Isabel Allende - Island Beneath the Sea

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Of the many pitfalls lurking for the historical novel, the most dangerous is history itself. The best writers either warp it for selfish purposes (Gore Vidal), dig for the untold, interior history (Toni Morrison), or both (Jeannette Winterson). Allende, four years after Ines of My Soul, returns with another historical novel, one that soaks up so much past life that there is nowhere left to go but where countless have been. Opening in Saint Domingue a few years before the Haitian revolution would tear it apart, the story has at its center Zarité, a mulatto whose extraordinary life takes her from that blood-soaked island to dangerous and freewheeling New Orleans; from rural slave life to urban Creole life and a different kind of cruelty and adventure. Yet even in the new city, Zarité can't quite free herself from the island, and the people alive and dead that have followed her.Zarité's passages are striking. More than merely lyrical, they map around rhythms and spirits, making her as much conduit as storyteller. One wishes there was more of her because, unlike Allende, Zarité is under no mission to show us how much she knows. Every instance, a brush with a faith healer, for example, is an opportunity for Allende to showcase what she has learned about voodoo, medicine, European and Caribbean history, Napoleon, the Jamaican slave Boukman, and the legendary Mackandal, a runaway slave and master of black magic who has appeared in several novels including Alejo Carpentier's Kingdom of This World . The effect of such display of research is a novel that is as inert as a history textbook, much like, oddly enough John Updike's Terrorist, a novel that revealed an author who studied a voluminous amount of facts without learning a single truth.Slavery as a subject in fiction is still a high-wire act, but one expects more from Allende. Too often she forgoes the restraint and empathy essential for such a topic and plunges into a heavy breathing prose reminiscent of the Falconhurst novels of the 1970s, but without the guilty pleasure of sexual taboo. Sex, overwritten and undercooked, is where opulent hips slithered like a knowing snake until she impaled herself upon his rock-hard member with a deep sigh of joy. Even the references to African spirituality seem skin-deep and perfunctory, revealing yet another writer too entranced by the myth of black cultural primitivism to see the brainpower behind it. With Ines of My Soul one had the sense that the author was trying to structure a story around facts, dates, incidents, and real people. Here it is the reverse, resulting in a book one second-guesses at every turn. Of course there will be a forbidden love. Betrayal. Incest. Heartbreak. Insanity. Violence. And in the end the island in the novel's title remains legend. Fittingly so, because to reach the Island Beneath the Sea, one would have had to dive deep. Allende barely skims the surface.Marlon James's recent novel, The Book of Night Women was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award.

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First the cattle began to die. The colonists attributed it to a lethal plant that grew hidden in the fields and began, without results, to call on European botanists and local witch doctors to find and eradicate it. Next were the horses in the stables, the mastiffs, and finally entire families were struck down. The victims' bellies swelled, their gums and fingernails turned black, their blood turned to water, their skin peeled off in strips, and they died in the grip of atrocious contortions. The symptoms did not fit with any of the illnesses that ravaged the Antilles, and they were manifest only among whites; at that point there was no doubt it was poison. Macandal, again Macandal. Men dropped dead after drinking a swallow of liquor, women and children after a cup of chocolate, all the guests at a banquet before dessert had been served. The fruit on the trees could not be trusted, nor a sealed bottle of wine; not even a cigarette, because no one knew how the poison was administered. Hundreds of slaves were tortured without telling how death entered their victims' houses, until a girl of fifteen, one of many the Mandingo visited at night in the form of a bat, when threatened with being burned alive revealed the way to find Macandal. She was burned anyway, but her confession led the militiamen to the lair of Macandal, scaling peaks and chasms like goats until they reached the ashen mountains of the ancient Arawak chieftains. They captured Macandal alive. By then six thousand persons had died. It is the end of Macandal, the whites said. We shall see, the Negroes whispered.

The central place was small for the public that gathered from the plantations. The grands blancs made themselves comfortable under their canopies, stocked with food and drink, the petits blancs resigned themselves to sitting on the galleries, and the affranchis rented the balconies around the place that belonged to other free people of color. The best view was reserved for the slaves herded there by their masters from far away, to witness that Macandal was nothing more than a poor one-armed Negro who would cook like a roasted pig. They crowded the Africans around the bonfire, guarded by dogs tugging on their chains and crazed by the smell of human flesh. The day of the execution dawned with clouds; it was warm, and no air was stirring. The odors of the dense crowd mixed with those of burnt sugar, grease from the fry shops, and the wild flowers that grew tangled in the trees. Several priests were sprinkling holy water and offering a bun for every confession. The slaves had learned to trick the priests with garbled sins, since the shortcomings they admitted went directly to their masters' ears, but on this occasion no one was in the mood for buns. They were jubilantly waiting for Macandal.

