So Many Islands

by Nicholas Laughlin

  Contents

  ___________________

  Foreword, Nicholas Laughlin

  Introduction, Marlon James

  Oceania, Karlo Mila

  Tread Lightly, Emma Kate Lewis

  The Plundering, Heather Barker

  Plaine-Verte, Sabah Carrim

  Neo-Walt Village Combing, Mere Taito

  Granny Dead, Melanie Schwapp

  A Child of Four Women, Marita Davies

  Immunity, Damon Chua

  Beached, Angela Barry

  Perilous Journey, Tammi Browne-Bannister

  The Maala, Mikoyan Vekula

  Unaccounted For, Tracy Assing

  1980s Pacific Testing, Fetuolemoana Elisara

  Coming Off the Long Run, Cecil Browne

  Roses for Mister Thorne, Jacob Ross

  Something Tiny, Erato Ioannou

  Avocado, Kendel Hippolyte

  Afterword

  About the Editors

  About the Contributors

  Commonwealth Writers

  The Commonwealth Foundation

  Peekash Press

  Copyright & Credits

  About Akashic Books

  ...There are so many islands!

  As many islands as the stars at night

  on that branched tree from which meteors are shaken

  like falling fruit around the schooner Flight.

  – Derek Walcott (Saint Lucia), 1930–2017

  from ‘The Schooner Flight’

  Foreword

  Nicholas Laughlin

  An Island Is a World is the title of a novel by the late Trinidadian writer Samuel Selvon, and a sentence that summarises something essential about human geography: islands, large or small, are indeed in some sense self-contained, worlds unto themselves. But the very sea that insulates and isolates – two verbs with a common root but crucially different meanings – is also the medium that connects one island to every other island, and archipelagoes to continents.

  The seventeen writers assembled in this anthology belong to the Pacific and Indian Oceans, the Mediterranean and the Caribbean. Some of the islands they come from may look remote on a map, but there is nothing isolated about their stories and poems and essays. They may be writing from and about small places – some smaller than others – but their ideas and themes take their measure from the scale of world histories.

  Small island countries within the Commonwealth share a past of colonial exploitation. One legacy in the present is a body of common political and social concerns. Another legacy is English, a world language with manifold accents and a multitudinous vocabulary, a shared and diverse tongue that allows these island writers to speak to each other across oceans, and to speak to us. Their stories, their insights, their arguments, their jokes, their memories and their questions travel far on unceasing tides.

  To belong to an island is to look outwards, understanding that the horizon is not simply a boundary between what is visible and what is invisible, what is known and unknown, but a challenge: to imagine, to yearn, to leave, to search, to return.

  Commonwealth Writers, in its work with established and new authors around the world, recognises the vitality and variousness of island voices and stories, but also the special challenges faced by authors from very small countries who seek to share their work with a global audience.

  The seventeen contributors to So Many Islands range from authors at the start of their careers to others with published books lined up on the shelf. They are a restless bunch: two thirds of them live elsewhere than their original home islands, and some are multiple migrants. The list of their names almost makes a poem about origins and journeys and destinations.

  All the pieces in So Many Islands were chosen from submissions in response to an open call in mid-2016: over five hundred poems, stories and essay proposals from close to three hundred writers. In the fascinating and months-long task of reading through this wealth of prose and poetry and refining the final selections, I was assisted by Nailah Folami Imoja, and we both were helped by Rukhsana Yasmin, formerly of Commonwealth Writers. (This is also the place to acknowledge and thank Lucy Hannah, former head of Commonwealth Writers, and Emma D’Costa, programme officer, both longtime and immensely valued colleagues, who imagined and stewarded this book into being.)

  Selecting just seventeen pieces was agonising, and the dense thicket of notes on my checklist of submissions confirms my recollections of our frank, generous and intense debates. Many stories and poems we loved did not make it into this book. We decided at the beginning to choose no more than one piece from any country or territory, and to try for a balance among geographical regions. The quality of submissions from the Caribbean was especially gratifying, and we could have assembled an entire additional anthology of accomplished new Caribbean writing without duplicating any of our choices here.

  Early on, we discussed whether the book should pursue certain themes, and whether and how we should try to discern or define ‘islandness’ among the submissions. Nailah and I, both islanders ourselves, agreed that an island perspective doesn’t depend on specific subjects, language or social settings – but rather on the writer’s imaginative grounding. We reached for pieces that simply excited and surprised us with their voices and narratives, and let the anthology’s eventual themes take shape on their own. It was a privilege and a pleasure for us to encounter new talents, new perspectives, new lexicons, to realise how much is shared among these far-flung island places, and how much is strange.

