Notebook: Imaginary islands
By Nicholas Laughlin On the atlas page, the Caribbean stretches from the Bahamas in the north down the long arc of Antilles, Greater and Lesser, to Trinidad, with its southern anchor in continental Guyana. But there is another atlas whose cartographers are the Caribbean’s novelists, and in this imaginary volume the traveller — which is to say, the reader — will find territories like Hiroona (G.C.H. Thomas), Kwayana (Edgar Mittelholzer), Isabella (V.S. Naipaul), Cuyama (Shiva Naipaul), Cayuna and Abari (John Hearne), New Forest (Wilson Harris), Corpus Christi (Robert Antoni), Maya (Lakshmi Persaud), San Carlos (Colin Channer), and cities and towns and villages like Elvira (Naipaul), Harbourtown (Harris), Porta España (Lawrence Scott), Baytown (Caryl Phillips). I remembered these names — this chart — as I read Shani Mootoo’s new novel, He Drown She in the Sea (reviewed in this issue by Melissa Richards), which is itself set partly in an island called “Guanagaspar” — a fictional version of Trinidad. The name seems to be compounded of elements from Chaguanas and Gaspar Grande (and, to my ear anyway, also suggests “guano”). In her previous novel, Cereus Blooms at Night, Trinidad’s stand-in was “Lantanacamara” — which has a sultry Spanish lilt, but is actually the scientific name for the plant Trinidadians call wild sage: Lantana camara.
Many of the names in this made-up Caribbean seem to derive from imaginary Amerindian languages. Others hint at the region’s Spanish Catholic heritage, and remind us that the very concept of the West Indies was a fiction of Columbus — a story about an Asia transplanted to the western side of the Atlantic, about islands of gold and spices, fantastic peoples and El Dorados, a gigantic fiction that transfixed all of Europe for centuries, one of the biggest bestsellers in the history of mankind. Writers and storytellers of all times and all places have invented geographies for their fictions, covered the earth with fantastic cities and imagined lands under its surface, under the sea, up in the air — Edens and Atlantises, Laputas and Xanadus. But why have West Indian writers been such particularly prolific inventors of imaginary islands that in five or six decades the fictional map of the region seems almost more crowded than the map in the real-world atlas? (An unmethodical scan of the novels on my shelves suggests as many as a third of all West Indian novels are set in made-up territories.) Perhaps the straightforward pleasure of invention, the thrill of the let-there-be that every writer knows. Or more likely the obvious difficulty of setting a story in a small insular society where it sometimes seems everyone does know everyone else, where writers don’t enjoy that everyday anonymity that makes it easier to tell difficult truths. West Indian readers have often responded harshly to unflattering written portraits of their foibles and flaws — have we yet forgiven Naipaul for The Middle Passage? — and any writer honestly describing the reality of the Caribbean must grapple with a past and present replete with blood and greed, enslavement and poverty, intolerance and mistrust, the old ills of colonialism and the new ills of “post”-everything. An invented setting releases the West Indian writer from the stifling confines — social, political, physical — of a very small place, and makes it possible to tell a bigger story of the whole Caribbean, beyond the particularities of a single territory. Call it the freedom of Anywhere, or Nowhere; and, after all, the original Nowhere — Thomas More’s Utopia — was also an imaginary island in the warm waters of the New World. |
