Poetry and Islands: Materiality and the Creative Imagination 1783484128, 9781783484126

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chapter One: Introduction
1.1 The Real and the Fictive
1.2 An Outline of Method
1.3 Of Islands in General
Chapter Two: Islands as Symbols
2.1 Islands as Figures of Desire and Dread
2.2 Islands Lost and Found: Atlantis and Ithaca
2.3 Islands and the Archipelagic Imagination
Chapter Three: Islanders as Types
3.1 Settling an Island: Crusoe
3.2 Demonizing an Island: Rāvana and Caliban
3.3 Returning to an Island: Odysseus
Chapter Four: Comparative Case Studies
4.1 Island Legacies: Iceland and Greece
4.2 Island Poetics: Japan and the Caribbean
4.3 Island Politics: Ireland and Taiwan
Chapter Five: In Lieu of a Conclusion: Oceania
More Water Than Land
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

Poetry and Islands

RETHINKING THE ISLAND The Rethinking the Island series seeks to unsettle assumptions by comprehensively investigating the range of topological and topographical characteristics that lie at the heart of the idea of “islandness.” Series Editors: Elaine Stratford, Professor and Director, Peter Underwood Centre for Educational Attainment, University of Tasmania. Godfrey Baldacchino, Professor of Sociology at the University of Malta, UNESCO CoChair in Island Studies and Sustainability. Elizabeth McMahon, Associate Professor in the School of the Arts and Media, University of New South Wales, Australia. Titles in the Series Theorizing Literary Islands: The Island Trope in Contemporary Robinsonade Narratives, Ian Kinane Island Genres, Genre Islands: Conceptualization and Representation in Popular Fiction, Ralph Crane and Lisa Fletcher Postcolonial Nations, Islands, and Tourism: Reading Real and Imagined Spaces, Helen Kapstein Caribbean Island Movements: Culebra’s Trans-insularities, Carlo A. Cubero Poetry and Islands: Materiality and the Creative Imagination, Rajeev S. Patke The Islands and Atolls of the Maldives Archipelago, edited by Stefano Malatesta, Marcella Schmidt di Friedberg, Shahida Zubair and David Bowen (forthcoming)

Poetry and Islands Materiality and the Creative Imagination Rajeev S. Patke

London • New York

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and London (UK) www.rowman.com Copyright © 2018 by Rajeev S. Patke All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-78348-410-2 ISBN: PB 978-1-78348-411-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 9781783484102 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 9781783484119 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 9781783484126 (electronic) TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

For Rithu, in gratitude for shared memories and For Zarann, in anticipation of shared futures

Contents

Acknowledgments 1

2

3

4

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Introduction 1.1 The Real and the Fictive 1.2 An Outline of Method 1.3 Of Islands in General Islands as Symbols 2.1 Islands as Figures of Desire and Dread 2.2 Islands Lost and Found: Atlantis and Ithaca 2.3 Islands and the Archipelagic Imagination Islanders as Types 3.1 Settling an Island: Crusoe 3.2 Demonizing an Island: Rāvana and Caliban 3.3 Returning to an Island: Odysseus Comparative Case Studies 4.1 Island Legacies: Iceland and Greece 4.2 Island Poetics: Japan and the Caribbean 4.3 Island Politics: Ireland and Taiwan In Lieu of a Conclusion: Oceania More Water Than Land

Bibliography Index About the Author

1 1 6 13 29 29 47 61 77 80 88 102 115 116 124 137 153 153 163 175 185

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Acknowledgments

No book such as this could be imagined without all the work of scholarship that has gone before: my deepest debt is to all those who have written of islands, especially the real ones. I am also grateful for various enhancements to my reading by friends and colleagues, especially Isabela Banzon and Petrus Liu. Pericles Lewis, then president of Yale-NUS College, was kind enough to grant relief from teaching during the period when the writing was in its last phase; prior to that, a research grant from Yale-NUS College helped enormously in the early stages of the project in facilitating visits to islands and libraries and acquiring primary and secondary materials. Without both kinds of help, the completion of this book would have been delayed. I am also grateful to Edwin Thumboo and Lee Tzu Pheng for permission to cite from their work. My pleasure at getting to join this series from Rowman & Littlefield is indebted to Elizabeth McMahon, who kept faith in the idea of such a book well before it was begun, and through all the stages of its writing. I am also grateful to all the staff at Rowman & Littlefield who have helped bring the typescript into its final shape with precision and speed: Holly Tyler, Natalie Bolderstone, Patricia Stevenson, and my copyeditor, Desiree Reid. Working on a book is mostly a solitary journey, stretching over years. My traversal has had family for company, and two delightful members of a larger group of fellow travelers are acknowledged with pleasure in my dedication.

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ONE Introduction

1.1 THE REAL AND THE FICTIVE My aim in this book is to give an account of what islands have signified through history and across the planet as that significance finds expression in poetry. This might sound like a grand claim, impossible of realization; it is proffered here in the spirit of the reflection by the French writer Blaise Pascal (1620–1666): “Since we cannot achieve universality by knowing everything that there is to know about everything, we must know a little about everything” (Pascal 1995, 64–65, §228). I should hasten to add that my aim is more modest than to have read and reflected on every poem about every island on the planet. Rather, it subscribes to an idea voiced in a dramatic monologue from Men and Women, 1855 by the English poet Robert Browning (1812–1889) through his fictive representation of the Renaissance painter Andrea del Sarto, that there is a logic—at once simple, paradoxical, and compelling—to why “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp” (Browning 1920, 170). Thus, it is my intention to point selectively toward the triple interest inherent to all island writing: that it refracts natural environments, dramatizes a continual interplay between the perceived and the imagined, and demonstrates commonalty as well as difference between island cultures. This triple interest enjoins the kind of recognition that the Antiguan poet Derek Walcott (1930–2017) celebrates in “A Sea Chantey” through what he calls “the beads of a rosary,” a litany of names singling out islands for all their individual and collective distinctiveness: Anguilla, Antigua, Guadeloupe, Grenada, and so on (Walcott 2014, 44–46). With a somewhat different aim in mind, the Irish poet Padraic Colum (1881–1972) relishes the simple enumeration of island names, unconnected except in how they sound together, bringing dissimilar things into 1

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a single series purely for the incantatory power of syntax to evoke a medley of associations, when named thus: Ithaca, Eriskay, Iceland, Tahiti, Crete, Corsica, Mytilene, Aran, and Iona (MacDiarmid 1939, 47). In this book I have attempted a compound answer to a single question: How does poetry represent islands? The answers are many. Poetry picks out from an island experience that which most calls for articulation and remembrance. It reports on island memories as well as perceptions and reflections. It describes and evokes islands. It mourns and celebrates in equal measure, giving proof not merely that someone existed in relation to an island experience but also of how that existence might matter vitally to those living in other times and places. Island poetry invites us to imagine more than it can tell or show. It dreams up fictive islands almost as often as it describes real ones; it wants you to know what it might feel like to live there, even if only in imagination. It believes in the mind’s eye just as much as, or perhaps a little more than, what our eyes can see and what our ears can hear of island sights and sounds. What’s in a Name? The word island, we are reminded by Joseph W. Meeker, is derived from the “Latin terra en sala (land in the sea),” which “became in English ‘isolated land,’ then simply island” (Meeker 2011, 197). So, what’s in a name? The obvious answer to that question is “everything.” The American poet Gary Snyder (b. 1930), for example, would prefer that his country men and women “give up the European word ‘America’ and accept the new-old name for the continent, ‘Turtle Island’” (Snyder 1974, 105). Any place-name is an invention attached to a real place for a time and with a reason. Denis Cosgrove reminds us, in Apollo’s Eye (2001): The globe’s geographical naming is necessarily arbitrary and conventional rather than logical or empirical, its apparent order and stability in atlas or world map deceptive: the nominal globe is a space of contestation rather than of concord. (Cosgrove 2001, 12)

In poetic writing, to dwell on a place is to reflect on and resonate to the natural as well as the human dimension of its geography and history. Consider the complicated history by which part of the Caribbean islands came to be called the Antilles: Peter Conrad, in Islands: A Trip through Time and Space (2009), narrates a line of transmission from a Roman adaptation of the name Atlantis to the invention of a phantasmal pair of balmy islands called Antilia, which came to represent a mythical refuge for Christians in Portugal after the Moorish conquest, and thence to Columbus during his first encounter with the Caribbean, using the word Antilles to encompass the archipelago that he marveled at (Conrad 2009, 75–76). The French ethnographer and writer Victor Segalen (1878–1919) proposed in 1904, when in sight of the island of Java, that the notion of the

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exotic might be approached through a parallelism between stepping back in time and moving out in space (Segalen 2002, 13). My method is comparable, except in dissuading us to think of any place as exotic: to balance moving freely across time and space while remaining intent on treating both the past and the distant as present in the moment of attention. The sustaining of such a balance is celebrated by two Francophone writers from the Antilles—Saint-John Perse (1887–1975) and Édouard Glissant (1928–2011)—as the sovereignty of the here and now (Glissant 1997, 37). The poetry of place makes it a task to name the intuitive being of a place as bespoken by climate and topography; by the histories of habitation, development, and depredation; and by all that a place has been before and after the time of the anthropocene. The result, each time, is an alliance between the real and the invented, between islands as home for the human (and other than the human), and islands as homes for the imagination. These considerations provide the book with a broad strategy: representative exemplification and analysis of the interaction between poetry and fiction, and between poetry and facticity. Islands foreground the relation between the natural—the intricate web that ties geology, geography, climate, plant, and animal life together on any island—and the routines and preoccupations of human existence, experienced in both individual and collective terms. Such relations are articulated by language in a variety of modes, from description and narration through idea and concept to image, metaphor, symbol, allegory, and myth. A Scatter of Islands Islands fascinate us: we travel to them, read about them, dream about them; some of us live on them, and a small number of us write about them. They are scattered all over the planet: some by the side of continents, others at great distances from land. Some stand out from the water all by themselves; others cluster in archipelagoes. Their number is large but never easy to pin down. Islands have arisen, and keep arising, from the seas; they also keep disappearing, whether slowly or suddenly, in a process of natural creation and disintegration that is both ancient and unceasing. We also know of floating masses in the seas that barely deserve the name of islands. One sort is known as pumice rafts (the result of volcanic activity on the sea floor). The other is simply trash accumulated over time in the oceans to form what is called a trash island, as in the case of the Pacific Trash Vortex. There are other, more proper islands that we know as tidal islands. They become islands only when the high tide rises; every low tide shows them bridged to a mainland, making their life cycle a steady alternation between connectedness and separation, a poetic trope for individual identity that is never either truly discrete or isolated. Such islands are scattered all over the globe, serving as reminders of connected islandness:

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Enoshima (in Sagami Bay, Japan), Jindo and Modo (off the coast of South Korea), Haji Ali Dargah (off Mumbai), Sveti Stefan (in western Montenegro), Mont Saint-Michel (off the Normandy coast), Eilean Donan (in Loch Duich, western Scotland), and Lindisfarne (also known as Holy Island, off the northeast coast of England), to name a few. The Scottish poet Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) showed his recognition of such connectedness with reference to Lindisfarne, in his long poem Marmion (1808): The tide did now its flood-mark gain, And girdled in the saint’s domain: For, with the flow and ebb, its style Varies from continent to isle; Dry-shod, o’er sands, twice every day, The pilgrims to the shrine find way; Twice every day, the waves efface Of staves and sandalled feet the trace. (Scott 1869, 71)

The tide is described as girdling the island with water: the image renders periodic sequestration as an activity that is kindly rather than isolating. It ensures that the identity of the land alternates between being an island and being part of a mainland. The human traffic of pilgrims is desired, but the waves erase their signs regularly, restoring solitude to the shrine and washing away human traces as often as it welcomes them. Some landmasses—like the three-in-one that is Greenland—are large enough to almost qualify as a continent; others are so small as to be scarcely inhabitable. Bishop Rock, for example, situated at the western tip of the isles of Scilly, has but one building, a lighthouse. The islands around Tristan da Cunha, which is one of the most isolated habitations on the planet, became for the South African poet Roy Campbell (1901–1957) an emblem for the condition of profound solitariness: An island of the sea whose only trade Is in the voyages of its wandering birds. (Campbell 1968, 40)

If Lindisfarne provides an emblem of minimal but regular connection, the location of islands such as Tristan da Cunha serves to underline the bleak solicitudes of wind, water, and birds. Solicitude—as much for the land as for those who live on it—has two aspects: one is conducive to solitude (which might be desirable, at least sometimes); the other, to solitariness (for which most of us have only a rather limited level of tolerance). In the singular, each island is unique. In the plural, islands constitute types based on a variety of factors: location and relation, origin, and history of settlement. Regardless of how they differ from one another, and how we assimilate them into typology, all islands gravitate toward an anthropocene commonalty. In one part, this comprises a sense of what it means for a human to be on an island, regardless of where, when, and

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for how long, and regardless of whether by choice or chance. In another part, the commonalty is created by the perception of difference between living on an island and living on a continent. This applies even when we grant the partial truth of the recognition that continents are indeed like very large islands, while islands might well be called tiny continents (Schalansky 2010, 13). The distinction between a continent and an island is neither simple nor absolute. Recent geological research about the provenance of New Zealand suggests that the pair of islands adjacent to the Australian continent is the protruding highest ground of a continental fragment now under water, which scientists refer to as Zealandia. Since this fragment is likely to have once been part of the supercontinent Gondwana, scientists feel more comfortable identifying New Zealand as the remains of a continent rather than a set of continental islands (Mortimer et al. 2017). We might say that modern geology comes to the aid of any New Zealander who would like to think that the home islands are no mere geographical adjunct to Australia. The condition of being an island enacts in a specific sense a more general relationship between land and water that has enabled poets to refract a sense of the intriguingly poetic through the lens of geography. In “The Map” (1946), looking at how land and water are colored green and blue, respectively, the American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) underlines the degree of interdependence between water and land in circumscribing an island: Does the land lean down to lift the sea from under, drawing it unperturbed around itself? . . . is the land tugging at the sea from under? (Bishop 2011, 5)

By humanizing both land and water, the poet makes it possible to assimilate them into consciousness as two entities working together to build a relationship, almost as if, by conceiving natural events in the form of acts of volition, the facts of geography could serve the purpose of a little narrative that is at once fanciful and imaginative: the land willing to lean, lift, and draw the sea around it—like a cape or girdle—which invites us to think of an island as land embraced by water, only for the opposite fancy to peep in: that the land could be tugging at the sea so as keep more than its nose clear of the water. The result is a charming miniature with a double vision of how land and water relate when it comes to islanding. A similar image, referring to the geography of another coastline, is used by the Irish poet Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) in reinforcing a similar codependence in “Lovers on Aran” (1966): Did sea define the land or land the sea? Each drew new meaning from the waves’ collision. (Heaney 1991, 34)

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Land and water coexist: each is one-half of a bond, and the bond is at the service of how the human might live amid the collision of land and water. That relation, in its turn, is linked to how humans use words, images, and sounds to make sense of how they live on land and water. That is where poetry comes in. The English poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744) described poetry as “Nature to advantage dress’d, / What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d” (Pope 1988, 44). Extrapolating from his aphorism, we might claim that island writing—whether of islands or from islands—is nature dressed, addressed, as well as redressed. How that happens, and why an island might need or get redressal, in geographical or historical terms, provide the occasion for new insights and the pleasure of new recognitions. Thus, a sense of the vital interaction between words and the world is central to all that this book attempts. The American poet Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) captures a sense of the vital connectedness between language and nature, between the human and the planet on which we live, in “The Planet on the Table,” which thinks of poetic inspiration in terms of the character of Ariel from William Shakespeare’s island play, The Tempest (1611), and ends with the recognition that “Ariel was glad he had written his poems” (Stevens 1956, 532). The reason for the gladness is simply this: that even in their poverty—and because they are part of the planet—his poems might hope to partake in the planet’s affluence. Drawing a cue from this poem, I might describe the spirit in which this book has been written as a desire to capture the lineament and character of nature’s imprint upon the human, as fixed by poetry that has islands in mind, both real and fictive. If this book gives back in the reading even a fraction of the pleasure it gave in the writing, I could say, after Stevens, that Ariel will be glad. 1.2 AN OUTLINE OF METHOD The Fields of Island Study The literature of, and on, islands is vast, and island literatures are studied by many, generally with focus on a region, a country, a period in history, or a specific disciplinary approach. But attempts to bridge significances, however selectively, across island literatures on a global scale are rare, and bringing the poetic discourses of real island experiences into conversation with those of imaginary island experiences is even rarer. In island studies as a field of scholarship, it is not sufficient to mention just a few of the many remarkable contributions to scholarship and understanding that have been published in the last two decades or so—studies that are general rather than specific to this or that island zone, without losing any part of the specificity that enriches ideas, arguments, and anal-

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ysis—because insights are scattered in journals as well as dedicated websites. I should add that a focus on poetry and the poetic element to “islandness,” as pursued in this book, is distinct from the study of islands in fictional narrative, cinema, and television, or cultural studies, or travel histories, and histories of empire or cartography. Like them, but even more so, the interface between imagined and real islands maps out areas of exploration that are in between conventional literary studies, ecocriticism, and studies focused on biogeography, environment studies, and island histories and geographies. Nevertheless, anyone working in such complex and interrelated fields owes a huge debt to the enthusiasm and dedication of journals in ecology and environment studies, as well as journals oriented toward island studies, such as Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, Archipelago (Clutag Press), Insula: The International Journal of Island Affairs, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, Island Studies Journal, Island Studies, ISLE Journal, Journal of Marine and Island Cultures, Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures, The Contemporary Pacific, The Island Review, and The Nauru Project. Likewise, and regardless of whether I cite them, among recent monograph-sized studies, I am particularly indebted to Godfrey Baldacchino’s A World of Islands (2007), Antonio Benítez-Rojo’s The Repeating Island (1992, 1996), Peter Conrad’s Islands: A Trip through Time and Space (2009), Peter Davidson’s The Idea of North (2005), Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith’s Islands in History and Representation (2003), Denis Cosgrove’s Apollo’s Eye (2001) and Geography and Vision (2008), Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey’s Routes and Roots (2007), John Gillis’s Islands of the Mind (2004), Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (1997), John Kerrigan’s Archipelagic English (2008), John Mack’s The Sea: A Cultural History (2011), Elizabeth McMahon’s Islands, Identity and the Literary Imagination (2016), Daniel Niles and Godfrey Baldacchino’s Island Futures (2011), Marc Shell’s Islandology (2014), and Helen Tiffin’s Five Emus to the King of Siam (2007), to name some of the most rewarding from a growing body of recent scholarship. The Plan of the Book My approach differs from these studies in two ways: it refracts islands through poetry and the poetic aspects of perception articulated as language, and it is as engaged with imagined as with real islands. It entails working selectively at identifying and analyzing articulations of real and imaginary islands in terms of what I might call a morphology of forms and a typology of poetic strategies. The importance of an island, as emphasized by the Chinese geographer Yi-Fu Tuan in Topophilia, “lies in the imagination” (Tuan 1974, 118). As form and strategy, island poetry mediates between perception and conception. It adds new insights to our

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understanding of our affective and natural environments, without which our sense of what it means to be living on this planet would be poorer. I have tried to make such connections across cultures and historical epochs, hoping to balance width of historical and geographical reference with a selective approach to poems and poets (in English, and in translations into English). The key element in my method is discovering the element of the poetic in how humans perceive “islandness” as a merging and melding of the perceptual and the imaginative. I have sought to remain always mindful, as Yi-Fu Tuan remarks in his essay on “Mythical Space and Place,” that “when we wonder what lies on the other side of the mountain or ocean, our imagination constructs mythical geographies that may bear little or no relationship to reality,” and when we imagine such places, we do so as a response “to fundamental human needs” (Tuan 1977, 86, 99). The book consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 provides a general approach to islands by surveying the notion of an island in both the literal and the figurative sense. It stresses the notion of islandness, and of the poetic as a feature of the human imagination that is foundational to, and larger than, the specific embodiment it gets through songs and poems. Chapter 2 focuses on the role of islands as symbols of three kinds: as objective correlatives for recurrent human desires and fears; as objectifications of the human fear of mutability and loss; and as the archipelagic version of a sense of collective identity that is at once both fragmented and aggregative, as much for human cultural history as for geography. Its first section surveys human mythologies in which islands play a prominent role; its second section studies two major island fictions— Atlantis and Ithaca—for why they have fascinated poets throughout history; and its third section addresses the ways in which archipelagic configurations affect culture and poetry. Chapter 3 studies the islander types who have acquired an archetypal role in poetry, either for a region or globally: the islander as Crusoe; the islander as Caliban or Rāvana; and the islander as Odysseus. Chapter 4 complements the focus on typology with three case studies, each focusing on a pair of island cultures. Each pair can be said to show sufficient commonalty as well as difference between them to make the comparison instructive: the first pairing foregrounds historical legacies, while the second focuses on aesthetics and the third on politics. So much for the overview, and now, to zoom in for more details regarding chapters 2–4: the first section of chapter 2 studies the role of islands in relation to the dual currency of desire and fear. Islands become places to wish for or go to because there—so we tell ourselves—we will get, or find, all that we most desire in life by way of happiness and permanence. Conversely, islands become places of fear and dread when we create them in such a way that on them resides everything that fills us with apprehension about our mortal existence on this planet; we supply

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them then with representations of all our more forbidding, or our less enticing, environments. The second section of chapter 2 addresses another need for an island: the peculiar property of entities and experiences that exist in a realm placed somewhere between being lost and being recoverable. The ambiguity of their placement gives cause for a gamut of reactions, ranging from despair, and longing, to hope. Two poetic islands—Atlantis and Ithaca—serve as examples of this type in how they provide poets with sustenance for hope, as well as grounds for apprehension and fear. The third section of chapter 2 addresses the imaginative configurations of several archipelagic systems: the Malaysian-Indonesian archipelago, the Philippines, the Greek islands, Scotland, and the Caribbean. Chapter 3 aims to complement chapters 1 and 2 by examining three types of islander who have become part of a common global currency of metaphor, symbol, and allegory. The first section of chapter 3 studies how island experience becomes the means through which we express our fear of isolation and abandonment. For the type of islander corresponding to this thematic drive, being stranded on an island becomes an archetype of the imagination. It recurs in numerous stories and poems and generates the character of the islander we know as Robinson Crusoe. The second section of chapter 3 studies the processes and factors that bring about belittlement to islanders: the smaller victimized by the larger. Such processes generate a dual character typology: the islander as Prospero-Caliban or Rāma-Rāvana. We examine the powerful logic that binds such pairs in the context of how islanders are vilified or demonized by their continental neighbors, for which Caliban is one example, and the Sri Lankan figure of Rāvana another. The former is demeaned by the force of circumstance, while the latter, though self-consciously grand, is defeated by a combination of his own propensities and by fate: both are potentially tragic figures. They illustrate the disparaged dimension to the fate of being an islander. The third and final section of chapter 3 tackles another type of need: the necessity to undertake a voyage that proposes an island as its destination. This need corresponds to the value reposed in places that we regard as home, for which an island is ideal as an emblem. This home may be a place from which one may have been distanced for a long time; therefore, returning home becomes a driving impulse, giving the return all the meaning that life can have as a teleological function. But wanting to go home and resting contented there are never quite the same: they are as distinct as desire from satiation, or as movement from stasis, or as energy from passivity. This section examines how the momentum that brings a traveler home might also propel him on further journeys, making an island as much a point of departure as of arrival. These powerful, and sometimes contradictory, propulsions generate the type of islander we recognize in the figure of Odysseus, who is not just a creation attributed

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to Homer but also a type that others after Homer have found fascinating for the new directions in which they can take him. Chapter 4 consists of three comparative case studies that are meant to complement each other in approach. Each section takes up one pair of island cultures for comparative analysis. The first section looks at how unique legacies were created from island experiences by the literatures of the Icelandic sagas and the post-Homeric poetry of the Greek islands. The second section of chapter 4 provides a comparison that examines the creation of a poetics that is uniquely tied up with island identity from two vastly dissimilar island cultures: that of Japan and the Caribbean, each internally cohesive and complex in relation to the specificity of its history. The third and final section of chapter 4 turns attention toward the political and the contemporary dimension of island experience by focusing on Taiwan and Ireland: widely separated from one another, but with comparable histories of domination by an adjacent mainland or by a larger island. The fifth and final chapter brings the book to a close with an overview of the island poetry of Oceania. One limitation to the scope and coverage of the book must be acknowledged from the outset: the islands cultures of the planet are many, and they find expression in song and verse in many languages, whereas this book is confined in its reading to what has been available to me in only one language, English. The limitation has this advantage, that it leaves ample room for others, with access to languages other than English, to add their accounts to the global narrative of how language and nature have enriched human civilizations through their interactions, wherever and whenever island cultures and ecosystems have given stimulus and inspiration to that interaction. Exemplification and Analysis as Method A character in the novel Robinson (1958) by the novelist Muriel Spark (1918–2006) repeats a familiar idea—that no man is an island (Donne 1844, 100). He gets an interesting response: he is told by his interlocutor that some people may be islands after all if what connects them to others is only that which remains concealed under the sea (Spark 1958, 22). The exchange exemplifies a central tension to a universal aspect of human existence: the degree to which each of us is ultimately a lone self, and the counter feeling that we are all connected. An island is the perfect example of a concrete particularity that subsidizes this universal perception. Put another way: an island both is and exemplifies. It is this dual capacity that I explore; to do so, description or paraphrase or citation and allusion are but part of the picture; the other half is in how the words of the poet—the words that embody the poetic—can exemplify in themselves by being worded precisely how they are, which commentary and explanation can convey less adequately.

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Thus, for example, in a poem written in the eleventh century AD, the Arabic poet Ibn Hamdis (c. 1056–c. 1133) remembers his erstwhile home in Arab Sicily as “agony” (Asmonti 2017). The poem is short and does not explain why he should feel so. It assumes that a reader will somehow be aware of the complex history of occupation, conquest, and habitation that the island of Sicily has undergone before and during his time. Such recognitions apply not only to Sicily but also to the countless other islands of the Mediterranean, of which Cyprus, Crete, Rhodes, and Malta are but the most prominent. Each such island may be read as a palimpsest comprising inscriptions overlaid one on top of another—one people, race, religion, or community of traders, conquerors, or settlers succeeding another—with the islands’ topography and writing as the surviving material residue of entire lives lived fully in a specific ecosystem, linked variably by the crisscrossing seaways that brought peoples and cultures into continual contact, conflict, or mutual assimilation over the centuries. Here is a second example to illustrate how tone and attitude can be complex even in an utterance that seems straightforwardly declarative. The English poet Lord Byron (1788–1824) celebrates “The Isles of Greece” in the third canto of his long mock-heroic narrative poem Don Juan (1818–1823), but tongue in cheek, bracketing the high-flown romantic assertion—of love of liberty in the context of the subjugation of Greece by the Ottoman Turks—with his sotto voce sardonicism concerning poets who will sing anything for their supper. Two stanzas should suffice to illustrate both the irony and the serious sentiments that the irony brackets and frames: In France, for instance, he would write a chanson; In England, a six canto quarto tale; In Spain, he’d make a ballad or romance on The last war—much the same in Portugal; In Germany, the Pegasus he’d prance on Would be old Goethe’s—(see what says De Staël) In Italy, he’d ape the “Trecentisti”; In Greece, he’d sing some sort of hymn like this t’ye: ... The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece! Where burning Sappho loved and sung, Where grew the arts of war and peace,— Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung! Eternal summer gilds them yet, But all, except their sun, is set. (Byron 2006, 289)

These two stanzas, in quick succession, reveal the complexity of an assertion that can be undercut by irony, while also allowing him to part his own curtain of irony in order to make a resounding asseveration of value and political commitment. The more that is always there to an is-

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land than its climate or its flora and fauna, which such poems point toward, is the value for which they serve as emblems; their location amid crosscurrents of history, which inspires the poet to sharpen awareness of what an island has been, and can continue to signify, to those who care about certain values. A third example, taken from Sri Lanka, illustrates how allusion can weave in historical reference so that the political present can be placed in a stereoscopic context; the current crisis refracted through an allusion to an analogue from the past. The allusion might change nothing of the outer circumstance, but it can change how a person might accept fate, and how we as readers might perceive—when two island predicaments are brought together—a freshly realized commonalty that transcends time and cultural difference. The scene: a private home in what was then known as Ceylon. The situation: internal strife and civil war. The impending event: soldiers are about to arrive, to arrest, or possibly to kill, the individual who awaits their arrival, knowing there is no escape or alternative. The poem dramatizes a moment in a chess game. The opponent has begun with the French Defense: this is a particular kind of opening in which, depending on how the player with the white pieces chooses to respond to the player with the black pieces, the resulting game will create a blocked or an open position. The player with the white pieces (the poet) is wondering how to tackle the situation. Chess is both like life and unlike life: it has clarity, while issues in life can be murky; chess has solutions and resolutions, but life is less clear about those. Chess on the board enables the poet to address as well as elide his predicament outside the game—his predicament in the game of life—where he is soon to be arrested (perhaps for sedition, perhaps for rebelling against the state): I know the Roman soldier in one shape or another—is on the way. (Siriwardena 1992, 104)

This is laconic but telling in its stoic calm. The poem was written from a specific island at a specific time in its turbulent modern history—Ceylon/Sri Lanka—but it has a wider applicability that extends to other contexts of islands as sites of blockage. The predicament it dramatizes is one of entrapment. And entrapment itself is captured in the figure of an island; just as the lack of choice in that predicament is brought in through an allusion—the knock on the door, the soldiers with orders—something that has happened often in human history. The island, in such poems, is a metaphor. The state of mind the poem strives for is that of acceptance: no kicking against the pricks, especially when on an island, with nowhere to go. That, too, is what the poem tells of. My final example is succinct: a tanka from Fujiwara No Teika’s An Outline for Composing Tanka (c. 1216):

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I will return and look on Matsushima once again. Do not let the waves ravage the hut on the islet of Oshima. (Sato 1981, 215)

The characteristic brevity and power of implied signification cultivated in such poetry shows how an island reference suffices to evoke home and origin, in which nostalgia for the past merges with hope or promise for the future, while measuring how far one may have traveled from it, in space and time, by holding steadfast to the idea of an island home as a closeness transcending distance and separation. One could cite poem after poem, list island after island, measure each sea and ocean in terms of what humans have made of their islands in all the languages that the race has invented. That would take many volumes, and more authors than can be mustered, more languages than are spoken today. What is presented here instead is a mere token, a subjective glimpse, the tip of an iceberg that floats through human history in the form of a merger between geography, language, and the imagination. One can say of it what the Alexandrian poet C. P. Cavafy (1863–1933) said in his prose poem “The Ships”: poetry is like a crossing, from imagination to paper, and once the paper boat of the poem sets sail, all manner of adventures and mishaps are possible. The ship’s cargo is generally fragile, the seas treacherous, the crossing rough (Cavafy n.d.). A ship may attempt to carry too much cargo, or it may end up carrying too little. It might have difficulties at the island port where it arrives, issues with customs or monopolies. But what is worse for a small ship is when the big ones arrive, the Homers of the seas. Then the small, frail paper boat of the poem reflects in awe upon the mystery of how they came and went— the mystery of how quick their journey into oblivion. This delicious little allegory can serve as an emblem for the project of this book: an overview of the journey made by the paper boats of the imagination around the islands of the world, with many such boats to review, where the islands are always more numerous than the poets who might work them into poetry, or the authors too few who might write up their interactions in books such as this one. 1.3 OF ISLANDS IN GENERAL From the Literal to the Figurative Islands signify in two ways: both in themselves and in relation to their opposites, water and continents. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995), in “Desert Islands” (1953), represents this juxtaposition as “the active struggle between earth and water,” which humans seek to portray in ameliorative terms, personifying one element as a mother and the other as a father (Deleuze 2004, 9). In an essay on “Discourses of the

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Island” (1989), the British literary critic Gillian Beer highlights the tension from a slightly different perspective: The idea of the island allows us at once the satisfactions of water and of earth, of deep flux and steadfast fruitfulness. At the same time it expresses the dreads of water and of earth, twin desolations, in which the self drifts or is confined, in which loneliness or loss predominate. (Beer 1989, 5)

In Islands, Identity and the Literary Imagination (2016), Elizabeth McMahon reminds us that the senses of the word continent have shifted from the Renaissance to modern times: “The word continent is used repeatedly in Renaissance texts but more often in its older sense of a container” (McMahon 2016, 36). The contrasted pair of island and continent acquire their modern, antithetical connotation once the sense sets in that the movement from being part of a continent to being part of an island is “a changeling substitution, which undoes the pattern of amplification and diminution of correspondences” (McMahon 2016, 36). The recognition that an island is to a mainland what small is to large, and what separateness is to connectedness, cuts two ways. Whether in terms of sailing or thinking, it is easier to wrap one’s mind round an island rather than a continent. An island reassures the human by reducing the scale of perception. It appeals by seeming to be readily comprehensible. Its size and scale console the predilection for agoraphobia latent in most of us. It seems nice if we could be tucked away on an island: snug, protected, safe. It is in this sense that we agree with the Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid (1892–1978) when he writes that “an island is an almost startlingly entire thing” (MacDiarmid 1939, 26). But there is also the opposite reaction. That an island is easier to comprehend than a continent does not necessarily translate into making it easier to live on. More confined in space, more limited in resources than a continent, an island can be conducive to claustrophobia, inbreeding, isolation, and circumscriptions of all kinds: physical, material, psychological, and psychic. In “St. Ciaran’s Island,” by the Irish poet Ciaran Carson (b. 1948), island living merges with withdrawal into solitude for the historical referent of the title, Ciarán of Saigir (fifth century AD), one of the twelve apostle saints of Ireland. The shore and the reeds on the shore are like a margin, a boundary, or an outer limit. He cannot cross them, and he knows that living within them is to solicit loneliness. The poem deals with the recognition in a laconic declaration representative of how the human will to survive can assert itself: “I will acclimatize. / My head will shrink in size” (Carson 2009, 24). Islands do not simply harbor, or confine, or cause to shrink. Even if they are equally apt for voluntary isolation and for involuntary imprisonment, there is always more to an island than scope for habitation. They invite movement, of a kind that creates a complex relation between ele-

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mental space and a localized sense of place. There is arrival and departure: there is the desire to go to an island, and the desire to set off for somewhere else. There is the need to find an island; there is an equally powerful urge to use an island as a point of departure. They serve as ports of call and as sites of shipwreck. In modern times, depending on the scenic aspects of island topography, their potential for business or pleasure has kept growing in direct proportion to the global ease of travel, which in turn is linked to developments in seafaring technology in the nineteenth century and air travel in more recent times. Once isolated, and sometimes in-bred, their appeal to the imagination and to the purse has been conversely inked, for some time now, to a steady increase in the pace of urban living everywhere. They are particularly popular as a place to go to, which is the obverse of wherever one happens to be, trapped in the business of daily living. That is rather different from the older ideal that distinguishes between happiness and pleasure, preferring the former and leaving the latter to tourism (MacDiarmid 1939, x). If islands have been destinations and homes, they have also been places of exile and imprisonment. They make themselves hospitable to a host of needs, equally capable of serving as a hideout, haven, or heaven. The distinguished English author Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) remarked in 1773, during his tour of the Hebrides, as noted assiduously by his companion James Boswell in The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785), “Sir, when a man retires into an island, he is to turn his thoughts entirely to another world. He has done with this” (Boswell 1984, 245). A contrary view is expressed by Hugh MacDiarmid, who rejects the idea “that to live on an island is to be ‘out of things’” because of its implication “that brains are brighter in cities and that dwellers in remote country districts are relatively clodhoppers” (MacDiarmid 1939, 20–21). Yet this attitude cannot shed an air of the defensive-aggressive about itself, and has no real refutation to the conclusions drawn by Samuel Johnson from his trip to the Hebrides, as declared in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), that the Scottish Islands had few allurements except to the “mere lover of naked nature” since their “desolation and penury” gave little pleasure (Johnson 1775, 366). That is by no means all there is to islands and the perception of distance. They also provide an apt location for the deserted, the exotic, the fearful, the magical, and the infernal. Islands have always proved adept at taking hold of the imagination, which transforms their use as habitat into a larger story concerning human needs, in which they act as an enabling condition for a range of experiences, which other environments cannot provide. Islands inhabit networks. When we apply adjectives such as remote and exotic to islands, these descriptors are functions of distance: the exotic ceases to be so if you live amid it. Likewise, free and isolated, when applied to islands, function as an instrument of self-representation. The signifying power of an island depends on where it resides in the

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network of its relations in geography and through time. It also depends on the continual seesaw between self-sufficiency and dependency that is the fate of every island. In all such cases, islands exhibit distinctive features—both of nature and of culture—that are tangible and verifiable. Others are recognizable through the evidence of lived existence that they accumulate in the form of artifacts. We might call these the fossils of memory, or coagulations of thought and feeling, some of which survive and are cherished in the form of art and writing. Given the many roles islands fulfill in literal and figurative terms, it is natural for human curiosity to attempt an understanding of the commonalty as well as the uniqueness of islands, in both individual and generic terms. This book pursues that interest with specific reference to the relation between two kinds of island: the real and the imagined. This relation may be said to constitute a global conversation between nature and culture, the real and the virtual, the outer and the inner. It covers the entire planet and involves every one of us. It began a long time ago: ever since humans began using marks on walls and sounds as words to make sense of experience through images and languages. From that complex and long-sustained polyphony, we tease out a few of the strands concerning the dynamic interplay between the islands of physical geography and the islands of imaginative geography. In the conversation between nature and culture, islands are both fact and fiction. Every attempt to comprehend an island finds the perceptual transformed into the figurative, while the figurative, at every turn, keeps drawing upon the perceptual. From specific islands to the idea of island is not merely a movement from the particular to the general but also one from the type and the token to the emblem. An island—any island, every island, the very idea of islandness—becomes a microcosm of all the interactions between climate and geology, which, over vast spans of time, in the inch and in the league, produce the ecological systems that we inhabit and transform with our habitude. Marc Shell, in Islandology, reiterates the many reasons why islandness is a foundational issue in philosophy (Shell 2014, 3). Islands as fact and symbol belong to a family whose siblings comprise rivers, lakes, forests, mountains, and deserts: all the combinations of earth, water, air, and fire whose parents are oceans and volcanoes. In this plenitude of environments, we live as a species, changing what shapes us, and all our unique times and places are held together in a bond that the American poet Robert Frost (1874–1963) spoke of as the interplay between inner and outer weather, in his allegorical poem “Tree at My Window” (Frost 1995, 230–31). Always mixing weathers, the human manifold of languages tells of how that conversation turns and returns upon phenomena that mingle mind and matter in equal proportion. From this we create many of our most memorable narratives and protagonists: abiding embodiments of value and belief, desire and fear, hope

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and longing. Many of these find expression in poetry, while all of them partake of the poetic, which is a more flexible and broad notion than that of poetry and serves as witness to the long history of this conversation. The poetic element in thought and language reminds us that how we speak and write echoes what we see, feel, think, and imagine, just as the places and climates we live in measure what we make of our lives on this planet. The Poetic Element in Perception Put simply, an island is land surrounded by water. This is what we might call a necessary but not a sufficient condition for a definition, though as such it is a commonplace, as when the Dutch geographer Bernhardus Varenius (1622–1651) declared that an island is “no other thing than a Land begirt with waters” (Ellis 2003, 47). Such simplicity will almost do, but only for the literal-minded side in each of us. If we push the literal against the figurative, we arrive at some striking transpositions. For example, in a recent essay on islands as tokens for all the stopping places on our journey of life, the American poet and academic Catharine Savage Brosman speaks of the planet Earth as “our cosmic isle” (Brosman 2013, 586). At the beginning of the last century, in a poem titled “Sunday Morning,” Wallace Stevens describes the Earth as swimming through space, an island solitude, “unsponsored, free” (Stevens 1956, 70). This condition of being free and unsponsored is ambiguous, caught between exhilaration and apprehension. There is a long genealogy to such feelings and thought. The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) reminds us that Seneca, quoting Thales of Miletus, described Earth as a ship floating in space (Borges 1974, 86). Denis Cosgrove notes that the idea of a “world island” has a long history in the West: The Greek term apeiron signified originating, elemental chaos, the opposite of cosmos. The same term was applied to the stream of Ocean that circumferenced the world island: epi peirasi gaies, or “at the bounds of the earth.” (Cosgrove 2001, 43)

He adds that as European explorers discovered islands, first in the Atlantic, and then, in the late fifteenth century made landfall in distant continental coasts farther afield, their initial reaction was to think of the new land masses as islands, confirming the mindset characteristic of continental denizens who continued to think of the globe as “a single landmass surrounded by archipelagos” (Cosgrove 2001, 83). The idea of the planet as swimming in an ocean (whether of water or space) is not confined to one people, culture, or civilization. The Cherokee Indians of the southeast region of North America had their own version. They believed that Earth floated in space, suspended from four points, and was connected to them by a cord extending from the solid

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vault of sky. They worried about what might happen if the cord ever broke (Sproul 1991, 254). Such examples show how the concept of an island, as derived from perception, can be transposed to articulate some of our most primal wishes and fears as a species: the desire for freedom and safety, the fear of harm and annihilation. At a far more mundane level, and contemporaneous with modern urban reality, we might add that denizens of cities are more likely to be familiar with an island surrounded by vehicular traffic than land surrounded by water: in the form of the humble, ubiquitous, and almost unseen space we know as a traffic island. When the protagonist of J. G. Ballard’s Concrete Island (1973) crashes his car into one of them, he undergoes a transformative and nightmarish experience, which illustrates how the notion of an island, linked to the idea of being marooned, can combine to translate the space of seas and oceans to the concrete jungles of cities, so that even the junction between motorways feels like a desert island (Ballard 1991, 16). Such transpositions occur everywhere between perception and figuration. Alastair Bonnett, in Off the Map (2014), reflects on what he discovers from his encounter with one such traffic island: that they cannot be reclaimed, although, as we see, even in the act of being named as such, they are in some sense made knowable (Bonnett 2014, 114). From real islands to figurative ones to imagined ones, we focus in this book on how the physical, psychic, and cultural aspects of islandness are refracted through the lens of the poetic. This idea of the poetic includes more than verse and song: it refers primarily to the poetic element in acts of cognition. A poetic element, as the term is used here, is a quality or property of the cognitive, such that what is cognized is crucially linked to how it is cognized, whether as concept, description, narration, figure of speech, or—as is most often the case—some combination of these four. What distinguishes a poem from the poetic is that the former uses words in formal patterns, with long traditions of oral and print culture to support its formal presentation as an aspect of the aesthetic faculty and as a literary artifact. The poetic, by contrast, is free of any such narrow affiliation to the literary. It subsumes whatever might be perceived as its aesthetic potential to a discursive realm such as religion, myth, ritual, or science. Consequently, the poetic element ends up appearing marginal or repressed in relation to the overt preoccupations of a specific discursive field. Regardless of such marginalization, or because of such repression, it becomes necessary and rewarding to practice a form of retrieval, bringing the poetic to the forefront of attention, as a unique form of insight into an aspect of existence whose uniqueness is intrinsically allied to the configuration of image, trope, phrase, and narrative that realizes it as cognitive. The poetic element to how islands are perceived and comprehended is

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just as important in this perspective as the songs and poems that evoke islands, whether of the real or the imaginary kind. We can see a rudimentary form of the poetic in action when we expand the definition of an island as a piece of land surrounded by water to formulate the concept of a habitat island (Whittaker and Fernández-Palacios 2007, 10). A forest surrounded by arable fields can be described as a habitat island, or a patch of open grassland within a forest. In such instances, the action of islanding is a mental operation, a metaphor based on analogy, which points to a homology between contrasting entities. Already in this expanded application of the term island we see the poetic at work. It does its work without needing a poem or a concept of poetry or of literariness. Therefore, we could say that the poetic is the more fundamental activity, of which poetry is a subset, a culturally determined and relatively narrow and recent manifestation. Moving to a specific application of the idea of the poetic in relation to an island, we could say that there is a specific kind of poetic element to islandness that attaches itself to island metamorphoses: islands that emerge, whether slowly or eruptively (as in the case of the Hawaiian islands); islands that submerge, gradually (as in the case of the Maldives), by erosion or by a rise and fall in sea levels (as in the case of all our tidal islands), or cataclysmically (as in the case of fabled Atlantis, or the island system known as Krakatoa); and islands that move. These may be described as poetic refractions of phenomena. Consider a major example of the poetic element in geology. It entails explanations for how the physical disposition of land came to be what it is now on a planetary scale, measured to a clock that counts time in millions of years. It is a true story, and poetic in a way that only the truth, or a plausible rendition of truth, can be. It concerns the breakup of what the Austrian geologist Eduard Suess named Gondwanaland, the supercontinent, or part of the supercontinent called Pangaea, whose slow fragmentation led to the creation of what we now recognize as our modern continents. A series of breakups had led from Ur to Rodinia to Pangaea, between 3.6 million to 250 million years ago, give or take a few million years, as reported by Pranay Lal, an Indian writer on ecology, in Indica (Lal 2016, 130). As a story within a story, this narrative includes the fate of Sahul, the composite entity that for a time held together the fragments of east Gondwana, comprising plate elements that would later provide the bases for Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand, and Antarctica. Included within that, there is the large ministory of Madagascar and other smaller island fragments, on trajectories that metaphor allows us to conceive not as land swimming the ocean, or as broken-off bits of land drifting under the compulsion of forces larger than the most powerful currents, but as giant plates moving apart, whose separation from one another created seas and

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oceans between them. The contemplation of such an idea is poetic in itself. We can also include it under the category or concept of the sublime. The English statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke (1729–1797), in A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), describes the primary effect produced by the contemplation of whatever in nature is regarded as sublime through its capacity to arouse extreme astonishment (Burke 2015, 47). Another classic articulation of a sense of the sublime in nature is found in the Critique of Judgment (1790) by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). He relates the concept of the sublime to the experience of awe and astonishment, which in its extreme forms leads to the experience of a particular kind of terror or horror that we sometimes associate with manifestations of the divine, as instances of shock that are also like an epiphany (Kant 2007, 99). What produces this mix of feelings is a perception of the gigantic in scale: this has to do with massive objects in space, or occurrences in the long perspective of infinity, or upheavals of a cataclysmic nature. We might transpose his account to our contemplation of continental drift, and speak of plate tectonics as a poetic element in the geological history of our planet, during a vast time period when the entire concept of continent and island was literally adrift. The precise focus we might bring to the poetic element in geology treated as deep history can contemplate an incredible event. A large fragment of Sahul makes a slow oceanic crawl from halfway down the Southern Hemisphere to halfway up the Northern Hemisphere, a distance of several thousand nautical miles, covered at the rate of about 7.5 centimeters a year (Frisch et al. 2011, 21). In majestic and infinitely slow motion, this fragment then rams into the Asiatic plate to its northeast, forty to fifty million years ago (Frisch et al. 2011, 13). The collision pushes it up, over the next several million years, into what we call the Himalayan mountain range, thus exchanging its interim status as a mobile island for the status of a peninsula, which we know as the Indian subcontinent. The ordinary human scale of comprehension is here confronted by a phenomenon on a scale so massive and momentous as to dwarf and humble the mortal in the contemplation of an awe-inspiring aspect of nature. Time and movement acquire a different feeling when islands and continents exhibit this kind of geological mutability, reminding us that the ground beneath our feet is at once solid and slow moving. The idea of a floating island does not belong solely to the discourse of the geological sublime. On a smaller scale, it can entail little more than a part of the land that holds in a lake, suddenly breaking free, as in the following two stanzas from a poem titled “Floating Island at Hawkshead” (c. 1828–1832) by Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855): Once did I see a slip of earth, By throbbing waves long undermined,

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Loosed from its hold;—how no one knew But all might see it float, obedient to the wind. (Newlyn 2013)

In the realm of the fanciful, a floating island can provide material for poetic whimsy, as in the playful “Outward Bound” by the Scottish poet Edwin Morgan (1920–2010), which begins: That was the time Scotland began to move. Scotland move? No, it is impossible! It became an island, and was able to float in the Atlantic lake. (Morgan 2000, 149)

The legendary history of floating islands is long and varied. It is chronicled with illuminating detail, for European literature, by Chet Van Duzer (2006) and by Stephanos Stephanides and Susan Bassnett (2008). The title of a novel by José Saramago (1922–2010), The Stone Raft (1986), captures the essence of the paradox enshrined in the idea of a floating island. The premise of the fiction is that the world has to cope with sudden geological developments, which include the Iberian Peninsula breaking off from the European continent to begin floating in the Atlantic Ocean. Such fantastical phenomena are a familiar trope in poetry. Consider the floating island of Aeolia, from Homer’s The Odyssey (Book X), which has ramparts and cliffs rising tall from sea to sky (Homer 1996, 230). Then there is Delos—less a floating island than an island that might be sunk—as evoked in the “Homeric Hymn to Apollo,” in which Delos is flattered that the goddess Lêtô should ask him if he will agree to have her son Phoebus Apollo settle on his island but raises the misgiving that Apollo might scorn Delos, which is nothing but hard rock and sand, and cast it into the depths of the sea (Hesiod 1914, 349). Delos is also commemorated by the Greek poet Pindar (c. 518–c. 438 BC) in his processional song “On Delos.” It describes the island as tossed in wind and sea until Lêtô, the daughter of Coeüs, set foot on the island to give childbirth, when pillars rose from the bottom of the sea to give the island stability (Pindar 2007, 561). And, of course, we have the fabled floating continent of Atlantis, as alluded to by Plato (of which more later). In all these classical instances, the imagined and the fantastical are treated as a given element of poetic mythology. There is yet another sense in which an island can prove to be poetic in itself: through its function in acts of naming, each of which entails a type of imaginative projection onto the geophysical. Derek Walcott—one of several poet laureates of islandness—identifies naming as an Adamic function. He invokes the figure of Adam to suggest that the things of the world exist in nature more truly when their linguistic being is spoken. His poem “Another Life” (1973) treats the Caribbean region as inconceivable in its early history because “no one had yet written of this landscape

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/ that it was possible” (Walcott 2014, 156). In the long poem Omeros (1990), his boyhood is spoken of as a time “when I was a noun / gently exhaled from the palate of the sunrise” (Walcott 1990, 12). This idea of poetic function binds all his poetry together in the conviction that naming gives or brings forth an identity that a place lacks when not yet named by the human. Of course, the approach he adopts may seem to favor the Anthropocene era in geological history, but it does so at the behest of the recognition that the realization of place is a mental operation closely tied up with our faculty of language. A more ironic illustration of how the act of naming makes a difference to the associations of an island can be found in the case of a cold and barren island in the northern Arctic Ocean: for a while it had a Norwegian name—Lonely Island—which was changed, after the island came under Russian control, to Solitude Island (Schalanksy 2010, 26). The change in names reveals a sharp contrast between the condition of being a prisoner and being a hermit: either type of individual may be isolated, but one loathes what the other seeks—solitude. The reasons adduced so far for why a movement from the literal to the figurative can be called poetic might make the skeptical reader wonder: Isn’t every idea poetic in some basic sense? How, then, might islands help us delimit a sense of the poetic that could avoid the risk of becoming so inclusive as to become fatuous? The method adopted in this book, of treating an idea, image, or figure of speech as poetic, is controlled by a singular consideration. This consideration is adopted from the American poet and critic John Crowe Ransom (1888–1974). It declares that the designation of an utterance as poetic is justified by its capacity to produce, present, or constitute a new mode of comprehension: “The kind of knowledge by which we must know what we have arranged that we shall not know otherwise” (Ransom 1968, x). On the surface, his words might appear clear and simple; the idea they capture with such disarming simplicity is profound. They subsidize a cognitive claim, which includes, but is larger than, an aesthetic claim. The poetic element to perception creates new knowledge, it adds a new element to the totality of our understanding. It is rooted in language insofar as language refracts both perception and thought. For present purposes, this claim has islands as its lens of refraction, but the principle it embodies is more general and applies to all the ways in which any idea is poetic that offers new insight, which would cease to exist if articulated in any other way. It is probably with such notions in mind that Aristotle (384–322 BC), in his Poetics (1451a37–1451b26, § 9), claimed that poetry is more philosophical than history, and Sir Philip Sydney (1554–1586), in An Apologie for Poetrie (c. 1583, pub. 1595), and Percy Shelley (1792–1822), in A Defence of Poetry (c. 1821, pub. 1840), ascribed a cognitive function to poetry.

