“There is no friend like a sister.” Mary Engelbreit

Since the end of 2005, I have been participating in a reading challenge whereby the participants are attempting to read a book by an author (or if there isn’t one translated into English, about the country) for each of the 200+ countries participating in the 2008 Summer Olympics. We have until the end of the Beijing Games to finish our reading. My thirty fourth is “Island Songs” by Alex Wheatle.

Wheatle was born in Great Britain and raised as in an orphanage despite the fact that he had parents and siblings. He didn’t become aware of them until later in life and in doing so discovered his Jamaican roots.

The story of “Island Songs” is the story of the fierce love between two sisters and takes place in a small Jamaican mountain village in the 1950’s and ‘60’s with flashbacks to earlier times and characters. It is built around the backdrop of Jamaica’s struggle for independence from England, while advancing toward modernity in the cities as well as the smaller rural areas. The story also shows the strong ties the people have to Africa and the slave trade of the prior centuries and the death of large sugarcane plantations as the island is stripped of its mineral resources instead.

Despite the fact that their parents love them and there are many extended family members nearby, Jenny and Hortense feel abandoned by their family. Their mama Amy loved their older brother David dearest and when he dies at the hands of the Kingston police, she becomes even colder and more distant to the girls. Jenny, the older of the two is the apple of her papa Joseph’s eye and after David’s death, he realizes that he has left things unsaid and undone with his own parents. In leaving to right this wrong, Joseph wounds Jenny deeply. Although he says he’ll come back, David had also said that when he left and the family fears they’ll never see Joseph again either.

Jenny and Hortense are like a lot of sisters in that they are loyal to a fault, and have each other’s back against the world, but there are times when their individual natures come out to play. Jenny’s biggest failing is that she wants whatever her younger sister Hortense has, including the love of a boy, Cilbert. This ultimately destroys any chance for a love Jenny can have of her own.

In spite of growing up away from family, Wheatle creates characters who are not only believable, but entirely whole and real. It is beautiful, heartbreaking, warm, and stark. I think Jenny and Hortense will be bickering in my brain forever. It took about 40 pages for me to get into the swing of the language, which though in English, is a very different take on the grammar and word choice. Once I found the rhythm, it made sense more easily. I heartily recommend “Island Songs”