Shades of Love: Celine’s Odyssey: A fictional story

Jacques Antoine Dorcely has sensitively and evocatively portrayed the tribulations of life of the common folk who com-prise the clear majority of Haiti’s teeming millions. The intertwined stories comprising a circle of life begin and end with two young boys and the mother of one of them, a widow striving to maintain her integrity while surviving in Aristide era Haiti. While she will eventually manage to join the stream of boat people risking their lives in the elusive quest for a better life in the United States, the other characters are doomed to eke out existences within the unjust order of their own country. Much about Haiti’s culture and society is presented in the form of their memories, both real, in fantasies, and in fantastic dreams. The interior town of Pilate provides a unifying thread.Uncle Sonson furnishes vivid memories of the U.S. occupation at the time of World War I and the heritage of marriages between Black American soldiers and Hai-tian women. He also recounts the saga of Haiti’s war of independence at the turn from the 18th into the 19th Century. A return to the present is furnished through the super-natural tales told by the elders to the children as a key part of their education. After an interlude concerning contemporary violence perpetrated by politically connected thugs, the reader is treated to the contrast between life in the interior town of Pilate, not coincidentally the author’s birthplace, and the indomitable widowed mother’s sacrifices to amass the modest, but to her almost beyond reach, sum necessary to get passage on the fragile and overcrowded craft that might carry them to the land of hope —or to a watery death in the Gulf of Mexico. This moving story, told with grace and seasoned with Haitian folklore, cannot fail to touch the reader’s heart while perhaps leaving a scar on his soul. Sara Graff Read more