ALSO BY
JOHANNA SKIBSRUD
FICTION
The Sentimentalists
This Will Be Difficult to Explain and Other Stories
Quartet for the End of Time
Tiger, Tiger
POETRY
Late Nights with Wild Cowboys
I Do Not Think That I Could Love a Human Being
The Description of the World
CHILDREN
Sometimes We Think You Are a Monkey
HAMISH HAMILTON
an imprint of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
Canada • USA • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China
First published 2019
Copyright © 2019 by Johanna Skibsrud
Excerpt from Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith, translation copyright 2001 by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Published by Wesleyan University Press, Middletown CT and used by permission.
Excerpt from N. Cuppini and M. Frapporti, “Logistics Genealogies: A Dialogue with Stefano Harney”, Social Text 136, Duke UP, Vol. 36, No. 3, September 2018 and used with permission.
Excerpt from “Exterminate All the Brutes” - Copyright © 1992 by Sven Lindqvist. English translation © 1996 by Joan Tate. Reprinted by permission of The New Press. www.thenewpress.com
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Title: Island / Johanna Skibsrud.
Names: Skibsrud, Johanna, 1980- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2019009950X | Canadiana (ebook) 20190099518 | ISBN 9780735234581 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735234598 (HTML)
Classification: LCC PS8587.K46 I85 2019 | DDC C813/.54—dc23
Cover and book design by Jennifer Griffiths
Cover and interior images: (flowers and vines; spider; fly) courtesy of the Biodiversity Heritage Library; (paper texture) Laon (Aisne), 1896, Gift of S.F. Joseph, Brussels, Rijksmuseum
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Contents
Cover
Also by Johanna Skibsrud
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Map
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Afterword
Acknowledgments
A Note on Sources
Islands scars of the water
Islands evidence of wounds
—AIMÉ CÉSAIRE,
Notebook of a Return
to the Native Land
ONE
It was not gradual. For at least several seconds Lota lingered, drifting among images from dreams she no longer recalled. Then the images vanished, the dream dissolved. She sat up in bed, already fully awake.
Her clothes had been laid out carefully the night before and now she dressed quickly in a pair of army-green cargo pants and a cobalt football jersey with the Brazilian national team’s logo on the front nearly rubbed out.
The room was rented. Up three crooked flights of stairs in an old cable company building that used to house the foreign workers. These days, foreigners hardly ever came to the island and, whenever they did, they were flown in and out at the north end. They did their work at the new cable station that had been constructed there, and never actually set foot in town.
Lota had been in the room six months, but it was still nearly as bare as when she’d first arrived. She’d hardly unpacked, was still living out of a single suitcase. There really was nowhere to unpack, even if she’d wanted to. The room had no closet, or drawers of any kind—only a single bed in the corner and a small table beside it, which supported a cheap porcelain lamp. Also on the table were Lota’s mobile phone and a glass of water, half drunk. Her suitcase, in the middle of the floor, gaped.
Opposite the bed and next to the door were a small sink and mirror. A bar of soap, a comb, and a toothbrush balanced on the rounded edge of the sink. Lota stood in front of the mirror, gazing at her reflection in the spotted glass. The room was so narrow that if the door beside her opened she would need to step aside.
But the door never opened, except when Lota herself entered and left the room. No one came to visit, or even knew where she lived. Her family in the village believed she lived with her auntie Toni, in the shopping district. No one had in fact spoken with Aunt Toni in many years and she didn’t have a telephone. It was safe, therefore, to say, “I am living with Auntie.” Nobody questioned her, but neither would they have known where to look for her if they’d needed to. Lota went back to the village frequently enough that the idea never crossed their minds. She saved just enough of her salary, and she brought it home every two weeks, along with tinned meat, potato chips, toilet paper, and other odds and ends from town.
She worked at the fish plant, fifty hours a week, and when she wasn’t working she was either at the gym or at headquarters. By the time she got back to her room, she just fell into bed—sometimes without taking off her shoes.
Lota splashed cold water onto her face and examined her reflection. The mirror was chipped in the corner and the glass rusted. In places it was difficult to tell what spots were the spots on the glass and what spots were her own. She was naturally freckled, like her redheaded grandmother, but it wasn’t white blood that ran in their family, her mother used to say. It was fire. The family could count back one thousand generations, knew how they were related to the sea, the sky, and to the hot lava that boiled beneath them. But like practically everyone else on the island, her mother never spoke of the family’s white ancestors: the Irish and German settlers who’d come for the sugar trade, their colonial masters, or those—from all over Europe and America—who’d arrived on the island along with the first telegraph wire.
