The island in question is San Andrés, itself an important character in the novel. It is the largest island of the San Andrés archipelago in the Caribbean Sea, approximately 750 kilometres northwest of Colombia, the nation-state to which it legally belongs. Over its history, the island has been inhabited by pirates, colonized by English Puritans, claimed by the Spanish Crown, and contested between Panama and the United States, among others—but also became home to the descendants of enslaved people, Arab traders, migrants from mainland Colombia, and more. It is against this tumultuous historical backdrop that our protagonist, Victoria Baruq, returns to her San Andrés, her home, after a prolonged absence—ready to question everything.
Victoria has been living in Mexico City for a number of years, but after discovering that her boring, predictable partner of some years, Roberto, has in fact been having an affair, she receives a call that prompts her to return to her family home in San Andrés. Her parents are long gone, having passed away in a sudden car accident, and when the house’s caretaker calls to announce that she’s leaving the island, there’s nothing stopping Victoria from returning to the place she once called home. At the beginning of the novel, Victoria’s entire life is in flux. As well as the break-up she terms a “divorce”, her health is unstable, affected by the diabetes that set in following the shock of her parents’ death. Her return to San Andrés, the landscape of her childhood, is a physical trajectory that parallels the emotional journey she undertakes throughout the novel.
Charco Press introduces Bendek as a Caribbean novelist, rather than a Colombian one, and this paratextual clue is key to the novel’s political and philosophical framing. The question of local identity is paramount; Victoria is Raizal, which means she is officially recognized as being from San Andrés. Raizal comes from the Spanish raíz, meaning root, so her identity is officially recognized by the state as “local”. But a return home means a return to contesting these “roots”. Victoria’s identity is consistently challenged by the people she meets, who primarily question her accent—tempered by the years in Mexico City—and her skin colour, paler than the other Raizal. And in turn, she actively seeks to question her own identity—to pull it apart, to interrogate it, to understand its importance to her. Much of the novel is devoted to Victoria’s own historical project of tracing her genealogy by asking a multitude of questions: who her ancestors were, how and why they came to the island, and what the island meant to them. It is clear that she hopes the answers to these questions will resolve some of her own doubts as to who she is, how and why she has returned to San Andrés after all these years, and what the island means to her.
San Andrés, however, offers no easy answers for Victoria. Her genealogical research takes her on twists and turns across the island, rummaging through little-used libraries to uncover some kind of truth. But the twin processes of learning and unlearning history do not ultimately take place in closed academic spaces—it’s the people she meets who challenge her. “How can you be Raizal if you don’t speak Creole?” Samuel, the boyfriend of Victoria’s childhood friend Juleen, asks. The question of language surfaces quickly as a conflict site for identity, nimbly negotiated by Robin Myers in her use of stealth glossing or in-line translations. Given that the island of San Andrés is now part of Colombia, it’s easy to assume that Spanish is the lingua franca, but even the monolith of “Spanish” belies a whole host of complexities. Mainland Colombian Spanish (which itself includes varieties from cities like Bogotá, or the inflections of the mainland’s Caribbean coast) and San Andrés Spanish are both present, but Creole looms large over the novel—a spectre that destabilizes Victoria’s belonging. In San Andrés, not speaking Creole seems to undermine Victoria’s claims to a Raizal identity.
But what the novel reveals is that, while the pursuit of a tidy, pre-packaged identity is seductive, it does not serve political resistance in an ongoing (neo)colonial context. The novel is full of political moments—from interpersonal discussions to blockades and “thinkin’ rundowns”, community gatherings where people eat, drink, and discuss the fragility of life on San Andrés, a place exploited by tourism and underdeveloped by corrupt governance. One of the bleaker moments comes when the “impossibility of being born” on the island comes up; hospitals run out of supplies so regularly that being Raizal—at least in the legal sense–becomes a challenge unto itself. Yet, Bendek is keenly aware that Raizal identity can only take Victoria and her fellow islanders so far. This is highlighted astutely during one of the blockades, mounted in protest against San Andrés’ current governor; Juleen confesses she, like other Raizals, voted for him because his wife was Raizal. Typically, they joke, the couple has now split up, making the political opportunism clear. Victoria goes on a journey and ultimately problematizes any idea of stability, saying, “Like all identities, San Andrés identity is under construction; it’s wrong-headed to think of it as something fixed.”
By presenting an uncertain protagonist like Victoria, Bendek invites the reader to question presuppositions of identity, particularly in the Caribbean, whose history is marked by cultural meetings and crossings. When Charco Press presents Bendek as a Caribbean novelist, not a Colombian one, this is because she operates within a Caribbean intellectual tradition, distinct from mainland culture or politics. Victoria sees this as a structural issue, noting that “I hadn’t learned any local history at school. As far as I was concerned, politics was something that happened in ‘Colombia.’” Victoria’s political awakening drives the novel; as her new friend Rudy notes, “returning to the Caribbean is a sure-fire spiritual crisis.” For Victoria, this involves acknowledging the darkness of her family’s past as she uncovers that some of her family participated in the trade of enslaved people. This reckoning with history is not done for the sake of self-flagellation or performative guilt, but instead as part of an active political project that is invested in tackling the ongoing legacies of slavery and colonization in order to build a just future.
