The Islands: Stories by Dionne Irving
Catapult
272 pages

Tomorrow, I interview Toronto born Dionne Irving whose collection The Islands was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Her stories feature women of Jamaican heritage whose lives unfold in cities across the diaspora: Here are some my thoughts ahead of our conversation.

The stories in Dionne Irving’s The Islands are quietly devastating. They are mysterious and subterranean in their accrual of meanings that prove as unsettling for her readers as they are for her characters. Epiphanies do not erupt out of the largely psychological action. Instead, insights are retroactive and hard-won and evolve over the passage of time, until a character’s personal past collides with collective history.

The first story, Florida Lives, opens with the words, “In hindsight,” directing us back to a time when the heroine was naive. Set in swampy, southern Florida, it follows the demise of a young marriage. The Jamaican wife’s light complexion is a trade-off for her dark-skinned husband’s education and American identity. But the transaction falls flat as cultural differences emerge, and the pair slide down the social ladder. Transaction is the operative word: Irving’s women navigate a claustrophobic, capitalist world in which they chiefly remain commodities.

The brilliance of this first story is representative of the entire collection. Throughout, Irving tackles the subject of intersectionality, illuminating its chaotic impact within and between her characters. For the most part, the racial whiteness of her settings serves as a screen against which her heroines’ lives play out.  Irving wittily uses grammar as a literary motif - (the Florida wife, for instance, describes her early marriage as “the past-imperfect”). She also chooses familiar words and phrases which explode into multiple meanings upon contact with the mind.  Indeed, the term immigration comes to symbolize various themes including failure and the wherewithal to begin again and again.

Please join us on Wednesday November 22 at Northern District Library at 7PM