Anne Hawk's ​The Pages of the Sea

Reviewed by Marcie McCauley

(Biblioasis, 2024)

Anne Hawk distills Wheeler’s view of life at home on an island in the Caribbean and expresses it in the simplest terms, so that readers of The Pages of the Sea can fully inhabit her perspective, even as it shifts and expands.

The view outward is most frequently a relationship between sky and water. In the sky, the clouds are appropriately prominent and, in the water, the boats and ships. In Wheeler’s view they are small or large, and this island girl readily differentiates between a tug-boat or a freighter, but only via an adult’s observation do readers learn that the merchant ships and trawlers used to come to the island more often and that such infrequency translates into fewer opportunities for work.

In this way, Wheeler’s horizons are broadening. She is beginning to understand why her mother is no longer there in the house with the rest of the family. Her mother has travelled to England without a timeframe for her return, and Hawk captures the contradictions of a child’s experience of this perfectly: it’s both an urgent, relentless, grating absence, and a vague, distant, temporary state. 

Her view of the concrete world around her is age-appropriate, while simultaneously accommodating her burgeoning maturity. At first, her world is: “A never-ending sea, replaced by the hemmed-in basin below.” When she is sent into town independently on an errand, however, she walks the familiar pathways and observes well-known landmarks in St. Catherine’s differently. She sees not only the sunlight “pirouetting through the trees” and the “wily scratchy” vegetation, but the “street glossy with heat” and the view of their home from a few streets away. Now even home-sounds, like calypso riffs and steelpan drum sounds that were once out of her sight, occupy space in a new reality. 
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While walking, she notes another house that the family previously inhabited. She peers to see their current home from this new position, but “she could not locate the hillside house in the distant patchwork of buildings.” She situates herself differently now, even though she cannot see everything, and she is learning how to speak when she cannot say everything, either. As when Wheeler complains to her oldest and next-oldest sisters about their aunt’s treatment of younger boys in the house:

“‘Mind y’biznis,’ Hesta snapped, not looking up.
Why she hav t’mind she biznis?
Wheeler lowered her head, shrinking into herself.

After she shrinks into silence, however, Wheeler summons the courage to speak—“Why ah carnt say nutting? Ah jus tinking bout Donelle and dem”—but, then, the oldest sister interjects. The sisters have been “t’styling people off” more often since their mother left, Wheeler observes. She doesn’t dare to contradict but, instead, she asks when their mother will send for them. Rather than answer, the middle sister redirects the question to the older, which signals to readers that there is a narrative beyond Wheeler’s comprehension, and only the oldest girl can determine which version of it will suit the youngest daughter.

It's this gap, between what Wheeler understands and what she nearly understands, that creates a quiet tension in the novel. Observations in the family home and in exterior settings, town and school, deepen Wheeler’s awareness but not her understanding. She recognizes shame and regret before she can name them, quietly observing one aunt, “’Sif she di’ sorry f’everyting bad she di’ do, everything she di’ say.”

Even the natural cycle of sun and shadow, the routine of schooldays and holidays, seem to develop new layers as Wheeler’s world widens: “The vast translucent sky peeped in at them with eyes of blue—the same sky in every peek, though not the same blue.” People’s personalities take on new dimensions, too: “At a stroke, the sisters had become their daylight selves, Adele leading Hesta quarrelling.”

Everyday structures in her world exist to protect the island dwellers, but they also flag new vulnerabilities for Wheeler now. The storm shutters, the bell tower, the buttress wall which secures the house to the land: these establish security but, simultaneously, acknowledge the risks the family faces together.

There are limits to what she can imagine: “She tried, but she was unable to picture Miss Eadie in hospital.” She can identify some of her fears: “They were afraid of all the spirits of the night, any of whose call might be disguised in the frenzied chatter all around: afraid of ligaroo and jumbie, of lajablesse, the hoof-footed temptress, whose long flowing dress concealed the terrible truth of what she was!” But she is also learning that her greatest fears could be something she doesn’t know anything about, as when Hesta snaps at her, “Some people leave dey chil’ren an dey in never look back. Is dat what y’warnt? T’warnt dat t’happen?”

Wheeler would have something to say to Christopher in Cecil Foster’s Independence Day, and to the narrator of Olive Senior’s “A Father like That”—other children trying to make sense of family connections and expectations, longing for information just beyond their grasp. The Pages of the Sea could also be shelved next to Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here and Éric Chacour’s What I Know about You (Trans. Pablo Strauss) for ways in which characters inherit a pattern of absence and grapple with identity in that context. And Anne Hawk’s work also fits alongside the works of writers like Sandra Cisneros, Eimear McBride, and Tsitsi Dangarembga, renowned for depictions of girlhood with a clear point-of-view and an exacting focus on voice, as well as other Caribbean authors like Claire Adam, Jamaica Kinkaid, and Edwidge Danticat who explore nuanced relationships in the context of chosen and blood families, strained by ordinary and extraordinary events.
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Near the beginning of the novel, a motor car passes Wheeler and the “signalling chromework caught her eye”; in much the same way, Hawk’s meticulous use of perspective and steadfast characterization in The Pages of the Sea will catch the discerning reader’s eye. This is not a debut which displays only promise: it secures all the elements of fine fiction to the page with compassion and conviction. 

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​Marcie McCauley's work has appeared in Room, Other Voices, Mslexia, Tears in the Fence and Orbis, and has been anthologized by Sumac Press. She writes about writing at marciemccauley.com and about reading at buriedinprint.com. A descendant of Irish and English settlers, she lives in the city currently called Toronto, which was built on the homelands of Indigenous peoples—Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabeg, Huron-Wendat and Mississaugas of New Credit—land still inhabited by their descendants.