What the Waves Know
Page 25
We are storytellers, all of us, and that fact begs the question of whose story gets to dominate the narrative. The stories we pass forward and the ones we turn away from rest at the heart of every conflict, from families to entire societies—they also rest at the center of every resolution. We live by them and die for them. They cause pain and they heal. So, to me, it is no small wonder that a storyteller walking around with the truth in her pocket may be frightened by her own voice, by the transformative power of her tale. I believe Iz is correct: we are all just the caboodle of stories we leave behind. They shape us, and those around us, with enduring persistence.
I grew up deep in the northern woods of upstate New York, the daughter of a mother devoted to helping children find their own voices and a father who is a lot like Ansel Haywood. He did not wrestle with mental illness, but he saw magic in every corner of the world, despite the fact that he was a criminal defense attorney who spent his days surrounded by the utter destruction of the human spirit. It is a fact that I continue to live in awe of and strive toward. When I was a child, my father would stumble into our bedroom and wake my sister and me in the middle of the night to go on snipe hunts. The snipe, if you were not fortunate enough to be raised among them, is a real bird with a fictional narrative. The legend dictates that the snipe comes out by the light of a full moon. To catch a snipe, you must trek into the woods armed with your pillowcase and a shaker of salt. The process goes something like this: you sneak up behind the fat little bird, shake salt on its wings, and toss the pillowcase over it. Voilà!
As an adult, I moved to rural Rhode Island and somehow the topic of snipes arose with our neighbor. “So,” I asked her, “snipes are indigenous here? Have you ever gone snipe hunting?” At which point, she tipped her head at me curiously and fell to the ground laughing. When she had worn herself out, she gazed up at me and said, “You do know that isn’t real, don’t you?” No, I thought, poking my father’s number into the phone while wondering what other fictions about the world I was wandering through life with.
That is the power of stories. We all struggle to tell our own, and writers spend a great deal of time agonizing over getting it just right in neurotic fits of wording, organization, elimination, and posturing, but there is also a great deal of surrendering to the story in ways that I imagine are a hair’s width from true mental illness. During a graduate seminar, I once had a classmate ask how I developed diametrically different voices in a work. “I hear them in my mind,” I told him with complete honesty, and other heads around the table nodded earnestly in agreement.
As an adult, I have watched several people I love wrestle with the voices in their heads—voices bigger and stronger than their own. It is often painful for everyone living through the experience. But as is so often the case, there is also an inherent beauty in that destruction—the yin and yang, the counterbalance. The wind is meant for flying into, the moon is meant for dancing with. In a world filled with stark realities, there is true exquisiteness in seeing things in a different way. We may not always believe in magic and mysticism, but we all have moments when we yearn to believe. I am a writer, and a dreamer, and a perpetual seeker of magic, so I am always mesmerized by moments when the story wrestles reality to the ground. But not all stories get told.
When I first completed my undergraduate degree I worked with young adults diagnosed with autism, a condition that inherently silences the people struggling with it in a multitude of ways. There were several young people whose diagnosis was questionable, and one who was a victim of trauma and had stopped speaking directly following the event. That was years ago, and I still wonder. We can be scared silent by the world. It has happened to all of us, and certainly we all have heard our own voice say things we ache to recall and erase. Words are powerful things that breathe their own life once they are born into the universe, so I can imagine a situation where a person decides to lay down that authority.
Several years ago, when I decided to try to tell this story, I had someone say, “So, you want to write a story from the first-person point of view of a character who cannot speak. Good luck with that.” While there is truth in that challenge, I cannot imagine a situation where a character would have more to say. We should all spend the time we are given finding our voice and teaching it to sing, because in the end those stories are our legacy and lesson to the world.
A Conversation with Tamara Valentine
Q: What the Waves Know takes place on an island. Does this have a specific symbolism within the story?
