Boundaries
Critical Praise for
Anna In-Between
by Elizabeth Nunez
• Winner of the 2010 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award
• Longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
“A psychologically and emotionally astute family portrait, with dark themes like racism, cancer, and the bittersweet longing of the immigrant.”
—
New York Times Book Review
(Editors’ Choice)
“Nunez has created a moving and insightful character study while delving into the complexities of identity politics. Highly recommended.”
—Library Journal
(*starred review*)
“Nunez deftly explores family strife and immigrant identity in her vivid latest … with expressive prose and convincing characters that immediately hook the reader.”
—Publishers Weekly
(*starred review*)
“A new book by Elizabeth Nunez is always excellent news. Probing and lyrical, this fantastic novel is one of her best yet. Fall into her prose. Immerse yourself in her world. You will not be disappointed.”
—Edwidge Danticat, author of
Brother, I’m Dying
“Nunez offers an intimate portrait of the unknowable secrets and indelible ties that bind husbands and wives, mothers and daughters.”
—Booklist
“Nunez’s fiction, with its lush, lyric cadences and whirlwind narrative, casts a seductive spell.”
—O, the Oprah Magazine
“The award-winning author of
Prospero’s Daughter
has written a novel more intimate than her usual big-picture work; this moving exploration of immigrant identity has a protagonist caught between race, class and a mother’s love.”
—Ms. Magazine
“
Anna In-Between
is Elizabeth Nunez’s best novel. Nunez proves that a great writer, armed with intellect, talent, and very little equipment, can challenge a multibillion-dollar media operation. As long as she writes her magnificent books, characters like the Sinclairs, characters with depth and integrity, will not be hidden from us.”
—Ishmael Reed, author of
Mumbo Jumbo
“In crisp, clear, and beautifully turned prose, Elizabeth Nunez has written a fascinating novel that will profoundly affect the way in which many readers now view the Caribbean. We welcome the voice of the infinitely wise narrator, Anna, who is an expert witness to the seismic changes that take place within and without. A wonderful read.”
—Lorna Goodison, author of
From Harvey River
“Elizabeth Nunez has written a contemplative, lush, and measured examination of how a family history can reflect the social history of an island, and how twined together, like fragrant vines, the two can remain.”
—Susan Straight, author of
A Million Nightingales
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by Akashic Books
©2011 Elizabeth Nunez
ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-033-5
eISBN-13: 978-1-61775-072-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011922901
Akashic Books
PO Box 1456
New York, NY 10009
[email protected]
www.akashicbooks.com
For my sisters
Contents
My thanks to Johnny Temple, the brilliant and courageous publisher of Akashic Books, and to Ibrahim Ahmad, an attentive and perceptive senior editor, for their gentle encouragement and sound advice. Thanks too to my dear friend Pat Ramdeen Anderson, my first reader, whose editorial advice always points me in the right direction. I remain grateful for the support and love of my sister Mary Nunez. My son, Jason Harrell, continues to brighten my life.
I know quite a bit about expatriation.
You always hit a glass ceiling.
—Michael Ignatieff
S
eventeen years after Anna Sinclair chose to move permanently to New York and the pain that constricts the heart of every immigrant who has left behind family—a mother, a father, sisters, brothers, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents—the land she loved as a child, the land that nurtured her as a child, has finally become unbearable. She decides to return to her island in the Caribbean, this time not for the week or two she goes every other year, but for a whole month, because her parents are old, her father in his mideighties, her mother fifteen years his junior; because she fears there is not much time left to be with them; because she wants to imprint on her mind’s eye the color and texture of the earth once familiar to her as the markings on the palm of her hand; because she wants to savor the scent and taste of the sea she loved, trade winds that suffuse the air in every corner of the island so that even in the swamp-filled land of the prosperous enclave where her parents built their house more than twenty years ago, salt from the sea corrodes metal within weeks and houses bleed orange where nails are hammered into wood slats.
Anna’s plan was all this: to spend time with her parents, to gather memories to sustain her through winter days and the suffocating heat of summers on a continent dense with people and the things people make that threaten to choke off forests, rivers, lakes, denuding mountains. It was about closure too. Paula, her friend, an immigrant like herself living in New York, has forced her to admit there are quarrels yet unresolved with her mother, resentments she still bears though she is an adult, a woman one year shy of forty.
Then everything changed.
She is three days on the island when her mother, Beatrice Sinclair, shows her the lump on her breast and the one under her arm lodged in her lymph nodes. The one on her breast bleeds. Neil Lee Pak, the family doctor and their friend, sends her mother to Dr. Ramdoolal, the best oncologist on the island. Dr. Ramdoolal does not need a biopsy to confirm what is plainly evident. Beatrice Sinclair has breast cancer. He tells Anna her mother has allowed the cancer to fester and bloom.
Allowed
, he says, making it clear that her mother is responsible. Because there is no way Beatrice Sinclair could not have seen, could not have felt the tumors rising inexorably under her skin. No way John Sinclair, her husband, could not have known. The doctor implies this with an accusing glance at John Sinclair, who is in his office, sitting in a chair, on the other side of his desk, next to Beatrice and Anna.
