Seven-Tenths

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  The island repeats a fantasy of human beginnings. The foetus – castle of the ego and keep of the soul – is effectively an island for the first nine months of life, entirely surrounded by an amniotic moat and connected to the mainland only by an umbilicus. Soon afterwards the playpen becomes an island, probably the most fabulous of all. Not only does the infant command its every square foot, he commands the world which his own supreme frontiers deign into being by marking off. His shores, his limen; and so by extension his ocean, his continents, his world.* Moreover, the fantasy of a private island always takes on that infantile characteristic of absolute flexibility in being able simultaneously to stand for almost any desire and to serve as the ideal locus for practically any fantasy. For islands are also sexual places because they have the air of being extra-legal, extra-territorial, out of sight and censure. Every so often a film appears depicting torrid intimacies among the conveniently marooned. For this cinematic purpose the island must be tropical and the state of undress constant. It would not be at all the same for two nubile castaways to find themselves stranded in the Bering Sea.

  The island is thus the perfect territorial expression of the ego. As such, it is all too easily a metaphor for the individual. Sometimes the metaphor is used at one remove, so the island takes the place of a wise alter ego. The message here is that man learns by true experience of himself. The lessons may be practical and moral (as in The Swiss Family Robinson or the story of Alexander Selkirk) or spiritual (as in Richard Nelson’s The Island Within).

  The infinitely flexible nature of islands, of their being at once safe and adventurous, constraining and boundless, erotic and polemical, has made them ideal destinations in a long literary tradition of imaginary voyages. More than 1,000 years before Homer there was a twelfth-dynasty Egyptian story about a castaway on a marvellous island, and Plato’s account of Atlantis functions as a kind of blueprint on which he might later have constructed a more complete utopia. When Sir Thomas More produced his own original Utopia in 1516 he put fresh life into an ancient genre. The dignity of his Latin must have induced many a lesser writer to indulge his own intellectual fantasies under the disguise of gravity, for the literature of the next three centuries abounds with all kinds of utopias and ideal commonwealths, most of them sited on imaginary islands. (At this point, and quite gratuitously, I wish to note an allegation that Sir Thomas More ‘used to thrash his grown-up daughters with a rod made from peacock-feathers’.* Without bothering to try and put a finger on it more precisely, one feels this sort of behaviour is not inconsistent with thought about islands and ideal societies.)

  It is curious there was no discussion in English of the imaginary voyage as a genre before the nineteenth century. Indeed, there was not even any recognition that it was a literary type worth discussing. In France, on the other hand, there were all sorts of studies and by 1787, when Garnier’s remarkable Voyages imaginaires, songes, visions … was published, he was able to subdivide his classification of Allegory into a whole variety of islands, among them an île d’amour, an île de la félicité, an île taciturne, an île enjouée, an île imaginaire and an île de portraiture. After Crusoe’s great success in France, several imitative Robinsonades showed what man might be capable of when thrown entirely on to his own resources, whereas adventures on an île inconnue tended to depict what happened to a domestic society cut off from the rest of the world. In this respect they constituted something of a counterpart interest to that in feral children (such as Victor, the wild boy of Aveyron), around which at that time all sorts of arguments revolved concerning what exactly constituted ‘the natural’ and ‘the civilised’.

  The genre still exists. The French writer Georges Perec in a novel published in 1975† uses an imaginary island off Cape Horn as the setting for a fascistic society obsessed with sports. And what else is one kind of science fiction but a convenient locating of utopias and dystopias off-Earth on imaginary planets which are, from our perspective and by any other name, islands in space?

