The Wide Sargussum Sea

#032 Bertha is mad for good reason

Note: My typical themes of creativity, wellbeing and nature have been stretched in the last two weeks and pulled me into topics that are more political. This article feels risky because I am using literature to reflect and comment on the very real and challenging areas of intergenerational trauma and post-colonial politics. They are not areas that I consider myself to be expert in, and I do not want to sound glib, nor oversimplify these important issues. Reni-Eddo Lodge in her 2017 book 'Why I'm no longer talking to white people about race', says “White people, you need to talk to other white people about race”. I do not know all of my followers and subscribers, but I am pretty sure the majority of you are white, and today I need to talk about race with you.

Having plucked myself from my ecosystem and planted myself in an entirely new one, I still have one eye looking at the UK, whilst looking at my new environment with the other, and adjusting to the new land, role, and culture in all its forms. We are nearing the end of October, which I am aware is Black History month in the UK, and from this weekend, the end of daylight saving hours. Here in the Cayman Islands the focus is on celebrating Halloween and Pirates week, and I believe Black History month is February. As with everything else I have experienced so far, I am sure I will gain a new perspective living in the Caribbean, so I talk with you here, with the knowledge that I am still, and will forever be, learning.

The Bildungsroman

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Up until recently I had two copies of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Both were the same, but one was thickened by my fingers flicking through the pages over and over again, fluttered with sticky tags that marked the pages with important symbolism or shifts in the plot.

The quote above is one of the most famous lines in the book, contrasting ‘Reader, I married him’, it epitomises Jane’s development of character, as is typical of the Bildungsroman genre. This was likely not the usual story amongst nineteenth century orphan-turned-governesses.

I have read this book multiple times, not because I loved it (which fortunately I did), but because it was a text I read as a teen, and then again, and again, and again, for my English A Level studies as a mature student. Set texts can sometimes become tiresome and hateful because they have to be pored over and dissected at such length, but I never tired of Jane. I only got rid of the second copy of the book because it seemed ridiculous to keep two, but I felt some sadness seeing her name and those pages that had engaged so much of my interest, at the bottom of my recycling box.

It am not sure when I read Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. I suspect it was a text introduced to me by the members of my wonderful book group. If you are not familiar with Rhys, she is a British author who was born and grew up in Dominica. Her family on her mother’s side formerly had a plantation in Dominica, so Rhys lived in the Caribbean when many countries were still part of colonial empires. Rhys moved to the UK to attend school at 16 (1906), and here she was reportedly ridiculed for the way she spoke, and ‘mocked as an outsider’. Her experiences undoubtedly influenced the narrative of Wide Sargasso Sea, which is one of the last books that Rhys published. It came out in 1966, over one hundred years after the story of Jane and ‘Bertha’, which inspired it. The 1960s were a time that Caribbean writers travelled and ‘made exile their central theme’ (Donnell, 2006), and I wonder if Rhys was aware of these writers’ work, and their influences on what was regarded as the western model of philosophy behind the traditional Bildungsroman (Ilmonen, 2017).

It is a gripping but uncomfortable read. As the prequel to Bronte’s story, it is told from the perspective of the ‘Mad woman in the attic’ who almost ruins Jane’s wedding day and future happiness. The novel is set in Jamaica in 1834, just after the Slavery Abolition Act (1833), and tells a story of the daughter of a former sugar plantation owner. It is a dark and difficult narrative, making the reader reconsider the madness of Antoinette / ‘Bertha’, Mr Rochester’s first wife, who Jane discovers has been locked up in the attic. In Jane Eyre ‘the problem’ of the first wife’s existence is solved by Bronte by a fire. Bertha set fire to Thornfield Hall, Rochester’s ancestral home, a place in which she had been imprisoned, before leaping to her death from the roof. The fire takes Mr Rochester’s sight as well as his property, and his greater dependence on Jane shifts their power imbalance. Rhys’ prequel gives greater insight into the significance of fire, loss, and past colonial power turning into powerlessness in ‘Bertha’s’ life.

Why am I writing about this today? Because I had been thinking about this book, having looked out to sea one morning this week, to see what I thought was a large mass of sewage dumped from a boat. I watched it creep closer with the waves, as I munched on my breakfast, both in fascination and disgust, and later talked about it with my roommate.

‘That’s not sewerage, that’s sargassum’, she said.

Sargassum is not a word I’d heard before, but Sargasso is, and so I looked it up and found the Caribbean link. A YouTube video explained what sargassum is, how it is formed, and what damage it is causing to nature, and the beaches (& tourism) of Florida, Mexico, and Caribbean islands. Later I heard about the discussions about Commonwealth reparations, and the two themes became entwined, for better or for worse!

