is just a simple outline. The actual book is more complex, more fascinating than that. Emmelie Prophète's writing is very poetic. I am not saying this in a general way, but in a literal way. The book could be read just for that alone. I can't resist thinking how it would be, if the book, instead of being organized in paragraphs of prose, had been structured in poetry stanzas like a novel-in-verse. I feel that this would have made the book even more beautiful, because we tend to read prose in a faster flow, but we tend to linger on poetry lines to take in their beauty, and this book deserves this lingering, and this pausing and this experiencing of its beauty. The second thing I want to say about this book is that, probably because of this reason, this book cannot be read like a straightforward prose work. If we expect an initial setting up scene, an introduction to the characters, the story moving with the progression of events, some dialogue, and a climax with a revelation, it is not going to be there. Atleast, in the form we expect. A better way to read the book is to go in with no expectations and start reading from the first page, from the first word, and just go with the flow and continue reading, and let the book come to us. In test cricket, there is an advice given to batsmen, who go out to bat on the first day of a test match, when the ball is new and it is swinging. Veteran opening batsmen say that the best way to play under these conditions is to let the ball come to you, and not to go after the ball. We can translate that advice to this book, and go with the flow, and don't think too much, and just read, and let the book come to us. When we do that, at some point, the book opens its heart and speaks to us and reveals its secrets to us, and it is beautiful.
I'll leave you with some of my favourite passages from the book.
"We remained tethered to our sorrows, like horses of despair. We ran, heads bent low, wounded and silent. We shared nothing. Words lived only in our heads, or on scraps of paper. We surprised ourselves sometimes by suffering. Expressions were complaints, and we looked outside ourselves for ways to exist, to live. I hid myself away in books, lost my head over heroes of fortune late into the night, and woke in the morning with other solitudes. Terrifying and unspeakable."
"I watch the rain fall, a thousand fairylike drops on the tarmac. Life is beautiful when you’re watching it from a distance, watching it through the window of an airport somewhere else. I imagine that it’s even better when your head isn’t filled with several deaths and more farewells than you know what to do with. The rain is lovely here, soft and steady. Like it was once, on the corrugated metal roof of the house on hot July evenings. Those rains, which were also sometimes storms of fury that came straight from the graves of the dead in the cemeteries, carried away children and objects and even our memories."
"That was what always happened in this family after someone died. You had to die to earn the right to be loved."
"My mother’s heart makes the same sound as her sewing machine, which I have known my whole life. It’s older than my brothers and me. Its brand is a woman’s first name: Linda. It has always looked like a museum piece. All of my little-girl dresses came from beneath her magical needles that broke sometimes. I’ve seen many women from this family sitting behind that machine, which makes an ancient mechanical noise like Maman’s heart, like the heart of all women who have been poorly loved...I’ve seen sewing machines that looked like the ones belonging to other women in the quarter, but none ever looked like Linda or had a woman’s name like hers. She wasn’t the most beautiful, but she was unique. She had been built to withstand time, like her owner, to watch others pass through and go away, even the youngest ones. She outlived Maman’s two sisters."
"I used to be afraid of the dark. I was afraid that the flame of the lamp would flicker so hard it would fall. The crickets accompanied the night with their long traumatizing songs. But since then, the night has won me over to its cause of solitude, unobtrusive and infinite. I am overly reliant on its calm, making up for the years of unwarranted fear, of eyes shut tight. My only beautiful times have been in complete darkness and heavy rain. Every word of love, of fate, has taken the path of the night. Daytime is the cruel bearer of “I”: it is all that light on the beaten earth of my childhood quarter, and on the marshes of Gros-Marin, and the Church of Saint Paul, and the runway of this airport—reality and its incomprehensible detours, its aches, its way of not making concessions."
"My stories have always come to me when they’re already in progress, almost over, even my love stories. I have hidden myself too often beneath words and their images; I’ve only ever just brushed the surface of anything, I am nothing but a memory trying to exist, and no one would notice, possibly, if I disappeared. I tell myself that no one sees me in this airport; my fate is to be a fleeting memory. I would like to learn the business of everyday life, real life, quivering and ever changing."