A: The island of Tillings is fictional, although its mainland counterpart of Tuckertown is quite real, even though I have taken liberties with the actual population and setting. There is something poetic for me about Izabella, who is struggling to find her balance in a world beyond her control, coming of age on a small swath of land surrounded by the shifting power of the ocean. And there is also the fixed reality of an island, which demands that people deal with one another since there really is nowhere to escape the realities around you.
Q: You draw on, and incorporate, deities and mythology from multiple cultures in the story. Is there significance to the cultural references?
A: The significance is less in the cultural reference than in the fact that each culture has a canon of stories through which they make sense of the world and craft a quasi-universal reality. Many of these myths and references overlap except in name, and yet we fight to the death to preserve our own as though everything we understand to be true is attached to them. And often it is. The references I chose to incorporate are powerful symbols of the forces that direct our lives, or throw the direction of our lives off kilter. Yemaya is a deity that captured my imagination, in particular, as she was one of the primary figures prayed to in Santeria when slaves were forced to abandon their own gods and pray to Christian saints. For me, it represents both the force of our own personal stories and a profound act of trying to steal the stories of others. In contrast, Ansel’s stories are not derived from an existing canon, but become just as important to [[?doc_335 ?]]Izabella’s understanding of the world—and certainly, they represent the reality playing out in his own mind.
Q: Mental illness becomes an inescapable reality in the story, but there is little discussion about it from Izabella’s perspective. Why?
A: Izabella’s father is clearly wrestling with alter-realities and a host of fictions. That is true. But, we all carry fictions with us and I don’t see Ansel’s as being any more, or less, acceptable. Our society often reduces a person with mental illness down to a diagnosis, and we have seen much fear and stigmatization about mental illness in recent history, as though there is a singular face of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, or any other mental illness. Among the most intense struggles for a person who loves someone with mental illness is the profound fear of having that person disappear into the illness. That is Izabella’s deepest anxiety, that her father will leave her behind. She is faced with the constant decision to enter into his world, often at the risk of her own life, or make the horrific choice to let him slip away from her. It’s an impossible dilemma. The other weight that she is forced to carry is the dread that she, too, might be the inheritor of the mental illness her father was ultimately struck down by. To realize that a thing is beyond your control, and that you may very well be standing in its path, is an intense position to find yourself in. At the end of the day, that is precisely what the waves know. The moon is moving the currents in the ocean, and there is not a single thing the sea can do to stop it.
Q: Zorrie’s character comes off a bit aloof and cold. Was that intentional?
A: Although Zorrie and Izabella appear to be very different, they are actually very much alike. Izabella has withdrawn entirely inside herself in an attempt to protect her from something she fears will destroy her, and Zorrie has chilled the world out to protect herself. Even though neither character can see herself in the other, Grandma Jo does.
Q: What role does Grandma Jo’s character serve in the sto
ry?
A: Grandma Jo is nearly devoid of anyone’s story but her own, and that is intentional. Her character doesn’t engage in religion, or mythology, or stigma except in the purest academic pursuit. She is intent on connecting with the moment unfolding around her at any given time and is fully self-directed and nonjudgmental. In many ways she is a true foil to both Zorrie and Izabella. Grandma Jo is also one of the manifestations of the “Triple Goddess” and a symbol of divine motherhood in her own right.
Q: Remy talks to her dead mother and bakes pies with her ghost. Is she also mentally ill?
A: No, Remy isn’t mentally ill. Her character is unapologetically brash and gutsy, but she is also wearing the scars from the night her mother was killed and shares many of Izabella’s fears about losing the parent she has left, as well as guilt about the accident. While Izabella has largely abdicated control over her life out of fear of doing harm, Remy has gone decidedly the other direction and taken control over everything and everyone. But both are motivated by the same fear of loss.
CREDITS
Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa
Cover photographs: © Krasimira Petrova Shishkova / Trevillion Images (girl); © Always Joy / Shutterstock (shimmer)
COPYRIGHT
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
WHAT THE WAVES KNOW. Copyright © 2016 by Tamara J. Valentine. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
EPub Edition February 2016 ISBN 9780062413840
ISBN 978-0-06-241385-7
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