The overcast sky threatened rain, and the Gouverneur calculated that they had very little time before the skies opened, but he had to wait for the Intendant, the commissioner who represented the civil government. Finally the Intendant and his wife, an adolescent crushed by the weight of her heavy gown, her plumed headgear, and her vexation, appeared on one of the raised stands reserved for honored guests. She was the only French woman in Le Cap who did not want to be there. Her husband, still young though twice her age, was bowlegged and fat of buttocks and belly, but beneath his elaborate wig he displayed the handsome head of an ancient Roman senator. A roll of the drums announced Macandal's appearance. He was welcomed by a chorus of threats and insults from the whites, mockery from the mulattoes, and shouts of frenetic excitement from the Africans. Defying the dogs, whiplashes, and orders from overseers and soldiers, the slaves rose to their feet, arms raised to the sky in greeting to Macandal. That produced a unanimous reaction; even the Gouverneur and the Intendant got to their feet.

Macandal was tall, very dark, his entire body marked with scars and barely covered by a pair of filthy, bloodstained breeches. He was in chains, but he stood erect, haughty, indifferent. He ignored the whites, the soldiers, priests, and dogs; his eyes passed slowly over the slaves, and each knew that those black pupils saw them, giving to them the unconquerable breath of his spirit. He was not a slave who would be executed but the only truly free man in the throng. That was what everyone intuited, and a profound silence fell over the place. Finally the blacks reacted, and in an uncontrollable chorus they howled the name of the hero: Macandal, Macandal, Macandal. The Gouverneur realized that the best course was to end quickly, before the planned circus turned into a bloodbath. He gave the signal, and the soldiers chained the prisoner to the post of the fire. The executioner lighted the straw, and soon the greased logs were blazing, enveloped in dense smoke. Not a sigh was heard as the deep voice of Macandal rose to the sky: I will be back! I will be back!

What happened then? That would be the most asked question on the island for the remainder of its history, as the colonists liked to say. Whites and mulattoes saw Macandal break free of his chains and leap over the blazing logs, but the soldiers fell upon him, clubbed him, and led him back to the pyre, where minutes later he was swallowed up in the flames and smoke. The Negroes saw Macandal break free of his chains and leap over the blazing logs, and when the soldiers fell upon him he turned himself into a mosquito and flew up out of the smoke, made a complete circle of the place, so all would be able to bid him farewell, and then was lost in the sky, just before the rainstorm that soaked the bonfire and put out the flames. The whites and affranchis saw Macandal's charred body. The Negroes saw nothing but the empty post. The former withdrew, running through the rain, and the latter stayed, singing, washed clean by the storm. Macandal had conquered, and had kept his promise. Macandal would be back. And because it was necessary to demolish that absurd legend forever, Valmorain told his unbalanced wife that that was why they were taking their slaves to witness another execution in Le Cap, twenty-three years later.

The long caravan was policed by four militiamen armed with muskets, Prosper Cambray and Toulouse Valmorain with pistols, and the commandeurs, who being slaves carried only swords and machetes. They were not to be trusted; in case of attack they might join the Maroons. The hungry Negroes moved very slowly, bundles on their backs, linked together with a chain that slowed their march and that to the master seemed excessive, but he could not countermand the head overseer. "No one will attempt to break away; the Negroes fear the jungle demons more than poisonous jungle creatures," Valmorain explained to his wife, but Eugenia did not want to know about blacks, demons, or jungle creatures. Little Tete was unchained, walking beside the litter of her mistress, which was carried by two slaves recruited from among the strongest. The path was lost in the tangle of vegetation and mud, the travelers' procession was a wretched snake dragging itself toward Le Cap in silence. From time to time the dogs barked, a horse neighed, or the whistle of a whip and a scream interrupted the murmur of human breathing and rustling leaves. At first Prosper Cambray tried to keep them singing, to lighten spirits and frighten away snakes, as they did in the cane fields, but Eugenia, stupefied by the swaying and fatigue, could not bear it.

In the jungle, beneath the thick dome of trees, it grew dark early, and the dawn light came late through the dense fog tangled in the ferns. The day was growing short for Valmorain, who was in a hurry, but eternal for the rest. The only food for the slaves was dried meat with a maize or sweet potato soup and a cup of coffee, handed out at night after they camped. The master had ordered a cube of sugar and a jot of taffia-the cane liquor of the poor-to be added to the coffee to warm those who were sleeping piled together on the ground and soaked with rain and dew, exposed to the devastation of an attack of fever. That year epidemics had been calamitous on the plantation; they'd had to replace many slaves, and none of the newborn had survived. Cambray warned his employer that the liquor and sugar would corrupt the slaves, and later there would be no way to keep them from sucking the cane. There was a special punishment for that infraction, but Valmorain was not given to complicated torture, except for runaways, in which case he followed the Code Noir to the letter. The execution of Maroons in Le Cap seemed to him a waste of time and money; it would have been enough to hang them without all the fuss.

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