Dionne Irving delves into the diaspora and memories of shipping barrels 'back home'
The Islands by Dionne Irving is a finalist for the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize
Set across the United States, Jamaica and Europe from the 1950s to present day, The Islands details the migration stories of Jamaican women and their descendants. Each short story explores colonialism and its impact as women experience the on-going tensions between identity and the place they long to call home.
Dionne Irving is a writer and creative writing teacher from Toronto. She released her first novel, Quint, in 2021 and her work has been featured in journals and magazines like LitHub, Missouri Review and New Delta Review. The Islands is her debut short story collection and is shortlisted for the 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Irving spoke with The Next Chapter's Ryan B. Patrick about The Islands.
The book opens with a quote from the classic poet John Donne, his Meditation XVII, where it goes, "No man is an island, entire of itself. Every man is a piece of a continent, a part of the main." Why did you want to include it, and why does it connect all the stories in the book?
I think the act of immigration often means feeling like you are going out on your own. And yet there is this idea of immigrant communities all over the world and places in which people find community. But yet at the same time, I think immigration can be an isolating experience because home can never be the place that you left it because places change, right? And you know, the new place too can also not be home.
To me, that idea of both being alone and within community and outside of community to me spoke to that Donne quote.
A lot of the themes deal with things like the mundanity of life, casual racism, stereotypes that black people from the Caribbean often have to deal with. Why was that something you wanted to write about?
I think that I just had not seen these stories told necessarily, and these stories were very important to me. In some ways, it's why it took such a long time to write the book, because I think in my heart in some way I was like, "These are stories that are very important to me, but I don't know if anyone else wants to read them."
And I think that the story is both of my parents, the stories of people who immigrated to Canada in the 60s and 70s, the stories of second generation and diaspora kids.
Those are stories that are powerful and I wanted to be able to tell them.
One of the stories is called Shop Girl, which touches on the expectations of a young girl who grows up in her Jamaican parents' shop which is located in a strip mall. And it parallels what you went through — you grew up in your parents' shop in Mississauga, Ont. Can you explain what the girl is going through in that short story?
It's about the idea of the island and still being caught between two things. It is also about what it means to be Canadian and having to think about those two things simultaneously. I had wanted to tell the story of that place and that time in my life for such a long time.
It was really hard to do — there were so many stories that arose out of that time. It was such a hub for community in the early 80s in the Toronto area.
It was also a chance to see people, to talk and exchange stories.- Dionne Irving
People would come from all over to buy groceries from my parents. It was also a chance to see people, to talk and exchange stories. I didn't know how to get all of that into one story because it's so much.
When I landed on the second-person narrative, that for me was eye-opening in terms of thinking about how the story can reflect inward and outwardly at the same time.
Do you have any specific anecdotes or memories of that time in your life?
I always tell people I learned how to butcher from the time I was seven! That was just part of the work.
But I think also the thing that for me was often most poignant was helping people get ready to ship barrels back to the islands.
Can you elaborate on that phenomenon?
So you have a lot of parents who immigrate and leave the islands, going to Canada, to the U.S., to England and the custom is to ship a barrel back to the children or family that you've left behind on the island. It's often a collection of clothes, North American consumer goods, things that would be expensive on the islands or hard to get.
Usually a couple times a year, people would send barrels back. There was a process of filling the barrel: you would buy things, a little bit at a time, until the barrel got full — and then you would ship the barrel back to an island.
There's a thread that weaves in a lot of the stories in this book where you talk about some of the ways that parents and children often misunderstand or disappoint each other. Why was that a dynamic that you wanted to examine and explore?
Parent-child relationships are often really fraught, but I think the immigration dynamic adds a different level to it. You are often growing up in a world, in a society and a culture that is so drastically different from the way that your parents grew up.
Parent-child relationships are often really fraught, but I think the immigration dynamic adds a different level to it.- Dionne Irving
I wanted to explore some of those tensions in my stories and look at the places where that adds this kind of level of misunderstanding between the parent and the child; the child can never completely know or understand the sacrifice that their parents made for them.
At the same time, the parent can never fully understand the difficulty of what it means to live as a child that's caught between two places.
Interview produced by Ashly July. Comments edited for length and clarity.
