In 1999, 13-year-old Domingo José Sepulveda’s beloved Papi died. “I knew that there was an invisible line splitting everything between the moment he lived and the moment he died. This was the beginning of the other side,” he muses in the opening pages of Ayendy Bonifacio’s Bless Me, Papi.
Domingo is offered solace in his Caribbean homeland of the Dominican Republic and at home in Brooklyn’s East New York City neighborhood—where his family immigrated when he was 6. He’s comforted, too, by none other than Papi himself, who returns in apparitional form as a pigeon and his human self both in Domingo’s dreams and his waking hours when he’s feeling troubled or sad. “Muerto como un perro. As dead as a doornail. But I’m here right now, and I’ll be around for as long as you need,” Papi tells his shocked son during their first post-death conversation. He reassures him, “Cuando estés feliz y contento, mijo, that’s when I’ll see heaven. When you are happy.”
While he’s mostly willing to accept this surreal state of affairs—after all, he reflects, “in our family, divinity and superstition went hand in hand. Everything came with meaning and myth”—Domingo does have questions, including the obvious (Are spirits really real? And where, exactly, is Papi right now?), as well as worries about who he’ll become as he transitions from boy to man without the powerful presence of his father. Over the course of a sometimes painful but revelatory year, Diego searches: in adventures around Brooklyn with his irreverent best friend, Naño; in the Dominican Republic with his cousin Matias, who’s discovered a meteorite shard endowed with supernatural powers; and in heartfelt moments with family members who contemplate how they’ve survived great loss in their own lives.
Bonifacio, a Dominican American author, poet and professor of English at the University of Toledo, Ohio, infuses Bless Me, Papi with authenticity and depth as his characters move between English and Spanish, magical realism and the quotidian, and literary references and dreamy flashbacks in this poignant meditation on grief, growing up and love that transcends every boundary.