I probably wouldn’t have read this on my own, but my book club wanted to read it, so off I went. I had really mixed feelings about it while reading, and then the more we discussed it, the angrier I got. And then examining my anger, I turned into a cat chasing its own tail, caught up in questions of cultural appropriation, wokeness, etc. So I wasn’t going to write about it, because I’m not sure it’s wise to feed The Discourse, etc, but on the other hand, maybe writing about it will help me figure out what’s going on in my own head — what assumptions I’m making about who I’m speaking to.
So, look, I’m not saying that white men can’t write Black characters, or write about Black history, etc (the fact that I feel like I need to say that first, or at all, is a hint as to how this debate gets framed in my head). I’m just saying that if, in the year of our lord 2023, you are a white man writing about a community of Black people who were declared savage and sent to an institution for the “feeble-minded,” you should probably be very careful about how you’re doing it, and what your relationship to the material is. And if you find that your goal in telling the story isn’t really about engaging the history, but is more for the purposes of using it as a backdrop to explore spiritual or philosophical questions of your own devising, then you might consider NOT using that history, or rather, making your work very explicitly fictional, and NOT relying on its link to that history to give meaning to your tale. If you don’t feel like you have some kind of responsibility to the actual history, or rather, to the people, and you can just make up whatever you want about them, then why not just make up a place and time to set your book in? You can add a little afternote and say, “This story is inspired by the actual history of this place [brief gloss], but that was only my jumping off point; I actually know almost nothing about that history.”
Because to me, it seems very clear that Harding is trying to have it both ways. He insists that the book is NOT a history of this place, and that the story of Malaga Island is not his to tell, but of course, the blurb about it tells you that it’s based on that story, and most every review of the book starts by rehearsing the actual history of the place. And the opening page is a quote from the Maine Heritage Trust about Malaga Island. So it’s very, very clear that you are meant to have that real-world reference in your mind. And then the book is laden with quasi-documentary materials — quotes from museum catalogues, descriptions of photographs and paintings — that constantly draw you into the sense that this is a reconstruction of actual history.
And this is why, if you’re me anyways, you start to pay very close attention to the way the characters are constructed, whose mind we have access to, and who we are invited to sympathize with. Because again, remember, this is a story about a group of people who the State declared degenerate, lacking in intelligence, unable to care for their children, immoral, etc. So I noticed, for instance, the way the dogs were rendered familiar, dependable: “Grizzly, who had the habits of fetching the island children from the water whether they liked it or not and sometimes gently sitting on them when he thought they were being naughty or too mean toward one another.” Meanwhile, there is the Lark family, Theophilus and Candace who are called cousins but are probably half-siblings or maybe even siblings, and have four “colorless” children (the “variety of traits inherited from African fathers and Irish mothers, Penobscot grandmothers and Swedish grandpas almost seemed to have drained out of the clan”), only one of whom attends school. The eldest sibling, Rabbit, “eschewed nearly all human food” and must be prevented from eating bark and starfish. Yet we find ourselves, once, startlingly, in her mind: “Wish chalk tasted like white snaps when I bite white sticks or unhappy man clicks white sticks on black wall and makes white bugs and white chalk clicks like a white click bug in a click white bush. Honey is bitter to the wicked, acid sweet.” So this is Harding having his Faulkner moment, right? Is it better or worse that he does it only once? I don’t know. Again, maybe I’m being unreasonable. But this moment really just pulls me out of the text and makes me think, perhaps unfairly, about the author, and how pleased he is to be penning these extremely poetic lines evoking the thoughts of a disabled Black child. And then you also notice how some characters seem like actual people, whereas other seems like mouthpieces for a collection of ideas.
Maybe the real issue here is just that I thought the book was generally sort of bloodless. A few of the people in the bookclub were just fully taken by the prose, which they thought was beautiful. And some of it was, yes. But I never got swept up into it — quite the contrary, the book was a bit of a slog; I struggled to get through it, without really knowing why (it’s not like I don’t enjoy abstract symbolic books). I don’t think that’s entirely because of my annoyance with the politics of representation at work. It’s entirely possible that it’s exactly the opposite; that it’s because I didn’t like the book that I was more aware of those aspects. In any case. I really didn’t like it.
Kasia Reads 