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‘The Whole Island is my Mother’: Cristina Bendek's Salt Crystals

Cristina Bendek always writes with a mirror and a flag on her desk. The mirror, she declares, is ‘a way of invigilating, […] a way to keep an eye on me.’[1] The flag is the flag of Bendek’s homeland, San Andres, and serves as ‘a symbol of autonomy, […] of yearning for freedom and for self-determination.’[2] Bendek’s debut novel, Salt Crystals,[3] incorporates the spirit of both totems. A search back through the protagonist’s family tree runs alongside and interweaves with the search for her homeland’s liberation. The result is a narrative that positions the conventions of the Western detective novel besides a searing Juvenalian satire of neo-colonialism.

The story follows Victoria as she returns to San Andres after having spent fourteen years living and working in Mexico City. As she gradually integrates back into the community she left behind, she comments on the environmental disaster and state corruption she encounters. A sewage system leaks raw sewage directly into the sea. The poorer districts have no access to clean water so must carry pails to the nearest well every day. The mental health hospital is forced to go months without medication, resulting in the suicide of a patient. Whilst rightfully enraged at how the government has failed her home, Victoria must counterbalance her outrage by acknowledging her ancestors’ role in the colonial legacy of her archipelago. As she fills in gaps in her family history at the local library, she must hold the mirror of scrutiny up to herself and her genealogy, whilst still pursuing national freedom. She must keep both the mirror and the flag in sight.

 

As Victoria delves into her lineage, she discovers that her own ancestor brought slaves to the island where he then ran several cotton plantations. The weight of guilt this discovery bears is complicated by Victoria’s questions about her ‘spongy hair.’ Her grandmother has insisted that there is no black blood in their family. But she has also professed that “slavery was never harsh here,” an assertion that is contradicted by Victoria’s discovery of a tree in a local botanic garden to which slaves were once tied as punishment. As Victoria later concludes, mothers are ‘handfuls of unverifiable memories.’ As Victoria challenges these previously accepted family convictions she comes to terms with how learning about one’s past will irrevocably alter one’s future course. ‘We stepped over a tremendous root like a fin rising out of the earth, slicing into the path.’ The root of Victoria’s family tree, slavery, is also the root of many of the problems that San Andres encounters today and must be faced before the island can move forward.

This is just one example of Bendek’s smart use of natural imagery. Salt Crystals is teeming with such metaphor. Bendek’s nature is both beautiful and threatening, pregnant with potential for either rebirth or annihilation. In all cases, however, it is used to indicate moments of revelation. Bendek manages to use nature in the novel like a barometer with which the reader can measure the state of Victoria’s mind and by extension, the fate of her island. This may be exactly why nature exists in such a liminal state, teetering between being a salvation or a destructive force.

By treading a cautious line between the two different threads of personal and national exploration, Bendek provides a muti-faceted portrait of an island that has been shamefully overlooked in literary circles. San Andres is a small island in the Caribbean that forms an archipelago with Providencia and Santa Catalina. Although classed as part of Colombia, it is also close to Nicaragua, which has claimed 75, 000 square km of its sea territory.[4] This repossession is just the latest in a long history of invasion and colonisation, which Bendek takes the trouble to map out for the reader. It is crucial that the island’s tumultuous past is fully understood, from its initial inhabitation by the Miskito, indigenous sailing people from the Nicaraguan coast, through to its invasion by the British Empire which was later followed by the Dutch who brought abducted African slaves.

However, Bendek serves the reader intimate glimpses of the island’s joy as much as she exposes its dysfunction and trauma. Street blockades turn into all-night fiestas. Calypso and reggae throb through the pages, presenting an alternative history to that which is recorded in the library’s public records, an oral history of resistance and solidarity. Communal banquets are served in the less affluent districts from, as Victoria rejoices, ‘a pot big enough for me to climb inside.’ Such womb-like analogy recurs throughout the novel, presenting San Andres as a place of nourishment and possibility. Bendek depicts Victoria’s retreat into local cultural traditions as a search for an alternative progenitor to the white side of her lineage: ‘the whole island is my mother, I tell myself.’ In doing so, Victoria seeks knowledge to replace that of the unverifiable words of her biological grandmother.

It is through such vivid accounts of Victoria’s social encounters that Bendek manages to prevent Salt Crystals becoming more like an essay than a work of fiction. It veers close at times to reading like a historical textbook about San Andres, but this is offset by refreshing moments of interaction between a host of characters that serve to enliven and humanise the text.

 

In translating the novel from its original Spanish into English for Charco Press, Robin Myers decided not to italicise anything that was left in Spanish or Creole, because, as she writes, ‘the novel’s multilingual fluidity feels like an essential part of both its identity and its form.’[5] The text’s fluidity is striking. Bendek’s prose ebbs and flows like a song or a sea current. Both music and nature have a strong presence in Salt Crystals. They are presented as cornerstones of San Andres identity and the melodic, free-flowing form works to emphasise their significance. The archival form of the narrative’s detective strand is punctuated by hallucinogenic passages where Victoria has cannabis-inspired ruminations about herself and her island. This collage of differing rhythms forms a unique pulse which forces the reader to appreciate that this island is a living, breathing place with all its faults, blessings, and intricacies. This is most apparent when Victoria is surrounded by many voices, when she is at parties or protests. In her translator’s note, Myers writes, ‘English, too, is an Empire to be unsettled.’ What better way to unsettle it than with a flow of different dialects, a chorus of explosive contemporary voices, full of both fury and celebration?

