Mind Picker: An Island

It was the first time that an oil drum had washed up on the scattered pebbles of the island shore. Other items had arrived over the years — ragged shirts, bits of rope, cracked lids from plastic lunchboxes, braids of synthetic material made to resemble hair. There had been bodies too, as there was today. The length of it stretched out beside the drum, one hand reaching forward as though to indicate that they had made the journey together and did not now wish to be parted.

An Island is a taut allegory on the post-colonial African experience: Samuel is a seventy-year-old lighthouse keeper living alone on an island off the coast of an African country, and over the quarter century that he has lived this hard-scrabble solitary existence, his only contact with the outside world has been with a fortnightly supply boat (which brings him the very basics for survival and castoffs from a charity shop), and with the refuse (bloated corpses included) that wash up on his shingled shores. Bone sore, slow moving, and stuck in his ingrained survival routines, Samuel’s agoraphobia and xenophobia are triggered when the latest body to wash up stirs with life. Is this strong-looking young man speaking an unknown language a refugee or a fugitive? Just what does Samuel owe to a stranger trespassing on his island? In a tense narrative, told over four days, Samuel will be flooded with memories of his life (and the unstable history of his country) that will explain to the reader why Samuel now finds himself balanced on the line between compassion and disdain.

While reading this — a short but impactful novel in which “an island” stands for “generic Africa” and Samuel stands for “generic African” — I found myself wondering just who author Karen Jennings is, discovering that she’s a white writer from South Africa who was a schoolgirl when Apartheid ended. I then found myself wondering if this was her story to tell, and noted that no one was really talking about that (certainly not in the way that Jeanine Cummings was roasted for American Dirt). And then I found an interview that confronts the question:

You are white and your characters in An Island are black. You are female and your main characters are male. Do you worry that you might be telling stories that are not yours, or is it the responsibility of the writer to try to see through the eyes of others?

This was something that concerned me greatly and still does. I imagine that there will be people who are angered and unhappy and will (possibly justifiably) accuse me of appropriation. What I tried my best to do was to treat the subjects in the book with care – that is partly why the refugee does not speak; I did not want to speak for him. In the end, all of my writing is about trying to understand something. In this case, a large part of what I was attempting was to understand the complex history of Africa – a history made dark and even more complex by the shadow of colonialism. Where do I, as a white African in the present day, fit into that narrative? It is hard to say. This story is part of an ongoing attempt to find out where I belong within this space; it has never been about taking something for myself.

As a white Canadian reader, I honestly don’t know if wanting to support Own Voices necessarily invalidates a novel like this one, but as it was longlisted for the 2021 Man Booker Prize, as I assume this question was raised at a higher level than that from which I operate, I feel all I can do is acknowledge the debate and endeavor to balance my reading with more minority voices. Returning to An Island:

The man raised his eyes. The whites were yellow, the pupils unfocused. He spoke a word that Samuel did not understand, or perhaps had not heard correctly. He took a step forward and the man repeated it, holding out his hand as a beggar might do, as Samuel himself had done as a child with his sister when his family had been forced to move to the city. Then in middle age, his hands as arthritic as an old man from his twenty-three years in prison, he had been sent out begging again. But he had had no child as a prop, no benefit of youth to help him compete with the throngs of young men and women haunting the traffic lights at intersections. Meat on skewers, bananas, fried chicken, stuffed toys, wooden carvings. The lust for acquisition everywhere around him. Always someone hawking, someone buying, and all of it done amongst the traffic as bone-thin dogs dodged cars in search of refuse. The man motioned with his hand again, this time bringing it up to his mouth as one might do with a cup. He repeated the word.

Much of Samuel’s backstory, a familiar trajectory in the recent history of African countries, is hinted at in this passage: As a child, his family was chased from their farm by the colonisers, forced into the city’s slums where he and his baby sister spent their days begging to support their family. Their father got caught up in the Independence Movement, and although he was always proud that he and his countrymen’s efforts routed out the colonisers and installed their own President, this corrupt embezzler was soon ousted by his closest General in a military coup. Samuel himself got caught up in the People’s Faction against this Dictator (mostly to impress a girl), and when he attended an illegal protest rally, he found himself arrested and imprisoned for the next quarter century. When he was finally released, Samuel was disgusted to see that the wealth divide between the rich and poor had widened exponentially, and stunned by glitzy shopping malls, celebrity tabloids, and the sprawling slums, he took his inhospitable sister's advice to escape it all and became the island’s caretaker. Twenty-three years of only bimonthly contact with other humans, and then the man washes ashore, and Samuel doesn’t know what to make of him; his presence forcing the complicated memories of a lifetime to resurface in Samuel’s mind. When Samuel finds another body on the beach — a woman with her throat slit — after hearing from the resuppliers that a refugee boat had capsized off the coast of their country, he finds himself even less trusting of the stranger who made it clear that he hadn’t wanted to be discovered by them.

He did not like to leave her yet, and crouched unsteadily beside her, wishing he had a handkerchief or something to wrap around her throat and bind her wound. He thought of what was to come: of covering her with stones. He remembered again Big Ro’s burial, the stink of it. Two murders. Two murders, and Samuel the undertaker for both. What had he done, what could he have done about either of them? He felt the answer rise up in his chest. These memories, these memories, hunting him down, taking possession of him. These memories, and a word now, just a word remembered, that moved inside him, sat on his tongue, waiting there, until he spoke it out loud. He turned his face towards the woman, bent down to her, said, “Violence.”

Less than two hundred pages, this is a short book, but Jennings’ writing gives the subject heft and an incredibly tense mood. This is the story of an individual, the story of a (representative) country, and asks interesting questions about the responsibility of decolonised people to refugees: How welcoming are a people expected to be when they fought this hard to chase off foreigners within living memory? What compassion can be expected from someone who has only known oppression? I found it interesting that the phrase “an island” isn’t found in a book with that title — Samuel only and ever refers to it as the island — so I’m left assuming that Jennings meant her title in the John Donne sense, as in: no man is an island entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent. And that’s probably how we should all be thinking about refugees, no matter our settings or histories. A really worthwhile read.