  The effect of islands is almost wholly regressive … This is most true of prison islands since there is nowhere more regressive than a prison. ‘Regressive’ should not, of course, be read as a synonym for ‘comforting’, although many brutalised and institutionalised people find incarceration reassuring. The objections are obvious. Did Napoleon ‘regress’ on St Helena? What was so comforting about le bagne which induced ‘Papillon’ to escape Devil’s Island? Was the camp on Blood Island in some way deeply cheering? But ‘regressive’ applies as much to the behaviour of a prison’s governor and guards as to that of its inmates. It refers to the effect on everybody concerned which all institutions exercise and penal institutions in particular. Punishment is by its nature regressive, and prisons usually involve extremes of pettiness, brutality and sexual licence: the normal ingredients of infantile behaviour. Seen in this light, Devil’s Island was something like a nineteenth-century English public school with mosquitoes and a guillotine. A succession of the prison’s governors encouraged their charges to settle into some variety of homosexual marriage, jointly tilling a small garden and sharing its produce. This was considered an effective antidote to the yearning for escape, a progressive piece of penology known locally as ‘the cucumber solution’ (la résolution du concombre).*

  At the very centre of imprisonment’s concentric rings is solitary confinement: isolation (from insula), which if inflicted for long enough on the wrong individual may cause a regression from which it can be hard to emerge. It all depends on one’s position. From the authorities’ point of view isolation is the place where the community expels the individual. From certain individuals’ points of view, solitude is what they long for to escape the community. Their yearning may even be for the numinous, invisible spot in the centre, identity’s apotheosis and vanishing point.

  4. An island’s boundaries can never be fixed

  Chapter 1 hints at some of the problems international law has in trying to fix Exclusive Economic Zones. In terms of absolute position, boundaries, like the Earth’s crust itself, can remain fluid. Thus when I hypothesised the case of an island’s EEZ happening to cross the edge of a tectonic plate and therefore either widening or shrinking, the response at IOS was a scathing ‘Good God, they can’t measure to the nearest nautical mile, let alone to the nearest centimetre.’ Over time, though, these centimetres add up. In 1492 when Columbus crossed the Atlantic, America was 20 metres nearer to Europe than it is today.

  One may multiply almost indefinitely the special cases of volcanically inconstant islands, islands whose coastlines are hard to define, artificial islands and self-proclaimed independent principalities sited on World War II anti-aircraft towers 6 miles off the Essex coast (a perfect example of an island as egoic headquarters).* There are islands like Rockall which seem to have no purpose but to act as a focus for legal wranglings, their sole value being as pegs in the ocean around which a lucky winner might draw an EEZ. Japan has recently been driven to considerable feats of technology in order to rescue its own eroding islet of Okinotorishima at the extreme southern tip of the Japanese archipelago. At high tide Okinotorishima consists of two lumps of coral respectively 3 metres and 5 metres wide. Without these little rocks Japan’s territory would end at Iwo Jima and she would lose 154,440 square miles of EEZ and with it all exclusive fishing and mineral rights. With each typhoon the rocks erode a bit more, so the Japanese have spent upwards of $300 million to enclose the island in a concrete and steel protective wall. It is important that no part of the wall should touch the corals because this would turn Okinotorishima into an artificial island and disqualify it from having an EEZ. As a professor of international law, Soji Yamamoto, says: ‘Territory is not something that exists naturally. It must be obtained by a country’s efforts.’*

  Meanwhile, if sea levels rise as predicted over the next half-century, what of island boundaries then? Will the original outlines of a largely submerged Maldives be maintained on maps as much out of respect as for legal or naviga
tional reasons, so sightseers can peer down from the rail of a boat at a lost land as they might today at a sunken battleship?

  Other kinds of island boundary are blurred, too, especially when there seems to be no logical or geological reason for assigning a particular nationality. Corsica is historically, linguistically and geographically more Italian than French. The Channel Islands might quite as easily be French as British and, with their degree of autonomy, form part of that odd, anomalous category of offshore tax havens which are neither fully integrated nor fully independent. The Isle of Man also falls into this category. Such islands generally have a certain diehard quality and are as much leftovers of an older social order as they are of a former geological configuration.

