What Can Story Do?
Image of Joanne C. Hillhouse, holding and surrounded by her books
Photo by Annetta Jackson, Intersect Antigua-Barbuda
It is April 23rd as I write this – World Book Day, as it happens; a day after April 22nd, Earth Day. The timing couldn’t be better. I’m continuing to revise stories in my book-in-progress; and many of the stories tackled during this second leg of my Intersect residency have to do with the environment.
I’m not a scientist nor a politician, but, climate change is real and writing is how I process life. The creative process compels me to grapple with whatever anxiety, and frankly fear, I may be feeling about our current and near future reality.
In “Freedom Cup” [1], a colonial speculative reality that has more in common with the Empire of Star Warsfame than our own galaxies, a teenage girl named Corinne dreams of freedom. While not an environmental tale directly, it is a world marked by exploitation of resources and people, futuristic in some ways but with implicit call backs to the theft of indigenous land and the enslavement of African people of historical record in our world. And something I picked up in more than one of the pieces is the presence of story/myth making.
Raflandia, he said, had been the last free land in the ULTRA. This had been millennia before her father himself had come into being but the people still sang of it. They sang of bathing under the water falling down the rock face, something Corinne had a hard time imagining. They sang of lying in the grass, something she had crossed off her to do list with her Eastlandia Bridge excursion. She had shared this with her father, to his delight. “Like lying on a cloud, isn’t it?” She didn’t know what lying on a cloud might feel like but it seemed a fair comparison. It made her heart yearn all the more for the land of her father’s people, with its cloudlike beds of grass and so much water it just fell without reason. And song. There wasn’t a lot of song in Eastlandia. But Atik would sing Corinne lullabyes of home.
Inspired by the football world cup, in “Freedom Cup”, the enslaved people of the ULTRA have the opportunity to play for their freedom and for the entertainment of the elites. Corinne and her best friend Gladstone, both enslaved teens in this world, have decided to go for it.
“Worst thing about being in that quarry wasn’t the work. Was knowing that Rockyway wasn’t everything, that I could have more, like soft grass to lie in, that I didn’t have to inhale dust until I died like my father.”
Writing about quarry dust and power dynamics, fictionally, reminds me of the recurring issues at the Bendals quarry in Antigua, from a childhood memory (real or imagined) of a story of a crushed child to news of quarry dust disrupting school and village life in more recent times.
She’d looked out over the vast quarry; ragged mountains of rock chipped away over time, rough steps hewn into the rock face, little clouds of dust announcing the presence of groups of Labs still chipping as far as she could see. She’d wondered how many lifetimes it would take before there was no more rock, maybe no more Eastlandia.
What the fictional and real world have in common here, I think, is the impact (environmental and social) of ‘development’ decisions made for political and economic expediency, and the extraction of profit over the interests of the most vulnerable.
In the life of Barbuda and Barbudans hurricane Irma, in 2017, has been one of the most transformative developments since 1834 [Emancipation]. Barbudans have traditionally understood their island to be communally owned. That has been eroded [2]. After Irma destroyed Barbuda, the island was evacuated. During this period, while Barbudans were climate ‘refugees’ in Antigua, the central government began the process of stripping away the traditional communal relationship with the land for a free hold arrangement (putting the limited 62 square miles on the market and clearing the way for resort developments by the likes of American actor Robert de Niro). Barbudans continue to fight [3].
Just as that relentless 2017 hurricane season is the inciting incident of Barbuda’s current storyline, it sparked the two hurricane-themed stories in my collection: “The Night the World Ended” and “Frig It!” And yet I didn’t set out to write about Irma or Maria, the 2017 hurricane season’s other big bad, in particular, so much as to process it all. “The Night the World Ended” was published in 2018 in The Caribbean Writer. I wrote it in such a fugue – maybe a trauma response – that when I read it in print, I barely remembered writing it. In it, a single mother wrestles the storm to keep her children safe. What I remember about the writing of it is holding the image of Jacob wrestling an angel one night, per The Bible, in my head the whole time. I remember wanting to write that from the perspective of the weaker being who has no choice but to keep fighting, knowing they can’t win but hoping to outlast the force they know is greater than them. And isn’t that what we do every time there’s a hurricane warning, as legendary Antiguan soca band Burning Flames said “batten dung” [4] and hope to outlast a force we know is greater than us?