"Each morning is the start of a new war against nature, against misery, against oneself or one’s neighbor. Survival has many meanings and almost no purpose."
Have you read 'Blue'? What do you think about it?
December 25, 2021
Blue is a beautiful novel; but it's one of those books the requires a little work from readers. Our narrator is sitting in Miami airport, drinking coffee and waiting for a flight home to Haiti after having attended an aunt's funeral. The novel is comprised of her inner ramblings: family stories, reflections on the choices of her aunts, reflections on her own choices. Since her thoughts move back and forth in time and she is thinking about people she knows well, readers must assemble the chronology and work out the relationships among individuals for themselves. While readers have to work a bit, the reading experience itself is lovely. The language is poetic in a way that enhances meaning, rather than obscuring it. This is a book for readers to pick up when they're feeling a bit ruminative and are open to entering another's inner world. The payoff is excellent.
I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are mown.
I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via NetGalley; the opinions are mown.
February 11, 2022
Poignant, Beautiful, Reflective
For me stories and memories linked to scents and colours are some of the most powerful and tangible ways of communicating not only the history and life of a person, but a community, and country. Each paragraph reveals more and more the headspace that our writer is in, even as we realize there is yet more that can be revealed.
Prophète I believe has captured that beautifully here. Her words are lyrically and rhythmically resonant, moving through space and time with seamless connectedness. With a poignancy that stuns, she intimates the loudness of silence in which so much is said and unsaid. The way in which our silence becomes a medium of transmission even when we wish or think otherwise.
She speaks to the ways in which objects can embody an identity for a time, and when that object is broken, how the shift can be a palpable loss. She uses material and lack to demarcate social and personal expectations, how that weight more often than not falls upon women and what they will do to keep on.
As we approach the end, Prophète ups the poignancy and tension as our main character indulges in some intense self-reflection. Moving from day to day, the sense of losing control, of being crushes under missed expectations and a lack of fight is palpable.
For me stories and memories linked to scents and colours are some of the most powerful and tangible ways of communicating not only the history and life of a person, but a community, and country. Each paragraph reveals more and more the headspace that our writer is in, even as we realize there is yet more that can be revealed.
Prophète I believe has captured that beautifully here. Her words are lyrically and rhythmically resonant, moving through space and time with seamless connectedness. With a poignancy that stuns, she intimates the loudness of silence in which so much is said and unsaid. The way in which our silence becomes a medium of transmission even when we wish or think otherwise.
She speaks to the ways in which objects can embody an identity for a time, and when that object is broken, how the shift can be a palpable loss. She uses material and lack to demarcate social and personal expectations, how that weight more often than not falls upon women and what they will do to keep on.
As we approach the end, Prophète ups the poignancy and tension as our main character indulges in some intense self-reflection. Moving from day to day, the sense of losing control, of being crushes under missed expectations and a lack of fight is palpable.
December 5, 2021
Really beautiful writing but so hard to follow, i think I would have preferred this as a collection of poems, it would have been easier to digest that way.
February 3, 2022
This was the January 2022 selection of The Nervous Breakdown Book Club. I believe it is the first book by Haitian author Emmelie Prophete to be translated into English. She writes in French. She is Black. She is also a poet and reading Blue, I found that quite evident in her prose.
The only Haitian author I have read previously is Edwidge Danticat. In fact, in a quick internet search, I could only find 16 female authors who were born in Haiti. I found out why. It is a tough place to live with its earthquakes, hurricanes, political instability, and crushing poverty. When Christopher Columbus landed there in 1792, he brought illnesses that virtually wiped out the native population. The French came to grow sugar and brought innumerable African slaves to the island, Toussaint Louverture led the definitive slave rebellion and finally Haiti achieved independence from France. The political scene has remained unstable ever since, the poverty has remained unshakable.
In 116 pages, Emmelie Prophète captures much of the above. Her character sits in an airport in Florida, shortly after the September 11 attacks, waiting for her flight and recalling her family, her childhood that contained no love, the further trauma that she will face when she arrives for the funeral of one of her family members. The color of this story is indeed blue, the emotion is perpetual sadness.