Anna is in shock, stunned by her parents’ silence, their complicity in a shared secret that may cost her mother her life. There are four stages, she is told. Surely her mother’s cancer is in the fourth stage, surely it is terminal. It has ulcerated, bled.
No, Dr. Ramdoolal says. Her mother has her age on her side and a cancer that is slow growing. She could live to be ninety, he says.
Hope swells her father’s despairing heart.
She will need chemo to reduce the tumors, Dr. Ramdoolal advises, before a mastectomy is possible. Her tumors are too large. “Bleeding, you know,” he says. “We may not be able to stop it.”
Color drains from her father’s face; Anna’s fingers turn cold.
“But not to worry; we’ll reduce the tumors,” Dr. Ramdoolal assures them. He has one caveat. The surgery must be done in the States. The island has good doctors—he is a good doctor, he says, studied at Cambridge—but the island does not have adequate hospitals. Gurneys in corridors serve as beds for overcrowded wards, and newspapers, not sheets, cover thin mattresses. “Go to the States, Mrs. Sinclair,” Dr. Ramdoolal urges.
Beatrice Sinclair refuses. She is a patriot. She will not have surgery in the States. She will have surgery on her island home. She has faith in her country, in her doctors, she insists.
“Then stay here,” Dr. Ramdoolal says. “Stay here if you want to die.”
His bluntness angers Anna, but terrifies her too.
Prosperity has come to the island on the second wave of an oil boom and the government has built a new hospital, stocked it with the latest newfangled medical instruments and equipment, but no one, it seems, had given thought to beds and linens. Surgery was the thing. Every man for himself afterward. Yet it is not the scarcity of beds and linens that scares Anna; it is the inability of the government to solve the problem of electrical outages that occur with frightening frequency on the island, shutting down traffic lights and turning roadways into a nightmare of cars and trucks snarled for miles around tight bends on the narrow roads. When lights go out and air conditioners no longer operate, work ceases at offices plunged into the sweltering heat. In hospitals, surgery has to be abandoned. There is an article in the newspaper about a patient who died when the machines shut down. And there is another story Anna overheard, whispered to her mother by a friend who does not yet know of her mother’s tumors. Bribes have to be paid to customs officers if you want your goods cleared from the shipping docks on time. The woman’s cousin, suffering from brain cancer, is forced to wait weeks for chemo. The drugs have arrived on the island, but the doctor has refused to pay the bribe. This is what happens when the government controls the hospitals, say the detractors of the system of socialized medicine the island has inherited from the British colonizers. We forget we are flawed creatures, the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve. We crave the incentives and rewards of capitalism.
“Go to the States,” Dr. Ramdoolal implores her mother. “You get service for your money.”
There are other considerations. Anna’s mother gives another reason for her intransigence. For it is deliberate intransigence, Anna is convinced, that allows Beatrice Sinclair to remain defensive in spite of a death sentence that looms if she refuses surgery in the States, going so far as to accuse the good doctor of maligning his own country, of betraying his own people. She could die, Dr. Ramdoolal has said. But Beatrice Sinclair explains to her husband, John, and her daughter, Anna, that she fears having surgery in a country that has doctors and equipment for Americans and doctors and equipment for African Americans. She has seen the protest marches on cable TV; she knows about the statistics: American jails are crowded with black men.
Anna wants her mother to live. She wants her to go to the States for surgery, but her motives are not entirely altruistic. If her mother has surgery on the island, she, as the daughter, her mother’s only child, would be expected to stay by her side. This is the natural duty of a daughter whose mother who is ill. The daughter abandons her work, she abandons her life. This is what Dr. Ramdoolal assumes that she will do, that she will stay on the island until her mother recovers from the rounds of chemo she must undergo to reduce the size of her tumors.
Naturally, she responds.
Naturally
.
Her father makes the same assumption. When Anna hesitates, he practically begs her to stay. There’s no changing your mind? A question asked with all the tenderness and hope of a father pleading with his daughter to remember the days and nights he has loved her unconditionally.
Anna promises to stay, but she cannot stay as long as her father would like her to. She will remain there until her mother has her last round of chemo, but not for the weeks afterward while she recovers. If her mother insists on surgery on the island, she will come back, but in the meanwhile, she needs to be in New York. It has taken her years to climb up the ladder at Windsor, an internationally renowned publishing company where she is head of Equiano, Windsor’s imprint for writers of color. Tanya Foster, her boss, has given her four weeks. Anna is afraid if she is away from her office much longer she might jeopardize her position. There are writers who need her, one writer in particular, Bess Milford, whose manuscript she has finished editing and has e-mailed to Tanya. Bess Milford is a true artist, her novel exquisitely written, but it is a literary novel and might not bring much profit to Equiano. Tanya Foster warned her of that probability when she reluctantly approved its acquisition simply on Anna’s recommendation. Anna knows Tanya has not read the novel, so she includes a synopsis when she e-mails the edited manuscript, hoping that if Tanya is still too busy to give attention to a book she does not think will be worthwhile commercially, the synopsis will do the trick to persuade her to at least commit to a reasonable marketing budget. For Anna wants to try. She is determined to prove to Windsor that Equiano can still be successful if the company publishes literary fiction by black writers. She needs to be in New York to set the wheels in motion so that the novel will get the promotion it deserves.