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- W2883441567 abstract "The Story of a Beach Andrea Lee (bio) Rokely Beach was a five-mile curve of sand white as table salt tracing the eastern coast of a small mountainous island of vehement green jungle and sugarcane. Far across the Mozambique channel rose the headlands of Madagascar, and in between lay reef and deep water in a million translations of blue. A few tall cumulus clouds stood overhead looking solid and sculpted, as if the scene were a tableau that would never change. In November, at low tide, under a laserlike midday sun, the sea lay mirror-flat and the scorching beach boomed faintly with emptiness. I felt shipwrecked, with a postcatastrophic mixture of hope and dread, as if finding human footprints amid the tracery left by the tiny colorless crabs would be both a blessing and a terror. Of course, even then I knew that the place was not at all deserted. Behind the screen of coconut palm, mango, sea pine, and kapok trees were red dirt tracks that led to the sugar mill, to the shrimp fishery, to a decaying port town that retained the lineaments of its French colonial past. Hidden just in back of the sand were villages where I was an object of curiosity: a foreign woman wandering [End Page 478] the beach in a showy getup of Indian silk wrap and Chinese lace parasol. I was there on honeymoon with my second husband, who was Italian and had sailed and dived in the Indian Ocean for years before we met. The disorienting fact of being newly married, in that place so remote from Europe or America, made all my impressions flat and conventionalized, like an exotic toile de Jouy: Paul and Virginie under a coconut palm, and perhaps a couple of cannibals peeping around a bush. This was ironic, because I am African American, from a strong-minded Philadelphia family whose members had fought for civil rights and for whom any stereotype was anathema, especially one regarding the Great Mother Continent. Still there I was, parasol in hand, playing memsahib. For two decades afterward, as our children were born and grew up in Milan, we returned to Madagascar each year for the long August and Christmas holidays. Returned to that small lush satellite isle of the mainland — Anjajavy was its name — and to Rokely Beach, at first renting from a French friend a dilapidated bungalow that for a long time was the only house directly on the beach. It had pitted concrete floors, a sputtering generator, hordes of mosquitos laired in a dusty collection of shells, and, set out like fetishes in the mildewed bathroom, empty jars of cosmetics abandoned by our friend's ex-wife when she escaped to Cape Town. Faded photographs showed her on horseback in front of the house, a pretty, doughy-faced young woman whose hair dissolved in the sunlight. Every morning we left the mournful house immediately after a breakfast of boiled zebu milk and soggy baguette. Vacation life for us was chasing crabs, fishing, diving, sailing out to remoter islets wreathed in rococo coral gardens. Never again was I vain — or in love — enough to imagine that [End Page 479] Rokely Beach was empty except for me and mine. In fact, there were four villages nearby. Two belonged to Sakalava fisherfolk, with their round inky faces and prominent ears, and two were of the wiry amber-skinned Antandroy, who worked in the cane fields and the shrimp fishery. Rokely Beach was their throroughfare, agora, and workplace, its business hours synchronized with the sun and the tides. Fishermen came and went in pirogues with square, rust-colored sails out of a thousand years ago. Women strode up and down on their way to market, bearing on their heads big hemispherical baskets full of vegetables, while every morning boys drove herds of humped zebu cattle into the water to wash off parasites. Early in the morning, on certain rocks just below the two bluffs that flanked the beach, the first dawn light would show groups of villagers squatting sociably together to defecate into the retreating tide. On Sundays, Comorian women came dressed in festive wraps to picnic in a grove..." @default.
- W2883441567 created "2018-08-03" @default.
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- W2883441567 date "2018-01-01" @default.
- W2883441567 modified "2023-10-17" @default.
- W2883441567 title "The Story of a Beach" @default.
- W2883441567 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/sew.2018.0047" @default.
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