RED ISLAND HOUSE - ANDREA LEE

My mom reads more popular fiction than I do and when this book started to pick up popular acclaim (there was a section in the New Yorker and Lee is doing the interview/podcast rounds) she picked it up then mailed it to me. As you might expect, I’m a bit of a completest w/r/t Madagascar stuff. Well, the stuff in English, the much more voluminous French collection of writings about Madagascar remains largely off limits to me. I’ve read a lot of history and non-fiction and poetry about Madagascar or written by Malagasy people, but this is the first novel I’ve come across. It’s been a while since I’ve read/reviewed a novel with a “plot” so spoiler warning. The book follows a Black American academic, named Shay, who marries an Italian man who owns a hotel/beach house on Naratrany, where the family goes for vacations a few times a year. Naratrany is the author’s pseudonym for Nosy Be, which is strange because everything else in the book is called by its real Malagasy name. She visits the island, and by island, I do mean her small part of Nosy Be, there is very little about any other part of Madagascar, for weeks/months at a time over decades as her family grows up, interacts with the various Malagasy people and the other Europeans on the island, then grows apart. The crux of the book is the slow realization by the narrator of how the island actually works and her role in it. I’ve lived in Madagascar, not the tourist spots (I never visited Nosy Be, which is the largest and fancies and most European of the Madagascar vacation beaches, but I visited several others), and what I found most interesting about the book was now naïve the narrator was. We’re supposed to believe that a Black lady, who grew up in Oakland, and professionally teaches African-American literature, would not immediately see through and be disgusted by the dynamics between the Malagasy and Europeans on Naratrany. Nosy Be exists in the French and Italian imagination much like Thailand (another place where I’ve personally seen this exact dynamic) or the Philippines exists in the British or American psyches, as sex-tourism spots, as places where people are paying to have sex with children. Lee elides this fact a few times in the book, talking about how the girls are young or “hardly 20” or “the age of his granddaughter” but, I can assure you, these girls are in their mid-teens and tourists quite famously and frequently fuck kids younger than that. For example, when I lived on Mada, it was big news that a French man and an Italian man were lynched and burned to death on a Nosy Be beach for exactly this behavior with young boys, Lee doesn’t fictionalize this instance, though it did happen the same year of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue shoot, a real-life event she does fictionalize. The reason she skips this, I think, is because it would make her narrator seem less sympathetic and more clueless. Shay is trying to portray the situation as more complex and nuanced than it really is, mostly to protect herself from feeling guilty. Shay, the main character frequently wonders about the morality of what she’s doing which I found interesting since it all strikes me as very clear. She’s abetting her husband owning a special child-rape house for himself and his buddies in the third world (the husband knocks up a teenager at the end of the book when he’s in his 70s). She runs a hotel in a third world country that is both extracting value out of Madagascar and, as is mentioned several times, will not hire Malagasy people for the high up positions. There is a long chapter about one of the main workers in the house dying and how she, the narrator, feels they’re sisters despite the fact that this Malagasy woman is so poor she asks for a tin roof as a gift and that Shay has never seen this woman’s house. She chalks up to a Malagasy thing, which is not true. If you’re friends with a Malagasy person, they will invite you to their house. Shay is suffering from the common American affliction of mistaking people who work for you for friends. Even towards the end of the book when Shay’s children are teens and they tell her that it’s fucked up for their parents to have this colonial holding, likening it to a “barracoon of slaves,” she dismisses them as spoiled. She also pretty consistently talks about the various ethnic groups of Madagascar in terms she would object to if, say, a YT French person had written them, for example, “Not Sakalava or Antandroy, but some other tribe bred to the point of divine symmetry of feature,” or the multiple references to the “Sakalava bubble-butt.” I’m not sure the author intended this but the book is a real case study on the ability for people to lie to themselves or never consider that they might be the bad guy. This would be old news if it was YT guy in Madagascar, it’s interesting that a Black Woman would be so naïve and blind. I kept thinking about academics I’ve met who say all the right things in their writing and teaching but are total abusive exploitive pieces of shit in real life. It’s a really good portrait of a person like that who has really strong feelings in the abstract but when they’re faced with actual exploitation or evil, especially when it implicates them or their loved ones and/or benefits them, they manage to obfuscate or talk about how complex the issues are or otherwise find some excuse for not rocking the boat. Beyond that, my biggest problem with the book is that I never understood why the husband and wife tolerate each other at all. The first chapter yadda-yaddas over their courtship and tells us that they like each other because they’re opposite but in all the rest of the book the husband seems to have no redeeming qualities so I didn’t really understand why they were together. Maybe it was another example of Shay’s aloofness and inability to do the right thing. If this is the only exposure people have to Madagascar I would say they will not a get a good idea of what the country is about, but as a portrait of a certain type of inadvertently evil liberal, it’s pretty insightful. 1960 red islands