The Firefly Letters

The Bibliography
Engle, Margarita. 2010. The Firefly Letters: A Suffragette's Journey to Cuba. New York: Henry Holt and Company. ISBN 9780805090826

The Characters
The three main characters of The Firefly Letters are Fredrika, Elena and Cecilia. While Fredrika Bremer is a real person, a women's rights pioneer from the 1800s, and Cecilia, the her translator who happens to be a slave is also real and documented in Fredrika's letters, Elena is fictional.

The Plot
Swedish writer Fredrika Bremer asks the Swedish Consulate to send her to Cuba so she can write about the lives of women there. She finds herself living in a mansion with Elena and her family's slaves. Cecilia, one of the slaves, is pregnant and works as a translator for Elena's family, but dreams of returning to her mother in Africa. Although she's wealthy, Elena's life is also like a slave's, she can not leave her house and also longs for freedom. Elena, with the help of Fredricka, figures out a plan to help Cecilia buy her baby's freedom.

The Setting
Matanzas, Cuba in the 1850s

The Theme
searching for freedom

The Style
The Firefly Letters is a novel written in verse from the perspectives of the main characters, Fredrika, Elena and Cecilia, and also Cecilia's husband, Beni. The rich poetry in English with some Spanish here and there makes the theme of the search for freedom seem, as quoted from one of the poems, "...such a rare / and fragile gift" (109).

The Analysis
I enjoyed reading The Firefly Letters. The poetry didn't seem forced and told a delicate story of the importance of freedom. Subtly comparing freedom with catching fireflies, this story was beautiful. Each girl seeks her freedom in a different way. Fredrika wants to write and travel, not be trapped inside her family's castle dancing ballet and playing piano. Elena wants to leave her house and do as she pleases, instead of being kept in her room, only to watch as the world moves without her. Cecilia longs for freedom from slavery and to move back to Africa with her husband and unborn child.

The Cultural Markers
Although this book takes place in Cuba, the story is not only about Cubans, but blacks and Swedish people as well. One particular passage on page 109 from a poem by Cecilia really describes the view she has of people and the color of their skin:

They tell me they do not believe
that people are either
black or white -
if that were so, then mixed-race children
would all be gray
instead of a myriad
lovely warm shades
of natural brown.

There are multiple references to the languages spoken by the characters in the book. Elena speaks Spanish and some English, Cecilia speaks both well, and Fredrika speaks and writes in Swedish and English.

The tropical landscape of Cuba is also described in several poems ("The quality of light in tropical air / is more intense and on hot days / a sea breeze feels like the breath of heaven" (71)).

The Review
Hazel Rochman (Booklist, Dec. 15, 2009 (Vol. 106, No. 8))
As in The Poet Slave of Cuba (2006) and The Surrender Tree (2008), Engle draws on little-known Cuban history to tell a stirring, immediate story in poetry. Based on the diaries and letters of Swedish suffragist Fredrika Bremer, who spent three months in Cuba in 1851, this title focuses on oppressed women, the privileged as well as the enslaved, in three alternating free-verse narratives. Fredrika remembers that back home in Sweden, she was kept hungry so that she would grow up to be thin and graceful. Her savvy translator is Cecilia, a teenage slave who remembers being captured in the Congo when she was eight years old and sold to a trader by her own father. Elena is a fictional character, a privileged girl in a slave-owning family who is forced into a life filled with “frilly dresses and ornate dance steps” that allows her little freedom. Through this moving combination of historical viewpoints, Engle creates dramatic tension among the characters, especially in the story of Elena, who makes a surprising sacrifice.

The Connection
I think it would be nice to share this book in verse about Cuba and slavery with other similar books written by Margarita Engle, such as The Poet Slave of Cuba, The Surrender Tree, Tropical Secrets and Hurricane Dancers. Her poetry is so moving that it would be nice to read it aloud.