Feministing Readz: Land of Love and Drowning

If I were to derive a formula for character development from Land of Love and Drowning, I’d return to watch Eeona rework a central myth in sleep: “She dreamed about a school of women walking out of the ocean. Then she dreamed it again. And again. Until in the dream she was finally one of the women.” Decide what your freest self looks like; conjure it into being; inhabit it as long as it holds. The next morning she wakes, makes her way to sea, and nearly drowns. Abandon and repeat as needed.

The adjectives so far affixed by reviewers to Tiphanie Yanique’s debut novel hold, and bear repeating: “epic,” “ambitious,” and “lush” all recur deservedly. Land follows three generations of Virgin Islanders through the first seventy or so years of the last century, charting the protagonists’ intimate upheavals against the backdrop of both World Wars, an exploding tourist economy, and competing nationalisms.

For all of its geopolitical grounding, the novel is everywhere suffused with fantasy, so that storytelling and the writing of history themselves become a kind of magic. Antoinette Stemme Bradshaw, her daughters Anette and Eeona, and their lovers and children all struggle to cast their own spells and construct their own narratives in pursuit of protean and divergent visions of freedom. 

It is a testament to Yanique’s own protean vision and narrative magic that freedom does not always take a recognizable form in her novel. Only for Antoinette does it look anything like independence. She’s socially and materially ambitious, but above all else she prizes her private sense of self.

One of her daughters remembers, “Mama could see that freedom does be well dressed and fashionable,” and Antoinette applies herself to making clothes for the wealthy women of the island as a way to install herself among them: “It was not enough to be beautiful, she said. A woman must be able to create beauty.” Fearing the erosion of her hard-won inviolability, she induces a number of abortions—a skill Antoinette considers to be the most vital lesson of womanhood—and before her younger daughter’s birth she worries that “with another child she would surely lose herself. How did other women do it?”

The dark side of Antoinette’s private integrity is an inclination to “wildness;” despite her efforts to instruct her children in the etiquette of the upper classes, Antoinette’s “episodes” are her greatest bequest. The affliction remains vague but consuming—an episode may entail impulsivity, confusion, or flight. The beautiful and threatening wild woman is a familiar trope that Yanique engages thoughtfully. As with Antoinette Cosway in Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’s classic rewriting of Jane Eyre from the perspective of Rochester’s Caribbean madwoman in the attic, the wildness of Yanique’s Antoinette becomes a self-fulfilling script: such inaccessibility cannot be recognized in women as anything other than danger and madness.

Eeona inherits her mother’s beauty along with her wildness, and she remains ambivalent about this legacy throughout the book, alternately claiming and defining herself against the values and machinations of her mother. Throughout her childhood, Eeona understands herself as both her mother’s inheritor and competitor; her relationship with her father Owen becomes sexual from an early age. Though Eeona and Owen both think of each other lovingly, it is important to call their relationship by a name Yanique never uses: sexual abuse. Owen dies while Eeona is still a teenager, but this incest indelibly marks the rest of her life.

Yanique is careful to acknowledge the abuse of power that underlies any such relationship between parent and child. At the same time, she works hard to honor the ambivalence and complexity that arise when such abuse is experienced as love by the survivor as well as the abuser.

In the aftermath of these early traumas, Eeona ricochets between ill-defined and competing definitions of freedom even as she remains steadfast in her pursuit of it. In her darkest moments, Eeona decides that her lack of control “must be the longed-for freedom. She began to live inside her episodes.” And even in the throes of an episode her sister overhears her “talking about how we need to be free women and how we think we free but we not.”

Of the three central Bradshaw women, Eeona’s sister Anette least self-consciously claims her own freedom. The chapters narrated in her voice bloom with confidence and wit: “Life was easy, let me tell you. I could make it so.” Yet Anette’s determination to have things her way coincides with a persistent and defining desire to be claimed by another. “Eeona want to have things. I had want to be had.” There is no weakness in dependence as Anette conceives it. If she is to be had, it will be on her terms. “I was a fast girl, always spinning on my own axis,” with no patience or time for a lover “who don’t know how to hold on tight.”

With Anette we see perhaps most clearly the extent to which freedom is a negotiation we undertake constantly with those others who populate our lives. Yanique and her characters are concerned not only with individualism’s allure, but with its limits; her novel unfolds as an ecology of wills shaped by and shaping their contexts and each other.

In her willfulness as well as in her willingness to compromise, Anette is as much her mother’s daughter as she is Janie Crawford’s, the protagonist of Zora Neale Hurston’s beloved Their Eyes Were Watching God. Love for both women is figured by the ocean, an image of threat and welcome, expansiveness and foreclosure, buoyancy and turmoil. “Love is lak de sea,” Janie reflects in Their Eyes, though the insight echoes throughout Yanique’s novel; “It’s uh movin’ thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.”

Love, then, is one name for the collision of individual wills; another, the novel eagerly reminds us, is history. “History was something so simple and insistent that none of us had escaped it,” quips the unnamed narrator, and it fascinates Anette just as love does. The novel begins just before the transfer of the novel’s three principal islands from Danish to U.S. rule, and America infects the islanders’ conceptions of beauty, freedom, and cultural integrity. Be it in the form of Antoinette’s wildness or of the “witches” and obeah women who lose prestige with the rise of American medical practice, women are made the bearers of all that is threatening about the Caribbean.

Threatening, and enticing because of it—the island women are pursued by foreign soldiers and exoticized by foreign media for “the kind of love only we island girls can give.” Americanness has the power to legitimate as well as denigrate. Anette sees the islanders “becoming real” in an exploitative Hollywood film for which they’re enlisted as extras, but she also imagines love as a kind of transport to “a time before Americanness. A time before any kind of ness.”

In addition to its thematic work, the historical backdrop provides some welcome structure to an otherwise unpredictable plot. The novel is propelled by a series of improbable coincidences and triumphs of fate that come and go like changes of weather, an impression made literal by the arrival of a hurricane—“a wild-woman storm,” of course. Time and circumstance hammer the island like waves against a shore, a persistent and capricious ebb and flow, but Yanique’s wild women weather them the best they can. Lovers enter and exit, act and are acted upon. They survive, until they don’t. They think they are free until they realize they aren’t, and vice versa.

But the plot twists do not overwhelm or aggravate, thanks both to Yanique’s deft pacing and to the unknowable magic at her novel’s core. There’s a looseness to much of the symbolism; it coheres with the logic of dreams, and dreams are as real in Land as anything else. This looseness, these dreamy symbols constitute and fill a world. I was glad to live in it these last few weeks.

Sam Huber lives and writes in New York City. He is a guest contributor to Feministing.