Island Beneath the Sea - Isabel Allende

It’s been a good week here in Nerdy Book Land. My sister had a baby! And since nothing near as exciting is going on in my life, I’m living vicariously through her. I’m also super amped to be expanding my auntiehood.

Being an aunt is the best. You get all the perks; the wet sloppy kisses, the tangled cuddles, the big hugs from tiny arms, and scrawled pictures where your crayon hair looks like snakes. But at the end of the day you get to give the kids back and sleep through the night.  I would do anything for my little Puertoguecan nuggets (Portuguese and Puerto Rican, get it?!) While I am not her mom, I was hit with an overwhelming feeling of love for that little girl the first time I held her. It’s the same feeling I have for her older brother. It’s a primal, instinctual feeling – the drive to protect those little people with all you are. And if I feel that way as their aunt, I can’t even imagine what being a parent is like.

All the happiness and joy of the last few days made Isabel Allende’s Island Beneath the Sea hit home that much harder. At the heart of the story is Zarité. Born a slave as the result of her mother’s rape by a sailor on the ship transporting her to the Caribbean, Zarité’s story is the history of slavery in the late 18^th and early 19^th century. Of all the brutality she faces; chronic rape, beatings, emotional abuse, and countless other indignities, the worst is the gut wrenching way her children are ripped from her arms. Having just an inkling of the love a mother has for her children, it is unimaginable to me to think of what real women like Zarité suffered in similar situations.

Island Beneath the Sea is filled with all sorts of other unimaginable horrors. We’ve all learned about slavery. We all know how disgusting a practice it was and how shameful a part of our national history it was. We all learned about whips and beatings, about families torn apart and about unspeakable punishments leveled for minor indiscretions. Somehow though, over time, and maybe because it’s too painful to look at full on, we lost the details. We see movies like Roots and Amistad, but the reality of slavery has been somehow sanitized in our national memory.

Not so in this book. Allende captures the abject terror of the people living on plantations in a way that smacks you in the face. Hearing the white characters speak about slavery, justifying the practice, explaining why they do what they do, joking about rape, dismissing the humanity of people standing right in front of them – is almost worse than the physical acts of brutality she depicts. But those are pretty hard to stomach too.

My gut churned while I was reading Island Beneath the Sea. To think that this is how people really thought, talked and acted filled me with rage and disappointment towards humanity. But just like Nabokov did with Lolita, Allende manages to find a way to use beautiful words to tell us a painful story. And as much as we would like to ignore the ugly, the harsh, the dirty, the shameful, the truth is that we need it. How else will we learn? Facing these harsh truths through books lets me say to my niece and nephew, “yes, that happened. And if you feel bad about it now, then you have to work to make sure it will never happen again.”