  Here you will find love poems and protest poems, tales of childhood innocence and innocence lost, stories about leaving home and trying to go home again, about never having left, or asking what home means in the first place. Here are pieces that tackle history’s traumas – from the aftermaths of transatlantic slavery to nuclear testing in the Pacific, from the 1974 invasion of Cyprus to the 1979 Grenada Revolution and its unravelling – alongside a delicate exploration of sexuality in a Singapore military base and a comic story where a cricket match becomes a minor drama of personality. Here are complicated families, the burdens but also the gifts of ancestry, the puzzling refractions of memory.

  Perhaps what these seventeen pieces have most deeply in common is an urge to contend with both the limits and the possibilities of a small place – whether that means cherishing the intimate territory of a familiar community, or escaping into a more expansive realm of the imagination.

  The shore that bounds every island is always a threshold. Looking outwards, the horizon may seem to draw nearer or farther, depending on the weather. But there is always a horizon, and there are always those – sometimes writers, sometimes readers – who accept the horizon’s challenge: to wonder, to yearn, to begin a journey.

  Diego Martin, Trinidad, July 2017

  Introduction

  Marlon James

  I wonder if it is because we island people are surrounded by sea, hemmed in and branching out at once, that we are always in a state of flux. The sea and even the sky are definers and confiners, they have spent millions of years carving space, while at the same time giving us clear openings to map the voyage out. And, today, to be an islander is to live in one place and a thousand, to be part of a family that is way too close by for your business ever to be your own, or way too far but only a remittance cheque away. Or, put another way, to be island people means to be both coming and going. Passing and running, running and passing, as the song goes. Living there, but not always present, travelling or migrating, but never leaving. Or what has never been a new thing, but might turn into a new movement: more and more authors staying put, all the better to let their words wander.

  That last part is potentially contentious. Because the writer in the diaspora can quickly lose touch with the
pulse of the people, even as he claims he has not, and bristles when it’s even suggested. I might be talking about myself. Scratch the surface of any nasty fight between a local stay-putter and a diaspora drifter, and it comes down to a greater argument about in-touchness, lost in a lesser argument about authenticity. Of course, arguing about authenticity is ridiculous. It has always been, despite the label, an invented value, especially among writers of literature. Because the fact is, literature is a pack of lies. Lies that tell the deeper truth, perhaps, but invention nonetheless, even in non-fiction. The real argument is that the writer abroad is the writer adrift, and cut from the island’s umbilical cord. And while you may still have the traits of the former land, you are not being fed by it.

  This is at least fifty per cent bullshit. But still a sore point with many writers, or anyone living outside the island, and a sore point with me, until I realised there was still, nonetheless, a point to be made. It came as a striking and maybe wonderful surprise to find that Jamaicans on the rock are turning out far more progressive than island people in the diaspora, moving forward on issues such as political tribalism, homophobia, secularism and liberal politics, while the islander abroad clutches those things tight, in communities of other island folk clenching just as tight, as if to lose these things was to lose the island itself. And yet we’re still talking about island people, being the same and different at once. So, yes, there is still the frustrating immobility on other issues, the elevating of small matters into big fights, the extreme religiosity, despite church leaders being poor at leading anything else.

  Instability is an island constant, but so is steadiness, and even stagnation. Our lands that we return to are at once unrecognisable and always exactly as we left them. Just a glance at our literature reveals how we’re still worrying about the same things, obsessing about the same people, wringing our hands around the same troubles, withstanding the same traumas and laughing at the same jokes. But that’s just because all human nature has not changed much in two millennia, not because Caribbean or Pacific people have not. But if human nature hasn’t changed much, nearly everything else has. It takes a negotiation with realities to make stories out of them, and if Joan Didion is right, and we do write to discover how we think, then each act of writing the Caribbean is a process of discovering it.

  Speaking of discovery: islands, certainly in this anthology, mean more than just Caribbean islands. It’s too easy to draw for similarities, and yet there is much that all island people have in common, just as there are many things port cities and fishing villages have in common, and not just a take-it-as-it-comes approach to life. Dig deep into the poetry and prose, and you find, to borrow a phrase from the writer Pankaj Mishra, a fundamental instability. You find folk wisdom clashing with facts and knowledge to create a new folk wisdom. You find things that usually bring people together coming apart, and people forced to redefine not just community but identity.

  And this as well: brand new colonialists up to the same business as the old colonialists, moving in to take away. Stars and stripes, yellow stars on red, Tricolours and Rojigualdas rising high where the Union Jack has been let go. Island people all over, thinking we escaped racism because our real problem is class, and not realising it was colonialism that taught us to think like that. We are bound to the Commonwealth (or prefer to think we are), where equitable wealth distribution has never, ever been common, not even now.  And even now, that relationship is loaded with conflict. Dignitaries and decorated folk from former colonies still being giving titles such as the Order of the British Empire, with one-two sword taps from the Queen. The most British of all the British innovations, and the ones they are most curiously proud of, railways, seaways and airways, were and still are avenues for taking our resources away. In one of the poems in this anthology, the big spectre hanging over us isn’t dear old Blighty, but dear old Disney.