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An Island as a Figure of Speech The poetic element, as defined by Ransom, and adopted here as a basic premise, is a way of taking the literal and making something different or more of it, by dint of the imagination. Consider four examples. The first reminds us that though, in a literal sense, an island is indeed land surrounded by water, a figurative significance can be read into that literal sense to create a compelling recognition that is essentially poetic. That is exactly what is accomplished in John Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624) when he writes, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main” (Donne 1844, 100). Geography thus becomes the foundation on which a humane recognition is enjoined, inviting us as isolated individuals to participate in general humanity in the same way that an island and a continental land mass might be conjoined below the surface, though the eye might see them as separate. A later poet, Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), writing in a very different style, opens up the separateness that Donne had sought to join. “To Marguerite: In returning a volume of letters of Ortis” (1852) declares: Yes: in the sea of life enisl’d, With echoing straits between us thrown, Dotting the shoreless watery wild, We mortal millions live alone. The islands feel the enclasping flow, And then their endless bounds they know. (Arnold 1852, 96)

Through the paradox of “endless bounds,” separation finds an apt image in islandness, though not without a reminder of how that which now suffers a rift might have been conjoined once—so they hope and feel—as parts of a single continent (Arnold 1852, 97). Gillian Beer, in her essay on “Discourses of the Island,” remarks of this poem that “Arnold here looks back longingly to the time before England had become an island isolated from the larger land forms” (Beer 1989, 13). In our next example, the twentieth-century Anglo-American poet W. H. Auden (1907–1973) toys with the idea of an island as “a lake turned inside out” (Auden 1979, 211). The conceit is particularly felicitous if we remember that the Canadian island of Manitoulin has lakes with islands in them, and some of these islands have lakes of their own. Auden’s idea elicits another conceit: the idea of an oasis as an island of water surrounded by a sea of sand—that is, the idea of any natural entity surrounded by its natural opposite. The point of such inversions is to suggest that we might understand the idea of an island better by learning to recognize the variety of ways in which it provides the basis for figurative thinking.

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Our fourth and final example is taken from the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who reminds us in his essay on “Desert Islands” (1953) that to dream of an island entails two contrary possibilities: “of pulling away from an island, or of beginning afresh on an island” (Deleuze 2004, 10). In this perspective, an island is not simply a particular kind of place; it is also a pretext for recurrent patterns of human interaction that make a function of islandness. One such pattern is that of journeys treated as allegories, each an act of finding or losing. An island is thus both a place in itself and a pretext for imaginings that need a local habitation and a name. In that role, it can give relief, sojourn, or pleasure, but it can also stand for that which frustrates, isolates, or negates. In all these cases, an island both invites and resists—or contains or circumscribes—the imagination. It is what we conjure with, and it is an integral part of what makes and keeps us human, especially when retaining one’s humanity becomes difficult. In all times and cultures, the poetic imagination has fed on the natural attributes of islands. All peoples, societies, and cultures with some experience of islands have inscribed them in their myths and legends, their histories and folktales, their songs, ballads, sagas, and epics. The primordial notion of matter still has something elemental about it to which islands keep us close, providing the material for images and symbols, and for individual experience and patterns of events to accumulate and transmute into the realm of the poetic. The conversation between the perceptual and the figurative constitutes a recurrent interface between the language of evocation or reflection and the language of imagination or invention. We arrive at this interface whenever language assimilates an island as a fact of physical geography—like any other concrete particular from the world of material reality—in a process described by Stevens, in the poem “Of Modern Poetry,” as “an act of the mind” (Stevens 1956, 240). In our context, an act of the mind refers to the balance accomplished in an utterance or a text between sense experience, the poetic element to cognition, and the affective value placed on island experience. Whenever the figurative and the perceptual are in equipoise, feeling and thought become one with whatever is out there, to be perceived as air, water, sand, and rock. An act of the mind, in our present context, then, discovers and keeps alive the principle of the poetic in engaging with an island as a vital and constitutive element of perception and reflection. In that sense, this book is about our experience of life seen through the lens of the island as fact and fiction. Every island we encounter becomes an instrument for the mediation of not just poetry as a genre of literature but also the poetic as a cognitive property of human experience. Poetic thinking as a set is larger than, and never simply congruent with, the set constituted by oral and written poetry. To think poetically is to think through metaphor without necessarily having recourse to verse or song. For example, Hans Blumenberg, in Shipwreck with Spectator (1979,

Introduction

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1997), reflects on the idea that if “accomplishments of spatial representation are genetically older than those of temporal representation,” then “the idea of the fluxus temporis, the stream of time” (Blumenberg 1997, 87) might also belong necessarily in the realm of the metaphorical, leading to the felicitous supposition made by the German philosopher Otto Liebmann (1840–1912) of “‘imagining’ the ego as ‘the serene shore, or rather the solidly anchored island, which the stream of events, the fluxus temporis, washes over’” (Blumenberg 1997, 87). An island thus becomes a figure for the notional fixity of a consciousness of self that stays relatively steady amid all the changes rung on the scale of mutability by time. Poetic thinking is induced by many interactions, of which island experiences supply examples that do not always, or necessarily, need the form of verse, or the vocation of poet. Consider the islanders of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), of whom Stephen Royle reports that once their ancestors had migrated to that isolated volcanic island (c. 700 AD) they lost awareness of the world at large; their descendants came of think of their island as “Te-Pito-O-Te-Henua, one translation of which is ‘the navel of the world’” (Royle 2014, 65). We could say of this instance of figurative thought and language what Martin Heidegger said more generally of the human condition in his essay “. . . Poetically Man Dwells . . .” (1954). He said that we need to ground our existence in respect for what language can do in relation to the planet we live on. We need to take measure of the dimension that gives us a space to live in, between sky and Earth. What he speaks of is a mode of dwelling in the poetic, in and of itself, which enables a description of poetry itself as a form of “letting-dwell” (Heidegger 1971, 215). Building on the understanding that an island exists only insofar as it is defined by water, we recognize it either as matter broken off from a continent or as the product of volcanic activity, raised from the ocean floor, independent of any continent. Just as water constitutes islands in our perceptual field, the idea of the islander, too, is created by the sea. What we do with the sea, and what the sea does to us, determines the kind of islander we become. For instance, the sea provides sustenance through fishing. Dennis Kawaharada, in his account of The Discovery and Settlement of Polynesia (1999), argues that the search for new fishing waters often led to the discovery of islands, so that they began to see themselves not as fishermen catching fish but as fishermen catching islands (Kawaharada 1999). Just as fishing for islands becomes a metaphor drawn from and growing out of the activity of fishing, real islands become metaphors for human projections. One might use the verb islanding to describe the mental operations and processes through which islands impinge upon our consciousness as specific entities with unique features. This activity may be described as poetic in itself, such that we treat metaphor as the essence of the poetic: the capacity of the mind to link dissimilar things by finding an aspect of commonalty that allows for a cognitive

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leap toward a new understanding. Thus, fishing is allied to another human attribute, simple curiosity: a desire to find out more about the physical world we live in. The poetic is not exclusively about the spectacular or the sublime. In the somewhat arcane field of modern theories of syntax, talk of island clauses and phrases became commonplace once the distinguished linguist Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) had addressed syntactic ambiguities concerning relative clauses in 1964. The idea was rearticulated in 1980 as follows: “We say that a phrase is an ‘island’ if it is immune to the application of rules that relate its parts to a position outside of the island” (Chomsky 1980, 194). This is for specialists (and concerns the ambiguity of reference created by islanded phrases in ordinary sentences like “Mary saw the boy walking to the station,” in which it is not clear whether it is Mary doing the walking or the boy). Even if such references to an island are arcane, the utterances to which they are applied are ordinary. Let us consider a few examples of the poetic at work in the most mundane of contexts invoking an idea of islands. When renovating kitchens, we speak of choosing between an island and a peninsula. When overtaken by loneliness, it feels not simply that I might be on an island but also that I might be one. There are times when the world is too much with us, and we wish to run away from it all. Then it feels like the best place to run to is an island. It is our favorite fantasy to loll on an island: whether as contented lotus-eaters or even as one of Circe’s swine (at least for a while). But when certain members of the species get on our nerves in a serious way, we think of packing them off to some remote island. That was the traditional place to which enemies and criminals were sent by the authorities, as remarked by the Japanese poet Matsuo Bāsho (1644–1694) in 1689, when contemplating Sado Island, which is located a few miles off the Japan Sea Coast in Niigata (Carter 1991, 357). The same could be said of Green Island (Lüdao), off the coast of Taiwan, and of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Indian Ocean. While physical islands come in all shapes and sizes, each with its unique flora, fauna, climate, and seasons, the islands of the mind differ according to the functions they serve in our psychic economy. Such islands can provide a home for many a buried treasure, just waiting to be found. Likewise, they are useful as repositories of the dead, the lost, and the found. They serve equally well as an abode of the gods, or of demons and wicked spirits. They are perfect hideouts, isolation chambers, and natural prisons. They breed isolation; yet they allow uniqueness to flourish uncontaminated by too much awareness of others. Furthermore, imagined islands may differ from real islands in obvious ways, but they have one feature in common: each is laden with a significance that is always relational to something else that is not an island. One does not have to have lived on islands to realize that they inhabit our minds anyway. They

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are places to live on or leave behind, or go to, or get sent to, equally apt as starting or end points for all our voyages. Islands and Myths Our earliest discursive creativity as a species is embodied in our myths. Myths of origin with islands at their center are among the foundational story material of all seafaring primitive societies. Such mythmaking is a poetic activity because it transmutes the brute phenomena of nature into symbol, allegory, and fable. Myths take the form of narratives peopled by the primordial presences we create through our propensity for personification. We give natural forces and phenomena names, shapes, and identities. This humanizes the alien aspects of nature, making them easier to comprehend. It enables the symbolic actions we devise—our rites and rituals—to negotiate our relationship with the forces of nature in ways that give us some relief or consolation when confronted by the baffling or inhuman aspects of nature. Myths attempt an explanation of how the world came to be, how its forces affect our lives, what we might do to change any part of that, and what we imagine the afterlife to be. Myths are not displaced or made redundant by science. They provide the matrix from which arise the beliefs, values, and preoccupations that characterize peoples, cultures, and eras. As story material, myths work with extraordinary, primal events, which are brought about by larger-than-life, primordial entities. In this respect, we can agree with Mircea Eliade when he writes that myths are generally an account of creation (Eliade 1963, 6). To participate in such fictions is to participate in the act of myth making that brought larger-than-life presences into our lives as our way of providing ourselves an account of how we experience the world. To participate in a myth is to enter the field of the poetic. It is also, in the same way, a way of refracting the world through our stories about that world. Karen Armstrong points out, in A Short History of Myth (2005), that myths are rooted in our fear of extinction. They are inseparable from ritual and equipped to provide us with a psychological and spiritual framework by locating the world of reality in such a way as to place it adjacent to, or based on, another plane of existence that gives reality a context (Armstrong 2005, 4). In Hawaiian mythology, for example, the trickster-god Māuichad is said to have created the islands of Hawaii by having his brothers fish them out of the ocean. Likewise, the creation myth of the Samoan people tells of how the god Tagaloa created islands by pulling them out of the water, so that his son, in the shape of the bird Tuli, might have a place to rest on in his ceaseless flying over the ocean. That is how—we are told— the islands of Savai’i, Fiti, and Tonga rose up from the ocean (Resture 2012). Japanese mythology has a different variation on the same theme of

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gods creating islands. The oldest surviving Japanese text, the Kojiki (c. 712 AD), tells of successive generations of gods, emerging in male-female pairs. The seventh such pair of brother and sister, Izanagi and Izanami, stood on the bridge connecting heaven and Earth and stirred the ocean with a magical spear. The brine thrown up by their churning fell back into the ocean and became the island of Onogoro. There they lived and procreated. Their first attempt failed; the second was successful, creating the first eight of the fourteen islands of Japan, and then giving birth to the other islands of the Japanese archipelago, each associated with a specific deity and specific properties as well as natural phenomena (Shirane et al. 2016, 24). The image of a divine couple stirring the ocean to a froth with a jeweled spear until the brine gave forth islands is a vivid example of how the mundane act of churning milk for curds can be transposed into a cosmic act of creation, linking the micro with the macro element of the poetic nature of myth making. These glimpses into ancient myth illustrate how making poetry and making islands has a long and ubiquitous human history.

TWO Islands as Symbols

The fact of an island generates a natural logic to any story or poem in which the physical reality of land surrounded by water acts as a basis for several kinds of verbal propulsion: the fascination of how we get to islands, why we need them, and why we also fear them. Going to islands, living on islands, leaving islands: each has a poetry of its own, and the poetic element in each such type of experience has found expression in verse from all societies through all ages. 2.1 ISLANDS AS FIGURES OF DESIRE AND DREAD Getting to an Island The Orkney-born poet Edwin Muir (1887–1959) once wrote a series of poems whose titles catalogue a series of poetic functions for places that acquire the role of symbolic sites. These are his titles: “The Unfamiliar Place,” “The Place of Light and Darkness,” “The Solitary Place,” “The Private Place,” “The Unattained Place,” “The Threefold Place,” “The Original Place,” “The Sufficient Place,” and “The Dreamt-of Place” (Muir 1991, 84–92). Each is rendered as a symbol emblematizing a set of related but distinct human preoccupations. The islands of the mind are such kinds of place. The history of concerns encoded in them transcends distance and time and provides strong support for a discourse in which islands and poetry interact to affirm our common humanity. This humanity is affirmed through roles ascribed to islands in a larger political economy of the psyche, which leads to the creation of a natural typology. Writing with reference to the islands of Scotland and Ireland, the critic Edna Longley enumerates the types of island we discover in the poetry of those two island cultures: island poems with a documentary motive, is29

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land elegies, holy island poems, and parable island poems. The fact that islands are amenable to such a wide range of figurative functions is proof, she argues, that island experienced is generally prefigured through imaginative tropes (Longley 2010, 144). That is to say, islands are prone to being treated less as a matter of sheer perception than for their figurative potential, and not just by poets. The islands of the imagination cross genres, and contain within their symbolic and mythic potential a large variety of antinomian pairs such as utopia/dystopia and prison/paradise. Similarly, as shown in fascinating detail by Peter Davidson in The Idea of North, the facticity of whatever lies northward and nearer the pole relative to wherever one happens to be is often construed in ways that have little to do with verifiable fact, and everything to do with affect. Thus, an island called “Thule” is assigned a northern location in tales and legends, and is claimed to be located back of the north wind (Boreas), where a people called the Hyperboreans are believed to have lived, “beyond the terrors, the dark and the cold of the north,” in “a paradisal oasis of peace and plenty” (Davidson 2005, 24). This idea recurs, from the Homeric hymns and Hecataeus to Pindar and others, throughout the course of Western constructs of the north. The fantasy of a paradisal place in some distant ocean at the edge of the known world is at least as old as the Garden of Jewels mentioned in the epic of Gilgamesh (Gilgamesh, 70, Tablet IX). For Fiji islanders, paradise floated at the eastern edge of the world of ocean (Sproul 1991, 331). Islands have always figured throughout human history and across cultures as the location for various versions of a happy place. It is a place that all of us wish for and only some of us might be deserving or lucky enough to find. It is characterized by a particular kind of environment: bountiful, clement, and unchangingly pleasant. Such imagined places are the rewards we reserve for ourselves to compensate for the lives we lead, in which neither outer nor inner weather is reliably clement, nor our fates bountiful, nor anything about our lives permanent. A specific variant represents islands as gardens, including island cities as neat in arrangement as a garden: for example, the fascination for sixteenth-century Venetians reading in Cortez’s letters of the Aztec capital in the New World, Tenochtitlan, as an instance of a perfect world of island self-sufficiency (Cosgrove 2008, 65). Islands became the favorite location for imagined gardens. For the ancient Greeks, such an island lay far off, somewhere west of Libya. They embodied this idea through several partially or fully overlapping names: Fortunate Islands, Isles of the Blessed, Elysian Fields. Several island attributes come into play in the make-believe that gives this idea such a hold over the imagination: remoteness from human settlements, great difficulty in getting there, and even greater difficulty in returning safely. Ironically, each of these attributes is equally well suited for the opposite role: islands as the abode of entities and personified fears

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that transcend the human realm, such as spirits, monsters, demons, and the dead. When they are the happy dead, the Greeks put them in the Elysian Fields: as immortal demi-gods in Homer’s Odyssey (4.635, 142), as the blessed dead in Works and Days (Hesiod 2006, 101), and as heroes in the Olympian Odes (2.71, Pindar 2007, 9). By the time of the Aeneid (c. 29–19 BC), the epic poem by the Roman poet Virgil (70 BC–19 BC), Elysium has become a part of Hades, a realm of the dead through which Aeneas journeys (Virgil, 6.741–42, 203). He arrives finally at a glimpse of what is reserved for the fortunate dead. This is how the English poet John Dryden (1631–1700) narrates it in his translation of 1697: These holy rites perform’d, they took their way Where long extended plains of pleasure lay: The verdant fields with those of heav’n may vie, With ether vested, and a purple sky; The blissful seats of happy souls below. (Dryden 1909, 233)

Many later poets return to this trope of the journey into the underworld. The singular attribute that defines an island—its separateness from other lands—also subsidizes all such island mythologies of desire and dread. Let us survey the happier motif first before attending to its opposite. Both entail a simple schematic element to the plot of the stories, legends, fables, and myths that give islands such a central role in our primary desires and fears: getting to an island, existence on such an island, and the hazards of the return journey. There is poetry to each element of this plot. The human species evolved on a continental landmass, and it needed both means and ends to get to its first islands. From the time that we humans could use the simplest means to carry us over water without sinking, we have been moving up and down rivers, across lakes, from mainland to island, from island to island, and across seas and oceans. Going from dugout logs and boats of wattle and hide and rafts tied by ropes to paddling and rowing boats, to sail ships, to steam, oil, and nuclear power, has been a dramatic escalation in the resources developed to cross water. These movements have been mostly a matter of deliberate intent. But in many instances, the discovery of islands has been an outcome of accident and chance: not a matter of looking for a place across the seas but a result of being blown there by wind or carried by a current. Regardless, even the paddle and sailboats of the Polynesian islanders— the most expert of ancient sailors—could cover 100–150 miles a day, and, using long, double-hulled canoes, they were capable of undertaking vast sea-voyages, as reported in ancient Polynesian legends (Craig 2004, 77). The exhilaration of sailing, the wind in one’s face, the open skies, and the constant challenges of capricious waters are a frequent theme in the poetry of the sea. The Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf (c. 975–1025 AD) gives a vivid account of how that felt:

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Since a tumult of sky, wind, and waves is likely to greet a sea voyager almost any time since the invention of seagoing craft, it has always taken courage, endurance, and robust craft making for seafaring to succeed across ocean expanses. If creating boats and ships was one part of the technology needed in such ventures, the other kind of technology had to do with the means of navigation: knowledge of winds and tides, sun, moon, and stars, the flight of birds, and all the paraphernalia of human invention from the compass needle to modern radar and sonar. The most basic motivation that brought people to islands was the need for food, shelter, and the hope of a new home. In a simple sense, islands are either habitable or uninhabitable. It is astonishing to think of the perseverance, ingenuity, and endurance that has converted seemingly inhospitable islands into habitations, however precarious and isolated some of them might be in relation to larger human settlements. If we think in mere numbers, inhabited islands are a smaller subset of the total number of islands on the planet, a number that keeps shifting as some islands sink, gradually or suddenly, into the ocean, while others keep arising through volcanic activity. The history of island settlements can be mapped in time and space by tracing patterns of migration in the search for food and shelter. The second motive that brought humans to islands was curiosity. Simply the presence of the unknown, if you wandered near it (either because your fishing took you there or because winds or a current drove your ship in that direction), has sufficed for people to sail into unknown island territories. If an island proved habitable, and showed resources that could sustain life, settlement often followed, which over time might lead to either a to-and-fro between previous and new places of habitation or an eventual migration, leaving one island behind for another. The history of making boats and ships that could cross water is an integral part of the poetic element in getting to real islands. Consider some of the closing lines from a poem, one of many, by the poet George Campbell Hay (1915–1984), from the Tarbert Loch Fyne region of Scotland. A large part of his work in English (and in the several other languages he wrote in, including Scots) is inspired by the world of sea, coast, and fishing vessels. A long poem titled “Seeker, Reaper” from Winds on Loch Fyne (1948) was inspired by a skiff named Sireahd (“seeker” in Gaelic), one of a pair of fishing vessels that worked from Minard, on the west shore of Upper Loch Fyne. Hay’s praise poem is not only for the skiff but also for the entire way of life in which fishing for a livelihood becomes

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merged with the exhilaration of celebrating the unity between vessel, water, wind, and the gutsiness that welds fishermen and their livelihood in a lasting bond. His technique is simple but inventive, taking the litany of appositional noun phrases to a level of intensity that combines exuberance of phrasing with an extravagance that has just as much energy in the wordplay as the water beating off the skiff’s hull when she sails: She’s a solan, she’s a tramper, she’s a sea-shaker, she’s a hawk, she’s a hammer, she’s a big-sea-breaker, ... When the big long seas come on like walls, cold-white-heided, she doesna flinch a point for them. Straight her wake is threided. (Hay 2017)

The romance of sailing became more than a vogue when early modern Europe began equipping and sending ships capable of making long sea voyages across the Atlantic, both westward and eastward. At the very earliest stages of this new collective and competitive adventure, the Portuguese poet Gil Vicente (c. 1470–1536) celebrated the attractiveness of a woman with two condensed analogies: to how a ship, sail, or star might be “fair,” and to how a horse, or arms, or war might be “fair.” A historian of the Spanish expansion in the Mediterranean explains these analogies in terms of the romance of exploration by sea, which allowed such romantic associations even amid the mess on board a sailing ship “or the waves ridden like jennets” (Fernández-Armesto 1987, 11). While real islands invite curiosity, fictive islands serve more than curiosity. They exist for being aimed at. They moralize a tale, focus a dream, and give our wishes a name and a location. Such islands are a pretext for what we need that can be fulfilled by having an island play its part in a serious game of make-believe. In “The Voyage, 1. The City of God,” a sequence of poems in Irish by Nuala Ní Dhomnaill (b. 1952) and translated by Paul Muldoon, the island is a simile for an idea: in this instance, the idea of the City of God. For that idea to be realized, an island has to be reached, but it does not matter where that island might be in geographical terms. The notion of the island is a means to an end, in the sense that the discovery may happen anywhere, including places that are not islands. The poet writes of how she glimpses this place sometimes in the form of a heavenly city, at other times located in the desert, or, indeed, sometimes “somewhere in South Dakota or Nevada or Wyoming” (Dhomnaill 2003, 73). Needing Islands Desire and fear both find common cause in making islands the sites for the realization of fable, myth, and legend. In doing so, we sometimes play a nominalist game. If an author invents a place-name—say, “Pen-

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guin Island,” or “Treasure Island”—then the name refers to a place as if it exists, even if we know it does not. In the game of make-believe, we can give it all the credibility of real places. We can put it in a map. Given all the appurtenances of virtual credibility, such a place can serve as subject or object of all our affective propensities. Just so, various islands used to be placed on the maps of the Atlantic used by the early navigators, not because anyone had established their location, but because a saga or a poem made mention of it being somewhere there—for example, “Antillia” or “Hy-Brasil.” We can see the idea becoming a figure of speech for the human desire for relief in the poem “Hy-Brasil” by the Irish writer Gerald Griffin (1803–1840), in which it is described as a beautiful specter always at the edge of the horizon, showing itself as both lovely and dim (Yeats 2002, 39). Nuala Ní Dhomnaill gives voice to the same motif in her poem “The Voyage, 3. Hy-Brasil” which tells of how the island calls to her, reminding her of how tired she is (Dhomnaill 2003, 77). Giving absence credence as a form of presence is not as fantastical as it seems. Arctic mirages are a fleeting version of a related experience, which is a perceptual rather than a cartographic delusion. Less fancifully, the flashing curtains of northern lights known as the aurora borealis was named Na Fir Chlis (the quickly moving ones) in the islands between Scotland and Norway (Davidson 2005, 63). All such phenomena—in poetry and in nature—give proof of the power of the distant and the spectral to imply an “otherwhere,” which the imagination can contemplate in fascination and wonder. The more remote from the world of the known and the familiar an island is said to be, the better its ability to invest our specific needs and fears with the sense of an embodied presence. Anything that differs from what we know, and what we are familiar with, has the appeal of novelty. More than novelty, it has the appeal of the hidden and the inscrutable, the mysterious and the potentially astounding. When just out of reach, when difficult to get to, and entailing a perilous journey, which many may never return from, simply adds to the allure of the impossible as the seemingly credible. All this works very well because we are not dealing with a real place. An island will do very well for what we need a place to be, because the large part of humanity lives on continental landmasses and an island is the natural alternative to a continent, except when we think of Australia and Greenland and decide to call one a continent and the other an island, or prefer to call the first of them an island continent, keeping in mind the recent declaration by the Australian novelist Tim Winton (b. 1930) in Island Home that “I grew up on the world’s largest island” (Winton 2015, 7) and Elizabeth McMahon’s observation in the introduction to her Islands, Identity and the Literary Imagination that “generations of Australian schoolchildren learned to describe their homeland as ‘the world’s largest island and the world’s smallest continent’” (McMahon 2016, 1). Almost independent of what they are actually like,

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and only sometimes based on what they really are like, islands become serviceable vehicles for a signification that has great appeal, though it lacks body. Consider some of the real islands of the world whose remoteness and mysterious appeal created a desire for a voyage to an island that is poetic in the sense that the idea of the island generated the motive for voyaging, rather than any known details about the island. That is the perspective in which we turn to fictive islands as the motive for voyaging. One the oldest strands in this weave of stories comes from the Greeks. Hesiod (c. 750–650 BC), an approximate contemporary of Homer, in his Works and Days alludes to “the islands of the blessed” as the place where Zeus gave rest to the race of departed demigods, in “an abode apart from men” near “the shore of deep-Swirling Ocean” (Hesiod 1914, 15). When the Romans refer to these islands, it is less purely as a matter of mythology. For them, the legendary had begun to acquire a grounding in geography, even if it was only a conjectural geography, based less on empirical knowledge than on the desire to believe in a happy place, where food is easy to procure and the weather is salubrious all year round. Plutarch (c. 46–120 AD), in his Life of Sertorius, includes an account of what are called the Atlantic Islands (which scholars now believe was probably a reference to any one or more of these: the islands of Madeira and Porto Santo, the Canary Islands, Azores, Cape Verde, Bermuda, or the Lesser Antilles). The Atlantic Islands were believed to form a pair, alleged to be no more than ten thousand furlongs from the coast of Africa. The climate is described as mild, with moderate rain, soil excellent for farming, and with a plentiful supply of grain and fruit, needing no great labor to cultivate (Plutarch 1998, 21). A little later, Lucian of Samosata (125–180 AD) moves several steps further from rapt fantasy. In a tone somewhere between the acerbic and the mocking, he has much fun at the expense of such myths. In the second chapter of A True Story, his band of sailors is described as entering a sea of milk, in which they find an island where grapes grow on vines and what they give as juice is milk (Lucian 1913, 307). When we move from the classical world to medieval Europe, we come across many sea voyages where the form of the narrative shows a predilection for allegory. This is developed out of implied resemblances and unspecific but tacit analogies that function like a two-layered narrative. The surface layer names persons, places, things, and events; the underlying level requires and permits a form of systematic translation, in which persons, places, things, and events can each stand for something symbolic: the specific for the general, the concrete for the abstract, the profane for the sacred, the secular for the spiritual, and so on. Irish storytelling is rich in such allegory. Irish traditions distinguish between voyages that entail visits to the underworld, voyages that include visits to Other Worlds (tales known as Echtrai), and voyages that contain elements of the supernatural (Immram).

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Another distinction separates voyages undertaken voluntarily (Immram) from voyages of exile (Longes). There are several such narratives in the medieval Celtic tradition, with analogues from the Northern sagas, and parallels in Islamic travel narratives and geographical accounts such as Muhammad al-Idrisi’s Nuzhat al-mushtāq fi'khtirāq al-āfāq (also known as Tabula Rogeriana, 1138). They all share the feature of sailors encountering strange islands west of the European continent. The key feature in both the Echtrai and the Immram is the comfortableness with which the realistic, the historical, and the credible coexist with the fantastical, the monstrous, and the supernatural. These narratives show no recognition of a gap between the credible and the incredible; instead, they encourage us to believe in a world where there is no such gap. They exemplify the kind of receptivity to fiction, or poetic faith, which the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called for in chapter 14 of his Biographia Literaria (1817), in the form of “a willing suspension of disbelief” (Coleridge 2000, 314). Consider the medieval Irish narrative Immram Brain (The Voyage of Bran), which was first written down in the late seventh or the early eighth century AD. It illustrates features also found in other narratives of the period, such as The Voyage of Máel Dúin. The medley of verse and prose in The Voyage of Bran recounts how the male protagonist is accosted by a magical woman who sings to him of a wonderful world of islands to which he must travel. This other world is splendidly endowed with crystal and silver, with things that glisten and glow. The emphasis is on delight and glory. But there are intriguing features as well, including an island populated only by women. Such fantastical reports were widespread during the early phase of European travel and exploration. The Italian cartographer Benedetto Bordone (1460–1531), the author of the once celebrated Isolario (1528, The Book of Islands), also reported an island in the Antilles as inhabited solely by women: Who at a chosen moment during the year copulate with cannibals living on a nearby island, the resulting male offspring departing for the cannibal island after three years’ infancy. The name of Isla Mujeres, an island off Mexico’s Yucatan coast, still records this fantasy. (Cosgrove 2001, 94)

For the culture that produced The Voyage of Bran, the unfamiliar ocean west of Ireland was cause enough to populate the unknown with the imaginary. In the poem, a prophecy unfolds that the tribe will soon be ruled by someone from the tribe who is born of an unknown father. Once the woman has finished her account, Bran and his band of men set sail. Eventually they get to an island where the inhabitants are all laughing (Meyer 2000, 10). The men do not respond to any attempt to speak but only gape and laugh. One of Bran’s men is deposited on this island, which they call the Island of Joy. Then they reach an island filled with

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women. An enticing welcome awaits them, a Celtic variant on a theme familiar from Circe’s island in Homer’s Odyssey. The men hardly realize how long they have tarried on this island until one of them grows homesick. The women urge them not to go. Eventually they leave and are told to collect the man whom they had left behind on the Island of Joy before they go. They are also warned that they cannot ever return safely home. As they reach the Irish shore, the one who was homesick steps ashore and immediately crumbles to dust, as if he had lived far too long in the other world of their voyage to retain the shape and body of a human in this world. Bran and his men have become part of Irish legend, but no one recognizes them. We are to understand that their island sojourn had them in thrall for a very long time, and all they can do is to tell their story and sail into the mist, never to be seen again. The story ends in a tantalizing manner, as fascinating as it is inscrutable. A different variation on this Irish motif can be found in The Voyage of St. Brendan, one of the most popular and frequently copied of narratives from the European Middle Ages. The earliest written account, in Latin, dates from the late eighth century AD and recounts the voyage by a band of monks led by Bishop Brendan of Clonfert (c. 484–577 AD) westward into the Atlantic Ocean in search of the Island of Paradise. In their voyaging, they come across a number of islands, some magical, others bizarre. Their seafaring also includes encounters with fantastical creatures such as a dragon, a griffin, and a sea monster. One of the islands they encounter is full of giant sheep; another seems to have a supply of food but no inhabitants except a dog and an Ethiopian devil; yet another, on which they land and light up a fire to cook a meal, begins to move suddenly after they have boarded ship again. It turns out not to be an island at all, because it moves away rapidly, and even from a distance they can see the fire they had lit when standing on it, believing it to be solid land (Mackley 2008, 272). The narrative sounds bemused at the sailors’ discomfiture, as well it might. The fraught comedy of a moving island that turns out to be a giant sea creature has parallels in many cultures. To take the fantastical idea even further, and as noted by Stephanos Stephanides and Susan Bassnett, A True History by the Syrian writer Lucian of Samosata (c. 120–c. 180 AD) tells of an island within a whale, and a dialogue between the whale and the inhabitants of the island, which includes an odd debate between the whale and the islanders in its belly regarding utopias and dystopias (Stephanides and Bassnett 2008). Depending on how a narrative is to be developed, the storyteller has the option to suggest a cautionary moral regarding the risks incurred by the human propensity to misread nature. In The Book of Imaginary Beings (1974), Jorge Luis Borges enumerates many occurrences of the same fable. The list includes the Anglo-Saxon bestiary of the Exeter Book; the Book of Animals by al-Jahiz, the ninth-century Moslem zoologist; the thirteenth-

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century Wonders of Creation by al-Qazwini, the Persian cosmographer; the account of the “kraken” by Erik Pontoppidan, the bishop of Bergen, in his Natural History of Norway (1752–1754); and many other notable examples (Borges 1974, 88, 155–57). In St. Brendan’s narrative, the sailors do not drown. Their narrow escape acquires significance due to the fervor and sincerity of the allegorical drive that subsidizes their leader’s faith in the mission. The entire point of the seven-year voyage and all its travails is to find the Island of Paradise, which is described as an island skirted by high walls ablaze with precious stones (Mackley 2008, 307). The pious and exhortatory aspects of the religious allegory remain to the fore throughout, but the fantastical elements are never left behind. In a spiraling voyage across a mix of real and fantastical geography, the distinction between the real islands of geography and the symbolic isles of religious vision is, one might say, successfully blurred. It is an unsurprising historical irony that sailors right up to the times of Columbus used to keep looking in the Atlantic for the Saint Brendan Island shown in maps such as the Liber floridus, and, as noted by Denis Cosgrove, these cartographic traditions “served to enhance the imaginative place of the island within the European geographical consciousness and gave rise in later medieval years to the island book, or isolario” (Cosgrove 2001, 66). Some have argued that the actual islands on which Brendan might have landed could be any of the following candidates: the Canary Islands, the Faroes, the Azores, or the island of Madeira. Others argue that the monks may have crossed the Atlantic and reached the shores of Greenland and North America. Such claims are difficult to confirm or disprove and can become distracting if one’s focus is on spiritual rather than on geographical discoveries. Be that as it may, Bishop Brendan returned to Ireland from his long sea voyage, had a long and influential career as a founder of monasteries all over the British Isles, and is revered in Ireland as one of its twelve apostles. A sailor-monk who travels tirelessly in search of spiritual rather than worldly riches makes for a fascinating islander and a redoubtable island seeker: robust of faith; open to the wondrous and the monstrous alike; humble, yet confident; eager for discovery, yet calm of faith. Fantasy Islands If medieval Christian allegory gives us one kind of fantasy island, then the era that followed shows how earlier traditions could be adapted and modified to perpetuate an ancient tradition in which islands have been the locus for a particular kind of wishful thinking. Before we review the tradition, we may as well acknowledge a modern countercultural classic, which proffers a modish antidote to this frame of mind. A Coney Island of the Mind (1958) by the American poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti (b. 1919) includes a selection from an earlier volume, Pictures of the Gone

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World (1955). In the 1960s, it became a classic, speaking for an entire counterculture in an idiom that represented an antithesis to high culture. The twelfth poem from that set alludes to the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, and his poems about sailing to places like Byzantium (a fantastical place based upon the historical city but made to bear a special significance in a symbolic binary between the world of art and the world of everyday life). Reading Yeats, the poet thinks of his own city of New York. He would rather not have any truck with the Irish romanticism of mythical and poeticized places. Instead, he affirms his satisfaction with the quotidian, where an old woman watering her plants “or a joker in a straw / putting a stickpin in his peppermint tie” (Ferlinghetti 1958, 90) can end up looking as if he had nowhere to go but Coney Island. The mundane is thus preferred as a prophylactic against the appeal of the fantastical. As for the long European tradition of wishful thinking centered on islands, the Roman poet Horace (65–8 BC), in the sixteenth of his Epodes, invokes the vision of an Island of the Blest to which he would love to retire. There, the happy fields yield corn without having to be plowed, grapes and figs grow wild, and honey flows from the oak, while fountains splash their way down from the hills (Horace 1927, 411). Such fantasies work within the pastoral tradition established since the Greek Idylls of Theocritus (third century BC). The life of the countryside, close to nature, is idealized in contrast to the toil of cities and the strife of wars. In this perspective, an island provides the locus for everything desired that the world of reality might lack, whether a cold-climate northern poet locates it in a warmer south, or a poet looking westward into the unexplored unknown imagines it as a place in which geography is conflated with the mythological Hesperides. The seventeenth-century English poet Robert Herrick (1591–1674) alludes to the motif in the very title of his book, The Hesperides. One of the poems in that volume, “The White Island: Or, Place of the Blest,” evokes the appeal of an island of dreams where we might let our tears and sorrows flow away (Herrick 1898, 221). It is worth adding that some have provided the White Isle with a location within Europe: at the mouth of the Danube (Parada and Förlag 1997). The White Isle also figures in classical mythology as an abode of the dead. Many tragic heroes and heroines are reported as going there after their death, chief among them Achilles, Helen, Iphigenia, and Medea. There are other variations on this theme, which came into play once travel literature began to make an impact on symbolic narratives. The discovery of new lands and islands by Christian Europe in the so-called New World brought one such need into play with the landing of Columbus in the outer Bahamas and the beginning of a momentous chapter in global history. In a context where making settlements in a new environment was fraught with uncertainty about survival, the early colonists needed reassurance that discovery coincided with destiny. Where they

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had reasonable hope of eventual mastery over land, climate, and native inhabitants, the need to survive metamorphosed into a need for selfaggrandizement. These mixed impulses took recourse to fantasies related to but distinct from the classical fiction of the happy islands as exemplified by Horace and other older poets. The consanguinity of the seventeenth-century poets with the pastoral tradition is revealed in how the new environment is celebrated for its salubrious qualities, while their divagation from classical myth is shown in how the new environment is assimilated into Christian typology. The flora and fauna, the climate and topography of the New World, are all translated into the symbolic vocabulary of an allegory of travails undergone and triumphs rewarded. The English poet Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) excelled at verses with a lapidary poise and nuanced rhythmic charm. His “Bermudas” (c. 1653–1654) might be said to assimilate and transmute the experience of arrival after a perilous sea voyage at a new island home into a devoutly grateful sense of being rewarded by God’s providence: What should we do but sing his praise That led us through the wat’ry maze, Unto an isle so long unknown, ... He hangs in shades the orange bright, Like golden lamps in a green night; And does in the pomegranates close Jewels more rich than Ormus shows. (Marvell 2007, 56–57)

The poem imitates the tone of psalm poetry, although, as noted by Timothy Raylor (2014), Marvell’s characteristic slipperiness leaves some room for a minority view of the poem as not without some concealed irony, an interpretation that reads the poet’s profession of Puritan ideology as tongue-in-cheek parody. The historical circumstances of colonization are pertinent to the question of irony, although they do not by themselves resolve the issue. Nigel Smith points out in his editorial note (Marvell 2007, 54) that the immigrant idealization of their newfound paradise elides all the ugly and harsh realities attendant on the settlement of the island by colonists from England, more than a hundred years after its discovery by the Spanish explorer Juan Bermudez. The fictional impulse in the poem depends minimally on historical fact. It takes the wish for the reality, substituting a sense of spiritual celebration for the epicurean hedonism evoked by Marvell’s immediate poetic source in Edmund Waller’s “The Battle of the Summer Isles” (1645), so named in allusion to Sir George Somers, a seventeenth-century castaway who founded an English colony on the island in 1609: So sweet the aire, so moderate the clime, None sickly lives, or dyes before his time.

