Loss Shapes the Characters in “Should the Waters Take Us” https://ift.tt/GjybO6V
In the recent boom of South Louisiana literature like Behind the Waterline, Berceuse Parish, and Pearce Oysters, this region has had its stories told from many angles. In Stephanie Soileau’s new novel Should the Waters Take Us, Louisiana gets all of what’s been written in the aforementioned works but put together in an all-encompassing epoch that spans generations, geography, and even climate.
Soileau’s tale makes the Terrebonne family, and the way they survive a gigantic oil spill, the focal point of the novel. Kinship marbles every decision and transaction between them. It is both an umbrella the family uses to protect themselves from the world outside Louisiana, and the rain they want to protect themselves from, leaving characters like Jacot “to see whether he could make his audience reflect back the man he wanted to be . . . . and who didn’t look at him through a haze of family history.” Soileau does a beautiful job of interweaving time deeper into the family atmosphere, with roots in medieval France and places like Port Harcourt, Nigeria, giving context to the disposition and decisions of its characters. She also brings a stacked bench of side characters to enrich this saga. Whether it is a Nigerian priest, a Vietnamese fisherman, an Indigenous mother, or the ghost of a Cajun cousin, Soileau writes Louisiana people layered in a way that few before have attempted. There is authenticity and evenhandedness in her telling, promising that literary fiction is alive and well.
Grief is a major theme of this book. The weight of the recently deceased and currently dying hang on characters like, well, dead weight. Learning about each of them means we must learn what they have lost and how that loss made them. And it is not only people being lost, but also land and history. Wilford (Boy) Broussard’s way of life is tied to pieces of land he doesn’t own, and the hunting and trapping practices inherited from a surrogate father he cannot consult any longer. Lee, Boy’s daughter, mourns her relationship with her mother, who must now work in Mexico because the moratorium on drilling after the oil spill pushed her there. Jaime, Boy’s nephew, will always be in the shadow of his father’s death by suicide, trying instead to live with “the invented father – the one that bloomed out of soft, visceral memories,” because, “by talking about him at all, would be to lose the man Jamie conjured to the man others knew better.”
Much of this sorrow is born out of futility. Each character’s tenuous relationship with each other, as well as water, places them in peril. Whether it be ambition, hunger, oppression, greed, or subsidence, water is what this story floats on across time and space while the people are crushed by its waves. The feeling of pushing water uphill is depicted in other places (France, Nova Scotia, Nigeria) and other times (17th, 18th, and 20thcenturies). Land that has been in Terrebonne possession for generations is depleted by the end of the book and hurricanes bring the threat of disappearance altogether. In her last days, Rosalie laments that living here means if you “tie yourself to this place, to its old ways of living, you’re bound to get your heart broken.”
This double bind with the past and future often leaves the characters either paralyzed or grasping for what little the world will give them, neither of which produces the bounty that their counterparts (patience and initiative) could yield. The people out of work from the spill can help with cleanup, but it will be taken out of their “lost wages” payout. Boy manages to get his oysters up only to find them dead from freshwater incursion the people upstream unleashed to push the oil from the coast. As Boy puts it, “brand-new day, même vielle merde.” Mr. Bourgeois says it even better with, “No matter what we do, we’re going to lose. So you’ve got to be practical about it. Save what you can, and the rest – write it off. You just got to write it off. The water wants it? Let the water take it.”
The propulsive element of this book is the resilience of its characters. Each is in the act of saving something — or at least figuring out what’s worth saving. They speed through life from the first page and don’t look back, as if evacuating the path of a hurricane, which ends up happening as well. Contained here is the boiled essence of residual strength in the face of certain uncertainties. It isn’t a catch phrase in this book. It is a step-by-step lesson of how to survive and reinvent yourself as many times as necessary. While much of this story is told through heartache, it is also a love letter to a place and a people that make community: “You find a home in a place that is only better than any other place because it knows you, accepts you.” There is a roundness to the book, bringing us back to where it started, maybe not having saved anyone except ourselves.
Despite the social ugliness of this region that Soileau does not shy away from, she finds beauty in how people here show up when it matters. In this entanglement of cultures, lineages, and timelines, she doesn’t try to form a single line like that of a fishing pole. Instead, she makes a net, capturing a feeling, a way of living, that only these folk could create. The ending seems to ask the question: Who else could live alongside the water as it takes everything without keeping score?
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