Jasmine Sealy takes a critical look at tourism and unpacks family mythology in her award-winning debut novel
Sealy's The Island of Forgetting won the Amazon First Novel Award in 2023
Originally aired on Sept. 23, 2023.
For her master's thesis at UBC, Jasmine Sealy wrote a short story reimagining the mythical figure of Calypso. In myth, Calypso is a seductive sea goddess. In Sealy's version, she's a willful, beautiful teenager.
Sealy transformed that short story into her award-winning debut novel, The Island of Forgetting. It's set in Barbados and follows a family over four generations as they run a beachfront hotel. There are secrets, sacrifices and loyalties that are tested against a backdrop of ever-changing tourism.
The Island of Forgetting won the 2023 Amazon First Novel Award.
Sealy's short fiction has been shortlisted for several awards and longlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize. She has also been published in various publications, including The New Quarterly, Room Magazine, Prairie Fire and Best Canadian Stories 2021.
Sealy spoke to The Next Chapter's Ryan B. Patrick about The Island of Forgetting.
The novel is set in Barbados and there are so many characters and complications. We see love, disappointments, birth, death — everything. This came from a short story about Calypso. Can you tell me more about Calypso as a mythical character and why the character has so much appeal for you?
I think that she looms very large in our imaginations as this kind of mythical siren seductress who led our hero astray and held him captive.
In The Odyssey, as written by Homer, she is only present for a very short period of time. So it was the lack of context that fascinated me. I had this desire to fill in the blanks and imagine how Calypso would have told her own story had she been given the opportunity.
I had this desire to fill in the blanks and imagine how Calypso would have told her own story had she been given the opportunity.- Jasmine Sealy
Then it was just the idea of this island seductress and temptress. I felt that there were so many parallels there in the ways that Black women generally, but Caribbean women more specifically, are often marketed as part of this tourism product. The idea that you come to paradise and there's these beautiful women. And I just think that there's like a bit of a stereotype there that could be unpacked.
It was really about, 'What would Calypso say? How does she see this man? How does she see herself?'
In the novel, there's a family who's running a beachfront hotel. And we see over the span of generations how tourists want different things from the Islanders. How do things change over the decades?
That was a really interesting part of the writing process for me, digging into the history of tourism in Barbados. It wasn't something that I was super familiar with because I was born in 1990, so the the tourism that I grew up with would have been very different to the tourism of the of the 60s or the 70s or the 80s.
I do think that at its root, it is still kind of this perpetuation in some ways of a colonial legacy.- Jasmine Sealy
And so I did a lot of research, just reading old travel logs and travel tourism from the 60s. It was really, really fascinating. I do think that it has evolved, but I do think that at its root, it is still kind of this perpetuation in some ways of a colonial legacy — the idea that the island exists to kind of fulfill the needs and desires of people who come from very far away. And no matter what iteration we see of tourism, you can't really escape that legacy.
The novel opens with a traumatic event. One of the main characters witnesses his mother and brother kill his father. How does this trauma kind of carry through or reverberate through the generations?
That was definitely inspired by Greek mythology and the idea that these mythological characters are bound by fate and are punished in perpetuity for things that for either things that they did, the decisions that they made a long time ago, or decisions that were made before they were even born.
And I thought that there were just some really interesting parallels there again between that idea in Greek mythology and also the original trauma of colonialism and plantation slavery that exists in the Caribbean and the idea that we as Caribbean people are forever living in that in the shadow of this legacy.
It informs the way we relate to each other. It informs the way our grandparents parented our parents. It informs the way our parents parented us. It really is the root of this unspoken generational trauma in the Caribbean.
How can we build a sense of a whole identity for ourselves where we feel content and just whole as people when we don't fully know our own history.- Jasmine Sealy
What would happen if there's this horrible thing that happens that then goes unspoken, but we see its ripple effects over the course of several generations.
We are so informed by things that happen before we're born. So that was just really like a deep fascination of mine when I was writing the novel. How can we build a sense of a whole identity for ourselves where we feel content and just whole as people when we don't fully know our own history.
The title of the book is The Island of Forgetting. What is the power that memory holds in your mind?
I think it's everything. I don't know if memory was at the forefront of my mind when I started writing the book, but it became so clear to me throughout the the writing process that it was the heart, really, of the novel.
Not just memory, but memory making mythology — myth creation within within families. The idea that human memory is highly fallible and highly susceptible to our own imaginations.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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