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Departure Story by Rowana Marlene Abbensetts Dobson
This moving coming-of-age tale explored (Departure Story) how the Caribbean experience and the American aspiration clashed. Both the strained bond with Celestine’s mother and the tug-of-war between her and her sister are skillfully shown. Even though Caribbean people are renowned for their warmth and friendliness, these kinds of unspoken, uncommunicative, and unloving relationships frequently exist in the normal Caribbean home.
Although Celestine is aware that her mother loves her, she feels that she doesn’t. Celestine attempts to fit in with her American peers, but everytime she indulges in her new surroundings and gets comfortable, a pop culture allusion or an unfamiliar meal serves as a reminder that she is alone.
For her, “code-switching” is essential to survival because there is added pressure to represent herself as Black. She even feels self-conscious when her new friends overhear her falling into her “gibberish” local speech on the phone when talking to someone from home.
Her experience is also influenced by her first love, which she had with a white American boy, no less, and by the confusion and sadness that follow when it ends. Celestine was still to Richard a “thing”—a thrilling, exotic object to serve his liberal progressive purpose, rather than a multifaceted person, as her friend Lucy describes, even though he’s a wonderful guy and might really like her.
Celestine faces opposition from both whites and Blacks as she gets active in college politics and works to promote diversity, but she occasionally “forgets” to be kind and understanding to temper her words. She comes to the realisation that even among Black Americans, there is a limit to the “kinship of melanin.” She ultimately manages to take little steps in the direction of major change, though.
Even while I adored and enjoyed this novel, there were some issues. There was a chapter from her father’s point of view that didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the narrative, and there was some viewpoint switching when “Celestine” unexpectedly reappeared repeatedly in third person.
Additionally, I occasionally felt as though there were too many characters and subplots to keep track of (primarily the romantic troubles of her friends); I could easily have seen some of these being cut out or reduced, as there wasn’t quite as much extraneous fluff to draw my attention away from the beauty of the main plot. On her own, Celestine was incredible!
This book spoke to me personally, and I’m sure it will do the same for other Caribbean women of Guyanese origin and those who have also studied abroad. I adored how the author skillfully and eloquently touches on some aspects of the Caribbean experience as a “fish out of water” in a first-world country, always doubting if you belong there and if it will ever truly feel like home, and also feeling that pressure from back home to “make it.”
The author’s voice is strong and distinctive in the way it unravels Celestine’s story. We really need to hear more voices from the Caribbean, therefore I’m glad the author shared this story. It’s much-needed in the cacophony of homogeneous whiteness. I would suggest this book to other people, and I intend to read additional works by this author.
About The Book
Love knows no borders and comes in the most unexpected packages. Celestine Samuels is making the biggest trip of her life, from Guyana to the United States for college. At first, she is relieved to get away from her primadonna sister, neglectful mother, and troublemaker brother and eager to embrace the new freedoms of the United States like Starbucks, bagels, and wild college parties.
Reality sets in when she gets the news that her aunt and uncle in Guyana have been shot in an act of political violence. Unable to go home, Celestine decides to find justice by championing the cause of an African Dance group on her small midwestern campus. Meanwhile, matters of the heart couldn’t be more confusing.
She finds herself entangled in a situationship with classmate and photographer, Richard Wirth, while she can’t help her curiosity about the obnoxiously cocky football star Don Bradford who also happens to be her fellow student council representative. No matter how far she travels, “Home” keeps haunting her dreams, leading her to question unforgivable family secrets, and search for answers she may not want to know.
The Review
Departure Story
9 Score
As Departure Story unfolds, we watch Celestine navigate college crushes, political assassinations within her family, casual racism from classmates, and kinship found in unexpected places. The unexpected frames much of this novel, which tells the story of a Guyanese American immigrant landing at a small liberal arts college in the Midwest. Both the narrator's unique position as a Black English-speaking South American immigrant and Abbensetts-Dobson's wry and insightful prose act prismatically to cast an entirely new light on identity in America and questions of home and belonging. Abbensetts-Dobson couches complex social analyses in a compulsively readable and almost breezy college narrative, imbuing this book with depth and interiority rarely found in campus novels. At once no-holds-barred and gentle, this is a graceful debut from a fresh voice and a singular perspective.
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