Here’s a Caribbean paradise we all know about: coconut arms, sand tender as white silk, blue seas veiling a coral underworld. And then there’s Dominica. One of the slender necklaces of inexperienced and mountainous islands – Guadeloupe, Martinique, St Lucia – bewitched the younger tour writer Patrick Leigh Fermor while visiting them in the 1950s. Named using Columbus as it changed into on a Sunday when the mariner noticed the tiny island’s rearing cliffs, Dominica’s appeal lies in a combination of unspoiled beauty – hikers adore its hidden lakes, cascading rivers, and almost impenetrable wooded area trails – and a sense of getting stepped returned in time.
I went to Dominica to search for Jean Rhys, the prestigious Celtic-Creole novelist born in 1890. I fell in love with her formative years. Eden, from the instant the neighborhood airplane from Antigua – no central agencies yet fly there directly – touched down inside the majestic shadow of Morne Diablotins. Awaiting me become the island’s full erudite tour manual. Affectionately known as “the Oracle”, Dr. Lennox Honychurch had volunteered to show me Dominica immortalized in Rhys’s novels.
Less Rhys-obsessed visitors can percentage a taxi for the 90-minute journey from Douglas-Charles airport to Roseau. I spent a happy day in the island’s capital on the renovated Charlotte Estate B&B. Set above Roseau’s sparkling bay, this charming little motel offers Creole cooking with a decidedly French twist served on a plantation-style veranda. Far off, you could listen to the conch shell horns pronouncing the return of the fishing fleet. Roseau is tiny.
It took me five minutes to stroll from the resort to the metropolis’s Botanic Gardens, created in 1890 in collaboration with Kew. Was it below the gardens’ great banyan tree – nowadays a fave spot for selfies – that Rhys painfully recalled having been “mentally seduced” through a confident “Mr. Howard”, an elderly Englishman who fantasized about turning an extensive-eyed 14-yr-old girl into his sex slave? Or did this ordinary episode take vicinity on the more formal lawn that encloses the clifftop Roseau library? (I knew this became where Rhys first studied Jane Eyre, the e-book that stimulated her first-class-acknowledged novel, Wide Sargasso Sea.)
Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017 and carried off the library’s roof. Its results are nonetheless visible today. However, I discovered the luxuriant mango tree described in Rhys’s memoir Smile Please, nevertheless spreading its inexperienced cover above the wooden shell of her mother and father’s once stylish townhouse on Cork Street. Literary houses aren’t a priority on an island that is rebuilding entire villages after the typhoon. Rhys’s Roseau home may also even have to be demolished.
Dominica haunts all of Rhys’s fiction. I questioned whether Roseau’s marketplace would scent frangipani, lime juice, cinnamon, and cloves. (Yes, although the market has moved the region from where enslaved people were once auctioned out to the city’s threshold.) Would I discover her remembered world of blue mountains and plunging ravines? A world, she wrote, wherein “the whole thing is green, the whole thing is growing….” Reader, I did.
The Napier family’s stunning domestic and neighboring cottages, Pointe Baptiste, is highly famous with visitors, so e-book ahead. It is a plantation-fashion house on Dominica’s north coast, which Rhys visited on her sole return to the island in 1936. Lennox and I arrived while the midday solar was glittering off the sea. Author Patrick Leigh Fermor remembered beverages with “nearly Babylonian splendor”. I favor the Atlantic view while savoring a bar of domestic-produced chocolate. (You also can purchase Alan Napier’s chocolate products at Petit Paris, Roseau’s favorite waterside espresso save.)
I knew that rampant plants had long swallowed up the tiny inland estates purchased using Rhys’s father (Amelia and Bona Vista), so I asked Lennox to take me to Geneva, where Rhys’s Creole mother grew up. Here, too, we have been greeted by an inexperienced plateau of tangled vines, enclosed – as constantly on this maximum mountainous of islands – through the soaring peaks, the names Rhys ought to recite in her sleep. Along with the manner, Lennox and I mentioned Rhys’s writings and the magnetic personality of their writer, a recluse whose works are haunted by the memory of her early Caribbean life.
I discovered that the house in Geneva was destroyed in the Nineteen Thirties. The rusty wheels and crushers of the old sugar mill continue to be reminders of an uglier age; below is nestled Stowe, the modest shoreside residence where Rhys’s mom and her twin welcomed Jean’s seafaring father to his first clinical practice on the island. “Stowe hasn’t modified in any respect,” Lennox proudly instructed me – and I commenced to keep in mind that Dominica’s landscapes should train me more about Rhys than her vanishing homes ever could.
