The brutality of memory
Karen Jennings’s novel is a moving tale set in an unnamed African country. By
Karen Jennings says her latest novel, An Island, was extremely difficult to write. Part of the challenge lay in her personal circumstances at the time: living in an apartment on the 17th floor of a tall block in an unfriendly city in Brazil, unable to speak Portuguese.
Cautioned against venturing into unsafe streets, she was left alone for 10 hours every day while her husband went out to work. Her situation, she found, began to resemble that of her protagonist, Samuel, an elderly lighthouse keeper who lives alone on a small island, and sees no one apart from the two men who bring him supplies each fortnight.
But part of the challenge also lies in telling a compelling story about a man who has virtually no social life. Samuel spends his days on the island engaged in a variety of moreor-less menial tasks.
He waters and composts his vegetable garden; he feeds his chickens; he clears the tenacious “smotherweed” climbing the walls of the lighthouse tower. With a sledgehammer, he breaks rocks to build a dry-stone wall around his garden — and then around the perimeter of the island itself.
Jennings used her solitude in Brazil to craft these activities into compelling nuggets of realism, providing just the right amount of detail — and subtly portentous allusion — to draw the reader along.
When the body of a refugee washes up on the beach, Samuel’s concern is mostly with the problem of its disposal. It is the 32nd such body to float ashore in the 23 years he’s lived on the island. He has given up on notifying authorities about the bodies, because the only ones they are interested in are those which can be linked to atrocities committed by the former (now deceased) dictator.
Refugee bodies, which do not fit into the current national narrative of healing and restitution, are someone else’s problem.
Samuel’s solution, on a rocky island where burial isn’t possible, is to seal the bodies into his dry-stone wall, where at least the gulls can’t pick at them, and “where the smell of decay would not reach him”.
In drawing on the heritage of realism initiated by Daniel Defoe in Robinson Crusoe, Jennings directs our attention to the practical aspects of Samuel’s situation, keeping the dark, troublesome currents swirling around his story in the background.
So when Samuel detects a pulse in the body, the order of his life on the island instantly begins to fray. He lugs the man up to his cottage in a wheelbarrow and, under the inquisitive gaze of his chickens, lays him out on a carpet. Unable to stomach the thought of a stranger intruding into his life, he flees from the door, hoping that the man will die.
The man recovers. Samuel clothes him and feeds him, but, in the days that follow, Samuel spirals into a paranoid conviction that the refugee, with whom he doesn’t share a language and whose name he can’t pronounce, wants to kill him. A haphazard game of cat-and-mouse ensues – a game in which, one suspects, the smiling refugee has only the vaguest idea of the role into which his erratic host has cast him. Samuel is visited by a series of long flashbacks to his life on the mainland. In the richly imagined story that unfolds, we gradually discover that the seeds of his exaggerated fear on the island lie in the traumas of his past.
Other reviewers have noted that the unnamed nation in which the story is set doesn’t seem to correspond to any particular African country.
Events that carry a whiff of contemporary South African history – xenophobia, the toppling of statues – crop up against a backdrop of colonial brutality, dictatorship and present-day disillusionment and decay that might locate Samuel’s country on any corner of the African continent (or, for that matter, on another continent).
Its allegorical non-specificity sets the nation’s story at an oblique angle to reality and contributes to a kind of spectral, or haunted, quality in Samuel’s recollections of his life. One has a sense that, like the grainy VHS videotapes he watches from time to time, the memories he returns to on the island are artefacts of a forgotten world, a place left behind by the creep of change on the mainland, where 24-hour petrol stations and shiny new malls built with “oil sheikh” money have reorganised the landscape.
The attention Samuel gives to cultivating his life on the island, rendered in Jennings’s fine naturalistic style, begins to seem like a concerted effort to secure a place for his own identity, rooted in a painful past that is being swept away by inexorable currents of change.
The refugee’s arrival on the island disrupts Samuel’s life by forcing him to confront the darkness of his past. It is also a sign – indelible, impossible to bury or ignore – that his fortifications are failing, that the machinations of history are once again threatening to overwhelm him.
The heritage of African writing, to which Jennings’s novel adds its voice, is steeped in an awareness of the tragic, and often fatal, consequences of misreading history when it arrives on your doorstep. Elsewhere, Jennings has written about history as a fluid, ever-changing system of stories of the relations between ourselves and other people.
Sometimes, she says, when we are afraid, it is our own narratives that are at risk of being erased. We stop investigating history, and risk becoming stagnant in the process.
If there is a lesson to be had in An Island (I hasten to add that, to the story’s credit, it doesn’t trade in easy morals), it is that this obligation to keep interrogating the past never comes to an end. We cannot, like Samuel, retreat to our little enclaves of memory and build walls to keep out the world. Even those of us battling ghosts from the past – maybe especially those of us battling ghosts from the past – need to keep our noses to the wind, to the strange new forms of relation blowing in from distant shores.