I listened to the Otherppl interview with the author. She was born in Port au Prince, Haiti and grew up in that sad poverty to become a celebrated author, journalist, lawyer and director of the National Library of Haiti. If I ever feel sad about my life or circumstances again, I will tell myself to STFU.
The only Haitian author I have read previously is Edwidge Danticat. In fact, in a quick internet search, I could only find 16 female authors who were born in Haiti. I found out why. It is a tough place to live with its earthquakes, hurricanes, political instability, and crushing poverty. When Christopher Columbus landed there in 1792, he brought illnesses that virtually wiped out the native population. The French came to grow sugar and brought innumerable African slaves to the island, Toussaint Louverture led the definitive slave rebellion and finally Haiti achieved independence from France. The political scene has remained unstable ever since, the poverty has remained unshakable.
In 116 pages, Emmelie Prophète captures much of the above. Her character sits in an airport in Florida, shortly after the September 11 attacks, waiting for her flight and recalling her family, her childhood that contained no love, the further trauma that she will face when she arrives for the funeral of one of her family members. The color of this story is indeed blue, the emotion is perpetual sadness.
I listened to the Otherppl interview with the author. She was born in Port au Prince, Haiti and grew up in that sad poverty to become a celebrated author, journalist, lawyer and director of the National Library of Haiti. If I ever feel sad about my life or circumstances again, I will tell myself to STFU.
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July 27, 2022I've been trying to finish 'Blue' by Emmelie Prophete, and I tried really hard to stir up enough interest within me to keep reading a few more pages each day, but it didn't happen. I stopped after reading half the book, because despite the author's beautiful poetic writing, there's is no coherent narrative and things start to feel repetitive.
Blue is like a long never-ending poem, where the poet rambles on and on and on... reading the book was like watching a river flow through a forest, sure, it looks beautiful, maybe even calming, but after a point, you are going to get bored and move on to doing something else.
Blue is like a long never-ending poem, where the poet rambles on and on and on... reading the book was like watching a river flow through a forest, sure, it looks beautiful, maybe even calming, but after a point, you are going to get bored and move on to doing something else.
December 5, 2021
Within a page of starting this book I knew that it was something special. It’s a beautifully written tale of inconsequential lives which have as much consequence as any life.
Wonderful.
Wonderful.
April 18, 2022
“This morning I am measuring the steps of those people, my people, their lowly paths. I am seeking their souls to console myself. I have an urgent need for reasons to dream, to continue to watch travelers, to think of where they might be going, what their lives are like. I’m alive, too, with roots painfully severed. I am strangely alive.”
TITLE—BLUE
AUTHOR—Emelie Prophète
TRANSLATOR—Tina Kover
PUBLISHED—2013 (English translation 2022)
GENRE—literary fiction; prose poetry; memoirrrr-ish? maybe?
SETTING—an airport in Florida in October 2001; memories of Haiti and other places in the Caribbean and North & Central Americas
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—travel & airports; the hope, refuge & escapism of travel; coffee as ritual; memories of home & family; the closeness between nostalgia & trauma of childhood; the suffering & hopelessness of poverty; immigration & being set adrift; “borders”; imperialism & colonialism; roots; solitude & isolation
WRITING STYLE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
CHARACTERS—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
STORY/PLOT—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
BONUS ELEMENT/S—The theme/setting of travel was really poignant and original.
PHILOSOPHY—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
“I will always love taking journeys. The ones I’ve taken alone in my head and in the cold. The ones I’m still trying to take. A path of flesh. A city of madness.”
On travel as an escape, a desperate, hopeblind attempt at securing a better chance at a better life. The severing of hometethers that never become fully severed whether for good or ill. The mixing of trauma and nostalgia in old memories, when you are far from home, or returning home, or never able to go home again and those memories are suddenly the only home you have left.
The delicateness of life. The ephemerality of love. The grief, the hopelessness, the crushing inevitabilities of injustice, struggle, and oblivion. Connection and dissociation in the crush of humanity. Stories brushing up against stories, meaning nothing, meaning everything.
