Book Review: ISLAND BENEATH THE SEA by Isabel Allende. Translated by Margaret Sayers Peden. HarperCollins Publishers, 2010.
Read & reviewed by Jane Mack, January 2022.
This historical novel takes place in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) 1770 to 1793 [Part One] and Louisiana 1793 to 1810. It tells the story of the African slave, Zarité, set against the backdrop of island voodoo practices, the slave revolt against French colonialism, and the color barriers and complicated systems of quadroons, mulattos and other racial mixtures in a transitioning New Orleans.
Toulouse Valmorain, a young man, arrives in Saint-Domingue to take care of his sick father, whom he finds in the end stages of “the Spanish illness,” syphilis. Valmorain’s life in France was saturated in luxury that his father’s sugar plantation provided to him, his mother and sister. He has no intention of staying, but finds he must take control when his father dies, in order to keep the pipeline of money coursing back to his family and France. The sugar plantation’s extreme success, like all of those in Saint-Domingue and throughout the Caribbean, stems from free labor provided by the slaves shipped in by the thousands.
Valmorain quickly shelves his ideological and liberal ideas and adopts a pragmatic dogma to guide the rest of his life. Unlike his monarchist father, he still favors the concept of a republic and rights of man. But he sees that he needs slaves to continue reaping the profits of his plantation. His practice toward the slaves becomes one of personal laxity and avoidance. He permits the kalendas and other voodoo practices, but also requires the slaves to attend Mass on Sundays. He lets his overseer, Prosper Cambray, run the cane fields and inflict cruel and vicious punishments, but always out of his own view.
Valmorain also determines that he will not die like his father, so establishes a sexual relationship with a courtesan in Le Cap. Violette Boisier is a free mulatta of extraordinary beauty with an exclusive clientele. Her slave, Loula, protects her from any trouble. While Valmorain is initially enamored with Boisier, he eventually settles into a comfortable yet less passionate arrangement with her. Meanwhile, Etienne Relais, a loyal French soldier and honorable man, falls in love with Violette and sets about climbing the military ranks without corruption in order to convince her to marry him.
Valmorain finds his wife, Eugenia García del Solár, on one of his business trips to Cuba, where he also partners with his brother-in-law, Sancho, who operates on the edges of legality. Valmorain has Violette fix up the house at his Saint-Domingue plantation for his wife. Eugenia, who was raised by nuns in Spain, comes to Saint-Domingue, speaking neither French nor the Creole language of the island, and is quickly lost in the world.
To help her, Valmorain has Violette find him a slave girl.
Zarité enters in pre-pubescence, purchased from Madame Delphine and already scarred from lashings for running away. She believes in freedom, represented in the island beneath the sea, where all the ti-bon-ange souls of her ancestors will meet her with joy. Until eternal freedom, she seeks earthly freedom. As a slave, however, her only release is dance, and when she hears the drums—djun djun, boula, seconde—she dances and goes into a trance. She clings to her doll of loa, Erzulie and wears her hair with a tignon tied around it.
Finally, the novel becomes Zarité’s story.
As Eugenia descends into madness, Valmorain fits into the role of plantation owner. He rapes Zarité and then gives away her son to Violette and Etienne Relais. He has a son Maurice with Eugenia, whom Zarité raises.
We meet others along the way, including Tante Rose, a mambo and docteur feuilles, who is also very close and protective of Zarité. Doctor Parmentier has great respect for the traditional healer and often visits Tante Rose. Prosper Cambray always poses a threat to Zarité with his open lust. There is Honoré, the old servant of Madame Delphine who taught Zarité to dance. We learn the legend of Macandal. Valmorain’s brother-in-law, Sancho García del Solár, makes appearances.
Zarité is forced into the role of concubine to Valmorain besides tending to his mad wife, who eventually dies. She meets and falls in loves with the young slave, Gambo, who is brought into the kitchens at her insistence rather than assigned to the cane fields. This gives her opportunities to develop a sexual relationship as well as friendship and love with him. Gambo wants only freedom and would rather die than live as a slave. With Zarité’s blessing and the essential guidance of Tante Rose, he escapes to join the maroons in the mountains.
Zarité finds herself pregnant again, and the question is whether it is the child of her maître or of Gambo. When Rosette is born, her white skin determines the issue; she cannot be the child of black Gambo.
As the story develops, the atrocities of the slave holders becomes more apparent. Cruelty, depravity, sexual predation and torture darken the story to make it difficult to read. Eventually, the slave revolt threatens Valmorain’s plantation. Zarité, with her underground connections through Gambo, knows in advance and acts to save Valmorain, Maurice and Rosette. In Le Cap, while waiting to determine if they will go back to the plantation or flee overseas, Zarité is assigned to learn how to manage a house for entertainment of the grands blancs. She meets Zacharie, a slave major domo of great beauty and bearing, who appreciates that Zarité learns quickly and loves another so she is not distracted by him.
