Some content warnings: this post talks about slavery and racism. It might be triggering to some.
Book: Island Beneath the Sea
Autor: Isabel Allende (Chile)
My Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
StoryGraph Rating: 3.9/5
Follow me on StoryGraph
This is one of my favourite books by Isabel Allende. It combines everything I love about her works: historical fiction, magical realism, social justice, strong women characters… all in a tropical island setting.
The story is set in the late 1700s, on the island of Saint-Domingue, which is now Haiti. Under the French domain at the time, Haiti went on to become the first independent Black Republic of the Americas and the only country in the world to gain independence through a slave revolt. As if this wasn’t interesting enough, the book also touches on other historic moments, such as the French Revolution and the consolidation of the United States as a country.
Our main character is Teté, a slave who, like many others, was born from the sexual violence committed by the White French soldiers against the many Black women brought as slaves from Africa. Despite her origins and her status in society, Teté is, like many of Allende’s characters, a force of nature.
This is one of the things I love about this author: how she writes strong, independent women who take even the most terrible circumstances into their own hands and turn them to their advantage.
“Under her mother’s tutelage the girl began to exercise her profession when she was eleven; by thirteen, when her mother was murdered, she had mastered the exquisite arts of pleasure, and at fifteen had surpassed all her rivals.”
Island Beneath the Sea – p.12
Another fascinating aspect of the book for me was all the Voodoo elements that are present on the island, alongside the Catholic religion brought by the colonizers. I already mentioned in another post how African-based religions in the Americas are misunderstood and misrepresented. I believe Voodoo is one of the biggest examples of that distortion. In the book, Allende shines a different light on the beliefs brought by Africans to Central America.
“He explained that in the tongue of his parents, voodoo means divine spirit. My doll represented Erzulie, the loa of love and maternity. Madame Delphine made me pray to the Virgin Mary, a goddess who doesn’t dance, just weeps, because they killed her son and she never knew the pleasure of being with a man.”
Island Beneath the Sea – p.40
The Voodoo elements mix with magical realism and historical fiction, and the result is a fantastical account of the slave rebellion in Saint Domingue.
“More than thirty years had gone by since Macandal, that legendary sorcerer, planted the seed of insurrection, and since then, his spirit had travelled with the wind from one end of the island to the other, infiltrating slave quarters, cabins, ajoupas, mills, and tempting slaves with the promise of freedom. He adopted the form of a serpent, a beetle, a monkey, a macaw, he blended with the whisper of the rain, he clamored with the thunder, he incited rebellion with the howl of the storm.”
Island Beneath the Sea – p.113
Other than Teté we have other characters, including ones that own plantations and slaves. The attitude of the White masters varies between the ones that use slavery as a means to satisfy their most cruel and dark impulses and the ones that consider it a necessary evil if they want to make any money on the island.
This second group often prefer to leave the daily management of the people they “own” to farm managers and hide behind a series of excuses and justifications. In some of the dialogues is possible to glimpse what kind of twisted logic allowed “high society” French men to profit from the enslavement of other human beings.
“’It’s obvious that you have had very little dealings with them. Blacks have the constitution for heavy work, they feel less pain and fatigue, their brain power is limited, they do not know how to make choices, they are violent, disorderly, lazy, and they lack ambition and noble sentiments.’ ‘The same could be said of a White brutalized by slavery, monsieur.’”
Island Beneath the Sea – p.113
This is an accurate description of some of the late 1700s European way of thinking (I wouldn’t be surprised if some of this logic is still circulating in some minds today). There were even “scientists” who went a long way to “prove” these theories using the scientific methods available at the time.
The armed revolt organized by former slaves, the creation of whole villages by the ones who managed to escape and the alliances they forged with other European countries at the time created a deep fissure in that logic. At the height of the events, many masters saw their roles reversed and had to flee to avoid being killed by their former slaves.
“He broke out in a sour sweat whose stench he could recognize: the odor of the impotence and terror of the slaves Cambray has martyrized. He felt that his fate was sealed and that like the slaves on his plantation, there was no escape.”
Island Beneath the Sea – p.222
Allende story runs deeper than just a fight between good and evil, between cruel masters and victimized slaves. She doesn’t shy away from all the violence that was unleashed when a big part of the black population decided to seek revenge for all the years of physical punishment and humiliation, on the former masters and their families, including children.
Neither does she hide the complexity of the interracial relationships among all the different ethnic groups living in Saint Domingue, and how they turned on each other.
This is an amazing story with a breathtaking ending that only consolidated what I already knew: Isabel Allende is definitely my all-time favourite author.
Leave a Reply