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Heaven sure has kept this spot of earth uncurst To shew how all things were created first. (Waller 1645)

Once again, we see pastoral motifs from a pagan tradition refracted through Christian typology. Other Renaissance evocations of this kind, as in Tasso (Gerusalemme Liberata, 16.9–11) or the Garden of Adonis (The Faerie Queene, 2.9.42ff) by Edmund Spenser (1552–1599) share with their classical predecessor Homer (Odyssey, 7.117–21) a predilection for the balmy that partakes of the erotic, or the exotic, or both. The motif was to remain a standard prop for poets after Homer. In a late nineteenth-century example from the Englishman settled in Samoa, R. L. Stevenson (1850–1894), we see how the exotic element would stay in place but spiritual fervor and sexual innuendoes would evaporate, leaving behind a tone somewhere between whimsical and droll, in speaking of wanting to go: Where below another sky Parrot islands anchored lie, And, watched by cockatoos and goats, Lonely Crusoes building boats. (Stevenson 1914, 17)

In such poems, we see a solemn tradition dwindled to little more than whimsical verses for children. Having reached this dead end, we can return to the second motif from the Renaissance period of exploration and discovery: the impact of realworld travel in seventeenth-century Europe on allegory. The arrival of the Spanish in the Americas opened up a new chapter in colonization that had a huge impact on literature. Arrival in the Americas was followed by a wave of European expansion in two directions. The Portuguese led the way for Europeans to go around the southern tip of the African continent into Asia, and the Spanish discovered the way round the tip of South America into the Pacific and thence to the archipelago of the Philippines. One of the cultural by-products of exploration and trade mutating to colony and empire was a minor subgenre dealing in fantasy islands. This tradition could be said to illustrate a specifically historical manifestation of the need to celebrate the discovery of islands as symbols of triumph in exploration rewarded by land and booty. If spiritual comfort was one type of need, self-aggrandizement was the other, and islands played a significant role here as well. Ever since travelers such as Marco Polo had brought back reports to Europe of eastern lands rich in wealth and the variety of material cultures, European explorers, backed by strong financial support for expanding maritime trade beyond the Mediterranean, had searched long and hard for a sea passage from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. This search was spearheaded from the Iberian Peninsula. After decades of unsuccessful effort, expansion took place in

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stages. First there came the seizure of the Muslim port of Ceuta in 1415. Then came the settlement of Madeira in 1420, followed by the fortification of Arguin Island off Mauritania in 1448 and the building of a second fort at Elmina (Mina) in the Bight of Benin in 1482. All these developments culminated in the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope in 1487 (Wolf 2010, 129). The drive to exploration came to fruition with four ships reaching the port of Calicut on the western coast of India in 1498, led by Vasco da Gama (1469–1524). Trade and localized territorial gains followed, with Portuguese influence spreading as far as Malaysia and Macao. The Spanish followed up on the Portuguese landing of Cabral in Brazil in 1500, with a systematic pursuit of western territories, eventually finding the route round the southern tip of South America into the Pacific, which led to more than three centuries of colonial rule over, and the Christianization of, the Philippines. The first of Vasco da Gama’s two trips to and back from India was symbolic in its triumph rather than commercially profitable. But it opened a new path to the East, fulfilling a dream cherished ever since Prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460) dedicated his life and resources to developing the cartographical, navigational, and technological resources needed to send large and heavily armed ships on such long voyages. Within slightly more than half a century of this accomplishment, and as part of the wave of mercantile and evangelical expansionism of which Portugal saw itself as the leader, the poet was born who would make a trip to India and the Far East, almost in the footsteps of da Gama. He would then write a fulsome epic to celebrate that mariner’s triumphant return to the home country, celebrating it with versifying a trip to a magical island to which the returning hero and his mariners are taken by no less a person than the Cytherean goddess Venus. The poet was Luís de Camões (c. 1520–c. 1580), and the poem Os Lusíadas (The Lusiads). It was published in 1572, two years after the poet had returned to Portugal from a series of adventures and misadventures, first in North Africa and Portugal, and then in India and the Far East. Camões aspired to an epic from the perspective of a Renaissance humanism that sought to emulate Virgil. The poem is described by Josiah Blackmore as “an exploration of the Renaissance Portuguese imaginary in all of its historical, poetic, and mythological dimensions” (Blackmore 2013, 72). Camões adopted the machinery of the Roman gods, but he wrote in a devoutly Catholic age, and he therefore explained the pagan features as part of a Christian allegory. Neither the machinery nor the explanation has ever been found quite satisfactory: not by the Inquisition in the seventeenth century, nor by readers since. But it does enable the poet to reward his mariners with something like a divinely appointed open-air boudoir in the form of an “Isle of Love,” courtesy of Venus. Its numerous and lovingly detailed charms are elaborated in profuse enthusiasm. This fantasy comes across rather better in a seventeenth-century

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version from Sir Richard Fanshawe (1655) than in any other subsequent translation: The second Argonauts now disembarke From the tall ships into an Eden green. There, in this Isle, this Forest, or this Parke, The fair Nymphs hide, with purpose to be seen. Some touch the grave Theorba in shades darke, Some the sweet Lute, and gentle Violeen: Others with golden Cross-bows make a show To hunt the Bruits, but do not hunt them though. (Camões 1963, 299)

The actual islands encountered by da Gama and his compatriots were nothing like this, of course. The moral to be derived from this episode in the poetic version of the history of maritime exploration is that the excitement of discovery and the expectation of rewards were always accompanied by a capacity for fantasy. It made of islands what the heart desired and fancy could invent, while the realities of how actual islands were met and dealt with remained an entirely different matter. Vasco da Gama’s Journal of his first voyage to India (1497–1499) notes that on the return leg of their journey, sailing from the Indian coast back to Europe, they had to suffer many periods of contrary winds, and were often becalmed, with frequent sickness and infections of the gums that prevented his men from eating: in short, about as wretched a time as might be expected of a long sea voyage across uncharted waters (da Gama 2009, 106). The fantasy celebrated by Camões had a successor in the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533), whose epic romance, Orlando Furioso (1516–1532), in its sixth canto (stanzas 19ff), transports his hero Rogero, atop a hippogryph, to an island whose paradisal qualities illustrate how this subgenre would acquire features that continue to flesh out modern fantasy islands. These include thickets of laurel, cedar and orange, myrtle and palm, all forming a bower where the weary could partake of the cool shade. Everything is narrated in a vein that mixes the pastoral with a hint of the exotic (Ariosto 1532). The fate of such fantasy islands can be reviewed, from the other end of the historical telescope, by turning briefly to the role played by islands in a later poet from Portugal, someone utterly unlike the adventurous Camões: the reclusive Fernando Pessoa (1885–1935), who composed poems under three separate and distinctive poetic alter egos or heteronyms. A glance at some of Pessoa’s poems shows how the mood of celebration inspired by mariners like da Gama lasted all the way into the early twentieth century, at least for poets from Portugal: a heady elixir whose last dregs were quaffed, in excitable affirmations by a poet trying to sustain a fantasy whose conviction about itself had become faded over the centuries that had seen Portuguese colonial territories in the East

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decline and disappear. In the poems of Mensagem (1934) and in his prose, the idea of a Fifth Empire—to succeed the First Empire of Greece, the Second of Rome, the Third of Christianity, and the Fourth of secular Europe—still lives strong. One of Pessoa’s several fictive personalities— Alvaro de Campos—declares his enchantment at his nation’s maritime accomplishments writ large in the history of human aspirations by extolling the seafaring life and all that which it embraces (Pessoa 2006, 170). The fantasy is plausible enough when the poetic voice asks for the romance of seafaring adventure from the security of a solid land base. From the ease of an armchair, it is easy enough to wish to see mysterious ports, experience solitude on board a ship, and contemplate vistas of land and sea (Pessoa 2006, 169). But the fantasy becomes a little more dubious when the poet cries out for islands, beaches, and voyaging to satiate his hunger for the mystique of the exotic embalmed in historical memory (Pessoa 2006, 184). That this fantasy is unhealthy is recognized subsequently, by 1933, in a poem that concedes that he does not know if that “far-flung, south-sea island / Is reality, a dream, or a mixture / Of dream and life”; the poem ends with an admission that is self-deconstructive of such fantasy islands and the poet’s own “deep malaise” (Pessoa 2006, 325). Dreams of discovery, conquest, and glory had their heady moments during a certain phase of history, but in time’s flow, that glory faded in the aftermath of the European empires, and if islands continued to be pretexts for fantasy, they would do so in a more secular spirit, delinked from nationalist fervor. In general, when wish-fulfillment fantasy got to interact with varying manifestations of reality, during the era of European colonialist expansion, the element of the imaginary within the fantasy got to feed on the specific features of overseas topologies and ecosystems. In his detailed narrative of this phase of history, Richard Grove’s Green Imperialism identifies several nuances to the phenomenon. In the British Isles, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the activity of clearing forests and vegetation in the wild was seen as an improvement, in the sense that cultivating the land was not only economically profitable but also aesthetically pleasing (Grove 1995, 65). However, this practical development went against the grain of the traditional idea of Eden as a place both wild and uncultivated, as colonization showed to be the case in the many mostly tropical islands and territories that colonialist expansion brought within the European zone of knowledge and control. Grove’s argument is convincing: European preconceptions motivated colonists to re-create their ideals in the tropics, putting those very different environments under sustained ecological pressure. Conquest affected territories as much as it did peoples, and it seems to have had little difficulty in sustaining a contradictory attitude. Clearing up landscapes whose wildness was at once both mistrusted and rationalized went hand in hand with treating the peoples indigenous to those landscapes as noble as well as

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ignoble savages: this was a pattern applicable in the Caribbean, as well as the Malaysian-Indonesian archipelago and the Pacific islands. Fearing Islands We have seen how the desire for an existence without dread, without mortality, and replete with everything we regard as pleasing and desirable—which real life offers us all too tantalizingly and in meager measure—creates islands of the type long recognized as the fortunate isles. We have also seen that the history of voyaging created a typology in which islands acquired an assortment of functions. Such functions extended beyond the needs of ordinary living. The need for a Happy Place was complemented in the psychic economy of the species by its opposite: the need to localize the dread of what happens to us when we die, which is also a specific form of our fear of the unknown and the unknowable. This inchoate fear created an underworld, one of whose forms is an island known generally as the island of the dead. In all societies and cultures, the dead are assigned a symbolic realm distinct from the pragmatic function served by cemeteries and burial grounds. In terms of real geography, an island such as Île des Morts, situated in the Bay of Roscanvel (off the coast of Brittany in France), acquired its name in the early eighteenth century once it had become the cemetery to serve the adjoining island of Trébéron, which served as a colony for lepers. In terms of symbolic geography, the realms of the dead have as many names as there are systems of mythology: SekhetAaru (Egyptian), Naraka or Pātāla (Hindu), Sheol (Jewish), Yomi-no-kuni (Japanese), Braglu or Bu’ral-gu (Australian aboriginal), and Annwn (Welsh), to name just a few. Not all of them are islands. As symbolic regions, they are generally located deep within Earth, in a realm recognized generically as the underworld, for which each mythological system has its own associations, narratives, and presiding entity as ruler. Some cultures locate their underworlds on islands. In Greek mythology, five rivers, including Lethe and Styx, converge upon and isolate the underworld, which is known as Hades. Styx marks the boundary separating the realm of the living from the realm of the dead. Hades is thus a separate realm rather than an island, but the effective function of water separating two realms is common between actual islanding and its role in mythology. Finnish mythology, as appropriate to a country with the largest number of islands on the planet, isolates its underworld, known as Tuonela (and Manala), by means of a river, also called Tuonela. Both make a significant appearance in the epic poem Kalevala (1835, 1849), which was assembled by Elias Lönnrot (1802–1884) from a large collection of traditional oral poetry. The epic was to provide the inspiration for the mesmerizing tone poem, The Swan of Tuonela (1895), by the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius. Another example of music inspired by an island

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is provided by Sergei Rachmaninov’s riveting composition for orchestra, Isle of the Dead, Op. 29 (1908). The music was inspired by a broodingly stark black-and-white reproduction of a painting by Arnold Böcklin, titled Isle of the Dead (of which several versions were painted by the artist between 1880 and 1886). In The Kalevala, the heroic shaman Wainamoinen seeks to fashion a magic boat but lacks the spells to complete the work. All his work is to no avail, until he gets the idea of going to the underworld to fetch the magic: “In the dwellings of Tuoni, / In the manala fields and castles” (Lönnrot 2009). However, no living person is meant to make such a journey, and if such a person is to succeed in crossing over, he must deceive the person who will ferry him across the river to Tuonela. After many attempted deceptions that fail, Wainamoinen eventually succeeds in persuading the girl who is in charge of the ferryboat to help him cross into Tuonela. But there is a price to be paid for entering a forbidden realm through deception. The shaman fails in his search for magic and is forced to escape by adopting the disguise of a snake. The tale enforces the moral that the living must respect the barrier that separates them from the realm of the dead. Some waters are not for crossing, and some islands had better remain unvisited until it is the right time to do so. The role of an island underworld is not confined to mythology or ancient poetry. It constitutes a narrative convention known as katabasis. We find an example of this in “Baldrs Draumar” (Balder’s Dream), from the anonymous and untitled collection of medieval Norse poems subsequently known as the Poetic Edda (thirteenth century AD). The English poet Thomas Gray (1716–1761) translated this part of the Norse narrative into a spirited ode, “The Descent of Odin” (which was illustrated in a vivid watercolor by William Blake). We can find examples of this tradition in contemporary poetry. Michael Thurston introduces his book on The Underworld in Twentieth-Century Poetry with an account of an experimental work by the English poet Douglas Oliver, In the Cave of Suicession (1974), which adapts the ancient motif of the trip to the underworld for prophetic wisdom into its modern narrative (Thurston 2009, 1). Somewhat unexpectedly, modern urban amenities such as drainage systems, underground railways, and other buried networks make the idea of a literal underworld real in ways that abet the imagination. The English poet John Milton (1608–1674) created an epic, Paradise Lost (1667), which provided unusual but apt inspiration for a later illustrator and painter, John Martin (1789–1854), who created vastly popular illustrations for Satan’s Hell (1825–1827) and then came to take extensive interest in the sewerage excavations of the 1830s, which laid the foundations for subterranean London. The English poet Robert Graves (1895–1985) enlisted in the army at the beginning of World War I and was badly injured at the Battle of the Somme (1916). Upon discovering that he had been listed among the dead,

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he wrote the poem “Escape” (Graves 2003, 27), in which, at once fearful and cheerful, we have the hero returned to life, despite the War Office report that he was believed dead of wounds sustained in battle: “After me roared and clattered angry hosts / Of demons, heroes, and policemanghosts” (Graves 2003, 27). A grimly contrary fate was encountered by another war poet, Wilfred Owen (1893–1918). His poem “Strange Meeting” offers one of the most powerful modern accounts of hell. Its representation of a phantasmal experience is related to what is narrated by his editor, Jon Stallworthy, of Owen’s war experiences: he once fell into a shell hole and was trapped for three days: the experience must have felt very much like the underworld that appears in many of his later poems (Owen 1994, xxvi). In “Strange Meeting,” hole, tunnel, pit, trench, and hell all become one in a reproachful encounter between those sent before their time to the Isle of the Dead, fighting for causes not worth dying for. Owen had attended Graves’s wedding at the start of the war. They were friends. He was killed in action one week before Armistice Day. We might say one was saved; one was damned: both alive to the poetic element in the tragedy that is war, one fleeing from a tunneled underworld and the other trapped there forever. 2.2 ISLANDS LOST AND FOUND: ATLANTIS AND ITHACA Islands seem like solid objects, distinct and clear in outline. They thematize the idea of a boundary more sharply than a continent. As noted by Godfrey Baldacchino, “Perhaps more so than in continental states, island boundaries express and define the inside and outside of a nation as a distinct, compact and cohesive social entity” (Baldacchino 2014, 59). In a previous work, Island Enclaves, Baldacchino notes that all “island boundaries are, by definition, permeable and are better conceived as representing interfaces with the world beyond,” which is why “a better trope to represent islandness would be a beach, that ever shifting liminality where local and global meet” (Baldacchino 2010, 115). One might extend the idea of liminality even further to mark the in-betweenness for which an island serves as a figure of speech, identifying that which hovers between being lost and being retrievable, or almost so. Such islands share with objects the propensity to get lost. Once you leave an island behind, it may be difficult to recover it. An island can then become an instance of something lost that we need to find again. And when found—so it feels— it might make whole again that which now feels broken or incomplete. Depending on the side you face of this coin, an island can look like an act of losing, or an act of finding. Greek mythology gives us a name for each side of this medallion, and material enough for two full-scale allegories. One is called Atlantis; the other is known as the island of Ithaca, the home Odysseus reluctantly left behind and then struggled to recover.

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Atlantis: The Story according to Plato The English philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon (1561–1626), in The Novum Organum (1620), distinguishes between two kinds of illusion: those created by names that are poorly defined and those created by names that refer to things that do not exist (Bacon 2000, 48–49). Atlantis might be said to be a likely candidate for the latter kind, reminding us that even illusions have their uses, as when the idea of an island answers to an abiding human interest that has proved both mysterious and compelling for more than two thousand years of human history, at least in the Western world, but with counterparts in other seas. The case requires us to distinguish between the functions served by a virtual, as contrasted with a real, island. The latter kind provides homes, havens, destinations for sea voyages, and accidental relief from shipwrecks, as well as apt locales for short or long stints in prison, exile, settlement, paradise, or the underworld. Atlantis has acted in a rather different role ever since it was brought into being as a name for an alleged referent by the Greek philosopher Plato (c. 428–348 BC). We are also told, many centuries later, on dubious grounds, by the historian Plutarch that what Plato wrote was an embellishment of an account that began several generations before him as a poem left incomplete by one of his distant ancestors, the Athenian statesman and poet Solon (639–559 BC) (Plutarch 1998, 70). This poem was inspired by Egyptian reports of Atlantis, for which we have no other evidence that has survived, except that the Greek Neoplatonist Proclus claimed that a student of Plato named Crantor had visited Egypt and found inscriptions referring to Atlantis on pillars. The story of Atlantis, Plato claims, was passed on to him by an uncle, Critias, whose fictional counterpart serves as the eponymous narrator of one of the two dialogues in which the story has its beginning for us. It is one of the more delectable ironies of history that the story of a lost island continent was first planted in folklore by a philosopher who would exile poets and professional reciters of poetry from his ideal society for trafficking in fictions. He narrates the story in two of his dialogues, Timaeus and Critias (c. 360 BC). More than two thousand years of scholarship have not been able to determine whether Plato was citing what he believed to be a historical reference or presenting as historical material something he had invented as a fiction. His characters’ matterof-fact style of narration and the precision of detail that is provided, especially in the Critias, blur the distinction between history and fable in a manner that has resisted all attempts by subsequent scholarship to distinguish fact from fiction. Whether as fable or faded historical collective memory, the Platonic idea bears an interesting relation of analogy to the more obviously systematic and discursive utopianism of two other dialogues, The Republic and The Laws. They show an interesting difference in similarity: while the

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former represents an impossible ideal, the latter, in its accounts of Magnesia, proposes a more plausible alternative. The analogies extend beyond Plato’s works to the kind of detail and believability striven for by others who invented their own utopias. Some are straightforward, as in Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis (1627); others are somewhat ambiguous. The English lawyer, philosopher, and statesman Sir Thomas More (1478–1535), in his Utopia (1516), presents a complex and tongue-in-cheek exercise in imagining an island community organized and governed in a manner that we might find enticing but enigmatically flawed. In The Republic, whose composition is believed to precede that of the Timaeus and the Critias, Plato provides grounds for the idea of what we might call necessary fictions as a useful expedient in matters of governance, which his Socrates describes as “useful lies” (3.414c, Plato 2004, 99). What is Atlantis like, precisely, in Plato’s account? The idea is both simple and complex: a referent for a fabled land of might, splendor, and plenty whose destruction harbors a moral or a tragedy, depending on the direction in which one wishes to take the fable. The Timaeus is brief in its reference. The island, and a large part of the neighboring region (smaller islands, an adjacent mainland), was ruled by a powerful dynasty whose colonizing ambitions extended as far as Egypt and Italy but were resisted successfully by a brave and adamant Athens. Shortly thereafter, Atlantis was destroyed in the period of a single day and night by earthquakes and floods, leaving behind nothing more than a region of unnavigable mud somewhere in the Atlantic (25b–d, Plato 2008b, 13–14). The incomplete dialogue of the Critias is much more elaborate. Atlantis is reported to have been an island “larger than Libya and Asia” (105a, Plato 2008b, 109); we can imagine it as more than three hundred miles by two hundred miles in dimension, with a city stretching over more than twelve miles. Its destruction is claimed to have occurred nine thousand years before the time of Plato. It originated as an island kingdom ruled by the progeny of the union between the god Poseidon and Cleito, the daughter of one of the original human couples on the island, Evenor and Leucippe. Poseidon made Cleito’s home secure and inaccessible to others by encircling it with two rings of earth and three of water. He fathered five pairs of twins and divided the rule of the island into ten sections, giving the best portion to the oldest pair, with his firstborn son, Atlas, recognized as king of Atlantis. That Atlas means “enduring” in ancient Greek is an irony outdone only by the other irony that an island protected by Poseidon should meet a sudden and dramatic end in being swallowed up by the ocean. The dynasty of Atlas prospered and ruled for many generations, creating an empire that included neighboring regions. The island was self-sufficient in natural resources and could be mined for a substance named orichalc, which is not found elsewhere and is described as second only to gold in preciousness. This was but part of the general richness

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and abundance of “that sacred, sun-drenched island” (115b, Plato 2008b, 113). After describing the highly evolved culture and technological advancement of the island continent and its varied natural and man-made topography, Plato’s Critias describes the kingdom’s armed forces, elaborate rituals of Poseidon worship, and system of governance. Things went well with Atlantis when the people adhered to these rituals, and the influence of Poseidon was strong in them (119e, Plato 2008b, 120). So long as principled actions, self-possession, practical intelligence, and soberness prevailed, they prospered; once that closeness to Poseidon was loosened, their mortal nature began to prevail and corruption set in (121b, Plato 2008b, 121). Seeing their degeneration, Zeus decided to punish them. Here the dialogue breaks off. We are left free to derive our own conclusion. The Afterlife of Atlantis Writers after Plato have been eager to seize the opportunity to make what they will of the fable. The American poet Hart Crane (1899–1932), in the “Atlantis” section of his long poem The Bridge (1930), celebrates the feat of engineering that links Brooklyn to Manhattan Island in New York. He evokes the towering pillars and cables of the bridge as an objective correlative for the mythopoeic element in modern construction, while also hinting at the hubris underlying the exhilaration: “The loft of vision, palladium helm of stars” (Crane 1946, 56). Prior to that, Jules Verne showed himself keen to weave real-world geography into his appropriation of the lost continent in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1869–1870) by claiming that the highest ground of Madeira, the Azores, the Canary Islands, and the Cape Verde islands represent all that is left of Atlantis (Verne 1998, 261). A different location in the Atlantic was proposed as a serious hypothesis by the American academic Charles Hapgood, with real islands—the Rocks of St. Peter and St. Paul, located about one thousand miles off the coast of Venezuela—as the visible remnants of what was once Atlantis. More recently, in 2002, Colin Wilson and Rand Flem-Ath proposed a complicated explanation for how Plato’s Atlantis might have moved from a mid-Atlantic location. They argue that it has remained concealed for so long because we know it now as the twoisland mass mostly buried in snow that passes under the name of the Antarctic. The more popular recent trend has been to look for lost cities not in the Atlantic Ocean but in the Mediterranean Sea and to speculate on whether they might have been what Plato was referring to. The irony in all this searching is that modern techniques of archaeology have discovered many once-flourishing sites and cities that are now virtually erased from geography and human memory, but researchers are unable to establish conclusively whether Knossos (on Crete), or Akrotiri (on the is-

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land of Thera), or a now-submerged part of Cyprus, or Sardinia, or the Greek city of Helike, might be the best candidate for the claim to have been Atlantis. The irony underlines a point that is an implicit and emphatic motif among poets, as we shall see below: any lost city and civilization serves a similar function in the psychic economy of human losses. Therefore, that other speculators locate Atlantis in Spain or in Asia Minor, or indeed in some other location farther from Plato’s claims, merely shows how effectively Plato continues to have the last laugh in the matter, while his motives or intentions remain open to a variety of conjectures. As far as lost continent islands are concerned, Atlantis is by no means alone. Researchers have proposed a lost continent—Pacifica—in the Pacific, located between Australia and the Antarctic, almost the size of Australia, older than Atlantis, and with more geological evidence for its erstwhile existence than has ever been discovered for Atlantis. The breakup of Gondwana was followed, over millennia, by the disaggregation of the Pacifica section (Nunn 2009, 64), with some parts colliding with East Asia in one direction and the western side of South America in another direction. While we have no myths and legends attached to the gradual dismemberment of Pacifica, the case is the opposite with Atlantis. Plato’s story is open to several interpretive approaches. Kenneth Feder provides a neat account of what seems the most plausible contextual understanding of the use that Plato might have had in mind for his story: Atlantis embodied material wealth, military technology, and pride; the Athenians, by contrast, demonstrated fair and rational governance and were successful in resisting and then defeating the Atlanteans (Feder 2010, 32). What could be better proof than Atlantis of how and why the insoluble nature of a mystery provides richer sustenance for the imagination than any recitation of facts supported by evidence? The very idea of place is rendered poetic. The admonitory and moralizing aspect of this idea has a long history of its own, which can be sampled from a work such as Lewis Spence’s Will Europe Follow Atlantis? (1942), which argues that Atlantis was destroyed by the gods for its sins and as a lesson to Europe (Nunn 2009, 199). Patrick Nunn also draws attention to a more generalized moral to be derived from civilizations that were once glorious and then declined into decrepitude and collapse. He notes how the history of Easter Island provides a cautionary tale of the harm done to an environment and its people by the profligate use of natural resources (Nunn 2009, 198). Plato’s tale—whether fact or fiction or a garbled mix of the two—has inspired a legion of elaborations, extrapolations, and divagations, each susceptible to its own allegorical variation on whatever Plato might have had in mind. It is worth adding here, though, that not every writer has been drawn to the idea of an allegory such as that of Atlantis. In his Areopagitica (1644), John Milton is skeptical of utopias discovered amid

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distant islands: “To sequester out of the world into Atlantick and Eutopian polities, which never can be drawn into use, will not mend our condition” (Milton 1959, 881). However, he was willing to grant that the fantastical could have a use and be more powerfully imagined by some writers as compared to others. In his pamphlet “An Apology Against a Pamphlet” (1642), while attacking Bishop Joseph Hall, who was one of his adversaries in theological and political debate, Milton dismissed Hall’s fantastical Menippean satire in Latin, Mundus alter (c. 1607), as totally unworthy of the lineage of utopianism, from Plato to Thomas More and Francis Bacon, each of whom fictionalized “a mighty Continent wherein to display the largenesse of their spirits by teaching this our world better and exacter things, then were yet known, or us’d” (Milton 1953, 881). Why should the idea of Atlantis prove so fascinating? From the scientific point of view, islands are a transient phenomenon, and, as we have noted, the geological history of the planet shows how even our seemingly solid continents have been forming and reforming throughout Earth’s history. A clue to the answer points in the direction of the prominence given to fabled accounts of floods, earthquakes, and other natural disasters in human prehistory. Every mainland and peninsula invokes such accounts of land submerged or broken off by the sea. A mundane explanation for the belief in a mysterious land west of Europe was provided in the nineteenth century by S. Baring-Gould in his survey of the stories and beliefs concerning “The Fortunate Isles,” which circulated widely throughout Europe during the medieval and Renaissance periods. This consisted of frequent reports of washed-up debris on the western coasts of Europe, which gave credence to civilizations yet unknown, making Atlantis but one in a series of fabled places that include Meropis, Kxonos, Ogygia, the Fortunate Isles, and the Garden of the Hesperides (Baring-Gould 1880, 398). After the discovery of the Americas, a new variation to the old theme began equating Atlantis with North America, starting with Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s A Discourse of a Discoverie for a Newe Passage to Cataia (1576), claiming that since no large submerged continent had been discovered, Atlantis should be identified with North America (Day 2006, 118). A more general part of the answer to the question of why we need an Atlantis myth indicates that humans seek a source and origin in the past for all that we find admirable and awe inspiring about our own accomplishments as a species. Yet another part of the same answer points to the sense of loss in which we embed such sources, something splendid that is at once out there and yet nowhere to be found, which offers a motive for searches, quests, and voyages, both literal and figurative. The colossal scale and alleged antiquity of that loss, in its turn, provides the desire for retrieval. This hope feeds on its own disappointments, as shown by the numerous forms that the story of Atlantis has taken over the centuries.

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The idea of a lost island is not simply durable and enchanting; it also renders insignificant any differences in how it finds embodiment— whether as quasi-historical legend, philosophical tale, allegorical fable, speculative fiction, and inspiration for poetry, pseudo-scholarship, television serials, or computer games—reminding us that the very idea of such loss is poetic. The idea of loss raises two related but divergent possibilities: a thing may be lost in the sense that whoever is looking for it cannot find it (but it continues to exist somewhere), or it may be lost in the sense of being no longer available for retrieval because it does not exist any longer. The idea of Atlantis, as we shall see, sustains both possibilities equally well, though the difference between a thing misplaced and a thing no longer in existence leads to a corresponding difference in the degree of optimism or pessimism, and hope or grimness, with which loss is treated. Each kind of loss is significant as a form of retrospective and belated recognition that something exceptionally significant and splendid existed once but is no longer accessible. The loss is also significant because it instigates acts of searching, which in their turn necessitate journeys, with outcomes that can vary between despair at the irretrievability of loss and the tentative intimation of the possibility of recovering what has been lost. Additionally, the loss provides the basis for a moral: something did not last or survive because something about what made it splendid got spoiled and led to its destruction. In brief, Atlantis becomes the vehicle for an allegorical tenor that touches upon one of the most powerful feelings that characterizes our humanity: the use of memory to measure in time what we may lose or, put slightly differently, to measure time itself—our experience of living in time—in terms of acts of losing and the residue of loss. Therefore, we might as well invert our question and ask: When has it not been a time for Atlantis? Such stories never slake the desires that engender them. We have always needed them—the stories that cover our desires—dreams in the guise of faded memories planted in our prehistory, rituals of celebration, admonition, or mourning for types of loss whose reckoning is never complete, except as instigation for further imaginings. The story of Atlantis echoes through more than two thousand years of human history as one of the grandest occasions for recognizing how a piece of land surrounded by water is usable, and was even perhaps invented, for the express purpose of being lost. Why should the point of inventing an island be the losing of that island? The poets have answers to this question. A Use in Poetry for Atlantis and Ithaca The legacy of Plato’s account of Atlantis partakes of legend, myth, and fable and is susceptible of several types of allegorical interpretation. Let us jump a large span of time to catch up with the fate of the Atlantic trope

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in recent times. It will enable us to recognize how deep and strong remains the appeal of the idea of Atlantis. It will also be useful in discovering what new emphases the idea acquires in the modern period. The range of interpretive possibilities discovered in the narrative by recent and contemporary writers can be illustrated by a brief traversal across a series of partial overlaps that also represent a gradual shift in emphasis from fictions of loss to fictions of desire that stop just short of what it might seem like to have desire fulfilled. Several poems from the last century demonstrate this range. The Canadian poet Louis Dudek (1918–2001), in Poems from Atlantis (a revision in 1980 of a longer poem first published in 1967), alludes to the voyage as a prototype for all the situations in which we find ourselves at a crossroads. The poem speaks of Atlantis as our true home, making us all exiles “waiting for that world to come” (Dudek 1980, 7). The idea that Atlantis is our true home is very distant from the way in which Plato had set up the narrative. That all our lives are a form of exile adds the romanticism of a postlapsarian view to the journey from Innocence to Experience. We have little of Atlantis in sight and more of what it means to miss it, and there is no hint of the calamity that caused Atlantis to disappear. There is a further nuance still to unravel. The nuance identified in Dudek’s reference to Atlantis had been articulated earlier in the century about another place that has long been emblematic of fabled destinations: Ithaca, not so much the Ithaca of Homer but the one alluded to by the Alexandrian poet C. P. Cavafy (1863–1933). Atlantis and Ithaca may be different referents, but the underlying emphasis links the two as serving a similar symbolic function. This emphasis valorizes voyaging as an allegory of life. We are all on a journey, and none of us can be sure of what awaits us at the end. We are not to see it as a reward for the voyaging. Instead, we are to adhere to an ethics that a Stoic would have approved of, which enjoins us to treat the journey as a task that is its own reward. Cavafy’s “Ithaca” (1924) is less about outcome than process, more about the journey than the destination. That we should have a worthy incentive for travel is all that the island is meant to do. The motif reiterated through the poem is simply to wish for the journey not to end. We might say that here is an attempt to forestall disappointment by converting traveling into a heuristic of what is, or should be, the process of life itself. The tone is friendly rather than exhortative, as of someone world wise and avuncular, whose experience is being shared with a new generation who can avoid the mistake of treating the island destination as the be-all and end-all of the voyage. The speaking voice of time advises us to always keep Ithaca in mind. There is no hurry about getting there. In fact, it is better to prolong the journey, so that you gather experience as you travel and are not disappointed when you do reach Ithaca, if it proves a disappointment. That is indeed the point of Ithaca: it motivated a wonderful journey, and we should expect

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nothing more from it, because it ought to suffice that “without her you’d never have set out” (Cavafy 2007, 39). This is not a weary and travel-worn Odysseus returning to his island home and family. He is a more pragmatic version of the “Ulysses” (1842) imagined by the English poet Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892): someone always eager for travel and adventure. There is an interesting genealogy to how the hero of Greek epic mutates in time to a figure from the heyday of the British Empire. Tennyson’s dramatic monologue begins with the character of Ulysses declaring that he cannot rest from travel. He’d rather leave his island kingdom to his son and sail beyond the sunset, because it is “not too late to seek a newer world” (Tennyson 1842, 91). For this allegory of a quest without a goal, an island is merely the starting point for more voyaging. These may be worthy sentiments suited for a Britain getting into its stride as an empire builder, but the travel lust expressed by this island voyager is a far cry from Homer and from Cavafy. This Ulysses is an echo of the extraordinary use to which the character is put by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri (c. 1265–1321) in canto 26 of his Inferno (1320), without direct reference to The Odyssey. Dante made his Ulysses into what Ernst Bloch called, felicitously, “a Faustus of the seas” (Bloch 1962, 82). When we encounter the two-pronged flame shared between Diomedes and Ulysses, Ulysses confesses that love for his son, father, or wife could not suffice in comparison with his desire “to gain experience of the world” (Alighieri 1980, 243). The injunction he lays upon the small company that has remained loyal to his wishes is to continue voyaging without end, so that they may continue their search for the “experience of that which lies beyond / the sun, and of the world that is unpeopled” (Alighieri 1980, 245). Cavafy’s poem is an antidote to all such questswithout-end: neither a golden fleece nor a pot of gold awaits us. Nor is voyaging glorified in and of itself, as in Dante and Tennyson. Cavafy is not interested in forestalling any likelihood of sour grapes; rather, he is concerned with the proper alignment between why we do whatever we do and what we might expect from doing it. The analysis has not strayed too far from the shadow of Atlantis. To the degree which Ithaca and Atlantis serve as a motif for voyaging, they function in identical fashion. There is a twist to the shared motif in the remarkable poem “Atlantis” (1941) by W. H. Auden. In this poem, Atlantis is not presumed lost and irrecoverable; rather, it is simply very difficult to get to. The tone is mock sardonic. Only “The Ship of Fools” is sailing this year in that direction. Therefore, anyone set on getting to Atlantis had better be willing to do what is needed: to behave absurdly. The second stanza complicates matters, both in its logic and in the tone that it now adopts toward the attitude it enjoins. The foolery of the first stanza is abated. We are being prepared to deal with doubters, so that our faith in the undertaking may be renewed through indirect means. Presumably, we are setting sail from within the Mediterranean, because if

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storms strike, we are to seek shelter in some harbor in Ionia. There the witty scholars will try to persuade you that Atlantis does not exist, but the subtlety of their logic will betray their grief, presumably at how such voyages have failed many times (Auden 1979, 117). The direction in which logic takes them and the direction their grief betrays are different. In that difference, we are to discover the eye of a needle, so that our faith may thread the way to a difficult affirmation. The third stanza enjoins another simple paradox: you can only get to Atlantis if you first forget about it completely. For this poem, Atlantis is evidently not in the Atlantic. It is no longer a fable of some distant and alien land and culture but a place near home (if you see yourself as European). As we travel around the eastern Mediterranean we are instructed to engage in a third paradox: we should listen attentively to anyone who claims to have been to Atlantis, even if you find the claims implausible, because, the poem argues, unless we are familiar with every false Atlantis, we might not recognize the true one. The fourth stanza is a little muffled in its impact because the poet uses notions that are less clear than the ones he had used until now. But the overall sense is clear. We have now beached near Atlantis, and the poet makes us pause: we are to be prepared for disappointment. This stanza brings us close to the kind of sentiment encountered in the Cavafy poem: Atlantis might not be what we needed or expected, and we should be able to cope with that realization even before we see it. The fifth stanza piles on the paradoxes, enjoining you to keep moving toward rejoicing, however difficult the effort (Auden 1979, 118), because even if you get a glimpse of Atlantis with your dying breath, you should consider yourself fortunate. This stanza takes us where the Cavafy poem did not go. You are told that even the briefest glimpse of Atlantis in a poetic vision is a blessing. The final stanza notes that “All the little household gods / Have started crying,” but that is no reason not to get blessings from Hermes and an assortment of other sage figures as you set sail for Atlantis (Auden 1979, 118). The poem combines a sardonic tone with a serious intent in its stylish updating of the message that we had received from Cavafy. Narratives of voyaging generally avoid anticipation of what is to happen next to the protagonist. Auden does the exact opposite: you are told that you will almost fail, and that you will die, but you are not to be put off from setting out for Atlantis. The poem ends on a note that is close to being subliminally Christian. Atlantis is like a New Jerusalem, no longer a place whose calamitous end conveys a moral. Instead, it is now a symbol of revelation. Yes, we are told that it may be a “poetic vision,” a claim that undercuts any hope of finding a real place by putting it now in the realm of the poetic, forcing us to ask whether that makes Atlantis a fictive entity. We have come a long way from the sardonic beginning, conducted masterfully by the ironic poet to a completely serious and un-ironic dec-

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laration of faith in hope, which is also a form of hope in faith. If the faith is in a fiction, then in a world after Nietzsche we might echo what was said about such matters by a very different kind of poet, Wallace Stevens: “The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else” (Stevens 1966, 143). In how they move and how they end, the Cavafy and Auden poems differ more than they resemble one another. For Auden, an affirmation is the goal; for Cavafy, the aim is retrenchment. However, that is not all that Atlantis can do. From the shores of a very different ocean, the more sanguine Korean poet Kim Seung-Hee (b. 1952) writes of an island called “In spite of it all,” which offers hope that if one never gives up, and if one embraces all, then all of us “will cross the river on a bridge of light” (Kim 2015, 70). Atlantis and the Theme of Loss For poets concerned less with faith or with island destinations as false teleological functions, Atlantis evokes the original sense of loss inherent in the Platonic narrative. There is no moral to promote, simply loss to measure, with the added delicacy of an irony that this is a loss that internalizes the island continent into a metonymy for the small and large things we forget, which are also the things we fail by failing to remember them. One of the most remarkable such evocations of Atlantis can be found in a villanelle by Elizabeth Bishop. In this elegant, sad, and brave little poem, “One Art” (1976), Bishop articulates a powerful sense of how losing is almost a habit characteristic not only of the poet but also, by implication, of the species. First, we are told that losing is an art; second, that it is easy to master; third, that when things seem intent on getting lost, their loss is no disaster. In this fashion, we might almost succeed for a time in believing that we can teach ourselves to either forget such losses or treat them with insouciance. First, she lost her mother’s watch, then a loved house or two, then two cities, two rivers, a continent! She admits that she will miss all these things but is willing to tell herself that none of these is a real disaster (Bishop 2011, 198). The form of the villanelle, with the cumulative impact of its repeated lines, enhances the resonance of what is being said, adding a new and escalating nuance with each iteration. There goes Atlantis, with all the smaller debris of memory. But as the losses pile up, our pretense can break down: an admission that the poet concedes, almost parenthetically, in the very last line, whose pathos uncovers, or discovers, how frail the fiction that we can somehow cope with our losses without breaking down. She adopts an air of nonchalance: if indeed one is prone to losing things, then one may as well call it, ironically, an art; considering how many things she has lost, it might even be said that she is pretty good at it. But the self-deprecatory or mockingly self-congratulatory irony breaks down:

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Chapter 2 The art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster. (Bishop 2011, 198)

Bishop’s poem is a miracle of art and spontaneity, in which islands have become continents of sorrow over what we cherished but lost. The poem leaves unclear whether the loss was due to a wrong deed or word or a mere effect of chance and circumstance. That does not matter once the loss has occurred. We are thus returned to part of what Plato had been about: that becomes irrecoverable which we do not do fairly by. Plato had applied this moral to the inhabitants of Atlantis; Bishop applies it to herself, and by decorous implication, to all of us. It is a lesson not to be forgotten, especially because it is administered so tactfully. We turn next to a contemporary poem, “Atlantis—A Lost Sonnet,” by the Irish poet Eavan Boland (b. 1944). It begins by wondering how an entire city and everything in it went under suddenly one fine day (Boland 2013, 217). The poet then shifts the ground by asking how she might have missed its disappearance. We are partly in the world of the Bishop poem, a world in which Atlantis is a name for a large and momentous forgetting. But then the sonnet turns toward an unexpected and novel direction. The word missed having been used to evoke the connotation of “failed to notice,” the poet then declares, “I miss our old city” (Boland 2013, 217), and we understand that the sense has metamorphosed from not noticing to noticing. That which is missed is not gone under. Rather, time or distance (or both) have intervened, and what is missed is lost in time, not space. This is an Atlantis we can all lose, because everything is subject to time. From mythic history, the poem slides almost imperceptibly to personal history. The poem has an implied auditor: he and she met in a city once and made it home. Evidently, something changed. The poem moves swiftly again, from the memory shared between two people to a collective sense of how this recognition must have been endemic to human history. That leads the poet to a speculative and fanciful, but utterly charming, notion: that the fable makers of old were looking for a word that might represent everything that is amenable to irretrievable loss, and then, in a time-honored manner, “they gave their sorrow a name / and drowned it” (Boland 2013, 217). That name, of course, is Atlantis. As with Plato, we are left uncertain of whether Atlantis is a real or a fictive place. But that does not matter. Was there ever an Atlantis? Did it drown? The poem brushes such questions aside to proffer a different idea. Maybe all we need to know is that we live in time, and things perish in time. Maybe Atlantis is nothing more or less than the name for such knowledge, made concrete in a fable, so that losing itself may have a substantive existence, even if only in a nomination. Atlantis thus becomes yet again, as in Plato, a means to a sharpened recognition. Loss is like

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sand or water slipping through our fingers. We need to give losing more solid embodiment. Atlantis is that embodiment. We drowned it, not through an earthquake nor from a tsunami nor as a result of divine wrath. The drowning was almost like ritual. With it, we gave ourselves something to point toward, which enshrines our capacity for such losing. As with Bishop, such poetry is a perfect example of the imagination providing its own self-validation, so that we accept the fictive as real, just as dreams and visions are real in their own realm. There is sadness here, and the delight of fresh ideas. There is also wisdom here: we need to understand what losing means, and how simple words like miss and missed may but half-grasp what Atlantis holds firmly in its drowned depth: a name not simply for an island continent but also for an aspect of experience that we will therefore never fail to remember. Before we are done with Atlantis, there are a few more poems to engage with. The context in the first of the poems we turn to now is similar to that in the Bishop and Boland poems, but developed more fully and more obliquely. The poem is a sequence titled “Atlantis,” which is also the title of the volume published in 2009 by the American poet Mark Doty (b. 1953). As with Bishop and Boland, the poem is voiced in the first person. Where they are elliptical, Doty is expansively ruminant, mixing evocations of days spent walking the beach near a seaside home as he and his lover prepare for the lover’s impending death from AIDS. Bishop and Boland had alluded to personal significances, but fleetingly, keeping the autobiographical element to a minimum of gnomic allusiveness so that the more general tenor of loss as an innate precondition of living could be foregrounded. Doty also reflects on mutability and the fragility of the body and the moment of the here and now: how fleeting it is, and how evanescent. We see yet again how the name and idea of Atlantis enters the frame indirectly. It is no longer fable, myth, or history. Instead, it is the name we give to the kind of loss that is felt sharply every time it happens, regardless of how often it has happened before, or will happen again. The name is part of the gift of storytelling with which we endow ourselves. Doty allows the autobiographical element to come to the fore in a casual rather than a confessional manner. The second poem in the “Atlantis” sequence, titled “Reprieve,” muses on a particular trick in children’s storytelling, which tags the end of each story with the declaration that it was all a dream. The poet, in writing class, advised his students against using such a trick since it explains by dismissing what it has invited credence in. But now he realizes the wisdom of that trick: it is not a bedtime story but an aubade for a new dawn; it provides closure; it is a kind of reprieve proffered in the shape of a gift (Doty 2009). It is also, precisely, the kind of reprieve that he is not going to get when the story of him and his partner living together is closed by his partner’s death. Life may itself be like a dream, but there will be no waking up from that death. And once that happens, what will there be to

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hold on to? Doty’s “Atlantis” ends with the poet asking his lover to look at the lost world and see their continent: “emerging from the half-light, unforgettable, / drenched, unchanged” (Doty 2009). A fiction of desire rises from the sea: Atlantis restored. The island may as well be called the Island of Our Dearest Losses. The theme of the lost continent is thus interwoven with the theme of the Isle of the Dead, from which only the poet can rescue mortality, on the only terms that afford the mortal any sort of reprieve. One of the most moving poems in the English language evokes this fictive possibility by taking up the theme of Orpheus seeking to retrieve Eurydice from Hades. The narrative of Eurydice’s death, and the failure of Orpheus to get her back from Hades, is the perfect allegory for any significance that, once lost, may not be retrieved, even by the poet. That is the classical myth, and in it Hades is like a prison house of the Unrecoverable. We encounter the story in several classical sources, including Plato’s Symposium (c. 385–370 BC), in which Phaedrus tells of how Orpheus was shown only a phantom of the wife he had come to recover because he had not dared to die for the sake of his beloved, as had Alcestis (Plato 2008a, 10). The Roman poet Virgil takes up the story in his Georgics (29 BC), where the shade of Eurydice says, “Sleep draws its curtains on my brimming eyes” (4.496), and he tries to cling to a shadow (4.501, Virgil 2006b, 92). The Roman poet Ovid (43 BC–c. 18 AD) expands on the story in Book 10 of The Metamorphoses (c. 8 AD), where we are told that Eurydice died a second death when Orpheus looked back to confirm her presence, even when warned by Hermes not to do so (Ovid 1958, 271). Later, back in Thrace, he gave up sleeping with women and instead taught boys the art of love to show how such love renewed itself like flowers in spring (Ovid 1958, 272). In more recent times, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1927) created a powerful version of that tragic narrative in “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes” (1904). His Eurydice, when in Hades, is no longer the woman with blue eyes who had echoed through the songs of Orpheus. Instead, we discover that She was already loosened like long hair, poured out like fallen rain, shared like a limitless supply. (Rilke 1989, 53)

That is why, when Orpheus looks back and Hermes stops her, sorrowfully saying he has turned around, she does not understand why he is sorrowful and merely asks, softly, “Who?” (Rilke 1989, 53). Rilke’s brilliance does not entail departing from the main plotline of the classical fable; the magical inventiveness with which he endows Eurydice with a dissociated consciousness is his way of deepening the impact of the fable. But the myth is also capable of inversion, as we find in the case of a small

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poem called “Orpheus’ Dream” (1951) by Edwin Muir, which is intent upon reversing the tragic force of the allegory. His Orpheus must have a happy ending, even if only in a dream. Therefore, in his poem, Eurydice is back, sitting in a little skiff, which he rows away from “the perilous isles of sleep,” and this outcome has him in such a frenzy of excitement that “the foundering skiff could scarcely keep / All that felicity afloat” (Muir 1991, 200). Do we find this dream a fantasy of wish fulfillment? A crazed illusion? A pathetic delusion? Or does it have a dream’s power to project the fictions of desire as a truth transmuting the mundane trivia that our quotidian selves call reality? The poem sustains a tremulous ambivalence in how it celebrates a Eurydice who does not turn back, because this Orpheus, at least in the dream that is poetry, does not lose faith in their community of two. 2.3 ISLANDS AND THE ARCHIPELAGIC IMAGINATION Contrasting Archipelagos As noted by Elizabeth McMahon et al. in “Envisioning the Archipelago,” of “three relatively durable topological and binary relations: land and water, island and continent/mainland, and island and island,” it is the last of these three binaries that has been relatively neglected until recent times, which “foregrounds interactions between and among islands themselves” (McMahon et al. 2011, 115, 116). With his own home islands of the Antilles in mind, Derek Walcott, in Omeros (1990), represents this partially repressed connectedness through the image of submergence: “the parchment overhead / of crinkling water recorded three centuries / of the submerged archipelago” (Walcott 1990, 155). When poetry enables such island systems to reveal themselves in their connectedness, the poet can celebrate that as the privilege afforded an islander by the sea, the “privilege / of an archipelago’s dawn, a fresh language / salty and shared by the bittern’s caw, by a frieze / of low pelicans” (Walcott 1990, 295). Just as lake islands differ from oceanic islands, sea islands differ from lake and loch islands, and oceanic islands differ from continental islands. Likewise, isolated islands differ significantly from those that are part of an archipelago. In the latter, there is proximity within separateness, and difference within commonalty. This commonalty may be constituted of several factors: a common geological origin, a common pattern to climate, shared flora and fauna, and the likelihood of a common history of settlement, development, and depredation: all of it defined in contrast to some continent, near or far. However, differences within an archipelago can be produced by a combination of several factors: not merely in how north might differ from south, and east from west, but also in how high ground

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might differ from low ground, windward from leeward, and in how the relatively larger might differ from the smaller. The smaller is generally likely to have less by way of resources and options, with a consequent dependency on and neglect or domination by the larger. The smaller members of an archipelago are likely to be relegated to a marginal status through processes that are not entirely a matter of geography but entail collusion between geography and the relative disempowerments induced by trade and commerce, politics and culture, and others’ prejudices, which, over time, are liable to become partially or fully internalized by those living on the smaller islands of an archipelago. Consider, for example, the vast archipelago of some seventeen thousand islands known as Indonesia, which shares geographical space with the nation of Malaysia. The main islands that constitute modern Indonesia—an independent nation once the Dutch colonial yoke was shed by 1949—are Java, Sumatra, and Kalimantan; the first of these is one of the most densely populated islands in the world. While Bahasa Melāyu has been a kind of lingua franca for the region from before colonial times, the cultures of the archipelago, before the Dutch pulled them together into a single colony, were far more diverse than is captured in the writing of modern Indonesian as a language. Javanese literature, for example, has a long tradition in poetry and the arts, and like all the cultures of the archipelago, an older layer of indigenous creativity is overlaid by two major overseas influences that have been assimilated through the centuries: Hinduism, which came to the region in the period from the ninth to the eleventh century AD (especially on the island of Bali, which continues to practice these traditions), and Islam, the influence of which grew rapidly from the end of the thirteenth century AD onward, making contemporary Indonesia the most populous Islamic nation in the world, with Malaysia not too far behind. The oral tradition of the pantoum (or pantun) is ancient among the peoples of the archipelago, and the interlocked pattern of rhymes across quatrains that are characteristic of this complex, primarily oral, form is capable of huge variety and great subtlety. A large part of this does not translate well into other languages, although the form of the pantoum was imported into the West in the late nineteenth century and recurs occasionally since then in French and English verse. Here are the two middle stanzas of a late eighteenth-century pantoum translated by the English civil servant and scholar William Marsden: They fly to the sea by the reef of rocks. The vulture wings its flight to Bandan. From former days to the present hour, Many youths have I admired. The vulture wings its flight to Bandan, Dropping its feathers at Patani.

