Isabel Allende’s latest novel, Island Beneath the Sea (April 2010), brings us into the 18th century world of slavery and revolution in Saint Domingue, Cuba and New Orleans. It follows the life of Zarité, a nine year old slave girl sold to Toulouse Valmorain, a French plantation owner in Saint Domingue (later Haiti). Allende’s richly drawn world envelops the reader, but even more compelling are the narrative voices telling this complex, interwoven story.
The novel shifts between chapters told by Zarité herself in first person and an omniscient voice, which manages to express an ironic distain for the deficiencies and cruelties of many of the characters while at the same time plunging us into the consciousness of a wide tapestry of characters. Zarité’s portions are punctuated with the refrain, “This is how I remember it,” a counterpoint to the other voice, as if to say this is my life, my feelings which you cannot possess or obliterate, a declaration of independence woven into the novel.
In the understated irony of the omniscient voice, Allende has created a brilliant balance to Zarité’s personal storytelling. At the beginning of the novel, Zarité’s master, Valmorain marries a young beauty through the designs of the girl’s brother, Sancho, whose profligate ways require underwriting by the wealthy Valmorain. The chapter entitled “The Bride from Cuba” ends with the sentence, “That began a long and solid complicity that would unite them till death”—except this echo of the marriage vow describes, not the bond between husband and wife, but between Valmorain and Sancho. When the insane bride from Cuba dies (in another layer of irony, her madness echoes Rochester’s bride in Jane Eyre), her value, or lack thereof, both to her husband and her son Maurice, is portrayed with devastating simplicity in these sentences:
As they took the silver-studded walnut coffin from the house, the one Valmorain had bought as contraband from an American during the time she tried to kill herself, Maurice was in the patio with Rosette improvising a funeral for a dead cat. He had never witnessed rites of that kind, but he had a lively imagination, and he buried the animal with more feeling and solemnity than his mother received.
The most skewering moments of this ironic narrator, however, are reserved for Zarité’s sorrows. Several times in the course of the novel, as Valmorain walks away from scenes in which he has made decisions of dire importance in the lives of the mulatto children he has with Zarité, he is described as immediately losing any memory of these decisions because he considers these children so inconsequential, even forgetting his son’s name on multiple occasions. This same son he has taken from Zarité at birth and handed off to a courtesan acquaintance of his so as not to upset his wife. When Zarité is pregnant a second time—she is forced to serve his bed as well as his table—he notices the expansion of her waist and breasts and then is startled to see her tears when he asks her about the pregnancy.
He had heard that Negroes have more capacity for suffering; the proof was that no white could bear what the blacks endured, and just as they take pups from bitches, or calves from cows, they were able to separate the slaves from their children; in a short while they recovered from the loss and later did not even remember. He had never thought about Tété’s sentiments; he assumed they were very limited.
Unlike Valmorain’s inability to concern himself with his own children, we have witnessed Tété’s feelings (Zarité’s nickname) with great intimacy and we know what agonies she has suffered as a mother. In this understated way, Allende portrays the resiliency of the human spirit even in the face of such sweepingly comprehensive if obtuse attempts to obliterate it. “This is how I remember it,” indeed.
The use of irony to express pain and suffering does create a distance between reader and characters—perhaps a necessary remove given the horrors depicted—but it recedes into the background when Allende portrays the warmth and loyalties of genuine friendships and devoted parenting. Allende’s world is as nuanced and complex as life. Happiness and lasting love flourish in this world built on the corrupting foundation of slavery, but without a trace of saccharine sensibility. The courtesan builds the soundest marriage. The passion of greatest intensity flourishes between a brother and sister. We enter bedrooms in the midst of wild amorous romps of intriguing creativity. Often women stand by each other in sturdy fellowship; sometimes men and women do also. Courage occasionally carries the day in satisfying upheavals; elsewhere power and money crush it.
Allende’s storytelling is like the beat of the African drums Zarité loves. We lose ourselves in the dance, both filled and exhausted when the rhythm recedes, but renewed.