I think this was the most beautifully written book I’ve ever read. Reading this book was the first time I’ve ever *sworn* *out loud* because the writing was just so damn beautiful. 😅 Like powerfully beautiful? Dangerously beautiful? Like, inconsiderately beautiful—beauty in spite of everything that life tries to wear away. I can’t stop rereading it… I think I may have found my giftable book of 2022. 😂
“I take shape in reality, I am alive, and I open my eyes to the colors and the movements. I create a first day for myself, telling myself that I have the right to it.”
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
TW // poverty, colonialism, sex work, child death (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)
Further Reading—
- Land of Many Colors & Nanna-ya, by Maryse Condé
- Everyone Knows I Am A Haunting, by Shivanee Ramlochan
- The Bone People, by Keri Hulme
- Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys
- Flights, by Olga Tokarczuk—TBR
December 28, 2021
The first two words that come to mind when I think about this book are "haunting" and "lyrical". This short, yet incredibly powerful book, is a book of recollection and memory. A Haitian woman recalls stories of her mother and aunts as she sits in an airport - at times I was never 100% sure if she was heading to or away from her homeland, but that isn't that essential - she's in transit. Using coffee and death as touch points throughout the narrative we learn about her family and the ongoing struggles in living in and being from a country that struggles to survive - to provide basic services like water and electricity while not always welcome in the U.S.
The beauty of this book is its nuance - it's like a slow burn - you feel the challenges of the characters but are never hit over the head - the images and the language are so captivating, and yes, hauring.
The beauty of this book is its nuance - it's like a slow burn - you feel the challenges of the characters but are never hit over the head - the images and the language are so captivating, and yes, hauring.
December 31, 2021
*I won a kindle copy of Blue in a Goodreads Giveaway.
I love short fiction that packs a punch, and that was what I was expecting from Blue. In some ways this book meets those expectations, but I also found this novel convoluted and hard to follow at times.
The novel is narrated by a women at an airport, thinking about the women in her family, their history, death, and her homeland, Port-au-Prince.
Blue is filled with striking prose that I found beautiful. I highlighted so many lines and passages. I really appreciated Emmelie Prophéte's poetry background thriving in novel form.
This novel tackles so many topics and I think that is part of what makes this story hard to follow. Prophéte writes about 9/11, family, estrangement, immigration, Haiti vs the U.S., and more. As I go back through my highlights I find so many interesting and thoughtful passages that really make me love this story, but I can't say I fully understood the narrative as a whole and therefore can not fully appreciate it.
This is not an easy read in terms of content or writing style, but the prose is excellent. I think it's worth the read, but its best knowing what to expect. Now that I've read the novel once, I plan to re-read Blue in the hopes of gaining more clarity. This is a novel that demands your time and attention to get the full experience.
I love short fiction that packs a punch, and that was what I was expecting from Blue. In some ways this book meets those expectations, but I also found this novel convoluted and hard to follow at times.
The novel is narrated by a women at an airport, thinking about the women in her family, their history, death, and her homeland, Port-au-Prince.
Blue is filled with striking prose that I found beautiful. I highlighted so many lines and passages. I really appreciated Emmelie Prophéte's poetry background thriving in novel form.
This novel tackles so many topics and I think that is part of what makes this story hard to follow. Prophéte writes about 9/11, family, estrangement, immigration, Haiti vs the U.S., and more. As I go back through my highlights I find so many interesting and thoughtful passages that really make me love this story, but I can't say I fully understood the narrative as a whole and therefore can not fully appreciate it.
This is not an easy read in terms of content or writing style, but the prose is excellent. I think it's worth the read, but its best knowing what to expect. Now that I've read the novel once, I plan to re-read Blue in the hopes of gaining more clarity. This is a novel that demands your time and attention to get the full experience.
February 18, 2022
I feel like a water strider skimming across Blue's ocean. So clearly written by a poet, each sentence so immensely and carefully packed. My soul is full.
Currently reading
March 13, 2022One of those books I knew that I'd need to experience at least twice. The writing is delectable and the narrative is distinct. Maybe there will be a more solid review following my second read
January 11, 2022
Beautifully written, like poetry — the entire story is a Haitian woman remembering her life while observing things at an airport, waiting does flight. It’s not heavy in plot, but I enjoyed every single sentence of this book.
