Querida Sharik

The narrator of this story is a woman from the Colombian Caribbean who lives abroad. One day, almost as a game, she decides to take a genetic test to trace her ancestry. She discovers that her earliest ancestor was a woman born in Angola some eighty thousand years ago, and she becomes fascinated by this figure. The only way for DNA from Angola to have reached the Colombian Caribbean was through the slave trade. Determined to bring her children closer to their roots, she plans a vacation to a Caribbean island, but her ex-husband alters her plans, leaving her to travel alone. On the island, she begins a kind of correspondence with her ancient ancestor—though the letters find other recipients as well. She writes to her grandmother, mother, aunt, sister, and cousins—and even to the woman who looked after them when they were girls—unearthing memories that are by turns hilarious and cruel, arbitrary and incisive. Meanwhile, daily life on the island unfolds: there is an American neighbor with whom she explores erotic fantasies, along with dazzling sunsets, torrential rains, exotic birds, video calls with her children, stray dogs, and the burning of trash—which at times envelops everything in a thick, unsettling smoke.