Madagascar

Red island house

by andrea lee

I finished RED ISLAND HOUSE by Andrea Lee a couple weeks ago and it was a rich, satisfying read. Choosing this book was a bit of an indulgence as Andrea Lee is not African, (she’s an African American who was born in Philadelphia and now lives in Turin, Italy,) however, she writes about colonialism and its impact on women and Madagascar with huge insight and sensitivity.

The chapters in RED ISLAND HOUSE by Andrea Lee are sewn together by the narrative thread of the experience of Shay Gilliam, an African American academic who, on marrying a wealthy Italian, finds herself the mistress of a large home in Naratrany, “a small lush island with a central crater that gives it from afar the look of a squashed green fedora. Framed by coral reefs, it is one of a chain of ancient fumaroles that in the Tertiary period arose to become satellites to the huge main island.” Shay is a well-educated, black woman from a middle-class family in California, USA, who finds herself in the position of colonial expatriate, living among the wealthy European and African communities who are served by the local Malagasy people. This dynamic is carefully explored by Lee as she offers the Black expatriate view of the world through Shay, who must navigate her own discomfort as she hovers between these two worlds, relating in some ways to both, but belonging solely to one.

Lee’s descriptions are so vivid and so visual that it is as if the scenes are unfolding in front of you. She has clearly done a great deal of research and the history, tribes, islands, and cultures of Madagascar are woven seamlessly into every chapter. Lee has visited the island country many times and there were moments in the book when the writer’s voice came through quite strongly and it seemed as if the depth of description and local knowledge had been included more to reveal the intellect and perspective of the writer than to serve the story.

The book reads like a collection of short stories and I was not surprised to read in the author’s note at the end, that this was Lee’s original intention. “Red Island House was a complicated novel to write. It began as a series of stories seen from different points of view and set in different parts of Madagascar, based on notes from my travels to the country over the last few decades. Only years after composing the first drafts of the earliest stories did I see that they could actually become part of one narrative, centered around a single, fictive Malagasy island; a house; a character.” Shay’s central narrative thread provides cohesion to the novel, but some story threads felt a little patched in, while others were woven through seamlessly. For example, Shay and Senna have two children who we hardly ever meet. Their characters are not developed and the children’s existence and involvement in Shay and Senna’s lives at The Red Island House seem very incidental to the adult world their parents occupy. Other characters, met or encountered along the way, return often and get full, rounded treatment.

However, this did not dilute the novel at all. Some books really bring a place alive and pull you deeply into the world where the story lives. This was one of those books for me. When I finished, I felt as if I’d just returned from a visit to a vivid version of Madagascar, and immediately wanted to go back.