Victoria seeks out “the many blind, deaf and mute subjects of official History”, as part of a political history that is inevitably personal; she cannot detach herself from history, not while everyone is “all jumbled together in this geographical accident”. But the focus is on building a “Creole nation”, the self becoming part of the community; the struggle is “autonomy, always”. As Juleen says: “I’m getting decolonized, girl, little by little.”
This decolonization is mental, spiritual, and physical work; Victoria stuns herself when she realizes that she had “never read the work of an island Caribbean academic before, not even at university. Horrifying.” Bendek does not name the Martinican writer Édouard Glissant as a direct reference, but her focus on the island Caribbean recalls his “archipelagic thinking,” a school of thought shaped by the forms of archipelago, its simultaneous multiplicity and unity. The archipelago becomes central to Victoria’s imaginary:
I want to immerse myself in the archipelago . . . I want to study the large branches of the early settlers and see if I can connect my hallucinations to the improbable chain of events that brought me back to this shore, to sit in this chair.
These hallucinations are induced by her diabetes—an excess of sugar, or the lack thereof, sends her spiralling: “who inhabits me, who’s calling me? Gyal! What are these strokes of fate? Is it the sugar talking?” Victoria seeks the voices in her visions to understand herself and her island better, and the conclusions she reaches are again shaped by Caribbean thinking. Theorist Michael Wiedorn talks about the contrast, in Glissant’s work, between “root-identity” and “relation-identity”—meaning, do we identify ourselves by where we come from, or by our present communities of connection? For Glissant, the dangers of “root-identity” come in its fixity, its insistence on dominating a territory via these roots—and the potential slippage whereby these roots are seen as ownership of a place, and consequently divide groups into “us” and “them”, whereby the rooted “us” becomes superior.
Bendek challenges roots as a conventional way of understanding our identity, questioning the dichotomy of native and foreign: “Most of the population was still native; that is, from families with multi-generational roots, regardless of their origins.” Roots are not originary, but rather connective; like the rhizome, there is no single stable point of origin but a web of interconnectedness. It is this that leads Victoria to challenge the “raíz” of Raizal, declaring at the end of the novel: “I think Raizal identity is a phase.” The ultimate struggle of autonomy for San Andrés won’t be solved by a label, itself codified by the Colombian government—Victoria dreams of something more radical.
The solution to understanding herself and San Andrés comes not from archival history; paper “is supposed to be the heart of memory”, Bendek writes, but Victoria finds the core of remembering in geography. Her relationship to the ocean—its waves, its water, its salt—is foundational to her own version of archipelagic thinking. Salt water is both a literal and metaphorical solution: wound-cleansing, life-sustaining, healing. Through ingenious and creative imagery, Bendek ties together the waves of saltwater with the pulsating rhythm of a dance at a rundown: “the rhythm is like an invisible thread connecting us.” She writes:
Engrossed in the rhythm, I think, we’re like the salt that makes the seas, simmering in the heat of a History as acidic as wound-healing vinegar.
The dissolving of salt crystals into water brings the islanders together; the ocean is a primordial soup, teeming with life, brimming with possibilities that come from making such gatherings possible. From Victoria’s initial disorientation emerges a dazzling utopian politics: “I know we’re like salt crystals, refractory, luminous, mirrors for each other.”
The central image demonstrates Bendek’s talent for shimmering imagery; she gifts us with an imaginary that glitters, sparking unexpected connections. The novel brims with this multiplicity; the strands of the narrative reflect and refract one another, just as the salt crystals do. The result is absolutely sparkling prose, at times crystal clear and other times churning around the “I” of the storm. The novel evidently has a political project; juxtaposed with the fact that Bendek is also a stunning prose stylist, her melodic sentences remind us that politics can be beautiful—and in fact should be. The lingering message of the novel is that it defends the necessary joy of resistance. Victoria’s return to the Caribbean comes with a “spiritual crisis”, but the crisis bears fruit: she is free, has nowhere to be, nor has she “ever felt happier being, just being.”
The novel bears witness to a multiplicity of joys—from the thrills of feeling alive to the comforts of community. The multiple melodies of the novel are reflected on a textual level too; the text is marked by its multilingualism. The novel’s multiple languages may pose difficulties for the translator, but Robin Myers handles these with tender care, and in fact its challenging, multilingual nature makes it exactly the kind of book that invites translation from the very beginning. Bendek seems to suggest, in the novel’s meanderings through history, that San Andrés is a translational space, a moment in space and time where so many worlds have collided that the pursuit of the original or originary is futile. All we are left with are translations—messy, gloriously incomplete, but fundamentally connected. It is part of the political message of the novel, which makes it fitting that Myers’ translation shares the same politics. In a compelling translator’s note, Myers makes the case for a multilingual translation, quoting fellow translator Jennifer Shyue: “who’s to say where the border between English and Spanish really is?”
And who is to say where any border lies? Bendek rejects mainland cartography; in a captivating passage about the Colombian flag—in horizontal bands of yellow, blue, red—Victoria rejects that the blue of the ocean is simply what separates gold and blood. Water is not the periphery but the centre of things, the substance that wraps around the globe and connects us all. Water is not the end of the map or the edge of our understanding but the beginning of everything. Bendek and Myers want us to jump in.
