In 2020, while the COVID-19 pandemic was raging and civil unrest over the killing of George Floyd swathed North America and beyond, I was angry. Through conversations with people during these protests against institutions of power, I realized something needed to change, intrinsically, in the conversation. Blue is my attempt at education and discussion, shifting the power of conversation back to a place of potential enlightenment.
Fun Fact: my main character was a 12-year-old girl in Indonesia, sweating in knee-high mud beneath the boiling sun when I started writing. I only ever wrote a page of that before changing to North America and Jacob (now Wolfe,) but the first page hearkens back to my beginnings. The characters they morphed from and into boggle me, and every day I marvel at what I’ve managed to accomplish. I can’t even believe I’ve written a book most of the time. A real book! There is a bit of grief attached to finishing a novel that consumed me for years, from 2020 through 2022. I’ve known these characters, cried with them, felt their anger and disappointment, and sometimes died with them. I imagine this is like sending your kids off into the world alone. It’s vastly out of my hands now.
Racial science is nothing new. We’ve used “science” to justify genocide against the Jewish people, Africans, and Indigenous civilizations. When we allow ourselves to be divided on trivial characteristics like skin colour, sex, where we’re born, the colour and shape of our hair, what language we speak, etc… we allow ourselves to forget our shared humanity. We say We Remember and Never Again, but we never remember; at some point, we forget. One day, eye colour might matter more than skin colour ever did, and could you imagine how dark a world like that would be?
As for why I wrote Blue, I realized people rarely understand the scale of racism in the Americas, past and present. The scope at which dehumanization happens and how easily the apathy of the masses empowers the hatred of a few to perpetrate cruelty on a massive scale is impossible to comprehend. The enormity of it is incomprehensible unless you’re in that situation. I wrote Blue to condense the horror of being seen as less than human into 180k words and, in the rare scenario when a sequel materializes, to reduce 100s of years of history into another.
I’m sure I’ll get angry messages asking how I could write something like this, of my sadism and evilness, to even create the scenarios you’ll read about. I remind you, I drew from the real-world atrocities that have actually been lived by real people. The transatlantic slave trade, The Holocaust, indigenous residential schools, Irish indentured servitude, and so on. Every horrific, torturous experience is drawn from the lived experiences of people long gone. Honour them through remembrance.
At the end of the day, I didn’t write Blue to anger, hurt, inflame, and certainly not to deride blue-eyed people, but to educate. I want people to imagine an “impossible world” lived by ethnic minorities for centuries and beyond, situations that have risen over, and over, and over again in “civilized” countries that would “never” do something like that. Never assume we’ve put the darkness behind us. Fight for other people that don’t look like you because tomorrow, you might be the one with a target on your back. Fight like you’re the one losing your humanity.
Don’t forget our shared humanity,
Miguel A. Fenrich