January 8, 2022
Beautifully written but it just wasn't really for me.
August 21, 2021
3 stars *may change
I think I’m someone who enjoys poetry on a one-on-one basis. Like, I’ll have one short poem I really enjoy, but if you give me an entire narrative book written in verse it’ll be too much for me? I just don’t click with it. Especially since this is a translated work, so it loses a lot of its original beauty and intent. Arghhh
Thanks to NetGalley for an advanced reader’s copy.
I think I’m someone who enjoys poetry on a one-on-one basis. Like, I’ll have one short poem I really enjoy, but if you give me an entire narrative book written in verse it’ll be too much for me? I just don’t click with it. Especially since this is a translated work, so it loses a lot of its original beauty and intent. Arghhh
Thanks to NetGalley for an advanced reader’s copy.
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August 26, 2022This short novel/almost a prose poem takes place as the narrator is sitting in the airport, getting ready to return to Port-au-Prince. Airports are a place of transition, and that’s much of what we see as the narrator reflects on her life and the life of her mother and aunts while she waits for her flight. This is not a work with a linear structure - it really almost feels like a meditation on voyages, connections, and the idea of home - whether we are running away from it or returning to it. The writing in here is exquisite and worth the time and effort that you put into the reading experience. You can tell that Prophete is a poet - the imagery is so vivid and the word choice and structure give a flow to the narrative that echos the concepts she is exploring. If you want to immerse yourself in a work and to spend time with language and thoughts, this is an excellent selection to pick up. There were so many passages that resonated for me, but one of my favorites was in the section where she is talking about her grandparents. “I didn’t get to see that sweet old gentleman who spoke only rarely. We’d arrived too late. I have forgotten the timbre of his voice. . . .He read softly, just for himself. His voice didn’t carry. He must have been unhappy all his life. He was tyrannized by his wife, my grandmother, with the silent complicity of his daughters. They took turns letting out great howling wails on that day, even though they had encouraged him to die, even though he had already been buried a long time ago beneath tons of silence.” And “Outside her home, though, she was human, Grannie. That’s what we called her. We talked about her with tenderness when she was far away.”
January 9, 2022
A lyrical and poetic memoir of Haiti. As the narrator sits at the airport waiting for a flight from Miami back to her native island, she reminisces about her life there and in particular about the lives of her mother and two aunts, whose miserable lives under the domination of worthless men, caught in an existence of poverty, loss and grief, are painful indeed. It’s a meandering and reflective narrative, as much an extended prose poem as anything, and at times I found its discursiveness hard to follow. The stream of consciousness style doesn’t lend itself to easy reading, and although I’m willing to put in a certain amount of effort in my reading, the pay-off has to be than I got from this, thankfully, short book. One I appreciated rather than enjoyed, although the descriptions of life in Haiti are indeed vivid and atmospheric.
December 25, 2021
Another fantastic book from the Nervous Breakdown Book Club.
The majority of the book takes place while the narrator is waiting for a flight at MIA, reflecting back on family history, her mother, aunts, cousins. The author is a poet, and that comes through in the beautiful language.
There is a thread running through the book related to coffee (airport Starbucks, coffee made at home) that intrigued me, as I am concurrently reading a book, Coffeeland, that referenced Haiti's one-time prominence in the history coffee, by the end of the 18th century, it was producing half of the world's annual coffee crop.
The majority of the book takes place while the narrator is waiting for a flight at MIA, reflecting back on family history, her mother, aunts, cousins. The author is a poet, and that comes through in the beautiful language.
There is a thread running through the book related to coffee (airport Starbucks, coffee made at home) that intrigued me, as I am concurrently reading a book, Coffeeland, that referenced Haiti's one-time prominence in the history coffee, by the end of the 18th century, it was producing half of the world's annual coffee crop.
January 22, 2022
At a mere 126 pages Blue is part lyrical stream of consciousness, part ode to the narrator’s motherland and generations of women. Their stories are told to us while she travels from Miami back to her hometown, Port-au-Prince, Haiti and finds herself waiting at the airport.
