Caribbean Women Writers (series): Tiphanie Yanique's How to Escape from a Leper Colony

There were beds that were still made up, kitchens where there were plates on the tables, offices that still had files on people who had been sick. It seems like people just vanished. The lore was that the place was haunted, that something had happened to the lepers. When I started doing research, I couldn’t find anything. No one knows what happened to them.

– Tiphanie Yanique on the Chacachacare story, which provides the fodder for her creative matter in the title story in How to Escape from a Leper Colony.

Yanique’s “How to Escape from a Leper Colony” is intricately woven with the elements one can detect there in the author’s initial intrigue with the true story of an island that was once home to lepers. The story she weaves is one of folklore and fantasy, mystery, childhood innocence, abandonment, death and disease, all of which have the ability to hold the reader captive from beginning to end.

Most of the other stories in the collection are just as well-crafted and contain similar elements of lore, mystery, abrupt abandonment or escape, and disease of some sort, which combine to create believable gloomy worlds both in the Caribbean and outside of it. Four stories, for instance, are created around a bridge built by a bridge-maker more famous for building ornamental bridges—for earlobes and fingers—than for building a functional bridge. The bridge he builds is described as “huge and stretching from Guyana—the place in the world most south—to Miami—the place in the world most north.” In mysterious turns of fate, characters in the four stories—a Muslim woman, a man and his son, and a beauty queen, whose lives don’t intersect at any time in the stories, end up on or near the bridge at the same time, and their arrival there, each with the goal of doing something akin to soul searching, is on one hand overly manipulated, and on the other hand, quirky and funny (darkly so) enough to achieve a satisfying conclusion to their stories.

Two other long pieces in the collection are well woven works of opposites. In “The International Shop of Coffins” three characters meet in a coffin shop—the proprietor, an immigrant priest, and a schoolgirl—and like the bridge characters, though their lives are vastly different, they become intersected, but in this case (unlike the case of the bridge characters) in a more believable manner. Their stories become entwined by paired thematic opposites—loss and recovery, innocence and awakening, freedom and imprisonment.

In “The Saving Work,” the stories of two families of mixed ethnicities are woven together by their children who leave the Virgin Islands to study in America. At the end of their first year abroad, they surprise their families back home with the news that they are getting married. As the details of the stories move back and forth between countries, questions about race, class, identity, and displacement are raised but are submerged or condensed as the events zero in on the impending wedding, and the shattered innocence of the young couple.

A shorter piece, “Canoe Sickness” (a condition of paralysis) takes place in the U.K. and in Ghana, and though its main characters are non-Caribbean people, the story contributes seamlessly to the collection’s portrayal of broken dreams, and various psychological effects of immigration.

But while the stories previously mentioned soar and certainly meet the expectations one would have of the author of the title story, which debuted separately to high acclaim, other stories in the collection fall short. One longer piece, “Kill the Rabbits,” is an ambitious working of three characters’ real and imagined issues with identity and belongingness to place that seems to either lose its way in carnival revelry or make a statement about carnival's effect on one or the other. I'm not sure. And other shorter pieces—“Where Tourists Don’t Go,” and “Street Man,” for instance—appear chopped or less fleshed out than the others though they contain high points. None of the stories is a complete disappointment.

A Caribbean conclusion

How to Escape from a Leper Colony is either a question one would ask of a psychiatrist or a magician, or it could be a prescriptive from one or the other of them, because presumably one would have to either escape such an incurable condition by way of mind over matter control or by some form of the surreal. Tiphanie Yanique’s characters (placed as they are in their exotic worlds of exaggerated antagonists) escape their incurable conditions—toxic relationships, trauma associated with displacement, and other forms of imprisonment--by making sudden desperate moves that sometimes take on surreal overtones. So if “Leper Colony” is analogous to any current or past Caribbean condition, then the picture is an overwhelmingly gloomy one. The book is fictive, of course, but I agree with Yanique here that there is something about seeing yourself in falseness that makes you feel real. That considered, probably the biggest compliment, and the most gut-honest reaction I (or anyone for that matter) can give to How to Escape from a Leper Colony is that it feels frighteningly real.

(But that may be my outside-of-the-Caribbean, penchant-for-a-well-told-fantasy talking.)

Be the first to comment, and I'll send you a copy for you to decide.

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How to Escape from a Leper Colony, by Tiphanie Yanique (Graywolf Press 2010, 240 pp).