In the old days, “white ghosts” had flooded the island and practically every islander was employed by one. The grandparents recalled this time often now, but whenever they spoke of it it was always as if the “white ghosts” had just been passing through. As if they belonged—and could only belong—nowhere, to no one.
Yes, in those days, the old people said, there’d been a station, long since demolished, nicknamed “the old chateau.” It had had something like fifty rooms, including a billiard room, a dance hall, and a library. There’d been little electric bells in every bathroom that when rung would almost instantly summon a Chinese servant.
After the war, a new station was constructed with none of these finer points. It was located underground in an old fallout shelter with twenty-four-inch-thick walls; the only luxury in the place was a wall of showers where employees could wash off radioactive material in case of a
nuclear attack.
But at least there were still jobs. Lota’s father had been employed there, briefly—and her grandfather and great-grandfather before him. But in less than a generation, everything had changed. Ø Com, the Danish outfit that acquired the station in the late seventies, laid off nearly all local workers, then simply stopped hiring.
They built an even newer station on the island’s north end. What had once been the “new station” became the “old” or the “main” station and the even newer one was referred to as the “outer station”—if it was ever referred to at all.
Mostly, because no one who lived on the island had ever set foot there, they didn’t call it anything, and half the time they even seemed to forget it existed. The work at both stations was done remotely these days, using computers, or else was too specialized for the undertrained local employees. Technicians and engineers were flown in for monthly service trips, and though a handful of islanders had been hired at the main station as janitors, desk clerks, or guards, no one but foreigners ever visited the outer station. It was as if, even before it was constructed, it had already disappeared: every official depiction of the island after 1982 left the entire northern end—occupied by the Empire, and by Ø—entirely blank.
The island’s history was another blank spot. Except on very rare occasions, no one spoke of the day that, nearly fifty-five years ago, they’d looked up and—miracle of miracles!—seen snow raining down slowly from the sky. Or about the sixteen years they’d spent after that living as refugees on the Surigao coast.
They didn’t talk about the war, either—in which more than half of the island’s young men had fought and died on behalf of the Empire. Or, except in passing, of the telegraph days, or of sugarcane, or of sandalwood, or of coconut oil. It was really no wonder, then, when you thought about it, that, aside from stories of boiling hot lava and fire, no one seemed to recall exactly how light skin and red hair had got into the blood.
Lota’s own hair was not red, but she had her grandmother’s pale skin. As a child she’d been teased for it, sometimes mercilessly. But her mother had said, “You’re stronger than they are,” and Lota knew that she was right. She’d fought fiercely, thrown herself into each brawl like a dog, but each time she’d come home scratched and bruised her mother had just shaken her head: “That’s not what I mean.”
It was not until the seventh grade, while disinterestedly flipping through the pages of her history textbook, that it occurred to Lota that she was white. The book had fallen open to the first page of the chapter “Colonial Society and Economy,” and underneath the chapter heading was a faded black-and-white photograph that depicted a European farmer on horseback surveying a group of workers in a sugarcane field. It must have been something about the way it was shot: the farmer in the foreground, his large face overexposed so that it appeared almost blank, and the workers in the background—more like shadows than human beings. For the first time, Lota realized that what separated the European from the workers in the field was not only that the European surveyed the scene from above, or that he wore a handlebar moustache and a grim expression on his nearly blanched-out face. It was the difference between his blanched-out face and their shadowed ones.
Her flesh began to crawl. For a long time, she’d been acutely aware of the colour of her skin but she hadn’t, until that moment, connected it to the subject of “Colonial Society and Economy” or thought of it in terms of race. So that was all it was, she thought: there was a simple explanation. Her pale skin was no more mysterious than the pages of a history book.
She began to pore over them. She emptied the library, learning about the first waves of migrant workers to the islands, then about the colonial land grab, the foreign investments, the second wave of migrant workers, the faltering industries, the strikes of 1867 and 1872, the third wave of migrant workers, the strikes of 1898, the riot of 1912…
She didn’t care anymore when the other kids teased her, and as soon as that happened, the taunts abruptly stopped.
“What did I tell you?” her mother had laughed.
Lota felt neither proud nor ashamed now; she felt simply curious. What had once been fable and mystery, completely beyond her ability to know or comprehend, suddenly seemed navigable—a complicated but ultimately chartable course of bloodlines and records. But when she asked her mother where her own ancestors had come from, and with which wave, her mother only shook her head. “You’re an islander, Lota.”
