Summary

Blue Basin Island is the final resting spot of formerly enslaved Africans whose souls have flown from Earth—not to heaven or purgatory but toward freedom and a new life. Lucille, the island’s seamstress, takes two forms. She lives among the inhabitants in human form and, along with the evil-repelling blue of the houses, her divine form protects people from the violence of the their former lives. Yet, even there, outside of time, the souls are not totally insulated from the world in which they were enslaved. Each time a Black person anywhere is harmed, a piece of Blue Basin disintegrates: an earthquake leaves hundreds of thousands dead, and bricks crumble on the island; when police kill a Black child asleep in her bed, the blue paint on homes throughout the island drips and then runs from the walls. Lucille must hold the island together, but she struggles to juggle the responsibility of ensuring everyone’s safety while also seeking and losing her own private love. Grounding the story in African folklore and dipping into the rich literary tradition around African people with the power of flight, Zoë Gadegbeku visualizes the destination at the end of the flight and the new life that awaits them.
 

Author

Zoë Gadegbeku is a Ghanaian writer. She received an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College and was a fellow at the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. Her writing has appeared in Saraba magazine, AFREADA, Blackbird, The Washington Post, and the anthology Pan African Spaces: Essays on Black Transnationalism. This is her first book. 

Reviews

"Blue Futures, Break Open is a challenging, dazzling novel, combining elements of allegory, poetry, history, and folktales. It levitates as it decenters, gesturing toward and embodying unquantifiable resilience and loss."

 —Foreword Reviews

“Beautifully written…Blue Futures, Break Open speaks to the power and possibility of women’s self-determination to shape fate.”

 —Kirsten Imani Kasai, author of The House of Erzulie

“There is something rooted in history, far and recent, in this book – a truth that should be shared. Even in paradise, the pains and realities of these pasts in some ways remain inescapable.”    

 —Morgan Christie, author of These Bodies