  It is archipelagos and chains of islands which are so often the geographical versions of displaced persons, holding at best a temporary passport. The Sulu Archipelago is a perfect example. One has only to sit on the wharf in Jolo to be prey to a literary sense of unreality. The waterfront of huts built on stilts over the sea, the lumps of islands at every distance, the decaying ferries and wooden launches full of fish and copra and red logs: allowing for a lack – but not complete absence – of sail, it is Conrad’s horizon still, and filled as ever with the dreamy tropic energy which slops across all boundaries. Politically, Sulu is part of the Philippines right down to Tawitawi, at its closest reaching to within a few miles of Sabah in northern Borneo. However, in 1981 it became part of an autonomous region with special barter trade rights between it and Malaysia. This was in response to the long and bloody war waged by the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) against what they thought of as an attempt by Christian Manila to oust or dilute Islamic culture and greedily expropriate whatever it is that governments habitually do greedily expropriate.

  On Jolo jetty Conrad’s azure map lies ahead, while immediately behind is a troubled, dark green backdrop of conspiracy and heavy weapons. Conrad would have recognised that, too, since men here have always gone over-armed. A drunken fight can lead within minutes to mortar rounds. The Republic of the Philippines, with its implied promise of centralised law and institutionalised order, covers Sulu with a cartographer’s fiction. The islands of the archipelago are defined and individuated by language, usage, tribal politics, gangs, bandits, even pride. They are criss-crossed by the interests of disparate ethnic groups, trading links, smuggling, piracy, local tyrannies, fishing, seditious movements and intersecting anarchies. In such places official boundaries vanish entirely unless drawn fleetingly by the wakes of navy patrol craft or coastguard cutters. I once went on a week’s fishing trip in an open boat from Palawan southwards. We fished for lobster off Bugsuk and Balabac islands, sleeping at irregular intervals wedged into the bows or on occasional dry land. I lost all sense of time and position. On the way back I discovered we must have spent one night on Borneo. The same thorns, mangroves and littoral clutter, it had seemed nowhere different.

  The example of ‘Tiwarik’ and its grandiose conversion from nondescript islet into businessman’s fantasy, vaulting a strait to appropriate a chunk of mainland, is a reminder that if physical and legal boundaries can often only be fixed with great difficulty, then areas of wish can never be clearly demarcated. The greed of dreams is to expand into any space denied them. Fantasies, daydreams and dreams flap about as they may, but they all roost in the unconscious and share its logic, which is that there are no contradictions. Just as sexual fantasies can simultaneously involve a single person and many, at once watching and being watched, doing and being done to, so may an island be experienced as both small and infinitely large, part of the land and part of the sea, sheltering and exposing, terra firma and freakishly unstable. As they melt, icebergs may become very unbalanced, often rolling completely over without warning. The private nickname ‘Tiwarik’ was prescient, for the word means ‘upside down’ and something about the place had always suggested rich possibilities of inversion. Never had I thought to see it so thoroughly stood on its head.

  *

  All this points to a boundary which as yet appears on no map but which is ever more real and ever more cavalier. If one considers ex-‘Tiwarik’ as a piece of terrain which has recently been annexed for the convenience of a foreign ‘lifestyle’, then probably there can be no such thing as a holiday island. Once an island becomes a resort it ceases in some essential way to be an island and turns into an extension of a mainland, even if that is half the world away. Nor need this mainland even exist as a sovereign country. It is enough to comprise that fictional international place to whose citizenship so many lay claim or aspire: that stateless state of BMWs, Chivas Regal and Dunhill lighters; of treasure and pleasure and leisure, guaranteed moth- and rustproof. Since much of this fabled place lies in chilly latitudes, it needs to push out long, tentacle-like peninsulas into warmer climes: Vacationland, embracing all sorts of otherwise under-used bits of lesser countries in the sun. It simply kits these out with its own standard furniture (scuba gear, water skis, hang gliders, beach barbecues, rock music, drunks, whores). And suddenly there are no more islands, only scattered slabs of a single moneyed empire joined each to the other by something solider than water. Or so it seemed, waiting for ‘clearance’ in the new beach pavilion on what was once ‘Tiwarik’. This building is now a border post. Under Philippine law no private individual may own any part of the foreshore below a point 30 feet above the mean high-tide line. It is national property. Hence anyone may land on the Fantasy Elephant Club’s beach. But where once by civilised common usage they were free to wander the rest of the island, they now have to be vetted by an immigration official in a blue uniform and wearing a gun. The beach has changed from a haven into a frontier.