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Many youths have I admired, But none to compare with my present choice. (Marsden 1812, 209)

The excerpt exemplifies the resonance created by the interlinked relocation of lines and rhymes across stanzas in a pattern of ABAB, BCBC, while also showing how the human drama narrated in the foreground is anchored in a sense of place, as conveyed through the flight of the bird. In such orality, even authorship and provenance matter less than the vivid representation of a human experience amid a scene of nature. Even the names we now associate with the peoples of this archipelago, and the names by which they constitute this or that nation today, can be misleading. As far back as 1812, Marsden noted that the people of the region did not describe themselves as malāyu; instead, they made a distinction between two phrasal appellations, as referring either to the “leeward people” or to the “windward-people,” which, he remarks, is unusual for being a “meteorological rather than geographical distinction” (Marsden 1812, ix). In addressing islands as groups, we need to balance recognition of commonalty with recognition of difference. While some considerations require the archipelagic to be seen as one entity, other factors alert us to the dangers of homogenizing difference, lest we oversimplify or misrepresent the degree to which seeming commonalty can mask disparities and tensions within the complexity of the internally variegated. Returning briefly to the Malay-Indonesia archipelago, it was observed as far back as 1869, by the distinguished English naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), that a marked difference separates one part of the archipelago from the other, belying the geographical proximity of the constituent islands and suggestive of a long series of continental fragmentations that help us distinguish between “the Indo-Malayan and the AustroMalayan divisions of the Archipelago” (Wallace 2015, 68). Having based his conjectures about such divisions on observable differences between the flora and fauna of the islands of the archipelago—as, for instance, between the geographically adjacent but biologically dissimilar islands of Bali and Lombok—he concludes that the two halves of the archipelago “belonged to distinct primary regions of the earth” (Wallace 2015, 79). Turning briefly next to the Philippines, it can be admitted that almost all of this archipelago of more than seven thousand islands was colonized by the Spanish, over a period of time stretching from the arrival of Ferdinand Magellan to Cebu Island in 1521, to its renaming as the Filipinas in 1543 by Ruy Lopez de Villalobos, to the entire archipelago being claimed for Spain by Miguel Lopez de Legazpi in 1565. The Spanish occupation of the archipelago proved to be one of the longest periods of sustained colonization anywhere in the world, and lasted more than three hundred years. When it comes to speaking of the spread of Islamic influence to the

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archipelago, it can be noted that this was a slow process, which began in old Malaysia and spread to the Sulu region of the southern Philippines through mukhdumin, Muslim traders versed in the Koran, followed in 1390 by Rajah Baguinda from Sumatra, who established a Sulu sultanate in Buwansa, and others such as Sharif Kabungsuan, who preached Islam in the Cotabato and Lanao region before the arrival of the Spanish. It is evident that the Islamic influence has lasted even longer than that of Spain and continues to inform life and politics in the southern islands of the Mindanao group, though it did not spread in the same degree to the central islands of the Visayas or to the northern island of Luzon, where the Spanish prevailed (Guillermo and Win 2005, 189). Differences between Spanish and Islamic influences are not confined to religion; they spread to every facet of life, from language, customs, culture, and writing to themes that continue to preoccupy the peoples of the different sets of islands within the archipelago, including recurrent resistance to the north by the Islamic south. Some Filipino poets have tended to make light of the succession of external influences on their archipelago, as much through bravado as through a phlegmatic view of history. “January 1899,” part of a sequence on “The Filipino-American War” by Alfredo Navarro Salanga (1948–1988), shrugs off the American neocolonial rule over the archipelago during the entire first half of the twentieth century, asserting: The sea has taught us that history comes like wave upon wave. (Abad 1999, 198)

The same can be said of the Caribbean, not with reference to religion but in relation to the languages that various European colonizers brought to the separate islands—Portuguese, Spanish, French, English, Dutch— and how that affected cultural developments, including the development of Creole languages such as Haitian Creole and Papiamento, and creative writing in all these languages. The archipelago is held together by a shared history of the decimation of indigenous peoples (among them the Arawaks, the Taino, the Caribs, and the Guanahatabey), followed by the repopulation of the archipelago through the import of slaves from various parts of West Africa, followed by the subsequent import of indentured labor from various parts of Asia, chiefly India and China. One Caribbean island culture differs from another in ways reflected in language, music, and poetry, just as in food, customs, and other sociocultural minutiae. And yet the islands of the Caribbean do hold together: not simply on the basis of geography or history but also on the basis of contemporary culture. The same could be said of the Greek islands and of the Malaysian archipelago. That is why, in his book The Repeating Island

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(1989, 1992, 1996), Antonio Benítez-Rojo speaks of each as a “meta-archipelago” (Benítez-Rojo 1996, 4). Center and Margin in Archipelagic Systems We turn to a specific aspect of internal difference among island groups: the tension felt by writers in respect of the choice of language and idiom available to someone born in that part of an archipelago that is perceived to be at the margins. For example, as argued by Robert Crawford in Devolving English Literature (1992, 2000), Scotland has always been in danger of being subsumed within the English literary tradition, and becomes the test case for considering the need for cultural devolution (Crawford 2000, 8). The issue of whether such devolution is or is not sustainable—a topic that continues to stir passionate debate in the twenty-first century—depends in part on how the major writers of every generation from that alleged margin resist, or are assimilated into, what they perceive as the archipelagic center. The result is a continual tension between cultural nationalism, on the one hand, and cultural assimilation, on the other. This tension is endemic to archipelagic systems as a function of how power is aligned across the different parts of the system at any given period in history. It has been argued in recent times that a discourse committed to discussing literary and cultural issues on the basis of a center-and-margins axis is limiting. Glenda Norquay and Gerry Smith, for example, in their introduction to Across the Margins (2002), argue that to retain the notion of marginality is to keep an alleged center in place, and neglect other connections that do not involve the binarism of center-periphery thinking. Be that as it may, this type of complaint is recent, and perhaps confined to academic critics. The poets of the previous century show the binary tension at work, generally in favor of the metropolitan, though not without fierce resistance by those whose protest makes them accept and celebrate what it signifies to be living at the notional margins. Such binary tensions are not phenomena confined to recent literary history. Focusing on seventeenth-century writing from the British Isles, John Kerrigan, in Archipelagic English (2007), reminds us of the long history of interconnectedness to the British-Irish archipelago and its diversity of ethnicities and religious affiliations (Kerrigan 2008, 2). He argues that when literature is designated as British or English, the numerous tensions and differences between literary cultures in England/Wales, Scotland, and Ireland tend to be blurred or ignored. His counter-strategy is to probe the devolutionary impulse in seventeenth-century writing from all parts of the British Isles so as to distinguish between the Scots, Irish, Welsh, and English elements in several representative writers. The nuances of such differences are many, and this principle of discrimination between writing within an archipelago is by no means unique to poetry,

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or writing in general, from the British Isles. The same kind of internal difference is to be found in all other archipelagic systems. Kerrigan cites as examples the seventeenth-century poet Henry Vaughan (1621–1695), whose Welshness tends to get elided in mainstream accounts of his writing, and William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585–1649), whose Scottishness consigns him, unfairly, to marginal status in an English canon. Such examples show that geography can collude with the politics underlying literary canons in favor of a dominant region and its norms concerning the language of choice as a creative medium. If Britain can be said to constitute an archipelagic entity with England at the center, then Scotland, Ireland, and Wales represent the margins. Some notable poets from these regions—for example, Edwin Muir (1887–1959) in relation to Scotland, Louis MacNeice (1907–1963) in relation to Ireland, and R. S. Thomas (1913–2000) in relation to Wales—have shown in their diction, idiom, and poetic styles how the metropolitan norms of standard English are preferred to any form of regional dialect affiliation. Regardless of how deep their allegiance might be to Scottish, Irish, and Welsh cultures respectively, they wrote in a poetic idiom more at home in London than in the Orkney Islands, or in Belfast, or in Cardiff. Muir argued in Scott and Scotland (1936) that Scotland could hope to create a national literature only by recourse to English rather than Scots (Muir 1982, 111), whereas Ireland produced a national literature by adopting English and adapting itself to it. He urged Scottish writers to emulate the success of the Irish poet W. B. Yeats in writing of Celtic themes in standard English, arguing that writing in a regional variety of the language was likely to leave the Scottish poet looking provincial. In Ireland, however, the poet Patrick Kavanagh (1904–1967) provided a different approach to the perceived tension between the marginal and the metropolitan. In his essay “The Parish and the Universe” (1952), he gave a new connotation to the notion of the parochial, setting it up for approbation in contrast to his redefinition of the provincial. In his account, while the provincial relies upon metropolitan culture for its norms and values, not daring to trust any other intuition or instinct, the parochial cherishes its attachment to a parish and draws strength from local associations and pride in the region and its culture (Kavanagh 2003, 237). Being parochial is here associated with being of a parish, and in that sense, rooted in region and locality in a way that is far removed from the sense of the provincial as the narrow minded and the bigoted, which a certain type of discourse treats as inferior to the metropolitan and the cosmopolitan. Meanwhile, the most spirited resistance from Scotland to Muir’s preference for assimilation into standard English came from MacDiarmid. That is why Muir and MacDiarmid (pen name of Christopher Murray Grieve, 1892–1978) provide a perfect example of how lines of argument get drawn between opposed factions on the issue of the choice of lan-

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guage apt to an islander who also happens to find himself (or herself) at the margins of a dominant metropolitan center. Muir was born in Deerness, one of the small islands of the Orkney Islands, off the northeastern coast of the Scottish mainland. MacDiarmid was born in the Scottish border town of Langholm, Dumfriesshire. Each can be regarded as a Scottish poet, but they made very different choices. Muir chose to write in an idiom indistinguishable from that of any poet south of the border: a standardized English with no trace of region or dialect. MacDiarmid castigated that kind of choice, accusing it of having obliterated all trace of local habitation and name in the interests of grateful and subservient assimilation into mainstream English. In aggressive and assertive contrast, MacDiarmid chose to write (not always, but often enough to make a point) in what he called “Lallans,” a kind of synthetic Scots of his own devising, which represented for him a linguistic entailment of the larger principle of devolution from London and its centralizing dominance of British margins. Others from contemporary Scotland have followed with a more natural use of regional Scots: among them, and in addition to MacDiarmid, who wrote in both Scots and English, William Soutar (1898–1943), Robert Garioch (1909–1981), Sorley MacLean (1911–1996), Sydney Goodsir Smith (1915–1975), Hamish Henderson (1919–2002), George Mackay Brown (1921–1996), Derick Thomson (1921–2012), Alastair Mackie (1925–1995), Christopher Salvesen (1935–2015), Raymond Vettese (b. 1950), and W. N. Herbert (b. 1961). The resistance and persistence of such writing has a role to play in the struggle for survival of languages suffocated by English, which has killed off more languages than any other imperial, colonizing tongue. Census figures for Gaelic tell us that about 18.5 percent of the population of Scotland could speak and understand Gaelic (whether as monolinguals or as bilinguals) at the start of the eighteenth century; by 2001, the number had declined to 1.2 percent (Glaser 2007, 64). As for older regional languages, almost nothing survives now of Norn (a Nordic-Germanic language once spoken in the Orkney and Shetland Islands, which has since been made extinct by Scots and English) but a few scraps transcribed by enthusiasts, among them the ballad “Hildina,” which was collected in 1774 on the island of Foula. This “Fowl Island” or “Bird Island” happens to be one of several candidates for the place that might have been the source for the mythic Ultima Thule (“beyond the borders of the known world”) of ancient and medieval European conjecture and cartography. A Scottish island is as likely a candidate for this nomination as Iceland or the Faroes, given that the notion of an edge or outer limit is a poetic notion only loosely attached to geography, as in Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Dreamland” (1844), which invokes Thule as a place endowed with a wild and sublime climate, existing somewhere outside ordinary time and space (Poe 2006, 420).

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The larger implications of the Muir-MacDiarmid debate remain as pertinent today in the era of devolution and Brexit as they did in the 1930s. In his introduction to an anthology of Scottish poetry published in 1941, MacDiarmid called for Scottish poets to go back to Scots and Gaelic. A call for a nativist return to origins is frequent in the history of colonized peoples all over the globe. The ideology of nativism gains a degree of traction through its collaboration with nationalist sentiments. But the fervor that lends itself to this dual enterprise risks treating nativist-nationalist commitment as almost equivalent to—and sometimes even as a substitute for—any notion of literary merit that claims to be apolitical (even when we grant that claims to an apolitical stance in matters of writing and the arts are in themselves a kind of tacitly political stance). MacDiarmid is clear about what is at stake: resistance to the English ascendancy over Irish, Welsh, Gaelic, and Scots (peoples, cultures, and traditions as well as literatures and languages). He finds allies for his cause not only in the alleged claim of writing for and of a working class but also in causes as far away as the Indian subcontinent, where Sanskrit had for a long time dominated the vernaculars, as medieval Latin had dominated Europe in the Middle Ages. The risk that such causes accept, implicitly, is writing for a smaller, regional readership, as well as the anxiety attendant on that choice regarding losing a large part of a potential international audience. In the history of modern American poetry, a comparable tension in the politics underlying poetic idiom can be illustrated through the difference between the styles of William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) and Wallace Stevens. Williams wrote in a colloquial American idiom that many American poets after him have admired and emulated. The more stylized idiom of Wallace Stevens, especially in his first volume, Harmonium (1923), declares its affiliation with a poetic style derived, whether consciously or not, from British poets such as Keats and Tennyson. Thus, the opposition offered to Edwin Muir by MacDiarmid in Scotland corresponds to, and was anticipated by, resistance from Williams to the choice of poetic idioms derived from English and European models by contemporaries such as Stevens and T. S. Eliot (1888–1965). The tension underlying the poetics in such contrasting pairs is similar: poets such as MacDiarmid and Williams stand for a regionalism that resists a distant literary arbiter of taste and conventions (in both cases, London or England). Their resistance is subsidized by the assumption that such traditions promote a narrow view of the constitutive norms of a specific tradition, whereas poets like Stevens and Muir prefer to see literary English as a tool that transcends regional and localized affiliations. This belief in avoiding a regional element clears the way for aspirations toward the universal dimension to English: a language dissociated from Englishness as a national, cultural, geographical, or demographic attribute. A similar belief characterizes poets from many former colonies of

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Europe; while the obverse prevails among other poets, who constitute a smaller, more passionate, and embattled community, committed to the need to retain proof of, and pride in, a region and its linguistic variants as a refractive index to be negotiated rather than elided, before the poetry of a specific time and place can aspire to the universal. The Poetry of Place: The Scottish Islands Scotland has more than 790 islands, fewer than one hundred of which are inhabited. The islands form natural groups based on location, and that in turn creates the basis for distinctive island cultures and nuanced elements of island landscape, seascape, and history. The three largest groups are the Hebrides (to the northwest of the mainland), the Orkneys (to the northeast), and the Shetlands (farther north from the Orkneys), with connections based on long histories of travel, trade, conquest, and settlement, whose patterns link the Scottish island systems to the Faroes, Scandinavia, and Iceland. The archipelagic imagination in Scotland is not all about the politics of language choice. It is in large part dedicated to the chronicling of events that merge legend with history, and to the celebration of variety within commonalty: island landscapes and seascapes celebrated for what the eye appreciates, which is far more vivid and fascinating than anything the imagination could invent, never better than across the scatter of islands. And the island groups differ from one another in distinctive ways. Scotland has a lively oral tradition of song and ballad. A long poem in Gaelic such as “The Praise of Ben Dorain” by Duncan Ban MacIntyre (1724–1812) is set to the structure of a pibroch, and is among the most astonishing praise poems in the canon of world poetry; it is composed in celebration of the mountain named in its title, which is located in the southern Scottish Highlands. Scottish praise poetry is rich and varied, especially when it shifts focus from praising kings and heroic deeds and turns to the unique qualities of northern air and light, water in all its states, and earth as soil, sand, rock, and bog. Here is part of Edwin Muir’s “The Northern Islands” (1953), which singles out light as the element to commemorate: The empty sky and waters are a shell Endlessly turning, turning the wheel of light, While the tranced waves run wavering up the sand. (Muir 1991, 293)

The islands of Scotland comprise several groups or systems, each distinctive in specific ways, and all of them characterized by a kind of stark beauty that sometimes finds expression in poetry and at other times remains a constant element to whoever lives on or travels through them, regardless of whether any of that experience finds representation in lan-

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guage. For example, while the Orkney Islands are adjacent to the Shetlands, and the two share several common features, there are significant differences, one of which is summed up in a neat aphorism by Hugh MacDiarmid: “The ‘Orcadian is a farmer with a boat, the Shetlander a fisherman with a croft’” (MacDiarmid 1939, 97). The Orkney Islands are rich in poetry and culture, and the Hebrides are even richer in both; the Shetlands might be a little short on actual poetry, though their landscape has it in plenty. Celebrating islands is part of a long tradition of archipelagic praise poetry that links the oral cultures of the Gaelic-Norse worlds of the medieval period, from Ireland through Scotland to the Faroes and Iceland, and branches off from panegyrics in praise of medieval chieftains and lairds to evocations of their domains. Here are the first and last lines of a stanza in translation from a twelfth-century poem in Gaelic celebrating the arrival of spring on the isle of “Arran”: “Purple lichen from its rocks . . . fawns capering, trouts leaping” (Clancy 1998, 187). The delight in seasonal cyclicity bringing renewal through summer has not changed, as we can see from a poem written almost eight hundred years later, Edwin Morgan’s “Fallout,” the thirty-ninth poem from his long sequence of “Sonnets from Scotland” (1984): Over St Kilda, house-high poppy beds made forests; towering sea-pinks turned the heads of even master mariners with lures that changed the white sea-graves to scent-drenched groves. Fortunate Isles! (Morgan 2000, 146)

The Scottish islands are among the least densely populated and the starkest of human habitations. That gives special scope for celebrating more than just blue skies and pretty flowers. Rain, mist, wind, wave, bog, and rock suddenly become the primary vocabulary of the material culture with which the poets of the islands must grapple. In “The Lord of the Isles” (1815) by Sir Walter Scott, energetic syntax and apt rhymes capture vividly the mountain-mist-and-rain visage of a landscape in continual metamorphosis: The evening mists, with ceaseless change, Now clothed the mountains’ lofty range, Now left their foreheads bare. (Canto 3, Scott 1869, 301b)

For an even more characteristically bleak prospect, we can turn to Scott’s description of Loch Coruisk (Gaelic: “Cauldron of Waters”), a freshwater lake surrounded by the Black Cuillin mountains on the Isle of Skye. The dramatic context: a historical narrative set in 1307, when Robert the Bruce

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sets out into the mountains with Ronald, Lord of the Isles, and exclaims to his companion: All is rocks at random thrown, Black waves, bare crags, and banks of stone, As if were here denied The summer sun, the spring’s sweet dew. That clothe with many a varied hue The bleakest mountain-side. (Canto 3, Scott 1869, 301a)

Lest we think that nothing more “sublime in barrenness” can be found, we can turn to MacDiarmid’s strangely magnificent poem in standard English, “On a Raised Beach,” from Stony Limits and Other Poems (1934). The poem provides an amazing display of geological curiosity inspired by the barren rockscapes of a small island called West Linga, off the bigger island of Whalsay, both part of the Shetland Islands. The poem creates its weird magic out of a collocation of words and rocks, words for rocks, words that are almost as fascinating in themselves as the rocks they celebrate, including words from the now extinct Norse language of the island, Norn: Cream-coloured caen-stone, chatoyant pieces, Celadon and corbeau, bistre and beige, ... I try them with the old Norn words—hraun, Duss, rønis, queedaruns, kollyarum. (Dunn 1992, 56, 61)

The bare and the barren, the geological primordial as the continually ever present, with islands standing in for the planet itself, provide a thematic motif that recurs in Scottish poetry: this should be unsurprising if we note that some of the rocks that constitute the geological formations of the Scottish islands are among the oldest on the planet’s surface, Lewisian gneisses, which were formed in the Precambrian period as far back as three billion years ago. The poetic imagination is stirred by such backward vistas of geological creation. Edwin Morgan invites us to imagine “The Early Earth” at age three billion BC, before we had continents or islands: “lurid, restless, cracking, groaning, heaving, / swishing through space” (Morgan 2000, 169). His 1984 sequence of forty-six sonnets is one of the major documents of literary culture from and about Scotland— covering lowlands, highlands, and islands—which shows how an intensely personal vision of place, people, and history can constitute at once a form of personal as well as collective or communal self-recognition.

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Archipelagic Networks: Sri Lanka and the Philippines Complex connections based on exploration, trade, conquest, and settlement tie the Irish islands and the Scottish islands and mainland to the Faroe Islands, Iceland, and Scandinavia. Similar networks can be discovered among all other archipelagoes and islands on the planet, especially when they lie in the path of movements that involve seafaring traffic from one major land mass to another, and especially wherever and whenever the need for new and better land for farming and settlement was either preceded by the simpler desire to loot and pillage or accompanied by the more abstract (but no less zealous) desire to propagate one’s religion. Archipelagic networks are thus causally overdetermined, and while one set of motives runs its course and either diminishes in importance or is supplanted by other motives, the overall result, when viewed over centuries, is a form of Anthropocene assimilation of nature into material culture, with curiosity and trade, or conquest and settlement, as the motley bag of motives. Consider the island system that is the Philippines. On the one hand, its history shows a to-and-fro traffic of goods and services with China, which stretches back past the period from which we have historical records. On the other hand, the more recent but several-hundred-yearsold occupation of the islands by the Spanish shows a similar basis in profitable goods and services, as well as religious conversion, as the principal reasons for keeping a remarkable set of networks alive for a very long time, before the advent of the steamship was to change the nature of sea voyages, and the opening of the Suez Canal was to realign the map of trade routes between the west and the east. Let us look briefly at two such networks of trade and self-aggrandizement that create or discover a prominent role for an island in the much larger context of maritime exploration and adventure. The first concerns the role played by the island known at various times in history as Ceylon and Sri Lanka (with other names before that, including the Arab name that gave the English language the word serendipity). In the early fifteenth century, Ceylon was a protagonist on a minor scale in an encounter with a larger mainland power: in this case, China of the Ming dynastic period (1368–1644) in its early phase. This encounter might be no more than a minor episode in a larger narrative, but that large narrative can reasonably be called a truly poetic venture, even if the actual poetry it occasioned might be no more than a few banal chronicles. The poetic element is this: Admiral Zheng He (also spelled Cheng Ho, 1371–1433 or 1435) led seven maritime trips from China to explore and to collect fealty from the coastal regions of the entire Indian Ocean. The longest of these voyages went as far as Zanzibar, and the east coast of Africa, as well as Arab trading ports in the Persian Gulf. The slightly shorter voyages went to various ports along the Indian and Malaysian

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coastline, including the island of Ceylon or Sri Lanka. The admiral was of Mongol descent, and Muslim in his faith; captured in youth, castrated, and given as a servant to the royal Prince Yan Zhu Di, in whose service he rose eventually to the rank of admiral, when the prince became the Yongle emperor. Eunuchs had a major role to play in matters of trust and surveillance in the court of the Ming emperor: they had served well under the previous emperor and were trusted, though they came from far-flung regions of the Chinese empire and beyond, and counted Mongols, Central Asians, Jurchen, and Koreans among their special community (Hok-Lam 1998, 212). Zheng He’s seven expeditions took place in the period from 1405 to 1433, a full eighty years before Vasco da Gama arrived on the shores of the western coast of India. The scale of his operations was huge: more than three hundred ships, more than twenty-five thousand men, and a navy so large that nothing bigger was assembled as a fleet until World War I, almost five hundred years later (Bowler 2006, 6). Whatever might be said about the extravagant claims made by Gavin Menzies regarding Chinese exploration in the fifteenth century, he is reasonably plausible when he suggests that hundreds of acres of teak forest must have been felled to supply the shipbuilders with the required quantity of wood (Menzies 2003, 57). The historian Yang Wei is plausible when he points that the spectacle of the full fleet sailing out must have been nothing less than awe inspiring (Yang Wei 2014, 27). A comparison between the largest ships in this armada and the ships used by Columbus for his voyages to the New World is instructive: the biggest Chinese treasure ships are estimated to have been around four hundred feet long, whereas Columbus’s flagship, the St. Maria, was under one hundred feet in length (Yang Wei 2014, 27). One of the party, Ma Huan, who served as an interpreter on the fourth, sixth, and seventh voyages, wrote an account in collaboration with another companion on those voyages, Guo Chongli (1433). Another account, The Overall Survey of the Star Raft, by Fei Lin, a soldier who served in the third, fifth, and seventh voyages, provides additional information. Of the two, the account by Ma Huan is more complete. It gives detailed observations on the customs and mores of every place at which the fleet stopped, including even such small island systems as the Maldives and the Laccadive Islands (Ma Huan 1970, 146–49). Unlike European explorers who came looking for trade and then acquired colonies, the Chinese were interested in exchanges of gifts and in exploring options for trade, but their kind of “tribute trade” did not envisage conquest or colonization. The following anecdote is illustrative: In the third of the treasure voyages, when the fleet harbored off the coast of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), the Sinhalese king Alakeshvara demanded precious gifts from Zheng He, who refused to comply. The king sought to entice Zheng He away from his ships and deeper inland, while launching an attack on

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what his fifty thousand troops supposed would be an unguarded fleet at anchor, only to find that the resourceful admiral then launched a counterattack on their capital city, taking the king and all his party hostage. These captives were presented to the Yongle emperor, who showed his magnanimity by releasing them soon thereafter. A poem by court official Yang Rong (c. 1515) commemorates that episode from the Chinese point of view: Straightaway, their dens and hideouts we ravaged, And made captive that entire country, Bringing back to our august capital, Their women, children, families and retainers, leaving not one. (Levathes 1996, 115)

This episode illustrates how a long history of maritime trade that linked Sri Lanka, on the one hand, to the west coast of Africa and Arab as well as Indian trade routes by sea and, on the other hand, to trade with Southeast Asia could be interrupted for a brief period by a show of power that had the entire coastal zones of the Indian Ocean amazed for almost two decades, with a show of force by the largest fleet assembled anywhere in the world at that time. It is one of the great ironies of history that after the seventh voyage, the Chinese emperor and his advisors decided against any further exploration; the navy was disbanded, the ships abandoned to rot over time. The subsequent momentum regarding maritime exploration would be taken up by the seafaring nations of Europe, with Portugal and Spain in the lead, and the Dutch, the French, and the English following them. The second example of an archipelago playing a central role in a complex global network is that of the Philippines: the centerpiece of what became known as the Galleon Trade, which connected the Philippines archipelago with China as one trading partner, and Spain, via Mexico, as the other trading partner. This trade profited the Philippines very little, but it was the placement of the archipelago, combined with the fact that it was Spain’s only territorial possession in that part of the world, that gave the archipelago a vital role in a network that was truly global: galleons set out from Acapulco, on the west coast of Mexico, across the Pacific Ocean to Manila, and then back again to Acapulco, with the goods brought in from Asia carried over land to the other Mexican coast, from there to make their way to Spain across the Atlantic. This network operated for virtually the entire period from 1565 to 1815, with many of the galleons actually constructed in the Philippines, bringing vast wealth to the Spanish and to whatever pirates were able to waylay some of these ships. Meanwhile, a large proportion of the silver mined under heinous conditions in the New World ended up in China, where silver had a high value relative to gold (Findlay and O’Rourke 2007, 214).

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When the US-based Filipino poet Luisa Igloria (b. 1961) tries to imagine what it might have been like to sail on board one of the first ships to navigate the Pacific toward what was to become Spain’s longest-maintained colony, in a poem from The Saints of Streets (2013) titled “What We Ate After Passing the Cape of Eleven Thousand Virgins,” she adds the subtitle 28 November 1520, Antonia Pigafetta. The crew is described as entering the Cape of Desire “retching and heaving,” but the calm waters they enter get christened Pacific (Igloria 2013, 6). This imagined account of a sea voyage undergone countless times in subsequent history serves as a prelude to what happened soon thereafter when the Spaniards reached the Philippine archipelago. In this instance, we have Spain, as colonial master, setting up a trade network with China—and what profit it made for more than two hundred years! This network figured Manila as the port city where the trade exchanges took place, with silver, gold, and precious stones mined from Mexico, Central, and South America changing hands for silk, ceramics, spices, and other goods from the Far East, which fetched enormous profits when sold in the Americas and in Europe. The Chinese presence in Manila was in itself a problem for both sides, and also for the Spanish, but since silver fetched a very high price in China, Manila continued to attract Europeans who could use it as a base from which to trade with China (Mann 2011, 196). The Manila Galleon Trade linked Spain to Asia via Mexico and followed two routes: westward from Acapulco to Manila and eastward on the return, following two separate belts of trade winds across the Pacific. It proved so successful and efficient that in its entire history it lost no more than thirty galleons, most of them while navigating the strong currents and frequent storms that hit ships leaving the Philippines for the open sea (cf. Guampedia.com). That very little of the profit accrued to the place where the exchanges took place—the Philippines—is an irony of history that perhaps accounts in part for why so little of that memory has stuck with the people and literary culture of the Philippines. But we do get a ruminative echo of what it means for a colonized people to have had such a history, even when partially expunged, or when it is more than half-forgotten and yet remains a thorn in collective memory. Here is part of a recent poem titled “Archipelago,” from What Passes for Answers by the Filipino writer Mikael de Lara Co (b. 1983): When the galleons came, no one ran. We bartered our tongues for something to chew on, our hands for a fistful of sand. (Co 2013, 9)

Over the horizon of history came the contingencies that changed the Philippines willy-nilly, though the people got none of the “trinkets” up for barter between the Spanish and the Chinese. Meanwhile, now as be-

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fore, pearl fishing and other phenomena that are part and parcel of their natural lifeworld all remain unchanged, as if nothing had ever been different, though a memory remains of the galleons that came and went, neither turning to stone nor leaving anything for the Filipinos, since it was only the Chinese in Manila who acted as middlemen for the galleon trade (Caoili 1999, 35). The complexities of this trade ensured that the Chinese population in Manila, though always a small minority, continued to play a significant role in the archipelago’s economy and in the ethnic mix within Manila city (Reed 1978, 56). A poet’s recognition that this chapter in their history gave Filipinos little to speak of beyond that is articulated in “Telex Moon,” part two of The Trilogy of Saint Lazarus by the Filipino poet Cirilo Bautista (b. 1941), in which the poet declares that it is useless to “weep over lost / galleons” (Bautista 2001, 149). Reflecting on that past episode in history, the modern poet is forced to a complex brooding on whether a people may enter the stream of a Heraclitan flux more than once. The fourth section of the poem “Dream Sequence,” from Clairvoyance (2011) by Carlomar Arcangel Daoana (b. 1979), is titled “Intramuros,” and refers to the oldest district of Manila, which is associated with Spanish rule over the archipelago. It reflects a backward gaze that reminds his people that “history hoists its agile camera / alert to all—people and cargoes—drifting here” (Daoana 2011, 32). The poem’s imagery suggests that the past and the present might in some sense remain coterminous. Such contemporary instances demonstrate how history induces poetic reflections regarding trade networks with island systems occupying crucial positions on the map, regardless of whether those islands profit from their location. It is a take-it-or-leave-it quandary. The angel of history, as Walter Benjamin might put it, at once invites a revisit, while also urging the present to move on past the scar of past traumas: the dilemma continues to haunt the poets of the Philippines archipelago. The Spanish galleon traffic crossed the Pacific at latitudes that might well have taken them close to several islands of the Pacific, including Guam and the Hawaiian Islands. But we hear little by way of contacts that might have been relayed down the corridors of history, though gathering provisions midway through a long, four-month voyage each way might well have made the Spanish familiar with some of these islands of the Pacific. Such are the ironies of the networks created by colonial empire building, in which islands played a role that was at once both central and marginal: driven by trade but less likely to profit islanders than those who could muster large fleets from the mainland.

THREE Islanders as Types

An island is a type of physical environment with a characteristic but changeable eco-culture. The small cast of fictional islanders described below is a token of how human agency interacts with island ecosystems to constitute a primary gamut of human roles in relation to islands. They represent three basic permutations in how islands shape human conceptions of selfhood. In reshaping island environments to needs and drives that history has shown to be endemic to humans, such fictional islanders provide exemplifications of what a poet like Marianne Moore might have had in mind in describing poetry as “imaginary gardens with real toads in them” (Moore 2017, 27). We apply her words in this context to mean that islands such as Homer’s Ithaca, or Vālmiki’s Lanka, or Crusoe’s island may be fictions, but their predicaments and situations symbolize recurrent truths about the human condition as refracted through the lens of specific island configurations. For inhabitants contending with what it gives and what it denies by way of resource and opportunity, an island constitutes a limiting condition of the kind that impels the human potential for growth toward forms of enforced self-realization. For better and worse, these realizations differ markedly from those confronted on a mainland. Whenever an island has elicited extremes of embeddedness or resourcefulness, the imagination has embodied these, at their most prodigious, in fictional characters who function as types, and whose actions become emblems of conduct. Over time, the interplay between symbolic character and emblematic action acquires an archetypal status that can become global. We focus here on one such set comprising four characters: Odysseus, Caliban, Rāvana, and Crusoe. The first is a type of the voyager driven by the need to return to his island home; the second and the third represent the islander as some-

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one displaced and usurped in his island domain; and the fourth is a type that makes an alien island into a kind of home away from home. From the particular to the type, from the specific to its universal applications, is an expansion in scope that depends on how the interaction between character and plot resonates in an expanded field of relevance, across space and through successive time periods. In “The Art of Fiction” (1884), the American novelist Henry James (1843–1916) articulated the relation between character and plot in a memorable pair of rhetorical questions: “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?” (James 1888, 392). The pattern of incidents mobilized by Odysseus points to the island home as motive for travel; that by Caliban and Rāvana to the island home as motive for self-rehabilitation; and that by Crusoe as another kind of self-rehabilitation, in which the strange becomes familiar and estrangement is turned toward a form of political economy that entails domestication and mastery over nature. The heroic persistence of Odysseus has made an impact on generations of readers as illustrative of the constant need of divine succor in bringing human endeavors to a favorable conclusion. The unquenchable optimism of Crusoe gives us hope that we as individuals and as a species can survive and even prosper, regardless of the vagaries of chance or the limitations that nature confronts us with, through our sheer stamina and resourcefulness. And when an island breeds a spirit of selfloathing or fear, the distorting mirror of the imagination represents the misshapen and craven aspect of this self-representation as a type of wretch, one of whose names has been Caliban, or as a character brought down by a combination of internal flaws and external domination, one of whose names is Rāvana. These island types have acquired mythic dimensions—and not only for the Western world—insofar as they represent characterizations rooted in specific cultures and times but with an applicability that extends beyond that rootedness to represent in a timeless sense the human capacity to respond in specific ways to the extremes of our changeful environments. These extremes present themselves to the island protagonist as a mix of the natural and the man-made, encountered always in the form of a challenge or caprice of fate. The protagonist must wrestle with these predicaments, converting contestations into opportunities for taking the self beyond its hitherto accepted limits. The responses of an Odysseus, Crusoe, Rāvana, or Caliban become global in terms of their mythic applications precisely to the degree that they mark the limits of what can be imagined and done by way of self-transformation, adaptation, or selfrenewal. In his preview to a now famous book, The Rise of the Novel (1957), Ian Watt articulated the notion of fictional characters as embodiments of myth, a process he spoke of as applicable to one set of cultures: that of Western Europe. The characters he had in mind were Faust, Don Juan,

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and Don Quixote. These constitute a type, he argued, because each “embodies an arete and a hubris, an exceptional prowess and a vitiating excess, in spheres of action that are particularly important in our culture” (Watt 1951, 95). Approaching the topic again in Myths of Modern Individualism (1996), Watt reiterated the qualification that the popular myths he focused on were specific to Western culture, with no claim to being global in scope, and bore the marks of the individualism that characterized the European Renaissance (Watt 1996, xiv). His claim may have been culture specific, but I would argue that the fact of a myth being embedded in a specific culture does not preclude or preempt the potential for such myths to acquire wider applicability. Some mythic plots or characters prove capable of articulating broad concerns and tendencies that are not specific to periods and continents but become global when that which is specific to one culture and period resonates sympathetically with other cultures and times. Type and token are the two terms used by philosophers, scientists, and linguists—in a similar though not always identical way—to recognize both a link and a distinction between a general set of features (attributes or characterizations) and their specific embodiments. Conversely, the two terms are also used to separate a concrete particular from the group or set for which it becomes a type by virtue of exhibiting features that are shared across the set. Figures such as Faust, Don Juan, and Don Quixote, as well as Odysseus, Caliban, Rāvana, and Crusoe, betoken types. Each reveals a set of characteristics that are so compelling and memorable that they become an apt way in which to symbolize and universalize a set of attributes for which they become the primary representatives, such that the mere citing of their name evokes the host of characterizations which earn them their archetypal status. What makes a token into a type begins with what the fictional character reveals through the functions it serves in the text of its first occurrence. It continues through how subsequent authors return to that characterization—to add, adapt, isolate, and accentuate, or simplify and distort—in a manner that bespeaks their own predicament, while conceding a grateful intertextual dependency on the source of their characterization and plot. The rich suggestiveness of a cumulative textual dependency creates a tradition of representation to which each dependent text adds its new variation on a theme whose recurrence points to an issue so perennial in occurrence and concern as to tie different epochs and cultures together into a larger sharing. Thus, the figure of Odysseus, whom we encounter in Homer, makes transposed appearances throughout literary history, from Virgil through Dante to Chaucer and Henryson and Shakespeare to Tennyson to our own times. Thus, Caliban takes his bow on Shakespeare’s stage only to loom large over the entire literatures of Central America and South America throughout the period of colonial and postcolonial history. His shadow also stretches to poets inspired by the origi-

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nal to develop what E. M. Forster described as the potential always latent in a truly rounded character to develop in new directions, as done with Caliban by Robert Browning in the nineteenth century and by W. H. Auden in the twentieth century. Likewise, if we turn from Western characters to the Rāvana of Vālmiki’s Sanskrit epic, we see this character migrate to all the other Rāmāyanas of South and Southeast Asia, demonstrating the incredible resonance and variety latent within that singular characterization. 3.1 SETTLING AN ISLAND: CRUSOE The Robinsonade Robinson Crusoe is the most popular, and the easiest to identify with, among the islanders who help us either bridge or blur the distinction between real and imagined islands. In the first of the three books ascribed to this fictional character, published in 1719, Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) built on, and extrapolated from, a rich and exciting tradition of European travel writing and sea voyages. This tradition started with the voyages that led to the discovery of the Americas, and culminated with the consolidation of colonial territories overseas by all the sea-faring nations of Europe. The time span covered by this tradition stretches from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century—featuring travel accounts by Columbus, Vespucci, and Pigafetta, among many others—to the seventeenth and early eighteenth century reports of exotic places all over the globe. These were authored by an assortment of sailors, adventurers, explorers, and natural scientists, of which the most well-known examples from England include William Dampier’s A New Voyage round the World (1697), Woodes Rogers’s A Cruising Voyage round the World (1712), and Edward Cooke’s A Voyage to the South Sea, and Round the World (1712). Ever since 1719, following the immediate and widespread success of the first of Defoe’s three Crusoe books, writing that purports to narrate accounts of real voyages has remained a very popular motif in fictional writing. The genre it has created, of which the Robinsonade is the chief instance, appeases curiosity about the diversity of the world’s flora and fauna and demographic heterogeneity while affording vicarious fulfillment to the perennial appetite for exploration and (mis)adventure, which is best enjoyed from the comfort and safety of one’s home. Beyond vicarious satisfaction, such stories also offer fictional proof of the human capacity to survive ordeals, thus reinforcing our hope-fantasy that human resourcefulness and optimism is always capable of prevailing in the face of extreme calamity and the caprices of nature. As noted by John Mack in his cultural history of The Sea, Crusoe, like the beach on which he spends a large part of his early existence, is a figure of liminality: disconnected

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from the world left behind, but not yet assimilated into the world on whose shores he has been shipwrecked (Mack 2011, 165). The field of the Robinsonade is especially rich in fictional writing. Here, we shall confine ourselves to tracing the connection established by the Crusoe character between real and imagined islands with specific reference to some of the most fascinating poems it has inspired in the contemporary period from two poets: Derek Walcott and Elizabeth Bishop. It is believed that Defoe got the idea of creating a narrative about a castaway (a sailor stranded for a substantive period of time on a remote island almost devoid of human company) from the experiences of a Scottish sailor, Alexander Selkirk (1676–1721). As is typical of all his other work, Defoe was intent on blurring the line between fiction and fact. Fiction had to have the conviction of truth, or at least appear plausible in every detail; the narrative could afford all its extravagances and mindstretching exaggerations (of which we always get plenty in his writings), provided the narration appeared painstakingly realistic and detailed in its reporting. Defoe created a meticulous chronology for his fictional Crusoe: he is born in 1632, runs away to sea in 1651, is shipwrecked while sailing from his plantation in Brazil in 1659, rescues and befriends Friday in 1684, and finally leaves for England, after twenty-seven years on the island (twenty-five of them with no human company), in 1686 (Defoe 2007, 270–71). Writing in 1718, Defoe likely read of Alexander Selkirk in a travel memoir by Captain Woodes Rogers (1712). It mentioned that Selkirk had got into an argument with the captain of the ship Cinque Ports, of which he was a crew-member while the ship had docked at Juan Fernandez, six hundred kilometers west of Valparaíso, Chile. Selkirk demanded to be left on one of the islands of that archipelago, and he stayed there until he was picked by Captain Rogers more than four years later. In the second decade of the eighteenth century, the English essayist Richard Steele (1672–1729) devoted issue number 26 of the periodical The Englishman (1714) to an account of a conversation with Selkirk. Tim Severin’s In Search of Robinson Crusoe (2003) is skeptical regarding whether such a meeting did take place, but Steele’s account, whether based on hearsay or an actual encounter, makes for plausible reading, especially in his report of how Selkirk felt when the recognition that he was stranded and alone sunk in (Steele 1714, 169–70). The difference between Selkirk’s story and that invented by Defoe are significant: Defoe made his castaway’s isolation a result of shipwreck rather than a deliberate choice by someone angry and impetuous. Also, he shifted his locale from the eastern Pacific to the western Atlantic, bringing the experiences closer to the traffic between Western Europe and the East Coast of the Americas. And he expanded the period of solitude from four to twenty-five years!

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From the Particular to the Universal Man is a political animal, declares Aristotle in his Politics (1253a3–1253a7). If we assume that some part of the political life begins with sociability, then it is precisely an access to the social that is denied to anyone shipwrecked into solitariness. That a human being should suffer this kind of deprivation for many years is bound to have a deleterious effect on all the dispositions, needs, and proclivities for which the sociopolitical finds little or no scope in involuntary isolation. The fictional Crusoe’s fate is thus limited to the company of a dog and some wild animals, and no pursuit but the hunt for food, and the natural husbandry of crops and vegetation. In the final two years or so of his forced residence on the island, a human being arrives, to be placed somewhat ambiguously in a role somewhere between companion and servant. Yet it is not the depressing side of such deprivation that Defoe presents us, but the opposite: an indefatigable resourcefulness in matters of enterprise, especially in respect of material culture. A specific aspect of Defoe’s invention has come in for particular attention: his careful book-keeping, and his penchant for detailing all aspects of consumption and production. Karl Marx, in his account of the commodity, in volume 1 of Das Kapital (1867), remarks that, like a good Englishman, Crusoe sets about listing all the useful objects left to him. Everything he does in terms of material objects shows how “all the relations between Robinson and these objects that form his self-created wealth . . . contain all the essential determinants of value” (Marx 1990, 170). Man and nature; man and his tools; man and his pen and ledger; man and another man who can be seen as a fellow creature or as an inferior to be guided, controlled, and used; man alone; and man away from home without a woman: each such relation finds in Defoe’s invention a repository of symbolic possibilities. The possibility taken up by J. M. Coetzee, in his ironic novel Foe (1986), is the absence of woman from Defoe’s first Crusoe novel. Coetzee’s intertextuality is at once complementary or supplementary to, as well as subversive of, Defoe’s fiction. Two concerns converge when Coetzee extrapolates from the fiction of the eighteenth century to his own plight in apartheid South Africa, as the descendant of Dutch colonists. The first is the alternative option to a story marked by the absence of the female of the species from the Crusoe myth of resourcefulness and self-sufficiency. The second is the alternative option to the absence of anxiety in Crusoe’s fictional world about who might write what story once Man Friday would learn to do his Alpha and Omega and take pen in hand. Coetzee’s irony diminishes Crusoe to Cruso, just as he diminishes Defoe to Foe; he also implies an affinity with or parallel to the history and fate of apartheid South Africa, its Dutch and English settlers, and their enslavement or eradication of indigenous peoples, among whom, and on

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whose continent, they never felt quite at home. Coetzee’s Cruso gets more morose by the day, with little or no interest in returning home. Instead, it is the woman who takes Friday to England, where she hires a ghostwriter (pretty much like the real-life Defoe) to teach Friday the alphabet. As Coetzee’s book moves to its end, a new sound and a new voice is heard; the white colonist cannot decipher its meaning, though he recognizes that it might well augur a new future after apartheid. That is how Coetzee makes peace with his own history of anxiety and guilt about what the Crusos of Holland and England did to his part of South Africa. In Defoe’s own time, the first lack—the absence of women in Crusoe’s adventures—was a brief one. Defoe’s first Crusoe book was published in April 1719. Wishing to cash in on its instantaneous popularity, by August 1719 Defoe had published a second Crusoe book: The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. In it, Crusoe returns to his island, accompanied this time by a wife. Soon after the publication of his second Crusoe book, fictional castaway narratives featuring women were published by authors such as the now forgotten Ambrose Evans and Penelope Aubin. Their narratives, like Defoe’s third Crusoe book, Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1720), have left little to no impression on posterity. Coetzee is thus able to expose an incompleteness to the idea that Crusoe symbolizes a complete allegory of the British version of the European colonial venture, which was already well under way by the beginning of the eighteenth century. In this allegory, a male-centered domestic economy provides a proleptic synopsis of the future of Britain’s mercantile empire of the next two centuries and more. Without quite meaning to, Crusoe thus stands as an ironic Homo economicus, presiding over all that he surveys, from land and water to fish, fowl, dog, pig, turtle, and Man Friday. The Caribbean Crusoe For castaways, there is always the matter of waiting to be rescued. This wish is premised on the underlying assumption that one finds oneself located somewhere other than where one thinks or believes one ought to be; that notion, in its turn, is premised on the assumption that the “somewhere else” is, or could be, a home to which a return is both possible and desired. Derek Walcott broods on these dimensions of Caribbean history and culture in The Castaway and Other Poems (1965), making of Crusoe an allegory for all those whose fate is to have suffered a primal displacement. In that context, a shipwreck is the metaphor for the collective wreck of slavery, whose long history and subsequent consequences deposited approximately ten to twelve million individuals, born on the continent of Africa, to live their lives (and the lives of their progeny) away from a home to which there was no realistic hope of return.

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Isolation induces a sense of diminution, just as history enforced a crippling sense of diminishment and belittlement. The scale of perception is thus warped. Between ennui and defeatism there is almost no difference, except for the verbal energy with which language as poetry confronts the little that is there, insistent that it is not nothing, even if old metaphors and gods have to be set aside (Walcott 2014, 57–58). Another poem from the same volume, “Crusoe’s Island,” shifts the focus to a related but different aspect of the conflation between fiction and history. The title might point to Defoe’s fiction, but the poem is about the Caribbean: not the Scarborough from Robinson Crusoe’s Yorkshire, but the one named after it, in Trinidad and Tobago. From this location, the poet declares that he will continue to work, though God is dead for him (Walcott 2014, 78). Two impulses work in subdued contestation in such poetry: the sharply observant notation of what the eye sees (the little that must be minutely observed and acknowledged to the point of magnification), and the sense of dispossession with which the mind’s eye sees what is wished for but absent here. The former is the not-to-be-sweptunder-the-carpet real, the latter the wished-for virtual, and between them there is little or no hope of stereoscopic vision. The poet is able to recognize the family resemblance between his plight—not just the plight of the poet as individual but also that of his fellowship of islanders descended from slaves taken forcibly from their homes, never to return—and the life of the involuntary islander as chronicled with such indefatigable gusto and optimism by Defoe. In this condition, what he most wishes for is human love, not divine love. Thus, in “Crusoe’s Island,” the poet accepts, and celebrates, his island fate among his people, having made peace with the disenfranchisement of history and declaring that he finds peace between his peoples and the islands they live on. Once that is possible, the progeny of Friday can now walk free, holding their heads high in pride and a sense of their own glory (Walcott 2014, 81): the optative standing in for the present, with a eye to a different futurity. Yet another Crusoe poem by Walcott starts off from a particular moment in the novel, when, after four years on the island, Crusoe enters into his journal an entry that represents his reconcilement with his island isolation: no more thoughts of the world he has lost, no more pining for what is not there. Walcott plays a similar variation on this theme in “Crusoe’s Journal.” In this poem, all the items and tools of daily use that Crusoe had salvaged from the shipwreck come in handy in the larger salvage operation he undertakes of rebuilding a microcosm from scratch. Out of that act of poetic salvage will come both his new genesis and his salvation (Walcott 2014, 75). Adapting the fictional islander’s tutelage to the real predicament of an archipelago built from slavery and colonial displacement, the poet reiterates the strategy from his other poems of this period. The wish is taken for the fact: a poet

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asserting on behalf of his people that they have found a newfound peace among their islands (Walcott 2014, 76). Two Islands and Elizabeth Bishop Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “Robinson Crusoe in England” was first published in book form in Geography III (1976). It gives a new twist to how we might view two island experiences as central to the Crusoe narrative: being marooned on a desolate island, and being rescued and returned home. Her approach is novel in at least one more respect: it moves attention away from familiar ways of celebrating the popularity of the Crusoe narrative and the reasons why it has become a kind of modern myth. She is not interested in his resilience, or his optimism, or his resourcefulness and industry. Rather, she focuses on how a point of retrospection can be used as a fulcrum for testing the weight of the two island experiences of his life: England, and the island of his shipwreck. Her poem unfolds its sequence of images and ideas in an order and with a focus that is neither chronological nor quite in proportion to how its details correlate with what we find in Defoe’s first Crusoe novel. Her poem is also remarkable for its willingness to take the familiar Crusoe into unexpected territory. For one thing, it is set not on Crusoe’s island at all, as one might expect, but on another island: England. The place as well as the time of writing (or voicing) the poem is foregrounded as an act of retrospection. The experience of having lived on a desolate island is refracted in the present tense from an island of the opposite kind: well populated and familiar. But—and this is the surprise the poet has in mind for us—the home island is the one that is estranging. England has no interest for him, while the desolate island on which he spent so many years is recalled as more vivid, more felt, and more real: every object he had handled there, from knife to crucifix, “reeked of meaning” (Bishop 2011, 186). The time of stress for which the island provided the basis was also the time when Crusoe was most alive, or so he thinks in retrospect; this recognition is—it has to be—an act of retrospection. The recollection is almost nostalgic, thus reversing the ordinary expectation that a former castaway might be glad of being restored to his home. Instead, the two islands are held in stereoscopic vision: we see that he is emotionally distanced from the one called home while retaining a bemused attachment to the one from which he was rescued. The moment of writing and recollection that provides Bishop with her leverage into the significance to be discovered in Crusoe is a familiar motif in the history of English poetry. There it is recognized as a form of depression. Its classic articulation occurs in a poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), titled “Dejection: An Ode” (1802). It speaks of how, while the evening is serene and the western sky a strange shade of yellow green, “I see, not feel how beautiful they are” (Coleridge 2000,

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114). The rift between the perceptual and the affective faculties is cause for sorrow, alarm, anxiety, and nostalgia for the time when those two faculties worked as one. Nostalgia is familiar territory for the kind of romanticism elevated into a theory of poetry by Coleridge’s friend, William Wordsworth (1770–1850), as is the role of retrospection. In his well-known poem “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (1804), Wordsworth remarks on how he watched, “along the margin of a bay,” a vision of thousands of daffodils “tossing their heads in sprightly dance.” I gazed—and gazed—but little thought What wealth the show to me had brought. (Wordsworth 2000, 303–4)

The operative element in such recollection is the disjunction between the instance of experience and the act of making sense of that experience. To experience is not the same as to know. The latter is defined, for those of a Wordsworthian frame of mind, by its belatedness. What is painful to Bishop’s Crusoe is exactly how it is for Wordsworth’s view of life’s significances: they are all—like poetry itself—a form of recollection. The preface (1802) to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, authored by Wordsworth and Coleridge, states, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility” (Wordsworth 2000, 611). Bishop, in inventing her morose and slightly bemused Crusoe, clearly wishes to echo this notion. In characteristic fashion, however, she renders it ironically. It works as an allusion with a twist. Her Crusoe cannot quite remember what it is that he should be recollecting of significance when on that island away from home. Having planted an iris bed, he is half-reminded of the famous poem by Wordsworth—and here Bishop allows herself a delicious anachronism, because neither Defoe nor Crusoe could possibly have known of Wordsworth, whose poem had not been written yet! But, of course, that would be silly pedantry. The point is that Crusoe halfremembers the poem but cannot remember the one word that matters most: “They flash upon that inward eye, which is the bliss . . .” The bliss of what? (Bishop 2011, 184)

The word, or rather the phrase, in question is “of solitude.” Of course, he looked it up once he was back in England; that is beside the point. The real point is the peculiar selective aphasia he suffered from: the blanks that he experienced in reading or recollecting books when on his shipwreck island. In the case of this word, the issue is this: solitude and solitariness seem almost similar, but there is a huge difference. People wish for, and like, solitude, but no one really likes being lonely. He was alone, and miserable about being alone. It is as though his memory en-

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sured that the wrong word would never come up for recollection, because if it did, his actual condition would show all that fanciful praise of solitude as false because it would fail to correspond to what it felt like to be really alone. Bishop’s poem would have us think that Wordsworth and Coleridge merely imagine solitude as blissful, whereas when it is undergone as a given condition of life, without choice, it is not blissful at all: not then, nor ever, though later, when no longer alone, the blank can be filled in by checking up on Wordsworth and Coleridge in a book. Tranquility is also treated ironically by the poem. Her Crusoe is tranquil when in England only in the sense that he is bored. When he was on that other desolate island, his condition was neither tranquil nor poetic. That is how Bishop creates an antipoetic stance out of her treatment of island experiences. The more real we imagine them to be, the less poetic or tranquil they become. For her, solitude of the Wordsworthian kind is never discoverable when one is alone and solitary. It is not merely that loneliness is not solitude, but also that to imagine solitude, and relish or cherish it, is to blank out or erase aloneness. The same idea, turned inside out, makes it impossible for one to see or cognize the other. When I relish solitude, it does not matter whether I am alone or in a crowd; when truly alone, the last thing I can think of, for myself, in myself, is solitude. An island is a place where one can feel alone; it is not truly a place for solitude, except of the kind that can be created anywhere, if one has the right mental discipline. That is certainly how Defoe saw it in his third book “by Crusoe,” though his account is not entirely free of a sense of complacence. In Serious Reflections (1720) Defoe attempts a distinction between solitude and loneliness in its claim that for Crusoe, solitude is precious and desirable and does not need the condition of being a castaway on a remote island for it to be enjoyed: For the Soul of a Man under a due and regular Conduct, is as capable of reserving it self, or separating it self from the rest of human Society, in the midst of a Throng, as it is when banish’d into a desolate Island. (Defoe 1720, 6)

This may well be true, but the variegated history and afterlife of the Crusoe character and all his paraphernalia of material culture and cultural affect underlines the degree to which solitariness and solitude, or isolation and solicitude, are always tensely opposed. This is true wherever the human condition has to deal with an environment inimical to human survival, sociability, and sustainable well-being: as we know, an island is a serviceable emblem for just that predicament.

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3.2 DEMONIZING AN ISLAND: RĀVANA AND CALIBAN Matters of Proximity and Size When it comes to talking about islands, we may agree with the historian Sujit Sivasundaram that dichotomous thinking is better avoided, because binaries of the kind common in the history of modern colonialism can hinder rather than help when dealing with complexities on the ground (Sivasundaram 2013, 5). Nevertheless, it is also the case that islanders are prone to being treated with unease or suspicion by mainlanders. This is one among several possible outcomes of a movement from one ecosystem to another. The unease accompanying such movements has to do, at least in part, with differences in climate and weather, flora and fauna, cultures and customs: people are likely to react negatively when entering an environment with which they are not familiar. Another part of the scope for adverse reactions is simply the consequence of geographical adjacency, whether or not any movement to and from is involved. It begins with the issue of size, and, as such, it is part of a homology, which extends from island-mainland pairs to all other types of uneven pairing that entail sustained proximity. Size differences open up several kinds of natural likelihood: the bigger tends to have more of everything than the smaller (resources, needs, variety, complexity, as well as opportunities), and the bigger will at some point in history seek (or end up) either taking over and dominating or marginalizing and patronizing the smaller. As with families, so with nations and with geographies. Moving from the East to the West across the globe, consider the history of relations between Japan and China, between Korea and Japan, Taiwan and China, the southern Philippines and the rest of the archipelago, Tasmania and Australia, Sri Lanka and India, the Scottish islands and the mainland, Ireland and England, and the Caribbean and the American continental land masses. Thus, for example, in Islanded (2013), a study of the British colonization of Sri Lanka, and the gradual consolidation of rule over the island from the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century, Sivasundaram develops the idea of “islanding” in two directions: as a dissuasion against simplistic binaries concerning the politics and topo-ecology of an island, and as demonstration of how poetry can be co-opted into a discourse concerning the beneficial aspects of colonization. He notes in particular how the British takeover of the island, once they had secured their bases on the Indian subcontinent, harnessed poetry for the purpose of assimilating British control into an older and well-established tradition of prasasti (praise) poetry. In a new variation on the old genre of pilgrim poems, the British were represented as Buddhist kings who did various beneficial things on the island such as the laying down of new roads and

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giving respect to the Tooth Relic of the Buddha, which became “the sacred signifier of their right to rule” (Sivasundaram 2013, 6). If, however, we point the wrong end of the telescope at how the British presence made itself felt in the island of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), we can see how the island denizens and an imperial visitor came off looking more uncomfortably related to one another than imperial historiography would have it. The occasion: a tour of the Crown’s subcontinental territories by the prince of Wales in 1922, which brought him on March 23 to witness a Perahera procession of one hundred sacred elephants, one of them carrying a relic claimed to be a tooth of the Buddha (left behind during the final of three visits to the island, as claimed ever since the Dipavamsa of the fourth century AD). And who should be there to witness the procession and the prince but the peregrine English writer D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930), whose account of the elephant procession and dancing has something at once both entranced and disquieted about it and includes this little vignette: In the noise of the tom-toms and singers; Elephants after elephants curl their trunks, vast shadows, and some cry out As they approach and salaam, under the dripping fire of the torches That pale fragment of a Prince up there, whose motto is Ich dien. (Lawrence 2002, 318)

Lawrence’s own attitude toward the island was largely negative, though not unmixed with acknowledgment of what it might have given him, as recollected in his Mornings in Mexico (1927) and commented on by Richard Lansdown in his account of this episode from Lawrence’s wanderings, which cites from Lawrence’s letters: All this “made an enormous impression on me—a glimpse of the world before the Flood. I can’t get back into history—The soft, moist, elephantine pre-historic has sort of swamped over my known world.” (Lansdown 2016, 53)

Lawrence is nothing if not honest, and his is a sincere ambivalence. The more customary reaction of whoever happens to be from a larger home (whether mainlanders or visitors from other climate zones, or simply members of a colonizing power) in relation to the smaller island is likely to be much more uncomplicatedly negative. That is also how Jean Rhys, in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), represents the hostility of the unnamed Englishman who travels from England to the tropical climate of a Caribbean island, to which he has come for the express purpose of collecting a bride with a large dowry: “Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near” (Rhys 1982, 63). Such negativities are endemic to island-mainland relations. World literature has at least two major examples of this phenome-

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non writ large: one from the Eastern Hemisphere, and the other from the West. Let us start with the East. The Islander as Rāvana: The Rāmāyana Story Materials Most contemporary readers, if they have heard of Rāvana, will have done so through some form of acquaintance with the Indian epic The Rāmāyana. In its present form, it is almost twice the combined length of The Iliad and The Odyssey (Goldman and Goldman 2004, 76). Others may have read of him through texts in two other traditions also originating in India: the Buddhist and the Jain traditions. Throughout India, and in large parts of Southeast Asia, the story is so widely known as to hardly need actual reading, because its plot and the roles of the major characters have by now become part of a cultural ethos shared across many regions and languages. In all of them, Rāvana is the ruler of an island called Lanka, and he plays the role of the villainous antagonist to the virtuous protagonist of the story, Rāma. The basic plot material of The Rāmāyana is seemingly straightforward, though the processes through which an oral narrative got transmitted and transcribed, with numerous additions and embellishments accumulated through centuries, as well as versions or “retellings” in more than a dozen languages, make for a more complex legacy of associations and connotations. The Sanskrit text attributed to Vālmiki describes itself as ādikāvya (the first among poetic compositions). Its plot is as follows: Rāma, the eldest prince of Ayodhyā, a kingdom situated in the northern part of India, accepts a period of exile at the behest of his father and king, and he is accompanied by his brother, Laxmana, and his wife, Sitā, in their wanderings south of their homeland. A series of events leads to the revengedriven abduction of Sitā by a demon king, Rāvana. In his island kingdom of Lanka, Rāvana keeps Sitā prisoner in a garden guarded by female demons. He urges her repeatedly to accede voluntarily to his amorous desires. She is steadfast in resistance. Meanwhile, her husband gathers a large army—vanara senā (monkey army)—and after a huge battle and much destruction, Rāma kills Rāvana, rescues Sitā, and places one of Rāvana’s brothers on the throne of Lanka before departing for his home. There—his father having died while he was in exile—he is crowned king. His reign is long, peaceful, and prosperous. Rāma acquires fame and adulation as an ideal and exemplary king. This basic narrative, as it was passed down through the centuries, has acquired many layers and embellishments. In its longer forms, it has been central to Hinduism for at least two thousand years. In Rāma the Steadfast (2006), John and Mary Brockington consolidate many generations of scholarly debate to suggest that the oldest, oral materials of the story might have started off as a heroic romance with a secular rather than a religious orientation. It is worth reminding our-

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selves that while the oldest manuscript of the epic dates back no farther than 1020 AD (Brockington and Brockington 2006, xxii), the original story materials were probably in circulation for more than five hundred years before that, from as far back as the fifth century BC. These got written down possibly during the fourth or third century BC. Many additions followed in the next few hundred years, leading to many versions of the so-called Vālmiki Rāmāyana, which became a hegemonic text from the late first millennium AD (Thapar 2012, 32). This hegemonic influence was part of the process by which Hinduism established itself in the Indo-Gangetic plain, and the representation of Rāma as an incarnation of Vishnu had a central role to play in the consolidation of Vaishnavite Hinduism (the worship of Vishnu rather than Shiva), which followed after the diasporic tribes who created the Vedās had settled down in the northern parts of India. The processes had already been long under way by which their older gods, such as Indra and Varuna (with distinct resemblances to their Greek counterparts Zeus and Poseidon), made room for and were gradually assimilated into or displaced by the newer gods. The process occurred over a long period of time, stretching from c. 1750 to 500 BC, with Vishnu becoming the centerpiece of the Hindu trinity of Brahmā (the creator), Vishnu (the preserver), and Shivā (the destroyer). What concerns us here is how Rāvana and his island kingdom are represented in the Sanskrit epic; how the narrative ascribed to Vālmiki differs from other Rāmāyana versions, of which the Buddhist and the Jain versions deserve particular attention for the different light in which they represent Rāvana; and how elements of mythopoeic material that extend beyond the Rāmāyana narrative provide a larger context in which we are told who Rāvana was, what his attributes were, and why he was to meet his death at the hands of Rāma. Embedding all these issues is the matter of how the anthropology of geographical and racial differences—as well as the mythopoeic elements of a poetic symbolism perhaps detached from any specific references to actual peoples—get assimilated into a story in which an island and its inhabitants, despite their many positive attributes, some of which Vālmiki’s text acknowledges, find themselves at the receiving end of a plot that entails their destruction. There is some uncertainty and much debate about whether the Lanka of the epic is a direct reference to the actual island of Sri Lanka or some mythopoeic region with no necessary correlation in geography to any real island, except that the place is situated far south of the northern setting of Rāma’s kingdom, beyond the Vindhya mountain range running from east to west, which separates the northern half of the Indian subcontinent from the southern peninsula. Some scholars have speculated that the Lanka of the poem might well have been located where we now have the Maldives; others have wondered if the author(s) of The Rāmāyana materials ever had any real knowledge of the geography of

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India south of the state of Bihar and might have invented their Lanka as a symbolic location for their demons, with little or no specific awareness of the real island of Sri Lanka. Be that as it may, for our purposes it works equally well whether one chooses to believe that the island of the poem and the Sri Lanka of geography are one and the same or not. Either way, the power of island-mainland relations is underlined as symptomatic of a xenophobic tension that is endemic to human mindsets about other peoples and regions, about the unfamiliar in contrast to the familiar, and the otherness of race, skin color, and customs when one set of people recognizes itself as different from other groups. The world of The Rāmāyana, as derived from the ethos of the antecedent Vedās and Purānās, recognizes several types of living beings who are generally hostile to humans and gods: asuras (beings of the spirit world, with supernatural power for either good or bad), yakshas (nature spirits), and rākshasas. A rākshasa is a kind of demon: grotesque and ugly in appearance, red eyed and fanged, loud of voice, gross of habits, violent in disposition, prone to loot and lechery, destructive by nature, antagonistic to humans, master of illusion and deceit, and cannibalistic in appetite. These traits could well be said to exaggerate the prejudices and stereotypes created by one people about other peoples, communities, and races. Given how crowded the Rāmāyana is with rākshasas, who or what they represent has been a matter of much speculation and debate for many centuries. The scholar Sheldon Pollock, in his introduction to the third book of Vālmiki’s Rāmāyana, Āranyakānda (the Book of the Forest), promotes the view that any attempt to historicize the rākshasas of the poem is an understandable but ultimately futile and unproductive enterprise, which fails to empathize with the imaginative participation expected of the audience to the world it creates of humans, gods, and demons. Instead, he argues, these creatures are better read as symbolic representations of primal human urges and fears, with physical deformity and grotesqueness of the demons to be understood not literally but as an index of moral depravity (Pollock 2007, 71–72). Just as the world of the poem makes room for rākshasas, it makes room for vānaras: monkey-like beings who speak and walk and act like humans, though endowed with greater strength and capable of loyalty to and friendship with humans. In the world of the poem, Rāma, the exemplar of human virtue and righteousness, is thus dealing with two other kinds of beings, while the gods in heaven watch the drama on earth with great interest and involvement. On the one hand, this prince in exile is befriended by an army of monkeys; on the other, he is the scourge of demons. As the process of transforming a heroic tale into a Vaishnavite tract gathered force from c. 500 BC to c. 1000 AD, the teleology to Rāma’s characterization came to the forefront of attention as in need of worship. Let us first review in brief how the island fares in the history of Rāmāyana

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poetry, and then examine how and why this specific islander gets demonized in the Rāma story. The Island of Lanka The island of Lanka has a history of successive overlords in Hindu mythology (as well as Buddhist history and prehistory). Created by Vishwakarma (the architect of the gods), the fortress city passed into the hands of three brothers—Malyavan, Sumali, and Mali—who challenged the gods of the Hindu pantheon. Defeated by Vishnu, they fled from the island, which was taken over by the god of wealth, and also the chief among yakshas, Kubera. As with other mythological entities from the Hindu pantheon, his names and roles vary, depending on the period and the text that Kubera figures in. He is displaced from Lanka by his half-brother Rāvana. When we first hear of Lanka in The Rāmāyana, the island makes its presence felt in the poem, first, as the prosperous land and city that is home to Rāvana; second, as the place where Sitā is incarcerated; third, with reference to Hanumān the monkey, an ally of Rāma, who makes an exploratory trip on his own to establish Sitā’s location and fate and sets many parts of its capital city on fire when making his escape; fourth, as the island to which Rāma and his army of monkeys contrive access by constructing a rough-and-ready bridge of stones and trees thrown across the narrow strait that separates the island from the mainland; and, finally, as the island is restored to a new rule of law once Rāvana is defeated and killed. The name Lanka refers to both the island and its capital city (just as Singapore is island, city, as well as river). When Hanumān crosses the ocean and gazes for the first time on Rāvana’s capital city, situated atop Mount Trikuta, what he sees is described as a glorious, paradisal vision. The poet is full of praise for its environment: replete with colorful and vibrant flora and fauna, filled with music and laughter, rich in architecture and wealth, fit for the gods to live in, and—curiously enough—not without its own atmosphere of devotion and prayer (Sundarakānda 2.9–13, Goldman and Goldman 2007, 115). It is noteworthy that even the rākshasas pray devoutly. We are told (or reminded, as the case may be) of who Rāvana was before the abduction of Sitā. The Tamil poet Kamba, or Kamban (c. 1180–1250), not to be outdone by his model Vālmiki, evokes his version of Lanka in even more celebratory terms in his Rāma-avatāram (also known as the Kamba Rāmāyanam): he describes the island capital as fit to be an abode for the gods, since it was a creation of Māyā, the architect of the asuras (Kamba 2002, 216). Kamban is hugely admired in South India. In the north, it is the version in Awadhi (a regional variant of Hindi) by Goswami Tulsidās (1532–1623), titled Sri Rāmacaritamānasa (c. 1577), that is at least as well known as Vālmiki’s epic, and its rhyming couplets are far closer to collec-

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tive memory than the Sanskrit text. Tulsidās underlines a specific nuance in his extolling of Lanka: that, glorious though Lanka may appear in outward terms, it will have to submit to Rāma’s power because it is the power of righteousness (Tulsidās 2001, 750). Amid all that glitters, the poet reminds us that this is the island city of demonic cannibals. We turn next, therefore, to the question: Why such fear, revulsion, and vilification of the islander? Rāvana: The Islander as Villain Rāvana is no mere lecher, though sexual voracity is indeed central to his downfall. He appears in a variety of guises, depending on whether we look for attributes to his multifaceted personality in Hinduism, Buddhism, or Jainism (or in the many Rāmāyanas of Southeast Asia). As remarked by the historian Romila Thapar, the three religious traditions developed along parallel lines, though without interacting significantly with one another (Thapar 2002, 17). The Hindu version of his personal history portrays him as a great warrior and a learned man, also skilled in playing music on the vina (an Indian version of the lute, sacred instrument of the goddess Pārvati, wife of Shivā). He had been a great ascetic and worshipper of Shivā. Through penance, Brahmā granted him great powers, including the guarantee that neither god nor demon could ever kill him. He sought no such guarantee against being killed by a human, since he took it for granted that his immense powers made it impossible for any human to constitute a threat. That omission proved his fatal undoing. The trouble started when he challenged and defeated the gods, who feared for the safety of the world. They pleaded with Vishnu to find a solution. The solution he came up with entailed being born as a human: thus, Rāma was no mere human prince and king but an incarnation of Vishnu, arrived on Earth for the express purpose of defeating and killing someone who is protected by Brahmā’s gift. That is how the original heroic romance is transmuted into a Vaishnavite text. Given this backstory, the narrative concerning Sitā’s abduction thus becomes a plot mechanism to get Rāvana to put himself in a corner where Rāma, as the god in human form, can then defeat him, demolish the demon race, and bring order to the universe. Put more bluntly, if one is so minded, and divested of the cloak of religion, all this righteousness on behalf of the character of Rāma might be said to have been deployed in a power game in which violence in the service of the northern Indian kshatriyās (warrior caste) was thus being legitimated, while those who were to be defeated and destroyed had to be given the opposite roles and hence were represented as monstrous demons. Meanwhile, it is worth adding that even amid the infamy of abduction, Rāvana never resorts to raping Sitā, a course of action that is well within his means: instead, he waits patiently for her to give in to his

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sexual desire. She, however, is resolute in defending her own person against this virtual onslaught. Sitā thus becomes an embodiment of female virtue, loyal to the sanctity of marriage, though Rāvana, too, seems to abide by a kind of moral code, which requires that a desired woman submit voluntarily to his desires rather than be forced through rape. His pleas and persuasions take a variety of forms: each attempt on her virtue entails reminding her of how glorious his island and its capital city are, how powerful and irresistible he is, and how foolish her resistance is given how pathetic and insignificant her beloved Rāma is (Āranyakānda 45.26, Pollock 2007, 184; 53.19, Pollock 2007, 204, and so on). But the epic does not actually leave Rāvana room for even that shred of credit for decency. It is not merely that he has to be shown as completely villainous by the plot function assigned his character; he is also burdened by a specific backstory that ensures that rape is forbidden him by a curse. Sheldon Pollock notes that the seventeenth-century Indian commentator claimed that Rāvana’s nephew Nalakuvāra laid a curse on Rāvana because he had raped the apsarā Rambhā (in Indian mythology, an apsarā was a beautiful female spirit of water and the clouds): the curse entailed that if Rāvana ever again dared to force himself sexually upon a woman, he would die (Pollock 2007, 331). The dice are fully loaded against Rāvana, and his lust is indeed his undoing, even more than the spirit of revenge that triggers it in the plot of the epic. Revenge, lust, defeat, and death are all part of the larger plan of keeping the gods secure in heaven by ensuring the destruction of the one power that constitutes a threat to them: all that which Rāvana does out of seeming volition is already predetermined. That is how the Vaishnavite version of the epic would have it. As a consequence, there is very little to distinguish this ravisher of women from someone like Caliban, Shakespeare’s (anagrammed) cannibal lusting after the admirable Miranda, except that one makes the gods quake whereas the other quakes before every mortal; this one is portrayed as brazen, whereas that one is shown as craven; both are irrepressible victims of libidinal excess; both also are victims of larger plots that have a use for their lust. Alternative Rāvanas When we turn to the Buddhist tradition, we see a radical transformation in the role assigned Rāvana. It might even be said that here the islander-as-king is being renovated from a perspective meant to cleanse him of all associations with the villainy of The Rāmāyana and to attach him instead to the legend of the Buddha’s visit to Sri Lanka. The earliest surviving source for this legend is the Dipavamsa of the fourth century AD. The legend is treated more fully in the fifth century AD narrative of The Mahāvamsa (Pali chronicle of the kings of Sri Lanka), which serves as a historical repository for the growth of Buddhism on the island. Its first

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chapter, “The Visit of the Tathagata,” tells that the Buddha set forth to convert the inhabitants of the island to Buddhism at a particular time in the astrological calendar (Geiger 1912, 3). For believers, this was the first of three visits by the Buddha (c. 528–519 BC) to Lanka. The visit and the conversion thereafter of the island population to Buddhism—whether treated as legend or history—are part of the foundational assumptions in some versions of one of the most complex Buddhist texts, The Lankavatāra Sutra, which is a significant text in the canons of Mahāyana and Zen Buddhism. In it, Rāvana, the ten-headed king of the Yakshas, invites the Buddha to visit his island (Pine 2013, 26). The scholar and translator D. T. Suzuki provides a historical explanation for the strategy underlying the assimilation of the Rāvana character into the Buddhist scriptures of Sri Lanka. In his study of this sutra, Suzuki explains that Rāvana enters the story of the Buddha’s visit to Lanka because by the third or fourth century AD, with The Rāmāyana well established as an epic, the Mahāyanists in Sri Lanka wanted to connect his visit with the island’s most famous king, Rāvana (Suzuki 1998, 16). This would present Rāvana in a favorable light, while also assimilating him into the lineage of Buddhism on the island. It is worth adding here that the parallel Indian tradition of Jain narratives—in the Dasaratha Jātaka tale—shows a comparable intention, although, in the case of the Jains, it is applied to Rāma rather than Rāvana: the attempt to assimilate the story of Rāma into the Jain religious lineage provided resistance, in its time, to the dominative Brahmin-Hindu tradition of Vālmiki’s Rāmāyana. The transformations undergone by the epic narrative when it spread to Southeast Asia are also worth taking into account because they demonstrate the degree of flexibility with which the parent story was treated by other island cultures. In an article published in 1927, the Dutch scholar J. Kats noted that the principal characters of the story materials—Rāma, Sitā, Hanumān, and Rāvana—undergo several types of permutation that depart from Vālmiki’s version. For example, Sitā is Rāma’s sister, and not his wife, in the older Jain text, the Uttara Purāna (c. ninth century AD), and also in the Malay version of the narrative, Hikāyat Seri Rāma (c. thirteenth to seventeenth centuries AD). The Malay version is likewise notable for its admiration for the powers Rāvana has secured through penance (Kats 1927, 583). These alternative representations of Rāvana can be said to make room for a multifaceted, rather than monocular, view of the islander demonized from the Indian mainland. But before we move on, it is worth reflecting on an irony remarked upon by Derek Walcott in in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory” (1992). The occasion that he brings up: a Saturday afternoon dramatization of The Rāmāyana in his home island, performed by the descendants of the Indians brought to that distant land by the British system of indentured labor. He, the poet who has recently dramatized The Odyssey, has no sense of the significance that

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only the Indians of the Caribbean seem intent on celebrating with a steadfast faith that he cannot muster for any of his cherished myths and stories: “I, out of the writer’s habit, searched for some sense of elegy, of loss, even of degenerative mimicry in the happy faces of the boy-warriors or the heraldic profiles of the village princes” (Walcott 1998, 67). But—he concedes—he was all wrong: for those who took part for nine days in this two-hours-an-afternoon ritual, there was nothing but delight and elation—the immersion of the believer. The poet grudgingly acknowledges that there is power here: “Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed” (Walcott 1998, 67). Such, we might say, is the hold of that epic on the human imagination through the long pathways of history. Having noted this, it is time to move from one island to another: from an unlovely Rāvana hounded by a Hindu Rāma to a wretched Caliban bedeviled on his own island home by a masterful Prospero: colonist-exile and magician-father. Shakespeare’s Caliban In Shakespeare’s Caliban we see the islander in a perspective that combines several symbolic roles connected to one another in a series of partial overlaps. He is someone native to a place, and as its aboriginal inhabitant he has intimate knowledge of all its nooks and crannies. As someone living in a condition of nature, his islander status underscores how this closeness to nature bears an antithetical relation to his relative lack of socialization, underlining both his isolation and his severely limited range of experience and opportunity. That, in turn, connects the untutored aspect of his characterization to his treatment as a primitive savage: someone typically at the involuntary margin of what others claim for themselves as a more central location, which has the advantages of greater knowledge, awareness, and power. He is also someone whose otherness to a given set of social and civilizational norms produces mutual alienation, assigning him the role of the strange and the monstrous in relation to the familiar and the civilized. This dimension is compounded by his predicament as the inexperienced male overcome by involuntary desire for an equally inexperienced female, a libidinal force which leads him to actions that come across as threatening, with sexual desire treated as a type of overreaching based not merely on class and rank but on racial difference magnified as a difference of kind rather than degree. He is also a relatively powerless victim: a tool in the hands of a dominative presence whose masculine authority, experience, knowledge, and power combine to transform what began as a paternal inclination to educate and civilize into an allegory of colonization and enslavement. In The Tempest (1611), cited here from the Folger Shakespeare Library’s online edition, Caliban and his island play a prominent role, generally presented in a negative light, as summed up in Trinculo’s exclama-

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tion: “Servant-monster! the folly of this island!” (3.2.5). The play had an element of topicality when it was first performed, which has never left it since. For its time, it alluded to the new wave of exploration and settlement that had Europe looking seaward for new lands to explore and settle. We have already seen how poetic writing reacted to the Bermuda experience of 1609, when a seventeenth-century group of castaways, led by Sir George Somers, founded a short-lived English colony on the island of Bermuda at a time when other settlements were also being attempted, chief among them the colony established in 1607 at Jamestown in Virginia. This venture was preceded, accompanied, and followed by a flood of travel writing describing sea voyages that featured strange lands and stranger peoples, not only westward but also based on voyages such as those of Magellan (1519–1522), as narrated by Antonio Pigafetta (1491–1534) and translated into English by Richard Eden (in 1555 and 1577), as well as an assortment of reports from Africa and other places, of misshapen peoples and savage customs. Pigafetta’s narrative reports giants in chains who cried out to their god, whom they called Setebos (Pigafetta 2010, 53). Shakespeare’s play—even though its cast of European characters implies a location in the Mediterranean—is the most significant of many such refractions of wonder, amazement, and shock at strange places and peoples, which the seafaring nations of Europe brought to the attention of Europeans throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Ever since then, the relationship between the settler and the displaced, as between the colonist and the colonized, has been writ large over the history of how the Americas came into the sphere of influence and control of European nations and peoples. There are several ways in which Caliban might seem entirely unlike the Rāvana of The Rāmāyana. Rāvana comes across as aggressive and fearsome, while Caliban comes across as miserable and grotesque. But it is also possible to stress the homologous aspects between them, the more to accentuate the symbolic role of systematic contrasts that the texts they occur in disseminate with lasting effects in their respective cultural spheres. Each is native to his island; each loves it and celebrates it in his way; each suffers displacement and defeat by a stronger external force from the mainland; each is seen as loathsome; each is believed to be a cannibal; and each is driven to his downfall through sexual desire for a feminine object of desire who is forbidden him and his kind. In the play, Prospero reminds Ariel that he had been imprisoned by the “blue-eyed hag” Sycorax in “a cloven pine” (1.2.322, 330); Caliban was “(A freckled whelp hag-born) not honoured with / A human shape” (1.2.335–6). Prospero may be dismissive of the previous inhabitants of the island, but Caliban lays claim to the island because he knows all its secrets: “The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile” (1.2.404). The one person who does not demonize the islander as a matter of routine xenophobia is Gonzalo. He reminds Prospero that the island is inhabited by peo-

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ple “Who, though they are of monstrous shape, yet, note / Their manners are more gentle, kind than of / Our human generation” (3.3.38–40). The Progeny of Caliban Caliban’s progeny are many. They are spread across many races, cultures, and regions, throughout post-Shakespearean history. They are progeny in the sense that they inherit a sense of predetermined overshadowing from the allegorical force of the Shakespearean text. The Tempest is a perfect example of how allegories develop naturally from the symbolic values that can be projected onto (or professed as inherent to) historical events and situations, provided they are seen at a sufficient distance and with the kind of involuntary or deliberate blurring of vision, which offers no impediments to the symbolization of the allegedly real into the type and the token. Several kinds of post-Shakespearean awareness inject vitality into the interaction between the play and its long-term applications. Let us consider a few as they arise from the symbolic potential for extrapolation inherent to Caliban as the maligned and exploited islander. Among the many writers who have turned to Caliban for inspiration, enabling them to apply Shakespearean allusions to their own times and concerns, one of the most interesting is Robert Browning. His poem “Caliban upon Setebos or, Natural Theology in the Island” was first published in Dramatis Personae (1864). It presents us with a Caliban escaping his drudgery while Prospero and Miranda sleep, by “Letting the rank tongue blossom into speech” (Browning 1864, 124). This is man in a condition of nature reflecting upon his maker, trying to imagine what that Setebos might be whom his mother named as his god. But Browning’s Caliban is closer to animal than to human nature, for this is how Prospero found and made him, “a sea-beast, lumpish” (Browning 1864, 130). Like a coldwater fish made sick by the warmer waters of the briny sea that he wishes for, this Caliban is trapped in “Hating and loving warmth alike.” He is characterized as someone who “perceives he cannot soar / To what is quiet and hath happy life” (Browning 1864, 129). The islander might wish for what he does not have, but if the wish—of living elsewhere—were granted, that, too, would leave him sick and distasted. Despite these woes, this Caliban has his pleasures, and they are all aligned with close awareness of plants, fruits, and the life of a host of creatures in the wild: on land, in the water, and in the air. Browning expands upon the passage from the Shakespearean text in which Caliban tells of all the secrets of the island over which he claims an aboriginal right. Intoxicated on mashed vegetable juice, he reflects on power: that of Setebos, and his own; on power to ensnare, control, and harm other creatures; and on the limits of power for each of them—Setebos, Caliban, and Prospero. He dares hope that he might overthrow those in power if they but dozed, but when there is thunder and lightning in the sky, he grovels again, fearful as

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before. The Caliban imagined by Browning remains confined to his element but is shown as capable of self-reflexivity, someone to whom grave disservice is done when he is patronized or disparaged. We move next to glance briefly at W. H. Auden’s The Sea and the Mirror (1944), which features a lively, articulate, and abstract Caliban, whose long prose disquisition brings to an end a medley of poems given as speaking parts in a static sequence that features all the characters from Shakespeare’s play. Each is made to articulate a self-reflexive account of his role. Each refracts a subjective view of the play, and the whole sequence is rounded off by a Caliban who is endowed with the mandarin prose subtlety and surplus of refined elaboration that readers familiar with the style of the American novelist Henry James might associate with the convoluted prose of his later novels. Auden’s Caliban is focused on the nature-nurture tension captured by Prospero’s words: “A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick” (4.1.211–12). Auden applies this tension to the symbolic contraries represented by Ariel and Caliban: the one belonging to air, light, and an asexual, eternal youth; the other bound to darkness, earth, and a frustrated and poorly controlled sexuality. Ariel represents the possible, the imagined, the imaginary, the desired, or the ideal. In contrast, Caliban stands and speaks for the plain and simple haecceity of things, lumpen reality unadorned by any kind of fiction: If the intrusion of the real has disconcerted and incommoded the poetic, that is a mere bagatelle compared to the damage which the poetic would inflict if it ever succeeded in intruding upon the real. (Auden 2003, 35)

Auden’s Caliban, glancing at Ariel, instructs and enjoins what most islanders might acknowledge—however grudgingly—as a hard truth: the irreconcilable difference between how they are and how someone (God, others, themselves) might wish them to be (Auden 2003, 42). Two recent trends show writers moving away from such rarefied and ironic abstractions as Auden’s to more downright politico-ethical applications. One trend arises from the history of colonialism as its long aftermath continues to overshadow peoples and regions occluded by the sense of remaining a postcolony, with all its complex and intermingled associations between power and what Frantz Fanon described in the 1960s as “Manichean delirium,” the damage done to the subjugated when they internalize the values and norms of the oppressor (Fanon 1967, 44–45). In an influential essay of 1987, Rob Nixon identified The Tempest as a foundational text for all literary aspirations with an oppositional relation to colonial interests and influences (Nixon 1987, 558). The ambitions of authors writing under the compulsion of that motivation were described as running parallel to the struggle for political decolonization after World War II, with significantly new values discovered in

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Caliban by works such as George Lamming’s The Pleasures of Exile (1960) and Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête (1969), texts that reversed the values associated with the antinomian pairing of Ariel and Caliban by nineteenth-century works such as the French writer Ernest Renan’s Caliban (1878) and Caliban: A Philosophical Drama (1896), as well as the Uruguayan writer José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel (1900). For writers from all the former colonies of Europe, a sense of cultural identity often comes down to a struggle with that overshadowing legacy. Their writing became a way of working out how they might either accept and live with that shadow or seek to free themselves from its constricting power. A second type of politicization concerns issues of environmental awareness and the ethical or moral imperatives that enjoin humans toward respect and concern for the microenvironments they inhabit on the planet. In both cases, the relative difference in size between an island and an adjacent mainland acquires enormous significance as a decisive factor in how relative disparities are played out on the ground, both in personal interactions among humans and in those between humans and their natural environments, of which islands are a specific instance. Consider the perspective encouraged by ecocriticism, as noted by Gabriel Egan in Green Shakespeare: Prospero’s main activity on the island is deforestation, parallel to the English settlement of Ireland (Egan 2006, 156), so that Caliban and his island begin to seem like variations on Irish stereotypes widespread in Shakespeare’s England. Guyana-born and UK-based David Dabydeen (b. 1955) makes a related indictment. He argues that the connections between colonial and sexual subjugation and exploitation are such that desire and disgust are complexly mixed, in the aggressor and in the victim. His essay, “On Not Being Milton: Nigger Talk in England Today” (1989), shows how Shakespeare’s polarity of Ariel and Caliban can be extrapolated to contemporary cultural relations within the British Isles for writers who use the English language but are not English by race: “The pressure now is also towards mimicry . . . the pressure is to become a mulatto and housenigger (Ariel) rather than a field-nigger (Caliban)” (Dabydeen 1989, 12–13). In a poem titled “The Seduction” (1988), Dabydeen alludes to Caliban’s sexual deprivation and alleged depravity—the islander-slave lusting for the colonist-woman—in a kind of reverse parody where the attempt at sexual conquest of a white (presumably English) woman by a non-white male of colonized descent either fails or is thwarted, with the woman adopting a self-deprecatory attitude. The situation is dramatized tongue-in-cheek, with sardonic relish at the discomfiture of both characters and conducted with a mastery over verse style and rhyme that shows (and shows off) how the poet who is not Milton can do more than just “nigger talk” in the language taught him by the Prospero of colonial history. The girl protests: she is neither Jane nor a stand-in for the colo-

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nizing race. Meanwhile, the frustrated male voice keeps insisting on a link between his sexual appetite and that of Caliban for Miranda: She said her name was really Jane That she was sweet as sugarcane Unblighted by colonial reign That all he wanted was some pain To wrap himself in mythic chain And labour in his self-disdain. (Dabydeen 1989, 30–31)

We see, in such messily pathetic situations, how individuals can get (or feel) entangled in collective, and mutually hostile, histories. The characters caught in these narrative roles also show that the relation between an island to a mainland is susceptible of multiple layers of allegorical significance. Caliban did more than learn the master’s language and ability to curse. That language has since led to more lasting insights into the various ways in which inequalities prevail as a condition of life, as much in culture as in nature, as much in writing as in geography. 3.3 RETURNING TO AN ISLAND: ODYSSEUS The Reluctant Hero The figure of a voyage is an obvious and compelling metaphor for knowledge articulated as narrative, just as an island is an obvious and almost inevitable point of arrival as well as departure for such narratives. It is the discreteness of an island, its demarcation from other land by water, its singularity amid the flux of water that makes an island a focal point for the idea of departure and the idea of return. Departures can be voluntary or accidental. That of Odysseus was a kind of mischance; his return is much desired by him, and much delayed by an assortment of factors. Fate, women, and the gods have much to do with that. His heroic struggle to get home makes Odysseus the dominant archetype for the returning islander. At the dawn of Western literature, his figure stands as an emblem for all that a poet might do in the heroic and the hopeful mold. Jorge Luis Borges honors that memory in The Maker (1960) by invoking Homer as “a rumour of black ships that set sail in search of a belovèd isle,” declaring it the poet’s fate that he should leave an echo of his songs “in the cupped hands of human memory” (Borges 1998, 293). For all Western literature after Homer, Odysseus stands as an emblem for everything that might be signified in the leaving of an island and, even more so, as an emblem for the kind of return to an island that is fraught with hazard and delay but can end in a homecoming that affirms everything to be valued about a sense of belonging to family, people, and the solid piece of Earth for which an island serves as token.

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The scholar Chet van Duzer, in his learned survey of islands in Western literature from Homer to Defoe, notes that writers from the Greek archipelago had a natural interest in islands that is far more central to their literature than islands are of interest to the literature of classical Rome (Duzer 2006, 145). The Homeric shadow is long and vast, and in that shade many writers have either embellished the margins or developed alternatives at a tangent to what we find in Homer. The reasons for this richness and proliferation, as well as happy dependency, may be found in the complexity of characterization to the principal cast of this epic narrative and the wealth of incidents and anecdotes that complicate and enrich the epic. We shall sample some of that variety while delineating the islander as discovered in Homer. There, the figure of Odysseus presents us a reluctant hero and an unwilling voyager: someone content enough with his few square miles of rock and soil but ordained by fate and chance to travel ceaselessly, seemingly unlikely to ever return to hearth, wife, son, and people, but doing so eventually, after two decades away from family and home. He describes his home island to King Alcinous as hilly and rugged, though “I know no sweeter sight on earth / than a man’s own native country” (9.31–32, Homer 1996, 212). No matter that Homer’s descriptions are not easily reconciled with actual geography, with respect to either the many islands mentioned in the poem or indeed the Ithaca that is the symbolic goal of his voyaging. Bernard Knox’s introduction to the Robert Fagles translation of The Odyssey notes that the descriptions of Ithaca in the poem are not consistent, and scholars have even proposed alternative locations including Leucas and Cephallenia for Ithaca (Homer 1996, 26). However, any attempt to pin the poem to a map is likely to prove futile. The workings of the poetic imagination are not susceptible to such a literal accounting. The islands in Homer belong to a realm in which geography is a token substratum on which legend and fantasy lay a cover of fictionality. In reading of all the islands that Odysseus visits, willy-nilly, we repose our faith in whatever the poet proffers by way of a mariner’s tale. The epic narrative is like a Mediterranean necklace, with islands as its beads. First, we meet Odysseus on the island of Ogygia, where Calypso resides in a cave. Then we are taken to the floating island of Aeolus, whose bag of winds helps Odysseus on his way. Onward to Circe’s island, where his band of companions is turned into pigs. Circe sends him next to the underworld, which is a kind of island unto itself, where the shades or spirits of Tiresias, his former warrior companions from Troy, and his mother speak to him of their lives and regrets. Onward, next, he sails to Scheria, the island of the Phaeacians, which gives us a glimpse into a life both isolated and magical. There he tells the Phaeacians about his adventure with the Cyclops. Following a series of events and recollected events woven into a complex narrative that moves back and forth in time, final-

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ly, after much travail, our weary hero is allowed by the gods to return to his rocky island home of Ithaca. What suffices for the epic to have its effect is for us to appreciate that this protagonist is the hero as islander. He is also the hero who has consistently affirmed that he is content with his own island, such as it is. His son expresses similar pride and awareness when he politely turns down a gift of fine horses from King Menelaus, explaining that his rugged island is not suited for pasturing or riding horses, given how it is rocky and slopes toward the sea, though he loves it withal (4.681–85, Homer 1996, 143). A modern retelling of Homer’s epic for radio, by the English poet Simon Armitage (b. 1963), captures the significance of the island succinctly in its dialogue between Zeus and Athena: Athena: Now what do you see? There, where I’m pointing. Zeus: An island. Athena: Not just any island. Ithaca. (Armitage 2006, 196)

Derek Walcott, in his dramatized re-creation of the narrative The Odyssey: A Play (1993), gives a Caribbean flavor and savor to a self-characterization by Odysseus that remains within the Homeric template, but with a zing all its own. In Homer, the fate of Odysseus—as decreed by the gods—is to suffer separation from all that is dear: first by having to take part in the siege of Troy, and then in years of involuntary dalliance as well as frustrated mishaps and misadventures. In Walcott’s play, when Odysseus asks the shade of Tiresias about how long and difficult his return is likely to be, he is told, laconically, “More islands, more trials” (Walcott 1993, 96). From the very beginning of Homer’s poem, we know that the goddess Athena takes pity on his travails. Circe’s wiles and charms, and our returning hero’s sojourn on her island, has given poets after Homer opportunity for quizzing the genuineness of his fidelity to home, hearth, and wife. As Walcott would have it, Odysseus is to be trusted when he tells Circe that though she is “sweeter than sugar-plum,” he has a wife waiting, “So I saving it all for she” (Walcott 1993, 80). In this dialogue between created pleasure and the resolved soul (if one may adapt an idea from Andrew Marvell about a mortal being pulled by these contraries), the fault is with Circe: witch and seductress. Alcinous later asks Odysseus if Circe’s island had enchantment, and he is given a succinct double entendre in reply: “In her and the island. One cleft of flesh, one of stone” (Walcott 1993, 56). Clearly, however jolly he may sound, Walcott’s Odysseus is sincere in wanting to go home. There are other ways of re-presenting Odysseus, as we discover in “The Grave of Odysseus” by the German poet Peter Huchel (1903–1981), in which our hero is referred to merely as that “pirate’s boy from Ithaca” (Kossman 2001, 258), or in the short poem “Circe” by the Mexican poet Gabriel Zaid (b. 1934), in which our hero admits to Circe, “I am a happy

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pig: I am yours: nothing else matters” (Kossman 2001, 260–61). This is but one episode, and tarrying with Circe is but one among many delays for Odysseus. Circe, after all, does help him: she shows him the way to the underworld so that he might communicate with the spirits of the departed. His longer stay of seven years with Calypso gives later writers more opportunity to speculate about the tension between wanting to go home and the delay in managing to do so, as much a result of her wiles as of the gods’ decree concerning his fate. In Homer’s text, we are told that Calypso craved Odysseus for a husband, and he found her bewitching (1.16–18, Homer 1996, 78). In a modern poem alluding to this episode, titled simply “The Island,” the Finland-born poet Anselm Hollo (1934–2013) reveals an Odysseus who has lost the desire to leave the island of Ogygia. When Calypso decides to ask about his wishes yet again, and is all set to send him off, she gets the tired response: “Who said I wanted to go?” (Kossman 2001, 268). In contrast, the Greek poet Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957), in The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel (1958), keeps alive the romantic figure created by Dante and Tennyson. His entire sequel is premised on a very different idea that is derived from Homer but expanded enormously. His Odysseus will soon tire of the island once he has returned to it; he will want to marry off Telemachus to Nausicaä, leave Penelope behind, and seek out Helen in Sparta, persuading her to leave Menelaus behind and travel with him on further adventures. We can see how, in the shadow cast by Homer, later poets make a bid for their own overshadowed and dependent creativity by insisting on making their islander refuse to act to type, at least not to the mold of The Odyssey, although their departures do have a point of takeoff from the Homeric poem. C. P. Cavafy’s laconic “Second Odyssey” (1894), whose epigraph provides a reference to the twentysixth canto of Dante’s Inferno, had developed this idea earlier, asking for a second Odyssey as great as the first, but without the inimitable Homer, and not in hexameters: greatness as in the past, but done anew, in a new style (Cavafy 2009, 275). Regardless of whether we might get a second great Odyssey, the motif from Homer that keeps recurring is that of an islander pining for home, who finds a reason to leave his island soon after he is back. Why this should appeal so much to poets remains an intriguing question. The Woman Who Waits and the Woman Who Seeks What would Ulysses be without all the island women who seek his company—Calypso, Circe, Nausicaä? The “Circe in Torment,” as imagined by the American poet Louise Glück (b. 1943), refuses to acknowledge any feelings he might have for his wife. She would rather deny him all sleep than risk losing him (Glück 2013, 344). Glück’s volume Meadowlands (1996) tackles the tensions in contemporary married life in terms of

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the male protagonist’s complex relationships with all the principal female protagonists in the Odyssey. Meanwhile, Penelope, as the archetype of the faithful, loyal, and resourcefully long-suffering wife, has been very kindly treated by almost all of Homer’s successors. Poets have also made much of the waiting of another woman associated with Odysseus. In the poem “Nausicaä” by the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos (1909–1990), the girl cannot forget the man with seaweed in his hair, from her first encounter on the beach. He was stark naked. The girl confides to her nurse that she would be content simply to remove the sand and pebbles stuck to his bare heels (Constantine et al. 2010, 538). A charming or a disturbing vision? Not everyone will accept the attitude attributed to the girl as more than a male fantasy, or a fiction that flatters the male protagonist, though it has a basis in Homer’s narrative of juvenile fixation. A poem that is to appeal to both genders needs something different. We can find that quality in Wallace Stevens: he provides one of the most touching representations of the half-fearful hopefulness with which Penelope waits for the return of her husband. The poem develops a hint from Homer. Toward the end of Book 4, Penelope has learned about the plot hatched by the suitors to ambush and kill Telemachus. She broods, shunning food and drink. Pallas Athene, wanting to ease her misery, sends a phantom disguised as her sister, who speaks to the half-asleep Penelope, reassuring her that Telemachus will return safely. As if in a dream, Penelope asks about Odysseus, and the phantom declares that she cannot tell her that story from start to finish, and then she departs with no more sound than the breeze stirring the curtains (4.44, Homer 1996, 149). The Stevens poem, “The World as Meditation,” takes up the idea of a half-dreaming Penelope and adds to that scene a simple natural element: sunlight on her pillow. She is not sure if this is a dream or a waking reality, whether it might be a true presentiment of her husband’s return or merely the warmth of the sun. From that mere touch, the poet develops a basis for hope: “It was Ulysses and it was not.” The warmth of the sun on the pillow is like “a planet’s encouragement” (Stevens 1956, 520), and that alone suffices for the Penelope in this poem to keep faith in her man’s return. This is as close as the modern poet will get—sentiment skirting close to sentimentality—in order to make do without the gods and their machinery of faith, but still intent on nursing a little wick of hope. Even a writer as free from sentiment and sentimentality as the Scottish poet Carol Ann Duffy (b. 1955) cannot help being kind to Penelope, who is treated as a member of a large set of female characters from history and literature who are cast in the role of The World’s Wife (1999). In that volume, Duffy represents her Penelope at her needlework, waiting without hope because hope might be the wrong thing to wait for. Instead, her needle works at “picking out / the smile of a woman at the centre,” and this woman is “self-contained, absorbed, content, / most certainly not waiting” (Duffy 1999, 71). Two cheers, we might say, for all

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such women! This islander wife is cautious and circumspect; she seeks to remain all that which is especially hard for any island wife to be: selfcontained, absorbed, content. We encounter a more bemused Penelope in the version of the islander’s return from Yannis Ritsos in “Penelope’s Despair,” where the slaughter of all the suitors leaves Penelope bemused, wondering if all the waiting and dreaming, and all the slaughter of suitors and maids, was for one miserable white-bearded old man: the realization is so startling that “She collapsed voiceless into a chair” (Ritsos, 1991, 91). An even sharper and more sustained alternative history comes from the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood (b. 1939) in The Penelopiad (2005), a novella whose prose makes room for verse in its choric moments. Atwood zooms in on the issue of why, when returned to his island, and busy brutally dispatching all the suitors who had harassed Penelope, Odysseus hangs twelve of her maids. The little book ends with their lament: “we took the blame / it was not fair” (Atwood 2005, 195). The narrative is focalized from the point of view of a Penelope after death. She begins by noting what she knew of her husband: he was always so plausible, a tricky liar who convinced her that he would not try his tricks on her. He keeps insisting that he means never to travel again; no sooner does she begin to believe he might mean it than off he goes again, “making a beeline for the River Lethe to be born again” (Atwood 2005, 189). The Islander as Ceaseless Voyager Homer’s Odyssey is all about a man wanting to go back home. In his visit to the underworld, Odysseus asks the shade of Tiresias a question regarding what lies ahead for him. The epic returns to this question in Book 23, with an answer to the question “What next?” This brief moment in Homer has given rise to an entire alternate story or sequel. This alternative option is based on the idea of the islander as driven by a desire to break free of the feeling of constrainment induced by his return to his island space, turning his back on home, hearth, son, and wife in order to venture forth into ceaseless exploration. One of the most powerful early articulations of this incipience—referring to Odysseus by his Roman name, Ulysses—is to be found in The Divine Comedy (c. 1308–1320), the epic poem in Italian by Dante Alighieri. Dante had no direct access to Homer and got his storyline from other sources such as Virgil and Ovid. In the twenty-sixth canto of the first volume of his epic, Inferno, the shade of Odysseus speaks thus: You must not deny experience of that which lies beyond the sun, and of the world that is unpeopled. (Inferno xxvi.116–18, Alighieri 1980, 244–45)

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Ever since Dante picked out this strand from the Homeric weave, poets have had a field day with the romance of ceaseless travel. We can treat this tendency as a latency to the Homeric text, growing from a genuine perception of the limits of the island condition, but taken to an extreme. We have already met Alfred Tennyson’s Ulysses. His dramatic monologue romanticizes the character of Ulysses at a time when British and European imperial interests in territory and colony had moved past the alleged satisfactions of exploration and the motive of trade to the dominative-exploitative phenomena we know as European colonialism. That is the context for seeing how the romantic version of this islander fares in a sea other than the Mediterranean, translated from the Western world to the shores of an island almost as small as his Ithaca: modern-day Singapore. Ulysses in Singapore Singapore is a tiny island at the tip of the Malaya Peninsula. It rose to prominence as a port and trading post during the nineteenth century and continued to grow in that role throughout the period of British colonialism in Southeast Asia. It separated from the Malaysian federation and became an independent republic in 1965. Its subsequent history features the most careful management of resources that any island can have seen in modern times, making it a unique instance of the systematic application of reason to finite means in order to create the semblance of a little utopia, which—whatever the cost of its success, and there is a cost, as some of the poets tell—represents one of the most remarkable narratives of resourcefulness in post–World War II history, not merely for Southeast Asia but also globally. Hardly any other island so small has accomplished so much of what it set out to do within such a short span of modern history, regardless of how that has meant leaving as little as possible to chance and bringing some part of what might belong in the realm of nature into the political economy of nurture (Patke 2013, 398–99). Industrial and postindustrial development has been accompanied by a precise emplacement of the island in various forms of regional and global networks. Success in securing investments in production and supply networks involving traffic in goods and services, and investments in the latest developments in information technology, air and sea traffic, oil refining, and an assortment of other activities have been integrated so as to make the island both prosperous and intent on its drive toward a particular kind of modernity. At the same time, ethnic tensions have been managed without serious crises in relations between the Chinese majority and the Malay, Indian, and expatriate minorities that constitute its demographic profile. The island’s state policies concerning citizen-owned and state-subsidized housing contrast sharply with the more laissez-faire

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approach to housing in Hong Kong (both prior to and after its handover by the British to the People’s Republic of China). Likewise, the policy of balancing state welfare support with making its citizens rely at least partially on their own state-managed savings in matters of health care and retirement benefits offers an interesting contrast to the welfare policies adopted by Europe after World War II. Hong Kong and the special administrative zone of which it is now part offers an interesting set of parallels (and an equally numerous set of contrasts) with the island state of Singapore. Throughout the short but eventful history of compulsive-addictive self-transformation, the island of Singapore has not lacked for poets. They have proffered their writing as a way of keeping their fingers on the pulse of the rapid series of transformations to which the state has subjected its hard-working and hard-worked population. “No future in nostalgia” (Yap 2013, 138), writes one of its most original poets, Arthur Yap (1943–2006), while another, Alfian Sa’at (b. 1977), titles one of his volumes A History of Amnesia (2001), alluding to the tendency of the island to be preoccupied more with tomorrow than with yesterday or the days before that. Another poet, Lee Tzu Pheng (b. 1946), was among the earliest to note a specific kind of concern about all the benefits of modernity. In her poem “Bukit Timah, Singapore” (1980), she alludes to the aspiring state’s “megalopolitan appetite,” and another locally well-known and frequently cited poem, “My Country and My People” (1980), alludes wryly to one of the dehumanizing consequences of that appetite for modernity: “milli-mini flats / for a multi-mini-society” (Pang and Lee 2000, 49–50, 51–52). A poet from Hong Kong such as Louise Ho can affirm without stress in her poem “Island” (1997): We are a floating island Kept afloat by our own energy. (Xu and Ingham 2003, 298)

From Singapore, Edwin Thumboo (b. 1930), the virtual poet laureate of the island, has given voice to the sanguine side of the collective project of island modernity. His account is significant in how it adapts the Ulysses we have met in Dante and Tennyson to a southeast application. His poem “Ulysses by the Merlion” (1979) became a local classic almost as soon as it was published, and it is by now the most written-about poem from the island in any of its four main languages: English, Chinese, Malay, and Tamil. It is quoted in full below, with the author’s permission: Ulysses by the Merlion I have sailed many waters, Skirted islands of fire, Contended with Circe Who loved the squeal of pigs;

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The Merlion is a creature of myth—half lion, half fish—whose lion aspect alludes to the Sanskrit etymology for the name of the island (Singha-pura: Lion-city), while the fish aspect alludes to the island’s maritime history and economic networks. Virtually every living poet in Singapore has countered with a Merlion poem of his or her own. The trend began with a gendered response from Lee Tzu Pheng: “The Merlion to Ulysses,” from Lambada by Galilee and Other Surprises (1997). It offers a sharply antithetical stance toward the Thumboo poem, which assumes a public role for poetry in a developing island nation and celebrates a new role for the former British colony. This role is emblematic of a larger drive toward collective self-definition, which can be recognized as the local variation of a global aspiration for modernity. A European text of the 1940s provides a gloss on that larger drive. In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), the Frankfurt-based social theorists and philosophers Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno articulated a diagnostic account of the will to power that finds expression through purposive or instrumental rationality. This rationality applies itself diligently to the mobilization of resources, including the efficient mobilization of labor, toward the accumulation of capital. That drive tends toward the formation of a collective identity that can either grow spontaneously, as in Hong Kong, or be fostered consciously by a one-party state, as in Singapore. In Homer, as well as in Dante and in Tennyson, Ulysses tends to leave women behind in more ways than one. In Homer, Poseidon’s anger had to be placated, and leaving women behind was part of the collateral damage in getting home somehow. In the case of Dante’s and Tennyson’s Ulysses, an idealized and willful appetite for novelty is the motive for leaving them behind. In Thumboo’s “Ulysses by the Merlion,” the westward Columbiad of a Ulysses who had to abandon Ithaca once again in order to go beyond the Mediterranean is now brought to the East: Orientalism reversed with a vengeance, one might say. The Ulysses we encounter in Dante is solemn and dead; the Ulysses in Tennyson is glad and willing to die; the Ulysses in Thumboo’s poem is curious and willing to be amazed, divested of tragedy and even heroism, except in name. He is brought to the New World to validate the Merlion. And what are his credentials? Small islander, unwilling diasporic, and hard working as well as crafty improviser—all attributes that make him the ideal mythic candidate from the West to endorse the Eastern myth-to-be-made. Thumboo’s poem can be read as a thesis to which the Lee poem provides a sharp antithesis (cf. Patke 1998). It celebrates the resourcefulness, energy, and determination with which Singapore has converted its meager natural and human resources into technological, managerial, and material self-betterment. The process of symbolization by which the Merlion has become an icon—not just in the poetry but also in the public spaces of Singapore—can be recognized as a specific instance of the type of objectification that accompanies global modernity. For Horkheimer and Ador-

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no, Odysseus is an archetype of the bourgeois individual (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972, 43), as much from his assertions of selfhood as from his being compelled to wander, as if he were an ancestor to the modern economic motives underlying diasporic movement (of the kind that has constituted the polity in modern Singapore). Their version of the figure is apt for Singapore in the sense that it embodies, for our times, a Robinsonade that is driven by the principle of capitalist economy (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972, 61). The Ulysses represented by Thumboo embodies all these elements, and the assumptions that subsidize his poems are a compact, tacit vision (at once analeptic as well as proleptic) of how Singapore was migrated to, settled, and then developed into the thriving and busy metropolis that it has continued to become, decades after the poem was published, and onward into the foreseeable future. Lee provides resistance to this use of the Ulysses figure within a Singaporean context. Her poem, too, is quoted in full below, with her permission: The Merlion to Ulysses (on the latter’s visit in Edwin Thumboo’s “Ulysses by the Merlion”) You have made too many detours, blown by the officious winds of many a poet intent upon showing you the sights; hitching a ride upon your reputation. You have known it all already, beauty and beast have been your daily fare, shallows and delays the grounding of your ill-planned journey. How long since you proved productive and loyal, properly at home? You, wedded to adulterous adventure, indulging a monstrous taste for consorting with monsters? In this harbour now, you limping in, once again the victim of conspiracy, what do your exploits avail you? You think I belong to that misbegotten crew that urged your malingering? I am none of that ilk! I am the instant brainchild of a practical people, for whom the likes of you spell decadence, instability and dreams. Newly arrived you have already outstayed your welcome.

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Look how easy it is to sell you my story? Are you the warrior, or the gull? You seem amazed? Properly impressed? So—the important things of our world, you must admit, have not changed much at all. I am the scion of a wealthy race. I wear the silver armour of my moneyed people. Before you leave, O feckless wanderer, remember to respect my creators. (Lee 1997, 8–9)

The Lee poem chooses to ironicize Thumboo’s appropriation of Ulysses. It is done deftly and sardonically, but the subversion comes at a price. Dialectic of Enlightenment draws attention to the subject position in which women are confined by a masculine (and European) idea of civilization. This claim certainly applies to the way in which Ulysses uses the women he needs (Circe, Calypso, Nausicaä, even the Sirens, and Penelope), all of whom he leaves behind. It also explains part of the reason for the resistance Lee’s Merlion offers to patriarchy: both of the Greek and of the Singaporean kind. Thumboo’s allusion to Circe’s love of pigs shows how directly woman’s power over men can be equated with their debasement. Overturned, this hierarchy shows the feminine as an image of dominated nature. In Lee’s poem, beauty and beast merge into the Merlion. A passing observation from Horkheimer and Adorno is surprisingly apt in the context of Lee’s Merlion: “Out of her distortion emerges her essence. Beauty is the serpent that exhibits a wound in which a thorn was once embedded” (Horkheimer and Adorno 1972, 249). The radical alienation that enables critique in “The Merlion to Ulysses” is willing to forego or attenuate the affirmation of a polity that will suffice. It speaks in disenchantment: with the culture of buying and selling, with the machismo of Western myth, and with the very need to mythologize. Its verbal energy and satirical humor mobilize the sardonicism of the individual who would interrogate the group, the citizen who would question the patriarchal state, the traditionalist who would mourn some of the triumphs of modernity, the woman who would challenge the masculine way of doing things, with a respect for psychic well-being that would question the adequacy of material prosperity. The poem ends with an ambivalent admonition. Her Merlion is not a free agent; it is the embodiment of what the poet grudgingly accepts as a matter of fact, though she does not like it. The freedom of the mythic Ulysses, and his fecklessness, are undesirable. Her poem is about the tension and the antithesis between Singapore and about it that the myth resists, even while the poem wishes to be free of myths per se.

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Its alterity has as much to do with the non-materialist values of the relation between individuals out of which family and home are constituted in the Homeric world as with the individualistic and involuntary libertarianism of Dante’s or Tennyson’s or Thumboo’s centrifugal Ulysses. Almost despite itself, Lee’s poem cannot help revealing a trace of nostalgia for the values it would deny. They are roughly the same values that the antepenultimate part of Thumboo’s poem hopes to recuperate. That is the commonalty between the two poems, even as they keep their faces turned away from one another, still revealing how Odysseus, translated into Ulysses, can lend himself (or themselves) to new extrapolations, all focused on converting places into homes, and also on the seesaw between leaving homes behind and returning to them, in an allegory for which the open seas represent experience in all its amorphous variety (at once hopeful, apprehensive, and excited) and islands represent the piece of certainty you want to return to, or have already left behind.

FOUR Comparative Case Studies

The penultimate chapter of the book presents three case studies in pairs: medieval Iceland and post-Homeric Greece, ancient Japan and the colonial Caribbean, twentieth-century Ireland and twentieth-century Taiwan. Why pair island cultures far removed from one another in space and time? The aim is to suggest a kind of stereoscopy, which discovers commonalty amid much that is dissimilar. This commonalty provides a thematic perspective that respects the uniqueness of each island system and its poetic culture, while also showing how similar issues can arise in island cultures not otherwise connected. Thus, a paired view of Iceland and the Greek islands shows that a powerful poetic impulse can be at work during a specific period of history, which leaves a lasting and distinctive mark on all the cultural productions of that island, long after that specific phase of poetic creativity—and the unique circumstances that brought it into being—are over. Likewise, a paired reading of the islands of Japan and the Caribbean enables one to recognize how, once a specific kind of aesthetic sensibility has begun to develop through specific types of interaction between humans and their island environment at an early stage of the island’s cultural history, that sensibility produces a poetics that then shapes the approach to creativity of that island people through most of their subsequent history. And politics, with its imposition of cultures and languages upon adjacent peoples, as in Ireland and Taiwan, shows how island poets work out their ways of dealing with the force of the political on their own terms. The first pair foregrounds a formative legacy that lays the foundation for collective identity formation; the second foregrounds the development of a distinctive poetics, as part of a larger aesthetics that encompasses more than art into daily living; the third foregrounds the ways in which island poets cope with the political urgencies of their time and place, in the form of reflections on, as well as 115

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resistance to, the insistent pressure in times of political crisis for a nation or a people that art should set aside everything else in order to deal with the demands of the political. 4.1 ISLAND LEGACIES: ICELAND AND GREECE The Poetry of the North The folk and literary cultures of Scandinavia, Iceland, and the British Isles give great prominence to the role of islands in narratives that mix the genres of legendary history, verse saga, ballad, lyric, and narrative. This is unsurprising given the seafaring histories of the region. In myth, legend, and folktale, islands serve the function of providing a lair, shrine, or sanctuary to an assortment of nonhuman entities, whether magical or divine, monstrous or beneficent. For example, the island of Heligoland was known to be sacred to a god named Fosite (Chadwick 2000, 256). Zealand, Denmark’s largest island, was referred to in the Germania of Tacitus (AD 98) as the island location for the cult of Nerthus, worshipped by several tribes of the regions. The rituals and symbolism of these rites bear some resemblance to the cults of Cybele in Phrygia and the Roman cult of the Terra Mater (McKinnell 2005, 52). In Scandinavian saga literature, islands are often the site for magicalheroic conflicts between human heroes and nonhuman (often female) entities. For example, Grettir was a historical Icelander of the early eleventh century who was made an outlaw by a curse from the monstrous Glámr and then was forced to retreat to the island of Drangey; despite its tall cliffs, he did not remain safe there for long and met his death on that bleak island (McKinnell 2005, 133). In another legend, the young Christian hero Ásmundur had to defeat the heathen Þorgerður Höldatröll (who lived on an island in the north). He won three trials of endurance and received a triple reward: the heathen was sent into exile, his daughter Hlaðvör became his bride, and she happened to be a Christian convert, thus bringing Christianity to the region (McKinnell 2005, 235). In such narratives, the role of islands depends on specific combinations of four factors: an island’s location in the sea, its relation to the nearest continental land mass, its relation to other adjacent islands and archipelagos, and its relation to the ever-present sea in all weathers. The northern sea figures prominently in all the poetic traditions of the region in a manner that evokes its physical experience as a bracing and vital as well as potentially dangerous but exhilarating reality. The tacit understanding in these narratives is that water is what surrounds you when you leave land behind, and how you deal with that continual interaction is always part of your fate and destiny.

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In the celebrated Beowulf, a long poem composed in Old English sometime during the eighth and ninth centuries (and surviving in a single manuscript that scholars believe was copied in the decade after 1000 AD in England), the narrative is set in the Denmark of a much older era, the North German heroic age of the fifth and sixth centuries AD. Part of the action of the poem is set in the town of Lejre on the island of Zealand, where the great hall of the king of the Danes, Hrothgar, has been harried by a monster for a dozen years before the young dragon slayer Beowulf comes to the rescue. The action is intense and interspersed with much legendary history of strife between Danes, Geats, and Swedes. The poetry evokes a physical world of wind, snow, and ice whose elemental presence is part of a worldview that sees our existence on Earth as a kind of “island solitude,” to use the phrase from Wallace Stevens (quoted previously) that captures succinctly the poignancy attached to mortal existence. It is a pagan world, written about in a later time that is full of the new sense of having been Christianized. It is also, primarily, a heroic and a tragic world. J. R. R. Tolkien articulated this dual recognition memorably in a lecture delivered in 1937 by evoking a world that comprises the eormengrund, the great earth, ringed with garsecg, the shoreless sea, beneath the sky’s inaccessible roof; whereon, as in a little circle of light about their halls, men with courage as their stay went forward to that battle with the hostile world. (Tolkien 1984, 18)

Sailing required much stamina and forbearance before landfall could be made again, as reckoned by The Seafarer (a fascinating poem that was composed in northern England sometime during the ninth or early tenth century), which evokes a vivid sense of the sea, wind, and ships: Terrible rolling of waves where narrow night watch has often got me at the vessel’s prow while she pitches past the cliffs. (North et al. 2011, 187–88)

Moving our focus from nature to human relations, we note that in the world of the northern sagas, islands are good for trade but even better for looting. They can be given as gifts or taken by force. They offer succor from troubles at home, and they make room for exiles and self-exiles. Islands also provide, or seem to provide, options for a better, or a safer, or a less oppressed—even if harder—livelihood. They were places that the various peoples of the seafaring north ended up on when least expecting to find them, or else proved more or less what the northerners were looking for when setting sail in the general direction of a legend, a refuge, or a new home. In his late nineteenth-century account of Icelandic literature, George Saintsbury remarked that this was a world that developed in relative isolation from the rest of Europe, and its unique culture of the north, along with all its attendant typologies, was corroborated by a new

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literature that reproduced with great fidelity “the rough Germanic virtue exasperated to sheer ferocity” and “the grey firths, the ice- and foamfretted skerries of Iceland” (Saintsbury 1897, 335). The sagas of the north, in all their variety, make room for an island as the apt mise-en-scène for ventures and misadventures. The saga of Egil Skallagrimsson, for example, invites like-minded individuals to join the warrior-poet in his skirmishing raids: Where will I find generous men, who beyond the sea that, nailed with islands, girds the earth, showered snows of silver on to my hands where hawks perch, in return for my words of praise? (Thorsson 2000, 166)

The image of a sea nailed by islands, girding the planet, is striking and wide angled in its vision, and it could be a commonplace of that culture. Such poetry celebrates in the guise of gratitude, as from a scop to his master, forms of doing and finding that entailed toil and hardship and often ended in violence and tragedy. In such poetry, an island can help the poet blur the distinction between the man of action and the man of words, between the poet as maker and his seafaring protagonist. It is obvious that without the poet, the exploits at sea would be lost to posterity; it is also evident that the writing brings self-awareness to the actions it evokes, as when a protagonist is made the speaker of his own song. Effacing himself, the poet would have his hero speak in person of the killing he leads, for example, on the island of Herdla, where thirteen men died; they are spoken of through an unusual metaphor that likens them to the “pines of the sea’s golden moon” (Thorsson 2000, 106). The pine image suggests strength, uprightness, and close bonds of proximity and being like-minded. The sea’s golden moon evokes a moonlit night sky that bathes them—perhaps in armor—with a golden light: the gold— apart from being a simple color referent—could also perhaps imply a projection or anticipation of the loot they hope to acquire. Some of the imagery is derived from motifs shared across cultures, but their force here remains as vivid as the narrative is violent. Men killed are like pines felled, and the booty to be won shines like golden moonlight over waves at night. The islands where such attacks were launched, and the seas crossed at the bidding of such lust, became part of a myth making in which the bard or minstrel composing his narrative in the thirteenth century collaborates with a protagonist whose deeds were over and done with several hundred years before that, perhaps sometime in the second half of the ninth century AD.

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The World of the Icelandic Sagas Iceland is unique in a number of ways: it was settled relatively late, in comparison to Ireland, or the northern Scottish islands. Its history follows a sequence from the establishment of settlements (c. 870 AD) to the consolidation of its cultural history (with a significant role in that for the writing down of its oral traditions of praise poetry and sagas in verse and prose) to Christianization (c. 1300 AD), to a long period of foreign rule (1262–1918), then gradual devolution, and eventually, the declaration of an independent republic—very recently, for a nation on the European periphery—in 1944. Iceland is also distinctive for the manner in which its inheritance of Germanic and Norse mythology was assimilated into localized traditions fairly early in its history of settlement. These verse and prose narratives, songs, and poems were written down for the first time during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They became a bedrock of myth, legend, and narrative, whose overall homogeneity stands out among the cultural productions of Europe for its vivid evocation of a world of hardship, endeavor, strife, tragedy, and heroism, in which the historical and the fictive are seamlessly one. This medieval legacy created a powerful sense of community that has proved enduring: capable of sustaining a sense of historical inheritance unaffected by the conversion of Iceland to Christianity, and durable enough to survive the relative impoverishment of cultural activity during the long period of Norwegian and Danish rule. Jane Smiley, in her preface to The Sagas of Icelanders (2000), describes the world of saga literature as cohesive to the degree that each narrative bears a family resemblance to almost all the other narratives of the period (Thorsson 2000, xii). How did that creative boom of slightly more than two centuries come about? Early sightings of Iceland did not add up to true settlement. They included the account of “Ultima Thule”—a land at the margin of the known world, where the sun never sets in summer—by the Greek explorer Pytheas of Marseilles (fourth century BC), who might have had Iceland or some other northern location in mind. Accidental landings by sailors blown off course or lost in the northern seas, and brief sojourns by medieval Irish monks looking for summer solitude and wilderness, did not add up to much, either. Settlement, when it began from the ninth century AD onward—whether by Norsemen displaced from their recent and tenuous Scottish or Irish settlements or by Norsemen displaced or induced away from their homes in Norway once King Harald began to unify Norway under his rule after 870 AD—was a consequence of the Scandinavian appetite for exploration and loot in the Viking era (Karlsson 2000, 11). The settlement of Iceland was more or less complete between 870 to 930 AD. Life on the island had to contend with much hardship and toil, many privations and frustrations. Managing life in a bleak, sparsely populated environment cannot have been easy for building, farming, herd-

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ing, or fishing. But the long winters proved conducive to storytelling in verse and prose. And poets were very important members of society: its historians and journalists, respected and honored in their own time as bards without whose work heroic deeds might pass into oblivion. Iceland, in particular, was famous for its bards, whose services were sought after throughout the region, and especially in Norway (Short 2010, 165). Two compilations of saga literature have played a major role in the transmission of the Icelandic legacy: the work known as the Prose Edda, by Snorri Sturluson (dating from the early thirteenth century AD), and a manuscript known as the Codex Regius (dating from c. 1270 AD), which comprises a compilation—from anonymous sources of oral origin—of twenty-nine poems now known collectively as the Poetic Edda. The manuscript was discovered in the seventeenth century and has had a lasting influence on subsequent writing that derives inspiration from, and finds itself drawn by a natural affinity toward, the Old Norse traditions, as in the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien and Seamus Heaney. The poetry of medieval Ireland was composed in two genres: Eddaic verse or skaldic verse. Eddaic verse is composed in alliterative stanzas and tackles mythological and heroic subjects, whereas skaldic poetry is largely praise poetry celebrating the deeds of specific noblemen, or past heroic achievements (O’Donoghue 2004, 62–63). The metrical forms used in skaldic and Eddaic (or Eddic) verse— especially in the former—are complex. As in the traditions of Germanic and Anglo-Saxon verse, they combine alliteration and patterns of stress and assonance, with a rich figurative play of the kind known as kenning, which involves using oblique associative substitutions for what is done through straightforward noun references in ordinary speech: for example, “battle-sweat” for “blood,” “sleep of the sword” for “death,” and “sail road” for “sea” (as in Beowulf). The result of using kennings in complex meters, combined with alliteration and a free use of word-order changes of the kind easier to manage in a highly inflected language such as Old Norse, created a poetic idiom as difficult as a riddle and as exalted as a gift from the god Odin ought to be. Such concentrated and complex poetry accounts for why poets occupied a cherished and honorable position in Norse society. Their role is acknowledged at the very beginning of Heimskringla: History of the Kings of Norway, by Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241). His historical narrative is interspersed with skaldic verse. The following is part of the account of how Óláf Tryggvason harried the British islands from every direction in a series of raids: The bender-of-the-bow then let British islanders perish, Irishmen eke—was he eager ever for glory. (Sturluson 2009, 169–70)

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Alliteration creates a powerful effect in listening to such verse. It was also a great help as a mnemonic device for poets composing in an oral culture. The alliteration goes hand in hand with a pattern of strong beats or emphases: often it is the alliterated sounds that also carry the strong stress. This creates a more heavily marked rhythm. The brevity of the verse line also helps keep the narrative at a vigorous pace. The adjectival element is minimal, and the momentum of the narrative is carried by the verbs and substantives. The intensity and opacity of skaldic verse also embellishes The Sagas of Icelanders. Here is an example (from chapter 58 of Egil’s Saga) to illustrate how kenning, combined with syntactic irregularities that the skald delighted in using, created a verse texture dense and encrusted with allusions: With its chisel of snow, the headwind, scourge of the mast, mightily hones its file by the prow on the path that my sea-bull treads. (Thorsson 2000, xxx)

To point in the direction of the sense that this might make if rearranged, Robert Kellogg provides this version of the above stanza: The opposite-rowing giant of the mast strikes hard, a file before the prow, with a chisel of sudden hail out on the smooth road of the young prow bull. (Thorsson 2000, xxx)

That the text in translation should need this rephrasing—and it certainly makes it easier to follow what is going on in the verse—should suffice to show how dense and complex kenning can be: a delight to those initiated into its highly condensed and imaginative training, but fairly opaque to the casual or the untrained reader. As for the Poetic Edda, it begins with an oracular poem, “Völuspá,” which provides a fascinating account of creation, followed by an account of how the gods were attacked by giants and monsters who threatened destruction to the gods and their creation of a cosmos out of chaos. Later, the earth rises again from the sea, cleansed, to be repopulated by a new generation of gods and humans. The world of both Eddas is full of the strife endemic to the Viking era. The violence characteristic of the Northern sagas is epitomized in a poem about the Battle of Clontarf (1014 AD), which occurs toward the end of the most complex and fascinating of medieval Icelandic tales, Njal’s Saga. The poem occurs in the text shortly after the death of Brian, high king of Ireland, and the death of his son and grandson, in a battle near Dublin against an alliance of Norse forces that they managed to defeat, though they paid for the Pyrrhic victory with their lives:

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The grim foreboding of the poem alerts us to the fate of islands in a culture based on aggression and conflict. In the Iceland of the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, we deal not with a poem here and a poem there that has an island reference to its theme or topic but an entire era, lasting several hundred years, during which poetry became the primary repository of an island’s history and culture, embracing the totality of its way of life—the bleakness with the grandeur, the isolation with the close-knit sense of a community intermeshed in love and war, desire and contestation—and all of it cherished by the people of the island, recited and heard by all the island’s population, through many dark winters, long before it was copied and then read in parchment and book. The Post-Homeric Poetry of the Greek Islands There is more than Homer to the poetry of the Greek mainland and islands, but it has not been easy for either later poets or readers to retain a strong sense of this possibility, given the powerful hold on the imagination exercised by the two Homeric epics. In his long shadow, later poets have played variations, showing how the fate for an entire culture of writing becomes that of the epigoni once a giant has loomed over the horizon. We shall trace the outline of his shadow as it falls on a few representative poems. This is but one among many strands that constitute poetry in Greece after Homer. We pick up this strand at its latter end, in the early twentieth century, and without trying to claim that it is the only, or even the most, dominant trait in modern Greek poetry, we note how it articulates a sense of belatedness and melancholia, either inscribing marginalia into the after-history of the Homeric cast of characters or giving voice to various forms of melancholia. The one exception, in respect of melancholia, is the magnificent sequel to Homer from the Crete-born Nikos Kazantzakis. His massive poem, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel (1958), assimilates the spirit of Homer and develops it in a direction where there is more inwardness and reflectiveness to the protagonist, and a more passionate and romantic willingness to represent states of mind, moods, and feelings, of which the ones concerning an island—as a home to be left behind, as a home dreamed of, and as a home dreamed of returning to—are particularly memorable. His sequel picks up where Homer ends, and the direction it takes is the one laid out

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by Dante from a hint in Homer. This Odysseus soon realizes that he must leave Ithaca behind. The island as home is thus seen from the reverse end of a telescope, as something to row away from. The evocations are no less powerful for that. Kazantzakis abandoned the fifteen-syllable seven-beat rhythm familiar to contemporary readers of modern Greek poetry (the equivalent in Greek to the blank verse of English poetry), adopting a meter of seventeen syllables and eight beats to a verse line. Kimon Friar translates it with admirable fluency and vigor. In this long poem, any island seen and remembered is the inheritance not of one individual but of an entire group, as in the case of the band of sailors who row for Odysseus, remembering what the home island feels like: “fragrance of wild thyme drifted down the mountain slopes, / odor of vines and ripening grain, and smothered their minds” (Kazantzakis 1958, 70). Such evocations occur frequently in the poem and show a love for the Mediterranean that ties Kazantzakis closely to Homer, regardless of the centuries that separate their verses. Kazantzakis writes always as a Cretan, and his beloved island and its turbulent history—at the intersection of the sea roads linking Asia and Africa to Greece and the European mainland—looms large in all his writing. The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel also finds many occasions to represent the island in a gendered vocabulary that allows for a conflation of military and sexual conquest, as in Book VI: From their far shores the males once sniffed Crete’s female scent and came to spy the island out, to smell it, touch it. (Kazantzakis 1958, 190)

We might say of Kazantzakis that he makes of belatedness a virtue, turning it to prodigiously energetic ends. The darker side of belatedness comes up with poets of a less sanguine cast of mind. The poem “How Young” by C. G. Karyotakis (1896–1928) states a paradox: the generation represented by the speaking voice of the poem is aware of its own youth, and yet it is laden by a sense of being at the very end of things. The final stanza reiterates a sense of abandonment for which the image provided by the poet is of a castaway isolated on a rock in some distant sea. The poet wonders what he and his generation have done: “that we are all so fugitive, so quenched, and still so young!” (Constantine et al. 2010, 482). It may not be irrelevant to add, in support of the notion that poets don’t simply invent the predicaments we read about in their poems, that the poem referred to above may be seen to have a direct bearing on the fact that Karyotakis committed suicide at the age of thirty-three. One of his final poems, alluding in its title to the town in which he killed himself, “Preveza,” speaks of death through a series of analogies, as cranes bumping into walls, as a shabby street with a resonant name. It is surprising— or, perhaps, not so surprising—that modern Greek poems bring up a feeling of bitterness or bemusement in relation to sea-voyaging, as if in

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recognition of all the voyages that have gone before. The several sections of the sequence Mythistorema (Mythical Narrative, 1935) by George Seferis (1900–1971) declares a sense of being trapped in an endless series of repetitions. Poem 21 is explicit about the relation of the present to the past: We, still upright on our feet, are dying, affiliated in stone united in hardness and weakness, the ancient dead have escaped the circle and risen again and smile in strange silence. (Seferis 1995, 25)

The oxymoron of the first quoted line is telling: they are standing upright, they are alive, and yet they always feel that they are dying. The dying suggests a sense of futility and secondariness, of feeling belated. This sense of belatedness, which is shared by several modern Greek poets after the Homeric era, is captured precisely in the melancholic allegory of writing from C. P. Cavafy’s delicious prose poem “The Ships.” In it, the entire project of making or finding value in the vocation of poetry is articulated through the figure of sailing from and to an island port. The difficultly of the process and the uncertainty of the outcome are all noted in elaborate detail. The poem ends with an allusion to bigger ships that sail past the frail boats of the present, or are seen from a distance: We recall that these verses are part of the song sung by the sailors, who were beautiful like heroes from the Iliad, when the great, the sublime ships were passing us by and sailed on—who knows where to. (Cavafy n.d.)

The great big ships of the Homeric era sail by, and the epigoni can only watch in wonder and a sense of feeling little. The past is too massive a weight to bear without groaning. What made it possible, and how its magic worked, is somehow beyond the ken of the later poets. Even their admiration is muted by a sense of exclusion from the old magic. 4.2 ISLAND POETICS: JAPAN AND THE CARIBBEAN The Logic of Comparison The islands of Japan and the islands of the Caribbean might seem to be nothing like one another. One has had a history of complex, intricately sophisticated but isolated development followed by a more recent foray—brief, tragic, and violent—into imperial conquest. The other has had a long and brutal history of displacement, subjugation, and enforced labor. Yet they can be put together in a kaleidoscopic view of islands because each has evolved an aesthetics that is rooted in history and binds

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all its cultural productions and processes into what may be described as a homogenous whole, which, without discounting the internal variety within each whole, makes each poetics stand out for its distinctiveness. One aspect of that uniqueness concerns the manner in which the smaller relates to the larger. On the one hand, this is illustrated by Japanese poetic culture in relation to the adjacent mainland cultures of Asia, and especially China (everything from Zen and poetry to the tea ceremony). On the other hand, this is also illustrated by Caribbean culture in relation to its long history of exploitation by European nations, and its sense of the adjacency to the American continents: North and South (leading, for example, to exploration of how the music of the islands spread to the Americas). Those topics—in all their richness and complexity—would need more space than we have room for here. Instead, we shall explore a second aspect: the development of an aesthetics that arose in these island cultures. In the case of the Caribbean it is based on the burden of history. In the case of Japan, it is based on the correlation between nature and human society, which finds a modern articulation in the notion of Fūdo: the idea or ideal of a balance between climate and sustainability, the respectfully harmonious blending that mankind might seek with the life of nature. Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō (1889–1960) from the 1920s (Tetsurō 1961, 1) elaborated this idea. The two strands of this chapter come together when the focus on representative figures from Japan and the Caribbean shows how a struggle with their craft (as much as a struggle with history) can lead to a poetics of engagement with nature in which the human concerns and preoccupations that propel writing engage in sustained conversation with their respective ecosystems, which speak when we learn to listen to them, teaching us to see them with discernment for the plenitude they offer. For the poets of the Caribbean, the reconciliation with their ecosystem entails a laying to rest of the ghosts of history, which is a history of enforced or involuntary diaspora. Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s remark in relation to the poetry of Grace Nichols has a much broader application that covers all the poetry of the Caribbean: By tracing a connection to the past through ancestry and genealogy, a characteristic trope of postcolonial writing is that it destabilizes the universalizing (and dehumanizing) narrative of colonial history, these writers make a familial claim to space that naturalizes the process of diaspora. (DeLoughrey 2007, 23)

Japan and the Dimension of the Aesthetic The opening lines of the second verse from the oldest chronicle of Japan, the Kojiki (The Records of Ancient Matters), which was composed in the early eighth century AD by the nobleman Ō no Yasumaro, at the request of Empress Gemmei, allude to Japan as “the Great Land of Eight-

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fold Isles” (Held 2014, 10). In the poetry of the period, and in subsequent ages, the recognition that the country comprises several islands is largely implicit rather than matter for explicit mention. Torquil Duthie, in an essay on “Songs of the Records and Chronicles,” remarks upon a disjunction between content and context in many of the songs included in the Kojiki. One of those songs, which is recited by Emperor Nintoku on a journey to find his consort Kurohime, enumerates the islands he claims to see from the cape of Naniwa: Self-Congealing Island, Foam Island, and Palm Tree Island. These are the mythical islands created by the gods Izanagi and Izanami, as narrated in the very beginning of the Kojiki (Shirane et al. 2016, 43). The contemporaneous anthology, the Man’yōshū (Collection of a Myriad Leaves), compiled by Ōtomo no Yakamochi (c. 716–785 AD), is the first and longest of Japan’s anthologies devoted exclusively to poetry. It provides many examples of the role played by islands in the poetry from earliest times to the eighth century AD. It also lays the foundations for the later practice of poetry, even though some of its longer poetic forms were abandoned by subsequent poets in preference for shorter forms. Islands figure in this anthology in a combination of two basic approaches: a visual contemplation of an island encountered in travel, which singles out a distinctive feature of its ecosystem, and a more abstract evocation of atmosphere and environment, which establishes a correlation with the mood, sentiment, or reflection on life that instigates the poem. A common variation on the theme of islands involves the figure of a soldier or guard, stationed at a northern outpost such as Kyushu or the islands of Oki and Tsushima, feeling distant from home and family, for whom the contemplation of an island provides a focalizing lens for a sense of loneliness. This recurrent motif generates a typical situation for poets who reflect on exile, or poets forced on journeys that take them away from home and family on matters over which there was no choice but to travel to a distant destination: Every time an island point disappears from view, And at each and every turn— Ever thinking of home, I have come Throughout the long and weary days of travel. (Man’yōshū 1965, 194–95, VI: 942–45)

In their introduction to the anthology From the Country of Eight Islands (1981), Hiroaki Sato and Burton Watson point out that as poetic methods developed to bridge observation to abstraction, from the twelfth to the early fourteenth century AD, the aesthetic criterion of yūgen came to the forefront of the aim in writing poetry, and this idea entailed “the representation of the ineffable or the unseen, a summoning up of what lies beneath the surface of perceived nature” (Sato and Watson 1981, xxxvi). The ideals of art that developed in Japan during the Heian and subse-

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quent periods, when poetry contests were very popular, connected the visual and verbal arts with ritualized arrangements such as the tea ceremony and the landscaping of gardens. With reference to the latter, Haruo Shirane points out, in Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons, that landscaping became an integral part of poetry as a cultural pursuit: miniature island landscapes were created as settings and backdrops, complete with sandy shores and coves for the performance of poetry (Shirane 2012, 93). The idea of islandness acquired a significant role in the aestheticization of nature. The result was a systematic attempt at the integration of nature and art, accompanied by a corresponding integration of the visual and verbal arts with landscaping and the practical crafts: the use of lake islands as talismanic landscapes, whether in palace gardens or in shrines and temples of the Heian period, with the edge of the island constructed to resemble a beach (Shirane 2012, 144–45). The popularity of longer and linked verse forms such as renku faded, and a preference for short verse forms from the old waka tradition, such as the tanka (poem in thirty-one syllables with the pattern 5-7-5-7-7) and the haiku (three-line poem with a 5-7-5 syllable pattern), prevailed. The haiku (or hokku) was originally the opening section of the linked-verse form known as renga (alternate compositions by two or more poets, with the syllabic count of 5-7-5 followed by 7-7). Its popularity consolidated that aspect of the poetic tradition that prized brevity and economy, encouraging poets to strip off verbiage toward the barest minimum of expressive content. Give this predilection, the conventional ways in which islands provided visual stimulus for moods and emotions implied rather than stated explicitly can be illustrated with a private poem, the voice of the solitary poet sharing an image and a thought with his readers. This is a poem by Kakinomoto No Hitomaro (c. 708–15 AD): we are on a small island off the coast of Sanuki, one of the four provinces of Shikoku (or Iyo, as it was called in the past). The poem evokes none of the props of what was to become the long and cherished tradition of poetic representation in subsequent Japanese poetry—no grass tossed like waves at sea, nor the change of seasons, nor blossoms, wind, rain, snow, or moonlight reflecting inner with outer weather. Instead, we have a storm at sea that brings the poet and his band of sailors to the famous island of Samine. There are many islands to choose from, and they decide to build a hut by its rocky shore. Once ashore, the poet sees a man stretched out on the grass, lying still, as if asleep, his head pillowed by the rough ground of the shore. He lies face down, so it is not obvious at first whether he is sleeping or dead. He has no pillow but the sands of the shore, and nothing for company but the unceasing sound of waves. It does not take him long to realize that the man is dead: hence the poem’s title: “Upon seeing a dead man among the rocks on the island of Samine in Sanuki.” The poem turns to musings that take the form of a one-sided conversation with the dead man, expressing concern for the wife who

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must be missing him. If the poet only knew where the dead man lived, he would go and tell his wife about his fate. She, too, might not know where he went; otherwise she might have gone looking for him. But now he has no choice and can only reflect on the thought: “she must be waiting / with anxious, yearning heart” (Carter 1991, 34). From the evidence of what the eye sees to what the mind broods over, the movement of the poem is both dramatic and subtle, surprise modulated into compassion, regret transformed into a wistful speculation that is also an assumption of how—had death not intervened—the island might have been an apt locale for the pair of husband-wife to explore, gathering the local starworts. The poem would have us suppose that musing over what could have been might reframe the island in our perceptions not simply as the locale for a death far away from home but also as a place that might have deserved a visit if only a wife had news of her husband, and if only he were alive. Regret at what has happened and speculation on what can never happen thus combine to create an effect that stops short of alleviation, while offering to redress loss, at least in part, through compassion and through the conjugation of the unexpected with the conceivable dimension of an unrealized possibility. Moving from the ancient period of Japanese literature to the seventeenth century, we encounter the magical personality and writing of Matsuo Bashō (1644–1694). In his life and in the record of his travels across Japan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (1689–1691), he created a seamless mix of prose and verse, known as haibun, which exemplifies all the virtues of what might be described as a Japanese poetics: the movement from observation to reflection, done with minimal detail, with only the slightest hint of all the affective features that such details betoken. The overall feeling is of self-aware gladness, of nuanced appreciation, of a sensibility alert and attuned to every aspect and fluctuation of nature. Here is an example in which the short verse lines are embedded in a longer prose account of how he came to Ojima Island, saw a number of cottages scattered among the pine trees, and realized how different this scene felt from his ordinary way of life. The poem, by his companion Sora, is so compact, that without the prose context a large part of the wider connotation gets elided: Clear voice cuckoo Even you will need The silver wings of a crane To span the islands of Matsushima. (Bashō 1966, 166)

The prose and the poem complement one another from opposite angles. The remarkable emphasis on elided feeling—implied, not repressed—can be illustrated from a poem by the distinguished painter-poet Yosa Buson

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(1715–1783). He alludes to Bashō in writing thus about Matsushima’s island-dotted bay: people are looking at the moon over Matsushima empty shells. (Crowley 2007, 68)

It is worth stressing that such poetry leaves a huge amount of what might have been said unsaid. The brevity is extreme; so is the elision of connections and explications. An image is presented, but even that presentation verges on the abstract. So much more is latent or incipient, but it is not to be stated—that would be too crude and insensitive and verbose and overexplicit. That is not the way of yūgen. However, the untrained reader does need help, and help is at hand: see what a difference it can make. It is as if a key had unlocked a door, or a clear window had opened where one had found only an opaque wall. The compressed expression needs unpacking, and Crowley is helpful: “He compares his own experience to an empty shell: hollow and inadequate to the task of responding to the sublime vision of the moon” (Crowley 2007, 68). Going back to the poem, it reads better after one has read the explication, but the explanation is not the poem. The resistance to transparent access, the desire to stand back from crossing every “t” and dotting every “i,” earns our respect, however grudgingly. One could multiply the examples endlessly, but there is hardly any need to belabor the point: this is a poetry whose aesthetics makes a virtue out of extreme economy and places an enormous emphasis on the subtlety of response with which the human observer responds to every nuance of the natural world, the cultivation of which can become the life-goal of acquiring miyabi, the ideal of a refined sensibility that values elegance. Feeling, but expressed obliquely; observation, but always intent on what eludes the corner of the eye; statement, but unobtrusive, underplayed, and always leaving more unsaid than said; and an overall semblance of elegant simplicity, always capable of hidden depths, but only as an implication, suggestion, and intimation from what is put out there in mere words—as seemingly simple and yet richly complex as a tea ceremony. And when the simplicity focused on incipience, incompleteness, on that which evades, avoids, or voids closure, completion, and finality, rondure or fulfillment, then one would expect to cherish process over product: the ideal of wabi-sabi, the finding fulfillment in the not-yet-fulfilled, with sabi referring to the aesthetic pleasure discoverable in scenes of solitariness or desolation and the pleasure in contemplating the faded, the old, the solitary (de Bary et al. 2001, 367). The result aimed for is a simple and stark beauty, the beauty of that which is irregular and incomplete but obliquely suggestive of rich interpretive possibilities (de Bary et al. 2001, 390).

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The concept of wabi added to that pleasure the appreciation of everything that is the opposite of plenitude, including attenuation and the reduction of every attribute or resource to a minimum, which then stands out for the preciousness of the scarce, the slender, and the slim, that which is past its prime, desiccated, sere, cold, but also severe and pure (de Bary et al., 391). When the aesthetic impulse leads to a sense of stasis or equipoise or balance, then that would be to arrive at another related ideal—that of being full of furyu—while the activity or process of accomplishing much, but doing so with the most unobtrusive means, would arrive at the attribute of being shibui. A Poetics for the Caribbean In the case of Japan, we have looked mostly at the period of literary history from the seventh to the seventeenth centuries. Making poetry in the Caribbean has a much more recent beginning. That is due to the history of the systems of slavery and indentured labor with which the islands of the Caribbean were populated by European colonists once the original inhabitants had been decimated through exploitation and contagion. The nomadism of those aboriginal inhabitants, which sustained human populations living off the land and water without depleting their natural resources in unsustainable fashion, was displaced by the rapacious attitude to the natural environment of the European colonists. The global networks that developed after Columbus had landed in the outer Bahamas—thinking he had arrived in Asia—spread more than religion from the so-called Old World to the so-called New World: what reached the New World included plants, crops, animals, slaves, and diseases, to many of which the inhabitants of the New World had no resistance (Wolf 2010, 3). Numbers can be misleading, but they do provide a sense of scale and magnitude: according to The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (online), in almost 36,000 slaving voyages over a period of 375 years (1500–1875), more than 12.5 million Africans were transported forcibly across the Atlantic. Of that number, more than four million were transported to the islands of the Caribbean, more than half of that number by the British. The Portuguese had taken the lead in the slave trade, followed by the Spanish; in the Caribbean, imported slave labor subsidized the plantation economies of the British, French, Dutch, and other European colonial powers that followed the Portuguese and the Spanish into the region. In Poetics of Relation (1997), Édouard Glissant recollects how slave ships, when given chase at sea, would drop some of their cargo of slaves to lighten the load and enable escape. The slaves thrown overboard would be weighted with balls and chains, and these can be found still lying at the bottom of the Atlantic. From there, they constitute a kind of beginning for the history of Caribbean cultures after Columbus, “a begin-

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ning whose time is marked by these balls and chains gone green” (Glissant 1997, 6). The motif of slaves thrown overboard for other reasons, such as getting rid of sick slaves so that insurance collected on goods lost at sea might substitute for the loss of revenue that their sale might have fetched when sold in the plantations of the Caribbean and the Americas, becomes a powerful driving force behind the passionate Zong! (2008) by M. NourbeSe Philip (b. 1947), who was born in Woodlands, Moriah (Trinidad and Tobago), and is settled in Canada. Likewise, David Dabydeen’s title poem from Turner: New and Selected Poems (1994) critiques the apotheosis of art celebrated on behalf of the English painter J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), with reference to the oil painting Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) (1840, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). This painting was extolled lavishly by the English writer John Ruskin (1819–1900), unmindful of the ambiguity of emphasis and focus in Turner’s painting, between the slaves thrown overboard as represented in the foreground and the magnificent display of fiery sky and turbulent ocean that seems to dominate the painting. The latter became the primary focus of Ruskin’s praise, and Dabydeen expends a considerable part of his bitterness on how aesthetics came to prevail over compassion and guilt. Once brought to the plantations of the Caribbean, the living conditions of slaves were extremely restrictive, the work demanded of them exorbitant. Given that slaves were brought over from different regions of West Africa, neither the mix of languages nor the hard working conditions were conducive to the growth of a unified linguistic community. Over time, through successive generations, Creolization became the linguistic norm. Literacy was nonexistent for slaves through most of the period of slavery. The conditions needed for the development of an indigenous culture were thus among the most inimical anywhere in world history. The creation of poetry, the giving voice to their own circumstances and history, became a matter of long-deferred and painful selfrecovery, which occurred haltingly and in many tongues, all of them a hybrid mix of African linguistic memories and indigenous rhythms overlaid by the five languages of the colonialists—Portuguese, Spanish, English, French, and Dutch—and a number of Creole languages: Spanish in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico; French in Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and French Guyana; Dutch in the islands of Aruba, Curaçao, Saint Maarten, Bonaire, Saint Eustatius, and Saba; English in Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Trinidad, and Tobago (and, on the mainland, in Guyana); and Papiamento, a Portuguese- and Spanish-based Creole language, which is spoken in Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao. In the afterword to her first volume of poetry, titled She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (1989), M. NourbeSe Philip identifies a

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need to find voice, and the difficulty in doing so, for poets from the Caribbean. She notes that while, in time, the people of the Caribbean could move away from slavery, they couldn’t really transcend that experience until it was broken down and reassembled in their consciousness through metaphor and language. For that to be possible, the language of the colonizer had to be mastered, disassembled, and reconstituted afresh on terms that felt appropriate to the conditions in the postcolony (Philip 1989, 81–83). Attempting that—she argues—would bring the islands of the Caribbean into focus. Another writer from the region, writing at the same time as Philip, helps us understand what would then be brought into focus. In his remarkable book, The Repeating Island (1989, 1992, 1996), Antonio BenítezRojo (1931–2005) proposes to make sense of the complexity of the Caribbean, and the striving for voice and language, as capable of crystallizing again and again the idea of a “repeating island.” The obvious question gets an interesting answer: “But what is it that repeats? Tropisms, in series; movements in approximate directions” (Benítez-Rojo 1996, 4). The idea of a repeating island encompasses the manner in which poetry, song, music, and dance are all part of a singular cultural heterogeneity, to which, in an interview, he attributes the quality of “polyrhythmic density” (Benítez-Rojo 2003). In the same interview, he remarks on how the notion of Creolization—which many people associate purely with hybrid language development—can be extended to apply to the unified diversity of Caribbean cultural processes and artifacts. The creation of a new poetic idiom built on accepting and more than accepting—defending as well as celebrating a hybrid culture through a hybrid language—has been the driving force behind the career of many poets from the Caribbean. Édouard Glissant wrote of the capacity of Creolization to encompass a virtually limitless and open-ended synthesis of linguistic differences in his concept of métissage (Glissant 1997, 34). Well before that, the Francophone poet Aimé Césaire (1913–2008), who, like Glissant, hailed from Martinique, created what remains one of the most radical verse experiments from the colonial period: Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, 1939). His poem demonstrates the crucial role poetry had to play in giving voice to predicaments and histories that come into being—in the sense of being heard and heard about—only when written about; because, when unvoiced, they pass into oblivion, as have the lives of those enslaved for three centuries on islands such as Martinique. A technique derived from the Surrealists and driven by a temperament motivated to break free of conventional norms creates a turbulent mix of verse and prose, which blurs genre distinctions to propel the reader on a flood of words, at once rhapsodic and agonistic, lyrical of voice but excoriating in its critique of racism and colonialism. The collocation of tension and exhilaration in the phrase terre tendue terre saoule (“earth

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tense earth drunk”; Césaire 1995, 86) captures all the passion and poignancy of the poet’s strife and his striving. It crystallizes both his violent rejection of the inhumanity at the heart of racism and colonialism and his intense desire to celebrate his tiny island. The political role model for all that is rebellious about the poet’s spirit of self-affirmation is celebrated through the invocation of the hero for all the islands of the Caribbean: Toussaint Louverture (1743–1803), who made the fight for independence in Saint-Domingue from Napoleonic France the symbol of the struggle for liberty, equality, and fraternity in all the colonies of Europe. The poem admits that the fate of the slaves in the Caribbean, and of their descendants, is far removed from whatever might be invoked by way of a grander African heritage. Instead, the poet acknowledges, in a tone caught between self-abasement and a sardonic willingness to have a stereotype serve for the group, that they have always been humble in their occupations and their aspirations (Césaire 1995, 105). Nevertheless, this great architect of the ideology of négritude (a concept that sought to restore the black race to a sense of its own dignity) (Césaire 1995, 115) asserts: Resistant Reason, you will not prevent me from casting, absurdly, upon the waters drifting on the tides of my thirst, your form, deformed islands your end, my defiance. (Césaire 1995, 123)

These lines argue that the thirst for freedom, respect, and dignity has drifted aimlessly for far too long in the Caribbean, and it will now be mobilized by the poet toward defiance. That thirst finds a form in the shape of islands, and though they may seem or feel deformed, the anticipated end result of efforts such as his will be obdurate resistance. The poetic strategy adopted by Césaire is literary and rhetorical in the best sense of both words, and its radicalism is borne on a flood of verbal energy and linguistic exuberance taken to a point of deliberate excess. A technical inspiration indebted to European Surrealism is adapted to political—or, rather, to moral—and exhortatory ends. At about the same time that his long poem was being conceived, the German writer Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), in a famous essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1935–1936), argued, in the context of the post-Futurist Europe of the 1930s, that while fascism sought to aestheticize politics, the desirable strategy was for artists to politicize art (Benjamin 2003, 269, 270). His own sympathies were with the Left, and he (rightly) feared the political Right as the danger for Europe. The kind of endurance and resistance that Césaire evokes could be said to be in natural alignment with Benjamin’s views, expressed at about the same time. Caribbean poetry gives us a kind of ethical counterpart to the politicization of art asked for by Benjamin. Its aim was to

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articulate resistance to a host of oppressive forces whose most obvious manifestations were racism and colonialism in the colonies and fascism and Nazism in Europe. The political Right was seen as a homologue to the kind of mindset that saw slavery as nothing worse than economic opportunism. “Be inspired by some of their art but use it for your ends”: that would be the logic underlying Césaire’s strategy. “Abandon their way of writing, retain the language, but turn it completely towards your people and their way of speaking it”: that has been the strategy that has proved most fruitful in the Caribbean and everywhere where colonial dominance was to be resisted through writing. Turning their backs on the poetic traditions of Europe, some of the more risk-taking poets from the Caribbean chose to write in the idiom of their people. The diction is that of local spoken language; the rhythms are indigenous, the phrasing and turns of syntax draw their inspiration from the region and its colloquial, everyday, nonliterary speech habits. Two instances deserve mention among many more. David Dabydeen provides two ways of resisting the British poetic idiom while continuing to write in English. In his prize-winning volume Slave Song, he dramatizes the speech rhythms of his native community: each poem in the volume needs a “translation” into standard English. Consider just the first two lines of “Song of the Creole Gang Women” for a flavor of the volume: “Wuk, nuttin bu wuk / Maan noon an night nutting bu wuk” (Dabydeen 1984, 17). Slave Song is mimetic of the speech habits of slaves and indentured laborers and their descendants, and it serves the function of memorial reconstruction, of bearing witness, and of transcribing the humble fate of the illiterate and the severely underprivileged against erasure from collective memory and from marginalization in official historical narratives. Two decades later, in the title poem from Turner: New and Selected Poems (1994), he adopts a very different strategy: he essays a deliberately formal, standard English idiom derived from the tradition of Miltonic blank verse, but applied to the predicament of sick slaves thrown overboard by slaver ships intent on recovering insurance for goods lost at sea and to the predicament of slaves who survive the Atlantic crossing only to be forced to a life of brutal work and slavery in the Caribbean islands. The mismatch between their plight and the language given them makes its own harsh indictment of the treatment meted to them by the masters of the English language. The 1994 volume subscribes to aims not dissimilar to those pursued in 1984, but at once more obliquely and more aggressively. The linguistic mimeticism of 1984 is replaced in 1994 by deliberately distorted mimicry of exactly that kind of elevated and convoluted language that a descendant of indentured laborers might be least expected to master. There is a savage derision and anger in the second volume, whereas the first portrays affection, pathos, and a grim desire to

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remember the linguistic truth about an entire way of life that is otherwise lost to awareness. If a middle way were to be sought, clearly distinguishable from the British poetic manner but not too strictly confined to a mere transcription from the speech habits of Creolized English and capable of exploring several linguistic and implied social and racial registers fluently, then we turn to the long career and poetic variety of the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite (b. 1930). It stretches from Rights of Passage (1967) to The Lazarus Poems (2017). The early poetry—especially The Arrivants (1973), which combines Rights of Passage, Masks (1968), and Islands (1969)—tackles the fate of the Caribbean islander of today aggressively, through a strategy that (a) avoids the reliance upon a traditional (that is to say, British) idiom and syntax that characterizes the poetic choice made through most of his career by Brathwaite’s distinguished contemporary Derek Walcott, and (b) engages directly with the need for the peoples born and living in the Caribbean to make connections with their repressed African inheritance. The poetry of what might be called the middle stage of his career, as represented in Ancestors (2001)—which includes the three previously published volumes Mother Poem (1977), Sun Poem (1982), and X/Self (1987)—approaches the same thematic material in a more abstract and symbolic manner. The other volumes of the same period—Black + Blues (1976), Third World Poems (1983), Middle Passages (1992)—take a complementary approach and are direct in their engagement with actual persons and events from contemporary social and political reality. What is more interesting for my present purposes here is Brathwaite’s more recent work, which approaches living in the Caribbean in a more relaxed but no less vigilant manner, choosing to build on the earlier work by making history a largely silent but acquiescent partner in a renewed willingness to live and revel in the moment and in the space of weather, geography, and the phenomena of nature. That is what the remainder of this chapter will illustrate, with a specific focus on the early part of a single volume, Born to Slow Horses (2006). (It is worth noting that Brathwaite’s aim of moving away from a standard or conformist policy on matters of literary affiliations extends to what is described in the dust jacket to this book as “his unusual ‘sycorax’ signature typography and spelling,” which is not reproduced below.) The poem “Iwa” begins with a narrative that conflates personal with collective Caribbean island history. Whenever he cried as a child, his mother urged him to think of himself as a Columbus of his own ships, sailing them in make-believe play in the garden: sancta maria w/black silk sails were these the swift ships sent from harbour? (Brathwaite 2006, 31)

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In its gnomic and elliptical style, the poem brings in a lot of allusions that relate the grief of the contemporary Caribbean to its roots in history: “pirates in smiling ships. / they rob the world I rule” (Brathwaite 2006, 31). The fourth of the poem’s five sections alludes to that predicament from a perspective dependent purely upon natural phenomena, as if the human subjects of that history had been temporarily effaced from recollection, the better to delineate the basic dynamics of desire and its disappointments as if they were an affair of human habitations, sea, and wind. The final section of the poem evokes the idea of ancestral gods whose immanence can be realized through ritual music, incantation, and dance, so that their power may reinvigorate the life of the contemporary Caribbean. The poem moves toward its close with the hope, which is also a belief verging on conviction, that the entire history of slavery, enforced transportation, and plantation labor can be exorcised (Brathwaite 2006, 44). This is a poetry of exorcism that seeks to restore the islands of the Caribbean to nature, divested of the history that prevents the contemporary inhabitants from making do with who they are, where they are. The third poem in the same volume, “Guanahani” (one of the islands of the Bahamas, the first on which Columbus landed his ships after crossing the Atlantic for the first time), offers a view from above, from an airplane. The perspective is ideal for a conspectus of the visual, as perception overrules memory and the islands of the Bahamas are seen as if for the first time, from the reverse end of time’s telescope, like a coral necklace or a string of hieroglyphs spread out across the blue water (Brathwaite 2006, 12). Brathwaite’s contemporary, Derek Walcott, essays a similar kind of acceptance of his home island as a sufficiency in old age when he writes, in “The Lost Empire,” from White Egrets (2010) of the beauty of its “windwarped trees, the breakers / on the Dennery cliffs,” and then declares that “I’m content as Kavanagh with his few acres” (Walcott 2014, 583). This alludes to the special significance created by the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh in the idea of an island community as a natural “parish” such that a poet who wrote of his island and its people in acceptance and contentment could be called “parochial” in a good sense, divested of all the usual associations of narrow-minded bigotry with which parochialism is associated, so that the relatively small and the allegedly or seemingly marginalized can be affirmed by its inhabitants as a center (Kavanagh 2003, 237). In just such a spirit, the poet of the nine former islands that constitute the modern city of Mumbai—Nissim Ezekiel (1924–2004)—had asserted as the conclusion of his poem, “Background Casually,” that I have made my commitments now. This is one: to stay where I am, As others choose to give themselves

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In some remote and backward place. My backward place is where I am. (Ezekiel 1989, 179)

By bringing diverse poets together in this commonalty, the Caribbean, Ireland, and Mumbai become a manifestation of the idea of a “repeating island,” a similar feeling and recognition that connects islands separated by distance and history, but sharing a determination not to let themselves feel marginalized, through the creation of a unique centeredness to which they apply their poetic energies. 4.3 ISLAND POLITICS: IRELAND AND TAIWAN The Politics of Geography It is not just in house hunting that location is all. It is so with islands too—especially when they lie close to more belligerent peoples living on larger landmasses, with more resources and force at their command. That has been the fate of Ireland in relation to England, and the fate of Taiwan in relation to both mainland China and Japan. It is also true in many other cases of unequal geographical proximity: Tasmania and mainland Australia; Lombok and Bali, Bali and Java; Sri Lanka and the Indian subcontinent; Sicily and Italy; the Scottish islands and the Scottish Highlands; the Caribbean islands and the American mainland to the north, south, and west; and so on. Not every such relation is always or necessarily fraught with violence, but each of the smaller members of such pairs is prone to suffer from the continued effects of a tension based on difference slanted toward belittlement for those at the receiving end of things and the satisfaction of exploitative dominance for the larger member of the pair. A study of each such pair drives home the point made by Philip Steinberg that there is a compelling logic to move beyond or away from land-based regionalizations, “whether centered on the community, the nation-state, or the continent,” toward maritime regionalizations that provide an alternate perspective, which “gives greater prominence to the cultural and economic interchange between societies that is the hallmark of historical and modern political economy” (Steinberg 2013, 157). Consider England and some of the islands it has dominated, near and far: Ireland was England’s first overseas colony. The etymological sense of a colonist as a planter and settler applies literally to how various parts of the island were settled and governed by the English from the twelfth century onward. With the return of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China in 1997, the six counties of Northern Ireland and the Falkland Islands remain the last British colonies overseas. The former is just 500 kilometers from London, while the latter is at a distance of approximately 12,705 kilometers from London: near and far, they remain the last ves-

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tiges of an empire built on colonies. All such islands with long histories of being colonized by more powerful and acquisitive nations foreground the nature of politics as the mobilizer of tensions concerning racial or religious difference, allegiances to variable concepts of nationhood, and the matter of who has the right—or, more bluntly, the power—to govern, or to claim primacy, over whom. The poets from these islands have been made part of factional conflicts not only over religious and political affiliations but also over their choice of language. That is not all. When histories of subjugation are prolonged over centuries, as remarked by Eavan Boland (b. 1944) in Object Lessons (1994), with specific reference to the history of Gaelic Ireland, then an island such as Ireland remains in danger of nourishing a political ideal that, in her opinion, is closer to a collective fantasy than to any realistic hope for the future, even (or especially) when we consider that this fiction or fantasy of a restored Ireland has been a persistent presence in the literature of the island (Boland 1994, 128–29). Additionally, such an ideal of a community married to a place, at once both irreducible and dangerously close to being illusory, entails the silent elision of women from its self-representations, except as passive objects of poetry, represented in forms that remain stylized and stereotyped. That is why a poet like Boland could say of an island like Ireland that its idea of nation and its tacit assumptions about a community could not suffice, because “As a woman I had no place in them” (Boland 1994, 114). Another issue that gets foregrounded when an island becomes the site for perpetual political tensions and hostilities is whether poets have any choice about what is regarded as apt subject matter, beyond the expectation that poets should versify the ideals of nationalism or chronicle the role of politics in daily living. The insistently political dimension of daily existence seems to rule out all other subject matter that poets elsewhere assume naturally suited to poetry, which, in the case of an Ireland besieged by external domination and torn internally by sectarian violence, ends up appearing inappropriate or self-indulgent. Most poets from politicized islands would agree with Seamus Heaney when he affirms in The Redress of Poetry (1995) that poets who experience “the gravitational pull of the actual” are likely to react “against the historical situation” by seeking “to place a counter-reality in the scales,” which he describes as the “redressing effect of poetry” (Heaney 1995, 3). A similar recognition is voiced in a poem from his volume Station Island (1984): a hope and prayer “that I may escape the miasma of spilled blood” (Heaney 1984, 12). The predicament of the island poet caught between politics and poetry seems an impossible one. “Away from It All” captures the dilemma succinctly: “stretched between contemplation,” on the one hand, and “the command to participate / actively in history,” on the other hand (Heaney 1984, 4).

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When the tension is external rather than internal, as between a smaller and a larger neighbor island, the matter can be phrased through gendered metaphors. In the essay “Feeling into Words” (1974), Heaney expressed this tension in an interesting contrast by imaging a numen for Ireland, which always assumes a female form, and contrasting that with a dominative male cult that has aggressive actors filling that role, from Caesar to Cromwell, aggressive figures who always happen to reside in the metropolitan center (Heaney 1980, 16). His allegory foregrounds gender as a figurative element in the oppositional tensions between the smaller and the larger members of an island-island or an island-mainland pair. A similar gendering and sexualizing of the political relation has been noted already in David Dabydeen’s work. The Poet in Ireland The irony of colonization, and one that applies particularly to the victims of the English language (if one may phrase it thus), is that the inhabitants of a colony end up losing their language soon after they lose their political freedom. With the establishment of the Church of England during the reign of Henry VIII and rapid growth in the settlement of Ireland by the English during and after the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, a polarization began to develop between a privileged Protestant minority and an underprivileged Catholic majority. This polarization was reflected in language choice: relegating the Irish language to a secondary position in relation to the use of English on the island. From the seventeenth century onward, all the way to the end of the nineteenth century, the status of Irish as a first language of choice declined steadily, especially after the Potato Famine of 1845–1852. By the beginning of the twentieth century, it was the first language of choice for a very small minority. A representative anthology such as Patrick Crotty’s Modern Irish Poetry (2003) includes a total of forty-seven poets; of these, only six write in Irish (Máirtin Ó Direain, Seán Ó Ríordáin, Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Biddy Jenkinson, Nuala Ní Dhomnaill, and Cathal Ó Searcaigh). It might well be said then that the Irish poet writing in English gains access to all the advantages of using English: a wider and larger audience, and scope for affiliation with the longer and richer tradition of English poetry. But all such gains come at the cost of a triple subjection: political, cultural, and linguistic. Religious affiliation adds a further complexity to the mix, and location adds its own limitations and pressures between the remote West and anywhere else on the island, and between Northern Ireland—after the Partition of 1922—and the Republic. Moving further back, to the career of one of the greatest of island poets, William Butler Yeats (1864–1939), several recognitions are enjoined upon any survey of how politics can both inspire and invade the province of poetry. First, there is awareness of how—for the Gaelic or Celtic

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culture of ancient Ireland—the role and function of the poet has been at once exalted and popular. On the one hand, we have the poet as bard, who articulates the legends and myths that animate the psychic life of a people. This applies to the islands of Scotland and Ireland. Here, for example, are the opening lines of a poem in Gaelic, “The Isle of Arran,” whose authorship is unknown; the poem is commonly included among what have become known as the Ossian poems and is cited from a translation by Eleanor Hull: “Arran of many stags! / Her very shoulders washed by ocean’s foam” (Hull 1912, 85). Such medieval poems are simple, celebratory, and solemn in tone. They link the ancient and medieval cultures of Ireland and Scotland at a time when the latter was known as Alba and the former as Eire. Such poems exemplify the poet as bard. On the other hand, in a complementary role, we have the poet as someone who gives voice—through song, ballad, and lyric—to the concerns and aspirations of the common people, chronicles their narratives, and entertains them while also reminding them of their shared mores. A few lines from an anonymous eighteenth-century poem, “The United Irishmen: A Tale,” will show how the popular tradition combines social and political commentary with populist nationalism as well as satire: Ireland’s lands are all divided; Which, on pretence that they were rioters, Were forfeited, were seiz’d, were given, To any scoundrel under heaven. (Carpenter 1998, 561)

To this dual tradition, Yeats made several major contributions while changing that to which he added his work. An Ireland of the imagination was invoked, so that the Irish might recover some part of lost pride in their own heritage. This was a task whose accomplishment for Ireland gave oblique support to the even more difficult task undertaken by the poets of the négritude movement of the 1930s in the islands of the Caribbean, as we have noted in the case of Aimé Césaire. Moreover, the poet took on the duty to mediate between the pull of the poetic that defined his calling and the demands of the contingent when contingency took the form of the political. The poet could not then be accused of being mesmerized in an ivory tower of his own making, remote from the daily strife that was the life of a country riven by sectarian and political factionalism. But this balancing act created its own problems. How was the need to contribute something meaningful to the political life of his island to be reconciled with remaining true to the intrinsic demands of the poetic vocation? How was loyalty to aesthetic criteria (whatever those might be) to be balanced with the pull of whatever happened to be one’s affiliation in terms of race, religion, and class (even if gender might have been unconscionably elided)? How was one to imagine (as a dream that could be realized) a single Ireland in which the

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boundaries of the island and the nation were the same? That, it must be said, remains a dream yet to be realized and, in the context of political developments surrounding Brexit in 2017, something that looks fated to prolonged deferment. We refer here to island preoccupations of belonging and un-belonging that are not safely immured within history. They are issues that will continue to beset the todays and tomorrows of the islands of England-Wales-Scotland-Ireland for a long time to come. Yeats was the most committed and significant Irish poet of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to foster what his friend George Russell (1867–1935) described, in a lecture on “Nationality and Cosmopolitanism in Literature” (1898), as an island of the mind that was more stimulating to his imagination than to the Ireland of reality (Storey 1988, 128). During the early decades of his poetic career, Yeats set himself the task of making the recovery of selfhood for himself as a writer inseparable from the founding of a selfhood for his nominated idea of Ireland as an island that had fostered a singular people and culture. But it was not easy to escape involuntary affiliations at the behest of this unifying ideal. Yeats was in the awkward position of being an Anglo-Irish Protestant, who spent far more time in London than in Dublin, bent on reviving Celtic nationalism on behalf of an idealized Ireland of the peasantry as well as the aristocracy without belonging to either class himself. His famous poem “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” (1889) illustrates both aspects. This poem refers to a small and uninhabited island in Lough Gill, a freshwater lake in western Ireland linking County Sligo and County Leitrim, located near the small fishing village of Sligo, which was Yeats’s birthplace. The poet declares that he will retire to this island, live in a cabin, and watch the water and the light, and so on: a fantasy concocted in London, charming in its fancy, but not meant in earnest, however sincere his fondness for his home county and its topography of lake and island might be (Yeats 1989, 74). The remembered island is invested with the mist of sentiment and the romance of the solitary life. It becomes a symbol for what is desired: a retreat from the bustle and clamor of city life. Nostalgia is romanticized, but not without an element of guilt at having left the remoteness of birth and origin behind. Life in the big city is both desired and regretted, such that the need to cleanse oneself of being bound to the city can be done vicariously by the kind of feelings expressed so plausibly by the poem, without the actual need to abandon the city and really go and live in island solitude. Thus, poetry abets in making a coward of the poet, and all of us who relish such poems and wish for islands, and even visit them briefly, only to return promptly to the cities we fled from, eager to plunge ourselves again in what we love, and also love to despise. The islandness of Innisfree is both pretext and fiction, though rooted in childhood memories. The poem is of a piece with an aspect of early Yeats that invoked an Irishness of the folk from their legendary histories, but the enterprise was

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subsidized from a position removed in consciousness from the classes on whose behalf the revivalism was deployed. Attempting to unite Gaelic and Anglo-Ireland was easier said than done, and when done on paper, it remained at the level of celebrating the peasant’s closeness to the soil while being attached to the aristocrat’s closeness to the life of the imagination. In an essay titled “The Place of Writing” (1989), Seamus Heaney describes Yeats as a poet whose relation to place had something of the bully in it, while his poems reposed in an island of the mind rather than an island on the map of reality (Heaney 2002, 253). Almost a hundred years after George Russell, the criticism had not changed, but as Yeats’s poetry matured, and as he learned to distance himself from the Revivalism of his youth, he produced writing that could reconcile the demands of political contingency with what he owed to poetry. One of the most successful examples of how he accomplished this is shown in the poem “Easter 1916,” written in reaction to the Easter Rising of 1916, in which Irish Republicans revolted against British rule over Ireland. After a brief skirmish, the uprising failed, the rebels were arrested, and their leaders were hanged for treason. Yeats’s poem reflects on what the uprising signified for the politics of heroism, sacrifice, and martyrdom. It was first published in 1921. In it, he wonders whether the sacrifice of Irish lives was a form of heroism, and the converse possibility, whether it might all have been a pitiful and needless waste of human life. He explores the tension between two obligations: what he owes to history, community, and the idea of nation, and what he owes to his own craft and vocation, to the integrity demanded of poetry in the face of the call for political engagement on behalf of a cause or faction. His mixed reaction is captured in an incredibly powerful oxymoron, which serves as a refrain that sums up that entire period of Ireland’s turbulent political history in an ambivalence that cannot be resolved: “A terrible beauty is born” (Yeats 1989, 289). That actual death should be a kind of figurative birth is one part of the paradox. That the appalling and terrible nature of the waste should require acknowledgment of its kind of beauty is the other part of the paradox: a transmutation of the living ordinary into the self-martyred dead. Other poets have struggled with the continual strife in Northern Ireland, particularly after it intensified from 1969 all the way into the 1990s. Ciaran Carson, for example, writing in “Belfast Confetti,” from his volume The Irish for No (1987), reports on how when the riot squads moved in, all manner of flying objects were raining around people, “And the explosion / Itself—an asterisk on the map” (Carson 2009, 93). The confounding of the ordinary peace-minded person on the street by the mindless violence of factionalism is also, for the poet, a confounding of his typographic options, as a sardonic token of the confounding of his sense of vocation. The protagonist of another Carson poem, “33333,” undergoes an even more disconcerting experience. He knows Belfast like the back of

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his hand, as the cliché goes, but then he exclaims, “My hand is cut off at the wrists” (Carson 2009, 101). Suddenly, his world is changed. It feels like a new door has been blasted open through which he has to walk. The casual tone and manner of the poem belies the shock of what it means to lose a hand to a bomb. That we need hands to open and shut doors becomes a very simple and forceful means of showing how that which we take for granted in our ordinary lives can be shattered and sundered by political violence. Seamus Heaney, the natural Irish successor and antithesis to Yeats, tried to come to grips with such riddling questions time and again in his poetic career: the same island, the same situation, a different time. He moved from Belfast to Dublin in 1972, from the colony to the Republic. However, the issue did not go away for a long time: different locations, but the same island—the same need or compulsion to declare affiliations and to imply disavowals. By the time we reach Station Island (1984), Heaney works out a new strategy. Rather than brood on how the island has been torn into fragments, he moves inward into how an internal balance might be achieved. The island is a thousand-year-old site of pilgrimage in Lough Derg, Donegal, and sailing to it becomes an allegory for a journey into oneself in search of wholeness, meeting or invoking various tutelary or exemplary or troubling presences as he moves forward. These figures are drawn from personal memory, or history, or from some of the writers whose work and lives might help him deal with his predicament better. In the third and final part of the sequence, we encounter the mythical king of Ulster, Sweeney, who was turned into a bird because of a curse, and whose travails provide the poet with a mythic voice or mask. Issues of guilt and contrition, penitence and blame, all are tackled in the poem, so that acknowledgments, not confrontations, might lead to resolution. A blockage—the past itself, its reasonable and unreasonable claims on the individual, and on the individual as a member of this or that group—is faced, and faced down. The politics of place and faction elicits from poetry, after much suffering, a hard-earned recognition, making the sailing to an island an exorcism of memory so that the present might meet the future more equably. Through having struggled with internal self-divisions, the poet finds that he is armed with a new conviction about language: debating whether the Irish should or should not use English is “raking at dead fires,” and as for the idea that the Irish islanders are a subject people, “That subject people stuff is a cod’s game” (Heaney 1998, 245). The poet frees himself thus from his traps. Time to move forward. Comparisons: Ireland and Taiwan Ireland and Taiwan might seem unlikely elements of a pair: they are separated by thousands of miles, and their histories have developed in ways that are not always comparable. But three factors make a compari-

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son instructive in the present context. Each is a sizeable island close to a much larger neighbor; each has a layered linguistic history, one language being replaced by another as the language of choice for the poets of the island, in direct correlation to how political and cultural dominance by external entities has kept changing the norms and models for indigenous creative writing; and, most crucially, both islands continue to struggle for political as well as cultural autonomy. The basic comparative dimension to the facts of physical geography, demography, and language use are worth keeping in mind (using The World Factbook—CIA as our source). The land area of the island of Ireland is slightly more than 68,000 square kilometers; that of Taiwan is less than half of Ireland’s, at slightly more than 32,000 square kilometers. As of mid-2016, the estimated population of Ireland was 4.95 million and that of Taiwan 23.46 million. The obvious contrast in this respect is that Taiwan, like most contemporary countries in Asia, is far more populous, and though almost half the size of Ireland, the population of Taiwan is more than four times that of Ireland. The population density in Ireland is highest in the east; in Taiwan, it is highest along the northern and western coasts. While Ireland has a temperate to cold climate with much rainfall, Taiwan has a subtropical climate, with June to August being the season of rain; both countries tend to be cloudy for large parts of the year. The majority of the population in Ireland is Catholic (more than 84 percent); whereas in Taiwan, Buddhism and Taoism account for more than 68 percent of the religious affiliations. The most interesting part of the comparison has to do with language: in Ireland today, English dominates, and Gaelic is spoken by slightly more than 38 percent of the population, mostly as a second language acquired in school, except in the west, where it is more common to find it the first language in the Gaeltacht—small sections of Donegal, Mayo, Galway, and Kerry Counties. In Taiwan, while Mandarin is the current official language (since the 1940s) and is understood by all, Taiwanese Hokkien (a variant of Chinese originating in the southern Fujian Province of mainland China, and widely used by overseas Chinese throughout Southeast Asia) is spoken by about 70 percent of the population. It is deployed across several sociocultural registers, as a kind of ubiquitous regional alternative to the universalizing aspect of Mandarin, which links all the overseas Chinese to the mainland. In addition, the Hakka variant of Chinese (originating in southern China) is the first language for a significant minority, while about 2 percent of the native population uses aboriginal dialects. That 2 percent comprises the aborigines of the plains and the aborigines of the mountains, who consist of ten major tribes, each with a distinctive cultural tradition in music, song, dance, and carvings in stone and wood: Atayal, Saisiyat, Bunun, Tsou, Thao, Paiwan, Rukai, Puyuma, Ami, and the Yami (of Orichid Island). Obviously then, the linguistic and cultural complexity of Taiwan is even greater than that of Ireland, though the

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history of print culture and periodical publications is much older in Ireland. There are two historical explanations for the cultural diversity of Taiwan: one has to do with the long history of migrations from various provinces of mainland China; the other to do with its history of successive colonizations. Mandarin speakers migrated to Taiwan largely after 1949. Before that, during the Japanese occupation of the island, Japanese was made the official language. Schooling was in Japanese, and for a time writers in Taiwan expressed themselves in Japanese. In terms of the written forms of the language, it is worth adding that from the 1950s and 1960s, mainland China (and, later, Singapore) adopted a system of Simplified Chinese (also known as Pinyin), while Taiwan (as well as Hong Kong and Macau) continued to remain loyal to the system of Traditional Chinese characters that has been more or less stable since the fifth century AD. All this detail is meant to help underline the complexity of the cultural situation in an island culture such as that of Taiwan. As for the historical background to the contemporary dimension, Taiwan has developed from being for a long time a marginal satellite of the Chinese mainland, through successive colonial occupations, into one of the most densely populated, technologically advanced, economically productive, and energetically democratic nations of the world. The island was extolled in an exclamation—Ilha Formosa (“beautiful island”)—by the Dutch merchant, navigator, and travel writer Jan Huyghen van Linschoten (1563–1611) when working under Portuguese influence in the Far East. The name stuck all the way into the twentieth century, an apt celebration of the lush grasslands and dense forests of the island. The Spanish built a settlement in the north of the island, which lasted from 1626 to 1642. They were driven out by the Dutch, who colonized large parts of the island between 1624 and 1662. They in their turn were driven out by the Chinese under Zheng Chenggong (1624–1662). The subsequent surrender of the island to a Qing army brought it under their dynastic control in 1683. More than two hundred years of Chinese rule followed, which came to an end in 1895 as a consequence of the defeat of China in the First Sino-Japanese War. The island was then ceded to Japan, whose rule lasted until 1945, creating several generations of writers who were taught Japanese at school and wrote creatively in Japanese. The Japanese occupation also meant that almost two hundred thousand Taiwanese were conscripted in the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II. Ironically, the first Taiwanese forays into modernism occurred not in Chinese but in Japanese, but having to find self-expression in the colonizer’s language bothered at least some poets, as shown by the example of Wu Zinrong, whose poem “Thought” (1935) refers to his generation as “poets with no language” (Yeh and Malmqvist 2000, 18). The kind of debates that occurred in other colonized peoples, from India to Ireland, also occurred in the Taiwan of the 1920s and 1930s. A modern literature

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in the local vernacular had its beginnings during this period, as a mix of Chinese and Hokkien. It was to come to fruition much later, from the 1950s to the 1970s. On the political front, the Kuomintang (KMT) Party took control of Taiwan after 1945, at a time when it was losing out to the Communists on the mainland. The Republic of China was established on the island in 1949. One-party rule by the KMT followed, lasting for forty years, with Chiang Kai-shek (1887–1975), the successor to Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), leading the KMT and ruling as president until his death. After 1945, Japanese was relegated to the background, and, for a time, so also Hokkien. Writers suffered acutely from the dilemma of which language to write in. Many had to reacquire Chinese, which they had lost during the Japanese occupation. Democratic reforms set in from the 1980s, culminating in the first direct presidential election in 1996. After 1945, from the mainland, the People’s Republic of China continues to lay claim to Taiwan as an intrinsic part of China, while Taiwan continues to fight for recognition as the true Republic of China. The two Chinas replicate, with some differences, the situation of the two Irelands. In the case of Ireland, the split is within the island, between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, while in the case of the two Chinas, the natural separation constituted by the turbulent Taiwan Strait is reinforced by growing differences in political ideology, language, and culture. Poetry in Taiwan Poetry has been written in Taiwan in Classical Chinese for centuries. During the modern period, we also have poetry in Japanese. Since the late 1940s, poetry has been written in both Classical and Modern Chinese. The latter, lacking the prestige of the former, has had a hard struggle to begin with. A partial analogy can be discovered in how writing in Irish has had to struggle against the prevalence of English among the poets of Ireland, even among those who are bilingual. A volume such as Nuala Ní Dhomnaill’s Pharaoh’s Daughter (1990, 2003) is doubly remarkable: for the vigor of its imagination, and for the fact that virtually every major contemporary English-language poet from Ireland has contributed at least one or more of the translations that comprise this bilingual volume. They honor her for writing in the native tongue—which is more than what they can do—and they pay homage to the language they have lost, which she strives to preserve for Ireland and for poetry. That this should be so is at once both touching and ironic. The determination to keep the Irish language alive for poetry, as with Césaire’s aim of reshaping the master’s language, finds a kind of correspondence in the struggle in Taiwan to restore dignity and self-articulation to aboriginal poets and their dialects. A poem by Mona Neng (b. 1956) refers to this sardonically as having to do with changing internal perceptions and prejudices about the aborigine

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tribes: “From ‘raw barbarians’ to ‘mountain compatriots’” (Yeh and Malmqvist 2000, 39). While traditionalists in Taiwan continue to rely upon stylistic models from the past, a larger number of poets show the influence of global forms of modernity, especially in their willingness to experiment with form and their propensity for a colloquial idiom and style. As noted by my former colleague Petrus Liu in a personal communication, differences between the two literary affiliations have foregrounded “the divide between mainland Chinese culture and Taiwan’s indigenous society as an encounter between continental and littoral civilizations” (Liu 2015). The result is the difference between a poetry that reinforces the island boundary as a marker of cultural no less than of geographical identity, and a poetry intent on making such boundaries permeable, so as to internationalize local writing: Many of the “nativists” sought to develop poetic alternatives to the “modernists” who were importing Western literary forms and techniques, and the entire enterprise of nativist poetry hinged on the conceptual delimitation and enclosure of Taiwan as an island, in the sense that the distinctiveness of Taiwanese culture was predicated on our willingness to accept the binary opposition between island culture and continental culture. (Liu 2015)

Given the island’s purposive drive toward modernity in every walk of life and in forms of production, manufacture, and governance, the contemporary writer from Taiwan is likely to be bilingual or more, between Chinese, Japanese, and English. The tendency of the visitor from a larger island to disparage the smaller island is a commonplace between Taiwan and Japan. For example, when the Japanese artist Kinichiro Ishikawa (1871–1945) visited Taiwan in the 1930s, he compared the scenic aspects of the coast of Taiwan with those of Nagasaki. He declared that artists from Japan tended to find the landscapes in Taiwan and China cruder than what they were used to in Japan, and we might well find it curious that nature should be thus assumed to discriminate between nationalities (Ping-hui Liao 2007, 294)! Disparagement is close kin to colonization. Every successive colonization of Taiwan is remembered by the poets, even to this day, and its impact is recollected in anything but a tranquil frame of mind. A poem about writing, “My Pen” by Chen Xiuxi (1921–1991), uses the routines of making up a woman’s face in a mirror as an allegory for “the sorrow of having been colonized” (Yeh and Malmqvist 2000, 11). “The World of Mountains and Seas: Preface to the Inaugural Issue of the Culture of the Mountains and Seas Bimonthly” (1992), by Sun Dachuan, welcomes the growth of aboriginal literature since the 1970s, and calls for a new writing that will bring about a return to nature (Sung-sheng et al. 2014, 403). That choice is declared to be more desirable than the temptation to keep perpetuating a

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literature of urban modernity, or a literature that frets about the political dimension to Taiwanese literature. Yang Mu and Chen Yi Finally, we reflect on two brief glimpses of poets whose way of dealing with history and politics has something instructive to offer, which may be rooted in Taiwan but reveals wider applications. Yang Mu (the pen name adopted since 1972 by Wang Ching-hsien) was born on the east coast of Taiwan (1940), studied in his home country and in the United States, and has shuttled ever since between academic careers in the United States and Taiwan. He is a scholar of Classical Chinese poetry, and an awareness of the musicality, precision, and subtlety of the best in that tradition informs his own approach, which strives always toward addressing the contingent aspects of reality in such a way as to enable the poet to move from the concrete to the abstract and the universal without losing any of the particularity that poetry is so good at absorbing into its figurative vocabulary. For example, in a poem titled “Fallen Leaves” (2003), he tackles a political subject of the recent past that has a direct bearing on the present in a manner that is characteristically oblique, yet telling. Yeats, in his poem “Easter 1916,” reflected on whether political violence and martyrdom at the behest of a nationalist ideal had been worth the cost in human sacrifice. The political event in modern Taiwanese history that occasions the poem is known as the “2-28” or the “February 28” incident, which took place in 1947. The incident started with the killing of non-Taiwanese Chinese immigrants who had recently migrated from the mainland; the perpetrators were local Taiwanese, many of whom had served in the Japanese army until 1945. The first killings lasted ten days; then the KMT stepped in. From mainland China, where the KMT was then based, General Chiang Kai-shek ordered his troops to quell the riots. Their use of brutal force unleashed what became known as “the White Terror.” Matters did not end there. After the KMT had lost to the Communists in mainland China, they fled to Taiwan, where they set up a regime enforced by martial law, which lasted all the way from 1949 to the mid1980s. The February 1947 episode—with a total loss in human life estimated at about twenty-eight thousand—fueled a passionate commitment to independence and democracy among the Taiwanese people. It remains the most significant single factor underlying the zeal that has attended the political ideals of modern Taiwan. As recently as 1990, a poem by Li Minyong (b. 1947) epitomizes the effect of those events on the people and the idea of nation by referring to Taiwan as “Tilting Island” (Yeh and Malmqvist 2000, 294). The KMT imposed a ban on any reference to, or discussion of, the events of February 1947. The taboo was to last for decades, giving the

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incident a power to arouse violent and divisive reactions even to this day. The comparison with Easter 1916 in Ireland is apt in that each uprising led to a sharpening of the appetite for political freedom, but the scale, duration, and causal momentum generated by “February 28” far exceeds the outcome and impact of the uprising in Ireland. It is worth adding that in a poem from 1971, Yang Mu alludes directly to the Yeats of “Easter 1916.” His poem, “Sailing to Ireland,” with its allusion to Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” imagines God passing through the graveyard where the revolutionaries of Easter 1916 lie buried. Even God does not know what sacrifices he might offer there (to appease and allay). The poet ends with the speculative rumination that perhaps by now “people have forgotten what happened that day” (Yang Mu 1998, 50). When it comes to a topic as inflammatory as “2-28,” how does the poet tackle the traumatic and the momentous: “the blood trails of old” (Yang Mu 2003, 37)? He adopts an oblique approach. From that horrific past to the troubled present is a period of history represented as a questioning and a pilgrimage, in which the human can learn from how the humble beetles and chrysalises work out their obscure paths. While the sun and the moon mark out their paths in the sky with recognition of what is due to parting and what is due to togetherness, we humans are more impassioned in how we deal with our disintegrated desires. Attentiveness to the phenomena of nature—a crane depicted on a Chinese scroll, spreading its wings to catch the upper air, the scent of flowers in the yard— interposes the living moment as more pressing on our attention than the buried past. The poet is amenable to bidding “a silent farewell to yesterdays” (Yang Mu 2003, 38). The drip of dew, a falling star in the sky, frost building up on windowpanes, the last fireflies of summer: these are imaged, startlingly, as “the virus of creativity” (Yang Mu 2003, 38). None of this is an evasion. “The owls of reason hoot” (Yang Mu 2003, 39), but the present immerses itself in reading intently: not just the classics but also the phenomena of nature. A white crane closing its wings after being ruffled by a flurry of snow provides the poet with his final image, which is an abstraction: “an image of purity from one to zero” (Yang Mu 2003, 39). To the reader surprised at how little of political detail enters the poem, one might reply with a few words from his autobiographical essays: “Forgotten. Actually I had forgotten nothing, or it had just settled” (Yang Mu 2015, 52). “Fallen Leaves” is an astonishing display of obliquity at work, converting what might seem trivia into what Heaney had called a redressal, in which poetry seeks to right the imbalances forced upon us by brute contingency, such that we learn to live in the present and handle our futures—aligned with nature—better than we did our pasts, with their dragging attachments to the violence of history. The strategy of the poem is at one with the rest of Yang Mu’s work. His collection of autobiographical essays, Memories of Mount Qilai (2015), is subtitled The Education of a Young Poet, along lines reminiscent of

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William Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1805, 1850), a poem unpublished during the poet’s lifetime, to which he referred in letters to his sister Dorothy as “the poem on the growth of my own mind,” and to which his widow Mary lent the posthumous subtitle “The Growth of a Poet’s Mind; An Autobiographical Poem.” In the case of Yang Mu, the education consists of understanding and assimilating many aspects of the time-honored ways of life in Taiwan, among them the aboriginal attitude to life and nature that he encountered in his youth among the Ami tribe. It entails teaching oneself to be attentive to things easily dismissed, such as “the color of the mountain and the sound of the sea” (Yang Mu 2015, 41). Looking and listening become the foundational disciplines for the young poet, and we see how in his later work that self-training bears fruit in a manner that is likely to be salutary to the creative traditions of a history as turbulent as that of the island of Taiwan. Next, moving the poet’s gaze backward across history, let us consider a poem by one of Taiwan’s leading contemporary poets, Chen Yi (b. 1954, real name Chen Yingwen), titled “Formosa 1661.” It is in the form of a dramatic soliloquy spoken by an early Dutch missionary who narrates how the aboriginal inhabitants of the then very sparsely populated island were tricked into a barter: fifteen bolts of cloth for land the size of a cowhide. The Dutchman chortles with glee that when cut into thin strips and joined end to end, the cowhide covered a lot more land than the aborigines had thought they had bargained to give away: it could cover all of Formosa (Taiwan) (Yeh and Malmqvist 2000, 360). The poem goes on to recount all the aboriginal places and dialects in which the Dutchman spreads God’s word while consuming the meat of the land and mixing his blood, urine, and excrement with the soil. This vivid retrieval of history becomes a reminder to the contemporary Taiwanese readers that their beautiful island is like a palimpsest in which “new spelling words are wrapped” (Yeh and Malmqvist 2000, 361). The inscriptions of colonization are indelibly mixed with the sounds, colors, images, and smells of the island. This recognition opens up a different mode of selfknowledge from that we see Seamus Heaney adopt in Station Island (1984), but the goal is similar, even identical: How to assimilate the complex history of domination-subjugation, marginalization, as well as the ethnic and cultural diversity of one’s island and its peoples, without denying any of the pain or frustration they have suffered through much of their long history? How to keep moving forward in acceptance of plurality, multilayered hybridity, and the pull of modernity, while retaining due regard, respect, and love for the land and its distinctive island identity? Returning to the present, as informed by the past, another poem by Chen Yi, “The Edge of the Island” (1993), reflects on what his island home signifies from a number of varying perspectives. On the scale of a large world map, it is nothing but “an imperfect yellow button” (Yeh and

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Malmqvist 2000, 355). When viewed thus, individual existence begins to feel as slender as a thread from a cobweb that seeks to tie island to sea, or like a book of mirrors, or like a tape recorder repeatedly replaying personal and collective memories. Existence itself becomes like living on the edge; the edge of the island is a boundary between sleep and wakefulness. What the poet holds in his hand is not simply a pen, or a finger poised over a keyboard, but also a needle stitching the button of the selfas-island onto a garment that the collective as well as individual self will wear. Through this surreal tag-team series of images, the poet manages to make the condition of living in Taiwan an emblem for living in the world today. Life is always life on the edge. Every one of us is a Taiwanese person having to stitch the button of the self onto something.

FIVE In Lieu of a Conclusion: Oceania

MORE WATER THAN LAND We have seen many ways of describing or evoking an island. Alluding to his Caribbean predecessor Saint-John Perse (1887–1975), the novelist and poet Édouard Glissant suggested that an island, even to the poet born on it, is “a conjectural place” (Glissant 1997, 37). This is a notion to conjure with in several senses. An idea might have to be grasped before the reality it names can make sense. The real has to be imagined. As observed and richly illustrated by John Gillis in Islands of the Mind, “The movement of the mind prepares the way for the movement of the body” (Gillis 2004, 45). Living—what it feels like, here and now—has to be articulated, in your own words, before being understood by yourself. The contingent is but a type or token. The sheer materiality of entities in space amazes and exhilarates, even more than the facticity of place. For Yi-Fu Tuan, even “place is a type of object” (Tuan 1977, 17). That anything solid should exist at all where there might be simply water is a thought to pause on (nowhere better than in the Pacific). And sailing, as toward an island, does not necessarily entail the notion that land is the fixity toward which the moving boat sails. John Mack, in his cultural history of The Sea, alludes to the etak system of navigation: “A version of dead reckoning which relies on the fiction that an imaginary island just beyond the horizon is moving, whilst the boat being sailed is stationary” (Mack 2011, 131). Movement and stasis are relational rather than absolute, and the moving object can pretend to be still and an island will move within its reach: no mere charming fantasy but a belief system that had the virtue of working in practice. An island may keep changing in its climate, its flora and fauna, its human habitations and population. Its soil may erode, its rock crumble, 153

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its coastline change, its rivers silt up, its lakes fill with mud. Islands may capsize, erupt, or float way. Their names might change or be forgotten altogether. But the conjecture that makes an island an island would remain. And what we might do is to turn the idea inside out. We could say that an island is a piece of land that makes sense of water. That which is shapeless and ever changing makes slightly better sense when played off against materiality that erupts, protrudes, and stays, even if for a while. Such an approach is suited to engaging with one more kind of island that remains to be addressed: the island with no mainland neighbor, the island with nothing but sea and other islands for company. The island from which, as the Hawaiian poet Joe Balaz declares, “Hawai‘i Is Da Mainland to / Me” (Wilson 2001, 129), in one of the recordings from his poetry CD Electric Laulua (1999). Such writing, which recognizes no continent, brings us to the vast expanse of the Pacific, “our sea of islands” (Hau’Ofa 2008, 27). The Pacific Ocean accounts for more than one-third of the planet’s surface, contains more than half of the planet’s volume of water, and is home to more than twenty-five thousand islands. Its maximum length north to south, from the Bering Strait to Antarctica, is approximately 15,500 kilometers (9,600 miles). Its maximum width, from Indonesia to Colombia, is about 19,800 kilometers (12,300 miles). The islands of the Pacific are generally grouped, on the basis of relative proximity, into Melanesia (which includes Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and New Caledonia, among others) and Micronesia (which is north of Melanesia and includes the Caroline Islands, the Mariana Islands, and the Marshall Islands, among others). Eastward of these two zones is the third and largest zone, Polynesia, which stretches from New Zealand in the south to the Hawaiian Islands in the north, and from Samoa to the Pitcairn Islands and Easter Island, the latter situated 3,500 kilometers from the coast of Chile in South America. Such zonal divisions are a fiction of the geographer, and poets live within them with a degree of justified skepticism, as shown in a recent poem “Amnesia I,” by the Kiribati and American poet Teresia Teaiwa (1968–2017). It begins by weighing the prefixes Mela-, Micro-, and Poly-, and then it concludes, “I am all of the above and more or less” (Teaiwa 2006). A mapping of identity as proposed by the cartographers is both accepted and resisted because another kind of mapping is under way. The antidote to such mappings, as we see in Bloodclot (2009) by the New Zealand performance poet Tusiata Avia (b. 1966), is to discover the self through a subjective approach to myth. Avia is of mixed Samoan and Palagi parentage, and her work creates a family narrative that is interwoven with her identification with Nafanua, Samoan warrior and war goddess, whose persona speaks in a variety of tonal registers covering various topics including what it meant to be growing up a brown person in the New Zealand of the 1970s and traveling to many destinations in

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and out of the Pacific. The idiom is generally standard English, but Creolized English is used as well to dramatize the correlation between ethnicity and language, without gloss or commentary, as the most direct way of bringing the uniqueness of communal identity to the fore. The simple matter of using the correct pronoun can signal the differences between cultures, as in the poem “Oe, You,” by Albert Wendt (b. 1939), which dramatizes the significance of the fact that “in Samoan your name means ‘you’” (Wendt 1994, 164). That startling realization makes him wonder if that is why he has always felt alienated: because he lacked a sense of proper identity while under the spell of Palagi (European, non-Samoan) acculturation. Likewise, a poem from the novel Where We Once Belonged by the Samoan writer Sia Figiel (b. 1967) declares that the self is always already a part of community (‘aiga): “I” does not exist. ... “I” is always “we.” (Figiel 1996, 135)

The first chapter in any narrative of human settlement across the Pacific will want to refer to the migration of peoples into the Pacific from various adjacent land bases, ranging from Taiwan to the Malay-Indonesian archipelago. This would have been a slow process covering many centuries, preceding (and sometimes concomitant with) the development of long-range maritime trade routes; at other times, through chance discoveries linked to fishing voyages, and to voyages gone astray due to bad weather, but also frequently motivated by the search for new homes. The degree of connectedness within an island system tended to be more intense than across island systems, and the farther one island system was from another the slower the rate of connectivity; with the most isolated ones, like Easter Island, evolving cultures unique to themselves. The second chapter of the narrative would concern itself with the encounter between the first settlers of the Pacific and a series of European explorers, traders, missionaries, and colonists whose combined effect, from the early sixteenth century to the late nineteenth century, was to create cultures of colonization throughout the Pacific, as well as a host of stereotypes based on travelers’ tales of scenic beauty, sexual freedom, as well as opportunities for trade, missionary work, scientific inquiry, and mercantile profit. In a delicious little poem by Ann Inoshita, titled “TV,” a little girl fascinated by commercials asks her mother longingly if they, too, could go to Hawaii, where apparently everybody lives in grass shacks, drinks tropical fruit under umbrellas, and lolls about all day. The result: “She look at me like I funny kine.” The little girl is told that they are already living in Hawaii. But she is unconvinced: “We no live Hawai‘i” remains her view (Inoshita 2007, 3). The mother has the same luck with the daughter when she is asked about an Asian-looking person on

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TV, and the little girl will not believe either that they are Asian or that she is Japanese. And, of course, we blame more than television for the little girl’s puzzled wonderment. In pursuit of more than knowledge and profit, the Portuguese and the Spanish were followed by the Dutch, the French, and the English; the Portuguese exploring from bases in Southeast Asia, the Spanish via the southern tip of South America; the Dutch, the French, and the English also established bases in Southeast Asia, once they had followed the Portuguese on the route via the southern tip of Africa and across the Indian Ocean. The European “discovery” of the various islands of the Pacific by European explorers stretches from Ferdinand Magellan’s landing in Guam and the Mariana Islands (1521), and the discovery of Tasmania, New Zealand, and Fiji by Abel Tasman (1641), to the discovery of the Hawaiian Islands by James Cook (1778), with the British annexation of Australia beginning a decade later. Polynesian Māori settled New Zealand from c. 800 AD onward. In its own time, Cook’s death in 1779 at Kealakekua Bay, on the island of Hawaii, inspired a play that was popular throughout Britain, and also in Paris (Dodge 1976, 41). Even now, his fate continues to inspire poems and paintings, while debates surrounding the events of that fateful day continue unabated. A verse libretto by the New Zealand poet Robert Sullivan (b. 1967), Captain Cook in the Underworld, undercuts the general perception of Cook, the heroic navigator and cartographer, by representing him as clumsy and intrusive, while also asserting that the islands Cook thought he discovered had been previously “discovered” by the legendary pair of Kupe and his wife, Kuramarotini (Sullivan 2002, 1). The two are treated not as characters from Māori mythology but as explorers from the early first millennium. Sullivan’s plan is interesting as an idea, but its execution struggles with working at once with myth and history: bringing together the Orpheus of Mediterranean mythology and the English explorer and cartographer of the eighteenth century is not an easy combination to pull off. A well-known poem from New Zealand, “Landfall in Unknown Seas” (1942) by Allen Curnow (1911–2001), commemorates the three hundredth anniversary of the “discovery” of New Zealand, on December 13, 1642, by the Dutchman Abel Tasman (1603–1659). There is some irony to the fact that the Dutch East India Company regarded that particular expedition as a failure, and no European explorers or colonists came to the islands until more than a century later. Regardless, the poem reflects wonderingly on the simple fact that the world of the known, for early modern Europe, was so much narrower than what it became once intrepid explorers had set sail in this or that direction, and, almost regardless of where they went, they ended up making new discoveries that enriched and expanded the sense of the planet’s variety and size, clarifying a “huge hegemony of ignorance” (Curnow 1998, 227) by adding details of sea currents, coastlines, geographies, topographies, and ethnographies to

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what had been the simple blank spaces of European cartography. That is only one side of the coin. For the aboriginal inhabitants of New Zealand, with boats of a size and technological capability that kept them to a relatively narrow zone of operations within a single ocean for a thousand years, the arrival of that Dutchman and his two ships was the first sign of a change that would eventually ensure the radical alteration of an entire way of life, since whatever came from the sea thereafter would inevitably spell danger. In the nineteenth century, colonization spread to most of the Pacific, attended by all the assumptions and prejudices attendant upon a people equipped with specific technological advantages and bent upon knowledge of and control over the environments and peoples they encountered. Pacific Islanders became the pretext for an assortment of projections and stereotypes, ranging from the ignoble to the noble savage, and from haunted or cursed to magical and paradisal islands. An established author from the West wrote about the Pacific in the late nineteenth century: Robert Louis Stevenson. He spent almost a third of his life in the Pacific and is buried in Vailima, Samoa. He made several voyages within the Pacific, wrote up local legends in the form of verse narratives, and settled in Samoa, where he was given the name Tusitala (Samoan: storyteller). He took passionate interest in the politics of colonial administration in the region, which he criticized vigorously in A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa (1892). The British had come to the region and begun their settlement from 1840, a full thousand years after the aboriginal settlement of New Zealand. But once there, they had consolidated their control over the islands swiftly through victories in wars with the Māori that lasted from the 1860s into the early 1880s (Keown 2007, 57). New Zealand was to remain a British colony until it became an independent dominion within the British Empire in 1907. More than a decade after the end of World War II, the processes of decolonization began in the Pacific region, with independence for Western Samoa in 1962, followed by independence for island after island, in a series that finally came to an end with Timor-Leste, which had been ceded by Portugal to Indonesia in 1975 and became independent in 2002. In the twentieth century, even those island nations that had escaped direct colonial rule—such as Western Samoa or Fiji— have not quite managed to escape neocolonial pressures. This has proved unavoidable all over the Pacific, given the relative thinness of island populations and their limited resources. That has meant a marginal position in global networks, reliance upon Western aid, and dependency on the relatively bigger nations of the region—Australia and New Zealand—for opportunities and employment. For someone like Craig Santos Perez, who was born on the island of Guam, even the affirmation of identity depends on whether Guam is depicted at all on a map and, if depicted, whether as an independent entity or as a US territory: “On some maps,

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Guam is a small, unnamed island; I say, ‘I’m from this unnamed place’” (Perez 2008, 7). The same might be said of his island’s Chamorro literature: until someone draws attention to what it was and how it faded, it is likely to pass unnoticed. His trilogy—from Unincorporated Territory [hacha] [2008], from Unincorporated Territory [saina] (2010), and from Unincorporated Territory [guma’] (2015)—provides a vivid and innovative re-creation of that buried history and its relevance to a contemporary poet whose search for personal identity becomes emblematic of the condition of being a small islander in all the to and fro of exploration, trade, and conquest. Being small and distant from larger landmasses mattered hardly at all before the Europeans came to the region. In the context of events on the global scale and their impact on the region, from World War II through the era of the Cold War, small islands have shown themselves to be particularly vulnerable. Since the late twentieth century, the combined impact of globalization and neocolonialism has steadily grown to be a serious disadvantage to the island systems of the Pacific, economically as well as culturally. A good part of the contemporary writing from the Pacific is about the frustrations and limitations of neocolonial modernity, and the ways in which a sense of communal identity might be retrieved or refashioned in ways that might put a more positive spin on the opportunities and quality of quotidian existence. It is also intent on finding a voice that can speak both for the past and for the present, keeping clear of clichés associated with Pacific Islands, or leaving them for “reality-TV tourists hunting for treasure islands,” as remarked by Albert Wendt in the poem “The Ko‘olau” (Wendt 2006, 65). The present is to be spoken for on its own terms, especially when it shows the symptoms of a global malaise, as when Celo Kulagoe jots down a detail from a commonplace of modern village spaces in his poem “The Village Tip”: “steel and plastic wrappers / are now teeth-cutters for hunting dogs” (Kulagoe 1980, 9). Various creative means have proved useful in this respect. As far back as 1892, Robert Louis Stevenson had noted that “Song, as with all Pacific islanders, goes hand in hand with the dance, and both shade into the drama” (Stevenson 1892, 11). Orality and performance art have seen a vigorous revival in the last several decades. The publication of the Ngā Mōteatea (The Songs) by Auckland University Press (2004) helps preserve the written record of the oral traditions of Aotearoa/New Zealand. Contemporary poets show a greater willingness to depart from standard English. Tusiata Avia’s poems show the benefits of mixing registers, as in the poem “Nafanua relates an incident from her childhood” from Bloodclot (2009): “auoi!, va’ai, dey stole our canoe! / dat canoe, it belong to our ancestor!” (Avia 2006). A reference that might point to no more than the stolen canoe manages to bring in the sense that what has been stolen is far greater: a sense of being connected to ancestral mores.

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A turn toward orality and Creole, combined with the desire to mobilize local legend and myth for present needs and ends, gives the contemporary poetry of the Pacific a greater sense of collective identity. That had been an enterprise as much of the wish, the will, and the intent as of realization during the 1960s and 1970s. Many shared it as an aspiration with the eloquent Hone Tuwhare (1922–2008), who was of Māori descent, and Albert Wendt, who is of Samoan descent and has lived in various parts of Oceania, including New Zealand and Hawaii. In the poem “With Hone in Las Vegas” (2008), Wendt remarks sardonically to his friend that they have both suffered a lifelong addiction, but it was with words, not with gambling (Wendt 2008, 177). It was always more than an addiction, of course. A poem by Tuwhare, “To a Maori Figure Cast in Bronze Outside the Chief Post Office, Auckland” (1972), imagines what the statue would say if it could speak. Nothing solemn or portentous: a joke about how even a scarecrow does its job better than this bronze effigy of the human. But then comes the articulation of an urge that speaks for all the peoples whom such a statue renders in well-meaning but inadequate effigy, the loss of an entire way of island life that neither nostalgia nor poetry can bring back, remembering the cliff at Kohimara “where you can watch the ships / come in curling their white moustaches” (Tuwhare 1993, 75). The image is at once a surprise and a delight; it humanizes nature as a familiar companion to daily living, and the hollow statue can say this for all that has been hollowed out of the Māori way of life without losing the sense of pleasure that the image conjures from nothing more than wave froth. This becomes part of a Māori way of looking at things. As for the land that is the mother of all such natural objects, a few lines from the poem “Papa-tu-a-nuku (Earth Mother)” by Tuwhare capture both the closeness and the affection of that relationship: We are massaging the ricked back of the land with our sore but ever-loving feet: hell, she loves it! (Tuwhare 1993, 126)

Given such a vast region of water, the cultures of different parts of the Pacific attempt not homogeneity but some degree of commonalty, and even that is not easy. In Routes and Roots, Elizabeth DeLoughrey describes this inclination succinctly as a preference for “water ties” over “blood vessels” (DeLoughrey 2007, 154). Within New Zealand, the Māori exist as a minority that has faced much prejudice and now accept the mixed blessings of partial assimilation into a settler culture, although it must be added that the bicultural dimension of Māori life is in some respects quite unique, and while the negative effects of colonization persist, a narrative based on a model of assimilation does not by itself prove adequate in

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accounting for the vitality and power of Māori culture. It should also be noted that Māori and Polynesian cultures of the South Pacific have been in conversation with one another through their writers for some time now, even when they do not speak always as one—nor need they, given significant differences in the contemporary environment, overlaid on top of differing genealogies and colonial histories. In terms of aesthetic choices, the simple binary of realist, conventional, inward-looking, and identify-focused orientations, on the one hand, and experimental, modernist, and postmodern orientations, on the other hand, has been shown to be inadequate, either as a method of writing or as an approach to the reading of Pacific Islands writing (Keown 2005, 195–97). What holds the writing of the Pacific together, in all its diversity and disparity, just as much as the ocean holds all the islands of that vast zone together, is the common enterprise described by Rob Wilson as “the remaking of Pacific into Oceania” (Wilson 2017, 67). By Way of Conclusion: The Planet in the Inkwell At the end of such a book, which has been insistent in pursuit of poetry that thinks islands and looked everywhere in time and place for poets who live on and write about islands, it might be apt to reflect on a recognition of a somewhat unexpected kind. The idea can be spoken of, through some elegiac lines in memory of Hone Tuwhare by the New Zealand poet Michelle Leggott (b. 1956), as “waking into shadow / walking into the bleached possibilities / of inhabiting only the moment” (Leggot 2009). When one has lived long enough on an island, or thought of, and through, that place—any place—long enough, then after a while it (almost) ceases to matter whether one is on an atoll or in a desert or in London or Innisfree or Te Kotahitanga. The refrain from the poem “Aubade” by the English poet William Empson (1906–1984) reiterates a simple and powerful recognition: “The heart of standing is you cannot fly” (Empson 2001, 69). In his context, he might have implied the need for stoic courage (Patke 2004, 191). The application for the present is that the place won’t fly away; you don’t have to obsess about it. Making a stand is more important. “I am tired / of being native,” an islander might well say (Hau’Ofa 2008, 100). As for being an islander, it should have percolated the fabric of being so completely that we need no evidence from the stain of a poem to tell that islandness matters to the poet. There comes a time to let go. The poets of Oceania—wherever they are across that wide ocean—brood far less about being on islands than we might expect them to. A large part of their poetry, like their daily living, is about accepting where they are and working out who they are. They take neither sea nor islandness for granted, at least not in the bad sense. They accept it. But they do not need always to be talking of it. Their world and work provide

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the apt launching site to loosen poetry from its moorings in space and place—to reflect, in passing, on what words have done with the world.

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Index

Across the Margins (Norquay and Smith), 65 Adorno, Theodor, 111–112, 113 aesthetics, 15, 39, 45, 62, 78, 147, 160; Caribbean, 124–125, 130–137; Japanese, 124–130; politics and, 68, 69, 88, 115–116, 133–134, 137–139, 141, 142–143 Africa, 64, 72, 74, 82, 83, 98, 123, 131, 156 al-Idrisi, Muhammad, 36 Alighieri, Dante, 55, 105, 107, 111, 114, 123 allegory. See poetry America, Central, 41, 75, 79 America, North, 17, 38, 41, 52, 64, 125 America, South, 41, 42, 51, 75, 79, 81, 125, 154, 156 Americas, 41, 52, 75, 80, 81, 88, 98, 125, 131, 137 Antarctica, 19, 50, 51, 154 An Apologie for Poetrie (Sidney), 22 archetype, 8, 9, 77–80, 102, 106, 112 Archipelagic English (Kerrigan), 7, 65 archipelago, 2, 3, 9, 17, 41, 61–76, 81, 88, 103, 116, 155. See also islands, real Arctic, 22, 34 Areopagitica (Milton), 51–52 Ariel (Rodó), 101 Ariosto, Ludovico, 43 Aristotle, 22, 82 Armitage, Simon, 104 Armstrong, Karen, 27 Arnold, Matthew, 23 Asia, 20, 41, 49, 64, 75, 123, 125, 130; East, 51; Minor, 51; South, 80; Southeast, 74, 80, 90, 94, 96, 108, 144, 156 Asmonti, Luca, 11

Atlantic Ocean, 17, 21, 33, 34, 37, 38, 41, 49, 50, 56, 74, 81, 130, 136 Aubin, Penelope, 83 Auden, W. H., 23, 55–57, 80, 100 aurora borealis, 34 Australia, 5, 19, 34, 45, 51, 88, 137, 156, 157 Avia, Tusiata, 154–155, 158 Bacon, Francis, 48, 49, 52 Balaz, Joe, 154 Baldacchino, Godfrey, 7, 47 Ballard, J. G., 18 Baring-Gould, S., 52 Bashō, Matsuo, 26, 128, 129 Bassnett, Susan, 21, 37 Bautista, Cirilo F., 76 Beer, Gillian, 13–14, 23 Benítez-Rojo, Antonio, 7, 64–65, 132 Benjamin, Walter, 76, 133 Beowulf, 31–32, 117, 120 Bermudez, Juan, 40 Bishop, Elizabeth, 80; “The Map,” 5; “One Art,” 57–58; “Robinson Crusoe in England,” 85–87 Blackmore, Josiah, 42 Blake, William, 46 Bloch, Ernst, 55 Blumenberg, Hans, 24–25 Böcklin, Arnold, 46 Boland, Eavan, 58, 59, 138 Bonnett, Alastair, 18 Bordone, Benedetto, 36 Borges, Jorge Luis, 17, 37–38, 102 Born to Slow Horses (Brathwaite), 135–136 Boswell, James, 15 Brathwaite, Kamau, 135–136 Brazil, 42, 81 The Bridge (Crane), 50 175

176

Index

Brockington, John, 90 Brockington, Mary, 90 Brosman, Catharine Savage, 17 Browning, Robert, 1, 80, 99–100 Buddha, 89, 95–96 Buddhism, 94, 95–96, 144 Burke, Edmund, 20 Buson, Yosa, 128–129 Byron, George Gordon (Lord Byron), 11 Cabral, Pedro Álvares, 42 Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Césaire), 132–133 Caliban (character), 8, 9, 77, 78, 79–80, 95, 97–102 Caliban (Renan), 101 Caliban: A Philosophical Drama (Renan), 101 Calicut, 42 Camões, Luís de, 42–43 Campbell, Roy, 4 Cape of Good Hope, 42 Captain Cook in the Underworld (Sullivan), 156 Caribbean archipelago. See islands, real Carson, Ciaran, 14, 142–143 cartography, 7, 36, 67, 154, 157 Cavafy, C. P., 13, 54–55, 56, 57, 105, 124 Césaire, Aimé, 101, 132–134, 140, 146 Ceuta, 41 Chadwick, H. Munro, 116 Chen Xiuxi, 147 Chen Yi, 150 China, 64, 72–74, 75, 88, 108, 109, 125, 137, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148 Chomsky, Noam, 26 Christianity, 2, 39, 40–41, 42, 44, 56, 116, 117, 119 Ciarán of Saigir, 14 Clairvoyance (Daoana), 76 Clancy, Thomas Owen, 70 Co, Mikael de Lara, 75 Codex Regius, 120 Coetzee, J. M., 82–83 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 36, 85, 86, 87 Colum, Padraic, 1 Columbus, Christopher, 73, 80, 130, 136

Conrad, Peter, 2, 7 Constantine, Peter, 123 continent, 3, 4, 5, 13, 14, 17, 19, 20, 23, 25, 31, 34, 50, 51, 52, 60, 154 Cook, James, 156 Cosgrove, Denis, 2, 7, 17, 38 Crane, Hart, 50 Crawford, Robert, 65 Creole, languages, 64, 131, 132, 134, 135, 155, 159 Critias (Plato), 48, 49–50 The Critique of Judgment (Kant), 20 Crotty, Patrick, 139 Crowley, Cheryl A., 129 A Cruising Voyage round the World (Rogers), 80 Crusoe, Robinson (character), 8, 9, 41, 77–78, 79, 80–87 Curnow, Allen, 156 Dabydeen, David, 101–102, 131, 134–135, 139 da Gama, Vasco, 42, 43, 73 Dampier, William, 80 Daoana, Carlomar Arcangel, 76 Dasaratha Jātaka, 96 Davidson, Peter, 7, 30 decolonization, 100–101, 132, 157 A Defence of Poetry (Shelley), 22 Defoe, Daniel, 80, 81, 82–83, 84, 86, 87, 103 Deleuze, Gilles, 13, 24 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M., 125, 159 del Sarto, Andrea, 1 De Staël, Germaine, 11 Devolving English Literature (Crawford), 65 Devotions (Donne), 23 Dhomnaill, Nuala Ní, 33, 34, 139, 146 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno), 111–112, 113 Dipavamsa, 89, 95 A Discourse of a Discoverie for a Newe Passage to Cataia (Gilbert), 52 Dodge, Ernest S., 156 Donne, John, 23 Doty, Mark, 59–60 Dramatis Personae (Browning), 99 Drummond, William, 66

Index Dryden, John, 31 Dudek, Louis, 54 Duffy, Carol Ann, 106 Dunn, Douglas, 71 Duthie, Torquil, 126 Duzer, Chet Van, 21, 103 Eden, Richard, 98 Edmond, Rod, 7 Egan, Gabriel, 101 Eliade, Mircea, 27 Eliot, T. S., 68 Empson, William, 160 etak (system of navigation), 153 Europe, 33, 35, 36, 39, 41, 44, 51, 52, 68, 74, 75, 78–79, 81, 98, 109, 117, 119, 133, 134, 156 Evans, Ambrose, 83 Ezekiel, Nissim, 136–137 Fagles, Robert, 103 Fanon, Frantz, 100 Fanshawe, Sir Richard, 43 The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 83 Feder, Kenneth L., 51 Fei Lin, 73 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 38–39 Figiel, Sia, 155 Flem-Ath, Rand, 50 Foe (Coetzee), 82–83 A Footnote to History: Eight Years of Trouble in Samoa (Stevenson), 157 Forster, E. M., 80 From the Country of Eight Islands (Sato and Watson), 126 Frost, Robert, 16 Fūdo, 125 Fujiwara No Teika, 12–13 Galleon Trade, 74–75, 76 gender: poetry and, 106, 111, 123, 139; politics and, 138, 139. See also patriarchy Geography III (Bishop), 85 Georgics (Virgil), 60 Germania (Tacitus), 116 Gerusalemme Liberata (Tasso), 41 Gilbert, Humphrey, 52

177

Gilgamesh, 30 Gillis, John R., 7, 153 Glissant, Édouard, 3, 7, 130–131, 132, 153 Glück, Louise, 105–106 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 11 Gondwana, 5, 19, 51 Graves, Robert, 46–47 Gray, Thomas, 46 Greece. See islands, real Green Shakespeare (Egan), 101 Grove, Richard, 44 Guo Chongli, 73 Hall, Joseph, 52 Hapgood, Charles, 50 Harmonium (Stevens), 68 Hay, George Campbell, 32–33 Heaney, Seamus, 5, 120, 138–139, 142, 143, 149, 150 Heidegger, Martin, 25 Heimskringla: History of the Kings of Norway (Sturluson), 120 Herrick, Robert, 39 Hesiod, 35 Hikāyat Seri Rāma, 96 Hinduism, 45, 62, 90, 91, 93, 94 A History of Amnesia (Sa’at), 109 Ho, Louise, 109 Homer, 10, 13, 21, 31, 35, 37, 41, 54, 55, 77, 79, 102–103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 111, 122–123 Homeric Hymn to Apollo, 21, 30 Horace, 39, 40 Horkheimer, Max, 111–112, 113 Huchel, Peter, 104 Hull, Eleanor, 140 Ibn Hamdis, 11 Idylls (Theocritus), 39 Igloria, Luisa A., 75 The Iliad (Homer), 90, 124 indenture, system of, 64, 96, 130, 134 India, 20, 42, 43, 64, 68, 73, 74, 88, 90, 91, 93, 137 Indian Ocean, 26, 41, 72, 74, 156 Indonesia, archipelago. See islands, real Inferno (Alighieri), 55, 105, 107 Inoshita, Ann, 155–156

178

Index

In Search of Robinson Crusoe (Severin), 81 The Irish for No (Carson), 142 Islam, 62, 63–64 island, types of: concrete, 18; continental, 5, 61; floating, 3, 17, 19, 20–21, 103, 109; habitat, 19; isolated, 61; lake, 61, 141; loch, 61; oceanic, 61; pumice raft, 3; syntactic, 26; tidal, 3–4; trash, 3; volcanic, 25. See also archipelago; islands, imaginary; islands, real island continent, 5, 34, 48, 49, 59 Islanded (Sivasundaram), 88–89 islanding, 5, 19, 25, 45, 88 islandness, 3–4, 7, 8, 16, 18, 19, 23, 24, 47, 127, 141, 160 islands, colonization and, 40, 41, 44, 63–64, 73, 88–89, 97, 131–132, 137–138, 139, 145, 147, 150, 155, 157, 159 islands, ecosystems of, 3, 7, 16, 19, 26, 30, 35, 44, 61, 67, 88, 89, 101, 116, 125, 135, 144, 153–154 islands, functions of, 26–27, 29–30 islands, imaginary: Aeolia, 21; Atlantis, 2, 8, 9, 19, 21, 47–61; Circe’s island, 37, 103, 104; Delos, 21; Elysian Fields, 30; Fortunate Islands, 30, 45, 52, 70; Hesperides, 39, 52; Hy-Brasil, 34; Isle of the Dead, 47, 60; Isles of the Blessed, 30, 35; Ithaca (in poetry), 8, 9, 47, 54–57, 77, 103–104, 108, 110, 111, 122–123; Kxonos, 52; Lanka, 9, 77, 90, 91–92, 93–94, 96; Meropis, 52; Ogygia, 52, 103, 105; Saint Brendan Island, 38; Scheria, 103; Ultima Thule, 67, 119; White Isle, 39. See also archipelago; island continent; islands, real islands, indigenous populations of, 64, 144 islands, languages and, 3, 6, 7, 10, 13, 21–22, 24, 25, 32–33, 61, 62, 64, 65–66, 67–69, 70, 71, 72, 101–102, 109, 115, 120, 131, 132, 134–135, 137, 138, 139, 143, 144–145, 146–147, 155, 158, 159

islands, marginality and, 62, 65–69, 88–90, 137, 145 islands, music and, 45–46, 64, 93, 94, 125, 132, 136, 148 islands, nations and, 44, 47, 62, 63, 65, 66, 68, 88, 98, 111, 115, 119, 125, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 146–147, 148, 150, 157–158 islands, painting and, 46, 131, 156 islands, real: Andaman and Nicobar Islands, 26; Antigua, 131; Antilles, 2, 3, 35, 36, 61, 96–97; Aran, 5; Arguin Island, 42; Azores, 35, 38, 50; Bahamas, 130, 131, 136; Bali, 62, 63, 137; Bishop Rock, 4; British Isles, 38, 44, 65, 67, 101, 116, 120; Canary, 35, 38, 50; Cape Verde, 35, 50; Caribbean islands, 2, 7, 9, 10, 21–22, 45, 64, 83, 84, 88, 89, 96–97, 104, 115, 124–125, 130–137, 140; Cephallenia, 103; Crete, 11, 50, 123; Cyprus, 11, 51; Delos, 11, 21; Easter Island (Rapa Nui), 25, 51, 154, 155; Eilean Donan, 4; England, 11, 23, 40, 65, 66, 68, 80, 81, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 101, 117, 137–138, 139, 141; Enoshima, 4; Falkland Islands, 137; Faroe Islands, 38, 67, 69, 70, 72; Fiji, 30, 156, 157; Fiti, 27; Greece, islands and mainland of, 9, 10, 11, 17, 44, 64, 103, 115, 122–124; Green Island (Lüdao), 26; Greenland, 4, 34, 38; Grenada, 131; Guadeloupe, 131; Guam, 76, 156, 157–158; Guanahani, 136; Hawaii, 19, 27, 76, 154, 155, 156, 159; Haji Ali Dargah, 4; Hebrides, 15, 69, 70; Hong Kong, 109, 111, 137, 145; Iceland, 67, 69, 70, 72, 115, 116, 117–118, 119–122; Île des Morts, 45; Ireland, 10, 14, 38, 65, 66, 70, 72, 88, 101, 115, 119, 137, 138–144, 146; Ithaca, 103; Japan, 10, 28, 88, 115, 124–130, 137; Java, 2, 62, 137; Jindo, 4; Kalimantan, 62; Krakatoa, 19; Kyushu, 126; Laccadive Islands, 73; Lesser Antilles, 35; Leucas, 103; Lindisfarne (Holy Island), 4; Lombok, 63, 137; Lonely Island, 22; Luzon, 64; Madagascar, 19;

Index Madeira, 35, 38, 42, 50; MalaysiaIndonesia, islands of, 9, 42, 45, 62, 63, 64, 72–73, 108, 155; Maldives, 19, 73, 91; Malta, 11; Manhattan, 50; Manitoulin, 23; Mariana Islands, 156; Martinique, 131, 132; Matsushima, 13, 128, 129; Modo, 4; Mont Saint-Michel, 4; Mumbai, 136, 137; New Zealand, 5, 19, 154–155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160; Ojima, 128; Oki, 126; Orkney Islands, 66, 67, 69, 70; Oshima, 13; Pacific islands, 45, 153–161; Pacific Trash Vortex, 3; Philippines, 9, 63–64, 72, 74–76, 88; Porto Santo, 35; Rocks of St. Peter and St. Paul, 50; Rhodes, 11; Sado, 26; Samine, 127; Samoa, 27, 41, 154, 157, 159; Sardinia, 51; Savai’i, 27; Scilly, 4; Scotland, islands and mainland of, 4, 9, 15, 21, 32, 65, 66–67, 68, 69–71, 72, 88, 119, 137, 140, 141; Shetlands, 69, 70; Shikoku, 127; Sicily, 11, 137; Singapore, 93, 108–114, 145; Skye, 70; Solitude Island, 22; Solomon Islands, 154; Sri Lanka (Ceylon), 12, 72–74, 88–89, 91, 92, 95–96, 137; Sulu, 63; Sumatra, 62, 64; Sveti Stefan, 4; Taiwan, 10, 26, 88, 115, 137, 143–151, 155; Tasmania, 19, 88, 137; Thera, 50–51; TimorLeste, 157; Tonga, 27; Trinidad and Tobago, 84; Tristan da Cunha, 4; Tsushima, 126; Turtle Island (North America), 2. See also archipelago; island continent; islands, imaginary islands, religion and, 2, 37, 38, 40–41, 42, 56, 62, 63–64, 88–89, 90–97, 144 Islands of the Mind (Gillis), 153 island studies journals, 7 Isle of the Dead (Böcklin), 46 Isolario (The Book of Islands), 36 Jainism, 90, 91, 94, 96 James, Henry, 78 Japan. See islands, real Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons (Shirane), 127 Johnson, Samuel, 15

179

Kakinomoto No Hitomaro, 127–128 Kalevala (Lönnrot), 45, 46 Kamba (Kamban), 93 Kant, Immanuel, 20 Kapital, Das (Marx), 82 Karyotakis, C. G., 123 katabasis, 46 Kats, J., 96 Kavanagh, Patrick, 66, 136 Kawaharada, Dennis, 25 Kazantzakis, Nikos, 105, 122–123 Keats, John, 68 Kellogg, Robert, 121 Kerrigan, John, 7, 65–66 Kim Seung-Jee, 57 Kinichiro Ishikawa, 147 Knox, Bernard, 103 Kojiki, 125–126 Kulagoe, Celo, 158 Lal, Pranay, 19 Lambada by Galilee and Other Surprises (Lee), 111 Lamming, George, 101 Lansdown, Richard, 89 Lawrence, D. H., 89 Laws (Plato), 48–49 Lee Tzu Pheng, 109, 111, 112–114 Legazpi, Miguel Lopez de, 63 Leggott, Michele, 160 Liebmann, Otto, 25 Li Minyong, 148 Liu, Petrus, 147 Longley, Edna, 29–30 Lönnrot, Elias, 45 Loughrey, Elizabeth M., 7 Lucian of Samosata, 35, 37 Macao, 42 MacDiarmid, Hugh, 14, 15, 66–67, 68, 70, 71 MacIntyre, Duncan Ban, 69 Mack, John, 7, 80–81, 153 MacNeice, Louis, 66 Magellan, Ferdinand, 63, 98, 156 The Mahāvamsa, 95–96 Ma Huan, 73 The Maker (Borges), 102

180 Malaysia-Indonesia, archipelago. See islands, real Man’yōshū, 126 Māori, 156, 157, 159–160 Marco Polo, 41 Marsden, William, 62–63 Marvell, Andrew, 40, 104 Marx, Karl, 82 McMahon, Elizabeth, 7, 14, 34, 61 Meadowlands (Glück), 105–106 Mediterranean Sea, 11, 41, 50, 55, 98 Meeker, Joseph W., 2 Memories of Mount Qilai (Yang Mu), 149–150 Men and Women (Browning), 1 Menzies, Gavin, 73 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 60 Mexico, 74 Milton, John, 46, 51–52 Mona Neng, 146–147 Moore, Marianne, 77 More, Thomas, 49, 52 Morgan, Edwin, 21, 70, 71 Mornings in Mexico (Lawrence), 89 Muir, Edwin, 29, 61, 66–67, 68, 69 Mundus alter (Hall), 52 myth, 3, 8, 21, 24, 31, 45–46, 67, 78–79, 82, 85, 91–92, 96, 102, 110, 111, 113, 118, 159; Buddhist, 93; Cherokee, 17–18; Fijian, 30; Finnish, 45; Greek, 39, 45, 47, 48–50, 60–61, 123; Hawaiian, 27; Hindu, 93; Icelandic, 46, 119, 120; Irish, 35–36, 140, 143; Japanese, 27–28, 125–126; Māori, 156; Roman, 35, 42, 60; Samoan, 27, 154; Scandinavian, 46, 116, 119 Mythistorema (Seferis), 124 Myths of Modern Individualism (Watt), 79 The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Bashō), 128 négritude, 140 The New Atlantis (Bacon), 49 A New Voyage round the World (Dampier), 80 New World, 39–40, 74, 130 Nichols, Grace, 125 Niles, Daniel, 7

Index Nixon, Rob, 100 Njal’s Saga, 121–122 Norquay, Glenda, 65 Novum Organum (Bacon), 48 Nunn, Patrick, 51 Object Lessons (Boland), 138 Oceania, 10, 153–160 Odysseus (character), 8, 9–10, 77, 78, 79, 102–114 The Odyssey (Homer), 21, 31, 37, 55, 90 The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel (Kazantzakis), 105, 122–123 The Odyssey: A Play (Walcott), 104 Oliver, Douglas, 46 Omeros (Walcott), 22, 61 Ō no Yasumaro, 125–126 Ōtomo no Yakamochi, 126 The Overall Survey of the Star Raft (Fei Lin), 73 Ovid, 60, 107 Owen, Wilfred, 47 Pacifica, 51 Pacific Ocean, 41, 81, 155 Pangaea, 19 Paradise Lost, 46 Pascal, Blaise, 1 patriarchy, 113, 138, 139. See also gender The Penelopiad (Atwood), 107 Perez, Craig Santos, 157–158 Perse, Saint-John, 2, 153 Pessoa, Fernando, 43–44 Pharaoh’s Daughter (Dhomnaill), 146 Philip, M. NourbeSe, 131–132 Philippines. See islands, real A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Burke), 20 Pigafetta, Antonio, 80, 98 Pindar, 21 Plato, 21, 48, 49–50, 51, 54, 58, 60 The Pleasures of Exile (Lamming), 101 Plutarch, 35, 48 Poe, Edgar Allan, 67 poem, types of: Japanese verse forms, 127; pantoum (pantun), 62–63; praise, 69, 70, 88; religious, 38, 90, 94, 96

Index Poems from Atlantis (Dudek), 54 Poetic Edda, 46, 120, 121 Poetics (Aristotle), 22 poetry: allegory and, 3, 9, 13, 16, 24, 27, 35, 38, 40, 41, 42, 47, 51, 53, 54, 55, 60, 61, 83, 97, 99, 102, 114, 124, 139, 143, 147; cognitive element in, 18, 22, 24, 25–26; forms of, 57, 58, 120, 127; idea of, in relation to islands, 24–25; imagery in, 3, 4, 5, 6, 16, 22, 23, 24, 61, 76, 85, 113, 118, 123, 127, 129, 149, 150, 159; metaphor and, 3, 9, 12, 19, 25, 83, 102, 118, 132, 139; symbols and, 3, 8, 9, 16, 24, 27, 29–30, 35, 38, 39, 41, 45, 54, 56, 77, 79, 82, 83, 91, 92, 97, 98, 99, 100, 103, 111, 116, 133, 135, 141 Pollock, Sheldon I., 92, 95 Politics (Aristotle), 82 Polynesia, 154 Pope, Alexander, 6 Portugal, 42, 43–44, 74 The Prelude (Wordsworth), 150 Prince Henry the Navigator, 42 Prose Edda, 120 Prospero (character), 9, 98 Purānās, 92 Rachmaninov, Sergei, 46 Rajah Baguinda, 64 Rāma (character), 9, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96 Rāma the Steadfast (Brockington and Brockington), 90 The Rāmāyana (Vālmiki), 90–95, 98 Ransom, John Crowe, 22, 23 Rāvana (character), 8, 9, 77–78, 79, 80, 90–97, 98 Raylor, Timothy, 40 The Redress of Poetry (Heaney), 138 Reed, Robert Ronald, 75 Renan, Ernest, 101 The Repeating Island (Benítez-Rojo), 64–65, 132 The Republic (Plato), 48–49 Rhys, Jean, 89 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 60 The Rise of the Novel (Watt), 78 Ritsos, Yannis, 106, 107

181

Robinson (Spark), 10 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 82, 83 Rodinia, 19 Rodó, José Enrique, 101 Rogers, Woodes, 80, 81 Royle, Stephen A., 25 Ruskin, John, 131 Russell, George, 141, 142 Sa’at, Alfian, 109 sagas, Icelandic, 10, 119–122 The Sagas of Icelanders, 121 Sahul, 20 Saintsbury, George, 117–118 Salanga, Alfrredo Navarro, 64 Sappho, 11 Saramago, José, 21 Sato, Hiroaki, 126 Scotland. See islands, real Scott, Walter, 3–4, 70–71 The Sea and the Mirror (Auden), 100 The Seafarer, 117 Seferis, George, 124 Segalen, Victor, 2–3 Selkirk, Alexander, 81 Seneca, 17 Serious Reflections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 83, 87 Seuss, Eduard, 19 Severin, Tim, 81 Shakespeare, William, 6, 79, 97–99, 100, 101 Sharif Kabungsuan, 64 Shell, Marc, 7 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 22 She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (Philip), 131–132 Shipwreck with Spectator, 24–25 Shirane, Haruo, 127 Sibelius, Jean, 45 Sidney, Philip, 22 Sitā (character), 90, 93, 94–95, 96 Sivasundaram, Sujit, 88–89 Slave Ship (Turner), 131 Slave Song (Dabydeen), 134–135 slave trade, 130–131, 134 Smith, Nigel, 40 Smith, Vanessa, 7

182

Index

Smyth, Gerry, 65 Snyder, Gary, 2 Solon, 48 Somers, George, 40 Spain, 42, 51, 74 Spark, Muriel, 10 Spence, Lewis, 51 Spenser, Edmund, 41 Sri Lanka (Ceylon). See islands, real Sri Rāmacaritamānasa (Tulsidās), 93–94 St. Brendan (bishop of Clonfert), 37, 38 Station Island (Heaney), 138, 150 Steele, Richard, 81 Steinberg, Philip E., 137 Stephanides, Stephanos, 21, 37 stereotypes, 92, 101, 133, 138, 155, 157 Stevens, Wallace, 57, 68; “Of Modern Poetry,” 24; “The Planet on the Table,” 6; “Sunday Morning,” 17, 117; “The World as Meditation,” 106 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 41, 157, 158 Sturluson, Snorri, 120 sublime, ideas of, 19–20, 26, 67, 71, 124, 129 Sullivan, Robert, 156 Sun Dachuan, 147 Suzuki, Daisetz Taitaro, 96 The Swan of Tuonela (Sibelius), 45 Symposium (Plato), 60 Tacitus, 116 Taiwan. See islands, real Tasman, Abel, 156 Tasso, Torquatto, 41 Teaiwa, Teresia, 154 The Tempest (Shakespeare), 6, 97–99, 100 Tennyson, Alfred, 55, 68, 114 Tetsurō, Watsuji, 125 Thales of Miletus, 17 Thapar, Romila, 94 Theocritus, 39 Thomas, R. S., 66 Thumboo, Edwin, 109–110, 111, 112, 113, 114 Thurston, Michael, 46 Tiffin, Helen, 7 Timaeus (Plato), 48, 49 Tolkien, J. R. R., 117, 120

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 130 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 7, 8, 153 Tulsidās, Goswami, 93–94 Turner, J. M. W., 131 Turner: New and Selected Poems (Dabydeen), 131, 134 Tuwhare, Hone, 159, 160 Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (Verne), 50 type and token, 13, 16, 17, 77, 79, 99, 102, 103, 153 typology, 4, 7, 8, 9, 29, 39, 41, 45 Une Tempête (Césaire), 101 Ur, 19 Utopia (More), 49 Uttara Purāna, 96 Vālmiki, 77, 80, 90, 91, 92, 93, 96 Varenius, Bernhardus, 17 Vaughan, Henry, 66 Vedās, 91, 92 Verne, Jules, 50 Vespucci, Amerigo, 80 Vicente, Gil, 33 Villalobos, Ruy Lopez de, 63 Virgil, 31, 60, 107 The Voyage of Bran, 36–37 The Voyage of Máel Dúin, 36 The Voyage of St. Brendan, 37, 38 voyages, types of: Echtrai, 35, 36; Immram, 35–36; Longes, 36 A Voyage to the South Sea, and Round the World (Cooke), 80 Walcott, Derek, 1, 21–22, 61, 80, 83–85, 96–97, 104, 135, 136 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 63 Waller, Edmund, 40–41 Watson, Burton, 126 Watt, Ian, 78–79 Wendt, Albert, 155, 158, 159 What Passes for Answers (Co), 75 Where We Once Belonged (Figiel), 155 White Egrets (Walcott), 136 Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys), 89 Will Europe Follow Atlantis? (Spence), 51

Index Williams, William Carlos, 68 Wilson, Colin, 50 Wilson, Rob, 160 Winton, Tim, 34 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 20–21, 150 Wordsworth, William, 86, 87, 150 The World Factbook—CIA, 144 The World’s Wife (Duffy), 106 World War I, 46–47, 73 World War II, 100, 157 Wu Zinrong, 145

183

Yang Mu, 148–150 Yang Rong, 74 Yang Wei, 73 Yap, Arthur, 109 Yeats, William Butler, 39, 139, 140–142, 149 Zaid, Gabriel, 104–105 Zealandia, 5 Zheng He (Cheng Ho), 72–74 Zong! (Philip), 131

About the Author

Rajeev S. Patke is professor of English at the National University of Singapore and the inaugural director of the Division of Humanities at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. Previous books include Modernist Literature and Postcolonial Studies (2013), The Concise Routledge History of Southeast Asian Writing in English (with Philip Holden, 2010), Postcolonial Poetry in English (2006), and The Long Poems of Wallace Stevens: An Interpretative Study (1985).

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