As they eventually flee Le Cap, Valmorain has a moment of heroics, and then they are off to Cuba. This ends part one.
Part two takes place in Louisiana where they settle. Sancho had purchased a sugar plantation and Valmorain has plenty of money, because he was entrusted by his friend and neighbor plantation owner LeCroix with huge sums to avoid taxes and other accountabilities, and with LeCroix dead, Valmorain treats it as his own money.
The second half of the book traces Zarité’s demands for freedom earned by her rescue of Valmorain; his second marriage to the selfish and indolent Hortense Guizot, and the problems with Maurice –insubordinate to Hortense–and with Rosette—too pretty and too favored by Valmorain. We see Loula and Violette again, but without Etienne Relais who was killed in action. Doctor Parmentier and his wife Adele also join the refugees from Saint-Domingue. We also see much more of Sancho and his charm. We learn more legend about Gambo, who become Capitaine Le Liberté and died fighting to protect his general.
The bright lights in the second half are the new characters of Owen Murphy, the new plantation overseer, and his wife Leeann, a former indentured servant whom Owen bought out of her forever bondage. When Zarité prays to her loa, Erzulie, LeeAnn calls upon her Catholic saint, not to be outdone, and the women laugh together in a rare moment of bonding between characters. We are also introduced to Pere Antoine, a Catholic priest who is called a saint for his work among the poorest and most desperate people. He helps Zarité again and again, and she repays him with her assistance on his missions to the jails and dangerous places.
In the end, Valmorain is feeble and disabled. Zarité is free and married to Zacharie with children. Maurice is heartbroken at Rosette’s death and has renounced his father and his inheritance as an abolitionist. Jean-Martin Relais, revealed to Zarité as her first born son, follows in his adoptive father’s footsteps as a dedicated soldier in the French military. Violette runs a plaçage business with Loula freed but still helping. The Haitian community holds kalendas and other voodoo rites alongside their practice of Catholicism.
Zarité dances to the drums.
My comments
The settings are carefully drawn. The cultures come alive through the consistent but limited use of terms that are italicized, like loa (voodoo god), taffia (harsh rum), grands blancs (important white plantation owners); petits blancs (free whites, merchants and petty bourgeoisie); affranchise (free people of color); maroon (run-away slave rebel); docteurs-feuilles (leaf doctors/traditional healers); kalendas (voodoo drum dances that induce trances); mambo (voodoo priestess or leader); maître (master), plaçage (a system for white men to maintain a woman of color as his mistress, with adherence to courtesies and protection); ti-bon-ange (spirit or soul).
Real events and story events weave together seamlessly.
The pace is a slow simmer and never boils. The climax is muted. The ending happens quickly.
Allende draws the characters at a distance. We never enter into their more complex thoughts and feelings. Zarité’s point of view is revealed in italicized sections, but it never dives deep into the trauma and pain she must have felt. Allende mentions but not explore the psychological. Allende renders the sex incidents with Valmorain, in romance-writing style as if they were not acts of rape, as if Zarité goes by choice to his room at night. The closest we come to real discovery is a scene where Valmorain’s lack of consideration of Zarité is compared to his riding his horse—that he would no more ask his horse how it feels than ask Zarité—both are property. But Allende steps over why Zarité saves Valmorain and the decision to do with a few brief words of explanation that she wants to protect the children and that Maurice would never be safe with the maroons. There is no revelation of any inner torment, any indecision, any waffling or weighing of considerations. That Zarité gives up her potential for immediate freedom and love with Gambo, and goes with Valmorain as a slave, just seems incredible.
For all the wonderful aspects of this novel, and it is wonderful, there is a distance between the reader and the characters that is never fully closed. I neither laughed nor cried, but I did skip over some of the violence and sex.
Besides the distance between the reader and the characters, there seems to be a distance between the characters themselves. They never quite trust each other, never really come together. At times when there is a bond, it proves artificial, as when Sancho introduces Maurice to a young maiden for his first sexual encounter. The bonds that do exist are fragmented with moral ambiguities and clear immorality: White Doctor Parmentier unwilling to live with his adored mulatta wife Adele; Plaçage as a “solution” to protect free women of color; the incest between Maurice and Rosette treated as a triumph when it feels to this reader like a tragedy. It’s difficult to care deeply for any of the main characters when they do not reveal their motives and thoughts except in the most superficial manner. We accept morally gray areas; we like flawed characters. But generally, we want to be part of the story and connect with their dilemmas as they face them; not just be told what happened.
I love stories of strong women. Zarité is a slave and yet walks with a tall, straight back and makes the choices she can with her own fierce loyalties. She’s a worthy heroine. I wish the novel were perfect, but it is not. It is, however, a good read. It might also make a good musical, which is a genre more suited to the epic scope without deep characterization.