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.

Born in Port-au-Prince, where she still resides, Emmelie Prophète is a poet, novelist, journalist, and director of the National Library of Haiti. Her publications include Blue (Le testament des solitudes), which earned her the Grand Prix littéraire de l'Association des écrivains de langue française (ADELF) in 2009; Le reste du temps (2010), which tells the story of her special relationship with journalist Jean Dominique, who was murdered in 2000; Impasse Dignité (2012); and Le bout du monde est une fenêtre (2015).

Translator Tina Kover is an American-born literary translator specializing in both classic and modern literature, including Négar Djavadi’s Disoriental, Alexandre Dumas’s Georges, and Mahir Guven’s Goncourt Prize–winning Older Brother. Her work has won the Albertine Prize and the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Fiction and has been shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, the National Book Award for Translated Literature, the PEN Translation Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and the Scott Moncrieff Prize. She is also cofounder of the YouTube channel Translators Aloud, which spotlights readings by literary translators from their own work.