Allende’s ‘Island Beneath the Sea’ is complex emotional tale

Isabel Allende is well-known for the unique situations and settings she creates in her novels. This one may be the most complex of them all, since the first part of the novel takes place on the French-owned island of Saint-Domingue – later Haiti – during the French Revolution as it begins to touch on island life in 1770.

As always, Allende tells her story through the characters who take part in it. In this one, it is the strength, intelligence and faith that sustains the slave girl Tete, the main character, and her relationships with others that mirror the times.

Her master, Valmorain, who has come to the island to build the plantation his father left him, bought her ostensibly for his wife, but rapes her regularly from the age of 11, quite indifferent to her as a person. She bears him two children.

Tete’s faith is in voodoo and its dances, and her faith sustains her. It sustained many of the slaves, because they had come from all over Africa and thus didn’t have a common language, but they had drums and voodoo.

The ambiance of the slaves, the careless to murderous way they are treated comes through the story and is the culture that gives rise to the title: Island Beneath the Sea. It symbolizes drowning, which some feel is better for a newborn than conditions the island slaves suffer. And they will rejoin their families, there in the place all souls went.

Meanwhile the slaves, reflecting the way they are treated (this is, of course, way before slavery came to America) revolt in a particularly brutal way, burning down the plantations, forcing their masters to flee – shown the way by Tete’s true lover. This man, who later dies trying to save the life of the liberator of Haiti, Toussaint L’Ouverture, is the means by which Tete got her freedom, as it was the custom that any slave who saved a master must be given their freedom.

Tete learns much later that Toussaint had freed all the slaves and declared the island he named Saint-Domingue independent under the name of the Republique d’Haiti. In order to erase racism there, all citizens were labeled by the color of their skin: negs or blancs.

But during the revolt, the plantation owners promise: “We will not sit idly by with our arms crossed.”

If they caught a rebel, he was flayed alive; 1,500 dogs were imported from Jamaica and mules from Martinique to drag cannons up a mountain. Many used the unrest to commit “bestial acts” though neither slave nor master. Being broken on the wheel was a common punishment.

Later in New Orleans, even though she had her (and Valmorain’s) beloved son with her, it was being lost in voodoo music and dancing that got Tete close to flogged. She was sent to a filthy jail to await the lashing Valmorain had arranged for her before changing his mind at the last minute.

Much of the action moves on to the next generation and Louisiana which had just been turned over from the Spanish to the French and then, almost immediately, from the French to the Americans. New Orleans racism is a different brand a generation later, and the story and the emotions aroused just as complex.

Throughout the story the intricate personal relationships are complicated and the story very suspenseful. The author clearly means to dramatize real events through her characters and succeeds in making the people very real as well as the culture in which they live.

No report of the relationships or specifics of the plot can convey the realities the author does so splendidly. Allende is a master at bringing historical material to life.

Book info:

Island Beneath the Sea

By Isabel Allende

Harper Perennial, $14.99

Posted by Rae Eastman on October 25, 2012. Filed under Arts and Entertainment,Book Reviews,Columns,Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry