Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat

Abstract

reviews reviews The collection opens with “The Ocean of Mrs. Nagai,” set in presentday Tokyo. Mrs. Nagai, the seventyeight -year-old wife of a politically prominent war hero, Shimizu Nagai, plays host to a young cosmopolitan couple, Nyla and Sam from New York. As Mrs. Nagai spends the day taking the Western couple around Tokyo, the conversation around Japanese history and culture creates mild tension among the characters and evokes in Mrs. Nagai horrid memories of World War II and the possible atrocities committed by her husband in particular and by the Japanese at large. The following pieces, “Pepsi” and “Raisins not Virgins,” are both extraordinarily unconventional in their topic of narrative. “Pepsi” follows the life of ten-year-old Zara, child of a diplomat father and a socialite mother in Addis Ababa. Friendless, nerdy, and ignored by her parents, Zara wanders off to play with children from the neighboring shantytown only to find herself in the thick of a class struggle. In “Raisins not Virgins,” Sahar Salam, a young Bangladeshi American in Manhattan , finds love in Rizwan, a lawyer with a similar cultural background, only to lose him to a jihad in the Middle East. A screenplay of this story was selected for the All Access Program at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival. Sharbari’s characters are immersed in this endless cycle of being lost and found—like Ella, the adopted Bangladeshi American protagonist in “Wanted,” or the middle-aged Laura in “Foreign Exchange” who is coming to terms with her daughter’s homosexuality and consequent murder in Bangladesh. The common thread sewing Sharbari’s unpredictable collection together is the fantastical chance encounters that the most ordinary and apolitical of people—immigrants , spouses, children, artists, academicians—have with historical and global events. The Ocean of Mrs. Nagai was published by Dhaka’s Daily Star Books in November 2013 and released at the Hay Literary Festival in Dhaka in 2013. Shilpa Kameswaran New York Edwidge Danticat. Claire of the Sea Light. New York. Knopf. 2013. isbn 9780307271792 Max Ardin Sr., the suspiciously highminded schoolmaster in Claire of the Sea Light, says something memorable about life’s painful separations when he tells the part-time teacher and sometimes lover whose dismissal from both roles he has just cleverly, discretely effected: “You’re like a starfish, constantly in need of a piece of yourself breaking off and walking away in order to become something new.” Another way of looking at separation , Edwidge Danticat’s signature theme, is the attitude expressed by the novel’s titular Claire. Early in the fiction, the seven-year-old disappears into hiding rather than let herself be given away by her hardpressed , widowed fisherman father to a widow with space in her life for a daughter. Suspended unhelpfully between these two divergent attitudes are the half-dozen or so Ville Rose residents whom we meet, mostly, while the runaway Claire is in hiding, resisting separation from her father. In a chapter called “Frogs,” we meet the widow as she was ten years before. For most of that year, Gaëlle was pregnant, albeit ambivalently so. Against her husband’s and her doctor ’s advice, she had refused the abortion that would separate her from her ominously cysted fetus. Yet on the very threshold of the baby’s birth, she walked alone in the swamp that surrounded her home, listened to the year’s diseased generation of singing frogs until, finally, she ate one. “Let them fight it out and see who will win,” she says of the frog and of the baby whose life she had just imperiled and whose separation from herself she clearly, on some unacknowledged psychological level, desired. We also meet the schoolmaster’s son, Max Junior, a young man unable to complete the separation from his home island that began some ten years before when, having raped his father’s housekeeper and begotten a child, his father sent him to Miami to live with his mother. However, the woman he has most promisingly met in Florida has described to him the feelings of abandonment that she endured for the whole of her life because she grew up in a fatherless household, grew up...