“Frig It!” written from a child’s point of view, probably calls back to my first hurricane, David, on a trip with my mother and sister to Dominica when I was six years old.
Cresilla, her mother, and the baby were standing on the bed, fully dressed, shoes on the bedspread, as the water rose. When the windows exploded like someone had thrown a grenade at them, the roof blew off, and a gust took the front door. The bed of the single room they shared had been pressed up against the door but there was suddenly no need for it and Cresilla imagined that with the next strong wind the bed would be floating like a magic carpet above the island.
Exploding windows – which show up in both hurricanes, “The Night the World Ended” and “Frig It!” – are lifted directly from my memory of David. While I remember this devastating event mostly as an adventure, the sound and violence of the exploding windows lives with me.
Having to go out in the storm clinging to my mother, me on one side, my sister on the other, is another memory from David.
As they inched through the storm, Cresilla clung as tight as she could to her mother, chanting “Frig it! Frig it! Frig it!” like it was a prayer. She turned her head just for a minute to look up, hoping to catch sight of him. She got water, sharp like knife points, in her eyes for her efforts. She stumbled, slipped, and fell. Her mother disappeared in the darkness. That’s when Cresilla screamed. The howling wind snatched her voice away from her.
The hurricane in “Frig It!” is a super storm, one of those game changers of the 2017 season, delivering on climate science’s predictions of weather events of a frequency and size previously unseen. It is a super villain Cresilla can only process by conjuring a superhero. Is it a story she tells herself to self-soothe or is it real? That’s the question.
Another question, one I can’t shake, with climate change such a big threat – and I’ll throw COVID, and its public health implications in there – is why we seem to have even less value for life (see unnecessary post-COVID deaths in Ukraine, Haiti, Congo, Gaza etc.).
Death and life is the subject of another speculative work of fiction from the collection, “Undying”, written during the pandemic, largely from the perspective of the denizens of a shadow reality that observe human life (like reality TV) and process human deaths.
…she said instead. “What’s it like?”
And his face scrunched up. “What’s what like?”
“Being human,” Mena said.
To her dismay, he started to cry.
In some ways, this story is grappling with how we squander life, from the perspective of someone for whom human life is a fascinating discovery.
… they found shelter under a tree whose bark she touched like it was skin and she was feeling it out. And when she was done with that she stepped into the rain and stuck her tongue out to catch it…
That we emerged from COVID without a new commitment to life, to doing everything we could to sustain life, challenges my own theory that survival is our most basic instinct.
The world today is peppered week to week with news of everything from heat advisories – including Antigua and Barbuda government’s recent contemplation of whether it was safe for Carnival to go on this summer between the heat and projected-highly-active hurricane season, earthquakes and aftershocks across the Caribbean, tsunami drills, warnings of Sahara Dust [5], and Sargassum clogging up our precious beaches. Precious in Antigua and Barbuda, land of 365 beaches, and many other islands almost exclusively dependent on [beach/resort] tourism, or so our politicians frame it; it’s the most precious jewel.
We are careless with our jewels.
I think about how several of the characters in the works I’ve been reviewing – Elena in “Ms. Shepherd’s Corner Shop”, Luna in “After the Event”, and Cresilla in “Frig It!” among them – are trying to understand their reality through story. I didn’t realize I was doing this until this round of revisions, and I do recognize this as an extension of my own journey. A reflection of how I channel everything – including my rage and despair, my questioning and searching, my hoping and dreaming – into this writing I do.
In “Frig It!” I attempt to capture the helplessness the weather events conjure, especially when opportunistic politicians swoop in to save the day.