Full review: https://westwordsreviews.wordpress.co...
Full review: https://westwordsreviews.wordpress.co...
December 21, 2022
3.5 stars
Not a book with a compelling plot but somehow I had to keep reading. Poetic language and a wistful sense of the past, of sisters who drift apart as one leaves Haiti looking for a better life and the others stay.
Not a book with a compelling plot but somehow I had to keep reading. Poetic language and a wistful sense of the past, of sisters who drift apart as one leaves Haiti looking for a better life and the others stay.
October 21, 2024
3.5 stars but I want to give it 4 stars
I really liked the writing, though you have to pay attention because there are a lot of jumps through time and stuff but I don't feel like I'm able to review it properly so yeah... I enjoyed, fuck colonialism
I really liked the writing, though you have to pay attention because there are a lot of jumps through time and stuff but I don't feel like I'm able to review it properly so yeah... I enjoyed, fuck colonialism
December 5, 2022
Rep: Haitian mc
March 3, 2023
I loved the writing, I loved the reflections. It was beautiful prose, but somewhere near the end this lost me a little.
January 6, 2022
“I am a witness to the slow death of my land, to its inexorable slide toward a foreign elsewhere, toward the sea, toward abysses near and far.”
Blue is very much my kind of book. I’ve always held a sort of romantic or hopeful view of airports, so a book about a Haitian woman’s airport reflections on what it means to leave and what it means to return to a homeland are really powerful.
Prophète’s writing is clear and beautiful. The brief meditations kept the pacing up while letting her poetic language shine.
I enjoyed this book and if you enjoy character-forward novels that talk about place, belonging, family, loss, love, and what it means to be a person, you’ll like this one too.
Thank you to AmazonCrossing publishing and NetGalley for a free e-ARC in exchange for an honest review. All views expressed here are mine.
Blue is very much my kind of book. I’ve always held a sort of romantic or hopeful view of airports, so a book about a Haitian woman’s airport reflections on what it means to leave and what it means to return to a homeland are really powerful.
Prophète’s writing is clear and beautiful. The brief meditations kept the pacing up while letting her poetic language shine.
I enjoyed this book and if you enjoy character-forward novels that talk about place, belonging, family, loss, love, and what it means to be a person, you’ll like this one too.
Thank you to AmazonCrossing publishing and NetGalley for a free e-ARC in exchange for an honest review. All views expressed here are mine.
January 12, 2023
Emmelie takes us through the MC recount of the lives of her mom and aunts’ through very poetic language that describes past experiences of her relatives whilst she waits at a Miami airport. Their struggles were highlighted and their resilience shown through as they seek to live a better life than what was expected of them. Though the plot wasn’t a linear one, it highlighted memories she was able to recall but the MC still doesn’t feel the connection to her home country.
Tips:
1. Read this book slowly; it is a small book and it would seem like it could be gobbled up in a less than a day but Prophète’s language translated by Tina Kover would cause you to slow the pace of devouring her story. Read slowly to assimilate what the writer is trying to reveal or depict.
2. Re-read this book. I don’t even think about re-reading books that are not self-help books but this fiction deserves a re-read. I am certain I would identify something I would have missed on my 1st read.
3. Buddy read it to dissect it so that you fully experience the author’s works… it deserves a discussion.
Tips:
1. Read this book slowly; it is a small book and it would seem like it could be gobbled up in a less than a day but Prophète’s language translated by Tina Kover would cause you to slow the pace of devouring her story. Read slowly to assimilate what the writer is trying to reveal or depict.
2. Re-read this book. I don’t even think about re-reading books that are not self-help books but this fiction deserves a re-read. I am certain I would identify something I would have missed on my 1st read.
3. Buddy read it to dissect it so that you fully experience the author’s works… it deserves a discussion.
December 31, 2021
While there's some beautiful, even profound, writing in there, this Haitian novel about the miserable lives of the other women in the narrator's life was a bit of a struggle to get through. Lacking a straightforward (or sometimes even a detectable) narrative, it feels like an extended exercise in creative writing; an overly long prose poem where the point is the beauty of the words, rather than the story they actually tell.
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