Finding Fish

The color of the sky in Antwone’s happy childhood dream will later become the name of his child: “blues I never even heard the names of: cerulean, aqua, cobalt, azure, indigo” (61). A kind of synesthesia takes place in this sentence. The color blue is simultaneously sonic, as in “the blues.” Indigo, Antwone’s daughter, is named for the composition “Mood Indigo.” Thus the word, sound, and color of indigo are a locus of symbolic meaning in the memoir. Antwone’s experience of the interchangeability of dream and reality is contained in the name. His depressive mood is transubstantiated into the clear blue of the sky through the acquisition and deployment of language (“blues I never even heard the names of”). In the same way that Antwone realizes a common dream of working in Hollywood, his ability to rewrite his own childhood through his own child, a common experience, is figured as surreal and magical, like the movies made in Hollywood.

Just as Antwone doesn’t know the names for the kinds of blue he sees in his childhood dream, he experiences childhood abuse as a lack of language. Trauma may be defined as an experience that the subject finds impossible to integrate.