Check this video out- showing a Cayman Island beach in 2022. Isabelle Gerretsen also wrote an article about it for the BBC in 2020. I’m not sure the positive projects she wrote about can keep pace with the growing mass of sargassum, and there are significant consequences for wildlife and humans e.g. getting caught in the bloom, hydrogen sulphide production when it rots.

Image of seaweed on the beach this morning

After learning about this problem I remembered seeing thick bands of brown stuff on one of the local beaches after the recent tropical storm, and at the time not thinking too much of it. Knowing what I know now, I feel horrified that there is a vast mass of this stuff floating around the ocean, flourishing in the warm waters, mostly due to our human acts e.g. run off from fertilisers on the land, ocean pollution. The estimated weight of this is Atlantic sargassum belt is an astounding 10 million tonnes.

Accountability

I’ve been hearing news of the call for an apology and reparations for the colonial crimes committed by the UK and other colonial powers all around the world- the slave trade included. I’ve read a little about it, but am certainly not well studied. Britain was one of the most active nations in the ‘trade’ of human beings, transporting an estimated 3.2 million people. The Cayman Islands are still a British territory, but they have a history of slavery, and our nearest neighbour Jamaica, is where 600000 African people were enslaved and imprisoned.

It’s difficult to understand why it is so hard to apologise for these actions.

Well, let me not be naïve. Of course it’s about money, and power.

How often I have heard the sentence that justifies inaction, ‘If we do it for them, we have to do it for everybody’, and I wonder if the fear of an unstoppable tide has given voice to these same words behind those closed doors of power. Yet yesterday President Biden apologised for the 150 year policy that led many Native American children to be stolen from their families and communities and sent to government and religious run boarding schools.

‘I formally apologise as President of the United States of America for what we did. I formally apologise.’

There have been mixed responses to this apology, but it shows that it can be done.

A house through time

Whilst it is trite to compare events in novels to events that caused untellable amounts of psychological, spiritual, physical, sexual, financial, and societal harm that ripples into our lives today through the effects of intergenerational trauma, I cannot help but think of the symbolism in the two books. In both, the enslaved expressed their anger and claimed back their power by burning down the houses of their colonial oppressors. Is this what we are afraid will happen by issuing an apology? Is this what we are doing to our society by not?

The foundations of our ancestral houses (whether this be the Houses of Commons and Lords, or the houses we see wonderfully brought to life by Professor David Olusoga) have often been built with money from slavery. Olusoga is a craftsman at telling the stories that have been long "lost in the archives, completely forgotten", probably because they tell the more shameful side of history that we often do not want to look at.

I, like most readers, felt horrified reading Rhys’ depiction of ‘Bertha’s’ history, reframing Antoinette as victim rather than persecutor. I read it before taking my A Level, and could never forget the new perspective it gave me. The curriculum didn’t allow for the broadened lens, and sadly ‘Bertha’ remained the one-dimensional character of scorn and pity in the analysis of Jane Eyre. In Rhys’ novel she gains a story of her own, and our feelings towards her become more complicated. The reader is left to imagine the stories of the other people who had been enslaved, and driven to burn the house of their captor down, as Antoinette does many years later. Do we empathise with these characters equally?

Bildungsroman

The ability to acknowledge and integrate the light and the dark aspects of ourselves and our history, is part of the journey of character development of a Bildungsroman. Is what we are talking about in offering an apology for past mistakes aintegral to the development of the character of our nation too?

Antionette’s aggressors could be seen with similar one-dimensionality in Wide Sargasso Sea, as ‘Bertha’ in Jane Eyre, but the echo of ‘Bertha’s’ story invites the reader to scrape off another layer and look deeper into the murky shame of colonialism. Each one of us has our own prequel. And each character in that prequel has their own. How far do we choose to look back?

I am aware that I am massively oversimplifying a hugely emotive topic, of which I have relatively little knowledge, but sometimes all that I can understand is the simple. I can only bring it back to what it is to be human.

• What does it feel like to have been harmed and to have no apology?

• What does it feel like to have your story erased, or mis-told by someone else?

• What does it feel like to see the blood of your ancestors in something that is glorified today?

• What does it feel like to have someone turn away from the pain, and say, ‘That was ages ago, we just need to move on’?

Perhaps it is important for us to keep burning down houses. Unless we can acknowledge the blood and bones that went into building them, how do we play our part in the recovery required, and not repeat our failings?

I don’t have the answers, but it seems to me that we have a choice whether we say, ‘That has nothing to do with me, I’ve got nothing to apologise for’, or we can stop and look at the rotting sargassum, past and present, and try to deal with it with integrity.

Are we brave enough to talk about it?

References not already linked:

Donnell, Alison. Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literature: Critical Moments in Anglophone Literary History. Routledge, 2006.

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