“But we weren’t always,” Lota had insisted. “We had to have come from somewhere! In the first wave, there were workers from Australia and the Philippines…”
“Lota! You’re an is-lan-der.”
But Lota continued to read—secretly now. And because the taunting had stopped at almost the precise moment that she understood the historical cause for the colour of her skin, she forever afterward associated knowledge with power. A year later, when her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, she checked out library books on the disease and its treatments, and lectured her mother on the latest medical advances, supplement regimens, and recommended healthy eating habits.
“Lota,” her mother had chastised her, “just because you know something doesn’t mean you can change it. God does not always, so simply, reveal his plan.”
But by that point, Lota had read her way well into the twentieth century. She knew about the nuclear tests and the controversy surrounding both the resettlement and the return to the island. She was not only curious anymore.
“It’s the island!” she’d burst out one night, her eyes smarting with the effort it took not to cry. “It’s poisoned! Don’t you get it? It’s the island that’s making you sick!”
They never should have come back, Lota informed her mother. The radiation levels were simply too high. Who knew what was even now—only semi-buried—seeping out of the earth.
“Pshaw!” her mother had spat. “You’re reading too much, getting all these funny ideas in your head. Life is not always so easy, Lota, and it is not for you to judge. God makes choices for—and through—us, not the other way around. We have to accept both the good and the bad.”
“Accept!” Lota wailed. “What does that even mean? ‘Accept’? Don’t you ever wonder why it’s always us doing the accepting? Why nobody else ever does?”
“So that’s it.” The soft, yielding tone that always resonated in her mother’s voice whenever she spoke of her faith, or of God, had given way to a harder, more exacting note. “So, Auntie G’s right. You’re too good for us here. Leave, then, why don’t you? Go away. Become a doctor, a lawyer; live on the mainland. Come home once a year!”
Lota had looked at her mother—her bright eyes flashing at her like underwater lights—and felt deeply ashamed. It was true Auntie G had often told her she was smart enough to leave the island if she wanted to. She could come back with a diploma, Auntie G said, do big things, both here and abroad. When her auntie talked like that it didn’t sound small and selfish the way her mother made it sound. For the first time, Lota realized just how impossibly thin every promise she might make—if she ever did leave the island—would seem to those left back home. She’d be celebrated, of course. Everyone who left the island was. Even her mother, despite what she said, would hang Lota’s diploma on the wall and brag about the money that she made overseas.
But she would also be scorned.
“Maybe they’ll give you a diploma right now,” Lota’s mother had said—without even looking at Lota. “You seem to know everything!”
Lota lowered her eyes, which had flooded with tears, and made a solemn promise to herself that, no matter what, she would never leave her mother or the island. But even as she said the words to herself, she knew—or hoped—that it was a promise it would at some point become necessary for her to break.
There was a noise in the hall. A rhythmic shuffle as someone climbed down three flights of stairs, then paused on the landing. Then there was the jangle of keys, the catch of a lock, the sound of a
door swinging open. After a moment or two, the door closed again firmly with a click.
Yes, before she was even out of middle school, Lota had known: it was as impossible to leave the island as it was to remain. But then another option had presented itself. She’d met Kurtz, had joined Black Zero. And now, after three long years of training, they were ready. By midnight, the acting government of the island—President Vollman’s absurd little puppet regime—would be overthrown and a brand new social and political order would be born.
Lota picked up the comb and began to tug at her hair.
They’d gone over every detail. Every possible thing. They’d visualized the progression of the day until they could have attempted the coup in their sleep—and did, almost nightly. So that even now, while everyone else on the island was waking up not knowing—while everyone else was waking up thinking it was just an ordinary day in which nothing would, or could ever, happen—for Lota and the rest of the Black Zero Army it was as if the events of the day had already occurred.
They’d storm the embassy first, then take the cable station. They’d alert the capital only once the station was secure. If the Empire deliberated in granting the Army their few demands (recognition of the island as an independent state; acknowledgement of its new leadership; imposition of a 24 percent tax rate on all Ø Com profits), they could, they would warn, simply shut down the cable system. The island was the main gateway of information traffic in the Central Pacific, and even a minor disruption of that flow would have a ripple effect costing billions in global revenue. All that was needed to completely dismantle the system was the login information—or a knife.
Lota exhaled slowly, pressing the breath past the point where it seemed to naturally stop.
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