Commentary: Clap When You Land
By Chava Possum
Surprise post!
Clap When You Land is Elizabeth Acevedo’s fourth book but my first experience reading her.
Written in Acevedo’s effortless verse, Clap When You Land follows two sisters, separated by hundreds of miles and decades of secrets. Camino and Yahaira don’t know each other, but they share a father and they share the excruciating pain of losing him in a plane crash. For Camino in the Dominican Republic, her father’s death brings not only grief but a financial ticking time bomb; it’s only a matter of time before she and her Tia run out of money and Camino’s dream of becoming a doctor fades away. For chess-master Yahaira in New York, the secrets of her father’s life threaten to suffocate her. She accidentally discovers that her father led a clandestine life in the Dominican Republic with a second wife and a daughter. Each year, he’d spend the summer in the DR, and would then return for the rest of the year to New York. The plane ride between the two places was the demarcation line between his two selves— two lives that never intersected in his lifetime. This double-life reminds Yahaira of the squares on the chessboard: each box separate, rigidly containing itself so that nothing bleeds out into the next square. Did she really even know him at all? Did anyone?
When Yahaira learns that her father’s remains will be buried in the Dominican Republic, rather than in New York, she is determined to go to her father’s homeland and meet the mysterious sister she never knew. What will they discover in one another? Camaraderie? Sisterhood? Or will they crumble in the face of grief when they see just how much they share?
Ultimately, Clap When You Land is about merging and emerging. We begin the story as starkly compartmentalized as the black and white boxes on the chessboard. Yahaira in her square, and Camino in hers. Yahaira’s version of her father in New York and Camino’s version of her father in the DR. But as we progress deeper into each daughter’s grief, the lines blur, the versions cross, and the girls bleed into each other. Emerging from the tangle, from the grief of loss, comes a new family, one no longer defined by Papi’s choices and actions, but one built out of survival and the love of women.