An island is just an island – “a body of land surrounded by water” as they parroted in class, “like a ball of fungi in a bowl of gravy,” Dalso had whispered during that lesson, causing the whole class to laugh and Teacher to get vex. Right now an island, Cresilla’s island, felt unmoored from the whole world, like a boat set adrift, no green flash to indicate the horizon, no nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles of water. A desert of water.
Yeah, let’s talk about water. How because of the nature of the world in “Freedom Cup”, for instance, a world that imagines water scarcity, I had to research plants and vegetables which require less water.
Bougainvillea, for one, didn’t mind that there wasn’t much to nourish it; it sprouted wherever in purples, oranges, and pinks.
Water rationing has been the norm in Antigua most of my life and it’s only gotten worse as we’ve become more modern. “Guinep Blossoms”, a farce, touches on this.
Pauline has government water but the tank is usually a reliable back-up. Government water is not so reliable, less reliable with each passing day. “I might have to cut you off,” Pauline tell Ras just the other day, though the two of them know she won’t do him and his bees that.
My collection being female-centered, that these stories of climate, colonialism, and community are gendered is no surprise; it’s also very true to real life, I think. I don’t have the stats but I see the way women carry the burden in the household and in the community, I see and feel the economic vulnerability and the burden of being the “Superwoman” [4] though only human. So, it doesn’t surprise me that I have tapped into that instinctively when writing versions and possibilities of my world. I am reminded of a recent social media post by Barbadian gender activist, founder of #lifeinleggings Ronelle King, who was featured in a 2022 edition of my CREATIVE SPACE art and culture column [6], sharing her recent meeting at the United Nations on the issues around gender-based violence and climate change in the Caribbean. I might need another catch-up with her for the particulars – but she spotlighted, through a prism of gender equality, the need to include the voices of climate refugees in climate discourse, policy, and action.
People like Ronelle, and Intersect for that matter, are doing the work. Me? I’m just telling stories. And while I do believe in the power of story, I don’t have answers. Neither does Lula in the alternate future dystopia in “The Event”.
“We fed the earth shit, it passed gas, and now we’re all breathing it, and those of us it doesn’t kill, it transforms.”
In her timeline, as with us during the pandemic, nature thrived.
She heard birds singing above her in the tree. Even their trill was happy. The Event had been like a shot of adrenaline in the arm for nature.
And, as she tries to find safe harbor for her sister and herself, she finds inspiration in nature and in the past (some Anansi and Mami Wata lore research may have been involved). Elena in “Ms. Shepherd’s Corner Shop” also finds inspiration in the past.
“Elena, you have to share,” Mrs. Henry said.
“Ms. Shepherd’s Corner Shop” is a nostalgia piece in that it harkens back to an Antigua that was, but it’s about going back to get the values that sustained us when we had nothing in a time that calls for creative thinking.
Elena thought of a made-up childhood game…All their games were made up then.
It’s not a policy paper – it’s about children and their nonsense (everything is play, even a trip to the corner shop) as much as anything, but there is a woman in it looking for solutions, who has a big presentation coming up.
She needed to remember to pack some granola and water. It wouldn’t do to face them with low energy in what she imagined would be a dimly lit room with ominous music.
As the world spins, and possibly prepares to spin us right off it, what is the purpose of story, of imagining.
Anansi was a trickster, Luna knew that, but what Luna remembers most about him is that he might not always get over, but you could never count him out; he had his head on.
Does story matter? Why do we tell ourselves stories? What can story do? I don’t have the answers, I swear I don’t. I’m just trying to make sense of the world. I do know that story has shown me both problems and possibilities, and Anansi is a good point at which to stop, as there’s no better example of the endurance of story. What it does beyond that, I think, is up to us.
ENDNOTES
3 – “Barbuda declares, ‘it’s not for sale’” by Kenica Francis, The Daily Observer
5 – “Air Quality Alert issued for Antigua and Barbuda due to Saharan Dust”, The Daily Observer
