This story tells the masacre of Haitains in Dominican Republic in 1937. These two countries are divided by a river, a borderline easy to cross by thousands of peasants looking for work harvesting the sugarcanes. Here is where we find Amabelle, a young Haitian who works in the house of Señora Valencia since she was a child, becoming an orphan as her parents died trying to cross the river/border.
She loves Sebastian. She delivers Señora Valencia's babies. She talks with Papi, as he listens to the radio, trying to get news from Spain, involved in war. During the first part of the book, we get the daily life in the Dominican Republic, people's traditions and beliefs.
A car accident tells us that the situation of the Haitians is pretty unstable. Suddenly, danger arrives and the atmosphere changes completely, becoming the book a page-turner, the reader escaping alongside the narrator, feeling the edge of the machetes, the burning of whole villages.
The mention of vultures clouding the sky gives us the exact measure of the killing; survivors retelling what they have been witnesses of; the reader grasping the horror developing unstoppably.
The memories of the survivors become the collective history written in the wind, the dead kept alive by those who remember them, by those who went through hell and stand alive, a journey that has no end.
Ana Ovejero
mail: ana.ovejero@gmail.com
instagram:ananbooks
No comments:
Post a Comment