From Puerto Rico to Lanzarote, from Cuba to Sicily, from the Lofoten to Ushuaia, for some years now life has taken me to visit islands. Like autumn in the beautiful title by José Carlos Becerra: Autumn travels across the islands. In some of them I have only spent a couple of days, in others I have rehearsed for months a daily life surrounded by water. “The damned circumstance of water everywhere,” wrote the Cuban poet Virgilio Piñera in his poem “La isla en peso”, in 1943. A verse that another Cuban, Leonardo Padura, has taken up more than once to talk about life in the largest of the Antilles. And with part of that verse he titled his 2019 book, Water everywhere, a tribute to the novel as a genre and to that country that, as he himself says, “is bigger than its geography.”
María Zambrano, who spent part of her exile in Mexico, left this land of ours when she fell in love with the light of the Caribbean, its rhythm and its poets. In the same year that Piñera wrote those desolate verses that say If I didn’t think that water surrounded me like a cancer / I would have been able to sleep soundlyshe created a short and luminous book, Puerto Rico Island.
An island is always a promise for the imagination…, wrote there…They appear as that which responds to the dream that has kept a hard and prolonged effort going; as the compensation expected beyond justice, where grace plays its role… gracious donation… residue of something, the trace of a better world, of a lost innocence; the headquarters of something incorruptible that remains there for a few lucky ones to discover…
And although he decided to abandon his beloved Caribbean dawn for personal reasons, and spend the second part of his exile in Europe, I am sure that he would have signed those lyrics by Pablo Milanés: I love this island, / I’m from the Caribbean / I could never set foot on dry land, / Because it inhibits me.
Islands seen as free spaces for the creation of new worlds, of dreams and belonging, as Zambrano suggests, are a theme present in literature at least since Homer; Ithaca remains there as a founding territory.
Centuries later, the chronicles of the conquest of America will show this fascination again. Guanahani is the first island that Columbus’s expedition reaches, which he calls San Salvador. On October 13, 1492, he wrote:
This island is very large and very flat and with very green trees and many waters and a very large lagoon in the middle, without any mountains, and all of it green, what a pleasure to look at.
Incredibly after more than 500 years, historians still cannot locate it with certainty.
Shortly after the arrival of the Spanish to these lands, Thomas More published his Utopia (1516), which places the ideal world on an island located off the coast of South America.
Our native peoples also have an island mythology, especially in the Antillean area, and in the extreme south of the continent, populated by Yámanas, Selk’nam and Kawéskar.
Of course, at the same time, there are islands that have meant darkness, confinement, fear, temptation – like the Island of the Sun with its mermaids, that of the Lotus Eaters suspended between happiness and oblivion, or that of the Laestrygonians with its anthropophagous inhabitants, to continue with the Odyssey. And that’s not to mention Alcatraz; or from Poveglia, in Venice; or of The island of Dr. Moreau, by HG Wells, in literature. These are other stories.
My love for the islands was born in childhood, when my parents put me on a boat with a cork life preserver and, to the rhythm of the two pairs of oars, we immersed ourselves in that golden landscape of Tigre, the Paraná River Delta. I know I have told you at some point that the most wonderful thing for me was seeing the reflections of light on the water.
The truth is that between the “Unfortunate Islands” (located 850 kilometers from the coast of Chile) and the so-called “Fortunate Islands” (the Canary Archipelago and other islands of Macaronesia), between the beauty of the sunsets at sea and a certain tendency towards isolation that I get from time to time, I believe that my words are always in search of those reflections that can make me feel like I am coming home.
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