  And yet, here is one more thing about island people: we have a way of taking influences, even powerful ones, and assimilating them even as they try to assimilate us. We remix them, recontextualise them, push them to the background or layer them on top of a verse.

  There’s more: things we weren’t told in our colonial and postcolonial educations that we can express. In one story here, racial dynamics are turned inside out and put up for serious critique, in a way stunningly fresh, particularly for the islander who has always been oblivious to both subtle and overt racism, even when directed at her.  A story from Jamaica isn’t gone two pages before we’ve moved past the wonderful foulness of a death fart, and find ourselves contemplating unexpected narrative juxtapositions, such as skin being as shiny as a new bruise. One could argue none of this is actually new. But there is something unseen, or barely seen here, hard to explain or pin down. Maybe it’s a certain daring, maybe brattiness, maybe entitlement, that looks at all parts of literature as equally available tools for use. So here are stories that don’t shatter taboos so much as ignore them in the first place. And forgoing national and international boundaries to focus on both isolation and community creates a refreshing effect. This is the real globalism, a glorious cacophony that seeks no common ground other than attitude. Stories and poems that exist in no other context than their own, characters who owe only to themselves, and writers who write with nothing hanging on their backs.

  Flannery O’Connor said great literature resists paraphrase. Great movements resist definition. It’s tempting to generalise what follows here, or at least scramble for parallels, when maybe the only real thing these stories and poems have in common that we need to recognise is their will to exist. Otherwise, we would also have to acknowledge shared histories of colonial oppression and exploitation that impact us still. But if that were the case, I don’t think this book would have got very far. There is still the notion of island-ness, beginning with whatever the hell that means. For me, it means many things all at war with each other. It means feeling nourished by the same down-home country sentimentality I despise. It means retreating into the rural as a way of retreating from the island, going further in, as a way to get out. It means small spaces that contain many islands within them – meaning even in small Jamaica, there are at least ten different Jamaicas, some with their own geographical and social boundaries. Island-ness means confusing race issues with class issues, because looking at social dynamics through the lens of class allows us to escape the nasty reality of Caribbean racism. Island-ness means sometimes stepping as far back as Florida or New York, to truly see it.

  And for all the talk about size and smallness, it also means boasting exceptionalism big as a skyscraper. That may be the trick of insularity, which stays intact despite outside influences like cable TV. In Jamaica, that may have come from a connection to America and a disconnection from the rest of the Caribbean as well as the idea of a Caribbean identity, something of a sore point with our neighbours. It also means that at one point I was far more likely to have read a writer from the US than one from Trinidad, unless he was assigned in school.

  That essential Caribbean-ness, that you can be singular yet part of a regional group, would come much later, and even then it was something I had to teach myself. But the damage was done and the price paid, not just in missing out on being part of a Caribbean aesthetic, or even community, but in being denied what could have been quantum leaps in our writing, had we paid attention to fantastic feats of language being pulled off by non-Anglo sisters and brothers right next to us. Honestly, it blows my mind what Anglophone Caribbean literature could have read like had we read Alejo Carpentier and Reinaldo Arenas decades ago. Quite a few of the shots first heard around the world in twentieth-century fabulist fiction were fired in Cuba, and we didn’t get so much as a ricochet.

  But here again I may be speaking only of myself, and after all this is an introduction to an anthology loaded with pieces proving me wrong. It takes a big mind, or at least a big worldview, to write from a small space, and even our depictions of confined interiors expand more than they contract. Eve
rything we write stands one foot on land, the other in the sea. We can’t help it: we’re from where the air is clear, so it’s almost impossible to think small. Because, for all our smallness, it is only when we come to places like the United States or the United Kingdom that we actually confront the minute, the hemmed-in, and the cut-off. It is where we, for the first time, have to make do with ultra-confined space, regimented lives, contracted social circles and no easy escape. How odd it is, then, an oddness that doesn’t escape a single writer from an island country, that we have to return to our small islands, if only to remember how to live large.

  Oceania

  For Epeli Hau’ofa

  Karlo Mila

  Tonga

  Some days

  I’ve been

  on dry land

  for too long

  my ache

  for ocean

  so great

  my eyes weep

  waves

  my mouth

  mudflats

  popping with

  groping breath

  of crabs

  my throat

  an estuary

  salt crystallising

  on the tip of my tongue

  my veins

  become

  rivers that flow

  straight out to sea

  I call on the memory of water

  and

  I

  am

  star fish

  in sea

  buoyed by

  lung balloons

  and floating fat

  I know the ocean

  she loves me

  her continuous blue body

  holding even

  my weight

  flat on my back

  I feel her

  outstretched palms

  legs wide open

  a star in worship