  There is one last kind of island, one whose elusive presence flickers at the edge of vision, quick as fish. This is the imaginary island faithfully mapped in every psyche, mostly unsuspected, infrequently discovered, even more rarely inhabited. An outcropping of the self, it lies across a treacherous strait which discourages acquisitiveness and, even on clear blue days, may have vanished as if it were roaming the oceans in search of the one worthy inhabitant. Then on a rare day the rare person wakes and it has swum out of the corner of his eye and stands before him. On such a morning it takes no effort to cross over, paddle flashing in the sun, until the skiff’s bows nudge grindingly into the shore.

  And then what pleasure to set up a hut, a fish drier; to pare things back to water and light, to knives and spearpoints, to order and silence! All men have an island, Donne should have said, for a suspended wheel rim being beaten in a cement block chapel on the distant mainland ought to tell us no more than the fish curling and flapping between our hands, bleeding rusty threads into the sea. That steely tolling from across the water brings no news, nothing we do not already know as later we climb the headland to watch soft dusk well up over the world’s rim and efface the ocean below. It is not interesting to tot up the sunsets seen and perhaps to come. Those deaths, our deaths, are not plangent affairs but matters of geology. We are all at best marginalia in another era’s fossil record. Go down to the hut instead through a drift of fireflies. Light the lamp, cook rice. There is nobody else on this island; there never was and never could be. Outside, the waves wring green flashes from plankton. The great mineral machine turns its fluid gears. The firefly in the thatch tugs us into its gravitational field.

  * Part of the island’s haunting quality may be because its exclusivity reminds us of the family as we once saw it through infant eyes: self-contained and self-sufficient. A family’s underlying sadness resides in its conspiracy of immortality. When decades later we come to look at it with an almost-stranger’s eyes, a family relic such as an old tablecloth now stands poignantly revealed in its faded colours and moth holes as having always been both altar cloth and shroud.

  * Magnus Hirschfeld, ed. Norman Haire, Sexual Anomalies and Perversions (London, 1959), p. 396.

  † Georges Perec, W ou le souvenir d’enfance (Paris, 1975).

  * See Cha
pter 7.

  * ‘Sealand’, otherwise known as Roughs Tower, turned by Major and Mrs Roy Bates into a ‘state’ with its own constitution, flag, stamps, coinage and passport. See The Independent, 24 February 1990.

  * See Nature 333, (9 June 1988) p. 487 and Fortune 122 (24 September 1990) p. 12.

  III

  MARGINALIA

  The isles of Britain

  Did Britain cease to be an island at some debatable moment between the end of World War II and the construction of the Channel Tunnel? Until 1939 Britain had lavishly exported its boundaries in terms of Empire, and while much was made of the idea of this ‘tiny island nation’ ruling a good part of the globe, it did still retain certain characteristics of an island. Among these were the world’s largest maritime presence, a thriving fishing industry around its entire coastline and an attitude towards the rest of the world which can only be described as insular. (The putative headline Thick Fog – Continent Isolated puts it quite succinctly.)

  The war provoked insular rhetoric, ranging from endless Shakespearean tags about ‘this precious stone set in the silver sea’ to re-emphasising the tininess of ‘this island nation’, although not now in comparison with the world it ruled but with the Hitlerian might threatening to crush it as it ‘stood alone in the dark days’. The white cliffs of Dover stopped being rather striking beds of calcareous plankton and took on the quality of Britain’s boundary, ramparts, bulwark, palisades. A few miles of cliffs came to stand for an entire spiritual seaboard which might not be violated. Had that portion of Britain’s coastline most adjacent to the rest of the world been as low and unremarkable as it is in parts of Essex, Suffolk or Lincolnshire, the rhetoricians and songwriters would have needed to come up with a different trope altogether.