 

What remains uncertain is Victoria’s place in this chorus. Despite being Raizal (an ‘Afro-Caribbean ethnic group from the archipelago’[6]) she doesn’t speak Creole, grew up in one of the more economically secure districts of the island and has had the privilege to leave the island and seek broader horizons. Her rage never really seems to be channelled into anything especially productive. Victoria cannot be called an activist, per se. She attends a couple of blockades but appears to participate only minimally, engaging herself much more enthusiastically in the after-parties. She even directly distinguishes herself from the more politically involved: ‘Everyone on this island is an activist, everyone’s fighting for something. […] And what about me? I live off a bank account managed from afar, but I don’t have anywhere else to be. Nor have I ever felt happier, being, just being. Which satisfies me.’ Such an easy declaration jars with the novel’s accounts of the lives of others who inhabit the island, those who must fight and struggle for the right to “just be.” The mothers, for example, who choose to give birth outside rather than risk the maternity hospital, because it is so overwhelmed. Victoria’s attitude begs the question, is it right to claim the island as her mother if she is not prepared to fight to defend it? Is such inaction just as condemnable as her grandmother’s willing ignorance about slavery? However, Victoria quickly follows her statement with, ‘I think of that and am inundated by the stench of actual shit.’ This is a moment where once again the mirror must come into play. Bendek is not about to allow her protagonist off the hook. To overly romanticise nationalism (the flag) without clearly viewing one’s own part in the collective is a failure to properly observe oneself.

The recurring imagery of the womb resurfaces in Bendek’s portrayal of the ocean as a baptismal life source. When not trawling through public records, Victoria swims in the sea: ‘This is how I must have felt in utero, in an amniotic liquid just like this, where all my possibilities were birthed.’ However, this opportunity for rebirth is threatened by ravaging neo-colonialism. ‘[T]he seaweed has morphed into a morass of plastic lids, straws, shreds of packaging, cigarette butts, stuff and more stuff. […] To one side, a seagull rummages in an abandoned coco loco, still capped with a little plastic parasol.’ This litter is the discarded artefacts of hedonistic tourism. A quick Google search of San Andres will result in pages of travel guides all heralding the island’s blue seas and white sands, with virtually nothing about the history and culture of those who inhabit it. Bendek rails against this reductive impression. Describing her beloved ocean, Victoria declares, ‘No, it’s not the sea of travel magazines, it’s not a holiday.’ Whilst she does delight in the glossy beauty of its blue expanse, she then peels this layer back to reveal an underbelly of used needles, ‘petrol spewed by the jet skis’ and ‘suntan lotion floating around the seaweed.’ The tourist industry is starkly framed as a form of neo-colonialism that is not just polluting the ocean but disrupting the connection between the islanders’ and their life source. (The population of San Andres is dependent upon the ocean for both their livelihoods and their spiritual practises.) By highlighting the destructive results of tourism, Bendek passionately condemns the commodification of San Andres as a holiday destination for Western travellers, picking up the legacy of Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place[7] with gumption: ‘We have to stop fortifying a production and consumption chain that leaves only trash in its wake.’ If the island is mother, then her womb is being poisoned. How can she bear her children and allow them to grow and develop if her most nurturing aspects are destroyed?

I still want to know what exactly Victoria intends to do with the knowledge she gains. Bendek leaves many cues to impress that Victoria is learning to be more conscious, to utilise the mirror to gain awareness of the role she plays in her island’s dysfunctions. However, the reader never really gets to see this consciousness develop into meaningful action. As she circles the island, chasing her past and soaking up the joys and challenges of the present, she never comes to any solid plans for her future. She has abstract ideologies about what is needed. ‘We have to conserve the forest, plant crops, make use of the land, reduce dependency,’ she says, all of which, of course, is correct. But the reader never sees how she intends to contribute to making this happen. Perhaps this is unfair. This is, of course, only the beginning of Victoria’s rebirth. She has retreated to the womb, worked her way back through her past and is now poised on the brink of her new emergence. She says, ‘the ocean has done right by me. I’ve travelled the path it unfurled before me on the very first day I returned to its womb.’ The question that hangs in the air, for both Victoria and her beautiful, misused motherland, is where will this path lead now?


[2] Bendek, Writer’s Routine

[3] Cristina Bendek, Salt Crystals, trans. by Robin Myers (Edinburgh: Charco Press, 2022)

[4] Bendek, Writer’s Routine

[5] Robin Myers, ‘Translator’s Note’ in Salt Crystals

[6] Myers

[7] Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place, (London: Daunt Books, 2018)

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