Autoethnography and Feminist Theory at the Water's Edge

Unsettled Islands

Sonja Boon, Lesley Butler, Daze Jefferies

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319908298
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book takes an intimate, collaborative, interdisciplinary autoethnographic approach that both emphasizes the authors' entangled relationships with the more-than-human, and understands the land and sea-scapes of Newfoundland as integral to their thinking, theorizing, and writing. The authors draw on feminist, trans, queer, critical race, Indigenous, decolonial, and posthuman theories in order to examine the relationships between origins, memories, place, identities, bodies, pasts, and futures. The chapters address a range of concerns, among them love, memory, weather, bodies, vulnerability, fog, myth, ice, desire, hauntings, and home.

Autoethnography and Feminist Theory at the Water's Edge will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including gender studies, cultural geography, folklore, and anthropology, as well as those working in autoethnography, life writing, and island studies.

© The Author(s) 2018

Sonja Boon, Lesley Butler and Daze JefferiesAutoethnography and Feminist Theory at the Water's Edgehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90829-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Islands of the Imagination

Sonja Boon¹ , Lesley Butler¹ and Daze Jefferies¹

(1)

Memorial University of Newfoundland, St John’s, Canada

Lesley Butler

Daze Jefferies

Abstract

This chapter situates islands as metaphorical spaces of the imagination and as epistemological openings. In particular, it argues that islands, islanders, and islandness offer unique perspectives through which to engage with theory making. Indeed, to live and think from an island is to think from a threshold space, a borderland between land and sea. More specifically, this chapter suggests that the water’s edge—that unsettled boundary between the solid and the liquid—is a potent site of theoretical possibility, potential, and dreaming.

Keywords

IslandsIslandnessTheoryAutoethnographyNewfoundlandBorderlands

End Abstract

The wind lashes around my body, ice drops flashing against my skin. Visibility nil, the weather report said, but still I am here. At the water’s edge. Scanning the invisible horizon. Newfoundland, this island I have now called home for ten years, marks its presence in my every move, and islandness now seeps through all of my pores. Islandness has become central to who I understand myself to be. Leaving here cannot be accomplished by foot or by bike or by car. It means navigating an expanse of water that freezes over in the winter, or flying in windy and foggy skies that sometimes close—for days on end—to air traffic. Islandness means waking to the lonely call of the foghorn and watching icebergs glide silently by, their stately masses keeping coastal communities cool, sometimes until late in June. To live on an island is to orient oneself to an infinite horizon, to the sound of beach stones constantly rolling against one another, and to the sticky tanginess of saltwater between my toes. The ocean knows…

Islands, as many have observed, are mythical spaces located “somewhere … between the real and the unreal” (Zilmer 2012, 34). As sites of infinite possibility, islands are places “away” where anything can happen; they are environments of the imagination. For Charles Darwin, islands were uniquely controlled environments and thus ideal laboratories (Walker and Bellingham 2011, 7), a quality they still retain to this day (Hay 2006, 19). Is it any wonder, then, that utopias are often situated on islands?

I haven’t always been an islander. For a long time, water did not flood my thoughts, my dreams, my bodily being. I spent much of my childhood on the prairies; for eleven years my identity was shaped by a low horizon that split gold from blue, wheat from sky. But just as wheat fields and prairie grasses undulate, so too does the ocean undulate. And just as the prairie stretches into eternity, so does the ocean promise an endless horizon. Perhaps, then, this islandness was already inside me, somewhere. But unlike the solid prairie earth, the ocean is always moving. Heaving. Rushing. Dancing. Rocking. And it is this constant motion that was so very disconcerting in the early days.

There are approximately 680 billion islands in the world (Ronström 2009, 171). Ten percent of the world’s population lives on islands (Baldacchino 2007, 1), and roughly a quarter of UN member nations are island nations (Chamberlin 2013, x). These numbers reveal not only the importance of islands within the context of a globe organized around continents, but also the continued conceptual relevance of islands in the human imagination.

At its simplest, an island is a “thing in water” (Zilmer 2012, 10). Islands are defined not by the earth—as continents are—but by something much more volatile: water. In places like Newfoundland, the ocean is a capricious, powerful, unruly, and uncontrollable border whose moods fundamentally shape the idea of the island. Indeed, the edge , that point of tension between solid and liquid, land and water, is fundamental to understanding islands and islandness. As Pete Hay observes, “islanders are more aware of and more confronted by the fact of boundaries than are most peoples” (2006, 21).

As liminal spaces, islands serve as “a master metaphor” (Gillis, qtd. in Perera 2009, 21). Indeed, in the words of J. Edward Chamberlin, “[m]aybe stories themselves began with islands” (2013, xii). We might consider here, the mythical Muskoka island envisioned by L. M. Montgomery in her single adult novel, The Blue Castle (1926). Here the metaphorical castle—actually a ramshackle cabin—rises from the mists, a space outside of time where anything, seemingly, is possible, and where the heroine’s long cherished but almost dashed dreams can come true. So, too, can we turn our eyes to L. M. Montgomery’s fabled childhood home, Prince Edward Island, whose rolling green hills and red sands have provoked the romantic dreams of many a schoolgirl, and served as the backdrop for Japanese—islanders themselves—tourist cards and wedding photos. Further afield, we can consider Dionne Brand’s Trinidadian island imaginary, as evoked in her 2001 work, A map to the Door of No Return: Notes to belonging (2001). Water shapes Brand’s memory, dreams, and history.

But if islands have been imagined as magical places, they’re also understood as dangerous: “Paradises, but also Gulags, are generally islands,” writes Godfrey Baldacchino (2005, 248). As H.W. Menard observes, islands—even as mere possibilities—have been deeply threatening to explorers (1986, 6). Isolated and remote, islands can be prisons for marooned communities incapable of escape. We might think here not only of such literal prison islands as Tasmania or Alcatraz, but also of the dystopian island space evoked in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), which examines the darkest underbellies of human social relations. We might even, perhaps, recall Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, who finds himself deposited on a Caribbean island, where he remains for twenty-eight years, forced to rely on his own resources: ingenuity, wit, education, and—tellingly—the support of a servile sidekick, a Carib man he names Friday, for his survival (Defoe 1719). This island space is not necessarily romantic; rather it tests resilience and the human will to survive.

“Every nation has its sacred isle, full of portent,” writes Elizabeth Waterston, before going on to discuss Manhattan and Ellis Island in the USA and then Vancouver Island, Prince Edward Island, and Cape Breton Island in Canada (2000, 266). Surprisingly, here, Waterston appears to have forgotten Newfoundland, a darker and larger island to Prince Edward Island’s immediate northeast. In contrast to the genteel character of Vancouver Island and Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland stands stark and wild. Windy and untamed, this rock faces the North Atlantic head on, subject fully to the whims of an unruly ocean. No rolling hills here, no gentle children’s romances; instead, Newfoundland, as an island of the imagination, is a place hewn from rock, will, hard work, and determination. Newfoundland is not a romantic idyll; it is something else entirely.

I arrived in Newfoundland late in June 2008. June is peak fog season in St. John’s, the province’s capital and only...